La otra muerte

A short story ("The other death") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

A couple of years ago perhaps (I have lost the letter), Gannon wrote from Gualeguaychú and announced he would be sending me a version, maybe the first Spanish version, of the poem The Past, by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  In a postscript he added that Don Pedro Damián, of whom I would retain some memory, had died the other night from pulmonary congestion.  Devastated by fever, the man had relived in his delirium the day-long bloodbath of Masoller.  This news seemed predictable, almost conventional, to me, since Don Pedro, when he was about nineteen or twenty, had fallen into the ranks of Aparicio Saravia.  The Revolution of 1904 led him to sojourn in Río Negro or Paysandú where he labored on a farm.  Pedro Damián was from Entre Ríos, an entrerriano, from Gualeguay to be exact, but went where his chums were, fully participating in their excitement and their ignorance.  He fought in a skirmish and then in the final battle.  Repatriated in 1905, he reassumed his field laborer duties with humble tenacity.  As far as I know, he never again abandoned his native province.  He would spend the last thirty years of his life in a very isolated place a league or two from Ñancay. 

Around 1942 or so, amidst this state of neglect, I chatted with him one evening; I should say, I tried to chat with him.  He was a taciturn fellow of feeble intellect.  The Masoller sound and fury had swallowed up all his other narratives, and it did not surprise me that he relived those memories at the moment of his death.  Knowing I would never see Damián again, I wished to remember him.  So poor is my visual memory that I only recalled a photograph of him which Gannon had taken.  There is nothing strange about this fact if we consider that I saw the man only once, in early 1942, and then many times in effigy.  Gannon sent me this photograph.  I lost it and have not looked for it.  I would be afraid to find it again.        

A second episode took place months later in Montevideo.  The entrerriano's fever and agony gave me the idea of writing a fantasy tale about Masoller's defeat; Emir Rodríguez Monegal, to whom I recounted such a plot, provided me with a few lines for Colonel Dionisio Tabares, who had taken part in this campaign.  The colonel received me for an after-dinner talk.  From a rocking chair on his patio, he recalled with little structure but great affection the days that once had been.  He spoke of munitions that never arrived, exhausted horses, sleeping, earth-colored men weaving in their labyrinthine marches; he spoke of Saravia, who could have entered Montevideo and who turned off route, "because that gaucho was scared of the city"; of men whose throats were cut all the way around their necks; of a civil war that to me seemed less like a collision of two armies than a crafty gaucho's dream.  He talked about Illescas, about Tupambaé, about Masoller.  He did so with passages so dignified and in so lively a manner that I understood that he had mentioned these same things many times, and I feared that behind his words almost no memories remained.  During a respite I managed to interject Damián's name.    

"Damián?  Pedro Damián?" said the colonel.  "He served with me.  A pansy whom the boys called Daymán."  He let out a loud laugh, then stopped just as suddenly, either out of feigned or genuine discomfort.

In another voice he said that war was like a woman: it served as a test for men.  And before entering into battle no one knows who he is.  Someone could think himself a coward and turn out to be valiant; by the same token, the opposite could occur, which was what happened with poor Damián, who went prancing around the local stores with his white insignia and then lost heart at Masoller.  In some shootouts with the zumacos, he comported himself like a man; but it was another matter when the armies drew up, the cannonade began, and every man felt like five thousand men had united to kill him.  Poor lad, who had spent his days bathing sheep and who was quickly dragged off by that jingoistic lot.  

Absurdly, Tabares's account embarrassed me.  I would have preferred that the events had not happened this way.  With old Damián as I had glimpsed him one evening many years ago, I had fabricated, without intending to do so, a sort of idol; Tabares's account destroyed it.  All of a sudden I understood Damián's reserve and obstinate solitude: these actions had been dictated not by modesty, but by embarrassment.  In vain I repeated to myself that a man hounded by an act of cowardice was more complete and more interesting than a man who was merely spirited.  The gaucho Martín Fierro, I thought, was less memorable than Lord Jim or Razumov.  Yet if Damián, as a gaucho, were obliged to be Martín Fierro – above all, before eastern gauchos.  In what Tabares said and did not say I perceived the rugged flavor of what was called Artiguism: the (perhaps incontrovertible) awareness that Uruguay was more fundamental than our country and, in the end, more brave ... That night, I remember, we bid farewell with exaggerated effusiveness.

In the winter, one or two details for my fantasy tale (which stupidly was not assuming the needed shape) still eluded me, engendering a return to the house of Colonel Tabares.  I found him with another gentleman of his age, Doctor Juan Francisco Amaro of Paysandú, who had likewise taken up arms in Saravia's revolution.  Predictably, they had been talking about Masoller.  Amaro recounted a few anecdotes and then added, slowly like someone thinking aloud:   

"I remember we spent the night in Santa Irene, where some others were incorporated into our ranks: a French veterinarian who died on the eve of the action, and a young skier from Entre Ríos, a certain Pedro Damián."

I interrupted him acrimoniously.

"I already know that," I told him.  "The Argentine who lost heart before the bullets."

I stopped; the two were gazing at me perplexed.

"You're wrong, my dear sir," said Amaro finally. "Pedro Damián died as any man would have wanted to die.  It was probably four o'clock in the afternoon.  At the top of the mountain range the Colorado infantry had made themselves very strong; our troops charged them with spears.  Damián was at the head of the attack, yelling, and a bullet hit him in the chest.  He stopped his stirrups, concluded his yelling, rolled to the ground, and remained between the horses' legs.  He was dead and the last charge of Masoller passed right over him.  So brave and yet not even twenty years old. 

He was speaking, doubtless, of another Damián, yet something made me ask what the lad was yelling.

"Bad words," said the colonel.  "Which is what one yells during a charge."

"That may be," said Amaro.  "But he also screamed, 'Viva Urquiza!'"    

We remained silent.  At length, the colonel mumbled:

"It might be a signal were he not fighting in Masoller, but at Cagancha or at India Muerta." 

Sincerely perplexed, he added:

"I commanded these troops, and I would swear this was the first time I heard anyone talk of a Damián."

We could not manage to make him remember.  

In Buenos Aires, the stupor engendered by his forgetfulness was repeated.  One afternoon, in front of eleven delightful volumes of Emerson in the basement of Mitchell's English library, I met Patricio Gannon.  I asked him for the translation of The Past.  He said he did not intend to translate it and that Spanish literature was so tedious as to make Emerson unnecessary.  I reminded him that he had promised me that version in the same letter in which he had written about Damián's death.  I told him this, all in vain.  In horror I noticed that he was listening to me with surprise; consequently, I sought refuge in a literary discussion on Emerson's detractors, on that poet more complete, more skillful, and undoubtedly more singular than unhappy Poe.       

A few facts should be noted.  In April I received a letter from Colonel Dionisio Tabares.  He was now no longer uncertain or obscure and remembered very well the little entrerriano who had headed the charge of Masoller and who, that same night, had buried his men at the foot of the mountain range.  In July I passed through Gualeguaychú; I did not pass by Damián's hut, and no one remembered him.  I wanted to ask the rancher Diego Abaroa, who had seen him die; but he too had died before the winter.  I wanted to etch Damián's features into my memory.  Months later, while leafing through some albums, I realized that the gloomy face that I had managed to evoke was that of the celebrated tenor Tamberlinck, in the role of Othello. 

Now I shall run through the conjectures.  The most simple, yet also the least satisfactory, holds that there exist two Damiáns: the coward who died in Entre Ríos around 1946, and the hero who died in Masoller in 1904.  The flaw in this conjecture resides in the fact that it does not explain the truly enigmatic component: to wit, the curious swings in memory on the part of Colonel Tabares, the oblivion which annuls in little time the image and the name of the person who had returned.  (I do not accept, I do not wish to accept a conjecture that is too simple: that I had been dreaming all along.)  More curious is the supernatural theory posited by Ulrike von Kuhlmann.  Pedro Damián, said Ulrike, perished in the battle, and at the moment of his death he begged God to return him to Entre Ríos.  God hesitated for a second before granting this wish, and he who had made this wish was already dead, and several men had seen him fall.  God, who cannot change the past, but can change the images of the past, changed the image of death into that of a faint, and the shade of the entrerriano returned to his native land.  He returned, but we must remember the shade's condition.  He lived in solitude, without a wife, without friends; he loved and possessed everything, but from far off, as if from the other side of a crystal.  He "died," and his image was lost like water within water.  

This theory is erroneous, but to me it must have suggested the truth (that which I believe to be the truth), which is at once the simplest and most unprecedented.  In an almost magical way, I discovered the truth in Peter Damian's treatise De Omnipotentia, the study of which I owe to two verses in Canto XXI of Paradiso, presenting exactly the problem of identity.  In the fifth chapter of this treatise, St. Damian claims, against Aristotle and against Fridugisus, that God can make what once was into something that has never been.  I read these old theological discussions and began to understand the tragic history of Don Pedro Damián.

I divine the truth as follows.  Damián behaved like a coward on the battlefield of Masoller and dedicated his life to correcting this embarrassing weakness.  He returned to Entre Ríos; he did not lift his hand to any man, he did not mark anyone, he did not seek out a hero's fame.  Yet in the fields of Ñancay he became hard, struggling with the mountain and the untamed estate.  He was preparing, doubtless without knowing it, the miracle.  He thought most deeply: if destiny brings me into another battle, I will know how to be worthy of it.  For forty years he maintained this battle with dark hope, and in the end fate brought him a battle, at the moment of his death.  It brought it to him in the form of a delirium, but as the Greeks already knew, we are the shadows of a dream.  In his death-throes he relived his battle and he comported himself like a man, and he headed the final charge and a bullet hit him in the middle of his chest.  In this way, in 1946, owing to a long-held passion, Pedro Damián died in the defeat of Masoller, which occurred between the winter and the spring of 1904.  

In the Summa Theologica, it is refuted that God can make the past into something that has never been, but nothing is said about the intricate concatenation of causes and effects, a chain so vast and intimate that perhaps it would not be possible to annul a single distant fact, as insignificant as it may be, without invalidating the present.  Modification is not the modification of a single fact; it is the annulment of its consequences, which have to be infinite.  To say this in other words: it is the creation of two universal histories.  In the first one (let us say), Pedro Damián died in Entre Ríos in 1946; in the second, in Masoller, in 1904.  The latter is what we are now living, but the suppression of the former was not immediate and produced the incoherencies which I have mentioned.  In Colonel Dionisio Tabares all the different stages were gathered: in the beginning he remembered that Damián acted like a coward; later, he forgot him entirely; then, he remembered his impetuous death.  No less corroborative is the case of the ranch farmer Abaroa; he died, as I understand, because he had too many memories of Don Pedro Damián.

As far as I'm concerned, I do not believe I am running a similar risk.  I have guessed and recorded a process not accessible to man, something akin to a scandal of reason; yet certain circumstances mitigate this fearsome privilege.  For the moment, I am not sure I have always written the truth.  I suspect that in my narrative there are false memories.  I suspect that Pedro Damián (if he existed) was not called Pedro Damián, and that I remember him by this name so as someday to create his story as suggested to me by the arguments of St. Peter Damian.  Something similar takes place with the poem mentioned in the first paragraph that versifies on the irrevocability of the past.  Until 1951, I believed I had created a fantasy tale and had recorded a real event for posterity.  So then did the innocent Virgil, two thousand years ago or so, believe he was announcing the birth of a man and foretold the birth of God.     

Poor Damián!  Death took him at the age of twenty in a domestic battle in a sad, obscure war, and yet he achieved what his heart yearned for, and took a long time to achieve it, and perhaps there is no greater happiness than this.       

The Flower of Evil

Many years ago a friend of mine commented that she did not understand why anyone would read a book or see a film more than once; surely, she implied, we all have better things to do with our time.  That her literary and cinematic tastes differ greatly from mine might be an easy inference by regular readers of these pages, but the matter is more complex than it might seem.  We repeat activities that we enjoy, sometimes owing to the content of the activity, othertimes to the memory of the very first experience (some high-profile drugs apparently pertain to the second category).  Do we watch films for added information and perspective or simply to repeat a high like the reviewing of a wedding video?  Are we drawn in retrospect to films that supported our ideals at the time or the ideals that we have developed with age?  The question is indeed complex, because it skirts that rather nebulous pond as to why we read at all.  Modern critics will inevitably tie our reading habits to the indulgence of our worst neuroses (modern critics, it should be said, think little of us and less of themselves), and could not possibly imagine that certain people would want to edify themselves from the pure joys of artistic creation.  Nor could their jargon-addled brains ever describe what real artistic pleasure entails since they are bound by edicts thankfully unclear to us to reduce everything to some theory of social, sexual, or national gibberish.  We, however, have no such restrictions.  It is possible for us to watch and re-watch a film about a well-heeled but highly unorthodox family in southwest France and revel in the strangeness of its details.  Their life is unlike ours but needs no category, and the film in question is this unusual production.

We begin with the return from the United States of a prodigal son, François Vasseur (Benoît Magimel).  Apart from good looks, money, and the swagger that studying halfway around the world usually begets, François has a certain surliness to him that we also see in the person who picks him up from the airport, his louse of a father Gérard (played up rather filthily by Bernard Le Coq).  Gérard has no redeeming qualities about him.  He ensnares his son in petty arguments as soon as he arrives, talks up the town council campaign of his second wife, Anne (Nathalie Baye), with inappropriate sarcasm, and generally gives the impression of someone who only likes money, power and being right.  His grin indicates something more: he envies the youth of his son because his son's obvious attractiveness allows him countless opportunities with members of the opposite sex.  If he accomplishes nothing else in life – especially considering that most of life has already been accomplished for him – François is determined not to be like his father.  He may get along with his stepmother, but his real interest (and a typical attraction given the circumstances) is his stepsister Michèle (Mélanie Doutey).  Modern critics' pedestrian conclusions regarding the deep-seated need for such a relationship notwithstanding, its occurrence in real life is rather frequent for one very good reason: both participants know beforehand that it will never work out (some people purposely seek out married partners to afford themselves the same exit strategy).  That said, François and Michèle really, really like one another.  Their desires have certainly been abetted by François's prolonged absence, but they do not hide what they want to do to one another and what life would be like if they could just be left to their own devices.  And they never get the chance they want, or, I should say, as many chances as they want, because of that electoral campaign.

The campaign is for a spot on the council of a small town in Bordeaux, an uninspiring if quaint dominion for a woman who has everything.  Anne is undoubtedly that type of woman, and one gets the impression that the position replaces her need to buy fine clothes or dine out at expensive restaurants.  The fact that the town severely lacks both of these amenities makes her turn towards politics all the more likely.  Through Anne, who is elegant, pleasant, and pretty if self-absorbed in a harmless way,  we begin to perceive the outlines of a far graver concern than the lascivious misdeeds of the stepsiblings.  "Everything in this family is a secret" (said more than once) seems to be the motto of a home formed twenty years ago when Anne's husband and Gérard's wife were killed in the same car accident.  And so we are hardly surprised to learn that someone has been writing poison pen letters against Anne indicating that her family has a sullied history, a history that may have bottomed out during this regime.  Although she lets on that she knows who is behind the accusations, Anne proceeds undeterred in her ambition to govern, if that is the right word.  After all, shouldn't a politician, especially of a somewhat backwater locale, be representative of the rabble?  Wouldn't the modest dimensions of such power not suffice for someone accustomed to the finer things in life?  But Anne will not be denied.  Even when she visits low income housing and displays her utter lack of sympathy with and knowledge of the plight of the everyday, we understand that she and her reptilian campaign manager (Thomas Chabrol, the director's son) will stop at nothing to ensure her election.  She shakes a few hands, pets a few children reluctantly on the head, and tries to stay positive about her chances in a manner reminiscent of a shopper bent on getting what she wants even if it means rummaging through every shelf in every store.  This dominative drive does not ebb even in the face of Gérard's unabashed opposition – at which point we consider a rather hideous probability and then put the matter aside as the streams of thought convene into a large pool.  The only question is whether we actually have the intestinal fortitude to look down to the bottom of that pool for old bones.

The critical reception of La Fleur du Mal was decidedly mixed, perhaps owing to a couple of contrivances that surface in the film's final scenes.  Its subtleties more than make up for its plot twists, and there is a sense of justice in the personal choices a couple of the characters make in the end.  Chabrol has directed better and more profound pieces, but few that contain all the elements of a thriller and yet slip into a literary study from a series of perspectives.  The titular reference to this French poet might have to do with the nature of the crimes committed, or simply with a cynical and apprehensive view of humanity in general.   I have also intentionally refrained from mentioning one last character who plays a valuable role in our realization of the truth, even though an attentive viewer might guess the truth early on.  And given the weird clusters of details about  this family, the truth may seem rather banal.

Footnote

A man can be jealous of anyone but his son or his pupil.

                                                                                                            Eliezer Shkolnik

For some of us gentle souls, no explosion, alien, or free fall could be more thrilling than intellectual discovery.  Surely, physical achievements in sport or on other battlefields may distract us, even inspire us, because youth's brawn and bravery will always possess a certain appeal.  But for those who believe this world to conceal another existence, one of spiritual and intellectual purity, if that is indeed our fate, it is ultimately what we do with our brain and our soul that really matters.  To wit, our soul should be clean of all wickedness and our brain should be brimming with many lifetimes of knowledge, of understanding, of insight, so that we may pass into our next existence with an idea of what this life is for.  An albeit thin idea, but an idea nonetheless.  And it you would be hard-pressed to find thinner and subtler ideas of what life may constitute than the choices depicted in this fine film.

The coy title of our first vignette is "The most difficult day in the life of Professor Skholnik," especially coy when we consider that shkol'nik is the Russian word for "schoolchild."  We quickly learn that there are two Professor Shkolniks: Eliezer (Shlomo Bar-Aba), a Talmudic scholar already past retirement age in many countries, and his fortysomething son Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi), also a scholar, if one of both lesser and greater ambition.  Eliezer spends his days in silence in the national library and his evenings with ear plugs at home pursuing precisely the same interests: a comparison of a vast and indefinite number of versions of the Talmud in search of discrepancies that may help future scholars better understand the glorious history of the Hebrews.  Uriel, bearded and bug-eyed in that manner commonly incident to madmen and charlatans, is a great popularizer of pseudo-academic works, and very much embodies what the faddish among us like to term a 'rock star.'  As such, it is Uriel not Eliezer who has won nearly every Israeli academic prize imaginable and, as we begin our film, it is Uriel not Eliezer who is being welcomed onto a stage and into the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.  An average film would spotlight Uriel as he spouts one platitude after another; a more serious film, however, would, if possible, pan to the person in the audience most affected by the speech, which in this case is a grumpy old Talmudic scholar who happens to share his last name.  Uriel expresses his gratitude to, in order, President Shimon Peres, an academic by the name of Yehuda Grossman (Micah Lewensohn), who will figure into our story's plot in more than one way, and last and perhaps least, his father.  Even if his father is thanked almost perfunctorily as a segue into one of those 'real-life' stories so lame as to justify the need for fiction. 

When Uriel was but a wee lad, eight or thereabouts, he was tasked with a school questionnaire that included the query, "What is your father's profession?"  He had wanted to put "professor," but didn't know whether that was really a "profession" (hysterical laughter from the crowd; perhaps the Hebrew pun is less insipid than the English).  His mother had gently suggested "Talmudic researcher"; his father insisted simply on "teacher."  He was disappointed and ashamed.  "Who boasts at school about his father, the teacher?" wondered an eight-year-old Uriel to his favorite person, himself, and told his father: "I have teachers at school.  You're not a teacher!"  His mother then proposed "senior lecturer" (more hysterical laughter).  But, in the end, a dutiful son heeded an overbearing father's orders and learned to appreciate the profession of a teacher, of "taking from the past generation and passing down to the next."  Uriel's speech concludes with vaguely sincere thanks – sincerity is not his most natural trait – to his father, who all this time appears to have been wincing in pain. 

Then comes one of those scenes that seem to occur only in movies but which actually do happen in real life, in perhaps somewhat less dramatic a fashion.  Our dear Professor Shkolnik – the elder, that is – wanders outside from the fabulous reception and all the fabulous guests and sits for a while alone, his head still down.  Someone on a cell phone is screaming ebullient plans to return to New York for a fundraiser; the guests are all inside, all happy to be with one another; in short, the world is continuing, as it always has, without Eliezer Skholnik's direct participation.  As he attempts to reenter the reception, however, he is stopped by a menacing guard who looks at his hands and asks him the occasion of the reception, a question he refuses to answer.  "Are you a member of the Academy?" asks the guard.  "No," his whole body replies, his face still examining the pavement.  When the guard, with some pity in his beady eyes, finally admits that all he wants to see is a blue wristband (of the kind intimately familiar to binge-drinking American college students), Shkolnik senior has an epiphany of sorts: he looks at all the guests and sees a blue wristband on each one of them.  Now he is not only the one person who doesn't belong at the reception, he also recognizes a deep irony in this oversight as a manuscript expert trained to block out big-picture cohesion for the sake of every individual detail.  At the reception once again thanks to the suddenly benevolent guard, Eliezer's ears are assaulted by those ridiculous 'academic' theories and buzz words that make one cringe in their fraudulence, and then his eyes meet those of the newest member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.  And one look exchanged between the Professors Shkolnik indicates that father has always considered son to be one of those frauds.

Here surfaces one of the hardest of family dilemmas.  Every good parent wants his child to fulfill his potential and succeed to the utmost; but what if the parent thinks his child's success is wholly undeserved?  This is not merely a case of jealousy or envy, but of objective discernment.  Most everyone with enough ambition, luck, and a car salesman's sense of what people want to drive this year can write bestselling mumbo-jumbo; very few can make lasting and original artistic contributions.  What Footnote wisely does not do, however, is sidestep this dilemma by spouting off some nonsense about the meaningless of writing for the future, for immortality, for the perfect reader who may be born decades or centuries after the writer's death.  From its bold introductory music to its rather tantalizing ending, Footnote takes its subject matter very seriously.   The result is twofold: we are inexorably drawn into one crisis after another, and the characters become hilarious because they are not indifferent.  In one scene, Uriel's clothes are stolen from a gym locker room, which leads him to don full fencing garb, a disguise in which he will accidentally spy on his father talking to a female coeval far prettier than Uriel's mother.  In a second, Shkolnik senior grudgingly gives the best-looking journalist God could have ever created (Yuval Scharf) an interview whose most memorable line involves potsherd.  And in a third, Eliezer, who has walked the same route from home to the National Library and back every day for forty years, pauses at a plaque for another scholar, murdered on a similar commute twenty years earlier, which makes us wonder whether the pause has become part of his routine.

Yet for all its comedic wisdom, Footnote remains a generational struggle between two men who go about similar jobs so differently that the distinction must be intentional.  The title itself is proof enough: while Uriel is an unabashed glory-hound, Eliezer contents himself with his once having been mentioned by name, a long time ago it seems, in a footnote in the most authoritative scholarly work on the Talmud.  So when at the very middle of the film a decidedly marvelous event takes place – an event that will embroil both father and son – we begin to learn a great deal more about these two arrogant men and their commitment to their discrete concepts of fairness (perhaps unsurprisingly, the only time that Uriel sounds sincere is when he defends his father's academic achievements to others).  The result is a masterpiece of timing, subtlety, and understated acting the likes of which we rarely see in our days of big, bang, and boom, but this quality in and of itself should not astound us.  If one indeed believes that the written word can endure for millennia and triumph over the trends and trash washed ashore every generation in slightly varied forms, then it is through the written word that we will arrive at the truth.  And why does Uriel's wife call him a coward after he admits that he never cheats on her?  Perhaps because she knows that certain types of people like their truth whole and lovely like an old pot. 

Der Husten meines Vaters

An essay ("My father's cough") by this German writer.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

When my father became as old as I am now, he seemed to me (perhaps naturally) to be older than I feel.  Birthdays were not celebrated at our house – this was seen as a deplorable "Protestant habit" – so while I cannot remember a party, a few details come to mind about the mood that reigned in October of 1930.  (My father shared a birth year, 1870, with Lenin, but, I think, nothing more.)

It was a dreary year.  Total financial collapse, and not your run-of-the-mill 'going broke,' either.  Instead, a baffling transaction called an "insolvency proceeding" took place.  It did sound much more noble than "bankruptcy," and was linked to the collapse of a worker's bank whose director, if I recall correctly, ended up behind bars (credit abuses, expired securities, frivolous speculation).  Our house out in the country had to be sold, and not a penny was left over from the amount we received.  Very disturbed by this event, we all moved into a large apartment on the Ubierring in Cologne, at the time directly across from the vocational school.

Bailiff after bailiff, bailiff's seal after bailiff's seal.  We would rip them off provided they had been freshly applied, in defiance of this premature attempt to seize our belongings.  In time, however, we grew indifferent and let the stickers be stuck.  Soon we noticed that some of the furniture had truly become 'seal colonies' (the piano, for example).  We got along with the bailiffs; sardonic remarks were exchanged, of course, but neither party ever strayed into vulgarities.

I also remember the politically-charged design of the four-pfennig coin involving an emergency decree and a tobacco tax.  This four-pfennig piece was a large, beautifully sculpted copper coin, although it may be that the coin first came out in 1931-32.  The Nazis marched triumphantly into the Reichstag; Brüning was still in office then; and the paper we read then was the Kölnische Volkszeitung.  My older siblings, however, swore by the RMV (Rhein-Mainische-Volkszeitung).

No more playing games outside.  Very painful.  In the suburb of Raderberg we used to play street hockey with old umbrella crooks and empty milk boxes, rounders sometimes, football less often, in the park by the promontory.  The park's roses were also snipped with what we called a Flitsch, a crotch, but which in other German regions is referred to as a Zwille.  When tossing tires we would slip old bicycle rims down a mild meadow cliff; the person whose tire rolled the farthest was the winner.  Records were set; tire battles went around the entire extended block; but using purchased wooden tires was considered inappropriate.  Ping-pong on the terrace, scarecrows in the garden; target practice with air rifles on unused light bulbs which still had bayonet screws.  We saw nothing military in these shooting exercises, much less anything war-like.  Ten years of freedom and too many idle games for me to count.  (The blazing torches on St. Martin's Day, the paper kites we would build and launch, the marbles we would play.)

In the long hallway of the Ubierring apartment we continued our target practice, now with standard-issue targets and pins called Flümmchen (which, I find in old Wrede's dictionary, comes from Flaum, "down" or "fluff," which in turn comes from the Latin pluma; looks like our pins had swabs).  Whoever happened to be in or going into the bathroom, kitchen, or bedroom during these exercises had, of course, to be warned.  The general mood was insouciance and fear, so they cancelled each other out.  Of course not all of our income was reported to the bailiff.  We were paid under the table for certain jobs, while also earning money by renting out our appliances for joinery and carpentry work.  Recently, I came across this passage in Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies: A Love Story: "If you wanted to live, you had to break the law, because all laws condemned you to death."  We wanted to live.

Things proceeded modestly and yet modesty did not become our watchword.  We had enough worries and debts as it was: rent, food, clothes, books, heat, electricity.  Against all this only temporary insouciance was of any help, and only because it was temporary.  Somehow money had to be drummed up for the cinema, for cigarettes, for the coffee we could not do without, all of which was met with only occasional success.  It was during this time that we got to know all the pawnshops.

Yet all of this was not as much fun as it might sound.  The more modestly life rambled on, the less of a watchword modesty became.  I recall with gratitude the loyalty of my older siblings who spared me, the youngest, from so much, even now and then hiding certain things.  Yet what most distressed me during this time was my father's cough.  He was a svelte man: between the ages of nineteen and eighty-four his body weight fluctuated only by one or two kilos; only when he turned eighty-five did he begin to waste away.  He did things in moderation, but he also liked to smoke; yet he never inhaled and never let anyone take away his Lundis (at least not entirely!), thin, pungent cigarillos in small tins.  In this respect he was sad, as well as powerless against the circumstances, and I think sometimes that we children did not properly take part in his mourning.

His cough even outyelled the powerful roar of the number sixteen streetcar; we could hear the cough then from a good distance.  But his cough most distressed me on Sundays in the overcrowded Basilica of St. Severin.  We never went 'all together' to mass, always individually, and it was rare that two or three siblings shared the same pew.  And so we would wait, each in his seat, full of dreadful tension, to hear our father's cough, which would suddenly break out, rise almost to suffocation levels, then, as my father exited the church, peter out anew.  We also understood that he would then stand outside and smoke a Lundi to better his cough. 

Now that I am as old as my father was then, I see that I seem to have inherited his cough (and I am not alone).  There are a few of them in our household who, if I parked on a street choked with cars, would recognize me by my cough, even during the loudest traffic.  I rarely need to ring a doorbell or stick a key in a keyhole; the door is already open before I can do either one.

My cough must lie on wavelengths which penetrate not only traffic jams and screeching brakes, but also many a tap and tattoo, although I do not think one may call my cough "penetrating."  It is composed of variations of different forms of hoarseness, usually expresses some kind of embarrassment, and is only rarely a sign of a cold.  And there are those who know that it is more than a cough – as well as less.

My one-year-old granddaughter, for example, seems to understand it as a form of language or address.  She imitates it, and the two of us converse in coughs, which assume an amused and ironic character and in which we clearly have something to express.  Here I think of Beuys, who once addressed someone solely by clearing his throat and coughing slightly, a very clever way, as it were, of addressing someone.

Perhaps we should establish throat-clearing schools, at the very least experiment with throat-clearing as a school subject.  We should likewise free throat-clearing from its dumb index finger function – a sort of warning of impending tactlessness during a conversation.  The art pour l'art of coughing and throat-clearing.

We should also consider whether some very smart people might want to devise a throat-clearing letter to the editor.

Mallarmé, "Dans le jardin"

A work ("In the garden") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

The lady youth who walks upon the lawn,
In summer trim of apples and of charms,
Where noon eclipses twelve with both its arms, 
And stops her lovely steps amidst its brawn,

As tragic, forlorn spouse, one time did tell 
To Death, seducing then her poet: "Woe!
"You lie, O vain realm! Jealous am I so
"Of this false Eden sad where he shan't dwell."

'Tis why the deepest flowers of the earth, 
Love him with silence, mystery and lore,
While in their hearts the purest pollen sleeps;

And come the breeze, by these delights he keeps
A name for goblets to be drunk in mirth:
"Helène!" his feeble voice will always roar!