Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics) (45 page)

It stood about half a metre to the left of our path, to the left of the circle in which every morning we paid solemn homage to fresh air. I literally trembled with fear, convinced that one of the blue coats was already tracking my gaze with his steely eyes. But as much as our watchdogs were accustomed to reacting to every jerk and gesture inside the stockade with a fierce barking, no one had yet detected my discovery. The little dandelion was still completely mine.

But I could only take true delight in it for a few days. I was determined to make her mine. Every time our exercise period came to an end I had to tear myself from her by force, and I would have given my daily bread ration (and that’s saying a lot!) just to possess her. The longing to have a living thing in the cell with me became so overwhelming that the flower, that timid little dandelion, soon took on the consequence of a human being, a secret lover: I could no longer live without her – in there, locked inside those dead walls!

And then came the business with Hairpiece. I started out slyly. Every time I passed my flower I took a small step, as unobtrusively as possible, from the path onto the patch of grass. We all have a hefty dose of herd instinct in us, and that’s what I was counting on. My hunch proved right. The man behind me, the man behind him, and the one after – and so on and so forth – they all followed slavishly in shuffle step. And so I succeeded in four days’ time to push our path so close to my dandelion that, had I bent over, I could have reached out and grabbed it with my hand. Though some twenty blanched blades of grass died a dusty death, trampled underfoot by a horde of wooden clogs – but who gives a hoot about sacrificing a couple of miserable blades of grass when you want to pluck a wild flower!

I came ever closer to the fulfilment of my wish. As a test, a couple of times I let my left sock slip, stooped down with noticeable annoyance and harmlessly pulled it back up. No one took issue. Tomorrow then, I said to myself!

You mustn’t laugh at me if I confess that I strode into the yard with a pounding heart and sweat-soaked, tingling palms. It was just so inconceivable, the prospect, after months of solitude and loveless longing, suddenly, unexpectedly, to have a beloved in the cell with me.

We had almost ended our daily dose of clip-clopping rounds – I planned it for the next to last lap. That’s when Hairpiece stepped into action, indeed in the most cunning and low manner.

We had just started into the next to last lap, the blue coats were already jingling the rings of giant keys, signalling our imminent departure, and I was fast approaching the place from which my flower looked fearfully back at me. Never in my life, I believe, did I feel so aroused as in those few seconds. Twenty steps more. Now fifteen, now ten, five …

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.

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.