Róbert Gál: Agnomia (excerpt 1)

Three young female artists present their projects. One of them, a famous photographer of the rediscovered theme of female bodies comes with a collection of paper boxes in which some idea is always intricately glued in, as if it were a jack-in-the-box or cuckoo clock. I sit at a table with this photographer in the sort of timeless space a café describes and I let her spill her waves of acute anxiety on me – this anxiety owing to the fact that one of her colleagues is nearly her identical twin. She describes her, detail-by-detail, with utmost concerned. “Young, beautiful, passionate. A tough one in pursuing her goals.” “Just like you,” I say. “Yes, you're right,” she answers and breaths out slightly. I head off to the old dingy building of a former train station. I enter a pub, it's a complete dive, at the bottom of the price category. Right at the entry there are a few steps down, which must be taken ritually – every newcomer is thoroughly and silently measured by watchful pairs of eyes. The tension between the regulars and me is nearly unbearable and yet I continue straight to the bar. I ask for a beer and sit down at a little table set strategically right beside the bar, shielded from possible attacks of invisible regulars. They are slowly becoming visible. They are heavy-faced people with the deep eyes of old men. The first one my gaze fixes on looks like the double of Samuel Beckett in his old age. Quiet and photogenic, with an elegant worker’s leader cap on his head. I see the other guests as well – each is like a living monument, sitting at his own massive table – they all have the exact same caps on their heads.  One of them opens a newspaper in front of him and looks at it, focused. I find myself in this place in the midst of a discussion. The patrons are trying to convince the pub owner about the necessity of some measure or other, but the man behind the beer-tap looks bulletproof. Instead of an answer to a direct question from one of his guests, who is pointing a finger at him as the only suitable addressee, the barman suddenly picks up a newspaper from a table, opens it and hides his entire face. The pages of the newspaper are black as soot. Even that must have a reason. I read that the first Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, is dead. And then I dreamt that I was passing through the reception of a dormitory, posing as a woman. One of the girls had gone to see her parents and so she let me take her bed. In the morning, I got up quietly and informed the two young men blissfully chatting on the other beds my name – this time it’s my actual name. Then I ask them whether I can stay there for a week, as this was the deal I'd made with the girl. They say it’s OK. We’re outside on a lawn and heaven's birds twitter nicely. I say to these fellows: “Look, I have an absolute bomb here! Perhaps we could organize a show.” I pull from my bag the precious contraband, in the form of a musical composition: Six Litanies for Heliogabalus. I put it on. The music starts, ritualistically, from the first beat, at full throttle. I realize that by the time the thundering of drums sets in (fired up by the shrieks of the singer), there is already a merry dancing on the meadow. A surrealistic painter watching it and keeping his distance writes in his diary: “This goddamned vermin is spinning since the morning.” A smaller group of dancers is like a squirming caterpillar moving across the hill. That’s where the real authentic „voodoo part“ of the composition comes in. And there is some sort of totem being prepared. Won’t they chop someone in quarters alive? Voices from the plenum can be heard. To come with objectiveness, waves, in which objectiveness comes. Objectiveness is never objective. On the account of one of Hegel’s books, Kierkegaard stated that, if the author noted in the preface that his book is a mere thought experiment, it would be an interesting piece of work. But Hegel did not make such a note and thus his thoughts are ridiculous. This reminded me of a scene from my relationship with L. One time, before leaving for someplace, I pulled a condom out of my bag in her presence, so that I could put it into a secret jacket pocket. And she immediately started complaining, not understanding, why I need a condom in a secret pocket when I’m with her. I didn’t know what to tell her. That the condom is something of a good luck charm, the one that continually fortifies me with the hope for something better? Yesterday I met Ben after two years at a literary soirée. I asked him whether he'd came back to Prague or whether he was here only for a visit and intended to return to Japan. He said living in Japan was impossible. Two years ago, he said the same thing about Prague. “Tell me something about Berlin,” he said. “My wife just applied to a school there.” To date, I still don’t know his wife’s name, because every time Ben talks about his wife, he uses the expression “my wife”. In my interpretation this means some sort of balance between the two words, which are equally serious. First of all, to point out the fact of ownership and secondly to point out the fact of the object of the ownership, which is, conventionally, specifically, designated as a wife. He spoke of her psychological anomaly, which he'd discovered only recently after their relationship had already lasted many years. I told him that when I first met his wife, she seemed to me ... hypersensitive. I called it that for lack of a better word and perhaps out of a certain tact. The soirée continued with a reading (in English), which flooded the entire inside of the somewhat humanized industrial metal organism of the pub. I asked a friend of mine, a Slovak sitting next to me, whether he understood any of it. He answered that he understood nothing but it was obvious nevertheless that he was having a good time. He said that it reminded him of the sermon at Sunday mass, where his grandmother took him at the age of six or seven. The rest of the evening was ruled by magical Markéta, who, after a dose of pot and plum brandy, got into such a weird spiritual state that she needed to gesture with her body like an ancient Sun goddess in the full fury of worship. Her hands were held up like bowls of weighing scales and her stare – like fiery magnetic rays shooting into the darkness of the pub – was what these bowls were weighing. Recalling this, I perceive her gesture now as some necessary tugging at the powers of stares. At the time I felt somehow able to absorb whatever she was beaming – as if it were some form of unusual nourishment. And this filled me with an outright sense of victory. In the last stage of this game, during which Markéta was staring at the quartered image of an emblematically multiplied vagina (a design by a Slovak photographer, Miro S., printed in bright green on the front of my black tee-shirt), she vomits into the ether some sort of curse which has to do with a spider. She can’t figure out what’s on my tee-shirt, but I can’t tell her either, because to do so would break the ice that holds things together and expose the basic excess that truth entails. Because every reality is missing something, in order to be generalized. “So, what’s up, little one?” L. asks, now again two heads taller than me.  As a child, I wondered what a doll would do if it suddenly came alive. But what does it mean to be someone’s doll from the perspective of God’s providence? Isn’t God just a clumsy horrible child playing, watching from above, to see what all his toys are doing down here all the time?  Let’s presume evil as an alternative option to good, good altered by evil. As is the evil of the choice of evil, when even the good we're commited to is understood by us as evil. For a person has the need to say something, but the words prevent him. I cannot forget little N. with her head held high and yet strangely set forward on a tiny stretched neck, as if it kept there only by force and wishing to be independent of it, so as sooner to be shown as a litmus of its morality, as with Medusa's head, whose remote functional application occurs only once it’s torn from itself in the hands of someone else.  Always that automatic nodding of the head, that Yes of hers in the ever faster tempo of a marionette play. Always that sharply focused stare of the eyes which only see what they themselves project, because the power of this projection gives them certainty in existence. A man who is, at a given moment, certain of his Yes, simply doesn’t think. He’s nothing but a prosthesis of his own need to have order in things and that’s entirely enough for him. But things don’t need order in things, because order doesn’t belong to things. Order isn't a matter of things, but of matter-of-factness and that's where preciseness leads us. All this it was possible to intuit from N's gestural shortcuts, of whose uncompromising urgency she was most likely unaware.  The preciseness of her relationship to things – and the entire seriousness of it – she no doubt perceived as a priori valid and which, therefore, was not open to discussion. As if a goat pisses on a sheet of metal: a free description of her stroboscopic laughter. "Actually, it was a sneer over his death," she replies, as if the reasons for it were planned. And could reasons in case of suicide forcibly disrupt some plan? And then there are these delayers of suicides, masters of the art of suffering, whose faces are mimetically silent for years.  And from the depths of their innocence, of truths spilled out as lies. Because at every moment of a thought, to have a feeling of objectiveness is precisely subjective, but thoughts don’t occur any other way. A thought doesn’t think about what it thinks when it’s not yet a thought – a thought doesn’t think at all. A thought in its embryo is always necessarily impulsive and, as it broadens, it weakens. Prickly touches of fingers. You hurt me invisibly, she says. As if I intended her pain? And above this, that exceptionally developed sensitivity to falls and fractures. (“Do not touch drunks, even those fallen on the ground,” was never valid for her.) My defense against her feelings thus couldn't be aroused, but there was no sadism in it.

Translated from the Slovak by Michaela Freeman.
First published in The Return of Kral Majales, Prague's International Literary Renaissance 1990-2010, An Anthology (ed. Louis Armand), Prague 2010