Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 3
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Albrecht Selge, Excerpt from Wach (Lucid, Copyright © 2011 by Rowohlt. Berlin Verlag GmbH, Berlin / Translated by Angela Flury
<1> Oh, August remembers, hears both girls whisper the diminutive word, over and over, as if wanting to weigh it. It hardly agrees with the heavy air in the Schandfleck [i], with the dense cigarette smoke and the babbling voices August feels are penetrating him. One of the regulars squeezes by the table, haggard old guy with a floppy hat and the drooping eye, his three-legged dog limping behind him. August's eyes follow them, the dog adroitly avoiding the beer puddles through which his master wades carelessly. No latte macchiatos here says the writing on the wall, there are flyers on the tables, the customers all talk at once, the room is theirs, on six days music blares, until Wednesday at midnight, when, on the seventh day, Silent Thursday, the music shuts down. August feels inside the pocket of his jacket for the tie he is hiding, two shirt buttons are undone, all to make him less conspicuous; his shoes are dusty, after work he walked for hours until the rain came down and, almost home, he landed here. The Schandfleck has lodged itself in a dilapidated house, behind crumbling plaster and dense ivy: the last of the dives in this freshly spruced up street, cracked elephant skin in a long row of pastel colored façades. Susanne hates the Schandfleck, even the ivy is shabby and half dead, she once said, look at the sickly color, maybe it was poisoned by the Eastern or prewar plaster, in which it is still rooted, or else by the smoke that oozes out. And inside, well, that pack, those mutts, how can you. Susanne dislikes everything that is left over and has not been modernized; Oh, and you don't, she once asked him, don't you prefer parquet in the apartment to rats? Parquet. August had hoped he would feel comfortable in the Schandfleck, where time and air stood still. But now he finds that being there is only tempting as long as you are not there, the standstill is merely sticky, he feels beleaguered by talk and smoke. He would like to do something with himself, maybe make himself weightless, or at least his head empty; then suddenly he remembers
<2> a journey this past winter: instead of smoke, swaths of fog in the night, darkly white meadows dipping into black, the scenery covered in snow, padded against all noise, windows lit up like squares floating in a room. Having arrived at the tavern, their parents retreated to their rooms. August and his sister went to the parlor, where only a few people sat around, a window had already been opened, the winter fog and tobacco smoke hung in the air without mixing, the smoke on the fog like oil on water. The proprietor, moustache and fringes of hair on the back of his neck, brought them two glasses of beer and a third for himself and sat with them. He enjoys being his own guest, a little too much, or so his wife had hinted in the morning, at breakfast. He immediately got started on the aunt, whom he knew, of course, and who turned ninety today, or turned ninety yesterday, did one really have to say that he knew everybody, the village wasn't big, the Odenwald [ii] in total wasn't big, not as big as the city anyway, at least in terms of the number of people, because in the city people lived closer to each other than in the country, but at the same time further away from one another. They talked about family celebrations, festivities, and bereavements; partying and mourning are like yin and yang, or the plus and minus of a battery, said the proprietor, his hand gliding over a glass of beer, and it all has to do with time. I had a friend from school who was such a case that had to do with time. Here in the Odenwald, the streets at night are pitch black and my friend ran into a tree. The car was one hell of a mess, they did peel him out from under with great effort, but nobody gave him the slightest chance, they brought him to the hospital just because that's what they do. And what nobody expected: the doctors saved his life. He recovered and had to learn everything from scratch, walking, speaking, in the end he even began to do carpentry again, something you guys in the city can't imagine is not simple work. That is, he didn't quite become his old self again, he always moved as though he were only mimicking someone, and everything he did, he did with hesitation. But he was back to his old life, with his wife, the kids, friends, often in the evenings he sat here in the tavern. Until one day he fell off the roof. He had wanted to fix some damage and in doing so, tripped, a small misstep, but unfortunately head first, he broke his neck. One might think, and that seems most plausible, that after the accident he wasn't really quite recovered, his slowness being a sign that somewhere in the brain an itty-bitty defect remained or two synapses didn't get soldered properly, and so it didn't switch fast enough, and he fell off the roof. But at the same time, one has to suspect, even if it's unlikely, but one suspects nonetheless, that the mistake did not lie in the fall from the roof but the real mistake happened beforehand, when he surfaced from the car wreck still alive, because his time was up and only through oversight did his time get extended, until the mistake was rectified in due time, and he had to go his way regardless.
<3> August still does not know what to make of the story. Full of holes, he remembers his sister whispering, as they went up to their rooms, and quietly adding: and the strings are in the hands of the proprietor, not the fates, my boy, if you swallow that story, you swallow a fate with crumb catcher and mullet. The regular is hanging at the bar, he is younger than appears, only dried up, brown like the ivy in front of the door; the three-legged one is sleeping underfoot. In comes a man in a wet summer coat, standing there undecided, looking around the room, then he goes back out again. August's eyes follow him through the streaky window, the man (seemingly confused) turns right, reappears, goes around a puddle (how jerky he moves, different from the amputated dog), turns left. The rain has stopped, it is warm again, across the street there's a wine tasting, in the soft light of the lanterns of old stands the grilled gate to the historical market hall, now an upscale supermarket.
<4> August half agrees with his sister, half not; but though he does not want to write the story off, he has no idea what to do with it. Here in the Schandfleck he feels more removed from premonitions than ever before. If one could free the head completely, for a moment only, all the drawers of retrospection securely shut, not to think and not to perceive, cut off from all impressions: to be an empty vessel. He closes his eyes and tries to lift himself from the room around him, from the smells and the murmurs. But the opposite happens: by trying to hear above the muttering, he only hears into it, or it enters him as an empty receptacle. In the hitherto formless noise, words and scraps of sentences form themselves, he is pulled into the conversations at the tables close to him: scrubbed my entire apartment on Saturday half the day ever heard from Theresa again all discourse theory fails started half past one and cleaned until eleven it was that necessary what can discussion philosophy at the podium do against private equity et al. Theresa used to come here more often but since she moved across and over and over again the question of power martyr poses and nothing but the question of power Morrissey's worn martyr poses sour wine hedge funds investment funds the wine in the Schandfleck has always been sour his celibacy poses swarming grasshoppers were such a peculiarity from Theresa a dead horse or chewed up gum on the other hand Barthes! because Morrissey is and will never be a Pasolini nothing more freeing than half a day of scrubbing until you're totally exhausted the damn district office Theresa, and finally, a cell phone is jingling behind August's back, Prelude C Major, and August notices that he has been moving the ashtray on the table back and forth, full of cold ashes, not from him, and he longs for a terrible racket or the perfect silence, gets up and exits the Schandfleck into the
<5> silent May night. August is the only one taking his dust into the clean air, but he is already walking lighter. On one side the house where he lives, a little farther, the street runs into a major traffic artery from where the trams leave; on the other side the street leads to the river with the new waterfront, where the residents, none of whom lived here twenty years ago, go for walks; their cars are parked in front of wine shops, coffee roasting companies, small stores specializing in fine pastry and chocolate. August goes neither right nor left, but in a roundabout way, on small side streets and detours; even though it is late already, he wants to walk a little more, for some time he has been having this growing need to wander. He rarely now accompanies his colleagues at lunch time to the restaurants on the bottom floor, often he leaves the Center and roams the surrounding streets. And in the past days and weeks he has been roaming around at night, after work, more and more often and for longer, strolling through incidental streets, along unexpected paths, across unintentional properties. He likes it best when he walks in directions where the pastel colors disappear and the houses become gray and the pavement uneven and full of holes. He roams around so much, or so he speculates, because Susanne is no longer in town and therefore he no longer goes to her in the evenings, or he walks around because it is the beginning of summer and he feels unwell in the Pleasure Palace Center, or else he feels unwell because he walks; roaming is not for him a means of distraction but a distracting end, an end in and of itself, that becomes, with each step, more lucid. And what about his insomnia? Who knows, when he is out and about at night instead of sleeping, perhaps he walks not only because he cannot sleep but because he does not want to: his walking would not therefore be an escape from insomnia, but from the sleep that he has come to fear, that twin brother; he does not wish to turn in his consciousness at the gate, to fall into the clutches of celestial wings or the hands of poppy stalks belonging to someone he does not know; he wants to be awake, observe, contemplate: to roam.
<6> The water from the downpour is everywhere evaporated, as if it had not rained at all, but the air is still noticeably free of pollen. August takes a deep breath. He rarely feels hungry now. It is supposed to get hot and dry in the days to come. He wants to walk to a park close by, where the humidity will have lingered. For a while he meets not a soul, only a big handcart with newspapers stands in front of an open door, from where light falls. Then it gets lively again. August comes to a street full of bars, tourists and night owls fill the void, they light up the dark city, pedestrians laughing in groups, girls walking arm in arm, a night bus waiting at the traffic light, an older woman sits between young people, her gaze directed at the back of the seat in front of her, sad or just tired: while the others are driving home or to another party, she may be on the way to work before dawn, going to clean a sleeping office or an only just vacated disco.
<7> A little ways off August reaches the park. A construction fence bars the entrance to the main road, now this park, too, is being renovated. August stays outside on the unpaved path between park and street. Puddles are here and there, and beneath August's feet a sticky white blanket, dense pollen like sludge, covers the ground, snow in the early summer, and as in winter August smells into the snow, but it does not smell like snow, he hears into it, but it does not sound like snow, no wonder, it is already melting and no longer muffles the noise. On top of the pollen, puddles are forming their shapes, between hollows, water has accrued, then a miniature sea, towards the hedges a sloping terrain, already dry. In looking down, August notices a hanging thread on his inseam, he wraps it around his forefinger and tears it. When he is about to toss it, he sees that the bag hanging in the garbage can is half filled with rain water. He puts the thread on the water's surface and wonders how long it will take to sink. So absorbed in the water, he hears behind him quiet steps, regular breathing, and that pulls him out of it, he does not want to appear like one who goes through garbage. He ambles along and lets the runner catch up with him; he knows the old man in his white jogging suit already, the word jogger seems inappropriate for him, it would be better to call him an endurance runner; this endurance runner runs nights, along the edge of the park, a familiar sight to all who may be out and about at the same time. Why does he run at night? Does he run after work (a waiter, a bus driver?) Before an early work day (baker, laborer)? Or is he a retired night addict? As August is being passed, he decides to imprint time and place to memory. […][iii]
<8> August's watch shows thirty-eight minutes past two; before long he plans to return and check whether the endurance runner passes this mailbox at thirty-eight minutes past two regularly. August's eyes follow him, the runner's movements seem perfectly consistent, as if he ran not only at night but on and on, around the clock in one constant motion. That, August thinks, is how he too would like to move, but only maybe; maybe he would like to go about it differently, round about: to stop in one place and, in between, to look-but always in perfect, uninterrupted walking: if one could make a go of it.
<9> The endurance runner turns in order to continue running along the edge of the park. When August reaches the corner, he sees, a little farther on, a couple of cars with silently turning blue lights; a policeman ties a red-white ribbon between trees, another keeps back a hand full of curious onlookers. August marvels at these people's blatant gawking, none of them hiding their curiosity, they strike August like animals, their gawking like gorging; he, too, likes to look, but not like that, he does not want to enjoy being a spectator, which is why he prefers to look at pollen on the ground, passengers in buses, scribbling on mailboxes. The endurance runner did not pay attention to the scene, but in a different way than August, without fail: he ran past it by swerving to the street as if he did not know the temptation to stay on as curious onlooker.
<10> The closer August gets to the fenced off area, the stronger the smell of the moist earth becomes. On the side of the road, power shovels and construction trailers sit motionless, next to them men are working on a pile of dirt, with their shovels and hands clearing away branches and uprooted shrubbery in the floodlight. It occurs to August what he is doing just then: he gawked at the gawkers to put himself above them, and now does as they do. He pulls himself away from the pleasure of looking and goes home.
<11> The silence of the apartment at night: on the terra cotta tiles of the southern balcony, olive and lemon trees in the dark, a built-in kitchen with electromagnetic kitchen stove and fully automatic coffeemaker, bathroom with floor heater, quiet bedroom, large living room. August inspects his rooms: high-grade renovation (who might have lived here before the modernization?), new parquet with tiny little squares, white walls, minimally furnished, like sparsely populated land: a leather sofa without a scratch, shelves with alphabetically organized books, small television, big sound system, very many CDs, the Blüthner piano, on top of it music sheets covered in dust (Chopin, Schubert, Debussy) and the package of Valerian pills, musty tasting and useless like all the good advice: no more alcohol, instead dark chocolate, rooibos tea before bed, warm socks, masturbation. Or a few steps in the fresh air, the means that has gotten out of hand. He has always gone to bed late, as a student he listened to music all night long, sonatas and string quartets by Beethoven and Schubert, songs by Strauss, Mahler, Berg, also Bach cantatas, Ligeti, number pieces and bird songs by Messiaen. But then, worried about his performance at work, he followed Susanne's advice from London and walked around the block to fall asleep more easily; soon enough he began to get up earlier in order to walk before work; the walks became longer, first at night, and then in the morning, and the time in between invariably shorter.
<12> And now? Some music, four final songs? Kindly to receive the starry night like a tired child … he sits on the leather couch, naked feet on the parquet, on the table a coffee table book, Department Stores, the cleaning woman's monthly bill: the total amount by 5-31 to our account. We thank you for your business and are committed to offering you the best quality work, the yearly mail from the children's village in Bangladesh (he had taken on the sponsorship as a student, subsequently increased the amount, what are three twenty-eight a day). He is too tired to go to bed, he cannot get up from the sofa. This inertia befalls him here again and again, no sooner has he come through the door, than his steps get heavy, wanting to lift his legs, they stick to the floor, wanting to get off the sofa, he is stuck in a bottomless depth. He feels paralyzed in his own walls, he believes that gravity is stronger in his apartment than outside, maybe he lives in a gravity fortification flat. On the wall an insect flutters up and down, it seems to August that this creature, too, is being pulled down again and again. Outside the window, morning becomes visible. He might listen to some music; but he really must lie down at all costs, sleep two hours before going to the office (today he has a meeting with the construction manager of the Trevi Fountain), at least doze, he thinks, doze a little, but he remains sitting on the sofa, looking at the spines of the books on the shelves:
A white book.
A blue book.
A black book.
A blue book. (Another blue one, as a matter of fact)
A white book.
A yellow book.
A black book.
A red book.
A green book.
A green book.
A white book.
A yellow book.
A pale blue book.
A dark red book.
A whitish book turning yellow.
A gleaming blue book, brightly yellow font.
A broad-shouldered blue book.
<13> A row of the same book spines in a box, softly arched, a dark blue wavy row, the longer you look at it, the more it resembles the sea at night, with white letters bearing bits of white crest, barely perceptible deviations only in the length of the lines, other than that perfectly constant motion; a gray book that towers above all others, like a lantern, with movements also barely visible, a long black row, some dullish white and gray bodies, one glowing crimson one books seems to sweat another to breathe another to tremble with tension
<14> To tremble
<15> how August would just once like to tremble. He squints and feels harnessed to his life, deceptively so. He is not pulled in all directions, but instead he is strapped in fatigue as if on a rack. One time he wants to tremble from being stretched, but he is discouraged by the nonsensical expressions and wrong pictures that come to him when he thinks of his life. Just now he stared at the books, and now that it's over, he wishes it would go differently for a change; but if every single moment in life stood still, one would be bound to become mad, the head shattering into a thousand shards, or he would implode from the negative pressure of progress like a baked prune or cosmic turtle, because one moment could only last forever if one's self remained eternally unchanged: that would be the end. And yet it seems to August as something of an essential wonder or essential evil and unbelievable to the core, that life could be anything but simultaneous.
<16> For that reason perhaps, August has lately been looking for potential experiences. At work, he secretly holds his breath on occasion. In the office, surrounded by colleagues and potted plants, he once managed to sense the hint of an anxiety about suffocating rising from his innermost. That was nice. Now he lies belly down on the sofa and turns his head to the side, pressing his face on the armrest and the ear on the seat, the skin sticks to the leather, and as he lies there, he feels his heart pounding. Its irregularity startles him, can it be from his insomnia? But he is even more astounded by the fact that his heart has been beating all these years, unnoticed, without it ever having to be nudged. He picks himself up, goes to the window and then, instead of opening it, goes to the thermostat and turns the knob, first to the temperature inside, and then to the temperature outside, and what a coincidence, twice he reads 23.3 degree C, rare harmony between inside and outside, what could this be suggesting?
<17> He eats half a banana, takes a shower, puts on fresh underwear and a clean shirt, brushes his suit with care. Although it is still early, he heads for work. When he pulls the door behind him shut, he remembers two experiences from recent weeks; always on the threshold these two incidents occur to him, always simultaneously or at least in close proximity, so that even the first one, which did not happen in the flat, but outside under the open sky, is connected to the door: August likes to walk in cemeteries, amongst the trees he harkens to the sounds of birds, or he walks between old cemetery gravestones and fresh mounds of dirt and reads names and dates. He is most interested in the graves where something is off. Nothing is naturally as wrong as the grave of a child; sometimes August figures out how old the child would be today, at the grave of a boy perhaps, who would now be in his mid-thirties, like him, had not all been brought to an end at five. But then there are the mysterious discrepancies, traces of changed or failed plans for life: for instance, when, on the gravestone next to the name of the dead one, another appears, a woman's name, only with the date of birth, a day in 1870 or 1880, and beneath a cross, where the date of death should have been-but it is not there, only the day of birth, a beginning without end, but the woman cannot be alive anymore, therefore she has to lie buried somewhere else, what could have happened? Is she lying with another, late love, or was she buried alive in a cellar, did she vanish somewhere in the world or into thin air? The grave, which he remembers at the door, was not particularly conspicuous, on the contrary, the woman had reached a respectable age when she died in the twenties. On the wrought iron plaque, framed by rusted flower vines, he reads:
Whosoever worked in faith,
Till his strength has been broken,
And dies with love,
Oh, he shall not be forgotten.
<18> Two girls with braces and peeling black nail polish stood in front of the grave, in their whispers and also in their half suppressed laughter rang respect for this place. But the urge to laugh was stronger: especially worked in faith seemed to strike their fancy, the one recited it in a whisper, worked in faith, and the other breathed : Oh, and again they had to laugh.
<19> The second incident, in contrast, is directly related to the door of the apartment. It is hard to close, one has to push considerably for the lock to snap shut. One morning when August opened the door to go to work, he noticed that the lock had not caught. The whole night, as he was asleep, the door had apparently been unlocked. It would not have been noticeable from the hallway, but if somebody had slightly pushed it, the door would have opened. A nice, soft motion, this carefully pushing open would have to be; August slowly pulls the door shut, so that it does not lock, and pushes it open again, but he is doing it too timidly or too firmly, he cannot do it as in his imagination, as he finally actually leaves the apartment and sets out on his way to work.
<20> That particular day he takes the tram. People on their way to work: the opposite of roaming, the potentially shortest and necessarily despised route from A to O. August tries to twist it by watching passengers or looking out the window. Along the way the tram passes an old people's home, a big house with a garden. From his journeys August has pieced together a picture: on the glass porch a rubber plant with broad hanging leaves, probably covered in dust, and next to the plant, filling out the space except for a small entry way, a wicker chair with a motionless old woman; even in the summer with a wool blanket on her legs, she is always already sitting there looking out on the street, with not a move that would give away whether she takes anything in. In her sitting around all day long, she has gotten lost to the world. Will anyone but August miss her, when she has finally disappeared altogether? Only by an oversight still in the time for which she no longer has any use, and which has no use for her, she is pure past; or she has already wholly come undone in the being of will-have-been, future perfect. In German, you have to paste the words together, Latin has a real form for them, surely for a reason. He was never good in Latin, lacking in talent and real interest, in contrast to his sister, who already talked about ghosts as a teenager and dug into old traditions, later she studied old languages and today she is temporarily employed in the past, in a university town, beleaguered by paper stuff, office hours, work noise. August on the other hand: enrolled in business management, only occasionally a lecture in art history or musicology, all in all maybe one semester delay, six months of music are acceptable zero point seven percent of an average life span, in any case he met Susanne in one of the lectures on Mahler (to meet a fellow business management student in a Mahler lecture); then he spent half a year in Aix-en-Provence, which he enjoys thinking about, even if he has little use for his French, and in Aix he looked, supported in this by Susanne, for crises resistant branches, did the appropriate internships, later the Center-Manager-Academy, two years at a small center, and finally, already during its construction, the Pleasure Palace Center.
<21> While the tram is waiting at the light, he looks around. A school boy is trapped between the hips of passengers. A far-sighted left-handed man underlines in a manuscript. The man in front of August reads the ads in a newspaper insert, at the bottom the logo: Pleasure Palace Center-experience the comfort. August looks out of the window. A little girl in a pink dress and a woman step out of a building. The woman checks out the sky, takes out a little hat and puts it on the child's head. Immediately the girl tears the hat off and throws it on the ground. The mother bends down and puts it back on the girl's head. This time the kid puts up with it; instead she stretches out her arms and throws herself forcefully into the legs of her mother, clinging to them. The mother takes the child in her arms and carries her away.
<22> When the tram gets going again, August looks at the watch his father gave him as a present many years ago; anyhow, he is way too early. The young woman close to him also checks the time, on the display of her cell phone is a Roman clock-face. A Mediterranean man with stubble and a bohemian hat is leaning on the door, beneath the brown corduroy jacket a vest, on which the golden chain of a pocket watch dangles. August likes this: time, if it must, put in your pocket, instead of bound to your wrist. While few thoughts crossed his mind, he has traveled through innumerable streets of houses, along tenements, prefabricated high-rises, Wilhelminian-style houses, forever recurring construction gaps, derelict land, soon to be developed terrain, finally, with a distant view of the pedestrian zone called Schlösschenfreiheit, past the waste center and the multiplex-now the gigantic silver grayish oval of the mall has overpowered all vistas, the door of the tram opens, and August gets out.
<23> More and more he's been going on foot, like the other day. The mornings are still breezy, getting oppressive only later in the day. And so August allows himself light-heartedly and repeatedly to find new colors for the long route, turning it into a game. He divides the way not according to distinctive buildings and busy intersections, but orients himself by means of little knobs in the asphalt: little tiles sunk in the ground, covering the city like a dense grid. He walks, without looking up, from one point to the next, the tiles are closely spaced, there must be thousands of them, tiny and slightly bigger circles, more rarely squares, made from copper, brass, aluminum, in grooves, concrete, between cobblestones, in hidden corners and-even more concealed-in the middle of the street, sometimes marked as meas. point, sometimes as measuring point, often they are enclosed by pink circles, sprayed on by the land surveyors, who occasionally can be seen from afar. Deceptions also happen, bottle caps or brass coins that have been stomped in the ground between cobblestones. August shimmies from one measuring point to the next. He imagines that one night all lights in the city went out, not a lantern and no bright windows, not a headlight and no colored advertising, and then all these knobs in the ground began to shine, dimly: a new city would be born. Or he considers whether through cold, heat, aridity, and wetness, the asphalt of the roads gets warped and the tiles on the sidewalk slightly offset, only by fractions of millimeters, and yet, the measuring points would move as well. If these seemingly fixed points really wandered, instead of remaining immovable, what would be the effects on his own life?
Notes
[i] Schandfleck is the name of the bar; it can be translated as eyesore or blemish, but more literally, means the stain of shame
[ii] A low mountain range in Southern Germany
[iii] Ellipses in brackets are the translator's and indicate a break in the continuity of Selge's prose. Ellipses that do not appear in brackets are original to Selge's text.
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