I went into the Laden for cigarettes. The man behind the
counter was Ottoman. Turkish, or Greek, or Serbian. There was a small
television suspended over the counter with a convex screen. It was in
a foreign language but it sounded like sports commentary. I showed
the man where the cigarettes were and he put them on the counter. The
hair on his arm was wild and grey. There was a pale reflection of it
in the glass of the cabinet behind him. When I had given him the
money he sat back down, and his eyes returned to the television. I
took the cigarettes, went a little way down the road and found a wall
to sit on. It had rained the day before. There were small, muddy
patches of water in the road, into which yellow leaves had fallen.
They had started to evaporate, drawing back into themselves. Former
domains. Alte Räume. “Help Me Rhonda” was playing in a Wirtshaus
down the street. I could hear it coming from the doorway. The smoke
and the road and the buildings opposite were blue. There was a
sparrow under the bench of the bus shelter. I looked at it and looked
at my hands. They were pale and blue. I could see the veins and feel
the pulse in my wrist, and then I began to feel it in my neck and in
my head, and I took another drag of the cigarette, and felt worse.
Ash dropped into my lap. My heart felt tight, my breathing tight. I
closed my eyes and exhaled and when I opened them I felt worse,
dizzy. I put the cigarette down on the wall next to me, and then I
leant down to the wall and put my head in my arm and it spun. When I
sat back up I had to cough and I could feel that my eyes were red and
moist from coughing. An old woman walked past and looked mournful
watching me cough, and I began to laugh, coughing, seeing myself as
she saw me. I wiped my nose. I'll eat a meal somewhere, I thought. I
watched a plane go through the branches of the trees planted along
the road.
HIRN
My flight came in at dawn. We were delayed landing and
made another loop to the southwest, over the city. The earth rose in
the window as the plane banked. The river was dark green and calm,
yellow streetlights strung along the Fahrbahn on the north shore. I
saw a motorboat pass under the old bridge, the water swelling in the
shadow of the bridge at its tail. The lights were still on
everywhere, in the windows of the Opernturm and the Post Tower and
far out into the suburbs. Traffic seemed to drift down the roads like
particles in a stream. We made our slow circuit, the city turning
beneath us. I took my flask from the back of the seat and drank a
little from it, then rubbed my legs where they ached from sitting. I
closed my eyes and listened to her voice. Music came over the
speakers and they thanked us for having flown with them. I opened my
eyes and looked out the window and into the back of the seat. I took
out the flask for another drink, which made my head hot, and I could
tell I had had enough. I started to feel it in my stomach. The sun
was coming up, and as we came back around to the north it lit up
hundreds of windows along the lateral streets. It was as if fires had
sprung up inside all the houses and offices. I let my eyes relax.
There were flowers moving in the wind. The flowers moved as the light
moved, and as the plane moved, and as the earth moved. I looked back
down into the water and there were lights there too. I felt her body
close to mine, I could smell her in my clothes. I leant into the seat
in front and put my hand to my eyes, and wiped my eyes and wiped my
hand on my knee. I undid my seatbelt and tried to get up, but the
stewardess got me back down into my seat. I looked back out. The fire
had gone out of the windows. I saw a train coming down through the
Bahnhof to its terminus.
STIMME
You
must write as a conductor would write, he said, looking around at us.
You must be a conduit as he is a conduit. In the moment before you
begin to write, your meaning is there, in potentia. It is silent. It
is silent until you move yourself into it. Your faculties lie dormant
in their quarters. They are subject to you. They are your
instruments. Raise the baton : summon up what you have to summon. It
is a movement so slight, those outside may not perceive it. A
movement like waking. A quiet movement, a kind of resignation. To
those born to it, a instant comes in which the voices they hear –
the voices in the world around them – grow dull, blend together,
draw out, disfigure. The words lose their sense ; the voices
themselves fall into a certain harmony. For the most part, we are too
agitated to hear this music. Il faut que nous nous ralentissons. All
understanding is an understanding of cadence. Call up your voices,
call up your familiar spirits, mes enfants! Attend to them well.
Observe their sequence. Your thoughts must be like chains. For all
the esteem you might hold me in, I should not be your model in this
; I am only a jester at the door. Turn to our kings. Unsere
Volksdichter. Take down one of their archetypes. The hopeless lover,
for example. Your knight aspirant cries „Ich
bin verloren!“
and weeps into his hands? So, he is your instrument. We should hear a
song die in his throat.
He put his hands together and looked at the door.
In
any case, he said, you have listened to a great deal of my nonsense
today. Thank you. Next week we will be back to our usual room. As a
point of notice, I will be holding an unscheduled seminar in
a half an hour's time at the estimable Frau Göldner's public house.
Any who wish to join me are welcome and will find me in a buying
mood.
There was snow on the ground outside. He gave me a
cigarette and clapped me on the back.
MUTTERSCHOSS
It
was summer in Bayern. That day we went up the valley, through the
woods and further on to where there were stones down by the river. We
swam over to the far bank and we could see upstream some children
fishing. Later, back at the chalet, we played cards and ate potato
dumplings and Mama let me have some of her wine. Helene and I went to
sleep in the little room. Papa came in and woke us up and said there
were shooting stars. We got in our coats and went out. I could only
see the shapes of the trees and I felt like I was in water. We came
to the field on the hillside. Papa shouted and fell down and rolled
over, I could see him roll over in the grass. He said „Wer
hilft mir auf die Beine?“
and laughed again. He pulled Helene down and pulled me down and we
rolled down the hill. We lay in the grass. Mama came and sat next to
me and did up my coat button by button. She pointed to a band of
lighter sky and said that it was die Milchstraße,
that it was thousands and thousands of stars so far and so many that
they were like dust. Helene saw a star fall across the sky but I
didn't see it. We lay very still and watched the sky for a long time.
A line cut across the darkness like a white pencil mark, silently,
and disappeared. It was faint and I didn't know if it was a shooting
star but Papa said it was. Then I listened to the crickets, and I
knew they were around us in the grass, but I thought that the stars
were changing and the noise of the crickets coming from the sky. I
saw one jump across the sky, fainter this time, red. I started to
fall asleep and my hair was wet. Mama helped me up and kissed me on
the head. We walked back to the house a different way, Papa lifted
Helene and me over a stile. Mama sang us a song on the path back to
the house. There was a light on in the window.
GLIED
From the front door and through the corridor and the
kitchen and into and out of the dining room, and into the outhouse
and into the yard and to the wall of the barn, I ran, my dress
pulling at the buttons, the skirt flying up and brushing the walls
and brushing the water from the bush before the door. Mama's shouts
came from every part of the house and when I came out of the door and
into the yard a damp wind came through the Hoftor and I ran in
circles with my arms like wings, feeling the wind push me and the
stones shift under my feet. Low clouds passing overhead in a shoal. I
felt tired against the barn wall. The dandelions at my feet went pale
and my breath came slower. I had dreamed that I walked through a
field at night and there were birds passing over and a windmill at
the hillcrest where the birds had landed and that an auguste clown
had a fire in a barrel there, which we rolled down the hillside and
into the river, and that the birds—I knew they were geese when I
woke—had waddled down and swum over the water into the fire, into
the fire until we saw them no more. I picked the flowers at my feet
and walked the long grey wall down to the stable, fighting my hair
down out of my face, getting burrs from the grasses in my socks.
There were the empty stalls. All away at the shows this week. Two
summers ago I saw the dapple stallion mount and I felt what made my
stomach pinch and after dinner I was sick. I was such a baby then
that am eleven now and grown. My blood is a secret, Mama says. When
the mares come from the field in winter they wet their hay in
steaming falls and their water is golden and their Kacken is golden
for all they consume is gold of grass and gold of grain and gold of
apples and gold of oats. I am golden. Vater burns his hand and he
says „So ne Scheiße!“ and when the stallion walks it moves
between the legs.
PANTOMIME
I did my medical Praxis in West Berlin. Johns Hopkins
had an exchange with the Freie Universität at the time. There was a
bookshop that was also a coffeeshop where I spent my morning hours
after the early early shift and it faced our side of the wall. I had
started going there with friends, every so often, but soon found I
was in there alone every day of the week. It was close and the coffee
was not so terrible as elsewhere, and the girls that worked there
were neither terrible. It was a good place to be half asleep. I used
to look at the graffiti and watch the traffic out of the big windows
at the front of shop. One morning there was a performer under the
wall, face painted white, gloves, black slouch hat, kind of a clown.
A mime, I guess. He was making some gestures in the direction of the
East. He would run planes in front of his face with his outstretched
hand and crash them into the concrete and have them fall to the earth
and mime the smoke. He was close enough I could see his makeup. He
had a frown and sad lips painted on but he was grinning like crazy as
he crashed planes into the wall, like crazy, and when he grinned it
broke up the design of the lips. White teeth, red gums. Then he
changed hats and started goosestepping up and down, stopping each
time and turning about on his heel and grabbing himself. Then he was
running into the wall and falling back from it exaggeratedly. That
went on for some time. There was a huge design of an eagle stencilled
above him on the face of the concrete. It was a Reichsadler, smoking
a snub cigar, with dice held in one claw and the old Schwarz-Weiß-Rot
crumpled in the other, the eyes crazed and blue. I watched the
performer moving silently underneath it for ten minutes or so until
the sun came across the windowpane and my head began to hurt in its
heat. I moved back into the shop and took a booth. I ate a pastry and
drank coffee, looking over the newspaper. When I left the shop there
were three police around him and he was no longer grinning. He was
screaming what I'm sure were oaths in German as the officers lifted
his kicking legs from the scrub and refuse and soil he had been
sitting in. His white, limp member was hanging from the fly of his
black pantaloons. He cried out raucously, each cry falling in thick
steam onto the air, like puffs of ordinance from a cannonmouth.
ÜBERICH
An angel spoke in the
morning dark. It saw that we, living and dying, felt the vastness
about us ; that we reached back into our past and feel a great
nothing, an unending Zeitraum ; that we felt our world had had no
genesis and would have no end. Seeing us so, the angel said : “My
children, it is not an hour since the world began.” –I look
through our great leatherbound family album with my grandfather. He
in the green armchair, I at his shoulder angling a lamp over the
yellowed pages. He opens it at the back. My uncle. My cousins. My
mother dancing. My mother receiving her degree. My father, the
suitor, disfigured by frame-spectacles and an untamed mustache. My
grandmother at the stove wearing my grandfather's hat and sticking
out her tongue. The old house in Bremen. My uncle at the age of ten,
wearing running shorts and a vest. A photograph of boys I do not
recognise. A photograph of a girl I do not recognise. The photographs
are monochrome now. My grandfather in uniform. My grandmother, young,
pretty, in a spotted dress beneath the sign of a restaurant. My
grandfather with another man playing cards, former in shirtsleeves
smoking a cigar. An old woman in an extensive swimsuit on a beach. My
grandfather says it is his mother, on the shore at Sylt. There are
many photographs now and I do not recognise the faces. They become
more formal. There are heavy backdrops and curtains, and the clothes
slowly begin to age. My grandfather turns the pages slowly. I see
features of my mother and of my grandfather and my grandmother here
and there, but distorted, tempered, stretched over unfamiliar frames.
The pictures become strange to me. The album is open on a page
dominated by a large portrait. It is of a man in a dark uniform, a
man in none of the other photographs. The man's eyes are large and
piscene, his neck thick and bullish. A face set as if in the effort
of command. I recognise the uniform, and the white insignia on the
collar. My grandfather is silent. He smooths the page with his left
hand, and I hear his breathing shorten. He draws a strand of hair
away from his forehead. After a short interval, he gets up and
replaces the album on the shelf. I stay by the chair. He comes back
to it and sits and for an instant we both stare ahead at the carpet.
“My father,” he says.
