Mouroir

A Pattern of Bullets

The Introduction

At last I’ve found the solution to my problem. Or the excuse for a solution. This morning while brushing my teeth over the basin it suddenly dawned on me — simple: why would it need a so-called explanation or even the appearance of logical probability? And more: a presentation of this lack of reality-like exposition (especially at that important point of articulation in the narrative which is still a dark spot for me) presented precisely by means of this introduction, may perhaps indeed establish for the reader an acceptableness. For me too. And that is after all what it is about. You see, I do not mince matters.

For a long time the unfinished story haunted me. I wanted to be able to complete it because I was keen to fit it in with the other writings, get my characters in perspective, fill my notebook so as to be able to hand it in. One doesn’t get any younger. The flesh starts riding you bareback, drags you down towards the sods. In vain! Each time I reached the turning-point of the story — the shooting — how many shots were fired? and what was the relationship between the number of shots and the other premises again? — then I became rigid. The juices dried up. Was it simply a question of the pig-headed un-memory? Or is there a deeper-lying theme which escapes me and am I staring blindly at the variations? Should I arbitrarily have imposed on the course a given turn, thus forcing the whole set-up in another direction? But when you start tinkering with a little nut, apparently innocuous, the whole structure may unexpectedly come crashing around your ears. And in the name of what legality do I deposit my hesitations on any given totality? Until this morning then when I realized that I need not even concoct any credibility in the attempt to disguise my obtuseness or my forgetfulness. As long as I express it clearly right at the outset. I am the writer: I can do what I want!

L.L. told me the story in prison. (L.L., strangely enough, was not his true name — that belonged to a compatriot of his and after the latter’s “unexpected” demise, I’m told a violent one at that, in South-West, my narrator claimed it for himself — certainly with obscure criminal designs in mind. Besides, the deceased, who dies intestate, owed my narrator quite a large sum of black money. A teasing question remains with me: if my narrator was (co-)responsible for the untimely disappearance of the original L.L., why then hijack his identity? What kind of identification is that? That it may have an unforeseen and unpleasant sequel he already knew. Shortly before being arrested and sentenced two unknown persons in a motor car tried to force him off the speedway serpentining around the mountainside; during the ensuing mad chase, eventually right into the city, the back window of his car was shot to pieces. After the officers of law and order managed to obstruct their way and had taken them to the police station, it turned out to have been an instance of “mistaken identity”: the vengeance had been intended for another L. L. .)

He is a middle-aged Slovak, small of posture with black hair now streaked with grey. He arrived as refugee or displaced person in Nomansland. In his own country — and elsewhere? — he had already at times known the bitter cosmos of concrete and echo-corridors and grills, but then it would seem for more “noble” motives. Nowadays he’s just a cheater — a “fraud artist” he calls himself, and moreover one of the aristocracy specializing in the forging of credit cards. You must get to the top of the slippery pole in the best way you can. And he was an obsessive smoker — of private cigarettes if he could get hold of them, if not then hand-rolled pills in any old paper. Often the lighting of the cigarette, the sucking in of the first smoke, went accompanied by a slightly trembling nervousness.

His knowledge of any other tongue bar his own (from which he could quote the most beautiful pornographic verses, popular art, of old boop-bellied Turks in horse cars) was quite picturesquely inadequate. With his tortured words he tried to tell me his story. Not that there’s much chance to have a quiet talk in gaol, not when one of the partners is a terrorist, and thus it took several sessions before I could get the thread of it out of him. Perhaps that explains why I lost the track afterwards. I remember (I believe) that he had to repeat portions of it several times. Whether it was the truth that he held up to me I don’t know. I pass it on the way I heard it. For what it’s worth. In my language.

He has since disappeared. Was discharged and probably sucked up again in the nebulous world of a shadowed existence, perhaps under a new name? And now, often when I think of him — and struggle with the story which for such a long time couldn’t be completed — phrases jump to my mind, like: “before I was silver”; or: “and I bit God in the calf”. Further:

The Narrative

Sometimes when those birds, the ones you call plovers, fly with their sharpened sounds through the night and when the frogs in the marshes down here start clamouring like demonstrators behind barbed wire, in waves, as if they’re the shivering contractions of the moon’s skin, the gooseflesh — neither fish nor flesh, amphibian, hermaphroditic, squamous, no recoverable intelligence and yet not just a dull droning, and the moon a smoke, then I shudder to the marrow. Is it because the ancient sounds address themselves to the ancient mindstem, the nerve-tree? Because it takes me back again to the nights I passed in my own country. And seagulls at night also screech a different type of noise — something like a foot in its sock. If feet were to have vocal cords. Can you have the thorax resoled? Nights I’d prefer not to remember. Let them rather sink and disappear in the branches of the pre-intellect. And nights, strangely enough, that I have forgotten entirely. Because memory is a blanket. We also have birds there calling through the night and the sounds are just as inaccessible. Frogs too. And nightingales, these wistful birds you do not know here. I’m now talking of real nightingales, not the Cape kind. There is something wild and inhuman in the night. A nearly prehistoric defencelessness which cannot be covered by reason. Other corridors, other canyons. Moonlight — dead life — it’s a totally different dimension. Do you know the Arabs believe you will go mad if you walk under the moon without covering your head? And that they hang out their sheets at night to bleach? The light is silvery, cold but thick. Yet without any weight or substance. On such nights one should hunt the silver fox, when wind pushes tepidly, and you ought to be naked, with dogs to help you — only, the dogs should not have vocal cords. And the splashes under the trees are darker, like pits reflecting the trees. Pools in which the trees are floating. The schemer falls into the pit he digs for another. Not that I’m superstitious or that I’m interested in supernatural manifestations or transactions of the spirit. Although. . Now listen to this tale — I swear I’m not exaggerating at all. What the meaning behind the events may be, the sense in the being, the explanation to it all, the solution — that I do not know. But must everything happening always have a reason or an explanation? Take for instance something like a war — the co-operative frenzy and murder. Why? Aren’t we often just roaring away in the swamps?

The time of these events, which I try to depict at present, is also long ago already. I was young then and my hair was black. You know by now how I tried to keep body and soul together — I told you all about it the other day: namely by smuggling people across the border. Also gut, when I was caught at last they held me as a political prisoner, but actually it had nothing to do with politics. Money has no political or ideological etiquette. When someone contacted me for a border crossing I named my price and if he or she had enough money it was fine, if not, well then it was “hard lines, my friend”. Silver always speaks clearly. It wasn’t hard work — like black market trading it could be described as a “cottage industry”, and many of our people in that zone were involved in it. The border was two or three kilometres up the road from our little town, Osnabrück not far, and Vienna barely 80 kilos away.

An old acquaintance one day turned up at my place, Keuner was his name, and he asked me for money. I was a bit taken aback because K was in the same “trade” as I, just active in another sector, and I well knew that he also dabbled in all sorts of black deals. He should have been making good profits. But who knows — maybe there was a sudden crisis, or an accident. “Sure,” I said, “I can advance you something.”

“Look, Lamortč̌ek,” says he, “I don’t want to borrow anything from you. Give me 500 kroner and I’ll let you have this pistol.” And he showed me a 6.35 of Czech fabrication.

“Man, I don’t want your gun. You needn’t give me a pledge either. I’ll lend you 500 kroner and you can pay me back just whenever you feel like it.”

“No, No! I told you I don’t want a loan. Here, now take this thing. Look, it’s just about new, hardly ever been used, in excellent order, I swear. And you can give me whatever you want. Come on!”

So I took the firearm from him. I already had one of my own, a German 9 mill., but it was a big calibre, a Parabellum, and the smaller weapon I could carry more easily on me, even in my inside coat pocket. In a bar or on the street it wouldn’t attract any attention, I reckoned.

That’s when the strange things started happening to me. At the beginning it didn’t really bother me because I’ve told you, didn’t I, that I’m not a man for believing in ghosts or visions. And I’m not a weakling either. First I thought it must just be my nerves giving me a hard time. With my kind of illegal activities one must always be on the look-out and with all that stress you end up being too finely tuned. Like the cocking piece and the trigger of a gun too dangerously filed down. I thought I just needed to shake off the weird emotions. But I couldn’t.

Listen: I’m on the street and suddenly I’m absolutely convinced that I’m being tailed, that someone is right on my heels. I slip around a corner or stop innocently before a display window to look for my shadow, and there’s nobody! Or sometimes I return home late through the deserted streets and suddenly I hear crunching footsteps behind me. I jump around and hold my breath: there’s nothing, just fog-wraiths perhaps swirling around a lamppost, just old windtattered streamers. Sometimes I sense the presence of someone or something, so imposing that I quieten the word-ribbon in my eyes so as to spy about very carefully — useless. Even at home there was no security. A few times I imagined seeing very fleetingly a bearded face peering at me through a window (the way a book character may brusquely become aware of the author), but surely it was god-impossible, I then soothed myself, because my flat was on the second floor of the building without balconies. Once, in a bar, I very strongly felt the “presence” on a sofa next to me and when I looked there was still the imprint in the leather cushion cover where some person had just been sitting and before my very eyes the seat stuffing filled out again. I tell you the short hairs of my neck were on end!

It became so bad that I could no longer trust myself with the gun. One night, it was late and just about no traffic left on the streets — because for purposes of my work I often had to move about when the good law-abiding citizens, the virtuous Zweiks, were already snoring away in their eiderdowns — a young woman as suddenly as a cat appeared from a doorway in front of me on the sidewalk and before I could even think the gat was in my fist ready to blow her to high heavens. Luckily I realized just in time that it was probably a night-walker in a hurry to catch the last tram or train, perhaps with the thighs still clammy. But you must know how dangerous it was — I very nearly wiped her out. And then I would for sure have been in big trouble. I could no longer risk walking the streets with my side-arm and yet I felt I had to, exactly because of the mysterious pursuer or spy.

One of my old mates, Gregor Samsa, was called up for his military service (too stupid to invent, like we did, cripple dependants which would have gotten him a dispensation). Several of us, all old classmates, decided to go and have a decent booze-up for old times’ sake, and to see him off properly. It was a weekend and Gregor was due to leave the following Monday night, or maybe the Tuesday morning. Saturday and Sunday we fêted right through. One chap could tickle the piano a bit and we sang and danced and drank like swine. It is with joy that you take leave of your youth, but it also hurts. That is the magic spell — that you can howl from happiness and drunken sadness because everything is so transient, so perishable, without your being capable of understanding it then. Later perhaps yes, and by then you’re too cynical for tears. Nevertheless, it’s only the present that matters. .

Monday I ran into Gregor on the street and he reminded me that I promised to spend tonight, the last night, with him and his girlfriend. All right, all right, I agreed, although I didn’t remember a thing about any promises, and we made a date for meeting up again at eight o’clock in the hotel on the old town square. I was restless: I just could not shake off the uncomfortable feeling of “the other person”.

The afternoon I went to buy some bullets for the pistol I’d taken over from K. On the black market to be sure, because I naturally have no legal licence for the thing. Such papers one couldn’t get hold of very easily by us, and with forgeries you’re always taking a risk. And as usual I went to pull off two shots outside town because you can never be too careful with stuff you buy under the counter — sometimes the powder is wet or the cartridges defective. And when you have to shoot, you come short.

Towards six o’clock I walk into Gregor again. His girl is with him and they’re already on their way to the hotel. He insists that I must join them.

“No, Greguška,” I said; “look, we’ve got an appointment for eight and I shall definitely be there. Count on me. But now I’ve got to go home first and eat something, you know, then we’ll see each other in a little while.”

Gregor didn’t want to know. I could just as well come for a snack with them in the hotel, he insisted, and like that we’re all together, and seeing as how it’s going to be the last night. . The true reason was that he just couldn’t face up to the boredom of being for two hours alone with the girl. To say goodbye is galling enough. I, on the other hand, wanted to be by myself a bit, and I was afraid too — of what I can’t very well imagine. I explained to him about the unlicensed firearm I carried on me, that I’m a bit apprehensive about perhaps starting to shoot wildly in the drunkenness of seeing him off, and an accident is quicker than a thought.

“Your war games are still ahead!” I teased him.

“Ach man,” Gregor laughed, “if that’s your only worry! Why don’t you just take out the clip and hide it away on your body? Then you can’t start throwing lead, however slap-happy you may become. And tomorrow, when you’re sober and cooled off, you reload the thing and Franz is your uncle!”

So I had nothing to oppose his argument with. I therefore took the clip from the pistol and tucked it away in a small sewn-on hiding-place in the lining of my pants under the belt. The clip was full — six cartridges. Plus one in the barrel which I removed also. That made seven. I remember I counted them. The discharged pistol I put in my inside pocket.

These precautions turned out to be unnecessary after all as we didn’t really get into our stride with the drinks. Probably because we were still saturated from the excesses of the preceding days. We ate, knocked back a few Pilseners, and on top of that several cups of coffee. Drunk I never was.

It was a lovely evening, quiet, not a breath of wind. Bright moon like a clean-washed car in the sky. And the moonshine like dust where the car has been passing. Night birds whistled and trilled. . By closing time we got ready to stroll home at a leisurely pace. Our drinking companions of the weekend would never have credited our demure behaviour. In our country the men often have to be chucked out at closing time. But it’s not at all like with you people here, even though the police there are armed too. A copper can’t just go for his gat there. You’ll never know how many guys I met in the cooler who were there for assaulting an officer! I tell you, the ordinary citizen there very easily gives a policeman a few of the best. And he’s not branded for that. As long as you don’t get involved in politics!

We were full of good food and good talk and a little melancholy under the moon at the thought of the last embrace. Gregor Samsa was to accompany his girlfriend to her parents’ place just out of town; I was to go along till about halfway before turning off to my flat. The streets were empty. Weekdays the workers go to bed early. We sang a little, like

Shine on, shine on harvest moon

Up in the sky —

when suddenly, from nowhere in the street ahead of us a voice started calling.

I shan’t remember what the voice shouted; I don’t believe it addressed us by name. But we knew it was meant for us. And I, I most definitely knew that this was the secretive presence that had been following me so stubbornly.

Just out of reach in front of us the enticing voice moves. We can’t make out anything. Neither light nor movement. Always it keeps taunting us. Does it dare us to come closer?

To the edge of town I walked with Gregor and his girl. There the road splits in two — left to the nearby neighbouring village where her parents have a small plot, right to the broken-down manor house of a ground baron from before the revolution. Just before you get to the ruins and just about bordering on the town there’s a reasonably dense forest. In the moonlight the tree-shadows were very dark and solid. The trees floated in the light pools breaking through the foliage. The voice came to a halt in that forest and called out to us to approach.

“Greguška, you take the girl along. I’m going to look who or what’s hiding among those trees.”

“Are you completely off your bloody rocker, or what?” Gregor wanted to know.

I take the magazine from the small bag under my belt and slip it into my pistol. “I’m armed. There are six bullets in the clip. I count them with my thumb. Plus one which I push into the barrel. That makes seven. I’m not a fuck scared.”

“No, you’re crazy! How do you know it’s not a deliberate trap? Just imagine someone’s lying there, waiting for you in the. . in the. . the dark, with a machine-gun? What will your little fart-a-puff mean to you then, hey? Don’t go, man. Someone is surely trying to lure you out of town to do you in. Leave it alone, I say!” And I consider his words. Could well be he’s right. At that time there were indeed all sorts of strange things happening. Particularly the back-and-forth over the border. Americans and Lord knows who all infiltrating people. Underground organizations. Networks. Vendettas. It’s true, I could very easily walk straight into a shooting party.

“Turn back and go to bed” — with these words Gregor clinched the argument. “Tomorrow is another day. Why go and risk your skin in something that ten to one doesn’t concern you at all?”

I pressed him to my heart and turned back to town.

And now a frightening thing happens, something which freezes my blood like quicksilver in the veins. The unearthly voice who only a while back was still heckling me from the trees is now in front of me, between me and the house, and again I’m taunted and beckoned.

Imagine a Middle European town late at night, not a cat on the streets, each house veiled in an isolation which can be called “sleep”. Dead silence — and remember, the place is densely populated, all live in town, right on top of one another. You turn down the street where your flat is. Old trees on the sidewalks both sides. Then thunderingly the echoing footsteps. And: a hell explodes. I know about the cracklash of shots, hoarse shouting voices, fire-jets flowering sharply, and powder-stench, and a running, and broken breaths. I know of an agony of fear, an explosion of senses, crescendo, apotheosis. Break. And then nothing.

I know nothing more. I woke up on my bed in the flat, quite feverish and completely wet with perspiration. Just in my pants and my shirt. Remember. I tried to remember. Everything was peaceful, beautifully quiet, and it was clear that whatever had happened must have been a denouement, that I’d henceforth be left in peace. I sat up and started looking for the firearm, my hands were still confused. That, the pistol, I discovered hidden under my pillow. I took out the magazine, counted the cartridges. There were two bullets. No more. And yet, of this I was sure: I myself hadn’t fired a single shot.

The Explanation

Well, it was a stormy period in the history of my country. In times of changing regimes, when there is a fighting for power, it always goes like that — you will still learn it also. On many a night the silver fox was hunted. Shots were pulled off. There were sometimes raw shrieks in the streets and in the low vegetation by the rivers. The silver reflections of the moon were often disturbed. And when I was arrested one day chance decreed that I be pushed into a cell full of prisoners amongst whom, to my total surprise, Keuner was also. The man caught a fright when he saw me, that was much evident. He was pale around the lips. When he tried lighting a cigarette his hands were nervous so that the little flame shivered.

“Also, old K, that pistol of yours that you were so keen to force on to me: let’s hear the story!” Thus, more or less, did I address him after we’d gotten the banalities over with.

“D — Do you still have it?”

“No.”

“Ah!” He relaxed. And started telling me what had happened at the time. Also that it was never his intention to offload any trouble on to me but that he was so unnerved that he simply had to get rid of the thing. (Ja, I thought — cause toujours mon gars!) It all started after he’d escorted a small group of refugees across the frontier. Four men and a woman. No questions did he ask beforehand. Their reasons were their own business. They had enough money, wanted to get out — the rest was a matter of logistics. Before the crossing he’d asked them to hand over any weapons in their possession to him, K. It was standard procedure — I must remember what it was like? If a border patrol from the other side were to intercept a lot of armed refugees, then the fat would have been in the fire, and the eventuality of a shoot-out on this side was equally an unacceptable proposition or risk for any guide. Only the woman, a particularly attractive lady, had this thing with her: the damned pistol. Everything went off smoothly. Routine nearly. A guide who is worth his pay sees to it. And at the destination, once they were safe, he — K — as was customary, handed the weapon back to her. No, he could keep it, she wouldn’t be needing it any more. A little ironic her smile was. Very rapidly she then sketched the history for K, whether he was interested in hearing it or not. She was in fact, she claimed, the wife of a much older senior officer in the political police. But at the same time she was a member of a clandestine resistance group. Did her husband suspect her? Did he know? Perhaps there was another aspect over which she draped a discreet veil — that there was a liaison between her and one of the four students. Maybe the extra-marital relationship was the only point of contact between her and the group. Who would be able to tell? Did her husband intend to manipulate her, use her to infiltrate the illegal organization? And when she learned that the political police were on the point of going into action she outwitted her husband and stole his pistol. As for the rest — about this my colleague K was not very clear. Was the government agent first killed with his own weapon, or did the group just leave? In any event, a curse of revenge was uttered. And the unsuspecting K, back across the border the same night with the stolen shooting-iron, immediately started experiencing the strange persecution which I, later, would in turn get to know. It played havoc with his nerves, made him a wreck. Till it reached the insupportable stage where he no longer could tolerate being the dark instrument for something or someone he could not comprehend. It was then, cowardly, that he “made over” the pistol to me and fled for his life. Apologies, sincere regrets, my old mate, etc. (Cause toujours mon lapin.)

This then is the story which I could never really unravel. I must admit that I twisted it a bit here towards the end. It was in fact K who started pumping me about the weapon which he’d sold to me and it was only after I’d informed him about my experiences — and the satisfactory ending — that he enlightened me mouthful by mouthful about the prelude. Truth, after all, has more faces than a polished crystal.