On the Edge

by Markus Werner

  He sat down and said, “It’s all fog, the lights across the way aren’t visible. I stood at the window like a blind man, and the futility of looking helped me realise that a thinking being isn’t dependent on its eyes. A simple recognition sometimes takes time to dawn on us, doesn’t it? And incidentally, it isn’t really true that it was your nodding that led me to orate. You actually nod very seldom. I think I’ve already given you a picture here and there of how things stand with me: along with my wife I also lost my speech, or at least the companionability to which speech belongs and in which it plays the chief role. I’ve withdrawn, even from friends, and have practically stopped talking, certainly about anything private. My vocal chords would be mildewed if I didn’t have school to force me to speak. When you sat down at my table yesterday evening, I’m sorry, but I was worried that you might speak to me, so much so that I wished I had a magic hood to make myself disappear and not have to talk to you. But you’re a fowler, and an able one at that. You lured me out of the bush, caught me, and made me so tame that I started twittering with the obsessive zeal of a bird that has been silent the whole winter. So much for an explanation of my communication compulsion. I ask your indulgence.”

  “I’m the one who should be asking for indulgence,” I said. “I pushed myself on you and disturbed your privacy. It’s very easy for me to initiate contact, and as an extraverted person I clearly run the risk of sometimes not noticing that others are different. I feel comfortable with people and don’t like being alone. Unsociability isn’t in my vocabulary. It’s a riddle to me how people live and let live without social intercourse. Good, you luckily still have the school. But what do you do in your free time? What do you do during the vacation? Do you at least travel sometimes?” “I hold with Ovid,” said Loos, “bene qui latuit, bene vixit.” “You’ll have to translate that for me,” I said. “I’m afraid I only understand the bene. Latin was never my forte.” “ ‘One who has hidden well, has lived well,’ ” said Loos, “but the pack animal can hardly imagine that kind of wisdom. And incidentally, I’m not so terribly alone, I have inner company, but never mind that. You’d be amazed: I do what I’ve had in mind since birth, namely nothing. I don’t always succeed at it, of course, but I keep practising and I’m on my way. ‘The wise man yields,’ I say to myself and leave it to the doers to struggle against the law of gravity.” “What does doing nothing look like concretely, and how can you practise it?” I asked Loos. “Well,” he said, “in this as in everything else: keep trying over and over, till you succeed. Say that you lie down on the sofa Saturday at noon and set yourself the task of lying there for two hours, at rest, but without sleeping. You hear a neighbour vacuuming or someone mowing a lawn, but instead of thinking about things you have to do, you should just watch the spider that squats motionless on your ceiling and on no account yield to the urge to get rid of it. Now the telephone rings. As a beginner you jump up and reach for the receiver. That would only be alarming if you learned nothing from your failure. Go back into yourself and practise more, until you’ve achieved the freedom of no longer reacting to external stimuli, which try to betray you into doing something.”

  “I understand,” I said, “but what is it all for, what’s the sense of practising it?” “Maybe,” Loos said, “you would experience for two hours long what it feels like not to be a slave, how peaceful it is inside yourself when you lose for a time that constant feeling that you have to be doing something.” “To each his own,” I answered. “I’m more comfortable when I’m active, even when there’s a must behind my activity and not a personal will.” “Yes, yes,” Los said, “ ‘Of idleness comes no goodness,’ as the saying goes. I said it to myself, no, hammered it in, to persuade myself to fly to Zakynthos. You asked me about any trips I might have taken, didn’t you? I took one, eight days last year in Zakynthos, and the pomposity of the saying proved itself a scandal. My vacation was shit. I use the word deliberately, it’s the only vulgar word I ever heard from my wife’s mouth, and that only once. She never cursed, you see, and she hardly ever used strong language—but you’d be wrong to think she was prudish or staid, she was just refined, and if it didn’t sound so madonna-like, I’d say pure. She stood one morning before the bedroom mirror, naked, and probably thought the door to the room I was sitting in was closed and I couldn’t hear her. As you know there are areas on a woman’s body that count as problem zones, because they’re especially susceptible to fat. Even my wife was a little fuller here and there than she had been, and she hated these areas, whereas I was fond of them. She didn’t believe me, though I tried to convince her. She found it unpleasant to be touched in such a place. She would really shrink back. But to be brief: she stood one morning in front of the bedroom mirror and said fairly loud, ‘I look like shit!’ ”

  Loos looked past me, absently, as if he were listening for her words.

  When he seemed present again—I saw it by the fact that he took out his handkerchief to wipe away a few small trickles of sweat that were running towards his eyebrows—I reminded him of Zakynthos and asked why he hadn’t enjoyed his vacation there. The onerous part of it, he said, had already begun on the flight over there, when the woman who sat beside him pestered him with the details of her private life. She had recently been divorced after twenty-one years of marriage, she told him, and now she was about to learn how to let go and grow inwardly with new experience. Et cetera. Didn’t he too think that every ending was at the same time a new beginning and accordingly brought with it an opportunity to forge ahead to new horizons and people? Et cetera. He, Loos, had said as little as possible, in the hope that the torrent would trickle out, but the ploy was unsuccessful. There are people who have no feel for distance, no inner feel and sometimes not even an outer one. When you stand talking to such people, they keep stepping closer to you, and as soon as you step back to regain the necessary foot-and-a-half distance, they shorten it with another step forward to about half that. He had a colleague who in every conversation pushed him backwards several yards through the teachers’ lounge. But however that might be—after their arrival in Zakynthos he lost sight of the woman and climbed exhausted into a taxi that the hotel had sent to pick him up. The driver said he needed another person staying in the same hotel to make the drive. After a fairly long wait a thin woman got in and brought him new suffering when she started getting personal and talking about her divorce as soon as the cab got underway. He was now virtually sure that the travel agency had kept him in the dark about the target groups that travel to Zakynthos. The woman tortured him further with two or three foot operations and acquainted him with the fact that she had been an official with the criminal investigation department of the police before her early retirement. When they got to the hotel, there was a hassle. He had booked a double room with balcony and sea-view, well knowing what kind of dingy cells hotels typically stick lone travellers in. To such a room they had now in fact assigned him, and it was only thanks to his stiffest resistance that justice prevailed in the end. He then reconnoitered the village, which according to the travel brochure was a quiet fishing village, but was in reality only one long, noisy street with innumerable taverns, discos, and bars. That evening he sat on his double bed and asked himself why he had come. He felt his presence here superfluous and at the same time realised that it was the superfluousness of his being at home that had driven him here. During the night dogs howled for hours, and in the morning, after breakfast, the police official suddenly stood before him, screamed hello, and sat down gabbing at his table. The horror repeated itself in the evening. He had taken a seat in one of the taverns, outside of course, and felt relaxed for the first time—even if a little annoyed by the eternal Zorba-music and the body-lotion smells from the mostly silent couples around him. When he saw her coming, the police official, he dropped his napkin and dived under the table to hide, but she, the official, was already standing in front of him when he surfaced. At least this time she asked whether she could join him. Instead of a no, he uttered a
please, and in so doing detested his parents, for nothing was harder to shed than good breeding.

  Loos drank, fixing me the while with his gaze, and asked whether his twaddle interested me at all and whether, if it didn’t, I had the courage to say so. I answered truthfully that it did interest me, he shouldn’t worry, and should just go on with the story. “Good,” said Loos, “but I’ll try anyway not to get lost. And lest I seem a misogynist, let me just say that the official from Bern was not only unattractive, but devoid of any subtlety of feeling. Her speech was coarse, her voice loud, and her talk mere blather. She might have compensated for this a bit by telling me about some fascinating criminal case, but that never happened. When I asked about something of the sort she just said that she had worked in the office and had little to do with the front lines. But she seemed to have an instinct for it, because in the coming days she succeeded in tracking me down almost everywhere I was. When I found a chair on the beach that was surrounded right, left, front, and back by other occupied chairs, I admit I felt hemmed in, but at least I was protected from her. So I sometimes eluded her detection, but could never calmly enjoy it. I simply sat on the chair, occasionally pawing the sand with my feet, and my disconsolate mood was brightened only by the thought that all the bodies around me would one day turn to dust. I retreated more and more to my room, or rather to my balcony, but it soon became evident that the balcony wouldn’t work either. If I sat there in the afternoon, I saw down below various topless women in the sand, some sitting, some lying, and sometimes one would look up and nudge another, who would likewise look up, and it wasn’t hard to guess from their giggling what they took me for. So the balcony was out—it wasn’t even granted me to sit there in peace late in the evening and drink an ouzo, because on the next balcony two German couples were playing a game, some card game I think, that seemed to involve somebody constantly saying ‘mau’ or ‘maumau’—all I heard for hours was mau and maumau either spoken or screamed. The vacation wore me down, and I take it that the dream I had the night before I left, of which I remember only the chief image, was trying to express symbolically the sum value of my Zakynthos days. In this dream I saw myself in a grotesque form, namely as a gnawed bone—not a skeleton, understand, but a bone all of one piece that had two protuberances on the lower end that it could hop on, but only backwards. Curious, no? That I, a heavy-set man, see myself as a bone of all things! Maybe the dream image was also simply trying to tell me I should stop stuffing myself. You should know that after the loss of my wife I put on about seventeen pounds. I had no desire to drink wine any more, instead I ate too much and got heavier than I should. It embarrasses me somewhat to talk about this craving, partly because of the saying that stupid people eat while the smart ones drink. Do you remember the storm?”

  “Last night’s storm? Of course. What makes you think of that?” “I’m sorry,” said Loos, “I mean the storm in Hyde Park, the fatal lightning bolt. I wanted to say that my wife changed after this body blow, and one of the signs of it was eating sweets. She did it secretly and in considerable quantities. I came upon it by accident. Knowing my fondness for good pencils she had given me a brass pencil sharpener, and one day as I was bent over the waste basket in the kitchen about to sharpen a pencil, the sharpener fell out of my hand. It disappeared so completely in the trash that I had to empty the basket and fill it again, and in so doing I found a huge number of crumpled chocolate-wrappers. This discovery stirred me somehow, and it also made me sad to see my wife hiding things from me. She must have known that I wouldn’t have begrudged her all the sweets she could eat. Naturally I said nothing. I in no way wanted her to feel guilty, like a child caught stealing cookies. I also said nothing about a slip of paper I found poking through the trash, although I would have liked to know the meaning of the sentence she had scribbled down on it: ‘I want no sky that sticks to the windowpane.’ A strange image, isn’t it? So my wife changed a little after the accident in Hyde Park. The most understandable part of it for me was the fact that, although she never had any problem with storms before, now she began to sweat and tremble at even distant thunder and sheet lightning. And unfortunately I couldn’t calm her down and take her in my arms, because in these moments of anxiety she also feared being touched, so that it almost seemed to me as if she saw me as a part of what threatened her. Afterwards she would feel guilty and let herself be consoled. And once she told me that she could no longer ride the elevator with her mother, who lived on the sixth floor of an apartment building, without being attacked by anxiety over her mother’s proximity. Certain of her idiosyncrasies and sensitivities had always been there, admittedly, and only became more pronounced after the experience in London. Her body, I should tell you, was a virtual divining rod that reacted to every imaginable source of disturbance in the most sensitive way. In the early years of our marriage, we moved twice within the greater Zurich area, and in each place changed the position of the bed several times because my wife felt the harmful effects of underground watercourses once and, another time, low-frequency magnetic fields. Foehns and full moons also oppressed her. But for all that, you’d have a false impression of my wife if you thought of her as sickly, whining, or neurasthenic. She was sensitive rather than neurasthenic, and that she was no whiner God knows she later proved beyond all doubt when she really was sick and had to deal with the worst. My memory fails me, did I tell you about this yesterday? I mean about her sickness?”

  “You spoke of a tumor, but only hintingly. You said also that the tumor was successfully operated on and that her blonde hair, that was shaved for the surgery, grew back quickly.” “Bravo!” said Loos. “You’d make a gifted liar.” “Where do you get that? I don’t know what you mean.” “Just a joke,” said Loos, “just a reference to Quintilian, who thinks that liars require an excellent memory. To cut a long story short, about ten months after the event in Hyde Park, my wife began to suffer from nocturnal headaches. And sometimes even before breakfast she had to throw up. Only the last I took seriously. I insisted she have a pregnancy test and hoped for a child. But there was nothing in it—the door remained closed to the late fulfilment of that hope. One morning my wife said to me that I looked distorted to her. I immediately called her in sick, despite her resistance. I’ve probably already mentioned that she worked in a jewelry factory where she superintended the wedding-ring section. This by the bye. When she then felt numb in the left half of her body, she went to the doctor. He had tests done immediately. The diagnosis came quick and with it my horror. Astrocytoma. A swelling of the star-shaped supporting cells in the brain. My wife stayed eerily calm, so that I thought she underestimated the danger she was in. She had a piano tuner come, as if that was now the most urgent thing to do. Two days later when I came home from the school—my wife was still at the doctor’s—I listened to the answering machine and heard the voice of the young, blonde piano tuner, Rossi was his name, saying, “Mrs. Loos, I’d love to kiss your legs.” That’s all he said. I was embarrassed, though also concerned. The twerp must have sensed something in my wife’s manner that encouraged his audacity. Yet my wife in her behaviour with other men was extremely reserved, dismissive almost; I have never been able to detect her sending subtle flirting signals the way most women do. So I was concerned, because I had once read that brain tumors can also lead to personality changes, and something like that seemed to be at work here, if my wife did indeed give the young man any sign of encouragement. I told her when she got home that there was a message for her on the machine. She listened to it and laughed long and heartily. But wasn’t she shocked, I asked. Shouldn’t somebody give this kid a good dressing down? ‘Don’t be silly!’ she said. ‘You know, a little while ago I would still have found his advance outrageous, but now it seems harmless and sweet, and even funny. The MRI of my brain forces me to think of my approaching end. And strangely, everything, or almost everything, that I now relate to that end or try to see from its vantage comes across as somehow funny, do you know what I mean?—it loses its wei
ght.’ When I let her know that I did know what she meant, she said something that I didn’t understand and still don’t understand today. She said that she had often wished, in vain, not to be understood by me. I asked her to explain what she said, but she refused. But to return to the point: I actually only wanted to say that my wife, counter to my suspicion, certainly did not mistake the gravity of her situation. And in fact she stayed cheerful while I myself nearly lost my mind with anxiety, worry, and helplessness. She consoled me instead of vice versa. She told me, for instance, she had heard a radio programme a while back about an ancient people and their strange custom of greeting newborns with lamentation and enumerating all the evils that awaited them. They buried their dead, however, with jubilation and banter, because they had finally escaped the sufferings of life. Didn’t I like this custom too? my wife asked. I didn’t mention that I was familiar with the Thracians’ custom and said, ‘Yes, in a way, but nevertheless the idea of a dance of jubilation around my grave makes me a little melancholy.’ ‘Not me,’ she said, ‘It would make me glad to see you dance.’ ‘You will experience it,’ I said to her. ‘As soon as you get better, I’ll do a dance.’ ‘With me?’ she asked. ‘With you,’ I said.