by Drago Jancar
Even though Satan should now have been banished from my home, I have the feeling that someone is still hanging around. You know the feeling—when you’re positive that there’s no one there, but can nonetheless sense the presence of some sort of threatening mystical being that makes you freeze in your tracks, terrifies you, makes you turn on all the lights in all your rooms and walk through each of them carefully with a kitchen knife, just to conclude that, indeed, there’s no one there, but you can’t put the impossible threat out of your head, you keep thinking about it, perturbed, uncomfortable. But, actually, that’s not quite what happens to me, because right from the start I head to the washroom and see nothing. But then I notice two black men’s hairs in the sink. And I get angry. I get mad at the man who supposedly sprayed my flat, because he must have been the one who left them there. Or were they there before he came? Again I’m overcome with doubt. Am I actually in my own apartment? Really my own? Or has someone been here, has someone broken in, and for a moment I can’t think about any sort of self-preservation instinct, but think instead about sex, about the perversity and sickness that this person has been guilty of in my home. I’ve always denied that spurious notion that a large percentage of women fantasize all the time about sex with a stranger or, what’s even crazier, about being raped. But, in all honesty, this mess is, well, yes, somewhat jarring, but also arousing—just a bit, I mean an absolutely minimal amount of arousal. And I think about all those unbelievable, certainly exaggerated sex stories in Confidential, True, and Private Lives magazines, about women who seduce old men, millionaires, pensioners—I mean those women with their long legs fully exposed in net stockings, the ones with Chihuahuas. And I think about the people I know having sex, or I try to, anyway, because I can’t really imagine any of them in bed with someone else, so I see them talking dirty, acting as people only do in private, undressing, maybe giving each other lapdances, or something, then washing up afterward, changing their sheets, frying up eggs for two.
I’m going to sit up all night on watch. Awake. I’ll be prepared for anything. For the worst. For yet another unauthorized person sneaking into the wrong place at the wrong time. In my own personal wrong place and wrong time.
I watch old Sex and the City episodes. Laughable. I’ve always wondered what it was like for them to make the show, to be on camera, probably a big laugh. Tonight I smoke out on the balcony, leaning over the railing. Everyone else is sleeping, not a light is turned on out there, no windows are lit either above, or below, or beside me. The moon looks as though it was drawn in with a marker, placed like a period in the sky. All sorts of thoughts pop into my head. They just come. But these thoughts have nothing to do with this story. Totally off topic. I eat cold potatoes and minced meat, with a knife and fork, like in a restaurant, and I wonder why, I’m home alone after all and can make a pig of myself if I want, and I think about the embarrassment I felt when those men delivered my new sofa yesterday and couldn’t get it through the corridor, so they had to remove a door. I think about what they must have thought. My nose had been running a lot, abnormally, really, so that probably about five liters of snot had dripped out of me in two days and the skin around my nose was like a scaly eczema, and the air-freshener in the WC was all used up. I couldn’t smell anything while I had the head cold. The linden trees had come into bloom in the meantime, and I didn’t smell a thing. The sofa still wouldn’t fit through the corridor, though, so then they took off the doors of a built-in cupboard in the corridor and had to take out all its drawers because their handles were in the way. In the upper drawer was all sorts of junk. In the second drawer were stockings and tights in several colors, balled up. While in the lower drawer was all my underwear, nicely lined up brassieres with panties thrown in beside them, and when it was lifted out, one of the men said, “We get to see all the good stuff.”
And I was so embarrassed. So embarrassed. But was it because my underwear was there for all to see, or because only my underwear was there, because there was no men’s underwear in the drawer, or . . . because I live alone, or . . . because I had bought a new pull-out sofa, not a double bed? And a sofa that was made of cardboard with just one skimpy support plank and a “memory foam” pad, a sofa on which you couldn’t ever have sex, because it would collapse beneath you, and they knew that full well. I wanted to sink into the ground. I wanted to be invisible. And I was invisible. And I also had an invisible man. Somewhere here. A skeleton in the closet. When I was little, I saw a black-and-white movie about an invisible man who was wrapped in bandages and made me very, very afraid.
I hear a car alarm sing under the balcony. I think about how to start and end my story, I think about the relationship between visible heroes and invisible villains. I think about Birthday Letters. And all through this a bespectacled cat keeps looking at me from a magazine cover. My invisible man.
I water down my tea so I can fall asleep eventually, in the middle of the night, collapse right there on my new, hard sofa. And because of the tea I have to go to the bathroom all the time, and afterward I also have to go and have a smoke, because I’ve abandoned my computer, and been thrown off track anyway, and those thoughts, those thoughts are of no use for this story anyway. I go into the washroom and pee, and at first I can’t understand what it is, maybe the cat has thrown up something white, because I see white foam in the sink. I look, then dip my finger in it, rub it between my fingers, taste it. It’s shaving cream. Absolutely and for certain this is men’s shaving cream. But it wasn’t here when I first came in to pee, maybe about an hour ago. He’s been here, without my noticing it, he snuck in and shaved. My weekend cotton panties are hanging from a string over the tub, light green with an unraveled band. And he saw them! I get nervous, go into the kitchen to have a cigarette, pour myself some more tea, which has been sitting in the teapot for so long that it’s strong and bitter and has a skin on top. And I get even more nervous, because beside my cup sits another. The second one definitely wasn’t there before. Everyone always helps themselves to my dishes, glasses, and cups, without asking . . . I mean, guests and other people. And then I notice that everything has changed, that I myself have changed everything, have brought pebbles from the seashore here and scattered them in every corner. I’ve borrowed all sorts of things, lately, and these are scattered around the apartment because there’s no good place for them, I don’t look for a permanent place for them because I know that they won’t be with me for long. Lately I like things more than I like people.
Someone is sleeping under the blanket, I see a body, I see it, but when I throw back the covers, there are only empty, unlived-in, cold sheets. Cold. I feel them. I know what Freud would say about all this. Cold sheets you can warm up yourself, but who is this “you,” your self? When I want to connect with someone, I log onto Facebook. Now I see something that makes me a bit paranoid—there’s all these new links on my profile: where I live, work, study, etc., but also a particularly odd one: Who’s home when you’re not home. I immediately click on this, and I’m taken to a total stranger’s profile. I look at his photo album. Nothing, I don’t recognize anything. I look at his blog.
The first entry: I look at her sleeping in her light blue silk nightgown, one strap has slipped from her shoulder and is cutting into her skin, she doesn’t feel it, her legs are spread out all over the bed, it’s hot, she’s kicked off that familiar thin sheet. I bend down to smell her, on the inside of her thigh I see tiny white hairs. She looks sad. The last few days she’s been looking sad. Lonely, as if I don’t love her.
The previous entry: She’s lost her mind! Decided to get her whole apartment sprayed with who knows what! Such a stench, bad enough to gag you. And all that when we’ve never seen so much as a single bug here! Not a cockroach, not a red ant, not a bedbug or flea, fly, mosquito . . . not a one. Not even dustmites, which they say are indestructable anyhow.
The entry prior to that: I don’t exist. She doesn’t see me. I talk to her—she looks through me. Transparent. Invisible. A
path in the fog. A horn in the mist.
One more entry before that: I, that is, she. She is her I. With a capital I. She sees only herself. Hears only herself. Senses only herself. Imagines her self. Why should she? I’ve already imagined her. Now we should simply be.
One more entry prior: blocked. The owner of the blog has not allowed public access to this entry. I click, click, click, click, and click. Then everything crashes. The entry is still denied to me. And suddenly something is crawling on my arm. Something is crawling. I jump. Frightened, I scream. It’s a hair that has fallen on my arm, and it tickles. But no, something is crawling. Really crawling. My brain is crawling. Over my back and away. Like white worms that have infested rotting meat. Like pinworms in the first grade. Like lice in the second. Like that inflamed root canal in the third. Like the first bad report card from the teacher in the fourth. Like the first lies to my parents in the fifth. Like my first kiss in the sixth. Like my first cigarette in the seventh. Like my first period in the eighth. Like getting drunk for the first time in the ninth. Like feeling grown up for the first time in the tenth. Like now, when I want everything to be as it was, as it is for children, as it is for the little ones.
I must collect all the words that I’ve let drop so carelessly from my mouth. I must collect myself. Someone comes in and asks, “Do you see me?” And I think, what a stupid question. I wonder how to present myself on the outside, clean and believable. I wonder how to be here, not be -ing.
“I’ve been waiting for you. I’m doing the laundry. I’ll be done soon. I bought you a new deodorant. Nivea. For sensitive skin. Can you hear me?”
TRANSLATED FROM LATVIAN BY MARGITA GAILITIS AND VIJA KOSTOFF
[LIECHTENSTEIN]
JENS DITTMAR
His Cryptologists
As a freelance literary talent-seeker—nowadays known as a “scout”—Alexander Kraus (who since 1956 had adopted the name Aleph Kraus-Góngora) was able to devote himself to his dissertation on the Spanish melancholic, Luis de Góngora. He traveled frequently, pausing whenever possible in Barcelona—which, though far too expensive a home base for his studies, was an easy jaunt from Frankfurt via Strasbourg and Lyon. Only once did he make it as far as Cordoba, where Góngora had passed his “sodomitic, heretical” life. Góngora, whose coeval and nemesis, Francisco de Quevedo, would gladly have seen him consigned, for his offenses, to the stake.
Whenever he was back in Germany, he attended the meetings of the Cryptologists—a literary group whose members assembled each Monday in Wiesbaden. A white mouse dragging behind it a recumbent A served as the society’s emblem. Their proceedings took place for the most part on the second floor of the Altstadt’s Hotel Bären, where a television set had recently been installed. Consequently, every now and then, when a football game was being broadcast, they’d have to wince off into the neighboring lounge. It was plain that the host had learned early on what it was that his customers expected: bread and circuses. And pleasant service. There at the bar, old Herr Bödeker would bore his punters with letters that Goethe had written in 1814 and 1815 to Christiane Vulpius, after taking the cure at this, the most popular guest- and bathhouse in Wiesbaden. And then, of course, not so long ago, the Senior-Chef, along with O. W. Fischer and Heinz Rühmann, had sipped their coffee here.
The bulk of each meeting was spent sniping at colleagues and their books, but occasionally there were genuine debates as well. Uwe Borowski—who they called the Polyglot—had been raised speaking multiple languages, and was now at home in sundry idioms. Thus he was fiendishly sensitive to the finest of terminological distinctions. In Polish he was another man; then he could even understand his father, whose German was every bit as good as his own, since he’d been brought to Gelsenkirchen as a child. By threading his stories with foreign expressions, he managed to achieve a sort of moiré effect. But if the talk turned to mimesis, he derided it as “rèpetitive art,” with an accent grave, thereby bringing into play a whiff of the unsavory.
One day Borowski had brought with him the eight-point proclamation of poetic action that had been declaimed by H. C. Artmann at Vienna’s Café Glory—according to which one could be a poet without, in fact, writing a word. Since then Borowski had repudiated any reproduction of poetic work whatever, whether by means of speech or script.
“Isn’t that something for our Herbert?” they said. He, having yet to publish a line, was nevertheless considered a writer. Nobody knew precisely why. He prided himself on having once stolen five paperbacks at a go—it was his personal record: White Fang by Jack London, This Gun for Hire by Graham Greene, 1984 by George Orwell, Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, and The Diary of Anne Frank. “It’s a counterfeit, that,” shouted Josef Silberbauer, who was attending one of the Cryptologists’ meetings for the first time. Since nobody there knew the book, his assertion remained uncontested.
“Why are you always stealing things!” a literary critic from the Sueddeutschen, who was just passing through, added in disgust.
The Viennese paradigm was vigorously discussed among the circle of Cryptologists. Should they plan a poetic torchlight procession, a silent march with incense and Chinese lanterns, through the inner city? All of them chalk-painted, shrouded in black, squired along by a flutist, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin?
The idea was seconded by Andreas Schalk from Ansbach, who bristled at countenancing any rules whatsoever. He didn’t believe in reason: for him the only thing that counted was wit, a sense of humor—the rest could come or go as it liked. Against the ground of this anarchist’s agenda, anything was possible—including the absurd, the grotesque. With the undeniable drawback that his particular breed of waggishness would be understood by very few, since his wit generally called for a good deal of rubbing before it finally kindled. So that usually his poems elicited more perplexity than mirth. With a number of kindred spirits he later founded a satirical journal, which sank, however, without a sound—like the Andrea Doria.
“Are my texts incomprehensible?” Schalk asked. “Or is it rather that the reader has false expectations? Most of them want to hear something about the world, want facts, rather than taking any pleasure in the aesthetics of riddles.”
“What does that mean, to comprehend?”
“If you can reiterate what I’ve said, I take it that you’ve comprehended me.”
Upon which this little exchange of repartee fizzled out. Apparently not everyone was willing to share such pragmatism.
For Guenter Portmann from Bochum, also known as the Arab, the suggested poetic performance fell on fertile ground. He had no desire to conceal his sympathy for the Viennese Actionists, and at every opportunity exclaimed: “The Essential is not my problem! Let someone else deal with it!”
And who would look after the widely neglected Inessential? Portmann, of course! He was at home on terra incognita, driving himself on toward those blank spots on the map, those thickets of negligibility—places where others, with their fixation on the Essential, would never set foot.
“Anyone can learn to write in the orthodox style,” he said, “and teach it as well. Journalists have to write clearly, correctly. So that they’ll be understood.” But he, he had a weakness for arabesques. He relished the ornamentation that others considered a crime. And given the state of things, he was a willing criminal. “I write like a terrorist—someday they’ll shoot me for it.”
The Arab, who thought himself irresistible in his little canvas cap, made passes at the waitress, who didn’t seem to shy from such advances. Fräulein Gerda was raising a kid on her own. Jochen’s father had made a break for it. They heard that he’d rambled off to America, where everyone was going in those days. Gerda no longer believed he’d come back for the two of them, mother and child. So she had to take care of herself. A week before, the tyke had smashed a shopwindow, playing, and she had no idea how she was going to pay for it. The installment plan they’d arranged for her was very kind, all things considered, but still, she couldn’t possibly afford to shell out
eight marks a month.
Deviation from the canon of proper spelling brings with it a certain measure of subjectivity—for many, that’s the classical definition of degeneration. But thinking that way betrayed a flawed understanding of the world. In which context Klaus Becker must be mentioned—Becker, who most of them called “The Engineer,” or simply “Zuse,” not least to avoid the danger of confusion: in Germany there were over 70,000 Beckers, and half of those are Klauses. He had renounced “message” in the conventional sense, and dreamed of sense-free poetry, crafted by means of computer. One day he wanted to develop a program that would write—using words selected from pre-established lists—not only poems, but whole stories and novels.
Not every hand is huge
Each bed is still.
And no one would realize, in scanning such lines, that a machine was behind them. For the time being, he confined himself, however, to a complicated permutational technique, so complicated that—thus far—he’d been able to generate only short texts.
Midway through the gathering, Kraus-Góngora left the Bären in order to go to the Roxy in Grabenstrasse and meet a character who had nothing to do with the Cryptologists, but wanted to deliver a manuscript to the editor of the Jonas-Wittling publishing house. They drank a warm beer standing up, and agreed to meet again the following Monday, same time, same place.
On the way back, Christa Reinig plucked him by the sleeve. She was on her way to Berlin, where she studied art history and archaeology; she bitched a bit about a colleague, who’d been awarded the Hessian Literature Prize. Kraus-Góngora closed his ears: he wanted nothing to do with that sort of thing; and definitely nothing to do with the dubious jury: amateurs across the board, and clearly half-blind. They had indeed—deliberately or not—overlooked the fact that their nominee hadn’t fulfilled the criteria for the prize, since she hadn’t published anything now in over a decade.