The other shadow
I make lists of things: soap, soup, batteries, film. And piles of things: socks, maps, passport, compass, a white stone with a hole in it for luck.
You’re not on any of my lists nor in any of the mounds I make of the makings of another journey.
The ordinary things come with me anyway – stray hairs of the cat stuck to my pants that will become far away memory of cat
demanding supper: tuna. Now. Some music for the road, some photographs, and always some of your dust, love.
A stray button that is something of you, blue as your eyes are, blue as the sky on a good day in spring is.
This is a dream. This is not a dream.
The guards are by occupation suspicious. An oriole is calling in the border strip.
Hills a blue glaze in the rain. Wild flowers in the upland pastures, buffalo wallowing in mud.
Wheat that will be bread, poppyseeds and sunflower that will be husks in the teeth, grapes that will again be wine’s sharp memory.
In the noon glare peasants huddle under trees: rakes, hoes, scythes, as in Brueghel, a landscape with Dürer through it.
And by the roadsides so many crucifixions, blue Jesus hammered into tin, arms spread, weeping for this grim potholed world. Thunder through the mountains. The road snaking up into pine forest. White horse running through black smoke.
A dream, not a dream. Here and not here.
Perhaps this is a fugue, a fog, a fug, the confusions of another journey where the languages beat at the brain, the maps suddenly another tongue.
It begins in a litany of the many names
of the seven Saxon towns of the Siebenbürgen that is Erdi, Ardeel, Transylvania, each a mouthful of argumentative syllables, gutteral, agglutinative, gobstopper names in languages with knives in their teeth, it depends who you ask, it depends where you’re coming from, in what irreconcilable tongue through the passes and the river valleys, to the lands beyond the forest forever in dispute and everywhere as anywhere the neighbours do not like each other.
Each town a scrabble of names: Koloszvar that was Klausenberg that is Cluj Napoca, Kronstadt that is Brasov and Brasso, Hermannstadt Sibiu to the Romanians and what the Szeklers call Szekelyudvahely is their Odorheiu Secuiesc, Roman Apulum their Alba Iulia a.k.a.Karlsburg and Gulafehervar, Tirgu Mures Marosvasarhely, Sighisoara that was Schässburg that was Castrum Sex, Fort Six, Hungarian Segesvar, only the ancient names of rivers survive.
In the night cities walking in the streetlights suddenly I am a man of two shadows, one before, the other after, one hurrying east, the other west,
falling away.
In the hotel of heavy chairs vodka solo listening to the rain falling into the town, the traffic hissing on the streets.
I drink to one shadow. I drink to the other.
In the lobby a million banknotes switch hand to hand, window to window, drawer to drawer. Always the paperwork.
I drink to one shadow. I drink to the other.
The TV a hiss of snowy static, signals from the wrong side of the mountains, the screen a grey plaza of rainy shadows shouting in their distant tongues.
Vague shapes running, the soundtrack a crackle or is it gunfire?
Outside the heavy Transylvanian rain falling all night into the leaves, and long after the bars shut the two languages shout each other down around the square –
proclamations, denunciations, declarations of ill intent, old wounds that go on being wounds, chants of the victors in a game of losers.
Absent from the events of my life, somewhere I recall little of later home again in my right self again.
Once again the wrong story wrong place wrong time. In my pocket a round white stone.
Think of one who arrives in the square in Brasov with no history no past no plan no story at all.
It is the war of the languages where the neighbours don’t agree about history, too much bloody water, too much misery, the Vlachs become the Rumanians kin with Trajan’s soldiery settled on the Dacian frontier where begins the East, serfs tolerated by grace, banished from the proud fortified towns, forbidden chimneys, windows, public office, embroidery, furs, shoes, boots.
Therefore the wars of the flags that repeat on the wind Romania Hungaria Romania Hungaria.
Therefore the wars of the tulips along the old ramparts. Therefore the wars of the chestnuts and the wallnuts each claiming each was here first and this old frontier their homeland, the birthplace of the Rumanian Matthias Corvinus, the greatest Hungarian king.
It depends who you heard it from. It depends on the question you ask. It depends how you ask it. It depends in which language.
The wars of the statues and the wars of my dog and of your dog and each other. Same old. Same old lebensraum scenario. A living and somewhere to live it. Same old poker game in a back room Chants of the victors in the game of losers.
Whisper of banknotes, the bad breath of money, pages in the book of guile.
How limited the sounds of the world: how limitless, the oriole still singing in my ear as the radio cuts in.
In the muddy village of Salt Mari Neni is singing for the lost world her laments for those who are leaving, left long ago over the oceans to Mexico, Australia, Argentina, their news growing fainter till they vanish. In her songs the colours of the Szekely women deepen as they age into blood red into mauve into purple into the black she wears, she has a tape hereabouts of when she was famous, she has no machine she can play it on.
She is singing for those still going away beyond the border, construction in Budapest and Balaton and beyond.
Everyone, everything, goes away, one day even the borders got up and left.
And in the 7 Csango villages set at the mouths of the passes where they watched for the barbarians— Pechenegs, Bulgars, Kazars, Huns, Tatars and Mongols and Turks arriving in waves of savage unstoppable water-- they recall watchtowers, alarms they rang, their name Csango from the chang of a bell, or it means to go off alone. Solo. They say.
Abandoned villages of the Saxons gone to Deutschland falling to crows and Gipsies and entropy and gravity and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
In the Bolyai house a beaker of the ashes of a poem said to be a love poem. At Petöfi’s monument a boy singing Flowers in the Spring. The ruins of ruins.
By order of the Minister of Ruins all the monuments are to be rearranged, all the junk that tells us who we are because we were who we were, whoever.
Ceausescu becomes Chaplin. Some will be raised a metre, some lowered, names added or erased, some switched the other way, shifted to another part of town,
removed indefinitely for renovation or posing in the statue park of yesterday’s heroes, splattered, greening over, their obituaries brief entries in the long book of misery.
After the revolution the proof is in the documents, somewhere hereabouts, mislaid, lost, burned round the back of the police station, or the translation not yet checked, not yet authorised. We have a video that when we find it is another white blizzard on the screen, static on the soundtrack.
A revolution. Not a revolution. The one hand and then the other. It depends who you ask. The red has faded from the star, the sickle come away from the hammer and the carnival is over.
Not much changed says the professor, who watches the watchers in next door’s Securitatae yard, only the names, the faces have not changed.
Csaba says now is better. If now I cannot sell a beer, back then I could not find a beer.
On the one hand and on the other says the man of two shadows. On the one hand on the other.
In the great square in Brasov the miraculous reappearance of the children of the Pied Piper
a likely tale.
And anyway you’re out of film when the procession goes by and the action starts, the tape run out, the batteries flat, the moment passes into the history of all moments, and anyway all the long way up the long hill you forgot it’s Monday and the place is closed, indefinitely, closed for restoration.
Far away now, far away then, here and not here, messages written to my fleeing self in some Transylvania of the mind.
Hung out in the distance like a lamp, the fading light of stars fainter and further in the borderless beyond.
Flowers in the upland pasture. Pebbles in a yard marbled into the letters of a word in some long ago language.
Come back I hear my voice call back on the long road home.
Bring a few things to say you were here-- a milkweed pod, a leaf from a walnut tree, a flower from the upland pasture, a handful of stones that spell out someone’s name.
Night cries startle my heart. Music dulls me into sleep, the bird still singing in my brain.
Not the journey but its recall fading in the remembrance, the slow falling into time.
Not the shadow but the other shadow, death’s, falling fore and aft, its agenda in the swish of time on the watch,
brief as a kiss in passing, voices shouting down the rainy night street some name, some message.
Photographs fade. Tapes fade, the words will come away from the page, from their meanings, mutters the shadow,
the same one that comes with us everywhere and eclipses us, swallows us whole, deletes our names in other people’s address books.
Think of the snail with a boat on his back he carries all his days that one day he will drown in.
Farewell all those I never met, faces that flit across a mirror, echoes on the phone, the hiss of stars.
There are the sweet songs of lovers. There is the wild music of the mountains. And there is death, suddenly.
There is the chanting among the wild-eyed rag-haired saints, an unaccompanied singing addressed to eternity. And there is death.
That knits us all into the ground, caught up with roots and shards and spent ammunition, into the names of stones flaked away in the wind.
We live a while in the tales of our children, their children, gossip and rumour, in the dreams of the sleepless, the memories of the forgetful.
The knife. Fear of the knife. The cancer clawing at the guts, or on a narrow mountain road a fast truck swings onto the wrong side of the road, goodbye. |