The Witches' Book of the Dead

by Christian Day

  There. Satisfied? And now good night to you, Jerry. Something else? Yes! Here it goes, and the physician glances first at his fingernails and then at his wristwatch: Putzi doesn’t want to grow old and rot away here in this icy wasteland, he refuses to indulge these impositions, he is an intellectual who did, please note, defect at the right time, and a doctor like Bland must be able to comprehend this. While his detention might be legal, it is, however, not in the least morally defensible; the Allies have apparently forgotten that he had always warned against that Charlie Chaplin–esque demagogue, that irascible, drug-addicted, vulgar buffoon, whereas the Allies, meanwhile, had arranged themselves in their undiscriminating, black-and-white shadow cabinet where every German was equally guilty; they must lock all of them up without exception—so goes the hapless conclusion of such reasoning—whereas he’s a decent man who desires nothing more than a quiet, reclusive life in the countryside, where it’s warm of course, with the option of being useful to his fellow man. Nature, work, quiet, books, Johann Sebastian Bach, love of one’s neighbor—that’s his idea of happiness. And—is he supposed to be able to live like that here in Iroquois Falls, at the edge of the Arctic? Where his fucking toes are falling off? And while he’s thinking about it, did he already mention the piano that should kindly be made available to him?

  Dr. Bland gingerly slips the boot over the outstretched sock donned again after the examination and signals to the still incessantly grumbling Putzi, that’s enough now, he may get up, please, and leave the infirmary through that door there.

  The German does as he is ordered and scuffles out into the darkness of the snowy yard, dejected. Dragging along his supposedly diseased foot behind him like Mephistopheles’s hoof, he disappears into his barracks while the doctor again attends to the radio receiver, a cucumber sandwich, and a glass of whole milk. Finland has surrendered to the Soviets.

  30.

  After the steamer docks in Kobe Harbor, few lasting images are impressed on Emil Nägeli’s shadow-tendriled retinas (grayish gulls on the pier, construction rubble from a recent earthquake, two infirm, mumbling beggar monks, and the bloodied, vivid redness of raw slices of fish). The Towa Film Corporation representative sent to meet him—and who speaks outstanding German—performs a veritable St. Vitus’s Dance of bows before him, then he boards the railroad to Tokyo, to his Ida.

  Together they sink down, osuwari kudasai, into the cloud-like seats of a very elegant compartment, clearing their throats, cleaning their respective spectacles (with lightly pursed lips Nägeli aspirates a vaporous O over his double lenses), and adjusting their ties, and the Japanese man smooths his short, slightly obscene mustache with forefinger and thumb.

  Well, tsk-tsk, conversation just doesn’t want to get moving; he feels as though his counterpart is waiting with some degree of laboriously concealed tension for Nägeli, who ranks far higher in the present compartment hierarchy, to please lead the discussion and, as it were, to set the right tone (the unuttered sound of the syllable tō meanwhile fills his mind with ineffable, dark promise). With his hand over his mouth, he suppresses a gas cloudlet pushing up his esophagus—that may very well be the raw fish, that brown sauce served with it, the green horseradish.

  And so, with a superficiality that causes him to wince a bit, Nägeli lectures for a good three quarters of an hour on European cinema (while outside the windows of the zooming train Fujiyama moves past: quietly trembling, humming god-mountain), and lo and behold, the matter of rank having been satisfied, the young man waxes eager to give the honored guest the feeling with nods and smiles that his insights are not only of great interest, but also in fact thoroughly inspiring.

  How tedious these triple contortions are, Nägeli thinks to himself, yet they are also the mark of an advanced civilization that expresses itself at once with extreme artifice and with the greatest naturalness. Another long silence ensues. As they look out the window into the sun, the young Japanese man noisily unscrews a thermos, peeps inside, and twists it shut again.

  It crosses Nägeli’s mind that he will have to learn to unfurl banalities not innate to his—ahem—Swiss spirit, to reel off formulas. Oh, the temperatures here in Japan are pleasant indeed, he, Nägeli, is rather surprised, one has seasons here like at home: autumn leaves, snowstorms, torrid summers. Yes, he continues, while suppressing a yawn, it is likely that only civilizations located in temperate climes are permitted to rise in splendor and renown; those in tropical zones foster in their people a lethargy that ensures no cultural foundations of relevance or duration can emerge, much less one with an imperial character. It tweaks him inside, this rubbish.

  But—but what then of the pyramids of Mexico or Egypt or the remarkable achievements of the Khmer or even the Javanese, the young man argues, and Nägeli immediately realizes that the man is objecting more emphatically than decorum should allow; he sees how he bites himself hard on the lower lip, probably tasting some blood in his mouth.

  He hastens to accept a cigarette from Nägeli’s proferred silver etui, holds it in thanks up to his forehead in the Oriental manner, welcomes the Swiss gentleman’s match with a nod, and pushes dragons of smoke from his nostrils. Just how to atone for this horrible tactlessness?

  A white-gloved conductor appears, opens the compartment door, bows, and examines the tickets. The clicking of the train on the tracks grows louder and more relentless. Nägeli gnaws at one of his fingertips. No further conversation takes place. The Japanese man seems to feel dreadfully ashamed; he smokes and looks down at the floor. Finally, when this silence can scarcely be endured any longer, the train pulls into Kōjimachi District and, braking long and clamorously, comes to a stop at Tokyo’s Central Station.

  Luggage is loaded on and off, smartly coiffed men in dark suits, impatiently smoking, shove past women in forbidding kimonos whose cheeks—how fascinating to look at!—are covered in a pale paste and then highlighted with rouge. Nägeli’s gaze tracks the hands on the face of a railway clock that glide toward one another in artificially slowed acceleration, only to unite then above at the capricious curvature of the twelve. A honking, a glinting, the flapping of pigeon wings, voices over the loudspeaker.

  They have scarcely escaped that luminous cavern of a train station when the young Japanese man maneuvers the suitcase into a waiting taxi and orders the uniformed driver to take the most honorable foreigner to a certain address in Akasaka District, the trip shouldn’t last even twenty-five minutes. Bows upon bows follow, which Nägeli still sees performed continually through the black-rimmed oval of the rear window even though the one thus bowing grows steadily smaller and more indistinct.

  31.

  Now and again during the ride, Nägeli captures these delightful scenes with his hands forming a rectangle, camera-like, before his eyes: soft sunlight at midday and bustling streets; fashionably clad youths (perfunctorily knotted, colorfully striped bow ties there, here bonbon-colored knit sweaters, white, loose knickerbockers) loiter about ice cream parlors; the iron wheels of streetcars, guided by gleaming tracks, screech away beneath telephone poles that march forth into the distance; tofu peddlers push their wooden carts against the current of hundreds of swarming bicyclists, tooting on the ocarina flutes of their guild.

  And here a small collision has taken place: an inattentive merchant has wheeled his trolley in front of an approaching truck, which was only partly able to brake, and now blood is gushing from the poor man’s mouth, and he sits cowering on the cobblestone curb in shame and misery and weeping for his smashed tofu cart. A bespectacled police officer disperses the congregated masses with conciliatory gestures.

  Tokyo is an electrifying polyphony of modernity and at the same time very, very ancient, a city that seems perfectly free of the taint of vulgarity. Filing past Nägeli’s side window: stately women promenading emotionlessly in the shade of two parasols; wistful gingko trees, nestled against primeval stone bridges, arranged to such a degree of perfection that it seems as if they had been posed there by an artist; the be
spectacled constable from a moment ago now regulating traffic stoically and stonily and myopically with raised white cuffs; then a military parade, on account of which the taxi must turn and take another route down and then right back up a gorgeous boulevard; as in a daydream they sail off underneath a delicate canopy of blossoms aglow in purple.

  A breathlessness suffuses him, he loves what he sees, he could definitely stay here and create something. Yes, one aspect of his being feels itself continually reminded in Japan of something long forgotten that he cannot have experienced himself, an altogether intangible sensation of satisfaction enfolds him; delicious the way that bundle of telephone cables droops there in the middle; how a barber, comb in the pocket of his smock, tentatively steps out upon the threshold of his shop and yawns behind an upheld hand; the way an embarrassed crowd scatters off after there has been another small, unremarkable automobile accident; Nägeli scours his teeth with the tip of his tongue; they are covered by a thin bacterial film.

  He feels something under his shoe, looks down to the floor of the taxi, and gropes for it. It is a pencil, a pale-violet one someone has left there. He rolls the clicking facets of the octagonal shaft in his hand and slips it into his blazer pocket as if he could somehow sense the mnemonic context and wished to keep the pencil only until he remembered what was meant by it.

  Switzerland and its parochial clusters of mountains, those massifs jagged with the mere pretense of loveliness, have morphological repercussions on the ghastly orneriness of its citizens, who lean out their kitchen windows with elbows propped on a pillow to note down in pencil if someone has parked illegally in their neighborhood—which is to say, to write down the license plate number in order to report the driver later to the cantonal police. But even these pendants are never as bad as the Swiss creative class, whose dim and petty attitudes make him flee his homeland as often as humanly possible.

  He must come up with something new, something completely unprecedented, it must be flawed, yes, exactly that is the essential factor; it is no longer enough to want to create a transparent membrane through film that might grant one of a thousand viewers the ability to perceive the dark, wonderful, magical light behind things. He must create something both supremely artificial and self-reflexive. That drunken vision that appeared to him so many weeks ago in Berlin with Kracauer and Eisner had revealed to him a new way forward, but now he must actually produce something full of pathos, must make a film that is recognizably artificial and deemed by audiences to be mannered and, above all, out of place.

  It’d still be a horror film; one just couldn’t depict creepiness with the clichés that horrible Hugenberg had preformulated for him in his glass poseur’s office in Germany. And there won’t be any vampires, nor any depraved, degenerate Asians, and most certainly not any young German women who allow themselves to be corrupted. Rather, Nägeli thinks, he has to devise a metaphysics of the present, in all its facets, from the innards of time outward. He’d still have to ponder it for a while, but then he’ll know how to begin, in a few days, perhaps even by tomorrow.

  The taxi turns off onto a side street, and Nägeli asks the driver, gesticulating, to please pull over on the left and wait for a moment. He climbs out, steps onto the sidewalk, bobbing up and down, and smokes a cigarette. Then he takes off his hat and with mild disapproval checks his appearance in the car’s side mirror. The chauffeur grips the steering wheel with both white-gloved hands and out of cautiously expectant propriety keeps his eyes fixed straight ahead without turning back to Nägeli.

  An airplane flies low past him in the sky; its cheerful drone, coupled with the twittering of birds in a nearby hedge, triggers a vibrant chain of memories that, as so often they do, send him falling down into the long-submerged world of his childhood. He sees before him the driver’s white gloves resting on the steering wheel left and right, which in their furtive patience recall for him Sebastian, his little albino rabbit, whose fur was flayed as in Chinese torture, and at this moment he feels as though he could, for a short while, borrow the anguish of the world and its cruelty and turn it upside down, and transform it into something different, something good and true, as though he might possibly heal with his art.

  32.

  Thinking he might want to smarten himself up a bit before meeting his fiancée (and somewhat bewildered at this idea), Nägeli has himself deposited at a hair salon and enters the establishment. Inside he allows an ascetic-looking, inexorably humming hairdresser to shave his head with hair clippers. Then from a glass wall cabinet he selects—from among so many other wigs slyly awaiting their new purpose, like black scalps in a museum exhibit—a specimen made from dark-brown human hair.

  While still in the shop (its chinoiserie wallpaper reminds him of those faintly dusty foyers in Swiss provincial theaters) he pulls it over his now bald and somewhat sickly-looking skull, has it adjusted by the coiffeur, who, while leaning over slightly, pulls and tugs at the hairpiece here and there and finally invites him with a hum to please have a look at himself over there, in that small adjacent room.

  Hanging exactly opposite one another are two floor-length mirrors framed in agate and carefully veiled in sheets of gauze because among certain rather old-fashioned Japanese there persists the superstition that there be a direct connection between one’s reflection and the human soul. Nägeli positions himself between the looking glasses, and when his image multiplied by the hundred vanishes into infinitude, his eyelashes turn damp.

  Can he perhaps sense that at exactly this moment his remarkably photogenic mother lies dying, his mother whose aristocratic neck never became wrinkled, she who for years wore a simple string of pearls over an ice-gray cashmere sweater and whose ash-colored hair, cut quite short between collarbone and jaw (as if a cold Alpine summer breeze had softly coiffed it forward at its brittle ends from behind), always outlined her face between her too-high cheekbones and her somewhat too-weak mouth and the sun-whitened spots between her hair and the skin of her temples—that while he is here in Japan she is dying, now, much too early, coughing?

  The effect of the toupee in any case is altogether astonishing; at one stroke, the clock of his life has been set back by years. Delighted at the intimate, precarious pleasure of his foreign customer, the sensei (for that he is, a master of rejuvenation) asks him, with the raised tip of his forefinger to his lips, to take a seat in that swivel chair and now carefully pencils over the curvature of Nägeli’s eyebrows, now dabs a brush into a jar filled with scarlet-red cream, and now with a steady hand paints the gentleman’s cheeks in circular motions, while strokes of his knuckles expertly wipe away the excess color.

  Now a rotation of the chair initiated by an invisible knee, which confuses him mildly, a new, scrutinizing look into the magic double mirror (while slightly sucking in his cheeks), a final snip with the little scissors—and an unruly eyebrow hair whose mission it has been for years to jut horizontally into space, groping just like an insect’s antenna, vanishes without a trace. Payment for the procedure is rejected under vehement protests.

  Outside the door to the establishment, Nägeli, full of disbelief at the markedly successful transformation of his appearance, gazes once more (not all too discreetly) at his reflection in the display window, turns himself around on the sidewalk in a hint of a pirouette and then, pioneer of metamorphosis, saunters down the street to the inviting scarlet rectangle of the torii of a nearby park or shrine. Happily striding through it, he walks awhile under a hyper-blue early summer sky, free from all thought, and then he pauses before an almost bare cherry tree, and he looks up into its pale-violet crown of blooms.

  A mechanical bird made of artfully painted sheet metal sits there on a branch in the tree, cleaning its plumage and warbling: fee-dee-bus. A cherry blossom falls in death, dies in falling. It is perfect like this.

  33.

  Masahiko Amakasu and Ida von Üxküll are seated across from one another in the salon of the villa that has been rented by the Ministry for the foreign filmmakers. Legs cr
ossed, they have between them on the low table a half-full bowl of snowily salted edamame and two rather questionable cocktails.

  They smoke, tapping their ashes into a coconut shell on hand for this purpose, play with an automation dog whose spring seems to have a malfunction, leaf half-heartedly through fashion magazines. Shallow, soft jazz music, some popular song burbles out in the hallway, or perhaps upstairs on the wooden gallery; it is not entirely apparent where the speakers are located. The servant was sent home around five.

  Amakasu has screwed a monocle to his right eye; he is wearing a tapered dark-blue woolen suit and a dark tie, the German woman, by contrast, that aviator’s uniform that becomes her so well, jodhpurs, and tall boots. A few days ago she had the curls in her hair taken out and the result dyed platinum blond—not to better distinguish herself from Barbara Stanwyck, to whom she bears a strong resemblance, but rather simply to look even more German here in Japan.

  With thumb and forefinger Ida tugs the cuffs of her blouse down the back of her hand as if trying to hide her wrists from the Japanese man—these she finds unattractive, even tomboyish. Her hands are not especially refined either, and at night she chews on her fingernails until the tips are exposed, ragged and bloody, which she attempts to conceal by day as best she can. Amakasu, who likewise chews on his fingernails, has developed the method of letting them grow out and then only biting them down to the point at which they exhibit the socially acceptable length.

  Ida is expecting her fiancé, has been for days; he, the man who telegraphed his precise time of arrival from the steamship—can one really say this so harshly?—is quite the philistine, but she does feel some antsy anticipation nonetheless. Hopefully, she says, hopefully he’s shaved his head by now.