Monument Maker, page 48
I made my way to Germany. How? Things are becoming blurry. There is a storm in the future. Clouds coming down. I made my way to Germany in time for the Passion play. What? The Passion play in Oberammergau. The Passion play that lasts one whole day. Bavaria was cursed by the bubonic plague, overrun by rats infected with a mutant strain and with the bodies piled up in mounds. To be done with the judgement of God, and in order for Him to spare Oberammergau, the residents of the village promised to put on a Passion play that depicted the final days of Jesus Christ on earth. Since the seventeenth century they have performed this play repeatedly over the course of five months in every year that ends in the numeral zero. What year is this? 1950.
Do you understand what a tableau vivant is? I asked the young boy. He had extorted a packet of cigarettes from a group of dying soldiers. Yes, he said, it is a vivid picture. You are merely repeating what I am saying, I said to him. Repeating is not understanding. Then why repeat the Passion play every day for five months? Because there is no understanding in the judgement of the Lord. Have you come with judgement? the boy asked me. Have you come to bring judgement down on the world? I have come to rescue all of the disappeared, to unite all true loves. Would that you could, the young boy said, and he spat into the dirt. But I’m too young to have had a love to return to. My parents threw me out when I was a kid. I’m beyond rescuing. A tableau vivant is a picture that has come to life, I told him.
I stood in front of a group of small children gathered around a cross. The children were completely motionless. I was able to observe them from all sides. I was able to ascertain that they did not even blink. Not one of them. They did not shake or fidget or scratch at themselves the way young monkeys are prone to. Not once did their gaze leave the cross at their centre. They call this the Adoration, and this is how it begins. I looked closer at the children. I surreptitiously poked one of them in the arm, a dark girl with freckles and with thick curly hair. No response. The child seemed fixed to the spot. Don’t tell me, the young man said, you had your suspicions that you were their creator. I had my suspicions, I admitted. But no longer that I myself was their creator. Rather, that in the wake of the war, simulacra were the order of the day. That truly we had been prophets. After all, a Januist is a man who is capable of seeing both ways. I made my way to the stalls. Great crowds were all around. They replay the Passion, day in day out, for the space of five months, I said to myself. Truly these are mechanical men. Then it dawned on me. Is that not what God Himself demands of us? The mechanising and regulating of His own creation? Were we not prophets? The play had begun.
I took a part-time job as an orderly at a mental home on the outskirts of a small town in order that the dead, whose chosen representative I had become, might converse more freely with the living or the touched or the half-dead, more appropriately, the kind of maniacs who had been locked away for hearing voices or for following commands, as I intended to put my theory to the test, my theory that the war had given birth to a new race of mechanised men, a hybrid who now wore a new face, a theory that had become confused in my mind with Christ’s promise of rebirth through suffering, a promise that I had become the living personification of, even as it exiled me from the company of my fellow men, even as I came into the confidence of madmen and was brought to the understanding that a single gesture, obsessively repeated, as by a man who has taken leave of his senses, as by a black stork in the remains of a bombed-out zoological garden, might contain all of the hope and dread that the world affords.
The inmates were suffering from shell shock or, as it is referred to in the modern world, post-traumatic stress disorder. Something in their brains had been broken, as a hymen, by the force of their own experience, which said to me that we stood at a key moment in evolution, as the love play between what was out there and what was in here had toppled into an overwhelming one-sided assault which consciousness had been slow to take up, in which consciousness played the part of the unwilling sub, to put it in a way that would have held the attention of my fellow jailbirds. And so, the rebuilding of man, in the second half of the twentieth century, became the responsibility of the dead and the dying, the insane and the blind, who stood as its crowning achievement.
I am organising a march, I told them. I am organising a great homecoming. Are you with me? A repeated phrase, an involuntary spasm, an obsessive tracking of the room. One man spoke to me as if I was his returned son, always with the same circular conversation. Heinrich, what time is it? What time is it, my boy? Father, it is Christmastime. Is it Christmastime yet? Father, it is Christmastime. Then go tell your mother that you are home for Christmas. Go tell her you are home for Christmas and that the shop is open. Another drew pictures of a man on stilts who with three strides could cover all of Germany. A third clacked the stumps of his arms together in a frenzy.
I worked under a doctor named Strindberg who claimed a distant relation to the melancholy Swedish playwright of the same name. We shall cure them with the aid of a metal bed frame secreted in the attic, the doctor would joke, a reference to the playwright’s belief that he had been controlled by a bed frame of similar design during an extended experience of mesmerism and possession documented in his books Inferno and From an Occult Diary. Strindberg also had a very pretty wife, the real Strindberg, my Dr. Strindberg, although unlike his distant relation he enjoyed real sex with her, not conjugation with her spirit form, as his namesake had enjoyed or more accurately suffered from when his third wife, Harriet Bosse, thirty years his junior, would invade his dreams and make spectral love to him. Can you be possessed by your relations? I asked the doctor. Is biological inheritance not a form of possession? he asked me in return. Is heredity not another name for the ghost in the machine?
Strindberg quoted Strindberg: “Who was the artificer who forged the links in these infernal syllogisms? Where was he? ‘There would be nothing for it but to kill the gold-maker.’
That was the last thought which my tortured mind could retain before I fell asleep about sunrise.”
What did you do during the war? I asked him. I sat it out on the sidelines, he said. I continued to practise, in secret, even though psychiatry itself was looked down upon by the regime in Germany at the time. But what an opportunity, he marvelled, a whole continent of the insane, he said, no end to the varieties of madness, be boasted. And yourself? I too practised in secret, I told him, though my process was more invasive.
?
I was involved in experimental surgery.
?
I was a pioneer of facial transplants.
?
I was the gold-maker.
I laughed and made light of it. Facial transplants are an impossibility, he said. Exactly, I said to him.
My quarters were situated on the second floor of the hospital, a converted nineteenth-century tenement in the north of Wuppertal. Truly, I had drifted. I had followed suggestions, associations, the fugitive signings of chance, in order to find myself where I was. I had been recognised, once, and now I led a furtive existence, careful not to wear my face fully uncovered, concerned, somehow, that my face or the other life that I had inherited was somehow directing me back to its old haunts, intent to resume the Januist experiment of the past, even as I had become the living embodiment of its dream, its vision of the two-faced man.
I had been recognised in the street, whilst walking in the pedestrian precinct and taking one of our mental cases for a run in his chair, which was something we tried to do as often as possible, Dr. Strindberg believing firmly in the display, if not the full integration, of a society’s madmen, just as psychiatry pushed for a form of cathartic wellness by the uncovering of the mind’s tightest knots and deepest complexes, so we too believed in the uncovering and the exposure of its tortured bodies, its drool-soaked overgarments and its fevered hallucinations.
I had been approached by an older gentleman who had greeted me as Donald and who had grasped both my hands and shaken them vigorously. Donald, he said. I thought that we had lost you. I denied any such thing. I’m afraid I have no idea what you are talking about, I told the man, and made to push the wheelchair we had improvised from the mangled frame of an old rusted bike further down the street. But he had blocked our progress. What are you doing? he said to me. And who is this man? The madman in the chair clanked his handless stumps together and looked up at our interlocutor with a tortured expression. Our interlocutor passed his gaze between me and the madman. Is this . . . he started, but before the sentence was out we had pushed through him and away. The man shouted something after us, something, I fancied, about making contact or staying in touch. By the time I returned to the hospital I was shaken. Had a rendezvous been arranged in another life? I wondered. Was there a point of contact? Had I arranged for my own great return, in secret? I was a man possessed by a mission, a mission that I could only be dimly aware of. In the meantime, I gave bed baths to cripples and cleaned up their mess and talked in riddled conversations to men with shattered memories.
And what of the dead? I hear you ask. I kept them in a room at the top of the hospital where they were least likely to cause a commotion.
As our friendship progressed I would often dine at the weekend with Dr. Strindberg and his pretty wife, herself a budding artist. As I examined them across the table at a tacky beach-themed bar in a Wuppertal backstreet that had become a favourite due to its experimental cocktail list and its mix of low-class and eccentric clientele, I saw them as a reflection of everything that Mariella and I might have been, or more properly could have been, once. Which is to say I could feel the past of my face colonising the present of my body.
What do you paint? I asked her. Animals, she said. Chimeras, she said. Invented animals. Of course, I said. Why of course? she asked me. I was about to say, because you are a reflection of what I once was myself, but instead I merely hinted that I too, in the wake of the Great War, had become interested in cryptozoology. Why in the wake of the Great War? she asked me, and I explained that the war had flattened zoological gardens across Europe, meaning that we had inadvertently seeded the continent with all sorts of previously unseen animal life, animal life that remained furtive and that kept away from human beings but animal life that was recombining and cross-breeding in all sorts of unimaginable ways. I paint more from myth, she said to me, I’m thinking more of Pegasus the flying horse than some kind of gruesome backstreet hybrid. Flying horses, I said to her, that too.
My plans were confused. I was waiting around for something to happen, for this rendezvous that I felt sure would take place, while at the same time avoiding it, hiding myself away, burying myself in the endlessly repeated complexes of our patients. It only occurs to me now that I had fled one madhouse for another, all the time dragging the dead with me, the unresolved dead, the silent dead.
At lunch breaks and in the early evenings I would steal into the room at the top of the hospital that I reserved for the dead, the dead, the dead, and I would scan their ranks. My family no longer pursued me. I hadn’t seen the hideous cadaver my father had become since our days touring the drawing rooms and theatres of the great and the good, never mind the small dog that now hosted the soul of my brother. For these were the disappeared, the never dead, forever. What was my role in all of this? What was I to do with them? They shuffled towards me as soon as I unlocked the door, gathering around me and pushing up against me, their faces to the floor, or at least what was left of them. I was never afraid. Instead it was a vague sense of mission that tied me to them. A mission that was soon to be revealed.
You have been talking to yourself all night, the young boy said to me. I woke in the stables of the jail, in a pool of my own sweat. Summer had arrived and with it a change in our fortunes. The winter had killed off many and now the prison seemed semi-abandoned. There were stories of jailers walking away, of soldiers absconding in the middle of the night. The war was turning. Soon it was as if we were a walled-in city-state, a strange experiment in barbarous living, more than just another internment camp for the dead and the dying.
Didn’t you put your face to better use than hiding away in a mental institute? the young boy asked me as he took a leak from a terraced walkway that ran high above the central courtyard. Think about it, he said. You know that you will be freed from this prison one day, you know that your face is rebuilt, you know that once again you can take your place amongst the living, in the heart of life, and this is what you do with it, this is to be your fate, a hospital orderly, a bed-cleaner, an ass-wiper? I struck the boy hard around the head and he urinated all down his leg. Some things are fixed and have to be, I said to him. Would you deny the workings of gravity? He looked down at the stain on his trousers and shook his head. So, did you make love to Dr. Strindberg’s wife? he asked me. Did you fire right in there? he said. Come on, he said. For God’s sake. Live a little.
Dr. Strindberg was ill with the beer. He would go on benders that meant he was often blacked-out unconscious or recovering in a darkened room, so that he would send his pretty wife to do the rounds on his behalf. His was a private practice, with no ties to the state and so answerable, essentially, to no one. This is before the days of reform and redress, when there was no one to complain to and no one to expect anything different than that a catatonic might be left in a bed encrusted with his own faeces for days on end.
We would meet in her private quarters, on the floor below the doctor’s apartment, they maintained separate living arrangements within the same building, and some of my greatest memories are of entering her on the divan with the headboard in the shape of a half-sun, as if we were capable of fucking the sun into the sky while all around us lay artefacts and collectibles and items of clothing that seemed to speak to us in our passion, a bowl of fruit slowly rotting in the darkness, a wicker chair that held a large potted fern, a swan made of glass that sat on the ledge in front of the mirror, a silk glove hanging limp from a shelf, the old-fashioned wallpaper with designs like octopuses or orchids, and her curly auburn hair and the dark of her eyes, the feel of her teeth on my shoulder (go on, get in there!), and her white chiffon dress pulled up around her waist and her panties down around her ankles (oh Lord!) and her pussy (go on . . . ) and her pussy, delicately shaved to a thin strip of hair (f-me, I have never seen that before, what wonders the future has in store for you, didn’t I tell you?), and every fuck felt like a reunion, every orgasm a reconstituting of the way things were (stick to the graphic sex descriptions, come on now), so that I began to feel that perhaps my mission was with the living and not the dead (don’t get distracted now, get back to the action), so that as she climbed up onto me one more time (here we go . . . ), so that as she guided me inside her (her trim little pussy, think about it, wow), so that as we exploded together (damn, no, seriously, is that what it feels like?) I began to feel that the rendezvous that my new face had set for me, the rendezvous for whom the dead waited in abeyance upstairs, was a simple love story, a simple boy-meets-girl tale, could it be that trivial, that profound (and did she say anything to you when you fucked her, did she say things like, give me your juice, baby?), and when we made love she would say, give me your juice, baby, as she lay with her ass on my face (wow, didn’t see that coming!), and I came to believe that we were in love and that our assignation across time was a form of poetry that came from the love play of space and time (back to the action, baby, come on), for love itself is a kind of sixth sense, is a kind of immediate or sometimes slowly dawning revelation that you are stood, right here, right now, in the presence of the future, it is a recognising of something that hasn’t happened yet and with that knowledge in my heart I was overwhelmed when Strindberg’s pretty wife revealed to me that she was pregnant and that I was, indeed, the father, as we lay on the divan with the half-sun, whether setting or rising I was unaware, at that time, only that it marked a star’s transit of the sky (and why does she have no name, this pretty wife?), and I said to myself, true love, true love secretes itself in history, true love is untold in time, true love, my friend, is just as soon forgotten.
I was walking with one of our madmen strapped to an improvised wheelchair when I noticed something odd. Across the street, some way off, I glimpsed what appeared to be a lynch mob kicking and lashing out with sticks against something that lay huddled in their midst. As I approached with my madman someone broke from the crowd and ran up to us and warned us to keep our distance. There’s a spell upon it, he said. Keep back. It has been suckled on the witch’s tit. Don’t be insane, man, I said to him. This is the twentieth century. The tits of witches have long dried up. The crowd parted as I drove towards its centre, pushing my madman in front of me. There I found a hybrid animal, a chimera, possibly one of our own, lying bloody on the ground, its grotesquely outsize arms and hands held tight around a gaping wound in its head. Its back leg circled and pawed with an automatic motion. It had pissed itself. It’s the work of the Devil, someone in the crowd cried. A curse on Wuppertal, someone else said. The end of days! Get back, I said. I’m a doctor. I undid the straps on my madman and lifted him into the arms of a stranger. Hold him for me, I said to her, as he drooled all down her dress. Then I gathered the chimera into my arms and tied it to the chair. The beast was unconscious. You, man, I instructed one of the navvies in the crowd, pick that madman up and carry him back to the asylum for me. He followed behind us as our macabre convoy made its way down a cobblestone street to much jeers and fear and taunting.
