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10.3.09
CHAPTER 16: The Risks Of Turning The Corner
“I had always heard that your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that second isn’t a second at all, it stretches on forever, like an ocean of time.”
-- Lester Burnham, in American Beauty
*****
I thought I'd surprise you, again, she said nonchalantly or perhaps ironically, with a smirk of expectation twisting at the corners of her mouth as she approached the table and registered the look of complete shock that enveloped my face.
I could only stare back at her face with incomprehension, a dream materialised before my eyes. A good dream? A nightmare? Who knows? I mean the initial shock didn’t allow anything else to flow past into the brain, to register any feelings or thoughts on the matter. Like when you’re cut and that split second when the cut is white before the blood suddenly starts rushing.
I wasn't sure how to introduce her to every body. My girlfriend, my muse, this
chick I know? I looked over at Albert for a clue but Albert appeared to be as dumbstruck as I was. Anastasia of course, revelled in the moment of indecision, the powerful effect her appearance was always bound to have. Hi everyone, she said to those gathered around us, those whose curiosity was piqued by her appearance and my reaction, the blood draining from my face. I’m Anastasia, a friend of Witold and Albert, she introduced finally in our silence. And before we could supplement, deny or agree with the introduction, everyone was enthusiastically returning the introductions and no one had any idea that they were in the presence of a woman who possessed the most beautiful voice they might hear during the entire festival. If, of course, she was going to sing.
It's funny, in that sick, twisted way that life’s curveballs come at you before dropping off the table and you to your knees, how you can think about someone so often and with such yearning that sometimes it's difficult to conjure up an image of them. You don’t visualise their eyes or sense the tactile softness of their flesh. It’s as though as they’ve existed only in a textbook somewhere in your student past and the words you were forced to memorise and recite still stick in your mind, randomly, yet you aren’t sure why.
Sometimes it takes a moment of not thinking about them to remember
their face, for example, not confuse them with someone else. I can't
tell you how often and how longingly I'd thought about her because
it would be both boring and encyclopaedic to consider in full depth,
Not to mention the fact you were already fully aware of the hours and days and sometimes weeks of painful correspondence, the gaiety and nonchalance grudgingly carved out, the drinking bouts inducing both passion and forgetfulness.
But unlike the first time she appeared unannounced in Utrecht, I
didn't accept this arrival without question, I didn’t embrace her without reservation, grateful for the opportunity. No, you know yourself if when you put your hand over a flame, closer and closer until suddenly the burning sensation becomes unbearable, unless you have mental instabilities or a masochistic streak of curiosity, you don’t put your hand back over that flame again any time soon..
No, as we drank each other in carefully, (the others had since gone back to their conversations and it was as though we occupied an invisible bubble amid them) she perhaps assessing my capacity for pain, trying to read into my eyes forgiveness or joy or anger, said nothing but put her right hand against my arm, gently. And I of course, stunned into silence, was running through a catalogue of emotions not unlike watching those varieties of fruit spinning in the slot machine waiting for the spinning to stop and the conclusion to make its presence known. Was there anything to forgive? I didn’t even know. Yes, my heart did pirouette a moment or two but then as though a hamstring pulled in mid movement, the joy was tempered by the pain.
Of course I had some stern questions for her. Well, I had them in my mind but was still incapable of speaking them. I assessed as much as possible in those tiny moments; how did I really feel about her being here? Fuck, of course, I was elated. And each time I allowed that recognition to creep in, bam! The shadow of her disappearance re-emerged and the questions were blew back in my face in order: Why did she leave Utrecht so suddenly, without even speaking to me, leaving me some stupid fucking letter in her wake? How did she even discover that I’d be in this little village on this particular weekend? How had she gotten her and most importantly, why in the hell was she here to begin with?
But these questions were to go unanswered for the moment. I can't
say that I didn't care, I most certainly did, but there are
questions you sometimes don't necessarily want to know the answers
to and rather than spoil the surprise of her appearance immediately
I preferred to push those questions to the back of my mind and
accept her as instinctively I'd know she wanted to me to accept her
– without question, without precondition and without asking for
more, which is precisely how I played it.
As she carried on talking with perhaps a practiced nonchalance as if it were perfectly naturally for her have left with a letter and then just as suddenly and unexpectedly reappeared here, materialised out of nothing in front of me, carried on talking as did those around us and she succeeded pulling me into this vortex, the initial introductions worn off and suddenly it was just the two of us, among them and I stood in my glorious numbness listening to her escapades in Torino, Budapest, Zagreb and Vienna, to name a few, I tried to imagine a selfless self that could simply wallow in her being here – to be grateful.
She wanted to be treated as a crowd would treat her - appreciative for her appearance, mesmerised by her presence, tangled in her web. She preferred to be loved rather than possessed, I could see that plainly for the first
time and the stage was the safest place from where to do it.
Perhaps it was the shock of seeing her or the space which had grown between us but as she was no longer simply a dream, a figment of my imagination, as she stood there real enough in flesh and blood I could almost perceive her in that moment as a person, a flawed person, not an icon, not an image, not a memory.
I tried to imagine that if this was going to be the only time I would see
her then I wanted it to be a memorable rather than a desperate or
confused experience. Notwithstanding the notion that the last thing
she'd come all this way and come to all this trouble for would be to
listen to a puny man with his puerile notions of possession react in
a vain and disdainful fashion instead of simple appreciation.
I wanted desperately to grab at her and caress her simultaneously
and yet I felt oddly torn between loyalty and fear in addition to
the uncertainty of how I should treat her, not just when we were
alone but more importantly, in this public venue. And these thoughts
allowed me to consider further the full implications of why she had
chosen to appear when she had, here in a public place, a safe place
where I wouldn't intend on mauling her with my selfish, hungry hands
or with my probing accusative questions.
I was swaying slightly both from the beer and excitement. I couldn't
very well leave the venue with our appearance due up later. Too many people had been told in advance, to many were waiting what these two weird American guys were going to do. There will be time, there will be time. As distraction, whilst she spoke I tried to think of the other lines that followed in that Prufrock poem by Eliot, knowing I’d once memorised them and hearing them in the back of my mind whilst I deliberated and debated my next move, our next move, for certainly we couldn’t simply stand here in the hall drinking beer and pretend nothing had happened, that her sudden appearance was as normal and ordinary as her sudden disappearance.
And so it was with ignoring the lines of the Prufrock poem I was trying to remember as a distraction or indeed, as a guide, that I finally lost my desperate grip on patience.
So, I interrupted suddenly, as casual as possible, Are you here to play with us again, then? I managed to ask with what I presumed formulated on my face a teasing smile but playfulness, I knew was not a strength of mine, not with so many raw emotions on the line and so perhaps it simply sounded bitter and cynical, it was hard to tell.
She didn't say anything for a moment as perhaps she was as uncertain of the basis and intent behind my query as I was.
Why don't I have a glass of wine while I consider she asked, snuggling unexpectedly into my arms and smiling, as though postponement, diversion and hinting at what I was certain to want was a sufficient tactic.
It's been a long journey, she clarified.
And so we finally had a few private moments over drink, clearing a
table for ourselves in the front of the hall where others were
hungrily wolfing down goulash and dumplings, slurping their beers
and either revelling in the previous performance or talking
excitedly about the one to follow. Not that I really understood what they were saying in any event but I’d grown accustomed, listening as I did daily to a language I could only understand in tiny snatches, to perceive rather than actually understand what people were talking about. Facial expressions, circumstances, tone, all useful aids. In the instant case, that they were hungry, perhaps drunk and definitely excited was sufficient to glean. We had privacy even among this crowd.
I suppose your wondering, among other things, how I found you here, she began after a sip of wine, her tongue perched momentarily on the wine stain of her lip as she peered into my eyes attempting to read what registered inside them.
I'd actually intended on surprising you in Prague, Witold. It‘s been so long and your letters have been a great comfort but as always, they aren‘t the same as seeing you. It‘s been crazy touring, you wouldn‘t believe it. Anyway, I just haven‘t had time before now to come up to Prague to see you and even now it was only because I’m on my way to a performance in Krakow, or I was at any rate.
I'd taken the train from Paris and believe me, there wasn't going to be a lot of time to prepare but once I was on the train I knew there was no way I could forgive myself if I didn't stop in to see you.
(Of course, in my mind, even whilst I digested her words, the initial instincts I thought to myself but not aloud, was why didn’t she just ask me to join her somewhere if she was so busy, surely she’d known I’d have come straight away and then the bit about no way to forgive herself, well, fuck, I tried to stifle an ironic laugh, how the fuck did she forgive herself for dropping me without the grace of doing so face to face but by a sneaky little letter under the cover of the night?)
I mean you know, a few times when I was close, I tried to drop a postcard to you but even then, most cities I go to, I’m not there for very long and since you don’t really have a telephone or any way to really get in touch with you, well, it’s been difficult. Especially since I don’t always know the next stop on the tour. It’s all been happening so fast.
So anyway, when I got to Prague, in transit to Krakow, I just took a cab and went to that pub you mention so much, Shot Out Eye? I even had a hard time getting a cab to find it because I didn’t have the address or even the name in Czech. Anyway, I figured you mention it so much in your letters, you were more likely to be there than your own flat. She gave a short giggle. Funny, isn’t that, Witold? Left with the choice I figured I’d be more likely to find you in a pub than your flat…anyway, I made a few enquiries about you two and it was then I found out that you would be here at this festival.
This morning I woke up and decided to come, even though it's out of my
way and yes, even though it meant cancelling, much to the anger of
my manager, the show which was scheduled for this evening. I still
have to leave first thing for a show tomorrow night but I thought at
least we'd have a little time together. I've missed you terribly
Witold. I try to make it to Paris once a week just so I can go back
to my flat and find all your letters waiting there and as soon as I
pick them up, I get back on the train and go wherever the next
performance is scheduled for with those letters bundled up to keep
me comfort in all those days and nights in between. I've dreamt so
often of being with you again that I can hardly believe it myself.
Why else would I go to this much trouble to see you even knowing you
are going to be preoccupied with the festival just for the chance to feel you properly relax in my arms and tell me more of all those wonderful things you write about in your letters.
But…if you miss me as much as you say, and not that I'm doubting it,
Christ knows how often I've dreamt of hearing you tell me these
exact things, still I can't help but wonder, knowing as you do how
willing I would be to drop everything and follow you, why you don't
just allow me to follow you on tour? That way we could see each
other all the time. That way…
She held up her right hand, touching my wrist gently with her left.
I could tell you a lot of stories, Witold. I could make up excuses,
the strain it would put on me for my performances, the difficulty of
the logistics, and yes, I would like nothing better than to have you
at my beck and call, but the truth is, I'm far too afraid to allow
you to accompany me. Afraid of what? You name it. Afraid of getting
hurt, afraid of hurting you, afraid of disappointment, afraid of
losing this incredible feeling I have reading your letters, knowing
that every day you are somewhere out there thinking of me, dreaming
of me. Do you have any idea what a comfort that is to me?
But why would you prefer it to the actual thing?
Quite simply because nothing, no one, not at the moment anyway,
could live up to what you've created. I certainly am not the person
you've imagined me to be, god knows, no one is really. I don't want
to discourage such infatuation but there are truths about me that
might ruin your illusion of me and to be honest, I'd be crushed to
find out that your illusion of me has been shattered. You see, it's
your dream of me that allows me to consider that I might just be
worthy of such a dream. It's what has allowed me to enjoy myself all
these months in between. The knowledge that someone out there anyway
thinks of me in the way you write about me, in a way no one has ever
treated or considered me before. It isn't your heart or my heart I'm
afraid of breaking. It is that dream, yours and the one that yours
allows me to hold on to. A tiny sliver of sanity.
Already she’d spilled more to me about herself, about her feelings, about her inner workings and thoughts in this short flurry of words than in all the times we’d spent together combined. For the tiniest of instances of self-recognition, I was dismayed to think I’d spent so much time pining after someone I knew so little about. Perhaps that dream was a common one after all, a tiny sliver of sanity. Perhaps that was the purpose all along.
I didn’t bother saying anything for awhile and neither did she. Her eyes searched mine for a faint hint of recognition but despite myself, despite the inner joy I felt at what she’d said, with the introduction of the idea that this, all these months of infatuation had simply been a diversion for not just me but both of us, I questioned the authenticity of any of the feelings I thought I’d had. Still, you don’t suffocate an infatuation as powerful as mine for her with a few words. Especially not when her words, if I chose to interpret them in such a way, were actually an acknowledgement that she too cared, that there was the thinnest hope of moving this beyond a simple sliver of sanity.
I took another sip of courage, finally moving, flinching, and cleared my throat.
Not that I need a definitive answer to this today, or even this month or any time in the near future but just to satisfy my curiosity, do you ever envision a time when you would allow yourself to reveal those things about yourself to me that you think would destroy the purity of my thoughts of you or has this illusion carried me as far as I'm ever going to be able to travel with it?
She smiled obliquely and took a larger sip of wine, large enough to finish off the glass. How about another glass of wine while I think about that a moment, she cooed as the tension in our nerves screamed out for a respite.
I searched for the waiter who, busy as he was, had managed to spy the emptying of the glass and was quickly on the job, bringing another two glasses to the table obediently, ticking our drink slip and disappearing again.
Armed with another sip of wine, her eyes never leaving mine, her hand touched mine again.
I'm glad you don't ask that as a definitive question because if it were, I'm afraid I would have to tell you that it has carried you as far as it can. But neither of us really wants to believe that and so why should we concern ourselves
with killing it off before we've ever given it a chance? Are you in
that much of a hurry to get on with your life? You see, this
vagabond life you and Albert are living seems to fit so perfectly with my own.
Had you been a young man on a career path looking for a wife to settle down and have kids with, had you been a man who knew what he wanted and wanted to take it without waiting, had you been childish and demanding, I'd have viewed you as an entirely different entity. But you aren't. Time appears to be something you have plenty of and I would only ask, perhaps beg of
you your patience, your recognition that you do in fact have plenty
of time to allow this relationship to find its appropriate path
rather than pushing it along ahead of schedule out of necessity or
impatience. Can we agree on that for both our sakes? Patience?
I felt myself swelling with emotion – love, infatuation, illusion
whatever it was I might choose to call it – I felt my hands
quivering with joy and requited expectation. This was no ending,
just a beginning. And yes, a strange beginning to be sure, but
clearly a beginning and a promise. I squeezed her tiny hand as hard
as I dared and kissed each knuckle on that hand gently, feeling that
joy in every one sending us both quivering.
Of course we can agree that, Anastasia. I will wait for you for as long as it takes.
Her face eased. She held her stare a moment longer before searching
out my pack of tobacco and began rolling herself a cigarette. In
that case, she said smiling, looking down and then looking back up
at me and smiling again, I'd be happy to sing with you two today.
*****
Oh shit, I wanted to get up and dance and sing and hug and kiss
every single face around me. I was losing my mind with rapture. Not of course, because we were going to go on stage together for the first time ever, the three of us, but because she was here at all and not only that she was here at all but that we’d actually held a discussion about our future together. The future. Well, it was not a definitive future by any measure but it was a hell of a lot more that I had to go on than I’d had a few hours before.
Without little further preamble, I took her by the hand and we
walked back out into the hall to the table where Albert, Mikhail and the
rest were sitting watching the performance. We sat down in the space
created by several sliding over, hunched over the table in
conference with Albert and began discussing the songs we would
perform.
*****
With Anastasia joining us we were suddenly a trio again, Anastasia’s arrival was a punctuation of our performance. It wouldn’t be about us, we whispered, but her. Even Albert seemed a little unnaturally giddy as he slurped his beer and explained various tactics for masking our insufficient talent with Anastasia’s sweet voice. Our own music was of no consequence, he elaborated. We would just tried to play as quietly in the
background as possible.
The others were naturally quite interested in these new developments. We all kept fairly low key about Anastasia’s talents; yes, she sang, no, she didn’t play any instruments, yes, we’d played together before, no we hadn’t been expecting that she’d show, no we were quite happy to have her join us and yes, they were all going to be in for a little treat, no doubt.
We were buoyed by her arrival, naturally. Suddenly we felt like we had a little credibility. Not credibility based upon the stories Mikhail had dreamed up to sell us to the promoters and get us on the bill but real credibility, a real chanteuse. And after all these months, after the false start of that club in Amsterdam, after those hours rehearsing in Utrecht, most all of which was now out the window it’d been so long ago.
When she excused herself at one point to freshen up, Albert leaned in conspiratorially. So what’s the deal then? I shrugged. No deal. I mean, well, I dunno, she kind of implied that she’s got a few things to sort through, the gigs for one, I dunno personal shit I guess, but that in essence, if I’m willing to continue waiting for her, well, it might be worth my while in the end.
Well I’ve got to hand it to you Witold, you’ve been persistent, I’ll give you that. I’d have never kept at it like you did. Not after the way she left. But what the hell, she’s here, I mean, this is great. Now we can avoid a long afternoon and evening of humiliation and embarrassment.
Eventually we were summoned to the front side of the stage and backstage and as the act on stage was tapering off, received instructions on set up; the sound check was going to be as brief as possible, they were running a little behind on time, Mikhail, who had come along as a translator, explained to us. And then, just like that, the band on stage was off.
We ordered a quick shot of slivovice for bravado and good
luck when suddenly the canned music faded and someone got on the PA
to announce, the infamously awkward, Damy a panove, Stalin’s Mother.
Muffled, half-hearted applause. Golf claps, really.
Albert stood there holding his bass, leaning backwards as though
that bear of a bass would knock him over from the weight and the
dozen beers that proceeded him.
I held the sax in front of me, too much adrenaline flowing through me to stand very steadily, gathered a deep breath and staring at a fixed point above the
heads of the crowd because I was terrified suddenly, gasping for
water.
But then Anastasia stepped out there with the dusty spotlight in front of
her and she had her back to me: so when she began to sing, and if
you could describe a voice as velvet and chocolate wrapped around a
cherry you would have hers, slow and velvet caress, her voice
bounced back from the walls of the hall past her and to Albert and I.
It wasn't hard to follow at all.
I'd hit a low note every ten seconds or so, Albert plucked here and there when it seemed appropriate and before we knew it the place had fallen absolutely silent.
The crowd, every face I could discern from my vantage point, bartenders and waiters and kitchen help and doormen all stood there, transfixed by Anastasia's voice. I wouldn’t have described it as being something more beautiful than they’d ever heard but you have to understand, the majority of the afternoon had been filled with mostly booming male voices, raucous blues and very little jazz. Especially jazz sung by a diminutive woman with a powerful song which seemed larger than her own lung capacity, her own body could have produced.
All those times we’d rehearsed back in Utrecht, what we could remember anyway, gradually began to filter back in because you don’t forget things like that - Albert and I didn’t anyway because we’d had really pretty much nothing to compare it to or replace it with in the interim.
But whatever we’d rehearsed, as we’d always played only for ourselves in that flat, had been rehearsed without an audience so there was no way of knowing what to expect. Yes, she’s sung hundreds of times for audiences and knew precisely what she was doing, how she was doing it, how she would draw them in and exhale them back out gently into their seats, how goose bumps would appear on their flesh. She knew the reactions and was prepared for them. She knew how good she was in essence, what she expected from herself and what she expected from her audience and knew from the very start, even with the two of us clanging around in the background, this was going to be her audience and she was going to make sure they remembered that.
And even though I thought I was concentrating on playing, in essence, even as I played ever so gently, I was listening to her like one of the audience myself and I was also noticing how silent and motionless the audience had become. I’d never seen an audience transfixed by anything Albert and I had ever done together. At best we were background noise with the risk of becoming annoying. But that was just the two of us. With Anastasia on stage, we were transformed. And out there, into that blackness the stage lights were blinding us from, there was no fumbling with glasses and silverware, no more idle conversations breaking ice over and over, no more bottles opening or glasses slid across the wooden bar counter. Just Anastasia's voice, like lying down on your back in the grass, closing your eyes to the sun.
When she was finished she just stood there as though waiting for us
to start the next song. But before we'd even considered what next,
the crowd had suddenly woken themselves, hooting and whistling,
shouting, holding up their drinks. She brought the mic stand over in
front of me.
Your turn. she announced, turning on her heel and taking a seat off
to side of the stage.
4:29 AM
9.3.09
CHAPTER 15: Holešice Jazz Festival
“Jazz is an intensified feeling of nonchalance”
- Francoise Sagan
Mikhail was a little droopy eyed as he stared at me over the chess
board. We were hunkered down in the smoke clouds inside The Shot Out Eye, racing through .51 glasses of Mestan beer that kept coming and coming interrupted only on occasion by a shot of Absinthe. Mirek and Miroslav, from a popular and historic local rock band, were trying to interrupt our already wobbly match by shouting about Kafka and black humour over and over again in different accents. Their band, I'd already been assured, had formed in 1985 in defiance of the Communist regime when they played music that was
considered antisocial by the government, and for more than four
years they performed in the Czech underground.
Mikhail, on the other hand, was a jazz and blues guitarist who worked in a music store part time and played around town with a variety of people who adhered to him and then fell away.
Shortly after we’d met him he’d invited us to come and open for the band he’d strewn together for a night in a local cabaret. He’d heard us that night in the Shot Out Eye and although he didn’t approve entirely of our music, he thought enough of us as novelties to try and lend a hand in promoting us.
Typically, Albert and I had spent the afternoon warming up in a our flat drinking beer and rehearsing. By the hour we were to step up on stage we couldn’t remember even how we’d gotten there. Our playing was atrocious, so we thought. Absolute shit. And yet, as we swayed, post gig, complete and random strangers approached us, eager to practice English by praising our playing.
It’d been a success but for Albert dropping his bass case on a knee-level glass table around which sat a handful of Russian mafia-types and upon which had sat several bottles and glasses of expensive champagne. When the case hit the table. Needless to say, glass and expensive booze went flying everywhere, including the clothes of the Russian mafia-types, who only moments before had been laughing and seeming to enjoy themselves and their slender female escorts.
Somehow, Mikhail was able to rescue us from certain death, hauled us out quickly, pleading with the furious Russian mafia-types who were ready to cut our throats to forget all about it, handing over handfuls of Czech 1000 crown notes he took from Albert and I as he was simultaneously pulling us away.
About a month later we'd tried a quintet that failed miserably. It failed mainly because, quite frankly, Albert and I proved to be rubbish at playing blues standards. Don’t ask me why, the music itself wasn’t difficult. It was perhaps the difficulty at maintain discipline or perhaps it because by comparison to the three other musicians, Mikhail, a drummer and a keyboard player, Albert and I weren’t really very good. No one really said it, they excused it politely by saying blues might not really be our bag since clearly we were talented jazz improvisational musicians and perhaps making the leap from one to the other was too much to ask too soon, etc. They really were quite nice about, thanks but no thanks and felt bad enough afterwards they took us out and bought us drinks most of the night to make up for it.
Mikhail kept staring at the chess board as if the longer he stared
the longer the possibility would exist that the pieces might somehow
rearrange themselves to his advantage. His crew-cut drenched with
the sweat of nausea. His face was mangled by a vague vertigo. He was
no Zbynek Hrácek, for sure. I was up two pawns, a rook and a bishop.
Check mate, under the influence of less Mestan, would have probably
been less than three moves away. My brain was lost, veering off the
fox chase and running for the hills and I'd be lucky if mate was
discovered at all. Mikhail pushed his finger out at his pieces and
knocked the king over. Are you quitting? I demand about the
speculative king down resignation. He looked at me deeper with those
droopy eyes and shrugged. There is nothing for me here. he comments,
finishing off his glass and standing up. Why don't you two boys come with me
to the Holešice Jazz festival? I am already playing and maybe there
will be time for you on an alternative stage somewhere... He raises
his eyebrows. somewhere where they won't notice you, he whispers
conspiratorially with a little snicker
**********
A few days later Mikhail, Albert and I are sitting on cold benches
with a few bottles of beer at a suburban bus depot waiting for a
ride to Holešice. A few old ladies and a school teacher going home
for the weekend are waiting with us. The isolation is deafening. So
did you hear more about our performance? Albert grumbles, lighting a
no filter Start cigarette, coughing, red-faced and veins popping up
in his forehead and looks expectantly at Mikhail.
Absolutely! he nearly shouts, relieved to have a topic of good news to break the soul dragging silence hanging over us. The old ladies and the school
teacher look over at us, accessing the level of our intoxication or
insanity. I've spoken with Pavel about it and he is convinced we can
promote you as some sort of expatriate avant garde jazz duo of
blinding importance. He likes your new name, Stalin's Mother, it
sounds more interesting than Deadbeat Conspiracy. He thinks it will
draw people at least through the duration of a beer, no matter how
horrible you sound. Mikhail says this matter-of-factly as though our
ineptitude is so understood that even we should be convinced of it.
Well, it's a relief that I didn't lug this fucking bass with me for
nothing Albert growled, giving the 6'5 tall bass carrier beside him
an unfriendly jostle. He'd pissed and moaned about it ever since he
woke up that morning. This is going to be one heavy fucking thing to
drag around with me all weekend. he began while the coffee was
brewing. Jesus Christ, this thing is heavy! he exclaimed when we'd
gotten on to the street and were headed for the tram. Getting it
onto the train at rush hour brought even more frustrated fury, angry
stares, bitching and complaining and cursing in languages no one was
going to bother to try and understand. His only consolation was the
kiosk where he bought several large bottles of beer. What a
nightmare he sighed finally, gratefully gulping his first mouthful.
************
We got into Holešice as the sun was setting. The first matter of
order of course, was to stop at the first pub we found, instruments
and all, and kill some time with the locals. Mikhail, as this was
his village after all, knew a lot if not most of the people ambling
in for their typical Friday night-return-to-the-village-by-train
beers before heading back off to their respective homes for dinner.
And as they came in Mikhail would call them over, introducing us as
a puzzling jazz duo, a once in a lifetime chance to see jazz taken
to its furthest, perhaps strangest parameters. We were in short,
musical geniuses. People would nod appreciatively looking at us and
our instruments, looking us up and down as though they wanted to
touch us, these two masses of American flesh with the strange
talents. Touch us to see not if we were real but to see if some of
this magical aura of American might rub off on them for better or
worse. We were after all, far from the raucous path of Prague
overflowing like backed up toilets with expatriates and tourists. We
were in this village anyway, a novelty.
But we felt more like circus freaks inevitably. Come, look at the
foreigners who will play at our little weekend festival, perform for
us like circus bears. It was unnerving enough that Albert was making
noises about wanting to go to Mikhail's place, unload his gear and
wash up from the ride in. After an hour or two of this benevolent
but eccentric treatment Mikhail, perhaps sensing Albert's
uncharacteristic reluctance at drinking a seemingly incessant supply
of beer, finally stood and announced without further preamble that
the bill had been sorted and we would now go back to his house where
his wife Elena, who had spent the better part of the afternoon
brushing up on her English and preparing a vast array of rustic
specialty Czech cuisine, would regale our palates and offer
desultory conversation.
Upon arrival we met and greeted Elena, a stocky blonde of
German/Bohemian origin naturally curious to discover this suddenly
revealed spouse we'd never, in all our nights of chess and drinking
together, heard mention of previously. It was strange to observe
this vaguely domesticated version of Mikhail, who along the uphill
march to his house, with a profusely sweating and swearing Albert
slowing our march with his bass, had filled us in on the logistics
of his past, revealing one breathless layer after another: the
marriage and child at 20, the death of the child three years later
under circumstances Mikhail did well to steer clear of, the
marriage, hanging by a thread over remorse and unspoken accusations
until Mikhail had taken the decision, spurred on by the news of a
flat of a friend which had become available in Prague when the
friend had moved in with his girlfriend, to move to Prague and then
the subsequent job he'd found in the music shop, the stepping stone
he'd hoped for a career in Prague as either a studio musician or
leading a blues band. The subsequent years of drinking and playing
music whilst the distance between himself and Elena, supplemented by
once-monthly visits back home, narrowed and slowly their original
love regained a second, tougher skin and whilst they were not
considering living together on a full time basis, they had at least
repaired, strand by strand, the initial emotions that had once
brought them together in the first place.
It's not been an easy several years, Mikhail intoned philosophically
and reluctantly having let us in to his present by bringing us up to
speed on his past as we stood on the crest of the hill overlooking
the lights of the village below and smoking reflectively waiting as
Albert trudged upward to reach us, huffing and puffing and cursing
again our lack of transportation. But I think we've overcome the
most difficult period we have been presented with and perhaps in a
way these experiences have strengthened our relationship.
I looked at his face, imprecisely lit by the cherry of his
cigarette, wondering at how different or rather how much more depth
people have beneath their surfaces when they chose to let you peer
down into the caverns of their histories and reveal to you their
pasts, their losses and their fears. I got the impression he'd been
withholding this information from us all these months not because he
hadn't trusted us but because matters of this nature were simply not
relevant to our encounters and that now, having invited us there was
really no way around it. Sure, he could have just revealed he was
married and left it at that – perhaps we'd have wondered about the
lack of children or why they lived in two different places, but
these questions would have remained unanswered had he not taken the
opportunity to reveal them voluntarily because it is certain we
wouldn't have thought to ask about them ourselves.
For that matter, all the years Albert and I had known each other had
revealed very little about Albert's past. Perhaps I wasn't curious
enough and had I bothered trying to reach beyond the stoic present I
might have found within him as well, troubled pasts from roads
beyond which led him to his current personality. We all were in
fact, hiding from things or hiding things, information - not
intentionally mind you, but all for the same reasons. Unless there
was a reason to bring up pain it was better having left it unsaid in
the first place. Perhaps that's what friends are supposed to be for
rather than simply revelling in the present but even for myself, the
past wasn't an issue that came up in the mind very often unless
prompted. The present was all there was and the past had grown more
distant, more obscure, perhaps even less believable as time moved
on.
And now as we entered his home there was little we might have
discerned about the past from the present. Elena greeted us with a
kiss on each cheek, smiling radiantly with anticipation as our noses
were filled with the unfamiliar scents of domesticity coming home;
Tchaikovsky in the background, meats and dumplings bubbling in
spices filling the air around us. Mikhail took us to the room Albert
and I were to share, unspoken that this was once the room of the son
who had not made it, the empty bunk beds in the corner a morbid
reminder of what could have been. After showing off his collection
of electric guitars, a Gibson in three of the four corners of the
room and a framed Zappa poster from the Freak Out album with The
Mothers of Invention, he left us to ourselves awhile, to clean up
and unwind as he caught up with his wife and sorted out the
evening's plans.
This whole thing creeps me out, Albert confessed sotto voce as he
leaned his bass against the bare wall, his cigarette-choked breath
coming in gasps from the exertion and slowly found consolation on
the lower bunk, his long legs stretching out over the edge of the
bed. I didn't say anything. Grunting non committally as I took the
time to roll a cigarette and digest not just the journey and the
history revealed but allowing a certain sudden angst of performing
to swim over me.
First in that bar with all those people coming up to us like we were
either lepers or gods and then all this business about Mikhail's
wife, the dead kid and shit, look at this, I'm probably lying on his
bed. He didn't move from the mattress in any event, rubbing his eyes
and continued muttering, more to himself than to me.
It isn't such a big deal, I exhaled, looking for an ashtray before
realising I probably wouldn't find one in the room of a dead child.
I opened the window and ashed in the garden below. Besides, I'm
starving and that food smelled like heaven.
No, it's not a big deal, Witold. I'm just creeped out thinking about
all that family planning going awry and sleeping in the bunk of a
dead kid I never knew existed. Not to mention the triathlon of
hiking up the fucking hill to this house, carrying that bass and
trying to smoke all at the same time. Is it just me or does it feel
to you like this weekend is going to be a disaster? I mean this
festival is going to be packed with talented musicians and who are
we? Two vagabonds with no talent trying to assimilate? What if we're
booed off stage?
I laughed to myself. What's this emanating from the mouth of the
great stoic, a smidgeon of pre show jitters? A dash of apprehension?
Don't go getting all human and sickly with emotions on me, Albert.
It's just a festival. Everyone will be drunk. We've played in
festivals before. We won't be booed off stage. The ghost of
Mikhail's child is not going to come haunting you tonight. This is
supposed to be fun. We're going to meet a lot of people, play music,
listen to even better music, drink a lot of beer and just outside
that door there's a rustic Czech feast awaiting us. The way I see
it, we're doing just fine.
Albert grunted, hitting his head on the upper bunk as he moved to
sit up, cursing and rubbing his head whilst reflexively reaching for
his pack of Winstons, tapping out a cigarette and popping it between
his lips. He got up gingerly, like an auld man in a nursing home and
stood up finally to his full height, lighting his cigarette and
joining me by the window. Yeah, I know Witold, I know. It's no
crisis. Just a passing fancy. You know, like once in awhile I want
to know what it's like to feel the illusion of being human. He
laughed to himself which induced a brief coughing spasm, spat out a
back throat full of bile and put his pork pie hat back atop his
head. Then again, such visits are necessarily brief.
The meal was as good as advertised through the nostrils. By the time
we'd entered the kitchen Mikhail was already sipping a beer and
quickly poured out two large bottles into steins for us to join him.
Elena proudly informed us we were about to engage in a typical Czech
meal which, after months of a diet consisting primarily of fried
cheese with chips from the Shot Out Eye, crunchy street stand
sausages and brown bread hunks, had our mouths watering before we'd
even settled over our plates. First came the tangy meat broth
flavoured with garlic followed by a sirloin of beef, which she
explained as she filled our plates, was mixed with fried, cut
vegetables with the sirloin interlarded with bacon, seasoned with
pepper, a bay leaf, thyme, vinegar and a cranberry compote then
baked before adding the fresh cream. She served this with dumplings
and when it was all over, a combination of fresh berries and apple
tart with powdered sugar.
Whilst eating we discussed our rationales for being in the Czech
Republic in the first place, how we were finding life in Prague,
what life in New York City had been like, and a further wide array
of discourse on blues and literature wherein it was revealed by
Elena that in addition to working as a physiotherapist, she had also
been compiling a translation of Tom Waits lyrics into Czech which
she had yet to complete but had already found a publisher for.
Although you could sense the anticipation in the air it was not
until we were sated and sat around the table in the kitchen puffing
cigarettes and sipping her grandfather's plum brandy with our belts
loosened that she allowed herself the luxury of explaining her
desire to go through particularly difficult passages of Tom Waits
lyrics which she couldn't possibly fathom a translation for.
Nor could we for that matter. Some phrases were simply
untranslatable and even attempting to explain their meaning in
English was virtually unthinkable. Imagine explaining the following,
for example:
kick me up mt. baldy
throw me out in the fog
tear a hole in the jack pot
drive a stake through his heart
do a 100 on the grapevine
do a jump on the start
hang on st. christopher now don't let me go.
Oh sure, we could explain the context of St Christopher but even
that she herself knew. Those little eyeball kick phrases however
were simply too much. To counter, I suggested perhaps as difficult
as making sense of some of Dylan Thomas' more elusive phrasings. We
felt guilty of course. Perhaps this was the entirety of our worth,
an ability to transpose the incoherence of scattershot lyrics into a
more palatable English but we were incapable and the plum brandy
made it no easier.
All night long on the broken glass
livin in a medicine chest
mediteromanian hotel back
sprawled across a roll top desk
the monkey rode the blade on an
overhead fan
they paint the donkey blue if you pay
Eventually sensing the effort of milking information out of us was
more trouble than it was worth, through a secret sign of
understanding between even an estranged husband and wife, Mikhail
announced that as soon as we finished our glasses we would go out
for the evening to meet some of his friends, his fellow musicians, a
cacophony of locals in a village suddenly flush with musicians from
all over the region.
We trudged along the dark road back into town following Mikhail and
Elena blindly relying upon their expertise to guide us through what
we supposed would be yet another sullying night of debauchery. Since
the meal, Albert had become much more animated as though his brain
and mouth had taken that much longer to catch up with the arrival of
his body and the inspiration of the food had been the facilitator.
Or perhaps it was solely because the walk back to the village was
all downhill, it was hard to say but I wasn't going to interrupt it
with questions.
The owner of the pub we went to was a giant of a man who went by the
name of Karel. And I mean, literally a giant. He must have been
nearly seven feet tall and easily weighed well over 300 pounds. The
pub had been his grandfather's, passed to his father, neither of
whom stood over six feet five but Karel had continued to grow and
once he'd decided to continue the family line of pub ownership he
had the roof removed and the ceiling raised higher to facilitate
movement. Otherwise, he stammered in broken English, I'd keep
hitting my head and the bumps were growing too big. So as we entered
to the right following introductions where Karel had saved us a
long, thick wooden table and several of Mikhail's mates were already
supping their pilsners, we could appreciate the rationale behind the
height of the ceiling, the addition of the second fire place to add
extra heat to the room. In older times the ceilings were necessarily
lower both because people were generally shorter five or ten
generations before but also because the low ceilings allowed the
rooms to heat more quickly and easily as there was less space to
heat. Of course another advantage to the higher ceilings was that
the room would be less smoky and considering the fastidiousness with
which the patrons were chain smoking, this was a good thing indeed.
Pavel, Miroslav and Tomas were waiting along with their girlfriends
and/or wives who sat gamely in expectation of meeting the new
foreigners and to reunite with Mikhail and Elena who, she had
confessed on the way down to the village, rarely went out save for
the nights when Mikhail returned. Most of them spoke a smattering of
English and when required, Mikhail and Elena could be counted upon
to relay enquiries and comments from one language to another but in
any event, Albert and I spent large amounts of time just taking the
scene in of this homespun beer hall and the chaos of clattering beer
mugs, waiters running back and forth adding and subtracting glasses,
foreign laughter punctuated by loud expressions we couldn't decipher
and the smell of burning wood and burning tobacco hanging in the
air.
As the night wore on it was decided, perhaps silently or perhaps
simply in a language Albert and I didn't understand, that then women
were all going to head back to their respective homes whilst the men
were to continue on through the evening. We were going to a club
where several of the festival musicians would be gathering to meet
and greet and get drunk with abandon once loosed from the strangle
holds of feminine parameters on intoxication and moderation, to
obliviate and obscure, wind up and down, spin and crash.
By then my mind was already a flip switch remote control, reality to
Illusion back to reality again. The beers had gone on holiday to the head, the others, I dunno, I didn't know, I was aware of the others but aware vaguely
so. There were too many carnival attractions in the imagination, too
much effort in walking without stumbling, taking in the darkness
without any adjustment of the eyes.
And before I knew it we were entering a club, the club; a heaving
scene of music and people planted and re-earthed from emerging
villages, Slovakian and Bohemian cities, heaven and earth, clouds
and graves and instead of settling in slowly taking in the madness,
instead of flowing along with the river of new entrants through the
front door, rather than holding hands with those that brought me
there so as not to end up a simple toast of human flotsam, I made a
beeline for a table filled with a mixture of young but grizzled men
and leggy, laughter flowing women who radiated, vibrated, seemed
itchy for my company.
Certainly this was an optical illusion, a trick of the mind, a
boring requiem of the drunken ego singing louder than the internal
accoustics would allow but this did not matter in this auto-focused
intoxication mind, not infused as it was with the hyperventilation
of the new, the congo of the coming festival banging in the mind,
the kaleidoscope of unfamiliar faces plump and waiting to be picked
from the bough.
Without realising, for that one out of body minute I had finally
allowed myself to become disentangled from my near constant
preoccupation with Anastasia and figuring perhaps that I owed
nothing, I was in essence, free to explore. After all, exploring, as
Albert often preached, meant exploring the native women as much as
the native beer and perhaps there was particular girl who'd caught
my eye but in any case, I'd broken off from the group, oblivious to
where they were headed and made myself comfortable at the lone empty
chair at this table where sat a particularly stunning brunette whose
eye I'd caught and predictably, filled with drink, enflamed by a
mixture of excitement and ego, swaying with anticipation, I
immediately and perhaps stupidly decided to try out the smattering
of Czech I'd learned to try and impress her.
Naturally she had no idea what I was talking about. I suppose I
didn't either. Something about the weather is fine, I'll have
another beer would you care to join me, or perhaps something that
sounded far more vulgar, I've no idea. Suffice it to say that
whatever it was, the manner in which I was addressing her
immediately set off alarms in the wolf of the pack who wasted no
time in leaping across the table, knocking beer mugs to the floor
and grabbing me around the throat, his momentum carrying us both to
the floor. I tried to bite at his arms, get a hold of a piece of
flesh to ward off the sudden attack and wriggling beneath him I
howled curses of incomprehension loudly in English, phrases I'd
never uttered myself before but had heard many times on the streets
of home.
I could feel my air being cut off regardless of how I struggled or
perhaps more so because I did as the grip this guy had around my
throat only tightened. And then just as suddenly as this attack had
begun, my attacker was pulled off of me from above and it wasn't
until he was fully in the air that his grip around my neck finally
loosened and was released and with incomprehension, I looked up to
see Karel holding the attacker up by the throat and the attacker
babbling apologies as Karel growled in Czech things I had no idea
of. I slowly stood to my feet with the assistance of Mikhail and
Albert whilst the attacker's apologies moved from Czech to Karel to
English to me.
I had no idea you were American, he effused. I thought you were some
drunk trying to break into our table, a threat to us….let me buy you
a beer, I'm sorry I attacked you, you must understand…
Relieved to no longer being choked, I shrugged, glancing out of the
corner of my eye to the girl who had for a second anyway, been the
object of my attention and slapped him lightly on the arm. No
problem, I said calmly, cracking my neck with a sudden movement of
my head from left to right. I'm sorry for interrupting the table
like that without an introduction.
I don't know what Karel had said to him but perhaps it was merely
the shock of being hoisted up by the neck by the village's infamous
giant that calmed him, in any event, we all settled back to our
tables and when I went back a half an hour or so later to buy my
round, my attacker arrived at my side whilst I stood waiting at the
bar, apologising again. He too was a musician, he confided. He would
also be playing at this festival and he didn't want me to get the
wrong idea, see. He'd thought I was just some leering drunk causing
trouble, you know how they are. I shrugged. You probably weren't too
far off the mark anyway, I confessed. In any event, let's drink to
the brotherhood of musicians. And the rest of the evening when our
paths crossed we'd make our mutual apologies, confer about music,
exchange favourite songs and generally attempt to remove whatever
lingering memories of ugliness.
The following morning, how we got back, I dunno. I recall going back
to Karel's pub before dawn and having a few more beers before
falling asleep with my head on the table and had no recollection
whatsoever of Mikhail and Albert having to drag me back up the hill
to the house, their laughter ringing in my dulled background ears at
the attack on the American musician, sure to make all the local
papers and fill the town with gossip for the weekend.
And I heard all about the following day as well after we'd had a
little coffee, showered and headed back into town to the concert
hall. Everyone who passed us seem to know me, waving a greeting or
making a joke much to my chagrin. So it goes in a small village
filled with strangers where news travels fast. Apparently nearly
every performing musician had been in that club last night and every
one of them had seen what had happened.
Nonetheless the excitement was tangible as we entered the empty hall
with our instruments joining those already on stage, those
performing in the early sets were already beginning to tune up,
performing sound checks, sipping beer or coffee randomly.
The music hall was already crowded before the first band had even started, heaving with musicians, friends, family, neighbours, supporters who were from early on, already allowing the beer to flow freely.
The first few acts came on as we were gathered around the table continuing our banter both in Czech and English (for our benefit and when one could be arsed to include us in.) They were in fact, quite talented acts, local kids who had formed in some instances, heavy metal screeching and in other instances, seminal blues bands.
Mikhail and his wife, along with his mates and hers were all sat at the table length and took turns switching seats to sit next to us, ask us questions about America, about our music, American music generally along the “have you heard of…” lines.
As the first hour or two had passed we were simply indifferent to the idea of playing at all ourselves. We were thoroughly entertained simply by the acts that were already on and the company, conversation and beer that flowed all around us in liberal portions.
In the midst of hearing about one girl’s experience as an exchange student in the suburbs of Cleveland, out of the corner of my eye, I could discern a movement in the crowd that had gathered around us. A subtle movement but one which I intuitively became aware of. Although I couldn’t see over the top of heads, a wave of sorts was moving the crowd back and sideways and eventually, as it reached the very front of where we were sat, I could hear no more of the conversation around me, as if I’d gone suddenly deaf. Actually it seemed as if everyone around me had stopped moving, stopped talking, the band had stopped playing and the beer was all gone. As the very front of that crowd parted, much to my shock and simultaneous excitement arrived the very diminutive figure of Anastasia.
1:54 AM
CHAPTER 14: Breaking The New Dawn, Piece By Piece
I know some day you’ll have a beautiful life
I know you’ll be a sun
In someone else’s sky
But why
Why
Why can’t it be
Why can’t it be mine?
Pearl Jam, Black
(from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 2, page 173)
.
..there is a lasting odour of doubt for months thereafter.
Albert's despondent drinking blossomed for days at a time before
wilting into empty political rhetoric and finally, asleep, snoring
on the sofa, the burnt-out tip of his Winston still clenched between
his index and middle finger. It has rained for two weeks straight. A
cold, gusty rain that turned the middle of October into an aura of
bleak autumn dying into its winter that keeps even the Shot Out Eye
out of walking distance for several days in a row. Sometimes we hire this kid, this little Czech entrepreneur named Jiri to take our pitcher and run up to the corner pub for a fill.
Jiri is the acne scarred teen who lived above the corner pub and often
hung out in front of the Europa Hotel trying to convince tourists
into guided literary tours of the old town. When we needed
something, we'd stick our heads out the window and yell down at the
corner. Since most of the time, Jiri was standing in front of the
Europa Hotel smoking, practicing German from a Prague Guide phrase
book Auf Deutsch.
*****
We'd already read all the few paperbacks we had in the room twice.
The cassettes and CDs had been played raw. Albert had the stand up
bass and I had the horn and once in a while, when we'd had just the
right balance of beer, cigarettes and instant coffee we cooked using
only hot water from the tap, we'd improvise. There was a
high-headedness, a mystical dizziness, a general gnawing of boredom
like a bone ground within our teeth, a perpetual gloom punctuated by
the open window and the hail hitting against the whipping drapes. It
wasn't necessary to have been in Prague. A prison anywhere would
have suited just the same.
In addition to the spell of unbearably shitty weather we'd outspent
our monthly allotment in one week and were stuck for three more living on only the barest of essentials.
Yeah, I suppose we could have dipped into the following month’s budget. It was an arbitrary, artificial sum in any event but it had been maintained
rather religiously leading up to then so we didn’t want to set the precedent of failing to meet our budget.
That’s how the fucking Soviets used to fuck it up all the time, Albert warned one night when we were sitting around playing cards listening to BBC World on the transistor and I was moaning about being bored and considering blowing the monthly budget off.
Remember all those five year plans they’d go on about achieving? Sure, they’d allege to meet them, but it was all bureaucracy, all about meeting targets, targets that were never met of course and everyone just fudged the numbers or cheated outright so they wouldn’t end up in some fucking gulag playing dominoes with frozen fingers and digging ditches all the time. Of course, those plans were based on productivity and our plan is based on well, diminishing resources with no planned productivity but nonetheless, the point is if the five year plans had been realistic to being with and in theory if everyone had fulfilled their end of the bargain, their quotes, their targets, whatever, the system might have worked. And so might ours. I’m trying to stay unemployed in case you hadn’t noticed, Witold. I’m not interested in having to go out and find work. But if I piss away my monthly budget, eventually it’s going to catch up to me and eventually, I’m going to be fucked. penniless. Looking for work. So there you go. Besides, it builds character, going without!
So that’s basically why and how we imposed these draconian measures. Because of Albert’s thoughts on the flaws on the Soviet Five Year Plan and because we were building character.
Well, it wasn't as bad as scouring the rainy streets for cigarette butts to
roll. We had enough left over for several litres of beer, a kilo of
sausage, two cups of tepid instant coffee and 11 cigarettes apiece
each day for the rest of the month but nothing else. Albert was
still decompressing from 12 years of intense television vision and
the fact that the only source of entertainment in English he could
get was listening to BBC, which he hated and ranted and raved about
to no end some evenings, only served to raise the tensions, as
though the 11 cigarette per diem didn't create enough tension as it
was.
On Sundays we went to the neighbourhood theatre, a large
garage-sized building down a winding driveway from a main apartment
house with dirt floors and folding chairs run by a wide bodied and
hard boiled old fat lady who grabbed at our crowns without preamble
more than a grunt without looking up, nodding her head behind her in
the general direction of the film. There were never more than three
or four people inside. It felt like going to a state fair peep show,
creepy and oily. The movie was always terrible. It was as painful as
going to church and so in our roundabout way, we were paying our
dues along with religious humanity, suffering along with the rest of
them in solidarity but skipping masses and séances wherever they
arose.
In many ways, it was the lack of events that made it most difficult.
We lived like dogs, waiting for hours in anticipation of a master to come
home then a ten minute walk or another plateful of the same smoked sausage with the same jar of horseradish.
I realised then how much time we were spending drinking. Sure, there were rehearsals and occasionally gigs, paying or otherwise, but usually non-paying. There was busking in the streets out of the eye of the police which was sometimes rather difficult considering the best places to busk were where all the tourists were which is of course where all the police were. And also considering with Albert’s double bass we weren’t exactly speedy in our attempts to escape.
But in the absence of having the money to simply drink as much as we could handle or spend as much time in the pubs and cafes as we felt like seemingly without consequences, we became acutely aware of how little we actually did.
One night out in Akropolis, after we’d gone two days subsisting on little bread rolls and the shittiest, cheapest canned beer we could find from the local market just so we could save enough of our remaining budget money to have the opportunity to spend a night of fairly free drinking where we weren’t pinching every heller and worrying over the prohibitive cost of every sip we took, I spied a pair of young women sitting by themselves casually drinking a bottle of Moravian wine.
Now, it certainly wasn’t difficult meeting or chatting up the local girls. By and large they were pretty interested in Americans, maybe they represented a ticket out, maybe because the mini invasion of Prague had piqued their curiosity, maybe, who knows.
But of course, I was far too preoccupied thinking about Anastasia to bother chatting them up or responding positively to any efforts they made inroad to holding a conversation and Albert was, well, older than most of the other Americans who were living in Prague or hanging out. It didn’t disqualify him but it meant he was forcing himself to learn a little more patience than he’d demonstrated when he was frequenting whores in Utrecht.
In any event, we were both pretty drunk at one point, not much of an accomplishment considering we’d been eating a minimalist diet of bread rolls and radishes for the last two days and the usual non verbal banter, eye-play started going on between our two tables. Eventually, Albert decided we should amble over with our beers and have a go at speaking to them. I dunno why exactly. It’s not like we weren’t accustomed to being drunk and it wasn’t like we were particularly desperate, it was just one of those things, you know, things fall together a certain way and well, you just follow.
We got around to chatting them up, sitting down at their table and ordering more beer. We were talking about how it sometimes felt like there was nothing going on in Prague other than hanging out in pubs and sleeping or riding trams and shopping. We were well aware there was plenty of going on, but it all seemed realated in some way to tourist shit. Did the Czechs ever go to these operas or plays or recitals in the old town or was it all just for show, just creative little things to keep the tourists busy?
Needless to say the two girls were a bit put off by our ignorance. That we slurred our words and laughed hysterically at our own jokes probably didn’t aid our cause either. But to the credit of these girls, they were troupers of sorts, not easily scared off or annoyed, willing to endure us on the premise that we might say something interesting eventually. One of them mentioned having seen us near the Charles Bridge busking, remarking casually that she recalled it in particular because she thought only the old Czech men played jazz. Most of the other buskers played acoustic guitars and sang cover songs.
If you’re bored all the time, or tired of wasting all your time in pubs, why don’t you do something else, one of them volunteered. Albert just harrumphed and waved the waiter down for another round. Something else that doesn’t involve beer, the other continued like a tag-team nag all of the sudden. Like what, have a nap in the National Museum? Albert wasn’t in the mood for discussing non-drinking activities.
Have you ever even BEEN to the National Museum, the other ventured, leaning in toward Albert and pointing a finger accusatorily.
The National Museum? He laughed. Why the fuck would I want to go there?
It’s unbelievable, really, they muttered to each other. People like you come here and get fucked off your head like there’s nothing else going on in this country, like this is just some cheap drinking society you come to for hedonistic lust. I don’t know why, but for some reason, I find something appealing beneath this phoney nihilistic façade of yours. Enough so I’d say that I’d see you again, Albert, if you were to say, meet me at the National Museum in two days around noon and if you were to say, show up sober and stay that way for let’s say six hours.
The other girl looked somewhat astonished and then looked over at me, terrified that I might anticipate a similar such offer. I shook my head. My heart was still pickled in the bitterness of missing out on Anastasia.
Albert on the other hand, managed to find it all quite amusing in an incredulous sort of way, as if it were happening to someone else or he were watching it in a movie, impassively from his seat.
What is this, some kind of dare?
Take it however you like, Albert. The thing is, people like you make me a little sick, the way you treat my city, my country. If you’re going to live here and drink here for crissakes, at least take some time to learn about where you are. Look at you, you don’t speak a word of Czech, you know nothing about the literature, probably very little about the music despite professing some sort of affinity for both literature and music, and you spend most of your time either drunk or recovering from being drunk. This isn’t a country called Cheap Beer Land, she chastised. It’s called the Czech Republic!
And with that, she took her friend’s elbow and the two of them stood up, not even bothering putting on their coats before leaving.
So do you think she was serious about meeting at the National Museum in two days at noon? Albert asked suddenly, somewhat sincere.
Ha, what do you care?
I might just show up and see what happens.
*****
Perhaps it was an indication of how bored he truly was but two mornings later, Albert was up early making a large cup of instant coffee from the hot water tap, smiling smugly when he saw me emerge eventually from sleep and fog.
Bear in mind that other than that fling with the singing whore in Utrecht, I’d not only seen Albert with another girl before, I hadn’t even heard him talk about anyone. I mean most people, even stoic friends, might let slip after all these beery evenings together, the name of one or two former flames. Maybe recount some maudlin tale about some love gone awry. Something. Hell, even though I spent most of my time prior to meeting Albert by myself, I’d still managed to work up a brief infatuation or two. Sure, I’d never actually screwed up the courage to talk to them let alone have a relationship with them, but at least I’d had a history that I’d divulged of showing some interest.
So you know what today is, he smirked, handing me a cup for myself.
Yeah, today’s the day you’re supposed to meet that girl in front of the national Museum at noon. Sober.
His face fell a little. Well, er, yes, that too. But never mind about that for a minute. In two days it will be first of the month! Meaning of course, our little budgetary crisis is over and we can go back to eating like humans instead of dogs or homeless people and most importantly, we have plenty of reserves to see ourselves through several nights of the Shot out Eye!
Oh, I get it. It’s nothing to do with this girl at all then is it? Just the first of the month and carefree times again? Pshaw. Admit it, you’re excited about meeting her again, aren’t you?
Ah fuck, I dunno, Witold, he told me with sudden candor.
You know I don’t have much use for women. I mean yeah, I like women. I like having sex with them, it’s just that I’m not particularly fond of all the chit chat I have to endure leading up to the good stuff. You know how I feel. But yeah, I’ll admit I was a little intrigued by her. I like a woman who’s not full of shit, who gets right to the point. And besides, who knows, maybe she’s got a good singing voice….
*****
Then, just as abruptly the pleasure had begun it ended and the wave of euphoria receded and it was still raining and it was only two in the afternoon and there were only 3 cigarettes left. The girl never showed for the National Museum. After all that subliminal foreplay by Albert, (I knew he’d had high expectations despite the transparency of his denials) he showed up at the appointed hour with the appropriate sobriety, under the influence of nothing but belief, and she hadn’t bothered to get there.
I figured as much, Albert confided. I mean my real intention, since she’d made such a big deal about being sober and checking out this cultural nonsense, was to try and convince her to have a drink at a café before we even went inside. I was going to impress her with the knowledge the museum was built on the sight of what used to be a horse market, just to show her I wasn’t just some drunken cultural ignoramus.
But I stood out there and stood out there until I couldn’t look casual standing there any more. So I figured fuck it. I’ll go have a drink. I know the budget’s fucked but I figured after that kind of humiliation, the least I could do would be to treat myself to a drink, right?
So I decide to go to Café Louvre, you know that snobbish sort of place on the main drag, Narodni, near the museum? So I’m sitting there, the waiter’s just brought the beer over and who shows up but this girl, can you imagine? I’m like where the fuck were you? You know what she says to me? She says, “I knew it. I knew you couldn’t go six hours without a drink.”
I’m like how the fuck do you know when the last time was I had a drink and how did you know I was in here having a beer? So she tells me, simple. She waited from a distance - she’d been there all along, see. She’d been there all along getting some kind of weird, sadistic pleasure out of watching me wait. Or seeing how long I’d wait before I’d give up. And then when I’d given up, how long before I had a drink.
So, I was pretty fucking shocked as you can imagine but I was still thinking on my feet so to speak so I asked her, what would you have done if I’d just walked away, just turned around and walked back to my flat and didn’t stop anywhere for a drink?
Oh, that’s easy she says, I’d have rung your doorbell and apologised for being late for the meeting, say that I got your address from someone at the Shot Out Eye since you told me you frequent that place and we’d probably have had a really good time. I usually sleep with men I fancy on the first date too. So there you go, she says, getting up from the table. I hope you enjoy your beer. That’s it, Albert nearly shouts hysterically over the Sonny Rollins live at the Village Vanguard CD I’d been enjoying. That’s all she said, hope you enjoy your beer. Can you imagine? I mean, what the fuck kind of mental case is she anyway?
Well Albert, maybe you’re right after all. Maybe you should just stick to whores. Cruel injustice, I know, I cooed afterwards. On the other hand, at least you weren’t in love with her. At least she didn’t come to visit you personally, fill your head with all sorts of off key ideas about emotions, fill you with some sort of hope about your music playing, fill your mate with some sort of rubbish about upcoming gigs and then just disappear leaving only a brief note in her wake.
Noted, he muttered, pretending to read a book in Czech, upside down as he ripped open a can of cheap beer and tried to relax.
*****
And so we returned to our rituals When it wasn't raining, I went out, no matter what time it was. I walked from one end to the other, fast and fogged
with the anticipation of reaching the end, turning around and going
back, outrunning the trams, looking into the windows with the old
women staring back down at me.
Fear of cultures clashing, the monuments against the sledgehammers, the pained against the pain free, the eyes of those old women seeing everything and knowing nothing more than the human nature of their neighbourhood, while I didn't even know the nature of myself, the unpredictable actions were
unnerving. There was no oasis and no abyss and the movement was
meant to keep one afloat in between the two.
One night I was finally able to convince Kazimir, one of the owners of the Shot Out Eye to allow us to open for a blues band scheduled to play the following Saturday evening.
Most of the regulars in the Shot Out Eye had heard us play at one time or another at a gig or two or had even seen us busking and were still confused enough about our talents that they hadn't formed a solid opinion against us yet.
The illusion was still working and so long as Kazimir felt assured that our playing wouldn't spawn a mass withdrawal from the pub, he was willing to let
us try and entertain.
So that following Saturday it seemed quite natural to show up at 1:00 when Kazimir opened the doors to the pub. Albert dragged the bass onto the bus and we rode down as soon as we woke up, flush with cash now that the new month and new budget had begun.
You know you're not due to play until 10:00 o'clock tonight, don't
you? he asked, still groggy, vaguely annoyed. Albert, with his arm
around the bass case as though it were a drunken comrade, pushed
past Kazimir and dragged the case behind him. I've been in that
fucking apartment for eleven days straight. I need a shot of
Slivovice and a beer as soon as humanly possible.
While we drank beers at a leisurely yet steady pace, we played a
best out of five chess tournament against each other. As people
began filtering in, we used a clock and played one round after
another of speed chess too fast to think, our hands a blur, our
eyes, disinterestedly staring into thoughts only the robotic
movements of our hands could decipher. The music was already louder
than normal. It felt like a Mexican peyote séance with painted faces
and dancing in between beers, hopping from foot to foot on the way
to the bathrooms, trying not to spill the beer in the hand.
By six o'clock, we were already too impatient to play our normal
route of slow and off key, the anti-jazz we wanted to portray it as,
too hip and out of place to be anything but they might cautiously
consider genius while at the same time weighing the distinct
possibility that we had no idea what we were doing.
The last week or two of having little money for other activities had
afforded us an unexpected sum of free time to practice and so some of the pieces whilst a little more polished musically, had developed lyrically or verbally, disproportionately enough so we ran the risk of giving away the fact we had no talent.
So, conscious of having drawn out several bits far too far, the usual lengthy preamble, the encyclopaedic history of a few nonsensical stanzas thrown in around a chorus I'd lifted out of the obituaries in the local paper, Dnes, I tried to coerce was forsaken and we found ourselves in the odd position of being forced to play more and talk less.
This led to considerably fewer options at our disposal. There
were the three set pieces we'd learned in Holland. We knew snatches
of more traditional standards, snatches we would blend in all
together haphazardly, like a tribute to musical sound bytes without
any cohesion. But it was stunning. No one knew what we were saying,
not even ourselves. I sang Berlitz lines from six different phrase
books. I sang obscure American curses, commercial jingles, lines of
Edgar Allen Poe. Whatever came into my head with the same
organization of watching shit blow across a street on a windy day.
Lyrical flotsam. Musical jetsam. By the end of the set, it was clear
we'd fooled them. Kazimir slapped us on the back and handed us
another shot of Slivovice.
I'm relieved my friends, he confided. You didn't spoil the party. You didn't
drive them away. We've witness a musical miracle! He laughed loudly
and bitterly but it was all a show. He liked the sound of it. A
musical miracle in the Shot Out Eye. The jazz vagabonds stuck in
Prague, unable to extract themselves from a hedonistic scrum, had
shown a modicum of worth for the first time in its two month
existence. We weren't malingerers and leeches after all, not another
pocket of tourist resistance to squelch. Now he wanted us to meet
some of his friends. Now he stopped by our table and joined us for a
beer, signalling to the waiter for another round. Now we'd never
fucking leave.
*****
A few weeks later I'd finally scored a job at the American Business
School teaching remedial English to a bunch of bored Serbian economics
majors. This school was the spawn of the new independence of the
Czech Republic, driven mad by the market to create English-speaking
managers and automaton employees for multinational companies hungry
for new human flesh in the new world be ushered in and I was
delighted to play a part in wrecking those fertile little minds of
future imperialists.
Once in awhile, I'd have a few beers in the Praha Holesovice train
station café next to the school with Marshall, the American who ran
the school's library, a patchwork collection of donated textbooks
from military bases, socialist non fiction, and a smattering of
Updike and detective novels that reflected his own taste's more than
the students'.
The train station café served a watery goulash and bottles of
Gambrinus and as Marshall would foment rebellions in his mind about
library autonomy, unrealistic funding aspirations and snatches of
his life as a Berkeley liberal who migrated once and for all out of
the slobbering jaws of American capitalism only to find himself
faced up against it again in even more sullied and contemptible
forms.
A series of budget crisis had left the school in tatters, desperate
for teachers of any walk and housed in a converted barn that reeked
of cabbage all day long. The caretaker and his wife living on the
ground floor and the stench of her gastrointestinal meals that made
the thought of food unbearable.
During breaks, I would go outside with the students and smoke
cigarettes. For the most part, I was ignored. I didn't like them
very much myself and I think they sensed that. There was something
about their aura of third world privilege that turned my stomach.
They'd come here to find their peasants to look down at. There were
plenty where they'd come from, but it must have gotten boring,
mistreating the same servant culture of what they deemed to be lesser races
over and over again. These kinds of people needed variety. Fresh faces to sneer at.
They believed their cultural and racial snobbery was applicable everywhere yet imagining them struggling as waiters in Chicago or New York, fumbling with English, dropping this façade of feigned cool, I realised they were nothing outside of their own bourgeois prisons Unimaginative, barbaric. Rich within their community or their country yet impoverished by their minisculity outside of it.
I was an anomaly. I wasn't one of them and I didn't step in from the scenery.
I'd come from another planet. They didn't know what to make of it. I
sensed that if I'd cursed more, if I thrown Yankee slang around in
confusion parables about lust and capitalism, they might have warmed
up to me a little but it was impossible. Each class was an endurance
test. All I could think about was getting out, sneaking back on the
tram, and riding around town reading my copy of one of the library's
crappy novels for the third time. The other teachers were even worse
than the students. They ran the spectrum from podgy, collegial
buffoons from England to psycho dramatic liberal arts graduates from
large metropolitan areas in America. Everybody qualified to teach it
seemed.
What were my qualifications after all? A few forged documents
Xeroxed at a local print shop? I could have been a mass murderer on
the lam for all they knew. It really didn't matter. As long as the
students didn't complain about you, you were fine and as long as you
let the students waste their time in whatever way they say fit while
giving them the illusion of teaching them something meaningful they
could manipulate in the future, they were satisfied.
There were weird memories of Praha Holesovice station. Getting
there was a dream with the names of stations recited mechanically in
that sexy, Tolstoy cold female voice as we swept through on the
yellow B line towards Northeast Prague: Křižíkova to Invalidovna to Palmovka and then Českomoravská, and at every stop, the pre-recorded chime would go off and then she would speak:
Unkonèit prosim, vystup a nastup, dvere se zaviraji., followed then
by Pristi stanice – and then whatever station was next.
I would tremble with delight at each word, wondering who this mysterious
woman was, if she was an embittered ex-Communist living in a panelak
flat somewhere in Zličín, chain smoking filter less Start cigarettes, staring out a rainy window, deep in thought about the wonder years.
After a ten minute walk, across Vrbenského, ending through a strange
tunnel which ran underneath the tracks, I would arrive through the
portal of Praha Holesovice into a dank corridor which housed the
kiosk where the workman would gather in their ragged, blue jumpsuits
stained an invisible brown matching the colour of the soot around
them, chatting about the night before, some sipping acrid Turkish
coffee and some others getting an early start on bottles of
Gambrinus or Budvar, all smoking their filterless numbs fighting off
the cold, the memory of a day that had already filtered through
their subconscious in repetition.
I would order a coffee, find a metal chair and open up a small
notebook, scribbling incoherent lines, hunched over like a cripple,
pen in one hand, page held down with the other, small plastic cup of
coffee steaming in front of me, dreaming lucidly of Anastasia as
though she were sitting there across from me, wilting in the deep
stench of the train station, patiently waiting for my return.
*****
When we weren't mired in our own reckless hedonism, stretched out on
the floor or sofa too exhausted to move, when we weren't out
drinking ourselves numb and acting like animals, we were actually
able to find our pieces of peace during day long periods doing
nothing.
Of course even nothing ended up being something. We lacked the
creature comforts; the internet, cable television, books or female
companionship thus we lived in a time warp of sorts. You can well
imagine it shouldn't be difficult for the average person to get
through the day without drinking, but take away their sacred cable
television, take away the children to distract and annoy them, take
away hobbies to simultaneously dull and amuse their senses, take
away the youthful indulgences of going on the prowl in search of
mating partners and there really wasn't a hell of a lot left.
I tried in earnest to kill time more quickly. I don't even know why,
really. Why did I want to kill time? I was in the prime of my life
so to speak, expatriated and out in a thrilling city, musically
untalented but still able to cobble together enough gigs to maintain
a semblance of respectability, reasonably secure in a professorial
sort of sense at the American Business School, and most of all, most
daunting and destabilising – free. There is nothing worse than free
time and I had too much of it. Oh sure, some swear they can use more
of it, tons more of it – how can someone say they have too much free
time? But it was true. Because free time was wasted on me. Idle time
was just another excuse to wallow in misery. That's how it is when
you're all knotted up in unquenchable infatuation waiting for those
few moments in between all those hours and months when on an
off-hand chance you just might run into Anastasia again. That was
me.
Albert had no answer for me. He wasn't infatuated. He often appeared
to have no feelings at all. Fuck it and Who Cares, were his two pet
phrases. You could throw the world of worries on his shoulders and
he'd shrug it off and let it fall to the ground, fall to eternity.
He was no Sisyphus. You'd never catch him pushing a rock up a
mountain over and over again. He'd have never bothered. He'd light a
Winston and look around for the nearest beer.
Take his beers and Winstons away from him however and I daresay
you'd have a different person altogether.
Why would I want to go without smoking and drinking, he asked
incredulously when I brought the subject up one day of what he'd do
without them. Let's just say, I said. Let's just say they weren't
available, for whatever reason you were marooned somewhere or stuck in a perpetual smoke-free sort of Disneyland and you had to go without
for a few weeks. What would you do then?
He shrugged, exhaling a long thin bluish stream of smoke as Lester
Young's Sometimes I'm Happy, a live recording, was blasting in the
background to the dismay of the upstairs neighbour who occasionally
pounded his floor, our ceiling with disgruntled futility.
I'd go without drinking and smoking, he said simply. I mean after all, if
it isn't around, it isn't around. I'd find another diversion. Take
up knitting or play cards or go for a jog around the block.
Ha! You go for a jog? You'd collapse of a heart attack after the
first half block!
He shrugged again. Then my problem of no cigarettes and no beer
would be over.
*****
(from the Diaries of Witold Kazmirsky, pg 42, book 3)
The other night I headed out to make my way for the Sunday evening
open mic night at a different gathering. Albert, usually in tow for
these sorts of outings, was again nursing an ailment of sorts, the
kind of ailment that was striking with more and more frequency over
the months. But neither of us worried. The burden of a
chain-smoking, beer-guzzling, slob, he shrugged. Fuck it.
This night it was a poetry reading but consisting primarily of local
Czechs, few if any of the dreaded expatriate blood spilling silly
lines about drunken nights swimming in the Vltava or some secret
romance with a Czech girl in short skirts of questionable legal age.
I had spent the afternoon reading an essay written by Havel for the
underground cultural journal Jednou nohu wherein he describes people
under the Communist regime as "nervous, anxious, irritated, or else
they are apathetic."
This was, he described, the stress of people living under the
constant threat of Communism, people dealing with absurdity and
nothingness brought on by totalitarianism.
And yet where was anyone different at any moment now? The foreigners
were still the relaxed crowd, those unharried by the thought of
waiting for someone to turn you in for an overheard conversation or
an act of sabotage – the Czechs were eased in some quarters but the
reality is that it is a hard yolk to shrug off, those years of
history that never really officially existed. And how did that go on
to explain my own certainly stressed-out face, my own preoccupation,
not with a totalitarian regime, far from it, but the regime in my
mind, the mind rotten without stories, simply filled with
obsessions, destroying any semblance of peace waiting for the next
postcard or another day to pass without one.
That night before the reading I stopped off in a blue collar bar, a
run down place populated by Gypsies and Slovakians living in Prague
for the higher wages. They were all dirt and grunge, instruments of
trade. I knocked back a few beers and surveyed the scene around me:
filthy alcoholics miserable for another crown, drinking away the
little pay they'd earned, those dream destinations of saving for
home sewn into their livers like embroidered histories of failure.
It isn't at all unusual to find a foreigner furloughed out to Prague
who speaks barely any Czech. But I was unusual for the locale simply
because tourists didn't stray into pits like this, they remained the
denizen of forgotten dark and dirty souls squelching tiny peeps of
forgiveness as they drank away not their sorrows but the memories of
the sorrows which ironically only led back up the same path back to
the sorrows again. Some of them spoke broken English. Some of them
spoke enough to ask me to buy them a beer knowing as they would
immediately that I wasn't one of them. But I wanted to protest that
I was and couldn't. Yes, my soul was ragged, yes, my stomach filled
with drink, yes, misery and fatigue were also my companions but the
difference that no time or place could overcome was that I was there
by choice. It was no courage to summon up a few tales of infatuation
hitting sour notes. It meant nothing to piss and moan my salary was
barely enough to scratch out a living. I was there by choice, they
by a destiny far deeper than mine. After all, what the hell would I
be crying about, playing at the destitution of others, standing
there pretending my heart sick was equal to their life sick that I
had a chance and threw it out whilst they could only stand and
watch, chanceless all along.
I bought beers for everyone to make up for it. Guilt, yes. I destroy
myself for fun and what would these characters have given for half
the chance to throw away? I held court via broken conversations of
gibberish, half-English, half-Czech, with a little Dutch and German
tossed in like kindling to a bonfire.
Gradually I was drawn in by Antonín, a man with a wife and two kids
lost somewhere in the paradigm of time in a village called Vlkolinec
where his father's house had been burned down by Nazis in 1944. So
he said. Why would he lie? And what was he doing here? Labour. Hard
labour, dirty labour, honest labour for dishonest pay tossed away
into the coffers of parasitical bar owners preying on the suffering
of others. The pure misery of loneliness. I suppose that's what
attracted me to him, the filthy fingernails, unwashed hair,
haphazard, cheap and dirty clothing and above all the eyes of
misery, clouding from time to time with tears recounting how much he
missed his family, how much he missed his village, how much he hated
Prague, the slave chasing a dream he was drinking away even as he
spoke.
Why should I feel sorry? For example, you come here to make a
living, send the money home to the family and eventually, as the
dream goes, return home a wealthier man or at least wait it out
until another factory reopens. He hates the Czechs yet wanted his
own country. Thus the split between the Czechs and the Slovaks. The
haves and the have nots. And imagine the irony. Here is your freedom
without even the consideration of making it a revolutionary
struggle. Here you go, you Slovaks. Have your freedom and we'll own
the factories anyway, those that don't get closed down and you'll be
stuck, thumbing your way to Prague looking for work, crying in your
beer about the family you've lost never thinking for a moment that
by overcoming misery you might find your future.
More disgusting still, where was my misery to match his? Missing
parents who had the foresight at least to leave me a flat and enough
money for rent to allow me to piss away an existence and drop out of
school, lounge my afternoons in libraries pretending I wasn't
bourgeois, pretending my indifference was cool? What did I have to
compare, as I matched him beer for beer in a hallucinogenic blur? An
infatuation gone sour? What could I possibly offer by comparison as
an excuse to piss it all away? Nothing, that's what. Nothing and so
I drank all the faster and bought him a beer along each time to
match me. Goddamnit. One of us was going to be miserable and both of
us were going to be happy.
Several hours later we were standing in each other's arms singing
songs neither of us could remember, generations apart, lifetimes
away, just two disgusting drunks consoling each other on the way to
finding our own particular paths through the misery, real or
imagined, actual or artificial.
Somehow I struggled to leave and make it to the reading. I was
already quite late and when I entered, in the middle of a fragmented
paean to the banning of Romanies from bathing in the local reservoir
of a neighbouring village, everyone looked up from their false
reveries as I loudly requested another beer and slumped in the seat
in the back. Why was I even here? This cultural yen for discovering
the undiscoverable? Who were these poseurs anyway? Were they more
valid in another language? Weren't they all struggling with the same
tiny yarn they pulled and pulled at obsessively seeking answers they
had no questions for or else pretending they were pulling at the
same tiny yarn that like me, might make them feel as though they
were really suffering, really and truly suffering rather than
standing up there in front of a bunch of put-ons waiting to give
their little golf-claps of appreciation in the hopes that someone
would recognize their genius, their suffering their uniqueness.
When there was an interlude, some snotty intellectual with a robust
opinion of himself meandered toward me in a non aggressive way and
asked me politely why I was there, reeking of beer and cigarettes
with nothing to say save for audible titters of ridicule dispensed
like cheap critiques in slanderous sidebars.
I'm here to hear your suffering chirping out of your orifices, I
mentioned casually, lighting another cigarette. This was followed by
an uncomfortable grimace on this fellow's face as though I had just
loudly farted. I mean really, I stated, standing up, gaining steam.
What is this charade; I demanded waving my arm in the direction of
everyone and unintentionally slapping him on the side of the head.
Then it all erupted. People jumped from their seats to squelch the
vagabond I imagined myself having morphed into when in reality they
all saw me for what I was: a drunk and cheap tourist taking
advantage, killing their excuses, giving them reason to pity or
disdain. A human goitre waiting to erupt. They all took turns
grabbing at me, shoving me roughly over and over again until I
reached the door and they shoved one last time, dumping me onto the
sidewalk.
1:53 AM
CHAPTER 13: Rot Sets In
“Yeah the women tear their blouses off
And the men they dance on polka-dots
And it’s partner found, partner lost
And it’s hell to pay when the fiddler stops:
It’s Closing Time.”
Leonard Cohen, Closing Time
During the course of our wanderings from neighbourhood to
neighbourhood exploring the inside of one pub after another, we
heard about a youth hostel which would be infinitely cheaper, filled
with personalities from all over the world and also had a bar on
site.
A few days later we were set up in our own double bunk room to
ourselves, still not cheaper than finding our own flat, but given
the circumstances, housing shortages, need to establish contacts,
figure out how willing we were to avoid the moving to the expat
ghetto outskirts of Prague, home of the panelaks, the cold,
heartless concrete buildings.
You can thank, in part, Swiss architect Le Corbusier, the precursor
to the simple and efficient Functionalism movement of the 1920s and
30s, for the existence of panelaks because in many ways, they are
modelled after that design, deformed over the years by Communism
into the symbolism of the alleged material equality and collectivist
style they were peddling. They'd always been a source of cheap
housing in a city notorious for its lack of living space, a simple
answer to the question of how to be quartered in thin walled,
cheaply built edifices glorifying communism. Ironically, they were
now the great way station of the ex-pat life for those living on the
thin of their wits who didn't mind long bus or tram rides back in
the middle of a cold, bleak night. Communism was dead and the
foreign hedonists and pseudo intellectuals were moving in.
We decided by straw poll, the two of us in an empty non-stop bar
near the banks of the Vlatava, that budgeting money would come
elsewhere. The only place we could imagine living was in Zizkov,
which had become our headquarters, our oasis from tourism and centre
of the most pubs per square metre of any other street in the city.
There was a collection of dead-enders who had fled their respective
countries to find not only hedonism but jobs in Prague. Jobs so they
could stay longer, drink more, pretend to be on the cusp of
something very important. In the early and mid 90s they liked to
regurgitate the notion created by foreign media that they would one
day constitute a movement of some kind, literary, artistic and
glorious, fancying themselves post-Communist Hemmingways and Joyces
and Steins.
I suppose it was to be expected in a way, Westerners flooding in,
held back and out precisely for their decadence, their unseemly
wealth, insatiable greed. The Americans held a disproportionate
majority of these temporary immigrants as though the word had been
disseminated solely through college radio, some 20,000 estimated at
one point with such heavy media coverage that you were almost
guaranteed back then, if you stayed a few months, to be interviewed
by someone for something but always with the same particular angle,
conjuring up Paris of the 20s and 30s.
It was only a joke if you took it seriously and by the time we'd
arrived, this crowd had eventually, like a shifting tide, begun to
trickle away, replaced by a newer corps even more intent on quantity
over substance. Yet you could still find these morons, lording over
some collective of misanthropes with misguided senses of cool, all
trying to out-hip each other as if it were they were doing the bump
in unison.
This was the point, in large part, of staying in Zizkov. There
weren't many places you could actually escape the disease of these
people gathering in what would otherwise be pristine pockets of
Pragueness, the local pivnices still holding on to their blue collar
perspectives and prices, unwilling or perhaps incapable of
surrendering to the mass collection plate of consumerist tourism,
the parasitic nature of all tourism in fact.
In 1420 peasant rebels, led by the famous general Jan Žižka, along with
Hussite troops from Prague, defeated the Bohemian King Sigismund
(Zikmund, son of Charles IV), in the Battle of Vítkov Mountain.
In the following two centuries Prague strengthened its role as a
merchant city. Many noteworthy Gothic buildings were erected,
including the Vladislav Hall in the Hradčany.
The neighbourhood was named after him.
Albert had no interest in working, even though he'd watched me spend
hours some afternoons with a Czech dictionary and the local
newspaper's want ads looking for housing and employment. He spent
entire mornings undercover, snoring through breakfast and sometimes
lunch even though I would be in the backyard outside the window of
our dorm room practicing the saxophone against the walls of the
building.
Our search continued, stuttered, distracted. We asked nearly anyone we came across if they were aware of any vacant flats. Even a solitary room would have sufficed. We wanted to end the sense of temporality living in the hostel provoked. But just like in Utrecht, even with money, finding a place was difficult.
One day we met Alois, a friend of a friend, outside a pub on
Executioner's Hill and apologies for the pub being shut, led us
downhill through finally street after street, a look at the flat, a flat we’d finally had a lead on after week after unfruitful week, the Holy Grail of expat living in Prague, a flat in Zizkov, which was in reality a state subsidised flat rented by his girlfriend, Maria, who was moving in with him to save money.
It's an old building across from a small, triangular park right on
the corner of a pronounced intersection of Koněvova and Jana Želivského and on a tram line. The elevator barely fits one so we walk the three flights of stairs, left at the hallway to the end, in the corner, Alois pushes open the door.
Immediately in front is a shower. To the right of the shower a three
foot corridor which opened into the main room and to the left, just
before the symbolic entranceway of the main room, the kitchenette.
Just to the left of the front wall separating the kitchenette from
the main room was a tinier corridor which led to a small cubby hole
of a room, the size of a closet, really.
Being state subsidised, it was cheap anyway so we weren't expecting
much. There was a mattress set against one wall and behind it a
small bookshelf whose half dozen Czech books Alois leaned down to
peruse before picking up a copy of Post Office by Bukowski. I love
Bukowski, he exclaimed in his very limited English as though
suddenly breaking through the hush of our inability to communicate
in much more than hand signals, Alois' English being raw and our
Czech being absolutely nil outside of learning the proper case
declinations for the word beer as need be.
Bukowski's great, man, I exclaim, suddenly buoyant, shocked at the
discovery, amazed they'd heard of him, not realising the reach of
Bukowski in the international subterranean world we were entering.
You like? He asked pointing around the room. Very good. We take. Our
English began to mimic his unconsciously as though by speaking in
broken English we might be better understood. Like people who talk
louder when speaking English to a non Anglophile as if the louder
the language is, the easier it is to understand, like talking to a
dog.
To celebrate, although we had no idea that was the purpose when
Alois led us from the apartment down the wide street to a pub table,
we were compelled to get inebriated. The speed and subtle fury with
which we drank through Clint Eastwood clenched teeth, the savagery
with which we attack first the beers and then, as Alois became
emboldened, calling the waiter over, going into a long monologue
punctuated with laughter which could only have been asides to more
serious business and then waiting expectantly as though the
announcement of his first child were eminent, demonstrated to us the
liquor and the glass – Becherovka, he taught patiently, draining it
in a quick gulp and urging us to do the same.
There weren't many in the restaurant yet and the few dwindlers
carried on their own languages in whispering corners. One shot after
another, chased with the beer which the waiter motored back and
forth with a speedy predictability. A man was picking his teeth with
his salad fork behind us. To the right, I could almost discern in my drunken hallucination that a pensioner couple were talking in hushed tones about the dog's bowel movements and the speakers placed around the room in corners near the ceiling, purred some strange Bohemian folk music.
We were able to converse only by the limitations of the palm-sized
Czech-English dictionary Albert carried with him every where. But
what did it matter really? We weren't saying anything important.
Bonding like apes before language was invented, simply grunts and
hand signals. I faded in and out of these communications,
transported back again to Anastasia as though she were my homeland
and the faintest whiff of home cooking sent me tumbling backwards
down the stairs unable to break my fall.
We were in a café in Amsterdam. Café Hoppe in fact, the brown café I
had come to frequent because the book seller across the road was
particularly good and one of my favourite coffee shops was just
around the corner. We were in Amsterdam for the day on the premise
of scouting a few jazz clubs we would enquire about and perhaps line
up a gig or two. Albert had stayed home nursing the last stages of a
flu that had bedridden him for days.
We were sitting at an outside table as the scenery rolled past us
like intricate waves peopled and dazzling with the enormity of
anonymous humanity washing by. Anastasia had been recounting a
morsel of her past – a recent past of course, I knew nothing about
her, no story she told was older than a year as though she had only
existed at once, out of nowhere, just beginning that evening in
Paris when I'd first met her. But even still, it was a morsel, like
a crumb from one of the biscuits they served with the koffie
verkeert in the morning when just around the corner a baker was
doing a bustling business.
The air was ripe with rain. Only that morning we'd been caught in a
sudden downpour, soaked to the bone as we wandered through a museum
and later snacked on apple pancakes washed down with black coffee.
For hours it had cleared and now the clouds had returned, anxious to
begin another hymnal of precipitation.
She was explaining one of the gigs that had gone wrong in Milan. The
microphone had started feeding back inexplicably half way through
her morose recalibration of Wild Is the Wind and the microphone
started crackling briefly before the sound went out all together.
She carried on with the song whilst the crowd murmured its
distraction and Christ, she said, stirring her coffee absently, I
felt as though I had just been fucked in some back alley and left
lying in the road. What was I singing for? Nobody was paying
attention? Those fucking people in Milan that night were all like that –
transparent and shallow. Wonderful stylish clothes and ghouls
lurking on the inside. They couldn't wait to be distracted, time was
wasting. Finally I stopped singing and walked off. A few cat calls
followed. It was ok for them to ignore me but for me to ignore them,
it was an insult. The manager tried to placate me but I was having
none of it. I'll never play in this shit hole again I remember
screaming in French to the dumb Italian who was torn between the
now-partisan crowd and me, the diva singer who was packing up her
things to leave.
I’m aware of it, you know, she said coyly. I know how difficult I can
be to work with. I've got to have everything just right and if
there's so much as a hair out of place on the trumpeter, I simply
can't stay focused. But this club had already had a week of me and a
week of problems. Lighting was terrible, the air was damp and
smelled like an auld whore with all those fancy women in their
fashionable clothes. I felt like I was suffocating up there every
night. Do you know what that's like? Of course you don't. You and
Albert just play, you don't give a shit. The walls could fall down
around you like a poorly constructed theatre set and you probably
wouldn't even notice. Too damned drunk half the time, aren't you?
Well anyway, that was it for the club. I told my manager I was
through with Milan in general. I gave him an earful of the treachery
that city had displayed throughout its history. And all the while he
would pat my arm and my shoulder as though I were some mangy dog
shivering in the cold. I wanted to punch him or scratch his face,
leave him with a mark his jealous wife would ask about later that
evening when he came home and stripped his sweaty clothes off of his
garlic-laced body.
She lit another cigarette then, even though there was still the old
one burning and then she stood up. Even thinking about it now brings
back the anger. I really hated that place Witold. It's so much nicer
here. The people aren't such….barbarians.
She took off for the bathroom to powder her nose or stare at her
reflection in the mirror, whatever it was women did when they used
the bathroom as an escape route. And whilst she was gone I sat there
sipping my little glass of Amstel, looking over at the chair she had
just been sitting in. I started imagining a day when she would be
gone again and I would be seated like this on another sort of day
like this in this very same café remembering just this precise
moment with the empty chair but Anastasia still here, gone for only
a few moments rather than months, sure to return from the bathroom
composed again, apologising for worthless emotions and asking that
we both have a glass or two of whiskey because she loves the
peaty taste so and then we'd be taking off on another rollercoaster,
drinking and talking until we were both obliterated, obligated to
maintaining the high, bouncing from venue to venue as though the
motion were the only thing holding us up.
*****
But Alois and Albert were still there at the table, fumbling through
conversation. We had a flat again. We had a home. Something for
Anastasia to come back to, if she ever decided to come back again.
As for Albert, the nights were hell on him in a way. We were both
out doing the business; mixing, drinking, floundering to grasp what
people were saying and doing, prodigious and copious amounts of beer
consuming led on by locals who only encouraged us with their own
habits. Albert took it more to heart, particularly the Absinthe.
*****
The name of this comes from the Greek, Dragan patiently informed us
one night out after suddenly ordering a round of it with our beers.
Dragan was a Croat who had moved to the hostel to help with the
remodelling of the upper floors of the building the hostel was
located in with the idea that the upper floors would also be
converted into more dorms, more beds, more people. Imagine what
those fat old, pinch-faced communist legged ladies thought of this
as they snooped and scoffed, sniffed and snorted their displeasure
at backpacking hedonists taking over their building, shouting and
puking in the hallways on each floor at all hours, every night, year
after year. The chokehold of Communism receded only to be replaced
by an invasion of loud, boorish drunks who were there solely for the
purpose of drinking and sleeping and fucking.
Dragan had been a graduate student in Shakespeare studies in Zagreb, escaped his military duty and for money, had come to Prague where a small cell of fellow Croats had established this hostel leaving him to ponder sonnets and
plays whilst he hammered nails on dreary afternoons. He was
sophisticated in a dark, knowing manner.
In a way like an animal that would only allow its baser instincts to rule. The world around him was just history. He had seen it all in the making, he had loved and hated it. Perhaps the contrasts of good and evil around him had been too sharp. The worst moments always seemed just around the corner and
no amount of brilliant literature or hours of classical music in
little beer gardens were going to make those memories go away. Only
the Absinthe.
Absinthe comes from from the word absinthion, which my understanding
is means undrinkable in Greek, he continued, lighting a Start
cigarette and gulping down a mouthful of Mestan . The French used to
use it in Algeria in the 1830s to combat malaria.
The shots were lined up in front of us as his preamble continued.
At some point, wine became too expensive because of vineyard destructions created by some sort of insect and thus, the working class stopped drinking wine and moved on to Absinthe, far cheaper industrial alcohol.
Thereafter, Parisians took to it, moving from one café to the next
during Green Hour, stinking of Absinthe. Toulouse-Lautrec was
rumoured to have carried a hollow walking stick filled with a
draught of it, sometimes adding shit to it like bitters, or wine, or
champagne. But here we shall take it in a pure shot, without the
boorish traditional burning sugar and spoon – just shots for men,
straight down. He raised his thimble like glass of green liquid and
urged it down with Albert and I following in dreadful pursuit.
And that night was a hoax, a deep mystery we were buried under.
Nothing was recollectable. Dragan took us down all sorts of memory
lanes, the ugliest stretches he could remember until even his own
words, slurring and weighted, began to lose all meaning and
thereafter it was all a blank save for the horrible waking the
following afternoon, heads pounded, stomachs acidic and vomiting.
A nice, clean buzz.
Thereafter, Albert was hooked on it as well, going off the rails
several nights claiming it held hallucinogenic properties. He would
sometimes sneak a few shots of it down quickly before practicing. My
bass is my lover, he would proclaim reluctantly yet proudly. I am a
bear and my bass is a bear and we live in this cave of a life,
blablabla. Imagine trying to get rehearsals in with the bear and the
bass bellowing in the cave of life. It wasn't easy.
Albert on Absinthe, off the rails, a train wreck I was always waiting to witness.
Problem is, Albert is a big man and when he begins to lose
equilibrium he is like a tranquilised elephant, capable of crashing
down on his side at any moment, regardless of what he crashes down
upon. Two coffee tables broken in two that way. No matter how much
he drank, Absinthe was the only thing that made him visibly
intoxicated. I suppose I was right there along with him, I dunno,
it's hard to remember, ha.
Afternoons reading until the urge to crawl out and begin the night's
gradual unravelling until by early morning, leaning on his bass when
the beer grew too heavy, and plucking out notes from his
subconscious as the night sputtered to conclusion.
*****
And, as I'd hoped, the distraction of moving, the diversion of a new
language, new culture, different people all conspired to rid me of
the listlessness of emotion I couldn‘t control or appease, which were catacombed and awaiting unearthing. Anastasia was in the background for far too many moments.
The flavour was bittersweet. She was there like a vague toothache
that at times would throb and remind you of the potential pain and
then in an instant gone again – there was too much stimuli around,
too much of the culture's aroma in every room, around every corner.
And thus, there could be times when all was forgotten. There could
be times when she could have passed through me and I'd not have
noticed, committed to forgetting as though the effort itself weren't
a reminder.
Some Sundays the little literary gatherings at Radost where everyone
smugly played their roles as ex-pat geniuses. Albert and I sat in
the back, drinking overpriced bottles of Budvar, chain smoking,
wondering where all the talent went. It was a kinky breed of non fame and non fortune and a lot of people kidding themselves.
Albert was affected by Anastasia's disappearance almost as much as I was although his heart wasn't as committed in the rubber room – her singing in Holland had given us instant credibility and without her we were out there, a
desultory duet of double bass and tenor sax, insolubly brief,
irreconcilably flat and uninspired as though all the confidence we'd
gained initially had been punched out of us and there we were,
bloodied and crawling in the streets again waiting for another break.
The same lethargy which had handicapped us before was as simple as a grammar school mathematics problem; dreams plus alcohol equalled dreams and little more.
Yes, we’d made it this far but certainly not down to any hard work on our part. The cash settlement and boredom had gotten us this far. The quest for somewhere else, that incessant canary in the mine shaft, got us somewhere else but the need for movement quenched by drinking, was no artistic expression. The dreams of something irretrievable.
What’s there to be motivated by, Albert scoffed in the middle of on of my frequent guilt trips on drinking too much and playing too little; like a little tour guide I highlighted the historical achievements and disasters. We aren’t going to be famous, Albert, I would state, writing our obituary aloud. We don’t even have that drive in us. We are alcoholics in search of window dressings. We want to justify ourselves despite there being no justification so we lean on the crutch of being musicians. The irony of course, not good musicians, just musicians. Just an excuse to travel, a furthering of drinking which we can justify by the periodic gig, the illusion of being musicians. Otherwise, we’re just glorified drunks. No dreams, no futures. Hell, maybe even no discernible pasts. Just existing because we’re too cowardly to even kill ourselves.
Albert sneered, taking a large slurp of beer. Why I think you’re on to something there Witold, no pulling the wool over your eyes, is there? We’re drunks with no guidance? So what? Who cares why we’re sitting here? Who cares how we got here? We are here. We have enough money to drink and we drink. As far as I’m concerned the music is not a crutch of any kind. It’s an augmentation. I could happily continue on as I had in New York, reading, listening to music, drinking myself to death slowly. This is merely a diversion. Don’t kid yourself. Fame, success? Perhaps you should lay off the delusional world you inhabiting for awhile. Take a vacation into reality. You’re a drunk. I’m a drunk. We could both simply remain drunks, could have stayed right where we were. But it wasn’t enough. So we’re drunks in a different backdrop, a different country, hearing a different language around us. We’re drunks with side interests in music. So the fuck what? Since when did we obtain a higher purpose? You’re beginning to irritate me with this self- righteous self-pitying bullshit. If you don’t like being a drunk, stop being a drunk. If you want to make something of your life, make something of your life. But please don’t insult me, sitting here, wringing your hands about what we should be doing. As far as I’m concerned, I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. If you want to elevate yourself to another plane, go for it. I’m quite happy where I am.
I said nothing for some time, turning his words in my head and trying, like that game where you hold a small board in your hands and shake it around trying to make little steel balls fall into the holes placed strategically around the board, to make sense of them. Albert wasn’t wrong but was he right? I thought back to the years before I’d even met him realising I’d done even less back then. Still drinking just as much but never even considering leaving the neighbourhood. So perhaps he was right. Perhaps I was over complicating a succession of events. Perhaps having lived so long feeling nothing and having then allowed myself to feel something, a vague sense of something if that with Anastasia and then observing it removed, observing myself struggle to find meaning…it had been the better response all along. Let’s just drink more and wait for the end.
Maybe we should try and find another singer, Albert suggested finally, perhaps a tingling of guilt for the bluntness of his appraisal reaching him. It had started to rain, driving us back and as we sat beneath a canopy and slurped, observant of the shapes passing before us.
What would be the point? We're not going to find another Anastasia.
I hated these sessions of pointless speculation that we so often
rounded to on afternoons like this.
Well, I hate to be crass, but you're not going to find another
Anastasia anyway. You've got something weird and clichéd invested in it.
Infatuation, lost love, longing. I'm only thinking of finding another
singer. I’m not too picky. We haven’t got much to offer. Perhaps if we did have more to offer, perhaps if we did find another singer you might find it distracting. So maybe it’s not such a bad idea after all. I’m sorry if I trampled on your dreams by getting drunk incessantly. I hadn’t realised how important the distraction of trying to achieve something was going to be to your sanity. He let the crack of a smile escape him, waving the waiter over and slapping me on the shoulder. Look, it’s not over, Witold. It might feel like it to you, but it’s not. Even the roller coaster has to stop at certain times to let some of the puking passengers off and let more enthusiasts on. Just be patient.
*****
I keep up my writing campaign knowing how well it had worked from
Utrecht. Afternoons after work, evading the plain clothes ticket
inspectors from tram to tram until I'd made it back to the
neighbourhood and slid easily into a chair at a boozy table at the
far end of a bar room where the smoke and smut of blue collar fates
had collected like a grime on the walls of buildings. The beer would
arrive, the piece of paper scored and I would open a Czech study
book and another, smaller notebook used to pen these waking thoughts
of affairs from far away.
They weren't devotional letters in word, the act of course bordered
on zealotry, but I was careful to couch perceived emotions in
innocuous terms as though I were writing to her about two people I
knew, lovers I'd seen and deciphered and calculated. These bar rooms
were safe for this exercise. Private. Populated by entirely male faces, there were no couples, no hand holding, no stolen moments of intimacy. And if an auld man would saunter over to my table with a beer in his hand curious about
my pecking away in the notebook with a variety of pens, I would add
the smudges of our stilted conversation between the lines which I
constructed to depict Prague as anything but what it was;
debaucherous, homely juxtapositions of insanity and mirage.
The only piece I didn't hold back on was the truth that it wasn't
only I who wanted her back but Albert as well despite his flippant denials. We were struggling without her on stage. She knew of course, the legitimacy her vocals lent to our performances. We almost seemed competent once and now we were plucking away at an internal illness we couldn't define.
Colicky moments of inspiration were infrequent. We were lost. I hinted. We
needed her singing to charm as though we were performing in front of
a crowd of cobras.
But I didn't let on in these letters to her. Instead, I let her know between the lines that it was a struggle. We were eating crumbs when we weren't pillaging our brains with beer and circular conversations in a language we didn't understand. Come back to us and we can really stun this city. But Albert and I alone were bicycle mimes, pedalling furiously and getting nowhere.
And then perhaps like someone rubbing a magic charm over and over
every day in the hopes something would come of it with these
letters, eventually there was a scrap.
A postcard from Budapest. I am here for a two week tour, was all she
wrote.
To me, a clear invitation and I didn't bother waiting to contemplate
it any further. I'd just gotten back from work and Albert was just
warming up to a mid afternoon rant about wars and diseases and
divine punishment and trying to drag me back around the corner for a
few quick pints before we headed out for the night. He was
pretending the postcard didn't exist on the one hand, careful not to
become too overanxious about the possibilities and twisting with
curiosity on the other hand, wondering if this might be the
beginning all over again.
I've no idea when the next train for Budapest is, I announced as I
quickly threw what few clean clothes I had into a sack and busied
myself with trying to calm down. In a matter of minutes I was packed
and heading out the door. Good luck, Albert mumbled, waving half
heartedly as though he didn't expect to see me back.
The excitement was short-lived. The last train had departed two
hours previous and the next one wasn't until 7:30 the next morning.
I returned to the flat, distraughtly calculating the postmark and a
two week tour – how long into had she been when she'd finally
decided to write? Where in Budapest would I find her with no clues?
What twisted game inspired her?
*****
It was no simple jaunt, a 7 hour train ride to Budapest that saw me,
mind racing with possibilities and scenarios, each mile a prolonged torture of expectation, each mile closer to what I hoped or expected might be an answer of some kind.
I didn't know how much time I had and I didn't know where I was to begin looking for her. But it had to be fairly simple. Jazz club gigs couldn't be too a plenty, I reasoned.
The only question was finding where they were and who was playing.
The problem is, Anastasia had an odd tendency to sing under
different names, depending on her mood. I knew this because she'd
mentioned it off-handedly one afternoon when we were rowing along
the Oude Gracht in Utrecht.
She was sat with her arms around her knees, looking
up at me as though from an imagined world. Do you know how many
different stage names I have, she asked. Of course not. I grunted
and shrugged, rowing. Ten? She rolled her eyes and tried to catch a
ray of sun that had suddenly showed itself from behind a cloud.
Three. Depending on my mood. Do you think that's how many moods I
have, three? I shrugged again. I've seen at least five I smirked.
But I'm expecting if it's only three, the categories are rather
broad.
They are. Up, down and indifferent.
And what are the names then? I started rowing faster, thinking we
were nearing the Ledig Erf and how much I wanted to grab an indoor
table before all the cyclists started showing up in their Lycra
biking outfits. I could almost taste the wheat beer on my lips and
see the chess board between us.
I'll tell you one, she demurred. See if you can figure out which
mood it represents. She closed her eyes for a moment, shaking her
head as though transforming herself, or preparing to transform
herself. I thought how odd it might be if she spontaneously
combusted and what I would do to put out the fire before the row
boat went up like an aquatic box of kindling and I'd be forced into
the canal, treading water and trying to gather up all her ashes.
Flavia Arbessi, she whispered, leaning forward as my body bent and
pulled with the motion of the oars. I stopped rowing and the boat
continued skimming along the surface with the momentum of my sweat.
We drifted like that for a few moments silent as the sun slid back
behind the stage above us and I attempted calculating the hidden
symbolisms.
Flavia. Well let's see, I debated. Isn't the origin of the name
Latin, for yellow? A blonde? More fun? Couldn't be a down name.
Yellow, blonde is too optimistic a colour isn't it? On the other
hand, perhaps you're trying to establish a sense of irony with that
stage name. Flavia in a depressive, suicidal mood…
She splashed water at me from the side of the boat. Why not
indifferent, she demanded. We were just coming around the bend and I
steered the boat towards the bank in preparation for unloading to
the Ledig Erf. Because indifference would be symbolised by some sort
of unisex name like Francis or Robin or something. I grabbed at the
mooring and stood up out of the boat, holding out my hand to pull
her up.
Well, I'd never use Francis or Robin for a stage name.
Why not? Robin, singing like a bird? Like little Edith Piaf?
Her nickname was the sparrow, not the robin.
Ok, I'll guess Flavia is for your up mood then.
I pulled her onto the bank and then yanked the boat up behind her.
So what's the answer? She smiled sweetly, watching an approaching
barge distractedly. I can't say really. I'll leave it for you to
figure out some afternoon when you're all by yourself and have
nothing better to think about…
I didn't have so much as guidebook to Budapest, knew nothing of the
language, had no map and no idea where to begin. Looks like it'll
have to be the auld standby, I amused myself in thinking. The
alcoholic's tour guide, hitting the locals and trying to milk as
much information as possible while watering my imagination with
Hungarian beer. I didn't even know what Hungarian beer tasted like.
So many bridges to cross.
By evening I'd accumulated a map and the names and address of five
different jazz clubs. I'd spent most of the late afternoon wandering
around through crowds; picking out faces and noting each one of them
was not her. Not surprising. What are the odds after all, to find a
familiar face among the hidden random in a city of Hapsburgan
bloodlines? For the purposes of distraction, I stepped into a wine
bar marked by the dilapidated characters gathered inside.
There was an auld and fat peasant woman standing behind a table
holding three different buckets of wine with ladles in them. I
merely pointed and she filled up a plastic cup. Around me pensioners
were smoking and playing cards. A few gypsy kids hung out by the
lone arcade game, begging cigarettes from stragglers and
entertaining themselves by imagining making millions in gun running.
I drank a watery white wine, smoking distractedly, ignoring the fact
I hadn't bothered trying to find a place to sleep that night. I
would put all my eggs in one basket. I would find Anastasia and stay
with her. As long as it took.
But there was no Anastasia. I found that out after enquiries at
three different jazz and blues clubs that ranged from seedy to
opulent. She played here last night, the bartender in the third club
informed me as he poured a German lager for me. Unbelievable voice.
Haunting. She was here for nearly two weeks but I'm afraid you've
missed her. Last night was the finale.
Of course the bartender had no idea where she was headed next. Do
you know her, he asked suspiciously. A groupie, I explained
half-heartedly, stung by the nearness of my miss for fuck's sake. If
I'd only caught yesterday afternoon's train here, the story would
have had a happy ending. Do you know where she was staying, I asked,
grasping at straws. He shrugged. No idea, mate. But she sure had a
lovely voice.
Back in the flat in Prague I returned empty-handed. Albert regarded
me from behind a book with the walls vibrating with a Brahms
concerto when I dragged myself home the following afternoon. What
did you expect, really, he surmised. What is this, some movie you're
writing the ending to? C'mon. It was rather ingenious of her, wasn't
it? Close enough to smell but too far away to touch. How bittersweet
for you.
What difference does it make? If she's out on gigs that means she's
already doing well enough. Do you really imagine she's going to come
rushing back here breathlessly urging us for the chance to play
together again as a trio?
What fucking difference indeed. Only my heart on a skewer. Heart
kebab. Care for a taste? Marinated in futility, lightly salted and
deep fried in false hope. We really should find another singer,
Albert ventured hopefully. And where would we find a singer
comparable to her? Are we just going to stumble upon someone as
though the streets are lined with them?
We played a gig of our own a week later. My heart wasn't in it. We'd
both had far too much to drink before we'd gone on stage and if we'd
been electric, they'd have pulled the plug. Instead, we were
ignored. What's worse than being ignored? Being forgotten? The
conversations in the crowd only grew louder, hoping to drown us out.
We really should learn a few standards, Albert remarked one evening
after we'd been drinking beer outside all afternoon listening to
Coltrane from a small garden next door to us.
Standards?! Why so by comparison everyone will know how bad we are?
I think we're best sticking with being too bizarre to decipher. It's
our only strength.
One afternoon we ran into Pavel again. We hadn't seen him since our
first afternoon in Prague and we greeted him as though we'd grown up
as neighbours and hadn't seen each other since the erection of the
Berlin wall. He was taken aback by our disproportionate enthusiasm.
We were out of ideas.
I told you we could get together for a recital one afternoon, didn't
I, he reminisced as we bought another beer for him. That's where all
our bated breath was blowing towards, in fact. Anything different.
He was game for it. I'll invite Frantisek and Jiri and yes, we'll
all assemble in my flat like the auld days. Perhaps some Chopin to
begin, then Thelonius then I dunno, perhaps some Stan Getz, what do
you think?
But the afternoon never materialised. As we were to find out later,
Jiri had died many years ago and Frantisek had immigrated to Paris a
decade before. They were still in his head as though they were
there, delusional. We came to an empty flat. No piano, no furniture.
Just old newspapers and a cat keeping him company. Have a seat, he
greeted enthusiastic and grateful, pushing the newspapers around as
thought they were antique furniture pieces. He made us some tea and
we sat quietly listening to the ticking of the clock. None of us
mentioned the lack of the piano that had been promised. Albert
stewed, still sweating from lugging the double bass all the way from
our flat. No old musician friends.
It's typical, he spat later on after we'd left and were back riding
the tram, Albert crowded the midsection of the tram with his double
bass, commuters staring at us angrily. It's typical that every
avenue we turn down, the despair gets wider. You think it's a
coincidence that Pavel as he described himself doesn't exist?
Ephemeral, like our music.
So we decided to forget gigs for awhile and concentrate on
rehearsing instead.
Changing venues from Utrecht to Prague had been, like this renewed enthusiasm for music, a diversion. My liberation from
heartsickness drowned in nightly debauchery. No excuse, we know but
at least I made one up anyway. Albert's was more complex yet like a fur ball
waiting to be hacked out. For me, it was Anastasia, haunting based
on mere weeks of experience, yet haunting as bitterly and painfully
as though she had been there all my life.
1:52 AM
CHAPTER 12 - Reaching the Temperature of Acclimation
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
Vaclav Havel
It was 18 hours by bus to Prague. Cramped seats, dishevelled sleep,
casual slugs from Albert's flask of Oude Ginever, the strong juniper
flavoured Dutch liquor from which gin is rumoured to have evolved,
fueled my insomnia along with the excitement of the destination
ahead of us, and instead of sleep, quietly humming to myself,
covered in a barely comprehensible issue of De Volkskrant purchased
at the origin of the journey in Amsterdam, a comically coloured
weekend edition of USA Today as well as the International Herald
Tribune, whose crossword Albert had completed at the journey's onset
in less than a half hour, I snuck peeks, through the dancing
moonlight of a German sky, at Jiri Weil's Life With A Star, whose
reading I'd timed for this trip, this story of Josef Roubicek, a
Jewish bank teller who is waiting to be called up for deportation to
Terezin whilst his fellow Jews were increasingly persecuted in a
Nazi Prague…
Neither of us had known much more than a communist Czechoslovakia in
the entirety of our collective existence and the idea of this
one-two punch, the Nazis followed up by the Russians, seemed like a
positively devastating set of circumstances.
And all this after the promise of the Treaty of St Germain in 1919,
Albert read, upon successful conclusion of the International Herald
Tribune crossword without breaking a sweat, from some notes he'd
scribbled in anticipation of our journey, some background fillers,
arcanea and trivia, solid facts and useful information he'd been
gleaning in his spare time for weeks once he'd known in his mind he
was ready to leave Utrecht.
You see, he began, warming up to his topic as we left some truck
stop somewhere between Belgium and Germany by late afternoon,
offloading a few travellers, uploading a few more whilst giving
passengers a chance to stuff themselves with cafeteria snacks and
junk food for the journey ahead, Czechoslovakia itself was the one
of the many offspring of the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire after World War One and with that treaty, the return to the
romantic notion of the medieval Czech statehood
Now, how did they lose that statehood to begin with, he smirked, I'm
glad you asked. He pulled at his beard, staring out the window with
cosmogony in his eyes.
The Czechs, you see, were in a pretty good position if you go back
to the 14th century. Their King Charles IV, King of Bohemia and even
Holy Roman Emperor believe it or not, the chief of All-Time Czech
chiefs, had set it all up proper-like. Not only that but he's the
one who commissioned so many of the Gothic buildings that still
stand in Prague, also started up the University of Prague, etc.
You'll see half the city appears to have stuffed named after him.
Anyway, he led this golden age for the Czech Empire and diplomat
that he was, later on he established several treaties of his own, of
primary importance that with the Hapsburg family in Austria and
surprise surprise, surprise, the Arpads in Hungary which, you
guessed it, was the foundation of the very Austro-Hungarian Empire
that needed to be dismantled some 550 years or so later.
His daughter married Rudolf IV, the Habsburg King and they enter
into a contract of mutual inheritance between his family and the
Habsburgs wherein if one family became extinct, the other took over.
Another Rudolf eventually became the Czech King but this wasn't the
proper downfall - no, that came because of, yes you guessed it,
internal religious wars between the Catholics and Protestants. We'll
save Jan Hus and the Hussites for another day, Witold but suffice it
to say that from that point on, the Czechs were no longer their own,
they were the Germans' and it wasn't until that treaty that they
became so again, however short lived.
Hitler once bellowed, sometime in 1937 I think, Czechoslovakia would
be wiped off the map! Smashed with military power, he threatened.
England, France and Italy helped sign his power to do so in Munich a
month later and by the Spring of 1939 not only was so-called
Sudetenland under the Nazi thumb, but their troops had entered
Prague.
So that, as they say, was that, Albert moaned, rolling his back to
me, head against the window, long legs curled inward in a futile
effort to fit his frame into a comfortable position for sleep. Not
on a bus. I returned to Jiri Weil's book:
..Ruzena, I said, people are now drinking coffee, well, perhaps not
real coffee, but they are sitting somewhere warm, after a satisfying
lunch, and I am freezing, Ruzena, and I am hungry…
It was a thoroughly demoralising book about human cruelty and the
rooms of mild insanity that thrived within them. By the time I'd
finished, I'd temporarily forgotten my fixation with Soviet Prague
and resolved to spend one afternoon, like Josef Roubicek, sweeping
leaves in a Prague cemetery.
Meanwhile Albert slept from the start, I noted jealously. You have
long hours to stare out the window yet most of the journey was made
in darkness so even staring out the window gave you the feeling that
you were enduring rather than travelling, transported anonymously
through historical lands in a god damned bus stinking of the bad
breath of two dozen snoozing foreigners instead of riding horses
like Sugambrians and the Suebian Tribes raiding along the Rhine.
Morning slowly unveiled and with its unveiling, the countryside
danced naked.
But as we made our approach to what we assumed was Prague there was
a growing ill ease. Everywhere had a hue of grey, industrial soot,
abused and staggered.
Expecting Bohemia, anarchy, surrealism and intoxication, we were
disappointed at our dropping point, a bleak Želivského bus station on the outskirts of town.
You think you know a place by reading about it, reading the
literature spawned from it, listening to the stories of other
travellers but ultimately, its like imagining what it would have
been like to sleep with the vintage version of Marilyn Monroe or
Ingrid Bergman – you might conjure up the face, fill in the blanks
of the intimate curves of the body, cobble together personality
traits from interviews and photographs but in the end, the
imagination is dulled by the inability to make it real.
During his few waking hours, Albert had continued his overview of
Czech literature and history on the bus ride out of Amsterdam
through Germany, filled me in on the Slavonic liturgy like the 10th
century legend of Ludmila and Wenceslas, the break of the monopoly
of lecturing in Latin in Prague by Karl Heinrich Seibt in the 18th
century, the Age of Reason with its secular focus that condemned the
Baroque, affected by mythopoeic patriotism, the birth of
neo-Classical literatures influenced by folklorism, the concept of
autonomous national culture, , the 19th century Czech Romantic poet,
Karel Hynek Mácha (whose poem Máj, he was even able to spout of few
lines in butchered Czech that he'd memorised), the effect of the
Ausgleich, which split the Empire into the dual Monarchy of
Austria-Hungary leaving Czech nationalism to the wayside, the Czech
submission to bourgeois Vienna, Hanuman, the poem by Svatopluk Cech
about civil war between clothed cosmopolitan and naked nationalist
natural apes, Masaryk and the Realists, anarchist utopianism - and
that's as far as I got in my reading so far, he shrugged
apologetically as the bus made a dinner stop in some German
self-service diner on the Autobahn.
This is Prague? Albert managed to moan, setting down his bag,
quickly lighting a long-awaited Winston and pulling the collar of
his coat up around his chin and grimacing. Prague's first nucleus
was founded in the latter part of the 9th century as a castle on a
hill commanding the right bank of the Vltava: this is known as
Vyšehrad (high castle) to differentiate from the castle which was
later erected on the opposite bank, the future Hradčany. Soon the
city became the seat of the Země koruny české Kings of Bohemia, some
of whom also later reigned as emperors of the Holy Roman Empire
I think so, I noted cautiously, sniffing the sulphuric air around me
and looking around for something familiar. Imagine if we were like,
dropped in here in like August 1968 when the troops of the USSR,
Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria were rolling in to douse the Prague
Spring. Imagine the euphoria of a greater democracy, economic
reforms and the abandonment of controls over mass media doused in a
matter of a few nights of occupation.
Jan Palach, Albert muttered, puffing greedily on the Winston and
wondering where the first pub might be located even though it was
barely seven in the morning. I've read this city is loaded with
non-stop bars, he explained in a typically distracted sidebar before
returning to his original thought. Less than five months later, he
continued, Jan Palach infamously performed an act of self immolation
in protest of the Soviet disbursement of reform. If you want to
imagine something, try imagining making the decision not only to
protest, but to kill yourself in protest and not only kill yourself
in protest but kill yourself by setting fire to yourself in protest.
That, he said, tossing the cigarette butt on the ground with
hundreds of others, and two historic acts of defenestration, are
what Prague symbolises to me before I've even had my first Czech
beer.
Did you know, Albert, that the average Czech drinks 11 beers a day?
Go on, that's not possible - that means some are drinking 20 some
beers a day whilst others, only a few…it would be a country of
drunkards, surely the ratio is skewed…
We carried on out of the depot and began the slow, uncertain walk
towards what we sensed was the city centre. It was clear from
looking up and down the Vinohodská that the east end was a trail of
the city trickling away into suburbs and the west direction appeared
to be the only other choice. Fortunately for us, unwittingly, it led
straight down, albeit after quite a pace, into the centre of town,
the Národní Muzeum
So we carried on, Albert lugging his bass with only a small duffel
bag over one shoulder and I, with the saxophone in its case, also
travelling lightly – clothes we would buy on the cheap – these were
third world prices, after all and despite effusions about history
and literature, like most others who had come, we were there for the
cheap lifestyle.
Ten minutes down the street and the strap on a bag snapped and fell
harshly into the slush of the sidewalk as a menacing dog held on a
leash by a disapproving old lady began barking at us. Fuck off,
Albert growled back at the dog as the old lady shouted something at
us incomprehensibly.
So this is the dream? Albert demanded after twenty minutes of
walking got us closer to what passed as the skyline. This fucking
dreary slum of a city?
Hang tight, I cautioned. First impressions are not always the right
impressions. Something tells me we've entered from the wrong side of
town. Have some faith, we're going to be dazzled, I guarantee it, I
preached boldly, trying to overcome my own trepidation with
something resembling optimism despite the bleak surroundings.
And sure enough, by half two, we'd quartered our belongings in a
quasi-posh hotel, showered off the dirt of the bus ride, found a
street-side stand to gobble incredibly greasy potato pancakes
lathered in sour cream and thick, crunchy sausages dipped in mustard
served on a cardboard square with a hunk of brown bread, had a flyer
for a promising youth hostel and were already in a famous watering
hole U Zlatého Tygre where great writers like Hrabal and Karel Hynek Mácha once drank.
*****
The religious split between Catholics and Protestants is followed
everywhere on an historical trail and Prague is no different. The
rationalist reaction against devotional Roman Catholic literature
was a constant spasm, like a dodgy sphincter, Albert explained as we
strode swiftly now, eager to begin. Sort of on par with the literary
rebellion against white males hogging all the good lit publicity for
themselves, he added. And look, in the 16th century, the
predominately and fevered Catholics of the Habsburgs took over,
pushing the Protestants aside, much like the Spanish king did to the
Protestants in the Netherlands. See the pattern of Europe during
these times? Religious intolerance.
But like the Dutch revolt, the bubble burst eventually when at the
Prague Castle, an assembly of Protestants tried two Imperial
governors, Wilhelm Slavata and Jaroslav somebody, for violating the
right of freedom of religion, found them both guilty, and threw them
out of the high castle windows, There you have your first Czech
defenestration.
Undeniably, the euphoria of historical partaking in Prague had long
since worn away within the last decade between the first intrepid
Western youth settlers to today's overindulged yobs, stag parties
and frat boy mentality sweating through pint after pint in one
trendy location after another. There were few remnants of Communist
Prague to sip on a leisurely afternoon, the aura had been vacuumed
and binned and its place cropped up a nihilistic subculture of
intellectual sewage who came to Prague much in the same way they
came to Amsterdam. Hedonism as an art form.
It was almost as though the old wooden theatre called the Bouda
(hut) had never been erected on Wenceslas Square – in fact it had
been demolished after a few plays were put on, mostly by Viennese
writers.
That isn't to say Prague didn't have its charms. And it would be
hypocritical to pretend that for determined drunkards like Albert
and I, latter day successors to the son of the esteemed Charles IV,
King Wenceslaus the Greatest 14th and 15th century drunkard, this
wasn't a sort of Beer Mecca we might have dreamt about once the idea
of alighting in Prague became apparent. Not solely because Czech
custom, being one of the greatest consumers, per capita of ale in
Europe, of imbibing but also because the beers were bigger and
cheaper.
They've been brewing beer here what, 1200 years? 8th century?
Bohemian hops are in the eyes of some, the worlds best. Whereas it
started off people just brewing on consuming on their own property,
by the 11th century they started pooling their resources, brewing
collectively. And here it is, dirt cheap and consumed en masse. We
will live the auld days of communism; smoky cafes, drinking lots of
and lots of cheap domestic beer.
And we knew there would also be more exotic yet powerful pit stops
along the beer super highway like plum brandy in the form of
Slivovice or the herb-laden Beckerovka and even absinthe.
But more importantly there were the Disney-like facades of what
remained a sort of fairyland architectural backdrop. There were the
working class pivnices in Zizkov where men traditionally supped on
gallons of beer in dingy yet church-like reverential quarters. There
was the cheap which made life a bearable bargain. There was Vaclav
Havel running the country instead of the literary resistance. There
was the underlying hum of informality when it came to proving
competencies. You didn't need a sparkling CV to do something, you
merely had to do it. And one can barely mention Prague without
mentioning the birds of Prague, whorish with deadbeat intellects yet
charming naivité, or, as the Czech poet Mácha described them pale as
an amaranth, withered in the spring
Albert didn't need much convincing, once we'd established quarters
in U Zlatého tygra which a guidebook had directed us to.
Albert judges every place he goes based upon the cost of a pint of
beer. Cheap beer in Albert's mind equals worthy society. Expensive
beer means they're all more than likely just a bunch of yuppies,
flesh merchants or worse, snobs. The upper classes lack poetry, he
was fond of repeating whenever we were accosted by ridiculous
prices. Life in sterility. So when we ordered our very first pints
in Prague the first thing he did was a little jitterbug on the way
to sitting at a table singing to himself, it's true, it's true! The
beer is cheaper than water!
Do you understand what we are creating by hopping now to this new
location, abandoning incomplete the experience first of New York and
then Utrecht? This is a poetics of surprise and variety giving us
the illusion of motion and expansion. Our acts are begun and never
completed. Our equilibrium is unstable because we are constructing
on several levels at once, each level with a different perspective.
And now we throw into the blender, the abundance of cheap beer, an
even deeper hedonism, a surreal blur of experiences. If this doesn't
emancipate our music, nothing will!
This is better than Mexico, he went on after having his first few
sips. I hate Mexican beer, he sneered, even though it's cheap like
this. This, this Pilsner Urquel from Bohemian hops, he sang, holding
the pint up in front of my face as though I wouldn't understand his
subject without visual aids, is the sign of times to come! And he
chugged down the remaining eleven gulps without breathing, placing
the glass softly on the table top and wiping his chin with his right
wrist.
Take it slow, lad – an old man who had been sitting dead for all we
knew, across from us, suddenly came to life, holding out a wrinkled,
age-spotted hand in caution. You lads are all the same. Your first
beers you drink like the first girl you fuck, quickly and without
comprehending what you are doing. If you are to be drinking many
beers in my city, eventually you will learn there is no hurry. There
is always another beer waiting somewhere just around the corner.
The old man introduced himself with an outstretched hand as Pavel
and when he got around after a few puffs on his pipe to asking us
what we were doing in Prague, we let it out quite casually that we
were here to start a jazz collective and slip into an irredeemable
vortex of hedonism in the process. No small feat and his eyes seemed
to instantaneously lose their tired sheen and first light
brilliantly with memory and then as the memory apparently slipped
gears from the pleasant to the unpleasant and back to the pleasant
again, he volunteered that his command of English, be patient, he
cautioned, this might become a long story, was owed to migration as
a boy of 14, just after the Communist's final coup for power.
Actually, only a few days after Jan Masaryk, he added as an aside,
the Minister for Foreign Affairs, was found under the window of the
apartment. They called it suicide but we all knew better. We were a
drop in a river of emigrants flowing out of Czechoslovakia,
disgusted and powerless, carried by the tide of that disgust and
powerlessness we went hiked through a thick forest for days and days
until finally arriving at the Austrian border.
He paused here, perhaps for dramatic effect or perhaps distracted by
a sudden outburst of laughter from three young men seated at a
corner table whose heated discussions were incomprehensible to our
ears but whose slurring demeanour and loud gesticulations
demonstrated them to be clearly in the hold of an early afternoon
bender.
During this pause I searched Pavel's eyes for perhaps a hint of
those of perhaps my own grandfather who had emigrated from Poland
just after the second world war. For the first time since we'd left
New York I was beginning to feel the stirrings of my own heritage,
even if this were a different country, a different background the
stories were similar. Homelands overtaken by ideologies, oppression
and force. Unlike my father, who had been born in America, had set
roots in America and had ultimately killed himself in that same
America, the same East River he'd grown up around, Pavel had
actually seen his homeland before and after the ravages, not once,
but twice and then again a third time, the euphoria of the
revolution in 1989, as he called it, by then an auld man of 55,
resigned to the fate dealt to him and thousands of others…
Well, I say we, he admitted, coughing lightly, but I hadn't really
had a say in the matter. My mother and father wouldn't have dreamt
of leaving me behind, not to mention the fear of what kind of
retribution I'd have been exposed to from the government once the
disappearance of my parents was discovered. So from the beginning, I
was told I was going and that was that.
The problem was, a girl of course. I was in love with a girl, Jitka
and we were inseparable and because of the goddamned Communists,
because my father worked for Lidove Noviny, the paper whose editor
was once Karel Capek and whose publication was banned by the
Communists in 1948, my father decided it was time to emigrate.
What that meant of course to me was separation from Jitka. Well not
just separation. Not like your summer camp romances. Jitka and I had
known each other since we were small children; she grew up in a flat
two blocks from our own. We spent all our time together growing up
and of course, as the human body and sexuality began to take shape
our friendship became one of experimentation.
What you must understand is that if it hadn't been for the
Communists, if it hadn't been for the decision of my mother and
father, fearful of persecution, to leave and to make me go with
them, I quite probably would have married Jitka and we would have
had a family and life history of our own. But this was not to be our
fate. Instead, our fate was sealed by events out of our control and
so, no matter how much I cried and pouted and stamped my feet and
sulked and screamed and threatened and cursed, my parents were
steadfast in their refusal to allow me to stay behind.
Of course, like any young couple in love faced with a forced
separation, this only made our will stronger and we decided on our
own to run away. We wouldn't have to flee in the back of a pickup
hiding under piles of straw, crossing under the eye of a well-bribed
and perhaps even sympathetic border guards. We didn't care about the
Communists, it was my parents we had to escape, not the Communists.
The Communists didn't care if we held hands or made love or got
married.
But our escape lasted less than 24 hours before we were discovered
and when I was forced back home my father said that was it, that was
too close a call, we were leaving that night - no more could the
effort be postponed.
There wasn't much I could do. My father and mother both begged and
whispered and cajoled all that day about our having to leave,
regardless of what I felt about Jitka, this was our only way of
survival. Jitka would still be here when we returned, they promised.
But of course, they never returned. I made efforts to write to Jitka
but of course do you think for one moment those letters ever reached
her? Or even if they had, that any letter she wrote in reply to
escaped émigrés living in a foreign land, flouting the failure of
Communism, did anyone really come to believe that such letters would
be delivered, regardless of how devoid of political content and how
utterly overflowing they were with descriptions of painful
unrequited love that had been forced from our clutches cruelly? Of
course not. Well, I can't be certain. Perhaps the censors rode
roughshod through my correspondences with a black marker line but I
never bothered with the political. Sure, I tried to express the
differences which would have been apolitical to the paranoid mind of
the state censor, but the rest of the letters, they were filled with
nothing but love, expressions of longing, elaborate detailing of
minutely sculptured suffering. The minute my parents had convinced
me I had no other options was the minute that I would never see
Jitka again.
From Austria, he continued slowly, taking a sip of his beer and
accepting a light to set the pipe afire anew from Albert whilst
sitting back slightly in his seat to see if we were sufficiently
captivated, we made our way to England, Slough precisely, where my
father got a job in the brickworks.
I suppose the initial excitement about escaping, the boyhood craving
for the exotic, allowed me to make the decision I wouldn't have made
otherwise. But once we'd made it out, past the border, a new reality
struck me. The reality that I would not allowed to go back, not
ever. The problem was of course, Jitka. My heart burned. Every
morning I woke up, both in Austria and then in England, my stomach
was compelled by bile, a sickness, a longing. Do either of you know
what it's like to have love torn from your clutches like that,
irretrievable?
We didn't need to look each other. And although it was presumably a
rhetorical question on the basis of building to a crescendo of
disappointment, disillusionment, we both shook our heads solemnly.
We needn't bother with our own silly little tales. Pavel and Jitka,
the love which had never been allowed to flourish, eclipsed anything
Albert or I might have imagined.
Pavel shook his head sadly, even to this day. He knocked out the
embers of his pipe and took another long swallow of beer. I noted
then, perhaps for the first time or perhaps for the second, that
Pavel had the kind of pinched, broken blood vessel-lined face that
you could instantly recognise in an alcoholic. A sort of club
membership symbolism, like a fencing scar for drunks.
Before I was forced to leave, Jitka and I had often discussed how we
would be able to reunite. It was out of the question of course, once
I with my mother and father had crossed into the West, to return to
Prague and thus it would be up to Jitka to escape on her own. We
both agreed it was too risky and she too young to attempt something
like an escape but agreed we would both wait for 4 years; 1952 when
we were both 18 and then she would cross into Austria, just as I had
and we would meet on Christmas Eve, 1952 in front of the Sudbahnhof.
For four long, desperate, delirious years I waited for that
Christmas even to arrive. In the interim of course we had no true
means of communication. About a year and a half after we'd gotten to
England, the Zelnices, a family who had lived in our building who
had also emigrated, were able to contact us from their new home in
Canada and with that contact came a small box of precious, precious
letters Jitka had handed to the Zelnices and begged for them to
forward on to me once they were settled.
They were letters from her to me, a year's worth which had been
edited and cut so that they would all fit into this tiny box that
the Zelnices smuggled out with them as a favour to both families.
I'm afraid rather than making the transition easier, I became even
more despondent. I was to have been practicing music, my parents
insisting of course that I was a protégé and yes, I admit, the
musical studies and hours upon hours of practice were indeed a
welcomed distraction. But once those letters arrived and I read them
through and through, over and over again, every single day since
they're arrival, the wait to 1952 was becoming unbearable.
I was dying in that home in Slough, I tell you. By the beginning of
1951 it was becoming too much for me and not even the music was a
significant distraction. I became a member of the London Schools
Symphony that year , as my dedication and need for distraction
through music probably turned me into a much more talented musician
than I'd have ever become on my own but none of it was enough.
He exhaled a long bluish stream of smoke and rubbed the side of his
face nostalgically. Somehow however, I did survive. And do you know
why? Jazz. Jazz, he repeated softly and slowly as if it were Jitka's
name, melodic and mysterious, pronounced by the 18 year old Pavel in
front of the Ostbahnhof station in Vienna on Christmas Eve 1952.
Well, perhaps I am over dramatising, he chuckled to himself with
amusement. Not simply jazz, any jazz. I was a classically trained
musician, not a jazz musician, you see. It wasn't until I first
heard of Oscar Peterson that I became fascinated. You see Oscar
Peterson had been classically trained, just like myself. He'd
studied under Paul de Marky, a Hungarian concert pianist.
The thing is, he also studied under a classically trained veteran of
the Harlem jazz scene and was rather enamoured with the swing music
of Benny Goodman which he heard via the radio. Rather than pursue
the concert pianist route, he chose jazz piano. I had never heard of
him although he'd spent several seeming fruitless years in Canada
exhausting the jazz scene there.
But in '49, Carnegie Hall, as part of a concert of Jazz at the
Philharmonic, Oscar Peterson made his debut in America as a jazz
pianist.
And in 1951, as I was pining away for Jitka and trying to
concentrate instead on studying music, the Oscar Peterson Trio was
formed with Ray Brown and Charlie Smith. Ah, and this trio, Pavel
cooed, was the beginning of my life being saved.
It wasn't until he paused further still and we were like children
sitting at the feet of our grandfather recounting war stories. Like
Oscar Peterson, Pavel also traded in his years of classical training
at the conservatorium, he explained, because he instantly loved,
upon hearing his first bootleg copies, Thelonius Monk and Oscar
Peterson and because the music distracted him from Jitka.
Jitka, of course, although she loved music, had no idea that . After
the Nazi occupation jazz flourished in Prague. Jazz was that
yearning for freedom we all craved. Not only did I play, but I read
and learned about the history as well. The history, for example, of
Bedrich "Fricek" Weiss, who was deported to the concentration camp
Terézin, where he led the Ghetto Swingers. In 1944 he, together with
his father, was transported to Auschwitz and directly to the gas
chamber.
And 1952 was a bad time for Czechoslovakia. I worried increasingly
for Jitka's safety. By then the communist show trials had begun and
even from England we could feel the fear bred during the trial of
Rudolf Slánský and thirteen other prominent Communist personalities
in November and December 1952. Whilst Jitka and I were busy planning
our reunion in Vienna, Slánský was executed, and many others were
sentenced to death or to forced labour in prison camps.
It was very difficult to obtain a passport in those days, he
explained wearily recollecting sadness. You had to apply for
official permission and to get official permission you had to have
an employer. Well, Jitka was able to convince her employer to deem
her a reliable person and she was able to obtain permission but due
to bureaucratic twists and turns I had no knowledge of, it was not
until February of 1953.
Of course, I was there, Christmas Eve in front of the Ostbahnhof
station in Wien. I waited there in the snow and the biting cold
expectantly without having had any confirmation that she would in
fact be arriving and yet belief, faith, made me wait.
I waited for several days out there, sleeping in the station to keep
warm before the idea began creeping into my head that perhaps I
should somehow get closer to the border so that she wouldn't have as
far to go. I could imagine millions of scenarios; being shot by
border guards, getting lost, starving in the forest, getting
frost-bite, dying, a million different things that could happen to
her that could have happened to her to prevent her from reaching our
mutually agreed destination at the appointed time.
It was insanity of course, to believe this could turn about into
reality. After several more days my money was running out and new
fears began to play in my head; evil fears of infidelity to the
dream. Who was to say, even though she'd written those letters,
those letters had been written two years before, who was to say that
in the interim she hadn't met someone else. Someone whom she
wouldn't have to escape her country to meet with. Someone for whom
she wouldn't have to pull up roots and futures to be with. Someone
perhaps better looking, more accommodating, anything. Anything
anything was possible! He slammed his hand on the table gently as
though living through every moment of those days in Wien again.
And what the hell did I know? I was 18. I had no real experience in
the world. Not from Slough. But I would not go back, not ever. I
decided in the end I would wait and in doing so, I auditioned for a
job in a Viennese bar to play piano, jazz piano. And whilst doing so
I waited and I waited and I waited.
The problem of course with a lack of communication was that I had no
idea of her situation back in Prague and she had no idea that I
would have waited for her. Without the confidence of knowing I would
be meeting her, the idea of simply getting out and leaving, of
disembarking in Vienna and never returning home again, without the
sanctity of knowing I was going to be there waiting for her, was too
much.
How do I know all this? He laughed bitterly. Because in fact, we
were finally reunited one day. 1990. She had married by 1955 and
started a family of her own. We weren't children after all, any more
and whatever dreams we had once had of reuniting, they were gone
forever. She could never again have the opportunity to escape Prague
and even if she did she would have no idea of how to find me. And so
that was that.
She married and raised a family of two children, became a
grandmother by 1980. And where was I? Still in Vienna.
Teaching kids, he confessed into his waning beer as the barman slid
through collecting empty glasses, taking orders and working the room
with a beer gathering mania that bordered on shamanism. I was
teaching kids who had no interest in learning about the piano but
were forced by their parents who saw classicism in them instead of
western consumerism. I didn't play in any more concert halls. I
played in pubs and bars around Austria and Germany when the need to
move forward fit but by and large, I stayed in Vienna until that one
day, that one day that was always a piece of my hypothetical life,
that one day…
It took me nearly a year to track her down now with a different
surname although the husband had died some time before. And of
course by the time I had tracked her down it was 1990, 38 years
later than expected, a lifetime's ocean between us.
I don't know which made me more sad. That we hadn't met at all in
1952 or that we were finally reunited in 1990 knowing it had already
passed us by.
But enough about these things, he suddenly waved away, digressing
into pity and sadness. What instruments do you play and what sort of
jazz is it you are conspiring?
I play the bass, Albert volunteered as the barman returned with
three more pints and ticked off three little slashes on our scrap
paper tally sheet which we watched with amazement. And Witold plays
the horn, neither of us very well, I might add.
Lacking astounding talent, Albert continued, we prefer a minimalist
approach to music. We don't play fancy 15 minute solos, we don't
spiral, we don't necessarily shake or groove or incarnate anything.
We try our best not to remind our audience that we struggle with
even the most rudimentary of beats and that neither of us could read
a music sheet any easier than we could read a newspaper written in
Sanskrit. In fact, to call us musicians might even be a stretch.
Conceptualists, perhaps. Like children who haven't yet conquered
speech.
Pavel stared at us for a few moments before taking a pipe out of his
coat pocket and relighting it, a shot of flame from a match struck
on the floor, audible puffs and the Pope-like smoke firing out of
the top of the bowl indicating he had finally digested Albert's
words in full. You will be very successful here then, I would
suppose, Pavel smiled slyly. This is precisely the kind of place
where you could pull something like that off.
We've already been a hit in Holland, I added unnecessarily because Pavel is clearly a talented musician and despite this hearing this hollow endorsement in my ears, I could not stop.
We are in the middle of a series of six month tours from one country to the
next, enough time to ingest the cultural and regurgitate it in our
music, all patterned locally.
Unfortunately, most of my contemporaries are long passed, Pavel
mentioned, thinking aloud. But if you are interested, perhaps one
afternoon you could come by my apartment and we could organise a
little session of sorts. It sounds as though it could be very
intriguing indeed.
Prague was like that in so many ways. By that, I mean opportunities
seemed to fall from the sky. A little initiative, a distinct lack of
fear and a modicum of self confidence and there wasn't very much in
Prague that couldn't be accomplished given time.
For weeks, like in Utrecht, we stuttered in our efforts to find a
place to live. It wasn't our intention to become permanent residents
of the hotel we were quartered in, even if there was a sauna in the
building with masseurs and masseuses, professionally asexual but
imminently competent at squeezing out the aching of alcohol from
your bones and muscles every afternoon before beginning the next
binge.
And make no mistake, those several weeks of stuttering was primarily
owed to a child-like fascination with spending entire afternoons and
evenings glued to the same table as customers came in and out,
joining tables with complete strangers, becoming acquaintances, beer
partners, co-conspirators. When that wasn't enough there were the
Non Stop mini gambling establishments where, incredibly, you could
drink 24 hours a day if needed.
But it wasn't only musicians or drunkards or ex-pat detritus that we were
dredging up in our sojourns and night prowling as we ambled or
stumbled variously from tram to side street, down dank beer cellar
stairwells, sat at tables with strangers, chain-smoked in a
dishevelled pattern of on again-off again conversations before
emerging hours later back up onto the suddenly chaotic streets, the
touristed pedestrianisation of human mish-mash with a gargle of
foreign tongues tingling in our ears.
One night we were in U Stare Pani killing time with cigarettes and
no particular goal in mind once the time had been killed other than
staring at the bar maid, a particularly engaging Moravian champagne
of a woman with flowing chestnut curls, dimpled cheeks, bright brown
eyes and a careless smile that whispered into every male heart it
was pointed at.
It was quite some time before the first act was coming on and we
weren't even certain we would stay long enough to hear the initial chords
when a foursome of performance artists arrived - we could sense they
were performance artists, dressed as they were in a variety of
costume but carrying no musical instruments thus clearly not the
opening act.
They took a table near us and set about their little gag: Milos,
Jaroslav, Robert and Ivo, all of whom shared a spacious attic duplex
in Prague 6, Bubenec, each speaking in character of their chosen
character: Milos as T G Masaryk, the Czech ideologist and
politician, dressed in an overcoat with woolen collar open at the
neck covering a white shirt, wearing a distinctive pince-nez,
whitish goatee covering the area around his mouth and chin. (more on
Masaryk accomplishments, etc)
Jaroslav as 1984 winner of Nobel Prize for Literature and poet,
Jaroslav Seifert, native of Zizkov, our favourite neighbourhood
dressed in simple peasant clothes, flannel shirt and stained grey
sweater his large face surrounded by a mane of white hair, the only
one of the foursome without facial hair, so chosen Jaroslav later
confided because he had difficult, with his light complexion and
fair hair, at growing facial hair at all.
Robert as Jan Hus, populist reformer, most imposing of them all with
his hair in typical medieval tonsure, long, almost triangular white
beard (although this was a sticky point, Robert admitted that
although oft depicted as such, he wasn’t entirely certain Hus had a beard) dressed in a burlap robe and wearing a paper hat with pictures of the devil on it, which is what was alleged he was made to wear whilst imprisoned, speaking Bohemian rather than Latin, which was translated for us sotto-voce along the lines of Lord Jesus Christ, I am willing to bear most patiently and
humbly this dreadful, ignominious, and cruel death for Thy gospel
and for the preaching of Shy World.
And finally Ivo as Antonin Dvorak, flowing handlebar moustache
speckled with grey and white, waistcoat, bow tie, black overcoat and
holding of course, a baton.
It doesn't make any sense, Albert protested, shaking his head and wagging
his finger simultaneously. Firstly, you're all of different eras and
save for Seifert over there, you'd all be dead so such a gathering
would be physically impossible.
Oh no, Seifert corrected, I'd be quite dead as well.
Well, it's artistic and tourist-oriented, Jan Hus explained. You see this is
primarily a method of promoting cultural awareness for both Czechs
and tourists alike, dressing up like this we promote Czech history
and culture. Of course, we aren't always IN character but on the
other hand, it is rather enjoyable to gauge peoples' reactions when
for example, after a long day of socialising with the hoi polloi,
working hard for our grant from the Czech Tourism Authority, we
enter a palace such as this eager to quench our collective thirst
and forget about the burdens which harangue our mutual characters.
Seifert, or I, rather, have nearly 30 volumes of collected poems,
born in Zizkov 1901, journalist until 1950 when I started being
respected and paid enough as a poet to earn a living on that alone.
Never toeing the party line. Want to hear my acceptance speech from
December 1984 in Stockholm? He cleared his throat, but we protested
we didn't have enough time…Of course, he interrupted, by then I was very
old and very weak, not like now…
Of course, it's not all about government grants or even eccentricity, Antonin
added patiently. In order to understand those with whom we want to
identify, we mimic them. I love Dvorzak's music and yet can't play
any musical instrument, have no talent or inclination towards
composing myself and of course, philosophically I would add that I
could never assimilate entirely, just as we are alive acting as dead
people who were once alive, Albert. It would create a split
personality, a duality between the person I am imitating and myself
and I would honestly struggle to delineate the difference between
myself and Dvorak.
Oh, c'mon! Masaryk laughed, slapping his palm on the table. No
amount of imagination, no costume, no nothing could ever create the
illusion that you were he or as talented or frankly, anything. Face
it, you're out of work, not composing. Instead of creating software
programmes, or sweeping crumbs off of a white linen table in a fancy
restaurant populated by politicians or cultural icons or German
tourists you have placed yourself in this vortex of character
imitation, not enough yourself so why not be someone else, correct?
Well for that matter, Dvorak confessed, I'm probably more entitled
to dress as Goofy or Donald Duck at the Euro Disney than I am a
famous composer but character imitation being what it is, guild-less
and free, well, there is no prerequisite and the entire plausibility
of it ultimately comes down to me. I can be prideful of being the
best Dvorak I can be but Goofy? Good or bad or indifferent, I would
be simply lost.
Masaryk scoffed and the conversation was becoming uncomfortably
heated as though all of the petty controversies polluting the daily
life of four grown men who lived together, spent most of their days
together dressed as other people, parading characters for tourists
and countrymen, was finally coming to a head, their frazzled ability
to maintain a semblance of civility between each other, as it would
appear a suddenly famous rock band whose fame had grown their egos
to unacceptable proportions and led to their ultimate split up, we
could sense the fabric unravelling.
We left them, Seifert warming up to his acceptance speech, Jan Hus
giving speeches about sacrifice, Dvorak waving his baton to an
imaginary orchestra and Masaryk rearranging the ashtray and
straightening the table cloth.
1:52 AM
Chapter 11: After Months of Waiting, The Sun Rises Again
“She’ll only break your heart, it’s a fact. And even if I warn you, even though I guarantee you that the girl will only hurt you terribly, you’ll still pursue her. Ain’t love grand?”
-Ms Nora Digger Dinsmoor in Great Expectations.
After all those months of unreturned letters, there was bound to be
an answer eventually. I hadn't expected to just run into her outside
the flat though, I have to admit.
Yet there she was, seated regally at the small table outside the Somalian takeaway, casually smoking a cigarette and watching me with amusement as I
neared and my eyes roared to life from a dull and listless stare.
And so here she was. Weeks, months of writing had conjured her as
mystically as I had met her. She shrugged her shoulders at my
incredulous gaze. I suppose I never really believed that all the
writing would work. I suppose deep down I had prepared myself for
the worst case scenario and despite the optimism bred in the act of
writing all those letters, sharing all those thoughts had somehow
grown with little nurturing like a cactus that needed little water.
I decided on holiday, she explained. The tour was going well but there was a break in the show so when I finally returned to Paris, your letters were sitting there waiting for me, like an unfinished novel. For two straight days I read them all, word for word, stopping only to cat nap a few hours here and there.
Your presence coursed through me like a hot shower. I decided to
take the train here immediately.
I would love to have a chance to freshen up she mentioned when
several moments had passed without my saying anything and had simply
looked at her instead, dumbfounded. It was a long train ride…
Of course, I immediately stammered, picking up her suitcase and
hurrying through the front door of the café. The men playing cards
around a table stared up expectantly when we entered, amused by this
sudden stranger who had declined their hospitality for hours and had
preferred only to sit outside at the lone table and chair nursing a
glass of tea and watching the flotsam of Amsterdamsestraatweg
passing by.
I made brief discussions, as brief as possible: friend from Paris,
stopping by a few days…but their curiosity would not release it's
clutches from us and they continued on with questions, bemused or
perhaps encouraged by my impatience.
How long are you staying for?
Why are you here?
What part of Paris?
What do you do?
Did you come by train or plane?
Why are you with this one?
When we were finally released I clattered up the stairwell without
waiting for her dreading whatever humiliating disarray awaiting us
in the flat. When we reached the stairwell I stopped a moment in the
kitchen which was devoid of the afternoon help peeling potatoes and
the smells of cooking still hanging in the air like someone else's
memories.
You'll have to excuse the state of this place I forewarned, pushing
open the door to the second landing. She shrugged me off. You've
prepared me quite well in fact she mentioned, reminding me of the
degree to which I had described the flat and the lingering smells of
the kitchen. So far it is precisely as you wrote. So far, I laughed
to myself.
My, she stammered to herself taking it all in, stepping back and
wiping a stray hair from her forehead which had fallen in the
exertion of walking up the steep incline of the second stairway. My,
she repeated, having a glance at the piles of accumulated
bachelorhood; the vague indifference of the unwashed plates, piles
of empty containers, newspapers, empty beer and wine bottles, the
stale smoke hanging in the air like a dense fog even though all the
windows had been left open.
Well, perhaps you underestimated the degree of your slovenliness,
she laughed.
I had to set about explaining the contraption of the shower and
toilet combination in the floor below, struggling to find clean
linens and towels, bemoaning the lack of good mirrors and even the
simple addition of a small table inside the shower for grooming. We
weren't particular after all. But she wore a face of pleasant
indifference which in the effort to conceal produced a mixture of
shock masked by a determination not to allow her disgust to
register. She didn't have to say anything. I was well aware of what
any normal human being might begin to imagine seeing such squalor
first hand. Albert and I rarely noticed – there were no guests
invited in this hovel and thus how we chose to keep it had been
precisely how we chose to keep it without the intrusions of keeping
up appearances.
While she disappeared into the shower I quickly leapt back up the
stairs into the main room to make some demented effort at
straightening up; ashtrays dumped into empty pizza boxes and halal
meal containers, bottles quickly collected, drained into the sink
and placed neatly back into their respective empty slots in the
crates they were once carried in, magazines and newspapers piled
into one corner, clothing picked up and thrown into a pile within
the makeshift closet.
However we had no vacuum and little more than a hand broom to sweep
up the lingering odours and ashes, dust and stains, mildew and
assorted filth. By the time she had finished freshening up the flat
had taken on an almost unrecognisable order which despite the state
of it's interior, was vastly improved by any effort to render it
back to it's original state which quite frankly, had never been too
charming or too clean to begin with.
Albert was no doubt already at the café and as I huffed and puffed
around the room I remembered myself – that I too was covered in the
dust and wood shavings and drying concrete, that my clothing hadn't
been washed all week and that I likely smelled far worse than the
pong of the interior of the flat. I lit a few candles and several
sticks of incense hoping carelessly to mask it all in perfume, the
room and myself.
She wasn't fooled. She made the best of it, put on a smile,
pretended it was another world altogether and yet still one we were
both in.
So we were fine. I just needed a shower and to let Albert know the
one room flat being used by two people had now become three people.
******
Of course, it was Albert's idea, one which had crossed my mind
several times but never reached my lips, to include Anastasia in our
rehearsal. We hadn't done much for weeks until then but one night
we'd stayed in, ordered Somalian food from downstairs and ate it on
the table in the Styrofoam containers they were served in, plastic
forks, napkins, washed down with a few bottles of beer.
So how about you sing a few with us? He asked grandly, pushing
himself away from the table and tossing the remains of his meal in
the large bag of rubbish that was opened just a few feet from the
table. We haven't had much inspiration these days, Albert explained
and I've heard from Witold that you've got a beautiful voice.
Anastasia, not one for self-promotion, at least not from what I'd
witnessed, rolled her eyes. But I came to see Witold, to get away
from singing, she tried to explain.
Still, we've got to rehearse and well, don't you have to keep your
voice in shape?
I could tell he wasn't going to let this one go although I wasn't
certain if he was making a big deal out of it simply to annoy the
two of us, because he was sceptical, curious or just wanted to hear
her. I started to beg off, not much in the mood to play myself but
then an evil little grin crossed her face and she nodded sure, why
don't you play a little for me now and then, well, if the mood
strikes me, I'll join in. After all, I haven't heard either of you
play before…
We don't know any songs, I fumbled, again explaining how we
ad-libbed everything, never learned a jazz song and probably weren't
worthy of having her singing anyway. But Albert was having none of
it. Oh hell, Witold, we haven't needed to know songs before, let's
show your guest a little sample of what we can do…
He got up from the table and moved with sudden dexterity into the
living room where the bass was leaning up against the side of the
sofa. Reluctantly and knowing there was expectation in her
bemusement, I too rose from the table and made my way into the
living room, our little improvised studio with horrific acoustics.
Outside the hustle and bustle of Amsterdamsestraatweg was audible.
Anastasia made to clean up the table and light a few candles while
the two of us tried to tune up and get into each other's keys.
And it was true I thought to myself, putting the reed in my mouth, I
was curious and excited about the idea of her singing with us. We'd
discussed it but never with any seriousness and she was here after
all, why not?
But maybe it was the nerves or the outside noises or fear that the
landlord would hear us down two floors and complain at the racket
because normally we waited until late at night when they'd already
shut down and the café was closed before starting to rehearse,
normally well into a session of beer, reaching blindly for
inspiration but here we were anyway and Albert looking at me
expectantly, fingers poised. Goofing off to relax, I blew a long
sequence to begin a sort of soulful snake charmer song, holding and
blowing while Albert slowly filled in behind me, plucking furtively.
In time we started to build on it a little more, lost a little
deeper until I was no longer aware she was even in the room. We went
on like this for quite some time before realising there was nowhere
for her to step in, even if she'd wanted to. I stopped playing and
stood there with the sax around my neck and looked up at her staring
at us both with arched eyebrows, bemused.
I don't think I've heard anything quite like, she stammered for a
moment. I've never sung to anything like it, that's for sure, and
she tittered and we all guffawed, relieved for the moment. You guys
are, well, a bit weird, I'll say. I didn't realise…
We tried a few more on for her, laying it out thick and
experimentational until ever so slowly, sipping a drink of scotch
Albert had poured her from his alcove stash, she stood up and made
her way towards us, hips swaying slightly until I closed my eyes
entirely and then I heard it: she wasn't singing words, just trying
to find a melody somewhere amid the confusion, her voice huskier
than I'd imagined, having never heard it before and only conjured it
in dreams. Soon I was trilling and Albert was slapping and we began
to hear this mournful humming that gradually birthed into some sort
of lullaby in French.
I don't know how long it went on, maybe it was only seconds, or a
few minutes, it was impossible to tell, but just as suddenly as it
began, it ended and we all stood there in the room not saying a
word, staggered not by a sudden genius but by the strangeness of the
collaboration until Albert finally set the bass to the side, wiped
his brow and lumbered back into the kitchen to pull a fresh beer
from the crate and settled back down into his chair. That's enough
for me for the moment, he mumbled into his sleeve as he wiped it
across his lips. I think I need some time alone, why don't you two
have a night out?
*****
None of us said anything about those few moments as a trio and
several days went by before we were encouraged, by virtue of several
bottles of wine, to do it again. In the interim, Albert stayed long
hours away from the flat, giving us our space. Anastasia was much
more animated out of her surroundings than she had been in them. She
regaled our friends at Martkzicht with steamy tales of the clubs
she'd been singing at in Paris and in Milan, embellishing, I hoped,
for my benefit rather than that of the others. She revealed tiny
shards of her past to me over days drawing out on canal walks, bike
rides and afternoons sat on various café terraces soaking up the
rare sun and sipping Belgian ales. She seemed to demur less and less
as though whatever fears had held her back when we were in Paris had
mystically evaporated. Don't get me wrong, she wasn't a sputtering
fountain of information. What little bit I learned was drawn out
over a long process but at least it appeared I was making headway,
at least I was no longer feeling like an intruder on her secret
life.
And then a few nights later, when we were sipping wine around the
kitchen table, listening to a few CDs she'd brought over with her,
she suddenly asked if we knew how to play any jazz standards. You
know, she said, My Funny Valentine or Mack the Knife, or anything
really, something I could sing to that wouldn't require, hmmm, too
much skill for you two to play. Not that I don't think you could
play standards well, I dunno, what do you think? Do you ever play
something known?
Albert and I looked at each other with a mutual grimace. We'd never
tried it before to be honest. What was the point for a double
bassist and a saxophonist when we had no one else to back us? We'd
been left with improv and weirdness out of necessity and even with
lovely female vocals we doubted the two of us trying to slam out
some jazz standard was going to sound very good.
But hell, Albert said. We can try it a time or two, just for the
novelty. How bad can it possibly sound just because Witold can't
read music and I can't play anything I didn't make up on my own? He
snorted into his glass. What do you think, Witold, are you up for a
little Mack the Knife? I'll do a smooth walking bass line to start –
and you just start going from there…
But before we even started, Anastasia wanted to get us in the mood
by telling us how the version we knew was nothing like the original
murder ballad, the tales of Mackie Messer, Und Macheath, der hat ein
Messer, doch das Messer sieht man nicht and she sings it with real
sinister intent, the man with the knife no one sees waiting to
spring it out and stab away, the cold hearted murderer…
And sure enough while she's telling us this, setting a background,
Albert began thumping the notes, slow and morose. And she sang a
little more and then, struggling to find the right note, I blew a
little – it was rudimentary, no doubt. Pitiful maybe, but Anastasia
seemed to gain a little more life because our efforts. She let us
walk through a few versions of it while she hummed the beat she
wanted. Man, it was a lot of run-throughs as I kept missing the note
and trying to figure it out from a little memory and a little help
from Anastasia's humming but after awhile, it started to take form.
Not any form that any of us had ever heard it in before because it
was slow and melancholic and not snappy in the slightest. And we
went through it several more times until it began to feel a little
less stunted and then we were ready, from the top and wow, we were
just blown away by Anastasia singing this horrible song about a
murderer, changing the lyrics, switching from German to Italian to
French, nothing like we'd ever heard with that low husky voice until
she broke with a higher pitched warble, a plea, almost.
And again we were all a little overwhelmed, and it felt a little
kinky almost, the three of us standing together there in that room
past midnight, sweating and letting it all ooze into us and then
breathing it back out slowly.
*****
The next morning we decided we would learn at least three songs,
this Mack the Knife version, like a sinister milonga, My Funny
Valentine and How Long Has This Been Going On. Each one had its own
strange stamp to it, the tentative, nearly talent less version of
our playing that she worked so hard to overcome and indeed, her
vocals were quite capable of carrying us beyond. We forgot all about
drinking for hours, simply rehearsing in that room over and over
again until we all began to feel comfortable with it.
Between these three standards we sandwiched two originals – well,
two songs that Albert and I sort of made up as we went along and
which Anastasia showed an adept ability to sing around. I had to go
to work during the day, Albert stayed in sleeping and Anastasia took
trips alone to Amsterdam, unbeknownst to us, scouting around places
we might play. It was if we all had some purpose – well, Anastasia
had had a purpose in her mind all along, it was Albert and I who
really felt the difference, really felt as though for the first time
since we'd come here we were finally doing what we'd come to do. And
Anastasia was the alchemist who turned our slovenly, drunken and
pointless hours into quasi-disciplined sessions of rehearsals. I
didn't have the energy to drink. We would rehearse for a few hours
at night after dinner and then I'd drop off to sleep sitting there
on the sofa afterwards. And after a few weeks it began to feel as
though we were really on to something. Just what, we weren't quite
sure but at least it had this tactile quality of accomplishment
about it.
*****
Riding my bicycle back from work, covered in cement dust and paint,
I found myself veering predictably for Marktzicht. After all, it was
Friday, the week over and I was exhausted from the week of work and
practice something no one else in the trio was undertaking.
Anastasia had her own wealth, I was certain of that. You don't have
a flat in the location she had in Paris without some resource hidden
away somewhere even if everything about her seemed to exude material
poverty. She bought her clothes from second hand shops, rarely
seemed to eat and certainly was no extra strain on my budget staying
with us. Both Albert and I were subletting our flats in New York but
unlike Albert, I wasn't charging the market value and making a neat
profit on the side. I suppose I should have done but there are so
many people in those neighbourhoods who come there with their stupid
little dreams of success and fame that I didn't want to be the first
to gouge them. Let them learn on their own.
And so yeah, I was the only one working. We still had plenty left
over from Albert's settlement although my cut had been dwindling and
this forced the work in a way, I still preferred working. Firstly,
for the social aspect of it – I couldn't sit around the flat all day
listening to music and reading like Albert could. I'd had years of
that already and frankly, I could have done that back in New York. I
preferred this life of labour, it was in my blood just like these
efforts at music. All in the name of the father, so to speak. And of
the mother? My mother? I couldn't think of her because doing so only
worried me. I considered her dead. As dead as my father whether it
was fact or fiction.
Swinging down Loefstraat, I spied Albert already out on the terrace
entertaining himself with a few locals and locked my bike up against
an iron post.
You've just missed Anastasia, he enthused, clearly in a celebratory
mood. She's gone back to the flat to change but stopping by here,
she brought a little news with her.
I motioned for my usual Amsterdametje and took a seat, still covered
in the day's dirt. So what it is it?
A gig, he smiled. Anastasia's gotten us a gig. In Amsterdam.
*****
It was a bit of trickery, she admitted as we celebrated in an Indian restaurant later that evening. Since you guys don’t have any demo tapes and haven’t really played anywhere of note, I set up a meeting with the booking agent at this club called Alto on the basis of my own recent tour in Italy. You see, I’ve got a few reviews and clippings of my own and I was able to have my agent sent a few of the recordings that have been done in preparation of a CD. I told the booking agent that I was in town and wanted to do a gig. I told him I had two jazz musicians from New York also in town and we wanted to try out some new material but that we needed to set up the gig fairly quickly because we were all going to pick up on the tour in Italy at the end of the month.
So, he had a look through everything, listened to my demos and agreed on the spot that we could be squeezed in, not as a headlining act but as support. She smiled coyly as Albert, beside himself with angst and drinking even faster than usual, in part because of the heat of the curry and in part because of his new- found nerves. So who is the headlining act, he asked impatiently.
Why none other than the legendary Hans Dulfer…
Albert and I looked at each other blankly. We knew legends. Perhaps not Dutch legends, but plenty of jazz legends and Hans Dulfer was unfortunately, not one of them.
I suggest we go this Wednesday night, Anastasia enthused over the dead silence as we attempted to figure out who this legend was. You can hear him in person, maybe even introduce yourselves. As I understand it he is quite an unorthodox but brilliant tenor sax player.
Great, I sighed. A brilliant tenor sax player. What am I going to bill myself as? The one of New York’s kings of mediocre tenor sax playing?
It isn’t important, Witold, she nursed, touching my arm before turning back to her meal. The important thing is to get your foot in the door. I think once you’ve done that you’ll find it isn’t such a frightening prospect after all.
Oh but it was. Hours upon hours, day after day, the frightening prospect of it hounded me like a irrepressible nightmare.
I changed my routine quickly. I still got up in the morning and went to my job, but as I told Anastasia, there wasn’t time for me to do much else other than practice. Suddenly I was the most dedicated musician on Earth. Every waking hour I was practicing to the point where both Albert and Anastasia would simply leave most evenings to get a break from me playing. Albert moaned incessantly. For god’s sake Witold. You aren’t going to become brilliant in a matter of weeks. Not after all these years of striving to be mediocre. Face it. Wallow in it. We both know neither of us are very good and if you ask me, that’s part of our charm. Suddenly becoming dedicated is not only an unappealing new element to your personality, but it doesn’t fit you. I feel like I’m suddenly rooming with a maniac.
Anastasia for her part, was subtly encouraging. No doubt she didn’t want to embarrass herself singing with our awful playing but she had already committed to it. Committed to me, I liked to kid myself in those waking hours. And I wasn’t going to let her down.
And with time flying, I woke one morning a week or so before the gig to find that she was not lying next to me on that beat-up pull out sofa mattress. I hadn’t heard her stir, hadn’t heard her get up, hadn’t notice her departure.
In her place, set upon the coffee table that was pushed to the front wall when the sofa bed was pulled out was a single flower and a note. She was gone.
*****
I awoke that morning as I had each of the four mornings before it;
for the first few seconds of consciousness I felt nothing - that
delicious absence of pain – didn't even realise the pain I would
feel again coming on as slowly the fog in my head lifted and memory
returned. But then in one millisecond I would remember where I was
as I stared up at the browning stains of the ceiling, the cobwebs
gathering in the corner directly to the left of the sofa upon whose
arm my feet were resting and in that millisecond every would return
like a cramping abdominal pain in a mid-spasm episode of irritable
bowel syndrome. Well, not everything. Just the realisation that
Anastasia was not here followed quickly like a right hook follows a
series of penetrating and exploratory jabs looking for the opening,
that I didn't know when she would be back when I would see here
again, here or elsewhere.
And then a psychosomatic pain would rub it's way through my joints
individually until I could feel myself involuntarily curling into a
foetal position, inch by inch until my knees reached my elbows and
the blankets were pulled not over a recognisable human form, but a
cruel and tiny, curled char of a human being's soul.
I could already smell Albert's Winstons burning away in the room as
he sat in the kitchen having his first coffee and vainly attempting
to focus on the words of his dog-eared copy of the English
translation of De Gedichten van Constantin Huygens. He had been
reading the same book for three weeks, always at the same time of
the morning, getting no further than the first dozen pages, reading,
then rereading passages until eventually the caffeine would kick in
and a few of the words began to focus. By then it was time to stand
and face the day.
As I had every morning since she'd left with her unbearable little
note, I contemplated a series of actions to ease the pain. I could
sit up and reach for whatever dregs of the evening's beer were left
over in the bottle on the coffee table beside the sofa. I could
continue lying on the sofa and practice squeezing my abdominal
muscles until I could distract the pain out of me in yoga like
fashion, or pretend to feel it leaving. I could try and imagine
myself in a nightclub somewhere, imagine the inhale and exhale, the
fingers along the saxophone, the people in front who were but blurs,
passengers on a distant imagination train stuck forever in the same
terminal. Any number of tricks employed to forget, none of which
would work, leaving me with the uncomfortable conclusion that whilst
lying forever on the sofa was perhaps the act of a man stricken with
inertia, it was not the act of forgetting, nor easing and thus,
inevitably, I would swing my feet off of the arm of the sofa and
place them on the floor simultaneously pushing myself to an upright
position.
You're up! Albert chirped with annoying alacrity. For a man who
himself greeting the onset of each new day like a new pain
discovered, Albert had been disgustingly enthusiastic ever since
we'd discovered Anastasia's letter. Not because he was happy to see
her go but that he believed, in his own misguided but
well-intentioned way that somehow, by exposing this new, nearly
criminal zeal for existence he could also influence me to embrace a
like-minded approach to the impending disasters of the day, as
though his sugar-coating misdirection of the pain I could not help
but embrace and wallow in like a man infatuated with his own disgust
would somehow similarly afflict me and remotely ease my burden.
I gave him high marks for the effort. It was not easy for Albert to
feign enthusiasm when his entire being, as long as I had known it
anyway, had been constructed for precisely the opposite, an
appalling aversion to cheerleading, a sterile blanket of immunity
and apathy that covered him and his flesh like a thin, ratty
overcoat. I admired him for the effort – the first time I could
recollect any such effort streaming out of him solely for the
benefit of another. As I scratched my head and focused my eyes on
first the coffee table, then the overflowing ashtray and the empty
bottles in front of me, I felt vaguely appreciative for such
efforts. But they were all for naught. The feigned enthusiasm merely
underscored the severity of my situation as though he had come with
a cheery countenance to my death bed to tell me what a beautiful day
it was and how many more beautiful days there would be to follow.
I cleared my throat severely several times until I worked up a
healthy wad of phlegm into my mouth, spitting it reluctantly into
the ashtray. The day gives birth. I stood finally with aches and
pains that one becomes aware of only in an ultra sensitised state of
low esteem and made my way to the kitchen table where Albert sat,
staring at me expectantly.
Gradually, I regretted to note, the scent of domesticity was ebbing
from what had become a sort of breakfast nook during Anastasia's
stay and in its place reappeared the gruesome dishevelment of two
miserable and sloppy men living in a miserable flat looking out over
a busy street of passer-by strangers and impatient traffic. The few
dishes we had were again piled unwashed from the residue of
Indonesian and Somalian late-night take away meals, bottles were
everywhere, ashes dumped in any convenient container, a general haze
of smoke, a hue of greyish ambivalence pervaded and outside, another
cloudy day to greet us.
It's Saturday, Albert exclaimed as though revealing I'd forgotten
having slept through Christmas Eve and a pile of presents waited for
me under a childhood tree adorned with tinsel and blinking lights.
No work, he added, as if I needed the reminder.
No work means nothing to do but wallow, I thought to myself as I
stared at his ridiculously happy moon face finishing off the last of
his coffee and lighting another cigarette. This Saturday means that
last Saturday I was waking up with cowbells in my ears and Anastasia
in my arms and it means that this Saturday I have woken to a
grudging acceptance of a miserable fate awaiting me. What possible
joy could be found in opening this unending bag of coal?
Wordlessly, I poured coffee while Albert watched me expectantly as
though I were a pregnant cat about to give birth to a miraculous
litter of kittens.
I sat down across from him and fumbled for a pack of Drum.
I was thinking we could go to the Saturday market, load up on
herring and salmon and mature Gouda cheese and make ourselves some
kind of feast for the afternoon, I'm starving, he recounted as I
continued staring at him as though this new Albert were something of
an alien who had taken over the previous Albert's soul casing. And,
he said gradually having elicited nary a sound of approval or
disgust from me, I have a surprise. Two surprises, actually.
I rolled a cigarette and tapped it against the kitchen table before
popping it between my lips and lighting. I inhaled deeply and almost
immediately induced a brief coughing spasm before drowning it out
with a quick swig of bitter black coffee.
Which surprise do you want to hear about first?
C'mon man, I chided, what the fuck are you talking about? Since when
do you have surprises?
He stood up from the kitchen table, grabbed a bag from the floor
just beneath the ladder leading up to his nook and produced two
tickets. Voila, he stated smugly. Two tickets for tonight's show at
Tivoli to see Walter Trout and The Radicals. He waved them under my
nose and then dropped them next to my cup of coffee while he leaned
over and pulled a fresh Grolsch from the crate and popped it open
for emphasis.
Damn. I wasn't beside myself but grudgingly, I let some of my
delusion leak out to be replaced by a vague enthusiasm. This kind of
blues guitar could be just the tonic. I glanced over at Albert who
was still watching me for a reaction. And oh yes, for the price of a
ticket, I let a slow smile escape me.
***
So what's the second surprise, I asked after enough coffee had
entered me to send me on a morning colonic and refreshed, returned
to the kitchen table to pop open my own Grolsch and pretend to feel
human again.
I'm in love.
For some reason, this sent me into a spasm of hysterics. Albert, in
love? With me kicked in the balls and groping for solid ground,
Albert, the man with few discernable emotions has suddenly decided
to find himself in love? What sort of sick irony was this at work?
With what, I asked reluctantly.
Not what, he corrected. Who.
Oh fuck off. What are you talking about?
Well, check your cynicism at the door my friend. This isn't some
ridiculous tale of meeting some fanatically self-referential Dutch
woman last night in a pub last night and falling in love, oh no,
this is much more beautiful than that. You see, I went to visit the
whores last night (this is what he called it, frankly enough,
visiting the whores…) and I came across an exceptional character
whose honesty, forget about whose beauty, simply knocked me loose
and sent all my change spilling out of my pockets.
I drank my beer faster shaking my head. Tell me you haven't fallen
in love with a whore, my god, what a cliché.
Not just any whore, Witold. An honest whore. An honest whore who
told me everything I ever wanted to know about the psychology of
whores without ever having taken my dick out my pants. A whore who
told me things I never realised not about herself, but myself.
What the fuck are you talking about?
I have too much ego, Witold. This is what the whore told me. She
wouldn't fuck me. She wanted me to go until I insisted I'd still pay
her even though she wouldn't fuck me. I wanted to hear why she
wouldn't fuck me.
How hard could that be to figure out? You stink of beer, you have no
respect, you can't get hard? What was it?
She told me that as a rule, she only fucked cripples and ugly men
and men with no egos. She said for a beautiful woman, her profession
would be disgusting if it were merely the money and the act itself.
She was looking for redemption and she found redemption only through
helping lost causes, like a saint, or a nurse. Her logic was that
any man who had too much ego sullied the goals she had in mind. She
wants to give comfort to those less fortunate not to give comfort to
horny, drunken men. Not to give a suck and fuck to a man too lazy to
find love on his own but only to those who could never find it on
their own and had to pay for it because no other woman but a whore,
would fuck them.
And this was enlightening?
Well, hardly at first. It pissed me off, quite frankly. But in the
middle of listening to this good faith whore who only fucks lost
causes, this patron saint of pussy, it suddenly dawned on me that
this was precisely the woman I've been looking for all these years,
if I've been looking at all. A woman who isn't out to take my money
and feign pleasure for a fee. A woman who doesn't even want to give
me the time of day because I am not needy enough. Do you get that?
Not needy enough? The audaciousness of such an attitude from a
whore. It fascinated me. So I paid for her for hours, just to
discuss things with her. Not just the aspect of being a whore, but
everything. It turns out she's a medieval history major at the
university in Delft. Working on her doctorate. Can you imagine that?
You've lost me somewhere Albert. Somewhere between not getting laid
and paying a whore to talk to her. And to pay her all night to talk
to her no less.
No, you're missing it entirely, Witold. It isn't anything about
that, it's about finding someone who is real. Someone who is both a
scholar and a saint.
You believed some line about you not being needy enough? That she
only takes money from gimps and pathetic cases, a whore with a
heart? Is that what you're telling me? Am I hearing correctly?
It was amazing of course, getting lost in this absurd conversation.
For awhile I completely forgot my own misery, let it slip away as
though reading the news about someone else's misfortune and
shrugging it off.
And I'll tell you something else, Witold. I'm going back again
tonight to her after the show. I want you to come with me. I want
you to meet her.
You're out of your fucking mind, Albert? Do you hear what you're
saying?
Sceptical little man with a broken heart, yes, I hear what I'm
saying. I've lived years waiting for this moment that I never knew
was expected of me. There is hope for me yet. I have found the
saintly, intellectual whore and I intend on finding out more.
*****
A few nights later I’m pondering to myself that the weirdest thing to me is that this language, the lack of a common one – fascinates me. Here, take the Dutch word gift which means like, poison or venom, the opposite connotation of the word in English. It's as though the word connotates some psychological
feeling in one language different from another. They use the same
word and mean something different, having a different feeling to the
same word I use in English to mean practically the opposite.
You've been to the coffee shop, I see, Albert bemuses, eager for me to meet his new whore girlfriend.
Look, coffee shop too. Think about what image coffee shop elicits in
small town America and then think about the image of coffee shops in
Holland splashed with fresh coats of the yellow and green painted
colours of Jamaica, music buffeting the door way and the subtle
clouds of Dutch reared sativa like a dry ice mist as you enter. Same
words strung together altogether different meaning. It's difficult
to feel responsible when everything linguistic seems familiar and
yet the deception lies in these different meanings for the same
word. And that doesn't even count the fact that otherwise, the same
meanings have different words completely.
You only think it's confusing because most of your time in public is
spent drunk or getting drunk or starting to get drunk from simply
drinking. Your entire perception of reality is gnarled, like the
discs of a spine which need to be straightened into place.
The whore approached the table. She's celebrating her birthday and
just yesterday Albert had been celebrating his. They both find this
absurdly fascinating. But that connection wouldn't be put into gear
until later. At the moment, she made her way to the table with
determination, her left hand was curled into a ball and only moments
before she had been staring dreamingly at the stained photo wall
before she began to overhear us.
This conversation you're pretending to have is not realistic enough,
she accused, stopping just before our table. I don't believe either
of you are sincere. Why don't you talk about your feelings instead
of vacant eyed ideas? She held up Albert's glass to the light. What
the hell is this you're drinking? What could possible compel you to
prattle on like that about the fact that languages are different?
Are you so completely inebriated by facile observations that you can
no longer hear the difference? What are you doing here anyway?
We're musicians; Albert smiled, taking his glass back. These facile
observations are in fact a furthering of our communication on stage
between my bass and his saxophone. Our musical is predicated on
simple thought. We believe repetition in sound is the finest method
of building faux spirituality. Or perhaps barbaric spirituality.
None the less, we were merely rehearsing with words as our musical
notes. Imagine coming into this café and finding two dolphins in
lounge seats at this table chattering away in dolphin saying exactly
the same thing I was just telling Witold here about language. The
same story sounds more fascinating in a language you don't
understand. And that's precisely what we intend on portraying on
stage.
*****
Ova, she says much later in the evening where the three of us have
been taking turns trying to out drink ourselves. The feminine suffix
of generally every woman's surname in Czech is ova – which means
daughter of or belonging to, and is tacked on to the end of the
surname of the father.
What about it, Albert shrugged, puffing luxuriantly, splayed across
the back of the pullout sofa I slept on in the living room Doesn't
it allow you to be immediately identified as a female, branded, open
to attack from all sorts of perverts with a telephone book?
It's demeaning, she huffs, sipping a snifter of claret.
But you're not even Czech! Albert sits up suddenly knocking over an
empty beer bottle with his elbow and ashing on the floor
unintentionally, limbs akimbo.
She watches him with curiosity, the suddenness of Albert's
detangling from the sofa and coffee table paralysing her a moment
before regaining consciousness, not literally of course, but almost
stunned in a way. She had never witnessed one of Albert's face dives
into the coffee table high on absinthe. At least this time nothing
was broken.
No, I'm not Czech but I've been there before and when I found out
about this –ova- business, I turned right around and left.
If you're not Czech then what are you?
Slovakian, hahaha. She burst out laughing as though on the verge of
manic hysteria. I don't think Albert understood what the fuck she
was laughing hysterically for but it was infectious. Albert, from
the floor, laid his head back down and held his belly, his body
trembling with the effort to burst out laughing. And then, like some
sort of airborne virus, I too became infected, laughing, hey it's
ok, laughing what the fuck are we laughing about anyway?
*****
Albert and Marie became an item in a short few days. I shadowed them
like a sole paparazzo lost from the flock, every intimacy
re-crucifying me with memories. I watched them with a masochistic yen
feeling closer to Anastasia for the pain. But eventually it was too
much. Consummation needs privacy, so I decided I was going to head
out of town, find a train going somewhere and get away, romanticise
the travel as a sedative.
They bid me good bye with their arms around each other's waists,
probably muttering don't hurry back to themselves as they shut the
door behind me.
Where was I going to go but of course Paris. Not the touristic Paris
but the no alternative Paris wherein I'd prowl the streets thinking
about every fifth corner that just around the block was a girl who
looked just like Anastasia, enough so that I'd gasp audibly. I know
this because I caught myself hearing it and thought what the hell
kind of weird thing it was to actually gasp at the thought of the
sight of her. If I had been any weaker I'd have needed a wheel chair
and someone to push it otherwise at that very corner I would be
stuck standing as the image walked past me and what I thought had
been Anastasia had been some other waggish beauty with an entirely
different history, a completely different perspective, unawareness
of my existence entirely, immune to me as she continued on the
sidewalk. And this was entirely how Anastasia had once been. Non
entities. Visions in an incomplete future. Parasitic souls searching
for other souls to suck dry.
And what does a drinker do in a city like Paris with all the statues
and parks and monuments and history beckoning like a lurid filmy
cartoon whore? Why he finds a place with a good view of people, has
a seat and orders a litre of wine, of course.
When you drink alone in an empty café on a weekday afternoon there
isn't anyone but the staff to socialise with. I wrote that down on a
piece of paper and congratulated myself for forgoing the second
litre when the first was empty, standing up and straightening out
and walking aimlessly around the streets breathing in as many as I
could take in without stereotyping. I ended up after a few trips on
the Metro at Père Lachaise, watching people walking around looking
at tombstones, an outdoor museum of the dead, the famous lumped with
the infamous, what a fascinating collection of ghouls who walked
hand in hand from section to section of the cemetery with maps in
their hands to help them identify locations of names they weren't
even sure they knew but figured that if they were on the map they
must be famous somewhere.
I caught myself fantasizing a life wherein this walk through this
cemetery was eventually going to take me back to Anastasia's flat,
ringing the bell and hearing a tinge of excitement in her voice as
she sang out and pushed the security buzzer to let me in.
And then I caught myself hours later in a jazz café off of a main
boulevard, a candlelit cave with smoke and music. And listening to
the band playing I sat back and poured a few more litres of wine
down my throat, gradually of course, and let music and
interpretations fill my head instead of realities which were thus
far unrealistic.
*****
Albert and Marie together were simply not believable. How many months
had I heard Albert disdaining the complication of emotions whilst
simultaneously composing Te Deums to legalised prostitution.
And this is the same Albert who loved nothing more than to spend an
afternoon on the terrace of café near the Oude Gracht sipping
Belgian beer out of snifters and giving me little monologues on the
history of prostitution in a vain effort to shrug out of the
overcoat of guilt he felt for allowing himself such pleasures.
Even in the Middle Ages everyone was pretty pragmatic about it, he
would shine, warming to the subject for the 100th time. I could
recite the speech from memory I thought to myself as he continued.
Of course, back then it was more encouraged because it kept all the
perverts busy who might otherwise have been preying on the chaste
women ripe with rape and defilement in their eyes. And then of
course our dear friends the Protestants came along and started
forcing people into crazy ideas like tolerating sex only within
marriage. The Protestants made it a sin and a crime in the 16th
century. Get it? The Protestants regulating Prostitution, likely
only because people were getting the two mixed up.
Albert wheezed into his beer, grinding out a cigarette with an
athletic vigour only a heavy smoker can muster. Anyway, as you can
see, Prostitutants; whores disclaiming sex. God, I hate religion. He
spits phlegm into a handkerchief he pulled out of his front pocket
brought along specifically with such a use in mind. You can't spit
on the street, can you now, he asked at my somewhat repulsed
expression. So never mind about what religion does to your dick,
think about all the spitting and pissing in the streets that went on
back then. Unpaved roads, probably. Cows and sheep and chickens all
over the place. Open fires on the road side, soot everywhere.
What the hell are you talking about I ask suddenly as if only then
realising he was talking about nothing at all just putting sentences
in senseless organisation. This was how we practiced our music
without ever using our instruments. We couldn't imagine music as a
skill because it was too much about non verbal communication, an on
stage charades with notes until one picked up the rhythm of the
other and there was a reasonable understanding of something, simply
scratching the surface with repetition until the pattern became
familiar enough to recognise.
*****
However difficult it was imagining those two as a couple, always on
the brink of menacing the other, they were in fact, spending a lot
of time together which meant that eventually we were becoming a
trio.
Oh, Marie can play, Albert assured me as we were riding bikes back
at night after a concert at Ekko, some sort of tango opera. Marie
can play the accordion and congas. She could be very useful.
He knew quite well what I would think about it considering Anastasia
was the real missing piece to the trio and without saying what we
both knew, that this was just a crass replacement, an ornament to
stick on the hood of a jalopy, and eventually, I succumbed to it
anyway because frankly, I was outnumbered.
*****
Eventually I was back to going out alone simply because of the
intensity of intimacy going on in the flat making me feel like I was
in some suburban family room instead of a shabby flat above a
takeaway on the Amsterdamsestraatweg. Then they would demure and
demand that we practice in the flat instead of going out. We brought
beers in from the corner market by the crate, each of us carrying
our own along with a few bottles of Jinever to tinge the evening
further.
These rehearsals were like séances each of us attempting to conjure
up something that simply wasn't going to make an appearance. Other
nights, for some magical reason it would begin to appear as if it
were coming together a time or two. We have to get used to her
playing and she has to get used to ours, Albert complained in
between sets, sweat pouring down from his face just before he
slugged down a half dozen throatfuls of beer from his bottle. We
pretended we were in clubs because we had no gigs. And we couldn't
have performed in such a state. Albert and I alone were barely
credible but the three of us together, off key, out of sync,
disjointed and confusing, were simply incomprehensible. We might
have been forcibly removed from stage.
So we stayed in the flat at night and practiced. After weeks, we
were back out in the night again going in different directions
because night after night had made us sick of each other. Albert
went to Marktzicht, sometimes with Marie in tow but sometimes Marie
would go back to her flat and reality and spend a night away simply
to clean herself of the soot that hung over all of us from so many
nights in that little flat with nothing but those instruments, beers
and smoke.
I would head for Fabriekzicht and sit quietly at a corner stool at
the bar watching the people all around me out of the corners of my
eyes.
*****
And then one day, it was all over before the first gig was even
staged. All that hard work for nothing. Albert was fed up. Too much
fucking touching too many reassurances required, he complained. I
was right all along. People are too fucked up to have relationships.
They should all just accept solitude and get on with creating
something meaningful out of their living, something more meaningful
than fucking reproduction and mass consumption.
They had one outburst and that was the end of it. She came back to
Marktzicht one night and threw a glass of beer in Albert's face. The
punters around us all clapped with amusement as she turned on a heel
and walked back out. Albert accepted the barman's beer-soaked towel
and wiped his face off with it, smiling. I'm glad that was your
beer, Jan.
*****
Now the sensation of being in Utrecht was wearing thin.
Both of us had nearly had the last member of the trio in their
clutches only to see them escape in the case of Anastasia and get
relegated in the case of Marie. Now we'd both had an experience that
involved all three of us and now there weren't any more experiments
to be conducted in this city. It was bad luck. We weren't getting
anywhere.
The place we should go, Albert suggested one night as we were
spending thirty minutes trying to unlock our bicycles in mutually
drunken stupors, is Prague. Prague is where we will find our trio,
our muse.
******
Making matters worse was that Albert was beginning to grow restless.
I like it here, he confided one afternoon when we were sitting out
in a terrace swallowing beer and enjoying a rare sun despite the
chill. But we aren't getting anywhere with the music and I'm getting
bored having the same conversations with the same people, playing
the same game of cards over and over again. I'm beginning to think
it's time to move on.
Move on? But why? I thought you liked it here. It's your heritage
after all, isn't it?
Well for one, I've been thinking a lot about Prague. The more I read
about it, the more I hear others talking about it, the more I've
begun to believe that it'd be a better place for us – it's a lot
cheaper for one – the beers are almost free, the culture is
bursting, the women are rumoured to be angelic not to mention horny
and well, it seems more conducive to jazz and just odd enough a
place to accept us.
But we've been accepted here…
Oh, in bits, yes. But not overwhelmingly so. Besides, let's face it,
there aren't that many jazz locales, not enough gigs, and frankly
not enough inspiration. We're pissing away scads of money every day
we remain here – we've got to find something cheaper, somewhat
western yet with a hint of mystery – and old communist stronghold,
an historical nugget, my god, do you know Kafka lived there for
example?
Well what would we do there? We don't speak the language, for
example and whilst that's not a problem here, it could be a big
hurdle there.
Hardly. I've read there's some 20,000 expats living there – we
should be able to straddle the border between expats and locals,
find jazz venues, drink cheap beer and meet racy women. What more
could be expected? I'm tired of whores, I'm tired of getting stoned
to oblivion in coffee shops, I'm tired of drinking these little
glasses of lager, tired of living above this hideous Somalian
takeaway, the weather sucks and most of all, here you are moping
around most waking hours, thinking about that girl. It's not just
for me, but for you as well. The change of venue will do you good.
1:51 AM
Chapter 10: After The Burn Fades
“And the only sound that’s left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row”
-Bob Dylan, Desolation Row
Odd, what a difference a woman can make.
As Paris faded away and gradually made its way to Brussels, it was
impossible to ignore the simultaneously twitching in my brain,
staring out the window lost in reliving every memory I could manage
to piece together as though relieving every note played in a show,
the heavy eyelids of two sleepless nights holding sway in between
the sticky familiarity of a train ride which was heading back to
what was almost familiar yet still lacked the feeling of home.
*****
Was it so long ago pulling into the Utrecht Central Station with
Albert, eyes brimming raw with excitement and now, one woman later,
every kilometre left behind on the tracks was a deeper surge of the
incommunicable pain racing through the veins, numbing yet
simultaneously heightening the pain.
There was little to do in Utrecht but pine away, stuff two week's
worth of memories into every day to be replayed over and over, hour
by hour like a television sitcom you've seen so many times there
isn't an unfamiliar episode remaining.
It's not like we ever had that much to do to distract ourselves with
in the beginning.
Considering our cramped quarters, it was a relief to pick up black
work through a friend of a pub friend, if only to get out, focus on
something other than memories and clear some space in the head.
My apprenticeship as an electrician interrupted, I had retained
enough familiarity with a job site through the summers with my
father to be able to work my way around Arjen's when it came to
carpentry and basic electricity and so passed most days working off
the steam of infatuation with my hands.
At first it was more than sufficient as a distraction. Day over, I
would gather myself back to the flat, filthy from head to toe and
exhausted. If he wasn't already in a pub or café, Albert would be
drinking steadily in the flat, chain smoking and listening to music
through the flea market stereo he bought the first week we'd moved
in.
The flat itself was above that Somali takeaway on Amsterdamsestraatweg,
one flight above the kitchen where food was prepared we shared the
bathroom and shower facilities with the cook and her staff and then
another flight above it, the top floor of the building which opened
from a kitchenette into a 10 x 15 metre bare wood floor flat.
We'd partitioned the space as best as possible but it was a small
space for two people. A large kitchen table never used for eating
on, just dumping stuff on – books, papers, empty beer bottles,
clothes, rags and whatever else found it's way into the flat but no
further – the kitchen table like a border guard, was off to the
right clearing a vague path into what we determined to be a
combination of a front parlour and makeshift bedroom made up of a
futon which I slept on although usually only it's sofa form, rarely
bothering to even pull it out lest the trouble of having to push it
all back in the following morning. Just before entering the parlour
there was a small ladder leading to a small crawl space within which
Albert had tossed a mattress and a few small drawers. It wasn't of
such a height that he could stand up straight in it but in most
cases he didn't seem to care as it was enough work to crawl up into
the space and onto the mattress to snooze away the hours.
We had no television – like freaks without societal connections, our
only method of newsgathering was via innuendo and gossip in
Marktzicht and even then, limited. The familiar faces that took the
favoured places in the café gathered there every day as if following
through on a daily reservation, other workers coming in from a long
day with plenty to complain about, observe and contemplate, all
within the half pint amsterdametjes that were poured down their
thirsty gullets.
It was odd to consider that in every café the uniqueness of its regular patrons would render the innuendo and gossip individualised and that this went on in cafes and pubs not just here but every city in Holland in every country until the multiplications of humans, squeezing out the bitterness and complaints of the day as they refuelled with alcohol would have seemed mind-boggling, the chatter overwhelming and unique or not, predictable.
Everything had a method in the day of a worker. Following work there
was the obligatory shower although some either too lazy or too
impatient for drink would go directly to the café and start in. In
either situation, by 6, the café was flush with workers sat around
tables, depending on the weather in or out of doors, drinking beers
and gossiping, filling the air with themselves, their voices, their
laughter.
And then as though deflating, they would one by one, get up and head
home for dinner content that they were sufficiently buzzed to make
it through dinner, an hour or two of blank stare television and then
bed.
The first night out with Albert I attempted explaining the meeting
with Anastasia. In fact, although intoxication and distractions had blocked recalling doing so, I'd actually managed a few cryptic postcards to him that I
wasn't coming back straight away but beyond that, I hadn't mentioned
anything. Now I was a faucet that couldn't be turned off.
In time it was up to Albert to shut me up. Nothing's more annoying
than listening to someone prattle on about some girl, some
infatuation, some inability to shut one's mouth for a moment long
enough to allow the other to get a word in edgewise. So you see,
there is nothing more boring. We have an entire world here to talk
about, gigs to rehearse for, side streets to explore, people to
meet. I can't stomach the idea of spending the next few weeks listen
to you waddle on about some girl you just met as though you'd
already had five kids with her and you were reliving your memories
on a deathbed fifty years later. Enough already. I get the picture.
I've got every detail stored away in my head. Now seeing as how the
situation won't be changing any time soon, might I suggest we go
back about our business and end this incessant warbling about love
and women?
He was right, of course. At this rate I would drive away every
friend we'd met since we got here so I directed this passion and
enthusiasm to writing letters to her instead. Fucking encyclopaedias
they were, devotionals, hymns, scraps of poetry, lyrics, new Dutch
words I'd learned, things I saw in a given day that reminded of her
in every blade of grass, every shift in the wind, changing of the
sky, dawn to dusk as though there was not a droplet of a single
second I wished to pass without her having knowledge of it.
Anyone can tell you such obsession is not only unhealthy, but bound
by its very nature to disappoint, he went on, perhaps feeling a
tinge of guilt for his recriminations. Unless of course, you can
imagine a reciprocal relationship where the emotions of one are
equal to the emotions of another, in depth and intensity – puppy
love, if you will, which is not bound to last. For every pair of
high school sweethearts there, rolled out like a line of custom-made
Rolls Royces, there are five times as many crap cars manufactured
whose shells you will see littering streetscapes – just like these
false senses of love and harmony. We aren't meant to spend our time
wallowing in love with one another; we aren't wired for it because
it's too self-destructive. What would man ever accomplish if he
spent all his time trying to fall in love rather than merely trying
to get laid?
Albert was one to often preach the utility of whores – lamenting the
simplicity with which man's second most difficult labour after the
effort to acquire power, the effort to get laid, could have been
made if the world had merely embraced prostitution rather than try
to sweep it under the carpets of morality. Can you imagine, he would
struggle breathlessly with the potential of this fantasy of his, can
you imagine if everywhere in the world were like Holland, if getting
laid was merely a matter of walking around the corner with 100
guilders and a hard on in your pocket? Can you imagine all the
broken hearts that would have been saved, all the fucking time and
trouble we men could have been spared all these years? Fuck. You
think man has progressed and advanced so far in this space of time
and yet you wonder what he might have been able to do, far greater
heights in far less a period of time had he not been consumed with
constructing methods and schemes for getting laid….
But Albert, I said, deciding to play the devil's advocate solely
because I had a flutter of infatuation in my heart and because it
was still early afternoon yet I was already feeling light headed
from beer, uncertain I would last the night. Certainly you can't
imagine all of those girls being enterprising young capitalists who
don't mind exchanging a series of sucks and fucks over a period of
several years in exchange for financial security? Surely you
recognise that the majority are there against their will, or against
their nature, forced by circumstances into a life of prostitution.
Surely you can understand how unsavoury it must be for them, day in
and day out to take men into their bodies, no matter how clinical
the method is with which they deal with these bodies who have little
or no personalities, just hard little dicks to compel them. I mean,
do you imagine them all merely nymphomaniacs who found a sound
financial mechanism through which to express their nymphomania?
Albert scoffed. It is volunteer work, he muttered into his beer.
Sure, maybe the idea of servicing a dozen disgusting men a day isn't
so appealing but I'll tell you what IS appealing…the money they make
afterwards. I've spoken to them in great detail about this because
I'm fascinated by their lifestyles. Do you realise that here, out
into the light of freedom rather than the dark shadows of some
moralistic insanity that forces prostitutes into true servitude;
pimps, beatings, rapes, the whole nine yards, here, it is a simple
matter of paying your rent for a room for the night. You pay the
rent and the rest is yours, the decision on how much you make, how
many you are willing to fuck, is entirely your own. It's free
enterprise, he stated, poking his finger in my chest. Let's say, and
I know from having asked, that a room costs a girl the equivalent of
200 bucks or less a night. In an eight hour shift, and, ironically, EU human
rights labour laws play a role in this, a woman can take, on average
eight to sixteen men at let's say a going rate of 50 dollars a pop.
Do you realise the money involved? Hell, if I were a woman, I'd do
it. I wouldn't care. Keep your eyes closed, let your mind wander,
what's the difference? At the end of the night you've got a fat
bankroll of cash to keep you company.
You're going to absurd lengths to justify visiting whores instead of
trying to meet the local girls, I pointed out.
Bah, he spat. Meet the local girls. What for? So I can waste hours
of my time trying to impress them? So I can spend my own money on
them, to treat them like royalty, let them think their own shit
doesn't smell, say anything just to impress, just to convince that I
should be allowed between her legs? Why the stultifying
conversations alone make that a withering proposition. I don't want
to talk to women. It's been my experience that women, once they
believe they have you in their clutches and no longer have to be
interesting, will immediately fall back on the old clichés of
shopping and nagging, nagging and shopping, planning the nest,
blablabla. The whole thing makes me sick to contemplate. And for
what? Just to get laid? I don't want to have any children. Do I look
like husband or father material, he asked with a laugh, standing
back, holding out his arms so that I could regard his full
character. No, of course not. And so what am I left with? Lies.
Acting. Convincing myself that wasting a several hours of my time in
a bar with a complete stranger is somehow worth it all just because
on the periphery of it all lingers the faintest hope that perhaps
this stranger will be convinced or perhaps this stranger will become
drunk enough that she no longer requires any further lubrication and
there we go. Just the possibility mind you. Now what kind of
investment is that?
He took another long gulp of beer, wiped his lips with his shirt
sleeved and let a low, subtle belch escape him. On the other hand,
he whispered conspiratorially, I can pay her fee and cut right to
the chase. God, I love it here, he emphasised again. Suck and fuck
they say, right down to business. Can you imagine if we could all be
that honest? I want a suck and fuck, how much?
But it's crass, Albert. These aren't cattle or pigs we're
discussing, they're humans. There's a certain finesse required when
dealing with our equals. You couldn't by that same token, walk into
a bar and point out a few burly men and say, hey, let's go – there's
a farm house up the road I've had my eye on and I need a few men to
help storm it. And think about this, Albert – if all that was ever
required for sex was a few guilders in your wallet, wouldn't the
lustre erode over time? Sure, the novelty here of the concept here,
for you at this moment is enthralling, more so than I can really
comprehend frankly, but that's beside the point. Once the novelty of
a world of whores wears off, what are you left with? Wouldn't you
then go out in pursuit of pure women, virgins even, who are yet
untainted by the experience of other men? Wouldn't you then, sated
with sex on demand, begin to ask yourself what love is?
Bah, he waved his hand at me dismissively. You're love sick, that's
all. That's all you think about, the girl. It's unhealthy to put all
of your emotions into one sack like that which she could just as
easily drop off the side of the Pont Neuf and never see again. Who
needs it, he mumbled.
*****
Fortunately, between the black work day labour, cleaning off and
passing the rest of the night drinking somewhere or rehearsing in
the flat, there managed to be some time spent other than devout
letter writing in an abundance of unanswered correspondence which
would be piling up through the mail slot whilst she was away in an
incessant effort of connecting myself with her even when she was
nowhere to be found.
There were times in the first few weeks when I toyed with the idea
of returning to Paris, even for a weekend, as though to be within
its borders would be near enough to her but invariably, Friday
nights after working would become night-long debaucheries which
culminated in the early hours of Saturday morning and an entire
afternoon sleeping with the shades drawn, the window slammed shut to
try and block out the sound of traffic, white noise CDs playing all
afternoon at low volumes from the stereo left over from the
evening-ending post-pub-closing beers Albert and I would stutter
through, already leaking through the pores with beer regardless.
By mid or sometimes late afternoon once of us would begin to clatter
around and by then it had snuck into the subconscious that the early
trains to Paris had been missed long ago and there was no sense in
just getting up there with enough time to turn around and come back
in time for work on Monday. I was too broke for that. I earned a
decent wage working black but most of it, ninety nine percent of it
anyway, was poured back into the pubs and cafés of town, consumed in
late-night halal meat takeaways and crates of Grolsch brought up the
stairs at some point nearly every day.
Money doesn't last long in drinking binges which is to say nothing
of the effort involved following a cold shower, of clearing your
head of enough of the molasses to be able to pedal a bike around the
streets in and out of traffic, around pedestrians and other
bicyclists, every potential obstacle in your furry state of mind a
disaster waiting to happen.
Yet I kept on feeding it to myself in a rapid cycle to burn the
hours I would have otherwise haemorrhaged through, bleeding
internally thinking about her, wondering what she was doing, whether
or not she was giving me any thought.
*****
But the more I thought about Paris the more I realised there was no
possible good outcome. If she was there, she obviously wouldn't have
wanted my communication. If she wasn't there, what was there for me?
A city of memories? A city to mope around in reminded at every turn
of Anastasia?
It was almost too much merely being in Utrecht because even in its
own stunted way, Utrecht was reminding me of Anastasia, reminding me
of the euphoria upon my triumphant return – the train station
arrival over a month ago imagining how one afternoon she would be
here and we would be walking along Amsterdamsestraatweg out for a
stroll from the flat, stopping in for a small beer or a glass of
wine.
So if there was no clean slate, at least I could avoid what reminded
me of her. Great lengths I'd go. For example, every time I passed
the Smakkelaarsveld just outside the station I'd think of the first
time seeing it in my return back to Utrecht from Paris.
As the bitterness and disappointment festered day after day without
reply I couldn't bear the sight of it any longer so I'd take an
elaborate route to escape the view, taking the back way out by the
bus station, down Moreelsepark, across the Catharine Baan along
Mariaplaats then wander back to Weerdzijde, Oudegracht overlooking
the cafes bursting with tourists and locals relaxing over lunches
and drinks, all the way down to Kaatstraat before turning onto
Oudenoord, Stroomstraat to Kerkweg then left on Blokstraat until I
hit Amsterdamsestraatweg near our flat, a feat which took a good
thirty minutes longer than simply walking straight across to the
Amsterdamsestraatweg and having to see the field – stupid, I know,
especially since we hadn't actually spent any time there, but
indicative nonetheless, of the fruitlessness of trying to venture to
Paris without her.
*****
I developed elaborate rituals in her stead. Some nights after work, after
showering, after grabbing a quick meal, I'd head off by myself to
Willemstraat and a pub decorated with local regulars, presuming
as such as they greeted one another like family, played cards around
large tables or sat quietly reading newspapers. It was here I could
normally find a good sized table to myself because other than
regulars, not many others came in and although the regulars numbered
quite a few at times, there was always sufficient space, if you
could drown out the slot machine and the Dutch folk music playing in
the background, to sit down and compose my letters to Anastasia.
And there I would order my beer, set it down on a fading Leffe
coaster which existed even though the Leffe didn't, and from my pack
take out the French/English dictionary, the pad of paper, set the
pen down, all an elaborate ritual as if preparing the table she
would soon be joining me at although instead it was merely my
obsessive thoughts of her and the paper and pen.
Sometimes it would be snatches of lyrics or poems, but more often
than not, it was a breakdown of the minutia of the day, what the
weather was like, what the work that day had been, conversations
with the builders, the lunch, perhaps a few glasses of wheat beer at
the Ledig Erf after we knocked off work, snatches of local politics
I'd gleaned from listening to conversations…it was all quite boring
I'd imagined, sprinkled with memories of Paris, excerpts of
historical passages I'd read.
And when I wanted to wander further, I'd wander back behind the
train station again, moving westward along the Moroccan and Turkish
shops of Kanaalstraat through the residential yet occasionally seedy
public housing Lombok neighbourhood, down Coenstraat past the
Molenpark and the big windmill, left on the Leidsekade along the
Leidsche Rijn past the boathouses until I reached Kanaalzicht, a
café pub set across from an ugly factory complex which was equally
spacious though somewhat louder but with a bigger outdoor café area
to write.
*****
` From the Diaries of Witold Kasmersky, cahier 2, p 331.
It's now that I begin to devour the history of Paris trying to pry
little figs of information through obtuse channels I flick through
trying to find images of Anastasia. I'm not sure what the siege of
Paris from September 1870 to January 1871 in the Franco-Prussian war
had to do with it other than September was fast approaching and I
could see myself laying siege to Paris myself. But the intrepid men
using hot-air balloons to take messages in and out of the surrounded
city certainly intrigued me in the absence of a word from her.
Or perhaps this was the Paris of August and September of 1914, when
the second German attempt to take the city was stopped by Gen.
Joseph Gallieni –a prostate cancer-ridden, retired officer who saved
the city by staying and fighting when he responded "Nowhere" to the
question of where the line of retreat would be in case they were
overwhelmed. Instead, 600 red Renault taxi ferried troops to the
spot in the front of the German line where a gap had been left and
each taxi making two round-trips a day until the enemy was stopped.
It takes ingenuity to overcome a sort of crisis.
*****
After three weeks we had finally managed to convince ourselves to
make another go at an open podium performance. The last one had been
so underwhelming that the crowd's distaste for our style was
politely palatable. Not one came up to us afterwards to offer any
encouragement as though by their collective silence, they might will
us out of their recollection of the evening.
This time we weren't giddy and flush from the success of a
surprisingly well-received gig. We were humbled and even though the
majority of our free time was spent drinking there were moments of
coherency well groomed enough to have managed three new songs to
perform.
I tried to conjure up Anastasia to give me confidence but it merely
unsettled me more as instead I had been busy calculating how much
longer before she would return and would knowingly begin to doubt
with each day nearer, that she would arrive in Utrecht at all – it
was certainly a distraction from pre-gig butterflies and the gloomy
uncertainty of how these three songs would be received, but it was
merely a replacement gloom, a heavy gloom, a heart-wrenching worse
than any potential embarrassment on stage.
Thinking of Coltrane's solo in Walkin with Miles Davis on the same
stage was no better encouragement. I was a little ant in comparison
and a little ant that wondered what the hell he had planned going on
a stage in public and playing. It boggled the mind, overwhelmed,
suffocated. Who was I kidding?
This time we'd invited a few friends for morale support figuring
that if we'd already been able to uncover a few souls who were
unafraid, willing even, to accept us, certainly, if we hit the right
songs, we could enlist a few more.
I spotted a few of them through the smoke of the club as the MC
clattered on unintelligibly in Dutch before we finally heard ….De
Deadbeat Conspiracy….a smattering of applause before Albert began
plucking out the first few chords and I began a memorised preamble
of the obituary of a Dutch politician, in Dutch for several
sentences before emphasising notes that peaked at the wrong moments
of the sentiment of the phrase as though driving us all backwards
before pulling us forwards again. Albert punctuated these swings and
the room was silenced as we went on, confused as to our direction
yet drawn in by a vague familiarity.
It was a dark cavern we were leading them through. Albert's thumbing
bass notes were the stalactical tears to the wails I hit with the
saxophone, raising my torso against it in effort as the sounds
bounced off these imaginary, slippery walls in a damp cavern the
crowd followed us through.
As usual, we didn't know precisely where we leading them. Rehearsals
were merely familiarisations with where would begin and end but for
the playing in between, we were on our own, one off the other and
back again as though our hands were holding a rope instead of an
instrument and the rope was what was holding us both in the same
line, the same line that the others were clinging to as we wandered
further into some low and slow flow melodies, tiny hints of melodies
really, suggestions as to directions which invariably led down dead
ends to turn around and head back from.
And when it was over there was the familiar silence as though they
were all expecting it to begin back up again until several seconds
hung between us and the realisation that it had ended, unexpectedly
– and just then, in that split second as they began to realise it,
as though we were too afraid to wait to find out if the silence
would last or melt into applause, we were already pulling them back
forward again.
*****
I woke up two Saturdays later wondering what it was I should be
expecting. For over a week the realisation that Anastasia was to
have returned, at least to Paris, was a constant cloud hanging over
me but for the hours I pined away drinking with Albert and friends
and I could quell it for a time only to have it punch me again in
the stomach without the slightest bit of forewarning.
There was no word from her.
Not that it had been all that well planned out. She taken down my
address but did I really imagine in hindsight that the minute she
got back to her flat in Paris after a month on the road she would
repack her bags and set on the first train headed out to Utrecht?
In fact, when I went over it in my mind, it was hard to ignore the
realisation that she hadn't pinned herself down to coming
immediately. She had merely said she'd come, not when she'd come. I
found myself analysing key words. After I come back, she'd said. Not
how long after, not soon after or years after. I'd been so over the
moon when she'd said she'd come I hadn't bother to read the fine
print – WHEN?
I seemed to take quite a lot of pleasure out of kicking myself over
that one. I was pinned down with just my King clinging to a corner,
three moves from mate. I resolved to pretend the month hadn't passed
at all or alternatively, that I had imagined or dreamt the entire
experience, that there was no Anastasia to begin with, I'd spent too
many hours in a coffee shop, had smoked myself into a stupor.
But every morning I woke up again there was a thick knot of nausea
in my stomach as though it weren't the overindulgences and late
meals that was doing it but some shattered dream that had collected
itself in pieces all around me waiting to be picked up.
Every morning I made the coffee, sat in silence at the kitchen table
after clearing a mound of clutter and rolled a cigarette so I could
sit back and smoke whilst staring out the window down into the
courtyard wondering how long I would manage to hold out before
writing again or worse still, taking a train to Paris and paying an
unexpected and unrequested visit.
Every morning, after the cigarette was stubbed out on the bottom of
my boot I drained the remainders of the coffee in one long gulp and
headed outside, unlocked the bike, got on and rode to the job,
another afternoon of filing dirt and assorted particles underneath
my fingernails, carrying wood from a pile, hammer nails into wood,
measuring, cutting, hammering, stopping for a coffee break with the
others at 10:30 and then lunch at noon seated on overturned plaster
buckets eating sandwiches with filthy hands, washing them down with
cold milk that offset the soot of destruction and construction
combined with the stale taste of every cigarette break until finally
we'd pack it all up again, get back on our bikes and ride off in
different directions to different homes, different pubs, different
understandings of the day.
I arrived home to the familiar strains of something bleak and evil
leaking out of Albert's headphones at full volume, sipping a bottle
of Grolsch with hand, alternating with the Winston in the other, the
smoke trailing from it like a plane that had been hit and was on its
way to smouldering ruins on the ground.
When he managed to notice me, somehow the feel of the room must be
different when all other senses are completely absorbed in the holy
trinity of music in the ears, beer in the hand, cigarette to the
mouth – there must be some perceivable alteration in space when I
entered because no amount of noise I made could have penetrated that
veil – but he noticed something changed in the balance of the room
and so turned to see me.
He removed the headphones which for a split second before he also
turned down the volume were as loud as the speakers might have been
without the headphones plugged in, took a swig of beer and nodded in
my direction. Good day?
I brushed off more dust and held up my hands. The day of a labourer,
I lamented before leaning over the crate and plucking out a beer to
pop open.
Oh yeah, Albert mentioned as casually as possible. Letter for you
today.
*****
You know what the simultaneous experience of elation and dread feels
like? As if two boxers, when clenching up between each other in the
middle of the ring covered in sweat and pain, suddenly begin to kiss
and I mean a deep, probing and soulful mashing of the tongues
against each others', held long enough for the passion to mount
before one of the boxers reaches behind and delivers a razor sharp
punch to the kidneys of the other.
I drained the beer whilst simultaneously hovering over the contents
of the kitchen table, bottle opener, overflowing ashtray, Dutch
advertisements for high tech electronics at low tech prices, empty
packages of Drum, empty packages of Winstons, empty wine bottles
with candles stuck in the tops like corks and melted wax hardened on
their sides, yellowing copies of Metro and De Volkskrant, pliers,
electrical wire, odds and ends of emptied pockets, lighters awaiting
refills, and finally, there it was emanating like magic atop a
musician's magazine and a flyer for free pizza delivery –
undoubtedly the letter, undeniably, the fate.
Of course, I couldn't open the letter yet. After all these days and
weeks accumulated waiting there would be at least one night's
festivities with a least part of the harness of doubt loosened –
there I was, my name in her antiquarian script on an envelope, proof
enough that I hadn't merely hallucinated a few weeks of time.
Evidence that I must have crossed her mind at least once in crossing
the gulf between us. Enough for heel-kicking and a shower and a
night out to celebrate the fate, whatever it was for at least for
the moment, I was going to live…
*****
What should I have expected such a letter to say? After all, she'd
promised to visit, not write. I could imagine nothing but a dark
foreboding, her left handed scrawl conducting apologies and excuses
simultaneously and between the lines, the truth that it had all been
sort of memorable but unremarkable mirage of events which had
transpired indeed, but had perhaps been blown out of proportion.
Surely by now my daily letters had reached her, my unhealthy
obsessiveness and oblique paranois apparent like some filthy secret
I'd unburdened to her.
But even looking at the postmark I could tell it wasn't from France
at all, but Italy and as I tore open the envelope and read hungrily,
I was overwhelmed with the realisation that the letter was only a
partial answer – if she wasn't in Paris it explained in part why she
wasn't here (logically, because she'd not yet returned) – but it
didn't explain more than some place where she was, the gig extended,
a brief confessional of an exhaustive battle with mental demons.
In the end, her words were almost as nostalgic as the thousands I'd
composed in all those letters but no regret other than her personal
trials. So in the one sense, I could afford to feel elated – I
wasn't being rejected, I was being put off for a time, postponed.
The gig was actually a big hit, she'd been singing in places
throughout Italy it turned out, Milan, Rome, Napoli, Firenze – all
over and as her status had grown, so had the demand for her, hardly
surprising, I supposed, but disappointing nonetheless because what
it all boiled down to was that she wasn't coming back straight away
and couldn't even say really, when she'd be back at all, although
promising definitely to be back and as soon as she was back, she
hadn't forgotten she was coming to visit in Utrecht.
Of course it was equally disturbing her casual questions like, have
you thought of me at all, I don't even know if you remember me any
more, perhaps I was just a fling for you, killing time in Paris –
(when all the while I'd thought it might have been the other way
around,) and the uncertainty of when this string of gigs would
finally end – she thought there might even be a small recording deal
in the offering. All things I felt proud of, that she was that
talented but also that amid all this excitement she thought of me,
wondered how things were working out in Utrecht, wondered if I
thought of her at all and imagined how much she missed our moment.
What it all spelled out in the end was that we wouldn't see each
other any time soon on the one hand, but that my hopes hadn't been
in vain, not necessarily, on the other hand. Just enough hope to be
maddening.
1:51 AM
CHAPTER 9 Paris Radio and the Dream Sequence Beat
“Perception is nine tenths of reality. The other tenth is the pain.”
From the Diaries of Witold Kazmirsky, Book 11, page 103
How often I stared with placid imagination at buildings, hundreds
and thousands of windows and the goings on going on behind them.
Have you ever wondered, I asked her, stopping for a second in
mid-pace to stare up and down a building of flats, admiring the dull
brick, the identical windows located in identical places one floor
above another above another, ever wonder what goes on behind each
window? Ever think about the scenes of domesticity or violence or
love or boredom playing out, the undusted corners of lifetimes
playing out to silence without recognition?
Yea, she said, her voice trailing. But what about the prying eyes
outside? What if I step from the bath, fully naked and wander just
for a moment, lingering, not with the idea of exposing myself to
some pervert just standing there in front of a lit, uncovered window
with his dick in his hand just waiting for my appearance, but with a
sense of freedom, a sense that there aren't thousands of gawkers and
perverts and psychopaths, just people minding their own business,
walking by without a glance…just for a moment so I could stand naked
in the light of the window and watch them going by.
You'd see much better with the lights turned off, I offered. You
can't see much of anything coming from the vantage point of light,
peering into to darkness. Haven't you noticed that before? Stand in
a room some night, well lit. Stand there and try to make out the
darkness outside - ok, it can't really be done in a city where light
outside is everywhere - but the next time you are in the countryside or even a suburb, try it. You can't see anything but then when you turn off the light,
poof! You and the darkness are one. Once your eyes adjust you can
see with clarity.
We were having a drink at the Café Vachette on the corner of Blvd St
Michel and rue des Ecoles, far enough from the entrance of the
cinema to digest a somewhat forgettable film we'd just seen
(forgettable of course, the name has already left my memory and yet
what if for her it was a significant, transitional moment? What if
for her it was a night never to be forgotten?) without the
predictable palaver of pedestrians ejaculated from the same cinema,
discussing the same film with the same stunted background of a
crippled culture to carry them or the same pompous yet false erudity
clinging to their words like a stinking sweat to the underarms.
What I meant, I start in again as if the conversation about the
humanity behind the windows we'd had prior to entering the cinema
had never ended and instead had been carrying on continuously
throughout the film in the back of our minds, was about those lives
and what fascinates me about them - not the collectiveness of their
existence but the individuality.
She frowned, having perhaps been thinking of something else or else
digesting some forgotten fragment of dialogue from the film turning
it over and over in her mind only to be intruded upon again with
this talk about what goes on in buildings, behind windows.
Individuality? Whatever do you mean? The lives of identical
people with identical cultures, identical thoughts, who watch the
same television shows laughing at the same time behind the canned
laughter or crying on cue with the crescendo of the music? Or do you
mean those flipping through the same magazines and photographs of
celebrities, those same dull minds covered in some undulating film
of repetition, watching the news broadcast the same story or slight
variations thereof over and over? What is so individual about them?
This collective humanity? This mindless beast in a mindless herd?
She has worked herself up into a minor froth. I place my hand gently
on her wrist and then run the tip of my index finger from her wrist,
tracing the outline of each finger.
Of course I didn't mean those people, I scoff with a palatable
albeit feigned contempt. I meant the woman stood in the kitchen
worried about whether or not the man who she thinks she is falling
in love with is thinking about her at that same moment as she's
stirring a couscous mix into boiling water on the hob.
I meant the undersexed 20-something still suffering the remnants of
a devastating case of acne, awkward and skinny, silent and shy
amongst his colleagues in some office building stuffed full with fit
birds, unimaginable sexy in tight skirts and opened blouses,
anonymous but for the jokes others snicker about him around him,
just out of earshot, who comes home at night to some flat alone and
surfs the internet sated with photographs and movie samples of
pornography, maybe even violent pornography and indulges himself in
fantasies about what it would be to be noticed and recognised, to
have those flock of fit birds talking about him sotto voce to each
other adjoined with half phrases about getting him into bed or doing
him in the elevator, atop the copy machine…
I meant the man and the woman, one visiting the other's flat for the
first time, the gentle music in the background, the studio filled
with 50 or 60 candles, the pullout bed, the silk or satin sheets,
the meal that will be cooked but go uneaten, the inaugural sex, the
romancing, the beginning - the things that happen between two people
at the start of something, all going on behind those windows
somewhere as we walk past a building oblivious.
And then we were talking louder, both to ourselves and to others, an
impromptu performance art of sorts, ordering another litre of red
wine from the waiter with recklessness observing even his eyes, the
flicker of something; amusement, disgust, befuddlement, we aren't
sure and we'll never ask to find out but the second litre arrives
and Anastasia has now found the syncopation of the idea, delighted
with a little game of imagination, thinking in the back of her mind
perhaps that the others sat around us might have abandoned their own
dull conversations and are now eavesdropping or listening
clandestinely whilst still formulating the sentences they are
speaking half in and half out of the game…
Do you mean also the heartbroken teenage girl who cries herself to
sleep at night, hidden under the covers waiting for her stepfather
to make some excuse to come in?
Or perhaps the single mother of three, scratching out an existence
without pleasure, the joy of these three once-beautiful children now
deformed by the insistence of realistic choices; new dresses for
that one, a new pair of basketball trainers for that one, worried to
death the third is hanging out with the wrong crowd and any night
there will be that call from the police…all the while squeezing
meals out of such a tight budget like a fat woman into a dress two
sizes too small, worrying whether she will have enough to last the
week and wow, never once contemplating her auld fantasies of life
sitting there in the kitchen with a glass of wine and a cigarette,
feet up, children asleep or away, suddenly discovering she is now
too auld, her stretch marks too wide, the lines beneath her eyes to
deep, the jowls sagging too far gone to ever return to youth before
she was ever a mother and dreams were a possibility not some city
you've just departed from an aeroplane she knows she will never
return to again?
I nod my head, pouring us both generous cups of wine in reward,
indeed. There are all sorts behind those windows…a man whose wife
has recently died who must now sit in the flat they shared an entire
life in suffocated by memories and waiting out each day like a
lifetime prison sentence waiting for his own execution, the release
of death from misery having long ago forgotten what life had been
capable of without her and not caring anymore as he had moored his
boat of adventure to her so long ago for so many years there never
was another lifetime to have contemplated.
And we carried on in this vein for some time, sipping our wine,
trying to out-imagine one another, forgetting there were others
around us at all, at ease that none of the lives we described or
imagined were ours at the moment, no prisons, no death sentences, no
slow crawl of endurance.
We were free!
And we left the café laughing, leaving money behind which could have
fed the poor or given another drink to the homeless slug who was
always sat on a cardboard box around the corner with his head bowed
and a little can in front of him wearing a sign that might have
proclaimed he didn't drink or do drugs but needed money for food.
*****
Do you believe in fate, she asked me one afternoon when we were
sprawled out on the mattress which had been taken off the bed frame and dragged out into the main room where the lighting was better, or at least more interesting, limb in limb, tracing the outline of each other's
skin, watching the shadows lengthen through the windows.
Why do you ask – do you have us in mind? I stood up then to have a cigarette
and pace but she pulled me back down again, nonono, she whispered, I
just mean in the sense of where any of us are heading, the direction
you chose, the direction I chose, why certain strangers walk past
you on certain days but never again, why some are born in one
country where there is poverty and starvation yet others in a market
economy perfectly adept at handling the possibility of that
individual's economic potential, you know – in a vague yet not too
general way…
I could quote Emerson, for example, I said, growing more
uncomfortable and making another, more successful effort at
releasing myself from the floor and the mattress and getting up to
the table to roll a cigarette. Emerson said that fate was just deeds
committed in a prior existence.
That doesn't answer the question of whether you do or don't believe
in fate, Witold. What made you choose to leave NYC? And once you
left, why Utrecht and once in Utrecht why did you leave your friend
behind to come here and once here, why did you decide on entering my
club and even then, that we were placed in the same place at the
same time, something gave you the nerve, the verve, the desire to
approach me and even though I wasn't the most receptive possible,
merely calculatedly mysterious, you were eager to see the
possibilities through without worrying what disappointment might lie
ahead. Was it fate, partially fate, partially choice, or just dumb
luck?
There's no such thing as dumb luck, only good and bad luck. In the
instance of meeting you, I'd say it was more a matter of chance than
of fate or choice. Is chance considered fate when chance is created
in part at least, by your own choices? I think fate implies it is
absolutely, utterly out of our hands – like the weather. You can
dress up for the cold or for rain but you cannot control if it rains
or becomes cold. I cannot control that I met you however, the
circumstances were in part, created by my own actions – unknowingly
at first, let's say up to the point when I'd first spoken with you
in the club – but thereafter, it is less a matter of chance or of
fate than of two people with somewhat similar goals, even as broad
and simple as getting to know each other.
Well then, let's say it is a matter of fate or for destiny, her hand
ran along her left shin bone and stopped at her knee. Fate would
have been determined by something beyond our control as in, some
higher power brought us together for a reason. Could be the fate of
souls perhaps, souls which are destined, in the course of living to
meet again and again through various stages of existence perhaps.
You know, like perhaps in another life, if you believe such things
of course, we knew each other very dearly and even though the lives
that were the vessels of our souls had long expired, once new
vessels were found, like this life we are living now, our souls were
bound to be reunited.
Smoke tapered upwards from her cigarette left burning in the ashtray
as she sipped at her wine. Fate, on the other hand, might be much
similar in that those souls are still meant to be reunited but we
too are participating. Perhaps we are doing so knowingly or
unknowingly. You coming to Paris, my being on the street I was on
when you first started following me.
If we did not follow this destiny, it would have been fate. One way or the other. So what if I could imagine an entire lifetime before her, however meaningless to this point. There is the pre-period and the post-period. I was no longer in the pre-period of my life. I was definitely somewhere else. The strange sensation of a female’s presence. A old panoply against this very moment worn thin leaving the wearer vulnerable.
Then I exhaled and stared out the window of her flat overlooking Rue Mont
Saint Genevieve. She stood as well, changing the disc from a sombre yet unknown jazz pianist to a wild and incomprehensible Ornette Coleman as though the cacophony might release us both out of the cocoon of the fledgling comfort of roads still on the horizon, yet untaken.
Well, most of the photographs I keep are of people I don't even know, she
belaboured, reminding me of that first night of meeting, the hundreds of photographs of strangers, postcards of places she’d never been. She was back up again, returning only after she’d retrieved a new set of photos as though they somehow held an answer. A key to knowing her, these photos? A recurrent theme which might become predictable, boring, stale in the coming months? Who knew? But Ornette Coleman’s rattling lent an almost surreal edge and when she’d returned with a handful of photographs again, stood in her panties in a brazen display of either self confidence or apathy, I was not with her.
Her words, as I focused unflinchingly on the bulb of her buttocks the fabric of the panties couldn't quite cover and then downward to the arc of her calves into her ankles, as much as those words were to have been cherished, were
somehow lost, as though they weren't being spoken at all, merely
forming a background symphony to an visual presentation. And then I
faded back in time to catch her continuing: Sometimes, she
elaborated as though I'd been paying attention all along yet somehow
sensed the impossibility of my concentration and hence her stance
there in the twilight of the flat in her panties, lighting a
cigarette of her own, it's more interesting trying to interpret the
lives of others through the memories represented by their
photographs than it is reliving your own…
And without an introductory preamble she suddenly changed discs
again and the Chet Baker River was flowing between the walls,
carrying us on a fool's errand.
*****
Nothing happened.
I stayed for two weeks in that flat with her.
The second morning I stole the keys, crept out in secret although
secretly she was likely not such a heavy sleeper and listened wordlessly as I was heading out. She wouldn’t know why and I didn’t either but I was heading out, and got out into the streets of morning Paris.
Regardless of the last day and twelve hours, I'd had a yet
unperformed desire to walk the streets alone. Especially at this
particular moment when you need the space to reflect on all that was
taking place inside the walls of Anastasia's flat in that time frame
from which we hadn't left since entering.
Without wanting to break the yolk, the rhythm, the syncopation of
bonding, I still felt compelled to get out - the air, the smells,
the foreign language until now had consisted primarily of everything
inside her flat and nothing of the world outside. Not that I minded,
but it was getting unnerving as though without a backdrop of some
sort of reality to add dimension, the entire encounter might well
have been some sort of dream, a prolonged stare out the window in a
moving train letting my idle thoughts wander into the woods, flat farmlands of Holland, the Belgium on to the mystery of arriving in Paris.
I wasn't gone long, mind you. I wanted to stretch my mind, like my
legs, to ascertain what I was thinking – my thoughts had not been my
own for the last day and a half. It was as though I had been sitting
for a painting and now wanted to see what it looked like.
At first, it was just a roll up and a coffee in the first café I
came across. But there was no real concentrating. Every fabric in my
skin breathed her – I could smell her perfume, her hair conditioner,
her sheets, her voice lingered in my ears – everything that had been
in that flat had come with me in scented form and it was after all,
impossible to escape.
And there was no real walking. Yes, the movements were similar but
inside, I was floating – as though watching myself walk without
having to actually perform the act, or incapable of it. This is what
it is like in the last milliseconds of life, I thought – the
experience often recounted of rising above the body, above the room,
the earth beneath you eventually growing so distant it is but a
speck as you are drawn to a greater light. This was infatuation in
action.
The barman was saying something to me – no idea what – I had been
speaking aloud to myself, muttering as though completely alone and
now, caught in mid speech, I stamped out my cigarette, shrugged to
the barman and headed back out of the café into the street again.
I was able to accumulate a few provisions before returning to the
flat. Some eggs, several different cheeses, none of which were
familiar and so like gambling, just as with the wine, placing bets
based on the colour of a label or the way the words were assembled.
Bread was easy enough and ham I was well familiar with, as were the
smoked sausages and fruit.
When I returned to the flat it was as though we'd been living
together for years. There was an air of familiarity which only a
short period of time had woven yet a familiarity untinged by boredom
or fatigue. These two lives were affixed, however provisionally, to
one another, slapped together like a sandwich constructed from the
remnants of the fridge until one of us would allow a larger hunger
to gnaw at us and it would all be consumed. Was it prophetic or
merely inevitable that one or the other would eventually wear this
relationship like a stringy sinew snapped and twisted, a meniscus
tear or rotator cuff gone off its wheels.
Already she had assembled herself prior to my return, fatigued with
dreaming, too excited to lie still in contemplation, fidgety with
the temporality of my disappearance. This is how it was at first –
those first few drinks were just settling into the bloodstream and
you could feel the effect of the alcohol in the head yet the vision
was still clear, the speech, unslurred.
There was a hot bath running whilst she went about picking up the
clutter of accumulation the last few days had assembled.
What did you bring me, she asked impatiently, reflexively leaving
the sink and the dishes to greet me at the door as though we'd been
doing this already for years. Proudly, I emptied the contents of the
sacks – feasts for lovers, enough wine to set us into days of
oblivion – on to the table for approval. The contents said all I
cared to say: let us not leave this flat, not now, not ever, let us
maintain this clean oblivion and nest herein forever.
Her reaction was mixed.
It wasn't as though she didn't necessarily share the enthusiasm but
perhaps the enthusiasm, in hindsight, was tempered by reality – the
reality of knowing her own life rather than flinging herself
recklessly into this ritual as I was willing to do.
That's a lot of cheese and wine, she noted, picking through the
selection with expertise, rubbing labels with her thumb and
forefinger as though hoping to peel away a more sublime quality.
Starving artists, she shrugged to herself without further comment.
But it did not escape her that this appeared to be a survival kit
assembled to last for days, rather than hours. She wasn't yet sure
how that felt.
We shared meals although eventually, as though realising a hidden
crime in spending the entirety of my time in Paris in her flat,
Anastasia was able to lure me outside when the sun was brightest and
the flat was growing stale.
Out we went for walks on clichéd tours of the bookstalls of the
Quay, sifting through paperbacks and manuscripts, art histories,
bartering prices when one struck either of us. We spent hours in
museum cafés yet visited no museums, walked along the Seine, one
bank to another, crisscrossing bridges with reckless abandon and
spent token gestures sitting for hours in cafés, before eventually
touring bars and allowing a different form of intoxication to
overcome us.
Other days we would simply stay in doors if the weather was crap. We’d lie out together on the rugs of the living room floor perhaps because it was less suggestive than lying out together in bed. She’d recite poetry in French to me in the afternoons, pieces she’d been made to memorise as a school girl which had stuck there in her mind year after year. Sometimes she’d recite the lyrics of a song and if she let her guard down ever so slightly, I’d catch a snatch or two of her humming a tune.
Or she’d read books to me in French. I began to get the funny idea that if I stayed there in that flat long enough with her I’d learn French through simple osmosis. I’d never take a class, never pick up a book, just listen to her voice purring softly in that language, luring me in.
And so it went most days and nights. Mornings, incapable of sleep
once the repetition of traffic began outside the windows like the
breaking of waves on the beach and before long I'd be standing,
already accustomed to the reality that Anastasia would sleep well
beyond the stirrings of civilisation outside the flat and there
would be long hours alone for myself, these sort of moments I once
longed for, bathing in the oil baths of solitude until I began
waking up in her flat. Then it was simply a matter of killing time.
I killed time by walking as though boredom is a bomb waiting to go
off once motion stops.
I began with short forays, circles around neighbourhoods with the
spirals outward growing gradually. You could be utterly ignorant of
history and still wonder through timeless unfamiliarity, overcome by
the senses – Albert would've had to page through a myriad of history
books and start each jaunt knowing precisely where he planned on
ending up simply because that's how he went about travelling. But I
was content to move in a dreamlike sequence, imagining history
without the facts, piecing it together in from the stories I
imagined overhearing conversations I couldn't understand in
family-run cafés, butchers, cheese mongers and tobacconist shops.
Infatuation has a way of weaving its way into every moment, every
sight and sound, every impression and no matter how many far I
walked, I was dreaming in this web about a future with Anastasia
spent here – that I barely knew her or her habits made little
difference as I tiled together a mosaic of future moments walking
those same streets, the moments and sights and experiences conjured
up from an imaginary future with no basis in reality, no matter the
wishing or dreaming it were already so.
I tried to rationalise that this was simply a temporary experience,
following temptation, morsels of Anastasia left like crumbs
throughout the day to nibble on. I knew at the bottom of the barrel
there would nothing left eventually – I knew this simply for the
historical precedents of other women that had already arrived and
departed in the year long terminals of train station after train
station.
But there was no stemming this benevolent rush of water overwhelming
the emotional levy built in time to prevent precisely this sort of
infatuation from overrunning me. There was only walking and dreaming
and when once noon had come and gone I knew it would be time to head
back to her flat, that she'd already be awake, drawn gradually back
to consciousness by coffee with a tiny shot of anisette.
And when I returned, there was no cause for further dreaming because
there I was, living the very dream I'd been walking through – a
punctual kiss and back to the business of waking for already I was
learning that nothing could be forced upon her and it was better
still to leave the hints and suggestions to her lest those dreams
start leaking from my head out of my mouth and into her ears and the
entire hideous charade was exposed.
By early afternoon it was back out in the streets for a small lunch
followed by another walk through one of many parks she so seemed
attached to,, a history of places of refuge and solitude she shared that had been accumulated over a lifetime. It was by no means solitude but there was still a
unique intimacy that must surely have been apparent to strangers who
might happen to have watched us from a distance.
I wanted to convince myself that we were like other couples we came
across but there was little evidence – you sensed that those people
around us had already had lengthy histories, had gone up and down a
hundred different times, had loved and spat bile at one another on occasion to wound. My parents‘ relationship was my own real barometer. I couldn’t know, didn’t ask, how she measured us against others. We
were neophytes, tentative, hardly ourselves but the best impressions
of ourselves.
And always it was me poking and prodding into her past getting
desultory answers which made the piecing together all the more
impossible. She showed occasional interest in my own background but
for her part she appeared to prefer finding out my background via
tactical philosophical questions, the kind of questions on computer
programmes designed to evaluate your answers into a psychological
profile.
She didn't like talking much about the past. She'd dummy up
immediately and between us it would seem as though a storm had
suddenly blown in on what had moments before been perfect weather –
sometimes she'd just change the subject abruptly, other times refuse
outright to delve any deeper – in either case, I didn't get much out
of her save for observations of things going on around us or little
historical miscellanea prompted by a turn around a corner, a
building's face, a street sign where a resistance member had fallen
in the liberation of Paris.
In so many ways it was an odd experience that I should have either
just broken away and returned to Utrecht before I'd become any more
pathetic with a lack of emotional control like a premature
ejaculator or should have somehow managed not to allow the emotion
to pervade me, to deflect it one moment after another like swatting
gnats around the head, late summer afternoon.
And thus I was in the unique position of a constantly fluctuating
state between joy and melancholy, my nerves jumbled by too many
quirky stops and starts, too much caffeine or wine, emotion on the
fingertips like a match held too long and in some ways, when she
would leave at night, I'd be relieved.
On the nights she had gigs, she always demurred my self-invitations
to come along in audience. You would be too distracting, she'd
deflect. I would forget the lyrics of songs and lose a note or two.
This is my profession, Witold. You wouldn't have wanted me hanging
around with you in that law firm of yours, would you? Of course not,
and so it is with me in my work place, even if it is just a dingy
nightclub, even if you are on holiday with too many hours to kill.
It would be too difficult for either of us to understand.
Of course I never bothered contradicting her. I’d have loved the distraction of her presence when Albert and I were on stage. But that, I rationalised, was the difference between an amateur and professional performer.
The enigmas of Anastasia were partly woven by odd phrases which I
could never quite decipher whether they were meant to portray a
deeper meaning than a twisted phrase in English, or were merely
grammatical errors with no hidden agenda. How can you tell with a
woman around whose every corner another unsettling inability to
pinpoint lurked?
One afternoon we were walking and as we walked she started telling
me about this Parisian girl named Amélie Hélie, a singer at the
beginning of the 1900s. She was nicknamed the Casque d'Or for her
lengthy, golden hair. The leaders of two rival bands in the
neighbourhood, the Corsican Leca and his rival, Manda, both fell in
love with her, madly, brutally. Their competition for her eventually
grew into a big battle one day on this very street, rue de Haies. A
big battle with knives and guns. They were arrested and then
appeared before the magistrate. The magistrate keeps badgering Manda
about why the battle grew in the first place, refusing to believe
that it wasn't over neighbourhood territory, but a girl. Manda said
something to the magistrate like, we fought each other, the Corsican
and me, because we love the same girl. We're crazy about her. Don't
you know what it is to love a girl?
So what happened I asked, thinking the magistrate saw the logic of
the explanation and let them free to fight some knightly battle for
the girl's hand. We both had stopped walking and were simply
standing off to the side of the street as passers-by dodged us.
I think Manda got life and Leca got many years and they were both
deported off to hard labour.
Hmmm. The magistrate wasn't swayed toward violent demonstrations of
love? Free will out the window?
Something like that, but worse still, after all of this…she paused,
waiting for me to light her cigarette. A friend of Leca, seeking
revenge for his comrade, stabbed Amélie one night in the club where
she sang. She didn't die, but she could no longer perform as a
singer. She's buried at Bagnolet. Sometimes it isn't sufficient in
life not to let yourself fall in love because letting someone else
fall in love with you can have equally damning consequences.
*****
Instead of ripping my fingers into her soil and digging further, the
foreboding facial expressions, the slight change in pitch of vocal
chords, which she must in any case, as a singer been a master of,
all conspired to convince me to be satisfied with not knowing
further, to accept with further innuendo, whatever was presented.
*****
So tell me a weakness of yours, she purred as we shuffled along the perimetre of the Bois du Boulogne. We’d been walking silently for a distance when she asked this and then, as to give me encouragement or strength, she took hold of my hand, the first real gesture she’d made of affection in public.
I didn’t say anything at first; in part out of surprise at the question itself and in part because caught off guard, I was a little stumped for an answer. You mean other than drinking or alcoholism, I asked, trying to laugh.
No, I mean something I wouldn’t know without knowing you.
How about not being able to be close to anyone, not having feelings sufficient to register, I dunno, emotion?
Don’t be silly, she laughed again, cavalier yet not malicious. I can tell you have feelings. You have feelings for this friend you travelled with, Albert, and …she stopped walking and tried to stare up at me on her tip toes. You have feelings for me, don’t you?
I suppose it was meant to be cute, maybe even coy, but her comment immediately terrified me. The idea of despite having done my best to remain what I thought was sort of casual and natural in the matter, she’d seen clear through me without the slightest hesitation or doubt.
I’m joking, she immediately amended, seeing the look in my face and deciding to take my hand again. Don’t take it the wrong way, Witold. It’s just that you’ve said you have no feelings and I just find that very hard to believe.
I laughed aloud, a laugh whose force was meant to convey a mutual understanding of the hilarity, of the absurdity of the joke, my joke, her joke, the contemplation of feelings at all or for each other, but which perhaps left to its own devices, had sounded sarcastic and bitter.
I know that, I muttered finally as we recommenced our walk. It’s you who fell for the act, not me, I corrected.
*****
The days rolled by in something that verged on being a pattern becoming a habit.
I was always the first up, would leave the flat to venture out for a walk, stop at the bakery for fresh bread and pastries, the fruit stall for grapes and berries or sometimes a pineapple and whilst I was gone she would rouse herself, make some coffee and wait for my return.
Although historically such an arrangement, even a relationship, was something I was entirely unaccustomed to, it was clearly something at least I could grow to want to be accustomed to.
Yet lurking in the back ground, always, was the innate certainty that eventually the penny would drop. In part because it seemed only natural to me that something of this nature; peaceful, contented, fulfilling, would eventually run its course and be replaced by the usual course of events so that life could return to its predictable roots of apathy and casual indifference.
And also in part because in a sense, she could have only let me in, and perhaps even I could have only allowed myself to be let in, because of the transient nature of our bond to begin with. Oh, I certainly allowed myself the luxury, even after only a few days, of believing, even if only in a crippled way of believing; knowing the belief would be rewarded with pain eventually. But that luxury was enjoyed only to the limits pessimism and reality would allow. I could even convince myself to a point that I could sense a slight, though tangible shift in her own attitude toward me; begrudged affection grown in a soil of initial laissez faire indifference.
Nonetheless, the day was coming, would come and half of my experiences with her were tormented by the knowledge that down the road, I’d pay for my pleasure. You being to believe you could only realistically allow yourself to open up to a certain degree and begin slowly to let your guard down. That’s how it works. The longer something goes well the more chance there is you’ll let your guard down and then Bam! the consequences of that carelessness would be revealed.
In any event, the routine was that after breakfast, we’d shower and head out by late morning for a stroll. Anastasia would ask me only to give her a number, an arrondisement and from that we would set out on our walks stopping at museums, for a pichet of wine in a café, shops, sitting in the grass or on benches in various parks, riding the Metro. We’d walk until there was little energy left and then we’d buy bread with sausage or cheese and consume them in hunks, washed down by wine or water and if the weather was agreeable, a nap in the park.
The common theme in our time together, regardless of what we did, was that we seemed to speak very little of our pasts. I’d always imagined that you’d need to know everything about someone, their histories, likes and dislikes, former lovers, all that, before you could sense any kind of growing attachment to someone. It’d always seemed like such an impossible proposition, having to spend years, or at least months, digging the trenches for the foundation of a relationship. You know, like when you reach a moment when the two of you would be together and start reminiscing about first meeting because you have a shared past and the past you don’t share, that which you lived individually before ever having known the other person, gets shared through telling stories about your past so that your past wasn’t just an empty space from then to the present but that there was a bridge between the two like “your” past and “our” present.
But that wasn’t how it worked with the two of us. It was sufficient for me that she appeared to be fond of me, for whatever reason. I didn’t have to know her past to feel close to her. Maybe because I wasn’t really close to her, didn’t even really feel a desire to be, or at least a desire to be that wasn’t tinged with reluctance. I only wanted that sense of feeling wanted, and that was as close as I needed to get to her, at least as the hours slid by.
And then, by late afternoon, early evening, it was time for her to go back, prepare for work, for singing. Although each day I did my best to ignore time there would be that inevitable point in the day when Anastasia, for whom time still mattered because she had places to be, would pull up softly, holding me at arms length and looking me up and down as if it was going to be the last time she’d see me. She didn’t have to say anything, I’d already knew that shortly she’d be on her way, leaving me in the lurch wherever we happened to be because we never gently eased our way back towards her flat, we simply walked until a certain time and then she’d be gone. As though I’d dreamt her up all on my own.
And so left to my own devices by the time rush hour traffic was hitting
its peak as though the timing of it were meant not to leave me alone
but united with the thousands of souls racing around the boulevards
and traffic circles to keep me company in her absence.
It was then the thirst would overtake me. I needed conversations in
a city whose language I didn't speak.
Instead I walked from wherever we had been, the scent of her perfume
still in my nostrils and headed for the Panthéon, the beginning of a
long, winding journey through a bastion of student life forward to
the Place de la Contrescarpe and then behind there, a few streets of
misdirection and I'd find myself at Le Teddy's, a bar I’d come across quite by chance one late afternoon and which I’d felt a simple affinity for straight away, the ground through which I'd slammed my pole and flag of discovery as my local, my oasis and new-found reality all at once.
*****
Walking worked well in the mornings but once the dark of day's
business end drew a curtain across the sky and the paths were more
uncertain, the markings less clear, it was time to head indoors and
as most places before and since I would discover, with time,
persistence, a predictable presence, eventually humanity would
return to me. Perhaps it was equally myself once a few beers had
registered, oiling my jaw and mouth enough to dare speak to
strangers without knowing the language of strangers and intimated
through facial movements and hand gestures until inevitably, someone
would show up or make their presence known and the roadblock to
communication would disappear through translation.
There were delineated stages of the evening defined by the coming
and going of customers and regulars whilst I remained planted at a
key position in the middle of the bar, wandering through one
conversation after another until the hours had filled up as simply
as empty beer mugs and before I knew it, time to return to Anastasia's
flat for a midnight snack and a shower.
Yet even within the course of several nights haunting this same
place I was able to discover revocable bonds with some of the
locals, Didier, the young artist, full of rancour and venom, a caustic burning being who drank and spoke in staccato bursts and Alan, an expat musician tracing the steps of Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhard.
Inside Teddy's we are roaring to life beyond happy hour. Didier,
with Alan in his garish shadow, chattered away to anyone and everyone around him, fuelled by passion and drink, known to everyone reluctantly as he sifted through the flotsam of the bar tide, his comrades fallen away, one after another yet until only Alan and myself are remaining.
The two had met in a bistro somewhere on St Andre des Arts, Alan busking as he walked with a tin can attached to a neck brace by a flexible metal arm, the kind you might see on a freely bendable lamp, so as to allow the passers-by to, if inclined and sufficiently entertained, to reach into their pockets for spare change and drop it in as he passed. He said he often thought it was more the strange invention that caught peoples’ attention more than his playing but for whatever reason, Didier, who had been brooding over a coffee and a copy of Valery Larbaud’s Journal d’A, immediately leapt from his table, grabbing Alan by the arm and pulling him back to the table. He wanted him as his own discovery, even if Alan wasn’t his own invention.
Thereafter, Alan, who was staying in a run down hostel in the 11th, at the end of Canal St Martin, took Didier up on the invitation to stay with him at his studio flat on rue Saint-sauveur where they would work on a jazz musical based roughly on Django’s biography. Although Didier couldn’t play an instrument, his scattershot creativity flowed sufficiently that he’d written lyrics for seven songs and had a loose script put together before Alan had even finished his second composition.
As I get us all a round in, Didier immediately switches from Alan, who is already feeling sleepy enough to seriously consider curling up in a corner on the floor in the back of the bar because Didier refuses to lend him the flat key, to me. Didier has other fish to fry. He wanted Alan there, keeping the conversation warm until someone else, namely me, turned up. He was worked up in a particular froth and needed to spit it out. Apparently, earlier in the afternoon, a butcher insulted his sensitivity by refusing to accept a poem as barter for a shoulder of lamb and since then, he’d been on an apoplectic edge.
Do you feel as though you've been especially summoned, that there is
a special calling for you as an artist? Are you particularly alienated with a pronounced sense of being misunderstood by conventional wisdoms, bourgeois moralities?
He was asking me these questions, he the unemployed poet, the aspiring artist, the man who couldn't simply allowing himself to drown in his drink and keep
quiet about it.
What's the point anyway, I ask pointedly as Alan takes the opportunity to slip off to the toilets. He‘s heard it all already that afternoon. Hours of it.
Isn't this all some crutch you use to get through your daily misgivings your dissatisfaction with yourself in comparison to the accomplishments of the others? What purpose does your art serve other than a selfish mechanism of
petty, egotistical indulgences?
What purpose does my art serve? He asked with incredulity. What
purpose do you serve if we are speaking about purposes. What is your
Utility, he spat bitterly? Is there some very special yet hidden trait woven into your genomes that will come to fruition and blossom in the righteousness
of your purpose?
Calm down, Didier, I caution, licking my lips nervously as other
patrons are looking at us out of the corners of their eyes. What I
mean to ask is what purpose do you propose your creativity to be
used for other than yourself?
Why should my creativity serve any purpose other than for myself, he
asked, clearing his throat of Gitanes phlegm like a plumber snakes a
clogged toilet. I suffer enough from my choices, they make sure I do
suffer indeed for not being one of their productive members of
society…I could never calculate the psychological damage brought
upon me by seeing the contempt in their eyes. And why then do you
think I drink? Who wouldn't under these circumstances? What are you
saying, simply because I cannot subordinate my art into acceptable
consumerist values like writing commercial jingles about disposable
diapers or creating new superlatives for the unique comfort and
absorption of a particular brand name tampon, I should crawl into my
preternatural cave to wallow in my own isolation, fed on disgust,
shat into neat little pellets that can be easily swept up and
disposed of as if I never existed?
The monologue was spat forth with great intensity, with barely a
breath drawn. And just why are we suffocated with this doomed sense
of having to justify ourselves and our utility to others? Do you
think the pimply teenage bagging groceries in the Carrefour
hypermarché is pissing himself over his lack of purpose? A
paper-shuffler, lost in a bureaucratic labyrinth of spread sheets
and interoffice memos is scratching his head wondering why he hasn't
yet soared to the heights of his corporate manager, fluent in
corporate techno speak gibberish?
This silly question of yours, questioning the purpose of my
forsaking the chain gang of subordinates, pacified by television
soma, beaten into submission by the overwhelming nature of keeping
up, this is nothing to me. I laugh at it. I am proud of being poet,
a craftsman. Proud of not being nothing, beautiful for it, in fact.
Look, Gautier once wrote that only things that are altogether
useless can truly be beautiful; anything that is useful is ugly
because it is the expression of some need and the needs of man are
base and disgusting as his nature is weak and poor. -
And furthermore, he added, warming to his subject like a university
professor unwittingly lured from the patina of his daily monologue
in front of an unfocused group of students, you will remember that Frank Zappa, your own countryman, simplified Art into being the act of making something from nothing and selling it. There’s your utility.
And that is what the purpose of my art is. Not to cultivate myself
out of egoism, not simply to avoid the plague of working for some
other fat pig who will make profit from my sweat and leave me
scratchings in return. The purpose of my art is to elevate me out of
this slavery of civilisation…to free me to be myself, not just the
self in front of you in physical disarray, but the self I am beneath
all the surfaces, the subconscious, the bones, the gristle and
blood, the ineptitude of years, deep down below all of this, like an
object buried in a landfill which will never be dug out, lies
myself, the self I am trying to discover, my only reason for living
here, now drinking this beer with you, walking home – all of it
seems entirely without purpose unless it is in the name of this
search.
I heard Didier's voice ringing in my ears all the way home, having
finally extracted myself politely, excused myself, my existence,
wondering whether I was beautiful or ugly, useless, or useful…the
world was upside down and I was rapidly becoming a slave to the
schedule of Anastasia. This was my sense of purpose.
*****
And sometime before dawn I would hear the key in the door as I lie
attempting to sleep despite the racing of an adrenaline heart and
the anticipation like a dog of his master coming home and I would
hear her footsteps creeping quietly across the front room floor and
after giving her time to pour a glass of wine and have a seat, I
would rise as well, feigning as though I'd been sleeping all along
and we would go through a predictable round of apologies for waking
me as though I hadn't been waiting like a predator all evening for
this particular moment to arrive and my subsequent dismals of the
apologies for wanting her company and pouring a glass of wine myself
she would unwind her evening to me in great detail, each song that
she sung, the reaction of the crowd at particular moments, whom she
spoke with, whom she met, what she had to drink in between sets
until every detail had been scratched into my imagination deeply
enough that I could almost convince myself I'd been there as well.
She was often exhausted by the effort, the reliving and recounting
but would relax more deeply asking me about the conversations I
managed to remember from the evening, which characters I could
myself recall through the hazy evening. Half the stories I made up
from conversations I'd had before with Albert because the truth was,
a great deal of the conversations I'd had, mired as they were in a
lack of common language and the tilting back of glasses invariably
meant that I'd spend most of those conversations determining the
dialogue myself as though I were writing it now free from the
slowing tactics of alcohol and translations.
Don't you get bored of that place, those people, the same beers, the
same faces?
No, they are like a human glue holding me together some nights. I
suppose I could have found better uses of my time but the truth is,
coming home to your empty flat with so much time to kill is like
sitting on death row awaiting a stay of execution. I need these
people, like I've needed all the people before them – if I am a
juggler, their faces are the balls I am juggling and concentrating
on those faces I am able to juggle.
Through the candlelight of the flat, I could see her staring at me –
Oh, you're just a drunk, Witold; you don't have to make excuses just
for me. I can't judge you any more than myself – it isn't the faces
as often it is the drink you are juggling and instead of helping the
concentration it is merely distracting it. I know, I've done in for
many years here and alone.
But we don't have to be alone, I would protest as though arguing
with a republican about the merits of the royal family. We've worn
paths through ourselves in that pattern, being alone and just as
easily, with time, we can wind paths through each other…
And the moat would be drawn back in and her feet would curl and her
knees hugged closer to her chest. Not now, she would murmur. Not yet
and maybe never but still always possible. There are a lot of years
on that same path with too many false steps in wrong directions.
That's why I need this time alone even if the one thing I seem to
want most is to be with you.
The value of life can be calculated only by the itemisation of the
sum and intensity of experiences, she said.
One of the reasons I keep all these photographs of strangers, she
was explaining early that morning after undressing and pouring a
glass of cognac from a bottle purloined from the club, is because I
try to abstract the particulars from the universal, the parts from
this composite. I wonder all the time what it is that makes one or
two men, say, out of a collection of them in one photograph, here,
she gestured, handing over a photograph of black-faced miners
standing below the photographer looking up as if from the bowels of
hell, regarding God. Look at this photograph. Notice how one or two
of the faces particularly grab you – why? Is it the angle of the
light, the photographer's vision, or some internal aura that the
captured soul demonstrates for that one split second?
She calmed after this sales pitch of the individual over the
collective and visibly decided that I could be trusted with her next
line of reasoning. When I regard men I wonder what qualities about
them I might admire, what characteristics might I absorb through
being in their presence – of course, the obvious – the only
qualities which are not intentionally hidden or cannot be hidden in
our venal society, are the easiest, yet least accurate measure of
judging. I cannot tell from looking at this photograph, any history
of the strangers below. I cannot decided who would be the more
caring lover, who would make the better father, who would be the
drunkard or the wild spirit yet in their eyes, those little white
circles peering out from the soot of their faces, I can tell who
among them is a decent man…
The candour was overwhelming when it came spilling out of her like
that so unexpectedly that I'd almost want to ask her to repeat it
again to make sure it hadn't been just another imagined bit of
dialogue in my head on a morning walk of dreaming.
I wanted to believe her but I wondered instead, with a vague jealous
passion, what she was doing. I wondered about friends which she must
have had whom she didn't introduce me to. I wondered if there was
someone else allowed to attend her gigs, wondered how many lovers
amongst the musicians she had taken or still took. I wondered who
stared at her dreamily as she sang, who invited her for drinks
between sets, who she shared jokes with and if of any of them, she
explained my sudden appearance.
Her minute descriptions of her evening always pointedly ignored what
was probably the reality of most of her evenings, whether it was
merely in my imagination or not.
I have to admit, my heart was fairly limping along with me those
nights. It was a rather unfamiliar feeling; queasiness, excitement,
uncertainty. The hours we spent together seemed like part of the
same stitched together during sleep and the moment we parted,
reality loomed ahead again. I didn't think about Utrecht or Albert
or any other moment in my life. I was living solely for the moment
when we would meet up again.
*****
I have something to tell you Witold, she mentioned casually as we
sat in Jardin du Luxembourg tearing off hunks of bread from a loaf
and stuffing it with cheese whilst washing the meal down with wine.
I sat up, alarmed. Finally the penny would drop.
I've had a month-long gig scheduled for some time, a gig that I
can't really break or postpone and it's not here in Paris.
No problem, I shrugged, I'll come along.
No….she drew her words out carefully, shaking her head. We can't
really do that you see…first of all, the place that booked me allows
me free room and board which isn't to share…
I could find a place wherever it is and stay back, in the
shadows-like, I smiled playfully, unable to mask the fear in my
voice.
Well, you know how I feel about having you see my gigs…there just
isn't much point. Besides, I want to have some time alone. To digest
all of this, she explained calmly, waving her hand somewhere in the
vicinity between her and I.
Aha, I knew there was a catch to all this sudden happiness, I lamely
attempted to joke. Boyfriend stashed away somewhere else?
She smiled patiently. No, no boyfriend stashed elsewhere in a secret
cupboard in another town. It's just like I said, time alone to reflect. Besides, isn’t your friend Albert going to start worrying about you? You haven’t called or written to him in nearly a fortnight. Won’t he get tired of waiting?
Albert? I nearly laughed. Albert will be getting drunk every night, will chain smoke his way through each day, will play or listen to music. The thought of what had happened to me might cross his mind, sure. But Albert is not going anywhere. Not yet anyway. And what if I rang the café he frequents and left a message for him? Not back for another month. Chasing paradise.
She laughed but still shook her head. You don’t mean to tell me that this comrade of yours who you’ve come all the way over from New York with to play jazz together in Europe with, he’ll barely notice you’re gone and worse still, won’t even care that you are?
No, Albert is not a man who worries about anything but where his next beer is coming from. And don’t try to turn this into something about Albert, this is something about me and you.
I felt instantly and regrettably bitter.
She smiled with discomfort, touching my head gently.
When I return, I will come up to Utrecht to visit you…
*****
There were, of course, untold questions I wanted to ask but I wasn't
sure I really wanted to know the answers. There were nights of
unflinching truths I'd often heard my father express about things I
could only imagine, truths which were usually better left unspoken,
as he often impressed upon me about my mother.
Deep down the desire to pout and pull in as though doing so would
alter the reality of the situation was overwhelming at times. Any
inducement out of pain, any remedy for the imagination of incessant
infidelities or worse still, apathy. I wanted to insist on coming
along, verifying myself things were as innocent as they were being
portrayed but I wasn't certain I wanted to be around to find out
they weren't.
I wanted to say fuck the whole thing, sorry I'd come along for the
ride, wanted to roll in a slough of my own bile, my own greed for
more, my own in fatigable paranoias and distrust. But I didn't want
to feel this new limb severed, didn't care for the idea of feeling
the numbness set in, the futile blankness of knowing something that
was once full with promise had been emptied, deflated, punctured. I
knew better somehow, innately, not to want either extreme for
neither extreme instinctively, was not the answer, merely a
impatient conclusion.
Play it cool, coldly and calmly and play it warm, supple and with
feeling.
*****
So the next morning, bitterest of mornings, reeking fear and regret,
I was seen off. Anastasia seemed genuinely disturbed by the looming
departure but I, as the entire time I'd been trying to piece her
together, hour by hour, sleeping or awake, through gestures, facial
expressions, hidden meanings in seemingly innocuous utterances,
remained as confused as ever about whether there was any difference
between what she appeared and sounded and felt and what she really
was – what did I knew even after all these days and hours
accumulated like rain water in a bucket left outside in a draught,
was that I didn't know her at all. I didn't trust her, I didn't
understand her yet somehow I was able to convince myself there was
something growing in me which she was unquestionably a part of – as
though the root of an indigestion can be pinpointed through a
specific meal, oh, it was the chilli dogs and sauerkraut, no doubt.
So departure was drawn out with a breadcrumb trail of promises and
yet still somehow, even though I was apprehensive about it, relieved
and heavily medicated from our farewell night that drew out into the
early first train of the morning in the direction of Amsterdam, I
wanted to leave the thread of this emotion at the station and let it
unravel all the way to the end of the journey so that at any time,
if either of us had been so inclined, we could merely follow the
strand of thread all the way back to the origin, crawling through a
tiny hole in the universe that had begun with a stilted conversation
in a night club.
1:50 AM
CHAPTER EIGHT:
REFUGEES WITHOUT PHOTOS
"Then love," she said, "may be described generally as the love of
the everlasting possession of the good?" "That is most true."
Diotima to Plato in The Symposium of Plato, Jowett translation
When a man loves the beautiful, what does he desire?" I answered her
"That the beautiful may be his." "Still," she said, "the answer
suggests a further question: What is given by the possession of
beauty?" "To what you have asked," I replied, "I have no answer
ready." "Then," she said, "Let me put the word 'good' in the place
of the beautiful, and repeat the question once more: If he who loves
good, what is it then that he loves? "The possession of the good," I
said. "And what does he gain who possesses the good?" "Happiness," I
replied.
--
Diotima and Plato from The Symposium of Plato, Jowett translation
In an after-hours boozer, long ago lost in the Pigalle's old, hilly
curvy cobblestone streets, ash cement buildings, cracked paint and
steep lamp lighted stairways, I wandered into the basement of a
candlelit club, seated myself at the first available table never
once allowing my eyes to leave the girl I'd been following.
I'd followed her in. I'd followed her, my own little Edith Piaf who
I recreated in the following as a tempestuous little street singer
dressed in a black, hand knit dress, a borrowed scarf hiding a
missing sleeve.. I followed her walking through the red light
district in full swing and with everything, the sex shows, sex shops
and prostitutes clamouring for my attention, all the way from Place
Blanche I'd followed her down Boulevard Rochechouart until she took
a right on Rue des Martyrs and appeared to lose me near St Georges
until I spotted her again on Rue St Lazare. I stopped when she did,
to light a cigarette beneath a light rain and when she entered that
after-hours boozer, so did I.
I hadn't bothered once whilst I followed to wonder why I was doing
so. Perhaps it started simply as a little game at first. Sure, she'd
caught my eye but so had many other s in so few hours; exotic faces, alluring fashion, the mystery I perceived in those anonymous lives cloaked even more deliciously with curiosity of their soaking in foreign cultures.
Yet as I settled in at an even pace a half block behind her I didn't imagine that I was following her as much as I was following an instinct or perhaps just following to have something to do, a break in an otherwise monotonous series of drifting movements from one café to the next as the afternoon hours
blurred into the evening and almost imperceptively into a nocturnal
lagoon of listlessness that neither the drugs nor the drinking,
fastidiously applied for just that reason, were able to overshadow.
And of course gradually, perhaps just after I'd become aware that
I'd made a left when she'd made a left and made a right after she'd
made a right, after I'd slowed when she stopped to peruse a shop
window, gradually, I began to realise that there was a purpose in my
following her.
Sure, it might have even started as a little game. See how long I
could follow until she disappeared somewhere I could not follow.
Imagine myself to be some secret agent tailing a suspected double
spy. Find a little opening in a stranger's anonymous existence, tear
it open wider until I could see myself what was inside.
No doubt her attractive features, those I could spot from varying angles and
disparate lighting played some role in piquing my interest. Yet I could suss this out even from watching the back of her, watching her move from behind;
her steps purposeful yet light, watching the ringlets of her dark hair
bouncing with each demure stride, a confident cat walk, against the back of that black hand knit dress and still nearly burrowed into the scarf around her neck but covering the bare of her back where the dress opened just enough to reel in the gaze but still enough to prevent the briefest exposures of her skin bared for the mildest of warm Indian summer evenings and of course, breathlessly I might have taken in the curves as they realigned with each step,
figuring and refiguring but always returning to a pleasing state.
Even from behind at my discreet distance I noticed a seemingly imperceptible grace in her movements. Not precisely those of a dancer, a ballerina, but perhaps of a woman accustomed to being watched. Someone conscious of her every move under observation, a conditioned self consciousness of sorts, someone who might have even practiced how she looked to a passerby or how she might appear to paparazzi.
Either her own figure or her manner of dress, moderate and bordering perhaps on old fashioned, cloaked the feminine curves. Admittedly, there was painfully little to spark the imagination of this seemingly saturnine figurine.
No, the more I considered this the more I was certain that no stereotypical allure would prevail. Instinctively I knew her physical features would not be ugly. And no, I did not reflexively chastise myself for such shallow standards of judgement nor flinch regarding my own character, someone who would follow so long as the beauty was not hidden internally, housed in a, let’s say ugly framework. I knew there would be something striking about her when I finally came face to face to her, if not her features, then her manner, something worth pursuing, even as I tried convincing myself, even then, that this was a casual, temporary obsession, this shadowing, this extemporaneous stalking.
And once I knew; having realised I was following and continued to
follow anyway, that there was some purpose to my following, some
means to this end, I then allowed myself the luxury of imagination.
I drafted the opening lines I might use to pry a smile or a spark of
interest from her before realising that knowing nothing about her personal history, her personality, her likes and dislikes, I might well handicap my chances with transparent clichés So I tried to imagine as many scenarios as possible which might appear obvious once she’d tuned and I found myself, or was caught out looking into her eyes. Clichés need no rehearsal, time and humanity has doen that for us already. Preparation, on the other hand, allowed for as many possibilities as foreseeable.
I imagined her replies. I imagined her in innumerable different versions of her own life before my having met her, of her routines and schedules, the countable heartbreaks such routines arose from, the defences and built-in obstacles to approaching her.
Oh it was quite an elaborate amount of daydreaming passing between
my eyes to the back of her as she walked, quite a pastiche of scenarios and then without warning, it came to an abrupt end as she stopped in front of the club, glanced at her reflection gleaned from some indiscernible location, lit
her cigarette and went inside.
Confronted with the sudden end of movement, this urgent need for a next step decision, I panicked.
I passed the club and continued on as though that had been my intention all along, taking a few deep drags to calm myself, and headed back to the club silently urging myself forward, fighting off fear, internally stomping out every fiery little outbreak of doubt as though my life suddenly depended on it.
Inside, the first floor was a fog of smoke and bad lighting. Tables were
filled with people, shadowy faces emitting conversations in
unintelligible languages, laughter and drinking. I attempted
with great concentration to unite myself with her again yet amongst all these
anonymous faces I could make out in the shadows at these tables or standing
idly impervious to the smoking and laughing of others I could not
find hers.
Again I was seized by an inexplicable panic although whereas the first
had overcome me outdoors in attempting decide the next step to take,
to carry on walking or to turn back and continue following, the
second wave of panic was of loss or perhaps being lost as people
stared at me sometimes openly, sometimes out of the corner of their
eye as people do in the middle of conversations they're only
listening to one side of. The panic was borne from a fear of loss of my purpose, the mission of finding.
No one approached me and I could only approach shadows. These people were like props set up as camouflage. I walked in what I’d hoped were casual circles around the tables. Perhaps appearing to some who chanced a glance in my direction like a poorly cloaked undercover cop seeking a fugitive, a lost suspect.
I had almost given up hope yet incredulous that she could have
simply disappeared into thin albeit smoke-choking air, before I
spotted a stairway, followed, and cautiously made my way down the narrow
passage which led down into a cavernous sort of opening with another
stage and a still-smokier area.
And there I spotted her once again, this time standing alone at the
far side of the bar, her back to the wall as though she were standing look out, a sentinel protecting herself. Having fixed my sight on her only for a second, I turned to try and find an empty table.
Once seated, and down here the vacant tables were in more ready supply, I attempted take in as much of her as well as decency, decorum and the dim light would allow without overtly staring.
I imagined that the shadows muffled her beauty or imagined beauty where I could see no details. I could make out her head and the shape of her face at the
other end of that bar but the details were entirely inaccessible.
It became important not simply to sit there paralysed
because failing to communicate or even attempt to communicate with
her after following her over that time and distance would be not
merely wasteful but humiliating, I rolled a cigarette with the
nagging half-expectation that any moment another man would emerge
from the shadows, her man, and they would embrace or perhaps kiss
lightly on the lips and that would be the end of this ridiculous
charade once and for all, before I had even gotten up from the seat
or begun screwing up some courage to speak to her.
My mind raced whilst my body remained in neutral, seated. Should I wait for table service and continue my distant spying or should I simply drop oall pretence and stand, order my drink from the bar, right next to her?
Finally, I stood back up from the seat after the private, subliminal pep talk
I'd given myself about seizing the moment and taking the bull by the
horns and a half dozen similar clichés recited like a rosary litany.
She had been talking briefly with the bartender but then stood
alone, comfortably alone, and looked off into the general direction
of the stage.
As I walked towards her in what in movies would have been slow
motion but in reality was simply taking cautious steps forward
careful not to angle too far in her direction yet still angle in
that direction, I imagined what it might be like to be moving with
the intention of ordering a drink and then suddenly pretend to discover her
as though I hadn't just followed her all that way into this place to begin with. Ah, it all seemed so transparent, my awkwardness, my indecision and then finally, some half-baked scheme, feigning non-chalance as though she were some rube just in from the countryside, first night out in the big city, naïve as a child. Who was I kidding? It was going to be a bad acting job.
What could I possibly say to excuse my intrusion on her private thoughts? What excuse could I give whilst waiting to order my drink that would not appear immediately contrived, that might engage her in polite conversation?
To try and relax I considered my potential opening lines as though
this were a game of chess and my opening line would be my opening
move as White, a variation known as the Staunton Gambit which had
been named after Howard Staunton who played it against Bernhard
Horwitz in a match in London in 1846 and which had been included in his famous Chess-Players Handbook published a year later.
The Gambit attempts boldly, by giving away White's central pawn, to
expose Black's king and here, by giving myself away, walking slowly
towards her, I would hopefully expose her vulnerability rather than
my own.
Still, as I approached, I debated the merits of establishing early
pawn control of the centre, to allow myself to linger at the bar
with a glass of house red wine pretending that I hadn't come there
all along with the explicit intention of chatting her up. Dozens of
ideas ran through my brain but before I'd even considered how to
order the wine: to contemplate whether to simply address her in
English in the hope that she wasn't solely a Francophile or muster
up some mangled mixture of what few French phrases I had attempted
to memorise on the train to Paris earlier that morning.
In the end, I said nothing, muttering red wine please to the barman
in French and standing there staring at the bottles arrayed along the back of
the bar, whistling in the dark to a mindless tune and before I could
even kick myself for my inaction she was beside me with an unlit
cigarette between her fingers, wordlessly requesting a light.
Oh, I fumbled with the lighter at first but after the second try and
trying to laugh the embarrassment, I regained some sense of verbal
clarity and before she could edge away again I blurted out a
breathless and disconnected dictum in English about "Le Bel Indifferent",
Cocteau's play written for and starring Edith Piaf, perhaps still
dreaming in a foggy, alcoholic trance that this woman in front of me
was somehow Edith Piaf, or her ghost. Had my casual afternoon of sidewalk drinks and delusional strolls with spliff in hand rendered me into a narcotic, hallucinogenic trance?
My sudden unravelling seemed to catch her off guard.. Perhaps she
expected more sophistication from a man who had followed over many
city blocks for nearly a half hour. She regarded me with a look of
amusement, a carnival in her eyes, engaged, then disengaged,
considering the rapid development of her own pieces on this imaginary chess board.
"I will be going soon to sing" she explained in heavily
accented-English, nodding towards the tiny stage where currently sat
an experimentational jazz trio who were still, it appeared to me
anyway, tuning up their instruments. In all likelihood, what I
mistook for tuning was the actual performance. I feigned interest
for a moment but immediately extinguished any look of interest in
the trio when it appeared she was inhaling again, preparing to
finish a thought, it was difficult to discern. "Perhaps you will
like to speak with me at a more opportune time, for example, when my
singing is finished? Perhaps in one hour's time, or so?"
Aha, this had been too easy. Certainly, even though I couldn't even
remember my words, I hadn't said anything particularly profound – I
was confused and instead of catching her off guard she had made a
move I hadn't seen coming in staring at the pieces assembled on the
board. I'd expected a polite brush off perhaps or a slight flicker
of interest at best. Certainly not an appointment.
Sure, I said hesitantly, watching her out of the corner of my eye. I
didn't realise you'd be singing, I found myself apologising. I'll
just have a seat and…well, watch the performance, I shrugged.
But she shook her head lightly as though I'd lost myself in the
translation. I could not discern the colour of her eyes which
somehow lost anyway in the shadows.
I must explain…I cannot bear singing for the first time in front of
people that I know. I can only sing for strangers. Otherwise I get
too nervous. But I will meet you instead. There's a little café at
the corner, one street over from here called Café Saint Amant. Why
don't you wait for me there? It's just a short distance from here. I
can meet you inside or just outside the entryway between one and one
and a half hours from now...
Well, sure…I answered in the voice of a man pretending he didn't
realise he was being brushed off. Her voice had the effect of
intoxicating me with expectation, the room felt unbalanced and out of focus. I'll meet you at Café Saint Amant, I repeated as though it was something we
did on a regular basis. In an hour or two.
Sure, I thought to myself. I'll sit there. I'll wait and wait and
wait. I shall place myself in the trust of her sincerity. I will beat
back the voices of derision in my head and wait patiently as though
doing so would be enough to guarantee her appearance.
Ok, I'll see you there? Her eyes did not hide from me even though it
was apparent her thoughts were already moving from me to thinking of
the set she would perform. It was the possibility of meeting her
where she suggested, when she suggested that compelled me into
compliance even though I doubted the outcome. I was curious to hear
her sing yet the facility with which she had first allowed me in,
then made arrangements for later, then turned back to the business
at hand of the stage with barely a second thought, was unnerving and
I convinced myself that I'd be better off leaving before my nerves
got the better of me.
Yeah. See you in a bit, I confirmed again, half aloud, backing off and leaning in the direction of the entrance. I wanted to look back to catch her
looking at me but instead I imagined her gaze stayed fixed to the
stage, focused without giving me a second thought.
I'll wait until you get there, I noted, suddenly enthusiastic. The
experimental jazz trio had morphed into one tune together, at the
same time, something vaguely familiar before it hit me: The "West
End Blues" 1928 recording performed by Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines,
Fred Robinson, Jimmy Strong, Mancy Cara and Zutty Singleton. Or
perhaps it was the jukebox. The room was far too smoky to discern
the stage any longer.
She was smiling at me blankly as though she knew I was already supposed to have turned around and left but in seeing me still standing there she had no idea what sort of smile toleave me with and had decided, at the last minute, to remain neutral. Had I remained standing there, I imagined there was quite a
good chance her smile would melt, her eyes would hiss and a few
strong-arms would grab me and dump me outside the door without
further notice, back out into the spattering rain and the cold and
the strangers.
See you then... I waved, turned on my heel in an effort at
careless optimism and headed for the exit. Fate indeed. Whether our
conversation went any further or not was entirely her decision.
*****
It wasn't too difficult to find the Café Saint Amant. Especially
considering I only half-expected it to exist at all. I knew there
could have been a myriad of potential road blocks. Was it the corner
one street over to the left or to the right, one street further down
before being on the left or right? Did it exist at all or would I just
wander the rest of the night in search of it?
But there it was, as soon as I'd reached the corner, one block over
to the right, lights on, a few people scattered around the outdoor
tables, fewer still inside. I took a seat outside, nearest to the
sidewalk and waited, taking in the neighbourhood around me.
Toulouse-Lautrec had once painted the surrounding area into a
district of cabarets, circus freaks, and prostitutes and at this
hour, with the remaining stragglers lurking and leering and drooling
a dazed sort of enthusiasm as they passed and bumped into me and
threw up in the alleyways, I imagined I could see what he'd have
seen, the nocturnal circus of haphazard humanity.
I'd read somewhere that Toulouse-Lautrec had broken both
of his legs in his early teens, and because neither had ever properly
healed, both had stopped growing. It could have simply been urban
legend but I couldn't help wondering that this Tom Thumb genius had
abnormally short legs as an adult and was only 1.5 meters tall. I'd
read that he'd been a heavy drinker in Montmartre and that because
of his heavy drinking he was eventually confined to a sanatorium,
battling the drink, battling his insecurities and his pain.
I spent my waiting time in the café in a variety of fashions. First,
the effort of waiting for the waiter. At first I tried looking at
other customers sat around me, trying to decipher their
conversations. A pair of middle aged women speaking to one another
in secretive tones, laying out, no doubt, the case against the lover
of the other. Another lone man sipping a wine and engrossed in a
book whose title I could not make out. A pair of young students
speaking to each other in German, battling philosophies.
With no one to speak to I thought instead about the things I'd lost
forever due to my own carelessness or apathy, or by virtue of
someone else's fuck up. I began to sketch a list of them, a
dispassionate list because you had to become dispassionate about
such losses in order not to let them gradually destroy you like the
slow leak of air from the pinprick of a rubber inner tube. In the
end, it is about denial and the acts and losses which deny you are
like angry, self-loathing little people who derive great pleasure
from denying you over and over again. The list grew impossibly
longer as I thought about it further and stared past people seated
around me as though they were ethereal, temporary visions. As I
choked down an Anise aperitif served with water that I'd ordered
solely to appear as though I knew what I was doing, I began to feel
sickened at the losses and resolved to make up for the losses with
gains. Monumental gains that dwarfed the world. Explosions of
personal insights and epiphanies.
The list I'd begun to sketch had become a doodle, an
incomprehensible, unhinged triptych growing darker and darker with
each subsequent swoop of my recollection: childhood toys destroyed
in fits of rage, writings and drawings ripped to shreds in
frustration, musical instruments bent and dented beyond repair at
the most subtle, corrective hints from strangers when I played on
street corners, acquaintances discarded because of distance or because
they'd grown intolerant of appeasing me, lovers, dead in the heart,
wilted, ashed and forgotten. An entire gawking collective of
memories and strangers mocking me. My blood pressure was rising, I
was sure of it. The anise tasted terrible and the water was as warm
as piss. However intrigued by this girl, I didn't know if I could
bear it even another minute of sitting alone in bitter recollections
that stormed in from out of nowhere.
So there, you've found your spot and look, you've even begun to
sketch the customers!
She seemed delighted to see me, far more delighted than a stranger
would be meeting another stranger after a few seconds of introduction and a completely blank history of conversation. But the cloud which had stuffed my head and my ears and was adumbrating everything around me passed suddenly and quickly as she removed an imitation velvet cloth coat with a fake fur collar
and shook the rain from it before setting it down along the back of
her chair. May I have a look? She attempted to remove the sketch
from beneath my hands as she seated herself across from me but I
kept my palms flat on the table, the paper snug inside.
I cannot allow strangers to see my drawings, I teased, reminding her
of having to leave the club for her, relegated to this table alone
for nearly two hours yet secretly joyous that she'd arrived after
all.
Do you know that Toulouse-Lautrec used to sit like you in this
neighbourhood, in crowded nightclubs, drinking and laughing with
patrons and drawing sketches. Then he would take those sketches with
him to his studio and work on them as bright-coloured paintings. Is
that what you're going to do, take these sketches of yours back to
your studio and turn them into paintings?
I scoffed. Hardly worth the bother. Besides, I don't have a studio.
I don't even have a room for the night.
Oh, she said quietly. I didn't mean to pry. I didn't realise…you are
homeless?
I suppose, in a way, yes. But not in the way you're imagining. I've
just arrived here this morning and in the excitement of being here,
I guess I just sort of forgot to look for a place to stay. I don't
really mind actually. There's something romantic about going to a
place without a plan, not knowing where you will end up when it's
all said and done, wandering around a new place without a specific
purpose…
Ah, but you seem to have had a specific purpose, haven't you? After
all, you followed me for quite a distance, yes, I knew it, but I
wasn't sure why and then when you appeared again in the club, well,
I was rather curious to know why you'd been following me. I thought
perhaps you knew me and in the club, as dark as it is, well, it was
difficult to tell whether or not your face was familiar and yet now
that I see you here it seems quite apparent that I don't know you at
all, so still, I am curious. Why were you following me earlier?
Her English was spoken with a heavy accent, almost a caricatured voice yet
she spoke with few grammatical flaws as though she was as comfortable in the language as I was.
I didn't realise you'd been aware I was following you, I began with
embarrassment. I guess I wouldn't make much of an undercover cop,
would I?
She laughed nervously and I imagined I could sense her reassessment
of having agreed to meet me at all in the first place. Any minute I
expected her to realise the business of solving the mystery of my
having followed her was no mystery at all, merely one lonesome man
prowling the streets who happened upon her and decided to see where
she was headed for lack of anything better to do. I expected her to
allow the mistake to sink in for only a few moments before politely
excusing herself mentioning the lateness of the hour and
disappearing back into the night she'd emerged from, gone forever.
But for some reason she didn't appear eager to go anywhere.
So tell me, stranger, she asked, touching my hand lightly, why have
you come to Paris then and why did you chose to follow me?
For the same reason you agreed to meet me here, I replied easily,
relief in the knowledge that she wouldn't be taking her leave of me
just yet, that the interview wasn't quite concluded, I was curious.
Her eyebrows were raised remarkably, the habitual, beaten path lines
of comers-on etched in the cynicism of her expectations.
And so tell me then, stranger, what precisely were you curious
about?
Unfortunately, I had no good answer. I suppose in the world of
flirtation, male bravado and self-confidence there are answers that
lend momentum to a snappy, comfortable rapport which would have
fallen from my lips as effortlessly as the tongue of a panting dog, But in this
world I inhabited, there were no well-honed comebacks. I was like a
heckled comedian who lost his nerve on stage.
She must have sensed my unease because her hand returned to mine
again with reassurance and she smiled, turning her head slightly as
though seeing me from a different angle might provide some clue.
You could begin by telling me your name….mine is Anastasia.
And so it began, the stuttering lack of timing and grace gradually
succumbing to an unexpected outpouring of detail beginning with
Albert's arrival on my door step, flowing into the personal injury
claim, the departure for Utrecht to discover ourselves, the success
of one gig that made us believe we might actually be able to
subsidise ourselves through a combination of guile and music, waking
up the other morning suddenly with that dream still lingering and
deciding to take the train, just on the whim of the dream, finding
myself here almost as suddenly as I'd decided to come, wandering
aimlessly all afternoon in expectation that something unexpected
would happen to justify my having come at all.
It's funny. At one point in the early evening I’d been readying myself to pack it in for the night, find a room and start again tomorrow in a different arrondisement, wander more until that inexplicable something would reveal itself to me. I mean, it's odd because I had faith in it, faith that it was bound to
happen, bound to be discovered, if only I were patient and
diligent…and then, I spotted you.
So, she said cautiously, am I to infer then that I was the dream?
She laughed to herself softly, amused by me in a way that a mother
is amused by some unexpected expression uttered by her child.
Well, not entirely…certainly if I wandered long enough, something
was bound to grab my attention, fulfil the expectation of finding
something, whatever it was. For all I know it could have been a
painting or the view as I turned down a particular side street. As
it turns out it was you. Not the dream of course and not even
necessarily the purpose of being here. But when I saw you, I wanted
to know where you were going because perhaps where you were going
held some answer…
And as it turned about, a jazz club, she inserted. How ironic, for a
jazz musician.
Well, not that I got to hear any of it, I answered shyly.
Perhaps there is some sort of internal yet cosmological magnet
between musician and singer that brought tyou to this point? I could discern in her engaging eyes, whether she was teasing or sarcastic - her accent somehow hid the nuances and vocal inflections you might normally use to detect.
I can't deny that Albert and I would certainly be aided by a chanteuse but somehow I have the feeling there's more to it.
Her cheeks pinkened and her pupils dilated slightly, perhaps a
reaction to the fatigue of the evening or perhaps out of the game of
the curiosity, I wasn't in a position to tell.
Strands of sweat still lightly tinged her eyebrows and even the nape
of her neck was damp. I wondered what her singing voice had sounded
like. I wondered what those other dark and anonymous faces had
registered as she sang.
Well, there's always a chance of almost anything happened, if you're
in the right position, she teased, smirking, took a cigarette from
the pack she'd tossed down next to the ashtray and lit it quickly
before the act registered in my brain and my hands could reach for
my own lighter. She exhaled quickly, tracing an absent circle with
her index finger in a small pile of salt that had spilled several
diners before.
I knew she wanted to witness me squirm from the discomfort of having
been misinterpreted. I knew it was a little game she was playing
with herself, but I wasn't feeling generous any more. Verbalizing
the train ride had disembowelled a section of the dream yet again,
reality had crept back. She was little more than a desperate urchin.
She'd take me back to her apartment, finish me off with a bottle of
Absinthe back in her rent-by-the-week apartment in some still
seedier section of town, take off enough clothes for the later dream
sequence to appear as though we'd actually fucked, then allow me to
pass out before stealing my wallet, grabbing what few personal
belongings she had in the room that she wanted to keep and then
disappearing forever into the buxom night of Paris. I felt sick and
lonely all at once, a wave of self-pitying nausea. I stood quickly,
clearing my throat.
Well, I suppose we've had our fun…your curiosity is satisfied, I
know where I can find a jazz club and perhaps I should be pushing
on…
I'll go with you, she volunteered, dropping the cigarette to the
floor and grinding it out with the toe of her shoe before standing.
The top of her head barely reached my stomach. Suddenly she seemed
harmless. Besides, what do you know of the city? You don't know
what neighbourhoods to steer clear of, you don't speak the language
and you have no place to stay. I couldn't very well just leave you
to wander through the mysterious night of your Paris dream without a
guide, could I? Besides, I'm always too wound up when I finish over
there. I can't sleep for hours. Usually I just go home alone and sit
quietly in the dark, drinking wine and listening to music. It would
be interesting to try something different.
Don’t you think it’s odd, I thought to myself, having ingested the ease with which she’d invited herself along. Ignoring my sudden paranoia with the cool confidence of a woman accustomed to getting her way.
Of course she would get her way, but why did she want it that way to begin with, I wondered, my brain suddenly scurrying to keep pace with the events unfolding. I’m a complete stranger. Nothing striking or exotic; life’s experiences had made that quite clear. So what was in it for her? Even as the bill was being sorted, chairs pushed back in, this question turned in my head again and again, each time pushed back down like a jack-in-the-box by my curiosity and natural need to see this through, irrespective of the let down that would surely rear its ugly head eventually.
Her questions ran along with her trying to keep up with me as I
pushed out into the night air which I gulped with great relief and
satisfaction, the dyspeptic dread finally departing as though I'd
already showered and changed and was seated on a living room sofa
with my feet up on the coffee table, a pipe in my mouth and the
evening paper beside me.
You were magnificent I exclaimed in a sudden fit of manic euphoria, taking her by her tiny shoulders and looking down at her.
How? What do you mean? Did you spy on me this evening?
Nothing of the kind. I meant to say, you are magnificent, a tonic. I feel
better already. Maybe I won't even bother with the train back to
Utrecht after all. What would you say if I told you that? What
would you say if I said I wanted to stay a few days, or a week even?
Would you let me hear you sing?
I began walking again without waiting for her reply. The night air
had suddenly filled me with unassailable buoyancy. I kicked myself
inwardly nevertheless for having made the decision back in Utrecht
to leave the horn behind.
Now would have been the most appropriate time! I could have
latched onto the banks of the Seine just as the dawn began and lent
my own dissonant blaring to bounce off the hours and airs of Paris.
All the while Anastasia followed behind, or as closely to my side as
possible, double timing her half steps to my determined yet
absent-minded strides as we went in no particular direction, street
corner after street corner until she finally begged, in exhaustion,
that we stop, that the incessant marching cease..
I could see myself enjoying her company. Not just because she was attractive and I was alone in a foreign city. I was drawn to her paradoxical qualities often seeming to sway unintentionally between bitterness and naiveté. She seemed at times to have come to know too much too soon and clutched at a past tightly as if by relinquishing her hold of it she would lose her grip entirely and plunge forever into some unknown abyss.
I didn’t pry. What could I have said? I understand? Surely I didn’t. If she was indeed struggling to hold on she was experiencing her past in precisely the opposite manner that I repressed mine, the one I’d released, extinguished forever.
And even as we walked and talked, stopped occasionally on benches, I couldn’t help but hear an inner voice asking me all the while - you know what YOU are doing with her but what is SHE doing with you? After all, she must have had some sort of life before you fumbled your way into it.
She seemed to pretend there was nothing, as though she’d been a simple drawing waiting for more drawings and a hand from the outside to turn all those drawings rapidly in an animation loop to give her the appearance of living.
Yet I waited all the while we were walking and talking for the other shoe to drop; for the casual mention of a boyfriend or girlfriend, for the admission she’d only recently been released from prison or a mental hospital, anything really, that flaw which she was certain to have which would finally explain why she was spending this time with me to begin with.
It was late, the sky was littered with traces of dawn.
So if you are a horn player, why have you no horn, she asked somewhat winded, as though just making the observation tired her as she pushed open the vaulted front door of an apartment building. I had no idea where we were.
She had led me through a labyrinth of winding, ascending streets,
alleyways and across sudden boulevards to get here.
I left it behind in Utrecht. I didn't see the point of bringing it. I wasn’t particularly interested in that point of answering the question, my curiosity piqued of course by our direction, our destination, but small-talk or not as she attempted to ignore that she was bringing me home, or as I pretended to ignore she was bringing me home, I answered.
I hadn't been intending on performing any serenades although in
hindsight, that lack of foresight seemed crippling. Not that I'd
have impressed you with my playing anyway, I admitted as we ascended
the stairs leading to her flat.
She opened the door, flicked on the light and tossed her keys on the
table beside the door which was already overflowing with things
having been tossed on that same table without having been picked up. I imagined build ups of things tossed to this table for days or weeks at a time before in one ambitious afternoon of flat-cleaning she‘d have finally swept it clear again.
There was smallish front parlour and to the left a kitchen nook that
further led down a slight hallway. In the very front of the parlour,
facing the door was a television set which had been gutted and then
stuffed with as many teddy bears as could possible fit inside, all
crammed in against the inside of the screen facing outwards, all with the same blank expression of teddy bear enlightenment, despite the cramped quarters.
What do you think about strangers when entering their flats?
A quick glance at the wall coverings before making a beeline for the
bookshelf.
That's what Albert taught. Nothing reveals more about a
person than their books.
In Anastasia's case, there was no book shelf. But the studio
reflected a passion for collecting, certainly. The teddy bears
stuffed into the empty television screen, a few posters on the wall
announcing gigs in cafes I'd never heard of by musicians I was
utterly unaware of and then, the photographs, everywhere, spread out
on tables, on the floor, clipped and cropped, pasted on boards,
everywhere little scraps of lives and even glancing at them casually
it was apparent that none of those pictured where Anastasia.
Shall we have wine or coffee she asked, already moving into the
kitchen and taking a bottle from the cupboard.
As it transpired, as the predawn wine flowed, we spent a great deal of time looking at photo albums, scrapbooks of people she didn’t know, people she’d never met, photographs from piles of postcards with 50 year old postmarks.
It was an interesting assortment and yet I couldn’t help turning over in my mind what a display of anonymity; histories of strangers connected only by her having plucked them from a multitude of sources and her having placed them all together, much like the teddy bears in the gutted television. A
vision of a grander scale she was formulating, a random, disjointed display? A road map to her own personal place of connectivity, a statement about herself or who knew, perhaps nothing more relevant than a simple hobby?
I collect photos, she admitted sheepishly but without further
elaboration when she noticed my expression, sensed the questions rolling around in my head, contemplating the significance of one collecting and showing random photos of strangers to strangers. Photos of anyone other than herself, her friends or her family. As though she had no history and constructed her own based on those of others.
There are so many of these lives I imagine, she attempted to explain. Maybe I’m completely wrong about all of most of them, but I look at their expressions like pieces of a puzzle of each of their humanities whose final form can be known only to themselves and those who knew them. It isn’t insight precisely, more guess work or imagination, but I try to see into these photos something about each person without knowing anything about them.
I read somewhere, she said finally, that there are two types of refugees. Those with photographs and those without. Which one are you?
What makes you think I am a refugee?
Well, you’ve fled your country for another, or a series of others, perhaps not to escape danger or persecution but to escape something, perhaps even yourself. But you are a refugee nonetheless, even if it is only yourself you are trying to escape. So. Are you with photographs or without?
I am without photographs, I admitted quickly and without much further elaboration. I’d been considering myself more an immigrant and this reflection that I was escaping something instead of simply moving in a random, chaotic fashion made me pause - was she reading me or reading too much into me?
You don’t have one photograph, she asked, her voice registering an off key disbelief. Not one? Not even in your wallet?
No. The meaningful moments, the life-shifting instances, were never photographed. Only the before and after. Only in unnatural poses attempting to look natural. How often do photographs ever capture the precise moment anyway? Yeah, a moment is captured, but not the moment. Sure, when it comes to something like world news; ongoing tragic theatre like the starvation of other humans or that blotch of human blood on the ground after a gun shot, photographs capture some certain profundity but as far
as my own life, no. I’ve never even owned a camera, have you?
No, I don’t actually take my own photographs. I recycle those of others. Perhaps I feel sad thinking about discarded photographs of people as though there’s no one around any more to want to see them and if no one is around who cares about seeing them, perhaps their very existence fades as well as though they were never here to begin with. I find that thought disturbing. So probably not just because I like to imagine some insight about these people or these places or moments in time captured by a photograph but also because they shouldn’t fade forever simply because no one cares about the photograph or the person it is of or the person it was taken by or the thoughts behind someone who reached out communication to another in the form of something as mundane as a postcard. All of it was real once and the thought that not only they would be forgotten but unimportant, ignored forever, well, sometimes it makes me sad. I know, I know. Probably ridiculous, right? Childish perhaps. Especially to someone like you who sits there perhaps proudly revealing you have no photographs, not of yourself, not of your friends or your family. I don’t either. I am the refugee without photographs and whether you wish to admit it at this point or not, I can sense, so are you.
She stared at me a long time in an unnerving way, without a word, her green eyes through which I imagined I could see the neighbouring candlelight flicker, focused on my face as though looking for a hint of a break in the
stoic poker player's face. My defences were taut, disciplined for
even then there was something about Anastasia that told you to keep
up your guard. Perhaps it was simply the mystery of why. Or that
lack of trust in why. It wasn't as though I didn't believe I
belonged with her – it could just as easily be me as anyone. More a
question of why she had chosen me when just as easily, I could have
failed to advance past the initial introduction.
I shrugged and stood up to pour us both another glass of wine.
I, on the other hand, had merely shown up, having followed her
without any particular reason or purpose. I never considered she might have asked similar questions herself as to why I’d chosen to follow her. I felt certain it wasn't as simple as a matter of timing – well, perhaps timing in that she was between relationships rather in the middle of one, but certainly
not that if I had arrived through the doors of the café a day
earlier or five weeks later all chance would have evaporated.
Well yes then, I admitted shamelessly carrying both glasses back. She was still seated on the sofa and I returned to my position at the foot of it on the floor, back against an armchair beside the sofa. Perhaps I too am a refugee without photographs.
1:50 AM
CHAPTER SEVEN: ONBEKENT IN BELGIE EN WEER TERUG
We were freaks of a sort. Americans meandering through a mad herd of European football fanatics and everywhere we went, people would double- take, ask us if we were sure we knew what we and they were here for. The European Football Championship, of course.
--from the Diaries of Witold Kazmirsky, cahier 11, page 18
We got into Charleroi on a morning train from Brussels. It was an
fleeting industrial town, devoid of anything of interest, far away
from refined humanity, a prison-like town far enough away from the
action to hold a match between the two rival countries with the
worst fan reputations in Europe. Throughout Belgium, measures had
been taken, in a haphazard sort of way, to control the masses. The
riot police were out in number a great deal, some cities restricted
the sale of beer to only the legally weakest kind and there was the
general self-vigilance that being aware of one's reputation
preceding one's arrival was likely to fertilize. But not Charleroi.
Their economy was so depressed, the local proprietors didn't care
about hooligans. They just knew they drank a lot of beer and would
spend a lot of money doing it.
The June sun was already bearing down us heavily by 9. As people
began to arrive, the old town square, Place Charles II was opened to
numerous cafes and outdoor terraces which, of course, with nothing
else of interest to do in such a dump, was the first place everyone
headed out of the train station.
Supporters on both sides seemed to drink as though the world were
about to end. The Germans and the English aligned themselves on
opposite sides of the square, staking out their respective
territories, content to swill trough-levels of Belgian beer in
plastic cups under the Belgian sun with the football match still
another 10 hours away.
Albert and I nabbed a pair of seats on the English side, the sunny
side of the square, eager to watch the unravelling as two countries
with the most notorious hooligan problems were assembled, as though
fate had requested their presence merely to watch a riot play out.
The beer wasn't a gradual swell either. It began suddenly and
swiftly, as soon as the overwhelmed cafe staff had been able to
assemble themselves in the factory line type of service required for
the sort of instant beer gratification that was demanded with the
pounding of plastic tables and empty bottles.
By the afternoon however, the singing began, somewhere in synch with
the level of intoxication on each side. Before long both sides were
singing and chanting with equal passion, snarling and screaming with
the sort of red-faced relish that they seemed so accustomed to under
the conditions. In the midst of this a few young girls skipped in
and out of the fountain in the square as though oblivious to the
debauchery going on around them whilst English screamed out clever
little chants like, Hitler, Hitler, what's the score? And shouting
we hate the Germans at the top of their raspy voices.
An English fan held up a German flag and set it alight before the
Belgian police stepped in. Then a German supporter made his way to
the fountain as the parents of the girls watched, unconcerned,
oblivious or transfixed as the German began making gestures toward
the English side and was rescued by the Belgian police as both sides
rushed forward, crowding into the fountain – a potential throw
thwarted again as out of nowhere appeared a lovely young Belgian
woman who began juggling a football for several minutes at a time,
transfixing the savages. Hitler, Hitler, what's the score, the
English continued chanting as the woman eventually abandoned her
plot, realising the futility of entertaining beasts. Still, a marvel to the causal observer.
The singing only heightened the tensions and not long after, someone
tossed the first plastic chair in the direction of the other. It was
impossible to tell from where it came since the first thing anyone
noticed was a plastic chair whistling towards and coming to rest in
the no man's land part of the square between us. It didn't matter
really. The act was good enough. Soon chairs were flying across the
square from all directions, followed in short order by the plastic
tables and the Carlsberg umbrellas. The Belgian riot police, who for
hours had been salivating like leashed Dobermans at the prospect of
trouble, didn't hesitate to jump into the fray with their riot clubs
and mace. Following them was the water cannon.
The water cannon kind of snuck up on everyone. One minute there was
chaos, with both German and English alike turning their assault on
the riot police, fending off the blows and delivering their own. The
burst of activity had come so suddenly, the best Albert and I could
do in response was to stand up, holding our beers and watching as
the water cannon aimed and unleashed its potent force, blowing
people off of the pavement, flying in the air, smashing into tables
and chairs, scraping along the ground. Despite the fact we merely
observed from the vantage point of our beers, the eye of the storm
rising around us, the riot police grabbed us as well, dragging us
away from our beers like jailors and demanding to know whether or
not we were English. Apparently, their orders had specifically been
to sort out the English. Fortunately, we were able to produce
passports proving we weren't and were released in time to have a few
more beers once everything had settled down and the realization that
the match was still to be played had settled in.
*****
It was riding the wave of football madness that we decided to head
back to Utrecht finally, exhausted by the ordeal, running low on our
monthly stipend of cash we'd tried to strictly adhere to, ready to
return to our new flat, ready to begin the business at hand finally.
Two consecutive weeks of binge drinking, football hooligans,
nationalistic songs and chanting, two consecutive weeks of
mosquito-invested slums in Antwerp, insufferable humidity drenched
our skins as readily as the beer made it sweat-soaked through our
pores and clothing, two consecutive weeks of train-hopping, watches
matches in great detail on to forget the details later in pubs
throughout Brussels, Bruges and Antwerp were more than enough to
calm our voracious souls for at least long enough to find a place to
call our beds, hose down our clothing, shower properly and get back
out into the sweltering afternoon of Utrecht.
*****
There was something simultaneously disturbing and yet comforting
about having a place to sleep, our own place, after so many weeks on
the road. In any event, once we'd taken the keys and had moved our
few belongings in there was little question that we would have to
venture forth immediately to Marktzicht to celebrate our good
fortune.
*****
Over the next few weeks our lives began to take some semblance of
shape. That which we had subliminally craved, namely domesticity,
familiarity and most importantly, an end to the indecisiveness
brought on by living in a state of constant temporality was suddenly
before us without further preamble. We woke the first morning
without coffee, the first indication of an abject lack of planning
and the recidivist's familiarity with an apathetic future. The
showers were ice cold and following much fumbling we managed to make
it out into civilisation again to the Café le Journal in the Neude
where we hunkered down over koffie verkeerd and opened newspapers
whose headlines we tried incomprehensibly to decipher.
So we've got to get a lot of stuff for that flat, Albert mentioned
off hand, flipping the pages of the Volkskrant without interest. The
odd thing is neither of us had lived with anyone other than each
other for those few months in New York in many, many years and we
weren't sure how to approach things. A female, he reminded me, would
have had the lists drawn up the night before but being two drunks
without a plan, we'll have to improvise. A female would have the
place cleaned and decorated he added for emphasis, perhaps fatigued
already with what seemed the enormity of the planning given that
we'd spent the better part of the month on the fly with the most
difficult dilemmas being which beers to order, which cities to
visit, which train to catch.
We were, it might have appeared to the outsider's eye, two
road-weary men of indiscernible age but old enough to have settled
these scores long ago, somewhat puzzled by the possibilities and
scenarios ahead. Neither of us had much facility with planning, worn
as we were by the drinking and the spontaneity of movement suddenly
coming to a halt.
There was a twofold problem based on practicality when it came to
furniture. One, transporting whatever we bought from A to B without
any form of transportation save for our legs and the local bus. And
two, once we brought it to the flat, how to negotiate those
staircases with awkwardly sized furniture.
I wonder what they'd suggest at Marktzicht, I ventured knowing it
was far too early for the first beer but knowing as well that its
patrons were often a useful source of practical information.
Practical information we were none too keen or capable of
disseminating ourselves. Albert grumbled incoherently. The waitress
brought two more coffees and little cookies that went with them that
I bit into hungrily. For the first time since the movement had
begun, now that it had temporarily ceased, I was feeling homesick.
Homesick for simplicity without practical decisions confronting me,
without having to feel like an odd couple of non-tethered people on
the brink of insanity fuelled by alcoholism and futility. At least
at home I knew where everything was and how to get it from Point A
to Point B.
By the early afternoon we'd made our way out of Café Le Journal and
had taken to wandering vacantly from one shop to another without
anything in particular in mind to purchase. What we really needed
was a pair of beds or mattresses at the very least, a sofa some
tables perhaps a chair or two and this was just the most obvious
things. The smaller details mattered less but would loom important
with time – music, books, something to play the music with and
shelves to store the books on. These were, after all, our bread and
butter but after weeks on the road we needed at least to make the
place seem bearable.
So instead of furniture we spent the morning listening to and buying
CDs. We still had nothing to play them on except the broken stereo
left by the previous tenant but at least we felt as though we were
accomplishing something by making an accumulation of something. We
needed collections to give home a feeling of home even if the
collections were arbitrary and perhaps non-representative of
anything other than the whim of the moment.
By the afternoon we were in fact back in Marktzicht having a few
beers and having convinced the barman to play Miles' Birth of Cool,
a few Shostakovich String Quartets, Joe Turner, Dexter Gordon and
Lester Young so that most of the afternoon we'd had the few
aficionados praising our selections and taking over the stereo
system to listen to what we wouldn't even be able to listen to at
home.
There were of course, plenty of suggestions on the dilemma of the
furniture - labourers' trucks and vans could be borrowed or procured
for the price of a few beers for a few hours with the added labour
thrown in for free, a pulley system could be rigged (failing the
fact that the windows would have to be removed and then reattached),
and several mentioned the idea of Ikea of other similar assemble
at-home furniture which would solve both the problem of transport
and stairways at once.
And so by the end of a week's time we had the semblance of home
assembled.
*****
For the first time in months our lives had descended from the peaks of madness thrust upward by the ground level thirst for alcohol. It wasn’t just being in Albert’s company that made it so, Christ knows I drank enough solo before I’d ever met him and further still when he’d been off doing his time for the drunken theft and subsequent car crash but ever since he’d returned with that bum knee to New York and we’d been stuck in the same quarters together, the litany of excuses for a drink was in essence, insatiable.
And certainly upon our initial arrival to Holland, followed by the blurry chaos of a fortnight in Belgium following the football, the level of drinking had not abated one iota, in fact, grew almost disproportionate to the intake of anything else at the time.
But now, here, a blissfully domesticated pair of virtually talent less, wandering musicians, we were finally capable of drawing a breath and exhaling, settling in quietly with relief, reduced to merely maintenance drinking and finally finding the space and the time to begin rehearsing.
Albert was content to sleep in most days, get up, buy an English paper or the USA Today or the International Herald, those innocuous rags that sopped up expat homesickness and kept those speaking only English in tune with the goings on of the world.
For a few weeks I spent my mornings as though in deep study trying to learn the language. I had a thick Dutch-English dictionary, listened to Dutch talk radio for the background noise to immerse myself in the sound and diligently set about translating articles from the Volkskrant which to the untrained eye, appeared appealing.
Gradually I began picking up phrases and attempted using them in the pubs and cafes, nearly always swept back into my own language by the English-infatuated Dutch.
And as more time went on, since I’d gotten only a cut of Albert’s settlement and wasn’t charging over the top to sublet my flat back in New York like Albert was, my concerns mounted about finances although I kept such concerns to myself.
Eventually, I decided I’d be best off, both as a means of managing my time during the lulls of the non-drinking hours and in order to augment my dwindling savings, finding some sort of work. Work where I could be paid under the table, black, as they called it, considering I had no legal right to work in the country, and at the very least earn the cost of my meagre rent and massive drinking tabs.
Through the trapeze of café to café, pub to pub, meeting locals and gaining their confidences, I eventually came across a few builders in the business of tearing up housing and redoing interiors, found a ready black market for employment and commenced getting up early mornings and setting off on my bike to a variety of work sites, performing a variety of jobs, mostly menial and low paying but income nonetheless, sufficient to keep me both busy and in beer.
Evenings were dedicated either to being out in the pub or the café embarking further delirious endeavours of intoxication, or staying in with a crate of Grolsch and Albert, working on a variety of songs we picked at like angry sores, over and over again until the irritation began to resemble in some fashion, a minor set list we could play if we were ever able to land another gig.
This went on for months, into the late summer, a routine that began to feel almost natural yet simultaneously foreign. There was no forgetting ever, that we weren’t a part of the scene, just shadows in the back ground although we were no doubt, there, drinking and socialising, we weren’t them, we weren’t always privy to their jokes and their culture, the conversations weren’t always, sometimes rarely about music or literature or art and in those moments even Albert and I together would occasionally feel as though we were standing on the outside looking in at the party.
*****
One night in early August I dreamt that I was dead, in heaven somehow and at the entranceway I was met by a chubby Mexican woman with a silently
proud Mayan face. She was my guide and she took me through each
level of this place, dead musicians from various decades on
different floors like a boarding house, just hanging around talking
and drinking – in each one I searched for a sign of my father,
holding his horn casually as he stood in a corner watching everyone
else. This Mexican woman, who needed no name for my recognition of
her was immediate, as though she were the mother of all mothers, led
me from room to room, knowing who I was looking for but not
acknowledging whether my search was in vain.
I stopped in a room that was empty. Must be the future, I tried to
laugh. The Mexican woman was gone, the wall slid open revealing the
streets of Paris.
Now I wouldn't be any more likely than you would to just rush off to
Paris in search of my father, primarily because I'd come to believe
that he was dead. I mean, you don't hold a thought like that for so
long and then suddenly come to disbelieve it simply because of a
dream.
But just as Albert had discovered what he'd hoped were the roots of
his soul in Holland, so I allowed myself to believe that perhaps my
roots, inexplicably, were somewhere in Paris, or perhaps a hint or a
sign of them were somewhere there, waiting to be discovered. Perhaps
the image of my father in the dream was merely his way of showing me
a sign.
I suppose secretly, I didn't believe a scrap of it. But now that the
idea had planted itself, there was no reason not to just have a
look. A few days. Just a look.
Albert was sitting in his bathrobe having a coffee, smoking with a
distant look in his eyes as he stared at the wall.
I'm going to go to Paris for a few days, I announced, pouring a cup
for myself and leaning against the kitchen counter. Albert didn't
say anything at all, blowing smoke rings patiently. What's going on
in Paris?
Nothing in particular. It's just that we've been here for several
months and I feel like I should at least get out for a few days,
make an effort to see someplace else for a few days. That, and the
fact of this weird dream I had last night which seemed to summon me
to Paris.
More smoke rings.
So you had a dream about Paris and now you're going to go there?
This morning? He smiled to himself. How very faithful of you…
Well, it's not like I believe the dream or anything; it's just a
good excuse as any to go I suppose. Certainly the City of Light must
be somewhere there on that tiny agenda hidden underneath the beer
and Winstons…I mean hell, I imagined we'd be barnstorming across
Europe by now and yet I feel as though I'm only here to listen to
the ticking of the clock, drink more beer and forget I'm alive.
Well, at least the venue is different.
Indeed and so shall the venue be different again. I'll be back
before it's even registered that I've gone.
1:50 AM
CHAPTER SIX: THE BIRTH OF THE DEADBEAT CONSPIRACY
One of the things I like about jazz, kid, is I don't know what's going to happen next. Do you?
---Bix Beiderbecke
For a moment I felt like I was the wooden dummy beside Albert.
In the other corner I imagined or thought I’d spied an ongoing chess match which had been played for years with no solution, one man winning one day, losing the next, too many beers or too few. I imagined that I’d eased my way over to study potential moves, sneaking them in my head across the board, knocking over pieces, dropping a beer on the floor and collapsing through the table, chess pieces flying everywhere, beer spilling out and hopelessly lost.
But I shook my head instead – the beer was making its way
incoherently into the system and the reverie was expelled like a
toxin and my attention was back to Cees and Albert and their
discussion of cheap places to live in town. It was our third
consecutive night awash in beer and football. Three nights stumbling
home up along the Biltstraat at three in the morning, pit-stopping
in an early morning Halal grill for gobfuls of Doner kabobs and
frites.
And three mornings in a row, in a desperate ploy to regain a sense
of depth, something filling in these great corridors of fatigue,
illusion and vague coherence with a semblance of sanity, composure,
I stopped for a short nap and a short read in the
Gemeentebibliotheek Utrecht, the oldest public library in the
Netherlands which in 1564 was converted into a library for the
university by the city library of Utrecht. But now it was a place to
sit and knowingly pull out books from shelves expecting illumination
in an unknown language through osmosis alone.
This is where we should make our base for the next several months,
Albert croaked the next morning over his eighth Winston of the
morning from a man who wouldn't get out of bed for a cup of coffee
before he'd had three cigarettes, ordering a beer from the table
service as soon as he'd drained his koffie verkeert. I've got a
feeling about this place, that it's the sort of place with enough
going on we can find a place to play – big university life will
swallow our queer jazz with a confusion they will attach both to our
creativity and the collective mistranslation of intent.
And so began our first foray into seeking a place to live, finding
locales wherein we might begin to play, establish our sound as it
were, and settling in to a new culture.
Among other things about Utrecht you might notice if you were in our
position, looking for housing is that very little suitable housing
exists. Well, the estate agents had plenty of ridiculously priced
luxury-style flats which we would have lived like furniture-less
kings in, but because of the influx of homeless students coming in a
few weeks before the new semester was to begin, in order to find
realistic housing, we would have to sign up for something before we
were even off for our fortnight of meandering through Belgium for the
European Championships.
When the B&B became prohibitively expensive, we switched to youth
hostel near the water tower off of Amsterdamsestraatweg and
continued half-hearted efforts of finding a more permanent place. It
seemed ridiculous to pay a month's rent for a place we wouldn't be
living in but the idea of not having our own place when we got back
seemed even more ridiculous. After all, once the fun and madness of
the Euros were over, it would finally be time to get down to
business and we weren't going to get much done without a rehearsal
space, packed into bunk beds in a youth hostel. On the other hand,
the odds were stacked against us.
Cees had a grand time with our search. Do you know that every year
hundreds of first year students stream through the streets looking
for tiny flats, three by five meters for five hundred a month,
anything – they search advertisements in newspapers and little
advertisements on the street and all the while, long, long waiting
lists - and imagine yourselves looking, not as students, for cheap
housing but foreigners, adult foreigners, surely no students, and
you'll begin to realise your chances are quite slim indeed. The
locals were quite happy to bemoan the lack of housing but there were
tragically few leads.
Every afternoon we'd stroll into Marktzicht and every afternoon
greeted by how's the search coming along, and every afternoon,
empty-handed, we'd sidle up to the bar or take a seat at a window
table if it were free and drink away our frustration.
Locals had just as much trouble. Gert had been looking for three
months. Pieter another one who had been living on a sofa for half a
year. They got a kick out of our futile searching.
Perhaps more annoying however was that we had no place to rehearse.
For one, the outskirt location of the B&B meant, due to the size,
weight and encumbrance of Albert's bass we couldn't venture very
far. There wasn't a single venue suitable for practice or play. The
B&B owner, although sympathetic, was no masochist, and warned us
that any rehearsals we wanted to undertake within the premises would
have to be sporadic and short. It's not that I don't like jazz, he
explained with a shrug of his shoulders. I admire it in some ways.
It's just that the other patrons…and his voice wandered off to the
rest of the buildings leaving us to infer the disturbances of
tourists and weekend honeymooners up from Belgium and France or
Germany.
And certainly we weren't going to leave. The breakfasts alone, full
table spreads of cereals, fresh fruits and juices, platters laden
with cheese and meats, were enough to keep us. We rationalised that
there wasn't very long before we'd be leaving for Belgium and the
European Championship anyway so a few more weeks out of tune
wouldn't hurt us.
For that matter we might as well have left our instruments behind in
New York for all the good they'd done us to this point, for all we'd
struggled carrying them first from New York and all the hassles
involved with customs, dragging them around Amsterdam and then
leaving them to gather dust at the B&B. Albert hadn't taken his bass
out of the casing nor I my saxophone and not wanting to carry either
we went out each day leaving the instruments behind wandering around
futility seeking housing and when not seeking house, more often than
not, hanging around like vagrants at Café Marktzicht where we were
fast becoming causes célèbres for our prolific, daily consumption of
beer and toasties, outrageous banter and the looming voyage to
Belgium, two yanks in search of football.
We tried vainly to sort out some semblance of a scheme but given the
temporal nature of our existence prior to leaving again, there
seemed little point. We wandered from estate agent to estate agent,
looking at flats which were situated in the most expensive
neighbourhoods simply because that was all they had to offer. We
wanted to find a dump, anything that wouldn't drain our coffers
quickly and a place where the noise of our rehearsals wouldn't
bother anyone. But it wasn't easy. We dropped hints everywhere we
went, every pub and café and falafel house we stopped in. We pried
and poked, questioned and demanded, all with equal futility. And by
lunch or mid afternoon, having exhausted ourselves and whatever
cryptic leads we had followed that day, we headed invariably back to
Café Marktzicht.
And every afternoon we'd stroll in, now familiar, greeted by the
stragglers who weren't at work or were off work early, order our
customary pints and settle in, sometimes by the window in front at
the tables reserved for the regulars and other times seated at the
edge of the bar, all the while doing the same, sipping our beers,
chain smoking our cigarettes and grousing about failed opportunities
until someone or another would strike up a conversation and steer us
in other directions.
And one afternoon, like all the others, the spell was momentarily
broken when we met Jan one afternoon sitting outdoors at a café with
our instruments, which we'd brought with us that morning on the
half-witted notion of finding a place in a park to at least rehearse
awhile in, languidly sipping Belgian Trappist beer in preparation
for our outward journey.
Jan spotted Albert's double bass carrier in particular, hard as it was to miss, which Albert had brought along simply because he's already worked out a deal to leave it on premises for the duration of our Belgian tour and invited himself to our table, ordering another round in the process. Harmless enough.
So, he concluded after we'd chatted amiably for a half hour and
established, as we did with nearly everyone we came across, the
dignity of our goal, to establish ourselves here as jazz musicians
with our own delicate and unique sound, just after the Euros were
over and we'd sated ourselves with hedonism, of course, I'm in a
band myself and while we aren't looking for any added musicians, we
are playing in a small little festival not far from Utrecht in a few
nights and I'm sure the festival proprietors would be happy to add
some kind of jazz act to the bill. At the moment it's mostly rock
and pop but yes, the more I think about it, the more I believe this
would work out perfectly for you, your first gig, your first chance
at getting heard someplace other than in your minds, he added with
typical Dutch subtle yet direct derisiveness.
But we haven't really developed any real play list or really any
songs of our own, Albert explained. We play in the tradition of
spontaneous jazz musicians, making it up as we go along more or
less.
Jan assured us it wouldn't be a problem. It isn't going to be very
professional. A neighbourhood hell raising fundraiser is all – you
wouldn't be critically judged, I can assure you. Not to mention the
fact you are not Dutch but hoping to live here and establish
yourself as jazz musicians, well, we don't get much of that even
though we have such a vibrant blues and music scene here with all of
our festivals coming this summer it would be a chance for you to
enhance your résumé so to speak.
And so it was agreed, rather suddenly, with little time to rehearse.
We would invite those among the clans in the cafés we habituated, we
would invite people by word of mouth and in a few weeks time, just
after our return from Belgium, we would have our first gig, even if
we had yet to find a place to live.
*****
It’s note that we’re not hideous to listen to. I often think the amount of ocular cringing people do when listening somehow prevents them from understanding that we’re not just bad, we’re beautiful…
from the Diaries of Witold Kazmerski, cahier 1, page 81
Around 11, we began subtle gesticulations at preparing ourselves to
go on stage. Albert, exhausted by a combination of beer and the
heavy ride trying to balance his stand up bass on the bicycle on the
way here, was leaning up against one of the pillars in front of the
stage, a Winston unmoving between his lips save for an occasional
labial twitch and puff of smoke. His eyes opened when I got nearer.
All I know is that I'm not pedalling that fucking bass all the way
back into town when this nightmare has finally concluded he hissed
with the cigarette bobbing up and down in his mouth. No problems I
reassured. I've already spoken with Jan about the bass riding back
in their van with them. We'll be meeting with them at Fabriekzicht
afterwards. Albert snorted and removed the cigarette to replace it
with his mug of beer. A little late now, eh? I'm so exhausted
already I'll need another half dozen beers before I can stand
straight.
The band ahead of us, electric violin, screeching guitars and a
belchy, subterranean growl from the lead singer, were winding up
their last song, building a crescendo, sweating beneath the lights
while an overly enthusiastic group of junior high aged girls swung
their arms and shook their legs, wild, tangled hair in every
direction. The crowd was diverse enough but following music like
this was a bizarre mix, an embarrassing fart of jazz to let leak out
on their uninitiated ears.
As usual, we had tried to prepare those musically in the knwo for the fact that we were talent-less, inept, embarrassing. But the more we said that, the more convinced they became that we were really something special. Something unique out of America, an unspeakable hipness that would blind them all with
its profound exuberance.
Holding the sax, I looked through the crowd at familiar, expectant faces. Our friends of the last week, complete strangers in other lives a month ago and now we were going to humiliate ourselves with an unmatched zeal.
Once on stage, we'd planned on an elaborate verbal waste of time to
get us through the early expectations. A note hit here and there for
emphasis, but basically, a ridiculously elaborate history of the
song piece, a virtual encyclopaedia of liner notes on a song we'd
just rehearsed only two days before for the first time. By lulling
them to sleep with the vocabularies and translations, the sheer
enormity of the words and sentences to the point of
incomprehensibility, the strange and unequally timed jazz number,
completely original and completely without skill, would be an almost
welcomed respite, no matter how bad it was.
Billing ourselves as avant garde lent itself an automatic elasticity where this sort of performance art jazz was concerned. Simple chords, in a chaotic
enough fashion, sufficed.
I could tell, a few minutes into the second number, that we had them
right where we wanted them:
Uncertain as to whether we sucked or we were great.
Logically, had we actually been great, the chances that we would be
playing in this little neighbourhood festival were pretty slim so
for me, it left the door wide open to the idea that we sucked.
Fortunately, Albert and I had worked with this incompetence long
enough to have learned how to dress it up a little, enough to create
that uncertainty. They sound like they suck, but they look like they
know what they're doing. We'd perfected it through watching years of
talent less musicians performing on MTV. While we lacked the
pyrotechnics of talent, we were able to create enough sparks to get
people to believe the burning was only a matter of time.
The last number involved getting the audience to participate, making
noises that ran, more or less, in tune with Albert's thumping bass
notes over and over again. There's no doubt if we'd had a talented
drummer, we could have really sounded like we knew what we were
doing, but lacking the drummer, we used the audience. And of course,
being one of the last bands to play, everyone was pretty drunk by
the time we'd gone on. My vacant preambles on music history only
made them drink faster. So by the end of the last number, we were
all in on the conspiracy, the conspiracy that we'd created together.
That's how Albert and I had come up with the name to begin with: The
Deadbeat Conspiracy.
When it was over completely, we were such a hit, Jan was somehow
able to fit both Albert, his bass, which he now carried around with
him like his date, and I into the van along with the other guys in
his own band. It was the space of being accepted, for whatever
delusion they harboured. People were everywhere, crawling on top of
one another, laughing, singing loudly over the stereo as we rattled
along the canal in the van back into town.
*****
We wake up to a Fiat giving birth to painful horn honking, a
determined bastard on the road outside presses down on the horn with
the kind of persistent hand motion he could only have mastered in
his pimply teenage years staring and drooling over back issues of
garage sale Playboys. I raise my head and peer over the sprawl of
bodies and limbs, the snores of hedonism so entrenched in the
subconscious that even the dreams are haunted by strobe light
scattered images of the previous night's piecemeal memory. No one
else's sleep is even faintly disturbed. With a strychnine-jointed
grimace, I gather myself off of the floor, reassembled in a standing
position, and take a sniper's peak out the front window to the
annoyances below.
A very disturbed sophomore twitches and fiddles with varying degrees
of urgency at his coat lapel, his nose, the side of his face, right
pant leg, greasy hair. He looks like a fidgety third base coach
giving bunt signals to a batter who has just stepped out of the box
to adjust his cup. He looks hung-over, or like a cat who just
escaped from a washing machine. I can feel the fraying of his nerves
from the window and the honking has only grown more urgent.
I open the front door and edge my head out, feeling the cold air
tweezer its way through my nostrils giving me a mild headache like
the kind you get from eating ice cream too fast. Hey! I yell
inventively, gesturing an empty stab of malice. What the fuck is
going on?
The honking stops immediately and the Fiat guy fixes his desperate,
bugging eyeballs in my direction. He rushes across the lawn as
though he was tossed from a moving vehicle and quickly arrives in
front of me, reeking with the urgency of a man with overactive
bowels. He flails out a sentence, which I can't understand because
it isn't in English and looks at me expectantly. I shrug my
shoulders. Agneta he clarifies suddenly as though speaking to an
embassy bureaucrat. Where is Agneta?
Agneta is half clad under a pile of parkas somewhere left of the
kitchen, perhaps under the dining room table but I'm not going to
tell this guy that unless I know a little more about him. The fact
that he uses a car horn as a means of communication is not a good
starting point. I squint at him suddenly, my memory comes back to me
at high speed from around a sharp curve on two wheels and his face
becomes vaguely evocative of some idiot's conversation I stumbled
over somewhere in the post-twister trailer park of last night's
festivities. Agneta's face had parked itself somewhere in that
memory, seated at a table where a half dozen of us had congealed,
braying over each other with intoxicated opinions on over valued art
and the rise of the Euro. This guy had played a large role in the
braying, his foreign service accented English constructing sentences
of non-sequiturs and mangled inferences with such a lack of charm
and dexterity that I couldn't now see how it were possible I'd have
forgotten him, even for a few moments.
But I had, and whilst I waited patiently as he went about explaining
a rehashing of his life story from the last month and a half forward
in excruciating detail, it began to dawn on me that he was leaving
and he wanted to wish Agneta goodbye. Leaving? I bellow, why you've
only just arrived!
And on it went further, more explications and disentanglements,
deeper detail until I, now reaching in the dark for the light
switch, begin to realise that he was leaving Utrecht, had been
living in Utrecht and wanted to say goodbye to Agneta.
What have you done with your flat, I huff without preamble and
without divulging the whereabouts of Agneta. I haven't done anything
with it, he admitted, sheepishly. I haven't paid rent in several
weeks and I've got a job offer in Rome, so I'm leaving, the hell
with it, I don't care what they do with it.
Where is this place, we'll take it, I say simultaneously, as he
tried to look around me, over my shoulder, somewhere through the
house where Agneta was alleged to have been crashing. What do you
mean, he stammered suddenly flustered simultaneously by my refusal
to divulge the secret location of Agneta and my insistence on
knowing and having his former flat.
Look, here are the keys, he throbbed aloud, pulling them out of his
pocket and dropping them into my palm. They'll be pissed about my
not having paid the rent but if maybe you offer to compensate them,
they'll just let you take over the broken lease. It's on
Amsterdamsestraatweg, see, just down the road a pace – just stop in,
it's above a Surinaam call centre and take away place – ask for
Belay and it's probably yours.
Agneta, I stood back and swung my arm laboriously sweeping behind
me, is underneath a pile of parkas beneath the dining room table.
*****
As we assemble in various stages of vulgarity and stumble out into a
fortunately clouded sky which eased escaping the bright sunlight in
little shells underneath covers over mattresses, I inform Albert
we've found a flat. Well, we haven't seen it yet of course, I amend,
but we are going to this afternoon.
Naturally, once setting upon the Somalian take away we had plenty of
explaining to do. It took two stabs and a few glasses of tepid tea
to meet the proprietor who arrived with the self-important airs of a
business man on the make, double parking his Mercedes in front, a
handful of keys jangling in his hand as he barked out orders to a
languid aide busy shuffling through calling cards in one breath and
turned to greet our shaggy countenances in another.
I understand you are friends with the man who was renting this place
from me and left two months arrears in rent he opened the bargaining
perhaps hoping to weasel extra money from us in the process.
On the contrary, I corrected, sniffing again the tempting aromas
that wafted down from the kitchen above before straightening to
embark on a course of enthusiasm and explanation that the person in
question had only been someone we'd met at a party to whom we'd
explained our situation and from whom we'd received this rather
miraculous solution.
There was no telling what background Belay was reconvening us from.
His eyes were full of delighted expression considering on the one
hand the rent in arrears to be paid and on the other, two more
borders of questionable character. The brief orders he barked to
aides were in fact given with the voice of authority yet not
authoritative, more like a loud suggestion than a command. The aide
hopped to it nonetheless and as languid as the other workers
appeared, they weren't relying on third world custom, loitering and
shiftless but were all agreeable and efficient. Men at work yet men
simultaneously relaxing.
Belay's expression waned replaced by calculations no doubt – one
could see an adding machine in his head, reminding himself that the
estate agent down the street who'd set up the last tenant had cost
him already two months rent not to mention the commission and here
were two more in the last's place having arrived without invitation,
no less unsavoury but musicians to boot. Still, we had quickly
offered two months rent in advance as a deposit and there was the
factor after all, of not having to pay the estate agent's
commission.
So what do you play? Please, sit down, he suddenly said, emerging
from whatever torpor had precluded his manners to begin with and
realising even if these were prospective tenants they were still
guests. He barked out a few more commands and several more cups of
tea were in front of us all, seated at the desk he'd brushed another
assistant away from, two chairs pulled up to join him, a chance to
discuss.
We play jazz, Albert without the usual preamble or elaborations. It
had been a late night with plenty of excitement and at the moment,
he just wanted to get the flat sorted out once and for all, collapse
onto a mattress or floor and sleep a few hours uninterrupted.
Ah, he noted, preparing to launch upon a long discursive about the
history of Somali music. We have some jazz-infused versions of our
own native music, well Somali and Islamic influences. Perhaps you
have heard of Maryam Mursal? He barked out a few more commands and
out of nowhere, as both Albert and I were confessing our ignorance,
as though we weren't even proper musicians if we hadn't come across
such music before, a boom box appeared and we were suddenly being
coached through the first opening bars of Somali's once famous
female vocalist, who, Belay patiently explained, because of some
criticism of Somalia's then-president Mohammed Siad Barre for his
murdering ways, was forced to give up her career to drive taxis for
a living before eventually being rediscovered by none other than
Peter Gabriel.
Albert scoffed, sipping his tea, the irritation of his sleeplessness
showing in the lines of his face like electricity coursing through
live wires, mumbling aloud - who hadn't? Peter Gabriel and Paul
Simon exploited amongst unknown third world musicians between them.
This is wonderful music; I interjected quickly and diplomatically
before Belay could fully digest Albert's words. You must be quite
proud, I suggested. Belay's eyes glistened, likely more from the
sudden memories of civil war in Somalia than the music, but
glistening nonetheless and appreciative that I appeared at least to
grasp the impact of her singing with sufficient levity. He wasn't
measuring us any more, I could tell. It doesn't take much sometimes
and more fortunate still he spared us both the humble rectitude of
lecturing us or congratulating us on our own government's foreign
policy amid his recollections and merely stood up suddenly. So,
would you like to see it?
As we made it up the first flight of stairs he explained the
intricacies of the flat itself. The second floor was a kitchen area
which we were welcome to use as we needed although during the
afternoons, as was evident, the sole chef, a large elderly dark
women with a tooth-missing grin, was busy at work preparing the
evening's take away food. The entire kitchen reeked of spices and
heaven. At the back of the kitchen was an entryway door which opened
into the courtyard used by all the neighbouring houses and flats and
which we would have a key both for the gate and the door and of
course, the toilet with a small shower. The shower was filled with
the remnants of vegetable stalks and shavings, clearly used for
other purposes in the absence of tenants and the toilet, although
functional, didn't appear to have been cleaned in months. Nor did
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