by Naomi Holoch
Translated by Margaret E. W. Jones
Karen-Susan Fessel
In her story “Lost Faces” (1996)—translated here into English for the first time—the German writer Karen-Susan Fessel depicts a contemporary time of love and loss. This story, like the excerpt from The Child Manuela by Christa Winsloe, has at its creative heart a vision of catastrophe. For Winsloe, it was the encroaching presence of Nazism. For Fessel, it is a nonhuman foe, an enemy that crosses national boundaries unseen and unheard. Fessel, who has long been involved in the social and publishing life of lesbian and gay Berlin, has chosen here to commemorate a community besieged by AIDS.
LOST FACES
WHEN Erik died, I was lying under the hot sun of Portugal, letting sand run through my toes, and arguing with Klara about the origin of energy, or, more precisely, the origin of human energy: was it by nature earthbound, or was it part of the universe? We could not agree: on the one hand, because we could not manage to leap over the chasm between faith and knowledge; on the other hand, because we were simply too lazy. Our argument trickled away into the Portuguese sand, and while with languid gestures and half-shut eyes we tossed each other one question or another, Erik died in a white room in the AIDS section of a Berlin hospital, surrounded by tubes, medical apparatus, vases of flowers, and Sonja.
In the evening, Klara and I would run home from the beach, along barren salt fields. With every step that took us away from the sea, the air grew warmer, the heat of the city streamed against us, oppressing us from a distance; and when we plunged into the narrow streets, our clothes once again stuck to our bodies. Later we sat in the mild night air, ate fish, drank wine, and in that way celebrated the lingering decline of our love. At night, in our stifling hotel room, beneath whose windows at about five in the morning the street cleaners rattled their barrels, we made love; after all, we had time, and nothing else to do.
At some time during those days, Janusz, many hundreds of kilometers away, gathered up his courage and set out on his rusty bike to ride, for the third time in two months, the long distance from Kreuzberg to Moabit. He said later that he had already had a premonition: but what use was that? Premonitions do prepare you in advance, but they don’t make anything easier, and when Janusz opened the door and saw the other hollow-cheeked face that had taken the place of Erik’s, he was no better armed against the pain that shot from his spine to his brain and down again—or was it the other way around? He met Sonja on the stairs; she held the bag with Erik’s things, and Janusz took it from her and carried it while they went to the exit together, past the many faces marked by sickness; Janusz recognized most of them, from other places, from other times, from another world. He knew one of the nurses too, Sabine: Sabine, who every time she finishes the five-week-long night shift on the AIDS ward cannot sleep well. She has bad dreams, she says. She dreams of the men whom she knows from other places, from places that I too know. Bars, pubs, discos: places full of life, of life in community. Sabine says she sleeps badly because she always has to think how all these men whose bony bodies she takes care of daily, and puts to bed, and gives injections to—how all these men will die soon and she has to think how many there have been already, and that there are more and more, so that in dreams she sees the pubs, the bars, and the discos emptied more and more, till at last hardly anyone is left, only separate, isolated figures and a preponderance of women.
In reality of course the pubs and bars are not emptying out; on the contrary, there seem to be more and more bars and more and more people in them, but just no longer the same people. Sometimes when I sit on the stool way back in the corner of my favorite bar, I discover the back of a head, a familiar shape; a memory stirs and then I know whose face it belongs to—but when at last I have a chance to glimpse the face, then it’s a strange one. The other face, the one I was thinking of, that one is lost. I see lost faces everywhere, and the worst of it is that for each face that I can remember, countless others come that I can no longer picture. They are gone, I will never think of them again, and yet I have known them, these lost faces.
In Adenauer Place as Klara, travel bag over her shoulder, disappeared around the corner, I already sensed that we were through. Our pleasure in each other had dwindled; it was torn like a delicate gold chain that one has only recently received as a gift, hasn’t got used to yet, and whose loss therefore is not especially painful. What else did I sense?
Nothing, really. I only wondered what might have happened during my absence. When Janusz told me on the phone a few hours later that Erik had died, a feeling of apathy overcame me. It made me sad and weary, because this was not news, his death was not an event; it was a process that had long, long been in motion, and now this was the end. “Oh,” I said dully, dull to the core.
We had lost Erik, he had lost the battle, the battle, his life. Evenings, in the bar, on my stool, I looked around and studied the people there. For which of them was Erik’s face also now lost, a face that one had often seen and recognized and that now was lost. How many would now not think of him ever again?
I did not know him well. From a face, he first became a whole person for me when he sat between Janusz and me in Janusz’s kitchen and did not want to finish his salad because he was feeling bad again. Janusz took him home, and I stood in the kitchen and hesitated for a while to throw Erik’s half-eaten salad into the garbage. It seemed strange to me, in some way unjust. It reminded me of all the salads that he would never again finish eating; in fact, it reminded me of everything that Erik would never eat again. But finally I threw away the rest of the salad.
Janusz went to the burial. Later he told me it had been dreadful, but also beautiful. Dreadful, because none of Erik’s relatives appeared; instead, there were a large number of his friends and acquaintances, most of whom in the last weeks had not shown up at his sickbed. Stiff, looking embarrassed, they stood there, and when Sonja—Sonja, who had accompanied Erik from their youth to the very end—broke down in tears, they gathered around her, pitying and dismayed; they formed a circle of silence, and from this circle one or another hand stole out and was laid awkwardly on Sonja’s shoulder. But how can one relieve suffering by the act of consoling? And how to relieve one’s own bad conscience?
But, Janusz said, Erik’s burial was beautiful because one could sense him in the resonant tones of the classical overtures that he had requested; in the three sentences from his journal that someone read in Sonja’s place; in the waves of sorrow and remembrance that rolled back and forth among the mourners and was manifested by a sad smile, a hardly noticeable shake of the head. However, at the end, when all was over, the mourners stole away alone or in twos, wordless, without greetings, and even Janusz left by himself, hands in pockets, like a thief who has put his loot back into place so as to conceal his deed.
I met Klara a few weeks later; we went to a disco full to bursting with jolly, laughing men. Heat rose chokingly. Chests were bared, legs in leather rubbed against tight-fitting jeans. Do you feel this energy, said Klara, how it pulsates? This is a small model of universal energy in the purest form of its translation; how can you say that there’s a difference between down here and up above, it’s all one, isn’t it.
I wedged myself between the dancers, threw myself among them and let myself be driven into a cauldron of aging youths and youthful death. I danced passionately, looked at the faces around me, here they were, they were dancing with me, wildly, full of strength still. And then I saw too the other, lost faces. I gathered them to myself one after the other. I danced, I danced the last dance, for Erik, the last dance, for we, I thought, we here below, we are still alive, so long as we dance we are still alive, and you, you live with us. And later I turned and saw Klara, her gaze in the distance, her eyes heavy, I saw sun and sand, from days gone by, a lost happiness, there will come a time when I shall no longer think of it; nevertheless, I did know it.
Translated by Nora Reed
María Eugenia Alegría Nuñez
Born in 1953, Marí
a Eugenia Alegría Nuñez, who now lives in the Cuban seaside village of Varadero, holds a degree in classical philology and describes herself as “new to writing.” She is currently working on a collection of short stories that, as she describes it, will focus on “obscure lives with unsuspected talents.” This theme is exemplified in her story “The Girl Typist Who Worked for a Provincial Ministry of Culture,” which is included here. In these pages, Alegría Nuñez creates a character who innocently subverts the suffocating worlds of bureaucratic constraints and academic pomposity with an irony reminiscent of that found in certain stories by the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti.
THE GIRL TYPIST WHO WORKED FOR A
PROVINCIAL MINISTRY OF CULTURE
THE page fell, and the typist never saw where. Completely mesmerized she goes about creating her inexhaustible world of words, between folding screens of paper and a thousand vegetable forms that creep along the colored mosaics, until they pile one version on top of the other in an inconceivable palimpsest of words never uttered but a thousand times heard that will become her work—enormous, endless, forged within the verbal wasteland that she is copying.
She shows the sun her solitude at midday. She drinks sweetened tea that sticks to the table, putting out incessant cigarettes. She had spent so many hours for so many years copying other people’s writings that she began to mix her own words in with what she copied, and almost without wanting to or without thinking about it, a work of unexpected splendor was born. A work in which words spill over one another in battles where style decides the victory. Every transcript, every document or memo reaches its destination with unusual errata, words never before placed in that order, precise and brilliant like the rare light that makes them new, unexplored. Nobody knows where they come from, but everyone is thankful for that perfume in the midst of so much dryness.
One weary afternoon under the August sun, a bored and idle poet trapped in a girl typist’s body began to collect all the tiresome pages with errata. When she collated them, she was surprised to discover a certain continuity. In obedience to a mysterious textual architecture, dazzling poems, stories, novels, and tales were composed, which were then trimmed down according to the flatness of what those lily white pages said, until only one novel emerged, rising up out of the union minutes, depositions, certificates, speeches, all that monotonous verbiage. It was an exceptional work, only comprehensible to initiates, those who not only knew the impenetrable lingo of official documents but also had the sensitivity to recognize interpolations. After years and years of typing so much verbal stupidity, the reading of the novel grew toward infinity. A new compilation and arrangement of all her office work during that period was necessary. The typist would put all that together carefully, with a few quick stylistic revisions, and from there her brilliant opus would emerge. It surged forth clean and beautiful, full of daring images that sprang from jumbled writings. Her first stories, her long poems that finally found their place in the composition of that one and only novel, created a narrative experience without precedent in the Spanish language. But the name of the author remained unknown. In spite of that notorious Cuban desire to honor individual accomplishments, plus the involvement of the secret services of the police and desperate attempts to track down the transcripts and documents that tumbled out from everywhere, authorship was never determined. Hundreds of girl typists put parts of their own lives and jobs into that tumultuous mass of paperwork circulating ceaselessly through the cultural bureaucracy.
The first interpreters of that body of literature tried hard to clear away what seemed to be pure rubbish. But when their work was practically finished, they doubted it had really been worthwhile. And feared that taking the typist’s paragraphs and sentences out of the monotonous bureaucratic texts, was, in fact, some kind of terrible mutilation of that which had occasioned in the first place such a marvelous work. Because it was those very words of transcripts and documents, the endless repetition of the same expressions as in a bad popular song, that had given birth to the luminous ideas from which the typist’s radiant poetry had sprung. She was definitely overwhelmed by the tedium but perhaps also bewitched by the rhythm of sentences repeated a thousand times, the same words empty of meaning, the wasted universe created by the colored mosaics, the folding screens of paper, familiar slogans, the incessant music of keys clicking in the office. Because we all know that the reproductive potential of words inundates everything. And when something is said or read or heard, it becomes real, takes on an existence of its own that rises above and finally imposes itself on our direct perception of things and people.