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  – Switzerland won’t let any Russians in. But the mountains will have to move (or split!).

  In 1918, the mountains moved.

  Walaschek didn’t see his parents, who had remained in Moscow, until 1964. In between, there’s more than just the Stalin era. There’s almost half a century. What does it mean to see people you were torn away from when you were just a little sprout, a bud, to see them again when you’re forty-eight years old (at that age in Switzerland, you’re still part of the Landsturm, the oldest group of military reservists) and your old parents are a generation older? People waiting for death, or to die together in some gloomy city apartment. Weighty words will be said: This is your father. This is your mother. And this is your son.

  Things quickly take a turn for the excessive. Paternal and maternal solicitudes, tears. Kindness to the point of obsequiousness on the son’s part. Which quickly brings on a veneer of irritation for the son, as someone who lives in comfort, in the modern, in the West. What is he doing there? There’s always another tourist excursion: museums, Tolstoy’s house, Herzen’s, Chekhov’s. The Bolshoi, in Red Square of course, with the long line for the Mausoleum. Caviar and vodka, yes. But it’s another planet. After a few days it becomes clear to everyone that most men are like cats, not dogs: they’re more attached to places than people. So it’s best if they all return to their own beds, their routines. Swissair, Moscow-Geneva. He can’t see the brother who was born after he left Moscow in 1918. That brother is dead.

  He’d gone to the German-Russian front. At twenty. How many others like him? Hitler was a trainer who didn’t tame animals but riled them up—young wolves, young tigers, he even drove the gentle elephants to frenzy. There were no more cages, protective ropes around the ring to protect the defenseless spectators.

  So up to the age of ten, Walaschek grew up as a Morel and a Swiss. But a careless word on the part of his pretend-mother grandmother Jenny Morel, over which this woman from her place in the beyond is still mad at herself, going over it with a neighbor for the hundred-thousandth time, brings the Swiss ambassador’s compassionate transgression in Moscow to light. Genia Morel regained the name Walaschek but lost his Swiss citizenship. He was given a Nansen passport for the stateless.

  So Klee’s O could also be a wheel, not the tire the fishermen in the North put around the adulterer condemned to death so that he floats vertically waiting for the deadly-beaked bird to crack his skull, but a third wheel, an old tire, an inflatable tube that in the cold season prostitutes on the edge of town burn in big fires that both sustain and beckon. You’re the third wheel now, a voice kept saying. Just like that, Walaschek was off the national team, which played against Portugal on May 1, 1938. Then a loudspeaker made from fascist alloy filled the entire Milan arena and surrounding streets, in its fascistic timbre, with the names of the Portuguese players. A defense that, decasyllable with enneasyllable, sounded like the prelude to a madrigal:

  Azevedo Simoes Gustavo

  Amaro Albino Pereira

  A legendary center forward, Peyroteo: a Mordechai of soccer, who always looks to his outside left, Cruz. The crowd saluted the Portuguese, fascistically, arms raised. The Swiss did not raise their arms and the audience in the arena hated those crude uncivilized butchers even more, though the Swiss names weren’t without a certain musicality. But who, in that 1938 of perversions, in Milan, or in Bern on April 18 for the Swiss Cup final at the Wankdorf, who in the box seats or the nosebleed section would have thought that the names spared (the next day) by Klee’s paintbrush, the Grasshoppers’, formed an almost eighteenth century incipit?

  Huber Minelli Weiler

  Springer Vernati Rauch

  the blast of eternal winds

  from rocky mines in flames!

  The charm of a heptasyllable line, of names. A British poet took his turn to speak:

  – Anyone who believes that the catalogue of ships (in Homer) is distant from (and distances us from) poetry understands nothing about poetry: he’s a dimwit, no matter what scholarly laurels he may boast.

  Ipso facto, he offered a prize (a carafe of red) to whomever, within five minutes, could come up with the most poetic team. That’s exactly what he said: poetic. To everyone’s surprise, and Klee’s visible joy, it was the meat inspector. Who was hoisted onto a bench so that he could read his lineup. He seemed like a Petrarch beginning to declaim:

  Rhone, Rhine, Iber, Seine, Elbe, Loire, Ebro

  He took enough air into his lungs for a hendecasyllable-team:

  iahn swan puč; kuhn krol krick; han rahn cruyff schek tóth

  and he hastened to explain that the schek at number 10 wasn’t just some hypocoristic for Francesco: it was the inside forward for the Swiss national team, Eugene Walaschek, who the painter Paul Klee had split in half, April 19, 1938. Yes.

  Everyone was momentarily absorbed in celebrating the victory of the winner of the carafe of red wine, but the jubilation ceased when an immigrant from the South thought it wasn’t fair that he’d come in second. Sure, he had no more than a defensive trio, but still . . .

  He jumped up onto the bench and began to recite:

  Bacigalupo

  Ballarin Maroso

  When on one postwar night Turin learned that their entire beloved team had been obliterated on the Superga hill, no one thought of the defensive line’s names as being inscribed within a refined schema of Italian metrics: a hendecasyllable with an ictus on the fourth, eighth, and tenth syllables. Despite knowing nothing about meter, the unschooled loved to repeat, night after night, those names with their immanent mysterious charm. The unschooled don’t know much about Dante, nor about a modern poet who loves goats “with Semitic faces,” nor about the Triestina team, nor about Ariosto. But something settled beneath the entryway (the threshold) of the minds of the poor (like the keys to peasants’ houses, in other times, might be stashed under a stone):

  mi ritrovái per una sélva oscúra

  e per la sélva a tutta bríglia il cáccia

  mi stringerá per un pensiéro il cuóre

  Bacigalúpo Ballarín Maróso

  – Do the gentlemen agree?

  Everyone turned toward Gottfried der Anti-Nibelung, in his aristocratic attire, who said amid the general silence:

  – The word is the phallus of the spirit, centrally rooted.

  – What does he expect people to know about the phallus of the spirit? some Knecht Ruprecht grumbled in his neighbor’s ear, without daring to put his thought into the form of an official statement. However, it was agreed, without its coming to a formal vote, that it wasn’t something people knew, but sensed. Ludovico Ariosto, on the other hand, he knew. From high up on a little cloud, still wrestling with additions to his poem, he would pick up ideas and rhymes from a café in some corner of Ferrara, enlisting new combatants for the siege of Paris:

  Bacigalupo

  Ballarin Maroso

  Otone Avolio Berlinghiero

  Avino Trello Vonlanthen Walaschek Schiaffino

  This for the audience. On the same paper as the secret plan for the procession on the eve of the match, for the finale of his octave, he composed three hendecasyllables, with the stress on the fourth, eighth, and tenth syllables: the ultimate defensive triangle, with a supporting rectangle, an offensive quadrilateral without fixed points:

  Bacigalupo Ballarin Maroso

  Otone Avolio Berlinghiero Avino

  Trello Volante Walaschek Schiaffino

  The barman reassured everyone: thanks to the Swiss National Fund for Scientific Research along with a grant in the social sciences, it would be scientifically demonstrated how, why, and wherefore Roger Vonlanthen, an emigrant to Italy, had become, scientifically, in the fans’ mouths, Volante. Professor Syntax, for his part, assured them all that Ariosto, a specialist in the tourbillon (that is, a poetics à l’hollandaise), wou
ld rearrange the positions of the four names in the defensive quad in every possible way until he’d finally finished (or he’d had enough), and would recite it to us full of and’s (which the people at the Swiss National Fund also call a “polysyndeton”):

  and Avino and Avolio and Berlinghiero and Otone

  – When you’ve got the right stuff, said Gottfried der Anti-Nibelung, then you can take your first line from the train schedule and the second from a prayer book and the third from a joke and all together it’ll still make a poem. And seeing that Klee had opened his Siberian cat eyes all the way, he wanted to continue, but was decisively interrupted by the barman, who had decided to bring the discussion back down to earth:

  – They didn’t make him Swiss—Walaschek, I mean—because of that game against Portugal, because of that spat between SATUS (the Swiss Workers’ Gymnastics and Sports Association) and ASF!

  All the things you hear at the bar! Sports, weather, the rise in gas prices over the winter, pensions, and politics too: yes, politics, blown in as though upon distant wafts of wind.

  – Who’s that guy? Snoozy asked a neighbor, tired of these comments made just to cast doubt on the reigning harmony in the homeland.

  – That’s Knecht Ruprecht. He’s a Nibelung too, naturalized Swiss. They say he’s a sly one!

  – He is, he is! Try and find a Nibelung who isn’t. After ’33 . . .

  Snoozy was a little worried because his country was full of Nibelungs, naturalized or no. SATUS is in charge of sports and ASF controls soccer. Knecht Ruprecht added that they’re as catty and jealous of each other as a couple of tarts. If ASF picked Walaschek, some newspaper, one of the ones put out by the Goths over there, prompted by SATUS, would publish a big headline:

  COMMUNIST CELLS IN SWISS SPORTS

  – Oh oh oh oh oh!

  With the Fascists in full swing, they couldn’t risk having Walaschek in Milan against Salazar’s Portugal: Amadò, a citizen of Italian Switzerland, played in Walaschek’s stead. Usually, a football player, if he’s good (and Walaschek was good), has no difficulty getting documents and permits, whatever he wants. Take—said our friend behind the bar, a bullshitter of the more subdued variety—take the biggest publisher in French Switzerland. His name is Dimitrijević. One day (after the war), a certain Artimovics, a coach from Grenchen, a city dear to Mazzini, this Artimovics, who on April 18, 1938 was on the field at the Wankdorf in Bern as the center forward for the Grasshoppers against Trello and Walaschek’s Servette (his name, like those of all the other Grasshoppers, spared by Klee’s paintbrush), well, Artimovics makes an “appeal” for his compatriot Dimitrijević; Dimitrijević plays one game with Grenchen, as outside right, and boom, he’s got a Swiss passport in his pocket—good-bye Tito and communism; he’ll start a nice little publishing house. Our barman stopped there, and rubbed his hands with delight. But every rule has its exceptions. Walaschek, in a way, and for a long time, was just such an exception. Because of SATUS? An exception, that is (it’s not pedantic to repeat), in the realm of soccer, because if we get to talking about farm workers or masons, workers in general, with them it’s the rule. And thinkers? As early as 1933, Sigmund Freud wrote from Vienna to the (Swiss) minister (and colleague) Oskar Pfister: “Our horizon has been darkly clouded by the events in Germany. Three members of my family, two sons and a son-in-law, are looking for a new country and have not yet found one. Switzerland is not one of the hospitable countries.”

  – It’s true, explained Mr. Vuilleumier, who was there by chance on a break from his work on one of our hundred thousand commissions, following some commissioners who’d left the room where General Guisan, from his portrait, kept an eye on everything. – It’s true. The Helvetian authorities wanted to protect themselves against those waves of refugees. Since 1933 they had been trying to make Switzerland into a transit country rather than a land of asylum: in other words, they tried to prevent the refugees from remaining by urging them on with strict sanctions, or even physically deporting them. The threats, boycotts, and acts of violence to which Jews as such were exposed weren’t sufficient for them to be considered political refugees. In fact, anyone who clandestinely crossed the frontier but wasn’t able to prove their political refugee status in a sufficiently convincing manner was sent right back to the nearest border post.

  In 1938 (says Ernest Jones, a follower and biographer of Freud), the “inventor” of psychoanalysis “pointed out that no country would allow him to enter. There was certainly force in this argument; it is hardly possible nowadays for people to understand how ferociously inhospitable every country was to would-be immigrants, so strong was the feeling about unemployment. France was the only country that would admit foreigners with any measure of freedom, but on condition that they did not earn a living there; they were welcome to starve in France if they wished.”

  Those who were welcomed in Paris were countless. Thousands and thousands of children could have grabbed one another by the hand and made a nice big circle, as big as all of Europe, round like Paul Klee’s O, and sung a nice “Ring Around the Rosie.” Ring around the rosie—a pocket full of posies—ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

  In the legions of those welcomed in Paris, the most numerous were perhaps the stray Russians, from Kerensky to Ivanov to the “noble” and non-noble of all kinds—all of them “fallen.” In Paris, the Austrian émigré Joseph Roth was actually dying. Of hunger—perhaps not for bread, but for everything. Alcohol took care of the rest. A kind-hearted waiter, as Roth sat at his table (at the Café Tournon) penniless and wasted, considerately asked the unfortunate, hard-up writer:

  – Quelque chose pour commencer, monsieur?

  – Je ne commence plus, je finis.

  And back in Russia, Osip Mandelstam was fini.

  Every so often, a voice, quietly, would ask Scribe O/17360:

  – And after death?

  – After death I too will go down, as everyone does, into Hades. I’ll wander among the shades looking for my mother, then I’ll wander around some more, through the fields, looking for Heloise and Tsvetaeva, with her tearful eyes, perhaps Helen of Troy too, or Marilyn, or Phryne, or Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, or Poussin’s Venus . . .

  – And then what?

  – Then nothing.

  She stood at the entrance, her eyes full of tears, aged, almost gray, hands crossed on her bosom. This was soon after the murder of Ignace Reiss in which her husband, Efron, was implicated. She stood as if infected with plague: no one approached her. Like everyone else I walked by her.

  No, Berberova didn’t care for her. Marina’s eyes. “Each socket seemed a ring without a gem.” Like Klee’s O.

  Now nobody asked leave to speak, everyone just chimed in. Herzen turned to Bakunin and said vehemently:

  – You have to open man’s eyes, not gouge them out.

  Klee’s O could be the eye of a cat who remembers having once been a tiger. The eye of a leopard. Klee’s eyes gleamed.

  – Of a Leonardo. Is it true that Leonardo would buy birds at the market to set them free? If he’d been alive in the twentieth century, he’d have sold all his Mona Lisas to buy the Jews and set them free. To buy land for the Palestinians and set them free.

  – Long live a free Palestine!

  Mr. Window asked abruptly:

  – But have you ever seen a cat’s eye? It fla . . . He broke off mid-flash. He liked Klee’s game, cutting words and names in half, as with Walaschek.

  Whereas Mr. Snoozy, who did not appreciate names cut in half, responded, as if at Mass:

  – Ashes—flashes.

  Klee’s eyes lit up.

  – Fel . . .

  – Felix? Feline.

  – I don’t understand why people aren’t speaking in complete words all of a sudden, complained Mr. Snoozy, who had been to Berlin, and, as he went on to say for the three-hundredth time now, in 1930s B
erlin you could leave your umbrella leaning against the wall at the train station, come back an hour later, and find it right where you’d left it.

  For his part, my neighbor on the left reasoned:

  – That thing with Paris, their not allowing the foreign-born to engage in any lucrative enterprises, I don’t understand it.

  “And behold, one shade from the depths of her head turned her eyes toward me . . .” Was it the eye of a mangled murder victim relegated to the cloisters of hell? Was it the eye of Sindelar (who will be called, when rien ne va plus, “the Mozart of soccer” in the Encyclopedia of Modern Sport), trained on the gas stove? The star of the Wunderteam was burning out. He refused—as confirmed by official sources, trustworthy sources—to play for Greater Germany. Was he overcome with synderesis, a crisis of conscience? He was found in his house, dead. That “mid-month moon,” for him, would never come again, when the girl (Pindar’s) would “unbind for the hero the fair girdle of her virginity”—never again. All that was left for him would be the nauseating smell of gas that, to a Swiss, neutral, aged ten in 1938, could only faintly recall the smell of the makeshift military latrines at the edge of town. And a scribe like O/17360 would really have to ask Marina to explain her comment that “one mustn’t forget that all poets of the world have loved soldiers.” She’ll explain it to him in the afterlife, whither she departed from Yelabuga on August 31, 1941, by way of a nice slipknot. Sindelar killed himself too? someone asked, in secret, in Vienna. Was Klee’s O a ring that had lost its finger? The finger of a bride, of a bishop extending his hand to the faithful. A hundred thousand people kiss a bishop’s ring, a hundred thousand are happy. And maybe even the germs celebrate. God’s finger touches Adam’s—and life is created. Was that a good idea? Or it’s God’s finger that crushes him, Adam. But neither Michelangelo nor Masaccio deem it important for God to wear a ring like a pope or a bishop. Or is it Hannibal’s ring? He kept it to hide poison under its stone.