Kruso

by Lutz Seiler

  ‘Now you’re avoiding the subject.’

  ‘In a hiccupping fit, you hold your breath, raise your arms, and so on. But C. was only twitching and not making any sound. So it was an emergency, I’d say.’

  ‘An emergency?’

  ‘Yes, as if she were grabbing the first available lifeline.’

  His fox groaned softly.

  ‘I said, someone thinks a lot of you.’ I mean, I was completely helpless.

  ‘Yeah-ack,’ she said, and pulled me to the bed. Around my feet, there was a sound like a thousand munching caterpillars, but the flood gradually drained away, and the noise slowly faded away. Then there was just C. and her soft smacking noise, very soft, just that, nothing else. Everything around me was soft, like velvet, and suddenly, no idea how — suddenly I could do it. I could look in her eyes while I was doing it.’

  Ed fell silent.

  The sea had begun breathing again with its dark foundation and light overtones. It was almost cool. Ed pictured C. His hand on her head. Her eyes, her high, sweaty, somehow egg-shaped forehead and her hair that she didn’t do anything to. Just stroking his thighs, just hooking him into her circuit of energy. A few hairs were stuck on his cock, and took on the current. A faint dizziness, as if she had lifted him, very gently, over the border.

  ‘These bugs, Ed …’

  ‘I believe it was the only way, I mean, at that moment …’

  ‘… they transformed you, right?’

  THE KRUSO ENERGY

  In their intimacy founded on poems, Kruso and Ed had found each other, and each passing day strengthened their companionship. Kruso now joined in the closing-shift cleaning of the dishwashing station, and often even took over rolling the bin with the food scraps outside — all tasks that had obviously fallen to Ed as the Klausner’s most recent hire. When Kruso sprayed down the station, Ed leapt about like a dervish, the short scrubbers in hand. In a manner only Ed was capable of, he seemed to stop mid-stride with the rinsing spray from the tap on his heels — it was a kind of dance, a prelude to the evening. In the end, Ed dried the floor with a rag; Losh rolled up the hose. Following a sudden inspiration, he put his foot on Ed’s head, but without any pressure. Ed grabbed the foot and leant it weight.

  On the whole, it was more than closeness and more than confidence. Essentially, it was a common alienation that underlay their friendship. That both were unable to speak about what weighed most heavily on their souls seemed to bind them closer than any confession. They simply didn’t have the words, and understanding meant not deceiving themselves about it. In any case, nothing could be rectified. The source of their unhappiness (which also determined their actions) was better off elevated in a poem. They had recited Trakl’s ‘Sonya’ to each other, and Losh had given Ed the photograph, the beautiful smile in the worn plastic envelope, in which Ed also recognised G.

  Often, too often, Ed had held the photograph and touched himself. When he looked deeply into the young woman’s eyes, his story and Kruso’s became entwined. ‘That you’re not completely alone in this world,’ Ed whispered, and kissed the photograph’s pale cover. He was immediately ashamed and felt his feelings drain away. He couldn’t have loved G. all that much if he was already no longer able to recall her features exactly. On the other hand, he was now able to think of her without the tram. He could see her sitting in her chair. She was speaking to him. Her mouth moved, but he couldn’t hear her. She was serious, and what she was trying to tell him seemed important. In the middle of a sentence and without taking her eyes from his, she reached behind herself and rubbed a leaf of her lemon geranium. The room filled with the lemon scent, and Ed felt his heart constrict. He stood in the cool pit of a well, surrounded by walls made of dead verse, huge gravestones thickly covered with writing that had consumed his pain and transformed it: into distance.

  Through the smudged window, Ed watched Kruso as he inspected the food-scrap bin and stuck his hand in it now and again. Although (or because) he had hardly slept since C. had been staying in his room and although (or because) his eyes were now filled with tears and his grief could return, he felt safe in the dishwashing station. He contemplated what had stuck on the sides of the sink from the ablutions: a few hair elastics, pine-needle bath oil, the wrapper from a bar of Palace Hotel soap. The washcloths on the line strung between the shelves were still damp. Only with great effort did Ed resist the temptation to bury his face in them.

  When Ed came up to his room from the shower, a sheet of the old Klausner stationery lay on his bed. Bit by bit, he had got to know the poems that Kruso, as he was fond of repeating, wanted to collect into a volume. ‘There is nothing better than putting together a volume!’ At first, Ed regularly found a poem on the foot of his bed; then on his pillow, in the middle of the hollow left by his head — in place of my head, he thought.

  He would picture it when he was still in the shower: the yellowed paper with the lines unevenly lined up to the right or left and the letters with the bloody caps. He pictured Kruso entering his room. Ed imagined it as a kind of mark of respect; as if his friend gave a bow when he set the poem down — Ed could let himself go that far as the water rushed over his ears, and he abandoned his body completely to the joy of being where he was.

  Møn was visible. Ed tried Speiche’s glasses, which still lay on the sink. He couldn’t have explained why. He rinsed the lenses and rubbed them clean with the hand towel. For the first time, he saw the fine white line of surf in front of the chalk cliffs. And the forest along the coast, a dark stripe, fifty kilometres away.

  ‘Ah, Speiche,’ Kruso called. He was suddenly standing in the room. He had brought his white wine. He offered some to Ed, took a swig, and sucked in his cheeks — his eyelid was stuck at half-mast. He rubbed a hand over his face as if he were already tired, but it just signalled the beginning of his speech.

  ‘You work in the dishwashing station. You repeat everything into the sink a hundred times, as many times as it takes to get it right. Actually, what you’d most like is to sink completely, to be submerged, but in the meantime the little circles your hands make in the water are enough. Add to that the muffled, barely audible sounds from underwater. The swaying to the right and left when a plate sinks to the bottom, sinks like a ship. From this the position of your verse. Or the muffled sound when something hits bottom, stacks of it. You can save it all, clean it, pile it up, dry it — every noise is a cavern, a language, Ed. You understand this, you live amidst noise. And that’s the only reason you ask what it means: you have to say it all one hundred times, to yourself. You can forget what the words mean. Let’s call it shattering the semiotic triangle. At first, you can hardly stand it: the clinking of glasses, of cups, the clattering of plates, the rattling of silverware, then the intolerable heat, the sultriness, the filth, the grease, the dizziness and nausea … An enormous loss, that’s what it feels like. But nothing is really lost, no one is, Ed, no one. You just keep on talking softly to yourself, with your own voice, you knock at the words’ door with your voice. Hundreds of times, to yourself. And at some point, you’ll hear it …’

  Losh’s innocent tone. It would hardly have sounded different in front of the map of truth — biblical, chant-like. Ed began to understand, in the core of his memory hoard, what it might be about. Poetry was resistance. And a path to salvation. A terrible possibility. Kruso showed Ed the books, the collection of at most twenty books he called his ‘library’. Among them were writers like Lev Shestov and Gennady Vorsterberg, whom Ed had never heard of, and others like Babeuf, Bloch, Castaneda.

  ‘Thinking makes things ridiculous, Ed. Everything becomes an anecdote. We never reach poetry’s innermost core. The surrealists are ridiculous, too, because they tried to solve the problem through technique, not to mention the Dadaists, who destroy everything and then lie in wait for someone to come and claim that it has meaning. But what we need is our voice — it’s music, it listens for the words of the world.
What we need is our voice and a space filled with absence — a place in which to reclaim time.’ Kruso’s large, open hand gestured towards the room’s floor: the ground opened up, a few walls turned like pages, and Ed saw the dishwashing station. He saw two poets, next to each other, standing at their sinks. One great poet, who in the future would walk in and out of the world’s best publishing houses, and a second poet, wrapped in a sheet like a toga with a handful of aluminium cutlery in his hand, with which he actually knew how to write and steadfastly took notes at the great poet’s side.

  Ed treasured Kruso’s confidence, and, although Kruso might forget him now and then during his speeches, Ed didn’t care. He could have listened to Kruso for hours. His voice bathed the world in a new light. Essentially, it was all attitude, no more and no less, a complicated form of existence that was, at the same time, the only possible one. Kruso’s being was attitude, and it was all Kruso — a strange mixture of severity, almost chasteness, and self-control on the one hand, and on the other, resolve, almost fanaticism, and a penchant for the fantastic and the illicit. A chaste fanaticism, if such a thing was possible, a striking blend of innocence and absoluteness, which no doubt also won over the esskays. On top of that was his saintly earnestness, a silently vibrating aura, or, how to put it, the Kruso energy.

  Everything could be valuable, everything meaningful. As if it were just a matter of hearing, of seeing, of living, from this very moment on. The possibility of finding a line, a word that rang true was hidden everywhere around him. Even work in the wasteland of the dishwashing station obtained a new gravity. The driftwood, the oven, the pig-slop bin, the most trivial details of catering, it could all become part of a poem. An individual voice, an individual tone — it was a light, a lighthouse, from which Ed now always took his bearings. The word ‘conquer’ flitted through Ed’s mind.

  For a moment, Ed wondered if Kruso was present at the ablutions. He wondered if Kruso had seen them all, touched them all, if he washed them with his expert hands and if he used washcloths to do so. Ed pictured C. crouched in his sink, the sink for coarse cleaning. He pictured her long, flawless back, the endless row of her vertebrae. He pictured the white tips of her knees in front of her breasts, her hands pressed against the bottom of the sink. And he pictured Kruso walking from sink to sink, handing out fresh little bars of Palace Hotel soap.

  THE CONCERT

  There was no one in the bunker. Ed had wanted to go alone, to clear his head, but after just a few steps he was declaiming to the waves at his feet. ‘This is the autumn that will break your heart’ or ‘Don’t cry for me Argentina’, lyrics from hit songs on his parents’ magnetic tapes.

  At first, his father had tried to cut out the chatter of Jauch or Gottschalk, the unspeakable propensity of radio announcers to talk over a song’s opening — it made his father suffer, and nothing could ease that pain. He knelt in front of the tape recorder, one finger on ‘Play’ and a second, already cramping finger on the fire-engine-red ‘Record’ button. His torso was leaning into the wall unit, the universe above him curved by the strain in his two index fingers. Both buttons on his infinitely precious Tesla B56 (later B100) pressed down at the exact same moment, but then Jauch had to say one more thing. ‘Loud mouth!’ his father roared. He believed the chatter was pure chicanery. Then, at last, the soft clicking, the tape started to move with its own particular delay, which often caused yet another second to be lost: ‘… cry for me Argentina’.

  The door was gone, only a gap was left, through which Ed reached a small space filled with excrement and scraps of newspaper. Before he ducked out again, he heard the voice. It was Cavallo, standing on the bluff above him. Could Cavallo have followed him, Ed wondered, but rejected the idea. Cavallo was leading someone over the grassland to the dump, which was so thickly beset with seagulls you could only guess at its contours. When they followed the access road into the hollow, the birds rose reluctantly, and with them a heart-stopping stench, thick and stifling with rot.

  Then Ed heard a rumbling, and with it a kind of song without voices, more of a croaking, like the seagulls and their pitiful cries.

  ‘They even got a licence to perform from the local council,’ Cavallo was explaining as Ed caught up. Ahead of them, the sea gleamed through a swath between the moraines that reminded Ed of Celtic royal tombs. The sun had turned and begun its daily drama of descent.

  They were greeted exuberantly, cheek against cheek, by people Ed hardly knew. Then Kruso’s cheek, too.

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why are you so late?’

  Ed wanted to make a joke about his complete lack of a sense of direction, but Kruso immediately interrupted him.

  ‘Please, not again, Ed.’

  The evening was a chaotic jumble of various performances, drinks, and nervous jumping around. In the centre was a four-man band, their guitars and electric organs hooked up to an old car battery. The electric organ was set up on a hard suitcase, in front of which a pale, thin boy was kneeling and staring apathetically through his overly large glasses. Bottles gleamed in the dune grass: Stralsunder, Stierblut, Strangler, and Kirsch-Whisky, too, as far as Ed could make out. The drum kit was half buried in sand, and a metal cart had been made into a kick drum. Ed recognised Chef Mike’s Stern tape recorder, which they were using as an amplifier for the guitar. A campfire burned not far from the band, and a few esskays fed it with wood as eagerly and conscientiously as if this were the most important job they could ever have in life.

  Ed felt disgust and a touch of contempt. He wished he were back in his room. All he wanted to do was wait there, just wait, wait for C. Maybe they would sleep outside this time, between the moraines, for one or two nights, until the poison of the exterminators … Cavallo pressed a bottle of Stierblut into Ed’s hand.

  The singer of the band had started to give a wild, rambling speech. He pushed the Hiddensee cart around in a circle, calling it the ‘machine’ and repeatedly ramming it into the small group of esskays, who leapt aside, shouting and laughing. Now and again, one would fall into the cart (when the singer’s aim was right) and quickly jump out again. ‘The machine, the machine, is in league with the god of the sea …’ the singer crowed. He seemed deadly serious. He wore brown, worn lederhosen, and his upper body was bare but for a bandanna around his neck and a leather wristband on his left arm. Ed could barely understand him. The song mainly seemed to be about a drink someone was supposed to mix for him. ‘Mix me a drink, that will take me somewhere else’: it was more croaking and squawking, with no rhythm or melody. Ed stood in the half-darkness just outside the periphery of the yellow-reddish light that flickered over the dance floor as if it were part of the campfire. The dune smelled of sweat. Ed thought of cockroaches. The mugginess had returned, and the dancers took off their clothes.

  When the band stopped and the punks and bluesers among the esskays had finished their tired applause, a man with Asian features stepped shyly into their midst. He elaborately placed a cassette in Chef Mike’s tape recorder and started to dance. Cavallo, who had returned to Ed’s side, whispered ‘Dance of the Khmer’ into his ear. ‘Scenes from the Apsara Dance,’ added an esskay, standing behind Ed and breathing down the back of his neck, ‘from Cam-bod-ja, capito?’

  Like everyone else, the Cambodian was barefoot, and like the bluesers he swung his long black hair, only he looked less desperate while doing so. His dance was a dance of pride and sensuality. In the middle of the song, Kruso stepped out on the dance floor and went to hug the dancer but made him lose his balance. The dancer stumbled right into the reeking crowd of esskays, who lifted his small, slender body right into the air, like a victor. Enthusiastic cheers, from Ed, too. The little Cambodian’s large white teeth flashed above their heads.

  Then Kruso gave a sign, and his reading began in slow, dragging rhythms and with all the unbelievable tension inherent in his broad-shouldered body. The book’s titl
e was The Night of Lead; it was the same leaden darkness that sank over the gathering at that moment.

  Kruso’s voice. Kruso’s tone.

  The hypnosis lasted long after Kruso had shut the book. The sea rustled softly and cautiously: ‘You can adopt my tone.’ A line that seemed to come from beyond. A core formed within the rustling, and suddenly there was order and discipline. Ed’s heart pumped, his eyes shone, he entered into a state of promise.

  Kruso pulled a small bundle of notes from his pocket and put it in Ed’s hand. ‘The program for Island Day.’ He hardly needed to raise his voice, it was so quiet. And, as if it always were his task, Ed distributed the small handwritten pages to the esskays.

  ‘What is to come, what has been prophesied?’ the singer croaked, and the band started up again. The song seemed to be well known. Shouts of ‘Bap-tism, bap-tism, ba-aa-ap-tism!’ rose, individually at first, and then in chorus, whereupon the singer pushed the metal cart (the machine) into the middle of the space:

  ‘Go forward, youth, youth take hold

  break your own path.

  No compulsion, no drill, only your free will,

  to determine your future hencefo-o-o-orth …’

  Ed shuddered. It took a while before someone was ready. Ed noticed that a girl tried to hold that person back, but the lederhosen-clad croaker immediately put his hand on the sacrificial victim’s (Ed thought of sacrifice) shoulder and it was sealed.

  ‘Go forward youth, go forward youth,

  look freely into the light

  that will never lack …’

  The band started playing a furious, hammering rhythm. The victim, who wore nothing more than bathing trunks, willingly let helpers tie him to the machine with his arms bent backwards. His legs were bound crisscross to the shaft. Finally, the esskay who had acted as a kind of assistant the entire time and who was wearing only an apron (and who, like an Aztec or a labourer in antiquity, had pulled the cloth tight between his legs, pulling his genitals upwards and pressing them into a shapeless something) put a tube with a small red funnel on the other end into the victim’s mouth. He slowly turned in a circle.