by Fleur Jaeggy
The story is told of a child from Prague who when they came to take him away with his parents only took with him, in haste, a visiting card. It bore witness to his existence. The young woman and the dog stopped before a child’s little one-piece outfit with heart-shaped pockets, displayed in one case. To Anja it seemed that the blind woman’s eyes were becoming a precision instrument. Then the blind woman turned her head toward Anja who moved away so as not to be seen.
The eyes of Anja and of the woman stare at the photographs of the detainees. In the three ritual poses. In profile, facing forward, and with a cap on. The woman has stopped before the wall of faces. She scrutinizes them. But not altogether. The gaze is directed elsewhere. Perhaps she is a student. Her only company is the labrador. A backpack on her shoulders. She feels that it’s growing dark. That Anja is following her. But she pretends not to notice. She is going toward the last block in the camp. Block number eleven. The flowers before the Wall of Death are limp. During the night they freeze.
It is closing time. Anja bid farewell to the woman with the white cane. Who smiled. She saw her move away quietly. The dog next to her. She felt her absence right away, when she disappeared altogether.
Basia was still sitting on the bench. Patient. She asked her if she needed anything. She was sitting on the bench for that, to wait, nothing more. A dark reverberation entered the hallway. Both head toward the exit. Basia apologizes. She wants to see no more faces. The tone of her voice is still even, though perhaps softer. Toned down. That’s enough.
If you want to know more about it then go ahead and become you yourself — her steady eyes are saying — become you yourself the victim.
The Hanging Angel
It had been snowing. For years, it seemed. In a desolate town in Brandenburg a boy shouts a Christmas sermon through a bullhorn. The town has few inhabitants. The houses are surrounded by a wall. On the wall the photograph of a German shepherd. “Ich wache.” I watch. It looks like a “Wanted” poster. The photograph of the owner is missing, One watches, the other incites. The moment anyone walked by the wall fierce barking was heard. There are no shops. But twice a week a siren announces that the provisions truck has arrived. The one that brought bread also offered a great variety of sweets, pastries, strudel, marzipan. The women, few of them, lined up, holding a handbag, orderly as if there were a crowd in front of them. When the meat truck came, their glances became more alert. They peered at the merchandise, the price tags, the knives. There wasn’t much money in the black purses. At those times the town became animated. The women talked among themselves, giving the impression of having many things to tell. When they stopped talking one could be certain that they had nothing more to say. Suddenly they all fell silent and went back to their houses.
The boy is in the company of an old man. The boss, his master. Judging by his looks he might be a monk or a poker player, like those you see in films. He has trained the child. Clothed and fed him. He has given him a place to sleep. The old man has survived prisons, burning pyres, and schools. In exchange the boy must preach and beg. Alms. A brotherly hatred united them. Around his neck the boy feels the rope that ties him to that man. He felt in his blood and all through his bones a primordial need for hatred. And that was how the boy managed to be moving, while reading the sermons. “And now sing,” the old man would tell him. The boy shouts from the Book of Hymns. The women surround him. Each one gives him alms. Pats his head, the pointed black wool bonnet. They want to touch him. He looks at them lovingly, as the old man suggested. It’s Christmas. The loot is substantial.
Sometimes the boy goes into the woods. Which are tall and deep. On frosty days the sky visits the trees and a sharp and spiritual light, so the observing boy calls it, descends on earth, down to their roots. In winter it’s easy to get lost in the woods. And so with the tip of his boots the boy marks a few arrows on the paths. They soon vanish. “I was here.” The boy who preaches was here. As he looks at the tip of the arrows he realizes that every direction resembles every other. And that the signs are soon lost in the snow. Everything disappears, in life, too. He would like to cry. But brevity, dissolution, cheer him.
The little preacher and the old man are in front of the brick church. The door opens with a screech, almost a human wail, a sound fraught with pain. It sounds like a “no.” For years it stayed shut. The bricks on the church are the colors of autumn leaves — swamp green, burnished gold, ochre beneath a patina of night and musk. All around the white landscape was dimming. On the plain, solitary sentry booths abandoned by Russian soldiers can be glimpsed. Mute sentinels, ghosts in stiff uniforms and muskets. They seem to look out from the depth of their stations. The boy calls out to them with a whistle. “You have a few more minutes,” he says, “to put on your features.” He also invites the invisible guests from the abandoned houses, the empty windows with curtains of dust, the clerks from ruined buildings with signs for companies that no longer exist. On the concrete one can still read “Supermarkt.”
Some months before the boy had made a journey into the past. A journey into a house of the DDR. Wohnen in der DDR. “Living in the DDR.” That was how the organizers of the show, Kultur in Heim, “Culture in the House,” had put it. The inhabitants were invited to enter the rooms where the families of the DDR had lived. An authentic reconstruction of “an actual living environment.” One is invited to open closets and drawers to discover secrets. The visit starts in the live-in kitchen. There were pots on the stove, no fire. The children’s room, the toy cat, the television, the old Rossini radio, the Rose von Florenz soap bar. The Riesaer matches, which the boy promptly took. “You’ll find a piece of your youth or childhood, or something interesting from the everyday life of different people.” The boy was so struck by that house, much more so than by a royal palace with a ballroom and a hall of mirrors. To get him to leave they had to insist. He directed a thought toward those who had inhabited those rooms. “Merry Christmas,” he said to their vestiges.
In the church there is an enormous wooden angel. They said that in the years of solitude and isolation it had grown even larger. Neither in Poland nor in Germany is there an angel that size. As soon as one enters the church, it feels as though the giant might lunge. It strikes terror. That may be why they did not want to open the church. For years. And often the key, the spiteful key, couldn’t be found. Now the faithful come. Dark-skinned Geoffrey has shoveled the snow and cannot let go of the shovel which he holds upright like a crucifix. An elderly couple hold hands, coats trailing. The gardener who grows bulbs underground is there. To him the garden is winter, the garden is Christmas. They sit in the front row. They are each immersed in their own thoughts. In the back rows shadows, like people, moved. Everyone sang the praises of the Lord.
Looking at the angel, the boy thought of the story he had read about a sacristan — one quarter sacristan and three quarters visionary. Well, the sacristan had been called by the angel. They traveled together. They had been all over the world. She lived in a cell with two chairs, one without a back and one without a seat. That’s where she had her visions. She conversed with the Lord. While carrying out her chores as sacristan, all of a sudden her soul would be swept off and then she would climb up to the most elevated reaches of the church, the window frames, the rose windows, all the spots it seemed impossible to humanly reach. But she, the sacristan, could reach them.
And the boy? The small preacher was full of doubts and resentment. He wanted to ask the angel something precise. He couldn’t rise off the ground. On the contrary, he felt that all he could do was to succumb. Stubborn, the boy stares at the angel defiantly. The eyes are glassy and sad. He has some Riesaer matches in his pocket. The old man has the alcohol. He was ready to commit a sacrilegious act. Nothing personal, he thought to himself. I have nothing to lose. Not even the future. He’d already lost that. It was already behind him. Meanwhile the faithful file out in silence. The church is deliberately bare. The desolation of its exterior s
eems to want to press its way in. From the entrance, one can still see the angel behind a veil of sleet.
“And now,” the boy asks, “which way?” The angel knows the boastings of despair, of the small preacher’s drunken melancholy. He replied, showing him the way. He flipped a coin. It was light, it flashed before falling. If it’s heads, you’ll go toward Berlin. If it’s tails, you’ll go toward the Baltic. It was tails. The boy and the old man turned toward their destiny. The coin was stamped with tails on both sides.
The Perfect Choice
The pain her son had caused her by choosing to die on a day in spring was less than she had expected. He is happy now, she said. And she herself felt almost relieved. She would have liked to die that way. Or she might have chosen a different method. But which? Pain let itself be pushed about like a paper kite and she, the mother, after having pondered the various ways of dying, was in absolute agreement with her only son, on the perfect choice. It couldn’t have been otherwise. She shut her eyes in order to see the scene, she knew the place by heart. Meanwhile she thought that she would have to change her will. The son had let himself fall off a rock, on the glorious Via Mala, where as a child they had taken him to see the gorges. Jörg looked unhappily at the water down below, lizard green, deep down. The mother dragged him way up, so as to have him look below. To force him to look down. His step faltered. He was sickly, wan. And this did not please the mother who held him by the hand. The boy looked at the emerald ring, the same color as the water. Beyond the limits of the visible. And today, years later, he went down. No one forced him. Of his own will. His will pushed him to the end. Almost as though to recover his eyes as they’d been back then, that had settled with hatred on the pools of water. He hardly realized that he was going down, falling, the green water rocking him and the sharp edges of the rocks had already torn him apart. Fossil lances. He left the bicycle padlocked. Out of habit. He had been advised to ride a bike to attempt to calm his insomnia. You must tire yourself out. You must tire yourself out a great deal. With some physical exercise. The insomnia lessened. At the same time tiredness increased. The doctor is pleased. And the mother who had gotten him used to sleeping pills, too. They were a dynasty of insomniacs. Of insomniac women. The men were more given to sleep. They had always slept, the mother said on a sour note. Why then could her son not sleep? The tiredness had to be increased so that the insomnia could decrease. The only son had become so tired that he no longer cared about the insomnia. He didn’t even notice. He stayed up all night, it seemed to him that he had a great deal to do, in the doing of nothing.
Then, when he managed to stretch out on the bed, he had the sensation of entering sleep. He was entering, given his enormous tiredness, into a kind of eternal rest. It was something very beautiful. He had experienced something like that with opium. He was lying on a sofa, an uncomfortable nineteenth-century sofa. His feet were resting on the wooden armrest. He was waiting. A hedge blocked the window. While nothing happened between the eyelids and the eyes, his legs lengthened, almost as though to touch a distant, very distant line with the tips of his shoes. It was just the horizon. A curved line in the shape of a sickle. And the sickle had flattened and skimmed the waves of the sea. There was absolute stillness. An enamel landscape, innocuous, mute. And he, the boy, felt so well, in the shadowy peace. In the light malaise in the air. The flush of spring, the scent was nauseating, tainted and too strong. The solemn and glorious instant just before dissolution. In a field he saw flowers with small purple wounds. Tattooed flowers. A minuscule branding, such as is used on herds, or linens. Someone must have marked them as they went by. But who? He didn’t care. The flowers were coming back before his eyes, before his door. He had shut them out. When the vision faded, he saw the wall. He opened the door.
The mother was there, holding a tray. “I made you some dinner.” Shellfish and something pink, boiled and gray, with two holes. His mother liked foods he couldn’t stand. Such as fish, for instance. No one could deceive him as to freshness. There are those who have an inborn gift for not being deceived in life. Neither by food gone bad nor by the Holy Ghost. She was pleased if the butcher gave her a beautiful cut of meat. And so, in the end, she was pleased with the death of her son. With the perfect choice. Understanding and charity begin in the mother’s womb. On the Via Mala.
F. K.
I rang at the door to her apartment. On the first floor. On the musty stairs, a smell of detergent. I rang but no one came. I started knocking. I knew that she was at home. I knew that she didn’t want to answer. She never opened the door. She didn’t want to see anyone. Before going to her place I had obtained some information. She lived alone. Entered the clinic. Left it. Walked in the streets. Sometimes she was very made up. Tight skirts.
So as to have news of her I contacted a police station. A kind of lost persons bureau. Not lost letters. People. It is called Contrôle de l’habitant. An office that can find any person. When people disappear they know that they have disappeared. And if they haven’t altogether disappeared, they track them down. And that’s what happened with my friend. They, the bureau of lost persons, found her. For me, who had sought news of her. One day, I believe, if I were to disappear, maybe someone will inquire after me at the lost persons bureau. Maybe not. And then it would be sad if no one wanted to know what had become of me, or to testify to my existence. My friend had been lucky, she had me. No one but me. I am the only person in the world who looked for her.
A lawyer, tutor, woman of the law, to whom by law she had been entrusted, took care of her. And that woman, too, had managed to find her in a certain office. She was the wife of an important politician. In the course of my enquiry I managed to obtain an appointment by the lakeside. An ice cream cart went by. It was a warm spring. An azure day, the boats off in the distance, the swans, the ducks, and not far from there the place where Sissi had been killed, there by the lakeshore. I was thinking: what an enchanting place, why not live here? I was thinking about my meeting with the lawyer, maybe she is a very stern woman, maybe she doesn’t want to tell me anything, maybe she is suspicious of me, because information regarding a citizen who goes in and out of a psychiatric clinic and is no relative of mine is reserved. She hardly knows my name. But I believe she knows everything about me. Because I was the one to ask for information about my friend and I was given it after I had given information about myself. My name, address. They must have checked my data. So it was that the wife of the politician was able to receive me. I was no assassin, though some have been known to frequent the lakeshore.
The woman came toward me. She was alone. Without protection. Alone to meet an unknown woman who was asking for news of a woman non compos mentis, not responsible for her actions, under the protection and control of the Confederation.
A kind woman, sober and affable. Her simplicity struck me. And her simplicity led me to explain to her the reasons for my interest in F. K. My interest was due, I said, to the fact that she had been a school friend. And I could no longer discover her whereabouts. I told her that I had last seen her at her mother’s house. I told her that she was a pianist. And that I wanted to hear her play again. Every time I went to a piano recital she, my friend, appeared under my eyelids. Her discontinuous presence was disquieting.
And then in our class, everyone remembered her, she was the star pupil. While I spoke of my friend’s qualities, I realized that I was saying too much. Since the lady was so simple and a little strict, I felt that too much praise would have been out of place. I would have to curtail my praises. I understood that no one is much better than anyone else. According to the lady. No one should be much better. Or should not show it. I was speaking of my friend’s exceptional intelligence and I saw in the lady’s light eyes a slight gleam of disappointment, very slight. But she was the only person I could talk to about F. The only one who knew F. I had to limit myself. And I had to appear detached.
Yet the lady knew that I had looked for my friend at the bureau o
f lost persons. Which is a police station. And not a place for lost souls. So, I, too was monitored. And the lady knew very well whom she was dealing with. We remained standing for at least half an hour. Then finally the lady invited me to sit at a café. At a café by the lakefront. I wanted to sit. And look at the lake before me. A spell that spread peace and a kind of happiness. And that blue sky, so enveloping, sweet. I was in the company of an important person. Keeper of the law and wife of a politician in office.
I will always be grateful to the lady for agreeing to meet me. For her kindness. Maybe, when I get in trouble, she can have me admitted somewhere, protect me. I’ve always needed protection, without finding it. And maybe I wanted to see my lost friend, to realize that I have lived, when we were together at school. I was unsure whether to have coffee or an ice cream. Maybe I had both. The lady, mineral water. Évian. I, too, was thirsty. That lake and the landscape made one very thirsty. One couldn’t breathe. It was like being in a desert. In a lake made of sand. The lady drank all of her mineral water. I finished my ice cream. How graceful the lady is. Minuscule gold earrings. And a trim suit, very proper. It couldn’t be otherwise. It is silly to say so.