The Death of a Craft
(second version)
contra Yukio Mishima
Had Marietta not received the news that her mother was dying (which would not have been really surprising, it had been forever since she had drifted away from home and became one of us, the old woman has of course severed any and all contact with her), and had she not sent word, asking us to accompany her to that godforsaken small town, possibly we would never have heard of “Herman,” this in his unique way rather scary fellow, regarding whom to this day it is not entirely certain whether he had in fact really existed or had merely arisen as an embodiment of craven, inferior fears, and perhaps the affair that back in those days threw us into such a tizzy would have remained forever shrouded in oblivion. Our group at the time — three fellow officers and Zsuzsanna, Berta and Lucy — could not say no to our thrilling and delicious Marietta, after all it was winter, and all of us were in a stifling funk following the fiasco of a grueling, over-elaborate and unconsummated saturnalia where, in spite of the “absence” of some of us, there had been no real risk or actual danger, and so we all embarked on the trip full of expectation, seeing in it ad esse ad posse the promise of a chance to stand within the radius of the expiring glance, soon to transcend all boundaries, of an already depersonalized dying woman. As the train, its interior as grimy as the exterior, departed at dawn, the more than two hundred kilometers ahead of us — because of the train’s annoying slowness — threatened to be unbearably tedious, so it was small wonder that — weary of the Lowlands desolation rippling past our window: flatland, snow, trees, hamlets, and beyond that, hidden by this mute idyll, the living abomination, of course — sleep soon overcame us, except for Berta and Rudolf who briefly closeted themselves in the toilet at the end of the corridor, until their fellatious amours sent the flabbergasted conductor fleeing when he opened the door asking to see tickets. We were rumpled and spent by the time we got off at the small town’s station, and set out across the sparkling, crunching snow toward the hotel on the main square; Marietta alone appeared fresh after the tiresome journey, possibly thanks to the small cookies laced with a mild aphrodisiac she had bolted before arrival that restored her usual vivacity, or possibly because of the keen anticipation of soon being able to see and touch the bed, source and object of her deeply symbolic attachments, where she was born and where her mother now lay dying. Although — as he reluctantly admitted — all of the rooms were vacant, nor, judging by his tormented, hankering glances at our girlfriends, could he have had any objection to our persons, the desk clerk nonetheless showed an incomprehensible resistance, indeed he seemed prepared to dissuade us at whatever cost from staying in town. And so it was well past noon by the time we could occupy our rooms upstairs and pacify Marietta who had insisted with eyes ablaze that we go at once to see the dying woman, until at last we managed to persuade her that after our sleepless night and the fatigues of the journey she had an even greater need for a few hours of rest than we did. Obeying our prior request, the desk clerk knocked on the door of Oliver’s room at seven, when, peeking in and catching a glimpse of Berta and Lucy asleep in bed, sweetly entwined, he beat a flustered retreat, returning several minutes later to whisper into Rudolf’s ear in the other room: “The manager would like to have a few words with the officer gentlemen.” But it seemed that the matter could not have been all that important, because no one disturbed us during dinner in the hotel dining room, and not even when we stepped out of the foyer into the freezing wind did the desk clerk trouble himself to hinder us, but leaning on the reception counter kept nervously chewing his fingernail, and merely sent a shouted warning after us to be careful, work on the street lighting in town wasn’t quite completed . . . Indeed, once outside, we almost fell on our faces, and on the icy sidewalks it surely must have taken us half an hour to cover what otherwise would be a ten-minute walk to the house of Marietta’s birth. As we sheepishly entered the room, the acrid smell of perspiration stopped us short in the doorway, and we never did get any closer since the old woman, seeing Marietta, gathered all her remaining strength, grabbed the nurse’s arm and implored her in a hoarse voice to drive out of her room “these monsters! Anything,” she shrieked, in abhorrence, “but this!” So we slowly backed out of the miasma of sweat, to wait outside at the gate for Marietta, who, we knew, would not calm down until she had touched the aged planks of the bedstead, until her velvety palm clasped “the link connecting her birth and her rapidly approaching liberation.” Until Marietta joined us, we exchanged somber questioning glances, for we were unable to decide if we were meant to intervene in the transpiring scene which, we sensed, needed our gifts for its true completion: the bold momentum of sacrilege, the thrilling frisson of a criminal act. That is to say, before catching a glimpse of the old woman taking her terrified leave of the light we had been positive that the occasion — it depended only on us — would offer an opportunity to fulfill the until now stillborn promise of our handcuffed imaginations, and since our paraphiliac experiments had been aimed at precisely this impossibility, the total liberation of the imagination — in Gusztáv’s words — “from the infernal void of esse,” it was very hard for us now to renounce this chance of its realization, the tantalizing prospect that perhaps this time we would succeed in emerging into the boundless spaciousness of freedom, from where — even if only for a split second before extinction — we could contemplate the dreadful beauty of our existence. But as Marietta stepped out from the house her gentle, resigned wave of the hand left no doubts that we would not be going back to the death chamber — she was gone for good — and so it was with heads hung in dejection that we returned to our hotel where we sat down rather listlessly around one of the filthy tables of the bar that stayed open all night. We were sitting there undisturbed barely ten minutes when the night waiter with the nauseating smoothness of a sophisticated peasant stepped to Oliver’s side and said in a soft voice that the manager requested permission to sit down at our table. Before Oliver had a chance to fend him off, the little mannikin with his toothbrush mustache had already pulled up a chair between him and Zsuzsanna.
The Last Wolf & Herman Page 3
