Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics) (47 page)

The princess swung herself onto her horse, no longer able to endure the clouds, for the stranger silently plotted out her and his first death. He sang her no word of farewell, and she rode towards her country with its blue hills that loomed in the distance in a terrible silence, for he had already driven the first thorn through her heart; and, ringed by her faithful attendants in the castle courtyard, she fell, bleeding, from her horse. But there was a smile on her feverish lips as she stammered: I know now, I know!

1984

Jürg Laederach

1. The phone refuses to ring. I sit here on 82nd Street, no, on 83rd, no, on 81st; I forget where I am. The phone refuses to ring, to tear me out of this enforced solitude, which I know only too well. This solitude that makes me sick and stirs me to tears, but surely not tears of compassion. A call is bound to come any minute now up from The Village and afford me the company I desperately desire. The phone isn’t ringing, the bell doesn’t work.
   
2. I have no other recourse now but to resort to the sharpest provocation, as a consequence of which the phone always rings, because it cannot do otherwise: to strip myself naked, place the phone far out of reach and lay myself in the bathtub, full of bathwater, of course. It is a characteristic of mine that in undressing, I never get naked; I can undress myself as long as I like. On countless occasions I’ve tried, to strip myself, naked, that is, but it has never worked for me.
   
3. I spend more time getting undressed than most. Since I tend to toss my clothes in a heap supported by a chair (or in this case, since I only recently moved in, without a chair) my clothes pile up to a considerable height; it’s quite a heap I have lying around. It is perfectly possible that beneath the clothes I just took off, several layers deeper, more clothes are being bred at this very minute; either my skin produces these clothes, or the new clothes grow between two layers of older, already worn clothing. In any
   case, I never get naked. One can only imagine what might happen were I ever to succeed.
   
4. Such are my bodily needs. Obviously, everything goes into my clothes, though I can’t feel it, and it isn’t noticeable to others. Just once in my life to see a little skin; for this I pray.
   
5. While most human beings crave to see another naked beside them, I harbour this same wish in regard to myself; but my energies are not up to the fulfillment of my wish. I know what I look like; had myself x-rayed, though not too deeply; the rays peeled off the excess layers, revealing no abnormality, which makes my condition all the more inexplicable.
   
6. I spend hours getting undressed; that’s the truth. I made a pledge: every time an attempt to catch a glimpse of myself lies in the normal course of events of my day, I condone it with restrained enthusiasm, of course. I spend hours getting undressed, as a consequence of which I will have to spend as many hours getting dressed again. The traditional lowly clown’s costume just made its appearance, stripped away, followed by the oil-smeared mechanic’s cover-all, stripped away, followed by the cutaway, the tail-less tux, that is, which disintegrated as I stripped it off. The white pants of the poultry chef have just emerged, how busy the kitchen was today.
   
7. I’ll have to spend hours, an entire night at least, getting dressed again as soon as the phone call comes. As soon as I climb into the bath, the water rises to the rim, and the cook that I am swells up like a soufflé, his clothing inflates.
   
8. This time the extended invocatory technique doesn’t work. I lie in the tub, covered with soap, after climbing back and forth into and out of the tub for several hours now, each time removing another layer of clothing, till I dropped exhausted into the tub where I now lie beneath the jet of water, the water level rising perilously close to the edge, and my two knees, bedecked with leather patches, poking up out of the foam. And it’s here at the knees of these leather-patched cook’s pants soaring up out of the iridescent suds that I shiver with the cold.
   
9. I can’t stand it much longer. Ever since I moved up here to 79th, no, to 76th Street – can’t remember which – that is, ever since I started wondering why the phone never rang, I’ve changed completely, become so much more defenseless and susceptible. Perhaps I ought to get myself x-rayed again, things might have changed beneath the surface too. I’ll let a little more water in.
   
10. The fundamental issue is clear. I am applying the sharpest means to provoke that phone call that refuses to come. I can’t understand it: though millions of people are thinking of me at this very moment, that phone refuses to ring. Perhaps they don’t dare call me. And whereas before it was the most natural thing imaginable that though millions thought of me, they never actually called me, it is completely incomprehensible to me now that the phone should not ring, now that I’ve taken such pains to provoke it.
    
11. The millions of prospective callers fear that millions of others are ahead of them on line, that there’s no getting through to me; thus the phone remains unused. There is another reason for this disuse: I have obviously not properly applied my conjuring technique. I didn’t take it far enough. It is still too easy for me to climb out of the tub and, with dripping cook’s pants, approach the telephone. And if a phone call should come and I’m standing there right in front of the phone, I can reach for the receiver immediately. Under such propitious circumstances no call will come through.
    
12. The telephone must first be placed further away from the tub. Were I to be able to get to it immediately when it rings, my reply to the prospective caller and the ensuing conversation would be assured. In which case, of course, no call would come through. Such conditions are not conducive to the satisfactory completion of a call, but rather, at best, to the telephone’s empty ringing. I’m rather wet today, soaked through to several layers of clothing; not all the way to the skin though, I’m still dry below it all, my skin cannot get wet.
    
13. My own x-ray device reveals that the wetness has seeped all the way down to my forester’s duds that fit me tightly several layers below. I may very well be the wettest person to ever lie in a tub. Water does not flow over me as it does over others, but rather, once it has settled around me, it seeps into my uppermost fabric and weighs me down. It is high time I climbed out of the tub, I tell myself, and I proceed to do so. Don’t fall, I think to myself, and immediately trip over something: a spongy mass. A bad habit, this duplication of thought into action, better drop it.
    
14. I try to block out consciousness, for the disappointments are unending. Impossible to get used to it. I may in fact be the single individual most prone to duplicate my thinking via my actions. I think, and then I do what I think. I feel much better really when I’m not thinking, and consequently, not doing anything, since I am by nature immovable and can only be impelled into motion by a flood of redundant ideas. Now it’s time to move, I think, and immediately replicate the thought in action. Out of the tub!
    
15. This is how I think, and this pre-phone call stage of my cognitive process propels my body out of the tub, my sub-exponentially variable body that is coated with a light film of suds and draped in cook’s pants and shirt. Here between 73rd and 75th Street, but more likely at 80th Street, this body of mine can never take centre-stage, and is invariably hidden from the public eye, in the sight of which it remains forever wrapped in all these clothes. It should, however, be noted that the very person to whom it never shows itself, namely me, couldn’t care less about it. With a contraction, the body wrapped in wet cook’s clothes whips itself out of the tub as a preliminary to setting in place those additional hindrances blocking the bather from the telephone, such that – as soon as I can no longer reach the receiver – the call will definitely come through and tear me out of this hermetic communion with myself.
    
16. For its own dissimulation’s sake, this body has laid too long in water. Once out of the water, its clothes hide it.
    The only way it can discover, that is, reveal itself to itself is by lunging at the receiver if a phone call comes. Then I can tell it all, confess everything which I now keep secret from myself. Only then, driven instinctively, can I find the words and ways to approach that which although close, remains infinitely far, wrapped in fabric, the tailored and ironed, albeit soaked, superfluous fabrics of my being.
    
17. Having strode, dripping, to the still-silent telephone on New York’s Upper West Side, I pick up the telephone to a place even further out of reach. I drag its cord behind me. The cord grins back at me as I carry the receiver to the most distant corner of this curious New York apartment. The apartment has a horseshoe shape.
    
18. A majestically narrow horseshoe shape. Divided in three. It has a center and two wings. In the center stands the tub; I carry the phone towards one of the wings, the east wing. I drag that miserable device into the farthest corner of the east wing. The walls of the apartment are white. The sun is blinding. A call could come through now; it doesn’t.
    
19. I deposit the phone in the farthest corner of the east wing of the apartment, walk back through the center, through the winter garden, back to the tub into which I allow myself to sink. A little worse for wear and tear perhaps on my outmost surface, my cook’s surface. The tail-less tux, the cutaway lies on the chair beside me. I am calm again in my bathwater; its waves have stopped beating. I sit up and am wet. Wet and alone: this is my essential truth. New York refuses to call; that galls me, and not only that. It depresses me. Here I sit – don’t recognize myself any more, I only know that tears of recognition will not fall; all my tears have run dry.
    
20. Seated back in the tub again, it’s still too easy to get to the phone. My possible paths to it are likewise component parts of its scheme. In the short time we have matched wits, the telephone has perfected its perfidious methods. It saw right through my emergency measures. Never again will I permit a phone call to break through into my ever-congealing seclusion, my isolation, my solitude that dwells
    on nothing else but how to break out of itself; the telephone watches over all my possible paths, which, according to my calculations, are indeed too readily accessible.
    
21. Under these circumstances, no call can get through, no other New Yorker can reach me, no living soul to whom I might reveal, or rather, from whom it might be worth hiding my radical stance. The key to the satisfactory completion of this method of picking up the receiver (a method that has, after all, been in effect for half an eternity, several minutes, that is), lies, I firmly believe, in the time it takes to climb out of the tub. I can, if I have to, be slow about reaching the receiver, but quick, on the other hand, at leaving the tub. I have achieved record time as warm-water sprinter, and must, therefore, complicate the process.
    
22. I pour a bucket of suds over myself, grab a big brush and start scraping off the cook’s layer of my being; the second cutaway surfaces, and I tear into it, launching into a lengthy cleaning process that can no longer be interrupted, except, of course, by a phone call. New York sullies its citizens to such an extent that only the most thorough mythologizing has any beneficial effect; and in any case, you’re still stuck in New York; no one will uninvite you once you’re here, this city is after all the Mecca of the most exotic masters of deceit. Still no phone call, even though I have succeeded, little by little, in tearing through the cutaway and I expect any minute now the appearance of my own skin.
    
23. The provocation of not being able to get to the receiver is still not extreme enough. I must bind myself to the tub, for which purpose underwater straps lie ready; the tongue of the belt can now be drawn through the shackle with my teeth. Perhaps not yet. Let the water get very hot first, so that, in climbing out, I may suffer a stroke. Later. The telephone is now positioned in the farthest corner of the horseshoe-shaped apartment; it’s now a mere matter of forgetting whether in the west or the east wing. Forgetting this would double the time it takes to reach the phone,
    because I’d first have to look for it in both wings. If someone else lived with me in this scanty apartment I’ve rented, I would at least discuss the situation with him, decide just how secretively this whole business of moving the phone around would have to be carried out so that I couldn’t possibly find it again. Then, dripping wet, fully clothed, I’d be forced to pace in a fury of frustration around the apartment, wringing my ears.
    
24. Meanwhile, I climbed out of the tub again and without knowing it, or perhaps forgetting right away what I was doing, I placed the phone in the room in the farthest corner of the east wing of the apartment, past the collapsing fruit crates – no, in that little alcove to the rear of the room with the empty fruit crates, the one that can only be reached via a small winding staircase, the door to which I keep locked. An unbreakable oak-panel door made of several-hundred-year-old New England oak stands between me and the phone that still refuses to ring. I toss the key to this impermeable door out the window. It falls into the big water tank at the district fire station, where the fire department maintains its reserve water supply. The very same structure that likewise houses that famous pole down which the firemen slide from their sleeping quarters to the station house proper, burning their hands in the process, bathing them thereafter in water from the tank. There, at any rate, in that water tank is where my key lies.
    
25. By turning on the hot water tap, I bring the water in my tub almost to a boil, the simmering suds dissolve the blue jeans that have come to the fore beneath my cutaway into little blue flakes; the suds dissolve everything. I appear to be naked but don’t dare confirm this possibility with my fingers, for my skin is meanwhile shedding in strips from my flesh, and I see, for instance, the inner joints of my arms floating like hinges in the brew. I am, moreover, still fastened with heavy leather straps to the bottom of the tub. Unfortunately, however, my very upset appears to upset the balance, thereby deflecting the intervention of that ‘extraneous’ element of otherness I so desperately desire. The fact is,
    I have all the while been mumbling continuous and sometimes criss-crossing conversations with myself, conversations of varying contents, the overall effect of which, however, is to scare away calls. When someone is so continuously consumed with himself, others won’t go near him.
    
26. The radio is turned up very loud, a crazy Brazilian reggae. The television is tuned to a midnight porno flick in which a woman, a naked woman – she has it good, I sigh, at least she can see her own skin – hung from a crane, is slowly lowered into molten gold and cranked up again, to the accompaniment of the Pink Panther theme played by Henry Mancini, and then the phone rings. A phone call at last, the magic formula worked, whew! What an effort! And it’s probably a wrong number, and if I
    could
    reach the receiver I’d have to hang up again almost immediately. There is, after all, no sweeter pleasure while using the telephone than to lift the receiver a mere centimeter and let it drop again immediately. This stimulates the caller to apply his utmost effort, a laudable challenge, he tries again, and again you pick up the receiver and let it fall, and whoever has been trying to reach you flies in a fury against the invisible bars of his cage like a bloodthirsty animal lusting after the flesh of its keeper. My boiling-hot bathwater stirs me, impelling me to conclude that it must be a wrong number. They hung up.