Mouroir

The Execution

These modern airships, he thinks, are damn well more luxurious and comfortable than the barely flying tin pails of yore. His eyes slide pleasurably over the interior. Nowadays there’s even an area, a space reserved in the belly of the body, which has been arranged like a salon, where passengers no longer have to squat like pupils, knees drawn up to the chest, in rows one behind the other, but may lean back peacefully to stretch their legs in armchairs and on sofas, face to face, each with a smile and a cocktail at the lips. (“Cocktail”, it is said, originally meant “horsetail”, an excited young stallion with the tail groomed and ribbon-interwoven.) There are even mirrors and imitation candlesticks against the sides. Some time ago already it was announced over the squawk-boxes that the aircraft would reach its destination, C — —, within a little less than half an hour that the local time is precisely so-and-so and the ground temperature 26˚C. The liquid in his glass is a rusty brown and even the two ice cubes, normally naked of any colour, now have very deeply a reddish tinkle. Half an hour and then the touchdown. There’s a slight tightness in his throat. Ample time to try and sort out the complications then — for he has no passport. Would it be best to trust in the mercy of the authorities? Across from him in attitudes of well-behaved and very evidently also well-to-do relaxation, sit a group of people with smartly tailored suits and tasteful gowns on their bodies, men and women of diverse ages who, it would appear, form a unit. Then he becomes aware, nearly outside the field of vision of his left eye, of a furtive movement: and not entirely unexpected after all, he realizes within that one moment of realization — one little bud of his attention had been preoccupied for quite some time with this swarthy female of around forty with the sleek black hair, between sips he has been watching her unconsciously, how she keeps shifting about in her seat. Suddenly this woman gets up in a resolute way and she is now moving down the aisle towards the door giving access from the passengers’ section to the cockpit (the flywell). That door is painted white. Close to the door, by the first rows of seats, an airgirl is still busy collecting cups and glasses from the travellers, filling up her tray. The fortyish woman, definitely nervous, scratches around in her imitation leather handbag, producing a knife. The knife has the long shimmer of a blade reflecting rolls of light. The hostess’s mouth becomes a sucking-black O of terror, she lets slide the tray and both her hands with the deep-red nails fly up to her lips to try and find shelter there, her blond curls are bobbing. It is too far for him and for the fellow fliers in the cabin to overhear the altercation. They all sit bolt-still with nailed shouts. The woman with the knife points at the white door which is half-closed. Then it is as if the plane flutters down, nose first, and the door is slammed close. The blade-lady grabs hold of the door handle and tries to open it, but it is probably locked from the other side. In vain does she push and pull at the door. While tears start running in wet-shiny tracks over cheeks she attacks one of the seats with her hand full of knife, long slits are ripped in the backrest so that the grey stuffing bulges into the open. There is nothing she can do about the situation now. Ichabod, or something like it. The air hostess neatly fetches up her fingers one by one, goes down on her knees, scrapes together the cups and saucers. The passengers relax and pick up their conversations — many, it would seem now, never even noticed the occurrence. He puts away the incident in one of the folds of his memory, so as to be in a position to use it later, and starts tying words with an elderly lady who sits with flabby thighs crossed in the angle of a settee opposite him; the hair a chic blue-grey coiffure and fleshmarks over forehead and cheeks, cicatrices maybe of a long-ago accident, or the tattooed imprints of her tribe. He lifts his glass. ¡Salud y cojones! he thinks, but it wouldn’t be fitting to offer this profoundly beneficial wish to a woman; so he settles for a muttered bis hundertzwanzig. Yes, the old aunt confirms his remark, they are a tour group of which she is supposed to be the leader, actually a choir. The other members modestly snigger in chorus when they hear her saying this. One is a chap with a very sallow face but cloud-blue eyes — to illustrate he hums a few dark bass notes, as if imitating in song the drone and the purr of the aircraft engines. There are small silvery stains in the black hair above his temples. He is the bass of the company. Well, strictly speaking not yet a properly constituted choir, the elderly soul directing this lot of rich no-goods takes up her talking again: they are all from Nomansland, she confirms with an approving and one could say a congratulatory look at everyone, and they are at present travelling around the world; now and then when they have a free moment (as here) they will form their lips around rounded sounds and allow their vocal cords to tremble, and if they find at the end of their trip that they harmonize and go well together, well, maybe then they will arrive at the decision to form a choral society. Most likely in Johnnysburg. You must feel first, and weigh up, and touch small glasses with the tuning fork. How else does one these days put together a vocal group? In what other way can you get on to the hit parade? Outside the portholes of the aeroplane it is revealed little by little that they are nearing their island destination: a green coral growth in the blue ocean, an atoll — a green pudding on a table covered with blue tablecloth — starts sliding in under the wings of the craft. Slowly they will descend, flaps will be resisting the air. The angles and the peaks of the island capture and reflect blinding knives of light. He removes the dark glasses from his upper pocket, puts them over his eyes.

He dons his dark glasses and the plane lands. A land, any country, is always, when seen from the sky, much greener than when one actually gets there. While dust clouds and the choking shrieks of braking still enclose them in waves, the less green surroundings rush in a smear of speed past the windows. The show is over. The luxury of air-conditioning and saloon cocktails now seems commonplace, dusty, artificial. By the gangway they later walk down to where some small buses are awaiting the arriving passengers on the airstrip, blue blowflies at the exhaust pipes. With feet on the earth the bodies are heftier. Each person settles for the most convenient position to sit or to stand, fingers his tie or inserts the fingers in a shoulder bag. Now it must happen, he thinks. What must be, must be. Not that he is resigned to his lot. He will simply say that he is a political refugee and they will have to comprehend this. Isn’t it true, strictly speaking? He doesn’t come with false pretences after all. But will they ever believe him? And if they question his bona fides? To his utter amazement the buses do not stop at the airport building but continue, with neither delay nor control, in the direction of the city. It doesn’t mean anything yet, he cautions himself — the problems are just being postponed till later. As soon as they leave the fenced-in area of the airport a rainshower comes (like thwatting grey flags in the rain) to veil the road and the bushes to either side. Behind the rain-flags you vaguely espy the movements of rank tropical plant life; the fleshy leaves, the tendrils and plant-tatters and milky ropes, the ferns and bamboos and palm trees and sugar cane and mango trees and banana plantations — everything heavy and glistening with water. Rain is liquefying silver, it is vanishing colour. They enter the city which seems all deserted. Would it be only because the rain has forced people to stay indoors? But it doesn’t look as if the houses are inhabited at all, or could even be used: many are dilapidated with broken roofs, others have their jalousies tightly bolted or grass shoots coming like wrinkles through the window apertures or chinks and slits in the walls. At measured distances, on street corners and at the intersections where the traffic lights are dead and not a single vehicle is to be seen, soldiers with green berets from which the water is pouring are posted. Each soldier has a drooping long red moustache. The moustaches are curly and so long that it appears, when the soldiers worry them with humid fingers, that they may be plaited. The buses traverse the entire city without the voyagers being able to catch by eye a single civilian, private conveyance, tram, trolleybus, chicken, pig or messenger. The tyres hiss with a sweeping sound over the asphalt, a bubbling as of eggs fried in a pan. They are a busload of cooped-up moths. Beyond the built-up zone they again penetrate the worn-out countryside. Here however it has stopped raining, in places maybe no rain at all has fallen, for the leaves are a dusty grey. In cleared areas in the ash-green bush they sometimes pass the ruin of a humble farmstead. Clouds, like the teased stuffing of a chair, curl and roll in all directions. What a dreary day, he thinks, and looks over his fellow passengers, their heads drawn into the shoulders, the wings folded, the antennae thick and without any feeling. They drive ever deeper into the interior, not in the direction of Mesa de Mariel or of Guanabacoa, but along the road past Santiago de las Vegas and Benjucal (with the Cordillera de los Organos to the right) till beyond Batabano where the road bifurcates — to Cajio and Guanimar on the one hand and Rosario and Tasagava on the other. Gradually the road becomes more untraversable because of potholes and gullies and mudpits and the obstacles of larger rocks and tree trunks. After some time the buses stop and they get out, dull and muzzy, to stretch the limbs and reactivate the circulation. The guide — the chauffeur of the first bus, with green beret and a wet red moustache — leads them away from the road through the vegetation to a marshy strip. They slosh through pools of stagnant water until they reach the edge of what appears to be a vast blue lake, certainly less deep than it would seem. Down the length of the watery surface, on high stilts of concrete, runs a modern highway; but this speedway (or what was intended as such) stops not far from where they are placed, high on its foundations, smack in the middle of the pan, as if the construction was abandoned right there. Rusted iron rods which were to reinforce the concrete now protrude everywhere. The road might as well have originated nowhere to reach this spot and remain suspended without destination ’twixt heaven and earth. Now you can see why it is so difficult to effectuate the necessary traffic connections in our country, the guide explains: this water before you has an exceptionally high salt content and contains apart from that a lot of sulphur too (our island is basically vulcanic); it erodes and finally destroys the pillars and the very road surface when it is built too low. And it is nearly impossible to provide for drainage because this water appears so to say overnight and can start welling up in the most unforeseen places and form a dam there. (True, the water must have arrived here rather suddenly, for the pan has no reeds, nor are any birds’ nests to be seen.) And there — he points out with an imperious movement of the hand — that there was to be our destination. Across the lake they see, as indicated by the guide, the broken-down walls of a few houses. It is not so much a case of decayed constructions, however, as that of buildings which were never completed. The walls fallen into disrepair are white with a crust of salt right up to the empty window frames. During this explanation his fellow passengers observed everything around them with mouths all black with surprise and interest (and confusion?). One man wanted to take souvenir photos and was furious when it became evident that his spouse had forgotten their camera somewhere — in the bus, the aircraft, or perhaps even in the second drawer from the bottom of the bedside cabinet in the hotel room of the hotel of another country. The fellow with the black face, the blue eyes and the distinguished temples fills his lungs completely with air and then starts to intone with his heavy voice: Bluewater! Bluewa-a-a-ter. . Then: It’s a firstclass day for screwing goats, screwing goats, s-cr-ew-ing g-o-a-t-s!

Think. Such a man, he thinks, it was just such a rare bird with a similar plumcoloured face who at the time became entangled in the merciless coils of being black. How do you know it wasn’t the same guy? he asks himself, and removes his dark glasses to better study the basso profundo. Yes, truly, despite the sallow exterior it really is a white man. Because White is posture, a norm of civilization. White is the specific arrogance of power. White is certainly as caught as Black by the conditioning and calcification of these relationships. How did Faulkner put it again? “How to God can a black man ask a white man to please not lay down with his black wife? And even if he could ask it, how to God can the white man promise he won’t?” True certainly, but equally certain from the mouth of Lucille Clifton:

girls

first time a white man

opens his fly

like a good thing

we’ll just laugh

laugh real loud my

black women.

Think. Black, they say, is not human — not yet; it’s kaffir, they say. The man, that fellow then who may well be the same one here, now, was cultivated and superior and pragmatic (but all abroad, entirely out of his depth) and he walked with wide shoulders and narrow eyes: therefore he must be White, they said; only, the pigmentation of his skin provided him with the ideal camouflage and out of curiosity and impudence he wanted to exploit this. During a police raid on a shebeen — which he frequented anonymously — it was the time of the revolution — he was arrested together with a bunch of genuine Blacks. In the process of sorting out, grading and classifying and partitioning thousands of people each week, a certain amount of confusion and some slip-ups cannot be avoided (made worse by the attempts of the ringleaders and the shrewd ones to obfuscate their true identities). The black White in the twinkling of an eye found himself in a harsh lock-up place, and from there, before you can say “knife”, in the death cell as part of a lot of sweating, chanting and feet-stamping black Blacks. You may say that he now ventured into a truly foreign cultural milieu. Also that his eyes were bigger than his stomach. Do you still remember what a row he kicked up, what a fuss he made, how strenuously he protested? Do you still see the flames in his blue eyes? High on the hilltops the fires spark against the moon. While the others sang to the heavens opening up above them, he, squeezed tight against the bars of the cell door, attempted to draw the attention of any passing authority. But nothing could be done to resolve the matter, the moths were blind, water was in the cellars of the houses. Ichabod, or something along those lines. Should one be bothered by the desperate and farfetched babbling of the condemned? It is not just a question of consequences and precedent and perhaps also quotas — there are finally also rules and regulations and a timetable that need to be respected. Struggling and screaming with foam-flecks around the lips, just like the others for that matter, a human being among the Blacks, he went up to the gallows room one morning at daybreak to have his neck stretched. Like a bow tie the rope was tied around his neck. As if for a dinner or a soirée dansante. But the pillory-cord is a pair of scissors snipping off life, he thinks along. You had an acquaintance among the doomed. It gives death another colour, another exultant visage, another smell.

What does this watery surface further remind you of? The stream of his thoughts is fretting the submerged and reticent stones of experience (like a beheaded cock). What does water always bring home to you? Easy, easy now my old one. The cock is in the head. Superlative tail feathers, no? Beautiful the red bubbling at the throat. . Remains the problem of your illegal entry, the complications. . That Christmas maybe? Remember. He puts his dark glasses back on, hides the eyes behind smoked lenses. It was along the Skeleton Coast and you were in that small coastal town — remember? Everything light and grey, the streets grey, the sky grey, the undefined sidewalks and the bedraggled gardens and the houses grey, and beyond the town the sand and the sea were grey too. A tremendous wind swept over all of this, brought fog-banks and veils of sand. It was cold with a bit gnawing through marrow and bone, a cold you can’t keep out of your body, which thoughtlessly and hypothermically takes possession of you in the same way that a thought infiltrates the wind, and without any positive effect you try to ban it. It cannot be chased off. Like ink in blotting paper it sinks into your fibres and the two can no longer be separated, all at once they have always been one. What is a “thought” after all? Isn’t it the incredibly complicated combination of partially body-own memories (inalienably part of the biological mechanism, ink in blotting paper, chopped-off head of the cock), and partly of the experiences and remembrances and projections of other creatures, of life — call it “reality” if you wish — of which you yourself are only a minuscule particle? Because you are lived, experienced through the reality, or rather the totality, and it is not you who live all raving and jerking. Even when you are isolated from any contact, even if you are without attachments like a dead eye hidden behind blue contact lenses, even then you are “conceived”, are you but a crumb of the thoughts of others. . The mind is an image of the cosmos, has its gravitational wells, its collapsars. The thought consumes the mind — or can it be the other way around, that the mind, that ever-expanding void, cannibalizes the thought? Without the realization the realizing experience-field does not exist. . And every act of taking cognizance has its gravity, its mass in movement, atom and quark. Which swells to a red giant slurping up its environment. Which inevitably must collapse into a white dwarf. Which cools, cools off, becomes colder, denser, blinder, more autistic, a black dwarf. The star is frozen. That’s cognition. Black crystal. Ah, which may blow up as supernova, shooting its neutrons at heaven, painting the final extremities in light, rotating deeper: pulsar. The mind goes beyond the thought, the thought wrecks the mind. And everything disappears in the black abyss. Also the black hole. Zero volume. Singularity. Where must it go to? Can “something” be entirely destroyed? Or is it at the same time there again, completely differently the same, as quasar? “Something” must die to exist. . The brain, the encephalos, the mind (which is a vibration of perceptions) is a black pool circumscribed by a happening-horizon, an eternity-skyline. You travel, you travel: always you remain the same nothing and never do you return to the original. . In this way exactly were you transpersed by the cold. Everywhere about you the layers and crusts of salt, each surface has its edge. As if there had been an ocean which drew back, evaporated, perhaps only became invisible, and deposited this salt all over. But the salt keeps growing, it is crystallized from the wind and the fuming light, crackling, and with the cold rim and rhyme of root-fire it covers everything. The town, that Christmas night, was deserted. Most of the houses were shells only, ruins whistling at the wind. Or otherwise they were uncompleted. It was a luminous night. Although there was no sun and therefore no etched or ironed-out shadows, one could see very clearly and very far. Most definitely the waving fog-clouds brought the light along, and the ugly diamond-fire in the salt crystals. In a side street you came across the parked open-roofed little sports model belonging to Am and Starlet, grey and stain-fiery under its incrustation of salt. You understood that they must be somewhere in town and you took off your rucksack and put it on the back seat of the car. Perhaps you can persuade them to take you with them, away from this region of death, you thought as you continued walking. It was nearly midnight. The wind continued ringing like a soundless bell. Several street blocks along you came across them: Am dressed in an impeccable white tuxedo, of a white which complements his teeth; Starlet had little patches of salt in her hair. They invited you to their home and there was, to the best of your knowledge, not another living soul in town (and not even any dead souls). No, no sweat, it was selbstverständlich that you could ride along. With pleasure. It’s just that the house had to be put in order before leaving. With Starlet you started washing the floors. In some spots the water flowed several inches deep over the floorboards. You each had a handful of stalks, charcoal sticks, and these you rubbed and rubbed over the floor. The sticks were fragile and the floors extensive — it was a never-ending task. You remember the black finger in the white palm of your hand. Starlet’s evening gown was soaked from hem to knees. Then the telephone scattered the silence. It was an urgent call from Johnnysburg: Am was suddenly recalled, there was some important business which couldn’t wait, or he had been elected to play wing in a very important rugby game, or some such event. And then? Ichabod?

Think, think. Because then you found yourself outside the township on the beach. When it was night still you knew of the black depths which cannot be plumbed above the light-sphere of fog-banks, salt-layers, grey streets and decrepit structures. Beyond the settlement it is day however, the darkness becoming light but remaining as far and as deep as ever, and everything just as grey. You are with Ganesh, he with his bleached blue jeans and towel over the shoulder. The beach is all pebble: grey and wet and round. You considered the thought that weird animals may, with the rhythm of the dead moon, have crawled from the sea — fools conditioned by their own procreative instincts — to stupidly come and lay these millions of stillborn stone-eggs. You can hear the sea lapping and flowing against the pebbles — these are only a few metres away but with the pale haze on water and land you cannot see it. You walk along the coastline. After some time you meet on the beach an Indian family who come strolling from the opposite direction. Not a complete family though, just a young girl and her two small brothers. The girl has a small figure and is very white in the face. Her hair is straight and black and her arms and legs covered with little black hairs. Ganesh (with his deep dark voice) and the girl tie a twittering conversation and start walking ahead of the others. She has swinging from the one hand an imitation leather handbag. The two little Hindus stay behind with you. It seems that they are wearing their best going-out outfits: dark blazers and shorts, shirts and black ties. With huge dark eyes they look at you. Their eyes are like oily tie knots. Some little distance further you arrive at a name board, fixed with stones around the base, standing practically in the water. On the board big letters, black originally, but now weathered to grey, probably indicate the name of this place: PASS PORT. (Spergebiet.) Grey trails of fog are adrift all over and there is an intense luminosity, a glistening faintness refracted from stone and mistiness and water surface. The light stabs at your eyes and you now regret that your sunglasses remained in your rucksack, perhaps even in another country’s hotel’s hotel room’s bedside cabinet’s second drawer from the bottom. At this place there are all around you, in the sea itself, the ruins of houses. From the beach dykes of stones were built, paths leading to the houses; there are also little ponds or dams, maybe used by earlier inhabitants of long ago as vivaria for fish. All grey now, and probably since long fallen into disuse. You and the two little Indians wish to go swimming and you wade into the grey water — which immediately becomes deep. The coast is treacherous. Therefore you decide not to risk it any farther from the side and you shout warnings at the two boys. With quite a lot of difficulty you scramble over the rolling and shifting stones up the bank again. Even though there is no direct sunshine you are rapidly dry. Your body is rough from the salt and it itches terribly. When you lay your hands on the shoulders of the two boys — they entered the water just like that, fully clothed — you feel the rustle under your fingertips of the salty film now causing white blotches on the dark material. They are all fidgety in their clothes. You wish to take their minds off their bodily discomfort and because they are inquisitive also you decide to try reaching one of the houses all along the ridge of a stone dyke. But close up you notice turtles and iguanas in the ooze of the pools, and still others lying motionless in the silver flickering on the banks. Finally you find a path of stacked stones which is not occupied and you walk out to a dwelling fallen in disrepair, about twenty-five yards from the edge, with the two black-eyed brothers hard on your heels. .

You opened that white-painted front door and entered a room where, so it seemed, thousands upon thousands of moths were fluttering; as living, caressing, abstract, hairy snowflakes were the wingbeats against your face and bare hands. You advance the hands before, pale as faces, and immediately they are covered by countless little wings. How the hands are shuddering! A light bulb was burning in the room and there were pieces of furniture which didn’t look mouldy at all although the floor was at least heel-deep under water. You couldn’t detect any switch for the lamp. The moths did not in the least attempt escaping through the open door. When your eyes became used to the gloom, you started deciphering with much effort the inscriptions and bits of writing and graffiti on the walls. Most were German words. In Gothic script. There was, inter alia, the fable, reduced to a minimum of words, of the man who had a green parrot chained to him, of how he had intercourse with the parrot, of how it is the bird’s ambition to one day hijack an aeroplane. . After a while you closed the door of the ruined house behind you and walked back to the beach, away from the room of prayers. Down the beach you saw Ganesh and the girl returning, all along the nibbling of the water. Despite the fact that they weren’t touching one another you surmised instinctively that, in the short period they were absent together, a “relationship” had sprung up between them. When they came nearer to where you waited — her sari was draped in an enticing way and stuck to the body to emphasize the meagre curves — she looked at Ganesh with roguish eyes and then — so fast and so small and so intimate was the movement that you had to put your memory to it in order to see it — she wrote a little line over his thigh with one red thumbnail. Then you did understand it all? And now.