Then, once again, she began to sing; I saw the mute, dark, fire burning like Valhalla in Götterdämmerung. She sang a funeral pyre, the swan’s song, death itself, and, with a brusque motion of her gun, she forced me forward on my knees while the dog stood over me as she tore open my clothes. The serenade smouldered all around us and I was so much at the mercy of the weight of the air, which pressed down on me like a coffin lid, and of the viscosity of the atmosphere, that I could do nothing to defend myself, even if I had known how, and soon she had me, poor, forked thing, stretched out upon a bank of shells with my trousers round my knees. She smiled but I could not tell what the smile meant; on this side of the mirror, a smile was no clue whatsoever to intention or to feeling and I did not think she meant to do me a good deed as she unbuckled her uncouth leather belt and stepped out of her jeans.
Parting the air with the knives of her arms, she precipitated herself upon me like a quoit on a peg. I screamed; the notes of my scream rose up on the air like ping-pong balls on a jet of water at a fun-fair. She raped me; perhaps her gun, in this system, gave her the power to do so.
I shouted and swore but the shell grotto in which she ravished me did not reverberate and I only emitted gobs of light. Her rape, her violation of me, caused me atrocious physical and mental pain. My being leaked away from me under the visitation of her aggressive flesh. My self grew less in agony under the piston thrust of her slender loins, as if she were a hammer and were forging me into some other substance than flesh and spirit. I knew the dreadful pleasure of abandonment; she had lit my funeral pyre and now would kill me. I felt such outrage I beat in the air behind my head with my helpless fists as she pumped away indefatigably at my sex, and to my surprise, I saw her face cloud and bruises appear on it, although my hands were nowhere near her. She was a brave girl; she only fucked the harder, for she was intransigent and now resembled the Seljuk Turks sacking Constantinople. I knew there was no hope for me if I did not act immediately.
Her gun lay propped against the shells beside us. I reached the other way and seized it. I shot at the black sky while she straddled me. The bullet pierced a neat, round, empty hole in the flat vault of the heavens but no light, no sound, leaked through; I had made a hole without quality but Anna let out a ripping shriek that sent a jagged scar across the surface of the wood. She tumbled backwards and twitched a little. The dog growled at me, a terrible sight, and leaped at my throat but I quickly shot her, also, in this negative way and, now free, there remained only the problem of the return to the mirror, the return to the right-hand side of the world. But I kept tight hold of the gun, by grasping it loosely, because of the guardian of the mirror.
To return to the house, I struck out from the shell grotto where Anna lay, in the opposite direction from the one we had come from. I must have fallen into a mirror elision of reflected time, or else I stumbled upon a physical law I could not have guessed at, for the wood dissolved, as if the blood that leaked from Anna’s groin was a solvent for its petrified substance, and now I found myself back at the crumbling gate before her juices were dry on my cock. I paused to do up my flies before I made my way to the door; I used my arms like scissors to snip through the thickness of the atmosphere, for it grew, moment by moment, less liquid and more impalpable. I did not ring the bell, so great was my outrage, so vivid my sense of having been the plaything of these mythic and monstrous beings.
The knitting curled down the stairs, just as I expected, and, in another moment, I saw, on a staccato stave, the sound of the needles.
She, he, it, Tiresias, though she knitted on remorselessly, was keening over a whole dropped row of stitches, trying to repair the damage as best she could. Her keening filled the room with a Walpurgisnacht of crazy shapes and, when she saw I was alone, she flung back her head and howled. In that decompression chamber between here and there, I heard a voice as clear as crystal describe a wordless song of accusation.
‘Oh, my Anna, what have you done with my Anna –?’
‘I shot her,’ I cried. ‘With her own weapon.’
‘A rape! She’s raped!’ screamed the androgyne as I dragged the gilt chair to the mirror and clambered up on it. In the silvered depths before me, I saw the new face of a murderer I had put on behind the mirror.
The androgyne, still knitting, kicked with her bare heels upon the floor to drive her bathchair over the wreathing muffler towards me, in order to attack me. The bathchair cannoned into the chair on which I stood and she rose up in it as far as she could and began to beat me with her tender fists. But, because she did not stop knitting, she offered no resistance when I brought my ham-hand crashing down on her working face. I broke her nose; bright blood sprang out. I turned to the mirror as she screamed and dropped her knitting.
She dropped her knitting as I crashed through the glass through the glass, glass splintered round me driving unmercifully into my face through the glass, glass splintered through the glass – half through.
Then the glass gathered itself together like a skilful whore and expelled me. The glass rejected me; it sealed itself again into nothing but mysterious, reflective opacity. It became a mirror and it was impregnable.
Balked, I stumbled back. In Tiresias’ bed-sitting room, there was the most profound silence, and nothing moved; the flow of time might have stopped. Tiresias held her empty hands to her face that was now irretrievably changed; each one snapped clean in two, her knitting needles lay on the floor. Then she sobbed and flung out her arms in a wild, helpless gesture. Blood and tears splashed down on her robe, but in a baleful, hopeless way she began to laugh, although time must have started again and now moved with such destructive speed that, before my eyes, that ageless being withered – a quick frost touched her. Wrinkles sprang out on her pale forehead while her hair fell from her head in great armfuls and her négligé turned brown and crumbled away, to reveal all the flesh that sagged from the bone as I watched it. She was the ruins of time. She grasped her throat and choked. Perhaps she was dying. The muffler was blowing away like dead leaves in a wind that sprang up from nowhere and raced through the room, although the windows stayed shut tight. But Tiresias spoke to me; she spoke to me once again.
‘The umbilical cord is cut,’ she said. ‘The thread is broken. Did you not realize who I was? That I was the synthesis in person? For I could go any way the world goes and so I was knitting the thesis and the antithesis together, this world and that world. Over the leaves and under the leaves. Cohesion gone. Ah!’
Down she tumbled, the bald old crone, upon a pile of wisps of unravelled grey wool as the ormolu furniture split apart and the paper unfurled from the wall. But I was arrogant; I was undefeated. Had I not killed her? Proud as a man, I once again advanced to meet my image in the mirror. Full of self-confidence, I held out my hands to embrace my self, my anti-self, my self not-self, my assassin, my death, the world’s death.
ELEGY FOR A FREELANCE
I REMEMBER YOU as clearly as if you’d died yesterday, though I don’t remember you often – usually, I’m far too busy. But I told the commissar about you, once. I asked him if I’d done the right thing; would he have done the same? But he said, if I wanted absolution, that he was the last person to ask for it, and, besides, everything is changed, now, and we are not the same.
I remember that I was living high up in an attic, in a house in a square. Most of the windows in the other houses round the square were boarded up and planks were nailed across the doors but they were not uninhabited. Although all these houses were waiting to be pulled down, they contained a handful of small, scarcely licit households whose members crept in and out through secret entries, lived by candlelight, slept upon the filthy mattresses the dossers who lived there before them had used and ate stews made from vegetable picked out of the greengrocers’ garbage cans and butchers’ bones begged for dogs that did not exist.
But our landlord – it was legal to own private property, to rent it out, in those days – refused to sell his house to the speculators who w
anted to pull the entire terrace down. He’d spent the blitz in his house; it was his fox-hole. He pulled the carious walls up snug around his ears and felt himself enveloped in a safety that, although it was fictive, he believed in completely. He rented his rooms out at old-fashioned rents because he did not know that times had changed; how could he? He never left home. He was confined to a chair and almost blind. His room was his world, his house the unknown universe he knew of but never ventured into. Everything else was unknowable. He did not even know that the boys who lived in the basement filled milk-bottles with petrol in their back room and made explosions.
A girl lived with them in the basement. She was fifteen. Her face was pale, mild and plump and always seemed a little surprised that she found herself stumbling under the weight of a pregnancy that had stunned her. She hardly ever spoke and moved with the heaviness of somebody moving underwater. You kept a rifle in our room and loved to sit and scan the square and the street below us from the open window.
A young man and a girl came to do yoga in the square every morning. They adopted the tree position. A child on the swings swung more and more idly; he twisted round to watch them. They always had the same audience, the children in the playground and the apprentice sniper. They unfurled their right legs from the hip and reefed them in at the knee in order to place the soles of their bare right feet against the inner sides of their upper left thighs. They joined their hands together as if in prayer and then raised their joined hands above their heads. In order to keep their balance, they fixed their eyes on the worn grass in front of them with the utmost concentration. They maintained this position for an entire minute – I watched the hand on my watch move – and then they returned their right feet to the ground as they lowered their hands and arms and now raised their left legs in order to repeat the exercise. When it was over, they decorously stood on their heads. They were rapt with devotion.
X watched them through the sights of his rifle while they went through the entire repertory of movements. I was scared out of my wits when he slipped back the safety catch and did not dare say anything. I knew the couple below by sight. They squatted in a house on the other side of the square. They were harmless as the pigeons who lived on the roof. When they had finished, they went away again. X replaced the safety catch and laughed. I was very frightened of him in his feral moods but he told me an authentic assassin ought to be as indifferent as the weather and, when he scanned the square, all he was doing was practising indifference.
I went into his world when I fell in love with him and felt only a sense of privilege in its isolation. We had purposely exiled ourselves from the course of everyday events and were proud to live in parentheses. I went out for a little air at night, sometimes, when the streets were flooded with the ghastly yellow light that bleaches the blood that runs out of road accidents so that it doesn’t look real. I used to walk through the streets for miles and I would clap my hands with childlike pleasure, I would enthusiastically applaud the detonating termini.
It hardly seemed possible the city could survive that summer. The sky opened like the clockwork Easter eggs the Tsars gave one another. The night would part, like two halves of a dark shell, and spill explosions. Because I lived in a house full of amateur terrorists, I felt I myself lit the fuses and caused these displays of pyrotechnics. Then I would feel almost omnipotent, just as X did, when he sat with his rifle above the square at the window of my room.
I was living high up in an attic. I hung over the summer in my attic as though it were the gondola of a balloon. London lay below me with her legs wide open; she was a whore sufficiently accommodating to find room for us in her embraces, even though she cost so much to love.
She is so old she ought to be superannuated, you said, the old cow. She paints so thickly over the stratified residue of yesterday and the day before yesterday and the day before the day before’s cosmetics you can hardly make out the wens and blemishes under all the layers of paint, graffiti and old posters – voluptuous, oppressive, corrupt, self-regarding London marinating in the syrup of her own decay like baba au rhum, while the property speculators burrow away at her guts with the vile diligence of gonococci.
A feverish, hysterical glamour played over this wasting city like summer lightning. While I watched it, the city changed shape. Towers of steel and glass thrust their way through the soft, soiled velvet rind of the rotting fruit. Nobody lived in those towers; how could anybody live there – like the architecture of the Third Reich, they looked as if they were intended to be most beautiful in ruins. Amongst this architecture of desolation, haunting the rat-infested rubble, mendicants and proselytizers rang bells and rattled tambourines as they offered to the passer-by a bewildering variety of salvations. Those in saffron robes who had shaved their heads invoked the gods of the Indian sub-continent though our neighbours told us we ought to trust in Jesus. But our salvation would be gelignite; the basement of the house in which I lived had become a little arsenal. Any wise child can get a hand-grenade together; it was the time of the Children’s Crusade.
It was a strange, suspended time. The city had never looked more beautiful but I did not know, then, that it seemed to me beautiful only because it was doomed and I was the innocent slave of bourgeois aesthetics, that always sees an elegaic charm in decay. I remember velvet nights spiked with menace and the beautiful showers of sparks when an amateur incendiarist ignited a police station. My house was always full of the shimmering sound of the trees in the square moving in the wind, so that it seemed the sea was rushing through the corridors, the rooms.
I was living on the fourth floor although I had such vertigo that the sight of any abyss, however insignificant, excited in me, almost intolerably, the desire to plunge. I was quite helpless before the attraction of gravity. I was overwhelmed. I became powerless. Therefore to live on the fourth floor meant that every day began with a small triumph of will over instinct. I wanted to jump; but I must not jump. Pallor, shallow breathing, a prickle of cold sweat – I exhibited all the symptoms of panic, as I did when I met X. That was like finding myself on the edge of an abyss but the vertigo that I felt then came from a sense of recognition. This abyss was that of my own emptiness; I plunged instantly, for my innocence was so perfect that I saw in this submission the height of sophistication.
It was as lovely a summer as those that precede wars. The West Indian lady who ran the neighbourhood launderette always wore a small felt hat with a veil, as if she were determined to keep up appearances even in the most extreme circumstances. She pushed the dirt around the floor with a sodden mop and, when her tasks were finished, she would sit on a chair and read her well-thumbed bible aloud to herself in that ineffable, querulous lilt, like the voice of a reproachful bird. Sometimes she would exclaim over the things she found in the book; when I looked over her shoulder, once, while she was crying: HOSANNA! I saw she was reading the Apocalypse.
The squatters consecrated the house next door. All night long, while we fixed up our explosive devices in the basement, they chanted: BABY JESUS, BABY JESUS, BABY JESUS.
I would not have believed Lenin was right when he said there was no place for orgy in the revolution, even if I had read Lenin then. What we were about in bed seemed to be activity that could in itself overturn the world. X’s lycanthropic eyes glowed in the dark like fuses. I found most pleasure of all in the delicious dread that seized me when he clung too close. I wanted to be the Madonna of the Barricades; I would have shot anybody you told me to but only if they did not get hurt. I felt I needed to understand nothing beyond my own sensations. I felt, as primitives do, that ceremonials such as the ones we made could revivify dead earth. Your kisses along my arms were like tracer bullets. I am lost. I flow. Your flesh defines me. I become your creation. I am your fleshly reflection.
(‘Libido and false consciousness characterized sexual relations during the last crisis of capital,’ says the commissar.)
A man constructs his own fate out of his sense of the world. You enga
ged in conspiracies because you believed the humblest objects were engaged in a conspiracy against you. Your conviction was contagious; it impressed me. ‘Even the strawberries smell of blood, this summer,’ you remarked with anticipatory relish. I found you more and more often at the window, practising indifference.
You described the state of permanent revolution to me. It sounded like a series of beautiful explosions. Volcano after volcano would erupt under their own internal stresses in an endless reduplication of ecstasy. When the bed creaked beneath us, it sounded like the liebestod from Tristan and Isolde performed with vehemence by a military band. The grand design of glorious convulsions you depicted was so beautiful I wept; but we would begin, you said, in small ways, we would begin with a single shooting. You made assassination sound as enticing as pornography. A, B and C were suspicious of me since you abandoned the basement for my bed. Now we were all gripped in the same obsession, they treated me more politely. Folie à deux, à trois, à quatre. We were living on the crater of a volcano and felt the earth move beneath us. What stirring times! What seismographic times!
(‘The bourgeoisie turned politics into an aspect of romanticism,’ says the commissar. ‘If it was only an art form, how could it threaten them?’)
The city unravelled like knitting as the transport workers’ strikes imposed vast distances between its various sections but we never went beyond walking distance of our house so the strikes did not affect us.
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