gets swallowed up by the Earth.
And you can say good-bye to it, erase it from your head forever.
The advantage was that she had predictable parents—she knew where they worked and what routes they took from home to work or to go shopping. Bratislava is a city with closed-off neighborhoods, like remote continents. In Lapa, Rosa doesn’t meet anyone from her family or from work. In the old town, the same people have been circulating for years, slowly aging in the cafés of her childhood.
Rosa. Despite my sense of security, it was clear that eventually they would figure out I was skipping. But this only gave that time a certain cachet. The cachet of treasure. Stolen time that you should enjoy: I definitely started writing poetry.
Today, she almost didn’t make it to work. Like it used to be in high school. She got up in the morning, left the house, but then just kept walking as she passed by that unpleasant building with her desk and the monitor in front of her face. Without blinking, she continued farther through the wintry city and wandered into a shop, where she put a bag of oranges, rolls, cheese and peppers in her basket—as if for an outing. A person with a history of crossing borders (into drugs, alcohol, food, lying, skipping out, unfaithfulness) easily backslides straight to the peak of their worst impulses—and their rock bottom. To the exposed nerve emitting heat. Like a moth/nightmare.
It’s raining and snowing on and off and she feels like she’s never felt such hüzün before. But it’s not true, she had the same thing last January. Every January. Only a meeting with Klaus Chapter one winter revived her. The old writer was sitting in the middle of a café full of people, glowing. He was laughing, talking, eyes shining—a firecracker of energy. She felt as if he had thrown a coat or rain jacket over her—a blanket full of fireflies. Nothing ethereal, just a heavy, thick covering—or maybe actually a physical body. Of a strong old man. A body full of light, joy, energy. Babbling with life!
Rosa. My scratched-up head hurts, the wounds are throbbing. Yesterday I wrote to Son telling him that over my lunch breaks I escape from work at 1:00pm just as they’re opening the night bar, and I drink. I knock down one margarita after another.
She discovered tequila.
One could say.
Like when the sculptor discovered a skull—he took it under his arm and didn’t come out of his atelier for a year.
Rosa. I’m trapped. I want to lie in bed next to Son, but instead, I’m sitting at work, a cramp personified. A trapped, bare, blood-soaked winter bone.
Her head, exactly in the spots where her hair & unconsciousness begin, is scratched bloody. It’s piling up under her nails. Odd that anyone who talks to her for an extended period of time starts scratching their head, too—people around her, colleagues, the cuckoo birds.
Rosa. Reflection in the mirror. My face has gotten thicker. Like a person who goes to work. High time to return to life.
I feel how work—any kind of disciplined work with rules and colleagues—exhausts me. It sucks out the marrow and the innards. Picks them out to make soup.
The Great One remembers how when he started school as a child, he was excited to meet friends, but at the same time felt he wasn’t himself around other kids.
Rosa feels it when she’s alone with Son for a long time and then has to go back to work. Among the cuckoos.
Rosa. We have fun together, eating, drinking, talking trash, yelling—but then when I’m alone again, I realize it was utter chaos. Of another world. A flaming comet with long wild hair. Apparently tied in a ponytail. And I’m surprised that our silliness, that debauchery and revelry, which I admittedly initiated myself, didn’t cause any accidents. Or tragedy.
The odd school of life2. Merriment as neurosis. Humor as war.
And, all the while, as if I were a swimmer, it’s clear to me that there’s nothing more dangerous than having a laughing fit when you’re in the water. You have trouble keeping your head above water. Waves wash over your face.
Today I read that they found the dead body of a Japanese tourist in the Danube. He jumped from Novy Most into the river. His Japanese friends said he jumped for fun.
Who knows how many twists and turns of the river it lasted…a Japanese animé joke.
My grandmother, before going to sleep, before turning off the light, terrified, but with joy: So we’ll survive, won’t we? Then we’ll survive after all…
When she was in a good mood, Rosa’s first boss called her employees little cuckoos. “How are you today, my little cuckoos?”
Rosa. Cuckoos, what a phenomenon—women who fill every day of my world. Uninvited guests. The bottomless stamina of cuckooness. They’ve always got something to say, to shout, to prattle about.
(Work, children, family, money, music, family, children, work, food, cognac, sex, plastic surgery, political theories, cellulite on the walls, food, cognac, work, money, sex, cellulite.)
At wit’s end, writes Camus.
I escape from work. On the dark street, I run into Son. After a long drought, we suddenly kiss on the sidewalk.
Tequila is so powerful, it outshines life.
Like the stars—
It throws into the air
All the crumbs.
We have coffee. The wintery city grips us like a steel trap. Hüzün. We get on the train to Vienna. Just to be inside something that’s MOVING.
It moves farther and farther away. Weg! Weg!
So we’ll survive, won’t we? We’ll survive after all.
Rosa’s first boss, the little captain, always acted distracted. It was supposed to draw attention away from her purposeful deeds. She was always losing her knife, so she could pat her pockets and mumble, got my knife, got my knife. Got my wallet, got my mobile, got my keys, got my knife.
The little captain was the archetype of a cuckoo. She devoured the space with her overflowing energy, all around her a kind of shivering gelatin spread, muddying the air. She made things opaque.
She was forever clutching a small animal under her arm. She always dressed him differently, so sometimes it was a dog, other times a wolf, a raven, a mouse, a reindeer, a dolphin or a pangasius.
It was her sweetie. It threw up under other people’s desks and peed on their backpacks, purses, feet. The little captain placed it on the table during meals and it ate from plates and nibbled at crumbs. Everyone thought it was funny, it was so cute, such a sweetie. And the little captain would shout: Is it bothering you? Oh, I’m so glad it’s OK with you!
The animal was extremely loved.
Just as ogres’ hearts are found in the golden eggs laid by geese, the little captain’s heart was in her pet. The other cuckoos nicknamed her clown beast.
The clown beast’s smile and roaring laughter wafting through the forest: that was what held Rosa prisoner. She didn’t want to run away from a laughing person. From a cackling cuckoo.
In
