Out of the Sugar Factory by Dorothee Elmiger

Author:Dorothee Elmiger [Elmiger, Dorothee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

– So, what is love, truly? What all do you want to know! I honestly have no idea; I also find that I confuse things all the time or that we confuse the words. So in the broadest sense, I would say maybe a willingness. What do you think?

– An attentiveness, perhaps, that is without intent?

– Which also always means a turning toward things. In France, it occurs to me that I read within a very short time last summer the passion simple of a French writer; although, as you know, I don’t speak French at all—I was not even able to indicate the breads in the bakery without touching them or had to ask someone on the street about the bus to the coast. I sat in the kitchen of the apartment that the landlady had claimed was located near the medical school, and when I looked out the window, I saw young men circling the small, unadorned church night after night on silent electric motorcycles, wearing sneakers that slithered across the asphalt. So, I was reading this passion and was already quite unhappily in love, and this is why, I think, I could understand every word of the book, although in principle it should not have been possible. At the same time I stopped eating and drinking almost entirely because my lack of language skills left me unable to order the things I desired—small oval cheeses with soft centers, shiny green fish freshly caught from the sea, or varieties of pâté.

– I’ve noticed recently that you’re getting thinner and thinner.

– So, what I mean is that love perhaps always means a connection with things—or, let’s say, with the world—such that I no longer look at it dispassionately but am very close to it and can suddenly in a mysterious way also understand it, just as I understood this book.

– And is love also sufficient for you, an end or a saturation?

– Of course I can’t begin to answer that since we’re speaking in such general terms. You say “love,” but you mean romantic love or infatuation. The most I can give you is an example. Recently, I went out of town with C.; we walked for a long time and looked at everything and told each other what we saw and pointed out the things that seemed special and beautiful or strange and even disturbing, then sometime in the early evening we reached a park situated on a slope, through which a winding path led, and we sat down on a bench. It was very quiet; two children were playing below us near the entrance gate, and still further down lay the railroad tracks and the long, straight streets of this city that Marx had referred to in Capital as a “single watch manufactory.” I suddenly felt how tired I was; my whole body was seized with a great fatigue, so I lay down on the bench, and as I lay there like that, I felt the movements of his body as he talked and smoked.

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