A Dirge for the Temporal (7 page)

Merging Tableaux

E
veryone has at least one scene that they cannot erase from memory, a fragment of the past that affected them so profoundly it now occupies a permanent place in their consciousness. I have two such scenes, one overlapping the other, textures blending without diminishing the shocking vibrancy of the details. The motion of surplus body fat, the smells of carnal appetite gathering in the air, the duet of bestial fulfillment and malignant laughter, the splatter of poppies.

  If I had let the past remain where it belonged, I never would have
known the second tableau. No matter the catalyst, returning after nearly
two decades had the flavor of psychosis. The demons had been at rest for a considerable while when unexpected contact from across space and time reawakened them. I’ve no doubt that had I but ignored the call, they would have lain still again, grotesque but inanimate, like poor Dirk. Alas,
I boarded a plane within the week, shying away from the stewardess during
the twelve-hour flight because of her dark, reminiscent eyes.

  Visually, nothing had changed, as nothing ever does over there. As I turned onto
Salmstrasse
, driving slowly in order to fully savor the impressions, I could see the
Rothaus
was still intact, though its paint had faded to a brownish red. In the fields behind the durable three-story structure poppies appeared, wild red-orange blooms peeping out of high grass, just as they had that spring of eighteen years before. The barn emerged from its hiding place, the surrounding weeds touched by a breeze, breaths and moans, the restless limbs of the chestnut tree.

 
The yard was in a state of low maintenance, a tractor perhaps hav
ing
swept through once or twice since winter. I pulled into the drive, its ruptured
paving stones flanked by
Brennessel
—burn nettles—already abuzz with insects, and this only the first week of June. I’d come straight
from the airport in the rental, and had to grope around for the right controls
before separating myself from the compact. The house looked
vacant except for the curtains in the second-floor windows. But they might
have been relics, their patterns formed by cobwebs behind the grimy glass.
Outside the tableau itself, I couldn’t remember such particulars.

  Poppies bright as blood, foliage sharp as jagged glass recalled an artist’s sudden, revelatory strokes, while the odors were no less direct in their assault upon my senses. Resin, earth, grass, rotting boards. Sweat. Metal. The ting of copper in the ears, on the tongue. I reached out and touched the side of the barn. Moist, always moist, as if it retained every sin ever committed. I heard, felt activity around my shoe, looked down to freeze the image—not of the snake wriggling out from under the weeds, but rather the bizarre American icon that was my tennis shoe, its bright white laces interweaving with the blades of vegetation. I held that frame for long seconds.

  Yes, here I was, back on foreign soil, which I had so longed to leave as a teenager. And approaching the exact spot which had changed my every perception of who and what I was, and where I fit in the global career path my parents had chosen. As I stepped around the side of the barn, I suddenly didn’t want to see the spot again, though I knew that in the immediate sense I would simply be looking at more of the jungle surrounding me. I cursed myself, my demons.

  Somehow there was no moment of discovery, no emergency of the heart, and yet neither was it just another patch of jungle. Very little grew in the spot, perhaps because of the shade created by the chestnut and the barn, perhaps because it was otherwise tattooed. The tableau didn’t rematerialize instantly, but waited for nourishment. I wanted to give it that. I had come a long way to give it that. Inexplicably, a discomfort expanded in my groin. When I reached down I realized I was erect. That was certainly
not
how I wanted to remember. But what had I expected?

  A movement caused me to jerk my hand away from myself. I looked
behind me, nothing. It was another occurrence of wind, necromancy, leg
erdemain. My errant hand wandered again, only this time it found its way to my pocket. I pulled out the letter, at once a confession, a rite, a statement of charges against me.

  It was the fiftieth time I had read it, and as with the other forty-nine
times, I was alarmed by its command of English and, more so, by its poetic
nature. She had been a poet, reading to the class as if we were manipulable characters in her dream. It was what had first caused me to take notice of her, just preceding her eyes, her aura, all the rest of her.

  That noise again, like an imp about no good. I sat against the barn and read aloud, in the quietest voice lest I wake the dead.

  “What she does to me just looking at her. Such eyes, such grace, such everything. My father would laugh to see how his experiment has fared thus far. Six weeks at a German school and I’m not only chasing the language, I’m also chasing one of the girls. She has read a poem in class recently, has looked at me with those onyx eyes of hers, and now I find myself following her like an animal.”

  The entire letter was written that way, recounting events from my point of view, and in an unsettlingly accurate way. She must have researched everything about me and my family, strangers in her village, toys.

  “The Rothaus is no destination for a girl. The villagers gossip that it is a home of half-wits and monsters. What business can you have there, Svenja? If only I could persuade you to notice me. Was that the briefest look? Should I hide?”

  It was. God knows, I did.

  “Whose voice is that from behind the barn? ‘Svenja!’ it calls. Can it be the boy named Dirk? Would she spare him a pot to piss in? But then, I’m a stranger and it’s all a mystery to me. For all I know they are lovers and I am wasting my life away with the perceptions that have been imposed upon me by my world.”

  How could a creature like her philosophize? Philosophy from her was
like excess venom dripping onto the letter, smearing the ink.

  “My mother loves this field, flowers like flames she says, and here I am walking through it. How would I explain my being here to her? I pass through your vision, Mother, to validate my own. But I know it is baser than that. Even now the sounds I’m hearing give me a raw feeling. Grunts of servility, hints of
subtle laughter. I know you, Svenja, I have seen you looking at me over literature
and gods. I know you and I don’t know you and I hate you if it is as I suspect it is.”

  Which was where the letter’s author began to lose me, I began to lose myself, pure verse took over.

  “It
is
as I suspect. There they are, behind the barn, Svenja on the whale-like massiveness of Dirk, forcing out the expulsions as she strokes his swollen penis, taking her own fashion of glee from the enterprise. I will discover the secrets of this, I will blackmail her a thousand times for a taste of what she is doing to him. But I can see there are stranger forces at work. Why would the half-wit want the wine that she pours over him, licking it off his face as she
laughs like the first dawn? Why, in the midst of his awful ascent towards cli
max, would he laugh with her as she swings the bottle in the air, bringing it down smashing against his forehead, spilling its poppies over his face?

  “And why, for the love of Christ, would he continue to moan in pleasure as the petals tear open his face, his neck, my own eyes as I witness this monstrosity?”

  From this point on I could not share her vision, for the pleasure had
been Svenja’s and Svenja’s alone as she devoured those moans, the sacrifice
of him to her. At the last she must have released that part of him she clutched in her fist’s bitter vise, for a bellow of agonized liberation pierced the deafness that had befallen my ears, the blindness that had overcome my eyes. I found her looking straight at me, through the splash of poppies behind which I crouched.

  Those spots appeared on my retinae now, making the words impossible
to read for a moment. I shifted to the last line, but as it came into focus, I could not read it aloud. No matter, for the author herself intervened.

  “‘And I wonder, has she lured me here?’”

  Heart thundering, I turned my head slowly to the left, where she had emerged from the corner of the barn. Like her voice, her appearance had scarcely changed. And her eyes possessed the permanence of onyx as well as its polish and opaqueness. Poets speak of the pools of a lover’s eyes. Hers threw you back like gates, even as they forbade you from retreating.

  “Did you?” I said, hearing the feebleness of my words in my ears.

  “Lure you here?” she said. “Which time?”

  It mocked. Which was her language.

  “You let them put Dirk’s father away for what you did.”

  “
I?
”

 
That word, that single syllable contained force untold. I found it difficult
to construct a sentence. “You…you threatened to make it my crime if I spoke the truth. You—”

  “Shhh,” she said. “It doesn’t matter now, does it, David?”

  David. She had spoken my name to me only once before, as she knelt before me among the poppies. The stark, fiery flowers had become a cage around me after what I had witnessed.
David, what have you done here?
she’d said in some Deutsch/English blend that had emphasized as much as conveyed her point.
As the daughter of the Burgermeister, can I let myself look the other way?

  She approached me, but now there was no cage and I rose quickly to my feet. The hand I used to keep her at a distance was also the hand that held the letter.

  “Okay, David,” she said. “But you might admit to yourself that if you had wanted anything other than to see me, to kiss me as we did then, in the field out there, you would have taken the letter to the authorities.”

  “I’m going to take it to your father,” I said stupidly.

  She plucked the paper from my hand, let the breeze lift it in a lazy spiral towards that first dawn of which her verse spoke. She smiled as she offered her lips to me. I closed my mouth tightly against the softness of her kisses, the warmth of her breath on my face. I had reacted the
same way then and met with failure, succumbing to her beautiful, delicious
mouth in spite of all. I used the past as a distraction, focusing on what might have happened on that occasion if Dirk’s equally half-witted father hadn’t emerged from the Rothaus, slamming the door in his wake.

   “You needn’t feel such guilt,” she breathed as she tried to tease my mouth open with her tongue. “They sent him to a mental hospital. He was out again in eight years.”

  It wouldn’t have shocked me to learn they had decided never to let him out, considering Svenja’s performance that day. She would have been convincing no matter who she made her scapegoat, breaking our kiss to run out of the field screaming about the horror she had witnessed. By the time people had arrived on the scene, Dirk’s father stood crying over
Dirk's dead bulk, touching his tattered face, confessing that the boy was in a better house now—which quote had become the focal point of the trial.

  “How long would they have kept
you
locked away?” I wondered to her. But the question allowed the sought opening, and her tongue was in my
mouth.

  Svenja’s hunger met my own despised lusts in a marriage as Godforsaken as the site of murder and madness where it occurred. I tried to push her away, but my hands found her body and its exquisiteness, and oblivion threatened to set in. Through the caresses and the sighs and all
the dark magic at work came remembered sounds, sounds that had interrupted
us the one other time we had made physical contact. Like everything I had ever known since encountering her, it made no relative sense.

  She pressed me against the side of the barn, hands finding the fastenings that held me together. When she loosed my grotesquely engorged shame, I wanted to die there, upon the ground of murder and madness, but more than dying I wanted to live, inside her, one with her, my Svenja, why had she waited so long to call?

  I clutched her buttocks, pulling her against me, but her hands were in the way, one of them gripping me so tightly the scream itself choked, the other lifting a familiar something, accessory, device. Where had it come from, the mouth of jagged teeth? Would it bring me exaltation? Her onyx eyes asked me if I wanted it, and somehow, in every way, I did. But as she drew her hand back, to share the whole of herself, every petal and
shard with me, a shape loomed behind her. I recognized the man’s hulking
clumsiness as his shadow became the backdrop, his facial contortions the accents of my new tableau.

  The foreground filled my vision, her expression widening in an ecstasy
my eyes had rejected eighteen years ago, but which now seemed a thing stolen from me. Poppies spilled out of her mouth as Dirk’s father stepped back, carrying her body with him, the tool’s handle still in his grip. I could not bear to witness it and turned my face to the barn, to the comfort of boards pungent with the retention of every sin ever committed.