TIME OF LIES: NATALIA'S LETTER PART 2 di Sibila Petlevski (narrativa)
La prima parte di questo racconto è stata pubblicata il 18 aprile, qui, sulle pagine di TeclaXXI
Sibila Petlevski
Time of Lies: Natalia’s Letter
Part 2
(An extract from the
novel Time of Lies, the first book in the Taboo Trilogy by Sibila
Petlevski. Copyright ©Sibila Petlevski
2024; First published in Croatian:
Sibila Petlevski (2009). Vrijeme laži. Zaprešić:
Fraktura. All rights by Sibila Petlevski)
Dear Abrashka, Natalia wrote - and even
that beginning left him in awe. No one called him that, not even when he was a
very small boy. I wish you were around,
so I could ask you for advice. After the tragic death of my parents, you were
and remain to be the only person I trust. There are some unexplainable things
going on for some time now. I'm upset and I don't know what to do. I’ve been
facing a problem for more than a year. Perhaps I should describe it
immediately, without an introduction. I urge you to refrain from premature
conclusions before you have read to the end what I have to say. I say this not
because I would doubt your patience and benevolent desire to come to my aid, as
always, but because I appreciate your rationalism, your knowledge, and your
reluctance to readily accept unverified facts and unconvincing arguments. I
will write what I have been postponing for a long time to admit to myself, let
alone share with another person: I am under the influence of a machine made
here in Berlin. My problem started about a year after the declaration of war,
when I met two people who offered me extra income. One doctor, who is also a
military officer, and his colleague, a young woman who would occasionally visit
my library, explained to me that they worked for a government agency that
studied the effects of certain waves on human hearing and that the goal is to
help the deaf to hear again. They emphasized that the experiment required a
group of volunteers, for whose services the Government is ready to pay well.
The machine, currently in the final testing phase, is not harmful in any way,
on the contrary - they insisted - only two sessions in the laboratory are
enough and dramatic results are recorded in relation to the initial condition
of the patient, after which the experiment can be continued at home. At first,
I wrote them off that I was not interested because I was already used to the
circumstances of life without hearing, but later I thought about it and it
seemed to me that the financial side of that offer was tempting. Besides, the
risk was practically negligible: how could the machine damage my hearing when I
was already completely deaf? Guided by this soothing thought, I headed to the Allgemeine
Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft, an imposing
architectural complex at Friedrich-Karl-Ufer 2-4. The second experiment in
which I participated, along with several other people, not all of whom were
deaf, was performed by the esteemed Professor Haber at the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute in Dahlem. In the first two sessions, I did not notice anything
unusual, in fact, I was disappointed because I could not give answers to the
researchers' questions that would indicate a change in my physical condition.
The third session aroused divided feelings in me. I was again invited to the
General Electricity Research Company, but there were no other volunteers
besides me. Moreover, the entire General Company building complex, after
passing the reception office, seemed unnaturally empty to me. When I stepped
into the laboratory, I did not see any of the staff, who were probably in the
so-called "control room," but after more than a decade of deafness, I
heard a voice for the first time. That was wonderful. Dear Abrashka, how
wonderful it was, just like I was dreaming. And I immediately felt something
like the blade of sorrow with which I always awoke when I dreamed of my
childhood in our old country, and when in those dreams I heard Aunt Laima
singing; and the wind howling through the chimney and whimpering through the
door; and horse bells jingling; and the creaking of snow underfoot, and the
barking of our dog Velna, whom we found half dead and given water and food, and
who was so small, thin, and sweet, but her barking would sometimes turn into a
wild howl like a wolf in the evening. And the father would say: “Look at our
little Velna, the devil, calling on the moon! Eh, you lunatic, you would run
with wolves!” And from that desperate howl that would soon turn into barking
again and end in a ridiculous barking-like cough, I would always wake up. I would
open my eyes surrounded by a thick silence, a fog that entered my ears and
engulfed me. For the first time in so many years, I heard a voice. A cold,
mechanical voice gave me instructions. And when I left the building, nothing
again. Silence. Deaf silence. And weakness. Dizziness. I went to bed exhausted
as if I was going to get sick. I shivered and tears moistened my pillow.
Abrashka, dear Abrashka, my dream of healing was short and it would have been
better if I had never, for a moment, heard that voice, because you can't
imagine how awful it was to hear again, and then not hear again, to lose that
peace in an instant which I have so long and painstakingly acquired after I
have given up all hope only to begin to hope again, hope and hope, and all in
vain. It would have been better if I had accepted my deafness as some strange
form of happiness, as an opportunity to completely separate myself from a world
in which all I cared about died screaming.
I have memorized your letter and it gives me
strength:
“The strength is in accepting things
as they are. Why should everyone be happy in the same way?”
You said it nicely, my clever
Abrashka, but I'm not sure that I have such an unwavering spirit and that I can
say as boldly as you:
“No one can rob me of happiness
because my joy is not comparable to someone else's, even when I share it with
someone who is my cause for rejoicing; nothing can get me out of the way
because wherever I go, I am headed in the right direction; my steps determine
my destiny. My destiny is in my feet paving the virgin path in the polar
desert. The secret is in the non-transferable, unique value of the ratio of the
ingredients of freedom and restriction, and that is why me, Freidus, I am not a
machine. ”
Sorry, Abrashka, don't take offense,
but I think you have more strength than me because you left this horror here
and went to the New World. To be far away means to have the opportunity to
forget. You can, but I can’t say, "I am irreducible, irreplaceable, the
only one." I can't escape the ghosts. They are in me. Their screams made
me deaf. And now it seems to me that I could be everything; that it is better
to be anything, just not to be what I am.
You must be wondering, as you read
this letter, how I could have taken the right to address you in such an
intimate tone. Abrashka, you are so close to me! You are my strength, I have
already told you, you are the only memory of our sad homeland - that lump of
dirty snow with an icy heart in the middle - the only memory I can keep with a
smile. There are days when I wake up so rested, so madly convinced that I could
follow you across the ocean to the end of the world. And then, those other days
come, when ink is poured on my soul, like on paper. First one small drop, then
a little bigger one that turns into a stain and expands, expands, until I sink
into blackness. Do you know, darling, what happens then? I hear a voice.
It
took me a long time to figure out where it came from. That voice - which I
first heard in the laboratory of the General Electricity Research Company, in
the left wing of the building, on the second floor, in room 207 - comes
straight from me. That, of course, is not my voice, for how, so cold and
commanding, it could ever be mine. Just think! Do I ever speak with reserve and
from above? Abrashka, you are my witness: I have stopped speaking so that I
would not have to speak like that; as a guidance machine; as a machine with a
built-in command:
"Natalia,
go to the kitchen and get a knife. Natalia, you have to take the knife now.
Take the knife. Natalia, take the knife.”
***
Freidus stopped reading and put the letter in his
briefcase because the ferry had just arrived in Manhattan. He was late for
work, so he decided to report that he was not feeling well and that he would
take a day off. Indeed, he was not quite his own: his sinuses were causing him
pain and he could barely breath as if he was breathing with gills. Freidus
longed for a cup of hot black tea with lots of sugar and a slice of lemon. He
bought a newspaper, but contrary to his usual habits, he just glanced at the headlines
and had no composure to delve into anything. He was sitting in a café near the
Flatiron Building, looking out the window at the "bow" of a dizzying
skyscraper that resembled a celestial ship more than the edge of the iron after
which it was named. Everything he looked at was still marked by impressions
from Ellis Island; everything was still reminiscent of Natalia's departure. He
sat down in the cafe with the intention of thinking, but he was overcome by
fatigue. His head dropped; for a few seconds he dozed, snoring only once, and
from that sound he was startled and his heart trembled. He was tormented by
many things.
Freidus
was upset and a little angry because he felt exploited. He had a strong
aversion to any direct or indirect imposition of obligation and "putting
the key in the back" of his person, and wherever he went, he emphasized
that "he is not a machine to carry out orders just like that."
Emotional blackmail and supposedly small friendly favors got on his nerves.
Occasionally, however, he would succumb to the circumstances that are an
integral part of every social life, even the most meager one. Freidus was amazed
at the amount of nonsense people considered important. He hated it most when
someone asked him for a small favor with the intention of finding a reason to
involve his person in some, most often trivial, hypocritical form of
socializing. Freidus would always find it easier to accept being in the service
of a beautiful woman than an authoritarian man, so the negative attitude toward
Graves, and the nausea around the whole situation, were somewhat alleviated by
the thought of Christine. He took a taxi and headed for her apartment.
***
Christine greeted him in slippers and a house dress.
Heavy brocade curtains completely covered the windows. It was a sunny and cold
late autumn day outside, but that could not be inferred from the gloomy
atmosphere in the room. A huge tiger cat slept by an overheated tiled stove on
a large armchair. The room was lit by two floor lamps with exotic lampshades.
From the couch, where Christine had apparently been dozing until a few minutes
ago, a dark red blanket slid to the floor. On the floor, next to the couch, on
a small silver tray - a crumbled piece of cake, a bottle of liqueur and an
overturned crystal beaker. On the round table, on a lace tray, an empty bottle
of red wine and two used glasses. Open notes on the piano.
"Do
you like calypso?" Christine asks. “Lionel Belasco is our personal friend.
Maybe you know him too: his dad was a Sephardic Jew. The mother, as can be seen
from his physiognomy, was black. A Creole black woman. Shall I play “Juliana”
for you? It's such a beautiful melody. ”
Christine began to play, but soon stopped.
“Oh,
how tactless I am. Well, you're still standing, Mr. Freidus. Take a seat. What
can I offer you?”
She
lifted the cat into her arms and made room for Freidus, who sank into an
armchair. He set the briefcase on the floor, but kept the package on his lap
like a shy boy:
“Shipment
for your namesake. The doctor mentioned some letters for him, but I didn't pick
anything up from the ship anymore. ”
"It
simply came to our notice then. Don't worry, "she said disinterestedly and
with a velvety look and a singing voice added," Thank you. You are such a
nice man. How about a little cherry liqueur? There are cakes left. Well, we can
make a toast, and then I'll finally play “Juliana” for you.
There
was almost no makeup on her face, but that made her even more beautiful. She
looked younger than on the movie screen. Although the bags under her eyes
testified that she had spent the past night in merry company, this,
surprisingly, did not spoil the relaxed impression she left at all: she was
reminiscent of a debauched schoolgirl who smokes, drinks and tries on her older
sister's silk underwear.
Freidus
stayed with Miss Mayo for too long, and when he went out he noticed that the
janitor was looking at him questioningly, perhaps even reproachfully. Or so
Freidus thought. In any case, after a few hours of gentle immersion in
Christine's large armchair, after a complete, voluntary and almost hypnotic
commitment to the "feminine atmosphere" of the overheated room that
drew him in like a wet vulva, Freidus experienced a sting of discomfort as he
left the apartment. There was a bit of self-blame, too, because, contrary to
his usual daily habits, he literally spent a few hours talking and performing
meaningless arabesques of benevolent decency — this futile social action that
he otherwise successfully avoided.
As
soon as he got home, he continued reading Natalia's letter:
Frankly, I'm not sure how long I'll be able
to resist: it's like hunger. My stomach starts to churn. It lifts me up. I go
to the kitchen, take a knife and cut myself shallowly. Blood follows the line
of my weakness. I rinse with iodine tincture. Scars remain: on the thighs and
on the left arm. And then the voice commands:
"Go, Natalia, go there. Into
the street here and there. ”
And
- just think - I dress obediently! Sometimes, when I put on my hat and gloves,
I get confused. I stand in front of the door and I don't know where I'm going.
Tell me, dear, what would you do if you were me? I know: you would go first to
Professor Haber, to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and ask him if your ailments
had anything to do with the experiment for which you received the honorarium.
And then you would ask Haber to return things to their original state if
feasible? That's exactly what I did, but the professor looked at me with a big
puzzled eye under a thick silver-framed zwicker. Very slowly, so that I could
read his lips, he said something like this:
“Dear
Miss Aronstam, but you signed the contract and the contract stated that side
effects were possible. I'm sorry if they happened in your case, but I really
don't know what I could do personally. Let me explain to you: our project is
made up of several relatively stand-alone programs, and you, as far as I know,
were not in the control group that was under my direct jurisdiction.
Unfortunately, I cannot provide you with adequate explanations at this time
because - I assure you - I myself am not fully acquainted with the results of
all the experiments carried out so far. So, only for a while, when statistical
analyzes of the obtained results are made, you can expect that someone from the
Institute will contact you, which I will take care of personally because I -
here, look, you can see for yourself - entered your data. Please make sure I
have entered everything correctly: your name ... Russian, if I'm not mistaken
... and your last name ..,”
"Jew-ish. From La-tvi-a”, and
continued in the same tone, slowly and clearly, articulating each syllable
carefully:
“...
and your Berlin address. It's all there.”
He took off his zwicker and stared
at me long and penetratingly, after which he began to recite:
“I no longer have a father, I no
longer have love; and let death teach me to forget, and that I have ever loved.
Have you read ...”
"Schiller? Of course,
Professor.”
"You are an amazing person,
Miss Aronstam, as if someone had invented you. A real tragic heroine. But don't
be so sad. Everything will be fine.”
Of course, Haber's explanation did
not reassure me. There were rumours about the professor that he was a great
seducer and that he recited poetry and dramatic literature for that purpose. I
even felt a certain sympathy for him, as it was rumoured that his wife, a
chemist who did not agree with his military engagement, committed suicide in
the garden of their villa by firing a shot from his revolver into her head. Her
name was, I think, Clara. It was in May. Newspapers wrote about it. Just a few
months later Haber recited Schiller in my presence. The passage he recited referred
more to himself than to me and that is why I regretted it. I was genuinely
saddened by this brief encounter with a man ruled by some contradictory forces;
who could not suppress his natural inclination towards the Jews because he was
himself a Jew, who converted to Christianity for patriotic reasons. Even on
superficial contact, he gave the impression of one of those people from whose
cold calculations uncontrollable sparks of romance occasionally emanate: he was
a humanistic convert and a mocking misanthrope. In any case, after talking to
Haber, after a long time, I felt the imperative need to visit my psychoanalyst
again. Unfortunately, Dr Tausk had just been mobilized as a military doctor.
That was very bad news for me because I only trusted him. Remember, I wrote to
you about my troubles in the first years of my stay in Berlin, when I used
electrotherapy, quite unsuccessfully, to cure neurotic problems related to -
you know what terrible events. That really led nowhere, not to mention the
financial side of the problem. And then I heard that Dr Tausk sometimes treats
for free. Talking to him worked wonders.
***
Freidus wondered as he read Natalia's letter how she
could have written in a collected way about a bloody tragedy that, by mere
chance, did not happen to her. She mentioned the deaths of her father and
mother as "you already know what terrible events". She persistently
tried to avoid the immediate memory of the day when she entered the courtyard
through the wide-open doorway. Velna lay in front of the steps of the family
house; her brain spilled out of her shattered head, and she looked as if she
was still snarling with her naked canines. Of course, nothing could remove that
day and that scene from her heart; she was just trying to make a circle around
the image of horror in her memory as if bypassing a pit of quicklime. Freidus
knew all this first hand because, with a few other neighbours and friends, he
was one of the first to step into the Aronstam family's estate after the
tragedy. He found everything exactly as the criminals had left it. In a shed
that served as a small ceramic workshop - a pile of broken pottery. Efim
Aronstam, coated from head to toe with clay, swayed hanging from a wooden beam.
Broken glass in the house: display cases and porcelain dishes in them. The
upholstery on a two-seater - slashed open. Pieces of clothing. A leg of a
wooden chair dipped in blood. On the bed - a body half covered with a sheet on
which it is written in blood: "Russia to the Russians!". Naked Raisa
with half-spread bloody thighs lying on her stomach. Someone carved the sign of
the Black Hundred on her back with a knife: a cross inscribed in a circle and
four times two mirrored Cyrillic letters "s" inscribed in the fields
around the cross.
It
happened in 1905. It was just one of several isolated "warnings". A
large-scale clean-up operation was prepared, and without the organized help of
the Latvian brothers, mostly Catholics, but also of other faiths, the massacre
would have been inevitable. They heard that the pogrom would begin at the old
Latgol fortress in the easternmost province north of the Daugava River. In the
evening, a crowd of Latgalians and peasants from several surrounding places
armed themselves with pitchforks, stakes and rifles. The Black-hundredists -
"Tschernosotjenzy" – were intercepted at the entrance to the city of
Ludza. After a conversation that threatened to escalate into battle at any
moment, the Black Hundred soldiers withdrew, faced with a numerically superior,
furious mob that was unwilling to let them carry out their plans. The bloodshed
was temporarily prevented, but the circumstances became more difficult every
day, and Freidus remembered very well everything that made him and many other
people in the area leave their homeland forever. Unlike Natalia, who remembered
winter, Freidus prefered to
remember the golden and green colors of Latvian summer, the blue of the
lake, and the buzzing of bees around the hives scattered almost everywhere
across the land. Bygones is bygones,
Freudus thought, and sighed softly.
In
the letter, which Freidus put on his knees for a moment, Natalia described the
electrotherapy sessions with all the details that did not interest him. She
used to write dozens of pages of long letters and would often stray from the
main line of what she wanted to say at the outset. He still saw this peculiar,
extremely well-read young woman as a poor, deaf, dumb orphan of his late friend
Efim and his, always cordial, wife Raisa. Poor Natalia, when she moved to
Berlin in early 1906 with the Kunrath family, devout Lutherans who accepted her
as their own child, tried to regain her hearing with the help of popular new
technology, but also to cure the "algolagnia" diagnosed to her by Dr
Albert Eulenburg. In Freidus's humble opinion, there was not too much medical
truth behind the fashionable term "algolagnia", which referred to a
neurotic disorder in patients prone to paradoxical pleasure in the pain of
self-injury. He was disgusted by the dead serious galvanization of patients,
mostly young women. This fascination with electrodes and wires seemed to him to
be a textbook example of false science and quackery, as a symptom of the
beginning of the collapse of the modern age. It seemed to him that cities
across Europe and America were networked and connected by the nerves of modern
people. For him, the tense nerves of Berlin and New York citizens were a
reflection of the tense telegraph wires and electric lights that illuminated
the Berlin metropolis for the first time in 1888 along the Unter den Linden
boulevard and Leipziger street. Four years later, New York City, lit by
electricity, celebrated Edison at the Commodore Hotel. Freidus felt as if he
was surrounded on all sides by brilliant forms of the same global lie which, in
the name of civilization, under the metropolitan glare, duplicitously conceals
the darkness of barbarism, the beastly need to deal with everything that does
not fit, that is different, that resists. He clearly saw the vile need to
silence the few remaining brilliant minds who, with the last atom of strength,
were trying to stop the degeneration of humanity, moral slippage and the steep
decline of human consciousness into the world sewer that became wider, deeper
and stinker every day.
List of characters mentioned in the excerpt:
Eulenburg, Albert, 1840-1917 - German neurologist and sexologist (real character)
Freidus, Abraham Solomon (Abrashka), 1867-1923 - bibliographer originally from Riga. Chief Librarian of the Judaica & Hebraica Department at the New York Public Library. (semi-fictional character)
Haber, Fritz, 1868-1934. - German chemist. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918; also known for his active participation in the discovery and development of munitions for the military industry (real character)
The Taboo Trilogy by
Sibila Petlevski is a necrography in three novels: The Time of Lies (2009), We Had It So Nice! (2011) and The Twilight State (2013). Although the share of historical facts is considerable, and
many real people are mentioned, Taboo is a fictional narrative in which the life of the forgotten giant of
psychoanalysis, Viktor Tausk, has only served as inspiration. Fictional
confabulations of historical facts are exclusively in the function of
literature, and their application to reality is a matter of reader’s personal
choice for which the author is not responsible. The Taboo Trilogy is dedicated to the brave, who do not agree to live in the time of
lies; to people who are not afraid of freedom.
BIONOTA
Sibila Petlevski, born on May 11, 1964 in Zagreb, is an award-winning novelist, poet and playwright, librettist, literary translator and editor of literary and scientific publications, researcher in the field of theater and interdisciplinary science, full professor at the University of Zagreb. She has written twenty-five books of different literary and scientific genres, edited eight scientific books, and compiled and translated an anthology of American poetry.
photo by ©David Gazarov
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