Thanatographies, p.4
Thanatographies, page 4
The women call me, demand return, not through dreams or some sleight of hand, but through rite. The rite can be convalescent but more often it is unfathomable. Raising children to see them leave. Living thoroughly to die. The women coax me from a distance to come closer and, of course, to come alone. They do not seem to care about my preoccupations, my fears, and uncertainties. They affirm a ridiculous movement: to go into it again, the body, the absence, the exclusion, the catastrophe, the trembling throat. They do not encourage visiting their gravestones or tracing remains. The return means to stretch out my hands into the past and toward the future, as inconsistent as these categories may be. To get up and place my feet. Walk and then crawl through the narrowest cave tunnel, some light playing on the walls. I do not know the way. In fact, I have no idea where I am. Plausible routes shoot out ahead, like veins or the branches of a tree. I find myself in a cavern, which means a room within the cave that is dimly lit and filled with more women, all in pursuit. Of what I cannot immediately say. Solitary but together they weave and laugh, brush hair, write on bricks, compose, bathe, make gestures with their hands, their voices, squat. I am kindly acknowledged and greeted though paid no further attention, and each woman is communing through her acts with the other women in the room, without ever leaving her own space of occupation. I find a shallow ledge in a corner and listen, which seems to be what I am communing through. The cavern quietly hums.
I can’t help but think that this might be the way women would speak to one another had civilization played out differently. Women in pursuit, who commune with no identifiable language except the sounds and manifestations of their acts. Not in silence but highly varied drifts of sound. Neither archaic nor universal, the female history, stored away in some subterranean cloister, may have existed outside of the alphabet, made up instead from a body of tones, grafting, and telepathy.
I want to keep sway with these drifts transiting the ecliptic. A form of sound speaking, which is what the mask dancer Lavinia Schulz emphasized in her performance of Sancta Susanna, a play written by August Stramm before he died in the trenches.
Schulz had appeared during that first summer of sleeplessness in an exhibition, which showed her full-body masks. Mythic creatures, such as Skirnir, the blue knight, wielding a sword, a messenger between the worlds. Nocturnal beings into which she slid. The interiors of the masks were uncomfortable, with protruding nails from which she had to bandage her face. She made these from found things, trash, and abandoned objects.
Before she developed her own full-body masks, she took classes at the Sturm-Bühne in Berlin with Lothar Schreyer, who cast his “talented new student” as the nun Susanna. Against the backdrop of the German capitulation and a brewing revolution, Lothar Schreyer turned Stramm’s play into a libretto for the Sturm-Bühne. Lavinia Schulz’s solemn proclamations must have stood in stark contrast to her dance, her costume, and her nakedness, which again stood in stark contrast to the content of the thirty-minute play circling largely around the life of a celibate nun. Though the nun is in ecstasy, in awakening. At one point, she announces to another nun: “I am beautiful, I am beautiful.”
Schulz, in the only surviving image from the performance, is wrapped in linen. And similarly to the mythic creatures she would later embody in her mask dances, glares abidingly into a space beyond time.
The ecstasy experienced by Sancta Susanna, under the influence of night, lilac’s blooming scent, and the ghost of another nun’s rapture at the cross many years before, turns diabolic when Susanna, in trance, takes off her gown and rips the cloth from the cross. A large spider moves over the altar. When Susanna refuses to repent, the choir of nuns cry out “Santana, Santana.” Not unlike Schreyer’s characterization of Lavinia Schulz, whom he described as both highly gifted and demonic.
Schulz’s performance has been primarily remembered for appearing completely naked in a scene and singing her text “like an animal.” Though a review in the Vossische Zeitung scornfully remarked that Schulz was not entirely naked but wore “a kind of mini-bikini.” Another reviewer noted: “Before a gaudy black, yellow, green, and red wall stands a woman wearing a dress and facial mask that mimics the background, her arms are stretched forward while she sings, speaks, and sounds. Cowering on the ground with her back to the audience a second woman, Susanna, answers in a shrill and giddy high voice. The antiphony continues until the woman on the ground sings a coloratura aria.”
Were these soundings a portal through which Schulz could maneuver herself elsewhere? The saints, as Imre Kertész has written, are infinitely more interesting than the catastrophe and evil that we fixate and draw our mirrors from. Though it is, of course, Schulz’s tragic death that absorbs the chroniclers. On the verge of starvation and unwilling to take up menial work during the Weimar years, she killed first her lover and then herself while her child was sleeping.
I sit upright in my bed and listen to voices of the myrtle. A little creature with the absurd hope to live one more day. Calamity has a lack of contour. Upright and inside of nothing, an image builds from vacant air. It is not so much an image, as it is a dream. The dream resembles a memory or a hallucination, both the edges of despair. To live like a nun, apart from the blister, caught inside of monotonous walls, in daily musings, and work without much consequence. To weed the garden or chop onions for the soup. To wake at dawn for prayer. To be elsewhere. To be firm outside, a scuttle inside. To drift and iron. To sleep or not sleep. To be ecstatic. To be communal as oneself. To not keep up with it but to keep clean. To not affiliate through speech patterns, units of thought. To let the light go out, with and without relatives. My nunnery is a wide-open realm. One cannot be driven to it and there is music, the company of saints, women in joyful labor.
I STEP OUT INTO THE GARDEN and look at the sky. The North Star at the handle of the little dipper, also called the navel of heaven. Clouds cluster like feathery harp strings, facts stumble.
I know that a tree without leaves is a tree sleeping, but there are also insomniac trees, equatorial old-growth forests cut down that perpetually grow back their leaves, unable to rest. I let the body lie down, slowly sifting me to the under earth and its worms. I travel along a spiral cord into the innermost center and drink water that will keep me alive, that will help me live without sleep.
This hour, too fatigued to know itself as a unit in time, begins with boredom and admittances. It begins with “I lived.” I lived for years in the night’s admiring gaze. I ate large steaks and rode on bicycles across windy boulevards. I waited on my order and stole food from the kitchens, in which I worked and never learned how to make the milk frothy, always sick with urine infections. I was a washed-up portrait and served in a Russian café, where the owner, a professional violinist, played every evening, and I had to pirouette the soup around his erratic elbow. I cut up the bread too thick and could not remember the sides and extras and, in the end, quit or bounced or got fired and went to the cinema instead. A photographer took my picture but did not touch me, and then did this dumb thing where he put raspberries on each of his finger, like in the Amelie movie, and I was supposed to laugh. That was his whole bag of tricks. A painter invited me to his house and drew my body in the basement. He had set the table for a three-course meal, his wife dead or on vacation. I feared for my appendix and took budget airlines, wore tight clothes from child-laboring chain stores on the dance floor. None of it lasted beyond daybreak. The days spent in waiting, carefully arranging outfits, cleaning my face.
I can hear the whole neighborhood snoring.
What if there is no story, and I am a bystander to the universe taking care of me? I sense the temptation to divulge more and more of myself, for which one eventually pays a price and gets a prize. And already I worry about losing your attention. Already I wonder what may be wrong with me for always angling from this deadly place, but the night is passed up and fibrous, admonishing me:
Know before whom you stand!
THE WORST KIND OF SLEEP is the one that does not come fully. I want to include some night vision, animals by the litter. A flash one is prompted to follow farther into the amber light of the forest, where other sensitivities live. Of course, I must first ask what has led me here? What did I do to make my prison such a realm of roses? Once I believed that beauty would rule my life, but I am the kind of woman whose world is all over her face.
The nameless woman finds it entertaining that I write. She laughs. Not because the writing is entertaining but because language also creates the world, and she senses the inadequacy of the one I am giving to you. I want to ask her how she is coming undone? Whom she is betraying and how?
She moves her head in a spiraling movement, her eyes closed. Forward, backward, around.
When I look at her from this angle, the grammar loses focus. Demons hang from eyelids and must be apprehended on equal footing, sleepwalking into the feud. I can see her quite clearly now. She emerges in the face of my best friend from childhood. A best friend you must forget to continue, and then remember in phantom features of another friend or an unnamed woman visiting your bedside at night.
My best friend from childhood was the most interesting person I could find, once we moved from Berlin to a small town in southern Germany. It was a stoic and bounded thing, our friendship. I hated and admired her, the way I hated and admired myself. We broke up after what seems to be now a dull, almost simplistic fact. The onset of puberty ravaged our lives. In that era of misfortunes, it was either all or nothing while everything else wore thin. That is not fully accurate. I could also cite my family’s move to an affluent neighborhood, close to the forest, as a cause for our fray.
I had found the house after highlighting the ads of interest with a yellow marker in Saturday’s newspaper. I enjoyed taking control of our future. The apartment my family lived in had become too small. My brother and I were sharing a room. The rabbit lived on the balcony. I imagined a house with corridors, a garden, maybe a dog. I would begin this new life by reordering my desk. I ignored the fact that with each upward move my parents had grown unhappier, that we had been most content in our run-down apartment in Berlin. My father started to iron his shirts when we moved from the city to a quiet apartment in this small, provincial town. My mother began to wear leather jackets. It would be distracting to detail how these changes in clothing affected the family balance. When I found the large row house close to the forest, I believed, for a moment, that I was on the verge of queendom, and upon being crowned, I would be given my own palace. I would have my own room and a house so big I could hide myself for weeks, sneak out through a terrace door and mark places with intricate symbols drawn into the earth.
My best friend did not welcome the move, nor the fact that I would live up the hill taking a different route to school. She had a small room to herself, so small her father had to build a platform for her bed. Nonetheless, it was a room and we stayed up late against everyone’s will. We ate cheese sandwiches made with a sandwich maker, sometimes four in an afternoon, and climbed into the attic where her parents stored old clothes from their youth. We built our daily characters wearing those clothes and her mother’s platform shoes.
At the new house, during the rare occasions that she visited me, we didn’t spend much time in my room and instead roamed the upper part of the garden, which bordered the woods. An unkempt territory. During some months in spring, we built a floral shop and sold flowers to imaginary customers. We each had our own version of the store and our own aesthetic preferences when it came to the flower arrangements. No one ever saw the bouquets we made, but creative competition was inevitable. While we mumbled to our imaginary customers, communicating what we could not say directly to each other, we maintained a keen eye on the other’s business innovations. I started to offer moss sculptures; she specialized in chestnut tree branch arrangements. We once heard the distant groan of a boar and collected ticks on our backs that grew into bulbous white cones. We made price tags and invented elaborate stories about our customers. There were some who had lost children and needed flowers for the funeral, others who could never be satisfied, a pervert who came by too often, and a wealthy woman from the city who needed twenty moss sculptures for her dinner party. The flower shop was destroyed and resurrected after storms. The surfaces of tree stumps, where we performed our work, needed frequent cleaning. After we went our separate ways, I tried to continue the flower business on my own but none of the customers materialized, and I did not get much satisfaction from making bouquets with no one to belittle, outdo, or destroy them. With her, the witness of my existence disappeared. Other reasons to make a world needed to be found.
The move to the new house precipitated a canvas upon which I could draw another life. I began to drive to school with my neighbor, also a classmate, in her mother’s silvery BMW on days when walking the thirty minutes to class would make us late. We were walking companions at first, suffering uphill together, with heavy schoolbags tightened to our backs. Her father was a retired banker, Sicilian, whose active involvement in the mafia before coming to Germany haunted his quiet pensioner’s life. My neighbor revealed this detail to me years later. Initially, we barely spoke, and instead spent our time together drawing geometric shapes with chalk onto the asphalt of our dead-end street. At this point, I was still very much in the fangs of my best friend, and this neighbor I considered an acquaintance, someone who made living in this part of town easier. At dawn, I would walk over to her house, which was only two houses down from my own, my face crumpled from nightmares. I knocked on the glass door, slipped into the hallway, and then sat in a bulging jacket on the staircase waiting for everyone to get ready. These ten to fifteen minutes of waiting were deeply satisfying. The hushed voices, warmth of the impeccably clean house, and the smell of burnt toast all mixed with my sleepy dream state. The voices were mostly directed at my friend’s younger sister who was making everyone else late. My neighbor, in a nicely ironed white shirt, energetically moved up and down the staircase, squeezed past me, organizing her backpack, stowing away her lunch before combing back her long black hair into a ponytail. She had a small forehead and marble-white skin. The dog, a recent addition to the household, was jerking off in the corner. The longer everyone took, the more likely it was that her mother, a once beautiful woman who now showed deep downward-pointing wrinkles at the corners of her mouth, would announce in a demure voice that it was too late to walk. She would give us a lift after all.
The entire house, as already mentioned, was eternally clean and decorated with assorted designer furniture from Milan. My own house, even though architecturally identical to that of my neighbor’s (there were six of its kind on the street), suffered from the opposite condition: chaos and filth. It was endlessly messy because my parents were, and we did not have a cleaning woman or a love for dusting. Our furniture was rather old, and my parents had made the mistake of buying white couches that were showing the residue of our slouching. The carpet was white too and bore stains. My parents about a year away from their eventual divorce.
I had been observing the way order played out in our lives more closely, noticing that my neighbor had an inherent sense of how to maintain class folders and handouts, cultivate legible handwriting, and arrive to school prepared. She illustrated her notes with little sketches and in her leather purse she carried a high-quality fountain pen, sharpened pencils, erasers, a ruler, and dividers. As much as I had tried, I could not emulate her system. My ink regularly exploded in my own leather purse, and it was covered with deep-blue blotches that looked like bruises or a riddle. My handwriting was inconsistent, and I usually stuffed handouts into my backpack, from which they emerged crumpled and food stained at some point weeks later. The grades I received reflected this lack of cohesion, especially in biology, whereas my neighbor’s careful sketches of prehistoric life, her straight tabular lines for botanical charts, earned her high esteem in the eyes of our teacher, who lived on the same block in one of the identical row houses. My neighbor’s best friend was the biology teacher’s eldest daughter and a source of frequent misery to me. Somehow, my predisposition for disorder, my low biology grade, and my exclusion from my neighbor’s innermost circle all collided into what I can now only call a propensity for indignation.
Decades later that indignation reemerged suddenly and without warning from the depths of my forgetfulness while reading an essay on the Yiddish writers Itzik Manger and Debora Vogel. The essay, which I can no longer locate, reflected on Yiddish and Yiddishland as transcendent of the nation-state. The language did not cohere around a fixed set of grammatical rules and never became part of any European literary canon. It drifted along the peripheries with its preliminary anchor and cultural center in Warsaw before the Shoah. This “no man’s language” was not recognized as autonomous. It was characterized as “broken German” or “linguistic mishmash.” Debora Vogel, a poet from Lemberg, today’s Lviv, whose first languages were German and Polish, defiantly chose to write in Yiddish, a language she had to teach herself.
Most of my classmates back then were Protestant Christians, with a few exceptions, such as my neighbor who was Roman Catholic, her best friend also Roman Catholic, and a few atheists who did not have to take classes in religion (a requirement in German secondary schools) and instead were collectively grouped into so-called ethics classes. I, too, was labeled an atheist and placed into the ethics class, even though I was technically Jewish. When we moved into this wealthier neighborhood, Confirmation was on most of my classmates’ minds, the Catholics and atheists excluded. I was caught in a dilemma. I could easily receive baptism and join my friends and classmates in the Confirmation craze, which included a weeklong excursion and a large ceremony with gifts and money from relatives at the end of the year, or I could retain my mixed and rather convoluted heritage.
