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 reality, the laughter made her legs turn to wood. Her calves and wrists quivered. In reality, Rosa was immobilized. She couldn’t even lie down, she was so completely frozen.
Everything became more dramatic on the day before Christmas. The little captain walked into the room. Under her arm, the animal was dressed as a boy. Just like Son.
Rosa took it into her arms, squeezed it and threw it out the window.
Standing in the doorway, she patted her pockets and mumbled: Got my feet—got my hands. Got my knife.
We can go.
In January, taking a walk is useless. You start to feel—enveloped in the gray and grief of lifeless nature—as if you were in a grave. Among the frozen, naked trees, under a nonexistent sky, surrounded by icy earth mimicking the dirty footprints of people—a grave. Except the corpse is missing. There’s just a rock, a rock under the ground.
All that’s left is how to choose the most aesthetic suicide: marriage + 9 to 5 office job, or a revolver. Camus develops this further.
Rosa gets scared that she won’t be able to keep walking. Her useless steps freeze. A tiny heart attack. In the middle of the road. She pulls out her telephone and calls her brother. Her legs hear a new, but familiar voice. The voice of a child. The eternal conversation of an older brother and younger sister. The legs continue thoughtlessly on. Swinging on the sides of trotting reindeer.
Rosa. The bridge. Weariness. If somebody pushed me, I’d fall over like a heavy sack. Right onto the sidewalk. The sack would come undone. Its contents tumbling into the water.
The tunnel. Dripping with icicles. They reach from above toward the hot crown of the head.
Oh, let me, let me, let me freeze again.
“Prose talks about something; poetry makes it happen with the help of words.”
People are divided into two groups, poets and prose writers. Into Sons and Rosas.
That’s why the first question strangers ask at the breakfast table is: And do you write poetry or prose? Anywhere in the world. At any literary festival.