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In Dreams

Paris, 2 April 2009

Dreamt that not our real father (although there had been some doubt) but the man my mother was living with when my sister was born was a certain Mehdi Dama, researcher, historian or sociologist from a very arid country, Libya, perhaps. (It was while I was in high school, while writing a newspaper story for a German class that I learnt how to spell ‘Libya’ and ‘Syria’, which is probably how I got Damascus. And the Dame of the lake, though not very arid by definition. I listened to that record at Prangeleux when I was a little girl.) I tried to get to know him at a cocktail party. He gave me a piece of paper with scribbling on it, something like a list of errands or notes that you take while talking to someone on the telephone, which dated from that time and documented the facts. Unfortunately, while I was talking to my mother about it later, I put it on the table and, while cleaning up, she threw it away, on purpose, to destroy the evidence. In the meantime, moreover, I was taken to task by my father who had told me, ‘A father and a mother, that doesn’t make Belgium yet.’ A statement that, in that context, was completely enlightening.

Later, while travelling, I noticed (from the middle of a country field) the towers of Manhattan in the distance, emerging from a yellow industrial cloud.

Paris, 18 July 2009

Last night I dreamt that Venice was actually inside Paris. Somewhere on the rue de Turenne, we passed a porch, entered a courtyard where there was a large, very wide staircase. Below, we were in Venice. I was surprised; in Venice the lagoon is all round you! But there was a simple explanation, which I’ve forgotten. It was wonderful to think that on any given day, on a whim, I could go down the stairs and take a stroll round Venice.

Paris, 26 December 2009

I’m wearing my brown boots, which are thigh-high, but I had to take them off and set them next to the wall to go into the igloo. When I come out they aren’t there any more, I should never have set them close to the trash cans! I spend the rest of the dream trying to track them down.

Mont-Noir, 21 July 2010

Dreamt of G. In Paris, we were walking in a ritzy neighbourhood, in front of the Russian embassy where he had an important job. Turning round I noticed a narrow, forbidden door between two buildings. I was amused when I realized that it was the end of the blocked passageway next to the German Historical Institute, the very place where I went to smoke cigarettes during my breaks. Without knowing it, and without seeing one another, our jobs were just a few feet apart!

Berlin, 18 November 2010

I’m in my apartment in Berlin, which is, however, larger than in reality, square, with a different design: there are double doors everywhere, like in the Rigiblick hotel in Zurich. My mother is there and is looking for a book on the bookshelf, she chooses a children’s book that I don’t really like, an old paperback that came from their house. She is very nervous, she is turning her flight tickets over and over, I ask her why. ‘Do I really have to tell you? ’‘Of course, tell me, I don’t understand.’ ‘Come on, you really don’t know?’ ‘No, I really don’t.’ ‘Well, I went back to work.’ It takes me a moment to grasp the importance of what she has told me. She has returned to work whereas she has officially retired, she risks being sanctioned by the governing council. I argue that it would not be very serious, since she was no longer working. But there is worse, she explains: she was ordered not to leave the country during the investigation, and she came here. The children’s book is an alibi, she has to justify her presence in Berlin by claiming she had important reading to do.

And then my father arrives through the same door. He is looking for a plastic duck, a bath toy, I don’t understand why he needs it, let alone for whom, it can’t be for my children, they’re too old.‘So you don’t know for whom?’ ‘No, I assure you.’ ‘Well, you should have an idea!’ ‘No, I don’t, you have to explain it to me.’ ‘Really, you don’t know?!’ My obtuseness exasperates him. Fortunately, I wake up before he gets really angry.

This extract and the illustrations have been taken from Diane Muer’s ‘In Dreams‘

Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, with illustrations by Sunandini Banerjee

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Aranyak: Of the Forest — An Extract

Baisakh and Jaishtha were over and it was now the month of Asharh. At the very beginning of Asharh was the festival of Punyaha, formally marking a new year of revenue collection from the tenants. Traditionally, a feast is organized by the zamindar for his subjects on this occasion. For my part, I wished to invite many people to the katcheri for a meal; I never got to see many of them at the katcheri otherwise. As none of the villages were located nearby, I sent Ganauri Teowari to all the distant hamlets to invite people to the feast. The day before the festival the sky became overcast and it was raining little drops; the next day, the heavens broke loose and the rain poured in torrents. Meanwhile, long before noon, and apparently indifferent to the rain, crowds of people had begun arriving at the katcheri in response to the invitation. Soon, it became difficult finding them a place to sit. Many of the invitees were women who had come with their children: I arranged for them to be seated in the katcheri office where they found themselves such space as they could.

It was not much trouble feasting people in these parts. I had not known that there could be a region so poverty-stricken as where I now lived. Compared to the average person here, even the poor in Bengal were better off. My guests had come braving the torrential rains to have a meal consisting of cheena grains, plain yoghurt, coarse jaggery and a sweet laddu each. These items were considered good enough to make up a regular feast.

An unknown boy of about eleven had been working hard since early morning. His name was Bishua, he said. He was a poor boy and must have come from a remote hamlet. Around ten in the morning he asked for some food. The Lobtulia patowari who was in charge of the stores brought him a measure of cheena grains and a bit of salt. I was standing nearby. Dark as ebony, with a beautiful face—the boy was like a living statue of the boy Krishna that had been chiselled out of stone. A delighted smile lit up his face as he anxiously unwound a part of his coarse cotton dhoti and put out the end to receive the trifling meal. I can vouch that even the poorest of Bengali boys would not deign to eat cheena grains, let alone be delighted with them. For I had once tried chewing on cheena grains, and the taste that has stayed with me will prevent me from ever referring to it as a pleasant item of food.

Somehow, despite the rain, we managed to attend to the feast for the brahmans. Late in the afternoon, I noticed three women who sat in the courtyard with their leaf plates before them and their two little ones around them—all of them streaming wet in the rain. There were heaps of cheena- grains on the plates but no one had bothered to serve them with either jaggery or yoghurt, so there they sat, looking at the katcheri with patient and expectant eyes.

I called the patowari and took him to task: ‘Who is serving these people? Why have they been kept waiting? In any case, who has seated them outdoors in the open courtyard?’

‘Huzoor,’ replied the patowari, ‘they are doshads by caste. If we seat them indoors, everything will have to be thrown away—no brahman, gangotri or chhatri will touch the food. Besides, where else can I seat them?’

When I myself went out in the rain to supervise the service for the poor doshad women, the others immediately hurried forward to serve them. Each one of those women ate such vast quantities of cheena grains, jaggery and the sour and watery yogurt, that it seemed miraculous. When I saw how eagerly they ate this humble fare, I made up my mind to invite them to a proper civilized meal. A week later, I had the patowari invite the women and their children from the doshad village. That day they were treated to a typical Bengali feast of meat and fish dishes, fluffy luchis made of flour, chutney, yoghurt, and several kinds of desserts made of creamy milk and rice, surpassing anything they might have even imagined. I will remember for long their wonderstruck and joyous expression, their shining eyes. Bishua, the vagabond gangota lad was also amongst the invitees.

I was riding back from the survey camp one day when I came across a man squatting beside a clump of kash making a meal of finely ground kalhai-dal or sattu. For lack of a bowl, he was mixing the sattu on one end of the dirty garment he was wearing. It was such a massive pile that it seemed incredible to me that a single person—albeit a Hindustani with a hearty appetite—could eat so much. The man stood up deferentially as soon as he saw me and salaamed.

‘Forgive me, Manager Sahab,’ he said, ‘it’s just a little meal that I’m having, Huzoor.’ I could not see what there was to forgive in a man who sat by himself in the wilderness, quietly having a meal. ‘You don’t have to get up,’ I said, ‘do carry on with your meal. What are you called?’ The man continued to stand as he answered respectfully, ‘Huzoor, this person is known as Dhautal Sahu.’ He looked as though he was over sixty. His was a tall and thin frame, his complexion dark. His feet were bare and all he wore was an extremely dirty dhoti and a merzai. This was the first of my encounters with Dhautal Sahu. ‘Do you know Dhautal Sahu?’ I asked Ramjyot Patowari on my return to the katcheri. ‘Certainly, Huzoor,’ said Ramjyot. ‘Is there anyone in these parts who does not know Dhautal Sahu? He’s a well-known rich moneylender, owner of lakhs of rupees—most people in these parts have borrowed from him. He lives in Naugachhia.’

I was taken aback by the patowari’s words. It was almost impossible to imagine a Bengali millionaire sitting on his haunches in the middle of the jungle and working his way through a mound of sattu off the dirty end of his garment. I thought the patowari might be exaggerating, but whosoever I asked in the katcheri had the same thing to say, ‘Oh, Dhautal Sahu! There’s no counting his money.’

Since that first meeting there was many an occasion when Dhautal Sahu visited me on his own work. As I got to know him, little by little, I realized that I had come to know a most exceptional character. Unless one saw him in person, it was hard to believe that such a man could exist in the twentieth century.

As I had guessed, Dhautal was about sixty-three. His home was in the village of Naugachhia which lay some twelve or thirteen miles south east of the katcheri. Practically everyone borrowed from him in these parts—tenants and labourers, small and middling farmers, landowners and traders. But the funny thing about Dhautal was that once he had lent the money he could never pressure the debtor to return the loan. In fact, there were many who had cheated him. A good-natured innocent creature like him ought never to have taken on the role of a banker and moneylender but he was unable to ward off any appeal. Besides, his own argument was that since they all borrowed money at a heavy rate of interest, he ought to loan the money in the interest of his own business.
Dhautal Sahu came to see me one day with a bundle of old documents tied up in his garment and said, ‘Huzoor, would you be kind enough to look through these documents?’

I inspected the contents and found that almost ten thousand rupees worth of deeds had become defunct because of a failure to appeal in the courts in time. Then he opened another fold of the long flowing urani draped around his chest and took out yet another bundle of equally faded and decrepit looking documents.

‘Huzoor, will you have a look at these?’ requested Dhautal. ‘I thought I should go to the district courts and have the lawyers look through them, but then, I’ve never filed a case. It doesn’t suit me. When I ask them to pay up, the defaulters keep saying they will, but they never do.’ I found they were all defunct deeds. The total value would amount to anything between four to five thousand rupees.

‘A good man always gets cheated, Sahuji,’ I told him, ‘it is not in you to be a mahajan. The only ones who will be successful in moneylending in these parts are professionals like the Rajput Rashbehari Singh—the sort who have eight hired men armed with their sticks to do their bidding. He lets his men loose in the defaulter’s fields and extracts both capital and interest by seizing the crops. No one is going to return a loan to a good-natured person such as you. Do not lend out any more money.’

I could not convince Dhautal. ‘Not everybody cheats, Huzoor,’ he maintained. ‘There is still the sun and the moon, and there is still the good Lord above us all—He who looks after the poor and the lowly. Besides, one cannot let money sit idle: Huzoor, money has to be let out at an interest. That is our business, after all.’ I did not understand this bit of logic. What kind of a business was it to lose one’s capital in the hope of earning interest? That day, before my eyes, Dhautal Sahu casually tore up fifteen to sixteen thousand rupees worth of defunct deeds. He tore them up as if it was rubbish; of course, they had turned into worthless paper. While he was doing this neither did his hands shake nor did his voice tremble.

‘I made my money selling raichi and reri seeds,’ he said. ‘Not a single coin did I inherit from my forefathers: It was I who made the money, and now, the loss is mine. If you want to do business, Huzoor, profit and loss is part of the game.’

All this was true enough, nevertheless, I wondered if there were many who would bear such massive losses with such calm, even indifference. He seemed to suffer from only one weakness: every now and then he would take out a cutter from a little red pouch and nip off bit of an areca nut and pop it into his mouth. He had told me once with a smile, ‘Babuji, I have some supari every day. This makes for quite a daily expense.’

If it is philosophical to be indifferent to one’s property and to regard a huge loss as a trifling matter, then I must say that I have never met a philosopher like Dhautal Sahu.

On the Author

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyaya was born on 12 September 1894 in the village of Muratipur in Bengal. Mahananda Bandyopadhyaya, his father, was a scholar of Sanskrit and music and a kathakar by profession. As a composer and teller of kathas, tales based on the Puranas, he was an early influence on Bibhutibhushan’s creativity.

Bibhutibhushan was the eldest of five children; his mother Mrinalini Debi was Mahananda’s second wife. His father died when he was very young and he lost several of his siblings under tragic circumstances. In 1917, when he was still studying for his Bachelor’s degree in Ripon College in Calcutta, Bibhutibhushan was married to fourteen-year-old Gauri Debi: she died of a sudden illness in a little over a year. The loss stayed with Bibhutibhushan for the rest of his life; Aranyak is dedicated to her. The near destitute condition of the family meant he had to struggle hard to go through school and later, college in Calcutta. He became a ‘guardian tutor’ while still at school (although he was exempted from paying fees), and continued to tutor students for most of his life to balance a slender income and his many familial obligations.

Excepting for weekend and other trips to his ancestral home in Barrackpur, until his second marriage to seventeen year old Roma Chattopadhyay in 1940, he made his home in various boarding houses (popularly known as ‘messes’) in Calcutta. The experience of the bhadralok migrant commuting from the suburbs and provinces fed into many of his works.

Starting with his first job in 1919, Bibhutibhushan earned his living primarily as a schoolteacher in various parts of Bengal. There were some breaks in school-teaching: he was to record without bitterness ‘odd jobs’ that he was obliged to take up and the unexpected paths they opened up. He was once hired to preach against cow-slaughter in present-day Bangladesh, on occasions travelling deep into the Arrakan hills. Arguably, the most significant of these ‘interruptions’, from 1924 till 1930, comprised his years as an assistant manager of a vast estate (of forests and otherwise uncultivated land) in Bhagalpur district in Bihar. He continued to visit the area until 1932 even after his return to Calcutta in 1930. Bibhutibhushan’s short stories had begun appearing in the literary journal Prabashi from the early 1920s, but these long and arduous years outside of Bengal proved to be a germinal period for him. They saw the gradual evolution of Pather Panchali, first serialized in 1928-29 and immediately recognized as a landmark in Bengali fiction. Successive novels in the following years—Aparajito, Drishtipradip—affirmed Bibhutibhushan’s place as a major litterateur. Aranyak had a long gestation and was first serialized in Prabashi between 1937 and 1939 and was published as a book in 1939. Although based on the writer’s sojourn in northern Bihar, the terrain of the novel encompasses places that he visited in later years.

Bibhutibhushan embodied wanderlust. His travels were rarely elaborate affairs; very often they were impromptu treks and sometimes inspired by what he may have glimpsed from a train window, but always, by a desire to know something about the place, the people who lived there. An intensely social being, Bibhutibhushan’s incessant travels and short sojourns away from the city were matched by activities that mark him as a metropolitan creature. Through it all he delighted in old ties, nurturing childhood connections with the extended network of village life, acutely conscious as he was of the pettiness and impoverishment of rural Bengal.

Besides writing extensively, in the last two decades of his life he was constantly chairing innumerable literary and other conferences all over the country, many of which also became occasions for sightseeing and travel. The last decade of his life revolved around the newfound companionability of his young wife and joy in their son Taradas, born in 1947.

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyaya died in his Ghatshila home in Bihar on 1 November 1950.

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The Arrière-pays—An extract

This extract has been taken from The Arrière-pays, by Yves Bonnefoy.
Translated from the French by Stephen Romer.

At a certain period of my life, nearly forty years ago now, I became involved with an aspect of the imagination which seemed to me then little explored—the dream we may entertain of a ‘country’ quite different to all those that we know but which we never come across in our wanderings, even though the track we did not take that would have led to it was never far from us, at a crossroads. A quite other country and society but not because of geography or language or civilization. What distinguishes so radically and mysteriously this arrière-pays lies in the relation of its inhabitants to the world—otherwise made up of more or less the same words and the same things as everywhere else on earth—such that it could nurture a being we can only feel to be lacking ‘over here’. Being is a difficult word. I mean it in the sense in which God conferred being on men created in his own image, as opposed to animals and plants, that ‘die with the seasons’ and are no more than ‘vain forms of matter’.

I repeat. There must be an ‘over there’ because ‘over here’ such a being is lacking. But ‘over there’, just as ‘over here’, is the same simple and fully natural reality. No belittling of this reality is implied in this kind of reverie, no contempt towards the place extending all around us, there is merely the desire to live more intensely what this place, and what nature, offers to us. It is the desire that sharpens Rimbaud’s cry—we are not in the world, the true life is absent.

To be clear, this desire, this thirst that is after all metaphysical, can be felt at every fork in the road, and the outer aspects of the sensible world are in no way its cause. But they can sometimes be intensified, because there exist over here certain aspects that seem to incite us to set off in search of this fundamental arrière-pays, this other country; there are gleams, clues, signs even, who knows, around us, that appear to be proofs of its existence. Take certain old photographs of monuments or of villages clinging to hillsides, on the horizon. The photographs are old, not because the arrière-pays belongs to the past but because such images, technically of poor quality, simplify what they represent, which one would otherwise understand too easily; and one can thus invest with some deeper intelligence this woman or this man halted at the edge of a terrace in front of a church in Armenia. The church itself is beautiful enough for us to believe that the master builder himself shared some of that hyper-consciousness which still perhaps survives today, somewhere in the labyrinthine heart of these mountain valleys.

Photographs, but also voices, of the kind one used to hear on the radio, issuing from those cathedral-shaped receivers, voices that swelled and fell away again with what was called le fading. With my ear glued to the wireless I became attached to those voices, which from time to time almost faded away completely. Where were they speaking from, who were these beings that sang, and sometimes chanted? Over there, where they lived, was that not the arrière-pays? There were place names listed on the turning dial, and I would try to link these voices to them—they were names I could even find on a map—but sufficiently remote and sufficiently other as to be tinged with the absolute. I remember becoming obsessed with the name Aberdeen, and even now I know that I could not arrive in Aberdeen without a feeling of holy dread.

There was also the science of perspective, in the Tuscan Quattrocento—the dolce prospettiva: dolce, what a fascinating word for it!—and especially its deployment by certain painters, major or minor, who I suspected of using it with other preoccupations in mind than that of merely putting an image together. For example, the monuments that are simplified according to perspective, because they are at a distance from the viewer, are they modified merely because of distance, or are the remaining, simplified aspects of their appearance a sign, still just perceptible to us, of another way of being, and of existing, in the light here all around us on earth, but which over there would be lived more intimately, and be better understood? But I found it was impossible to pursue these reflections further, and confusion invaded my mind, quite naturally I came to think, because here we no longer dispose of or cannot recall those higher modes of thought and feeling.

In a much earlier book, I had tried to describe these phantasms of mine, some of which I had simply dreamt, others I had actually tried to apply. For I am forced now to admit, I was very much given to dreaming in the way I have described, so anyone could say to me, and with reason: ‘Are these reveries of yours not simply an aspect of who you are, and no business of ours?’ And yet no one among us was prepared to consider that there may be something universal in these things, given how our consciousness of the world is structured. The latter, in fact, undergoes language like a kind of prism through which our perception of what is becomes diffracted and is deformed, or even appears double, tinged with what then appears to be supernatural colour. Our engagement with reality is disturbed as much as it is constructed by language, in which case the arrière-pays would be no more than a linguistic illusion, much as we might speak of an optical illusion. It would be a trick or a turn in speech, something almost impossible to straighten out, which explains how this reverie might exist at the very heart of our relation with ourselves and is not just personal to me.

I had already pondered this question of the place elsewhere, and the nature of its otherness, that I imagined radical, in the book I have just mentioned, L’Arrière-pays, published in 1972. In retrospect, my treatment of the subject seems to me incomplete, and I want now to take up the threads again, by describing some further experiences which I feel are linked to the ‘over there’ of the arrière-pays, and yet are of a quite different nature.

And what I want to evoke, first of all, is not an elsewhere specifically at all but, rather, something on our side, over here—it is the feeling we sometimes get that the place as it exists in the mind, despite its strangeness, is in fact the same as the place in which we really are at the instant we perceive it, but it exists at a level that is more inward, and deeper, than the here and now of our outward and visible existence. How so? It is worth noting to start with that the arrière-pays, the idea of the arrière-pays, is a thought, and is not as such accompanied by any perception, visual or otherwise, since we do not enter into that country, we know nothing of it, even if, as I have just remarked, the phantasm can vaguely attach itself to images or situations or visible places scattered here and there in the real world. It is a thought, nothing more, unsubstantiated by formal representations. But what I have in mind now is anything but an abstraction.

I close my eyes—what do I see before me? Nothing indistinct but something very near and clearly visible. To my left and right are some very ancient stone walls, stretching in front of me all the way to the horizon, which is not that far away, under the fine blue sky of a summer’s day. Between these walls and, apparently growing under my feet, there is a stretch of tall, wild grass, with a few nettles, and apparently rising clear of this confusion, three or four scattered rocks. Nothing else, save that emanating from everything I see at this instant is a very strong impression of reality; I am at liberty to assert these things because this vision of mine is not something I have just invented for the occasion but an experience I have actually lived, and one indeed that I have had often. I often see these stones and grasses, and my immediate reaction is always the same—this place exists, or rather it is, and I am in it, it is my here, it is even a here that brings with it no elsewhere. For when I am in it I imagine nothing else, nothing even that might be close by, the other side of these walls to the left and right of me.

Its existence here? Yet it is not my actual life, it vanishes as soon as I open my eyes again, and there is no trace of it in the conscious memory of my past life. Compared to the quality of presentness, and of being, with which I invest without hesitating what I ordinarily see around me, or to what I know I have seen, this is non-being. But absent as it is from my life and knowledge, this place of grasses is nevertheless present, in the sense that it is like a place where I am and not one where I should like to go or where I have been and have kept the memory. Here, in this sort of here, absence and presence coincide. So what is it?

People will tell me once again: ‘But it is only an image like the ones we see in dreams. This one has taken form and become obsessional in you because of the psychic charge it has, of which you are unaware! This place of grasses, has a meaning, either of a symbolic nature, like the archetypes Jung speaks of in his analysis of dreams, or else a product of condensation and displacement according to Freudian terminology. Try and find its meaning, and make a kind of mandala of it; or explore your own association of ideas, make a puzzle of the apparently visual perceptions that are in reality nothing more than signifiers in your own personal language.’

But, no! I cannot think in this way, and for one very simple reason—it is that between the different parts of my place of grasses are numberless links that are very tight and hold the whole together in a unity, or better, that rise from every part of them like the tremors in hot air, like an intensity which erases in every visible aspect all that is not of its own pure, immediate self-identity. And I myself am a part of this unity, I feel it within myself, I know that thanks to it I am; more, I am where I must be. These two walls, these grasses, these rocks under the sky, they are absolutely not an image—it is in these moments, for me in any case, a reality, the reality. I come into my own country.

It is not the desire for another place, as in the reveries of the arrière-pays. But it is the place itself which is my here and now, erasing any thought of an elsewhere. Such is the nature of this event, which unfolds before me fairly often, and which I am prepared to believe is an experience shared by others besides myself.

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Starlite Terrace — An Extract

This extract has been taken from Starlite Terrace, by Patrick Roth.
Translated from the German by Krishna Winston.

‘Man, you have no idea what the movies were in those days. The movies in Madera. There were only two theaters. One of them was the MADERA, which was expensive, and the other, where a ticket cost only ten or fifteen cents, was the REX. The REX next door. Always packed, you know, total chaos. Often we stretched out on the stage because every seat was taken and stared straight up at the ratty screen. Westerns, gangster flicks, comedies, all B-movies. The program changed three times a week. And they always had double bills in those days. First came the cartoon, then the newsreel and finally the first feature. During the previews of coming events, especially when the hero clinched with the heroine or swooped in to kiss her or the bad guy went galloping out of town, we’d toss our empty popcorn boxes at the screen and then . . . we’d shut up. Shut up for the second feature. A four hour ritual.’

He fell silent, animated yet contented, and it became clear to me that Rex could see his parents before him, this unknown couple whom, as he admitted, he would not have recognized in any photo or on the street. His imagination had inserted them among that wild horde of children occupying the REX, two people whispering to one another.

And what were they whispering about?

It was about his name, the name they would give him. While he was still in her belly, his name had long since captured their imagination and was whispering to them what he should be called. It came from the screen, that name did, through the ratty fabric, through the smoke from cannon salvos, waving pennants, whizzing arrows and lances, as a battle in black and white raged around the fortress; it zoomed over the rows of spectators, staring open-mouthed at the screen, wormed its way into his father’s ear and from there to his mouth, and he leaned over to whisper to his mother the inspiration that had reached his tongue.

I thought I could see how this thought process had filled him with the secret strength he now felt. It seemed to Rex as if he had baptized himself REX. As if he, REX, had given himself a home and could take credit for his parents’ best hours and for countless imaginary walks the two had taken after the movies. He, the prompter, the guide, REX, who had whispered from his screen to his parents, telling them what name they should give him. Long before he glimpsed the light of the world. While he was still the light of the world, every evening after work, in the light-dappled darkness of the REX. Three times a week—space, light and sound—prized and reasonably priced—the REX ritual.

‘And it must have been in the REX,’ I said, ‘that your father saw Gary Cooper for the first time.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Rex said. ‘Come to think of it, he saw Cooper in Beau Geste—that’s the first film with Coop I remember—or The Westerner or Mr. Deeds Goes to Town or The Lives of a Bengal Lancer . . .’

‘That was Hitler’s favorite film, by the way,’ I remarked.

‘Really?’

I was irked at myself for having interrupted him.

‘. . . or The Adventures of Marco Polo,’ Rex continued, as if he had to smooth over the reference to Hitler. ‘Or The Pride of the Yankees, one of those early Cooper films in the REX. And to think he was holding my mother’s hand! Maybe a little tipsy but romantic; she must have liked that, in the movie theater, in the REX. He held her hand and didn’t know, couldn’t have guessed, that his hand would one day take the place of the hero’s, in High Noon, and that those two hands were more or less identical, that of the hero up on the screen and the one down below resting on the dress of my mother, tipsy, pregnant and infatuated, in the REX.’

While he was speaking, filled with enthusiasm and hardly addressing himself to me anymore, he stared out the window into the rainy morning. It was as if he were painting a picture that he wanted to correct here and there. But at the mention of the film’s title, I was suddenly reminded of the signature melody in High Noon.

I had seen the film in Germany when I was a child, not in ’53 when it was first released there, but maybe in the late fifties. The images themselves could not be separated from that melody, the song that now came to mind. It hovered over the shots of the bleached sky, the bare-swept street which Marshal Kane, aka Gary Cooper, must walk down to confront the men who arrived on the noon train to kill him. Before that decisive moment, he is abandoned by the woman, Grace Kelly, the stunning woman in white, whom he married only an hour before and with whom he was hoping to ride away so they could consummate their marriage. He hoisted her in the air, holding his bride by the waist with strong hands, and set her down on the justice of the peace’s desk, promising the laughing, singing guests that he would not let the bride get down until she kissed him. At that point, someone interrupts the merriment, bringing word of the noon train. And the ground caves in. Kelly abandons Cooper because he refuses to run from the killers. Then the song is heard again.

Sometimes, my father sang it to me, darkening his voice because he saw that I liked the sad song better that way, campfire-dark, as if a lonely cowboy were singing. He sang in German,

Warum bist du von mir gegangen . . . Oh, why have you gone and left me?

I couldn’t remember the rest of the words because at the time I always fixated on the word gegangen. It sounded so terrible, so final. The couple, whom I always secretly identified with my parents, had parted. One of them had deserted the other, irrevocably, once and for all. As my father sang, I saw the hero searching, saw him sitting by the fire under the empty night sky, staring into the flames and muttering the question. There was only this question, which went unanswered. He sang the question and left me dangling, with this final, hopelessly sorrowful gegangen in my ears.

I am sure I was afraid at the time that my parents might split up. The fear made my throat tighten and prevented me from remembering the rest of the song. Fear that my father was singing so beautifully, with such mournful loneliness, because he sensed that the song expressed his own destiny and, therefore, mine as well. Nonetheless, I loved hearing that song, I don’t know why, and asked him again and again to sing it for me.