Proleterka, page 5
It was summer. A sweltering summer. The sultry heat parched the trees and the peace. We go into our relative’s house. They have laid him out on a table, beside the window. From the window, not a breath of wind. We gather round him. Fragile, slender, pearls at her throat, Johannes’s former wife wears a bewildered look, her fingers brush the relative’s hand. What was that affection she was showing for the suicide? “She is getting closer to grief.” I had never seen her so moved, she was looking in the relative’s face, I thought, for something that we try to see when it is too late. “Too late,” I would have liked to tell her.
Since she was a believer, she wanted a priest. The priest instantly refused to hold a funeral mass in church. His superiors would not permit the coffin to enter the church for the religious service. The priest agreed to come into the house. He blesses the body. His cassock was dirty. Grease stains on his cassock. It was probably the sultriness, the terrific heat that had glued itself to his body. His face running with sweat. He could not wait to get out of that house. Like all of us, except Johannes’s former wife.
The family was hot, but it was impeccable. They were prepared for the infernal climate of a sunny day in the country. Everyone was dry-eyed. Almost absent in the presence of the relative who had to be closed up as soon as possible. The flies buzzed. The sky became duller and duller. Tea and biscuits were served. We drink the tea around the relative who cannot know that the Catholic Church has rejected him. I condemn those religions that have no compassion for suicides. I condemn those who condemn. Condemn the word sinner. Words that lead to vendettas. The Church punished us too, by denying us the religious ceremony. It punished the suicide of our relative. And we all felt like suicides, unsuccessful suicides. Which has always been our vocation, for generations.
He did not even look like a suicide. The hole was tiny, his hair hid it. Everything was becoming insignificant in that house. Johannes’s former wife thanks the country priest. Suddenly the refusal of a blessing in church becomes a gift. It was a gift of the Church that our relative was denied a funeral service. All that was necessary was a hasty sign of the cross, a whiff of incense, the Latin, the murmured prayers. That’s enough. We thank him. We go out of our way to thank him excessively. Now the priest was feted, the guest of honor, it was he who saved us. We could not have borne other ceremonies. There is a moment, a long moment, in which everything becomes vain. Everything loses consistency. Becomes irrelevant. The priest’s cassock, sanctified by then, leads the cortège. It looks as though it is floating in the shimmering haze. A handful of people walk hurriedly in the scorching heat. The vegetation pitted. Stricken. As if sprayed with acid.
They say that in the preceding days our relative had been shooting at birds. He was practicing. He had never done so before. He had several hunting jackets. He would go out for his walks wearing a hunting jacket, but he did not shoot. His dogs did not like the sound of gunshots. Of course, it’s a far different thing to aim high, at the sky, than to aim in front of a mirror. At the left temple.
He had practiced by shooting a few birds. Now, some of them stop on his windowsill. There were lots of them, when they took him away.
I ask Johannes to excuse me. I have to get out of the dining room. The pastor caresses his wife’s hand, as if to reassure her. The strong hand, knotty and long, and the doll’s hand. I think of something carnal and violent. The pastor has never said a word to me during the voyage. His wife is sitting on the edge of her seat, her feet do not touch the floor. The pastor will give a sermon for each of the Guild passengers, when their turn comes.
A sailor brings me dinner. Nikola has arranged this. Every evening I eat on deck. I apologize to Johannes. After the hors d’oeuvres. In any case he always eats alone, in the hotel. Save when he is invited by his best friend. Or by someone from the Guild. They bring him his food without cutlery or glasses. He uses his Baccarat glasses and his silver cutlery. His fruit comes from a shop in the Bahnhofstrasse. Two apples. One pear. In a cardboard box. His repast is a frugal one. He swallows several pills. The table is small and round. For one person. In the hotel room, an austere order. Nothing personal, nothing to identify the room. Only the number.
Years afterward I would see the photographs of what had belonged to him. The factory too. Over one hundred years before, Johann Jakob, the founder, had established a textiles factory in a place called Rote Trauer, Red Sorrow. Through the town ran a river that became tinged with flame at dusk. The hour at which they tolled the bells. No believers entered the church. They were afraid to cross the bridge. Yet the bells continued to peal, to call. It was as if they were chanting the names of the inhabitants. The name of Johann Jakob. It was he who had donated the bells. Their pealing was fierce, eloquent. A runaway sermon that scourged the silence, as if out hunting for souls. As if howling out the names of Johann Jakob’s descendants. Johannes’s mother used to say that that place could have had no name other than Red Sorrow. That place had given them wealth. And it had taken it back. The bell ropes were pulled by a malign spirit. Johannes’s twin brother’s illness coincided with the loss of the family fortune. Which Johannes has always looked upon with his cold eyes. While his twin remained in the wheelchair. He struggled to look up at the sky. Even just to keep his eyelids raised. He would stare at something. As if it were the final point. He no longer noticed the changing of the seasons, as he became weaker and weaker. He lowered his head. Now he was accompanying us on the sea voyage. To see the point to which Johannes’s daughter, unlike them, wishes to live. The dead twin sails, as we sail. The blades of a wind gauge idly rotate in Hades.
Johannes’s daughter and the officer meet for the second time. The conversation has made no progress. The girl follows him to his cabin. It is small. A bunk, a table, two chairs. They sit down on the low bunk. The girl’s clothes are on the floor, a light heap. She gives a serious smile. The officer is still in uniform. Johannes’s daughter had seen the same scene in a film. What was the next sequence? She does not want tenderness. The officer seems to foresee her desires. He bears down on her with violence. Every move with violence. Every caress. Suddenly the girl feels exhausted. Through the upper half of the porthole, dawn is beginning to break. She has the strength to get up, take her clothes, and flee. She goes back to Johannes’s cabin. A brief night passes. Brief nightmares. The following day she looks tired. The day after that, she goes ashore.
On the calendar the places are the days. The visits ashore mark the time. On the program today, Santorini. The volcanic island is not shown on the participants’ programs. The ship and the captain decided to put in there at the last minute. The crew unloaded us in a place that was “not included” with a certain joy. We mount the mules. Slowly. In file. The thirty-year-old woman goes before me. She waves to someone on board the Proleterka. I cannot see who. She is wearing colonial shorts, a silk blouse, and a big hat with a blue ribbon. Her legs elegantly draped sidesaddle across the back of the mule as if she were sitting on the edge of a precipice. And the precipice is there to admire her. Two words accompany me like a refrain: “living” and “experience.” People imagine words in order to narrate the world and to substitute it. The two words must take concrete form. On the mule’s back it is pleasant to mull things over. We skirt a monastery. How much time will the Proleterka give me for experience? She is the one in command.
Johannes has trouble in mounting the mule. I have never seen him run. I would perhaps have felt a bit uneasy, having a father who runs. He used to watch me run. He would wait for me after my skiing lessons, leaning on his stick. He would accompany me to the ice rink, while I skated. He, who could neither ski nor skate nor run, was my motionless companion. I was consigned to him for a part of the summer and winter holidays. During the school year I was consigned to others. At six I won a ski race, the only time. At around seven I began to ski less well. Everything that he could not do, he had his daughter learn. Like tennis. And he would wait for me at the end of the match. Leaning on his stick. When my schooling was over, I stopped skiing, skating, and playing tennis.
From the heights of Santorini, I look at the landscape. The cliffs plunging down to the sea. In the distance, as if stranded, the Proleterka. Dozing in the spent dreams of the volcanoes. Hazy and still. In the afternoon we return on board.
A peremptory voice calls an officer. An order echoes out. The sun was taking a long time to set. One felt like pleading with the sky to get dark. The day did not want to come to an end. The captain calls again. “He’s in his cabin,” I say – and I add: “He is not alone.” The captain pretends not to hear. In a kind and playful way he says: “Jealous.” And he turns his back on me. I realize immediately that I have made an unpardonable error. I should have kept quiet. I was keeping an eye on the other one, the other woman. I had been unable to resist letting the captain know. That I knew everything that happened aboard the Proleterka, my ship. I informed him that the woman had not chosen him. That’s all. She was in the first mate’s cabin.
Professor Z.’s son is holding a glass and seems to be talking to the waves. His round, bulging eyes stare at the sea. The fathers have not brought their children on the cruise. Except for my father and Professor Z., who is doctor to all the passengers on the Proleterka. To Johannes and me. He vaccinated me against smallpox. His son has changed, a pink shirt. It is open over his smooth chest with its fine, blond down. He is wearing perfume, and smells of disinfectant. He kisses my hand and sighs, sorrowfully. The trip is a disappointment, his weary voice tells me. He concentrates for a moment before saying why. Yes, the bunk was too short, he could not stand it any longer. He does not want to be a doctor. He is in the third year of medical school. The health of the human body does not matter to him. Nor do diseases. Every time his father cures someone he is seized by despondency. Everyone on board is his father’s patient. The world is a perennial illness. And so, he wanted to imply, are things of a sexual nature. “Which things?” I ask. He is embarrassed. He bets that I too have a tiny scar on my arm. “They think they are safe.” On account of a tiny scar. His voice is slow, nasal, monotonous.
Narbe, he keeps on repeating, scar. “You don’t understand,” he says. Why then is he studying medicine? Because he has no willpower. Thanks to his lack of will, he lives. He has given himself over completely to the enemy, to his father. He is an only child. In him there are the unborn children of his parents’ marriage. They wanted more children, three at least. The desires of his parents have deprived him of willpower. The unborn, in a certain sense, have deprived him of the will to live. He had said: “No, thanks” to the voyage. Then he found himself on the voyage. Affirmation and negation have no sense for him. His mother, the doctor’s wife, thinks she has lost two children. The unborn drive him to study medicine. They are in agreement with his father. Now his mother is in a clinic with bars. She wants to get out. Outside there is an extremely beautiful lawn. She sees them playing. With a tiny ball. The children must have surprisingly good eyesight, they can see what is not there. In this they resemble their mother. Their mother plays cards. They cheat. Their mother gets angry. Mother does not like losing. She goes for them. They look for the money in a black leather purse. The purse is empty. They go to rummage through their mother’s bag. She pleads with them. They must not take her money. They will have it. They will have it naturally, with the will. They have no need to cheat. And in any case she has been drawing up wills for months. The children are satisfied. They take the written sheets of paper and carry them off, to the lawn. She watches at them from behind the bars. Thrilled, they read the wills in their favor.
Well, doesn’t her father see? Doesn’t Johannes see his daughter’s behavior? It is unverschämt, shameless. We are in the dining room. Johannes’s best friend looks with commiseration at the corner table. The neglected table. Johannes is absent and indifferent. He tries to tell me something, I should not leave the table. Immediately his voice dies away. Without conviction. Do what you like, say his clear and wounded eyes. The room sways. The waiters bring the hors d’oeuvres. They too no longer want anything to do with the passengers of the Guild. Politely, I get up, excuse myself. The dining room is a prison.
Nikola shoves me violently into the cabin. They must not see us. The captain can know, but he must not see us. He locks the door. He is violent on the bunk too. I had decided: we shall do it all. I want more and more. At school, with my friend Sebastian (that’s what she wanted to be called) we used to talk about sex. She wanted to do it with strangers. “Primordially,” she used to say laughing. Without conversation. She is sixteen. Experienced. She would tell me things and provoke me. Now, in bed with the second mate, I think of my friend. Of her erotic and wild nature. Slim, short hair. Her nape smooth and bare. Wary. Taut as a bow. She used to say that she wanted to possess physical pleasure at all costs. There is nothing else. There was nothing else around us, she would say. She considered education harmful. We do nothing else but educate ourselves from morning till night, like a long sleep. Sebastian should have been watching us. I was behaving a little as if she were present. She was taking notes. An invisible presence in the cabin. A little smile in her eyes. “At last, you too,” she would have said. Yes, at last me too.
Nikola knew how to take my thoughts too. They are in a void. He whispers a few words. I do not understand. “Ja te ljubim,” I love you, I say in his language in a small voice. I am exhausted. When you are exhausted you feel like continuing until you reach a kind of annihilation. Complete abandon. “That’s enough now,” he says in Italian. His voice comes to me like a whiplash. “Get dressed.” Like an insult. “That’s enough now.” I throw on my clothes. There is still time. His turn on watch begins in an hour. From four to eight in the morning. He kicks me out.
“Rhodes, Delos, Mykonos”: it says in the program. Three days ashore. We visit Rhodes on foot, from eight in the morning until noon. We visit everything that the program offers. The Templars’ Hospital, the Templars’ Way, the castle, the walls… It is all in the program. Johannes is fatigued. He cannot walk so much. The sun penetrates his soul, his ailing heart, his eyes, washed out and faded for generations. It penetrates his memories. In the past, burning. I think about Nikola, but I cannot avoid thinking intensely about my father. A ghost at my side. We go back on board for dinner. Shadows in the dining room. I draw the curtains alongside our little table. The light bothers Johannes. And me too. Perhaps we have the same illness. My eyes will become faded too. Our eyes are not strong like those of his wife, my mother. Like those of the women of the generations that came before her. They all had dark eyes. Even when they were blue or green.
I do nothing but look. What I do not know is where Johannes is looking. I cannot understand where he comes from. From a disused factory? From a hotel room? Yet my father and I are united by a bond, as if by a superior will, which is not of this earth. As a little girl I used to say to him: “Sind Sie mein Vater?” Are you my father? “Herr Johannes, ich bin ihre Tochter,” I am your daughter. Legally I belonged to him. I was his fourteen-days companion. His companion for a few winter days, a few summer days. And now, exceptionally, a departure from the rules, in spring. Spring is bad for him. Nature too.
Aboard the Proleterka, dead moments, stasis. The aftermath of the visit to the ruins. The nervous irritability that grips the passengers after visits ashore. The passengers have only just returned on board. Stunned, worn out. The visits have enfeebled their vital energies. This was spotted instantly by the crew. Who thrust them into their cabins. In captivity. Until they got their strength back. It seems as if every leg of the journey is harmful for the ladies and gentlemen of the Guild. Ruins, temples, stones, and blades of grass can be harmful. Even the Proleterka could be harmful for the passengers.
The third mate walks on. Robust. He walks with a rolling gait, as if it were stormy.
Johannes’s daughter follows him to the cabin. He tells her to strip. He tells her to do what she does with Nikola. And no nonsense. The daughter thinks that this is part of experience. She strips and does what she does with Nikola. The mate’s rough fingers fondle her. Scales. Like Nikola, he is violent. She feels as if drawn by lots. Drawn by lots by the crew. She feels pleasure in the disgust. I don’t like it, I don’t like it, she thinks. Yet she does it all the same. She no longer has much time. The Proleterka is the locus of experience. By the time the voyage is over, she must know everything. At the end of the voyage, Johannes’s daughter will be able to say: never again, not ever. No experience ever again. “I want to go,” she says now. The other throws her clothes at her. “Be my guest.” He laughs, pointing at the door.
Entering the Bosphorus. It is the end of the journey. Three nights left. Three evenings in the dining room. Two stopovers. Istanbul and Athens. The Proleterka grants me a little more time to get to know Johannes. It is my last chance to know something about my father. To realize who my father is. And I avoid it. He is sitting together with some other men on the deck. Dark glasses. Dressed in dark colors. As always. I should like to go to him and tell him to stay in the most sheltered place. His friend, his best friend, is talking in a loud voice. He is laughing. Beside him, his wife, arcanum of ill luck. I look at Johannes and fear for his life. I avoid him. I can look at him from a distance. Consider his presence from a distance. I shall have other chances to know my father. I avoid knowing, as if this were the only way of knowing. I observe him. Together with the passengers of the Guild. Together with his friend. They were friends as boys, as students. Even then they went on boat trips together. On the lakes. Trips in the country. The smiling friend. Suntanned even in winter.
