by Fleur Jaeggy
And that had already happened in our family. Our grandmother had scalded herself with boiling hot coffee and had never even noticed. She was insensitive to burns. Our mother, who was there, thought she was mad. Because Grandmother went on as though nothing had happened, talked, joked. Doesn’t it hurt? our mother asked. Hurt? she replied. Where? And so if in our family we don’t even know when we’re burning like logs in a fireplace it can only mean that our bodies abandon us, that maybe we are spirits, and it’s not clear when we stopped being ourselves and became something else. We turned into we don’t know what. I used to be the brother of the big spy, I had a name, a precise identity — now I’ve become something else. I realized that the body did not follow my thoughts, my commands. My steps were becoming heavier. As though I was meant to keep still. The external aspect — forgive me but I am not convinced that there is an internal one — remained the same, apparently. All was appearance. I myself felt apparent. You’ll understand better than me what that means. There’s an age-old feud, as you know, between being and seeming. Being seems to me something more certain. Seeming more suitable to disappearing. And I felt apt to disappear. My body was, that is. Even my sister had noticed how well disposed I was to disappearing. Because she was still spying on me, she worried grudgingly. People, nearly all of them, don’t know how to worry about others without being presumptuous, with finesse, with modesty. They think they know. My sister thought she knew. Knew the human race. She was highly annoying. I don’t like people who know. Or pretend to. Knowledge doesn’t know. But that’s something few understand.
Without physical pain, I had to increase my dose of Rohypnol. Because my body, which was immune to pain, had become dulled to sleeping pills. They were never sufficient. Without pain, I had no desire to sleep. Whereas the brother of XX had a great, a very great desire to sleep. I had a passion for sleep. For those twelve hours of absolute immobility. For those twelve hours of absolute distance from the world. Twelve hours of gentle, o so sweet burial. My body does not dream. It is not there.
I am twenty-five. I have done what was, according to my sister, important. But when I was eight I was a poet and a writer. And no one had told me that it was important to write. Since then I have only done things that were important, according to my sister — studying, graduating, succeeding in life. In the street I look at people passing by, while I should be going to talk to someone about a job. I tell myself that every one of them perhaps is succeeding in life . . .
I only follow shadows, I am still young, I have sleeping pills in my pocket, so I am all set, I lack nothing, except whatever is lacking in terms of doing something important. That little bit of rope to be joined to another rope so as to do something really important in life, enough to succeed in life. So says my sister XX. Who went around saying that I killed myself. That’s what I can’t forgive her for. I graduated, went to my mother’s last rites, unwillingly, against my wishes, without the least desire to succeed. Without the least desire. Even to suffer. Without grief. On the contrary, with an idle joy I am tempted to call happiness.
Negde
It was very cold in winter in New York. Iosif would leave his house in Brooklyn so as to breathe. For his evening walk. Without a coat on. He wanted only to walk and to breathe. Two breaths of air. He made the gesture, puff, two drags on his cigarette. He needed that Baltic quality of air, expecting snow. Air coming from the bay and knocking on his door, behind the columns. “Come out,” it commanded. And gave him a handful of frost. At that hour there was no one about. A dog walker with some leashes going home after delivering his charges.
The closer Iosif gets to the water, the more lashing the air. Winter, the real season of the year. As in Saint Petersburg. “The wide river lay white and frozen like a continent’s tongue lapsed into silence.” So he wrote. An arcane hyperborean breeze on the branches of trees. Iosif can’t help living in watery places. He is like a sailor. He plays with the lunatic wind star that pushes him toward the river. He liked the blue uniforms of navy officers and their coats with double rows of gold buttons. Like avenues at night, their lights receding. At the age of fourteen he had applied to the submarine academy, but had been turned down. Then jail. Which is better than the army. He walks distractedly, almost far from himself. The distractedness doesn’t stop his melancholic gaze from being on the alert. Words, landscape, silence, as Frost would say. Could it be frost that makes the poet?
A few more minutes and Iosif has reached the Promenade. That is the name of the walkway bordering the bay. The benches face the water. And Iosif. Tugboats go by, clouds and barges. “A swanky clipper, whose Franz Liszt profile keeps stabbing the waves.” There is calm, a vague stealthy disquietude, some void. It’s nice to sit on a bench and think, with a feeling of reciprocity, of the void. In the daytime children play in a nearby park. They play merrily, muffled laughter and many colored wool caps.
Iosif is absorbed. The façades of houses, capricious and frivolous, have a proud episcopal mildness all their own. They look like maidens who have remained young. The kind that watch, without being seen, from windows. Hair drawn back, a lace collar, small white buttons enclosed in perfect buttonholes. On the bed the doll is missing.
“The sweet bedroom (a doll between the pillows) where she has her ‘nightmares.’ The kitchen, where the gas ring’s humming chrysanthemum gives out the smell of tea. And the outlines of the body sink into an armchair the way sediment settles in liquid.”
An upright piano. A tune can still be heard, further and further away, muted, being played. The eyes of the maidens withdraw from the windows, the curtains are pulled and light falls only through flowers on the sills.
On the railing of the Promenade there is a sign: Quiet Zone. And four NO’s in bold type:
NO RADIO PLAYING
NO BOOM BOXES
NO MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS
NO LOUD OR UNNECESSARY NOISE
No bicycles, and again, clearly marked, At any time. Ever. Unnecessary noises. It is a timeless quiet zone. And that is greatly reassuring. Even voices seem to become muted. Maybe passersby don’t quarrel. Maybe it’s an almost happy earth. Iosif looks at the towers. The firemen’s boat, with paddles resembling fans made of water, glides by. In the dark sky the flight of dark birds. On the opposite shore, large warehouses, depots. And in direct line of sight, the towers. It is what Iosif sees, the Twin Towers. They were, once.
They saw them burning from the Promenade’s quiet zone. They witnessed the destruction. They were there, the spectators, they saw them burn, reflected in the water. The windows seemed to reawaken. Fire on the bay. Iosif may know that they are no longer there. The two towers are missing. There, in front of the Promenade. The glint of evil. They left grief and an abyss that are not wiped away by a hand or by words. Iosif revisited the Neva then turned back. Elsewhere, a night without shadows, in the month of May, he wrote by that light. The light was clear, rosy, faint. Now he writes in the dark. All he needs is a sheet of paper and ink as long as darkness lasts. Every place is to him a mental city called Negde, which in Russian means “nowhere.” And Iosif would go nowhere so as to breathe.
His desk is the site of all places. The light of the green cupola spreads enameled reflections on objects. A constellation of things, still like arrows in flight. A pyramid, a minuscule tin airplane, the fan. Fountain pens, secrets and hiding places. The watch has stopped. The thin black hands in osmosis with the farewell. It is still winter in the faded garden below the brick wall. At the window the gray curtain is lowered halfway. The objects knowing nothing of Schmerz and Schmalz, sentimental sugar and internal grief, handed him paper and ink. A comfortable arabesqued crimson armchair with a green pillow listens to the tapping of the typewriter keys. It is the imperceptible flow of words as yet not visible. Objects have a sense of belonging, as in a pact. They don’t want to be separated from Iosif. They don’t want to be moved, and if anyone shifts them, they go back to their spot. They seem to
be waiting for him. The bust of Pushkin is turned toward the door. On the walls Anna Akhmatova. And Wystan Auden. Everything as it was. Maybe he hasn’t really gone away, Iosif Brodsky.
The Last of the Line
Taciturn and moody, the servants sat in the kitchen. The firstborn of a family from the Grisons ambles around the house followed by his dogs who are exhausted, shaken by tremors. Their yelps, filaments of vagabond dreams, sound like a woman’s voice, raucous and pained. With extreme submissiveness they await the execution. Their glances veiled. The yellowed orbits follow their master, Caspar, an old bachelor.
His line ends with him and began with the portraits on the wall of a long hallway, having the features of Ursulina. Bride, mother and widow. Three theological virtues. Absent from the expression on the face was faith or hope or charity. Her descendants, next to her on the wall, dwell in the portraits, as though they hadn’t had a real existence. The last generation are children. Anton, seven years old, and Stefan, nine. They stand, their apathetic expressions sweet as can be. They are Caspar’s brothers. After sitting for the portrait, they seem to say: “We are no longer here.” And more or less that’s what happened. It was a winter day. The white landscape appeared at the narrow windows. The house was built like a fortress, isolated from the rest of the village, and isolated in the mind of the rest of the world. The lakes were frozen. Caspar skated. He crossed the lake several times. He flung himself violently onto the sheets of ice. Was he chasing them perhaps? Immortality didn’t quite convince him. He was eleven years old. In the woods the snow brittle, vitreous.
Inside the house the silence is brutal. Caspar affected a haughty reserved coldness. He did not contemplate crying. He had tried to cry, wanted to see pain made manifest on the face. No one notices pain, not even Caspar. He was scared. They had played together and suddenly they had grown pale, as though struck by witchcraft. In short, Anton and Stefan are dead. Caspar is brimming with questions. Indifferent to the answers. Death, he had decided, makes prisoners of us. And he, like one sentenced to hard mental labor, could think of nothing better than to sit in the kitchen with the servants and interrogate them. The bread was fragrant. The fireplace lit. They get up. They had never done that before. All together they cried out that they were aggrieved. They sit back down heavily. They listen to Caspar’s voice. Their interlaced fingers are resting on the table, like pieces of heavy wood. Their every word proceeded slowly from their mouths. The eyes serene. The brows furrowed by an absence of mirth. They were proud and looked like outcasts. “We don’t know,” they answered at last. From their tone it seemed they were alluding to a threat, or simply to this — that not knowing is completion. The child asks once again, “Have you by any chance dared to look for those who no longer exist?” They answered in a chorus. They do not go looking for miracles, or for sacrificial lambs.
At the end of the hallway the deer’s regal horns. He is the patron saint of the portraits. He doesn’t have eyes but bones. He possesses majesty, Ursulina followed him through her binoculars, during the hunt. The two seem to gaze at each other still. One is without eyes, and the other has painted irises. It was noted. The fawns of Rhäzüns kept watch around the house and went in to look at their king. Timid and curious, they raised their eyes to their progenitor. Fawns may not identify the bones of a felled creature, but they recognized the trophy.
Ursulina did not take part in the dinner after the hunt, she does not deign to eat meat. She had been assigned the place at the head of the table. She was already a widow. And it isn’t fitting for a widow to mix with men and wild game. She stayed in her room, seated by the fireplace. The dogs panting and sweaty at her feet. They smelled bad.
Having talked with the servants, Caspar turned to the Godhead. Not knowing what it might be, other than darkly, he appealed to Nothing. And Nothing took on the name of Godhead. He put forth the name before his brothers’ portraits. According to him, they must know the Godhead, his brothers, inevitably. It seems to him that the portraits are deriding him. Of Nothing he had yet to form a suitable view. To conjure it one had only to say, “Nothing.” It was like a game. The servants heard him say, “Nothing.” They thought he had gone mad. Richer, after the death of his brothers, and, in one stroke, mad. Caspar looked closely at the portraits. He wants to dress as they do, in a white shirt and a jacket the color of mud and swamps. Around his neck he tied a lace handkerchief. It would have been easy to strangle oneself. All one had to do was tighten the knot. Ridiculous with a lace handkerchief. It would have been easy to die. All the solutions that came into his mind were degrading. A sorrow, he thought, renders the seasons indifferent. Was it in the past that they disappeared? It is silence that arises, like a flame. And he is alone.
Memories were mowed down, in seven days, leaving some prints in the snow. The heavy step of a man sinking, a crow’s light step. It seems to him that memory has little to do with remembrance. Because it no longer possesses. The color of his brothers’ eyes was subject to blanks. Any object took on the color of his brothers’ eyes. It was mimetized. Not so the sky. It was a strange graft of tints.
The next day Caspar threw handfuls of snow at the portraits. He behaved as before, after all, the snow had not changed. With his little arrows he struck at the hearts of the portraits, the hearts of his brothers. To remove the arrows he used the extinguisher.
The old game warden had noticed that the boy, the last of his line, was playing with the dead. He was a man changed for the better by the terrible fatality. Arnold has never had any accidents. Accidents were always very far from his comprehension. Even those he read about in the papers. They were far from the Canton. Far from the valley, the woods, and if, at times, something happened in the mountains, he shrugged. His head, immune to the thought of a tragic event. His hulking head. Yet he didn’t consider himself lucky. But he realized that he had become good. And that he would become more and more good. That is how he partakes of the life of each day. He has begun to experience a dull and acute pleasure on discovering his sympathy for the pain of others. He surrounded Caspar with great affection and care, which the boy did not return. This elicited in him an even greater affection and devotion.
He had his best years ahead of him, those remaining. To be able to breathe, feel the pain of others. To serve pain. Caspar plays and he partakes of the terrible accident. He has so little to do. A new game warden, a young one, had already been hired, who spent his days outdoors. And now Arnold could afford the luxury, as he said, of suffering. And suffering brought him a wondrous peace. He would have liked to run all over the Grisons, even the Jura Mountains, preaching. His specialty would have been preaching to children. How many Caspars are there in the Grisons? Often in winter there are children who disappear. Every morning Arnold left him a bucket full of snow. This gesture didn’t seem to please Caspar. Once the boy tells him that a brother had geschlagen, beaten him. And he had pointed to a small wound at the temple. A wound that wasn’t healing. That was when the game warden had started to worry. He never left him for a moment. He followed him everywhere. Worry marred the affection. “You are preventing my brother from wounding me,” Caspar said with rage. He lunged at the aging game warden, with uncanny force. The old man fell and hit his head on the iron in the shape of a scythe used to scrape the soles of shoes, in a corner of the hallway. Caspar leaned down toward the stocky body stretched out on the ground. He whispered in its ear: “Why did you intrude? You cannot intrude mit den toten Kindern, among dead children. It is sacrilege.” Wasn’t he afraid of being condemned by the images? The game warden’s large hand clenched a lace handkerchief. He tried in vain to wrest it from him.
The old bachelor is sitting at a table for dinner, with his dogs. Helga and Ali. German hounds. For all three sweetbreads in lemon sauce. Caspar is seized by nostalgia. Nostalgia for the children in the portrait. The food repels him, he throws it to the dogs. He fills a glass with port. It is night. The dogs don’t touch the food if the master doesn’t st
art. Heavy curtains cover the windows, but one can see that the vegetation is shaken by the wind. Even the dogs prick up their ears. And sniff at the master’s thoughts.
Caspar misses his brothers who never left the portraits. Now they must decide. There is stillness in the room, a sound from afar, almost a primary sound that wants to be listened to as silence. It comes, he thinks, from the frozen lake. It is the lake, dreaming.
