The Illogic of Kassel

28

As the hour approached when Germany has lunch, the Dschingis Khan started to liven up, as you might expect, and customers began coming in: people chose tables near mine. I was so alone there (in theory Alka and Pim were still smoking outside, although I’d soon discover Alka had taken the bus back). For a while, I entertained myself by pretending everyone in the place was an acquaintance or a friend, a really surprising gathering of people linked to different periods of my life.

As everyone asked for the menu, so did I, though in my case it was just to have something to read. They might be old acquaintances or friends, but none of them spoke to me, which never ceased to be a relief. I was worried they might all want to head for me at once and I’d have to choose between friends or acquaintances from one period or another; the truth is, I’ve always hated favoritism.

I’m not sure how it came about that I bent down and started looking for a hole under the table. Knowing that Marie Darrieussecq knew that I, too, liked those jail scenes in which prisoners leave useful messages for their successors in their cells, I was trying to find a cranny into which she might have slipped some instructions about how to survive in those tricky Chinese circumstances. As you might guess, I didn’t find anything, but I did spend quite a while pleasantly entertained, mostly by imagining I did find a scrap of paper, which turned out to be a message for Holly Pester, not for me. She was another of the writers who’d passed through here. I’d been able to read some of her poetry on the Internet and enjoyed it a lot.

On deciding the fruitless search was over, and also purely to fill the time, I turned to doing something else. I devoted myself to listening to the conversations in German and Chinese that I could hear in the restaurant, as well as those between customers and waiters that mixed the two languages together. They might be acquaintances or friends, but they all spoke in German and Chinese. Supposing our paths had crossed over the years, my friends certainly seemed to have changed a good deal, at the very least to have changed languages.

I rang a friend in Barcelona to ask if he could possibly imagine the idea of a Catalan taking up the Chinese language and renouncing his own forever. Luckily for my friend, he wasn’t at home. I didn’t feel like calling anyone else after that.

Soon the whole restaurant had turned itself into a new Galway Bay as I began to use my fantastical “Synge method”: that special technique that allowed me to believe I understood everything everyone was saying so perfectly that I could even draw conclusions about what was going on there.

For a moment I went so far as to believe that, if the circumstances were right, I could someday work as an interpreter in meetings between Chinese and German entrepreneurs. I heard, for example, a German customer telling his wife that her face, usually washed out and tending toward a sort of eggish hue, had acquired an incandescent tone. And I heard the wife replying that he was a dead man. I heard a Chinese cook tell a waiter he wanted to get over his sexual extravaganzas and that he was fed up with his horrible girdle. What girdle was he talking about? Did I really know what a girdle was? I heard another waiter tell a customer he understood his desire to stand out when there were ladies around and I heard the customer promise him a big tip if he managed to make him stand out even more. I heard one of the Chinese cooks tell a German kitchen boy he was a greaseball and that they’d end up finding him in a sewer and have to scrape a layer of filth off in order to identify him. I heard the kitchen boy tell the cook she had a lovely big ass. He congratulated her on having such a large one but said that every day she wasted half her time stuck in the doorway, as it was so hard for her to get into the kitchen.

From everything I heard and translated using the Synge method, I came to the conclusion that there was an undercurrent of violence about the place. A tension between the German and Chinese citizens — both countries stars on their own continents — ran almost covertly in every corner. It was as if all the immense tension between the Chinese and the Germans over dividing up the world as soon as the United States lost it was concentrated there in the limited space of that establishment.

You could feel that tension, and the dialogue somehow reproduced it with a hefty emotional charge. It ended up leading to my notable physical exhaustion, and only that morning’s excellent mental state saved me from a weariness and anguish premature at that time of day. It was obvious I couldn’t bear being in that absurd place any longer, where perhaps the worst thing of all was that I wasn’t doing anything. Nobody came to see me, despite how ghastly that would have been. Maybe because of this, when I saw Pim reappear I actually felt happy. At first, I thought Alka had got left behind. But I soon discovered that not only was Alka no longer there, but she was perhaps several miles away. It was obvious Pim had sent Alka off to laugh elsewhere; but I didn’t inquire, I didn’t want to know. I preferred to remain ignorant of what had become of the marvelous Croatian woman who laughed because she thought her job obliged her to. I was more concerned with things of a different order, most particularly my weird situation waiting at that table with its monstrous vase.

As if being there all by myself with the red notebook weren’t enough, Pim angrily remarked that nobody was coming to see me. I’ve always thought it most unnecessary that she told me so. I contained myself as best I could and, letting myself be carried along by my generally good state of mind, I simply said that I found her immensely amusing and somehow was going to put her into my next novel.

I expected she would at least want to know what my next book was about and that might even cause her to lean over my table to see what I’d jotted in my notebook (that way, a feeling that people were interested in me would be created, and this might possibly help with the formation of a line; it’s well known that people tend to be imitative); but not only did she not glance toward my notebook, she half turned around, and after saying she was going back outside to carry on smoking, she disappeared from sight so quickly I almost felt offended. I was so annoyed by her attitude that I couldn’t bring myself to follow her. I didn’t even want to get up from that absurd table and catch a breath of fresh air, or concentrate on the sprightliness of the pensioners on the terrace by the Fulda.

The minutes that followed have all vividly stayed with me, even though nothing happened. The mysterious mind sometimes seizes on moments that are simply dead or appear quite banal, but which, for reasons that escape us, stay in our memory and end up leaving us uneasy. These memories seem to be ineradicable, making us think these moments mean more than we first believed, and perhaps we just didn’t succeed in seeing it all at the time. In fact, if we take stock, all the moments of our lives are like that; in other words, more happens than we think. But there are some moments that surprisingly tend to be dull and yet mysteriously lodge in the memory, perhaps so we might investigate later on what buried reality ran through it all.

I was there a long time in this second phase of strange lingering; I was basically hanging around, waiting for Pim to return from her latest cloud of smoke. And during that time nothing happened, but taking into account the fact that I remember it minute by minute, I tend to think much more took place than seems possible to get down on paper. Throughout that period of time, boring and memorable at once, I devoted myself to recalling an unexciting impasse experienced on a now dimly remembered group trip to Dublin: I was trying to buy film for my camera, but we were in the suburbs and in a hurry to get up some metal steps leading to a bridge we had to cross to reach a train station. . Well, I won’t go on, because nothing happened. Or, more accurately, I didn’t know how to identify what it was that really happened and left me intrigued for life.

I was just thinking of this when Pim came back in, this time to tell me she was considering seeing a hypnotist to give up smoking.

“As nobody’s coming to see me, don’t you think we could go now?” I said.

“It’s not all about you being seen,” she replied, aghast.

It was unnecessary for her to tell me this, too, but it did sound like she was reproaching me for not getting down to writing, which ultimately, she seemed to think, was what I should really be doing.