On the Edge

by Markus Werner

  Loos stopped walking and breathed heavily. “Since being alone, I’ve started smoking again, and that takes its revenge,” he said. “I didn’t smoke for five years, although my wife—she herself was a non-smoker—never pressured me to stop. It was an obese woman who freed me from my addiction.” “A layer-on of hands?” “No, not a layer-on of hands, but a person who sat across from me in a café and gobbled up various desserts with well-nigh shameless voracity. I felt disgust. ‘How can someone be so unrestrained and weak-willed?’ I asked myself, lit a cigarette, and realised that I was smoking it voraciously. That was my last, and in the next five years there was no backsliding. All right, we can march on as far as I’m concerned.”

  “I’m still interested in this business of Hesse’s umbrella,” I said. “What impressed your wife so much about it?” He had asked himself that, Loos said, especially since it was just a simple black umbrella like his own and millions of others. In fact, he had not only asked himself, but his wife too, later in the hotel room—they were staying at the Bellevue. He, her husband, he told her, also had an umbrella, but evidently she regarded his as the epitome of the commonplace, whereas she had stood before Hesse’s umbrella as before a sacred object. Could she tell him what enchanted her about this umbrella? She smiled at him and reminded him of the Freud Museum they had visited together in Vienna; there was a display of one of Freud’s half-smoked cigars that he, in contrast to her, had gazed on almost devoutly. He had to admit she was right—the cigar had indeed moved him intensely. And that was the end of that subject. In bed, his wife also read him a poem she was very fond of, that had been displayed in the museum, printed on a letter-sized sheet. Two lines of it she read to him three times, which is why he knew it by heart:

  And so the heart at every call from life

  Must ready be to part and start anew.

  When she asked him if that wasn’t beautiful, he had tactlessly grunted sleepily, at which she had turned the light out.

  It pleasantly surprised me that Loos could not only harangue and debate, but all at once tell a story as well. And since he had so far divulged so little about his life, I now seized the moment and asked him whether school was fun for him, did he like teaching? He enjoyed being in the classroom, he said, but right outside the door an evil spirit ruled. Over the past few years the schools had almost everywhere fallen prey to the bureaucrats, pedagogical illiterates, but on this march through the silent night any further word on the tragedy of the school system was forbidden.

  We didn’t speak again till we had the winding ascent behind us and had reached the plateau of the Collina d’oro. The stars were gone, and a wind came up. “What are you thinking?” asked Loos. “Ah,” I said, “I was just trying to remember when exactly I ended the relationship with the girlfriend I told you about.” “Yes,” he said, “it can’t be easy for you to keep track. Is it so important?” “Not at all. It just suddenly struck me that this girlfriend, who was also a patient at Cademario, might have known your wife, if they stayed there at the same time.” “My wife was only there for five days, till the eleventh of June last year, if that helps you.” “That means till the day after tomorrow a year ago?” “Yes,” he said quietly, “the accident’s a year old on Pentecost.” I didn’t dare ask again about the circumstances of her death and told myself too that I would have heard from Valerie, who stayed at Cademario for three weeks, about any fatal accident that took place during her time there, all the more so if she knew Loos’s wife.

  Just before Bigogno the first raindrops fell, lightning lit up the sleeping village, the crickets fell silent, and after the thunder I advised Loos to turn back. It wasn’t a good thing to break off something once begun, he said, and besides a good six seconds had passed between the lightning and the thunder. If you divided that by five you’d know how far off the storm was—more than a mile in our case. So he wasn’t going to turn back, but on the other hand, he’d be happy if he could step off the road for a minute. I said I’d been feeling the same need for some time now. We stepped to the side of the road, keeping a distance of about two yards. I told him that in my practice I had recently had a man wanting a divorce, who had been trained by his wife only to pee sitting down in the bathroom, to avoid splatter, and now after four years of compliance, the client suddenly felt her spoon feeding as a ground for divorce. Loos didn’t take it up; he was humming to himself. For the first time I felt the urge to ask him his first name. “What are you humming?” I asked. “ ‘O How Lovely Is Thy World,’ a Schubert song,” he said, “one of my wife’s favourites.” “That I practically assumed,” I said. “You certainly see the world differently.” “So it is—people complete themselves harmonically.” Was this harmony never troubled by discord? I asked, as I zipped up my fly. “So seldom,” he replied, “that I haven’t forgotten a single instance, least of all the last, which had to do with pickle jars.” “Pickle jars?” “With empty pickle jars,” Loos said, who was also finished now. “The case might interest you, I mean as a lawyer. One day we found an empty pickle jar in the parcel-bin—what we used to call the milk-bin—of our mailbox, and the next day another. At first I took them as a kind of joke greeting, but after a month, by which time I had gotten rid of a dozen of them, I got upset. At the same time I realised that I was practically disappointed when a few days went by without a new one. After another two months, my wife was still giggling and calling it a non-problem, while I had to put up with these pickle jars invading my dreams. At night I sometimes stood in the unlit kitchen alone, looking out over the scene of the crime, but the perpetrator never showed himself. ‘Enough,’ I said after the sixtieth jar, ‘I’m going to the police, before I go crazy.’ ‘Do you know what you are?’ my wife said, and her eyes for whole moments betrayed anger, if not contempt. ‘You’re a philistine,’ she said. So of course I didn’t report it, and my wife took over the duty of getting rid of the jars. And now I ask you, Mr. Clarin, to give me a legal view of the matter.”

  “Not easy,” I said. “Did the perpetrator enter your property, or was your mail box on the side of the road?” “The latter,” said Loos. “Then by the criminal code trespass hardly comes into consideration. On the other hand, you could appeal to the environmental protection law, which forbids waste-disposal except in approved repositories. For the inconveniences you suffered, you might have a claim to compensation according to the Code of Obligations, but, as I said, the case is hard to categorise. You did well not to take it to court.” “Thank you,” said Loos. “You’re well-versed. Do you have a card? By the way, there was an end to the haunting, soon after my wife took charge. One evening, she put a jar with pickles in the parcel-bin, and it must have unsettled the delinquent so much that he never came back.” “Did he take the pickles?” “No,” said Loos, “he probably thought they were poisoned.” “You had a smart wife.” “Yes, she was life-smart, in contrast to me, superior to me in many ways, though she was twelve years younger. Most of all, though, she was placid, which is why, as I said, it very seldom came to heated words and only once to a word like philistine.”

  Loos was panting, so I slowed the pace. The storm didn’t seem to have gotten any nearer, but no sooner had I concluded that we would reach Agra halfway dry than a violent downpour erupted. We were immediately soaked, so that it made no sense to seek shelter anywhere. We stopped talking. Only at the front door—Loos fired his lighter so I could find the keyhole—did I ask him whether he would like a nightcap. “You’re just asking to be polite. You have a lot to do tomorrow.” “At the moment, I’m completely awake,” I said, truthfully. We went in. Loos looked around shyly. “I can’t offer you any dry clothes,” I said. “You wouldn’t fit in them, but please, sit down. I’ll make a quick fire.” “Excuse me,” he said, “I think I’d rather go. I see that it’s time.” “That’s a shame,” I said and was genuinely disappointed. “We could certainly meet again tomorrow, if you’d like, maybe in the evening,” he said. I replied, again truthfully, that it would delight me and that
I had planned anyway to wait until evening to get the car. We drank a cognac standing. I thanked Loos for walking me home.

  Outside, the crickets were chirping again, the rain had let up, and the breaking clouds gave us a quick view of the moon. “Have a good trip back,” I said. “Rest well,” he said, and his figure, a swaying bearlike shadow, lost itself in the dark.

  Although it was already close to one, I made a fire in the fireplace. Then I took my wet clothes off and stood before it in my bathrobe. I wanted to think the whole experience over and clarify my scattered impressions of Loos. But instead, I fell into an unusual state of brooding over myself. I suddenly had the feeling that I lacked real feelings, that I was lukewarm, shallow. I was somebody I didn’t like. From time to time a log crackled and threw off a few sparks. I drank another cognac.

  At a certain point I was shivering, and pushed the embers back and went to bed. I slept badly, a rare occurrence.

  PART II

  Not a restorative sleep then, although I—otherwise an early riser—lay a full twelve hours in bed and only got up around two, with cricks in both mind and body. And yet I had planned to get to work at nine, so that to my headache and discontent was added the self-contempt that afflicts habitually disciplined people when they fail to do what they’ve resolved to do out of weakness of will. It was noticeably cool in the house, and while I lit the heater in the study, I recalled the suspicion that first occurred to me in my half-sleep, that Loos’s wife might have killed herself. This seemed even more certain to me now that I was awake; it plausibly explained Loos’s reluctance to talk about the circumstances of her death. I made myself a strong coffee. But do people who have been operated on successfully and released to recuperate in a sanatorium take their own lives? And hadn’t Loos said that his wife relished life? I stepped out the door. It was cloudy. It didn’t look like it was going to be a very pleasant Pentecost. The marriage must have been happy—a stroke of luck, according to Loos. Maybe a post-operative embolism? And there are also post-operative depressions, so possibly a suicide after all? I stood cleaning my spectacles—and felt anxious about dropping them. After another cup of coffee I went into the study and sat in front of the laptop, but after ten minutes I realised that I couldn’t get into it, that there was a fog separating me from the screen and the keyboard.

  I went back into the kitchen area, sat down before the cold fireplace, saw a big spider running over the floorboards, and jumped up and smashed it dead with my slipper. Mental defect. Loos has a mental defect, I thought, without knowing where the expression had come from. I wrote it down on a block of note paper. I jotted down words, sentences, and scraps of sentences spoken by Loos or to him, in no specific order or connection. I felt cold and went into the adjoining shed to split some logs. Maybe I’m too normal, I thought. But that’s far better than being half crazy, I also thought. His cult of the dead! It wouldn’t surprise me if he kept her urn on his night table. Sometimes he repels me, other times I think I’m feeling something like what a son must feel towards a fragile father. I lodged the axe in the splitting-stump and went back to the study to give it another try. At any other time, I could have shaken a few introductory remarks on theme and purpose out of my sleeve even with a hangover. But now, though I was passably back in gear thanks to coffee and Alka Seltzer, it was beyond me.

  Of course I immediately thought of calling off the meeting with Loos, so that I could devote the evening to work and continue with it early on Pentecost Sunday with a buoyant mind. Why didn’t I? Certainly not out of politeness or consideration. Loos didn’t need me. He wasn’t in my opinion like some sailor who needed an audience for his stories, and not even his condemnation of the world seemed dependent on finding an echo, much less approval, in someone else. It could even be that my company weighed on him and he now regretted yielding to the twinge of alcohol-conditioned affection that had led him to suggest a second meeting, and this on the anniversary eve of his wife’s death, an evening which I imagined he would have wanted to devote to undisturbed remembrance. So everything spoke for calling it off—except, obviously, the one factor that proved decisive, although it wasn’t really clear to me till the moment of the actual decision. Loos attracted me. More precisely and with fewer suspect connotations: I sought his aura despite myself. I call this phenomenon magnetic, even—as far as I’m concerned—magical. No more on that.

  I went back to the kitchen and cleaned the oven, which my predecessor and co-owner had forgotten to do over Easter. I leafed through a women’s magazine, which, I remembered, came from when Valerie was here. Recent investigations had now decided the question of whether women choose men according to looks. Their ideal of male attractiveness varies with their menstrual cycle, I read: in the fertile phase they prefer manly men with muscles and broad shoulders, during the rest of the cycle it’s the more sympathetic type. The rest of the cycle is the main period in point of duration though, I thought, but did a few pushups nonetheless. Another article cited a study according to which both men and women regard people with blue eyes as more attractive and intelligent than those with brown or green eyes—a finding that favoured me. When I put the magazine down my eye fell on its date of issue, June 21st of the previous year. Shortly after this date—in other words, two weeks after the death of Loos’s wife—I must have picked Valerie up at Cademario, brought her here for an aperitif, and then driven her down to the Bellevue. Since this, as I knew for a certainty, took place toward the end of the third and last week of her stay there, and since Loos’s wife had died on June 11th after a five-day stay, I was able to conclude that the two women must have been at the Cademario Sanatorium together during their first week. Although it was clear to me that they could not have gotten to know each other—the sanatorium is after all enormous, and otherwise Valerie would, as I said, have told me about the death—my discovery brought me to a state of excitement that I could hardly explain. Irrationally, I seemed to feel the circumstance that Loos’s wife and Valerie might for a few minutes have seen and smiled at each other as something that bound me closer to Loos. He himself had of course made it known, tersely, almost gruffly, that such coincidences didn’t interest him, which made me resolve not to bother him with it. And it was still unclear whether I would have another conversation with him. “We could certainly meet again tomorrow,” Loos had said verbatim. I remembered that as exactly as I did much else that he said. The old saying about wine—that it kills memory—was never, or hardly ever, true of me. This “meeting” could mean a handshake, a short goodbye, but also another meal together. What was my preference? I wasn’t really sure, but then definitely inclined to the latter. Perhaps it’s like a reader who would like to put down a book that’s short on plot, but eventually keeps reading it, either because he hopes or suspects that the decisive event is still coming or because the half-experienced, the broken-off and unfinished, gives him an unsettled feeling. The comparison limps, of course, in the sense that I myself could not, or would not, decide whether the conversation was to continue—Loos’s situation and his seniority unquestionably gave him the right of option. And as far as unsettled feelings go, I have them all the more now that I’ve read the book. I could wish they were merely unsettled.

  The rest of the afternoon I spent in utter idleness. I sat or walked around in the house, picked up a piece of lint, blew a crumb from the table, which I stooped to pick up again after another walk through the house. I hate inactivity, it puts me under stress. “Lord, let it be evening!”: an exclamatory prayer no one had ever yet heard issuing from my mouth. And now I heard it myself, and it was answered in the usual way, so that I was able to start out close to six equipped with an umbrella and haunted by a vague sense of foreboding.

  The terrace was empty, just a waiter busy drying off the wet tables and chairs. When he saw that I was looking at him, he glanced several times up at the overhanging sky with a skeptical expression that seemed to say he was aware of the apparent futility of what he was doing. I asked if I could get an
aperitif. He nodded, and I settled myself at the same table as on the previous evening, but in the seat Loos had sat in, and when the waiter went to bring the Campari I looked up at the façade of the hotel—and froze. The window of the room Loos had pointed out as his stood open, and though it wasn’t a rifle but a telescope I saw pointed at me, I felt very uncomfortable, even threatened. But before I could get really angry at Loos, he appeared in the window and waved to me—apologetically, as I took it—and shortly afterwards he stood before me embarrassed. “That was tactless,” he said. “Please excuse me. I was trying to penetrate the mist, when I saw you and couldn’t resist bringing you in my sights for a minute. I’m sorry. My telescope otherwise serves only to bring the Cademario Sanatorium close. You’re downright pale. How are you feeling?” “Frankly, mediocre,” I said. “And you?” “I’m in a playful mood, God knows why,” he said and sat down across from me. In truth he did look different than on the previous evening, more relaxed and cheerful. He beamed accessibility. “You are staying for dinner?” he asked. “Gladly,” I said, “as long as you wouldn’t rather be alone.” “I wouldn’t have asked in that case. I rarely allow myself to be governed by feelings of duty any more. The older I get, the more fastidiously I select them and follow only the few that halfway agree with my inclinations. By the way, I’ve reserved a table inside, since there’s little prospect of a dry evening. Why are you feeling mediocre?” I told him about my trying night, about my lingering in bed and my chagrin over it, and about my sluggish, wasted day. There were no wasted days, Loos said, and lack of drive, understood as civil disobedience, as a counterforce to the great hustle and bustle, was a symptom of health. Everything that served to slow us down, even a prolonged breakfast, benefited the public health, which was endangered as never before, because more and more people felt that they were no longer equal to the frantic pace of the mechanisation and were falling by the wayside. Whether or not they wanted to admit it, whether or not they smoothed it over with last-ditch agility and cheerful panache, they were all utterly and unremittingly overburdened, and that made for sickness. Take the animals, by contrast. No animal on earth worked, with the exception perhaps of ants, bees, and moles, whose busyness, however, was not motivated by a moral imperative. The others sauntered around here and there in their search for food—unless we took house pets like cats and dogs. The average dog, for example, slept or dozed about twenty hours a day, and cats took it just as easy. He and his wife, in fact, had had a cat, a black one with white paws. His wife had loved it, but he sometimes had a hard time countenancing its unspeakable laziness. All it did was let itself be served and then sink back, purring, into a half-sleep, while he had to watch the clock and leave for work. But at least these animals, in contrast to human beings, were healthy and had a sleek coat of fur.