by Nizon, Paul.
Write something or pull it to shore, that is, put it on paper, otherwise you’ll get sick in this freedom, it’s unlimited, I would never have believed that freedom could be a form of captivity, freedom can be like a primeval forest or like the ocean, you can drown in it or disappear and never, never ever find your way out again. How can I make it to shore in this freedom, or how can I enjoy it? I have to parcel it out for myself, plant something in it, cultivate it, I have to change it, at least a little, into an occupation, freedom is a bottomless abyss when it presents itself in this totalitarian form.
How I longed for freedom when I was still in Zürich. It always seemed to me as if I’d been robbed of the day. And it was always evening, it’s already evening, I said to myself. First I had to take the dog out for a walk. I waited impatiently as he was busy sniffing everything, these detours to the left and right, these embarrassingly exact analyses of the ground, with his nose on a spot on the sidewalk that was invisible to me, a scent mark, oh the damned beast, I thought, impatiently shifting from one foot to the other, and sometimes I tugged at the leash, shouted at him, and he looked up at me as if he were looking over the top of a pair of glasses, both reproaching me and asking my indulgence. But he stubbornly braced himself with all fours against my tugging, against the leash, against me, and I thought, what a burden, I was tied to the dog that pulled me all over the place, which is why I inwardly cursed him, and then I felt bad about doing so, he doesn’t have it easy with me, if only I hadn’t saddled myself with a dog, I thought. And people walked briskly across the street, and I stood there and waited for my dog to finally stop his sniffing and snuffling and do his business. I was always torn between scolding, grumbling, the gestures of a lord and master, guilt, and love. Dearest dog, I thought, when he got sick once and the people at the animal hospital feared he wouldn’t pull through, my dearest dog, I thought, and was about to cry, I was already choking back the tears, and I got all emotional thinking about his grumpy behavior when late, very late at night, he had rolled himself up into a ball, his nose deep in the bushy hair of his tail, like a fox. Then he was unapproachable, and if I called him, if I called out to him, to tease him, then, without moving, he just breathed out grumpily, almost growling, to signal his displeasure. And I regretted scolding him and pictured our walks when man and dog were going along the street side by side, in step with each other for once, and he would suddenly stop and just sniff the air, he savors the wind with his snout, his nostrils, he purses his flews and filters the air through his teeth, virtually biting it, getting the news by tasting things, the incredible things of a world I have no sense of. But, then again, when I’m in a hurry, on the way to meet someone, and I think it’s important not to come too late, I brusquely tell him to get a move on and I curse canine behavior, and at that very moment, at the most inopportune time, he comes running up to me with a branch, presenting it to me like a transverse flute held in his teeth, head high, tail up with pride, the entire dog an invitation to play. Now of all times, I think, and I don’t know if I should laugh or cry, you always bring on this diabolical inner conflict in me, and later, as we walk along, he shoves his moist snout against my hand, as if to say, “we two are pals, right,” and I feel indebted to him, he’s a noble dog, say my friends. Flen is a lord, said Karel, who used to share my studio and was always drunk.
In Zürich, I longed for freedom. My day was always fully booked and a waste of time, I wriggled in a net of commitments, by evening I felt chopped to bits, the day was already spent, and I longed for freedom, for the possibility of considering something and pursuing it at my leisure, no matter what it was. Move out, away from everything, I can’t thrive here, move out, transplant myself, I thought, that’s the only solution.
And even before that, when I was in Bern and an assistant in the museum, I had finished my university education, that burden, and then I went into the museum day in, day out, my small office was right next to the entranceway, a door the size of a barn door, which could hardly be moved. My small office had bars over the window, inside it smelled like a grotto, damp, and I sat at my desk working on some inventory cards, what was this stuff to me, and outside the day was going by, a day with speeding streets and strolling people, and I was sitting over this monotonous work. It smelled of corpses in that museum, of mummies, revoltingly sweet, and every morning my dear Herr Oleg came along, Herr Oleg was over seventy, a Russian emigrant, an agronomic engineer, he had served under the tsar and later under the Bolshevists and had traveled through all of Russia on important, very important jobs, but he had finally fled, and now he was working here as an engineering draftsman in the prehistoric department. For health reasons, he started work at nine, not at eight like the rest of us, and he always dropped in to see me before starting his work at the drawing table. He folded his face into a kind smile, and his eyes looked at me with faint amusement, well, young Dr., that’s how he liked to address me, I was twenty-seven, but looked twenty; and then he told me a story, at every opportunity he thought of a story. He took a metal case out of his pocket and put a cigarette in his holder, not a whole cigarette, one third of a cigarette, a stub, he cut his cigarettes in three at home and filled his case with these miniature cigarettes. It wasn’t so much a way of economizing as a means of protecting his health, a ruse, he should have stopped smoking long ago. It was in the capital city of Pschrrssssk, as he prounounced it . . . he began, and then came the story of the beautiful couple, head over heels in love and recently married. They had moved to this city one day and all eyes were on them, a couple like in the fairy tales, I lit a cigarette for myself too and sat lounging in my swivel chair, the couple was the talk of the town, obviously there wasn’t much going on in that provincial capital, everybody knew everybody else, and so people were happy, just because it kept the gossip going, when there was a newcomer. The couple would soon have been forgotten if another character hadn’t turned up, an ugly guy, hair like licked by a cow, said my dear Herr Oleg, and his body bent like Paganini’s, a real son of devil, he said, but this guy then started to get interested in the young married woman, that is, he pursued the woman, which of course could not remain hidden from the people in the small city. Well, he didn’t have any say there, we thought, the young married couple had eyes only for each other, everything was new to them and beautiful, being married, everything. But one day, well, what excitement in the city, the young woman had vanished, and indeed with Paganini, if you can believe it, because, says my dear Herr Oleg, moral is of story: Men love with eyes, but women love with ears: if you put violin in women’s ears, then they become soft as wax for your hands to grasp. The devil’s son had courted her with words of such virtuosity that she couldn’t resist, in any case she had gone missing along with him. Now I’ll be going, said Herr Oleg and withdrew, at the door he made as if to bow and wish you four and twenty pleasures. And I bent over my inventory cards or over the annual report while the sun wandered uncertainly past the barred window.
I was in this dark building, built in the style of the old castles, and I wanted to get out. I looked out through the barred window of my ridiculous office that was squeezed into a side tower. Through the trees, I saw passersby on their afternoon walks, I felt the sky brighten and darken, and everything that was going on outside seemed beguiling to me: people out for walks along the edge of the forest in the nearby zoo, perhaps old people leaning on something or someone and stopping to rest again and again, turning toward each other to finish talking about some small matter with all due emphasis; that looks odd, that method of moving along, old ladies standing still on a leaf-strewn walkway in the afternoon. Then they go on a few steps, stop a while, arm in arm, only to stop again. And as background noise I imagined the dry plop plop of tennis balls being hit, I saw the smooth-trodden red earth of the tennis courts behind chain-link fences. In all this time the old people have only progressed a few small meters on their walk, and now they turn their necks to look behind them, because a large bird has sailed overhead, over the fo
rest path, a crow? And the smell of the forest comes wafting over, and something is rustling in the bushes, small birds, nothing more. I wished I were there, I would overtake the two old ladies with long strides, I would bathe my head in the still afternoon air. The scents of the forest and the earth and the slightly rotten smell of leaves. And in this tiny tower room, where I already had to turn the light on, I bent over the boring annual report again. Soon it would be evening, but closing time wouldn’t seem like a release to me—together with everyone else at the streetcar stop I would declare the day lost, and I hadn’t even noticed what the weather was like. I hadn’t even been able to experience the weather. I tore the day off the calendar.
The two old ladies—or perhaps it’s one old lady, definitely well-to-do and charming, already walking with a stoop, while the other one is younger? the nurse, companion? a younger relative? and when they turn to one another like that under the canopy of leaves on the forest path, it looks from a distance like a conspiracy; or the lady is saying: that’s how it is, my dear, and I also wanted to mention . . .
The old dove man has had his hair cut or trimmed, I saw that when he leaned out the open window to hit at a dove with that ridiculous cane, the cane is bent at the front, a metal rod with a hook, a crook, the two-faced shepherd. He’s wearing gray woolen things, the cigarette dangling from his lips. Now he looks like a convict or like some old man from an asylum. His trimmed gray hair over the gray wool knitted vest . . . He really is an inmate, someone out of a home, a madhouse, or perhaps an overseer, a bad man. Always hitting at doves that, to his mind, are unauthorized, and therefore punishable. Now and then he leans out the window to yell something at someone in the courtyard, something that begins with MERDE, of course. When he’s sitting down, he sits sideways, so he can keep an eye on the television and the doves and me. He obviously has no problem with freedom, with free time. In the mornings, before turning on the television, he reads the newspaper, he seldom has anything in his hands that looks like a book. A disgusting character, I often think I can see an expression of sneering superiority or malicious gloating on his face. I think: this dirty swine, this bastard, this totally superfluous scoundrel, vermin, ORDURE. He pollutes the air with his presence and ruins my mood with his roaring. Has he been pensioned off early? He can’t be all that old yet. An invalid? But I see no sign of any physical disability. What he’s been doing now for years—or for decades?—is not only ridiculous, it’s scandalous. Feeding doves and swiping at them, snapping at his wife, bawling out people in the courtyard. I don’t understand why he gets me so worked up, I still don’t understand it. When he takes his seat by the open window and lets his slimy, spiteful, almost lecherous eyes wander in my direction, that is, recently he’s been looking past me or pretending to look past me: then I always feel as if a snail has crawled over me. I think he wants me to watch him, that he craves my attention.
Recently he disappeared for a few days. It was the first time he’d ever failed to appear. For a while his window was wide open, showing the room as a yawning black hole. His one favorite dove perched on the window ledge for a good while, then I saw it—I didn’t imagine it—hop into the room and disappear from view. Later it was standing at the window again, looking baffled, I thought. Two or three of the other doves also stood for some time on the adjacent window ledge, looking helpless and bewildered outside the window that had in the meantime acquired a billowing curtain. No raucous voice, no nastiness, not a sound. I wondered if the old dove man had died, I was preoccupied with that question, I was totally absorbed by the thought, downright hypnotized by the empty window. Actually, I should have been relieved, but the opposite was the case, I was concerned. If only he hasn’t died and gone away forever, I heard myself think, anything but that. I had grown accustomed to the guy. A life without the dove man—I would feel impoverished. Let him come back with all his damned yelling, I murmured inaudibly, just let him come back, please don’t take him away.
The next evening, the old woman was suddenly back at the window. I waited. She came and went, several times. There was something uncanny about these appearances at the yawning black window. Then she stood there and started yelling at someone—at whom? there was no one to be seen anywhere, far as I could tell—with a shrillness that verged on madness. You filth, she screamed, you shit, son of a bitch, bastard, for years now I’ve been cleaning your ass, so cut the playacting, I see you, she screamed. With whom is she talking, I wondered, horrified, could it be that she was addressing the old dove man, that now that he’s died and she’s alone she’s letting him have it, or rather letting his ghost have it, somewhere down there in the courtyard?
But the next day he was back again, looking downright jovial he assumed his usual sideways position at the window, with that crafty, derisive, supercilious expression, so self-satisfied that I found it almost obscene. And I thought: oh you bastard, if only you’d stayed away forever, I thought that and said that and felt relieved that I’d been spared that ordeal one more time.
You dirty swine, I whispered each time I passed Florian’s apartment on the stairs, I couldn’t wrench myself away from the topic of Florian, it was like a compulsion.
I lived in a room in the Zürich Altstadt, the old part of the city dating back to medieval times. The room could have been called a studio, one of its walls had four windows that overlooked the Altstadt roofs, and if I stood at the window, I could glimpse a bit of the river between the roofs and the buildings. But I seldom stood at the window, I sat with my back to this wall of windows, at an enormous table, an ironing table from the past century, it was a veritable expanse of a table, its surface polished bright by all the ironing, but now strewn with papers and obscured by them, it was a time when I was doing a lot of work. In contrast to the Romantic view, I felt anything but romantic, and in no mood to be charmed by the Altstadt, I paid no attention to my surroundings, I was in a race against time with my writing, a race against the hours, I often wrote through half the night. That’s why I sat with my back to the windows, I ignored them, I wanted to write myself free, to write myself out of there and into the open, I was obsessed, enraged, tugging at my chains.
This Florian Bündner lived below me. He too had a large table, a rustic table with bulbous struts, a dark-stained Renaissance table. The entire surface of this piece of furniture was laden with piles of newspapers, books, documents, and junk mail, the books and papers and newspapers were stacked up into tall, swaying towers. If he had invited someone over, which was all too frequently the case, then he had to transplant one or two towers onto another table, but since the second table, which was also rustic, if somewhat smaller, already held several towers of files, the transplantation was a tricky undertaking. Florian was something like a teacher. Actually, he was a runaway student, one day he had broken off his study of German language and literature as taught by Professor Emil Staiger, I don’t know what semester he was in or the cause of his departure, from that point on he seemed to occupy himself entirely with private projects, and in order to finance himself and these projects, he taught a few German classes as an assistant teacher at a commercial school that could only be interested in this subject and in literature, if at all, insofar as the prospective merchants needed to be able to write a business letter that was grammatically correct, with the periods and commas in the right places. As for literature, those courses were offered at best for the purposes of providing a bit of conversational trivia. Yes, it was at this school that my fellow tenant taught, he performed his duties in an extravagant, persuasive, and, as people said, revolutionary style that was captivating and inflammatory and flew in the face of his contract, which is why the students seemed to love this teacher, he stood out from the other instructors by virtue of his effusive independence and his eloquence.
The German classes were Florian’s only job, and they provided him with an income that, although modest, was obviously adequate. He was not at all interested in doing any more work, because he wanted to keep himself inwar
dly free, available, after all, not for nothing had he distanced himself from the treadmill of the university.
He got home from the school late in the morning, but since his room was so crammed full with reading material, he couldn’t think of staying there or of beginning to do anything, so he left right away again and went to a café, where he entered with a newspaper, journal, or paperback under his arm and gave the impression of being absorbed in the printed matter. But his absorption didn’t last long. If he saw someone he knew, he couldn’t help inviting that person to his table. He gave the impression of being a jovial intellectual, due to the books and papers he always carried around with him and always postponed reading to a later date, since his innate sociability interfered with his reading and prevented him above all from reading anything to the end, which is why he loaded his books, newspapers, treatises or illustrated catalogues onto those tall, swaying towers.