The Illogic of Kassel

25

They say nobody sleeps on their way to the scaffold. I can only speak for myself and say that I was more than wide awake that Wednesday morning on the free Documenta bus heading toward my fast-approaching Chinese gallows. Alka and Pim kept laughing at what I was telling them with my morning good humor. I was witty, or at least I thought I was, though I didn’t manage to forget I was actually a prisoner.

The bus soon left the network of the city center, which had been entirely rebuilt since the war. It took a road that I think looped around the city, an unobtrusive ring road. It also looped around the baroque-style Karlsaue Park, which was Kassel’s vast and beautiful extension. Entering this open space multiplied my optimism and joy, although I didn’t forget the shadow of the Chinese gallows continuing to loom over the present.

And that’s how we ended up going onto the Auedamm, a lovely road running beside the Fulda River and along which walked hordes of retired Germans. Pim told me that Germany was a country for old people. The old knew how to have fun there, how to travel en masse better than anyone. It was enough to see them euphoric on the terraces beside the Fulda drinking beer, defying a world that otherwise believed only in youth.

For a while I’d been wondering what Autre had meant with that comment about “not even starting again, but going toward nothing” and I ended up asking my two jovial companions how they would interpret a man of a certain age suddenly showing a desire to go “toward nothing.”

A difficult question, I thought, a question to make you laugh or cry. Alka and Pim looked at me with mistrust and then backed away from me on that half-empty bus; they stood still a second, and then, like automatons, said something into each other’s ears and burst out laughing simultaneously.

The uncalled-for synchronization of their laughter and their movements made me rather uncomfortable, although a distinction had to be made between Alka — who laughed not understanding anything (once more, she was laughing only because she thought that was what her job entailed) — and Pim, who reacted that way because, it seemed to me at that moment, she was dictated to by what we might call the downside of her charm, which obliged her to show herself, without the slightest letup, always delighted by life.

Anyway, it was drizzling when we got off the bus at kilometer 19 of the Auedamm. On one side of the highway, a beer terrace with views over the river was crammed with German pensioners. On the other was the most miserable-looking Chinese restaurant I’d ever seen in my life. Karlsaue Park spread out behind it.

The Dschingis Khan, I thought, was a place for the evenings when anxiety gripped me; it had not been designed for my jubilant mornings. I was left hoping this first impression was false — I had to add, moreover, that I was convinced of finding myself confronting my own personal gallows. Perhaps it was all down to the drizzle that made the whole place look unwanted and disastrously glum.

In for a penny, in for a pound. Whatever the circumstances, I’ve never been one to turn and run if I didn’t like something; I’ve always known there’s only one battlefield with no way out. I say this because as soon as I went in to the Dschingis Khan, I spotted the old-fashioned round table, a sort of Spanish warming-table, and could barely believe it: pushed to the back of the dismal corner they’d assigned me, it was one of those tables with a space underneath for a heater and had a hideous vase and a worn, old yellow sign that read: “Writer in Residence.” Despite all this, I did not run away.

I had been so many men (I thought, parodying Borges), and now I was just a resident writer they’d invited to come and do a Chinese number. To cap it off, you could tell the sign had been handled by a large number of writers who’d been invited in the preceding weeks, some of whose names I remembered: Adania Shibli, Mario Bellatin, Aaron Peck, Alejandro Zambra, Marie Darrieussecq, Holly Pester.

I thought I’d be able to bear it.

I would sit at my gallows with dignity.

I knew some of those writers. I had preferred not to email them to ask how they’d artistically come to terms with the obligation to sit in that disagreeable corner each day. The fact of the matter is that writers can get drunk with one another, but they can never resolve together the technical problems they have with their respective lives or novels or Chinese residencies. Watching two writers talk of these matters is as excruciating as watching two future mothers swap details of their respective pregnancies, believing they’re talking about one and the same thing.

At that time of the morning, there were no customers in the dark, not terribly attractive restaurant, and there were just a few employees: some cooks and some waiters. There was also a Chinese woman at a table piled high with papers next to a large fish tank, who was devoting herself, in full view of everyone, to doing the accounts.

Not a single employee bothered to greet me; they all behaved with notable indifference, if not aversion. I understood right away that they saw me as a dangerous element: one more link in a frightening chain of scribblers, which made me surmise that the ones before me had, in general, left dreadful memories behind them. Furthermore, from certain disparaging looks I thought some of the cooks were sending in my direction, it seemed that more than a thousand different reasons to steer clear of writers had built up in their minds.

I took advantage of the unwelcoming atmosphere to ask Pim what she thought I should do with my pencil and my eraser and my red notebook in that somewhat inhospitable spot. No reader had come along at that mid-morning hour to see me, which wasn’t surprising, considering the fact that my appearance at the table in the Chinese restaurant hadn’t been announced anywhere in the city or on the Internet, and only one sign on the restaurant door and another on my table indicated I was there, at the mercy of any idiot with a vocation for gossip or who wanted to snoop at what I was writing.

“Who do you think is going to bother taking the Auedamm bus this miserable Wednesday to come spy on what I write here?” I asked Pim, with all the common sense in the world.

I was waiting for her answer, when a German woman weighing over 260 pounds came in and spoke briefly to Alka or, more accurately, Alka spoke to her very sharply. She must have said something to her about me, because, seconds later, the woman came resolutely forward and, in the most effusive manner, proceeded to embrace me with rare enthusiasm.

“Writer, writer, writer!” she shouted gleefully, as if she’d never seen one before in her life.

She let me go, but then embraced me again. Again she shouted, Writer, writer.

I heard Alka’s needless laughter.

“Yes, I’m a writer,” I said, annoyed. “What of it?”