Mouroir

Wiederholen

When we were young we often had the fancy to go camping or holidaying for a few days further than the dunes where the land flattens again. Now, looking back, I no longer remember the details exactly and it may well be that one of our group lived there permanently so that the rest of us just went to visit from time to time. The land was terrible, sublime, massive, majestic in its absolute barrenness. Stretched out it lay around you: to both sides and to the hinterland it was unending and apparently smooth — just here and there like a guileless pattern of reef, a crinkle or a seam — until that too curbs away into the perspective, in the haziness of the no-more-see; to the front — in my memory I now view the world from the veranda of the house where we usually sojourned — there was at first a firmament of nothingness, for the skyline is the distance which you always carry near you, inside you, but then further along where it starts descending to sea level it was more indented, there were, scanty at first and gradually with deeper contrasts, the waves of dunes as the land washed against the sea and crumbled there, there were fissures and gaps in the walls of the land, chasms with high walls trapping the shadows and causing them to be more or less intense, and through which pass serpentined, places where the ground suddenly disappeared under your feet, so suddenly that involuntarily your stomach was squeezed higher, rather as if there were landslides or a centuries-long erosion of catastrophic magnitude testifying to — relatively speaking — telescoped cataclysms. Purple it was then, brownish at times, depending on the cracking of the day or the twilight of the evening — but the dominant colour scheme of this naked world was grey, a hundred different shades of grey, starting with the wet ashen colour deep under the wings of a broody speckled hen, passing through the nearly transparent silver of falling rain to the hard glitter of a blue-grey rock ledge in the sun, and stone reefs and harshness were the most common characteristics of this area, but despite the nudity it wasn’t cruel or sore: all these hues of grey surged and heaved, a gigantic play of aloof light and shade washing over the expanses to give contour and nearness and a sombreness, a depth, a mystery, a surfaceless mirror. And yet there was no chiaroscuro alternation of frisk-light and sucking-shadow: the summits of heaven were cloudless and limpid and blue with maybe just the slightest haze of limitless distances or the trembling, nearly like smoke, when there is a play in temperature shortly prior to the piercing of the sun or immediately afterwards. The sun, fearsome horseman with a robe of glistening blood, ah! Except for the falling away of the land in the direction of the sea there was neither hill nor abrupt rock formation nor disintegration of terrain, nor sand windblown in heaps even, to project fervent stains. No vegetation worth mentioning — be it tree or shrub — which might have brought the colour of differentiation, even if that were just a needle-line or a knife-notch or a small hairy fist. No, all these tones of grey were indigenous to the environment — but there was change nevertheless, movement. That which created the illusion of a succession of cooler blots and inaccessibility was indeed part of a much larger context, the impersonal rocking of the sun-planet through a space which could never be plumbed and is perhaps therefore, with our limited definitions, not space at all, always expanding, bigger and more illimitable; it was, seen closer to us, maybe the languorous round of seasons: but in these quarters there were no noticeable seasons and no climate to speak of. Or does the soil have its own climate? Where the dunes start rolling and the ravines and gullies sink away to a lower area, there at least other colours may be found: the dove-grey with violet tints of the sand, gold maybe from a reverberation of light between cliff faces or beams skimming over crests, the flicker and sparkle sometimes of a glow — like movement — being splashed off anthracite or quartz, a curve of greenery and nearly the appearance of grass or very ancient dappled glass and verdigris where an aperture opens up in the earth. At certain times of the day there were blue sections not related to anything at all, immanent, unreal, except that the eye could perceive them. And by night there were horrible dark hollows, knots in the grain of darkness usually so grey and so smooth, sluice-chambers in the horizon, a mothiness, a leprosy, the opening up of vertical caverns — which, when you stared at it from miles away, from the yard of the house, when you tried to feel it with your brain, down and down, caused the skin of you forearms to pucker from a cool satisfaction. The land softens, the land caves in, the land unravels, the land screams with a gurgle becoming dust once more of a black liquid in the holes and the splits.

Somewhere in that high country was the house where we would stay. So far back it is now that I no longer remember how much time we whiled away there: maybe only a few days, maybe months on end. Time had no constitution then, no skin or cells or pattern or feeling. Time was a cold crystal, transparent, a spectrum, a stalactite or a growth with every century a single drop. My realization of time silted up. But now, much later, it is a physical pleasure to fetch it from somewhere within the unknown folds of the self, to find the thread and to start reading, to dredge the self’s receptacles. A curettage. The house was built of weathered grey planks long since gnawed at by the darkening of all things passing, by the finest hardly visible particles of mica which when whipped up over the flats by winds had to be hurtled against something in the end, by the corrosion of saltiness in the condensation of the night. A dilapidated stoop, knocked together from planks in the same fashion, provided a kind of platform to one side of the house. Over this small stage there was a lean-to propped up by four wooden pillars not really very solid any more. From the stoop the drawing room could be reached and the two windows giving on to the front were laced with curtains. These two curtains might have been white once upon a time but now they were barely a lighter shade of grey than the tremendous world outside. They were the only windows so endowed; peradventure they were the only two windows in the house. Around the house then was the area designated by us as the “yard”, but who could ever tell where its limits were, where the yard stopped and the waste land began? “Yard” was a “convention”, an “agreement” — an oval-shaped imagined zone around the house with its outer boundary never more than twenty-five yards away, perchance a little more tamped down than the rest, and indicated as “living space” by garbage and implements — mirrors, cardboard boxes, chains — which at times could be found there all strewn about. The only other compromise towards the taming of the farmstead was that which we planted there and which never grew — flowering shrubs, bushes, even trees. With enormous trouble we transported grown trees, for instance, from the coast to the house — along the way the leaves and fruit dragged in the dust: it was the abduction of an exotic princess from a far-off empire; we then dug a deep hole and made the tree to stand upright in it. Occasionally it took several weeks, months even, before the transplanted tree shrivelled up entirely and had to be unearthed — that is, if it hadn’t tilted over all by itself in the meantime — eventually for firewood. But never it took root. Trees or brushwood, anything that could capture the wind and give it sound, is so always needed around a house. Because otherwise you lose all memory of yourself and are gobbled up by nothingness to become part of the night.

On the flat area before the veranda we had erected a target for shooting practice, a plate on which was painted a man. We had one pistol, very sacred to us, which we guarded jealously. Above our heads the sun traversed the blueness like a gigantic jet seemingly moving slowly only because it is flying so incredibly high. Everywhere about us the reach and the shuddering of the silver landscape. No shadows at all except for our own, the house’s cape, shards and blotches from the transplanted trees. But their leaves were already wilted and dust-coated — as corpses planted up to the waist in corruption they were decomposing in leaves and twigs. We took turns aiming at the target. Tjak was always the one enjoying the shooting the most. “Aber es freut mich!” or sometimes also: “Dennoch freue ich mich daran!” he called out time and again. I became aware that my eye was out, or alternatively that the sight of the pistol was not adjusted to my eye. Although I could group all my shots in a small circle — we had pasted white sheets of paper over the painted man’s vulnerable parts to in this way establish our acumen — they were for ever too low, too far to the left. Purposefully I tried to adapt by taking a bead on the top right-hand corner, hoping to place my shots in the desired bull’s-eye. I was, with one eye closed to a slit, still busy trying to elucidate this aberration to my comrades when I became aware of their not paying any notice to my explanation. Something else had a priority claim on their attention. Alarm! They were silent, the heads rapt and alert as those of birds all turned in a certain direction. I lowered the arm with the cocked pistol and followed the attraction point of their eyes with mine, attempting to make out what it was they were staring at so distractedly: over the floor of the grey plateau a group of men moved, and evidently on their way to us. Far away we could hear small bells throbbing. There are no fixed routes over this vast highland, no paths or true crossings, and I have never yet seen a company of travelers trekking over its rims. Nevertheless it had to be possible, it had probably even occurred, that people all through the ages journeyed here. Who could deny or affirm that vegetation flourished in these parts long ago, that there were yurts or farmsteads or even inns here and, who knows, perhaps cities with canals filled with lapping water. Dust. All dust now. Passed and extinct. Or had it always been thus? Nothing, no indication or track could ever prove the hypothesis or its refutation. Still, these two extremes were reconcilable, eventually one: the nothingness contains traces of what was — aren’t we all, and everything around us, finally the wind-blurred drawings of the structure of decay? But this troupe now, although still quite a way off, clearly carried threatening implications for us.

“Mensch, was ist denn los jetzt?” Tjak murmured.

The purpose of the visit of the observed group wasn’t clear except that it contained no promise of good for us, and we therefore thought it wiser to take certain precautions because they were numerous — far more so than us. We entrusted Tjak with our pistol and with the instruction that he must make himself scarce: our intention, in so doing, was to safeguard our only weapon and property of value. Within a few hours evening would fall and under the cloak of the night, for there was no moon, Tjak would have had a chance to reach a safe haven with the pistol, or at least the protection of distance. In the meantime we would attempt to occupy the unwelcome intruders and to hold them back.

Our uneasiness had good grounds, our fears were realized. It turned out to be Albert and his gang, and faced with their superior numbers we were soon powerless. Without too much bother they took over everything and held us captive in the living room while they searched the house from floor to loft. For us time no longer mattered. But gradually it became night and, as was often the case at that hour, an evening breeze started blowing; the grey curtains fluttered slightly. The wind — experience had taught me this — would become stronger towards midnight, a veritable sighing, and the tarrying heat would as always make way for the pure-skinned lucidity of the night and then for the merciless cold of the small hours, for the sharp reflection of starlight on stones, like ice pellets. Albert apparently surmised — or did he know? — that one of us had eluded him, that our firearm had slipped through his fingers: he delegated members of his gang to go over the surroundings within a radius of one and a half kilometres with a fine-tooth comb. It became dark.

When the gloom had settled in completely we all heard the crack of three pistol shots in the distance, two near together and after a pause of what must have been three seconds a single last one. Afterwards nothing. All lifted their heads and listened to the silence with ears pricked up. Nothing more. Nobody talked. No one referred to the strange detonations. Later too, as far as I remember, no explanation was offered and it was never discussed. In the course of the first quarter of the night the search parties returned — whether all or just some of them wasn’t clear and neither do I know whether they reported on their doings. We became drowsy. Now and then you could hear someone groaning in his sleep. Albert sat in one corner on a chair, his heavy head bowed, chin on chest; it was no foregone conclusion that his eyes were still open or, on the other hand, closed. In any event, he asked no questions, gave not a single order, didn’t try to start any conversation; just hunched there without budging, peering down into his private night.

When it was already quite late I got up to go and smoke a cigar outside under the naked heavens. It was an old habit of mine to do so, even under otherwise normal circumstances: to slowly contemplate the fantastic pageant of the galaxy, all those beasts and formations and images and petrified ice fields and remote fluttering fires and to see how they rock by, to see how blanched they are; I know of no better solution for oppressive thoughts: the I is liquidated. The wind came from far away, noiseless, and encountered no resistance until it came pushing against the house with a soft, burbling sound. The wind smelled of unknown mosses and contused moulds, of crystals and of dust. The wind was also with a rustling in the loose leaves of the tree. The clatter was so muffled that one could presume, had you not known any better, that it wasn’t caused by the wind’s goings-on but perhaps by the slight and gradual fall-go of the stars overhead. It passed through my mind that the leaves will not be on the tree for much longer, that they will come loose as they’ve always done before and that the trunk and branches will be parched and grey, without sap of vegetative faculty. I also absorbed the notion that all come to nothing and fall away in this way, so, just like the grey ash of my cigar; and I furthermore thought of the white eyes in the bottomless abyss above my head, of the little clumps of bones, the white almond blossoms on invisible branches, the fluttering of pale wings. When I looked around me I was, alas, once again brought to the realization that our “yard” would never be transformed into a “garden”.

And all at once, under the rather deeper blackness of the leaves’ whispering, I became aware of something, or someone — of a presence, a barely noticeable change of position. I never moved an inch. From under the cover of dying or already dead leaves he stepped forward, laughing softly with shimmering teeth. Tjak. Or really — this too I immediately and intuitively sensed although he uttered not a word with reference to himself — actually not Tjak the way you and I would normally mean when talking about Tjak, or about Murphy or Giovanni or C — — or Glassface or Tuchverderber or Nefesh or Fremdkörper, but his. . what? His spirit? His memory? His momentary mirroring in the grey matter? His remains? The power field of words around him? Very close to me he came and softly he enquired whether he may finish off my cigar. I handed it to him, the smoke-flowing little grey stump notched by my fingernail at the one end, and deeply he sucked on it and for an instant the smoke lingered blueish grey between us before being carried away by the wind. When the cigar tip glowed clearer at short intervals, I could observe the large dark and wet stain on his chest: nearly as a shield protecting the body very intimately it was, or the ever-spreading blood puddle in the sand under the young doe giving birth whilst dying, or like a submerged rose it was of colour and to the touch — and it had an odd odour, the dank and yet distant smell of a wing. “Aber weisst du, ich habe mich damals so unauslegbar viel gefreut. . Wenn ich das unbedingt mal erklären könnte. . ” he still whispered nearly inaudibly soft with the wind among his words and starshine on his teeth, and then he was gone. Gone, irrevocably gone before my eyes. With my fingertips I stroked the paper sheet over this afternoon’s target and felt that it was sticky.

Many years went by. I don’t believe I ever again visited the house of grey planks and certainly it no longer exists, but became — as others before it? — one with the grey, the brownish and the purplish environment, just like the trees in exile and the exotic scorched flowering shrubs and little bushes one by one. Or does this house in reality still exist? I use the stirrup-word “reality” — knowing that it contains no conception — with aversion and reluctant lips. Is it not true, friend, that nothing finally gets lost in us? That the house, now that we discussed it, still lies somewhere in a huge grey landscape, a landscape alternatively becoming more sombre or brighter without shadows or boundaries being cast over it? I don’t believe I ever again penetrated the upland as deeply; steep-climbing gorges and canyons in the passes coiling higher along slopes where tons of gravel had come sliding down, at times cutting the route or burying it — but certainly no further. Occasionally I did visit the coast. The coastal strip itself, the fence running down into the sea was an area we were not allowed to enter. I knew — I no longer know how — that an ultra-modern camp had been constructed beyond that frontier on the slightly greenish hills and the yellow dunes, with the very best facilities: cinema halls, restaurants, drugstores, even a landing strip with a well-equipped control tower. Once I tried to explain it all to my mother. She was with me on holiday there — outside the fence — or she had come to visit me while I was holidaying there by myself, and we decided to go swimming. My mother was then already very old but her face and her body were fat and without wrinkles; with the hair tucked under a bathing cap and without her glasses she was quite white and blind. We watched a child — a little girl with red flames at the throat — playing in the water, and I tried to interpret to my mother the fugitive images on her retina. It was low tide, although stormy, and the girl clearly had the intention to obviate the barrier and to get, from the sea, to the enclosed zone. Despite the low tide the coast of that forbidden area was most dangerous with edged rocks, pools where the waves frothed, and a sea bottom descending rapidly and sharply. My mother was worried about the little girl and couldn’t understand why she insisted upon reaching that particularly treacherous beach; even from afar we saw the blood on her feet and legs, we noticed the water at her feet being coloured and foaming like a crocodile, and still she continued laughing with a shrill, hysterical voice while stubbornly attempting to reach the side. I explained to my mother that that camp, out of bounds to the little girl, was a veritable heaven on earth for children, and I described the wonderful luxuries to her in detail. But, when I wanted to point these out to her, there was nothing to be seen beyond the fence except for a few grey buildings, very low and smooth like bunkers just about entirely buried in the sand. Just seams; only bumps and reefs. I had to point out to my mother — though I was now blindly entering an unknown terrain — that the much vaunted wealth was probably installed in a subterranean way, yes, even the landing strip of the airfield. But that it had to be there, of that I was sure!

Along the coast the weather was continually fair. Above the blue space, below the sea blue or black at times, and like weathered gates maybe giving access to the deep land above and beyond were the brown sandcrests and hilltops along which the paths climbed; roads of an origin and a purpose and of the people using them — dealers? agents? recruiters? izigijima? — fallen into oblivion. The sun in the hollows of the heavens was a silvered beetle at the hem of a sky-blue robe — but blue is just black seen from close up or grey seen from afar — or, you can express it this way too — the sun was the phosphorescent skeleton of a rider having to roam like an unsatiated and restless spirit through all times and all spaces even though the flesh has long since become blue dust. My heart wasn’t with the lips of sea and strand. Besides, on the side of the demarcation where people like me could move uninhibitedly, there was nothing — no asylum or hideaway or night club or public toilet or workshop or quay or church hall, no bus stop or road sign or cigar factory or drawings in the sand or birds’ nests. My heart stayed elsewhere, where it’s higher and clearer and more healthy, where the landscape is so insignificant that time’s passages could leave no mark and where time therefore does not exist, where there are no emotions or desires or memories to cling to. Perhaps my heart was only a sheet of paper with a number of holes, glued to the rough and by now nearly indistinguishable silhouette of a man traced as target on a metal plate. I couldn’t absorb my restlessness: there was a hole in my chest. The sun is at last a heart. Whenever I could I attempted ascending with one of the twisting and climbing paths, but never succeeded: so many of the passes were dead ends or had fallen in desuetude or had silted up or become eroded or were never intended to lead anywhere. On one such occasion — it was not yet noon and in my imagination I saw how the sky and the sun and even the stars, which by day also travel clothed in blue, become lost in the grey of the high plateaux somewhere above me until there would be just a soft shimmering over the earth, heaven and earth one imperishable because already gone — on one such an occasion when my imagination had like a bird flown up from my body to go and scout far ahead, I was obliged to stand off to one side, tightly pressed against a rock ledge to make way for a convoy approaching from ahead in orange-coloured dust clouds, on their way to the lowlands. There were a few camels heavily laden with grey baggage, a rider with expressionless eyes on a horse — maybe he was blind — and mostly donkeys with pack saddles, driven and accompanied by men with long headcloths wrapped around their heads and mouths and noses so that the light points of dust in their eyebrows were very evident. These men held, like lepers, small tinkling bells in their hands. I watched them coming by, and how they took no notice whatsoever of me, how they disappeared out of sight lower down around a bend of the pass. And I was on the point of continuing my journey, the dust raised by donkeys’ hooves had settled again, the sun was a vulture high up in the air and I considered that this caravan must definitely be coming from somewhere and that they therefore could indicate the route to the highland — or one of the routes — on condition that I remain on their tracks — but in spite of the dust the soil was hard and it was difficult to retrace the fresh marks on the rocky parts; there were too the millions of slits and small hollows and little riffs of old precedent tracks retained intact through the centuries, tracks forking off and disappearing in all directions so that one got the image, knowing it to be true, of a whole world consisting of layer upon layer of tracks — when I heard someone calling behind me. “Murphy! Murphy!” the one voice bawled, followed directly by a choir of further voices. What now? What could have happened? Were these the intonations and incantations of a midday prayer? But Murphy then? Or are they calling me? I turned around and ran back. A hundred yards from where I last lost sight of the caravan they were now motionless in the twelve o’clock heat. The beasts of burden were not unsaddled but just stood there, quiet, with lowered heads and the reins trailing in the dust; a camel or two stood ruminating with the funny cut-and-hash lip movements so peculiar to them. The drivers were all off to one side of the road, crowded around something on the ground there — here the area along the track was flat for a short distance. They no longer called out but rang their little bells with a sort of absent concentration. I rushed there. Over the skyline, not from the road but from further away, from behind a hill, a man appeared wearing a white shirt and leggings. When he came nearer I could see his blond hair and his blue eyes. Even if he were much older now than years back I still recognized him instantly. It was Murphy. Indeed. Ah, I turned to him and now also remembered — or did one of the caravan drivers inform me of this? I cannot recollect — that Murphy was a frontier guard, that it was his duty to patrol the wire obstacle stretching from here somewhere — no one knows exactly where — inland in a straight line ever higher through the gullies and over the hummocks. I didn’t know in whose service he was, whether it was to prevent the inhabitants and authorities from the other side from breaking out towards us or to restrain our people from penetrating the closed-off strip. He carried a little whip. Together we pushed our way through the crowds with their bells to see what the focal point of their restrained excitement could be. The men in the inner circle stood grouped around a rubbish heap. How did it happen, so my thoughts went, that in my ascent I never noticed this ash heap — it is after all something remarkable in such desolate surroundings! And from when does this garbage date? What does it speak of? Whose was it? Was it exposed by a recent or more ancient sliding of the soil? Was it always here then — and I so sunken in the endless wandering of my searches, which could never reach a destination, that I knew deep in my soul — that I never saw this remarkable aberration? I can’t remember even having heard a suspicious rumbling. . The men were intent on a cadaver lying among the ash, the petrified garbage, the broken-legged or splay-backed chairs, the burst mirrors, the cardboard boxes, the grey planks, the blue rusted chains, the rests of tree trunks from distant kingdoms. It was the corpse of a brown boy, so fresh in appearance that he could scarcely have died earlier than that very morning if it hadn’t been for the rigid, tooth-fixed smile between lips forced open, on his back there as if only to rest for a wee while with the uncovered face and the limpid eyes turned to the unending blue nothingness. His shirt was still clean, unbuttoned to the belly — excepting one dark and damp stain. Over the swarthy skin of the chest I could see a bird tattooed in a dark red line of dots reminding one of a string of shiny rubies. His one arm was bent at the elbow so that the hand pointed straight up. In this hand he held a pistol and the still flexible index finger was neatly and exactly folded around the trigger. From the barrel emerged, stiff and silent, a jet of grey smoke just like the tendril of a creeper or the heart attack of a tree.

The remainder of my narrative is not much and can be accounted for in a few sentences. Murphy, with an embittered grimace, took me through the fences to the forbidden territory. We betook ourselves to the terminus for air travellers; we were to take a flight, off and gone. It was a modern structure full of people also sitting there, waiting for their respective flights to be called. Murphy told me a long story which it is not in my power to repeat here. Part of it however concerned the clothes which Albert had stolen — or borrowed — that time, some of Murphy’s also in the lot, and had handed in here at the lost property office where it was kept all these years, and that he, Murphy, come hell or high water, now had the intention of retaking possession of same. We ordered drinks. The cocktails were of a rusty red colour. The waitress wore a black dress with an oval-shaped white apron. Her calves and thighs were most smooth and shiny and well formed and when she bent down over the other tables to serve the passengers-to-be, we could see the white leg as far as the elastic, and a dark shadow higher into the moist folds of the imagination. The other travellers all sat leafing through magazines which they held high in front of their noses so that we could not identify their faces. All the magazines had covers of a bright orange colour. We learnt from the waitress that the lost property office was to be found on the last floor and that a signboard with “Damen und Herren” would indicate it to us. But, she said, we were to wait: at the apposite moment we would be sent for.