Poppies bright as blood, foliage sharp as jagged glass recalled an artist’s sudden, revelatory strokes, while the odors were no less direct in their assault upon my senses. Resin, earth, grass, rotting boards. Sweat. Metal. The ting of copper in the ears, on the tongue. I reached out and touched the side of the barn. Moist, always moist, as if it retained every sin ever committed. I heard, felt activity around my shoe, looked down to freeze the image—not of the snake wriggling out from under the weeds, but rather the bizarre American icon that was my tennis shoe, its bright white laces interweaving with the blades of vegetation. I held that frame for long seconds.
Yes, here I was, back on foreign soil, which I had so longed to leave as a teenager. And approaching the exact spot which had changed my every perception of who and what I was, and where I fit in the global career path my parents had chosen. As I stepped around the side of the barn, I suddenly didn’t want to see the spot again, though I knew that in the immediate sense I would simply be looking at more of the jungle surrounding me. I cursed myself, my demons.
Somehow there was no moment of discovery, no emergency of the heart, and yet neither was it just another patch of jungle. Very little grew in the spot, perhaps because of the shade created by the chestnut and the barn, perhaps because it was otherwise tattooed. The tableau didn’t rematerialize instantly, but waited for nourishment. I wanted to give it that. I had come a long way to give it that. Inexplicably, a discomfort expanded in my groin. When I reached down I realized I was erect. That was certainly not how I wanted to remember. But what had I expected?
A movement caused me to jerk my hand away from myself. I looked behind me, nothing. It was another occurrence of wind, necromancy, legerdemain. My errant hand wandered again, only this time it found its way to my pocket. I pulled out the letter, at once a confession, a rite, a statement of charges against me.
It was the fiftieth time I had read it, and as with the other forty-nine times, I was alarmed by its command of English and, more so, by its poetic nature. She had been a poet, reading to the class as if we were manipulable characters in her dream. It was what had first caused me to take notice of her, just preceding her eyes, her aura, all the rest of her.
That noise again, like an imp about no good. I sat against the barn and read aloud, in the quietest voice lest I wake the dead.
“What she does to me just looking at her. Such eyes, such grace, such everything. My father would laugh to see how his experiment has fared thus far. Six weeks at a German school and I’m not only chasing the language, I’m also chasing one of the girls. She has read a poem in class recently, has looked at me with those onyx eyes of hers, and now I find myself following her like an animal.”
The entire letter was written that way, recounting events from my point of view, and in an unsettlingly accurate way. She must have researched everything about me and my family, strangers in her village, toys.
“The Rothaus is no destination for a girl. The villagers gossip that it is a home of half-wits and monsters. What business can you have there, Svenja? If only I could persuade you to notice me. Was that the briefest look? Should I hide?”
It was. God knows, I did.
“Whose voice is that from behind the barn? ‘Svenja!’ it calls. Can it be the boy named Dirk? Would she spare him a pot to piss in? But then, I’m a stranger and it’s all a mystery to me. For all I know they are lovers and I am wasting my life away with the perceptions that have been imposed upon me by my world.”
How could a creature like her philosophize? Philosophy from her was like excess venom dripping onto the letter, smearing the ink.
“My mother loves this field, flowers like flames she says, and here I am walking through it. How would I explain my being here to her? I pass through your vision, Mother, to validate my own. But I know it is baser than that. Even now the sounds I’m hearing give me a raw feeling. Grunts of servility, hints of subtle laughter. I know you, Svenja, I have seen you looking at me over literature and gods. I know you and I don’t know you and I hate you if it is as I suspect it is.”
Which was where the letter’s author began to lose me, I began to lose myself, pure verse took over.
“It is as I suspect. There they are, behind the barn, Svenja on the whale-like massiveness of Dirk, forcing out the expulsions as she strokes his swollen penis, taking her own fashion of glee from the enterprise. I will discover the secrets of this, I will blackmail her a thousand times for a taste of what she is doing to him. But I can see there are stranger forces at work. Why would the half-wit want the wine that she pours over him, licking it off his face as she laughs like the first dawn? Why, in the midst of his awful ascent towards climax, would he laugh with her as she swings the bottle in the air, bringing it down smashing against his forehead, spilling its poppies over his face?
“And why, for the love of Christ, would he continue to moan in pleasure as the petals tear open his face, his neck, my own eyes as I witness this monstrosity?”
From this point on I could not share her vision, for the pleasure had been Svenja’s and Svenja’s alone as she devoured those moans, the sacrifice of him to her. At the last she must have released that part of him she clutched in her fist’s bitter vise, for a bellow of agonized liberation pierced the deafness that had befallen my ears, the blindness that had overcome my eyes. I found her looking straight at me, through the splash of poppies behind which I crouched.
Those spots appeared on my retinae now, making the words impossible to read for a moment. I shifted to the last line, but as it came into focus, I could not read it aloud. No matter, for the author herself intervened.
“‘And I wonder, has she lured me here?’”
Heart thundering, I turned my head slowly to the left, where she had emerged from the corner of the barn. Like her voice, her appearance had scarcely changed. And her eyes possessed the permanence of onyx as well as its polish and opaqueness. Poets speak of the pools of a lover’s eyes. Hers threw you back like gates, even as they forbade you from retreating.
“Did you?” I said, hearing the feebleness of my words in my ears.
“Lure you here?” she said. “Which time?”
It mocked. Which was her language.
“You let them put Dirk’s father away for what you did.”
“I?”
That word, that single syllable contained force untold. I found it difficult to construct a sentence. “You…you threatened to make it my crime if I spoke the truth. You—”
“Shhh,” she said. “It doesn’t matter now, does it, David?”
David. She had spoken my name to me only once before, as she knelt before me among the poppies. The stark, fiery flowers had become a cage around me after what I had witnessed. David, what have you done here? she’d said in some Deutsch/English blend that had emphasized as much as conveyed her point. As the daughter of the Burgermeister, can I let myself look the other way?
She approached me, but now there was no cage and I rose quickly to my feet. The hand I used to keep her at a distance was also the hand that held the letter.
“Okay, David,” she said. “But you might admit to yourself that if you had wanted anything other than to see me, to kiss me as we did then, in the field out there, you would have taken the letter to the authorities.”
“I’m going to take it to your father,” I said stupidly.
She plucked the paper from my hand, let the breeze lift it in a lazy spiral towards that first dawn of which her verse spoke. She smiled as she offered her lips to me. I closed my mouth tightly against the softness of her kisses, the warmth of her breath on my face. I had reacted the same way then and met with failure, succumbing to her beautiful, delicious mouth in spite of all. I used the past as a distraction, focusing on what might have happened on that occasion if Di
rk’s equally half-witted father hadn’t emerged from the Rothaus, slamming the door in his wake.
“You needn’t feel such guilt,” she breathed as she tried to tease my mouth open with her tongue. “They sent him to a mental hospital. He was out again in eight years.”
It wouldn’t have shocked me to learn they had decided never to let him out, considering Svenja’s performance that day. She would have been convincing no matter who she made her scapegoat, breaking our kiss to run out of the field screaming about the horror she had witnessed. By the time people had arrived on the scene, Dirk’s father stood crying over Dirk's dead bulk, touching his tattered face, confessing that the boy was in a better house now—which quote had become the focal point of the trial.
“How long would they have kept you locked away?” I wondered to her. But the question allowed the sought opening, and her tongue was in my mouth.
Svenja’s hunger met my own despised lusts in a marriage as Godforsaken as the site of murder and madness where it occurred. I tried to push her away, but my hands found her body and its exquisiteness, and oblivion threatened to set in. Through the caresses and the sighs and all the dark magic at work came remembered sounds, sounds that had interrupted us the one other time we had made physical contact. Like everything I had ever known since encountering her, it made no relative sense.
She pressed me against the side of the barn, hands finding the fastenings that held me together. When she loosed my grotesquely engorged shame, I wanted to die there, upon the ground of murder and madness, but more than dying I wanted to live, inside her, one with her, my Svenja, why had she waited so long to call?
I clutched her buttocks, pulling her against me, but her hands were in the way, one of them gripping me so tightly the scream itself choked, the other lifting a familiar something, accessory, device. Where had it come from, the mouth of jagged teeth? Would it bring me exaltation? Her onyx eyes asked me if I wanted it, and somehow, in every way, I did. But as she drew her hand back, to share the whole of herself, every petal and shard with me, a shape loomed behind her. I recognized the man’s hulking clumsiness as his shadow became the backdrop, his facial contortions the accents of my new tableau.
The foreground filled my vision, her expression widening in an ecstasy my eyes had rejected eighteen years ago, but which now seemed a thing stolen from me. Poppies spilled out of her mouth as Dirk’s father stepped back, carrying her body with him, the tool’s handle still in his grip. I could not bear to witness it and turned my face to the barn, to the comfort of boards pungent with the retention of every sin ever committed.
The Crookedness of Being
My piss fled back into my organ. At the foot of the wall opposite, on the ground, was a body—a woman. I stepped over, knowing she was dead, turned away at the sight of the dark fluid that surrounded her. She’d been shot.
Sometimes the strangest part about being there is being there. That was damn well the case that night in The Whaler as I sipped my hard Scotch and wondered how many years it had been since I’d had genuine déjà vu. The feeling had hit me the moment I walked in from the December night, and hung with me well after I was obliged to answer the Whuddya have? of the embittered bartender. He obviously wanted nothing better than to have a greasy glass in front of me so he wouldn’t have to think about my patch of counter again for awhile. Not that he had a booming business tonight. It was Christmas Eve, and only the most pathetic of us were out.
Christmas Eve. It was why I was here, actually. My regular haunts were closed—as any self-respecting dive should have been—so I’d come down Waterfront to see what was about. Now common sense says that a man who enjoys his meager existence does his best to stay away from the Waterfront. I wish I’d had some of that, instead of the blues, that Friday night couple years back. Wish I’d had even a snifter of that. 'Cause I was ripe for the undoing the moment I first stepped foot in that Godforsaken hole. Goddamn all of us, I say, but bring us home again when you’re finished, old man.
Déjà—everloving—vu. Can you believe that? I think drink or age or both takes away our ability to tap into the recesses, you know, into the deeper psyche…oh hell, I was never much for philosophy. Fact was, if I hadn’t been here before, I’d damn sure as hell dreamed I had, and the whiskey glass and the tinkle of ice and the lazy drone of Bing Crosby through the cheap speaker boxes, dreaming his own dreams, White Christmases my ass. When you’re married to your misery, and Scotch on ice, all the Christmases are the same dull shade of bleak. Take it from me, folks.
Six customers besides myself, three at the bar, three at tables, all isolated, each cupping his or her drink as if it were the last, or better yet, some mind-opening eggnog surprise, with the secrets of the cosmos spinning in its milky depths. Occasionally we looked at each other wondering what the other was thinking, what the other was doing here, if the other were drifting on that same wave of déjà vu. I remembered clearly remembering that before. You’d think I would have known better than to get up and saunter over to the nearest of my lonely cousins at the bar.
“May I sit?” I said, and hoped my expression elaborated, Is it really an intrusion when it has already happened?
“Not at all.” Coldly.
I offered her a drink, which she accepted, the bartender refreshed her glass, frowning, and we were old friends now, chestnuts and snuggly blankets.
“They call me Jock,” I said apologetically.
“Miriam.”
“Miriam is really nice.”
I would have sworn I’d said it before.
“I’m not Miriam,” she said.
“What?”
“Oh, never mind. Never mind, Jock.”
What was I supposed to say now? I’m not Jock? This isn’t The Whaler? We are not on the Waterfront?
She pointed at the wall, a fishnet, wheel and anchor adorning the aged wood. “My father was a fisherman. But you know that, I guess.”
I remember your telling me…
Perhaps I had been drunk at the time. “Yes, of course, Miriam…I mean…”
She smiled sort of a crooked smile, a humorless smile.
The bartender was passing. “The bathroom?” I requested.
“Out of order.”
“Out of order? But this is a bar.”
“Go out back.” And moved on. To nowhere.
I glanced over my shoulder at a door in the back of the place, metal affair, emergency bar. It appeared to be ajar. No bells, no alarms, good.
I told the lady I’d be back and fired up a cigarette as I parted with the stool, dragging deeply as you might, worrying a lot, wishing it weren’t Christmas. Wishing the feeling would go.
The door was waiting for me, heavy, plodding on its works. A wall came into view, other side, other side of what proved to be an alley, might have guessed. The seedy side of the city and its alleyways.
I stepped over by a big dumpster, unzipped, freed the thing, and as men are prone to do, looked around whistling. My piss fled back into my organ. At the foot of the wall opposite, on the ground, was a body—a woman. I stepped over, knowing she was dead, turned away at the sight of the dark fluid that surrounded her. She’d been shot. In the head, in the face, the rest was hidden to me. She lay belly-down in the alley, long fox coat spread about her like a blanket, its fur saturated.
I backed all the way to the door, which I had left ajar, slipped inside, that feeling of déjà vu so strong now I might have myself scripted the events of the night.
I didn’t wait till I was seated. “John—Whiskey John!”
The bartender was not pleased. He’d offered his handle as a matter of routine only.
“But she’s dead,” I said, gesturing backwards with my thumb.
“Someone you know?”
What?
“Miriam,” said the lady.
I turned towards the lady. She was so very familiar, I felt as if we were both from another planet, and everyone else, the vignette of a Christmas Eve on the Waterfront. Funny, none of them were in the least bit concerned about my proclamation of death. Perhaps they hadn’t heard.
“There is a woman lying back there in the alley with her brains blown out. Does that concern any of you?”
If it did, they weren't saying.
The bartender pointed at me hard. “You are really beginning to fuck up the peace.”
I was nearly dumbstruck. “Fuck…fuck up the peace?!”
“Fuck up the fucking peace, yes. Peace on Earth, man. It's Christmas, for Christsake.”
“There is—”
“Yeah, yeah, a woman with her brains blown out. I’m sure we’ve never seen that before. Look, if it’s what you’re worrying about, I can get you another fur.” He turned to the lady. “How’d you like that, Wanda?”
She looked straight at me. “I think that’s up to Jock.” As she twirled the hem of her synthetic with the nose of her revolver.
A Dirge for the Temporal Page 7
