by Ian Wedde
How trivial, how pedantic, how dull, how banal.
I writhed to get myself out of the corner I’d backed into.
She picked up the clumsy ‘Horney’ cue somewhat later, after we’d left the damp, leaf-mouldy autumn woodlands of the botanical gardens and visited Rudi Dutschke’s grave at Sankt-Annen, indeed after another visit elsewhere the following day, which was both disappointing and exciting—the ‘Horney’ thing, that is. It was disappointing because I’d have preferred her to have had the style and intelligence to give me the benefit of the doubt about the leery mistake of ‘horny’, but exciting because the mushroomy smear on her thigh was exciting, later, when she said, ‘And now, as you see, I’m Horney after all.’
The early morning light that comes through a dreary internal window into the comfortless little room of the Comfort Hotel on Cuba Street is what I wake to from a performance that’s half dream and half memory—half memory because I did approach the dark wood that Gertrud opened between the bare boles of her thighs, but half dream because I’m no longer sure what form my stupidity took. What was its context? Its text? I’ve had many versions of this waking dream in the seven years since what might best be described as a ‘So oder ist das Leben’ moment; and despite the unambiguous erection they cause, most of them seem designed to camouflage the circumstances of my humiliation, to rewrite the script, to cast doubt, to encourage ambiguity, to tunnel under truth. Worse, to eschew ‘truth’ by asking, What kind of truth?—emotional truth, some kind of indeterminate, possibly specious cultural truth that wavered across the mistranslations of our hit-and-miss conversations, or even a truth of fiction as our story unfolded?
Was I in the nut house? Yes, no. No, yes. Ah, but in what sense? What was it about those priceless aromatics, that ancient trade in spicy amelioratives for rotting meat, those corrupting lessons in excess and luxury, that had made me stand as if paralysed among the cinnamons, peppers, nutmegs, cloves and cardamoms?
Did we stroll between the bare trunks of the winter trees, beneath which the rotting deciduous leaves were steaming off a smell of warm mushrooms? Yes, no—but what did I notice then, if we did walk through the botanical gardens: her studious conversation about German films, or the primitive woodland aroma of regeneration?
Did we visit Rudi Dutschke’s grave at Sankt-Annen near the university? No, yes. He was my hero when I was doing my Doctorate here at the Free University. He died in 1979, the year I completed the PhD, and he has gone on rebuking every cowardly, self-serving decision I’ve ever made in my life, and he may even have reduced their potential total over time.
At the graveside, did we try to remember the words of the Wolf Biermann song, ‘Drei Kugeln auf Rudi Dutschke’? Yes, no. I doubt it. She didn’t know them. I can’t remember them now. When I try to, it’s the image of his rough boulder headstone that ‘comes to mind’, whatever that means, with its inscription Dr. phil. Rudi Dutschke, and of course its ground cover of simple ivy, how German that is, but no words, and I don’t know if the person standing silently beside me is Gertrud or not.
Did those stupid words come out of my mouth? Yes, no.
Not Biermann’s, mine. My words.
Yes.
But no.
My phone. It’s Peter, texting from Napier. Vero’s plane gets in at ten. Meet at ‘the house’. I wonder if the quotation marks are his idea.
Yes, no.
But of course yes, because Vero refuses to have a cellphone, god only knows why, it’s as if she’s still afraid of ‘voices’, that phase she went through after our mother died.
What was also sexy was the sound of breath refilling Gertrud’s chest after one of those long German expostulations—such a vital connection between thinking, speaking and breathing, as if what she was refilling herself with was words, not trivial conversational ones, but ones with the savour and substance of spices and woodlands.
Halyards are rattling in the nasty wind at the Port Nicholson marina, and a smell of warm chlorine gusts from the door of the pool as I go in.
I saw my father and Mick on one of their morning walks just before I went to university up in Auckland, a couple of years before the old man died. I was just leaving Freyberg Pool and they went past at my father’s fast clip, elbowing each other, trying for the harbourside track. They didn’t see me.
After twenty lengths the mind begins to quieten and a rhythmical consciousness takes over, the muscles stop resisting, the patterns of breath and movement become one, thought moves back into something bodily, like the circulation of blood and oxygen, but also like music. It’s Beethoven’s Great Fugue in B flat Major, Op. 133 that often works for me, its muscularity, the way it pushes and surges through the thick, deep chords, how it turns and repeats, how it refills itself.
But not if I think about it or want it.
And not today. There they go, the memory lit by clear sunlight as I miss the rhythm of my turn, pushing and shoving, my father’s impossible legs performing spindly, nimble moves, Mick’s face turned towards him, his mouth open in adoring laughter. God almighty, he was sixteen already.
The venom and disgust in my father’s voice. Why do you want to study Cherman?
Why do you think.
Why do you want to go to Auckland?
Why do you think.
A man with the welt of a heart-surgery scar the length of his chest is singing unselfconsciously in the shower, and I want to ask him if he’s happy because he’s been given a second chance. He grins at me and flicks lather in my direction as if the answer’s yes.
I get a banana smoothie from the juice bar at the pool and walk with it along the Parade towards the Point. There’s still time before I meet Vero at ‘the house’. My hip aches in spite of the swim, or maybe because of it, but there’s another ache, it’s the one I’d never admit to my father when he was alive, and only to myself after he died, and the one I’ve spent my adult life denying to Mick, and it’s why I don’t want to go back along the Parade, and up Cambridge Terrace, and left into Brougham Street, and then around the corner to where the red house will be standing with that choleric complexion stained and aged by the effort of remaining relevant, by the impossible effort of resisting the moment when its self-importance will fall down, when its dignity will collapse, when, like an ageing man falling upon the body of a young woman, the truth of its condition will be naked.
‘So, why did you do it?’ I said to Gertrud.
‘Why not?’ was her reply.
What should matter can seem so trivial, and the importance of what seems trivial can pass you by without you noticing that your life has just begun to end.
My second lecture at the Peter Szondi Memorial Symposium in 2007 was intended as a semi-humorous counterpoint to the dour one about Klaus Groth and Johannes Brahms. In it, I rehearsed the spatial performances on 15 August 1961 of Corporal Conrad Schumann and Private Hagen Koch of the East German Army. Schumann became famous for jumping into the West over the initial barbed-wire roll-out of the Wall at the corner of Bernauer Strasse, and Koch for painting the white line that would mark where East Berlin began on the border between Mitte and Kreuzberg. This was my homage to Peter Szondi and his theories about the close performative counterpoint between drama and life, that life is as much about performance as drama is about life. It went down ‘quite well’ with the audience, who clapped politely and asked some dutifully intelligent questions. There was Gertrud about five rows back, with some young friends, it seemed. She gave me a little wave.
Later in the afternoon we were standing in the Bauhaus Archive looking at the absurd, fetishistic installation of chairs. Breuer’s bizarre 1921 ‘African Chair’, and then Neufert, Hartwig, Dieckmann, more and more Breuer of course, Albers, Van Der Rohe, Arndt, Schulze, and on and on, I knew them all, they made me feel sick to my stomach; their skinny, grudging bones were the bones of my father rattling away in all the houses he’d haunted with his uncountable horde of objects designed to repudiate history. These things were zombies—
they didn’t know how to die, or when to; but I couldn’t say any of this to Gertrud, who seemed to be gazing at the chairs with the close, reverend attention of a cultural sychophant.
I, meanwhile, was imagining her bottom filling them.
For that matter, I didn’t know why she’d asked to join me, in fact join me again, following the previous day’s chance meeting in the nut house, after which we’d parted awkwardly, as if we both acknowledged a discomfort or tension in the maladroit flirtations of our walk in the gardens and to visit Dutschke’s grave—she to go home to the flat she no doubt shared with other students, me to attend a stuffy reception at the Norman Foster library building where the symposium was being held.
‘My father,’ I began, looking at the chairs my father had made his brilliant versions of—me, an ageing professor about to talk about my own father to a nineteen- or twenty-year-old woman young enough to be my, what, granddaughter?—but then felt her warm hand slide into mine.
‘So,’ she said, in that correct tone, ‘are you a jumper-over or a drawer of lines, Professor Klepka? A Schumann or a Koch?’
For a moment I can’t tell if it’s the memory of that moment or the impact of a hand falling heavily on my shoulder that makes my heart stop with a great, ponderous thud, so that when I turn and see Jörg grinning at me I stare at him for a few seconds with my mouth open, waiting for breath—I see his expression freeze around the big smile, expecting recognition, delight, love even, so that when I finally get the words out they sound effortful and insincere.
‘Jörg! What a surprise!’
He’s got running gear on and has the lean, drawn look of someone whose life expectations are outpacing his condition. For some years he used to send me slightly competitive photos or later email attachments of himself taking part in marathons—Around the Bays, in New York, in Chicago, at the top of an immense sand dune somewhere, lying grinning in a starfish shape among people’s feet in a paddock while someone turns a hose on him, seeming to get leaner and more stringy with each image until the grin began to look like a rip in the stretched skin of his face. Sometimes he sent links to papers he’d published or lectures he’d given here and there around the world. Sometimes he even appeared in media coverage of political demonstrations, an old leftie. But then the email attachments stopped coming, also the informative Christmas letter, possibly because I stopped reciprocating.
‘Not really so surprising,’ he says, gripping my hand with both of his, ‘since I live here, as you know. But you, Sandy? Why . . . ?’
Why are you here?
Why didn’t you recognise me?
Why can’t you ever really forgive me?
I can tell by the solicitude of his grip and his by-now forced smile that he knows about my divorce, and he may also have heard on the academic grapevine about my enforced semi-retirement to a .2 single-paper place-holder at the university, with a shared office. He, I’ve heard on that same grapevine, has retired from Victoria University with full emeritus honours and, since the opportunist rush of academic blood to the head following the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, Pussy Riot and so forth, a run of requests to guest-lecture about the student movements of the 1960s and ’70s, the SDS, the Red Army Faction, urban guerrillas or, alternatively, the revolution of all-conquering love, und so weiter. Back when we were both doing PhDs in Dahlem, he was the native departmental darling who diced with political impropriety. He organised campus protests when the RAF activist Holger Meins died after a hunger strike in 1974. He was reprimanded for publishing a paper on state terrorism in which he compared Stammheim Prison to a Nazi concentration camp. He advocated the assassination of Axel Springer. We both had new young wives with new young babies. He introduced me to Dutschke’s work and managed to be both radical and academically successful.
As well as advocating political assassination, he was all for peace and love. He introduced me and Jilly to marijuana, and I can still remember the enthusiastic sounds (‘Oh, Jörg!’) Jilly made fucking him in the next room while I lay paralysed with stoned vertigo on our bed with his wife, Imogen, who, after a while, just said, matter-of-factly, something like ‘Keine grosse Sache’, and lit a cigarette. Then one of the babies woke up and began to cry.
I release my hand from Jörg’s commiserating clasp and am about to say, ‘My brother, Mick, just died,’ which is a simple truth, but instead I say, ‘We’re all going to die one day, Jörg, you can’t run away from it,’ partly because it just comes out like that, but also because that’s what I want to say to him, and also because it’s true, it’s even truer than the fact of Mick’s death. It’s a general truth, not a particular one.
And also because, all at once, I’m sick to death of all the bad faith and hypocrisy that’s fogging up the view of several simple truths: Jörg’s a self-serving fraud, Mick’s dead, my career’s fucked, my marriage is also fucked, I’m broke, I live in a shitty studio apartment, my son’s bankrupted himself again and is about to re-marry with a woman half his age who says she doesn’t like his kids, I have trouble getting past twenty pool-lengths into the mind-free zone, I’ve wanted for years to tell the shit Jörg that I can never forgive him for making Jilly cry out in the next room, let alone for conveniently taking a job in New Zealand, but also . . .
‘What’s up, Sandy?’ says Jörg, stepping back towards the mizzly vista of the grey, ruffled sea, the windswept city, the drab, misty hills. ‘Has something happened?’
Has something happened?
And this is the star political phenomenologist of the Freie Universität back in 1979/80? The tame conscience of the de-Nazified faculty? It must be the expression on my face that causes him to re-hear what he’s just said, because his face clenches and goes red, as if he’s shitting himself.
I think a yelp of laughter comes out of me.
‘Sorry, Jörg,’ I say. ‘Never mind. Good to see you. You’d better keep going, you’ll stiffen up.’ And I turn and begin to walk back towards ‘the house’, half expecting Jörg to yell after me, ‘It’s about Jilly, isn’t it!’—but of course it’s not about Jilly thirty-five years ago, yes, no, but also . . .
He doesn’t yell anything at all after me, and has disappeared around the Point when I turn for a quick look. On any other day we could have agreed to meet up to share a bottle of wine and reminisce about this and that, although probably not that. We managed it a few times. He’d probably have demanded to know why I didn’t tell him I was coming down, I could have stayed with him and whatever his current wife’s name is, there’s plenty of room, I could have borrowed one of the cars. How are the kids doing, the grandchildren, what are you working on, did I see there was something of yours in Telos a few years back, the Peter Szondi memorial issue, you must send me a copy?
But also.
But also because, when I said to Gertrud, ‘So why did you do it?’ and she then said, ‘Why not?’ I then said, ‘Because I’m old.’
‘Because I’m old, Gertrud. I’m old enough . . .’
‘To be my father?’ she snapped. ‘As if I want to fuck him!’
‘To be your grandfather!’ I snapped back.
‘Or him? Scheisse!’
I thought she’d go on being angry, or get angrier, but she just laughed.
‘So, we talk in clichés now. As if you didn’t do this before. I can tell. And anyway, we did it, a few times, it was quite nice, you didn’t think about this before?’
I didn’t answer, or couldn’t think what to say.
‘So, it’s clear, then,’ she said. ‘We agree. It doesn’t matter.’
This was the last time we ‘did it’. The house she shared in Dahlem was full of young people who greeted me politely, brusquely, but without surprise as we went to her room.
‘Why does that matter, your age?’ She was smoking a cigarette, and blew smoke carefully away from me towards the open window of her bedroom. There was a tree outside, and some long-tailed birds were foraging for something or other among the last few brown leaves. ‘I wan
ted to meet you, I am interested. I liked the way you talk. You worry about being old? About your body? You have quite a nice body, not young, but quite nice.’ She gestured at the window with her cigarette. ‘It’s an autumn body, I also quite like the autumn.’
Quite like.
‘Your manner is funny-serious, I like that. I like that you can think. It’s quite interesting. So you made me a little bit horny. What’s the matter with that?’
Little bit.
‘Nothing the matter with that.’ The words fell out of my mouth like stones. They weren’t the ones I wanted to say.
‘It’s a little bit different. A little bit unusual, an older man. It’s quite interesting.’
Little bit. Quite.
‘I didn’t do that before. So it’s different. Maybe that’s why . . .’
‘Why you get horny,’ I said, and heard my grief and shame begin to give the words a hard, nasty sound.
‘But it’s also because . . .’
I was getting up out of the chair that had her scarf thrown across the back—I could smell her astringent perfume on it, something with citrus, it was the smell of her throat exposed on the pillow when her window was shut, it was what she’d been wearing in the Tropischen Nutzpflanzen.
‘And it’s also because you are sad.’
I sat down again. ‘I’m sad?’
‘Yes, you are a very sad man.’
‘Not quite sad.’
‘No,’ she said, as if what I’d just said was neither a joke nor a taunt. ‘I think you are a very sad man, and that’s why I make an action. Before, I didn’t think about doing it. But then the chairs.’
But then the chairs.
This is why I have to get past twenty lengths of the pool, to shut it down, to smother it under the surge of oxygen like Beethoven’s great fugue in my blood, my memory of what she said in her chilly room with her cigarette smoke blowing back inside, away from the energetic, resourceful birds in the tree out there in the mid-afternoon dusk, even if I’ve got it wrong, even if I’ve rewritten it, even if it didn’t happen like that. But then the chairs.