“Now move according to your impulses,” Sonja told them.
The dust components huddled together in a group while Emotion with arms crossed over her chest and an unfocused gaze made loops and circles around them.
“Where do you belong?” Sonja asked her.
“I belong to dust but not to any of its individual parts here.”
“Something is missing,” Dead Insects suggested.
“Yeah,” said Dandruff, “the most important thing is missing.”
“Ahaaa,” said Sonja, looking now at the circle of people sitting and watching the performance. She asked Winnibald (bodywork):
“Could you be the most important thing that’s missing?”
“Of course,” Winnibald said.
Winnibald had hardly stepped onto the stage when the other stand-ins turned to him and smiled; Emotion beamed and moved next to him.
“Are you material or immaterial?” the assembly leader asked him.
“Immaterial.”
“From the Schools of Light or the Schools of Darkness?”
“Schools of Light.”
“Is your function to learn or to teach?”
“More to act as a sort of…remainder.” Winni rumpled his forehead. “I am that which remains when you have understood. Something exhausted, empty, but free.” He closed his eyes. “Cinders. No, finer. Ash. Fly ash. Finer than air. When someone has understood something, something disperses. One part floats away upward. I am the part that sinks back. To the Earth. But invisible. The invisible remaining waste.”
“I’m ashamed and grieving,” said Emotion with tears suddenly rolling down her cheeks.
“For what?”
“For the many erring paths. The tears. The sorrow. The violence. The blood.”
“What do you mean by that?” Sonja asked.
“For a few it’s passed,” sobbed Emotion, “but so many are still stuck in it. It’s so…shameful.”
All the other stand-ins were crying now too.
Sonja stared at Emotion, turning after a long pause to her seated colleagues: “I can’t make sense of this anymore. Can someone help me out?”
The circle too was full of confused looks. Gerlinde spoke up:
“It appears that there is an additional, hitherto unknown component of dust,” she said haltingly, “a sort of spiritual cinder. Or ash. Invisible, but with a heavy emotional weight. It appears that this emotional weight is shame.”
She cleared her throat, stared into space for a moment, and then said so softly that only those next to her could hear: “It seems that dust is ashamed of people. For what they do. How they do it.”
With regard to her Formica epiphany, Frau H. did something at once very smart and very dumb: She reached for her camera, loaded it with 3200 ASA black and white film, and set about taking pictures of the dust tableau from all sides: with macro, normal, and wide-angle lenses and from varying distances.
This was very smart because she managed thus to break her epiphany into smaller and smaller pieces and so provide herself with material that would last the next few years of her life and career.
This was very dumb because she would spend these next few years struggling desperately to conjure back the epiphany’s entire and monstrous wholeness, profundity, and value.
This was very smart because she understood in the emotional rush of the first sighting that any attempt to represent the wholeness of her experience would only be destined for failure.
This was again very smart because Frau H. had for a long time chosen ceaseless action and restlessness over stillness and contemplation, which to her meant failure. Movement, decisiveness were what fueled her as an artist—epiphany or no epiphany.
This was very dumb because Frau H. had condemned herself to the position of photographic middleman: someone who might taste the thing itself but never be fully satisfied, never truly receive the dust gift she’d worked so hard to be worthy of—with every muscle fiber, with every neuron—in the years leading up to this day.
This was again very dumb because Frau H. failed to perceive the true meaning of the epiphany that had come unto her, which was not, as Frau H. thought, that she had been chosen to bring the beauty of dust to the world, but rather that she, Frau H., was just as whole, as profound, and as valuable, as the epiphany itself.
Brandstetter was convinced that you only really see what other people are like when they’re having a crisis. How a person behaves at the bottom of the barrel—whether that person gets drunk, overeats, starves himself, yells, goes quiet, starts fights, runs away—shows you the sort of stuff that person is made of. Klubka, well, Klubka became a hermit when in crisis: withdrew, ruminated, lost sight of the practical. Hermit crises were difficult because they were slow and persistent. No end in sight. Brandstetter would have to set about fighting the symptoms one at a time.
“I like this song,” Klubka said, indicating the Cuban song playing in the bar. “Old men who meet once a week, drinking rum, smoking, playing music, singing. Relaxed, worn out, thankful for every day they still have. I should move to Cuba. Klubka in Cuba, hah.”
Brandstetter hadn’t been paying attention to the music, and he didn’t start now, but it was good that Klubka was talking again. “Do you speak Spanish?” Brandstetter asked.
“A bit. Took some continuing ed courses,” Klubka replied.
“Nice language,” said Brandstetter.
“Yeah, isn’t it? Good string tension. Taut and elastic at the same time. I like it a lot.” And then, after a pause: “God thinks in Spanish.”
“Viva,” Brandstetter said and nudged Klubka, “Want another one?”
“God thinks, but he doesn’t speak.” Klubka pressed his temples. “Clever. You have to lure Him out, you know? But not with prayer. That’s useless. Believe me.”
Brandstetter signaled the bartender, pointed to his empty glass and raised two fingers. The bartender nodded.
“You lure Him out by showing that you know how He thinks,” Klubka said. “This, for example,” Klubka raised the leather pouch of violin resin, “is typical God. First there’s the forest, then we come along. Then there’s the resin. And with resin, culture begins. Because you can glue things with resin while in nature there’s no such thing as gluing. Resin makes flint points and sticks and birds’ feathers into arrows. Viva.”
“Viva,” said Brandstetter and decided to put off doing the expenses for the day before yesterday’s concert until tomorrow. Today, “The World According to Klubka” was on the program. And they were still stuck on colophony.
“God’s saying something there. Even if He’s not talking. He says ‘Whoever wants to know what I think, considers the resin.’ So I consider the resin. And what have I found out? It’s everywhere. At its lowest point as the pitch rubbed on pigs to remove their hair before slaughter. In the middle as the soldering agent in electronics. At its highest point as violin resin in music. God’s saying something here.” Klubka winked knowingly. “Do you want to know what, Brandstetter?”
“Of course,” said Brandstetter, tired.
“And do you know why I’m going to tell you and only you?”
“Yeah,” said Brandstetter. “No.”
“Your name.”
“Gerolf?” asked Brandstetter.
“Brandstetter.”
“Okay.”
“Brandstetter, German for ‘fire-starter,’ the one who goes into the forest and burns himself a clearing so he can settle down there and work.”
“Aha,” Brandstetter said.
“That’s someone who understands.”
“Sure,” Brandstetter said and felt alcohol and exhaustion taking the life out of him. He had to bring things to close here soon.
“God says: the resin is like Me. At the lowest point, at the highest, and in the middle. And so I draw Him out.”
“With the colophony on your violin?”
“With the colophony on my violin.”
“That’s smart,” Brands
tetter said slowly. “But isn’t God even closer to you when He can stay in…that leather pouch, next to you, up against your body?”
Klubka winked at Brandstetter again, put the colophony away, stood up, smoothed his concert tux, and bent down to Brandstetter’s ear.
“It has to kick up dust, Brandstetter. That’s the trick. God only comes when dust is flying.”
Klubka left the bar, smiling, elated.
At least their talk had done some good for someone, Brandstetter thought. God only comes when dust is flying. It’s been Operation Desert Storm from the beginning.
“Can I tell you a secret?” Brandstetter asked the bartender. The bartender raised his left eyebrow and looked at his customer with a shifting mixture of patience and weariness.
“Orchestra tours are a real bitch,” Brandstetter said, shuddering. “And this time a double, please.”
TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN BY DUSTIN LOVETT
[LATVIA]
NORA IKSTENA
Elza Kuga’s Old-Age Dementia
The languid afternoon light of autumn envelops Greenwich Village. There is silence, peace, and a certain strangeness in the air. In New York, once called New Amsterdam, this network of narrow streets, crowded with the houses and warehouses, meanders haphazardly. Fortunes are told for five dollars on Bleecker Street, a polished, pre-packaged Tibet, India, or Nepal ready to cast an Eastern third eye on the inhabitants of the Village: their artists’ delusions, all the fantasies of Gotham. The happiness of gay men is in full parade on Christopher Street. Small yellow flowers grow in beds and pots along Horatio. They smell like chrysanthemums and look like balls of butter. A man with a pale, flower-yellow, illness-ravaged face sits on some steps.
“Elza,” he calls out and waves with a wasted, almost transparent hand.
Elza Kuga is sitting in her “coach.” Her coachmen tend to change often. But for some time now she’s been pushed around by Nebucadnecaria of the Ivory Coast.
“Call me Nabuco, ma’am!” she had screamed into Elza’s ear the first time they met. They’re like night and day—Elza with her white tuft of hair and Nabuco with her head topped by a shiny black tower fashioned of a hundred small braids.
Elza waves back at the flower-yellow man.
“I wonder what his name is,” Elza thinks. She no longer remembers how many years these Village scenes have slid by her eyes. She’s like a small dog being taken for a walk—though a dog whose walker doesn’t yet need to bring scoop or bag in case of any unforeseen accidents. When that day comes, Elza will move to an old folks’ home, where, when she needs some fresh air, she’ll be pushed out onto the balcony or into the yard.
Elza asks Nabuco to stop beside the yellow flowers. She reaches out her thin hand to pluck one. The flower-yellow man smiles weakly at her. Elza’s coach moves on. She brings the blossom to her nose and draws in its fragrance. In this brief moment, through her time-eroded memory, the scent draws out some sort of echo, some distant reverberation that she almost certainly recognizes. She wants to reach it but cannot.
…a yellow flower is a yellow flower is a yellow flower, it has the fragrance of a yellow flower, the fragrance of a yellow flower, the fragrance of a yellow flower…
In Elza’s lap rests a rust-colored, dog-eared little book. She flips it open, puts the flower in it, closes it tightly, then holds the book with both hands. Two young men are strolling on the opposite side of the narrow street; one has something resembling a dog’s collar around his neck, while the other has him on a short leash. The two appear very much in love, happy, demonstrating publicly their good-natured dependence upon each other.
Elza closes her eyes and turns her old face toward the tender autumn sun. She is and the sun is. The two of them speak to each other without words. Not even half a word is needed for them to understand one another. The sun is Elza’s father, who carries her to her wet nurse, because her mother was destined to never rise from her birthing bed. The sun is her lover, who, having kissed her breasts, goes off to war never to return. The sun is her home, which she knows by name—“sun.”
When they stop at a tiny intersection, Elza opens her eyes. A slender young man in black jeans, with a baby in kangaroo-pouch draped around his chest, is crossing the street. An old Labrador hobbles behind him, its back legs in a wagonlike contraption. The dog lumbers forward, stiffly moving its unencumbered front legs and weakly lifting its head to look at its master with sad, trusting eyes. The trio inch across the intersection.
Someone is knocking at Elza’s heart, asking her to open the door, wanting to see what’s hidden inside. Elza herself can no longer enter. “England is locked, the key is broken.” God only knows why this fragment of an old nursery rhyme is going through her head. Time has rusted the hinges of her heart.
If Elza had children, would they lead her along like the young man his old Labrador, or would they whisk her away somewhere, out of sight? So that their children need not see feeble old age with its sad trusting eyes and its back legs locked into a wagonlike contraption, Elza thinks. Elza refuses to continue this train of thought. Elza is Elza is Elza. She will die in Greenwich Village, she will be turned to ashes and buried somewhere in the middle of Gotham. She will mingle with the crowd of thousands of fallen souls who have got stuck in chimneys en route to heaven. There will be a place commemorating her passing. A spare patch of earth in a carefully mowed lawn among stone crosses and other markers. It seems to Elza that it would be only proper for there to be some burial mounds around as well. But why?
Nabuco guides “the coach” expertly through the door of an Italian eatery. On noticing the new arrivals, a man behind the counter calls out happily:
“Elza, Elza, mozzarella fresca, mozzarella fresca…”
Elza smiles at him and nods in agreement. The lively Italian, knowing well the answer, turns to Nabuco.
“No mozzarella for me,” Nabuco says, a warning note in her voice.
“Salmone a la griglia,” the Italian tempts her.
“Let it be,” Nabuco sings out in a throaty voice, crooning the popular song.
The delighted Italian rushes into the kitchen, returning after a while with take-out containers full of food.
Enticed by the smell, Nabuco pushes Elza forward enthusiastically. The slow-motion frames flickering in front of Elza’s eyes accelerate as well.
…people, buildings, dogs, sidewalk cafes, squirrels, the golden-coin leaves of a maidenhair tree, pigeons, short Puerto Rican flower vendors, faded rose petals in gutters, discounted book piles on sidewalks, antique tea services, fresh chocolate cakes, mannequins—transparent virtual lovers with shaved heads in shop windows…
Elza hurries on. What will flash past her eyes in her last moments? Elza senses that in that brief instant she will suddenly remember everything. The faded contours will all be sharpened, her phantoms filling out with bright, natural colors. Their voices will sound clearly.
Elza will be handed a mug of hot chocolate, she will be advised to blow on it, and just to make sure, asked to tie on a bib. A bunch of yellow flowers will be bought for her in the quiet, spring-touched city. Elza will talk and think in one and the same language. Elza will make love twice. In warm, yellow leaves and in a war-destroyed house with a torn-off roof. Over the shoulder of her beloved she will see rain clouds. Beyond them it will be thundering. Noises empty of the evil intent behind mankind’s own thunder. It will thunder in order to rain, and rain in order to make things grow. As nature intended. Without hate. With love. Peace of thunder on earth and goodwill toward Elza, because a beloved heart is knocking at her door. And then Elza will be alone. Elza will be Elza will be Elza.
Nabuco brakes suddenly. The escalator of thoughts and images stops abruptly in Elza’s head. The idling of her “coach” returns her to reality. Nabuco opens a low gate and, bending down, pushes Elza into a small garden. In the trees, bushes, and flowers, autumn plenty is battling with premonitions of decay. Nabuco guides Elza’s “coach” toward a bench at the farthest co
rner of the garden. Then she enacts a long-practiced ritual. She takes the rust-colored book, still tightly closed to make sure that the yellow flower does not slip out, from Elza. She lays out serviettes and places the container of food on Elza’s lap. Finally Nabuco settles herself comfortably on the bench opposite Elza.
They begin their meal. The noises of the city beyond the garden wall sound like the foghorn of a boat on a distant sea. A gray squirrel jumps on the bench. Elza grimaces at the honey-grilled salmon, gnaws delicately on a small chunk of white cheese. A pigeon spoiled by urban luxuries lands heavily. A thirsty wind blows over a plastic water glass. A hungry bush throws purple leaves at the diners. The sun snuggles up to the feast like a pregnant cat.
Keeping the same silence, Nabuco removes all vestiges of the meal, tidies and smoothes out the blanket around Elza’s knees, settles herself more comfortably on the bench, and opens the rust-colored little book.
“Sanskrit lesson,” she says in a practiced voice.
In caring for the solitary people of Gotham, Nabuco has come to know dozens of forms of senility and folly. She has had to participate—in all seriousness—in a secret conspiracy against the Arabs, has had to help dress a prima donna each evening for a nonexistent performance, has had to make certain to lead a pug dog to pee in a despised neighbor’s flower bed, be the single audience for one-man song and dance shows, dye gray hair to a fiery red or a pitch black, help announce the end of the world, and paste up slogans against communists, against genocide, for equal rights, against abortion, for celibacy, against, for, against, for…
Thus, Elza’s “Sanskrit lessons” seem perfectly acceptable to Nabuco. Elza doesn’t talk much, and that’s a help too. Elza gives Nabuco pocket money and pays for their lunch. Elza isn’t high-handed, fussy, or cantankerous. Nabuco senses that Elza’s thoughts fly with golden wings.
“Deva—Maya,” Nabuco diligently deciphers in a loud voice.
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