Intimate Stranger

WRITE AND WRONG

One plunders the notebook again and again. I don’t know whether I’ve written this before.

I find: “The past is the ink with which we write the present — and in the process and the flow of writing words, concepts and ideas, the images, the flights become. . just ink. Whereas, what we’d probably like to write would be an open hand wherein time, which is the future of the present movement of surfacing, could find its fit and its fist.” (One also remembers that there is lamp-black in ink.)

A little further I find: “You must polish the word — not to have it shiny or smooth, but to make it as clear as the mirror or the pebble in which you can read your face, and may see that your face is death.” And then: “The recognition and the acceptance of the Other’s humanity (or humanness) is a maiming of self. You have to wound the self, cut it in strips, in order to know that you are as similar and of the same substance of shadows.”

These reflections surface during the visit to Weimar where I’m to be a member of the jury tasked with deciding which philosophical essay best answers the question of how to free the future from the past and the past from the future.

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.”