I would like to express directly my disgust with the whole situation: life, with all its dirty lies, and my own distaste for any participation in this idiotic panorama. This may be even more pressing than my longing to be convinced of the opposite. But if nausea is as dictatorial as love, it must be equally easy to dissect. Therefore I retreat, a bit shaken, and continue to watch, fascinated, from a certain distance.
If we take love as the belief, reasonable or not, in a somehow important confrontation—just like a thought is the sketch of a relation between facts—it really would be the same situation, and then also the same amount of work, as an interesting conversation. And in quite the same way, I am seized by a terrible impatience as soon as I feel that the other person is heading in a fruitless direction. From then on I can only watch—granted he fascinates me aesthetically. Krassa was brutal: relentlessly she used her competence, her decisive, sensible opinions on me, and I had great difficulty defending my silliness against her. At the same time I sat quite calmly and was full of wonder: What might be going on inside of her? And how spectacularly ugly she was! The question I must ask myself is if I—if I ever had an actual thought about her.
The long time that I spent staring at her blankly, while she, on the other side of the gap, was following some scent or other, seems to me now like the endlessly drawn-out moment of a choice. Max Klinger’s Judgment of Paris comes to my mind, a huge painting in which, on a high terrace, one goddess after another presents herself naked to the man who is posed, he too naked, on a seat in the shade. The three women stand tall and firm, well dressed in the sporting whim of a morning, and yet they tremble before the painful results of nuances. How cruel the joke is, but also how vast and free! The figures are life-size, the air bright daylight, one seems to feel the wind on the expanses of bare skin, to be able to estimate the temperature. I remember well how the picture impressed me, especially when I saw it for the second time, in Munich. It was October, and I was in the city to take a test to prove I had reached a certain level of proficiency in Japanese. The evening before, however, I had met up with my Munich friend Godiv. He appeared with two other students, both blonde, one girl looking slightly pinched, the other creamy and sprinkled with moles. The way Godiv acted with them, I no longer desired him, which threw me into a raging depression and I ordered round after round of vodka. Godiv was no longer as I remembered him. The two times I had met him before, he had been somehow extended by his own surprise into a longer reach than usual, a shining person he himself hardly knew. But tonight he entangled himself in boring, academic-moralist discussions with the girls, with whom he seemed to be trying to compete. And while I tried to either lose him completely to the girls, so he could unfurl his arts, or find a topic that would re-erect him, they refused to drink more vodka and gave me theirs. In the end it worked, so to speak: Godiv disappeared into the subway car with the girls, and as the doors closed I finally saw that wide-eyed, scared, questioning, screaming, altogether present glance I had wanted to see again.
But it had taken too much to get there. More like a flower than a person I drifted to my hotel, fondled the iron handrails on the way up the stairs and slept the three hours that remained before my test.
Saturated with coffee that held open my eyes like the awning of a long-term campsite resident in heavy rain, I sat at the university in a neon-white classroom, stared for a while at the test paper and began to laugh. Ten multiple-choice questions stared back at me with small, expectant eyes, with delicate fake lashes. Each character was more beautiful than the next. But what did they mean?
I found it absolutely idiotic to waste my knowledge on tracing the line between right and wrong, particularly since the people giving the test already knew the facts they were trying to get me to spit out. I was to cross out two of three characters, which consisted of completely blameless possible parts, in order to participate in this game. Was it not much more important to know and love them each in their own right? To protect them—the right ones, the wrong ones, and particularly the nonexistent ones—by refusing to choose?
Of the three characters in the first question, two together formed a familiar combination. Was it word, literature, book, university, or warning? The third character was the same as the first, only on the left the one had the radical “man,” the other “water.” And I had always just left that part out when I wrote it, I discovered with horror! I had been learning on my own, no one had ever corrected me. The characters were so interesting. I copied them, in vertical calligraphies that shrunk, tornadolike, toward the corner of the page. Loved them on to the paper again and again and again. Characters, no matter what they may be like, are supposed to fit in a rectangle of a certain size, but you would never guess how difficult that is. After I had spent some time on the refinement of my stroke, I felt farther away from the answers than ever. Something like a hunch crept over me, then a slight dislike for the left side of the page. But the dislike, I reasoned, would probably point to the right character rather than a wrong one, seeing that I am always against the right things. Didn’t the wrong characters fill the air with the more interesting perfumes of the nonexistent? Finally I handed in two pages of calligraphy, it having morphed on the second page into a series of pinup figures, and went to the museum. I felt three. Free. Free of linguistic competence, free of calligraphy.
At the museum I thought I was able to feel the troughs in the floor where people would stop in front of the pictures and shift from one foot to the other before moving on. When I came to The Judgment of Paris I rested my limbs using a bench that was there, trying to imitate Paris’s pose. I looked at a Kokoschka, then an oil painting by Schiele. How on earth did the painters remain the masters of their colors? At one time, I too had been able to hit all possible nuances of the skin by swiftly switching the order of the colored pencils in my hand; often blurring the page with squinted eyes as I scribbled. But nowadays, though I had withdrawn to the reduced palette of black ink, not even there could I command my line: it led me on, in figures I had not wanted to breach, it and I in the spell of some obstinate fidelity to something I had hardly the slightest idea of. Thus everything I did was necessary and imposed by its own character; I stepped back when a choice appeared, as if I were in trance or an animal that can be immobilized by simple tricks such as eye contact. Like a child that one can actually prevent from doing anything by giving it confusing choices; like a band of robbers that can be draped in arabesques of heavy-handedness by dropping tidbits of conversation from out of a treetop above their camp. In this manner I would land on the back of any idea, any whim, any strict internal logic that would carry me away from the moment of a choice. Usually something like prodigality or excitedly racing around. But while I languished in the passing time, in the light of my latest lamp, the world forgotten, something else lay beside it all, unnoticed. Had I really avoided the choice? I fear I had merely avoided my judgment.
Outside the window, a desert is passing, briefly illuminated by our headlights. One city after the next. On the back of my hand I feel the delicate pressure of Krassa’s hot fingertips. They are going to rub me to insanity. I cannot sleep, but slowly I drift away into the pleasant black cosm. Then a new wave of consciousness arrives, dragged by Krassa’s fingers onto the tray of my mind, in candlelight, as it were: w- w- wo- wo- woman, someone wishes a word with you.
I am generous, I am generous, I don’t mind, I breathe deeply, change my position in the seat, procure a bit of air for the posterior by giving up some around the shoulders, scatter my hands differently and—great side effect!—they land far away from Krassa’s puffy fingers. Air! Freedom! Existence and respiration! Now back to the naked cosm, to sleep.
The idea of being enclosed in the logic of jouissance as by a high palisade remains with me even in my sleep. At the same time, I am in the uniform of an officer of the Czarist army. I stand facing a line of glasses filled with vodka. I don’t remember how I got here, but I know I must defend a woman I have kidnapped, whom no one must
treat badly. She is a foreigner, a heathen, a tribeswoman. I don’t know the significance of the glasses in front of me. I think I have asked for a duel, and someone is trying to change it into a drinking contest. I protest! I want high cliffs, the first light of morning, numbered bullets! They say I should marry her. The idea is closing in on me like a tapestry closes in on a frothy-mouthed dog! They insinuate that otherwise they might not have sufficient respect for her. Swine! Well then, I will marry her if you like, we will marry three times, by the church, by the state, and by the Devil! Except that already now it fills me with disgust that she depends on me. You must educate her, says my friend, a warm moist breath in my ear, good advice, but I shake it off. Make her your equal in society, an equal opponent. That is too difficult. Too difficult! Drink! I cry. I empty two of the glasses and leave. With that, I have lost a dozen friends at once: To rise above their games is unforgivable. Now I have only the woman I kidnapped. I stand outside the casino and stare at the starry sky. Its insolence.
Something small begins, an impulse, a miniature movement—yes, a rubbing on my thigh. The Devil, have Krassa’s hands now fallen upon my thigh! There, like a patch of oak processionaries, they decide—darling creatures that hands are, in all their plotting—to slowly make their way across my thigh. At this speed it will take half an hour. We have more than thirteen to go, during which we will remain in precisely the same position …
What should I think? Should I go searching for reasons to stop the hands’ procedures, which do me no harm? I brush them off, that should do it. I pretend to be sleeping, it’s not my fault if my honest insides act on their own needs during my sleep. Let brute force take the place of confused delicacy. Why not do away with Krassa altogether? Into the cosmos with me! I am entering slumber, I feel the breeze of nothing on my cheeks, see my officer friends in the distance, greeting me with ironic salutes: they have stumbled out the door to look for me. I call from out of the constellations, I cannot hear myself. I am the kidnapped Circassian woman, soothed by the stars in a song that I am playing on the flute while my officer is at the casino. The officer stares into the stars, which seem to have some pull, the consequential flow of a melody that he cannot quite grasp. It is I, standing on the ground, no, my feet are actually floating, carried by a bus through the desert, above the vibrations of the motor. Some of the reading lamps are on, while most people are sleeping, among them the three Kabyle engineers, one of whom had grown suddenly excited and told us he had spent ten years working here—he pointed into the dark, where on the horizon a faint glow could be seen from the great refinery several miles off the road. Krassa heaves a deep breath and snores a little.
The odd thing is that I am only here because she has a false vision, is fuddled by love. If her mind were doing what it should, she should have no reason to take a trip to the desert with me. “Many a pair of friends,” she said, as we leafed through guidebooks, “never spoke with each other again after travelling in the desert.” If I succeeded in changing her notions to fit mine and she ceased to imagine love, my presence here would become problematic. If, on the other hand, I went along with her, I would merely be someplace else, which I like so well, right? Yes, but I cannot be there, because she is already there, and so solidly present. I can’t? I mean that physically there is no space for me in her thinking. But it is thinking, it cannot be a question of physical space. But one also cannot think two versions of the same thing at the same time. She may desire me, but I think she doesn’t particularly like me. That is the bag that caught the cat, the brutality, the misunderstanding. Certainly, I do not like her particularly. Why not? She is amazing. No, she is terrible: she doesn’t notice that I don’t want to echo her desire, or she doesn’t care. She has a dream, and I am supposed to play a role in it. I am supposed to want her dream, I am supposed to enjoy it. I am supposed to want her. Want to enjoy her. I cannot, it is impossible, I gasp for air and she begins to stroke me again. Slowly. She gathers confidence, becomes methodical, regular. Diligent softness, self-confident gestures. I stop her again. A few of her muscles become tense and she turns to me slowly like a superdimensional mechanical puppet. Her eyes, popping out of their sockets, are far too close to my face, her strutting, confident upper lip, crowned with its silky mustache, spits out her full, warm voice: “You don’t like?” A voice squeaks out of my esophagus: “No. I don’t like. It prevents me from sleeping.”
I feel the hard sentence sending waves of disappointed realization through her body, then she is shaken by a few sighs. She turns away from me, rearranges herself, like one shakes up a pillow.
The Circassian, the Circassian, the Devil take me, I had forgotten her for a moment. And yet she is locked in my room all day long. I don’t want to teach her to be a lady, I wanted and still want the way she storms through the room, or flies over to me, hair streaming behind, or wraps me with hot silence, wrathful, not punishing. She is the creature in me, I am her carpet, the receptacle for her words; she doesn’t understand what I mean by sensible reasoning, by freedom as a mood, easily broken, dependent on the faculty of judgment. Her words, that consider so much of me not worth considering, consider the rules of society no arguments, consider all my moral duties silly, imbecile rituals. She has her own morals, and they demand of me my own, wild kind of fidelity. My comrades, adieu.
We arrive in the morning, not long before dawn. The music drives away with the bus and its place is taken by birds welcoming the morning with their peculiar and drastic song. A native of the town brings us to a café, where he begs a friend of his to sit with us. The air becomes lighter and lighter. My heart pulls toward the music, yearns for the day, wants to walk and walk and walk, as the air bangs my pants about my legs. Laissez-moi voir venir le jour. I have to remain seated. I get up and pace up and down. “What’s the matter?” asks Krassa, not wanting to displease the guardian, who is there to protect us from dragons, robbers, demons, and our own ignorance. Protection is courtesy in a region famed for its wildness. “No,” I say, “I can’t sit anymore.” I appear weak, unable to discipline my body to meet the standards of good behavior. I roll a cigarette and light it. Krassa and the guardian glare at me. She who does as she pleases, while others force themselves not to, earns eternal jealousy and bitter revenge in time. This cigarette has placed a seal on our antagonism, but as will be shown, Krassa is willing to forgive me several times, at least for the duration of this trip.
We wait, no one knows for whom or what. Someone has called someone else, and therefore someone having something to do with our lodgings will emerge out of the morning, out of this wide world of sand and the city, protected from which we sit under the awning of a café that is as active as sleep-encrusted eyes. The glass cooler is full of fresh mint leaves and bread. Outside lies the world, incredibly beautiful, while the parting dusk retreats like a clear wave on a beach. The way it plays high up into the sky in this particular place makes me admire without restraint the extent of physical objects. It begins here, this world I desire so much. But if I went out into it, leaving behind my little human duties, I would no longer know who I am. Since we are in a desert, the end would resemble all other ends: I would die of thirst, like millions of people have died before me. Or be ashamed if I were to be saved. I acquiesce to my confinement. With sardonically small steps in my heroic garb of billowy striped brown pants and cobalt blue shirt, I go and sit back down on one of the plastic chairs.
The sight of an awning from below reminds me of an image that impressed itself on my mind as a child. It was a rainy day at an arts and crafts fair, and I was sitting beside my mother, who was spinning at a wheel. The drops would slide to the lowest point of the material, which was gathered up in loops, and fall from there. Only in one place they fell from a loop that was not the lowest, as if giving in to the temptation to fall. They could not know there was a lower loop not far on. With my eager little soul I wanted to tell them, but found no words to talk to drops.
Finally, the proprietor of the guesthouse comes acros
s the square, an elderly Frenchman in khaki pants, fresh convert to Islam, obstinate, stern, friendly, a young grandfather. To walk! To walk! The three of us walk through the town as it grows lighter and lighter, trousers and hair fluttering as if moved by the wind of time itself. In the kitchen of the guesthouse, we set down our things and drink the old coffee out of our thermos bottle. Then Pierre takes us through the town. We pass through a labyrinth of mud walls that rise high above our heads, into close tunnels under ceilings of woven palm leaves, the anterooms of the houses. There is no such thing as public and private space, it seems, only various degrees of familiarity. Not even the families are really private, not even the emptiest part of the desert is really public, as one is so dependent on networks of human culture to survive. Some kilometers on, following invisible paths with a guide in a 4×4, we arrive at a castle on a cliff. The wind whistles through the open windows. It is the only obstacle between the horizons. Three saints lie here in their graves, above which there is a small room with a tin teapot half buried in the sand. The wind has been blowing through the window for centuries. Three coins lie in the sand. Koran verses lie in the mouths of the dead. For help, there are social networks. Help, social networks. One has to behave well, wherever one is, I realize uncomfortably.
Into the walls of the city children or adults have scratched drawings and letters, logos like Coca-Cola and Toyota, portraits of people and cars and cartoon figures. I cannot hide that all this is quite new to me. We pass out of the labyrinth into a wider street leading to the “fortress,” which is used as a hotel. Beyond the steep, palm-covered descent, the salt lake begins, Le grand Erg. On the edge of the rise lies the source, from which the old irrigation system branches out to supply the whole oasis. Pierre leads us to its mouth, tells us to remove our shoes and to walk into the tunnel of the canal. It was dug by slaves, he says. We wade through the clear water until we reach a bend, lighted from above by a hole in the tunnel’s roof. The stark light is a mere placeholder for the heat outside, strengthens the feeling of dark cool. Krassa and I balance in the half-light on sandy outcrops of stone. Then we come back out. The heat seems friendly as it smothers us, like a mother’s love. I drop my scarf in the water and wind myself a dark, dripping turban. Under the wet hat I wander on, an odd, theatrical mushroom, breathless at the beauty, shy, step by step, as if on the moon. Krassa too. Her formality is afloat, her Arab pantaloons, her sandals, her feet pattering over the ground, sure and rough in those ugly health sandals. We are dizzy and blinded. I feel excitedly good, like on a tipping scale where balance forces one to be unafraid.
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