The men dance their way out. The speeches start again hands across the frontiers on floating stomachs over the talking delegates and a rebellious group shouting ka-dın, ka-dın, ka-dın until the dancers come in, pale pretty girls in green and crimson puffy trousers covered with striped bands, none smiling under their orange headscarves over their high hats as they go through their solemn motions unhappily not quite in unison one tearful still and pale.
— Well yes I do look pale. Until I put on my face like. But I must say I didn’t fancy them popish crows coming to interview me about you and your ex, dear, what could I say? I don’t poke my nose into other people’s affairs. Well, yes I know I agreed, and of course you confided in me in your loneliness poor love but still, and so slow! You should’ve seen them, writing it all down in longhand, just like the Scribes and Pharisees, or do I mean Sadducees? Well in the end I said to hell with that if you’ll excuse me I’ve had a secretarial training. Yes, I worked in an office before I got spliced didn’t you know, solicitors in the Strand. And I’ll just type out your questions I said and my answers as one of your witnesses—witnesses I ask you what would I witness? You’d think they’d taken me for a peeping Tom you should’ve heard some of the things they asked I couldn’t make head or tail of it. Not like our lawyers at all well of course you can hardly call them lawyers can you, just popish priests, black crows my mother used to call them though she also called the Church of Rome the scarlet woman and the golden calf. Or do I mean fatted calf? And I said if you have no objection sir, I said, oh yes I treated them polite for your sake love and they had none in fact they couldn’t have seemed more delighted and surprised like they’d never seen a typewriter before. Such antiquated ways! I can’t think what you see in that lot love. I mean why do you bother you don’t want to get married again or do you?
— Nnn-o.
— Well then. And even if you did it don’t mean anything any more all that sanctification lark you just go ahead and do it you got a proper divorce in the law of the land you don’t need them foreigners. Oh I beg your pardon love but I never think of you as foreign. Oh I know you speak with an accent, French, didn’t you say? Well that explains it, but then who doesn’t we all have accents come to think of it, your hubby I mean your ex worst of all a la-di-da accent anyone’d think he thought himself a cut above and he didn’t fit in down here not like you do dear. So you just go ahead and live in sin he settled the cottage on you didn’t he, oh no you told me, you bought it yourself for five hundred pounds. And you had a biddy put in by my Tom he liked that nobody has a biddy down here. Well then, all the more so. After all you earn your own wages and come here on your holidays, funny that coming to England for holidays when everyone goes abroad but then you do everything the other way round don’t you dear and I like you for that, I like original people. So you just bring your boy-friends here like you used to in the old days after the bust-up when you worked in London and came down weekends it quite livened up the village and what difference does it make?
Wejście/Wyjście.
Push. Tirez. Pchnąć. Ziehen.
The hands lie quite still on the pink table-cloth with darker pink towers cathedrals domes palaces in rows and WIEN repeated at intervals under each row and the plump prancing knight Carolus der VII between, the eight fingers touching away from the body to form a shape like a cathedral roof, the thumbs pressed together towards the body over the crumbs of toast and the postcard from Dubrovnik out of the discreet envelope forwarded from Paris Headquarters face down to show the phrase about la douce inoubliable dame aux yeux d’émeraude and signed with an illegible initial.
In whose mind in what place at what time has one remained la douce inoubliable dame aux yeux d’émeraude scattered with castles, lampoons, fiery lanes and sweet evening conversations? Somewhere along the Romantische Strasse between Wien and Valladolid amid the air-conditioning and other such circumstantial emptiness with emerald eyes gazing at the blue temperature of minus forty-five degrees height eleven thousand metres immobile speed nine hundred and twenty kilometres an hour handed over the back of the armchair in front by a fat hand over Prague where the new lord mayor has promised to take up the challenge in getting you to commit yourself to a single idea.
— Ideas? My dear good girl for twenty years I have conducted my higher education by transmitting other people’s ideas or rather platitudes from one microphone into another. And I can tell you that not one of them deserves a moment of attention. One does one’s job, in order to live well, have fun. We’ve had fun haven’t we?
We have played those games mein Lieber.
Unless he says one does one’s job, to the best of one’s ability, simply as an instrument.
Man does.
— Not that you followed him in all things Liebes. But why talk of him he’s gone let’s talk of us we must love one another or die.
But where have all the lovers gone?
Siegfried grown balder somewhere between Dakar and Helsinki with a paunch pahr dessue le marshy sits in the kitchen of il piccolo chalet in Wiltshire where stones talk walk and make love until they come to a standstill. So, you have grown tired of your small box your refuge your still centre within the village within the wooded countryside within the alien land. Tired of weekend commuting between London and the end of nowhere strapped to your seat with a chastity-belt? Do you remember the Air Hostess who said with a, charming English accent Prière d’éteindre vos ceintures and got so covered with confusion? Her voice I mean, got covered with confusion.
— Yes. Presumably air-hostesses, rather like interpreters, increase the statistical possibility of sudden death by flying so much. Do you think that counts as suicide? Without the actual trouble of committing it.
— Oh come off it Liebes counts for whom anyway?
— Oh Siegfried can’t you understand?
— I understand perfectly. You have got bitten again with the old Wanderlust not to mention the other and long for the freedom of the air in your twentieth year and plus. Plus what exactly? Not that it ‘matters I can work it out, besides, you don’t look a day older and I wish you could pretend the same for me for old time’s sake.
— Pretend?
— You will find your life-jacket under your seat.
— Dit zwemvest kan dienen voor een bewusteloos persoon.
— Good girl.
— Well, help me.
— So you want a zwemvest. Hmm, I don’t suppose I have much influence at Headquarters but I can put in a good word for you. Why we could meet again here and there in Paris London New York und so weiter weiter gehen, immer geradeaus if you let me know your schedules in advance who knows, just think what fun we’ll have.
— We have played those games mein Lieber.
— So you decided in advance madame, to divorce if it didn’t work, thus annulling the contract in the eyes of God?
— Plus ou moins.
— My child you must use words more precisely. Did you or did you not?
— Oui mon père.
— Et votre mari aussi?
— Je crois, oui.
— Comment, vous croyez? You must say if you made a joint decision or not, the point has great validity in Canon Law.
— Father for three years he refused to testify. He said he would not give evidence in a foreign court.
— Foreign? Westminster?
— Traduzione per favore.
— Then came seven more years of vain attempts, first at Westminster then at Augsburg but they wouldn’t even admit the petition. They said it didn’t have a leg to stand on. And even here it has taken three years to prepare the case, interview witnesses and so on, well, all this for four years of marriage, after seventeen years one can’t remember exactly.
— My child you must calm down, have patience, we did not build Rome in a day. The Holy Mother Church takes each case very seriously and leaves no stone unturned to find out the truth in the eyes of God.
— Traduzione per favore.
; — Scusi monsignore. La signora dice che dopo sedici anni non si ricorda esattamente.
Non si ricorda esattamente of the truth in the eyes of God or even whether God has eyes or merely an absence which signifies eine Abwesenheit die etwas bedeutet. Ah yes, you always know everything don’t you my sweet?
— In that tone of voice you should not use endearments it annuls them.
— Annuls! What fancy words.
— Why you mock my English you used to find it charming?
— I don’t mock, I merely state. You do the mocking my sweet if I may say so.
— How, mock?
— Oh not mock-ha-ha, alas, just destructive. Always quibbling, correcting me, pushing me out to get all the attention, spoiling my jokes. But the Germans have no sense of humour.
— Pushing you? Correcting you? How, in English? Only in German. You said you wanted to learn it.
— Always on at me to take up this and that language. Wherever we happened to stay for a congress lasting hardly more than a week, ten days at most. The good lord or parental circumstances more likely gave me two languages by birth and I see no reason to acquire your smatterings of modern Greek, Turkish, Portuguese, Italian, Everyone everywhere speaks English or French, enough at least to understand one’s daily needs of bed food and excretion. Immer geradeaus dann links, that will suffice me amply as far as German goes.
— You turn everything into a dirty joke. We never discuss anything nowadays, as we used to, even if we didn’t agree, now we never talk of anything, not even the places you go to, the conferences you attend, the ideas—
— Ah yes! The ideas. Here we came in, the hero will now pick up the heroine on a plane about to land in Hollywood and offer her a contract for life. They go into a clinch. But it doesn’t last, come the misunderstandings the infidelities on other planes in other cities und so weiter and we might as well get out of this picture into the bright lights of freedom for what can I tell you that you haven’t already imagined, not to say invented? Yes, you know everything don’t you. And you wouldn’t believe me if I said one merely does one’s job, simply as an instrument.
Whatever that means with which he takes her blonde auburn dark, her flashing eyes her floating hair fresh complexion small apple-breasts filling out between Stockholm and San Francisco too visible in a low décolletage by a Renaissance pillar or bare in bed with hats geschmeckt. A thing of the intellect perhaps a passion they have in common undiscerned by marriage literature for example irrigation the theory of signs significant and signified for the under-developed areas or a certain verbal anarchy of lewd puns ready-made dirty stories which makes their allusions intertwine in the palazzos castles university halls where the commissions, conferences, congresses, conventions broken occur while the Regency house gets created into a pied-à-terre for his two feet that walk down airplane steps blue yellow orange white depending on the theme the time the climate, whether canyons or the Taurus Mountains for instance create great holes of air into which the heart sinks suddenly as in the Ascenseur with the red button KINΔYNOΣ meaning perhaps alarm? Pupate? No no signora, in fondo a sinistra.
— So you call this culture?
Of course of course natürlich selbstverständlich und so weiter weiter gehen through the freedom of the air and the precision of such devil-may-care feelings at thirty-eight and plus the splendid solitude in single bedrooms without bath or shower the toilet down the corridor and to the right or left unless double bedrooms without masculine unmarked the other eiderdown untumbled puffed out virgin-bellied or the sheets turned back over the dark blue blanket in two parallel straight runways from which only angels and ministers of grace take off into the blue the cloud the fog. Have you anything to declare such as love desire ambition nothing at all just personal effects and the fact that in this air-conditioning and other circumstances of total emptiness freedom has its inebriating attractions as the body floats in willing suspension of loyalty to anyone, stretching interminably between the enormous wings that spread back motionless on the deep blue of the high sky, above the sea of cloud that draws the gaze into an idle fantasy of stepping out and bouncing down and up on it as on a trampolin, stretching interminably towards the distant brain way up, suspended between the anti-syphillis programme the commission on narcotic drugs and division of narcotic drugs the timber committee for increasing production of immigration opportunities in Latin America beyond the magenta curtain and behind no doubt the little door. We live in an age of transition between one social order and another and we must effectuate that transition or die. To this end we favour the amendment to the draft revised resolution although we would remind the delegates that they still have to face the real question of how to implement it. The Egyptian representative’s suggestion that the organisation should provide technical publications in all the official languages and in others as well would entail great expense. The organisation could only approve such a course in exceptional cases. The Mexican representative’s suggestion that the Secretariat should try new techniques such as collaboration with the Press will receive most careful consideration. As for China we must emphasise that a great cultural revolution has taken place which the world will not find easy to integrate into a willing suspension of meaningful activity as the most advanced technique so far evolved for moving from one technology to another without blowing ourselves up. To this end we should formulate the principles that will guide the future work of the commission rather than discuss that work in detail which the commission can examine at some later stage.
The divine principle descending into matter or vice versa with the soul rising like incense and fusing with nothingness. All ideas have equality in the eyes of God at the Congress of Gnostics out of time out of space unless merely an absence that signifies outside the Church no salvation which simply will not do and indeed the Church itself has now admitted its error in this respect as in so many others. History has proved them wrong again and again, even in religious matters they have quietly had to shift their ground many a time while yet proclaiming to guard the eternal verities against the morality of the age. But even adopting ladies and gentlemen their outmoded, historical, diacronic view, look at the vital mysteries they have lost, by euphemising and narrowing them into convenient dogmas which even lose their convenience as times pass through the earphones in French and out into the mouthpiece in simultaneous German. And the fact that the breakaway sects have lost even more hardly justifies this great loss at the centre of things almost from the beginning if beginning we can call it sub specie aeternitatis. Of course the language and modes of thought of most people remain behind the inklings of the few always as ever persecuted destroyed burnt at the stake and at best ignored throughout the ages that pour through the neutralised transmitter in the brain and out in simultaneous confusion.
The bottle of Eau du Kiém stands on the dressing-table next to the empty wine-glass on a round metallic tray. L’eau de table de qualité. Gazéifiée-rafraichissante, digestive. Soutirée par Minolux S.A., 2 rue du Kiém, Luxembourg–Neudorf. Grand Duché de Luxembourg. The fringes of the white nylon curtain walk in the breeze all the way across the wide window just above the sill over the radiator. On the bedside-table lies the postcard of Palermo face down to let the eye fall on la si gracieuse dame aux yeux de vair that surely means a fur, not green or glass as apparently intended and signed with an illegible initial.
Outside the window the bridge spans a vast canyon with trees and houses down its slopes at the bottom of which runs a two-inch wide stream. Beyond the bridge and canyon stands the palace or town hall. Unless perhaps yes didn’t Cinderella have souliers de vair? Which still meant fur. Qui fait trembler mon coeur de fol espoir. Can one have furry eyes? Translate the following passage into German and comment on the formation of these words: vair, ma douce amour (gender) und so weiter natürlich Fräulein you have passed. Sehr geehrtes Fräulein. We wish to inform you that in view of your fluent knowledge of French you have obtained the Dolmetscher Zulage which means that
you may now draw 80 RM extra per month on your salary as Assistant Censor. Lieber Heinrich, hab Dank für Deinen wunderbaren Brief. Mes chers parents. J’espère que vous allez bien. Ne vous faites pas de souci pour moi. Depuis qu’on m’a emmené en Allemagne je travaille ici à Nüremberg dans une usine. Au fond je m’en fous. Meine Lieben alle! Lieber Horst, Lieber Helmut, Lieber Hans. Sehr geehrtes Fräulein et douce dame qui fait trembler mon coeur de fol espoir.
Where when and to whose heart did one do that? And what difference does it make? None except by subtraction from the marked feminine to the unmarked masculine or vice versa as the language of a long lost code of zones lying forgotten under layered centuries of thickening sensibilities winds its way surreptitiously up through the years into no more than the distant brain way up to tickle a mere thought or two such as where when and to whose heart did one do that?
— Wherever particular people congregate … you smoke too much. You tap your cigarette too often into the ash-tray and you never smoke them to the end, just as you get on first-name terms with everyone and don’t remember their surnames. So why don’t you marry me after all these years?
— You know why.
— Oh that, I can’t think why you bother. You don’t even believe it any more.
— No.
— Well then, what difference does it make?
— Just—how to explain, a sort of blind protest at the lack of freedom to choose, for or against.
— But my dear, you have the freedom to take no notice. If you no longer believe in the validity of any annulment, or its failure, based on half-truths and antiquated sophistries?
— We live in an age of transition, haven’t you heard? The Church will find a voice. One day. Perhaps.
— Oh yes, the Church reforms but always at least a hundred years too late, and with an agony of resistance over the one per cent of what they ought to do at any one time. Even now—but you know Congresses better than anyone. I wouldn’t mind if they’d got stuck in the 18th century or the 17th, but the 19th, ugh!
The Brooke-Rose Omnibus Page 39