Mouroir

And Move

Do you remember when we were still making memories?

I am human. Or humanoid if you prefer. Subject to the same whims and fancies as you may be. Lazy in a similar way too: the flesh thickens and the mind becomes blunt, the imagination caducous, if you see what I mean. Let me put it another way: that I live like a blind and aged foetus inside the layers of myself, gobbling up whatever experience I find at hand, feeding the caecum (and that that in itself gives carnal satisfaction). I am, I think, (still) bent on gaining weight in this charnelhouse so as not to be blown away by the black wind of oblivion. For to live and to feel yourself living you have to jiggle around with D. Death. (Perhaps it is the other way around.) And for sure I am a miserable petit bourgeois, an obyvatel. Of what possible use or contribution can I be to the revolution anyway? Often the same nightmare recurs: some delegate is dumping a batch of dead horses’ heads in my lap and blood and mucus will yet be dribbling from the horrible nostrils and lips to mess up my pants. No, I am too far removed to be (vigorously) of the proletariat.

I have said that I am lazy but it should rather be that I am lying in wait. For what? Ah, for nothing — since I’m not particular. That is exactly it: for nothing. I have thought of that before. Why then communicate? That, I can assure you, is not a matter of choice. Besides — I don’t. I digest. Words are winds, obliterating taste. And often I have to assume that I’m still alive. Merely a prolepsis? Even so I shan’t be making any hurried attempts to move (even if I could): one shouldn’t provoke a prolapsus. It needs something protuberant to get me going if at all; a salient experience. If at all. And then I just leave the acts lying about. Let them grow fat, become facts. Erst kommt das Fressen und dann kommt die Moral. I am furthermore, I must tell you fairly, like Procrustes the highwayman who made his victims fit his bed by stretching or lopping them.

This prolegomenon (this proem, yes) is necessary because of what my friends Tuchverderber and Galgenvogel keep saying to me. They don’t fancy the way in which I bring up my words (to put it mildly). They carp at my being prolix, verbose. They think that I am putting on. They accuse me of being weighty (which is exactly to the point). They don’t comprehend why I procrastinate, why I don’t burp and get it over with. (But be careful of the black wind, I feel like telling them.) Of an afternoon we sit chewing the fat and there they are munching their lips and gnashing their gums. “Why dontcha write a simple story?” one of them, either Galgenvogel or Tuchverderber, asks. “Why not ‘boy sees gurl, gurl sees boy, boy likes gurl, gurl screws boy (or the other way around), alas gurl is already married, boy terminates husband with extreme prejudice, luckily the court finds it legitimate defence and they all live happily ever after’? To what purpose all this hum-hum muck?” One of us refills the little shot-glasses with kümmel (we don’t wish to know the sun disappearing). The thin blood from bloated horses’ heads has soaked into my trousers. They think I’m writing for obscurity. Just jiggling around with Kultur. Little do they know. If at all. Their chins are grey too. Each goitre a gobbling half a gander. Wobbling in earnest indignation. “Ja,” I answer, “am I to scribble for the worms?² Would you have me suffer the delusion of a Weltverbesserungswahn? To amuse the masses? To be flatulent? (I beg your pardon.) But I’m too fat for that. And D. Death is too thin, too white, too scaly. All the same.” All the same what then? A piercing question. “All the same it is a Kriegspiel.”

I digest these thoughts and counterpoints while I sit in the bus. Perhaps, I reflect, I shall bring them a simple tale after all. It should naturally describe everyday matters in an uncomplicated way. One shouldn’t weigh it down with all those utterances of life. For instance, what could be more straightforward than this trip this afternoon? Of course I could introduce a jiggling of beauty here and yonder just for the juice of it — some lacustrine colours perhaps, and a breath of sentiment not too lachrymose. Nothing lacerating however, no — none of that turning inside out or bringing dark mumblings to light.

And really it is quite a clear story. Let me tell it in the past tense and then allow me to go into the future. And move. Merely a prolepsis? But it is the pattern that weaves its tissues which cannot be avoided. (Ah, the layers of blunting and the carnal joys!)

We had a fine afternoon of it together in that big grey building where we used to meet so often. Slowly we lipped and sipped our kümmel and we refrained from observing the sun sinking. Now I really had to leave to rejoin my lady wife. It was cumbersome — my coming out was already a rare occurrence since I didn’t move much any more these days. I bade goodbye to my friends Tuchverderber and Galgenvogel. I was inordinately proud of not having made any mention of rumours (or fat facts) which had reached my ears lately. Was it Galgenvogel or Tuchverderber who couldn’t look me in the eye, who asked no question about my lady wife?

It was late but the day refused to die — just as if it were suspended for an eternity. I wanted to go back to my lady wife. She had been out shopping with Eva and I was thinking that she may get worried upon returning to this unaccustomed absence of mine.

I called my man. He help-handed me into the cart and then set out pulling it. We called him “The Horse” because of the clopping noise he made when trotting. This was due to the heavy and clumsy black boots he wore. He had had polio as a youth and since then the carpus and tarsus were permanently warped and annealed so that he had to go about on his errands with these stiff boots on, keeping the time to himself with rigid wrists. None the less we progressed at a jolly nice pace, jiggling, and I knew that home was only a few canals away from the grey building.

But today he took me back along an unfamiliar route. To tell the truth, it had been such a long time since I’d come out of myself that I no longer recognized the city. (But please don’t let me complicate the story.)

Horse was tiring, I could see it by the angle of his grey hat sinking ever deeper between the shoulders. So that I allowed him to convince me that we should take the bus as we neared the station. We got in — Horse with much stomping of shanks, obsequious winking and rubbing of hard hands. Apparently he knew the conductor and the other passengers. Horse and the cart were put in a special compartment rather like a stall separated from the rest of the bus by a steel partition. Against this he proceeded to kick with his clumsy black boots, all the while sniggering and moving his greasy grey fedora backward and forward on his head. He has a grey face with a wobbling chin and the goitre of a cretin. He also drools at the mouth. But this never stopped him from chatting and gossiping — a real flibbertigibbet. Was it not from him I heard the rumours concerning my lady wife and Galgenvogel or Tuchverderber?

The bus, strangely enough, took us right out of town. Horse and the conductor and even my fellow travellers kept on trying to reassure me that this was quite all right, even rather normal. But I didn’t remember the city this way at all. I certainly didn’t recognize these suburbs and the countryside unfolding — not that I’ve ever been far enough from my home to know. If at all. But I’ve always conceived of my home town as flat and shot through with canals running just a little lower than the cobbled streets. Now I saw black hills dotted with sunshine. From time to time the bus stopped and taciturn men with blackened hands and faces half swallowed by the shadows of flat caps got on. These were miners, I was told, and those hills are mine-dumps. What a labyrinth of shafts and corridors and caverns there must be below the surface to excrete all this blackness, I thought. Like thoughts. We also passed places where there were lighter patches not unlike furry growths. I wondered whether these may be flowers — cacti perhaps, or rocks of a vegetable shape? But no, everyone confirmed, they were only the severed heads of horses from the abattoirs and from nearer, I was assured, I would see the blood and mucus still freshly trickling from them, and the scores of busy flies. All the scars. (Or stars.)

But that, I felt, really belonged to another story. And I was quite enjoying the ride despite the unfamiliar proletariat all around me. The day was caught motionless in a decline of dappled lights; distances held the sheen of lacquer rather like the soft sateen of my shirt. Ja, I ruminated, this day is finally just like a smile saturated, soaked in sunshine. (But my pants were damp.)

We passed by the lakes. We passed over a bridge with the railway tracks below us. Workers got on and got off. They mumbled and moved their caps with black hands. Horse whinnied and kicked against the steel-plated partition behind which he was standing. We came to a forest. Hills and green trees and the opaque but silver surfaces of water. Porcelain and peppermint and pink. And then behind the tip of the woods the city reappeared.

I knew that this was the same city, I instinctively appropriated the memory of it, and as we entered the first streets I saw in fact that I was now so very nearly home — just approaching it, you know, as it were from behind. I felt quite content. More precisely: I was heavy with contentment. Now I should go home, I thought. And forgive my wife my immobility. And perhaps I should go out more often and then reabsorb the familiar from this unexpected angle and show it to her and to my friends Galgenvogel and Tuchverderber too. One could have picnics here. I even felt benign towards The Horse. In truth of course I have the edge over him, I am superior to him — for whereas he hates me I like him. But that has to do with fatness and the blight of a festering class consciousness.

The bus halted. There were now crowds of people milling about in the streets here on the edge of the city. Some girls were dressed in our national costume. It was strange because unannounced and inexplicable. I just couldn’t work out what the processions were in aid of. Was this a national holiday then? Or — G. God forbid! — an uprising? revolution? anarchy? Already? (If at all.)

And I found myself as suddenly abandoned in the bus. I called (or burped) for The Horse, but he was no longer in the little stable. So, with great toil and difficulty I managed to alight by myself. People were jostling over one another in the teeming streets. But this must be the same town, I thought: after all I practically know this area and those houses from behind.

In the street I tried to ask my way from a prancing youngster. His teeth flashed. All the people had flashes in their mouths. But neither he nor anyone else among the frenzied bypassers knew any French. A few trees from the nearby forest grew to within the city limits. Under their high canopies the room-like spaces were already dark. Ah, I thought — now the day is finally going.

I felt rather than saw a shuffling of people (skirmishing? dancing? imitating horses?) in a narrow and leafy alley leading off the paved main thoroughfare where the bus was now being rocked by a gaggle of dark-faced juveniles. So I heaved myself over in that direction, feeling true, feeling solid.

When I came near the gesticulating throng gave way (before my weight). Two men crouched in the sudden circle, flecked with patterns of darkness, and they looked at me with saurian eyes, their scaly lips dappled with blood and their grey chins wobbling.

They came to me in a streak of understanding, my two friends: Tuchverderber and Galgenvogel. “Ah,” one of them — or it might have been both — breathed, and the other one so rapidly and deftly produced a kukri or a kris — the blade a steely white flash-tongue of all clarity and knowingness and simplicity — jiggling it — that my comprehension froze. And plunged it with a curious little falsetto snigger into the layers of my dumbness. Splitting the blubber, spilling extravagantly the writhing white worms. Death. Yes. D. Death.

(One never digests death my friends.) (If at all.)