The Ends of the Earth by Willemsen Roger; Lewis Peter;

Author:Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4689157
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Published: 2016-08-11T04:00:00+00:00

Lake Fucino

Wasting Away

Around the mid-1980s, a young woman with a dark pageboy haircut was labouring long and hard on her research in the Austrian National Library in Vienna. Every morning she’d heave a weighty pile of books onto the same desk, and every evening, she’d lug them back to the same returns counter. She didn’t let anything distract her. The only people who heard her voice were the library staff who handed out the books to her and collected them again in the evening. No one invited her for coffee, nobody chatted with her, and because I sat two rows behind her, I can say with certainty that she made no moves herself to invite anyone over to her desk, or to go and fetch anyone from theirs. Her skin was pale, but even so she still wore white face powder, never appeared without her Campari-red lipstick on and, even in her late twenties, must already have been dyeing her hair. Jet black.

But it wasn’t her rather eccentric appearance or her forbidding, almost sneering, manner, nor indeed her fixation on her work – which was less zealous diligence than it was a burning fury, a self-immolation – that kept any of her fellow brainworkers from pestering her. Rather, it was that she couldn’t help but give off an air of awkwardness and hysteria, a sense that she might well be fanatical or ecstatic, or, at the very least, unreasonably and desperately at odds with life. I didn’t use her real name very often, since she couldn’t stand it, and so we settled on ‘Clarisse’ as being the one that suited her better than any other. Curiously, I can recall her smell better than I can her appearance – a disembodied, mildewy odour that was somehow the carrier medium for the smell of churchy types who have remained unredeemed.

I’d been working in this library for some months, during which time we’d taken note of each other’s presence, nothing more; months in which I studied her neck for the most part, her white-powdered, naked neck, which supported the black helmet of hair like the stalk of a mushroom supports its cap. And so the months went by, until one day I came back from my lunch break to find a note on top of my papers. On it, scribbled hastily in thin, violet-coloured ink, were the words: ‘Our man from Cairo has arrived at the station’.

The next time I got up from my desk, I stole a glance as I passed hers just to check that she wrote in violet ink. So, that evening, I came and leant on her desk and asked:

‘So, what now?’

She was writing about Kafka, but you couldn’t call it research. Rather, Kafka was imposing his will upon her, casting a spell on her. Nothing and no one could resist it. It was a case of taking something too seriously beyond all measure, a classic case in fact, given that she was taking Kafka more seriously than he ever took himself in all likelihood.

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