Flights

JOSEFINE SOLIMAN’S THIRD LETTER TO FRANCIS I

Your Majesty maintains a silence and is no doubt engaged in important affairs of state. But I will not abandon my efforts, and so I write to Your Majesty once again in order to beg for mercy. My last letter was written over two years ago, yet I have had no response. I repeat, then, this plea.

I am the only child of Angel Soliman, Your Majesty’s servant, eminent diplomat for the Empire, an enlightened and widely respected man. I beg for mercy for myself, for I shall never know peace so long as I should have the knowledge that my father, my father’s body, has not yet obtained a Christian burial but is instead – stuffed and chemically treated – on view in the Cabinet of Natural Curiosities at the court of Your Majesty.

Since the birth of my son, I have suffered from an illness that continues to get worse. I fear this matter is as hopeless as my own health and now believe that if I am to obtain anything – which I think I shall not – it will be but by the skin of my teeth. The word ‘skin’ fits perfectly here, as – if I may be permitted one more mention of it – my father was skinned when he died, subsequently stuffed, and now serves as an exhibit in Your Majesty’s collection.

Your Majesty refused the young mother, but perhaps the same shall not be true of the young mother on her deathbed. I visited that horrible place before leaving Vienna. For I married Your Majesty’s servant, Herr von Feuchtersleben, military engineer, subsequently transferred to the northern reaches of our country – to Krakow. I was there and saw it. I might say that I went to visit my father in hell, since as a Catholic I believe that without his body he will not be able to be resurrected in the Last Judgement. That faith also suggests that in spite of what some think, the body is our greatest gift – that it is sacred.

When God became man, the human body was forever sanctified, and all the world took on that form of one single individual man. There is no other access to other people or to the world other than by way of the body. Had Christ not taken on a human form, we could never have been saved.

My father was skinned like an animal, stuffed haphazardly with grass, and placed in the company of other stuffed human beings among the remains of unicorns, monstrous toads, two-headed fetuses floating in alcohol and other similar curiosities. I watched as they crowded in to see Your collection with their own eyes, My Lord, and I saw how their faces flushed as they beheld the skin of my father. I heard them praise You for Your vigour and Your courage.

When You visit Your exhibit, my Lord, go to him. Go to Angel Soliman, Your faithful servant, whose skin serves You even after death. Those hands, which have since been stuffed with grass, once embraced and reassured me; that face, now dried out and caved in, once brushed up against my own. That body loved and was loved, until attacks of rheumatism finally finished my father off.

From this arm, Your own doctor let my father’s blood. These remains labelled with my father’s name were once a living man. I often wonder – every night it keeps me from falling peacefully asleep – what the real reason is for such cruel treatment of my father’s corpse (may he rest in peace).

Can it be that it is simply the colour of his skin? Dark? Black? Would a white-skinned man who wound up in some exotic locale be treated the same – be stuffed and exhibited to the curiosity of passers-by? Is it sufficient for another human being to be different, be it outwardly or inwardly and be it in any way, for him to be stripped of the rights and customs ordinarily afforded to man? Were those rights conceived and created merely for people who were identical to one another? But the world is full of diversity. Many miles to the south there are people who are different from those who settled the North. And in the East, there are people who are different from those in the West. What is the point of a law that applies only to some? The law should be observed for everyone without exception wherever our ships and our money are able to take us. Would Your Majesty stuff a courtier if he were white? A person of the absolute lowest position has the right to a funeral. By refusing my father that right, are you then denying his very humanity?

I think that those who govern us do not aim to govern our souls, as is commonly thought. The ‘soul’ is a concept that is hard to understand or identify with these days. If God is – may I be forgiven this bile – the One who wound up the clock, the Clockmaker, or, in fact, the spirit of nature, appearing in its hazy way and completely impersonal, then the notion of ‘soul’ becomes uncomfortable, embarrassing. What sort of ruler would reign by means of something so ephemeral and indefinite?

What sort of enlightened ruler would wish for power over something whose existence has not been proven in a laboratory? There is no doubt, Your Majesty, that real human power can only affect the human body – and that is precisely how it is exercised. The establishment of countries and of the boundaries between them demands of the human body that it remain in a clearly delineated space; the existence of visas and passports holds in check the body’s natural desire to roam and to move around. The ruler who sets up taxes has his sway over what his subjects will eat, what they shall sleep on, and whether they’ll wear linen or silk.

You determine, too, which bodies will be important, and which less so. Nourishment shall be divided unevenly by the mother’s milk-filled breasts. The child from the palace atop the hill will suckle till it’s satiated, while the child from the village in the valley will just lap up what’s left. And when you declare war, in so doing you are hurling thousands of human bodies into pools of blood.

To rule over the body is to truly be king of both life and death, which is greater than being the emperor of even the greatest country. So now I write to You accordingly, as to life and death’s lessee, as to a tyrant and usurper, and I no longer request but demand. Give me back my father’s body, so that I may bury him. I will follow you, my Lord, like a voice from the darkness, even when I die I will never let You be, never cease to whisper.

Josefine Soliman von Feuchtersleben