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15.4.03
Torgeir Schjerven:
___ IT WAS A FINE DAY IN JUNE AND MOST PEOPLE HAD A GRIP ___
He stood there drinking and overlooked the day
with a bunch of green bottles and a full sea.
He drank them empty of all meaning and
threw them in the ocean and drifted around in the light,
void of directions. He drank until he was drunk and lost.
Lukewarm skirts of summer rain caressed his cheek
and he let thirst take him. He drank until he evaporated
like steam from his pores. He drank until he was drunk, and established
his body humbly on the hill by the ocean and poured himself
out in some grass. And all the moist of heaven and earth rubbed
his blood and the cliffs with a sound of silk. It was
a fine day in June and most people had a grip.
[Translated from "Det var en fin dag i juni og de fleste holdt seg i
skinnet", published in _Tanker og andre personlige bedrifter (kjærlighet og
død)_ (Thoughts and other private enterprises -- love and death), Oslo:
Gyldendal, 1989.]
5:06 PM
"The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you
have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 1028 meters from here. This distance
is so large that it is beyond astronomical, but that does not make your
doppelgänger any less real. The estimate is derived from elementary
probability and does not even assume speculative modern physics, merely that
space is infinite (or at least sufficiently large) in size and almost
uniformly filled with matter, as observations indicate. In infinite space,
even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere. There are
infinitely many other inhabited planets, including not just one but
infinitely many that have people with the same appearance, name and memories
as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices.
"...the multiverse theory can be tested and falsified..."
speaking of metaproblems is only speaking of problems but in
recognition that some problems are at a higher level (or import or
generality).
1:34 PM
NOW IN PROGRESS
From the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 5.3, Winter
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
-- Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, ch. 1, sct. 1 (1955, rev. 1966)
I don't like women who talk too much. I'll say that straight out because it doesn't take much. I'll start up a perfectly innocent conversation with someone, perhaps in a bar, lighting a cigarette and giving the ice in my Bushmills a chance to warm up, just being friendly, or at least pretending to be friendly because I'm in a bar and I hate it when people just sit there like drunks stewing over some clownish inner turmoil which they make up in their own minds to appear artistic and tortured.
"What do you think about the sea swells on the north coast of Madeira this time of year?"
She'll say something studiously unwitty like, "I didn't know Polacks drank whiskey" or, "Why do you smoke filterless cigarettes? Don't you know how unhealthy that is?" I know she thinks I'm Polish because of the name tag on my janitor service shirt. How she comes to the conclusion I'm a Polack however, I don't grasp.
"Polacks are people too. They drink all kinds of things. Beer, vodka, sewage treatment overflow, the blood of virgins....as for the filterless cigarettes, I'll tell you what someone once told me and perhaps you will understand: I don't smoke cigarettes with filters for the same reason I don't drink my whiskey through a dish rag." Then she continues standing there, staring at me as though waiting for a punch line, as if she doesn't understand it still. "Would you like to come to my apartment and listen to old Rembetika music?" (you see, I'm one of those clandestine hipsters, the kind tackling the obscure while the rest of you are still teething on esoteric sitcom references and comparing notes on the vagueries of time travel.)
Of course, she doesn't want to come to my apartment to listen to anything. I don't even want to. The conversation is going no where but we're the only people in the bar so far and the bartender has disappeared to take stock of his disappearing wine cellar or stand in front of the bathroom mirror rubbing his face and staring into his tired eyes asking himself where he went wrong.
"Is that what you do for a living?" she snorts condescendingly, pointing at the name tag on my janitor services shirt which has "Blepko Janitorial Services" emblazoned on the right chest plate in fancy cyrillic-looking lettering. "You're a janitor?"
You see, this is the kind of conversations you get with women when you aren't busy pretending to have some fascinating tip on the brewing Belgian beers or arguing what a load of crap Plato's "Republic" is. You must come armed with bullshit. No one likes an unpretty truth. They prefer you lie to them. I could lie through my teeth but then you get scraps of lies between them like small chunks of rotting meatloaf that went unbrushed for days. I'm not even sure I'd know what the truth is anymore regardless. I prefer lying unconvincingly.
"I bought this shirt at the Salvation Army because I have dependency imbalances and all sorts of emotional diseases and I thought this shirt would bring it all to an instictive and subconscious conclusion. Sort of the opposite of feigning wealth and intelligence while mocking bystanders in an unemployment line."
"I don't think you're clever. I know you think you're clever and that making fun of my judgemental line of questioning is some strange way you have of pretending you are clever, but I think between you and I, standing here alone at this bar, we can speak in black and white. You are not clever. My manicurist is more clever than you in fact and she doesn't even speak English. The only reason I continue standing here is because I'm waiting for a friend of mine and it amuses me to watch you try and amuse yourself with your own delusional sense of intelligence."
Funny enough, the friend never shows up. Other people show up and every time the door opens bringing in the cold from the outdoors, letting in a few flakes of snow and bluster, we both look to see who it is and then I watch with increasing amusement as her anticipation inflates and then deflates like a irritable zit getting popped leaving an angry red blotch in it's place. Instead, we drink alot. Everyone comes in as couples, adopts tables to sit by candlelight, converse loudly, over the jukebox music and ignore us. I buy us drinks over and over again. The bartender is amused, watching the transgression.
"This one's on me" he smiles slyly, pushing my Bushmills over to me and her Amstel Light to her. Eventually, she makes me roll a cigarette for her and then eventually, because I'm chain smoking myself and then she starts to as well, I feel the beginnings of a repitition strain injury aching in my fingers, a youthful yet arthritic pain which can only be anesthetized by more Bushmills and more cigarettes until everything, the conversation, her hair, the chattering teeth outside waiting for a cab, the fumbled disrobing later on, the snores and even breakfast the next day becomes a blur. A dissheveled dream that slowly eases into a nightmare that involves my having to call her every day thereafter for a week to find out how she's doing and what her job is like and cooking dinners or eating out all boiling up, building to a crescendo of a romantic indigestion.
Fortunately for me, a few days later, Albert announced he was in town, fresh off the Amtrack, with a stand-up bass and no place to keep it. And because the last month had been one long cold spell and we were cooped up in my little studio breathing in each other's chain smoking, it was Albert's idea, once he sensed he was wearing out his welcome, that the two of us should take out musical act on the road, for him, off to Europe for the first time, a return to the home continent.
***
from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 1, page 81
"Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm, and yet will make Gods by dozens."
-- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Essays, bk. 2, ch. 12, "An Apology of Raimond Sebond" (tr. by John Florio, 1580). The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations
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 pedaling 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 embarassing fart of jazz to let leak out on their uninitiated ears. As usual, we had tried to prepare the talent pickers for the fact that we were talentless, inept, embarassing. 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 exhuberance. 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 encyclopedia 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 neighborhood 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 talentless 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 key 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 in the van along with the other guys in his band. 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 fidgity third base coach giving bunt signals to a batter who has just stepped out of the box to adjust his cup. He looks hungover, 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 were 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. "Anastasia" he clarifies suddenly as though speaking to an embassy bureaucrat. "Where is Anastasia?"
Anastasia 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 somwhere in the post-twister trailer park of last night's festivities. Anastasia'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 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.
Anastasia was on her way to Prague in a matter of days. Later on I would live to regret it.
revision to Diaries of Witold Kazersamski as the light of day scrapes across these stuttering eyelids and Witold recalls the first meeting with Anastasia:
In an after-hours boozer, long ago lost in the Pigalle's old, hilly curvy cobblestones streets, ash cement buildings, cracked paint and steep lamp lighted stairways, I wandered into the basement of a candelit club, seated myself and spotted what I immediately mistook for Edith Piaf, a temptuous little street singer dressed in a black, hand knitted dress, a borrowed scarf hiding a missing sleeve and waited patiently for her set. She'd just come in from outside the cafe, lighting a cigarette in the light rain, I'd followed her in. I'd followed her from 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 and I wasn't quite sure why other than something to do to pull myself out a nocturnal lagoon of listlessness than neither the drugs nor the drinking were able to overshadow.
I stood back up from the seat after I'd had a pull on a Kronenbourg and walked directly up to address her, considering as my opening , a variation known as the Staunton Gambit which had a long history having being named after Howard Staunton who played it against Horwitz in 1847. Basically, it is a bold attempt to demonstrate that by giving away the central pawn White can show that Black’s first move is misguided because it exposes the king. In practical experience it scores well at club level where an accurate defence is awkward to play when White has a rampaging attack. Still, as I approached, I debated the merits of establishing early pawn control of the center, before quickly blurting out a breathless and disconnected dictum about "Le Bel Indifferent", Cocteau's play written for and starring Edith, perhaps still thinking it was her after all but being uncertain. She regarded me with a look of amusement, a carnival in her eyes, engaged, then disengaged, considering the rapid development of her own pieces.
"I will be going on shortly" she explained, 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 would like to speak with me at a more opportune time, for example, when my set is finished? Perhaps in one hour's time or so?" The suggestion seemed reasonable. Through this second line of conversation I was able to discern an accent of sorts, one I most certainly could not pin down but an unmistakable butchering of grammatics which could only have come from a non-native speaker. I indicated my agreement, looking at my watch as though to synchronize the meeting with our current time zone and making a wordless gesture meant to convey that I grasped her idea and just after I'd Fred Astaire'd my way back to the table I'd left my Kronenbourg upon, I'd return to her to sit and wait. But she shook her head quickly.
"Please, not here. I cannot bear anyone but complete strangers witnessing my performances and since we have spoken and will be speaking later, I ask that you wait somewhere else...perhaps the Lily La Tigresse? I can meet you inside or just outside the entryway between one and one and a half hours from now...my name is Anastasia" her eyes were hopeful yet even within them, I could sense how immediate their clamp down would be should I dare ignore her request and seat myself at her table anyway. I looked at the watch again before realizing helplessly that it was still set on daylight savings time. Instead of embarassing myself by clarifying the time or making note of the fact that other than the fact it was still dark out, I had no idea how close dawn was approaching, I decided to let fate play itself out further, recalling the dream I'd had only the night before on the train from Utrecht, of the discharge of the undigested remains of problems which had already been worked through spiritually.
"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 smokey to discern the stage any longer. Anastasia 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 to leave 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, walked back to the table and grabbed the beer bottle, finishing it down in several slugs as I headed for the exit. Fate indeed. Whether or conversation went any further or not was entirely her decision.
**********
The Lily La Tigresse was a respectably seedy bar in the heart of the red light district. I'd quickly learned my way around the seedier aspects of rue Blanche so finding it wasn't difficult. 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 salivating a dazed sort of enthusiasm as they passed and bumped into me and threw up in the alleyways, I could see his vision. I felt like I'd stepped into a Hieronymous Bosch painting.
While I waited, I thought 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 incomprehenible, 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, friends 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 Anastasia, I didn't know if I could bear it even another minute...
"So there, you've found your spot and look, you've even begun to sketch the customers!" Anastasia 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 Anastasia 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 let anyone see my work until a piece is complete." I explained in an effort to imitate her need to perform only in front of strangers at the club.
"I suppose I should come to your "studio" to see some examples of finished products?" Her eyebrows were raised curiously, the habitual, beaten path lines of comers-on etched in the cynicism of her expectations.
"I don't have a studio here. I don't have an apartment or even a room for the night in fact. I just came down to wander. My plan was to return on an afternoon train to Amsterdam."
Thwarted by the miscalculation of her assumption she was slightly taken back, her cheeks pinkened, her pupils dialated slightly, perhaps as a reaction to the stress of having only recently performed. Strands of sweat still lightly tinged her eyebrows and even the nape of her neck was damp. I wondered what her voice had sounded like. I wondered what those other dark and anonymous faces had registered as she sang.
"You're leaving Paris already? My. I thought I'd be interesting enough at least for an afternoon..." 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. Thwarted. 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 disemboweled 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.
"Yes, yes, it all reminds me, it's coming back to me now...I need to get the tickets this morning to make sure the train isn't sold out."
"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? How will you find the station? Do you even know that you are to depart from the Gare du Nord and where you will find it?" 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 dispeptic 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 said suddenly, 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. I feel better already. Maybe I won't even bother with the train back to Amsterdam 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 an unassailable buoyancy. I kicked myself inwardly nevertheless for having made the decision 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..."We are here." she seemed to notice aloud, pointing up at a smog smeared building. "My apartment."
**************
from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 2, page 1732
...there was a lasting odor of doubt for months thereafter. Albert's dispondant 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 rained for two weeks straight. A cold, gusty rain that turned the middle of August into an aura of bleak autumn dying into its winter that kept even the Shot Out Eye out of walking distance for several days in a row. Then we'd hire Jiri to take our pitcher and run up to the corner pub for a fill. Jiri 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. 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. We'd outspent our monthly allotment in one week and were stuck for three more living on nubs. Well, it wasn't as bad as scouring the rainy streets for cigarette butts to roll. We had enough left over for several liters 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 neighborhood theater, 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 seances 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 ten minute walk or another plateful of the same smoked sausage with the same jar of horseradish. 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. 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 pain against the pain free, the eyes of those old women seeing everything and knowing nothing more than the human nature of their neighborhood, 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 Miroslav 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 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 Miroslav felt assured that our playing wouldn't spawn a mass withdrawal from the pub, he was willing to let us try and entertain.
It seemed quite natural to show up at 1:00 when he opened. Albert dragged the bass onto the bus and we rode down as soon as we woke up.
"You know you're not due to play until 10:00 o'clock, 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 Miroslav 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 seance 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 usual lengthy preamble, the encyclopedic history of a few nonsensical stanzas thrown in around a chorus I'd lifted out of the obituaries in the local paper, Dnes, had to be shortened considerably given the language barrier. So we had to play more music and talk less, leaving us with 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. Miroslav slapped us on the back and handed us another shot of slovovice.
"I'm relieved my friends. 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 touristic resistance to squlech. Now he wanted us to meet some of his friends. Now he stopped by our table and joined us for a beer, signaling 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 Serbian economics majors. Once in awhile, I'd have a few beers in the train station 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 school was 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 servants over and over again. These kinds of people needed variety. Fresh faces to sneer at. But I was an anomoly. 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 pudgy, collegial buffoons from England to psychodramatic 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 printers? 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.
*****
Hradec Králové Jazz festival, cahier 1, from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski October-November
Mikhail was a little droopy eyed as he stared at me over the chess board. We were hunkered down in the smoke clouds inside U Vystrelenyho oka, 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 Uz Jsme Doma, were trying to interrupt our already wobbly match by shouting about Kafka and black humor over and over again in different accents. Uz Jsme Doma, I'd already been assured, had fomed 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 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. Only the month before, we'd tried a quintet that failed miserably. Mikhail was really the only studied musician of the bunch. That's why he played around so often. Attracted hacks left and right then shedding them like a winter cold.
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 crewcut 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. 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 I 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 looks at me deeper with those droopy eyes and shrugs. "There is nothing for me here." he comments, finishing off his glass and standing up. "Why don't you come with me to the Hradec Králové 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 clandestinely.
**********
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 Hradec Králové. 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 Jiri about it and he is convinced we can promote you as some sort of expatriot avant garde jazz duo of blinding importance. He likes your name, Stalin's Mother. 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 Hradec Králové 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 was from the neighborhood, knew alot of the people coming up to our table, introducing us as a "puzzling jazz duo", a "once in a lifetime chance to see jazz taken to its furthest parameters." We were in short, musical geniuses. That got us alot of free beer. Everyone who came to the table bought us a beer of welcome and it wasn't long before everything was quickly dissolving again into a Thompsonesque hallucination.
The dictum from Nietszche goes along the lines of what doe not kill me makes me stronger. Under that premise, I've been growing stronger every day of my life since, to date, nothing has killed me yet. On the other hand, there have been plenty of moments when, placed in situations which seemed to at least hint at death, no strength was gained at all. The event would barely register, other than in the cosmic realm of possible outcomes, where one death resulted somewhere else for your having escaped.
There are times when the dying seems to be a gradually progressive motion as you could, if the mood fit, allow yourself a prolonged battle against the armies of depression. Those are the times when being alone feels the same as being around people because the people are just objects you cling to keep away the dread and panic and little to nothing of what they are saying is registering with you.
When Albert finally demurred, when he'd had enough, grown ill from the constant drinking and home sickness, it took him only a few moments upon reaching that realization, to decide he was going back. At first, I was secretly elated. After all, Albert had become like a sore that wouldn't heal. When he wasn't complaining, he was sleeping and when he wasn't sleeping, he was drinking, which, of course, led to the bitching and then to the sleeping. Traveling with him had become such an endeavor that we'd been rooted in Prague for several months solely in order to avoid relocating, uprooting, starting all over again. It was an easy city to lose track of time in. Hours became weeks and as one month passed into the next, it felt as though we'd only been awake for a few days at a time.
Without having made a conscious decision about it, I realized that even as Albert was planning his departure, I knew there wasn't going to be much left for me in Prague either. There wasn't going to be much of a future for The Deadbeat Conspiracy with just my beer coaster lyrics and lousy saxophone playing. So the question was, failing the excuse of touring around Europe playing music, what the hell was I going to be doing there?
Naturally, it was only a few days after Albert's departure that my descent into the daily dying began in earnest. It was only a matter of time before cash supplies dwindled and being stranded would be a fact of life instead of a romantic luxery. You can worry about money to no end when there is still a little left but once it begins dwindling down to nothing, the concerns seem to evaporate. What difference does it make? You are ready to surrender anyway. You are ready to sit motionless for days eating nothing, getting no visitors, falling asleep with every attempt to read or think.
MEETING ANASTASIA:
From the sweat-soaked pages of the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 8, page 312, after Albert leaves.
The kiosk around the corner from my flat finally removed it's hand-printed cardboard and water-logged "Back in Fifteen Minutes" sign after 3 long weeks. The fat, pinched face of the old Ukranian woman which had occupied the kiosk window during the summer months has been removed by state officials apparently, replaced with a pretty Latvian woman who wears far too much make up and doesn't smile, not even when she is in pain. I went there this morning, shocked that it had reopened, and fully prepared to ransack the inside for whatever seasonal fruit might be in stock and a few bottles of watered down vodka. She didn't greet me when I rang the service bell, continuing, instead, to smoke rancid black tobacco cigarettes and eat crudely sliced slabs of raw herring while staring at me blankly.
"What have you got in stock this morning?" I demanded, fingering the stolen food stamp coupons in my pockets and the rusting spare change I'd picked up from the fire escape the night before when looking for the cat. "Nothing" she said, crusts of black bread falling from the corner of her mouth as she continued to stuff oily pinches of raw herring into one side of her mouth while puffing on the cigarette from the other side of her mouth. The whole thing was beginning to disgust me. I hadn't had breakfast yet, my stomach was still burning acids from drinking on an empty stomach the night before and I hadn't even seen the morning's headlines. I rang the service bell again, repeatedly and with rancor. "Don't tell me nothing!" I demand, slamming my fist on the counter. "What possible reason would this kiosk have for reopening if there was nothing in stock?" I thought it was a sensible question but apparently, the Latvian woman didn't. She laughed aloud, more food chunks falling out of her mouth, half masticated and dripping with drool. "Who do you think you are?" she demanded suddenly, slapping her own meaty paw on the counter. "You want everything on credit, another bottle of beer, another stale crust of bread, another fresh ear of corn? Show me your money!"
I counted to ten and inhaled deeply, thinking for a moment about how Ernest Renan, the famous French historian and archeologist, would respond. He once said "As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost." I decided not to think, exhaled instead and spat on the sidewalk. "Perhaps I can make it worth your while," I hinted slyly, thinking of the machete I still kept in my bathroom for emergencies. "I know where to get my hands on some controlled bleeding experiment videos." The Latvian looked at me skeptically. I could tell she wasn't interested, but I could also tell that she was wanted badly to go back to her privacy, her eating binges, her cigarettes and that by looking at me, she had a sneaking suspicion I wouldn't be easily put off. When she tried to slam the kiosk window shut on my fingers, I jerked my arm up and blocked it, wagging the index finger of my other hand in her face. "Please madam. I have good reason to believe I'm experiencing a Subarachnoid hemorrhage and frankly, if I don't get some fresh fruit, a few eggs and this morning's newspaper, I can't guarantee you're going to come out of this interaction with any teeth left to chew those disgusting nodules of raw herring with, if you know what I mean..."
She muttered to herself, cursing under her breath. "It is people like you who drove that poor woman who used to run this kiosk before to an early bankruptcy and possibly to her grave. No one pays for anything in this neighborhood. Don't any of you have jobs? How do you live with yourselves?" She seemed genuinely concerned and irritated but her demeanor was relaxing. She set down her raw herring and bread, ground her cigarette out in a dead cactus plant beside the window and motioned for me to enter through the small opening of a side door. "You may take one egg, two pieces of stale grapefruit, one onion and a bottle of Somalian apple wine but as for the newspaper, you are on your own. They never delivered any copies this morning."
With great relief, I burst through the opening without waiting for her to finish her sentence or begin a new lecture. People like this want to bend your ear all day if they think they can get away with it. When I stood back up from my knees, finally inside the kiosk, I got a full look at the fire hydrant body of the Latvian. It wasn't a pretty sight, unexercised, poorly washed, blotchy in places with some sort of infectious rash with open sores. She had draped a wool blanket over her shoulders to keep off the cold but otherwise wore only a pair of combat boots and pajama bottoms with peanut butter and strawberry juice stains all over them. Her breasts hung like fleshy stalactites which began at her sternum and sagged down to her ribs, unappealing and moist with sweat. She looked like the fat peasant woman in Diego Rivera's "La Molendera". I repressed a surge of bile that nearly erupted from the back of my throat and went to work rooting through the bins of stale fruit and rotting vegetables.
I was able to emerge a few minutes later from the kiosk, grateful for the fresh figs I'd pocketed on the sly when she was writing down my bill on a chalkboard. The thought of my departure, now that I had what I wanted, caused a brief sensation of regret in Latvian's heart. I could tell. She grimaced as though she'd been punched in the stomach. "You've stolen my prized figs!" she screeched suddenly, trying to grab at me through the kiosk window. I jerked away, laughing as I skipped down the sidewalk toward the bus stop. I had to move on. The public library would be open again in a matter of hours and there was still the matter of the bottle of Pernod to filch from the cafe around the corner before I attempted to board the bus and fight my way through the last vestiges of the late morning rush hour tide. Once I had the Pernod, I could bribe the bus driver to take me past the last stop to the public library and then my afternoon of figs and Mozart could begin.
page 116, cahier 3, from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski:
I arrived at Rome Stazioni Termini as dawn was breaking. Outside, the neighborhood sweltered with pickpockets and gangs of thieving children. Signore Antonio Pignatelli was supposed to meet me here and was nowhere to be found. A typical scene. I pulled out my tobacco and was just beginning to roll a cigarette when an English speaking cretin stepped toward me, calling my name gently. In his hand was a small cardboard sign that bore my name. He attempted to shake my hand, claiming he was Chuck, sent by Mr. Pignatelli to pick me up since Mr. Pignatelli had been delayed. Chuck appeared to be in his early thirties, sporting an unhealthy complexion, puny frame, round shoulders and a surprisingly prominent paunch. His hair, which looked as though it has been cropped by a pair of blunt shears, was very greasy. I could have filled a mason jar with the grease in his hair. His clothes were total grunge. A dirty nylon rucksack was crumpled at his feet like an abadoned baby. I wondered out loud why Antonio Pignatelli had sent such a seedy and slovenly looking guy to meet me. "I'm the only guy he could find on such short notice who speaks English as my native tongue." he explained as he picked up the rucksack and led me by the elbow toward a cafe where we could sit for an espresso and some bread while we waited for Antonio to arrive.
As we sat there, another broken-English-speaker, who must have overheard our conversation, scuttled in from off the street toward us like a cockroach toward a pile of bread crusts and sugar. "'Allo, my name is Jirko" he stammers and then asks us if either can spare a few euros for some paintings of his. He asks us both but of course, he is speaking only to me. Chuck doesn't look like he has any money. He looks like he'd be as likely as Jirko to be panhandling, perhaps more so. Jirko's lustreless hair matted in some kind of grease, or perhaps it is turpentine, judging from the smell. His fingers are paint-stained, the nails long and filthy. He too has a rucksack and from this one, he pulls out a few vague, almost hallucinatory charcol etchings, explaining all the while that he lives in a squalid condominium on the slummy eastern fringes of the city where he rents a small, damp room in the basement; broken down into the submission of poverty teaching haphazard english classes, giving black market tours of Rome to wary english language tourists charging 2 euros for an hour per. I wave him off, spitting to the side of his shoes and looking out for the waiter or someone to chase away these vagrants. Others are beginning to take notice, their vagrant, gypsy antennae picking up the scent of money in the neighborhood at this early hour.
Finally, Chuck loses his apathetic demeanor and waves the butter knife in the direction of Jirko and a few other slowly approaching vagrants. "Get away fuckers! Liberty is not a release from all law, from all restraint! Crawl back into your sewers and gutters! Stay away I warn you or this distinguished gentleman with me will be forced to brandish his fire arm and fire it at you indiscriminantly!"
He flops down next to me, smiling but a little sweaty. The sidewalks have cleared. "One thing I've learned" he begins, lighting a cigarette and flagging down the waiter impatiently, "is that the consumerist impulse, even in junkies, drives us all toward personal satisfactions that we never quite experience without a solipsistic sense of loneliness hounding us. We may need love and self-opening in order to achieve genuine intimacy and commitment with even a few others."
The waiter arrives glancing at us and having heard the shouting, relieved but curious as to where the vagrants disappeared to. Chuck smiles, "You see?" he demands of the waiter, lighting a cigarette and coughing heavily. "John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, that no one has a right to interfere with me for my own good, but only to prevent harm to others” is now generally accepted. The streets are clear of riff raff. So bring us a pair of espressos, a bottle of Pernod and perhaps a few chunks of bread, rapidamente! senza ritardo!
Chuck continues, puffing on his cigarette proudly like a pimp. "Signore Pignatelli has been looking forward to your visit. I don't expect this delay should be long. He's had some difficulties lately with potentially destructive ideals but frankly, I think the worst is over. If he hasn't arrived within the half hour, I'll take you to a fine pensione I know of only a few blocks from here."
"What exactly are these 'difficulties' you speak of?" I ask with only a vague sense of curiosity. The espresso has arrived and it's aroma overtakes me, overtakes the smell of pigeons and unwashed sidewalks. Train station neighborhoods always smell the same. Like poverty and ammonia mixed with illicit sex and stale urine.
"Well, I'm no shrink, but I think he has to stop looking for salvation to come to him from somewhere else, from above. Instead, I suggested to him only yesterday, he should seek to reconcile with reality. After all, there is no external measure of the meaningfulness of our lives and practices. He wallows in his insignificance, the meaningless of his life, and it paralyses him at times with terrible fits of depression. I slipped him a mild amphetamine sulphate. I'm sure he'll be ok in a little while. Then he'll come to pick you up and everything will continue on as planned." Chuck stared at his fingernails awhile as I thought about how Mr. Pignatelli's affliction might affect his ability to help me locate some leads about Anastasia. It didn't look good. I cursed loudly to myself, much to Chuck's surprise, who took up a defensive Yang Tai Chi position on the other end of the table.
"Sorry about that. I'm just a little annoyed at having come all the way from Kaunas and a meeting with the pianist Vyacheslav Ganelin regarding a concert to be performed in the Siberian city of Sverdlovsk, only to find out now that Mr. Pignatelli is suffering from some sort of dysthymia or bipolar disorder. I was urgently counting on his assistance."
"Don't worry about it." Chuck assured, picking up his rucksack and rifling through it for a few scraps of paper which he handed over to me. "These are the remains of the records of his therapeutic foster home stay. It suggests only a minor depressive disorder brought on by the ill-advised use of estrogen which he'd hoped would improve the somatic and mild depressive symptoms but in the end, only seemed to fuck up his system worse. He should be completely recovered in a matter of days, perhaps weeks, but for the time being, so long as he's jacked up with a little Japanese shabu or alot of caffeine, he's fine for long periods of time. Whatever he's supposed to help you with, I'm certain he'll be functional for long enough periods of time to assist you. Believe me, if he couldn't, he wouldn't have invited you here."
Just then there was a jaunty horn honking from the street as a dioxazine purple Alfa Romeo 156 GTA pulled up to the curb with Antonio's delicate hand waving out the driver's side window. He lept from the car, the engine still idling, and shouted out greetings to both of us. "Witold! Chuck! What great fortune that I've finally found you! I was caught up in an accident with a chestnut roaster and got caught up in the irrisistable, musky fragrants of the chestuts on Via Nazionale and then stopped for a few moments of reflection where Mussolini used to harangue the crowds from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia. I feel like a tourist again! What a morning!"
He quickly grabbed my bags and tossed them into the trunk of the Alfa Romeo and motioned me into the passenger's seat. "Chuck!" he screeched. "Meet us at the New Mississippi Jazz Club on Borgo Angelico tonight around 10! Bring Adriana and Camelia with you!" As I carefully folded my legs in the passenger seat, Antonio fell in behind the steering wheel, yanked the car into gear and floored it, yanking me backwards. We were on our way to what Antonio told me in very speedy explanation was his September home in Rome. First, a quick bite to eat, a few bottles of wine, a nap and then we would get down to business...
random page sifting, cahier 2, from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski:
I knew the 19 hour ride on the EuroNight car from Roma Termini to Budapest-Deli station was going to be an exercise of endurance, a tag team of piecemeal and useless conversations with peripatetic strangers wandering through the hallways of the cars at all hours having nothing in their own lack of imagination better to converse about than the weather we were unable to experience and an international goulash of political expostulations and petty griping.
When I was able to elude the strangers, I'd stare into the blackness of what seemed an endless, dispassionate tenebrosity Emilia-Romagna countryside staring back at me. For hours I did nothing but chain smoke and cleanse my palate with warm cola. There was, of course, the Buescher Aristocrat, but the moment I'd touch the reed to my lips and begin even the faintest alternations of strident and mellow tones the neighboring passengers erupted into immediate and obdurate, brick wall protests of noiselessness and sleep.
Having anticipated this, especially for those long hours with nothing but the chain smoking and the warm beer preventing me from sleeping, I'd brought along a bookbag gorged with internet cafe printouts on subjects ranging from the Mandelbaum translations of Dante's Purgatorio to obscure American government statistical guidebooks. Nevertheless, the journey was doomed to bring with it an unendearing sense of time and layers of peeling consciousness, through the cosmos and back again all the while fraught with the bristling chaos of the Anastasia restrospective slipping in and out of my vision which could not be escaped.
By the time we'd pulled into Bologna Centrale for a long layover, as a diversion, I'd already begun a laborious, ball-breaking study in thought about time travel and how it couldm, in some instances, mirror regular, geographic travel. I still had the internet printout of the U.S. Department of Labor Handbook of Labor Statistics measuring the value of money back then using the consumer price index calculated by some strange index of prices paid by vermont farmers for family living (2002 Price = 1850 Price x (2002 CPI / 1850 CPI).
Taking that equation, I spent many bouncy hours on the rails calculating things like how my 10 cents in 1833 would be worth around $2.00 today until my head hurt. Why 1833, I'm not sure. It seemed to hold some symmetry for me which couldn't be rehearsed. By dawn, as we creapt toward the Austrian border, energized by a few swigs of grappa from the flask inside my rucksack, I'd figured that if I take $200 of today's money and travel in time to 1833, I'd have the today's equivilent of about $4,000 to work with.
I wasn't sure where this line of thinking was going to take me. Wishful thinking for four grand was one thing but wondering what I reason I'd have to be on a train a place that wasn't even yet called Budapest yet in 1833, disquisitive about what the hell would be going in 1833 and what my role in it would be. Slowly, wishing I'd printed out deeper history of the breadbasket of the Habsburg Empire, the weaving and rolling had its somnolent effect and it wasn't long before I'd fallen asleep to the lullabye rocking of the train as we moved through the Kärnten province.
Either waking from a dream, or thrust into the middle of it, (difficult to discern through the haze of the morning fog), it seemed Balzac was seated next to me, smirking noiselessly, but staring openly.
"Good morning" I muttered unsteadily. He looked a little dissheveled himself, a little pudgier than the Louis Boulanger portrait, wild-haired and determined, staring me down his little moustache twitching like the whiskers of a rodent. It was as though I'd interrupted him in mid-conversation with himself as he continued pointing out that while he wasn't deep, he was "very wide" and how he would create a new style of realism by portraying the present.
Thinking quickly, I remind him that Georg Lukács was to say that he'd passed "from the portrayal of past history to the portrayal of the present as history", and christ, Lukás wasn't even born until 52 years later.
Balzac barely paid me any attention. He went on, giving elegies on the irreparable decay of good society and his idea of linking together his old novels so that they would comprehend the whole society in a series of books.
He gives me a copy of Le médecin de campagne, which he said he would publish that year in Paris. I thumb through it quickly about a doctor who has given up his mistress and then learns that she died giving birth to his son and then decides to devote his life to working with the poor. "Geez," I tell him, shaking my head, "why are you guys in 19th century France always portraying the peasants as degenerates and cretins? What kind of predictable sociopathological discourse is this?"
Balzac stares at me a moment, a vague disgust in his eyes as he speaks: "An idiocy of rural life. The rural population was helpless. They needed rational authority which they did not themselves posssess, to improve their situation. They were like children. They were hopelessly backwards and required massive state intervention to bring them up to the modern age." he clears his throat and continues: "Besides the plot, regard how l am interested in the lives of typical, every day people, like an anthropologist. I don't care about these common histories of nations and political and public figures the world scribbles on about without definition and contrast...Do not all these solve the difficult literary problem which consists in making a virtuous person interesting?"
*********
1833 was also the building of the "Petõfi" Bridge and when Strauss' father was taking his first concert trip to Budapest.
How many Forints would four grand be? How much pörkölt and gulyás?
It didn't matter. I was going solely for Jazz Days, headed in September for Debrecen where they held Hungary's top jazz festival. Of course, I was hoping Anastasia would change her mind and meet me there. It was a daft hope, devoid of reality.
12:36 PM
from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 3, page 22
The dictum from Nietszche goes along the lines of what doe not kill me makes me stronger. Under that premise, I've been growing stronger every day of my life since, to date, nothing has killed me yet. On the other hand, there have been plenty of moments when, placed in situations which seemed to at least hint at death, no strength was gained at all. The event would barely register, other than in the cosmic realm of possible outcomes, where one death resulted somewhere else for your having escaped.
There are times when the dying seems to be a gradually progressive motion as you could, if the mood fit, allow yourself a prolonged battle against the armies of depression. Those are the times when being alone feels the same as being around people because the people are just objects you cling to keep away the dread and panic and little to nothing of what they are saying is registering with you.
When Albert finally demurred, when he'd had enough, grown ill from the constant drinking and home sickness, it took him only a few moments upon reaching that realization, to decide he was going back. At first, I was secretly elated. After all, Albert had become like a sore that wouldn't heal. When he wasn't complaining, he was sleeping and when he wasn't sleeping, he was drinking, which, of course, led to the bitching and then to the sleeping. Traveling with him had become such an endeavor that we'd been rooted in Prague for several months solely in order to avoid relocating, uprooting, starting all over again. It was an easy city to lose track of time in. Hours became weeks and as one month passed into the next, it felt as though we'd only been awake for a few days at a time.
Without having made a conscious decision about it, I realized that even as Albert was planning his departure, I knew there wasn't going to be much left for me in Prague either. There wasn't going to be much of a future for The Deadbeat Conspiracy with just my beer coaster lyrics and lousy saxophone playing. So the question was, failing the excuse of touring around Europe playing music, what the hell was I going to be doing there?
Naturally, it was only a few days after Albert's departure that my descent into the daily dying began in earnest. It was only a matter of time before cash supplies dwindled and being stranded would be a fact of life instead of a romantic luxery. You can worry about money to no end when there is still a little left but once it begins dwindling down to nothing, the concerns seem to evaporate. What difference does it make? You are ready to surrender anyway. You are ready to sit motionless for days eating nothing, getting no visitors, falling asleep with every attempt to read or think.
11:51 AM
14.4.03
from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 2, page 1732
...there was a lasting odor of doubt for months thereafter. Albert's dispondant 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 rained for two weeks straight. A cold, gusty rain that turned the middle of August into an aura of bleak autumn dying into its winter that kept even the Shot Out Eye out of walking distance for several days in a row. Then we'd hire Jiri to take our pitcher and run up to the corner pub for a fill. Jiri 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. 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. We'd outspent our monthly allotment in one week and were stuck for three more living on nubs. Well, it wasn't as bad as scouring the rainy streets for cigarette butts to roll. We had enough left over for several liters 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 neighborhood theater, 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 seances 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 ten minute walk or another plateful of the same smoked sausage with the same jar of horseradish. 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. 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 pain against the pain free, the eyes of those old women seeing everything and knowing nothing more than the human nature of their neighborhood, 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 Miroslav 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 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 Miroslav felt assured that our playing wouldn't spawn a mass withdrawal from the pub, he was willing to let us try and entertain.
It seemed quite natural to show up at 1:00 when he opened. Albert dragged the bass onto the bus and we rode down as soon as we woke up.
"You know you're not due to play until 10:00 o'clock, 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 Miroslav 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 seance 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 usual lengthy preamble, the encyclopedic history of a few nonsensical stanzas thrown in around a chorus I'd lifted out of the obituaries in the local paper, Dnes, had to be shortened considerably given the language barrier. So we had to play more music and talk less, leaving us with 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. Miroslav slapped us on the back and handed us another shot of slovovice.
"I'm relieved my friends. 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 touristic resistance to squlech. Now he wanted us to meet some of his friends. Now he stopped by our table and joined us for a beer, signaling 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 Serbian economics majors. Once in awhile, I'd have a few beers in the train station 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 school was 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 servants over and over again. These kinds of people needed variety. Fresh faces to sneer at. But I was an anomoly. 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 pudgy, collegial buffoons from England to psychodramatic 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 printers? 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.
*****
9:08 PM
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