The Angels
10
Why didn't Tamina ask where she was going?
If you don't care about the destination, you don't ask where you're going!
She watched the boy sitting across from her and rowing. He looked weak, and she thought the oars were too heavy for him.
"Wouldn't you like me to take over?" she asked him. The boy readily agreed and gave up the oars.
They changed places. He sat down in the stern, glanced at Tamina rowing, and then picked up a small tape recorder from under his seat. Soon the air was filled with rock music, with electric guitars and song lyrics, and the boy began to writhe in time to it. Tamina looked at him with revulsion: the child was swiveling his hips with flirtatious adult movements she found obscene.
She lowered her eyes to avoid seeing him. The boy turned up the volume and began to sing along softly. After a while, when Tamina again raised her eyes, he asked her: "Why aren't you singing?"
"I don't know that song."
"What do you mean, you don't know it? Everybody knows it."
He went on writhing on his seat, and Tamina was feeling tired: "Would you take over now for a while?"
"Keep rowing!" the boy replied, and he laughed.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
But Tamina was really tired. She shipped the oars to rest a bit: "Are we nearly there?"
The boy pointed straight ahead. Tamina turned around. They were close to shore. The landscape was different from the one they had left behind: it was green with plants, covered with trees.
In a few moments, the boat touched bottom. On shore, ten children were playing with a ball and looking at them curiously. Tamina and the boy stepped out of the boat. The boy tied it to a stake. A lane lined with plane trees extended from the sandy shore. They took it and, barely ten minutes later, reached a large, low, white building. In front of it were some large colored objects, whose function Tamina did not know, and several volleyball nets. Tamina was struck by something odd about them. Yes, they were hanging very close to the ground.
The boy put two fingers into his mouth and whistled.
The Angels
woman who is conscious of her beauty and tries to emphasize it with a conspicuous indifference to every-thing that is not she.
The little girl opened the door to the white building. They went directly (there was neither a corridor nor an entrance hall) into a large room filled with beds. She looked all around the room as if she were counting the beds, then pointed to one: "That's where you'll sleep." Tamina protested: "What? I'm going to sleep in a dormitory?"
"A child doesn't need its own room." "What do you mean, a child? I'm not a child!" "We're all children here!" "But there have to be some grown-ups!" "No, there aren't any here." "Then what am I doing here?" Tamina shouted. The little girl did not notice her agitation. She headed out, then stopped at the door: "I've put you with the squirrels," she said.
Tamina did not understand.
"I've put you with the Squirrels," the child repeated, sounding like a displeased teacher. "Everybody is assigned to teams named for animals."
Tamina refused to talk about the Squirrels. She wanted to go back. She asked about the boy who had brought her here.
The little girl pretended she had not heard what Tamina said, and went on with her explanation.
"I'm not interested in that!" shouted Tamina. "I want to go back! Where is that boy?"
233
11
A little girl no more than nine came forward. She had a charming little face and the coquettishly rounded belly of the virgins in Gothic paintings. She looked at Tamina with no particular interest, with the look of a
232
I
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
"Don't shout!" No adult could have been as haughty as that beautiful child. "I don't understand you," she went on, shaking her head to express her surprise: "Why did you come here if you want to go back?"
"I didn't ask to come here!"
"Tamina, don't lie. People don't go on a long journey without knowing where they're going. You should break the habit of lying."
Tamina turned her back to the little girl and rushed out to the plane-tree lane. When she reached the shore, she looked for the boat the boy had tied to a stake barely an hour before. But there was neither boat nor stake.
She started running to inspect the shore. The sand beach soon gave way to a swamp that had to be skirted, and it took her a while to get back to the water. The shore always veered in the same direction, and (having found no trace of the boat or any kind of mooring) she was back after an hour at the spot where the plane-tree lane met the beach. She realized she was on an island.
She went slowly up the lane to the dormitory. Some ten children, girls and boys between the ages of six and twelve, were there in a circle, holding hands. When they saw her, they started to shout: "Tamina, come and join us!"
They opened the circle to make room for her.
Just then she remembered Raphael smiling and shaking his head.
234
The Angels
She felt a pang of fear. Coldly passing the children by, she entered the dormitory and cowered on her bed.
12
Her husband died in a hospital. She had been with him there as much as she could, but he died at night, alone. When she arrived at the hospital the next day and found the bed empty, the old gentleman he had shared the room with said to her: "You should file a complaint! The way they treat the dead is criminal!" The fear in his eyes showed he knew it would soon be his turn. "They grabbed him by the feet and dragged him along the floor. They thought I was asleep. I saw his head hit the doorsill."
Death has a double aspect: It is nonbeing. But it is also being, the terrifyingly material being of a corpse.
When Tamina was very young, death would appear to her only in its first form, under the aspect of nothingness, and fear of death (vague as it then was) was fear of no longer being. Over the years, that fear diminished and nearly vanished (the thought that one day she would no longer see the sky or the trees did not frighten her), but on the other hand, she reflected more and more on death's other aspect, the material: she was terrified by the thought of becoming a corpse.
235
:
i:
ii
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
It was an unbearable insult to become a corpse. One moment you are a human being protected by modesty, by the sacrosanctity of nakedness and intimacy, and then the instant of death is enough to put your body suddenly at anyone's disposal—to undress it, to rip it open, to scrutinize its entrails, to hold one's nose against its stench, to shove it into the freezer or into the fire. When she wanted her husband cremated and his ashes scattered, it was also to avoid being tormented the rest of her life by the thought of what had become of that beloved body.
And when some months later she contemplated suicide, she decided to drown herself in the open sea so that the vileness of her dead body would be known only to fish, mute fish.
I spoke earlier of a Thomas Mann story: a young man suffering from a mortal illness gets on a train and descends in an unknown town. There is a wardrobe in his room, and every night a painfully beautiful naked woman steps out of it and tells him a long, sweetly sad tale, and that woman and that tale are death.
It is death sweetly bluish, like nonbeing. Because nonbeing is an infinite emptiness and empty space is blue and there is nothing more beautiful and more soothing than blue. Not at all by chance did Novalis, the poet of death, love blue and search for nothing else on his journeys. Death's sweetness is blue in color.
The Angels
But if the nonbeing of Thomas Mann's young man is so beautiful, what happens to his body? Do they drag it by the feet across the doorsill? Do they rip it open? Do they throw it into a hole or into the fire?
Mann was twenty-four when he wrote the story, and Novalis never reached thirty. I am
unfortunately older, and unlike them, I cannot avoid thinking about the body. For death is not blue, and Tamina knows it just as well as I know it. Death is terrible drudgery. My father lay dying for days with a fever, and I had the impression that he was working hard. He was bathed in sweat and concentrating entirely on his death pangs, as if death were beyond his strength. He no longer even knew I was sitting beside his bed, he was no longer aware of my presence, death's work totally exhausted him, he was concentrating like a rider on his horse trying to reach a far-off destination, but with no more than a final remnant of strength.
Yes, he was riding a horse.
Where was he going?
Somewhere far away, to hide his body.
No, not by chance do all poems about death depict it as a journey. Thomas Mann's young man gets on a train, Tamina gets into a red sports car. A person feels an immense desire to go away and hide his body. But the journey is in vain. He gallops off on a horse but ends up back on a bed and then with his head hitting the doorsill.
236
237
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
The Angels
13
who could no longer say a single word. Then he turned to me and said aloud: "He's no longer conscious. His brain is deteriorating." I saw Papa's huge blue eyes open still wider.
When the doctor left, I was horribly uneasy and wanted to say something quickly to drive those words away. I pointed to the window: "Do you hear that? What a joke! They're making Husak an Honorary Pioneer!"
And Papa started to laugh. He laughed to show me that his brain was alive and I could go on talking and joking with him.
Husak's voice reached us through the apple trees: "Children! You are the future!"
And then: "Children, never look back!"
"I'm going to close the window so we don't have to hear any more!" I winked at Papa, and looking at me with his infinitely beautiful smile, he nodded.
A few hours later, his fever suddenly rose once more. He mounted his horse and rode it for several days. He never saw me again.
Why is Tamina on the children's island? Why do I imagine her just there?
I don't know.
Might it be because on the day my father was dying the air was filled with joyful songs sung by children's voices?
Everywhere east of the Elbe, children belong to what are called Pioneer organizations. They wear red kerchiefs around their necks, go to meetings like adults, and at times sing the "'Internationale." They have the nice custom of sometimes knotting a red kerchief around the neck of an eminent adult and giving him the title Honorary Pioneer. The adults love that, and the older they are, the more they enjoy getting red kerchiefs from children for their coffins.
They all got one—Lenin got one, and so did Stalin, Masturbov, and Sholokhov, Ulbricht and Brezhnev, and Husak too got his that day at a grand celebration in the Prague Castle.
Papa's fever had gone down a bit. It was May, and we opened the window overlooking the garden. From the house opposite, the television broadcast of the ceremony was reaching us through the branches of the flowering apple trees. We heard the children singing in their high-pitched voices.
The doctor was in the room. He bent over Papa,
238
14
But what can she do now that she is lost among children, the boatman and his boat have disappeared,
239
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
The Angels
and she is surrounded by an immensity of water?
She is going to fight.
How sad it is: in the small town in the west of Europe, she never made an effort to achieve anything, and here, among children (in the world of things without weight), was she really going to fight?
And how does she intend to fight?
On the day she arrived, when she refused to play and took refuge on her bed as in a fortified castle, she felt the children's nascent hostility in the air and was afraid of it. Now she is trying to forestall it. She has decided to gain their friendship. To do that, she must identify with them, adopt their language. So she voluntarily takes part in all their games and contributes her ideas and physical strength to their activities, and the children are soon won over by her charm.
To identify with them she has to give up her privacy. She goes to the bathroom with them, though on that first day she had refused to accompany them there because it repelled her to wash herself with them looking on.
The large, tiled bathroom is at the center of the children's lives and secret thoughts. On one side are ten toilet bowls, on the other ten washbasins. While one team sits with hitched-up nightshirts on the toilet bowls, another stands naked at the washbasins. The seated ones look at the naked ones standing at the washbasins and the ones at the washbasins look over their shoulders at the ones on the toilet bowls, and the whole room is filled with a secret sensuality that awak-
240
ens in Tamina a vague memory of something long for-
gotten.
Tamina is sitting on the toilet bowl in her nightshirt, and the naked Tigers standing at the washbasins have eyes only for her. Then there is the gurgle of water flushing, the Squirrels get off the toilets and remove their long nightshirts, and the Tigers leave the washbasins for the dormitory, where the Cats are now coming from; they sit down on the vacated toilets and look at big Tamina with her dark groin and big breasts washing herself at a washbasin along with the other Squirrels.
She is not ashamed. She feels that her adult sexuality makes her a queen who rules over those with hairless groins.
15
So it seems that the voyage to the island was not a conspiracy against her, as she had thought when she first saw the dormitory and her bed. On the contrary, she was finally where she had wished to be: she had fallen far back to a time when her husband did not exist, when he was neither in memory nor in desire, and thus when there was neither weight nor remorse.
Her modesty had always been well developed (mod-
241
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
The Angels
esty was love's faithful shadow), and here she was displaying herself naked to tens of strangers. At first she found it startling and unpleasant, but she soon got used to it, because her nakedness was not immodest but had simply lost its significance and become inexpressive, mute, lifeless. A body whose every part was marked by Tamina's and her husband's love story had sunk into insignificance, and in that insignificance there was relief and repose.
But if her adult sensuality was vanishing, another world of arousals began slowly to emerge from the distant past. Long-gone memories came back to her. This one, for example (it's no wonder she had long ago forgotten it, because the adult Tamina would have found it unbearably ridiculous and unseemly): in the first grade of elementary school she worshiped her young, pretty teacher and dreamed for months of being in the bathroom with her.
Now she is sitting on the toilet bowl, smiling and with her eyes half closed. She imagines she is that teacher and the little girl with freckles sitting on the toilet next to hers and curiously looking sidelong at her is the child Tamina of long ago. So utterly does she identify with the sensual eyes above the little girl's freckled cheeks that somewhere in the distant reaches of her memory she feels, half awakened, the quiver of an old arousal.
16
Thanks to Tamina, the Squirrels won nearly all the games, and they decided to reward her formally. The children dispensed all punishments and rewards in the bathroom, and Tamina's reward was to have everyone at her service that evening: that evening she would have no right to touch herself—her totally devoted servants, the Squirrels, would diligently do everything for her.
And so they served her: they began by carefully wiping her as she sat on the toilet bowl, then they lifted her off it and flushed, took off her nightshirt, and led her to the washbasin, where they all tried to wash her breasts and belly and were
eager to see what she looked like between her legs and what it felt like to touch. Now and then she tried to push them away, but that was very difficult: she was unable to be nasty to the children, because they were playing the game with admirable earnestness, pretending to be serving her as a way of rewarding her.
Finally they went to put her to bed for the night, and there they again found a thousand charming pretexts to press up against her and caress her entire body. There were so many of them she was unable to tell whose hand or mouth belonged to whom. She felt them pressing against her entire body, but especially where she was built unlike them. She closed her eyes
242
243
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
The Angels
and thought she felt her body rocking, slowly rocking as in a cradle: she experienced a singularly peaceful sensual pleasure.
She felt that pleasure making the corners of her lips quiver. She reopened her eyes and caught sight of a child's face closely watching her mouth and saying to another child's face: "Look! Look!" Now there were two children's faces leaning over her, eagerly observing the quivering corners of her lips as if they were looking at a watch taken to pieces or a fly with torn-off wings.