by John K. Cox
“When?”
“Why, tomorrow. Après dîner.”
Something collapsed inside me. I asked:
“Where?”
“Very far away.”
“To Daghestan?”
“Tu n’est pas mal instruit. Peut-être, pour le moment . . .”
“Soit . . . Laisse-moi rêver de nouveau après m’avoir réveillé si cruellement par cette cloche d’alarme de ton départ. Sept mois sous tes yeux . . . Et à présent, où en réalité j’ai fait ta connaissance, tu me parles de départ!”
“Je te répète que nous aurions pu causer plus tôt.”
“So you would have liked that?”
“Moi? Tu ne m’échapperas pas, mon petit. Il s’agit de tes intêrets à toi. Est-ce que tu étais trop timide pour t’approcher d’une femme à qui tu parles en rêve maintenant, ou est-ce qu’il y avait quelqu’un qui t’en a empêché?
“Je te l’ai dit! Je ne voulais pas te dire vous.” Then, wearily, I extinguished the candle. The book fell with a bang onto the straw. A solemn stillness enveloped my thoughts, my sleep.
Adieu, mon prince Carnaval!
Igor, I created Eurydice. I sang her form into existence!
I was able to follow from day to day the metamorphosis of her breasts, growing round under my hands until they became as fragile and delicate as the finest Chinese porcelain.
I made her hips dance, made them bloom, made her waist unfold like a lily.
I seasoned her tongue with chamomile and hyacinth; I sharpened it with kisses, unbridled it.
Igor, my friend, I transformed her fingers into endearments, into caresses, into a lute.
Her arms I ennobled, transformed into a bolster for my head, into a dream.
I turned her into my own selfishness, my friend Igor, into a sigh, into breath.
And what is left for me to do now, Capricorn, other than pull my own hair out, or poke out my eyes?
Brother Igor, she wrested away my selfishness, my masterpiece!
THE LUTE, OR THE GRAND FESTIVAL
“Get up!” said Igor.
I didn’t open my eyes. I just listened to him plucking the straw and ripping the paper from the window. Then two or three small pieces of glass hit the floor through the fine straw, and a draft of air struck me.
“Get up!” Igor repeated. “You cannot take refuge in sleep. I brought you a little beef broth and a shot of cognac. That’ll bring you back to life.”
“Close the window, Igor. Please. You can see that I’m shivering all over, that my teeth are chattering. And I can’t even open my eyes in this burst of light.”
“Will you eat then?” he asked.
“Let me have a sip of the cognac. My tongue is rotting.”
He brought over his little flask and poured a few drops into the lid.
“Don’t act preachy,” I snapped. “Just hand me the flask.”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Kill yourself with it for all I care. You haven’t eaten anything for days and you won’t come to your senses. You’re going to go nuts like this.”
“So what if I go nuts? At least I won’t be conscious of anything.”
“Just a little soup,” Igor said, guiding the spoon to my mouth. “And enough of these dark thoughts . . . So, what really happened?”
“Nothing happened,” I said. “Everything is perfectly fine.”
“Eurydice . . .”
“Shut up!”
“Well, well, look at that,” he said. “You’ve gotten as mean as a junkyard dog. But I’m simply asking as your friend: What’s going on with you two? Something’s obviously not right.”
“Everything is fine. (Sorry, but I’m really irritated.) Why shouldn’t it be? She loves me, I love her, and . . . so there.”
“Nonetheless,” he said. “Something happened during your absence. Surely she didn’t . . .”
“You are a vulgarian, Igor. She’s not that Marija from the ground floor . . .”
“Still, something happened. That’s clear enough. Ultimately, even your Eurydice is no angel. Even she . . .”
“Igor! If you say anything obscene, I swear I’ll kill you. I don’t know with what, but I’ll kill you.”
“All right!” said Igor. “This means that your old egoism is back. You’re cured. You’ve recovered.”
“Give me a cigarette,” I said, “so I can thaw out.”
We smoked for ten minutes without a word. The soup gave off steam and, together with the aroma of the tobacco smoke, the vapor gave the attic a new odor.
I only drank one more little glass of cognac.
Afterward I spent several months in the attic, neither receiving visitors nor going out. I grew a beard like a hermit. Serpents hatched under my nails.
I had ripped the lute’s hair out so it wouldn’t provoke me. I plugged up its mouth with dirty rags so that it couldn’t sigh and couldn’t hear.
Day and night I reclined in the rocking chair, staring at the ceiling. I listened to the gurgling of the rain, the grieving of the winds.
From time to time Igor brought me unsweetened tea with toast and cigarettes. I was choking on my own stench, in the smoke. I had forgotten how to see and how to speak.
I was a coward for not killing myself then. Or wise.
Freshly shaven, and in my sumptuous black tie, I was seated before a succulent leg of chicken in a café. I had a white napkin across my knees and the sleeves of my coat were rolled up so they wouldn’t get worn out. I was no longer drinking either dark, flavorsome wine or scorching absinthe. I had only mineral water and a soft drink. Voraciously, with my nose in the foam, I gulped down a beer.
“I barely recognized you,” said Billy Wiseass.
I offered him my hand in greeting without getting up.
“Well . . . filtered cigarettes, uh-huh, and real mineral water, and . . .”
“Cut it out!” I said. “This is not some roadside dive.”
I saw the malice in his eyes. He was getting ready to say something unpleasant to me. Maybe to remind me of the attic. To rub my nose in it and stain my sleeves. I waited, nibbling away at the drumstick. A bone had gotten caught in my throat.
“You’re not even going to offer me a seat,” he said. “Look, even if you’re angry at the whole world, that’s still no reason. . . .”
“Sit down,” I said.
I saw that he had something to tell me.
“Do you want a beer? Waiter!”
“A cognac,” he said. “A double shot, please.”
“How’s your Urania?” I asked. “I haven’t seen you two for a long while.”
“Fine, thanks,” he said. “Oh, yeah—I almost forgot. Perhaps this will interest you . . .”
“Out with it already!” I said. “You’re cooking up something malicious, aren’t you, you dirty rat.”
“Eurydice!” he said.
I plunged my nose into my plate.
He repeated: “Eurydice. I said ‘Eurydice.’”
“So what?”
He grabbed me by the arm. “She’s waiting for you in the attic, you moron.”
“Very nice,” I said. “But first I have to pick this bone clean. I’m not going to leave this chicken to the cooks out of sheer charity!”
“I haven’t seen you for ages,” the cleaning lady said when I came running up.
“I’ve been sick,” I said.
I expected her to ask me for the rent.
“Sick? And I didn’t even know. Otherwise I would’ve paid you a visit. So what was wrong with you?”
“Influenza,” I said.
“And just what is that?”
“Bloody diarrhea,” I said and then rushed up the stairs.
I had already raced up two floors when I heard her voice: “A girl was waiting for you.”
“Are you talking to me?” I asked, panting as I leaned over the wobbly wooden banister.
“To you . . . Who else? She left less than five minutes ago. If you hadn’t been licking your plate, you
would’ve caught her.”
There was still a warm indentation on the bed where she had been sitting. The window was wide open and the wind reverberated in the lute. She had taken the rags and paper out of it. The ashtrays were gleaming, and the books, which previously had been lying strewn about in the corners everywhere you looked, had been piled up into a burial mound.
Orpheus, a note read, why do you claim the right to suffer for yourself alone . . . ? I waited for you until 9:30. I could tell by your lute what kind of shape you’re in. Can’t you even . . .
I couldn’t read the rest.
So there we have it, Igor. A few light-years older, but so young, and so bitter.
And what would have become of us if we had kept on acting and pretending?
You know very well, Capricorn, that I wouldn’t have lasted very long rolling up my sleeves and drinking mineral water and smoking filtered cigarettes.
What would we be like without journeys, without conversations?
How would I fare without my lute, without Eurydice?
“You have to look at things realistically, dear fellow, realistically,” said the man whom we are here calling Billy Wiseass or some such thing.
“I agree with you completely,” I said. “But don’t forget, my good man, that it is especially necessary for people like us: artists. And even for you, the astronomers, too. Through the twinkling of the stars you’re supposed to glean hints of the aroma of the astral humus, the social composition and political structure of the galaxies. After all . . .”
“You’re wrong,” he said. “The point is not to intuit an object, as you say, but rather to investigate it, tangibly, to touch it and feel it. Without any sort of guesswork, my dear fellow.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I assume you can’t feel the stars with your hand as you would the udder of a cow.”
“Why is it that you always want to be witty, at all costs? I’m tempted to say: a professional wit.”
“Out of egoism,” I said. “That is to say—by mistake. In actuality, fate has allotted to you the role of reasoner and wiseass (your name states as much), just as I have been given the lute as my lot . . .”
“I’ve had it up to here with that lute of yours. A stupid, pompous, antiquarian symbol.”
“It is not a symbol at all!” I said.
“What the hell is it, then, if not a symbol?”
“A lute,” I said.
He waved his hand dismissively: take a hike.
We walked on in silence for some time. We were still such good friends that the silence didn’t bother us. The hollow clatter of our footsteps hardly made us flush with embarrassment.
“Take a look at this, Igor,” I said, pointing at a large yellow poster.
Or was it he who pointed at the big yellow poster and said: “Take a look at this, Lute-meister . . .”?
At any rate, the poster was there, yellow, damp with fresh glue and rain, looking like some enormous rose petal. On it was written, in beautiful black letters:
“Let’s go, Capricorn,” I said.
Or he said: “Off we go, guitar-meister.”
At any rate, we headed in that direction . . .
At the door they asked to see our passes. Igor pulled out a thousand-dinar note and slipped it into the man’s hand. The guy took a look at us and then gave us two pornographic postcards; the program was printed on the back of them, along with the words “No Admittance Under Sixteen Years of Age.”
“No matter,” I said. “I would make a point of attending out of professional curiosity, even if I were under sixteen . . .”
Billy the Goat laughed. “That’s a good way to put it,” he said.
“Flowers grow on the dung-heap,” I said sagely.
“What do you mean by that? What kind of flowers?”
“Nothing, nothing. I was just thinking out loud. Besides . . .”
“Why do you always stumble to a stop before you finish your thought?” he said. “What kind of flowers are at issue here?”
“The ones that are sprouting from me. With their roots in my heart and their blossoms in the sunlight. With their pollen in my eye . . . Those are the ones.”
?!
After some sort of incident—I don’t remember what—Eurydice either couldn’t or didn’t want to come see me in the attic anymore. Maybe it was after that note she’d left me while I’d been licking my plate clean in some pub. I don’t know. I no longer even know if that attic ever existed or if I just conjured it up. And I also don’t know if Eurydice ever climbed up into that attic through that narrow, dirty stairwell, where the cockroaches rustle about when the light catches them by surprise. Then, with a light crack, they squish under your feet like berries. A little greasy spot remains; it spreads out and becomes darker the farther it gets from the epicenter of the eruption. I don’t know—I don’t believe—that she ever climbed those filthy steps. But then where did that slip of paper come from, which I found at some point under the bell jar next to the rocking chair? Maybe she passed the note to the cleaning lady downstairs in the hall, and then she put it under the bell jar so the rats wouldn’t shred it like lettuce. Who knows if I ever really read this note? Or whether she, Eurydice, really wrote it with her own hand. But I can’t believe that I planted this note here myself. For God’s sake, how would I have been able to imitate her handwriting so skillfully . . . ? It truly was odd handwriting. And worthy of further comment. At first glance it resembled Sanskrit. To tell the truth, I’ve never actually seen Sanskrit, but in any case I think that Eurydice’s handwriting has its roots in some secret dream. In places her writing was utterly illegible. All the consonants looked like a single letter, which looked like all of them together, so that you could never determine precisely which was intended. Each and every vowel was also written identically, with the one difference that you could at least produce its sound: that eternal letter—a multitude of circular, oval, large-eyed and bewitched letters rolled around between those indeterminate, exotic consonants. Come to think of it, everything she wrote looked like it contained only one and the same imperishable letter, so that her words, once written, scrolled past like a vague tolling of bells. But I never had sufficient time then to ponder all this. I was always completely preoccupied with deciphering her notes, which I found unexpectedly here and there, most frequently right in the attic upon returning from my travels. These really weren’t missives in the true sense of the word. On a slip of paper ripped from a memo pad she would string together a necklace of sighs, with pretty much every other little square containing either an O, or a kiss, or a tear, or an eye. It all depends on who’s reading them, and how. And of course on what the word denotes outside of its pictorial meaning. Such a letter-kiss, a letter-poem, had ten, or a hundred, variants and interpretations, and I believe that my fate was sealed by one such misunderstanding. I would remind you of that well known, historic misunderstanding which resulted in the godhead being represented with horns instead of a halo; thus Moses became a garden-variety cuckold, ridiculed in secret by everyone in the neighborhood—beginning, of course, with the cleaning lady. And the fact that one venerates him in public, or even prays to him—that is, I believe, the result of hypocrisy. But one should not forget to observe a moment of pathetic reverence: even a cuckolded godhead does inspire respect, after all.
“You’ve really gotten carried away, Cuckold,” said Igor, peering over my shoulder. “I’d bet my life that you no longer know what you’re talking about.”
“I do know,” I said, offended. “About the horns! And next time don’t stick your nose into my papers.”
“What horns are you talking about?” he said. “About yours? That’s obviously the reason you started hiding your papers from me.”
“About your horns,” I said, in the calmest possible voice.
He grew a bit more serious, and then exploded in laughter. “Maybe you’re just a big jerk, banjo-meister. A joker is what you are.”
“I was talking about ho
rns,” I said again. “About yours . . . and about mine. I wouldn’t joke about such things. You know that quite well.”
He stopped laughing. All at once he grew as pale as . . . well, simply pale, like . . .
“It’s not that . . .”
“Uh-huh,” I said, nodding my head. “Forgive me for having to tell you this . . . You know . . . this is unpleasant for me, but since you already . . .”
“Just go on,” he said quietly, clenching his teeth. “I can take it.”
“Marija . . .”
“I know. She was making out with someone in the lobby of the building.”
“No.”
“Something more serious? She didn’t . . .?”
“No,” I said impatiently, “but it’s simply that . . .”
“Maybe it’s simple for you!” he cried out and slammed the binoculars to the ground.
“That’s a shame,” I said. “And to think that tonight they’ll be celebrating the ‘golden wedding anniversary’ in the constellation of Orion.”
“I don’t care,” he said, with his head thrust into the palms of his hands. “Finish telling me what this is all about or I will kill you.”
“Take a look at this,” I said, handing him the postcard that I’d gotten at the Grand Festival of Coiffures, Flowers, and Pop Tunes. “I have no choice but to show you this . . . It wouldn’t be fair.”
He grabbed the Marija-postcard out of my hand and held it closer to the light.
“So what?” he said. “That’s Marija. What are you trying to say? This particular number is called ‘Unforgettable Pussy.’ She strips to the tune of the Persian March for a whole fifteen minutes . . .”
“And you knew about this?”
“Of course,” he said. “I got her this gig . . . Is that all you had to tell me about Marija? Just that?”
“Isn’t that enough for you, you old goat? Isn’t that enough?!”
He doubled over with laughter, blushing, and his tears flowed down like . . . His tears were gushing out because of the laughter. When he had calmed down a bit, he pulled out his wallet, which was made of donkey leather and adorned with initials of mother-of-pearl, and he silently handed me another postcard. Then he went back to rolling around in the straw, convulsing with laughter.