Kruso

by Lutz Seiler

  She entered his room quietly, and immediately crawled into his bed. She smelled freshly washed. Her hair was still wet.

  ‘I don’t want to bother you.’

  ‘You aren’t bothering me.’ He would have liked to lie down next to her right away.

  ‘Where did you shower?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  Ed forced himself to stay at the table a bit longer. He read a few more lines, stretched his arm out to the window, took a deep breath, and tried to determine if the light on the horizon was moving. A clean, salt air had blown in to the room with C.

  He stood up, paced across the room, turned around, and straightened one of the bricks supporting his table. A delicious sense of anticipation washed over him. He sat at his table and wrote a sentence in his notebook. It was a dirty sentence — he had never written one like it, not even in puberty, when words like ‘fucking’ and ‘shagging’ were hardly comprehensible and remained inaccessible as expressions of a darker, coarser world. If it did come up, they would talk of ‘boinking’, using a warmer, gentler expression, like one that probably came from the Thuringian dialect. ‘So did he boink her?’ — the question was more tender, more childlike, whereas ‘fucking’ was a harder, more direct, and cutting matter. Ed remembered discussions in which they’d argued about the difference between ‘tart’ and ‘whore’ when they were just fourteen. A strong faction claimed that tarts were only in it for the money. But what they didn’t clarify was whether it was possible, for example, to call a tart a whore. Not possible, according to his friend Hagen. According to Hagen’s theory, one could assume that whores always did it for free. Ed had his doubts. At any rate, there must be whores somewhere in the world, although it didn’t seem all that believable — women who just did it, with anyone and for free. It was almost a miracle. Back then, Ed had eyed every woman in his vicinity. His friends’ mothers, neighbours, teachers, the saleswomen in the supermarket. What were the signs, and, above all, what signals were needed to get them to do it with you? That, after all, had been the greatest mystery, and fundamentally still was.

  ‘What are you writing?’ C. whispered.

  ‘Nothing. I just have to finish something quickly.’ He realised he was playing the intellectual for her benefit, and he was suddenly embarrassed.

  ‘Where are your things?’

  ‘In the forest, under a tarp.’

  ‘There’s enough room here.’

  ‘We all have our things there. They’ll stay there as long as we can manage to stay here on the island.’

  All of a sudden, it became clear to Ed how little he understood about Kruso’s larger plan.

  ‘Are you doing well, I mean, how do you like it — here?’

  ‘Very well,’ she said softly. She smiled tiredly and turned towards the wall. The shadowy lines of her shoulder blades, upper arms, and hips all seemed to Ed indescribably precious. He took off his things without a sound and nestled against her.

  ‘And can you feel it, the freedom?’

  Over the following days, Kruso expanded the scope of his confidence. When they were alone in the dishwashing station, his murmuring sometimes swelled, which caused Ed to move more carefully in an attempt to make less noise, which was almost impossible in the chaos. Kruso’s deep, monotone voice seemed to be caught up in the words alone, as if he were speaking only to and for himself, speaking into the sink, into the greasy broth, and not to Ed. The plates, the scrubber, the pots, the Romans, the entire surroundings changed — the dishwashing station turned into an expression, an expression of something else that had to be handled with care. For a long time, Ed was unsure if Kruso expected any reaction whatsoever, if his presence made any difference at all, or if the silverware in the sink or the dishwater were more important.

  Ed only ever got an indirect answer. The fact that Kruso was reciting his poems to Ed in the dishwashing station was taken by the crew as a sign. Edgar, the new plongeur (Rimbaud), was finally accepted. Rimbaud immediately considered Ed part of his audience when he stormed into the dishwashing station with new books and ideas. He often began with as simple and catchy a quote as possible, which he would then write down as ‘wisdom of the day’ on the slate board with the daily specials. Time and again, there were guests, mostly day tourists, who, in their thoughtless hurry or in complete obliviousness, ordered the daily wisdom. ‘Two orders of Panta rhei, please,’ or ‘We’d like God is dead …’ Before they had a chance to explain that their order was the result of a mental short circuit — brought on, no doubt, by being in holiday mode — for which they could excuse themselves with a chuckle (although such orders’ kinship with a dish called ‘Dead Granny’ in Saxony was not to be denied), Rimbaud was called over, and he would begin, with complete gravity and without the slightest condescension, to deliver a short speech on ‘Panta rhei’ or ‘God is dead’, apologising at the same time for the fact that neither ‘Panta rhei’ nor ‘God is dead’ was available as an entrée, ‘no, not yet, maybe later, of course under Communism, as we all know, utopias seldom become realities’ — thus Rimbaud would wrap up his brief excursus and recommend the stuffed cabbage.

  It was not unusual for him to flourish a sales check over the heads of the bewildered guests as if it held his most important notes, but he never looked at the slip. He just used it to direct one long sentence after another in the air over the tables. Most likely, he simply needed a bit of paper between his fingers when he talked, an old habit from his days as a university lecturer in philosophy in Leipzig on the Pleiße.

  ‘Fame, when will you come?’

  Without actually waiting for an answer, Rimbaud speared the sales slip on the needle near the cash register, and puffed the question once more from under his moustache, no longer as a question but instead as a little melody:

  ‘Fame, when will you come, will you come, will you come …’

  Since the book dealer’s last visit to the bee house, Rimbaud had been leaving books by Antonin Artaud in the nest. ‘This season’s favourite,’ Kruso murmured in the steam of the clean, almost boiling hot water pouring into the sink in a thick stream. The books had titles like To Have Done with the Judgement of God or Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society. Ed had to admit that Rimbaud’s readings of Artaud left him at a loss, and he realised how little he knew about matters of poetry, despite his verse hoard. ‘There where it smells of shit / it smells of being.’ That made sense. However, Ed would never before have imagined that anything like the ‘Pursuit of Faecality’ was possible — as a poem. ‘There is in being / something particularly tempting for man / and this thing is, justly, / CACA.’ Surely it sounded different in French. Whatever you thought of this, you could always learn something from Rimbaud.

  Even more than Artaud’s writing, the pictures of the author in the appendix (taken by a photographer named Georges Pastier) made a deep impression on Ed. He had never seen a man without lips before. Artaud was a man without lips. His chin jutted out, his nose protruded, and instead of a mouth there was only a hollow that drew a long line that reached almost from ear to ear, actually more of a slit that sketched the possibility of a mouth. If the writer Antonin Artaud did, in fact, have lips, then they had to be internal lips; that is, he had spoken with internal lips. Ed could only remember seeing a similar physiognomy, although not in this extreme form, on the famous author Heiner Müller, held in high esteem by those esskays who read books, who was meant to have said — constantly quoted by Rimbaud — ‘Artaud, the language of torment!’ This, again, immediately made sense to Ed. At this point, it would have been Rimbaud’s privilege to establish the connection and point out the correlation between lips and literature, but instead he quoted Müller again: ‘Read on the ruins of Europe, Artaud’s texts will be classics.’

  Would, for example, a literature of the thin-lipped and the lipless make any sense then? Ed’s question annoyed Rimbaud. And Ed conceded the point. His objection was primitive an
d an expression of his high spirits. Yes, Ed was feeling high-spirited. He was, in fact, filled with primitive elation, because he was the man who had had C. And C. had lips, endless lips.

  THE TRANSFORMATION

  20 July. ‘… suddenly starts whispering, gets out of bed, sings, and does a few awkward dance steps, with a gleam in her eyes. Or when she goes to the toilet in the middle of the night, feeling her way out into the hallway and raises her arm in the air, softly snapping her long fingers, snip, snap, snip, like steps in the air … That is, she doesn’t do it for my benefit, not for me to see. Sometimes, we just lay very still and … How can I put it? I don’t believe it has anything to do with me, and probably not with us, only with her.’

  ‘Very possible, Ed.’

  ‘I’ve never been cheerful that way.’

  ‘You’re cheerful in a different way.’

  ‘Not since G., old rascal.’

  ‘You found Kruso. You found me. You’re not completely alone in the world.’

  ‘There’s something I haven’t told you.’

  ‘Please, Ed. You know I’m just lying here, in this pleasant cave by the sea, gradually becoming one with the tides. And you come visit and talk to me, I mean, that’s the best that could happen to me, Good Lord, I mean, a fox in my situation …’

  ‘It was our first morning together. C. like a vision in my bed. As if I’d imagined her. When she pulls her hair back behind her ear and looks out at the sea … With complete aplomb, you know? She says she doesn’t do anything to her hair, no particular cut, just her hair, like her bangs, which she trims herself, maybe with her pocket knife. So she looks out the window, and her face has this pre-Christmas glow, and everything glows with it, the horizon, the pine trees, everything. Then she suddenly asks me, if I like it better this way.’ Ed blushed.

  ‘You were asleep when she came into your room, right? It was all a dream and everything you did was …’

  ‘A dream. But still, I thought she wouldn’t have come back because of that.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Yes, you understand.’

  ‘In a certain way, she was the first.’

  ‘Yes, damn it.’

  ‘So you’ll think of her now whatever happens next, my friend. She is your debut, your confirmation, and the album that goes with it, in which you will gather all your pictures to come.’

  ‘All this has nothing to do with G.’

  ‘No, Ed, nothing at all.’

  ‘Everything with her remains …’

  ‘Untouched.’

  ‘Yesterday, we were on the beach. C. was drawing. She always carries a little sketchbook with her, and her tiny pocketknife to sharpen her pencil — it always has to be very sharp, so she’s always sharpening …’

  ‘Tell me, Ed.’

  ‘At some point, C. wanted to go to the island cinema. That afternoon, Little Matten and the White Shell was playing. In the evening, it was Bear Ye Another’s Burden, and the late show was Until Death Do Us Part.’

  ‘We live in biblical times.’

  ‘And the first plague is already here. An entire company of exterminators are fumigating the Klausner. That’s the only reason I’m able to be here with you now.’

  ‘Thanks to the roaches.’

  ‘When C. and I came back from the cinema, the premises had already been cleared. A few slept on the consecrated spots, and a few throughout Kruso’s distribution network. The news didn’t reach us. Nothing was cordoned off, everything looked the same. Maybe the heat had also made us blind.’

  ‘You’re telling me, Ed.’

  Only then did Ed notice the agitation with which the fox was looking at him. Inside its little bony eye-sockets was a kind of semolina porridge that seemed to be stirring itself.

  ‘Oh, you old rascal, oh dear, I’m sorry …’ Ed hurried to the water and grabbed a handful of sand from between the stones.

  ‘Sandman, dear Sandman …’

  ‘I beg your pardon, Mr Fox!’ Ed tried to joke as he carefully let the sand fill the fox’s eye-sockets, first left, then right. His friend sighed with relief.

  ‘Forty degrees in the sun, and I had my window closed because of the storm Viola was always warning us about. Once an hour, there was something about storms from the north-west, and refugees in the embassies, but no one was really listening. As if we were somewhere beyond the news, and I believe that’s how it is, old rascal, we are not of this world. In my room, it must have been at least fifty or sixty degrees. Even from the stairs, I heard a kind of rustling, like silk, or as if someone were secretly unwrapping a present. I said something about airing out the room, opening the window, fresh air, looking forward to it with all my heart. I turned the light on and …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something you don’t understand just seeing it. First an explosion, silent, with no centre. You only see the thick brown wave spreading in all directions, everything is flowing, the wall like a wave is how I’d put it, and you see it reach the corner and pile up, a gleaming, seething foam, crackling somehow … You know, I’m not afraid of cockroaches. And I don’t think C. was either. But we still screamed, both of us, as if we were being skewered. I went at them with my arm over my face, like in war. I was filled with rage, real rage, and all of a sudden I was holding my big notebook. I just started hitting, non-stop, with sweat running off me, and when I looked around …’

  ‘What, Ed?’

  ‘Not sure if I can …’

  ‘You can do it, Ed, you can.’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘Do it the way people talk about things they want to keep at a certain distance. They use a different person — he, you, she, it.’

  ‘You mean because they feel it all too deeply?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Keep a certain distance.’

  ‘So what does he see then, our friend?’

  ‘He turns around and sees that C. is also thrashing about like crazy. She’s using her sandals. With each awkward blow, she gives a compact little war cry, with the same stress in her voice as women tennis players have when they serve. It always sounds a little desperate, but on the other hand it’s a pure expression of will, you see?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And then we started our, ummh, they started their joint hunt. They hammered all over the place, they shot their way free, so to speak. Her sharp bang-bang, his loud smack-smack, small calibre and large, almost like music, as if they were Bonnie and Clyde. And suddenly she broke out laughing. She lay on the bed, staring at me, and laughed … Sorry, I’m saying “I” again. I can’t get the story together any other way. I’ll say “I”, and maybe you could think “he”?’

  ‘I is another.’

  ‘Rimbaud says that that’s only true in French. And only in an earlier time, when people still knew what another is.’

  ‘In French?’

  ‘Yes, you little rotting psychic, that’s the point.’

  ‘I thought so.’

  ‘The laughter just burst out of her. She lay there, on the bed, flailing with her arms and kicking her heels against her rear-end. Her entire body rose and fell, and her shoulders twitched, that is, she laughed and screamed at the same time, she screamed, “Yes, Yeeesss!” and “Crazy!” and “Aaaah!”, and then she started hiccupping. A deadly fit of hiccupping. Hiccupping like I’ve never seen before.’

  Ed’s shoulders were also twitching.

  ‘Maybe it was the shock. After a while, she could only pant. Her eyes were getting bigger and bigger. She looked like a clown, her eyebrows raised high, and I started to get worried.’

  ‘Not surprising, Ed.’

  ‘You know, I’ve had experience with cockroaches. From my time in the army. Eighteen months with the little beasts in my room. They came in through the heating pipes, right from the Leunawerke chemica
l factory into the barracks. The old ones were really fat, probably mutants, chemically resistant over generations. But after a few weeks, I knew how they behaved. I knew them, you could almost say, I knew how they thought. For example, I knew that their complicated little bodies reacted to air pressure, I mean, to the most minute changes. They know even when I’m just starting to lift my notebook. When I turn a page, they can feel it in their hiding places, and I’m sure they register every word I write, word for word, translated into the tiniest frequencies. In a certain sense, they were like readers. They not only knew my chocolate or the dirty laundry in my closet in the most minute particulars, they also knew what was in my letters home and my euphoric attempts to write poems, word for word …’

  ‘You squashed your readers.’

  ‘The secret is: never aim to hit where they are. No, you always pound right in their escape path. And C. caught on when she saw me on my rampage. And when I realised she’d understood my experience, my assurance, I no longer felt any disgust, on the contrary, it was intoxicating. Through C., we’d somehow become allied, the vermin and I, hunter and hunted, the old communal fate.’

  Ed took a breath. Something moved in his fox’s eyes — something like interest, Ed thought.

  ‘Naturally, you can’t compare it to the three or four cockroaches in my army locker. They were always there even long after I stopped keeping anything edible in the food compartment. Sometimes, I thought it was always the same ones, and waxed a little sentimental, probably from being confined. Even though I’d already killed hundreds. It was almost part of our morning exercises. Before we went on leave, we had to assemble for roll call. Two steps forward, open bags, and dump out clothes. “Shake, shake your bags!” — that was the sergeant major, Unterfeldwebel Zwaika, a bloated lump. He could barely speak and could hardly see, he forced everything through his nose. I think it was his only idea. There were no regulations or anything about this. “Doan’ wanna give your woman a heart attack” — that sentence was muttered before every leave. He probably meant well.’