Leavetaking (11 page)

painted for Jacques my visions of apocalyptic landscapes with rustling fires, fleeing animals, drowning and vanishing cities, my visions of the crucified and scourged, of terribly distorted masks and seductive women’s faces. The pictures that arose spread out before us and took us up into their depth, we wandered through the antique cities and rocky wildernesses, the ruined halls and enchanted gardens. Jacques built even more into these landscapes. Everywhere we found forms, sounds, concordances. At times we were caught up in wild laughter, it was a laughter that burst out as if a spell had been broken. We sat next to one another at a table in a café in a basement in a rain-sodden street in a vast city in a strange land in the endless world and laughed so much that tears streamed down our faces. Shaken by laughter I talked of my existence at the office, of my existence at home, the life I led there was so improbable that I could only laugh about it. In my conversation with Jacques I suddenly lost all fear of life, everything was possible to me. Jacques had already fought himself free, he had already conquered his consuming freedom. He had exposed himself to unprotectedness and wounds. In his life there was the wildness and unruliness that I had sought, but also the hunger and the distress. In his presence I crept out of my cocoon and hoisted my colors and made my thoughts scintillating and extravagant and thus we unwound our worlds to each other and gave each other rebuslike glimpses into our past, our dreams, our hopes for the future. I saw scaffolding on which Jacques balanced, I saw him playing the violin at a night
club, I saw the violin disappear into the pawnbroker’s. Jacques showed me the house where he had grown up, the wide entrance hall through which he fled, at its side doors of carved oak, mirrors, tinted, lead-framed windows. In his past an old, gray servant in red livery, in the park dogs who bounded after him up to the door. The wrought-iron latticework, the iron roses, the heavy latch, then the country roads. Surrounded by our images we went through the city, the rain had petered out, the sinking sun shone through the smoke, and our cataracts of laughter continually broke loose, everything grew wavy, as in the mirrors of a fun house. A nimbus of glorious perspective surrounded us, our future lay open, I saw wide walls hung with my pictures and Jacques directing the orchestra. In the train on our way to the suburb where I lived with my parents we changed the basic elements of our being into music, we were the sounding instruments in the rhythms of the wheels and above in my room under the sloping roof we built a fugue with our voices from the raw material of our hopes. From the unpatterned and as yet unspoken arose transparent blocks of sound, grew, split up, towered one above the other. Later this edifice dissolved in darkness, we listened to the vanishing melodic lines, we returned again to the realm of words and pictures, lay among the drawings and the painted panels, among the manuscripts and books, until we no longer understood our words and each of us sank into the shaft of sleep. Next morning my mother stood beside me in the kitchen and began to attack my friendship with him. I don’t like the
look of him, she said, he has dangerous eyes. Next to her on the kitchen table sat a cockroach, its front legs crossed and rubbing each other, and looked at my mother. The floor was covered with cockroaches, they swarmed up the walls and disappeared, one after another, headfirst and rowing with their back legs into the crevices. The cat walked among them with high, disgusted steps and bit one of the cracking bodies, drew back its mouth from the slime that oozed out of it. My father shouted, Hurry up, I’m going now. I answered, I’m going later today, my friend Jacques is here, we are going to give an exhibition of my pictures in town. What did you say, he called, an exhibition. Yes, I replied, an exhibition, Jacques knows someone who has an empty room where we want to hang up the pictures. My mother stamped her foot on the floor, the cockroach on the table started moving, ran around in a circle several times and then stopped at the edge, shaking its tiny head and quivering with its feelers. My mother swept off the roach with a brush, it fell hard and dry onto the floor and scrambled quickly up the wall where it forced its way into a crack, its pointed hindquarters with the crooked, bristly legs rocked up and down for a while before it disappeared. Upstairs in my room Jacques stood ready with my pictures. Jacques. A thirteen-days’ conversation. A thirteen-days’ dream we had shared in which everything within us that sought for expression was discussed. Far away stood the totem poles of my father and my mother. Their words ran off me. They stared at me full of horror as at a condemned man. While we were lighting up layer after
layer of our inner being, with energy unpent we roamed the city. We hung my pictures up in a room over a garage in a courtyard in a concealed mews in the vast city in the strange land in the endless world. We sent out cards announcing my exhibition. No one came. We did not care. The pictures were there for us, they grew for us, they developed for us. For thirteen days every breath was fruitful, everything we touched unfolded itself and put forth blossom. Silent courtyards saw our pantomimes. Archways heard our oratorios. Dockside pubs were recipients of our thoughts’ genius. But then suddenly a gray shadow fell. We felt tired. What would happen now. Now I had either to break loose entirely from the old or sink back into it. On the thirteenth day I accompanied Jacques, who had stayed overnight with us, to the station. I don’t know why he wanted to go to town, perhaps some chance of a job had turned up, perhaps he was tired of me. Now this morning is quite saturated by the feeling of departure, this English summer morning with shimmering sunlight through the early mist, with the sleepy rattling of a lawn mower and the distant clatter of horses’ hoofs. There lay my brother’s tin pistol on the garden path, I picked it up, took it with me, Jacques spoke to me of Spain, of the Civil War, perhaps he expressed a desire to join the International Brigade. Now, looking back on this morning, it contained a final farewell, but at the time there was some agreement to meet in town, it was all over, no more to go on, I shot Jacques dead as he stood there behind the lowered carriage window. I raised the tin pistol, aimed, and imitated a shot,
and Jacques pretended to be hit, threw up his arms and fell backward. The train set itself in motion and disappeared in the tunnel behind the station. Jacques did not appear again at the window, I never saw Jacques again. For a long time I looked for him. He left no trace behind. His name was not contained in the official records. I have often thought about this strange figure, and have sought to interpret it. It contained much that I should have desired, this complete license, this freedom to come and go as he liked, this vagabond’s life, in my thoughts I idealized his existence, I dreamed of its extravagance and audacity as I sank back into my old imprisonment. Other things, however, made me suspicious, the impulse in him to make up lies and exaggerations, for instance, or his mystifications and his dressings up, sometimes appearing with a false beard, or with a big pair of horn-rimmed glasses, or with his wrists and forehead bandaged. His uniqueness, it seems today, lay in the very brevity of his appearance. He gave a guest performance. With prodigal intensity he built up a friendship, then when he felt it had reached its peak, he withdrew. He wanted the extraordinary. I was too slow on the ball for him, after the brief flight I lost my strength and could not follow him into his dubious and adventurous exploits and so he abandoned me, his role was at an end. Sometimes I thought, Perhaps I was mistaken, perhaps it wasn’t a toy pistol I shot him with, but a real revolver, perhaps I have really killed him, and these thoughts go together with dreams that recur at intervals and in which I am involved in duels with an adversary,
or an alter ego, and in which there is only one choice, you or I, and either he will murder me, coming slowly and threateningly closer, with his knife, his gun, or his terrible bare hands, or I will plunge the dagger into his body, or fire my pistol into his dissolving face. After Jacques’s disappearance I returned to being a piece of furniture in the communal household, I stood at my appointed place, and when we moved to the Bohemian town in which my father was to take over the management of a textile factory I allowed myself to be shipped with them. There I lay in the evenings in the living room under the table, with the dog. I pressed the dog’s head close to me, felt his warm breath on my face and clutched with my hands at his soft coat. You, Harras, I whispered, and the sheepdog laid his paws on my arm and gazed at me with his big, black eyes, and his tongue licked me. From this low vantage I saw my father sitting in the armchair glancing through the paper and my mother at the sewing table, her hand gliding up and down with the needle. On a sofa tucked away in one corner of the room sat my brother with his schoolbooks, while in another corner my sister Irene bent with her short-sighted eyes over a letter. The room was warm and clean, white curtains hung at the window, the books stood tidied on their shelves, the grandfather clock ticked in the hall. I too was thought of as part of the imposing whole. The look of the place had been settled once and for all. The piece of furniture that I was in this home was all polished and put in place and the dirt forever settling down on me forever wiped off. No one ever asked where
it came from, this distressing dirt that trickled out of me, no one ever inquired, they just rubbed, brushed and polished, tirelessly, so that the shameless spot was never seen. When my mother looked down at me over the top of her spectacles pain seethed up in me and something within me urged me to crawl to her and lick her hand. I held more tightly to the dog, we belonged to one another in our dumbness. Nothing could be explained. My life was a dull waiting for the catastrophe. My father folded up his newspaper and got up. He said that it was time to go to bed. Each of us slowly worked himself out of his hole. We said goodnight to our mother. She embraced us as if we were setting off on a long journey, pressed us to her and kissed us. Oppressed and embarassed, I took leave of my father. Sometimes in my need for reconciliation I gave him my hand and got nothing but cool, dry fingertips which he hastily withdrew. I crept out of the room and my brother joined me, the dog following. We went out into the bare garden and got caught up in our games in which the lostness and instability of our existence was expressed. While we strolled over the clayey fields and woods of the neighborhood, we were changed into explorers in unknown regions of the world. We came across strange creatures and were involved in dangerous battles. We composed documents that we blackened with smoke and splashed with red paint to show that one or the other of us had been taken prisoner and was awaiting sentence of death. With the help of complex spy rings we discovered each other, liberated each other from the deepest dungeons
and out of the hands of the most gruesome inquisitors. It seemed as if there were more reality and topicality in these games than in my work upstairs in the loft. These games were psychodramas in which we tried to adapt to an emigrant existence, and in my work all was alienation and concealment. My room was in our landlady’s apartment in the top floor of the villa. To reach my room I had to pass through her hall. The widow lived on this floor that was filled with flower pots and smelled sourly of cabbage. When I came through the door to the flat, she stuck out her gray head from behind the leaves of some plant or out of a niche and stared at me distrustfully from her close-set eyes. From dawn till dusk she shuffled about, swept and clattered about in her hall, I locked my door and hung a cloth over the keyhole. Only at night was I free from her sniffing around my door. Then I was alone in the rushing quietness of a vacuum, alone with my pictures and my written pages, alone with my books and my music. I muffled the record player with blankets. From an immeasurable distance the music came to me, like a dream of liberation. I stood in my grotto and my hands danced in time to the music. In my blood and in the vibrations of my nerves, in my pulse and my breathing sounded the music. Tears streaming down my cheeks I drank in the music, and then went to the spirit-voices of books, carried on imaginary conversations with the people of the books, they seekers like myself, and to me the books were secret messages, letters in a bottle dropped out at sea to find kindred spirits. Everywhere, in the most distant cities, on desolate
coasts, in the seclusion of woods, these individuals lived and many spoke to me from the kingdom of the dead. This concept of belonging together consoled me. It seemed to me as if the man whose book I was now reading must know of my presence, and when I sat down myself to write, I knew that others were listening for me through the great rushing noise that surrounded us all. When I saw Haller’s name for the first time on the back binding of a book, a memory was awakened in me of a head gardener who appeared in a book out of my childhood. This head gardener, who had lived with his family in the jungles of South America, gave to the name of the writer Haller its first depth effect. The dedication on the flyleaf of his book roused my interest. It came from a friend of my parents, who had immigrated to China, had there been converted to Buddhism, and later committed suicide. My parents had spoken of him only in disparaging terms. He had left his family, it was hinted that he even threatened his wife with a gun. He had withdrawn from everyday life and disappeared. The words he had confided to my parents in his nervous, scratchy handwriting outflowing onto the absorbent paper were, This book is written by a brother of mine. I removed Haller’s book Only for the Crazy from the orderly row on the shelf, I freed it from its unappreciative environment and let it speak out in my own realm. Reading Haller’s works was like probing into my own pain. Here was a blueprint of my situation, the situation of the bourgeois who wants to become a revolutionary but is crippled by the weight of established convention.
In many ways these readings held me fast in a romantic no man’s land, in self-pity and nostalgic longings, I could have used to advantage a harder and more cruel voice, one which would have torn the veil from my eyes and made me rise and shine. The “I” that I was carrying around with me was used up, destroyed, useless and had to go by the board. But how could I get to do that, how free myself from everything that was dragging me down, poisoning and stifling me. Where could I find the energy. The difficulties were bound to force me more and more into a corner. There was no other way but the way of disintegration and decay. Changes occurred with infinite slowness, one hardly noticed them. Sometimes I felt a sharp jolt and then I believed that something had become different, and then the underground waters closed in over me again and hid what I had gained in mud. Thus I felt my way along until I believed I was on the track of something new again, and one day something actually would be there, perhaps I would find firm ground beneath my feet. When I wrote to Haller it was an attempt to escape my unreality. And I received an answer to my letter. There stood my name on the envelope, I read it again and again. Suddenly I had entered into an inconceivable relation to the outside world. Someone had written my name on a letter, someone believed in my existence and directed his voice to me. I read the words of a living mouth. I was almost indifferent to the meaning of these words. The fact that someone spoke to me was enough. They were the words of an aged, humble craftsman. Perhaps I was disappointed by