The Illogic of Kassel

59

And the other dog, the less media-friendly one? Just as I was wondering that, the caretaker of the two animals appeared. He wasn’t just in charge of the dogs; he kept the forces of nature in harmony, in that complex but balanced territory, all in a tense equilibrium.

He spoke French and had a shaved head with an impressive diagonal scar; his ferocious appearance contrasted with his affable character. He’d been sleeping, he told me, in a hut nearby, with the two dogs. He’d been staying there since Documenta started, prudently taking the dogs in each evening when it got dark.

Was I there to steal the dog with the pink leg? I didn’t know if he was serious or joking. The question offended me, I said. Imperturbable, he asked the same question again. It’s my duty to know these things, he said, the hound has many admirers. I asked: If I had come to steal her, what would happen? I asked him. You’re pretty old to be doing things like that, he replied. I’d put your head in the beehive and the bees would do away with your urge to take the hound home. I don’t have a home, I said, just a cabin, but I don’t sleep there because I can’t think inside it. I’m not sure he completely understood these last words, spoken in my broken French. He looked at me first with profound astonishment and then with contempt.

The hound seemed to get bored with our conversation and went for a walk around the territory. I was observing her closely, and at first she actually managed to surprise me with her apparently infinite eagerness for all smells. When she found something that caught her attention — always an enigma for me, because I couldn’t understand what was so alluring in what she was smelling — her snout stuck to it with absolutely amazing obstinacy, with such anxious, frenzied enthusiasm, the rest of the world seemed to have stopped existing for her.

The dog was like a little Piniowsky. Obstinately interested in everything and prisoner of a great enthusiasm for whatever crossed her path, she seemed ready at any moment to ignore the whole damned world. I reached the conclusion that she was enjoying herself and that was all there was to it. She seemed to be living on a permanent high, lost in a nasal nirvana that she couldn’t detach from.