by Unknown
That’s when the most appalling thing happened! Suddenly, as though dancing a tarantella, Hairpiece flung his spindly arms into the air, gracefully lifted his right leg up to his navel and pirouetted to the rear on his left foot. I will never fathom where that lifeless tuft found the courage – he flashed me a triumphant look, as if privy to my dreams, turned his calf’s eyes inward till they shone white, and then simply collapsed like a marionette. That’s when I knew for certain that he must have been a circus clown before, because the whole lot of us burst out laughing!
But then the blue uniforms starting barking, and the laughter was wiped away as if it had never sounded. And one of them stepped over to the prostrate figure and remarked matter-of-factly, the way you say ‘it’s raining’ – that’s how he said ‘he’s dead’!
I have to confess something here – with all due respect for myself. At that moment, when I stood eye-to-eye with that man whom I called Hairpiece, and felt him succumb, not to me, no, but to life itself – at that second, all my hatred welled up and washed away like a wave on the beach, and nothing remained but a feeling of utter emptiness. A picket had broken off the fence – death came whizzing by a hair’s breadth away from me – then I quickly pulled myself together. I’ll grant Hairpiece this much in retrospect – he won a presumptive victory, beat me to it, I admit.
The next day I had another front man who immediately made me forget his predecessor. He had the lying eyes of a theologian, but I believe he was released from hell with the express purpose of making it impossible for me to pluck my flower.
He had an impertinent way of making himself conspicuous. He disseminated merriment. Even the pale blue dogs couldn’t suppress a human grin, a very strange sight in this place. Civil servants to the bone – but the primitive dignity of these usually callous professional soldier faces was twisted into a grimace. They did not want to laugh, hell, no! But they had to. Do you know the feeling when you’re angry with someone and both your faces are masks of malevolence, and then something funny happens that makes you both laugh – you don’t want to laugh, not on your life! But the face involuntarily tugs sideways and takes on that all-too-familiar expression best described as a ‘sourpuss’ grin. That’s what happened to the blue coats, and that was the one human response we ever noticed in them. Yes, that theologian was a real piece of work! Cagey enough to be mad – but not so mad as to undermine his cageyness.
We were twenty-seven men in that ring, surrounded by a pack of twelve uniformed, pistol-packing pit-bulls. Some of them must have been engaged in that barking business for twenty years or more, for their mouths had come little by little over time to resemble snouts. But this animalistic metamorphosis did not rob them of their conceit. Every single one of them, just as he was, might have served as an epitome for the inscription: l’État c’est moi.
The theologian (I later learnt that he was, in fact, a locksmith who had an accident while working on a church – God took him under his wing!) – he was so crazy or cagey that he completely respected the guards’ dignity. No, more than respected! He puffed up their blue-coated prowess into a veritable hot air balloon of inconceivable size, of which the bearers had not the slightest inkling. Even as they laughed at his apparent stupidity, a certain surreptitious pride puffed up their chests and conflated their bellies, straining their leather belts.
Every time the theologian passed one of the watchdogs that stood spray-legged, his power on display, snapping and snarling at us – every time he made an altogether forthright-looking bow and wished him a heartfelt, affable and well-intended ‘Happy holiday to you, Sergeant-Major, sir!’ – he sounded so sincere that not a soul, let alone the over-inflated hot air balloons in uniform, could have taken it amiss. And his bow was so bashful it always looked as if he was side-stepping a slap in the face.
And so the devil made this comedian-theologian my front man, and his madness made such a spectacle of itself and had such a powerful effect on me that I almost forgot my new little girlfriend, my dandelion. The sight of him so rattled my nerves, pressing a cold sweat out of my every pore, that I hardly managed to flash my darling a tender smile. Every time the theologian made his bow and wished his ‘Happy holiday to you, Sergeant-Major, sir’ – that dripped like honey from his tongue – every time I had to tense every muscle to keep from imitating him. The temptation was so great that, time and again, I was already nodding a friendly greeting at those symbols of authority and only managed in the very last second to hold my tongue and keep from genuflecting before them.
Every day we circled for about a half-hour round the yard, which amounted to twenty times around a day, and twelve uniforms stood watch at the perimeter. So the theologian must have made at least two hundred and forty genuflections a day, and two hundred and forty times I had to tense every muscle not to go mad. I knew that if I kept this up for three days I’d start going soft in the brain – and I wasn’t about to let that happen. I was totally drained when I got back to my cell. But the whole night long in my dream I ran an unending gauntlet of blue uniforms, each of whom looked like Bismarck – all night long, with deep bows, I bid these pale blue Bismarcks: ‘Happy holiday to you, Sergeant-Major, sir!’
The next day I managed to arrange to make the column pass me by and I got a new front man. I lost my clog, made a big fuss of finding it and limped back into line. Thank God! The sun rose right there before my eyes. Or rather – it played hide and seek. My new front man was so unabashedly slow that my entire 1.80 metres were swallowed by his shadow. Providence was on my side – I just had to help it along with my clog. The man’s inhumanly long limbs just flopped about aimlessly, and the strange thing was he actually managed to move forward in the process, even though he had absolutely no control of the motion of his arms and legs. I loved him, almost – went so far as to pray that he not drop dead, as Hairpiece had done, or go mad and start making cowardly genuflections. I prayed for his long life and the preservation of his sanity. I felt myself so safely sequestered in the mantle of his shadow that I let my loving looks linger longer than usual on my little dandelion without fear of blowing my cover. I even forgave this heavenly front man his disgusting snivelling snout – indeed, I nobly stifled the urge to dub him with all sorts of nicknames, like Oboe, Cuttlefish or Holy Roller. All I could think about was my flower – and so I let my front man make a fool of himself for however long he liked.
The day was like all other days. The only difference was that at the end of our half-hour’s exercise the prisoner from Cell 432 suddenly developed a pounding pulse and his eyes took on an expression of sham harmlessness and badly veiled vacillation.
We turned into the last lap – the key rings came alive again, and our human picket fence slept on its feet, soaking in the scanty rays of sunlight, as though embracing the bars of an eternal gate.
But what was that? One picket wasn’t sleeping at all! It was wide awake and excitement made it change its stride every couple of metres. Did nobody notice? No. And suddenly picket number 432 bent down, fumbled with a fallen sock – and lunged, lightning-fast, with one hand, at a frightened little flower, ripped it up by the roots – and already seventy-seven pickets were hobbling again round the last lap, according to accustomed routine.
Picture this comic sight: a blasé, contrite young man in the age of the gramophone record and space exploration standing in Cell Number 432 beneath the high-walled window, holding a little yellow flower, a perfectly ordinary dandelion, cradled in his solitary hands, up to a thin ray of light that trickled in. And then this person, previously accustomed to smelling powder, perfume and petrol, gin and lipstick, but reduced for months to sniffing the scent of wooden bunk bed, dust and the cold sweat of fear, brings the dandelion to his hungry nostrils and he snorts so greedily the essence of that little yellow blossom into his lungs that now he’s nothing but nose.
Then something unfurls in him and pours like light into the cramped confines, a thing of which he had not the slightest notion until now: a gentleness,
an attachment and a warmth he never felt before, binding him to the flower and filling every inch of his being.
Stifled by a sudden sense of enclosure, he shut his eyes in stunned amazement: yours is the smell of the earth, of sunlight, sea and honey, my beloved living thing! He took in her immaculate cool breath like the voice of his father, to which he’d never paid much attention, but which he now found so consoling in the silence – he felt the coolness like the bare shoulder of a dark woman.
Gently he lifted her, like a lover, to his water cup, and lowered her weary little body in it – and it took him minutes – that’s how slowly he sat down, face to face with his flower.
He felt so relieved and happy that he took and stripped everything off, everything that burdened his soul: imprisonment, solitude, the hunger for love and helplessness of his twenty-two years, the present and the past, the world and Christianity – yes, that too!
He was a brown Balinese, a ‘savage’ member of a savage people that feared and worshipped the sea and the lightning and the tree. A people that beheld, revered, devoured, but never grasped the coconut, the codfish and the twittering colibri. He felt so free, and never before had he been so ready to do good as he whispered to the flower … oh to be like you …
The whole night long his happy hands embraced the tingling tin of his drinking cup, and in his sleep he felt them heaping earth on him, dark, good earth, and felt himself at home in it and becoming one with it – with flowers sprouting from his skin: anemones, columbines and dandelions – tiny, inconceivable bursts of sunlight.
Shadowlight
1949
Paul Celan
The heart held out, hidden in the dark and hard as the philosophers’ stone.
*
It was spring and the trees uprooted to branch with their birds.
*
The broken jug* will to the well until the well bows to its will.
*
All talk of justice is for naught so long as the biggest warship hasn’t been torpedoed by the forehead of a drowned man.
*
Four seasons, and not a fifth to worry about which to pick.
*
So great was his love for her that she might have been able to lift the lid of his coffin – if only the flower she’d laid on it were not such a dead weight.
*
Their embrace lasted so long, it drove love to despair.
*
The Day of Judgement had come, and to scout out the greatest iniquity the cross was nailed onto Christ.
*
Bury the flowers and lay the man on that grave.
*
The hour sprung free of the watch, stood before it and commanded it to run on time.
*
When the general laid the bloodied head of the rebel at the feet of his sovereign, the latter flew into a wild rage. ‘You dared pollute the throne room with the stench of blood,’ he cried out, and the general trembled.
Then the lips of the beheaded opened and told the story of the lilac.
‘Too late,’ declared the ministers.
A later chronicler substantiated this opinion.
*
When the hanged man was cut down from the gallows his eyes had not yet closed. The hangman hastened to press them shut. Bystanders had already noticed and sank their suffering gaze.
But at that very moment the gallows took itself for a tree, and since no one had their eyes open, it is impossible to say for certain that it was not so.
*
He laid virtues and vices, guilt and innocence, qualities and faults on the scale, as he wanted to be sure before passing judgment on himself. Yet weighed down as they were, the scales of justice came out level.
But since he absolutely wanted to know for certain, come what may, he shut his eyes and walked countless times in a circle around the scales, first in one direction, then the other, until he no longer knew which scale held what. Whereupon he passed judgment, randomly selecting one of the scales.
When he opened his eyes again, one scale had indeed dipped lower, but it was impossible to say which: the one loaded with guilt or the one with innocence.
It made him mad to derive no benefit from the evidence, and so he condemned himself, though he could not help thinking that he might be mistaken.
*
Make no mistake: this last lamp doesn’t shed more light – the surrounding darkness was just sucked into itself.
*
‘Everything passes’: this too, and does it not simultaneously give us pause?
*
She turned her back to the mirror, for she could not abide its vanity.
*
He taught the laws of gravity, offered proof after proof, but his teachings fell on deaf ears. Then he raised himself aloft and taught the laws in this suspended state – whereupon the people paid heed, though no one was surprised not to see him sink back down again.
The Secrets of the Princess of Kagran
1971
Ingeborg Bachmann
Once upon a time there was a Princess of Chagre or Chageran, from a people that later called itself the Kagran. St George, the very same saint who slew the dragon in the swamp, so that after the monster’s death the city of Klagenfurt could be founded, was also active here in old Marchfelddorf, on the far side of the Danube, where a church still stands near the flood lands marking his sainted memory.
The princess was very young and very beautiful and she had a black horse on which she rode ahead of everyone else. Her retainers counselled and implored her to hold back, for the land where they lived on the banks of the Danube, where later the Rhaetians, the Marcomanni, the Norics, the Moesians, the Dacians, the Illyrians and the Pammonians settled, was always in danger, and borders had not yet been invented. There was also a Cis- and a Transleithania, for peoples were still on the move. One day the Hungarian Hussars rode up from the puszta into the far-reaching, undiscovered corners of what would later become Hungary. They brought with them their wild Asian horses, as swift as the princess’s steed, and everyone trembled with fear.
The princess lost sovereign power, she was taken prisoner as she did not put up a fight; but she refused to be pawned off as a bride to the hoary-haired King of the Huns or the aged King of the Avars. She was held as a hostage and guarded by many red and black riders. Because the princess was a true princess she preferred death to being bedded down by some decrepit old monarch, and she had to pluck up her courage, for that very night she was to be taken to the castle of the King of the Huns or that of the King of the Avars. She thought of escaping and hoped that her guards would fall asleep before the break of dawn, but her hope faded. They had taken her steed, and she had no idea how she might slip out of the enemy compound and find her way back to the blue hills of her homeland. Sleepless, she lay in her tent.
In the middle of the night she thought she heard a voice singing, not speaking; it murmured and gently lulled, but then, so it seemed to her, it no longer sang for others, but for her ears only in a language that enthralled her and of which she did not understand a single word. Nevertheless, she fathomed that the voice was directed to her alone and called out to her. The princess did not need to understand the words. Enchanted, she got up and pulled aside the cloth that covered the opening of her tent. She saw before her the endlessly dark sky of Asia and, looking up, caught a shooting star. The voice that broke through to her told her she could wish for something, and she wished it with all her heart. Suddenly she saw a stranger standing there before her in a long black coat, not one of the red and blue riders; he hid his face in the shroud of night, but even though she could not see his countenance she knew that he had cried out for her and sung hope into her heart in a voice never heard before, and that he had come to free her. He held her horse by the reins, and she quietly parted her lips and asked: Who are you? What is your name, my rescuer? How am I to thank you? Whereupon he laid two fingers to his lips, which she understood to mean that she should be still; he moti
oned for her to follow him and flung his black coat around her so that no one could see her. They were blacker than black in the night, and he led her and the horse which quietly lifted and lowered its hooves without whinnying, led them through the encampment and out a fair distance into the steppe. The princess still had his wondrous song in her ear, and she was charmed by this voice and wished to hear it again. She wanted to ask him to ride upstream with her, but he made no reply and handed her the reins. She was still in the greatest danger and he gave her a sign to ride off. Then she lost her heart to him, even though she had not yet seen his face, since he kept it hidden; but she obeyed because she had to obey him. She swung herself onto the horse, looked down at him in silence and wanted to bid him a word of farewell in his language. She whispered it with her eyes. But he turned away and disappeared into the night.
The horse started trotting towards the river, the damp air guiding its direction. The princess cried for the first time in her life, and later peoples wandering in the region found several river pearls, which they brought to their first king and which are, to this day, amongst the oldest precious stones set in St Stephen’s crown.
Once she reached open country she rode upstream for many days and nights until she came to a region in which the river spread into countless backwaters running in all directions. Soon it turned into one big marsh overgrown with stunted willow bushes. The water was still at its normal level, the bushes bent and swayed, rustling in the ever-changing path of the wind of the plain, in which the willows could never stand upright but remained stunted. They swayed gently like marsh grass and the princess lost her way. It was as if everything had been set in motion, waves of willow branches, waves of grass – the plain was alive and no other person trod its soggy ground. The rush of the Danube, relieved to have broken free of the constraint of its immovable banks, split into countless streams that lost themselves in the labyrinth of the canals, whose veins cut broad swaths through the washed-up islands past which the water shot with a mighty crash. Listening amidst the foaming currents, the tide and tangle and the stream, the princess understood that the water was fast eroding the sandy beachhead on which she stood, eroding great hunks of the embankment, taking clumps of willow along with it. The water consumed entire islands and washed others up again elsewhere, and that is how things would proceed on the plain until the time of the high water, when willow and islands would be washed away and disappear without a trace. A smoky fleck hung in the sky overhead, but there was not a trace of the blue heights of her native land. She did not know where she was, she did not recognize the Theban Heights, the foothills of the Carpathians, all still nameless, and she did not see the March flow into the Danube; nor did she know that one day a watery border would be drawn here, dividing two as yet nameless countries. For there were no countries and no borders to divide them back then.
