by Suah Bae
Do you know, Werner? Jörg taught me many things over the last three years; the last of them, and the most oppressive, is precisely this: death. At the last, without any preparation whatsoever he gave me this book, without explanation or footnote or critical commentary, written in an indecipherable language, and departed. Now I am isolated and powerless, with only the book for company. When we first met he was already wearing flesh pallid with age, and for the three years I knew him he had been very close to the end of life, and all I knew was his end. But he refused to compromise with infirmity or death, he refused more firmly than anyone else in this world, and until its final moment the life he lived was greater than any other, he was someone who had wanted even more life for the sake of more life. His mind had never been exhausted for even a single moment, and his eyes would light up in front of literature. As you say, I will continue to write. If there is religion or a soul for us then it is clearly nothing other than literature, and all I can do for him now is write, but although I’m well aware that this was what he wanted above all, writing can no longer be the object of supreme happiness for me. Because from now on I am simply powerless, I cannot but write; that’s the way it will be for me, now. A person passes, and so if we absolutely cannot accompany them to Hades, what can all a human being’s mental actions be, other than vainly flirting with life, trying to win its attention?
Diary entry from the banks of the Spree River in Berlin, one day in September, 2008. We were in the middle of a long walk by the river. We passed the Berliner Ensemble at the Bode Museum and then continued walking aimlessly, our legs eventually carrying us up to the area around Bellevue railway station. It was evening, and the setting sun, though slightly obscured by clouds, was suspended above the autumn trees, which were dyed with a brilliant golden light. With the shadows of a certain hour, both a chance occurrence and a one-time-only thing. Looking at the photographs from that time, it’s clear that I had been in the center of something. The center of what, exactly—that can’t be expressed in a single word. But clearly the center of some particular world, made up of simple language we had already long possessed, and of simple light, of color, water, voices, footsteps, and hints of evening; some kind of opposite shore of the mind, shining fixedly, staring fixedly at all those things like their shadow or soul, water opposite water, though we can arrive at that place through a singular gesture and expression, a world that cannot be entered arbitrarily, a country of unspecific time that cannot but be called “that certain moment.” Dividing our own place and time from nature and the physical world. Dividing our selves from the realism known as the present. That was something I dared to do of my own volition. I was a traveler. I was a poor uneconomical traveler who had come to that place for the sake of writing a single sentence. In that way I was an extremely self-willed traveler; still more so since my travels were not only geographical. Walk, cry, and write, I said to myself. While we ate hot cakes and coffee at a literature house cafe that afternoon, we talked about Erpenbeck’s new work, Heimsuchung, which had come out that year. And after that, continuing the day’s conversation, you had sent me an email expressing why, as a critic, you couldn’t personally like the writer Martin Walser, or going further, even the person Martin Walser. This was a point of some heated debate between us, specifically relating to Martin’s Angstblüte, a work we both knew well, but whose appraisal we had failed to come to an agreement over. Though you played the extremely pre-determined role of the perfect, “invisible” assistant, up until the time when I was able to complete my translation of that book. You set up my initial meeting with Walser, and even accompanied me in both of my two trips to meet him. At that time I recorded our conversation, along with the essay you improvised and recited in the train. The train rattles along through the landscape of Germany’s southern states, and two people have their faces buried in their two arms, and two people bury their two existences in the eternally parallel tracks and in time, and station after station passed through, the monotonous fields that languidly appear and disappear, passed right through just as you realize that you are approaching them; within wind and river water that is neither a torrent nor an earthquake, neither happiness nor unhappiness, but merely adapts peacefully to the cycle of circumstances, itself soon wind and river water, but certain things in literature are different, they transcend environment and temperament, contort a face with pain, to the point that attempting to express them in words is completely meaningless, and to that extent literature was a common interest between us, of pain that had seized us both. With you, I can broach literature as a topic of conversation without embarrassment or hesitation. In that way, over the last three years we have been together with literature in various places, in various places and at the same time, we have crossed continents and have all those moments, of all kinds of places at the same time, compressed into one. Oh, but once again that particular world turns back to face the banks of the Spree, to face that moment that had suddenly flowed past through the very center of something. Because that was when, having been staring fixedly at the bridge opposite during our stroll in the Tiergarten woods, you seized my arm and blurted out “Take a good look at that road. I think I can see my mother pushing a stroller. Those are very same the woods where she would often set out for a walk with me, back in 1938 when we lived in Berlin, before the war.” Until then, I had never once known you to adopt the role of surrealist. “In that case we should wait here,” I said fervently, putting my whole heart into the words without even knowing why, as a kind of reflex. “Until your mother takes you for a walk, that is. I would so like to see what you looked like as a young child, and how she looked back then.” Recoiling instantly, your expression startled, you gestured in agitation and reproved me, what kind of crazy idea is that? As though you were angry at yourself for having impulsively blurted out your sorrow. You made as if to dash away over the bridge, as if fleeing from something. At the time I was lost in a dream; since your eyes, which had been seeing something else, had already reddened . . .
Never have I experienced having to say a final goodbye to someone very close to me, someone corresponding to what is called, according to the general expression, one’s own “flesh and blood.” No, I had come to reject the premonition that there would ever be such flesh and blood for me. I was unable to grasp the essence of that thing called loss, which is both the suffering of the soul and of the flesh. Instead I said to myself: Walk, cry, and write. Since that is all I am able do in this world. Walk, cry, and write. And so, I will remain nothing more than an intermittent and uneconomical traveler, until the day I die. I was frightened. The conviction of those words: “I know.” (And after it was all over, my friend who lives in Bonn sent me an email that began with exactly those words: I know what it must be like for you right now.) Now and then, without any deliberate intention, just on an impulse, I display a stubborn streak, which was what happened that day. “Wait, your mother is certain to appear, and your child-self too. I know they will. We’ll be able to watch them from here. Believe me. You’re a scholar of realism, but I’m a writer, one who has always been thinking up novels where this kind of thing happens, so this time I’m right.” But as if struck by an invisible arrow or lightning bolt; as if that day in 1938 was truly going to pierce the wall of time and long sleep to reappear in front of your eyes; as if, though the scene was not yet visible, you could feel your mother pushing you in the stroller, walking slowly from that distant place, that day seventy years ago, toward today; as though you were suddenly struck by a frightening possibility, perhaps that no, they might actually never appear; or else as though you were furious with yourself; or else like a sorrowful penitent, looking back on their life with the agonized regret of one who knows that what they long to undo is utterly irrevocable, and with a particularly violent gesture, your lips set in a stern line as you struggled to control your emotions, you coldly rebuffed my earnest desire to wait for you and your mother, who might be going to show themselves to us, turning your back on me, and fin
ally marched quickly away from that place, your gait agitated, and put an end to it. You walked away facing squarely in the direction of life. Without hesitation you turned your face away from the river and woods opposite us, away from that cave of time that had abruptly revealed itself to us. My heart races and the river shudders. The peaceful scenery, the calm surface turns into a burning abyss. From the brink of an enormous pitch-black hole you turn your back on me, on yourself, retreating rapidly into the distance. I follow after you, but there is no way for me to follow to your Hades.
Did you know, Werner said to me in a choked voice, his hand clutching mine, according to certain traditional beliefs passed down in Central Europe, like in Germany, when someone comes across themselves as a child, particularly as a newborn baby, it means they don’t have long left to live.
The dream isn’t over. A person is leaving. The body of the river wracked with slow sobs, as if all dead things are suspended in its waters. A person is leaving; I cannot see them. I can only feel that they are passing by this place. The air hazy like a suspended veil, verdant light around the edges of the woods. I sit by the river and look down into the water. A person is leaving. On their way, they pass by the village. The houses have their mouths closed, dumb; children stand in front of the doors. They look on wordlessly as the person approaches. And stare fixedly at his retreating figure.
This thing on page 65 of Franz Kafka’s Dream is both Kafka’s dream and mine. There were two reiterated heterogeneous dreams. They pile up bodies and appear. The wind often blows and if it blows their bodies over, they look out of the window immersed in yearning. We stood in front of Werner Fritsch’s camera by the Wondreb River. Werner told me later that I was playing the part of one of three goddesses. And you appeared as light, dressed as the great poet Dante, walking the dark wooded paths in hooded medieval clothes. I try to see you through Werner’s camera. In the final moment, light poured down over your face, bleaching it brighter than the light itself until it disappeared in the glare. Within two dreams, a person is leaving. I stare into it. But I cannot see it. Only feel that it is passing by this place.
Mouson
That night, though the taxi I shared with the model-plane collector took us along the road that ran above the river, the oil-black water was concealed by the metal guardrail and ugly flower beds. Before that, we had passed by the richer neighborhood, rows of villas with their own gardens, the central station with its lights off and shops with their doors closed, hotels and travel lodges clustered around the station, and the district of tall buildings whose glass bodies flickered in the dark; as we passed, it occurred to me that I saw people wearing white closed-top shoes running lightly along the road, their feet seeming to lift up a full palm’s breadth off the ground, and each time we clattered down one of the narrow roads paved with bumpy stones, which lay to the rear of the buildings, the small-framed, stout-shouldered taxi driver spat out a mumbled, incomprehensible criticism. I thrust my head forward and strained to listen, hoping to understand what he was saying, but all I could ever make out was a strange sound like the wind whisking by, and so we fell into an auditory hallucination, imagining that a broken radio was speaking those words in his place; as predicted, the reflection in the window was that of a foreigner, with a trim moustache and hair on the backs of his hands, his skin black—when I first got into the taxi the phrase “black as coal” had sprung into my mind; his black face reminded me of the lonely African who, several years ago when I’d spent a day at the zoo in one of the cities I’d wandered to, had come up to me with his enormous old-fashioned Russian camera and asked if I would take a photo of him, at which I had hastily pressed the shutter; strangely, nothing happened, and I had to point the camera several times at the bulky African, who sat alone perseveringly in front of the thick-mesh cage the ring-tailed lemurs were shut up in. It was the middle of the day and the sunlight was dazzlingly bright, and all I could see through the lens, bafflingly enough, was the blackly shadowed mesh of the cage and a white flash of light exaggerated beyond all proportion, and when I brought my eye to the camera again, flustered as both the ring-tailed lemurs inside the cage and the African disappeared without a trace each time, it slowly became clear that they all formed a part of that dark pattern I had mistaken for a shadow. The memory of the African who had suddenly become something non-shadow every time his eyes met mine from the shadows. But the moment after the glittering headlights from an oncoming car shone full on the driver’s face, the moment those beams slid off at a diagonal, that face became the same shade as a milky cappuccino, then later, once the modelplane collector had ceased to conceal his anger, gradually changed to a lifeless gray, and when the driver eventually turned to look back at us, I saw a fly crawling over the face of a Russian, hardened like lead-colored candle drippings, or we were sitting in the rear seat of a taxi whose driver was in fact a Russian.
The driver’s language was made up of such a clump of vowels that it was difficult to believe, and those clumps were so huge that they felt heavy, like a gust of wind that cannot lift anything up, and the look in his eyes, so intense that it was impossible to look directly at them, was enough to make any antagonist think twice. On our way to the point which we were then at, the driver had giggled now and then for no apparent reason, and had rudely demanded to know what we did; his questions were almost incomprehensible, and because it was clear, given his inability to understand our word “literature,” that he could not have understood the address we had given him at the start, we became extremely anxious. Apparently picking up on this anxiety, the driver nodded at us fervently in the mirror, though rather than serving to reassure, this action seemed to express that we were not the only ones who were worried, that the driver himself felt exactly the same.
As soon as I had gotten into the taxi, the model-plane collector explained where we were headed. It was a reading by a writer friend of his; the reading would be held at Mouson Tower, by coincidence the writer’s name was also “Mouson,” the title of his latest book was Performers, and was, the model-plane collector claimed, a very interesting work, in which the writer had collected, in the style of an encyclopedia, likenesses of all the performers with whom he was personally acquainted. The model-plane collector said that he was curious as to whether there was among these likenesses the Japanese performer who, as the founder of Aum Shinrikyo, had instigated the poison-gas terror attack on the Tokyo subway, but though he did not at this point know the answer, having not yet had a chance to take a look at the book, we would find out soon enough. Of the famous performers who appeared in the book, there was Kaspar Hauser and the Pope, the Dalai Lama and Peter Handke, Prince Charles, and Osama bin Laden of course, the model-plane collector continued. Just so you know, the model-plane collector went on, the writer goes about sporting bizarrely bright-red socks and wears his curly hair long and disheveled, and is famous for his fluttering gestures and manner of speaking as well as his threadbare attire; there’s even a rumor that he eats hot noodles with his fingers, though for your information, Mouson was a successful entrepreneur. Aside from the writer Mouson whose reading we are going to, there was also the original proprietor of the “Mouson” where the reading is being held, the model-plane collector added. He is the descendent of a family who moved to Germany to escape the French oppression of the Huguenots; he gained experience working as a young soap manufacturer wandering between various cities toward the end of the eighteenth century, and on coming to this city he secured work, later took over the business in which he himself had been employed, and after establishing himself thus his business enjoyed a long period of prosperity, eventually enabling him to found a soap and cosmetics factory on the site of the current Mouson Tower. The company’s most representative product is its “Creme Mouson Intensive Moisture,” which was introduced directly after the First World War; the Mouson company’s cosmetics factory later relocated to an area further out from the center, and a head office was built at the original factory site, including a tower thirty
meters high. That tower is the tallest building in this city. Then, in 1972, after an extremely complicated process, the company was sold off and the office was torn down, with only the tower left standing. After that, it got a second life as a venue for various kinds of independent arts events, and people began to call it Mouson Tower, borrowing the name from the original founder, and Mouson Tower is an entity known to almost everyone in this city, and as it’s an especially recognizable name for taxi drivers, like the White House or the Forbidden City, if you get into a taxi and say only that, Mouson Tower, every driver will glance back over his shoulder saying you’ll never catch me reading a book, just the TV guide, I never set foot in the theater, never go to the ballet or book readings, but I still know what that name means, there’s no way I couldn’t, being a taxi driver in this city! The model-plane collector finished off this speech with an insistent gesture.
Today we had arranged to meet in front of the museum. The model-plane collector was already in something of a state when his taxi pulled up, asking if I knew the way to Mouson Tower as I was still settling myself in next to him. He’d had an errand to take care of in a different part of the city, around an hour away, and had caught the taxi from there; not only was the driver ignorant of geography in general, but the name Mouson meant absolutely nothing to him—he claimed to have never even heard the phrase “Mouson Tower” and, since he had no clue as to where a tower by such a name might be, had asked for the precise address, but the address the collector had provided didn’t show up on the car’s GPS, leading him to doubt whether it was accurate, but not only did the model-plane collector participate in a literary event at Mouson Tower every year without fail, he naturally took a taxi there every time, and had never yet misremembered the address, meaning there was no reason whatsoever that he might be misremembering now, and given that he was going to a reading by a famous writer, at an arts venue named after an even more famous soap-cosmetics manufacturer, there would have been no need to inform him of the address if the driver had not been a foreigner, now would there, and it’s already been an hour since you said you would take us there, he emphasized. Look, if you can’t find the street, can’t you just ask the Center? Isn’t the Center there to deal with these things? Can you understand what I’m saying? the model-plane collector said to the driver, earnestly yet coldly, courteously yet without concealing a chill note of criticism. The driver mumbled something, again with his mouth closed; to me, it sounded like someone saying that they’d already asked the Center a little while ago, but had been told that the address was not an entrance, only using a jumble of imprecise words that lacked the ability to communicate that meaning fully. But the model-plane collector cut the driver off before he had finished what he was saying, exclaiming, I know the road Mouson Tower is on, I’ve known about that tower since before you were even born, and I’m telling you there’s no way in heaven or hell that it’s this road here, Mr. Driver!