The Witches' Book of the Dead
Page 12
Several times while walking, he senses a small hand reaching for his own, feels his thumb being enclosed by a child’s hand; if he looks, there is naturally no one there, but if he hikes farther, then he cannot shake the very concrete sensation that someone small is walking with and beside him; his instinct tells him he is being watched, but whenever he turns around, he is utterly alone.
He is certain these peculiar feelings owe to the solitude of nature, and he concerns himself no further with them. Yet, suddenly, his father is back, after long weeks and months; there is his suntanned, carefully shaved neck with the ice-gray, half-millimeter-long stubble, the cheerful age spots, the twinkle in his eye, yes now, damn it, his father did have a sense of humor beneath all that recursive, elegant brutality.
And all at once he is sure that his father simply stopped liking him one day because he, Emil, had at some point withdrawn his hand, because for an older child, so he had thought, it was no longer appropriate to walk holding one’s father’s hand. Yes, he thinks, that had been the break between the two of them, and it was all his fault and not that of his father, whom he suddenly misses very much.
43.
After a week’s foot march, during which Nägeli acquires thoroughly tormenting blisters, when he reaches the impoverished, almost deserted little town of Asahikawa, shielded and overtopped by long-extinct volcanoes (as if he had always carried these perfect mountains, siblings of Fujiyama, in his brain’s repertoire of images), he walks for a spell down the main street, lined left and right with slapdash timbered wooden houses, in search of an inn or a hotel.
Instead, he comes upon a shop, probably a general store, a souvenir shop, and he steps through the door of wood and glass. A little bell jingles above him in the quiet of the afternoon. Although he first clears his throat loudly and then calls out a hello, no one appears. The shop seems abandoned, maybe even derelict.
Once his eyes have adjusted to the cushioned murk, he sees light-brown dust everywhere; lying spread out on tables are curtains of dark-red velvet woven with golden silk threads, sitting on top of them, in turn, are stuffed owls and kingfishers, scattered beside them silver forks removed from sets of cutlery, there is a dainty tea service, dried flowers, a dented yet still discernibly finely wrought samovar, there, a rusted toy train, light-wooden shoe trees inside buckskin ankle boots, a reproduction of Voltaire’s death mask.
Several paintings hang over the radiator, which, upon closer inspection, turn out to be quite exquisite. Here, at the edge of Asia, he feels as though he were inside a memory chamber of an old, lost, long-forgotten Europe. Nägeli flips the light switch on the wall beside him, retrieves his Bolex camera, and films the room and everything in it with a slow, steady hand.
44.
The first few days in Los Angeles are so terrifically exciting! Radiated from above and lulled by the Mediterranean-mild Californian light—which only the envious could consider mediocre—Ida crisscrosses the megalopolis by streetcar, stopping now here to eat a hot dog, now there to pet a little dachshund in MacArthur Park. She attends endless cocktail receptions and visits the numerous museums to admire the American paintings exhibited in them, which in their shocking, naïve vitality oppose traditional European modernisms; she feels as if she were mixed up in a glorious whirlwind blowing her here and there through a city with diversions and a richness of culture far superior to those in Europe.
First and foremost Ida is to act in a film with which UFA hopes to introduce the United States to Heinz Rühmann, who is completely unknown in this country, but he declines Ida as his partner because he, for his part, does not wish to act with someone unknown. He of course can no longer recall the evening spent with Nägeli in Berlin and does not even make the connection between Ida and the Swiss director to begin with. The film does not materialize, and Rühmann will never travel to the States.
While auditioning for the next project she is told, okay, her aviator look may have been passé for years now, but she can have the role. Seems she had a powerful advocate, wink, wink. Admittedly, it is only a B-picture with Wallace Beery, but she throws herself with élan and zeal into the role of a housewife who sticks with her wrestler husband even though he suffers one ringing defeat after another. She firmly believes in him and emboldens him, but after his victory in the big, all-decisive match in Chicago, he cheats on her with a whore.
The script is dreadfully written, and the bloated, doughy Beery pinches her behind incessantly during the shoot and painfully squeezes her breasts when they are alone together one day in the dressing trailer, but she is not to be deterred, she wants to become a star, and this is ultimately part of it.
Alas, because a contract between Paramount Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer comes into force, the final cut of the film Spirit of the Fight is shelved, and it disappears in an archive, never to be released. Ida receives a small cancellation fee and the prospect of acting in a Western in the foreseeable future, provided she loses thirty pounds.
After she has nearly starved herself to death for a month, the studio lets it be known that, thanks, but she has little discernible talent for acting, which might not be all that important, but unfortunately the hot-blooded South American type is in demand now, and the cool Nordic woman she embodies is outmoded. There might still be the possibility of plastic surgery if she were willing to do it. No, she is not. Well, they tell her, then unfortunately the studio’s hands are tied. One more suggestion for the future: she really ought to change her name; not a soul here can pronounce it.
She thus begins cleaning, first on the side, then all day long, for a very well-known actress. She has been informed that the lady doesn’t want to hire any blacks or any Jews, and that’s why she, Aryan that she is, may start immediately; for the time being she needs to buy a pale-blue housemaid’s uniform and report every morning to Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, at the gate of an imposing villa, shaded by tall palm trees and built in the Spanish Mission style.
Each day in the late morning, the actress appears on the gallery of the house, her face slathered in moisturizing cream, wearing her dressing gown and accompanied by her two German mastiffs, Arthur and Lancelot. She behaves insufferably, drops her cigarette ashes wherever she likes, throws slices of salami and entire Qing vases at the staff when she is hungover, and on afternoons lies by the swimming pool naked and oiled up and in sunglasses, the riding crop in her idly outstretched hand, two cucumber slices on her eyes.
She seems only to be lying in wait for Ida to make some sort of mistake. A large dinner is planned during which Ida is to assist in serving soup and such things. When company arrives and steps up to the festively bedecked table after having sipped aperitifs in the yellow salon, she sees through a gap in the door to the kitchen that Charlie Chaplin is standing among the guests, tanned brown and in the best of humors. She bursts out to embrace him, a girl somewhat past her prime, emaciated and white-aproned, as if she were an addled fan; with an embarrassed grin Chaplin turns to the hostess, who then dresses Ida down and orders her out, back into the kitchen, where she cuffs her something powerful, once on the left and once on the right, and fires her on the spot.
45.
After a long voyage back to Switzerland, Nägeli enters his little flat in Zurich-Niederdorf, makes himself a cup of tea, skims the considerable stack of mail that has accumulated on his kitchen table, lights three cigarettes in a row, and while smoking feeds into his projector the film he has provisionally edited on the brand-new Steenbeck machine over at Nordisk in Oerlikon. After watching it twice, he smiles to himself silently and with pleasure because he sees it is a masterpiece.
He locks the apartment door from the outside, strolls down to the Limmat, which flows, sedate and placid, out of the lake, and for a long while observes the swans as they slip their heads with grace—it is now late autumn—under their wings. In the shallow, transparently shimmering waters of the riverbank, he discovers the slowly rotating spokes of a bicycle. In the distance beyond the lake, to the southe
ast, the snowcapped Alps are visible, and high above them, towering up in the föhn wind, there are the clouds he would stare at for hours when he was a child.
His hair is now the usual length again, he feels it in the brisk wind, touching his scalp with a shrug to see how the bald spot there on the back of his head has spread. From the long walk in Hokkaidō he has grown muscular and slim; there is something remote about his gaze, almost dreamlike.
Switzerland is no longer quite as strange to him as it was even a year ago. Apparently he has been missed, for in the intervening period there have been second thoughts about his creative work, and he has been both offered a guest professorship in Bern and awarded some sort of bronze medal in Romandy. What’s more, he has been asked to give a series of lectures at the University of Zurich on the future of Swiss cinema, and he catches himself delighting in these new, bourgeois, even almost friendly affectations of his homeland.
He shows a rough cut of his film, which he has titled like this book, in a small, unimposing screening room in the Seefeld district, quite near the opera house. It is so very warm on this late afternoon; lightning sizzles from the clouds over the lake.
A female pianist and an unfortunately rather ungifted cellist accompany the black-and-white, silently flickering scenes; a Japanese man and a light-blonde young woman can be seen, he reading the newspaper in an open-top car; then a golf ball receding up elliptically into the heavens; the snowy cone of an extinct volcano; a dark junk room filled with worthless old trinkets; jittery, blurry animals that look like brown bears; close-ups of the rugged hands of Asian sailors mending their nets; the long-take shot of a trampled paper cup. Not all viewers stay awake.
Afterward there is restrained applause and four chilled bottles of Valais Fendant. A couple of receptive journalists have come, as have a few friends. The next day, they show Nägeli the newspapers amid approving laughter; in them he is declared an avant-garde and a surrealist—in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, however, mentally deficient. And this in Switzerland! it says there. The passages of the film in which Amakasu and Ida have sexual intercourse with one another are addressed only to the extent that one writes what a good example they are for those tawdry and scheming tendencies in art that meanwhile, alas, are taking hold everywhere. In Germany, Hugenberg has been relieved by Joseph Goebbels, who seems to have forgotten, or has repressed, that Nägeli will forever owe UFA one film.
Sometimes, although not often, Nägeli thinks of Ida and Masahiko. He has heard through friends of friends that both have gone to America and been married there. She’s probably become an actress and has come into good circumstances. That cultureless land does little for him. Hate? No, he no longer hates Ida. He does quite like to watch Westerns; maybe he will see her up on the screen one day. Perhaps, he says to himself, perhaps he actually should try visiting Hamsun again.
46.
Poor Ida. She trudges from one audition to the next. No more films materialize for her. A theater on Hollywood Boulevard does offer her a booking as an understudy, but when she dyes her platinum-blonde hair brown for the role, she suddenly has several sudsy clumps in her hand, she looks awful, and then she is simply let go once more, four dollars’ compensation in her pocket, out to palm-lined Gower; good grief, they tell her, she really ought to count her blessings.
Chaplin does not answer the telephone, or no one puts her through; every day she rings him up multiple times, but it is no use, after all he has so unbelievably many appointments, she tells herself, or else he does not remember (how could that be after he so very obviously recognized her some weeks ago?), maybe this is just how America is: full of broken promises and wanton disappointments.
Presently she is given notice to vacate her room, the electricity has already been shut off, she muddles through week by week. For days on end she slinks around the pawnshop with her clip-on earrings in hand. At least at the diner on Cahuenga she can still put fried eggs and bacon on her tab; they like her there.
One afternoon, a Brazilian gentleman (pencil mustache, cigarillo, enameled Art Deco ring on his pinky finger) addresses her at the diner as she sits in front of her twelfth cup of free coffee. He takes her along with him to his villa in the canyons; already waiting there in the recessed, velvet-cushioned living room are other thin young girls. They are offered brandy and heroin; she declines but has to think about it at length.
The Brazilian arranges the girls on the pillows; some of them strip naked; one or two film cameras are running; an assistant brings a large wooden baseball bat from the kitchen; the door to the house is bolted from the inside. Ida panics and is slapped in the face. Outside the sprinklers are twirling and spraying billions of the finest drops, which coalesce wondrously to form a rainbow, only then to drip down again off the foliage and succulents into the sparse, beflowered Californian shrubbery.
Ida screams and screams. The assistant opens a glass sliding door for her, she stumbles out barefoot onto the lawn, hastens through the shimmer of falling drops of water from the sprinkler system, her short, beige, filigree silk gown becomes wet and transparent, and one of the cameramen trailing behind films her faltering, whimpering, running away—mocking laughter follows her out of the villa.
Back outside her apartment building she finds the lock to her door changed and her belongings and furniture placed out in front and on the sidewalk. A few passersby have already helped themselves to her things and walked off with this or that. She sits down on the curb, hugging her knees, and considers whether she ought to cry.
Above her, up in the bone-dry hills, she glimpses the gigantic menetekel of the Hollywoodland sign beneath the immaculate blue of the sky. Masahiko appears to her, the man who truly touched her body for the first time. But perhaps she also misses Nägeli. That this was bound to happen, fine, that wasn’t really the plan. Actually, there was never any plan at all.
It is already evening when she ascends the framework of the H. Beneath and before her, clearly recognizable through the metal struts, lies shimmering and blazing the boundless city whose infinite expanse seems to join up at the ultramarine horizon with the gradually blackening night sky; up to that point there is an enigmatic, elastic flatness, which the simple grid of intersecting boulevards, welling up in golden yellow from the car headlights, extends through perspective into the distance.
Higher and higher Ida climbs, sitting astride the steel-framed edge of the letter, now bringing the other leg over to the front. Oh, now that’s odd, she thinks: an H, exactly like in my dream. There is a forgetting of all existence, a silencing of our being where we feel as if we have found everything.
Her head sinks down until the vertex of her secure grip is exceeded, she slips off, tries to grab hold at the last moment, calls out in astonishment, falls noisily and far, and her plunging, tumbling body eventually comes to rest, draped over cacti whose sharp, merciless spines have lacerated, yes, almost flayed the skin from her face.
They come with an ambulance and a hearse, parking all the way up on Mulholland. A gaunt coyote, lured by the smell of blood, quietly slinks back into the bushes. Three policemen take notes by the light of the flood lamps; one has bashfully turned aside to vomit. Down below, at the exit to the canyon, the lights of Los Angeles eternally hiss their encoded messages.
Ida’s half-naked body is carefully laid onto a stretcher, but before she is lifted into the hearse, a journalist will flash a few pictures of her disturbingly lacerated face, which he will later sell to a magazine specializing in spectacular fatalities. In these writings it will read that she was like a fire sleeping in flint.
ALSO BY CHRISTIAN KRACHT
Imperium
A Note About the Author
Christian Kracht is a Swiss novelist whose books have been translated into thirty languages. His latest novel, The Dead, was the recipient of the Hermann Hesse Literature Prize and the Swiss Book Prize. You can sign up for email updates here.
A Note About the Translator
Daniel Bowles teaches German studies
at Boston College. For his translation of Christian Kracht’s Imperium, he was awarded the 2016 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. He has also translated novels by Thomas Meinecke and works by Alexander Kluge, Rainald Goetz, and Xaver Bayer. You can sign up for email updates here.
Thank you for buying this
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on Christian Kracht, click here.
For email updates on Daniel Bowles, click here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Part One: 序
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part Two: 破
Chapter 20
Chapter 21