Gootbye! Helga calls out with her Berlin accent and a satisfied smile, Helga trotting into the tunnel and airport chambers and halls and electric-eye exits to the exultant world of a thousand free washrooms without gatekeepers or even doors. Just walk right in!
Not everyone saw Helga hoist her skirt and hunker down to pee by the stewards’ galley; most passengers had filed off the plane. How many stunned citizens actually saw Helga pee? Passengers, flight crew — perhaps ten of us total, a chosen few spreading into city and suburb, telling our story downtown over drinks or later at home, tearing into Loblaws jerk chicken at the kitchen nook. “Hey kids, guess what Daddy saw today?!”
This anecdote of aeromarine conflict will be replicated in taxis with broken shocks and monster homes dizzy with Christmas lights, in sundry hotels and solemn Maple Leaf Lounges, the German prof’s succinct revenge play, voicemail from those in the sardine tin, her direct and fluid art.
Most people will bluster of rebellion and revenge, but Professor Helga quietly envisioned an option and followed through. She was not loud. Her act could be an art installation at the Tate in London or that Berlin gallery in Kochstrasse — what a place, what a gallery! First a Nazi bomb shelter, then a dungeon of a prison, then a warehouse storing bananas, then an S&M fetish club, and now an underground art gallery; could such an odd yet strangely logical metamorphosis take place in any metropolis but Berlin?
In sun-drenched Pompeii women wash windows and sweep steps while men stand trading insults in musical rhythms, fundamentally superior to any brand of insult in North America. While playing hockey, a forward might utter, Fuck you, and on defence I might reply, No, fuck you. We lack imagination, are afraid of words.
Here one man calls out, “I have more lead in my clock than you, Mister Fish Eggs.”
“You?” laughs the other. “You are nothing but an old saliva-spitter with a chest full of coughs and testicles that go down to your knees.”
“You were raised on whore’s milk and you wear your donkey idiocy like a mantle.”
“Stop it, you old fools,” the women mutter as they clean windows and steps.
The men all have good hair, big hair, no matter the age. Why is that? The locals are very friendly to me, though I still worry someone one night might knife me, it’s always morose stabbing season in jittery Campania.
Ciao! Buongiorno, signore. Everyone knows everyone. Skipping the sweaty train, I walk to the ruins, pack riding my sweaty back, excavations open at my feet, dead conversations with that woman from East Germany on a loop in my head.
In Pompeii’s roofless ruins I think of Dresden’s firestorm palaces and Berlin flattened to the cellars by the Red Army and my mother and father hiding from Berlin’s bombers in formation above them in London’s Blitz; one city’s love letter to another, so many fine cities unroofed and what is gained but smoke and enmity. As they say in Italy of their gangsters, You begin as flesh, but end in concrete.
My mother and father hid in the London Underground as skinny German bombs teetered toward their heads and now in tunnel shadow I descend underground into the guts of the gladiators’ amphitheatre, the Spectacula, this spectacular place where they died, where grass has taken many sections, as if the ledges are graveyards for those cuckolded by death. Isn’t it really wild that we are all basically skeletons walking about with wallets and PINs? Skeletons stare into phones and hope their plan covers calling the dead on an 800-number chat-line or a woman cycling near Dresden.
Pompeii’s ancient oval theatre seems intimate, but twenty thousand spectators used to jam inside to watch beast and human dance to the death on the sand. Rome forbade gladiatorial games for ten long years after a murderous riot in the taverns and food stands that once surrounded the Spectacula, a brawl where rival fans moved in stages from jeers and taunts to blows and stones to killing with swords. The locals won the day, but the emperor in Rome took away the games after the murderous brawl. The emperor’s dictum: you could be killed on the sand inside the stadium, but you were not allowed to be killed on the sand outside the stadium.
Now the next town’s blood has vanished. I’m impressed how much the earth takes in like sawdust on a butcher’s floor and still stays on axis and orbit. Behind a wooden bench I see a crinkled piece of paper and pick it up, unfold a neatly typed list.
Der Polizist = Policeman
Die Weinachtsfeier = Christmas party
Die Zuendkapsel = Detonator caps
Der Sprengstoff = Explosives
What the hell can this strange list mean? A Baader-Meinhof bombing plot? A Christmas party in June? Today everything seems German, a bratwurst juggernaut — Germans taking over the hotel, taking over Europe and the EU, Germans taking over the art world and the breweries, Germans taking over my head. Is this piece of paper a conspiracy, or simply a scrap left of an innocent language lesson?
And really, what isn’t a conspiracy or a lesson? Italian anarchists conspire, men and women conspire against each other, the cabbies and waiters conspire, Madonna conspires to keep her career alive, our genes and mutations conspire inside while in Canada my obsessive neighbour with her measuring tape and trowel digs up a one-inch strip of my driveway while I am out of the country.
And what gentle genetic conspiracies tick away inside our own bodies as we laugh and drink wine and buy tickets online and hop train to train to Sienna and Zagreb. My older brother needs a marrow transplant, and I am tested, but I am not a match. What minor rebellions are brewing inside us, what factions warring inside our bodies and coming to a decision about us like disapproving parents as we break Starbucks windows and motor nights of Molotov cocktails outside the embassy.
I see my couple from Berlin strolling the vast ruins and see wild dogs of Pompeii looking dusty and thirsty. We’d kill for a cold beer, some hop or wheat, a pint of Old Bastard from the underskinker, but no trace is left of the ancient taverns that once stood right here. The dry earth around the forum is vacant as Valium and the jagged volcano with its crown of flames looms over our burnt tender heads.
“Typical of Italy, no services, no washrooms anywhere,” the man grumbles to me.
“So damn hot,” the woman says, “and nothing cool to drink.”
To drink we must hike back to the modern side of town. Don’t mention the war! I take a stab at a John F. Kennedy imitation: Ich bin ein Berliner, but I don’t think they understand my attempt in their language. We can be heroes, I half say half sing, à la David Bowie.
Looking puzzled, the couple moves away from me. Gootbye, they say firmly.
We’ll meet again, I call to the Germans. Ciao!
Gootbye. I still think of the woman from East Germany. Arab warriors sailed to Italy and in tiny ships they found their stormy way to the west of Ireland to take away whole villages of trembling slaves; where are those villagers now? Their DNA moving through Algeria and Libya. In my Irish B & B she whispered that she had butterflies in her stomach, and I was nervous too. Did I like the idea that she grew up on the far side of the Iron Curtain and inhaled the Russian language and now with me in Ireland’s stony mist? There are possibilities and there are walls. Was her farm near Dresden flooded in those last rains? Her land flooded and Pompeii burnt by lava. I wish I’d stayed in touch.
Do you ever have those affecting moments where you crave a service or magic mirror to tell you exactly what someone is doing at this exact second, whether she is sleeping or working a shift in the X-ray lab or walking around the tiny farm with her brother and their doomed rabbits? Gootbye.
Mondo cane, so many feral dogs in Pompeii. A dog trots up, pauses to pee in the sand outside the Teatro, and I am reminded of Professor Helga peeing at the plane’s exit door, her gushing message from the peons stuffed into steerage. Gootbye! Helga called out with her German accent and trim satisfied smile like when you return a rental car with no dents.
The astounding thing was the shock and paralysis on the plane: not a single person made a move to stop the professor walking up the tunnel
, to detain her. I know because I saw her soon after, head held high as she waited for her luggage at the carousel. She did have the element of surprise on her side. Had it been a male — a penis drawn out to douse the floor — would there follow a different reaction? A mad chase into the airport and the police asked to supply a few tasers as party favours?
Carousel: what a wonderful word for such a mundane location!
The Italian men continue their ribald exchange, stumbling around the Pompeii sidewalk as I try to pass.
“The widow prefers me.”
“You? You are a toothless disgusting old traitor with eyes watering.”
“And you are a mucus-stub covered with ringworm and gout!”
“Why don’t you go take a shit on some stinging nettles!”
I must tell Natasha. No, I’m not talking to her. I will tell Eve when I get back to Rome.
In the modest Pompeii hotel the unhappy German sighs loudly and pays for his room, pays for his wine and meals and thick marmalade and peel.
“I could buy a flat in Berlin for this!”
“And we’ve had better Italian food back home in Flughafenstrasse.”
“Now we have to get back on board that stinking train. Can’t they clean the trains here?”
Soon the two come back, a wildcat strike, no trains today, each train soppresso, soppresso!
“What a place!”
The two Berliners are constantly offended by Italy (though they like Turks even less than Italians, and now the Irish and Spanish are showing up in Germany looking for work, everyone with their hand out to Angela). The Berliners want to correct Italy, to give Italy a makeover, an assignment, they want Italy to be Germany.
Didn’t the Germans and Franks sack Rome several times? Perhaps this disdain, this desire to correct someone, is what caused such invasions. In schoolyards and on continents conflicts are birthed by irritants tinier than fruit flies.
And that reactionary German is Pope for a while, an old man eating knackwurst and wearing the white silk cuffs, fur-trimmed mozzetta and his red shoes, the shoes’ red colour representing the blood of Jesus and the persecuted martyrs, though one might add to this symbology the blood of those the church persecuted and tortured and abused. Pope Rat retires, he’s gone, gootbye! A white helicopter lifts his raccoon-eyed bulk on high and, as I squint, all our sins and souls are laid bare as cobbles in sunlight (so much more light in Italy than Berlin).
I wonder if I’ll ever fly to Berlin or Dresden to see the lovely East German woman with hair tinted red like the actress. My life is excellent, but at times I dream of just slipping away from anything with weight and bills, steal back to misty Dingle and cycling with the woman from East Germany. A ghost can emanate more power and light than the real, a ghost does not cry into her hummus or run to the lawyer. The years slip like bent gears, like bent beggars; does she remember me the way I remember her? Memory seems random, the lobes of my brain seem to rule me, as if I am the sighing servant. Should it not be the other way around, shouldn’t I rule my own brain? Yet it doesn’t happen.
I must study brains more when I have time. And Mediterranean languages, their rollicking music unfolding on the tongue. And opera, maybe Wagner. And rock operas, they are always so worthwhile. I don’t think I’m highbrow or lowbrow — so am I middlebrow? I prefer to think I am sideways-brow or upside-down-cake-brow.
My brain and eye hurt from the sun and sparkling sea and malicious Fiats doing their turbocharged take on chariot races. I love Italy mightily, such a ribald riotous kingdom, but after weeks swimming in noise I also need solace, need a private Arabia, my own private Tibet. Here the ghosts and wonders of the Roman Empire are crowded out by adolescent drug dealers on burping scooters.
But I wonder: when I exit Italy’s ancient odours, will my house in Canada seem far too quiet, a spooky silence, will I miss the voices shouting in the streets (Zotico! Cafone rozzo!) and will I miss the horns beeping and the dinosaur roar of the Naples garbage truck and trash bins and waterfalls of crashing glass that wake the block at three a.m.?
The man from Berlin insists that no sane person in Germany would dare make all this noise, would dare honk their horn with such ardour as the Italians.
“It is just not done in Germany; in fact, you can be charged by the police for such transgressions. No one uses their horn, it is not civil, and if you give the finger in Germany, the other driver can report you and you will be escorted by the police and forced to apologize to the offended party.”
In Italy’s pleasing catastrophe they will not report you for being unruly, in Italy ’roid rage is quite normal and one does not have to apologize to anyone.
Outside the hotel, under the latest model of the warlike sun, shade starts to seem life or death, a mortal consideration. I am desperately in love with soothing shade, the clear delineation of a separate more pleasing world inside the existing world, like seeing someone else, an offer of reprieve. My skull is a brick oven and like a heap of bricks my big stupid head keeps radiating heat long after the sun is tucked away. To confirm the shade’s cool embrace I creep against medieval walls and veer hither and thither to keep my head under the shade of cypress and umbrella pine, not sure where I walk or when to leave or where I will go next, but admiring wild lemon trees, so bitter but beautiful. I’m attracted to the glittering Bay of Naples, the way the buildings and citizens hug the shore and hug each other in a kind of doubt and hope and love and chaos.
A terrone walks among butterflies, strolls rows of orchard trees growing under the shade and shelter of boughs and black nylon hung like wartime camouflage netting to hide a gun emplacement, to hide my dead uncle’s position. The worker walks a subdued interior world and with a long-handled scythe he reaches high and expertly lops down a lemon for his lunch or to squeeze zest and sunlight into a cool drink. He seems so relaxed in the dim hallways of this treed sub-world, this arena of ripeness, lemons and oranges glowing everywhere. Could my Irish mother make marmalade from his Italian fruit?
Lemon groves left to us in sunny southern Italy by long-dead Arab overlords from another time, hours ago, minutes ago — vanished like parents, like Goth armies, like wars, here and gone, but they left their permanent mark, left startling fruit floating high in branches as evidence, our train a steampunk monster moving its windows uncertainly past endless walls and groves of brains glowing with the heady hues of a language that once ruled us.
Hallway Snowstorm
When old words die out on the tongue,
new melodies break forth from the heart;
and where the old tracks are lost, new
country is revealed with its wonders.
— Rabindranath Tagore
My wife sends a friendly note from Canada: everyone is doing well and the Italian heat wave is in the news back home. In the streets of Pompeii I notice the locals’ shirts are dark with sweat; so they also feel it, they are not inured to the heat? I am running like margarine. In this oven that is southern Italy, I find myself wondering, does Canada still exist? Why does the heat here not spread and melt the whole world?
Canada’s gift for snowy fields and frozen rivers seems utterly impossible, yet only weeks ago I lived through a brute storm where snow fell and fell and blinding winds bent corners and heaped huge drifts against my old house and at night some furious kingdom of darkness descended on us.
My wish is to hunker down, bunker up, but our old-timer team has a hockey game that night, a game miles away in a country arena. Do we dare drive a night like this? Will any other players make it? The insane machinery you’d need to manufacture this wind and snow. The few vehicles visible are spaced out in hesitant half-speed convoys, roads terrible and blurry and the ditch beckons.
Coach phones with the word: the game is on and he will be in my driveway at the usual time. We may be the only old-timer team with a coach.
In the storm we drive back roads and loopy hills and hollows where sawmills once buzzed beside rivers and now the mills are fallen do
wn and the train tracks ripped up and the covered bridge burnt by teens with tires and gasoline. Coach is a good driver and we make it to the old sheet-metal arena that smells of chicken fries and our goalie rubbing on Tiger Balm and, a bonus, we win the game and, another bonus, Darcy invites us afterward to his riverside garage full of canoes and skidoos, to his iron stove and beer fridge and lobster and duck sausage and goose and moose and deer sausage sizzling.
Darcy played pro for Montreal and Ottawa and in Seattle and PEI, he played in Croatia and has some wild stories and salacious gossip about other NHL players and coaches and their wives, including the famous Habs star who was a cross-dresser, he saw him in full makeup and dress at a Montreal strip club. Darcy fought many nights, fought Donald Brashear, Wes Walz, Everett Sanipass, Rudy Poeschek, Milan Dragicevic, and Jim McKenzie, and he beat the snot out of a future Maple Leafs star known far and wide as an irritating rat.
In one town Darcy spent hours sewing an iron rod into his hockey glove to get revenge on a guy who suckered him from behind. The unseen blow knocked out Darcy and gave him a concussion. But Darcy couldn’t go through with his revenge; all those hours spent sewing and then he tore out the iron rod.
Darcy was a fighter, an enforcer, so he can say what he wants and we listen. We eat and drink after the game and he says quietly, “Think about it — people who don’t play will never know how great this feels.”
He played pro, but we joke that we are bringing him down to our level of play. His friend Chad, a skilled player who played against Sid the Kid, says, “Hard to soar like an eagle if you’re playing with turkeys.”
Knife Party at the Hotel Europa Page 9