Wide World In Celebration and Sorrow

by Leon Rooke

  —That’s good, Martin, Elfride says. I love that factically possible line. It makes me break out in a cold sweat.

  Indeed one of them in the room is sweating, though it isn’t Elfride. Heidegger is sweating because writing a new philosophy, bringing the axe to old traditional philosophical walls – that, mein Führer, is hard work. Plus, there’s the other problem: the window, the cat. How hot and stuffy this room is. If he raises the window, he will be wasting heat. Heat the Volk must not waste. Only a Jew saboteur would waste the nation’s heat. So he is stymied on that front. Yet – and now he is getting to the essence of the situation – yet if he raises the window, the simple solution sans heat, the loathsome cat which always plops itself down on the sill, will come in. Thus, he keeps the window shut. He sweats.

  Architects, he thinks, truly are a repellent tribe. They can get nothing right.

  Floss swings in his chair. His shoe soles strike the floor. He sees Elfride poised. Resolute Elfride is ever on the job.

  —Were you saying something, darling? says Elfride. It isn’t the architects, it’s me. Don’t blame the architects for your stinginess. Blame the war. Or better yet, yes, blame me.

  She parades curvaceously around the sage’s desk.

  —Although of course, she says, you would be perfectly justified if you blamed the cat. I’m with you there. I hate that cat. That cat is the ugliest creature I, for one, have ever seen. Are you for two – if I may phrase the question so – in thinking that cat is the most frightful creature ever to walk on four legs?

  —Three, Heidegger says. If we are to speak of the cat, then let’s speak precisely. The cat has but three legitimate legs. The fourth, as you can distinctly see, is so foreshortened as to scarcely exist.

  —Foreshortened? says Elfride. Do you mean to say the leg in question existed that way in the womb? Perhaps in the very exchange of seed? Oh, I think surely not foreshortened, because I clearly remember that leg was perfectly normal until you crushed it when you caught the cat coming through your window.

  Heidegger lowers his head. He kneads his brow. He is thinking, I have stayed up all night for this?

  He is thinking, Hannah, thank God, was not a chatterbox. Her head was on my chest whenever I spoke.

  —Yes, darling, Elfride is saying. As much as I despise the creature, it is criminal what you have done to that cat. You all but pressed that cat flat. Martin, I hardly know what to say. I hardly do. I am speechless, listening to your infirmity on the subject of that cat.

  Floss sees the philosopher’s eyes narrowing. He sees him looking with utter hatred at this wholesome, proud, meandering wife. Heidegger’s defence collapses. Elfride has described the scene exactly as it occurred.

  “It was an accident,” Floss says.

  —It was purely accidental, Heidegger says.

  Elfride snubs this excuse. She whisks it away with her broom.

  Floss has his attention elsewhere. He is focusing on the sleeping cat. The cat, to his eyes, has altered itself somehow. That the cat suffers deformity is true enough. But it is no longer the bony, undernourished cat. The cat has been eating. It has found food somewhere. The cat is fat.

  As for Heidegger, already he is scribbling again. Quote, When what we call “accidents” befall from the with-world and the environment, they can befall only from resoluteness.

  Floss forsakes his study of the cat. Hold the phone, he says. Hold the phone. Hello, hello. Bravo, my friend.

  But Elfride’s broom is stabbing the air.

  —You could kill the cat, Elfride is saying. Yes, my lamb, you could finish the job. Then you could raise your window, if only for a moment. Surely not a great deal of our precious heat would escape if you raised your window for one mere moment. Our war resources would not be sorely depleted. Fresh air, Martin! Glorious health! With the window open, even so little as a tidge, you would not be forced to wrestle there in heavy sweat. You could be comfortable. Surely your work would go better if you were comfortable. Kill the cat, my good soul. With the cat dead, your Being and Time will be concluded in nothing flat.

  —Enough, Elfride. Enough!

  —Shall I kill the cat for you, Martin? I would be happy to kill the atrocious cat if you tell me you believe I should, and can morally justify my performing the act. Issue the cleansing command. Think! She is only a cat.

  —She? That cat is female?

  —Oh master, groans Floss.

  —Yes, and rather resolute, by the look of her.

  Heidegger sinks low into his chair. He hoods his eyes.

  —Are you done, Elfride, dearest soul?

  —Done?

  —Yes, done. If you are not done, Elfride, then I am leaving my desk. I am leaving my house. I will walk this night all the way to my cabin in Todtnauberg, if that is what it takes to be quit of your tongue.

  Floss, at his desk gnawing a fingernail, allows himself a smile. The sage is tempting fate with this mention of the cabin, of Todtnauberg. He has stepped with both feet into Elfride’s trap.

  —Todtnauberg? Elfride says. Your cabin? But, darling, the cabin is mine. True. I gave it to you. But quit my tongue? Oh, heavens, you can’t mean I have disturbed you. I rattle on, certainly, but only because I know how much my rattling improves your mood. If I did not rattle, you would go about eternally under your famous black cloud. You would never be able to look anyone in the eye. Your students would hardly hang on to your every word. Oh, I think it is fair to say, Martin, that without me and my tongue, and my Nazi boots, and just possibly the cat’s presence at your window, you would never get your work done. You would never write a line. Most assuredly your opus would never be completed. Fame would elude you. Not a person outside Freiburg would ever have the pleasure of hearing your name. You can admit that to yourself and to me, can you not? I’ll not hold it against you. You do not have to prove yourself to me, not ever. Certainly not the way you had to prove yourself to that schoolgirl, Hannah Arendt. And to take her to my cabin in Todtnauberg to prove it, well, my word!

  —So that’s it, is it? That’s what this eternal dusting is all about. This mouth disease. So you can harp night and day on my little Hannah fling.

  —Little, darling? What would poor Hannah think if I repeated to her what you have just said? Did you not write to her that she was your life? Did she not reply that you were her every heartbeat? That your paths would haunt each other until the death? Oh, I think so, darling. I believe those were the two sweethearts’ very words. ‘My homeland of pure joy.’ Was that not your latest encomium?

  Floss applies a handkerchief to his eyes. His eyes are wet. They ever get so each time he sees Hannah and Heidegger together in the cabin at Todtnauberg. Strolling together after class under the singing trees. The decades of love to come. How thrilling it must be, Floss thinks, to possess these loves.

  Still. Still, Floss altogether shares Jasper’s view when it comes to that Hannah relationship. Resolute, yes, but messy, messy. Cataclysmic love: Hannah defending him at the French de-Nazification committee hearings: scrambling to hawk his manuscripts to Columbia: through the years never one syllable from the master’s mouth as to the beloved’s own work which he read in secret and secretly believed ephemeral if not deliquescent. Her head ever lowered to his chest.

  Elfride is thorough. Not all has been said:

  —Or perhaps the precipitation in your eyes has as cause your forthcoming tart Princess Margot of Saxony-Meiningen? Will your rendezvous signal this time be flashing lights or will it be your shades hanging at a certain depth, as was the case with banal Hannah? Which? Will she hand-copy your every hour’s text, as I do?

  Floss is astounded. He is giddy with excitement. He has not heretofore perceived that Elfride’s capacity to see into the future matches his own. He sees her now, as one day she doubtlessly will, hands clasped in an unrecognized lap, confused by the vague sense of warfare between aching joints, an old woman of ninety-two awaiting death in a caretaker home. Will she see her two sons on Russian soil, pr
isoners of war? Has she yet seen the Delphic oracle rescuing from rubble manuscripts housed in what previously was a Messkirch bank? Hiding them in a cave?

  Not at the moment, in any case. At the moment what both Elfride and Floss are seeing is the Master frantically bicycling 16 miles to Todtnauberg, flinging off his clothes, now dressed only in an absurd Tyrolean cap, Elfride, Hannah, the Princess, and scores of other women panting in pursuit, flinging off theirs. For Floss, madness promotes the vision. For Elfride, a confirmation of enduring love.

  A thousand letters, cards, over the decades, informing Elfride where his Divinship is, not one suggesting who he is with. What a challenge this marital devotion, these conjugal splits. Send in your party membersip, dearest soul, thinks Floss. In resoluteness is strength.

  “Get back to the cat,” Floss tells Elfride. Forget Hannah. The cat, after all, has meaning; it is both a real and a symbolic cat. In light of the great man’s post-war silence on the issue of certain atrocities, personal betrayals, I could tolerate additional intimate details re his treatment of the cat.”

  —Shoo, shoo, says Elfride. Stop harassing me.

  Heidegger is distracted. Once more, Elfride is communicating with vacant air. But perhaps this is good. Perhaps her nasty obsession with Hannah has for the moment exhausted itself. Elfride, he thinks, with her everlasting can of worms. Essence of spite. Why can’t my two great loves, my sprites, be friends? I must see to that, however imbecilic it may appear.

  He looks at the cat, asleep on the windowsill. Even curved like that, one can see the leg’s deformity. The crippled spine. The cat should be killed. It is doing that cat no favour to let it live.

  He would give Elfride the order. He would say to her, Elfride, kill the cat! Do it now.

  But he and she are locked in this struggle. They are irresolute. The cat, if it is to die, must die under Elfride’s own initiative. If he were to give the order, the cat would ever survive intact in his memory. Whereas, if she killed it outright, slicing its throat with a knife from the kitchen or beheading it with the hatchet on a woodblock in the backyard or merely trampling it to death, then the cat would be gone forever. It would disappear totally and entirely from his mind and from the world. Its essence would have been annihilated, its entity denied.

  He thinks: what Elfride is hoping is that the weather will get extremely cold this winter – Freiburg under ice, the cat stiff as a rock in the freeze. Certainly there is not the remotest chance that she will allow the cat inside the house.

  Unless she does so in punishment of me. Unless she does so out of revenge for my taking Hannah to Todtnauberg. Such a stupid impulse, despite its having led to excruciating reward.

  One, it had led Hannah out of drabness. It had transformed her overnight into a bewildered passionate vehicle of sex. Wrought, her mind had unloosened, her brain cells uncoiled.

  God forgive me the moments I even have wondered she wasn’t the better thinker than me.

  Heidegger is close to tears. The shame of this.

  —Oh, she’s bright, Martin, Elfride says. I have never denied you her brightness. But – she snaps her fingers – she isn’t you.

  Floss leans back in his chair. He removes his glasses, polishes them. Elfride’s face is flushed. Always, with that flushed face, any wild remark is apt to burst from her mouth. He wants his glasses clean, that he may see her clean, when next she speaks.

  “Tip the scales, Elfride,” Floss says. “Show the great man how bright you are.”

  —Martin, darling, Elfride says. She is laughing. – Look what I am doing!

  Martin has been cleaning his glasses.

  Floss, putting on his glasses, sees Heidegger putting on his.

  As for Elfride, Elfride is at the study window. She is poking the cat with a stick. Heidegger keeps the stick there for that very purpose. Enter a line in Being and Time, then jump up and poke the cat. Enter another, poke the cat. Day after day, poke the perfectly stupid, ever returning cat. That is how his opus is being written: Elfride’s dusting, Eflride’s interventions – but whenever alone he has been poking the cat.

  So Floss figures. Floss has figured it out. Just as he has figured out – flipping the pages, speed-reading the familiar text – the nature of the breeze. He must wipe his fingertips of glycerine, that’s how much speed he needs. He has learned the dark secrets of this book. Floss knows precisely each line, each phrase, where Heidegger has got up, flung himself across the room, picked up his stick – tortured the cat.

  But today, to Floss’s mind, there is something different about this cat.

  “A moment, Elfride. Consider. In my view, that’s a pregnant cat.”

  But Elfride is in action. Elfride has the stick. She is poking the cat.

  —Da!(poke) Da!(poke) Da!(poke) Da!

  The cat is squalling; it is meowing, hissing. Clawing the glass. It can’t get in, it can’t get out.

  Heidegger, cannot, will not, look. He turns his back to this scene. He claps hands over his ears. Elfride is capable, reliable. When the deed is done she will dispose of the corpse. He need never be appraised of the how or where. Philosophy need not concern itself with a being’s single specific fate. It has steered fathomless circles since the Greeks established the course. Well done, Greeks. Now those old walls must crumble. With certain exceptions, work to date has been rubbish in the wind. The ground is soggy, diseased, repellent: it releases a fetid odour. Original thought is now required. Already the cat’s presence, Elfride’s resoluteness, is slipping from his mind. The pen flies into his hand; it flies across the page. Quote, “Irresoluteness” merely expresses that phenomenon which we have interpreted as a Being-surrendered to the way in which things have been prevalently interpreted by the “they.” Sweat pours down his cheeks. He pauses. He wonders if he may permit himself a footnote excluding Plato, Hölderlin, Nietzsche from this “they.” Probably so. Why promote their cause?

  He works on. He is unaware that Elfride’s Da! Da! Da! has catapulted into shrieks. Something about the cat. Something about something inside the cat. Let her deal with the matter. The cat is a household problem. That’s what marriage is for. For wives to deal with them.

  Floss isn’t fooled. He knows Heidegger’s deeper thought: This wife, this hellcat, distorts the providence of being.

  —Do you wish to whack the cat, Martin? Elfride is whacking with each shriek.

  Floss cannot sit still in his chair. His every nerve is shot. He cannot witness any more of this. He is shouting at Elfride, “Put down the stick! Filthy Hun, put down the stick!”

  Already she has dropped the stick. Blood has splattered on the carpet, on her lovely nightdress. Her hands are covering her face. On the sill the dying cat is wrenching its body one way and another. Gore is leaking from the torn fur. Blood pools on the windowsill. A slimy wedge of kitten protrudes beneath the crooked tail.

  Never mind. Soon, reaching towards sixty, Heidegger will be out on the hinterlands with young and old, digging trenches to delay the advancing enemy. Floss hurriedly assembles his books. He hitches the backpack over one arm. Rushes down the stairs. The library is exceptionally well lit. Fluorescent tubes quiver and spit. In the entire building no other individual is stirring. The universe is silent. Dawn has arrived, an ascending quilt. His own cat will be crying. His cat will be saying, Why have you not been here to let me purr in your lap? What have you been doing? His wife and children will be in tears. Where have you been? Who are you? (Dearest soul), resolute being, explain yourself.

  BAD MEN WHO LOVE JESUS

  Queening isn’t what it used to be.

  This king isn’t easily fooled. Take the queen, today she’s staying in for lunch, mucking around in the kitchen with poisons in the mixing bowls, dipping the odd finger. Tasteless, she says, not quite aloud, which means it is only the rhubarb old kingy will notice.

  Any minute now he’ll be shouting, “Feed me!” So few of his tasters have died this year, if less than ten is few. “Less than on the battlefield,” th
e king likes to say.

  “Here woman,” he’s saying now, “kneel, rub my feet.”

  Queening isn’t what it used to be. “Out of here,” he’s been heard to shout of nights, upsetting the peacocks asleep in the trees, “Tonight it’s lesbians I want!”

  He’ll have them too, and any way he wants. Who’s king here?

  Lunch, king?

  “Not rhubarb again!” he says, “Is rhubarb all this kingdom grows?”

  “Ah, but lad,” he says, “take a decent taste, not finger dips as I see the queen is taking hers. That’s it, lad, a full dollop of the stuff. Now let’s give it a minute, see if your face goes blue the way mine does when I sing. Singing’s good for a body, you know, ask the queen, the whole this morning these tuneful hums under her breath, so happy, you know. Well, who would have it another way, a smiling face, that’s the thing.”

  “Hmmmm, that food’s looking good. I find it so undignified, this having to wait, a tugboat anchor, you know? How’re you feeling lad? A fast poison, a slow one, how’s one ever know? Lad, lad, I say, lad, poke out your tongue, I’m told that that’s the first place a true poison shows.”

  “No, queen, you go ahead, don’t wait for me. I insist, truly, I insist, here, let me put this big serving on your plate.”

  Minutes pass, an hour, so much time passing, my word. The taster boy prone on the marble floor, the king’s doctor, a good rep, better at bloodletting than most, fans a broom over the taster’s face. There, see him, frankly the boy looks done for to me. Ah, now the old feather-beneath-the-nose trick, is such really needed, did you ever see such a blue face? Too bad, such a fine, stout lad he was, come all the way from Egyptland, I’m told, though it’s true that turban bothered some.

  Did the king eat? We know the queen did, the king insisting, insisting, going up on his shoes, even flashing that steel, “If you like the stuff so much then eat it yourself. Eat, goddamn you!”

  Our poor queen, expatiated, no, that’s not the word that I was looking for, expired, that’s the ticket. It’s a case of “an ovo,” if you ask me, from the egg, right there in the beginning a wise party would have known those who were not going to work out. Yes, as you say, those rogues in Rome have a phrase for everything, “anguis in herba,” that about covers the matter, there was always a snake in the grass. Those lesbians, for instance, there was one that split the camel’s back, that truly got the s – t hitting the fan, definitely. If I had to put up with monkey business of that scale, I would have come unstuck a long time before our good queen did.