Alphonse Kauders said: “I am myself, everything else is stories.”
Dr. Joseph Goebbels, talking about the winds of Alphonse Kauders, said: “They were akin to the wail of an everlastingly solitary siren, sorrow in the purest of forms.”
One of the seven wives of Alphonse Kauders had a short leg. Then again, the other leg was long. The arms were, more or less, of the same length.
In the Archives of the USSR, there is a manuscript which is believed to have originated from Alphonse Kauders:
“1) shoot under the tongue (?);
2) symbolism (?); death on the ground (?); in the forest (??); by an anthill (?); by a beehive;
3) take only one bullet;
4) the sentence: I shall be reborn if this bullet fails, and I hope it won’t;
5) lie down, so all the blood flows into the head;
6) burn all manuscripts => possibility of someone thinking they were worth something;
7) invent some love (?);
8) the sentence: I blame nobody, especially not Her (?);
9) tidy up the room;
10) write to Stalin: Koba, why did you need my death?
11) take a bottle of water with me;
12) avoid talking until the certain date.”
One of Alphonse Kauders’s seven best men was Richard Sorge.
Alphonse Kauders regularly subscribed to all the pornographic magazines of Europe.
Alphonse Kauders removed his own appendix in Siberia, and he probably would have died, had he not been transferred to the camp hospital at the very last moment. And that was only because he had informed on a bandit in the bed next to his for secretly praying at night.
Alphonse Kauders said to Eva Braun: “Money isn’t everything. There is some gold too.”
Alphonse Kauders was a fanatic beekeeper. In the course of his life, he led fierce and merciless battles against parasitic lice that ruthlessly exploit bees, and are known as “varoa.”
Alphonse Kauders said: “The most beautiful fire (not being a forest one) I have ever seen, was when the Reichstag was ablaze.”
The very idea of creating Alphonse Kauders occurred for the first time to his (future) mother. She said to the (future) father of Alphonse Kauders: “Let’s make passionate love and create Alphonse Kauders.”
Father said: “All right. But let’s watch some, you know, pictures.”
Alphonse Kauders was a member of seven libraries, of seven apicultural societies, of seven communist parties and of a national-socialist one.
Alphonse Kauders told the following: “In elementary school, I attracted attention by stuffing my fist into my mouth. Girls from other classes would rush in droves to see me stuff my fist into my mouth. My father, a teacher, glowed with a bliss, seeing all those girls swarming around me. Once, a girl that I wished to make love to approached me. And I was so excited that I tried to shove both of my fists into my mouth. I sacrificed my two front teeth for my passion. Ever since I have been noticed for my insanity. This strange event probably determined the course of my life. Ever since I haven’t talked.”
On one copy of The Forestry Bibliography, 1900–1948, kept in Zagreb, there is the following handwritten remark: “Since the day I was born, I have been waiting for the Judgment Day. And the Judgment Day is never coming. And, as I live, it is becoming all too clear to me. I was born after the Judgment Day.”
Alphonse Kauders told the following: “When Rex and I had a fight, and that happened almost every day, he would stray and would be gone for days. And he would tell me nothing. Except once. He said: ‘The stray-dog shelter is full of spies.’ “
On the eve of World War II, in Berlin, Alphonse Kauders said to Ivo Andric: “A firm system still exists only in the minds of madmen. In other people’s minds, there’s nothing but chaos, as well as around them. Perhaps art is one of the last pockets of resistance to chaos. And then again, maybe it isn’t. Who the hell cares?”
On the eve of World War I, Alphonse Kauders said to Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s pregnant wife: “Let me penetrate a little bit, just a little, I’ll be careful.”
On one of Alphonse Kauders’s seven tombs, it is written: “I have vanished and I have appeared. Now, I am here. I shall disappear and I shall return. And then, again, I shall be here. Everything is so simple. All one needs is courage.”
Alphonse Kauders wrote to one of his seven wives letters “full of filthy details and sick pornographic fantasies.” Stalin forbade such letters to be sent by Soviet mail, because “among those who open and read letters there are many tame, timid family people.” So then Alphonse Kauders sent his letters through reliable couriers.
Alphonse Kauders said: “I—I am not a human being. I—I am Alphonse Kauders.”
Alphonse Kauders said to Richard Sorge: “I doubt there exists an emptiness greater than that of empty streets. Therefore, it is better to have some tanks or bodies on the streets, if nothing else is possible. Because Anything is better than Nothing.”
Alphonse Kauders, in the course of time, put a revolver on Gavrilo Princip’s temple, for he had burned a bee with his cigarette.
Alphonse Kauders, in the course of time, said to Stalin: “Koba, if you shoot Bukharin ever again, we shall have an argument.” And Bukharin was shot only once.
Alphonse Kauders said to Eva Braun—in bed, after seven mutual, consecutive orgasms, four of which had gone into the annals—Alphonse Kauders said to Eva Braun: “One should find a way of forbidding people to talk, especially to talk to each other. People should be forbidden to wear watches. Anything should be done with people.”
It is widely believed that the little-known pornographic work Seven Sweet Little Girls, signed by pseudonym, was written by Alphonse Kauders.
Alphonse Kauders told, in the course of time, about the first days of the Revolution: “We killed all mad horses. We set empty houses on fire. We saw soldiers weeping. Crowds gushed out of prisons. Everybody was scared. And we had nothing but a bad feeling.”
Albeit Alphonse Kauders hated folk from the depths of his soul, almost as much as he hated horses (Good God, how Alphonse Kauders hated horses!), he was the creator of a folk proverb: “Never a bee from a mare.”
Joseph V. Stalin, talking about the winds of Alphonse Kauders, said: “Many a time, in the course of our Central Committee sessions, Comrade Kauders would, well, cut a wind, and a few moments later, all comrades would be helplessly crying. Including myself, as well.”
Alphonse Kauders owned the revolver used to murder Lola, a twelve-year-old prostitute from Marseilles.
Ivo Andric, talking about Alphonse Kauders, said: “His in-sides were removed by a secret operation. All that remained was a sheath of skin, within which he safely dreamt of a bibliography of pornographic literature.”
Alphonse Kauders spent the night between April 5 and April 6, 1941, on the slopes of Avala, waiting to see Belgrade in flames.
Alphonse Kauders killed his dog Rex with gas after Rex had tried to slaughter him in his sleep because Alphonse Kauders had set mousetraps all over their place to take revenge on Rex for having pissed on his new, pristine uniform.
Alphonse Kauders, in the course of time, was engaged in painting. The only painting that has been preserved, oil on canvas, is called The Class Roots of Tattooing and is kept in the National Museum in Helsinki.
Alphonse Kauders said to Josip B. Tito: “A few days, or years, hell, ago, I noticed that a tree under the window in one of my seven rooms had grown some ten goddamn meters. There aren’t many people who notice trees growing at all. And those who do are likely to be lumberjacks.”
Gavrilo Princip, talking about the winds of Alphonse Kauders, said: “They sounded like this: Pffffffuuummmiiuujmmsghhhss.”
Alphonse Kauders had two legal sons and two legal daughters. The rest were illegal. One son was shot as a war criminal in Madona, Lithuania; the other was a distinguished member of the Australian national cricket team. One daughter was an interpreter at the Yalta conference; the other
discovered, in the Amazon rain forests, a hitherto unknown species of an insect resembling the bee, labeled eventually Virgo Kauders.
Alphonse Kauders said: “Literature has nothing human in itself. Nor in myself.”
Alphonse Kauders never finished work on the bibliography of pornographic literature.
NOTES
J. B. TITO was the Yugoslav communist leader for thirty-five long years. My childhood was saturated with histories of his just enterprises. My favorite one has always been the one in which he, at the age of twelve, found a whole, cooked pig’s head in the house pantry, hoarded for Christmas, and, without telling his brothers and sisters, gorged himself with it on his own—an ominous act for a future communist head of a state. He was sick for days afterward (fat overdose), and was additionally punished by being banned from the Christmas dinner. Later on, he lost interest in Christmas, but never lost passion for pigs and heads.
ROSA LUXEMBURG was a German communist who attempted, with Karl Liebknecht, a socialist revolution in Germany after the end of World War I, and then withered with it. Rosa Luxemburg was a terribly nice name for a revolutionary.
KING ALEXANDER was a Yugoslav king and was assassinated in Marseilles, in 1934, by a Macedonian nationalist, with a generous support of Croatian fascists. Rickety propaganda machinery of the first Yugoslavia sermonized that his last words were: “Take care of my Yugoslavia.” The likely truth, however, was that he gobbled and bolted his own blood, while a sweaty French secret policeman was protecting, with his own body, Alexander’s ex-body, corpse-to-be. I always thought that the fact that an Alexander was assassinated by a Macedonian was as close as you can get to a nice touch in a farce.
RICHARD SORGE was a Soviet spy in Tokyo, undercover as a journalist, eventually becoming a press attaché in the German embassy. He informed Stalin that Hitler was going to attack the Motherland, but Stalin trusted Hitler and disregarded the information. The first time I read about Sorge I was ten and, not even having reached the end of the book, decided to become a spy. At the age of sixteen, I wrote a poem about Sorge entitled The Loneliest Man in the World. The first verse: “Tokyo is breathing and I am not.”
GAVRILO PRINCIP was the young Serb who assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand Habsburg and Sophia, his pregnant wife, thus effectively commencing World War I. He was eighteen at the time (I think) and had the first scrub over his thin lip and dark ripples around his eyes. He was incarcerated for life, which lasted only a few more years, and died of tuberculosis, blessed by repeated beatings, in an obscure imperial prison. In Sarajevo, by the Latin Bridge, at the corner from which he sent those historical bullets into the fetus’s brain, his footprints were immortalized in concrete (left foot W-E, right foot SE-NW). When I was a little boy, I imagined him waiting for the Archduke’s coach, waiting to change the course of history, stuck up to his ankles in wet concrete. When I was sixteen, my feet fit perfectly into his feet’s tombs.
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE USSR is a book whose different editions are innumerable and often obscure. Historical characters (like Stalin’s Secret Police chiefs) would be praised in one edition and then would be vanished in another. There are countries whose precious minerals (with annual production in parentheses) would be minutely listed by the encyclopedia’s sanguine world map, and in another edition they would be swallowed by an ocean, much like Atlantis, without the bubble-burps ever reaching the surface of the map world. This great book teaches us how the verisimilitude of fiction is achieved by the exactness of the detail.
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF YUGOSLAVIA, on the other hand, was never even close to being entirely published, because of so many conflicting histories involved, so there really isn’t any encyclopedic Yugoslavia, which by a snide turn of history, couldn’t matter less, since Yugoslavia is not much of a country anymore.
NIKOLAI BUKHARIN, dubbed by Lenin “the darling of the Party,” was a member of the Politburo and probably the main Soviet ideologue (save the great Stalin) in the thirties, for which he was rewarded with an accusation of spying, simultaneously, for the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany. No one was surprised, but everyone was terrified when he was sentenced to death, for that was the beginning of one of Stalin’s greatest purges. From his death cell, he sent a letter to Stalin, beginning with the words: “Koba, why did you need my death?”, which Stalin is believed to have kept in his desk drawer for a long time. Bukharin voluntarily cooperated with his inquisitors and refused to be used as the martyr of Stalin’s tyranny. If he is in a Dantesque inferno, he’ll eternally bang his porcine head against the walls of hell’s pantry.
IVO ANDRIC, a Bosnian, was the only Yugoslav author who has ever been awarded the Nobel Prize. In 1941, he worked in the Yugoslav embassy in Berlin, and helped organize trysts of cringing Yugoslav politicians with Hitler. He was a gentleman and wrote novels about the ways people are entangled with history. At the acceptance ceremony, he talked about the importance of bridges. In his youth, he was involved in organizing the Archduke’s assassination.
On APRIL 6, 1941, at dawn, Belgrade was relentlessly bombed by the Luftwaffe. That was the beginning of the German attack on the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which lasted for eleven more hapless days.
AVALA is a breast-like mountain near Belgrade, with the tomb-tumor for the Unknown Serbian Soldier, built after World War I.
THE YALTA CONFEREN CE brought together Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. The end of the war was in sight and they appeared to be the victors (“I’d like some Germany.”) When I was thirteen, I saw a photo of those three great men in Yalta, sitting in three wicker chairs, against the background of standing people whose names were as insignificant as their deeds. The three heads of the free world had something like a dim grin on their round faces, as though they had done a good, hard work (“Have some Germany.”) When I was thirteen, I thought that the picture was taken right after their lunch, because—as my father claimed—right after lunch is the best time, for people are “full and happy.” I thought that behind their dim grins they were trying to get out last bits of food from between their teeth. They gaze at me, full of borscht, sweet Crimean wine, and plans for the world. Within a few moments Churchill will be asleep, and I’ll be old, lacking significance, but not memories.
Now keep reading the book.
THE SORGE
SPY RING
HISTORY, a description or recital of things as they are, or have been, in a continued orderly narration of the principal facts and circumstances thereof. History, with regard to its subject, is divided into the History of Nature and the History of Actions. The History of Actions is a continued relation of a series of memorable events.
—ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA
first edition (1769–1771)
The book was auburn, with black slanted letters on the spine reading “Spies of WWII,” and, impressed onto the front cover, black letters, tiny trenches, with golden brims, reading: The Greatest Spies of World War Two. The book was big and weighty. I’d put it on my knees, but then its weight would spread my legs and the book would close itself and slip to the floor. And I’d lie on my belly and rest my head on the scaffold of my hands and read. When my elbows would begin to ache, I’d recline my cheek on the thicker half of the book, incline the other half, feeling the sticky moisture connecting my cheek and a spy’s face, secrets of WWII just inches away from my absorbing pupils.
There were lots of black-and-white pictures: a five-man column—surrounded by soldiers pointing rifles—with their hands on the napes of their necks; when I would narrow my eyes, they’d look like black-and-white butterflies; the head of a chubby member of the Rote Kappelle,1, with an asymmetrical face: nose slightly on the left side, right eye hardly opened and seemingly asleep, mouth kept shut with effort, as if there was a spring of blood behind the feeble lips—I just knew from his face that his hands (swollen wrists, bloody, burning trenches under the cuffs) were handcuffed; a picture of General Montgomery standing, arms akimbo, turned sideways, looking a
t the upper-left corner of the page, with the timeless beret parallel with his gaze: General Montgomery’s doppelganger, just the head, looking at me with odd pensiveness, as if painfully aware that he could never be General Montgomery; a row of blindfolded people in white in front of the ready firing squad and a smiling officer, his right arm raised, pointing at the upper-right corner of the picture. And, near the end, there was Sorge—”at the outset of his mission in Japan”2—framed by a door behind his back, standing legs apart (left foot NW, right foot NE) in a dark trenchcoat, one hand pocketed, the other somewhat clenched, holding a purse or a camera case; and his head: fiendish ears, large and ill-shaped; lips shut tight, as if his teeth were biting the inside of his lower lip; the wide base triangle of his nose, its top angle connected, by two deep furrows, with two dark dots in the corners of his mouth; lightless twin-holes, at the bottom of which were his eyes; and the black-inked helmet of hair.
The picture was obviously retouched: Sorge’s anxiety was burdened with someone else’s curtained body. One could see the sharp cut at the verge of his collar, where his head, guillotined in a shadowy laboratory, was attached to a headless trenchcoat—plus an inexplicable excess of neck-flesh on the left side3. But I believed that Sorge was in that trenchcoat. I believed that he was about to enter the door-apparition behind his back. I believed in the totality of that picture, I believed in the apparent, and I trusted books. I was ten.
In the winter of 1975, I began to conceive the idea that my father4 was a spy. He had been pursuing a degree at the Leningrad Energy Institute and had often been away, going to Leningrad or Moscow5 or Siberia or wherever far away. At the 1975 New Year’s Eve my father was in the middle of a blizzard, immobilized at the Moscow airport; my mother6 was staring through the window, watching snowflakes parachuting on Sarajevo; and I was patrolling our home, vaguely missing my father, anxious to accost Grandpa Frosty (in Socialist Yugoslavia, Santa Claus became Grandpa Frosty and used to arrive on New Year’s Eve) at the very moment of his arrival and force him to exchange a plain fountain pen and fluffy sweater (both of which he had sent in advance) for some spy devices. A poisonous fountain pen;7 a disguise kit8 (with a fake mustache and contact lenses that could change the color of my eyes); a matchbox containing a micro-camera; and a cyanide ampoule, were on the list of my desires. Tired of patrolling and longing, I asked my mother what she would think if I became a spy and she said she wouldn’t mind too much, but she would be afraid for me, just as she was afraid for my father and said she would be lonely and sad if I’d change my identity and forget about her and she said she wanted me to be better than my father, not to be somewhere else all the time. That night, falling asleep by the plastic tree, on guard for Grandpa Frosty, I was imagining my father being somewhere else, in a black trenchcoat, stealthily walking down a dark hall, stopping in front of a door, looking down the tunnel-like hall behind him, unlocking the door with something in his hand, entering the room (my dreamy gaze passing, like a camera, through the wall, following him), finding the desk drawer in the darkness, turning on the desk lamp, turning it away from the window, breaking the lock of the top drawer, taking the matchbox out of his pocket, taking the file out, photographing the documents 9 (with blurred headings) with the matchbox (whose snapping I attempted to reproduce: “sllt sllt”). But wait, I hear footsteps, heavy thumping, I turn off the light, the footsteps open the door, cut the darkness with the flashlight, like a sword. I’m afraid that he (she?) could smell my fear, my heart is as loud as a tank engine, the door is closed and everything is fine, but I do not dare to be relieved. I uncurtain myself and continue photographing and then I hear a woman sobbing and there is another door and I open the door and a torrent of light rushes in, and a Japanese woman10 says, with a sorrowful smile: “You must go to bed now. Go undress yourself.”
The Question of Bruno Page 3
