On the Edge

by Markus Werner

  “Mine began unpleasantly, otherwise I can’t complain.” “Hangover? Headache?” “Not a trace,” said Loos, “but after the alarm rang—which isn’t a ring at all, of course, but a series of beeps, as with everything these days—I nodded off again for a few minutes and was plagued by a short dream, an SQS dream.” Loos chewed, and I asked if that was a special psychological term. It wasn’t yet, he said, but would probably be one soon. SQS stood for “Salary-effective Qualification System” and had even penetrated the classrooms under this bombastic title at the behest of the economic system and its cringing enforcers. This meant that for the purpose of judging a teacher’s qualifications a “visitor” dropped in from time to time, sat at a desk in the back, spread out various sheets and a checklist before him, and during the instruction evaluated the “field competence,” the “method competence,” and the “social competence” of the teacher. To make a competent judgement of these three competences he had no less than thirty-nine criteria at his disposal. That he might know what actually belonged under the rubric of social competence, for example, there were eleven relevant points itemised on the checklist, among them the “gestures” and “facial expressions” of the teacher being evaluated, as well as—whatever it might mean—his or her “role model effect.” Two further points were “stamina” and “humour,” both instances of salary-effective social competence that victims of this procedure often vainly struggled to achieve, to be sure! In short, Loos went on, before reaching for knife and fork again, if the Salary-effective Qualification System was already nightmarish enough as a neologism, how much more was it so for what it meant, and then, still more emphatically, his dream of it this morning. “What did you dream then?” “Just the usual. I was late to class without being prepared, neither of which has ever actually happened. The pupils wouldn’t talk, but chewed gum and sent and received text-messages. The visitor made checkmarks and then took me aside after class to say in my ear that my nasolabial folds were too pronounced, which would mean a pay deduction—at which point I awoke. Unfortunately the nasolabial folds, popularly known as worry folds, obsessed me the whole day. On the walk I took in Lugano I felt compelled to scour every face I saw for them. But otherwise, as I said, my day was thoroughly tolerable.”

  Yesterday on our night walk to Agra, I said, he had not been able to speak on the subject of school and had only alluded to tragedy. Was the qualification system he just described what he meant by that? Marginally that too, Loos said, for it was part of the barbarity that raged in the school buildings. Ever since the so-called education politicians had agreed that the school system had to become “frontline-oriented”—an expression which incidentally said it all about the mentality of such people—the school buildings were echoing with the panting and wheezing of both pupils and teachers. But as long as a morsel of rabbit filet and a few beans still remained on his plate, any further word on the subject was off limits. The SQS had already curbed his appetite. There should on principle be no unedifying subject of conversation during a meal—his wife had taught him this, and they had stuck to it as a rule, though it had condemned him to a certain monosyllabicity, especially, of course, when he read the newspaper before eating. He would mention in passing that he was an addicted reader of the paper, but while the satisfaction of an addiction normally brought pleasure, in him it predominantly aroused disgust. Was that not a paradox? “Only on first glance,” I said, “since there are people who like to be disgusted and take a keen interest in the unpleasant.” “You mean me,” said Loos. “I have already had to defend myself several times against your suspicion, but nevertheless, on a very general level you are right: Without a minimal delight in filth no halfway sensitive person could read the newspaper without washing his hands afterwards. But we’re still eating, excuse me, and my day was really wanting in dissatisfactions, as long as we discount the mentioned dream and perhaps also my unsuccessful quest in the various shops of Lugano to find something that seems hardly to be produced anymore, because the textile industry shows ever less concern for the needs and habits of older people. For a full fifty years I have worn briefs with an opening or fly—it’s opening in Switzerland, fly in Germany—but these briefs with opening or fly have increasingly disappeared from the market. I just remembered, my wife had a similar problem. For a while underwire bras were so in fashion that she had the greatest difficulty digging up a normal bra anywhere. She simply couldn’t wear an underwire bra, because it would have reminded her of the most frightening incident in her life. But that that doesn’t belong to our present conversation. I only wanted to say that normal briefs are being systematically squeezed out by underpants that are not to the purpose, that have no fly and can thus hardly still be distinguished from women’s panties, so that we have to speak of a creeping feminisation in the area of men’s underwear and the abolition of the distinction.” “I beg you, Mr. Loos, there are still boxer shorts, and they are free of any feminine touch!” “I’ve tried them,” said Loos. “They’re too roomy for me, I get no feeling of security in them. But there it is exactly: the world is out of joint, and there is much we seek in vain therein.”

  Loos paused. He looked embittered. Not the slightest facial expression betrayed that he saw anything ridiculous about his lament. Either he was a master of dissimulation or I was in fact dealing with an unbalanced person. But in spite of my alienation I lifted my glass and said consolingly, “To the fly!” Now he smiled, reached for his own glass, and clinked with me. He then drank it down in a single draught. “Basically I’m in a jovial mood,” he said, “because I also had a lovely, almost wondrous experience in Lugano. Shall I tell you about it, or would you welcome it if I were a little more reticent?” I asked in return whether he could really fail to imagine how curious I was to hear something that wasn’t negative coming from his mouth for once. “ ‘Accusation is my office and my mission,’ ” said Loos. Pathetic crackpot, I thought, and Loos said: “Schiller, from Wallenstein.” And then he began to tell his story—the waiter had meanwhile removed the plates. He had bought a newspaper from the kiosk at the railway station in Lugano. The woman had waited on him in a friendly way, just as the sign behind the glass with the words “Guaranteed Friendliness” printed on it had indeed promised. He then passed two automatic booths for passport photos in the station’s forecourt and immediately felt the urge to see himself in a photograph again. One of the booths was occupied, with the curtain drawn, so he sat himself in the other. He put his coins in the slot and with eyes opened wide braced himself for the flash, which startled him anyway. The person in the next booth came out at practically the same moment he did, an attractive woman of about forty, and she not only nodded to him, as he did to her, but smiled at him, and smiled to such a degree, that he got embarrassed and started to sweat. While they were waiting for the photographs to develop they made eye contact several times—her gaze was warm and probing, his was probably rather shy, and he was always the first to look away. Nothing was said, he couldn’t think of anything, since he had never been a man of the world. With respect to spontaneity he was a dilettante, as his wife had once formulated it, verbatim, but with indulgence. When the strip of four photos slid into the delivery chute, he felt relieved and immediately pulled it out. It was still warm and a little moist. He looked at the pictures dumbfounded and simply couldn’t believe that this image of a half-moronic criminal from a wanted poster was his own effigy. True, he saw his face, when he looked in the mirror, as a shadowy autumnal landscape, but that didn’t mean that he found it unbearable. Yet this face in the photo was an impertinence, and his dismay was at its peak when the woman, who had apparently been observing him and had meanwhile received her own photos, spoke to him.

  Loos stubbed out his cigarette and used his handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his forehead and neck with elaborate care. He drank. He drank continuously, as he had the evening before. He didn’t look like a criminal, so I find it really mysterious that when he pronounced the word, I was struck by the awful
thought that he might have killed his wife. But no sooner did the thought occur to me than I realised its absurdity, and the only way I could justify the momentary suspicion to myself was to take it as a sign that my table companion was still a complete stranger to me and made me feel uneasy. To be sure, I’m inclined to expect anything of anybody on principle—no one with court experience can do otherwise. And yet I was now embarrassed by my fleeting suspicion with respect to Loos, who in the first place did not look like someone on parole and, in the second, had spoken so affectionately about his wife, about his harmonious marriage with her, that one could almost have felt envious. “What are you thinking about?” Loos asked. “Oh,” I said, “not really about anything. I was only asking myself why people in these automat photos often look a little demented and even almost criminal and why this is more the case with men than with women.” “Could it be,” Loos asked without looking at me, “that you were thinking about something else?” I gulped and said no. “ ‘Thoughts are free,’ ” he said, “and by the way, your observation is on the mark: the woman I mentioned, in any case, looked in her pictures exactly the way she did in natura, that is, very fetching, not to say enchanting. But in sequence: I was about to go and was looking for a trash container, when the woman spoke to me, asking if she could see my pictures. I don’t know what confused me more, her curious request or the similarity of her voice to my wife’s. I stammered out that the photographs were terrible, they had come out so badly that it would embarrass me to show them to her. She smiled. She was wearing a loosely tied orange scarf on her head, a warm Indian orange, which likewise reminded me of my wife and of the awful time when they shaved her head. The woman said that she found failures intriguing. She didn’t take up my ‘Why?’ but took a step toward me and reached very, very gingerly for the photo strip in my unresisting fingers. ‘Let’s sit down,’ she said and pointed at the metal bench next to the photo booths. There she looked at the pictures and said not a word. After a while she asked, ‘Can I have one of these?’ ‘But why?’ I asked. She said, ‘Must everything have a reason?’ ‘Maybe not,’ I said, ‘only I’m not happy about giving myself away in such a disfigured form, or do you collect antic faces?’ She rummaged in her handbag and took out a tiny pair of scissors. I was so flabbergasted that I didn’t intervene: when she cut off one of the pictures, neatly and with a childlike absorption, I simply allowed it to happen. ‘And now the return gift,’ she said and cut off one of her own photos. She took my free hand, which was closed into a fist, folded each finger back, one after the other, and put the photo in my hand.”

  Loos appeared agitated. He said he had to go up to his room for a minute. Only after he left the table did I notice that the light armless sweater he was wearing had been put on wrong: the V-neck was on the back, and to the right of it, at shoulder height, was pinned a black mourning button. The sight might have amused me, but I found it somehow disturbing. Loos was gone a good ten minutes, and when he returned he looked different. He had had the urge to shave, he said; now he felt better. He had the sweater on right now, and without the mourning button.

  “I called my experience wondrous, which it also was,” he said, “but it not only lifted me up, it bent me down at the same time.” “Excuse me,” I interrupted, “you haven’t told the rest of the story yet. What happened next?” “There was no next. I must have fled. I found myself back in the mail van to Montagnola, where I awoke from my daze without being able to recall how I had got to the stop. If we didn’t know better, we might think the woman had bewitched me, don’t you think?” “My God, Mr. Loos, what do you mean by ‘bewitched’? She was Circe herself, are you blind? She was practically forcing herself on you, or at least offering herself. And you, instead of gratefully snatching at the offer, take to your heels. It’s really beyond comprehension!” “Yes, it’s hard to comprehend, Mr. Clarin, especially for spontaneous natures and other ever-ready types, and on the other hand it’s easy to understand and actually easy to explain. I belong, you see, to the lowest caste—since fate has taken my wife away—the caste of the untouchables. It still isn’t completely clear to me at this moment who I’m confiding in. I hardly know you, you’re young, and you’re very different, and your aplomb with women doesn’t exactly make it easy for you to understand me. But no matter, no matter. I say it loud: I’m handicapped!”

  Loos really did say it loud, and the neighbouring table went quiet. I saw that Loos’s hands—which by the way had nothing fleshy or pawlike about them, but in their delicacy contrasted strangely with his heavy physique—were trembling a little. I waited till the two couples at the next table resumed their conversation and then told Loos that the word handicapped sounded too strong; it was certainly rather a matter of a temporary cramping. He seemed to have so mercilessly excluded the erotic after the loss of his wife that now, when it brushed against him in spite of himself, he felt threatened and cramped up. That was understandable, but a shame, and would only become a handicap if he kept the barrier in place out of a mistaken sense of fidelity. Did he really think he was acting in the interest of his dead wife if he emasculated himself, so to speak, if he lived the life of a monk, perhaps to the end of his days?

  There were things in the psyche, said Loos, that did not allow themselves to be governed, as was well known. There were inner handicaps that were independent of the will and therefore inaccessible to appeal, and for this reason my advice to let down the barrier, however well meant, was meaningless. Something in him was receptive to the erotic—he was a sensual man—and something in him performed acts of sabotage, whenever he neared the flame. I had erroneously interpreted this second something as a falsely conceived fidelity, but it was not a question of fidelity here, not even as rightly conceived. For fidelity sprang from an act of will, which is why it was felt to be a moral virtue. He, however, did not at all will the barrier, and he incidentally only became aware of it because he had been ready in the last half-year, although seldom, to enter the terrain beyond.

  “I have a friend,” I said, “who is happily married, and he insists that he lacks for nothing, even in bed. And yet he nevertheless repeatedly gets involved with other women. He explains that his desire can’t be focused on a single woman. In short, he takes certain liberties with fidelity, and has a very tolerant attitude to his extramarital affairs. So it seems in any case, so he has always represented it. But a short while ago, he came to me late in the evening, tipsy and forlorn. He told me he had been brooding on a certain question and could come to no conclusion. He asked for my opinion, as well as my discretion. His question was as follows: What does it mean when despite all erotic desire your member refuses to get hard except within the principal relationship?”

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to say,” Loos said gruffly. “My impediment isn’t of a bodily nature. Why should I be concerned with the afflictions of a philanderer?” “Well,” I said, “they might show you that fidelity, counter to your idea of it, is not due to an act of will, but—how shall I say?—tied to a subconscious apron string. As much as your barrier might differ from my friend’s, I interpret both as the consequence of an inner edict that insists on fidelity.” “Isn’t that a little trivial?” Loos asked. “That may be,” I answered, “but does the trivial have to be false?”

  At that moment a mobile phone beeped. Loos shook his head and turned red. I feared an angry outburst. He reached for his jacket, which hung over the back of the chair. Now he’s going to leave, I thought. He slid his hand into one of the outer pockets and the peeping stopped. “Sorry,” he said, “I forgot to turn it off.” “No problem,” I said. “You see,” he said, “a person can honestly curse what he himself takes part in—life for example. Your health!” “A cheer for inconsistency!” I responded, “It keeps us flexible.” “It robs us of our self-esteem, but I can say in my defence that the thing was given to me, and hardly anyone knows my number.” “Then you must know who was trying to call you.” “Pretty much,” said Loos, “but back to our theme. You kn
ow, my wife travelled once or twice a year to England to visit a friend, the daughter of the family she was an au pair with when she was nineteen. And since she never told me very much about these visits, one day a suspicion crept over me that was otherwise very untypical of me. I asked her in a pseudo-jovial tone whether this friend really existed, or was she after all a he? She turned very pale. She was quiet so long that I must have gone pale too, since I thought I had hit the bull’s eye. She said eventually that we had never talked about fidelity, and for that reason she had assumed it was self-evident. For her, in any case, fidelity was a need, a silent natural instinct, requiring as little strain as love itself, and as long as love was present, I needn’t worry. So there seems to be a kind of fidelity that derives neither from an act of will, as I claimed a few minutes ago, nor from an unconscious decree, as you claimed. And this natural fidelity I then found reassuring—wrongly, it should make us feel anxious.”

  “Why though?” I asked. “Anyway,” Loos continued, “there was this English friend, who died in June the year before last. Her death was horrible, and could have been the death of my wife as well. They were both walking together in Hyde Park, when a storm came up with uncanny quickness. They ran towards a group of trees to find shelter from the rain, but my wife’s sandal fell off in the process. She went back a few steps, stooped down to get it, and noticed that the strap was torn. Her friend had meanwhile reached the trees, and while she was waving to my wife from about forty metres off to get her to hurry up, she was struck by lightning. She died on the spot right before the eyes of my wife, who herself remained unharmed, outwardly, but had to be taken to the hospital for the evaluation, because her legs would no longer carry her. She called me the same evening. I had difficulty understanding her; she sounded as if somebody was strangling her. The next day I flew to London and spent three days at her bedside. There was no medical finding: the doctors spoke of a temporary lameness caused by shock. She could cry on the second day, and she cried for a long time, first in convulsions, then increasingly freely. When I entered her room on the morning of the third day, she was sitting on a chair and was able to get up and walk over to me. Before she was released, a doctor told us something utterly incredible. The friend’s death, it turned out, had been caused by the metal wires in her underwire bra—the metal functioned as a lethal conductor. As the doctor recollected, it was the second death from such a cause that he was familiar with. To my question what would have happened if my wife had been standing next to her friend at the moment of impact, the doctor said that she was unlikely to have survived. In the taxi on the way to the hotel I held her hand—she seemed hardly to be present. ‘What is a life still worth,’ she said suddenly, ‘that owes itself to a torn sandal strap?’ ‘More than before, perhaps,’ I said, but decided not to go into an explanation, because I sensed that she was sinking back into herself. Well, that’s what happened,” Loos said, “but unfortunately I don’t remember anymore what got me talking about this incident.”