Index
Cher Monsieur Valjean,
I have been requested to finish off these accompanying documents; not to complete them — that, you’ll agree, would be unethical — but to book them. This dubious honour befell me basically because I had collected the diverse fragments over several years, and also because I did know or have met some of the memoirists and their companions.
About the background of these people I don’t intend or wish to inform you more substantially than they have chosen to do themselves. Why indulge in gossip? Yes, you’ll say, but what happened to them afterwards, or what happens now? So before letting you peruse the book in your hands it may be instructive to attempt tracing, however briefly, their subsequent careers. I have since lost contact with all of them: they weren’t exactly friends of mine, and thus there was no reason to maintain even the tenuous links of acquaintance. Life is a process of losing contact anyhow. And my information is therefore inevitably based on hearsay.
The one exception is Brother Giovanni who sometimes writes to me from his far — off refuge — not expecting an answer apparently, since he never bothers to cite a return address. Judging from his rambling epistles he seems to be indulging in what used to be known as “life of the soul”. (Spiritual fruition to him then!) My own experience is that such a pursuit makes for confused and shallow generalities, that such a pretender must in fact be mildly demented, believing as often as not in beings inhabiting the clouds, in reincarnation or the Doppelgänger theory and other weird escapes or escapades. But who am I to judge? Perhaps a mental or physical defect forced him to withdraw from the bustle of our materialist environment — and I seem to remember that he was anyway much influenced in that direction by his friend Mr Thelonius Monk. If that is the existence he desires (allegedly of no-desire!), so be it. We are all failures at something or other. Nothing wrong with his sentiments though. Here, see for yourself, from a recent letter.
I salute you. I am your friend, and my love for you goes deep. There’s nothing I can give you which you have not got: but there is much, very much, that while I cannot give it, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today — No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this precious instant. Take peace!
Another I did stay close to — this will surprise you — is Patanjali. In fact I have him here with me. We actually work together, with Rab too, for the Cirque d’Hiver. Talent will out in the long run.
Then of course, why hide it? — there’s Levedi Tjeling. I love her as one would love a singing bird in the cage of the heart, and I have always done so. I love particularly the knobbles of her spine. But she, alas, has remained as elusive as ever. I can only guess at her whereabouts. Reading some of these pieces you may well come away with the impression that she was romantically linked to Minnaar. Not so! Minnaar was a much over-estimated mouse — don’t you ever believe that myth of the supposed potency of the blacks. It will only be wishful thinking on your part. I even once taunted him to his face with the epithet “Lousy Lover”. I tell you, virility is the most subtle and final mask of death!7
I’m digressing, forgive me. Still, as I say, Levedi Tjeling is the one closest to me and yet I know not where or when or even how to find her.
Samsa has gone into literature. He’s let himself be used as a “symbol” by the practitioners of belles-lettres. K is acting as his agent — I have read his claims that Samsa’s experiences or antecedents constitute “an original angle from which to view reality”. Whatever that may signify.
Nefesj, with his reputation of a dandy, a dabbler (in the occult too), an amateur, Nefesj surprisingly turned out to be one tough cookie. He asserts his gayness publicly — belatedly: in our world it’s no feat, surely, to join the majority; and as publicly took as “concubine” young Boy. I believe he treats him very harshly, like a slave or a trained animal really. On weekends, so they say, he’s fond of taking Boy to the woods around the city where he has him dodging the trees and sprinting across the glades, completely naked. And all this while Nefesj sits morosely huddled in his car, fumbling a news-sheet, puffing a cigar. How the hypersensitive philosopher has perished. . or flowered. . Who can tell if Boy enjoys the life of kept appendix or not? He has never yet been known to utter a sound. At home (the eccentric old Egyptian gentleman, called Horse, with the toothless shuffle, still looks after their needs in the luxurious flat on the fifth floor), I believe, Boy passes the time surrounded by mirrors, voluptuously studying the wrinkle and sag and bald patches of his thickening, ageing body. Nefesj has been heard to remark bitterly: “He’s in such an indecent hurry for bugger all.”
Tuchverderber is employed in the rag trade in America. Eva owns, and guides along, an art gallery in Amsterdam. There is the concentration of inner space. Galgenvogel is reputed to be running dagga on a grand scale. Ms Cenami got married to someone in Flanders and is no doubt having it off at any time of the day or night whilst miraculously retaining still her virginal airs.
Braytenbach came to a sticky end. Or so it would seem. There’s somewhat of a mystery there. It appears that he turned up in Paname out of the blue and that he there one day approached a lady (on a public thoroughfare) insisting that he was her husband returned from nowhere in Niemandsland, claiming that he’s been looking for her and persistently addressing her as “Mooityd”. (She didn’t know him from anywhere, was either divorced or a vieille fille.) They say that he was so obviously distressed, and so pathetically recalling incident upon incident, creating pell-mell a rickety structure of supposedly shared memories and impossible imaginings, that the strange lady was ultimately moved to play along. She must have had a white heart. Was it pity she took upon him then? Perhaps she thought that he was obfuscated by amnesia or some other (temporary) delusion. Anyway, he was quite a harmless old maniac with the most ridiculous fancies and conceits. And so — you won’t credit this — they started living together. She donning completely the life of Mooityd, as reflected in his fire and nostalgia, if indeed such a person ever existed. Well, in due time Braytenbach died the death, in the end claiming and maybe believing that he had been a poet, and innocent (his deathwords: “Not guilty, your Honour” — which indicates how Calvinist he must have been), and the lady, by now passably Mooityd, even grieving over the deceased, wrote off to the authorities in Niemandsland enquiring about the dead’s previous life. She needed to fill in the few minor gaps of her own newly inherited old life. They responded (after the normal bureaucratic foul-ups, because things move by channels) that yes, ah, indeed they were in possession of records pertaining to a certain Brethenbach who, so he claimed, had been united in the state of matrimony to one Mayted. This subject had spent many years in safe custody, subsequently absented himself illegally and unlawfully even, gone (by all accounts) to Cuba, returned rebuffed, was freshly apprehended. . and was eventually obliterated whilst still serving his time, by general debility and the rot of said time. Now the interesting part is that these events (sentence, escape, blue, re-sentence, death) all took place while the imposter was already living the life of Breathenbach. . in Paname. And the question arises: who were these people? I leave it to you.