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– You take a guy, he said, string him up like a salame and put him under dripping water. Like if you tie someone under the edge of the roof during Easter, when the föhn melts the snow day and night: one drop per second, right in the middle of the head. The strongest or the dumbest—idiots, imbeciles, retards, complete pinheads—could last a day, everyone else would go crazy within a couple of hours. And then another form of torture, a Japanese one, consists of taking a man, tying his hands behind his back, and putting a metal collar around his neck, a kind of bib with a nice sharp edge against the skin. They take the man into the middle of the desert and set him free. They tell him he can go wherever he wants. So he wanders around for a while in the boiling heat, then he tries to scream, cry out, sob, then pray, ask God for help, then he curses Him, and along with Him, the entire human race: the place, the time, the seed of their begetting and their birth.
Mr. Window broke in:
– Arthur is right. Where did Dante get the material for his Inferno if not from our real world?
The carpenter tolerated this interruption with oriental calm. From a poet named Giacomo Leopardi, he’d learned that human malice is the consequence of unhappiness and not the other way ’round. What an unhappy people the Germans must be! – At some point the blazing sun will take pity on him. With the help of hunger, of exhaustion, he’ll stumble and that lovely round choker like a collar encircling a seventeenth-century nobleman’s noble neck will cut off his head like his own personal guillotine. The carpenter also said (perhaps something of his own invention?) that one time there was a truck transporting poorly secured sheets of metal up a mountain road full of potholes and rocks. Then came a strong wind, the same kind that ruffles flags and women’s dresses, and wouldn’t you know it, one of the sheets flew off the stack and glided a stretch through the mountain air, like a giant’s scimitar, a genie’s magic carpet. Behind the truck a man in a sweater, sunglasses, and beret was zooming along on a Motosacoche, and the metal sheet slashed through the biker’s neck like a razor before he could say ah or bah. He didn’t even close his eyes. His razored head rolled like a ball down the slope, and the rest, the motorcycle and beheaded body, continued straight down the road until the bike, at the first curve, flew into the air—a man decapitated not by Klee’s O but by a magician’s flying dagger. Or perhaps Klee’s O wasn’t a Japanese torture blade, it was one of those car tires that fishermen on a certain island in the North put around the waists of those who’ve been sentenced to death for adultery . . .
– What’s adultery?
With maximum tact and precision, as if he were inlaying a piece of solid wood furniture by hand, the carpenter explained the word adultery. Then he continued: – They put the condemned in the sea, upright. They put a light weight on the man’s feet and tie the tire at his waist at just the right level so that the man floats vertically with his head above water. Then they stick a nice, shiny fish on his head. So a heron or any old sea bird with a hard beak will see the fish, nose-dive down to spear it, and, in doing so, with its long beak, split the adulterer’s skull.
– What kind of places are these! said Asshat. Couldn’t they keep things simple and just call Klee’s O what it is: a zero?
Maybe yes. Klee seemed to agree, or so he seemed to be telling Walaschek and Co. He had to have heard of them—in 1938, in Paris, they were the national team who, under the leadership of Karl Rappan, the Wolf, inventor of the “bolt” tactical system, would face the great Germany of the wily Sepp Herberger, Hitler’s Germany, which had reinforced both offense and defense with five greats from the Austrian Wunderteam:
Für deutsches Land das deutsche Schwert!
So sei des Reiches Kraft bewährt!
For German soil the German sword!
Thus shall the Empire’s might be proved!
Lohengrin III.3
Yes, Klee declared, I’ve been labeled a degenerate artist by the swastika squad. I am one of those, I believe, who are convinced that the language of the German people must now be rebuilt from the ground up, making a tabula rasa of what the Nazis have pumped full of their drug. Germany has to start from scratch, from the a priori of reason if reason is what led to the sea of swastikas you saw waving in the wind before an enrapt Cologne as they celebrated one of their rites; if reason is also what led to the perversion of the pure meaning of words like Blut, blood, or Boden, soil. Words that in the eighteenth century were used to describe wines. We must start from zero.
– And what could all this have to do with me? Walaschek, worried, seemed to ask.
And Klee, laughing, seemed to reply:
– You were number 8, the inside forward. And I, by halving it and halving you, brought you back down to zero.
But Walaschek still had a reserve of fear somewhere deep in his eyes. The number zero makes people afraid. As if on the playground of a nursery or elementary school Klee had drawn a circle, an O, in chalk, and made all the children sit in a circle, then gave the teacher a look that said “ready.” Upon which the teacher (a cute girl, really cute, nice right ventricle, nice left ventricle, nice little ears and upturned nose) said: – Now we’re going to play Who’s the Rotten Egg.
But when it was Bubi’s turn—Bubi was the major’s son who, when guests came to their house in Vienna (and this long before 1938), would raise his arm in salute like a little Hitler—Bubi dropped the handkerchief right behind little Sindelar. Sindelar was perfectly aware that the handkerchief was behind him, and that he was supposed to pick it up and chase Bubi and try to catch him in the space of one trip around the circle, otherwise he’d be the rotten egg. But he didn’t pick it up. In three strides someone like Sindelar could catch every chubby Bubi, any child of those Third Reich beer-guzzlers, but it disgusted him to think of picking up that handkerchief that had been in Bubi’s hand all the way around the circle—it was a big circle. So little Sindelar became the rotten egg and all the children, in their guilelessness, called out “rotten egg, rotten egg.” Sindelar lied and said he was expected at home for something important, and stopped playing. Stopped forever. He couldn’t play with Bubi or with the Grossdeutschland of Sepp Herberger and Hitler. He was found dead, from gas poisoning. Suicide—or revenge? Walaschek shuddered, as if out of the corner of his eye he’d glimpsed a legbreaking fullback racing at him full of rage and malice. A zero? No. He wouldn’t have wanted to grow up to be a good Genevan, all condo and office, like a good gasoline pump that pours gas into this or that tank without discriminating. He wouldn’t have wanted to be a tree in a public garden or square with a railing around it, like a kid locked up in an orphanage or boarding school. Nor would he have wanted to spend every Sunday evening of his twenty years playing cards, because even if he had never read a single line of Arthur Schopenhauer, didn’t even know who Arthur Schopenhauer was, he vaguely sensed that nothing lays bare the dismal side of humanity more than a game of cards, sensed that boredom is represented by Sunday, and necessity by the other six days of the week. Walaschek had found his place as inside forward, and he was happy because an inside forward is something more than an outside forward with his predefined role, running along the touchlines and toward the corner, crossing for goals. An inside forward has to have a complete view of the game, communicate with the other midfielders, pass not only to his own outside but also to the one on the other side with sharp cuts that confuse the other team’s defense, or reach his own center forward with a long pass that won’t end up being just a weak kick into the goal box, a Christmas present for the opposing goalie, handed over with kid gloves.
Bubi’s handkerchief was foul, like Franz’s sheets at boarding school, when Walaschek and Sindelar played hard in those teams on the outskirts of town, where they’re tough, where a kid—and especially the most precise technical masters, like Sindelar and Walaschek—could really learn the ropes if he managed to keep the others (the types they call “butchers”) from ruining his legs. One Friday e
vening, before the school’s “guests” went to catch the train home for Christmas break, the housemaster inspected the dormitory. All the boys had to stand at the foot of their beds. When the housemaster got to Franz’s bed, he reached his hairy white arm beneath Franz’s pillow and with a brusque, deft flick of the wrist whipped back the white blanket and comforter, thereby revealing, quod erat demonstrandum, the bedsheet underneath, the hovel where that Jew-faced dog Franz slept. The sheet was filthy, and the housemaster, with crooked finger, summoned everyone to Franz’s bed, and they all huddled around to get a good look at that dirty sheet. One of the boys, the youngest, was trying to see as much as he could from the second row by peeking through the bigger, more imposing bodies in front of him—just like during their soccer matches. The sheet was filthy. It wasn’t blood, but yellowish stains, almost brown around the edges, as if, to pull another one on Franz, they’d cracked a rotten egg there. The youngest kid would later ask Rudolf—Rudi—who always knew everything, to explain. Because everyone had started snickering, nudging one another—though not like when a player is about to take a straight shot from eighteen meters and there are only a few opponents elbowing the defensive wall. Franz was the only one standing stock-still, he looked at his bed as if it were him there instead of the sheets, his unholy shroud desecrated with every second of that hell he had to endure. He looked on with his long face and his sad mouth, his lips prominent and fine like his mother’s, so much so that, once, Zaccheo—the art teacher who outside of school was a painter and in class always talked about “our Pavolo Veronese,” and if someone asked him what color to use he would reply “use your brain, Mr. So-and-So,” since he was always formal with everyone—Zaccheo went right up to Franz, examined him with a cat’s crafty eyes as well as a mountaineer’s, and said to the entire class: all of Botticelli’s women, even the Madonna, have mouths like this.
Genia Walaschek opened his eyes in the darkness. The housemaster, on the other hand, didn’t know squat about Botticelli. But he did know how to play—just by tapping his squat fingers (in a digital version of the arrangement) with spirit and vigor—“Lili Marleen.” Just lovely. Lili Marleen must have been the exact opposite of Bubi and Bubi’s sort. There was something lovely about Lili Marleen, yes, the exact opposite of Bubi, who had even stolen two peaches that one of the youngest children hadn’t allowed himself to eat so he could take them to his mother for Christmas. Bastard, thief, give those two peaches back, even if they’re as hard as tennis balls, balls you could have played a little with, con, avec, mit, sic, as you’re practically running through the passageways of the Bern station, returning, on the way, in a hurry, a flurry almost, obsessed with returning to the Klee Museum in Bern in time to see the Schwarze pastose Wasserfarbe auf bedrucktem Zeitungspapier again—running, almost, through the people in the long underpassages of Bern, packed with bustling crowds: and feeling like a kid with a tennis ball again. Captain Severino Minelli, only secondarily on the Grasshoppers, primarily fullback and captain for the national team, says that it’s with a tennis ball that you learn to handle a soccer ball. Until you can control it like the balls or pins in and out of a juggler’s hands in a variety show, in the circus—as if it’s magnetized. When Sindelar had the ball at his foot, his caracoling advance, his advancing caracole, to the left, to the right, was so unpredictable that all his opponents watched him aghast, and, it must be said, with admiration and loathing. What would come of those movements, his body so gracefully aslant? The ball obeyed his choliambic foot like a dog, a tamed animal. Sindelar-Walaschek had only to don the tamer’s cape and say Hop Suisse, Hop Wunderteam, and the ball would obey, like the Little Tramp with his cane or bowler. Sindelar (and Walaschek too) could shoot the ball into the corner (they call it the “set”) of the opposing net just as he could (could, let’s stop at could) have shot an arrow of spit into the swinish face of one of the Führer’s men, a Bubi of Anschlussed Vienna strongarmed and gassed. Old adolescent Vienna. But you can’t die like Sindelar, otherwise we might as well all die. Ta ta ta ta.
Was that the trumpets of old Vienna or shots from a machine gun?
Becoming more serious than anyone had ever seen them before, Klee’s grandmother and Walaschek’s too, Jenny Morel, seemed to say, through Klee’s mouth, to Walaschek:
– Try, when you play against Hitler in Paris, since alles ist Politik, our great Gottfried was right, try to make a divine play—en surplace, to push out, take down, reduce your Nazi fullback to the zero limit. We’re against bullfighting, because we can’t help but see Him, Christ, in the bull—but use a toreador’s style, feint in a way that throws your persecutor off balance, pull off a corner kick that surprises everybody and sends the ball straight into the net without anyone being able to touch it, which is the pinnacle for someone making a corner kick. You will be that pinnacle! If you have to make an eleven-meter kick (and you’re so obedient that you wouldn’t shy away from that enormous task, you’ve got a fanatical, or hostile, world watching you), you have to send the goalie one way and the ball the other, at mid-height. Every muscle in your body, and your brain too, even your heart, will have to cooperate.
– The sophia of the Greeks, Mr. Window cut in, is technique, art. The carpenter, the smith, the sculptor, the architect, and every other craftsman who knows his trade well, has his own particular brand of sophia; as does the singer, the musician, the fortune teller, the doctor, the poet. Try to find yours too, Number 8. It’ll be your metaphysical experiment, a work in which the “disorder” of the self will reveal itself to be part of the divine order. It will be something that stands out—on the one hand, from the sphere, the ring (“my” ring?), of comedy, the theatrical space reserved for wild dreams and ordinary life; and on the other, from the tragedy of sacrifice. They’ll put you on the degenerate team, along with Klee:
Grosz
Thoma Schlemmer
Engelmann Gropius Feininger
Jawlensky Walaschek Klee Kokoschka Kandinsky
They make an especially tight attack with that slew of Ks like a bunker or a tank with cannons that could crack every tooth of the Beelzebub Krauts of the swastika crew. A solid battery of Ks, and against them, in jerseys of virginal white, appear:
Treblinka
Göring Goebbels
Auschwitz Buchenwald Mauthausen
Himmler Eichmann Hitler Von Ribbentrop Von Papen
Who’ll be the first to stand up to the Third Reich?
What do they want anyway, these Swiss shits who come and cut us off right in the middle of 1938, and at the Parc des Princes, after the Anschluss, after we swallowed the Wunderteam? These Swissters, those pawnbrokers and watchmakers, produce their little shits with such passion and precision that you can never get them off the soles or sides of your shoes. But we’ll make them eat their shit, every single piece, they’ll get what’s coming to them.
Instead of a round theater, a place of forgetting, of emptiness, of openness, what if Klee meant to draw a circus, a ring for elephants, horses, acrobats, clowns, with a thick rope around it to keep the performers separate from the audience?
The life of Genia Walaschek, of Czechoslovakian stock, before the stadium, began in the circus.
Walaschek’s paternal grandfather was an orchestra director at a circus in Moscow, and Walaschek’s grandmother-to-be worked at that same circus. The father of the future forward for the national team, a piano teacher at the Moscow Conservatory, chanced to marry a Swiss woman, the daughter of a watchmaker from the Canton of Neuchâtel who had gone to Moscow to ply his trade.
Skipping—with the speed typical of a civil registrar, always on intimate terms with his material: family trees and dates—skipping to the maternal branch, his grandfather is Swiss, his grandmother German, Jenny Toss from Hanover, destined to become, by marriage, Jenny Morel. Into this European hodgepodge, during the very years when Europe is in flames, Genia Walaschek was born in Moscow on June 20th in 19
16. Between 1916 and ’18, between the war on the German front, the start of the revolution, and the rise of Lenin, Russia was all a grid of sentimental journeys, as they’re called by Viktor Shklovsky, someone who did his share of traveling down those roads:
– There was talk about some postman who ate his wife, said Shklovsky, but I don’t know whether that’s true or not. It was quiet, sunny, and hungry—very hungry.
And: – Our train carried coffins and on the coffins was scrawled in tar: RETURN COFFINS.
Even: – A rifle—especially a Russian one—is a treasure in the East. At the beginning of our retreat, the Persians gave two to three thousand rubles for a rifle; for a cartridge, they paid three rubles in the bazaar; for the same cartridge, they gave a bottle of cognac at the Kangarlu station . . . In Feodosia, a woman cost fifteen rubles used and forty unused, and she was yours forever. So why not sell a rifle!
The situation was getting depressing, especially for Walaschek. So Marina Tsvetaeva, with her incurable tragic goodness, asked:
– In Moscow? Were you born in Moscow? Where I lived in Moscow in the mornings the birds always sang, even in 1920 they sang, even in the hospital they sang, even in the middle of the crowds, they sang.
Then Marina too grew sad.
– During the Revolution, during the famine, all my dogs had to be poisoned so that the Bulgarians or Tatars, who had eaten worse, wouldn’t eat them. Lapko avoided that fate because he went away into the mountains—to die on his own.
Whereas Walaschek went to Switzerland. At the beginning of 1918, his grandmother Jenny Morel and the young Genia (a year and a half old) left Moscow with a group of refugees. No coffins. The Swiss ambassador to Moscow, generously concerned about the child, added him to the grandmother’s passport as if he were her own child. So as the son of Jenny Morel, Genia Walaschek arrived in his new home, the same Geneva of John Calvin. The mountains, for him, had parted. Although on May 10, 1926, Marina, yearning to see Rilke in Switzerland, Rilke who she was never to see, writes: