by Peter Weiss
The two hacked-off heads lay on the crumpled, gray-white, blood-stained cloth. Cushions, shoved under the sheet, were propping them up. Were the rough-cut cross sections of their throats and the watery trickles of blood not visible, they could have conveyed the impression of a couple who had been surprised by death while lying beside one another in their bed. The picture was painted with black and white and a minimal addition of brownish and reddish hues. The woman’s visage was tilted toward the man. Her mouth was slightly open; between the eyelids, ringed in shadow, a point of the white of her eye glistened. Oddly bare, her ear protruded from her hair, cropped short for the guillotine. The face of the man, with the hint of a beard across his collapsed cheeks, was still marked by terror. His eyes were open, clouded and skewed, sunken deep in their sockets; his mouth was also ajar: the gaping lips, the teeth, the tongue still seemed to carry their final cry. They must have dragged him to the guillotine; the woman had given up sooner. It would have been disrespectful to compare the extinguished quality on her face with a sort of peacefulness; for how, even after the arrival of her eternal rest, could the thought of peace be connected with her existence. And yet her features—a faint glow on the temple, cheekbone, nose, and chin—contained a softness, her head lay there like an overly ripe, fallen piece of fruit. The man had been ripped from his existence. The chin muscles, the sharply bulging nose, and the crudely dimpled contour of the bare skull still expressed an energetic tension. If the woman had been completely divested of power, he had violently resisted for as long as there had been a breath left in him. The painting was hung on the wall of a small side room in the National Museum. Through a window, my gaze fell over the stream and onto the castle and the wide street leading up to the obelisk. Traffic flowed back and forth on the Skeppsbron. As I turned back to the small canvas, the agony captured there grew more piercing. Once more I was face-to-face with Géricault. On this Sunday, in the first days of May, half a year after my arrival in Stockholm, Paris rose up within me, overwhelming. Once again I was following Géricault, into Beaujon Hospital in the suburb of Roule, into the Salpêtrière, into the morgue, where his study of the definitive had taken him. The fascination that death had exerted upon him mirrored his desire to confront the moment in which everything is over. I began to understand why he craved such a counterbalance to his activity. In doing so, he put his desire for truth to the test. His work had to withstand the final moment, the irrevocable. At the sight of these corpses, every remnant of vanity and self-deception in him withered away. I had walked along the narrow path at the foot of the retaining wall between Pont Saint-Michel and the Petit Pont. There, where the blocky building of the morgue had been located, overlooking the quay, next to a steep set of stairs leading up from the embankment, the great palace of the police prefecture now loomed, on the Quai du Marché-Neuf. In Géricault’s time, the Petit Pont was still nestled between two tall defensive walls, and from the bridge, which rested on arches of great ashlar blocks, a gate led into the throng of tall and slender buildings over which the cathedral towered. In one of his most remarkable prints, Meryon had captured the old mortuary, the former abattoir on the market. He too had been drawn to this building, because its cold interior contained the terrifying antithesis to the vision of civilization of which the city boasted. He had lifted the quarter on the front edge of which the mortuary house stood out of its surroundings and depicted it as a sealed world. Black smoke billowed from the two smokestacks of the mortuary house, as if, inside, in the ovens, rags, damp clothing, perhaps also decomposed body parts, bodies were being incinerated. A strip of the Seine was visible on the bottom edge of the sheet. One of the long, flat laundry boats was sitting moored at the embankment. Women were leaning over the railing, rinsing and wringing out towels; shirts and sheets were hung up to dry under the slanted wooden roof. The barge, with a ladder running along the side of the vessel, and with poles and ropes on the deck, filled the entire width of the water’s edge; on board, people were working, unperturbed by the events unfolding directly above them. On the left, behind the boat, on the corner of the embankment, steps rose up out of the water. From this point, the scene of the salvaging of the dead body began to take form, with its intermeshing movements and gestures signaling their continued upward procession. The drowned man had been hauled out of the river in which the women were washing their laundry, was now lying face-up in the arms of the two people carrying him. Standing in front of the group was a thin woman in a long gown, her hair out, arched so far back in despair that her spine almost formed a right angle, her hands thrust over her face, a child behind her like a small tree swept bare of leaves. The constable, with rapier and tricorne, was showing the way from the stony bank, above the drainpipe of a sewer, to the steps in the middle of the wall. A couple of other women, rushing down the steps, were being held back by a guard. On the left, the brightly lit surface of the wall past which the dead man was being carried, his hands scraping along the ground; on the right, on the squat substructure, the morgue with its deep-set windows half-covered by thick, protruding shutters. A kinked drainpipe led down from the roof to the cobblestones of the path along the embankment, with tufts of grass growing in the cracks. Below the mass of the houses stacked up in the background, which dominated the upper section of the image, and the broad, vertically divided mid-section of the wall, the small figures were almost lost in the left-hand corner, having just emerged from the hard shadow. Onlookers were sitting, crouching and standing on the ledge of the wall, some of them leaning on the edge, they were gathered together casually, as on the balcony of a theater, while curious gawkers were propped on the railings of distant windows. Distributed across various levels, water, barge, embankment, wall, building façades, plumes of smoke, attics, an event unfurled that at first glance seemed to fit into a typical cityscape, and only gradually revealed its complicated drama. The workers, sealed off in the elongated cavity of the ship’s hull, were facing forward, the path along the embankment was the stage for the actors in a pantomime. Passers-by and street vendors had come down to the wall of the quay from the market stands with the curiosity that accidents arouse. Yet only a few of them expressed surprise, sympathy; the others were indifferently taking in the free show, which was probably an everyday occurrence. The marketplace was hidden behind the height of the wall. The cloud of smoke from one of the chimneys, blown sideways, hung above it; the houses must have been continuously blanketed by the acrid stench. From the thick chimney on the right, the smoke ascended to the jumble of rooftops, which, on the upper edge of the sheet, revealed a stippled section of sky fluttering with crows. Among all this, the main subject, the morgue, stood there abandoned, as if it had nothing to do with the motivation for creating the image. It could just as well have been some sprawling warehouse; barge poles were leaning against the basement wall, arranged around an anchor; a rope was fastened to the wall with pieces of sailcloth hanging from it. Both Meryon and Géricault knew what it looked like inside. In a moment, the dead man would be lying on one of the stone tables in the hall among other perished souls, among nameless suicides, people who had starved to death, fallen victim to drugs, been executed; and then the people would step back from the wall, commerce would continue. Heavy, oblique shadows, bright sections of façades with square window openings, horizontal and vertical lines, between them tiny figures, a dead man, a broken woman, a helpless child, a precisely framed cityscape, a view into a limbo that had to be entered by those who sought to walk the path of knowledge. I had spent a long time thinking about Meryon’s engraving; unable to get my hands on a reproduction, I had even sketched it. On Sunday afternoon, in my room on Fleminggatan, I sat over this paper that I had produced in Paris, tried to call to mind a conversation about the second and third cantos of the Inferno, from long ago. The absence of my close friends Coppi and Heilmann had formed part of the desolation of the past months. I could also now find the time that I needed to come to myself, I could always skim off a few hours from the wear and tear of the
day. It was just that earlier we had been so in tune with each other in our group that everything we uttered was immediately expanded upon by one of the others, every question had led to answers and follow-up questions on which we honed our thinking. Alone with my thoughts, I was often overcome by despondency. I tried to imagine Heilmann’s voice declaiming the verses of terza rima. I could see his face, the movement of his lips. Yet what I heard remained fuzzy, could not be brought into alignment with my thoughts. I experienced something of that which we had anticipated in our discussions back at the cemetery of the Saint Hedwig parish, namely, the instant in which, despite having already made resolutions and begun activities, we had to hesitate and start over. That had been on that dark slope, at the spot where the steep, rough path drops away. I had paused there with Heilmann and Coppi, had also encountered Ayschmann, Géricault, and Meryon there. This was the state of realizing that we had strayed from the straight path, whatever the straight path was, as if something like that ever even existed for us. We only knew that there was no possibility of return and that we had to liberate ourselves from our fear of continuing on. I called out to Heilmann and Coppi through the open window overlooking the hospital grounds, which were beginning to grow verdant. Among the blossoming bushes, a pregnant woman was pacing to and fro. The driver of a tram that was rolling past stepped on his pedal-operated bell at a person hurrying across the tracks. How did it go again, I yelled, how did it go, when the speaker had entered the city from which the path spiraled down into the underworld. And then I heard something of the torrent of noises which, captured in just a few verses, contained all forsakenness, all exile. Back in Paris this tintinnabulation had pursued me, though I had been unable to determine its origin; now, above the budding trees, I was able to distinguish the individual elements in the eddy of sounds drifting through the air. From the jangling of the iron wheels, the fading of the bell, the rattling of the car engines, the hard thudding of the steps, a sigh, a single cry of lament was released, and was joined by many identical voices; a scraping and grazing emerged, as in a crowd of people scuffing about endlessly, I could hear the lips opening, tongues stirring, teeth grinding and chattering, words in all languages sought to emerge from the murmur of voices, a whistle, a clapping of hands, a cry of pain, of rage, cut through the stammering, whispering, and singing. In this way, those who had been cast out moved forward like shadows, toward the border river, the Acheron, which a ferryman would take us across, a man so awful in appearance that we’d have swooned on the spot. Yet I didn’t sink to the ground, as if overcome by sleep, but rather hurtled down the steps, inside the screw thread of the stairwell, whose mother-of-pearl coloring was shot through with a network of thin cracks containing scattered holes and deeply scratched streaks. Descending from landing to landing, I saw the roofs of the courtyard buildings growing upward, covering the tower of the town hall, I walked along Fleminggatan, past the bicycle workshop, the coal vendor, the shop windows full of urns and coffins, the gray-green beer hall with people sitting motionlessly at stained tables, past the factory, the wooden fence, and onto the Kungsbron above the broad expanse of the railway tracks and the forest of railway cable poles. At this late afternoon hour, the sun shone directly into Kungsgatan; behind me, from the dark blocks at the end of the street, the tower of the town hall rose up once more, backlit, as if made of translucent fabric. On the sides of the main street, the pedestrians trailed back and forth, with their long shadows, washing past one another in streams; here and there waves and eddies formed, stagnated, twisted and turned, and in the middle, in opposing directions, the glistening automobiles glided along, between them the trams whose front carriages shot blinding reflections, one of them bearing a number two, the other an eleven, in their round, cyclopean eyes. Through the flowing, swirling Sunday throngs, I walked down the Kungsgatan beneath protruding signs, leaning to the side, tracing arches through the sunlit bodies that collected in front of the shop windows. In the vitrines, the inimitably sophisticated gentlemen were displaying casual trousers, sports jackets, fleecy tops, brightly colored neckties, lightweight shoes and sandals, raincoats, felt hats and peaked caps that they were planning to wear in summer, while ladies, also made of plastic, writhing ecstatically, smiling seductively, touted their suits and silk blouses, their light underwear, floral bathing attire, and their headdresses made of petals and foam; and I walked across Sveavägen to the office building on the corner, where Hodann had been quartered in the cellar since his arrival from Norway.
