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13.8.06
Pacing The Bird
- Jaap Stijl
I’d been underachieving for years.
There’d been a period of unemployment, a spotty record of warehouse jobs at minimum wage and night after night alternating between intoxication and hangovers.
Pervaded by a listlessness and lack of direction, punctuated by lonely nights listening to jazz or blues in dark rooms lit only by candles, chain-smoking, thinking about as little as possible until the veil of drunk slowly eased over the eyes, through the pores, numbing and transcendent yet all the while as though killing time with the acupuncture of oblivion, bottle by bottle.
And perhaps just as inexplicably, what had seemed acceptable for the better part of winter suddenly tasted like the bile of a bad meal eaten too quickly.
I had to find something else, some other method of living, some escape from the futureless present into a more tangible reality. I needed a career.
Keeping the nostalgic frames to a minimum, as required by one whose past is recollected infrequently, as though dropped into a 3rd floor walkup without history, I could count through the basics of growing up as consisted of two polar opposites, both of which eventually affected my lack of upward mobility, motivation and general, all-around championship apathy.
My father, Zbigniew, being a second generation Pole growing up in the Lower East Side and my mother, Miranda, a first generation Puerto Rican living in Harlem, were not precisely moving in intersecting circles, either socially or culturally.
Compounding the improbability of their meeting, my father had two great passions which dominated his life and shut out most else: he had been an electrician’s apprentice by the age of 14, dropping out of school to help his mother make ends meet (my grandfather had died in a construction accident many years before forcing my grandmother and father into early destitution.) and gradually building on his experience to start his own small company, beginning with the wiring and rewiring of his own building to that of several buildings owned by the same landlord all over the city once he had proven himself. One of the buildings happened to be the one on the Upper East Side in Spanish Harlem, where my mother lived.
My father’s other passion was Dixieland Jazz. Whenever he wasn’t working he was at home listening to recordings by trumpet player Henryk Majewski, pianists Mieczyslaw Mazur, Wojciech Kaminski and of course, Jan Boba. He bought his first trumpet when he was 12 and had played both trumpet and piano ever since, sometimes for church functions, sometimes for social gatherings, sometimes for street fairs but with virtually every spare moment he had away from working his lips were puckered, or his fingers were exercising the keyboard.
The day my father met my mother was one summer afternoon when he happened to working on a flat in my mother’s apartment building and overheard a bomba recording emanating from one of the adjacent flats. So intrigued by the drum ensembles, the rum barrels, maraca and the singer and chorus calls responding alternatively to one another that he took the brazen step of actually knocking on the door to ask what it was.
As it turned out, it was my mother who answered, just 16 at the time, who knew little about the specifics or the history that my father wanted to know about, but loved to dance to it and because she was able to bridge the language barrier between her mother’s historical narrative and my father’s inability to speak Spanish, she acted both as an interpreter and demonstrator of some of the dance moves.
Not to mention that Zbigniew was astounded from the moment my mother opened the door. Some days, many years later, my father would catch me off guard in the middle of a Saturday afternoon whilst he’d been seemingly drown in his own thoughts propelled by whatever symphony or jazz combo he was absorbed in whilst drinking one bottle of beer after another, a few months after my mother disappeared for the last time, he would suddenly stand up, pull a photo album out of the closet and sit next to me in beery recollection, one photograph after another like precious and out of print baseball cards, collectors editions, of black and white photos of Miranda, my mother, the 16 year old girl who’d invaded my father’s up-to-then unblemished heart.
Look at how beautiful she was Witold, he would mutter. Imagine what it was like to walk along 1st Avenue with her on my arm, by Christ, the stares we’d get from passersby made me imagine I was walking with a movie star. You just didn’t see beauty like that in this neighbourhood. Not back then. It was all blonde and blue, child-bearing hips and pinched immigrant faces. Miranda was like a matinee of fireworks shooting off stars in everyone’s eyes.
I often wonder about that afternoon, somewhere in some anonymously massive apartment complex overlooking the East River on a warm June afternoon, my father transfixed by a new sound he’d never come across before and my mother, dancer and translator of music from her native island. What an odd sight it might have made; the electrician and the beauty school student, weaving a new history in the course of an afternoon delicately balanced on a common interest in music.
Of course, it didn’t end there. There wasn’t anywhere in his own neighbourhood where he could listen to such music live and he certainly wasn’t socially capable of making the leap to weekend visits to Spanish Harlem on his own to watch live bomba dancing and singing and so eventually, it was sorted out that he would join Miranda, her family and friends one afternoon for a delicately monitored social visit which would include an evening of local food, music and dance.
And perhaps it’s not such an amazing surprise that from those twice-monthly visits, my father attempted boleros, started listening to music like the Rafael Munoz and might have forgotten all about his precious Dixieland Jazz musicians were it not for my abuela’s interest when he casually mentioned one day that he too played musical instruments quite passionately.
This led to an excursion of the Melendez family down to an afternoon of stifling Dixieland Jazz at the Ukrainian Street Fair one late August Sunday afternoon where the Melendez family formally met the Kazmirsky family over kielbasas, pierogies, blintzes, bacalaitos, carne guisada and empanadillas washed down with cold Polish beer and rounds of Puerto Rican rum in a cultural summit of unprecedented proportion for ours of their neighbourhood.
Zbiegniew was swollen with some sort of love sick hangover for months and this festival was the culmination of it all. Meeting by meeting Miranda and he had been exchanging secret glances, passing notes in mutually yet characteristically different broken English, using music and family gatherings as excuses to sneak away when nobody was looking.
And before anyone was the wiser, they were already hammering out the fine print of their relationship across the front seat of Zbiegniew’s pick up, pushing away the tools, lying down on estimate sheets and newspapers well after the light had escaped from the afternoon and windows had steamed up enough, the rum was gone, nothing but crumbs left and both families were approving of what was impossible to disprove: Miranda and Zbiegniew were an item.
Sure, it was an unusual cultural stew, taking up with a white boy, taking up with the chicano teenager, a West Side Story without the gangs and knives, the choreographed dancing and well-rehearsed singing. Both families were compelled to agree: there was something appealing and endearing about them – memories of their own past passions sprang up in front of them and as though they were looking at the children of others and remembering their own, the cross-cultural romance of Zbiegniew and Miranda was compelling enough for both families.
As things progress in natural causes, eventually, I became the next bit of miraculous news to hit the two families. It was a bit stressful of course, given that Miranda and Zbiegniew were not married, but once that sticky situation was resolved with a ceremony that covered two different Catholic churches, one on East 7th Street near Tompkins Square park and the other near East 91st Street, the only unresolved problem was whether I would grow up in Spanish Harlem or in the East Village – as it turned out, a bit of both, until the timely death of old lady Sadowicz in a building just around the corner from my grandmother’s flat provided an opening which Miranda and Zbiegniew seized without much hesitation once it was agreed there would be plenty of subway and bus rides back and forth between the two neighbourhoods.
*****
How does this explain my own shiftlessness and dead end career choices? Well, as in many romances which begin with focused passion, inexperience and closed quarters, reality gradually set in, almost imperceptibly; nearly translucent cobwebs formulating in the corners of each’s heart, petty arguments over money and of course, the constant nip and tug and pull of two distinct cultures grinding against each other like sand in the gears.
My mother’s career as a beautician was in essence, ended upon impregnation. My father was earning a decent living as an electrician, we were in a rent-controlled flat and there was little need for my mother to work.
And so their intentionally interwoven lives might have strangled them.
Most weeks went on the same; my father off for work near dawn, my mother trying desperately to find a means of idling away the hours – housework in a small flat was no day-long episode and by noon, the cleaning and shopping had been done, the boredom set in.
Some afternoons if the weather was bright, she’d drag me out to Tompkins Square Park, mingling with the homeless and the junkies just for a sniff of a few trees, a glance at the skies by staring straight upwards. In my country, she liked to say, the sky is everywhere. You don’t have to break your neck to find it. Here we live like rats in holes, staring everywhere around you Witold, look, apartments, windows, brick and concrete. How can we live so trapped like this?
Other afternoons, she’d pack us up on the subway or the uptown bus to the barrio and I would spend the afternoon lost in a word of foreign sounds and smells. It was incredible that we could travel such a short distance to find ourselves in another world. What was this world? It must have been similar to what it was like looking out at East Berlin from West Berlin in the 70s. My mother made that commute as often as possible, from the black and white and drab to a vibrating binge of colours, animation where stoicism had only hours before, prevailed. My sky is here, she said, looking out over the East River. It isn’t pretty, but at least it’s alive.
My mother was a fruit fallen from it’s tree, gathered by migrant worker, placed into a box with other fruit and transported to the supermarket where it was then selected, paid for and later, consumed. Her seeds yearned to return to that same tree and begin the process all over again.
This was how we wiled away the hours of my childhood. Long walks seeking clear views of the skies, subways and buses, leaving one world for the next and then returning.
Later, we’d retire home to prepare dinner and begin the vigil of waiting for my father. Depending on how business went that day he might be home by 6 or 7, weary, but emotionally bouncy at the thought of what he’d accomplished that day. Other times, the harder days, the days with disagreements with customers or, more inevitably, other contractors and labourers, he’d stop somewhere on the way back to wind down with a beer or two in one of several neighbourhood Polish or Ukrainian watering holes. Some nights, after particularly gruelling days, the socialising took a more serious form and the drinking was more concerted and meaningful with oblivion being the goal, shots of vodka with mugs of cold beer chasers being the mode of transportation.
Those nights my mother and I would wait around for hours and then gradually, she would acquiesce to allowing me to eat but would hold off herself on the vague hope that any minute he would come bounding up the stairs and through the front door.
Over the early years however, a pattern emerged, as it often does, and as time went on, we ate every night at the same time, regardless of whether or not my father was planning on being around, once a silent, mental deadline had passed in my mother’s mind, her eating a distraction from the seething disappointment that wallowed in her like a taxidermist’s fluid.
And when my father did eventually make it home, it was no longer fatigued but angry. Angry with the world, with the contractors, with the crooked businessmen, with the fact that dinner was no longer waiting, that neither I nor his wife were there at the doorstep to great him. Those nights all hell would break loose – screaming, yelling, threats, dishes shattering, bottles breaking – a world within the walls of our flat of a slow breakdown of détente, a renewed vigour for finger pointing and accusations.
And although most nights it didn’t reach histrionic proportions; a few minutes of hushed voices, the slam of a door and that was the end of it, the pace was gradually set in stone. Some afternoons we would take the uptown bus and rather than a few hours of cozy chat, “we” would decided to spend the night with the abuelos. Rather, I would, and my mother would disappear for hours at a time.
But my father, despite his habits of late nights in bars after particularly frequent rough afternoons, was still a hard-working man and regardless of the state he woke up in the following morning he was always out the door by five or six at the very latest, freshly showered, ready to take on the world. In some ways he was machine-like in his ability to shake a hangover off, a characteristic I would later inherit and come to appreciate but at such a young age, at the time, I had no sense whatsoever of what was ever going on behind the scenes.
Sometimes, if my mother and I spent the night in Harlem, my father would return home early the following afternoon with flowers and the world’s troubles long ago off his back, smiling and singing, playing the trumpet whilst she prepared the evening meal. Those were harmonious and happy nights which all of us recognised as being part of a larger pattern of redemption – the ebb and flow of happiness at home.
My father worked Saturdays as well but usually much shorter days and when he came home it was never with the same menace or venom he returned with on the weekdays. Saturdays and evenings following overnights my mother and I spent in Harlem, were always the happiest times in our home.
My parents would play records with teenage abandon all afternoon and evening, starting with Chopin and Debussy, moving on to the avant-guard jazz of the Polish 60s, Kurylewicz and Trzaskowski’s hybrid of modern jazz and contemporary philharmonic hall music, followed later by the Andrzej Trzaskowski Quartet and my father’s new favourite, “Ptaszyn” Wroblewski, the brilliant tenor sax and flutist. And while this went on they’d sit in the parlour drinking rum or vodka or cold beers, smoking and talking like the two youngsters they were as though they’d peeled off the thick skin of adulthood for an afternoon and enjoyed themselves in precisely the manner they’d have done if they’d had a longer youth together before I’d come along to add the weight of parenthood around their necks like a millstone.
When I was older, my father would try and teach me a few things with the trumpet and although I was receptive, it was the tenor sax that really tweaked my ear. The first inklings were of Lester Young and his gentle manner I listened to within the Count Basie Band recordings before unconsciously following the chronology, the gawking aggressive sound of Coleman Hawkins, especially in those days leading a combo with Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Max Roach, among others, as sidemen.
And then Coltrane swung into my hearing and whilst at one time I had merely dabbled, it was Coltrane’s mad spiralling, his out of consciousness playing that hooked me once and for all on the instrument.
When the polkas and waltzes and jazz records had all been played, by that time the room was thick with smoke and the careless, incessant laughter and howling of late afternoon/early evening Saturday night drunks and then my mother would insist they listen to jibaro records, the cuatrom guitar and guiro ensembles, bongos and bass, the old periódico cantaos of the plena, made up from old stories of old neighbourhoods of my mother’s former island, the seguidors, segundos and requintos reverberating off the walls, shaking past midnight with the boleros and danzas until the flat was magically transformed by booze and music into a personal dance hall for my parents – furniture shoved aside, yipping and clapping themselves into a frenzy which would inevitably end with me being left sitting in a room alone whilst they disappeared into their own for mysterious yet equally noisy undertakings.
And of course, on Sundays, there was atonement. I, of course, had nothing to be sorry for, nothing for which to ask forgiveness – sins are few and far between until you first are aware that they are possible and second, are willing to try them out.
It usually began and alternated between St Stanislaus Church , followed by dinner at Babcia’s of stuffed cabbage, kasha, peirogies, blintzes and pickles, a quiet afternoon of dulled senses from the church service to the heavy meal to the silent hours sat in the front parlour listening to the condensed orchestras of Liszt’s piano and Chopin polonaises before Mozart, Bach and Beethoven were all brought out in due course – music for remembering in that household, dark, craven thoughts, not conversing as it was clear in my household of my father’s youth, little talking, unless absolutely necessary, went on at all. My babcia would only stare morosely at photographs of my father’s father, showing my the black and white albums, their youth in Poland, the countryside, the funny dress, the world outside a world outside a world of memories and lost hopes. It was depressing, even for someone as young as myself who hadn’t even started school yet, just to be sitting in such a heavy, stilted air of musical harmony yet emotional distress. We could all feel it and not a single one acknowledged it.
On alternate Sundays, we would dress up and all climb into father’s pickup truck with the words Strzlecki’s Electricians painted on each side door and we would drive up town to meet my mother’s family for the day, and afternoon invariably filled with contrasts, afternoons which whetted my appetite for exotic day dreams and although we were still on the same island of Manhattan, it was easily as though we had transported ourselves to another world altogether.
Of course, my parents’ translation skills were required in all these endeavors – afternoons with babcia would require my father to translate the Polish to English for my mother’s sake. I was already familiar with the language and the sounds yet owed to age, my vocabulary in any language was strictly limited.
On the days in Spanish Harlem, my father would endeavour to muddle through some of the phrases he picked up via my mother, via labourers he came across, via the little islets of Hispanic culture appearing on nearly every street corner, and of course, via the lyrics of the music he’d become so fond of, but even then, for the more serious conversations he required my mother’s interventions for dialectical phrases, specific questions requiring specific answers rather than broad, philosophical strokes of whimsical speculation.
And in the early days especially, for its flavour, colour, beat and sassiness, pure interest alone, I was growing up more Hispanic than Polish and imperceptibly, as they’d likely intended, large weeds of Americanism sprouting up through the cracks in the pavement of my Puerto Rican/Polish heritage.
But more often, I grew up in a house of boredom that epitomised the hopelessness, the gutted future of my mother since I spent so much time around her and so little around my father. Although only a 40 minute bus excursion through traffic back to her home, my mother was in some ways, cut off from her own life, the life of security and familiarity, to be thrust in to a new role of motherhood in a neighbourhood of prying, fat babushkas who spoke in dialects she could not understand as they sniffed and pointed and mumbled whenever we entered a deli or stopped in somewhere for a egg cream. She was ostracized from social circles outside of my father and grandmother by those who jealous of her steamy beauty, her flamboyant personality and the loud salsa that emanated from our windows.
She took me out of the neighbourhood frequently, enough so that I grew up hearing more Spanish than Polish, but it wasn’t enough to take field trips thrice weekly to Spanish Harlem simply to have a brief dip in the pools of her culture. Gradually, the unease graduated to unhappiness, mild at first, growing as I did and my needs for her waned.
Thinking of the future, my father began taking on more and more work which in turn led to being home less and less frequently and even when he was home, he was tired, overworked, grumpy, no longer the hard-working yet simultaneously carefree Pole with a passion for Dixieland Jazz but simply greying in flesh, tiring in spirit, dying in soul.
Then there were fights – many of them in fact, some weeks, nearly every night so that I grew up with the impression that the two people who were meant to mean the most to me simply hated each other outright, tolerating one another’s existence simply out of a sense of duty to me, as if I’d had any say in the matter at all, as if I were the collective anchor weighing around their necks, as if it weren’t for me, Miranda would be working as a beautician somewhere in Spanish Harlem, surrounded by her culture, surrounded by her family and friends, surrounded by boys who chased her and praised her beauty knowing it was not being disassembled daily by the existence of a half-breed son neither Puerto Rican nor Polish, simply existing somewhere on a plain of foreign American neither here nor there.
No one came right out and said this of course, but it was there, palpable, for all someone who spent the entirety of their day with another, to begin to allow to sink in. My father resented me for I’d meant more work, driven a barrier between himself and the sexual passion of his wife, not to mention, taking away any semblance of free time to practice his beloved music. And my mother, although at first enthusiastically carrying me from place to place with her like an adult pacifier, gradually began to lose interest. She was too young to be so old and it was too early to have packed in a promising future so early.
So rather than a prize in a game of tug of war, I became the object of mutual resentment and blame, the cause of unhappiness, the ending of potentials and futures. Or so it seemed. Sometimes it doesn’t take a complicated thought process or a licenses in psychotherapy to draw simple conclusions.
Don’t think it wasn’t a relief to get out of the flat and finally start school. It meant freedom for us all.
Well, not exactly freedom. True, I was free from being toted from place to place and let out of the environment that was suffocating me with it’s resentment and blame, but I wasn’t exactly free, just on furlough.
For my mother, there was first the relief of not having to take a kid around with her everywhere she went, but also the freedom in there not being me around to report on our comings and goings to my father when he came home. This in turn led to some rather strange behaviour on the part of my mother who discovered a vicarious excitement in affairs of all sorts which might pop up from anywhere, any street corner outside of our or her neighbourhood, any chance propositions, any furtive glances of lust in her direction for regardless of being burdened with motherhood, my mother was still quite young and still quite attractive.
Eventually disappearances became more frequent and lasted longer. Some times my father would come home from work, find me buried in books and command me to come along with him, driving up to Harlem, up and down the streets in search of Miranda, a habit I would later undertake myself, albeit without the pick up truck and a lower quotient of anger boiling inside of me.
Like watching water swirling down the drain after uncorking the bathtub so was it to watch the disappearances eating away at my father, so it was like watching the marriage flounder, Miranda’s sudden appearances at home, drunken or remorseful, bursts of passion flowing between them as though they both knew the legacy was ending for both of them and I was forced to stand witness to it.
Years went by like this – it’s remarkable to think how normal it all seemed somehow. Day after day turned year after year, schooling continued, dinners were burned, arguments erupted but were quickly placated by my father who, although resigned to my mother’s scattered disappearances, knew there always existed the possibility of avoiding them just like the arguments – by keeping silent, seething within as if she wouldn’t notice the resentment, as if she were impervious to being ignored, she would remain faithful, not at his side but not utterly abandoning the two of us either.
You wonder what goes on in two peoples’ minds and hearts, linked by a sentence of marriage with occasional furloughs of genial grace, walls dripping with polite interaction, please, sorry, excuse me, might I…etc.
Perhaps it was at the point when the arguments ceased entirely that whatever lingering passion was extinguished forever. To me and perhaps to my father it was clear my mother was merely biding her time. She argued for the chance to go to night school and finish her diploma. She started taking up interests completely outside the realm of our household; palm reading, bowling, jogging, drinking and smoking less, calm, collected, cleaning on schedule, putting dinner on the table like clockwork, agreeing to everything my father said much in the way he agreed with any suggestion she made. A truce of magnificent emotional retraction, two icebergs passing in the night.
And then, as if to confuse fate, my father was the one who disappeared first and forever.
It was after a particularly long period of quiet restoration of quasi normalcy at home when my mother was home every night with dinner and my father was through the front door at six o’clock with the precision of a Swiss train and they’d sit with me eating and discussing the day as though we had decided to forget everything that had ever happened in all the years leading up to this remarkable yet transparent transformation.
Then one night, my father didn’t come home on time. He didn’t come home stinking of beer and vodka as he usually did when he didn’t make his scheduled appearance. He didn’t come home at all that night, didn’t show up the next morning, didn’t show up for several mornings and evenings in a row. Contractors began calling and complaining, customers were at a loss, no one had seen Zbiegniew although his pick up truck was spotted near the corner of 5th and Avenue C and another few days later when the police began to come around with questions and more and more questions and finally one or two people seemed to recall someone having taken a dive into the East River and begin swimming cross-current, towards the banks of Brooklyn, the ending had become apparent.
My mother didn’t make it to the memorial service.
Once the idea that my father had drown himself, either intentionally or accidentally, began to sink in, she appeared to see the light.
I was 16 by then, old enough to know the time was drawing near and sure enough, within days, I came home from school one afternoon to find the house empty.
Well, the furniture was all there, there were foodstuffs in the cupboards, the laundry and dishes had been done. One less chore for the guilty conscience. But she was gone, I could smell it the moment I opened the door. This wasn’t a disappearance to aggravate my father, my father was dead. This was a disappearance to liberate herself entirely from the memory of her life.
I checked the closets for her clothing and found a great deal of them gone. All the shoes, all the dresses, all the hats and scarves. A few winter coats remained, a few drabber styles and retired undergarments stayed behind but all else, toothbrush, mascara, deodorants, perfumes and soaps, shampoo and the essentials for running away for good were gone.
Odd, I thought. My father was dead yet all of his personal effects, all his clothes, all his documents and papers, auld tax returns, business statements, photographs, music – all of it were still here lingering like a foul odour. On the other hand, my mother had left little behind but the shell of the skin she had shed, free for the first time in her life.
On the kitchen table, which I had somehow missed in my investigative rummaging, was what I thought was a letter but as it turned out, merely bank statements, account numbers and passwords. Their legacy to me.
*****
I didn’t have many marketable skills to speak of. I’d learned a few whispers of the trade my father worked in and picked up skills like lint in the bellybutton merely by the experience of being on the job sites in my own free time when I wanted to earn a little extra cash after school.
My father probably dreamt some day of passing his electricians business still intact down to his son one day but of course, without my father, that business didn’t last forever.
With that there was little more. How they were ever married was always somewhat of a mystery to me. Your father, my mother used to tell me in the following weeks leading up to her own disappearing act, was not only quite charming, but industrious, always on the go, always working, always saving money, thinking of the future. So in the end it probably wasn’t love so much as a means of extricating herself from her own barrio of listless machismo that centred around bodegas and cat calls and whistles collecting unemployment or other forms of government benefits. At least that’s how she presented it. I wanted to get out, anywhere and your father was the only available ticket. That ticket was gone but she was still young, there was still some residual value left in her to trade upon.
*****
Without solitude
You bang your head
Against the W alls
That other people built
--From The Diaries of Witold Kazmersky, notebook three, somewhere between pages 113-117.
Of course, this put me in a bit of a bind yet also afforded me my own inherited flat, a luxury not many schoolmates could brag about.
I told no one of my mother’s disappearance, insisting instead that she was in bed suffering from the depression of my father’s death and some sort of intestinal flu when she missed the wake.
Given the heavy pall that had nearly suffocated me in that flat, I can’t deny it was a little more than liberating to realise that I had the place to myself, that there was no reason to keep any of their memories sitting around me like uncollected rubbish.
I had to make diurnal visits to babcia simply because she was still in the neighbourhood but by god, it was stifling. The unrelenting tears and babbling away in Polish that I kept insisting to her I didn’t understand, the foods she cooked for me whilst making little croaking noises about the no good mother of mine rotting away with some sickness in bed whilst I was left to fend on my own. I didn’t have the heart to tell her my mother had already disappeared and frankly, I was worried what babcia would have insisted upon had she known, so I kept mum about it and as she never really left her own flat very often to begin with, it was a secret that lasted until she finally gave in to the end of life herself several months later, still wondering what had ever happened to her son.
And although I still had the number and address, the Puerto Rican side of my family who had once caressed me with unadulterated fascination, vanished as though I had only imagined them all along, perhaps conspiring guiltily with my mother or perhaps simply not caring or even forgetting I’d ever existed in the first place. They had their own troubles and didn’t need me adding to them.
So I was alone and I didn’t waste much time to relish in it after all these years cramped into that one bedroom flat with my parents, stifled into reclusion.
Oh, I kept the hi-fi, the records, the photographs. I kept the things that mattered to me about their existence. Month by month, in secret rubbish sacks, I assembled bits and pieces of the past and left them out by the kerbside for the homeless and the scavengers and eventually, the garbage men. The bed and the sofa and the kitchen table were all disassembled hacked to manageable pieces with a hatchet I purchased from the hardware store on the corner and carried out in the middle of the night to the kerb.
There wasn’t much money left but I calculated roughly mortgage and utilities, the cost of pedestrian meals on a monthly basis and how long I could last on the remaining savings in between. Approximately two years. My father had been quite industrious after all.
I stopped going to school of course. What was the point? I had entire days, week after week into months with nothing to do, no obligations, no one stifling their hatred and arguments for my benefit, for the benefit of peace. It was everywhere this peace. I started hanging out in the Public Library on 42nd Street, liberated from strict curriculum to read what I saw fit as I saw fit, whenever and wherever to educate myself as the desire arose testing myself only against myself and how much I wanted to learn.
It had been a lonely existence when they’d been there yet somehow, in their absences, I felt a comfort I had never known – relying on myself was no novelty – not having to feign normalcy, was. But this loneliness was no longer as palatable because there was nothing to contrast it. Order needs chaos to be order by comparison. Now I was without the chaos. Order no longer seemed like order. Chaos seemed naturally internal now instead of external. It liberated an entirely side of me I had barely known existed.
Alone there are no toes to step on. You are free to walk as you please.
Unfortunately, not every memory of them had been removed from the house. There were two bottles of vodka and a crate of beer which I finished off in the first week. In seven days I experienced every degree of euphoria, desperate despair, boredom, excitement, lucidity and fog imaginable. I played their records day and night, drinking without few breaks but for to pass out, vomit, wake up and start again. This was my mourning and my toast to their lives, discovering the path to alcoholism. It’s not like they hadn’t left plenty of markers along the path to guide me to their legacy.
So the money didn’t last as long as the Two Year Plan would have indicated. And eventually the reality of needing to find some sort of gainful employment began creeping in. I’d lost the only job I’d ever had working for my father as an after-school and weekend electrician’s apprentice still several years short of competency, and was rather stuck then for something to do.
What followed was a transient tide of part time jobs requiring no skills and paying even less, jobs in restaurants as a dishwasher, as a busboy as a waiter eventually all the way up to a bartender although even this was done with great mediocrity and depressing incompetence, miserable Ukrainian dumps and delis, third world and Old World juxtapositions in a workaday world of one uneventful week after another.
And so on it went, year after year, futureless vista after futureless vista, drowning my sorrows in my dead father’s flat, reading books bought from street vendors, mincing around in Ukrainian and Polish pubs between worlds, listening nostalgically to fading salsa records that mother had never bothered to take with her, biding my time until one day perhaps I too would follow my father’s legacy into the East River.
But something happened along the way to give me a little kick, a slight start.
I somehow happened across Albert through these myriad fluctuations and pointless meandering from point to point in no discernable pattern. One night I came across him slouched at the bar in his porkpie hat, a Winston hanging from his lip as he stared at some point in the wall in deep meditation. He had a scraggly greying beard and the appearance of a man who had just been pulled out of a spider hole after 6 months on the lam.
It was barely eleven and I was already swaying, this pub being only a pit stop on the way to bigger things.
I stood next to him, sipping the beer and taking particular notice of the labels of every bottle on the shelf in front of me, becoming intimate with the names, memorising them and the order in which they ran, right to left. There was music playing from the jukebox, familiar music. Have you ever seen a dog watching you whilst pretending not to watch you? That’s how I stood beside Albert.
There was another guy to my left who had been drinking quietly and smoking with fever who suddenly began muttering to himself, sparked apparently by the song on the jukebox which he found, he stammered, beneath us all, an insult to humanity. It was some catchy Motown song which elicited a barely familiar melody in my ear but filled this guy next to me with revulsion. Albert looked up from his dead stare into his ashtray when the guy croaked a few bars of Ein Deutsches Requiem by Brahms.
That was my father’s favourite, Albert admitted unprompted. But I always hated it. Nietzsche accused Brahms of making a fool of himself by trying to pass himself off as the heir of Beethoven. Delusional, false. He falls back lazily on the past, fooling himself with the familiar rather than fooling the crowd into believing he is uniquely the great modern style, like Wagner, false and fooling the crowd rather than himself with this myth of modernity.
Albert’s eyes are closed as he speaks. The smoke from his Winston curls around his head, wafting upwards. When he opens them again, he points to the bartender, signalling another beer for himself.
The guy to my left appears uncertain of how to proceed. You could see his eyes, one second filled with the lust of a great monologue building, the next second, puzzled. He shrugs inwardly, almost imperceptively and looks down at his beer, deflated. There was no bark left in him as he busily tried to address the idea of the delusional and the delusionist. Brahms and Wagner. He was like a man enmeshed in a crossword puzzle, cranking out the words, one line after another until finally, stumped, he puts the crossword down and goes back to his beer.
The song was over and another began. There was no further commentary, both back to their neutral corners.
Albert rocked back and forth on his heels, lighting another Winston once the previous one had been ground out and took a victorious, smirking sip of beer.
“Ridendo dicere severum”, the man to my left finally and suddenly erupted. Through what is laughable say what is sombre. German composers are too serious anyway. I used to teach Nietzsche at Manhattan City College. I remembered reading that rubbish aloud, forcing those poor bastards to memorise chunks of texts like Talmud students.
Albert stopped rocking, took a long puff off the Winston.
It is the ethereal we are looking for, he cackled uncertain for a moment perhaps if he was even serious himself but pushing onward anyway, carelessly tossing provocative statements in the air like a bored baton twirler.
Like Chopin’s Polonaise in A flat Major, Op. 53? I had cleared my throat to make sure I wouldn’t be misunderstood, looking first to the man on my left and then Albert.
Precisely! Albert proclaims, finger in the air.
My father played that song every Sunday, during breakfast, for years.
Interesting. My father was a violinist in the New York Philharmonic, Albert exhaled, looking at me through smoke-squinted eyes in reevaluation.
My father was an electrician, I replied with the straight line.
My father was a Trotskyist! The man to my left exclaimed as if releasing the secret of his life out of his hands to fly away.
I signalled the barman – another three beers, the first round of solidarity purchased in a night wavy with empty proclamations and beery toasts.
*****
By the time last orders were called, the man to my left, Gifford, as it turned out, was swaying unequivocally like a man on a ferry crossing across a choppy and disturbed sea. The jukebox was playing Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit.
I’ve got to go, he muttered, feeling around his pockets for unidentifiable objects, hanging his coat over his shoulders. Wunnerful. Unexpected.
Albert and I were left contemplating last orders and what to do next.
Of course, what to do next was a simple manner, in many ways. More beer. More beer as though there was nothing else going on in the world but the distance between this bar, the corner bodega and my flat. Why? Why, you can ask yourself night after night wondering when enough is enough, if it is ever enough. It never is. Just around the corner, after the next brain cell has desisted, lies peace. Numb and fluid.
*****
It was through Albert and only commencing from a period of time shortly after meeting Albert that I began to sit up and take notice of myself because of his excoriations on my listlessness and pointless existence. He summoned me to take pride in myself, dazzle myself with underdeveloped possibilities, tending to me daily like a botanist discovering an unknown form of weed. He provoked me to wonder if there wasn’t something more to my life than this endless series of dead end jobs and sweet memories of meringue music mixed with Polish waltzes.
It was Albert, through his cunning and encouragement that compelled me finally to try and figure out a method of moving forward, forget all about the past and reconstruct a future out of the present beginning with now.
Dropping out is just another form of mourning, he told me one night when we had spent the afternoon smouldering in dark, dank bars whose only populations were morose, intoxicated and hopeless. The intellect is the remedy, one of the few. The intellect stimulated by music. We are two musicians with one bass and one saxophone. Certainly, irregardless of the parameters of talent we possess, between us we should be able to find some modicum of releasing the mourning and embracing the feel of it.
You’ve got to have self respect to have confidence and to have self respect you’ve got to have a reason, he went on, his beard speckled with beer. Pride. So have some pride in yourself, stimulate yourself, get out of this rut, this cycle of dead end jobs and emotionless drifting. And in the meantime, we’ll begin our band. That will be the release of the mourning. Work for self respect, like your father did and just as he did, find your haven in your music.
Are you crazy? Why would I want to emulate someone who drowned himself in the East River? And what about you, I countered? You have no job.
Ah, but I’ve had a career. It’s necessary to give perspective to a life of listlessness. You’ve yet to experience. Jobs are just menial labour, there is no demoralising environment to drown in, the existence itself is more demoralising than any environment can overcome. As for your father, well, imagine what his life would have been like single, with no kid.
And besides, he would add, his excitement tangible, the mad scientist with his lab rat, my job is provoking my intellect. I need no other work.
Despite immodesty and his drinking, Albert was in fact, quite diligent in his pursuits. He would spend hours alternating between reading and practicing his double bass which loomed in his spare bedroom study like lover waking up from under the covers.
Whereas Albert had once been my drinking buddy, chess companion, mentor in matters of literature and music, the older brother I never had, as if he had rehearsed the same song my father and mother had played, the departure theme, he too was gone and whilst he’d been gone I’d been busy making amends.
From him I’d learned to drink Guinness instead of gassy Polish lagers, roll my own cigarettes, read Durrell, American Beat heroes, Genet and Berryman simultaneously by walking throughout his apartment, room to room, and finding books spread open to key passages, highlighted and underlined for my edification. Another world opened up that I scarcely knew existed.
He was a quirky bastard. His flat smelled like cat piss when you walked in and as you progressed, the smell gradually metabolised into stale beer and cigarette smoke clinging to every fabric, deep in the years of abuse. There were tropical fish, televisions set at different angles throughout the sitting room, loud music at all hours which his neighbors came to express their dissatisfaction for in torrents of abusive language and slamming doors, beer everywhere, stained on the counters, in the cushions, across album and CD covers, soaked in the rugs – a virtual laboratory of misjudged beer.
The funny thing was no matter how much he drank he never seemed visibly intoxicated. Certainly this was an illusion woven by years of public drinking and functional alcoholism, but it was an impressive trick he performed for me as my own head grew more and more muddled by the hour.
Albert was a man of the Classics hidden in a drunkard’s life.
And I, until he decided he wanted to experience some regurgitated fantasy of trans-American highway adventure, his protogé.
*****
The experiment in finding a career was naturally, given my disinclination for bowing to societal pressures and social mores, an absolute failure.
I entered on the lowest rung of the corporate ladder, the copy machine. I choked a tie on every morning, ate a disgusting diner lunch every afternoon and came home at night, salivating with the thought of drinking beer to quench the tireless boredom.
We rehearsed sporadically. Usually we were at Albert’s flat simply so he wouldn’t have to drag the bass to mine. Usually I was already into my second six pack by the time I arrived. Albert, as was his wont, had spent the morning and early afternoon, had a shower and a nap and was feeling refreshed. We were a terrible combination and I in particular, ate away at Albert’s patience. We weren’t going anywhere.
Not until one weekend when Albert announced we were going to Washington, DC.
Why the fuck would we go there, I wanted to know, with the world’s greatest city beckoning like Gustave Caillebotte’s Nude Woman Stretched Out On A Sofa.
Two reasons. First of all, change of venue. Changing your venue can be as refreshing as a hot shower after a week without bathing. But change for change’s sake is a futile and meaningless effort.
The other reason is because I met Gato Barbieri last night and after confided to me he was headed to there for a gig at Blues Alley. We chatted for nearly thirty minutes. Fascinating guy. Soft speaking stream of consciousness sort of conversation. You know me, my favourite kind of conversation. And some good stories. About Argentina, Buenos Aires, how there were no instruments to buy when he was growing up and had to wait for someone to die to get one. Anyway, I think he was jealous of my irrevocable consumption. Reminded him of the good ole days, perhaps. He told me how he used to take a lot of coke and drink too much. Wore him away, he claims. You wear away anyway, I corrected him. But he’s like a child with a new toy, this sobriety. He says he’s stopped drinking, started exercising and eating healthy. It would have been repulsive but for the stories and the histories.
Anyway, Albert carries on, exhaling and sipping an espresso, staring out at the leggy pedestrians on a warm spring afternoon near Tompkins Square Park. He seemed to like me for some reason. I lied and said I was going to be in DC this weekend anyway. He says he’ll put me and a guest on the list. So there you go. You and I to DC, to Blues Alley, Gato Barbieri. Should be fantastic.
*****
So Saturday morning we get up and catch the bus down to DC. It’s an odd city. A museum of French government architecture in the middle of a ghetto. We were due to catch the 8pm show but Albert had brought a flask with him on the bus and we passed it between us with such religious fervour we stunk of it by the time we got off, already swaying.
I say we splurge, he says as we hop into a cab and ask to be taken to Georgetown. I’ve been here once before. Let’s get a nice hotel, fuck it. Dressing pigs up in tuxedos. We’ll stay at the Georgetown Four Seasons. Imagine their disgust and imagine our pleasure in stinking of this cognac, dressed like slobs, flippant at their gaudy pretensions.
And so that’s precisely what we do. We don’t have any luggage. One duffel bag between us. Change of clothes? Forget it. Clothes cannot change what we are. We’ll flaunt our arrogance with our apathy in our appearance. Who cares? These people love clothes. It’s a big fuck you they won’t mistake.
We spend only a few minutes in the room before leaving, stopping in the first place we could find that was open, a Brazilian café. We drank Caipirinhas, entertaining the barman with our incessant, meaningless banter, word associations – the kind of stunted dialogue produced by tired minds, drunk minds. We mixed Brahma beers with the Caipirinhas, as though trying to prove some obscure point. When we mentioned going to see Gato Barbieiri at Blues Alley, he asks, offhandedly, if we were going to the matinee show.
And this is what became our downfall. The matinee show.
*****
We arrived by cab, dropped at the alley and stumbled up to the front door demanding to see Gato. There was no mistaking our potential hooliganism, we certainly weren’t the typical matinee crowd. The door man listened to Albert’s wind up patiently, indulgently waiting for a long sputtering spiel of off colour ramblings to come to a merciful end before politely informing that we were not on the guest list of the afternoon show and we would not be getting in. It helped not one iota that Albert became slightly abusive at that point, demanding credentials, demanding justice, demanding again to see Gato. Another doorman approached cautiously and soon we were surrounded by linemen sized men who took us in at first as a curiosity but once the curiosity had been exhausted, quickly began losing all patience with us.
One of them took me aside whilst Albert continued his harangue to another. Listen, he hissed, the two of you are disgusting. You’re drunk, you’re loud and obnoxious and frankly, unless you’re both members of Gato’s family, you wouldn’t get in here even if you were on the list for the matinee show. My advice is that the two of you go sleep it off. You won’t be welcomed here, not this afternoon, not this evening, not ever, frankly.
And when the doorway was shut tight leaving us standing there swaying in the alley with a gentle breeze, Albert suddenly slumped as though the life had been kicked out of him. He leaned against the side of the building and lit a Winston. Fuck ‘em. We don’t need these bastards anyway. I’ve got a better idea.
And those next few minutes would prove to be well fateful for as he spoke to me, pork pie had twisted in his hand, he spotted a cab driver on the lower end of Wisconsin Avenue getting out of his cab to talk to another cabbie who was leaning against the hood of his car reading a newspaper. I watched with interest as Albert pushed himself up from the side of the building and sauntered over towards the idling cab.
Then, without warning, he suddenly jumped into the driver’s side of the cab just as the other two took notice and as they leapt, shouting after him, Albert threw the car into gear and sped off, wheels squealing, up to M Street, hung a right and mingled into traffic at speed. The two cabbies shouted after him before stopping, noticing me standing there and vaguely recalling my presence next to Albert only moments before, approached me cursing.
I don’t know anything about it, I protested. I’m just as surprised as you.
They weren’t in the mood to debate and I could see the thought pattern in their brains tumbling between grabbing me and chasing after the stolen cab. They waved me off with foreign curses and hand gestures, hopping into the others’ cab and taking off down M Street in pursuit leaving me there wondering what the hell had just happened and what my next move was going to be.
Albert would later tell me that endlessly that he hadn’t actually “stolen” the cab perse. He was just bored and wanted a little excitement. The kind of dysfunctional excitement bred out of intoxication; senseless, without preamble, without premeditation. I just wanted to pick up one fare, just to see the look on their faces when they got in and I tore off from the kerb like a mad man. Just one fare.
But he didn’t make it that far. Naturally his driving skills weren’t very lucid given his consumption and before long, instead of a fare, he’d run straight into a parked car, jumped out of the cab bloodied, only to be overtaken by the two cabbies who between the two of them and the help of another passer-by, managed to hold him down in the street long enough, dazed and wounded, until the cops duly arrived about three minutes later, the moment of madness punctuated like the fluttering dropkick of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major, Opus 35.
*****
Albert says the judge was lenient. We had a little joke in the court room. Either that or she was trying to find the motivation for my seemingly random anarchistic and criminal act. What are your dreams, she asks me at the sentencing. I gave her several different scenarios. To tread water until my limbs grow too tired to tread anymore and I drown. I thought I was being clever. She shook her head. Are you still finding this a joke, she asks me, incredulous. No, it isn’t funny at all your honour, I sincerely don’t have any dreams. Not dreams that would be rendered coherent in an incoherent society anyway, your honour.
You said that? I took another swig of the pint, these repetitive motions were all part of communication in the world Albert and I were sitting in. He nodded his head enthusiastically. So what did she say?
Nothing for a minute. Silence. Summing me up in her head. Clearly she was impressed by me in some indefinitive way she was quickly trying to calculate. Would it be more helpful if I told you it was my dream to be the guy who assembles display furniture all day long at an Ikea factory outlet mall? Then her eyes were like little slits, comprehending I wasn’t taking my sentencing seriously at all. What did I care anyway. I know the maximum sentencing guidelines. I wasn’t a murderer, I hadn’t committed a violent felony. Four years maximum, free food, regardless of how shitty it might be, the experience of prison, time to work on my book, I could have gone on all afternoon about the exciting possibilities a small prison sentence would have afforded me.
By then, the judge wasn’t interested in any of my answers. She’d tried a tact, tried to be humane. Inexplicably, while my public defender representative turned white with incredulity, she became almost jocular, leaned over the front of the bench. Too ambiguous, she stated, nearly inaudible and very slowly as though I had some sort of learning disability rather than genius.
How about an interpretive dance, done with feeling and emotion, I offered. But the game was over. She slammed the gavel down, suddenly impatient and poof, sentencing was on. Do you know how many times I told that fucking story to my cell mate? How many variations, how many different tenses, different languages, different angles I’ve created that story into, sheerly out of boredom?
He pinched out his cigarette with an annoyed look on his face. I’ll tell you something Witold. It wasn’t as bad as you might imagine jail to be. No rapings, no beatings from prison guards. A lot of long hours with nothing to do. It drives some people crazy but for me, it was three years to think.
*****
Needless to say, the first thing I did upon my return home was to quit the ridiculous job I’d barely hung on to and endeavoured to find something more stimulating, something with even a vague promise of upwardly movement. Albert wasn’t going to be back any time soon and time was wasting.
*****
Having been blessed once with an inexplicable facility for language, I decided to forego my apprehensions and answer an ad for a bilingual paralegal for the Law Offices of Richard Pennymaker – my qualifications were vague at best. I’d done a stint in a similar job for the Legal Aid Bureau for several years before being disgraced simultaneously by an office affair that went wildly off the rails and a corresponding apathy to showing up for work. In the end I had escaped a humiliating dismissal from an organisation known for dismissing no one (so hard-up they were for employees willing to work hard for the love of the work rather than the pay and so poorly-paid were the employees), solely by tendering my resignation just as the walls were closing in, the petty thefts were discovered, the psychological harassment of a sweet old lady who rubbed me the wrong way and of course, the office affair, the final nail in the coffin.
So in relying on my present skills rather than my past in particular I decided to see what might happen if I applied.
The interview was a circus to say the least and should have been sufficient indication, even in my fragile state of desperation, like a low-grade fever and sore throat, of the terrible influenza that would this job would become.
There were many layers to the Richard Pennymaker phenomenon which would have been impossible to grasp without the benefit of hindsight but it was apparent straight away that Pennymaker was deranged in a not-so-subtle yet still socially acceptable fashion. It was apparent in his vanity – a pathetic state of denial; the comb-over of greasy, dandruff-ridden greying hair, the belt around the pants so tight that the fat would seem to explode in all directions if he dared inhale deeply, the generally vagrant look to his appearance – pleated corduroy pants, oversized NYU sweatshirt, psychotically shifting eyes, all warning signals that I chose to ignore.
The interview itself was fairly straight forward in that we discussed my background, or lack of background as it were in matters of personal injury before quickly moving on to a wide range of topics which had nothing to do with the job or law at all but more with his manic desire to impress upon me the goodliness of his nature, the selfless, fading 60s hippy ideologies and the somewhat incredible admission that he fancied himself some sort of modern day Robin Hood, taking from the big, bad corporate insurance companies who were, in themselves, some of the worst kind of thieves imaginable, and giving back to the indigenous, the poor, the needy, a tiny pocket of wealth to help them back on their feet.
The interview, as it were, went on for hours as he told me the history of his crusade, the indignities he’d suffered at the hands of corporate buffoons and political tyrants, the dreams which had been snuffed out by the callous indifference of a controlling society of greedy, lecherous types, all of whom flew the same sort of corporate flags again and again of indifference for the plight of the less fortunate.
We were interrupted frequently – the receptionist for important calls from insurance adjusters, witnesses, new potential clients, existing clients, doctor’s offices, reconstruction experts and plastic surgeons. A pattern of clients, all of whom had been scheduled more or less around the same time, brought in, cases dissected, medical treatments diagnosed, advises dispensed like a neighbourhood guru to the parasitic.
That the clients were brought in for these meetings in the middle of my interview didn’t seem to bother either him or the clients as I was introduced as a prospective employee, invited to ask questions on cases, all without the benefit of knowing anything about the field whatsoever, save for what I was trying to digest in between clients.
When one particularly important client arrived unannounced, he excused himself and brought the receptionist in to replace him. Alicia was my competency exam, a political refugee from El Salvador who had been in his employ for a few months. Pennymaker merely introduced us in his own broken and brackish version of Spanish and invited the two of us to sit alone in the conference room for a chat to flesh out my abilities in Spanish.
It wasn’t difficult. Frankly, Alicia was one of those barely literate immigrants of Central Indian descent who had somehow managed to escape the village she was from and land on her feet in America. She was terrified of Pennymaker, that much was clear and had no tangible idea of how or what was expected of her in the conversation so I took it over myself, pigeon holing her about her past, the village she was from, her musical tastes, her favourite foods, what she thought of New York City and America in general, whether she had a boyfriend (no) or any children (two already), where she lived, how long she had been working for Pennymaker.
I told her about my mother, romanticised the days excluding the drinking and the screaming fights and hot tempers, the beatings and the bruises.
In the end, I befriended her because I thought it would be the easiest way to win her approval. I flattered her unnecessarily and ruthlessly, pouring it on thick, relying heavily on a combination of lyrics from Julio Iglesias to Mercedes Sosa, which were the backbones of my vocabulary in post-Miranda Spanish, the lovesick months over women I had never met. In fact, I was quite adept at spouting beautiful, philosophical phrases about love gone wrong and heartsickness in general and although it had nothing to do with law or personal injury, by the time Pennymaker had finally returned some thirty minutes later, Alicia was like putty in my hands and as it turned out, gave a glowing review of my incredible Spanish to Pennymaker as I sat there admiring my handiwork, not the slightest bit embarrassed or disgusted by what I had just done. Desperate times after all.
And so this was how I embarked on my odyssey of personal injury law paralegal slash translator.
*****
It was all going quite well, all things considered. I had steady, disposable income. I had some vague sense of self-esteem that bordered on self-importance when asked what I did for a living, no longer mumbling none of your business or what the fuck do you think I do. I had yet another skin to cover that of the alcoholic, that of the struggling and hopelessly untalented musician, enough money to set up the flat in the Lower East Side, go out and try and impress unimpressionable women, find a group of people to start a band with and wow the unwowable city with whatever it was I imagined I possessed.
That is, until Albert showed up again.
*****
Although I’d often sent him odd packages with collections of non-sequential, unrelated miscellanea discovered in nocturnal walks through city streets, we hadn’t seen one another in nearly two years since he’d left to pay his debt to society in a prison in the outskirts of DC before early release for what he called not only good, but exemplary behaviour, teaching the inmates to read, teaching the guards to appreciate jazz and classical, making his mark with the best and most efficient laundry press work of anybody on the block, so he said anyway, in his sporadic yet voluminous letters to me.
So I was rather surprised as I strode home in my monkey suit swinging my briefcase which contained nothing but old newspapers, a flask of vodka, and several emergency packs of Drum, at passersby in menacing fashion drawing occasionally hostile stares, when I spotted Albert sat on the stoop in front of my apartment building, a Winston dangling from his lip, a pork pie hat perched on his head, a yellowing neck brace and a cast on his right arm.
What the fuck, I managed to blurt out loudly, stopping in my tracks, the briefcase hitting me in the back of the knee.
Long story, he muttered, standing up from the stoop and snubbing the Winston into the side of the sculpted three foot high lion beside the steps. The lion’s head had long since taken on a Dada-esque melting quality by virtue of years and acid rain and god knows whatever other kind of abuse it withstood over the years.
I got into a car wreck, ironically enough, hit by a drunk driver, he laughed, half-snorted, looking up at an old woman who was shaking a rug from a window several stories above the sidewalk.
As it happened, the story spun out over a night of the kind of debaucheries perfected only by long-lost, beer-swilling mates in a time of utter black-out.
He had, sure enough, been involved in a car accident not long before and had suffered a series of minor albeit financially lucrative injuries as a result.
It’s the cash cow – I could almost hear Pennymaker’s horrific Jersey accent grinding into my ears like granules of sand – the cash cow is the knee, he liked to tell me, sitting back in one of his grandiose moments of self-delusion in his office, hands behind his head and unbearably philosophical - once you get the knee injury, the torn cartilage, or better, the meniscus, oh, then we’ve got them.
Nevermind that because his law firm of two lawyers and a half dozen paralegals was built upon the worst nickel and dime sorts of claims, the overblown cervical and lumbar strain, the whiplash, the headaches, the inability to work, etc., could only rely on a cash cow like the knee. He could only dream about the accidental deaths on job sites or horrific car accidents resulting in permanent disabilities because that kind of lottery ticket was never going to drop in his lap no matter how many ambulances we chased, no matter how many ads were done on Spanish language television stations, how many pink business cards that were handed out, the big break was not going to happen to a man whose law firm was a constant threat to collapse entirely from the burden of stupidity and mismanagement that evolved out of it.
So you’ve got to take the knee if you can, I explained to Albert later that night. You’ve got crap knees already, don’t you? Aren’t you always complaining about them aching? Well, here’s your chance – perhaps they’ll find some previously undiagnosed tear, some arthritic change brought on by the vicious impact of the collision. In any event, you’re looking at thousands.
Albert squinted up at the ceiling, exhaling a draft of smoke from the back of his mouth and watching it be shot in frenzied directions by the overhead fan. How long is all of this going to take, he wondered sceptically, schooled in the no something for nothing academies. Still, you could see his brain working out the variety of implications a sudden thrust of income would have on his liver.
Regardless of how long it takes, so long as you play the role properly and to the hilt, you will get rewarded. If you need income before then, well, they’re certain to be able to work out some kind of loan based on your potential settlement as collateral.
So we are migrating nomads, Albert surmises through squinted eyes. What are nomads in search of? Water, arable land? We are nomads in search of cheap beer, loose women and a hedonistic apathy about global economics. We have no cattle, no sheep, no pigs to bring with us and thus must sustain ourselves on our insubstantial wits – that and a healthy personal injury settlement – which I share with you for helping me gain it to begin with…
So just like that, it was sealed.
The following morning, I brought Albert with me into the office. Pennymaker’s eyes lit up to see Albert coming in behind me with a limp, a cast and a neck brace. You couldn’t actually see the dollar signs ringing up in his eyes, but perhaps a fleck of saliva watering his lips.
This is my friend Albert, I began. Car accident, utterly the fault of the other driver. The only real issue I can see for us to speculate on Richard, are policy limits. The magic words, policy limits. Otherwise, the sky’s the limit.
We went to work immediately, ringing the insurance company with the policy number, gradually filtered to the claim number. And yes indeed, broken wrist, cervical and lumbar strain, possible knee injury. Music to Pennymaker’s ears who listened greedily as I spoke to the adjuster.
The three of us talked numbers in Pennymaker’s office.
Let’s say, conservatively, 2,000 for the whiplash, another few grand for the wrist and the knee…he shouted out to the paralegals gathered on the edges of the office: Somebody get Dr. Shoenshoin on the phone, get Albert an appointment, right away.
Dr Shoenshoin was the orthopaedic surgeon we often used for potential knee injuries.
My god, we could be looking at anywhere between 5-10 grand for the knee, at least. Policy limits Witold! We’ve got to get the policy limits somehow. See how much we can soak these bastids for. He rubbed his hands over the top of the desk as though caressing a woman’s breasts whilst leaning over her supine, writing body beneath. Oh, it’s the cash cow, he muttered to himself before snapping out of his reverie and looking up, his eyes glistening with giddiness, shimmering.
Well boys, Witold’s got it from here now. The rest of you, standing there? What the hell is this? C’mon, c’mon. He clapped his hands together. Every one out and working! What the hell is this? He turned to me, shrugging his shoulders. Albert looked at me, grinning evilly, shrugging his shoulders. I shrugged my shoulders as well. Now I was the goose that laid the golden egg.
Albert, man – this is the ticket, I murmur as we went outside to the parking lot for a cigarette before he was off to his appointment with the orthopaedic surgeon. Not only are you going to make some good money but you’ve elevated me in the eyes of that pederast, I exclaimed.
And sure enough, within a few days, once the initial prognosis of Albert’s knee by Dr Shoenshoin was spectacularly successful – possible torn meniscus. Possible surgery, months of paid therapy, ching, ching, ching.
Pennymaker was effusive in his mothering of me thereafter. I was moved into my own office. A few weeks later, complaining of the conditions bitterly, having it out in a tirade of ranting bile for every one to hear. Spoiled and pampered and demanding attention like an open wound. Admittedly, I was hung over, skittish and anxious to jump over the edge.
But Pennymaker, grateful for this unexpected windfall that held his focus day in and out ever since Albert’s arrival, silenced me quickly and conspiratorially with his rodent voice – We’re just going to have to get you a secretary…
Pennymaker had a knack for creating turnover. Employees came and went. Half of his days were spent interviewing. He fired people at the drop of a hat, humiliated anyone showing the vaguest sign of weakness, hired people after hours and hours of interviews that interloped with client meetings, telephone calls, newspaper reading, speechmaking, autobiographying. It was like the accounts of losing friends on the Front. You were afraid to befriend anyone lest they be gone the next day.
Rumours went on around about how he liked younger men – interviews were embarrassingly at times, little more than extended dates. The air was thick with a fetid sort of sexual harassment as Pennymaker hired certain younglings, barely out of college and those of us still around the next day were left to watch a stumblingly untalented neophyte delicately fend off the advances of Pennymaker who would spend days with the new boy, “training” him closely, until inevitably, by the end of the day, he’d raise his arms in frustration and say ah hell, you’re too goddamned stupid to work here. Get out! Get the fuck out!
And then Pennymaker would sulk for a few days in his office, refuse to see clients, showing up for only half days, sometimes looking as though he’d just rolled out of bed into the office, slipping on the same manky courduroys tightly belted so the rolls of fat pinched out underneath some grease stained sweatshirt or a dress shirt that was two sizes too small and clung to him like a baby – all the fat oozing out from every direction.
You had to wonder about a guy like him. Something sinister and dark.
*****
From the Diaries of Witold Kazmersky, cahier one, p 100
“Pomifer autumnus fruges effuderit, et mox Bruma recurrit iners.” – Horace Odes, Book IV: Autumn, bringer of fruit, has poured out her riches, and soon sluggish winter returns…
The excitement of Albert’s arrival, the elevation of my status in the Law Offices of Richard Pennymaker and even night after night going out to see jazz bands and hone our visions, hear poets give open readings and rehearsals with my saxophone and Albert’s newly acquired bass were all conspiring to dull my nerves.
The first issue of course, was Albert himself, who did nothing for months but attend physiotherapy sessions, limp back to the apartment and drink the cases of beer I lugged back on his suggestion most nights after sweaty subway rides with the armpits of humanity stuffed in my nose and a full day of work under my belt.
It didn’t bother me that he didn’t work because this was an investment – splitting the proceeds of what was bound to be in the neighbourhood of 25 grand, even after Pennymaker took his cut, once the case was settled. It didn’t bother me that his knee was still too prone to go out and lug a case or two back on his own or drop a bag of garbage out the window on to the street curb with steady aim at three in the morning when there were few passersby along the sidewalk. It didn’t bother me that he didn’t cook or clean – I wasn’t much in the habit of myself quite frankly. Nor did it bother me that every evening upon my return there was a heavy pall of smoke in the living room, CDs lying around in a disc jockey chaos, newspapers and magazines strewn over every available empty space between seat cushions, overflowing in the bathroom, on top the television and the stereo – because that’s how Albert spent his free time, reading, plucking at the bass as he leaned, using it like a crutch for his gimpy knee, chain smoking, inventing new expressions and drinking beer.
The elevated status at Pennymakers grew dull once the excitement of Albert’s case wore off and it was back to the every day soap operas unfolding with Pennymaker’s ever-fluctuating and evolving obsession with young male graduates flowed in and out of the office and his knowledge that secretaries and receptionists were equally replaceable, all birdbrains in his repertoire, flushing them out of existence almost as soon as we’d become accustomed or even sometimes enamoured with.
And while it had been less than a year squired away under the constant scrutiny and back-stabbing, I no longer felt that itch of working to scratch, especially knowing that once Albert’s pay day spilled forth, so did mine and that it was unlikely in any event that I could withstand the daily uncertainties and chaos for much longer without seeing it spill like untreated sewage through the streets of my subconscious, invading my nightly rituals and sullying everything else being constructed around it.
I knew instinctively that once that payday had been cashed in there was little else left to keep me there under such primitive circumstances although what I planned on doing in lieu of it – returning to hit and miss jobs with contractors, dead end temporary assignments or bartending in pockets of hovel humanity – was left unassigned for later duty where I was busy imagining any number of possible scenarios that inevitably involved kicking up a great storm and leaving.
What bothered me in the end was simply the lack of space.
Although the flat had once been sufficient for the likes of my parents and myself despite my having to sleep on the pull-out sofa in the living room growing up and study at the kitchen table with the distraction of my mother preparing dinner around me, both Albert and his bass were too big a presence in the room once he had taken it over.
In The Odd Couple, one guy is a slob and the other has a cleaning fetish. In The Even Couple, the sitcom Albert and I were playing out every night, I would arrive home flush with the spoils of the liquor store, pick up the empty tins of takeaway and deliveries stuffing them all into a bin heaving with empty beer bottles and crushed empty packets of former cigarettes, knock off the ridiculous shirt and tie act and the two of us would head out for the evening with the laugh track roaring in our ears.
It doesn’t matter who you’re with whether it’s a long time mate, partner, girlfriend, lover, relative, sushi and chopsticks Wall Street financial advisor, whatever, if you spend every waking hour in their presence and half of those waking hours are further spent nailed away in some dodgy dive bar peeling away beer after beer to find intoxication waiting underneath, eventually you tire of the presence. Eventually you begin to notice the habits and the quirks of the other and while you were once intrigued by the novelty of discovery, once they’d been discovered, they seemed to play over and over relentlessly repetitive, repeated annoyances growing to grievances to too much truth talking in too many loud bars in between laying bad lines on princesses sipping cocktails who couldn’t hear you over the music if they wanted to anyway.
Once the annoyances begin piling on they become like an inner city grime you can never fully wash from the windows that cloud your vision of the view as though you were suddenly suffering a mild form of cataracts and knowing you were gradually growing blind.
Gradually, the hints were dropped like carpet-bombing silences afterwards. Instead of coming home I’d stop off directly after work still caked in my suit and tie loosened then pissed then stumbling home with a takeaway, the lights and smoke blinding once in the flat, stumbling further into bed with the takeaway perched on my chest, snoring fitfully into the morning. Other times I’d come home and he’d already be out, sometimes a note of where he might be headed, sometimes a nothing which was meant as a message of something.
Either way, we tried avoiding one another as many days as possible, endeavouring to create space between us before eventually filling it back up again with consecutive nights rehearsing in the flat, the banging on the walls from neighbours until gradually relenting, back to sitting in the living room, drinking more beer, eating more takeaway, reading passages from magazines and library books which were never returned.
We were waiting out the end of a prison sentence. We both knew that the settlement which was to come would liberate us and it was all we could do to mark off the days on the calendar in black circles filled in with sinister dollar signs, waiting, purgatory.
Gradually we got around to talking about the spoils as though it were some dirty, unspoken truth between us that had to be gotten off our chests.
The rehearsing going on hadn’t been entirely in vain or delirious. I felt like I owed to my father and this particular flat and all those nights he and my mother had listened to records or my mother sat quietly sipping rum whilst my father played private concertos for the two of us.
I dreamt often of being in clubs – perhaps because Albert and I were in so many of them night after night showing up in cheap jazz clubs, not the flashy 25 dollar a head dinner table sort of jazz that flowed through Manhattan like a third river running through the middle of the island but the jazz of students and unknowns, up and comers, fading downers and never would be’s. I dreamt of playing alongside my father on stages all over the city, polkas and jazz blending in with calypsos and salsas, spinning into bottles and spinning back out again into the faces of my mother over the years, hair up, hair down, with and without mascara, in happiness and in health, sadness and poverty, emptiness and sullen and later like the fat peasant woman in Diego Rivera's La Molendera, before finally disappearing altogether and my father no longer beside me on stage, playing to the fishes in the East River or swept out into the Atlantic and then Albert with his stand up base, pork pie hat, head down in concentration, unlit Winston perched on his lip, loud Hawaiian shirt with camouflage pants and jack boots and there I was beside him back in the flat going line over line again, stopping and starting, snorting and laughing through rehearsals as though living out a piece of what this flat and my father never lived long enough.
One thing we could tell ourselves is that we weren’t very good in particular although in the abstract we were almost plausible.
And because the last month had been one long cold spell and we were cooped up in my little flat 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, somewhere in the distant spectacle of Europe.
Why indeed, he liked to stammer. Why not some cross country porno film cabinet masturbation of the great American dream bustling through the urban sprawl and dull poetic landscapes of Midwestern nothingness? Because that was where I last left off Witold, that’s why, Albert explained night after night until it sounded like an imaginary drum assembled on a beat machine in a distant African night. That is precisely what I chased when I last left New York, looking for my lost America. But it isn’t here. It’s over there, across the Atlantic, the lands of our fathers, the continent where history spills out of bins and is casually swept away into a larger pile of rubbish and carried out to the countryside to be buried in a landfill or carted off by ship to someone else’s landfill until some piece of it pokes out inescapably again to remind us. We must go to Europe.
***********************************************************
...All travelling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity. -Ruskin, Modern Painters
Albert begins a slow whine about his creaking knees, fresh out of the train from Antwerp, stopping in the middle of the station's tides of passers-by to mewl and set down his bag for a moment. It's almost too much to bear. An entire town to be eviscerated by our greedy, insatiable needs waits and a middle aged ache cripples him as if he were kicked in the balls. I make a rotten cabbage face, set down my bag and roll a cigarette, clenching it between my digits with unquenchable agitation before firing up the butane and touching it to the cigarette tip. I exhale a mind suddenly dull for its lack of curiosity. Will this be requiring immediate surgery? I ask, my eyes begin to race around the minor circus of food peddlers, discount record stores, blaring video screens and this tiring chatter of humanity around me. Should I be concerned? Should I consult the phrase book for the appropriate foreign phrases dealing with emergencies; will this require a thrombectomy? This food disagrees with my digestive system and is planning an uprising? I spatter these questions out to Albert who already has the Winston in the yap, wincing from his knee pains and searching out a cafe or a pub to dull the aches.
Fuck you. He says this matter-of-factly, as though he'd just wished gesundheit to an old lady following a sneeze. He sees me like a sort of flying, buzzing insect around his face and ears, but instead of swatting, he picks up the bag again, nodding over to the station cafe where a gang of stragglers putter around their little round tables, pushing cigarettes into ashtrays, glasses to lips, weakly attempting to prop up the jowls with a feigned interest at every item of human flotsam floating past in a vaguely intoxicated dream. I'm going to have a beer. And he sets off to cross the floor and find a table to unload himself, peel off the sport jacket and pork pie hat, loosen the knot of the tie and swallow some of the local brew. When he travels, he dresses like an old Southern Baptist dressing for Sunday sermons. Dignity distinguishes, he often complains.
If I don't follow him, it leads to a lot of confusion. We’d been in Holland for two days already blurry. Schiphol to Centraal Station to the first pub we spotted across the tram, taxi and bus strangled entryway outside the station where crowds of a wide array of freaks were assembled for various causes. Why a pub? Because Albert was in charge. How many hours since we left Kennedy, he mumbles in scruffy justification. Haven’t had a proper beer, haven’t been able to sit down and enjoy a cigarette, haven’t had a second of time to just sit and absorb toxins as if they were my closest relatives and this was a family reunion. Amsterdam’s been here what, fourteen hundred, fifteen hundred years? It isn’t going anywhere while I sit having a few quiet beers and a few smokes and get my bearings, now is it?
Well, they say it was settled by two Frisian fishermen, for starters. The beginning of the 14th century or the very end of the 13th century, depending on whose book you read. Two Frisian fishermen and a dog on the Amstel River. That makes it about seven hundred years, not fourteen hundred or fifteen hundred years that it’s been around. And no, not worried about it disappearing while you drink yourself into a torpor of indulgence but am worried about where we might sleep at least. You know, once you get rolling you can’t be distracted. Can you envision yourself, twelve pints in, getting up suddenly, clapping your hands together, then rubbing them together like you had a stick between them and you were rubbing it against a rock trying to make a fire and yelling enthusiastically, hey! Let’s find a place to crash for the night first!
Albert shrugged as we marched resolutely across a road with a pack of pedestrians and cyclists and trams and cars and buses all passing back and forth in front of us, around us, between us as though every step taken risked collision.
If you’re bothered by it, he sneered, go and find a place yourself, it doesn’t matter to me where we sleep. I just got here. There are welcoming drinks to consume with the natives. It’s tradition, in travelling. Welcoming drinks, lay of the land from inside a pub.
He opened the door and marched in. I followed in behind him.
A day later, or perhaps it wasn’t a full day, 18 or 20 hours later, I was waking from a bench in front of the train station, my bags tied around my ankles to prevent thieves while I slept, from seizing the booty. And I raised my head, in the grass about 20 yards away, Albert was fast asleep, snoring even, with the double bass like a mistress lying beside him still in it’s ominous looking white Kolstein Uni-Air Bass Carrier. His duffel bag was underneath his head, the strap tied around his neck.
And here we were arrived in the station in Utrecht having hit the rewind button and finger poised over the play button ready to set the nihilism back in motion. This was some preview of Albert’s Europe Tour – dead of liver poisoning in the first two months. Hospitalised with exhaustion. Accidental drowning in the Oude Gracht .
So far, the plan was working with precision. It was like a business, Albert had preached in New York. We had to be serious if we wanted to be taken seriously. We’d even gone to the expense of hiring out a small recording studio to do a few demos of songs we made up as we went along, so lubricated with drink that the end result was too shoddy to bother bringing with us to Europe with the idea of impressing local club managers. We had no promotional capacity behind our playing. If that meant playing in parks or on bridges, if it meant open mic venues, or if it meant just knocking door to door looking for desperation to seal our fate, we weren’t going to be taken very seriously, incapable of pulling ourselves out of the first pub we came across. Not unless we stumbled across a wedding looking for two avant-guarde drunks with thick tongues pasty with drink and abilities rendered still-borne by a fog of apathy, to act as a sort of wedding reception sideshow
Albert waved off my concerns. Called me too tense. Too future tense, more specifically. How can you imagine having a feel for the people if you’re rushing around tsking and multi-tasking about where we’ll end up playing. We haven’t really learned any songs. What do you suppose we’re going to play at all these magical recitals? Once we have a feel for the people, have a feel for their local drink, their local food, the music on the radio, the jazz they play in a few nightclubs, then we’ll have a better grasp of where we need to head next. This is all an experiment; we are the vanguard of our own shadows. Calm down, have a beer.
I pushed a few orange banners hanging from the ceiling, away from my head. The entire country was done up in orange. Orange banners, orange flags, orange t-shirts, orange bunting, orange underwear, orange beer. This was patriotism. This is what a football tournament did to a society’s subconscious. I tapped the guy next to me on the shoulder.
What’s the deal with all the orange anyway, I asked impatiently, my eyes riddled with two days of orange and not a single football match.
The man turned, bristle-chinned, pipe hanging off his bottom lip and regarded me with curiosity. He removed the pipe from his lips and exhaled a cherry tobacco scented plume in my direction.
We are celebrating the House of Orange. Orange, in the likely event you don’t already know, is in France, the warmest, temperature-wise anyway, city in France. But that’s neither here nor there. You see, Charles the V, Holy Roman Emperor, was born in Ghent, a Belgian city several hours south of here, and raised in the Netherlands. Part of the booty of the Empire were the Burgundian lands and the Spanish kingdom. But it’s all a bit confusing to visitors with no grasp of history, I can tell from the blank stare in your eyes.
It wasn’t a blank stare, I corrected, offering to buy his beer anyway like putting more coins in the jukebox to hear another song. I’m mesmerised by a chance encounter with an historian. Think of all the reading you’re saving me.
Albert swayed in between us, eyeing the stranger and pulling on his own spackled beard, days of roughage sprouting little barbed hairs, splotchy with tobacco stains and greying whiskers. We’re going to Belgium in a few days for the Euros, he coughed, dribbling his drink against his lips and buying the guy yet another beer. Let’s hear all about it, he barked with sudden, inappropriate enthusiasm.
Well, considering you’ve now given me two extra beers, I suppose I can reveal that the Holy Roman Emperor passed on these lands to his son, Phillip, who was Spanish. The Protestants and Calvinists chaffed under Catholic rule and little outbreaks started happening. The Calvinists went crazy in Brussels, destroying Catholic statues and calling them heretical, like false icons. Spain sent troops. Smashed it all up, chopped off some big heads and thereby started the fire of a full scale revolution for independence.
Oh, isn’t that typical, Albert bellowed, drawing a few looks from around the bar before placing his beer softly on the bar and smiling gently. Everyone’s little religious fumblings ending in mass murder. Why can’t we just get on with answering the simple question, why is everything in Holland covered in orange? Witold and I are well familiar with the history of human cruelty. We were looking for inspiration not lectures.
Naturally the guy who had been patiently laying the groundwork for an elaborate reply to my single, innocent question, was more than a bit taken aback by Albert’s rude directness. It was one of the reasons Albert had so few friends to begin with, his impatience, his lack of tact, his utter disregard for diplomacy. And why? Because, as he explained quite often in the early days of our knowing each other when I would ask him why he was such an opinionated asshole sometimes and why he couldn’t give people the benefit of the doubt, time is short. Suffering fools is a full time addiction for some but the way I see it, the less time I spend listening to what I’m not interested in, the more time I can spend finding people who are saying something worth listening to. It’s a matter of Pet Shop Boys versus Shostakovich. Our time on earth is limited and I’m not going to waste my time politely listening to someone with an undisciplined sense of communication imprison me with their lack of focus.
After a moment’s pause, the guy who one moment ago had been warming up to his topic grimaced as though someone had given his nuts a pinch. He wasn’t quite certain how to approach Albert’s insouciance. Take it as a challenge, like a heckler in a crowd? Walk away in a huff? Albert would tell me later it is how to get an instant gauge of one’s character. How they dealt with confusion.
In the end, he carried on anyway as though Albert had said nothing. There was still the matter of one and a half beers to drink and so on the one hand, since he couldn’t bring himself to turn away from free beers, he couldn’t very well turn his back and continue drinking them, he was stuck with the choice of staying and drinking the beers or surrendering them and walking away.
Eventually, he made his way to the elder Protestant prince, William the Silent, assassinated for talking too much about independence from Spain, the guy began again. He brought us through the royal family photo album, the younger brother, Maurice of Nassau, who became the Prince of Orange after William was killed and carried on the fight against Spain. He was killed in battle against Spanish Forces and his son later became King of England.
The beers had been drained. He wiped his lip gently with a cocktail napkin and leered over at Albert, tapping him on the forehead. I sure hope, he said, taking his coat, that you communicate better with that bass than with those lips.
From the Utrecht Central Station, miraculously having convinced Albert we had reached our temporary destination and were capable of making it to a B&B booking agent, we were finally stretching our legs out of the train station café.
Two consecutive weeks of binge drinking, football hooligans, nationalistic songs and chanting, two consecutive weeks of mosquito-invested slums in Antwerpen, 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, Brugges and Antwerpen 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.
As we are walking Albert recounts the story of Descartes first arriving in Holland four hundred years earlier after joining the army of Prince Maurice of Orange, then at Breda. As Descartes was, like us, walking through these streets for the first time, he saw a placard in Dutch and curious as to what it meant, stopped the first passer by and asking him to translate it into his language, French, or Latin. As it turns out, the first passer by was a guy named Isaac Beeckman, the head of the Dutch College at Dort. Beeckman agreed to translate it but only if Descartes would answer the placard. That is, the placard itself, translated was a challenge to the entire world to solve a certain geometrical problem. Descartes worked it out within a few hours, and he and Beeckman became good friends.
So, as neither you nor I are Descartes but we are in fact, walking through the streets of Utrecht with no tangible cognition of the language, why don’t you find yourself suddenly curious and excited at some seemingly benevolent sign in Dutch and stop the first girl with a pearl earring you see, asking her for the translation. She will in turn invite us for coffees or for a beer in some swank café and our first evening in Utrecht will be predetermined.
He isn’t serious, he is sweating. It’s unbearably warm outside, the humidity is peeling layers of water out of him beneath the bags.
What I would say about Utrecht is that it is a city with the feeling of small town. Een stad met het gevoel van een dorptje. How clever I feel when I repeat this phrase in Dutch night after night in a variety of pubs and cafes: It is one of the few phrases I learn straight away and memorise from a crumbled piece of paper and to each person that I recite it, I am rewarded with the gratitude of a simple person understanding a simple observation. Like a child in a pub making precocious comments. They are impressed. They think you are clever.
But what you come to know straight away is that a great deal of the day to day experience is about the weather. Like any other place, a consistent diet of clouds, mist, sometimes driving rain and gusting winds, wears away the resolve over time. You bend to the will of the weather. You suffer silently. As people have always done, making little comments about the weather, staring out the window at the changing cloudscapes viewed from inside a café through a large window. And when you’re in such an environment, when you’ve resigned yourself to the weather, you will no longer care about the weather’s mendacity or its sometimes cruel and disappointing nature. What you will learn to appreciate instead is the appearance of the sun. The appearance of the sun will become an event, a happening during which the dispositions of those around you will visibly brighten, your step will lighten and all the burdens of daily living seem almost magically transformed.
It was hot and sunny that first day in Utrecht and thus, without the hindsight of weeks of unbroken cloudy hangover days to balance our enthusiasm, it immediately became an outdoor summer concert of faces, a circus of smiling and big horse Dutch-toothed mouths, a shuddering orgasm of activity and all around us, the small town bristling.
Eventually it could become a disaster of solitude, of stunted conversations, drunken poetic waxing which have meaning only in the embryo of the brain and die still borne once they are uttered aloud, in public. In search of a confidante, a brother in calculated misery and introspection, you realize instead that you are merely
drunk, getting in people's pointless and meandering conversations, infused with the pettiness that comes in a small town of gossips where everyone knows each others' business and exploits it to the fullest...it is then you realize you've missed the transitional phase of the evening when the prematurely drunk have already returned to their beds and the nocturnal gibberish that follows is all a temporary illusion in which
every utterance is forgotten almost the moment it is spoken. You tour the bubble of cafe life along Loeff Berchmaker and Voorstraat with the same lack of success, the curse of learning a language so you can realize no one has anything of interest to say and it was better off being incomprehensible and mysterious. It is within that bubble you realize that you are still a stranger, still the outsider attempting to assimilate a lifetime of experiences in matter of ragged months...
Dutch windows are inevitably and unusually large, partially because they are gateways to light and partially to limit the weight of buildings. A wall taken up by a window will weigh far less than a wall taken up by concrete or even wood and when you think about how much of Holland’s land was built through Dutch ingenuity rather than naturally made, you think of how soft the land really is, how simply foundations could sink in drained water turned to land– windows create less weight and thus such buildings with large windows are less of a burden on the land beneath them.
I sensed in Holland that everything is put in its place to shape it by light and shadows, trapping and reflecting light to create form, giving energy and life to even the most drab surroundings. The climate is drab and thus the lighting, diffused through windows, thin curtains and tiny openings, acts as a gentle luminance shaping material and space.
Fortunately, as we made our way up the Voostraat after crossing the Oudegracht and turning left from Neude,. dragging baggage behind us past cafes and restaurants which weren’t yet opened, employment agency after employment agency teeming it seemed, from what little we could make out, with vacancies and offers, travel bureaus and small shops selling anything from antiques to snacks to CDs and modern furniture, books and occasionally clothing. Voorstraat gradually gave way to Wittevrouwen and then finally, crossing the Stadsbuitengracht, the canal that rang outside the old city’s borders, onto the Bildstraat, past the Moluks Historical Museum before finally reaching the Hogelandse Park, turning left onto FC Donderstraat and after several miscues and mistakes despite the tiny map in our hands, reaching the B&B just as the grind of city outskirts were giving way to neighbourhoods. The flat grandeur of the mini boulevard shared by buses, bikes and automobiles gave it an oceanfront feel. There is something sterile yet simultaneously filthy about Dutch cities. The sterility, we came to believe, was owed to the language, even though everywhere we went smelled like Drum and stale beer, everywhere being of course, the cafes and pubs we littered.
You cannot forget about the history with the Dom and the Cathedral lurking just around nearly every corner or looking down over bridges on to curbed canals loaded with cafes, clubs and restaurants. Since the late Middle Ages the Dutch have been making mud flats and sections of the ocean habitable by draining the water and making high levees blocking.
The Dutch had learned, early on in the War of Independence against Spain that they could build a homemade defence by flooding low lying areas. Once they’d succeeded in evicting the Spanish, Maurice of Orange came up with the idea of protecting Holland with a line of flooded land protected by fortresses that ran from the Zuiderzee down to the river Waal.
They built sluices in dikes and forts and then built fortress towns along the line of sluices. Those flooded areas were carefully kept at a level that was not flooded so as to allow enemy boats and yet not so shallow that enemy soldiers could march along it with ease. In the winter, they could manipulate the water flow to make the ice weaken and incapable of supporting troops.
And thereafter, they turned their thoughts to building land out of water – as they famously boast. God didn’t make Holland, the Dutch made Holland.
The building of the Barrier Dam started in 1923. The 30 kilometer long dam was made of boulders and clay, the spaces in between were filled with sand, stones and brushwood. On the final day of construction the tide turned and the Ijsselmeer, a freshwater lake, was created. The dam also got sluices for draining excess water and locks for maintaining shipping.
After the dam was built, the draining began. Four enormous polders were drained in the IJsselmeer and the result was 165,000 ha of new land. The Wieringermeer Polder and the Noordoost Polder are beeing used for agriculture, Z
The Afsluitdijk (Closure-dike) is a major dam in the Netherlands, constructed between 1927 and 1933 and running from Den Oever on Wieringen in North Holland province, to the village of Zurich (mun. Wûnseradiel) in Fryslân province, over a length of 32 km and a width of 90 m, at an initial height of 7.25 m above sea-level ( 53° 00' 00" N 05° 10' 00" E) . It is a fundamental part of the larger Zuiderzee Works, damming off the Zuiderzee, a salt water inlet of the North Sea and turning it into the fresh water lake of the IJsselmeer.
Previous experiences had demonstrated that till (boulder clay), rather than just sand or clay, was the best primary material for a structure like the Afsluitdijk, with the added benefit that till was in plentiful supply in the area; it could be retrieved in large quantities by simply dredging it from the bottom of the Zuiderzee. Work started at four points: on both sides of the mainland and on two specially made construction-islands (Kornwerderzand and Breezand) along the line of the future dike.
From these points the dike slowly grew by ships depositing till into the open sea in two parallel lines. Sand was then poured in between the two dams and as it emerged above the surface was then covered by another layer of till. The nascent dike was then strengthened from land by basalt rocks and mats of willow switch at its base. The dike could then be finished off by raising it further with sand and finally clay for the surface of the dike, on which grass was planted.
Construction progressed better than expected; at three points along the line of the dike there were deeper underwater trenches where the tidal current was much stronger than elsewhere. These had been considered to be major obstacles to completing the dike, but all of them proved to be relatively straightforward. On May 28, 1932, two years earlier than initially thought, the Zuiderzee ceased to be as the last tidal trench of the Vlieter was closed by a final bucket of till. The IJsselmeer was born, even though it was still salty at the time.
The dike itself however was not finished yet as it still needed to be brought up to its required height and a road linking Friesland and North Holland (the current A7/E22 motorway) also remained to be built. It would not be until September 25, 1933, that the Afsluitdijk was officially opened, with a monument marking the spot where the dike had been closed. The amount of material used is estimated at 23 million m³ of sand and 13.5 million m³ of till and over the years an average of around four to five thousand workers were involved with the construction every day, relieving some of the unemployment following the Great Depression.
Beside the dam itself there was also the necessary construction of two complexes of shipping locks and discharge sluices at both ends of the dike. The complex at Den Oever includes the Stevin lock (named after Hendric Stevin, a son of mathematician and engineer Simon Stevin) and three series of five sluices for discharging the IJsselmeer into the Wadden Sea; the other complex at Kornwerderzand is composed of the Lorentz locks (named after Hendrik Lorentz, the famous physicist, who personally did the calculations of the tides that were crucial to the construction of the afsluitdijk) and two series of five sluices, making a total of 25 discharge sluices. Periodically discharging the lake is necessary since it is continually fed by rivers and streams (most notably the IJssel river that gives its name to the lake) and polders draining their water into the IJsselmeer.
The Amsterdam-Rhine Canal or Amsterdam-Rijnkanaal is a canal in the Netherlands that was built to connect the port city of Amsterdam to the main shipping artery of the Rhine. Its course follows a generally southeasterly direction as it goes through the city of Utrecht towards Wijk bij Duurstede where it intersects the Lek branch of the Rhine and then continues on to the Waal river near Tiel, with a branch, the Lek Canal, to the Lek near Nieuwegein.
Along the Rhine we could have passed through Arnheim, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Bonn, Strasbourg, Basel.
Castle Vredenburg or VredenBorch was built in the early 16th century by Charles V in Utrecht (Netherlands). Its main purpose was to retain control over the city. For that reason the castle's main armament was aimed at the city.
The castle was destroyed in 1577 by the citizens of Utrecht.
Some of the remains of the castle can still be seen underneath the current Vredenburg music centre.
built in the late 7th century by Willibrord, the first bishop of Utrecht Dom Square
knowing that for years before they had merely loaded barrels of beer and cartons of supplies to the restaurants, blacksmiths, cafes, and FEBO automated food dispensers above, shoving rondvleeskroketten, frikadelen, Bamis and kaassoufflés into our drunken gobs when the restaurants were shut or we were too impatient to eat to wait at a table pretending to be civilised.
Those canals were for later. So too was the Cathedral and the Dom. As we strode down the street, sweating out hangovers in stultifying heat and humidity, beneath backpacks and dragging suitcases by the nape of the neck, I could only hear Albert bitching and complaining behind me about my impatience for finding taxis and because I wanted this experience to be on the ground, inhaled, exhaled and with great exertion. Nor was it a far sight from girls and women plucked out of fantasies I never knew I had coasting on bikes, chattering away to the people riding beside them in a language that sounded almost English for long enough to lead you down a dead end street of undecipherable, guttural utterances.
This is supposed to be my great grandparents’ tongue, Albert spat with disappointment, sweat pouring over every stretch of pale, bare, smoked skin and darkening his shirt as he paused to shake out a Winston and lit it to his lips. It sounds like people are vomiting all around me for crissakes. How can a country that drinks so much beer speak a language that sounds so thirsty?
We carried on to the B&B with only the thought of beer that would transpire once we’d shed our belongings and poured ice water over our heads.
*****
Our eventual landing was in Café Marktzicht which, unbeknownst to us, would eventually become a variation of our den, an extension of our living quarters, our adoptive family and toasties kitchen.
It was merely the Oranjeboom sign hanging outside that drew us. We’d never seen it or heard of it before. Pubs everywhere advertised their home draught, Heineken, Grolsch, Brand, Dommelsch and on and on.
Instead, we headed straight for the bar and sat down, still squeezing the last semblances of exhaustion whilst the heat and humidity clung to us in the un-air-conditioned indoors with only the coolness of shade and the soupiness of beers to comfort us, we settled straight into the familiar pints, forsaking their half pint beers and native-brewed beers. We were already enamoured with the Belgian beers and finding some steady supply on tap was precisely the venture we were going to spend our capital on.
Before long we’d attracted a crowd of sorts beginning with Cees, who had spent well over three hundred of his three hundred and sixty five late afternoons to early evenings for the last recollectable years in this very same café, holding court with a fluctuating collection of regulars who varied in shape and form from documentary producer to builder to computer programmer to bicycle shop owner to carpenters to ploughman and muckrakers.
Cees was immediately transfixing on his first approach swooping down on us – we were unable to take our eyes and ears away from him, a sometimes sputtering, wildly gesticulating, maddening cacophonous force of inner-connected phraseologies as though blown throw several horns simultaneously all in different notes.
At once the three of us were like long lost brothers – Albert had merely to mention his surname, a derivative of a Flemish philosopher, and Cees was in another tail spinning uproar on long lost relatives and forgotten ships and the war with the Spaniards and on and on all the while hands flicking inward and outward, fingers twirling the grips of his handlebar moustache and slapping his leg simultaneously.
Before long Henk emerged from a table, ambling up to the bar on the pretext of change for the cigarette machine, overheard Cees and Albert’s conversation and proceeded to ante in his opinion, catching my eye a time or two as he attempted to ejaculate himself into the conversation. Before long, defeat slumping in his shoulders as he could not out shout Cees, he turned to me, looking me up and down – ugh, another tourist in the café! And then he guffawed slapping my shoulder lightly to reassure me it was all in good fun, the hilarity of the circumstances.
He ordered himself a beer and flicked a finger over towards me before sliding in closer. So what are your impressions of our country so far?
There isn’t much to be fair – we just got off the train an hour ago. Yes, we know all about the coffee shops stinking of skunk, the whores flexing in front of windows in scant, alluring outfits. Window after window of sexually sculptured bodies preening and advertising. But beyond that, it’s pretty much a clean slate.
What you should notice, should you venture outside of the city, is the landscape, the moods that nature effects on trees, canals, shop windows…I myself am an artist. I’ve just been working on a painting in which we, rather than the landscape, are the giants. I have not drawn the horizon low on the canvas but rather only as a sliver at the very top. Beneath it, humanity, eating, gobbling up the landscape. Actually, I’m planning it as a triptych, wherein in the first painting would mirror something like Ruisdael’s Wheat Fields gradually giving way in the subsequent paintings, to What Fields?
He gave me a tap on the arm again – you see? Understand?
Yeah, I mutter ungenerously, sipping the beer quickly. The usual patter about man destroying nature…what about nature killing man? What about volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, that sort of thing. What has that to do with human control? I think man is often the forgotten victim here…I sneer into the beer, tapping him on the arm to reassure him. All in good fun, the hilarity of the circumstances, like you said.
Uh huh, he pondered. His mind was already racing back towards the conversation unravelling between Cees and Albert – Albert was in mid-explanation of how we’d gotten here, our intention to stay here – for the time being anyway.
The café was getting more crowded. So what do you know of Dutch painting, then, Henk returned to me, decided to ask.
The Golden Age, I recited dutifully. Great artistic production brought on by the capitalism awoken by the bourgeois power after the war with Spain…that’s about it and even that I only just read on the train here from Antwerp.
Well you see, going back to the idea behind my painting, the inverse of the earlier Dutch enchantment with their newly formed homeland following that war, the celebration of the landscape in 17th century enthusiasm, I am remarking not only on as social commentary about destruction of the environment but also the effect of the population explosion in Holland on the landscape. We have very little space here and yet we revere space so fully. Space and shapes and object – tangible things. All of it, like the landscape, is slipping away. I envision one day we will be nothing but a series of high rises all across the land, housed much in the same way of the high rise containers of pigs or chickens to conserve precious space…
He went on in this vein for quite a spell. I felt myself fading in and out of focus, drinking faster, smoking more; simple distractions that helped keep me rooted in front of him, a smile frozen on my face, nodding and hmmmming where appropriate.
You never know quite what to do in these situations, utterly trapped. I couldn’t very well break off and stick my head back into the Albert and Cees’ conversation without appearing rude. I couldn’t make the excuse that I had to leave, as Albert was still there. I wanted to just squirm and mumble enough! with verve, to make him stop in some way. I was powerless to change the course of the conversation or the converser. People who appeared far more interesting butted in and out of the human barrier beside the bar, only to disappear again once they’d retrieved a drink. Lucky people who could escape.
…..once artists were out from under the rock of the wealthy and powerful, like the Church, they were free to cater to the wider tastes of the growing middle class…and even though there was a guild in place to attempt to limit the amount of painters and paintings and to each have their niche, well, even then actually, by guild definition, even house painters were considered painters simply because they used a brush – can you believe that!
Henk was barely drawing a breath by then. I’d already bought him two beers and one still stood full on the bar so busy he was with talking and filling my ears with the sound of his voice. I stared at the lines in his face, along his brow, in the corners of the eyes when he smiled, wondered where they derived from more, a life of tobacco smoke and beer or the years of holidays getting burnt beneath the sun of Portugal or Spain.
And beyond Henk, I could see the café filled to capacity, conversations everywhere, laughter erupting in pockets all around the room, Drum smoke forming a bluish haze overhead. I tried imagining what an equivalent café here in Utrecht might have seemed like in the 17th century. On the outside of the café was carved 1678 in the edifice. The name, Marktzicht, meant Market View in deference to the textile market that had been set up on this cobbled street every Saturday – it’s façade was dominated by a large window overlooking the small square and outside, even with the light beginning to fade slightly, you could see the streetscape outside. And such a source of entertainment for punters sat on the terrace sipping Duvel or the regular groups of workers at tables near that front window, fascinated by every little weird nuance of life moving through. Comments about the parking jobs of certain women who might nearly reverse into other cars, chuckles over someone struggling with a large package, whatever little sampling developed was under the scrupulous eyes of the beer drinkers and like all Dutch, eager to poke their noses in, eager to add in their two cents worth. So were painters back then knocking back beers and talking about their new found source of wealth, the middle classes, gibbering on about their theories of the future of their art? Were they worried the Spanish would fight back again, seize Dutch independence, reduce them back to decorating church organs in the name of The Reformed Church?
As it turned out, Henk cautioned, it was the war with France that killed off the art market in the 17th century. The economy was diverted, art was a luxury, not a necessity and of course, after a half century of paintings being produced en masse, the market was already glutted to begin with…by 1650 or so, Utrecht’s art market was already in decline although Delft, not too far from here, was still prospering.
Fortunately, Cees had begun to lose himself, having already spent the better part of four hours drinking beer prior to our arrival, and announcing his departure loudly, intervened between Henk and I to shake my hand, twitching in my face, demanding Albert and I return here the following evening for the football match. And thus, Albert was able to rescue me from Henk’s relentless monologue and we were able to escape, back out into the street, back out to find a different reality.
That’s what it’s like crawling from bar to bar, a moving picture with changing backgrounds yet inside, fantastically enough, similar scenes were being played out everywhere. Not just all along Utrecht, but all along Amsterdam, Den Haag, Rotterdam, Eindhoven, Maastricht, in every mind bending corner. It was incomprehensible to ponder the amount of beer being consumed in Holland at that very hour.
EXERPT:
Success was guaranteed by the production of art which matched the buyers' expectations. Many painters depended on secondary sources of income to survive. Vermeer was known to have dealt in works of other painters but it is not known how much success he may have had. However, even though in his early years he had secured a patron, the well-to-do Delft burger Pieter van Ruijven, who bought approximately half of his artistic production, in the later part of his career he was not able to support his numerous family with his own dealings due to his unusually large family and the ruinous war with France which had suddenly and gravely damaged the then flourishing art market. Ironically, the advantage of having a fixed client/artist relationship with Van Ruijven was later to have hinder the spread of the artist’s fame outside his native Delft since almost all his works were in the hands of few clients. Vermeer depended largely on the generosity of his well-to-do mother-in-law in those difficult years.
*****
I was the wooden dummy beside him at first. In the other corner I 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 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 gob fulls 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 month-long meandering through Belgium and Holland 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 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 has been looking for three months. Pieter another one who has 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. We took to the Smaakelaarsveld not solely because the junkies were too out of it looking for bicycles to steal or begging for money, but because it afforded us a nice few of people streaming out of the train station who would sometimes drop a few coins here and there while we practiced.
Like the flat search, the practices weren’t going along too well until we met Jan one afternoon sitting outdoors at a café with our instruments, 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, 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 streets and parks where you have to keep a constant eye out for crackdowns on unlicensed busking.
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 days time, we would have our first gig, even if we had yet to find a place to live.
*****
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 the talent pickers 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 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. 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 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 was wanting 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 56 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.
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
The European Championship was in full gear. We'd already had a heady week of bars and cities and football matches in Belgium, the co-host nation. We'd gotten caught up in the mini-riot between the Belgian police and the German and English hooligans. Actually, they weren't technically hooligans. The real ones, despite the pre-tournament hysteria, had by and large, been kept back in their respective countries. What was left was just the core of drunks and the core of Belgian riot cops itching for action.
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-vigilence that being aware of one's reputation preceeding one's arriuval was likely to fertilize. But not Charleroi. Their economy was so depressed, the local propriaters didn't care about hooligans. They just knew they drank alot of beer and would spend alot 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 debaucherie 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.
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.
****
One night 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.
*****RETURN TO UTRECHT*****
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.
*****
PARIS
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 candlelit club, seated myself and spotted the girl I’d been following, my Edith Piaf, a tempestuous 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 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 wasn't quite sure why I was following other than a simple break in the evening, a reason for moving to a destination 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 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 I imagined what it might be like to be moving with the intention of ordering a drink and then suddenly discovering her as though I hadn’t just followed her all that way into this place. I considered my potential opening, a variation known as the Staunton Gambit which had been 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 centre, before quickly blurting out a breathless and disconnected dictum about "Le Bel Indifferent", Cocteau's play written for and starring Edith, perhaps still dreaming in a foggy, alcoholic trance that this woman in front of me was somehow Edith Piaf, or her ghost.
My sudden unravelling caught her off guard.. 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?"
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. Why don’t you wait for me at the Lily La Tigresse? 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, the room felt unbalanced and out of focus. I’ll meet you at the Lily La Tigresse. 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 honesty. 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 greeted, backing off and leaned 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 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 in an effort at careless optimism and 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 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, because he’d broken both of his legs in his early teens, that neither had ever properly healed and thus, stopped growing, 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.
While I waited in La Lily Tigresse, 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 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, 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 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 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?
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 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 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. I was 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, singer, you know, all that jazz, she giggled, feeling clever.
I can’t deny we would certainly be aided by a chanteuse, Albert and I, 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 neighbourhood 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 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.
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 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 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..
“Le seul honnête homme est celui qui ne se pique de rien” – La Rouchefoucauld
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 as though just making the observation 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 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. 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 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 her 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, we spent a great deal of time looking at photo albums, scrapbooks of strangers even she didn’t know, more photographs from piles of postcards with 50 year old postmarks. I collect photos, she admitted sheepishly but without further elaboration.
I read somewhere, she said finally, that there are two types of refugees. Those with photographs and those without. Which one are you?
I am without photographs, I admitted, although not a refugee, merely the world’s immigrant. Not one, not even in your wallet? Nada, save for my passport photo, I suppose.
Well, my parents were never really ones for taking photographs…we didn’t even really take holidays. Trips out to the ocean some weekends, once, a trip to the mountains upstate, but more or less, we spent our time in our neighbourhood and didn’t really leave very often. There were occasions for photographs, I suppose – birthdays, anniversaries, parties…but my parents weren’t interested in photographing their memories. Frankly, I think they believed there wasn’t much all that memorable to begin with.
She stared at me a long time 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 trustworthiness 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.
You see, there was something I believed back then relating to selection – the mating ritual of the ******* for example, requires ********** and *********.
I, on the other hand, had merely shown up. 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.
*****
Do you believe in fate, she asked me one afternoon when we were sprawled out, 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 *********, 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. ******** said ********.
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.
I exhaled and stared out the window of her flat overlooking Rue Mont Saint Genevieve. She had already 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 these photographs are of people I don’t even know, she commented, turning page after page, stood in her panties in a brazen display of either self confidence or apathy. 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 she would have no idea 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, over the plain, of mystery.
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, figidity 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, 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.
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 seemed attached to. 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. 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 constantly fluctuating state between joy and melancholy, my nerves jumbled by too many quirky stops and starts, too much caffeine, 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.
The enigmas of Anastasia was 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 passersby 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.
Left me to my own devises 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 for it’s boudoiresque salon of chess players and beer drinking, 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, in particular.
Inside Teddy’s we are roaring to life beyond happy hour. Didier, as his comrades have fallen away, one after another yet somehow our space at the bar ebbs and flows until now, flooded as it is with humans, he must nearly shout his questions to me.
Do you feel as though you’ve been especially summoned, that there is a special calling for you as an artist? Are you particularly aliented 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. 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? 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?
He was easily excitable this evening, either in a particularly foul mood or simply unreceptive to my line of questioning. In any case, 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, Pessoa agreed, “Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not needing them for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can’t live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you’re a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you’re not free. And you can’t claim tragedy, for the tragedy of being born what you are belongs to Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life’s very oppression forces you to be a slave, Hapless you are , if having been born free, capable of being separate and self-sufficient, poverty then forces you to live with others, This tragedy, yes, belongs to you and follows you…”
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 – why 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, aren’t your friends going to start worrying about you?
Ah, so it is your concern for my friends…I felt instantly and regrettably bitter. She caressed my head and looked deeply into my eyes as though willing my comprehension.
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.
*****
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 a 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.
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. I’d sent 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 going on and 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 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 my wages 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 Amsterdamse 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. After work, after showering, after grabbing a quick meal, I’d head off by myself to a place Willemstraat to 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 offier 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. Alberts 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 hungerly, 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.
***** 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 atop one of her bags of luggage, casually smoking a cigarette and watching me with amusement as I neared and my eyes roared to life from a dull and listless stare.
I was away on holiday, she explained. I was gone three months, staying with some friends near St Etienne and 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.
*****
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.
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.
A cute girl 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 recrucifying 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 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.
***********************************
PRAGUE
**************
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. Covered in newspapers, 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…
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 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 given me an 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 Hrad?any. Soon the city became the seat of the Zem? koruny ?eské 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. 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.
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, mate, I cautioned. 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 eleven, we’d quartered our belongings in a quasi-posh hotel, had a flyer for a promising youth hostel and were already in a famous watering hole known for it’s jazz musicians and cheap beer.
*****
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. For drunks like Albert and I this was a sort of alcoholic’s Mecca. Well, perhaps the more appropriate location would be Munich during Oktoberfest, like a Hajj, but in any event, the beers were bigger and cheaper, they were more natural thus inducing far fewer and certainly less severe hangovers. There were exotic yet powerful pit stops along the beer super highway like Plum brandy and Beckerovka and even absinthe. 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 and consulted a guidebook to find an auld jazz hangout near the banks of the Vlatava. 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, 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 as Pavel whose command of English was owed to several years in England as a boy, after the war. Pavel had the kind of pinched, broken blood vessel-lined face that you could instantly recognise as having experience with the drink, some would have even ventured too much experience with the drink, but his head was still sound after all those years and when he got around to asking what we were doing in Prague (start a jazz collective and slip into an irredeemable vortex of hedonism in the process,) his eyes instantly lost their sagging skin quality and shone with remembrances for he too was a jazz musician, pianist who had flung off years of classical training, he explained, because he instantly loved, upon hearing his first bootleg copies, Thelonius Monk and Oscar Peterson.
Monk with his Brilliant Corners and Oscar Peterson plays Duke Ellington, my, my. I would listen to these recordings in secret at home, out of the earshot of my parents and party members even though Peterson was raised, like myself, as a classical pianist. These were what broke me from the classicists and my automotonic brethren in the Communist party with their authoritarian controls over lucid clarity. Music that was transparent yet enigmatic. Form losing out to chaos, so it seemed.
I teach kids now, 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 teach kids who have no interest in learning about the piano but are forced by their parents who see classicism in them instead of baggy pants hip hop and western consumerism. It’s a mild form of hell for me, actually. But enough about these things 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, 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.
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.
Jan Hus, a theologian and lector at the University, held his sermons in Prague. From 1402 he summoned his followers to the Bethlehem Chapel, speaking in Czech to enlarge as much as possible the diffusion of his ideas about the reformation of the church. Having become too dangerous for the political and religious establishment, Hus was burned in Constance in 1415. Four years later Prague experienced its first defenestration, when the people rebelled under the command of the Prague priest Jan Želivský and threw the city's counselors from the New Town Hall. Hus's death had spurred the so-called Hussite revolt. 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 Hrad?any.
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.
Boleslav The Cruel is notorious for the murder of his brother St. Wenceslaus, the result of which brought him to the Czech (ducal) throne. Wenceslaus was murdered during a feast, and precisely that time Boleslav's son was born. He got a strange name Strachkvas, what meant a dreadful feast. Being remorseful of what had happened, Boleslav promised to devote his son to religion and educate him as a clergyman, and kept his word.
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, actually a state subsidised flat rented by his girlfriend, Zorka, 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 and 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, 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 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 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, 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 so much 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 our 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 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. The world around him was just history. He had seen it all in the making, he had loved and hated it. The worst moments were always 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.
Thereafter, Parisians took to it, moving from one café to the next during Green Hour, stinking of Absinthe. 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. 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.
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.
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, 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.
On Sundays the little literary gatherings 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. 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.
Anastasia had committed to memory all of what we had pandered to, effortlessly. Our confidence was shipwrecked and this remote island in an inaccessible city painted and stripped and painted again each night.
Maybe we should try and find another singer, Albert suggested one dreary afternoon where we’d spent unsociable hours pouring beers down in search of inspiration. Instead, it rained 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. You’ve got something weird and clichéd invested in it. Infatuation, lost love, longing. I’m only yearning for another singer. It’s much easier. Perhaps if we did so you might find it distracting.
I keep up my writing campaign knowing how well it had worked from Utrecht. Afternoons after work, evading the ticket checkers 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. 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. 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. We needed her singing to charm as though we were performing in front of a crowd of cobras.
The truth was, we weren’t doing too badly. We’d enlisted a variety of musicians, one night to another, from a range of instruments, to come and play with us, add depth and perspective, round out our sound, however illegitimate it sounded in our ears.
But I didn’t let on in these letters to her. 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 nary a clue?
*****
It was no simple jaunt, a 7 hour train ride to Budapest that saw me, heart gulping air almost entirely oblivious to the sanctity of arriving in a new city. 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. 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.
I hadn’t left her behind in Paris and certainly not in Utrecht – there was no escaping. Prague was the diversion. My liberation from heartsickness drowned in nightly debauchery. No excuse, we know but at least I had one. 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.
from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 2, page 1732
...there was 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. This school was the spawn of the new independence of the Czech Republic, driven mad by the market to create English-speaking managers and automotonic 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 servants over and over again. These kinds of people needed variety. Fresh faces to sneer at. But 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 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.
But 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: K?ižíkova to Invalidovna to Palmovka and then ?eskomoravská, 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 Zli?ín, chain smoking filterless 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.
*****
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 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 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 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 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 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.
There was even a giant. Well, not a real giant of course, he was probably only six foot seven or eight, 150 kilos. Larger than normal, almost larger than life. He was known all over the village as one would expect and when far later into the night we were in another club and I was slurring broken Czech to a girl sitting at a table of wolves salivating at the thought of her, his enormous had pulled the rabid man off of me who had suddenly leapt from his chair and grabbed me by the throat when he thought I’d been trying to insult them all.
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.
Suppose… I spoke slowly, choosing my words with care, all of a sudden, just like that, and I snapped my fingers, we quit drinking? I can pour what's left of that little bottle down the drain and we can start from there. We make a resolution and stick to it, see, stay sober from now on, make a fresh start.
Albert stretched, stifling a yawn before placing the lip of the pint to his lips.
We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman Albert noted briefly, replacing the pint between his gnarled fingers with a cigarette.
Anastasia chimes, perhaps disgruntled: We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
I'm appalled: Why wont we sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt? Why wont we note the nocturnal vibrations of our wanderlust through drinks and despair?
*****
Different city, different street.
Otherwise, with half of my mortal coil still sitting in a bus depot in
Los Sueños begging spare change from vending machines, I'll applaud from
the distance.
--From The Diaries of Witold Kazmersky, notebook four, page 113.
When you travel enough, spinning through a vortex of languages which have secretly imbedded their meanings in your subconscious there are times when you awake with a start in complete confusion about what it is you’re waking from.
I walk to a window overlooking a street viewed through a prism of rain, half-lit by street lamps, watching a man attempting to walk with a speedy nonchalance, newspaper folded over the top of his head, one arm up to hold the newspaper in place, the other swinging back and forth in desperate propulsion.
And only this morning I’d freed an insect of some sort from a spider’s web just under the bathroom sink wondering if I was doing the humane thing by rescuing it from it’s struggles and the slow, inevitable end to its existence or if I’d only been interfering like the spider’s little nosey neighbour, gobbing up the mechanisms of nature and the balance of the insect world.
I watched the man and his rain-spattered arm-swinging until he was gradually swallowed back up into the night further down the street.
Three days I’d been in this hotel in Bratislava on the mere rumour that Anastasia had been headed this way. And don’t think for a minute I didn’t have to hear an earful from Albert – the old, haven’t you learned your lesson yet? speech he brought out every time one of her postcards arrived. She probably doesn’t even send them herself, he’d mused back in our grim and smoky flat on Husitská.
Certain enough, I wouldn’t find her sitting in this hotel room with its drab curtains and filthy carpets. Three days I’d been here already and having left only once since I’d arrived, gathering the strength to face her again, chain-smoking and staring at stains in the wallpaper, I had a good idea the courage was never going to come from anywhere other than a half dozen pints in the nearest pub. Then again, that wouldn’t have been courage, that’d have been drunken bravado, devil-may-care, feigned nonchalance as in oh, fancy running into you here in Bratislava, Anastacia.
There wasn’t any postcard. I dutifully informed Albert. The postcards came sporadically from different towns and cities, little clues and cryptic messages. At first, I’d drop everything and go looking for her, seized with some sudden and inexplicable desperation of knowing that if it wasn’t now, it wouldn’t ever be and how could I throw away that last chance without trying?
But the last chances never evolved, never materialised, never a trace of her. And a lot of these places were villages small enough that the locals would have immediately known who it was I was looking for if she’d been looking to be found or had in fact, been in the town at all to begin with. That’s why Albert had embraced his pet theory that it was all a colossal mind fuck of some kind, some sort of sadistic little game wherein she’d conspired with others, travellers perhaps who she knew would be going through that village or town who could write out these little postcards on her behalf, just to keep the game going.
It might have been a sound theory but for the fact that it was certainly her handwriting on those postcards and how does one after all, buy a tourist postcard from a village or town, write a message on it and post it all without ever having been there in the first place?
So that’s the way it had gone for the last six month, getting these postcards, rushing off to the village or town it came from, hanging around in public places, markets, squares, pubs, news agents, all in the vain hope of timing it just right. Maddening.
You get off the train with a burst of energy but after the first few hours turn up nothing the energy wears away and slowly it sinks in that the chance had been missed again. How could I be expected to stay one step ahead of her, to know instinctively where she would pop up next?
For a few weeks in August I thought I could detect a pattern in the postcards, or perhaps it was merely delusional, still, you have to try. Did the names of the villages and towns fall in alphabetical order, some geographic sequence, some cleverly disguised yet still breakable code? Not in any of the instances. One week it was Hungary, another it was Austria. The following month Slovenia, the month after that, Poland.
I was growing weary of the game, frustrated by my lack of success and then, when I’d overheard a conversation between two Czech Dixieland jazz musicians on the Charles Bridge talking about the little French girl with the beautiful voice having stopped by only a fortnight ago to sing with them, I crudely demanded to know what they were talking about.
After their initial huff at my intrusion they reluctantly shared a few tidbits with me about a little bird with a beautiful song in her voice stopping in for a few songs on her way to the train station for Bratislava.
Surely that couldn’t have been a plant. I never hung around the Charles Bridge any more, rarily even crossed it, so she’d not have left this clue for me here. No, it was certainly unintentional, coincidental, a twisting of fate I was meant to overhear and meant to act on.
But the moment I got off the train in Bratislava had come the crushing realisation that the situation was hopeless, the idea had been hare-brained. What if it hadn’t been her? Oh, certainly I grilled those two musicians on the Charles Bridge but good for details to try and ascertain with certainty that it was in fact her, but they didn’t know her name and who knew anyway, she might be using any name by then.
Even if it had been her, what was she doing in Prague at all anyway? And if she had been going to Bratislava in the first place, who’s to say she’d still be there at all. And if she was in Bratislava, where in the hell was I going to find her?
Nowhere, I thought to myself sitting on the edge of the creaking bed and rolling another cigarette. Not sat indoors never having left the hotel room paralysed by inertia or fear or the knowing futility of it all.
The only logical place to begin looking were music venues. Bars or cafes or pubs which had live music where she might be singing or might be looking for someone to sing with. A bird with a voice like hers had to sing, after all, craved the public attention, yearned for the recognition. It never should have been hard to begin with yet in all the little music venues he’d stormed into expectantly in all the little villages and towns, he had yet to overturn a single worm beneath the rock, had yet, not only to find her but to even find a trace of her having been there at all to begin with.
SCENE AT THEIR MINOR CONCERT DESCRIBED BY AN INTERESTED ONLOOKER
No matter how thoughtful or inspired much of modern jazz is it is increasingly difficult to find musicians who don’t take themselves too seriously – the weight of history and the pressures of constant innovation fighting the fun at every step. One might do well to scan the horizon: the humor apparent in European jazz – Han Bennink tossing wooden kitchen spoons Misha Mengelberg’s way – has been well documented for some time, whether Americans have chosen to listen or not. No such fussy stuff here then, either, as Deadbeat Conspiracy a strange trio with meaty chops rips through a blistering set of high-octane, solo-intensive jazz; the muscular breadth of ideas matched only by the unadulterated exuberance of their execution. Anastasia X and crew have little truck with the spate of style wars currently fashionable, relying instead on the untested yet euphoric water of spontaneity. Often with a capital S.
Thankfully, then, it is with a certain audaciousness that Deadbeat Conspiracy comes out of the gate with fists raised, tempo topped out, tone tightened to an off-kilter acidity, and tongue-tying technical intricacies wrapped in the folds of every phrase. If not the most subtle approach, it is rare to find an opener with as much instant adrenaline delivery as Señor Dada, pistons pumping with sheer verbose force. In a sense, it is reminiscent of a bebop aesthetic in which flat-out fluency had to be proved first before one was given credence on a bandstand; in another very real sense, however, Anastasia X is a consummate enough singer to avoid the pitfalls such bop-based flurries inspired: the mindless, mile-a-minute mechanics of too many straight ahead discs on the market today If Witold comes out of a lineage anchored by Coltrane’s emotional urgency, it is motivated by the revolutions of Jackie McLean’s harmonic keening and tempered by the florid eloquence of Benny Carter’s supple resolutions. On the song Señor Dada,, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and most of all on Mussolini – the most startling virtuosic displays of the day – Witold is tethered around a pole of high tension, clearly inspired by his material and musical companions, playing the game of statement and substitution with such alacrity that the smile is nearly visible spreading across his breathless mouth.
Witold also acquits himself nicely, if less joyfully, on the slower numbers that add pacing to the show. Flanked by Anastasia X and Albert aan de Baas, Witold is able to surrender to a variety of moods, adding a much needed respite from the all-out assault launched during the disc’s most inspired moments.
Deadbeat Conspiracy of sympathetic soldiers is no exception to the club, offering challenging compositions attacked with a straightforward ingenuity, openness and outright joy. If not the most starling release of the year, it ranks among the most enjoyable, proof positive that stern-faced, bulky jazz music can snap to smiling, svelte shape in the hands of the right practitioner.
Wireless Mothers of Jesus
In other words, they only listen if
they've finished talking,
authoritative claptraps, saliva lips,
causing droopy eyes,
changing channels make believe
if they're
outside all day in cafes, sitting
sculpted into leather beneath
the sun, the old Madonnas
on cellphones, cellulite sweating
into the vast universe of important rules
they ignore in all their chatter.
and see something else to pinch himself awake again.
Anastasia was sick of road tours. I’ve been on the road for six months and only just arrived in Prague a few weeks ago. I just want to settle down for a few months, collect my wits, find some sense From the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 1.3
The truth of the matter is, since we invested so little time in practicing, not wanting to ruin the momentum, the blossoming fraud of our performances, both on the stage, on the Charles Bridge, in alleyways, hiding from the local police, we had plenty of time to polish our drinking skills. In many ways, it was a test of wills for both of us. What joy we took in watching the waiters scurrying around with handfuls of beer glasses, four handles of four glasses in each hand like two fists of beer punching out towards us whenever our glasses began to take on the image of running low. And certainly we didn't care at all as he marked more little slashes across our scorecard that served as an indication of our bill. Everyone got these little slips of paper and you could always tell, by a glance at the slip of paper of another, just how far along they were in their journey to intoxication by noting how many little slashes they had scratched onto their slips of paper.
Everywhere we went, we drank until the pub closed. There were times, of course, when the pubs didn't close at all. The bartender would doze off sometime after four or five in the morning and we would still be seated, blathering away, drinking the beers, refilling them for ourselves when the need arose. How many Prague mornings we watched sailing over the top of the Vlatava River as we drank our beers, unconcerned, all but oblivious.
You might wonder what purpose it all served: we would have laughed long if you'd have asked us. Purpose? But then again, we might have settled down and told you that we were constantly embarking on an effort to forestall the future. Our days didn't operate like the majority of the people around us. We had nothing to do. No place in particular to go. We were working up a beery theory of the meaningless of time around us. We were burning hours like a pyro lights matches one after another, just for the sheer pleasure of it. We wouldn't be provoked by watches, by history, by futures. We were languishing in a sort of beer o'clock time frame in a hedonist city filled with well-meaning, yet futile drunks. The hand we were dealt. We weren't partaking in the pissing and moaning of life. We weren't comsumed with grocery lists, petty fears about dirty laundry, or wondering where our last meal went. Regardless of the question, the answer was always concise: beer.
The 24 Hour Party
There aren’t any alarm bells that go off when the body’s had enough. We could abuse ourselves five days and nights out of seven and a two day holiday of sofa camping, automotonic television, radio blaring simultaneously, stains accumulating, plates and pans piling up over the kitchen landscape like the blemishes of a skin rash on smooth skin, would be enough, ultimately, to recharge.
When enough’s enough, the signs are subtle yet persistent. The taste of tobacco goes bad and each consecutive roll up perpetuates, in a cycle interwoven of masochistic nihilism, the sense that each roll up is in and of itself a death sentence. It isn’t, of course. But the taste buds need a break. More salt and grease to scratch out the nicotine grime of the palate, like spraying twelve hour oven cleaner in your mouth and letting the foamy particles to do their work
And if it isn’t the tobacco, it’s the vague fatigue of the mind. Sluggish and feeling decades older within days is the way your thoughts shuffle along through the hours. Disjointed and yet feeling collective at the same time. Conversations we’d throw out into the middle of the front room, talking around the empty Chinese takeaway cartons and newspapers, would fold up and blow away before they’d been answered.
I’d go outside and marvel that society was still going on around me. Within the flat, one entombed world existed, punctuated by bouts of another reality going on outside the windows, television news, sirens down the road, the tram’s bell and the grinding of metal on metal as it executed its left turn on to STREET IN ZIZKOV.
Once outside the flat, it came at me in multi dimensions; the odours, the pattern of pedestrian footwork dancing around each other, sotto voce conversations briefly revealed in the brief seconds of passing them. You could be aware of yourself and hope at the same time you were blending in as anonymously as passersby. Who were all these people anyway? From whose wombs did they spring and why?
Usually the premise for leaving the flat was replenishment. Food stuffs, drinkable liquid, toilet paper. Walk past a few pubs and restaurants hoping none of the usual drunks saw you and climbed down from their stools or got up from their tables to chase you down the street inviting you to join them.
You can only mask alchoholism with social drinking for so long. Gradually, the drinking hours lengthen and deepen. And one by one, your compatriots drop off, to eat, to sleep, to coax sexual performances out of their partners, sometimes just to get away, and as these compatriots peel off like dead skin, the pool of drinkers grows smaller until it is merely a puddle of drunks who will carry the task on enthusiastically past dawn.
It is surreal to still be awake and drinking, a survivor of the night before, as workers scurry through their early mornings. If you happen to be trapped on the street, moving from one after hours dive to another, when these commuters let themselves from their houses and head off to the collective misery, it is like being trapped in a maze of somnambulists. Try talking to these people as they march on to their destinations: not a single one will give you the time of day. They are all either disgusted or envious when you confront them with beery breath, dressed in last night’s clothes, as though you were a temporary hallucination of theirs they wanted desperately to avoid facing, shake them from their heads and refill the subconscious with the inner nattering of daily preoccupations.
*****
Typically, on the nights no class was scheduled, I’d leave the office in the afternoon, take the tram back to Zizkov, always keeping a watchful eye out for the tram ticket warden, jump off and head immediately for a café. There was no dinner scheduled. There were no household items to purchase. There would be the paperback or a notebook for company. Set up camp at a table and then, watch the marks on the paper tab scratched off, one by one, beer after beer.
The café itself was of no consequence. I never spoke to the patrons. I never looked around except to stare out the window. I would drink the beer, chased with cigarettes, taking notes, writing letters, occasionally reading from whatever booked I’d nicked out of the school library that afternoon. But for the most part, I’d compose novella length letters to Anastasia, recording the minute details of the day, forcing the obligatory, devotional ramblings out of my pen as though they were written with my own blood through an eye dropper.
And when those events had been exhausted, a few more pints to round it off and then back to the flat. Albert would already be there most afternoons. He worked sporadically, picking up odd jobs around the neighbourhood. Moving and lifting, a scrape and paint job, renovation work that entailed moving rubble, brick and mortar in a wheelbarrow from the inside of a gutted frame to the dumpster in the street.
When he worked, he’d be sat there in the front room, still covered in whatever combination of dust, dirt, grease and paint that had clung to him during the course of the day. The headphones would be on, a small litter of beers would already be on the coffee table and floor and the room would be heavy with the haze of his smoke. Depending on what he was listening to, he’d either completely ignore my entrance as though it were just part of the hypnotic trance of the music that was banging into his eardrums, or take the headphones off and click the speakers back on so we’d both be covered in the music.
My days aren’t tough. Academic life, even the poor excuse for it at the College, was a phantom life in a physical world. Albert’s existence, the fact that he’d been out in the real world, shovelling, hauling, getting down and dirty, merely underscored the ghost-like existence I felt at the College. The only dirt I carried home with me from work was in my head, the filthy thoughts about Croatian co-eds in short skirts and long legs. There was no sense of self-respect in teaching there. It was like whoring in a cheap brothel. You got what you paid for. We weren’t paid much and in turn, we weren’t very astute teachers. There were no standards as there were in the physical world Albert pushed himself through for half the pay.
Albert knew it as well. It was a great theme for his pontifications whenever he’d get foamy-mouthed about the state of the world. Look at you, he’d say as I came through the doorway, my fingernails still reasonably clean, my clothes still reasonably fresh. How do you know you’ve even been working today? You look the same coming in as you did going out. Your shirt isn’t even wrinkled. Didn’t you sweat all day? Wasn’t there even a moment of intellectual anxiety enough to leave furrows of philosophic thought in your brow? You’ve taught future bureaucrats and landowners how to maintain their claw-hold on the throats of the working public, how to bleed them of their pay, how to tax them, how to feel slightly cultured while doing it. You’ve spent the day perpetuating a sick lie.
*****
I’m playing a chess match against Mikhail on the picnic table outside the Shot out Eye and the table is getting beerier as the hours go on. First one to win four matches wins and we’ve already been through eight matches without conclusion. It’s almost dark outside and the board is lit by candles around us. A few stand there in earnest, holding their beers, staring down at the table like gods overseeing a battlefield massacre.
POSTCARD SNAPSHOTS OF PRAGUE:
1. Our first public performance at the open mic night in the basement of Radost-FX. What about it? The room was painted with hangovers. We’d sat in on these Sunday sessions a few times already to get the feel for the place, see whether or not music was welcomed. Musical acts didn’t happen often and when they did, they were usually solo acoustic guitar numbers and usually not very pleasant to listen to so we had no reasonable expectation that our reception would be any worse.
As it turned out, it was met with stunned silence. As usual, no one knew whether they’d just heard something awful or incredible.
2. The crunchy sausages with mustard with a diamond-shaped napkin and a chunk of brown bread, eaten on the main boulevard with the hum of late night intoxicated sexuality dripping in the streets from the gutters and the eaves of clouded minds.
3. Sitting in the park near the hostel on a bench smoking a joint and staring up at the night sky.
4. Local pub we joined in late, four Czechs, one playing the guitar at the table as we sang Beatles songs wearing sun glasses and pounding our beer mugs on the table top like barbarians singing songs of mythology the night before pillaging the neighbouring village.
5.
*****
Most of these events won’t register as memory. Either they’re fed through a haze and don’t have any durable qualities or they become enlarged, poster-sized in the subconscious. They don’t stick for very long as they aren’t really memories at all, just events. Not unlike the walls of a construction site that get covered in concert announcement and new released music advertisements, glued up and then covered over, ripped down, graffiti’d on, spat at. No one remembers what poster was up two weeks ago. And similarly, I can’t remember what happened to myself two weeks ago. It’s not like we sit around a table reminiscing constantly like, remember this, remember that? No one cares because whatever it was, chances are it will be repeated in some form or another later in the day or that week or perhaps the next month and for a moment, a tiny light of recognition might go off and sputter out.
The tendency is to filter events so that they become almost unrecognisable save for those tiny moments. There is no filing system in our memories. It’s all scattered around on the inside like a hotel room that keeps having new guests without a maid to come in and clean up afterwards so that one person’s layer of existence left behind is quickly covered by the next and so on.
Is this how royalty greets the well-wishers that come, one by one, for a handshake and a few words? Imagine all the people who have the highlight of their life, I’ve met the King and here is the photo-moment to prove it, hung on the wall of their front rooms for all guests to ooh and aah over whilst the King has absolutely no recollection at all of having ever met them.
You hang out with your core, the regulars who join you at the table and the conversations begin again as though they’d never left off in the first place.
*****
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 atop one of her bags of luggage, casually smoking a cigarette and watching me with amusement as I neared and my eyes roared to life from a dull and listless stare.
I was away on holiday, she explained. I was gone three months, staying with some friends near St Etienne and 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.
*****
Albert wasn’t pleased with the addition of a new flat mate. We’ve barely any room in here as it is, he cringed, waiving his paw around the smoke-filled air of the studio.
But she can cook and she can sing, I rationalised.
Well, I don’t like this at all, he growled. Not at all. This is a fucking disaster.
*****
For several days, it was a lot of walking on eggshells. After all, Albert had found the flat and flats weren’t all that easy to come by. Especially not a cheap one like this. If he deemed the breach severe enough, he might just threaten us with having to find our own place and considering that despite work, the disposable income I disposed of so quickly came in large part from Albert’s personal injury account, this wouldn’t have been a good development at all.
How to pacify Albert was our theme for days. Anastasia suggested sleeping with him but the looming love triangle might prove even more daunting than finding our own flat.
In the end, it was several nights later, after Anastasia had joined us on stage for the first time, that Albert was convinced. The tension eased. Yeah, what the fuck, he explained. She’s a good cook and she even does the dishes afterwards.
*****
At the Shot out Eye, it was a bit of an event when Anastasia arrived. Not only was her presence a little breathtaking in the background of our norm, but her conversations never flowed with any of the others previous. It was like someone riding a bicycle in the middle of a tank parade. For weeks, we had complete strangers trying to join our table, lining up for the opportunity hours in advance, sometimes merely to get a glimpse of Anastasia.
After the first night she’d joined our performance performing the vocals, word spread quickly. Within weeks, we’d had offers for gigs all around Prague, and from as far away as Bratislava and Budapest.
*****
So what are we going to do with all these offers?
The three of us were sat in the train station café just outside the Anglo-American College and the vote was split.
Albert was sick of Prague, he insisted. After so many months, it should be time to move on. Prague was like quicksand and we were sinking rapidly. He had to get out of foundation, even it is just temporary.
My vote was a necessary abstention. I couldn’t side with Albert for risk of driving the newly arrived Anastasia away and I couldn’t side with Anastasia because my poverty level salary at the College wouldn’t afford the two of us our own flat without Albert’s personal injury fund to sustain us.
If I side with staying in Prague, I asked Albert, what would you do? If you are sick of Prague and merely want out, where would you go?
He puffed on his cigarette for several moments in silence. I can stay another month, but that’s it. Either we hit the road together or I hit the road alone.
*****
We didn't need a doctoral thesis to validate it. No one understood anything we said anyway, and we didn't understand them either. It was the perfect relationship.
Of course, when Anastasia would tire of whoring in Amsterdam, she inevitably made her way back to Prague to stay with us and that, I submit, was the only time Albert or I had to defend ourselves or our theories.
You guys look like you haven't left this place since I left she would comment like a disapproving den mother over a scout troop.
Is that supposed to pass as dialogue? Albert would ask. Then Anastasia would make a big show of ordering a bottlr of Moravian wine in a hideous castration of the Czech language, the waiter would look at her blankly, trying to decipher a translation, to what the fuck is she talking about? Albert had mastered the beer vocabulary. He'd even taken the trouble to learn grammatical agreement, depending on how many beers he was ordering, but beyond that, he knew nothing of the language and never bothered to try. But, like all linguistic dilemmas, it was easily solved when he would bring her a beer instead. They're all out of Moravian wine, I'd explain.
From the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 3.2,
...Is it ever possible? Were we merely illusionists with a talentlessness so relentless that it almost became convincing. What else could explain our presence on these stages, night after night, noisy pub after noisy pub? Was it stunned silence at something so horribly awry, they synapses misfired over and over, convincingly? We certainly couldn't believe it ourselves. And by some strange psychological victory, we'd been able to convince the others. Or confused them beyond healthy criticism. We began to accompany ourselves with three foot high inflatable chess pieces and had two volunteers play out famous matches on a 5 x 5 bedsheet painted as a chessboard. More confusion. The lyrics continued lifted out of foreign language obituary pages and stories of local interest plagerized as stanzas in a bizarre, low key baritone that sounded like scratching sandpaper with a two euro coin. Most importantly, the sax and the bass continued to play as basic and few chords as possible, applying repetition and sometimes extremely slow tempos to cover our lack of skill.
But a style that began with extremely minimalist tendancies slowly began to emerge as a spectacle large enough to divert attention from our increasingly frantic fear that eventually we would be found out. When Anastasia joined us with her compositions, her overbearing bossiness and clarinet, we responded with the chess matches recreated on stage, a few interpretive dancers we'd lifted from their classes with promises of popular relevancy, and a harp player.
May Day
Most people don't belong together, she exhaled patiently. People ARE together because they have to be with somebody, one way or another...too lonely to accept solitude with a warm embrace like a lover coming home from the war...no, these people around us, and here she gesticulated wildly in an arc encompassing, one imagined the whole of humanity, not just the stray passerby who happened to be strolling within that imaginary arc they aren't comfortable being alone. They've seen too much television telling them in too many subtle ways, through sitcoms and chat shows and deodorant commercials, that it is their moral obligation in this society to be with someone, anyone - they've had it drummed into their skulls from the beginning...they won't accept anything less and when they wake up one morning wondering what they've done with their lives, who this person lying next to them is, who they get ready for work in the morning with, who they eat a silent dinner over the telly with is, by then, it's all too late. They realised too late...
She wasn't even talking to me, really, talking through me.
She got like that when the sores of society would bubble on her, get in her eyes, underneath her fingernails. There was always another tirade down the road, with Anastacia, you could predict that much, measure your time in the days between rants.
And it was always a sign that she was getting antsy, that she was preparing herself to start travelling again. Snip, snip, cut the ties.
I sat back silently as though savouring the wine, watching the smoke rings I blew upwards; my head tilted back slightly as I watched them slowly carry themselves upwards toward the ceiling and dissipate, my eyes focusing gradually on the present rather than a visionary's distance.
*****
It was May Day in Prague. Albert and I had a bet on to see who could stay off the piss the longest. Albert made it til ten o'clock that night.
Fuck it, he announced, standing up from the chair and away from the game of solitaire he'd been conducting silently for nearly two hours. You win. I'll buy the first beer.
There weren't many nights we weren't out, frankly. Prague is like that, a vortex drawing in the alcoholics and pretend poets and the blue collar Czechs from Zizkov. We were all there, nearly every night, playing cards, chess, music, holding conversations we imagined we were having only to realise that we were, flirting with drunker foreigners, chain smoking, enjoying the evening with the kind of pre-future nostalgia that made it seem like that evening was our last.
*****
Can I tell you a secret? she asked out of the blue as we were lying in bed, still clothed, the candles burning and the pot smoke hanging above us in a haze. I sat up for a moment, rubbing my eyes as though it were just morning and I'd had a good night's sleep. Sure, I answered non committally.
I want to leave. She didn't move as she spoke, just staring up at the ceiling. I want to leave tomorrow, get on a train and just end up somewhere else.
I hadn't been kidding myself too seriously. I knew this would ultimately be the natural score at the end of this match. She was too edgy to relax, pacing the room sometimes (no mean feat in such small quarters), drinking heavily as if to transport herself somewhere else, always somewhere else.
I can't say I didn't understand it although in my case it was more a case of inertia than any true longing to remain in one place for very long. Even Albert had talked aloud to himself about getting the fuck outta here... a few nights this month.
And I want you to come with me. she concluded, grabbing my hand.
*****
So the following morning, just after dawn and before we'd even had a coffee, we were walking down towards Hlavni Nadrazi to catch a train. Albert was annoyed that he wasn't invited but in the end, decided to go back to sleep anyway.
The gypsies were all out in force having slept off whatever they were on the night before that had them singing and dancing and holding their hungry babies in front of your face with one hand whilst the other hand was either upturned, palmward, or trying to reach into your pockets.
The funny thing is on the way down, we didn't spend a second talking about it. It was as though we were heading down to snatch a few klobasa and a beer first thing in the morning, as though this was yesterday or the day before.
We walked silently inside the station and Anastacia picked a window, mumbled things I couldn't hear from behind, pulled out a wad of unexpected cash and stepped back with two tickets.
So, where are we going? I hint,
Someplace you've never been. she replies with an excitement I imagined she would normally reserve for finding a hidden stash of catnip.
Awww, but I've been there already, like a hundred times! I exclaim just to throw her off guard for a moment and take away her suspicious, ruling hand.
I grab at the tickets and have a look. Low whistle.
Rome.
*****
The very first time the three of us were on stage simultaneously was at Jazz Club Železná.
After the first few times, Albert and I didn't get nervous anymore. We had butterflies and vomited often beforehand, but we weren't nervous.
With Anastasia joining us we were suddenly a trio, Albert and I had another aspect to overwhelm us with. But she had a sweet voice. Our music didn't even matter. We just tried to play as quietly in the background as possible.
And that first night we were all having a shot of slivovice for good luck when suddenly the canned music faded and someone got on the PA to announce, the infamously awkward, Deadbeat Conspiracy.
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 fourteen cans of beer that proceeded him. (He was done at thirteen but I told him it was unlucky, so he had another.)
I held the sax in front of me, staring at a fixed point above the heads of the crowd because I was terrified suddenly, gasping for water.
But 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 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 was absolutely silent.
The bartenders and waiters and kitchen help and doormen all stood there, transfixed by Anastasia’s voice.
We'd rehearsed all week at the walls in that little flat and had not even smelled a hint of the reaction. 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.
ROME AND IN PURSUIT
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 could, 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 crept 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 equivalent 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 lullaby 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 dishevelled 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 possess, 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.
Czech – Jarmila and Karel.
Pigeon hole Karel Hynek Macha as imitator of Byron.
Macha: Czech girls, pale as an amaranth, withered in the spring
GM Hopkins wrote a good deal of spiritual, sensual poems?
Not until 30 years after his death his poems were published. (1918)
no appreciation for the ordinary individual
Czech is the fifth European vernacular language after French, Italian, Catalan and Dutch into which the Bible was translated.
philosophical amazement at undestructability of existence in nature.
Hopkins saw the whole world as barbarous in beauty to him, everything was charged with the grandeur of god.
12:49 AM
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