Intimate Stranger

by Breyten Breytenbach

  It is a curious town, the small provincial capital of Thüringen, egg-yellow facades are washed to keep up a sun-splashed face of classicism and quaint comfort and the late bourgeois charms of GDR democracy — but in the back streets houses are rotting from neglect and decay. The place is flooded with Goethe; he is on every menu — the dogs don’t piss against trees and lampposts, they bark snippets of the great man’s wisdom. And to a lesser extent there’s Schiller and Herder and Liszt who played his piano in a big room with an ornate ceiling and Nietzsche who stroked his madness in his mother’s house as if it were a moustache. . Their spirits flutter above the rooftops and the steeples the way banners are the remembrance of republics and of battles.

  It is dark when we visit the replica of Goethe’s Gartenhaus. A blonde lady architect guides us through the low-beamed rooms of the exact copy of the small house where the master used to work. Look, she says and points, we photographed the floor-tiles of the original dwelling so that we could faithfully reproduce the spots and the scratches; and look, this is the identical copy of his writing desk where we made precisely the same ink-stains blot by blot. When she turns her back to escort us to the next room, Andrej Bitow, the Russian author, slips a kopeck into one of the desk’s drawers, “to fuck up the symmetry and destroy the German soul.”

  But why this? Because we wanted to see if it could be done, the girl guide says. It cost nearly 2 million Deutschmarks to assemble. Now you see it, now you don’t. The original nearby in the dark garden of the night is for pious ogling only — the clone here you can run your hands over. But is that not the definition of totalitarianism, ‘the repetition of the same’? And now, what about aging? Will they touch up the copy to show, in time, the same wear and tear as the original? Or will the original be brought in line with its monstrous shadow?

  On Sunday, after adjudicating an essay called “A Dictionary of Winds” the best entry, we go up the hill to visit Buchenwald. It is so close by — a raven could bridge the distance like an open hand writing a single line of invisible ink without even thinking! And yet, how distant it is.

  There are trees up there, many trees, and clouds racing through a high-domed light-soaked sky, and birds fluttered by the wind, and probably insects in the soil too. There’s a breathtaking view over the gentle surroundings of flowing valleys and peaceful towns where Goethe must have taken his walks. And suddenly it is cold, so desperately cold — as if we’d moved into another world.

  We have moved into another world. We shouldn’t have come.

  A young man takes us through the camp. He is thickset and has dark half-moons under his eyes; he speaks English with a Scottish accent, probably that of the soccer fan, but the German breaks through painfully. He blurts out figures and facts relentlessly. This was a training ground for the SS, he tells us. Already from as early as 1934. They came here young, sometimes only 16 years old. They were to be the new elite to revolutionize society. New Man could only be unshackled in a hierarchy of self-abnegation and arbitrary violence and torture. He saw this job as guide advertised in the newspaper, the young man says, and so he applied. Sometimes he wonders. He has met survivors. He asked them: “What were your first thoughts when you woke up in the mornings here?”

  We are shown the barracks. We see the exact replica of the small zoo where officials brought their families on Sunday outings — hardly three meters away from the barbed-wire enclosure keeping in the inmates. We pass through the narrow wrought iron gate to the inner camp, with its mocking iron letters: Jedem das Seine (to each his own). Then we see the bare expanse, the broad view from up here overlooking the world with its harvests.

  And then we’re taken to the execution block, the tiles of the autopsy room, the furrows to sluice away the blood, the instruments shiny and elegant like slivered mirrors or like pebbles. Then the ovens and the urns, and in the basement the hooks and the piano wire. . We should not have come here. I’m so sorry.

  But this I cannot look at. This then is the Other. This is Me. This is what we do. This is what we’re like. Vietnam. Ruanda. Kosovo. Afghanistan. Iraq.

  We cling to one another. The wind is in our eyes and in our throats. A beautiful sunset purples the sky. Grandfather sky and father sky and son sky. (And man.) Grandmother wind and mother tree and daughter bird and grandchild insect through all the ages. And man once only. Once is enough.

  Back in the hotel, Andrej Bitow gives me a full glass of vodka, “to take the shiver out of the soul.” He clumsily cuts up an apple with a bottle opener. “One must always have an apple with the vodka,” he says. “Now go and take a hot bath.”

  Immediately I fall into a bottomless sleep. I have a first dream.

  A bright, sylvan scene. A clearing in the forest. We hear, at the periphery of our eyesight, a thrashing in the undergrowth. As if somebody (or something) is observing us from the invisibleness, but clumsily now camouflaging its presence. We then know it is an immortal. How can he be lured forth? Only one thing will work. We peg down a book in the sun-filled glade. This will be the irresistible bait. We know he/she is desperate to know what’s written. Does the wind turn over the leaves of the book? Can the wind read? And what is the title? I’m so sorry.

  How rotten with memory this earth is! And how the one thing slides over the other! When does memory become obliterated? Can we write everything? Are we not obliged to approach obliquely, camouflaging our presence, turning away our faces? Can we see Goethe whole?

  It should have been burned to the ground and left to the wind. The town, too, should have been given over to the dark ink of time. No memorial, no ceremonies, just the salted earth forever. Because we have no right to remember.

  Thereafter the night turns, and it is empty. And when we take leave the next day to return to our respective cities of time and of rhythm, Andrej Bitow and I, as writers from nowhere at the end of one century and the beginning of another, exchange the empty bound books that we had been given by the organizers. He writes in the copy which he hands me:

  “I would like to present you something. But we, in our monastery, have nothing. .” Underneath he jots: “For writing nothings.”

  And in my copy to him I note: “1. Thou shalt not kill. 2. Thou shalt laugh with thy whole face and thy whole belly. 3. Thou shalt study the expressions on the faces of ants.”

  FRÈRE KHÈRE1

  exile

  memories terribly leaked away

  (Sappho)

  will you stay with me as far as I go

  brother stone still throb with the stillness

  of a spoilt moon rotting and rending

  the sea of stars

  era la negra

  negra solitud de las islas

  there was

  the black aloneness of islands the hard

  cold hour deserted like the wharves at dawn

  when cold stars and whales heave up

  black

  birds migrate as free goddesses leaving port

  y solo la sombra trémula se retuerce en mis manos

  (and only the tremulous shadows twist in my hands)

  what were you before I found you

  Neruda what

  who was I before you made

  yourself known and how will I know you

  brother stone petrified eye of time

  fearless and lidless or tongue

  and if so what word was stilled

  as vowel of eternal becoming

  qué dolor no exprimiste qué olas no te ahogaron

  say

  what sorrows did you not express

  what waves did not drown you

  say

  I was told

  that with you to put on top of the head

  I would stop growing to darkness and wings

  because you would be my moon mind made visible

  to trace and confine the shadowy earth

  I was told

  that with you as word in the mouth

  I would never again tire of flying

 
in place

  as tiredness itself would be pronounced

  a grave pebble under the tongue

  and when

  and then

  and now

  es la hora de partir oh abandonado

  when it will be the hour of departure

  will you stay my hand

  brother

  stone

  be the marker of my absence

  KNOWING IS ALWAYS A FUNCTION OF GRAMMAR

  Mind is an insatiable gormandizer. You, as toilsome writer, will lay down a page, perceptibly mind will devour it and ask for more without giving so much as a passing thought to the time and the pain of composition. One never knows when one has had enough. To become conscious is to be alienated. Perhaps the price of survival or the penitence for alienation is to never reach satisfaction. Does one experience this feeding frenzy because Reality cannot be hunted down or recovered?

  Mind slurps up the surroundings and presents as justification that the about-mind can only take on shape through the process of swallowing-and-integration. A partisan and parasite argument, if I ever heard one! This may be true if one accepts that it is impossible to know anything except through the subjective point of being. And that no other shape of knowledge can exist. For something doesn’t exist until I have taken cognition of it. (But this taking-notice-of or getting-acquainted-with may be unexpectedly sudden and brutal, as with a lamppost in the dark, or with death.)

  Now this happens: the gorging and digestion of consciousness is the creation of unawareness. And also a replacement. There is neither ‘environment’ nor ‘world,’ only the waxing and chiming of consciousness. But equally true: without surroundings there can be no coming to consciousness. I cannot be without becoming, and only become in reference to that which stimulates me to understanding or reflection. Mind is but a growing awareness of the existing environment. Mind is but a tiny reflex action of an unborn and immortal and all-pervasive rhythm. Mind opens up, opens up, and doesn’t exist. The most pure being is to stop being, is nonbeing. It is also the Buddha nature. Mind is movement.

  And it is in writing that we put down the dullness: both the cooled residue of pure consciousness and the seed of new awareness. Writing is the mediating line spelling out the paradox. Writing is the ongoing imagination and invention of that which has existed since all darkness and absence. It is our way of visibly trying to breathe rhythm.

  THE RETURNS

  So what did I bring back from my trip to Berlin? First, a lake of black tiredness like a liquid mirror just below the horizon of wakefulness, threatening to rise at any moment and engulf me in dark oblivion. The Afrikaans word for jet lag is vlugvoos — to have been made spongy, perished or rotten by flight. Then, a jumble of impressions.

  Airports have become irksome and dangerous places. The illusion has been punctured. It was probably never going to be ‘normal’ for the human to fly, but these entry zones were intended to lull you into thinking you were in some shopping mall piping soothing music, with service people, polite and efficient, processing you painlessly through the various stations of embarkation, and your fellow-departees interestingly attractive. It was to be painless, though dull. Now it is chaos in there. To get on board is like going into combat: sullen but ill-trained functionaries body-search you and dig into your luggage repeatedly, irritated clerks ask silly questions over and over, waiting lines snake for miles down the corridors, fellow-travelers are disheveled and grumpy, flights are retarded beyond decent delays. In Frankfurt, on the way back, rushing for a connection, I made my way to the head of the line by telling people they should not be fooled by my beard, that I’m actually seven months pregnant. You wouldn’t want me to have a messy miscarriage right here, would you now? An angry woman with glasses spat at me. At the screening posts little old ladies of eighty or more, clutching forms and passports and tentatively tottering on spindly ankles, were ordered to return to the check-in counters and book their umbrellas. One had visions of madly yelling grandmothers spearing pilots and transfixing them to the walls of the cockpit. And once you surmounted these obstacles, were you finally to feel more secure? Of course not. The only slight distraction was to try and spot the air marshal. As the aircraft growled and shuddered to get into the air one was painfully aware of the howling emptiness below.

  On board I read a news item about problems at Tel Aviv airport. It would seem that the take-off flight path has planes fly directly over a considerable cemetery. The descendants of Aaron, the Cohens, destined to be priests, are not permitted to enter burial-places so as not to be defiled by death. A ‘solution’ had been found: these believers take their shrouds with them (in effect, plastic body-bags), and zip themselves inside for as long as it takes for the shadow of the plane to move over the impure place. Due to more stringent security concerns, one is no longer allowed to take along your folded death envelope as hand luggage. The authorities worry about people smothering in their sheets. A rabbi who was unwilling to break the rule hired a small private plane to fly him, wrapped in his shroud, to Cyprus where he boarded a regular connecting flight to London.

  We are moving into a whole new world. On an incoming aircraft a gentleman got up from his seat shortly before landing and hurriedly made his way to the forward toilet. Time and bladder have their own pressing habits. Immediately two flight attendants and a third person in civilian clothes (obviously the air marshal) floored and overpowered the hapless man, holding a cocked gun to his head, and all the other passengers had to stick ’em up before placing same on the backs of the chairs in front of them. The trussed man apologized profusely, explained that he is a full-bladdered lawyer, to no avail. (Being from Mexico, his skin was also the color of sunned wind.) The plane landed, agents came on board to take the unthinking fellow in custody, and he was only released hours later, sopping wet by then one presumes.

  I crouched in my seat and promptly tried to get drunk. Just before leaving the house I learned about the death of my mentor and old friend, Jan Rabie, far away in South Africa. I was told that it had been hot and sultry there for quite some time. He would have been uncomfortable with the early season heat, lying in his bed in a home for the terminally weak. He’d been suffering from Alzheimer’s for a number of years already. He had become shrouded in grayness. The last time I visited him there he recognized me immediately, but it was as if he had to come back from far to focus; Golden Lotus and Gogga were with me, and he insisted on speaking French. On the 14th, last week, he had his 81st birthday, and the next day his heart stopped. Maybe he’d tried to sit up, to get one last look of the blue mountain wall behind and the ocean rustling below, smell the wind and taste the salt. He’d been a singular traveler, always going against the trends of his time, execrated by the bourgeoisie, so little understood, denigrated even by his fellow writers. . How I loved him.

  I tried to write an angry poem about our ranks being thinned out, and how futile our battle against the subversive and sly and cruel Dog Death is turning out to be.

  Some months later his wife, Marjorie, the painter and mistress of gossip, will have a massive brain hemorrhage on the opening night of a retrospective exhibition of her work in Fools Forest. When Jan was too weak to resist she used to go to the hospice where he lay at lunchtime and eat up all his food. Now she will end up in the same place. When she finally comes to and is less befuddled she will ask after her departed husband, he has left and she doesn’t know where he is. Friends will gently remind her that he’s dead and gone, but she will contest that and tell them she has been reading the obituaries in the daily newspaper and there was nothing about Jan.

  On the German side, when you arrive, matters are more relaxed. You step high and try to look sober. The autumn days are blustery but clear. Many men have clipped moustaches and short, graying hair. They go dressed in long, elegant coats of good cloth. The women are noticeably slimmer than those on this side of the Atlantic. They use little visible make-up and wear their hair loose. Their feet seem to be narrow and their
shoes are shined to a high gloss. People carry briefcases (there are few backpacks to be seen) and stride purposefully. Many have folded newspapers that they then open with crackling sounds as if unveiling revelations. They frown their brows and make snorting noises. On the front pages there are reports of the war in Afghanistan and photos of summary executions carried out brutally. Some of the headlines are in Gothic script. Articles describe how a Green Party minister in a three-piece suit voted with the senior coalition partner, the German Socialist Party, to send soldiers to the war, and then speculate about how this may break the ruling alliance. I wasn’t used to being in an environment where people are in appearance so homogeneous, so predominantly white. The streets in Berlin are smooth and clean and often tree-shadowed. I saw no dogs outside. The buildings sometimes have colored facades and the windows are double-glazed. The Tiergarten is aflame with the slow fire and rust of the dying season. Despite growing economic difficulties there still is a lot of good money in Germany. You can smell it on the soft necks of people when you embrace them or on their manicured hands.

  The conference was a textbook example of wasted effort, energy and money. Well, perhaps not entirely so. One of the working documents was a recently approved UNESCO declaration on the rightto (cultural) diversity. Although it was written in the regular gray putty of Internationalese, clearly the product of many a compromise arrived at through dull and cynical committee chugging and slugging, it still constitutes a reference point of legitimacy for the oppressed or ignored minorities of the world. Under the title, “The Global Dimension of Cultural Policy,” the conference grouped UNESCO bureaucrats responsible for the implementation of that strange institution’s cultural policies, those running the “Haus der Kulturen der Welt” in Berlin, directors and other top dogs of the Goethe-Institut and the Institut Français and the British Council, and random stragglers and strugglers of culture and creativity.