Das Gestern, das mich flieht, kann ich nicht halten,
Das Heute drückt mich wie ein Frauenschuh.
Die kleinen Wandervögel schon entfalten
Die Flügel herbstlich ihrer Heimat zu.
Ich steige auf den Turm, die Arme weit zu dehnen,
Und fülle meinen Becher nur mit Tränen.
“Translate it for me,” Paulina requests as she so often does when she looks at a page I have filled with my scribbling. If I translate that into English it won’t make much sense, I say, pushing back my chair, but if I translate it into Paulinish we’ll both understand it better. My hands have taken hold of her wrists, my lips caress her neck, she pulls back and retreats to the bed. “Every word has at least two possible meanings,” I mumble, a left-handed clumsy meaning, my mouth sucks hard, and an always-has-to-be right meaning, my mouth leaves one nipple and wanders to the other, slowly crossing the hollow between her breasts, the tip of my tongue drumming against her skin.
“I’d like to come inside you without you noticing.”
“You say the craziest things.” And here it is again, this laugh, the most lovable thing about Homo sapiens, and I say: “Yes.” More than that would be too much chatter, her laugh turns to moaning, we are sinking, air bubbles rise to the surface of the water, we are sinking, everyday colors vanish from sight, we tarry in the deep as if we could hold our breath as long as we wanted. When we surface I listen with one ear to the latest rumors which she stirs up the way a gust of wind blows a raked pile of dried leaves (it’s a feast for the ears when she and Esmeralda fill the refrigerators every morning. Their mouths rattle away like sewing machines, snatches of overheard conversations are immediately reworked into colorful elaborations, while the bottles clink and clink as they’re taken out of the boxes and loaded side by side.) At the beginning of our relationship I was worried that her liaison with me might damage her esteem in the eyes of her fellow Filipinos, but in fact the opposite happened, when it comes to cruise ships in the deep southern latitudes I’m evidently considered a good catch. I open the curtains, the expedition leader is entitled to a good view, Paulina was used to windowless sleep — the only thing that’s the same in all the rooms is the screens.
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.
Paulina maintains that German sounds beautiful, she doesn’t learn any vocabulary, she catches useless words such as Waschlappen, Hauruck, Kasperltheater (which in her rendition has limited recognition value) and inserts them into the least appropriate situations. I’m sitting undressed on the edge of the bed, looking at half of myself in the mirror that’s mounted on the bathroom door. The years have not simply passed, they’ve folded themselves into my skin, deposited themselves on my hip, and there’s no reason to assume the invisible half might show anything more reassuring, it’s a mystery to me how Paulina manages to ignore everything that by rights should dampen her desire. Instead she leans forward and her lips touch my scrunched-up penis with the lightness of a scarf grazing the skin.
Fog is setting in, it’s not rising off the sea but hovering above it, just enough to let the light safely in its lock before passing it to another level. Now the iceberg behind is discernible only by its base. A bird slips out of the mist and flutters past. “And a good south wind sprung up behind; / the Albatross did follow.” “We humans have eyes made for hunting,” says Jeremy, “our nose could fall off without great loss to our senses, our ears serve only to uglify our face, but our eyes are sharp and alert, they can be relied upon.” “Especially,” I add, “when they fix on something in order to kill it.”
Get a move on, bigmouth, no I’m afraid we don’t have any hotels here, no guest rooms either, you know we never get visitors unless they’ve lost their way. The Urd is already in position and has begun rescuing the passengers, but it can’t take everyone so the rest will have to be divided among the other ships. Get a move on, trackdog, don’t lose that scent, estimated arrival is in forty-five minutes, the Spanish girls are lovely, rent-a-friend, oh yes indeed they are, a friend for rent, cut. As soon as we heard the sound of the motors someone suggested we should form the SOS again, as a warning sign, with us on the ice and not a ship in sight. Pipe down, 24 percent of those polled believe that nature has its own right to exist, but the ladies of Calcutta, blackbirds are dropping dead from the sky, cut. We had already begun to disperse, although the lecturers kept trying to herd us back together, we probably could have managed to make a smaller SOS, everyone immediately wanted to make the O. Cut, two cotton candies and two carousel rides for the price of one gingerbread heart, first the saplings burn, then the shrubby underbrush, the young trees, the dead wood, and all that just fans the fire, the price never reveals the truth. We formed the O very quickly, it was way too big given our numbers, someone called out, come on over here, let’s make the S, I could hear people screaming in other languages, cut. Don’t give up, go hog-wild, cool off, best put your hopes on ice, cut. I hurried over to help out with the S, thinking surely we can pull that off, in any case it was a lot smaller than the O, and that was it, we didn’t get any further, cut. The wildfire reaches the flashpoint and consumes the tallest trees, it blazes away, hotter and stronger than ever, starlings are dropping dead from the sky, are sweeter by far, then comes the third fire that burns everything away, destroying all life, the third fire is the inferno that burns down the world once and for all, cut BREAKING NEWS STRANDED PASSENGERS RESCUED FROM ICE BREAKING NEWS STRANDED PASSENGERS RESCUED FROM ICE all ablaze