Glimpses on a novel
One
Irina is Russian. When she is walking toward me, the whip on her side dangles and I am tempted to chase the alleged jingling from my head. She always wears fishnet stockings, which ascent to the ultrashort black-leather pants. The first time I had met her, I believed to have chosen the wrong street and to be stumbling upon the most breathtaking hooker I've ever seen. However, this impression didn't last. I still have an inner picture of our encounter, when Irina stands up to the sign hunter (another character of our group), parries his utterances, falsifies his assertions one after the other and finally enounces her acridly inflating word worm that drives the sign hunter crazy because he doesn't understand a single word.
When Irina speaks up, it is very difficult to retort. Her opinion is a stronghold, and we often have to recognize later that she has been right. Most of the time, the sign hunter tries to oppose her, but he usually comes back with a bloody nose. One day, when he took the adventure to approach her (since her appearance alone puts men under high pressure), she repulsed his advances in such savage manner (but, by the way, without even touching him a single time), that we did not dare to talk about it for weeks, although the event was burning in our – male – minds.
Without doubt, Irina is the sturdiest in our group of five. She determines our direction and she tells us the right moment to leave together. On the other hand, Irina has developed the most hearty relationship to Lea, who is the sign hunter's daughter. Despite their deviating age, they form a couple of very best friends, and when the ten year old girl is running and yelling to and fro, Irina is the one who impedes Lea's father from intervening.
When I met Irina alone, at daylight and, in a very prosaic way, in the supermarket, she turned out to have much confidence in me – which I wouldn't have expected. We talked a while and she told me some of her secrets, one of which the soon expected arrival of her friend from Nanterre in France. She knew that I would keep quiet, what I really did. Slowly I began to understand that Irina's insight to human nature makes her treat the people around her as they need it – or deserve it.
Irina is Russian. Her eccentricity to use some chosen Russian words in her speech taught our group of friends what expressions like конечно and спасибо mean. She knows that we know it and even use them when we believe to be unheard. And if she wouldn't mind about that, she wouldn't be Russian.
Two
Embedded in our group of five, Irina has gathered her friends:
The Sign Hunter is the one who opposes her frequently, but who is attracted awfully by her personality and who immediately comes to support her when she needs a helping hand. The sign hunter knows exactly that Irina does not want him to smoke; therefore his pipe is mostly used like a token in his hand, almost never lit, almost never between his lips. The few times he forgets this rule, Irina's whip swiftly makes the pipe disappear, without even touching his fingers.
The sign hunter lives alone with his daughter Lea. We only know that his wife had died when Lea was a baby – the sign hunter does never talk about it in public and only when I have the chance to be together with him alone and for some hours, he might reveal some of his hidden pains. Of course, the sign hunter also has a name. But it needs one unique situation of nearness and confidence in the novel, in which the reader will learn it.
Lea makes the wind and the noise when our nocturnal joining is on the brink of getting inert and dull. The ten year old girl has accompanied her father several times, and every evening she doesn't show up, we begin to ask where she has remained. Albeit her ten years, Lea became best friend of Irina, who often seems to act as the mother the girl never has had.
Marie-Zoé arrived when the other four (me included) had believed we would be complete already. A fine whisper from Irina had taught me that something would happen. But as Marie-Zoé suddenly stepped into the room, because one of us had left open the door, we expected a furious confrontation of the two women: Irina, the fiery Russian, fishnet and whip – and Marie-Zoé, the jaunty French, elegance and savoir-vivre. One word gave the other and then, surprisingly, the witty duel ended up in a joyous embrace. Staring with open mouths we understood that these two ladies have known each other for a long time.
Beat (pronounce it as the Swiss would do) is a very calm, almost shy character. As I felt superfluous in the group, he turned out to be someone I could talk to, and he would listen. We discovered that we had many things in common, and occasionally we exchanged our opinions about the daily verbal combats between Irina and the sign hunter. Beat is a friend of whom I always know that I can count on him.
I am the fifth person, and sometimes I feel as the odd, the superfluous cipher. I needed a long time to begin to understand what we really were doing when we left the apartment in the evening in order to look after the, yes, “lost souls” strolling around in Vienna's downtown. To be frank, I needed Marie-Zoés appearance and the completeness of our group to comprehend. However, my primary role is to narrate the events as they happen.
Three
Tired from the night, Irina will not stand up before eleven or even twelve o'clock. Nobody knows exactly what her daily work is, but it must be something freelance and that she is able to do from home. With this work, she earns enough money to live in modesty and to pay her small two-room apartment. Without doubt, she reads a lot, because otherwise no one would explain from where she gets all the sophisticated words she is capable of shooting at someone during a discussion or confrontation, words that are not part of her native language but of a foreign one.
In the afternoon she does what one has to do at home and for daily life. She may clean the apartment, answer letters and email, she may wash her clothes, repair the faucet (yes, she does it by herself!) or leave for shopping. Hence I ran into her in the supermarket, where an exquisite dialog began to evolve between us. Our conversation continuously bloomed in parallel to our group joinings and evening events and finally led to an outbreak of unexpected emotion and tenderness. But this happened almost in the end.
Irina has already managed her life in a favorable way. Russia, her childhood and her once beloved but now perished family depict the elements of a past that merely reside in her memories. However, without this past and the turbulent events that ended it so abruptly, she wouldn't have become the firm, independent and determined woman she is today.
At 6 p.m. she leaves home and arrives at our meeting apartment approximately twenty minutes later. On most days she is the first one to show up, and she already sits at the table reading a book or oiling her whip when we come in.
Four
There are two characters in the supporting cast, who play a minor but eminent role, they are important components of the novel.
The first one is the Salesman. He seldom shows up, but when he does, he is always sitting in the adjoining room at a writing table, doing his calculations. Enormous calculations as it seems, because he never stands up to join us. Nobody is allowed to enter the room – he would immediately look up and stare into one's eyes without moving a single muscle, till the moment in which the intruder gives up and turns round. The salesman's look is cold and pragmatic, and nobody wants to endure it. Accordingly, nobody enters the room while he is here, nobody except Irina. She is the only one admitted. Now and then she sits together with him and they have a soft chat, so soft that no one standing at the door or in the main room would be able to catch up what they say. The salesman pays our joining apartment. We wouldn't even know what the costs per month are. Maybe Irina has learned about it but she doesn't tell us. We believed that the salesman paid the rent because he estimated our nightly doings. One day however, Irina discovered his true motivation.
The second one is the Beacon Collector. This, i.e. the German form of it: Bakensammler, seems to be the real name of a man who lives in a nearby residence. (Bakensammler is a quotation of the Austrian poet Paul Celan who created this word and referred with such obscure wording to a writer or poet.) The beacon collector is in possession of thousands of books stored in his apartment. When we met, Lea almost fell in love with the beacon collector's cosmos of the written word. Her father, the sign hunter, was not keen on pushing the contact, he even rejected the acquaintance, but Irina decided to enable the girl's more or less secret meetings of literature immersion, and I became their trusted helper. The beacon collector loves reading as well as teaching the world of books to other people, especially kids. He loves to shape out human nature and the fundament of ethic sense out of the literature that surrounds him and the society he believes to belong to. On a metaphysical layer, the beacon collector is a kind of ending or final point to our search whose commencement is represented by the sign hunter.
Five
Who is changing? Nobody? Everybody? Of course, to a certain extent, everybody will experience some changes as the novel goes on. Changes are normal and even characteristics may change, or let's say: adapt. The clearest changes may show in Irina's character, as well as in one of the – still unmentioned – street characters.
Irina is a very determined woman. She is the strongest character in the story and thus she even might seem cold to outsiders. In our group of five friends, we know about her soft sides and how hearty she can be – because we see it every week when she talks to Lea, when she plays with her or defends her against her father, the sign hunter. Since Irina is a woman men are dreaming of, she attracts the other gender like a 100 W bulb attracts the flying insects in the middle of the night; however, there is no relationship she would have, there is no love and, at least as we know, no sex. When the sign hunter tries to approach her, he is repulsed cruelly, and when the salesman tells her that she, Irina, is his true motivation to finance the joining apartment, she rejects him, too, but this time in a fair and friendly way, eager not to offend him more than necessary. The change that occurs, is the relationship between Irina and me (the narrator). Through our frequent discussions our mutual confidence is growing steadily. It all ends up with an explosion of love – which surprises me enormously, but seems to be a development Irina has already foreseen for some time. What I don't know in the moment of outbreaking love, is that our togetherness is a goodbye, a farewell to the group of five and the initiation of the near departure of my four friends (when they will, on the last page, climb St. Stephen's Cathedral in the center of Vienna, jump out of the windows on all four sides and disappear like bats in the dark of the night – while thousands of people on the ground take a pause from the urbane music event and look up to the sky; in silence, amazed, profoundly touched and flabbergasted).
And who the hell is the street character? A man? Yes. Alone in the streets of Vienna. We met him first at the riverside and didn't discover any specialty. A homeless individual, drunk and bawling. As we met him next time, we remarked some verbal pejorative outbreaks – but in a scenery like this, in a city like this with its turbulent and ambiguous history, such behavior is – unfortunately – nothing abnormal. Very slowly we learned about the city vagrant's hatred, especially for other ethnicities. Not only once had we to defend other people, stranded persons, drunkards, young drug addicts, against his verbal and sometimes physical attacks. However, he learned even to avoid Irina's whip. When he affiliated with an Arab, also homeless and open to violence, we just had to make a decision; in order to smooth what we couldn't win any more. While Irina's change occurs as complexity, the change of the homeless man develops in linearity.
Six
Antagonism might be a two-layer play. On the first level, we see a kind of antagonism personalized by the sign hunter. His almost daily opposing Irina leads to witty discussion, to increasing argument and fiery verbal duels. The sign hunter forces Irina to show her strength and determination, in many ways he is coercing her to unveil her authentic face. It is true that we all know the friend in him and that we can count on his support during our nightly activities but the slightly dangerous atmosphere (in a figural way) is observable in many ways. The antagonism between our Russian lady and the sign hunter does not allow routine and boredom.
On a second level and in the midst of several minor conflicts our group of five has in the nightly streets of Vienna with different kinds of homeless, junkies, drunkards and aggressive juveniles, there is one person who does not only oppose us and seek opportunities to offend or even to attack, but feeds his dislike and disapproval persistently, so that it grows more and more to hatred, especially when he grasps what our group stands for (or wants to stand for). In the beginning, this person, a homeless man, living on the streets and in the subway stations of Vienna's downtown, was only one of numerous obscure subjects we met on our quests. We noticed him because of his clearly stated xenophobia and racism – thus we had to protect other homeless and juvenile junkies several times against his attacks. When his hatred became focussed on our group, we were surprised to see him one day together with an Arab, whose ethnicity he would have battled days before. They both banded and joined their hateful forces which turned out to be a strange amalgam of racism and militant Islamism. Our group of five, once proud of its uniqueness, had to experience the bitter insight that some human behavior cannot be influenced or changed by words. Neither the Russian firmness nor the French esprit, neither the sign hunter's choleric riposte nor Beat's silent art of persuasion are suitable.
While the sign hunter is the inner antagonist, the bum is the external one. Maybe the inner conflict between Irina and the sign hunter is a kind of training for the external conflict, which does not break out immediately but grows slowly and soundly. If it will help? Who knows ...
Seven
The texts I write, do not fit into a specific genre. There may be elements of a grotesque, sometimes ideas you might expect more from fantasy stories, thus I'm not always sticking on reality, because this is something for journalists, chronicle pages in newspapers and TV news. The shelf where I want to see my books, is hardcore literature, next to Kafka, Celan, Jelinek, Robbe-Grillet, Pla, Riera, Faulkner, Plath and Joyce.
I do not choose my genre, or better: the absence of a clear genre. It is true I don't like crime stories so usually there are no such elements in my stories. It is true I don't like trivial romances and blunt action hero novels so usually I don't have them. It is also true that I don't like political reality thrillers so usually I take another direction. Of course, there will be allusions, insinuations; concerning politics, mainstream interests, crime even. All of this is life and since I am alive (I hope so at least), this life will shine in many different ways in my writing. I do not choose my genre nor that my writing belongs to what I called hardcore literature. It is simply in me, and I can take it or ... no, I cannot stop writing. I only stop to write (and my family doesn't like it always; er, to be frank, they never like it). Someone said that writing literature is like an illness. I hope it won't be sick to write but the comparison is a good and valid one.
In addition, I guess I am not willing to choose a genre because I almost never accept their limitations. It is not a genre that makes me write, it is the emotion and it is the language – they both make me create something (hopefully) publishable. Characters and stories however, they are mere ingredients that come to me.
Eight
Together were we strolling through downtown's underground, seeking the places that we knew were frequented by the lost souls (oh yes, a word that I am using, albeit my complete non-religiousness!) of the city. Maybe we didn't know it from the very beginning, but the big conflict, the huge one, didn't show up very clearly because it was represented neither by a single person nor a single group nor a single event. The awful conflict we had to face, rendered a characteristic of society. I wouldn't say of Viennese or even Austrian society but of human society in general. The fact that particular persons are tossed out from the mainstream creates a weird pair of antipodes – here the well situated society and there a group (or multiple groups) of losers, of outlaws, of people who aren't considered as part of the society they belong to.
I cannot say we understood all mechanisms leading to cleavages that run across cities, social layers and families; maybe we grasped some of them and had a certain comprehension of how one might slip from normal life onto the street, but nothing more. The big conflict of the story is like a unsteady, smoothly yearning vibration which is endangering the intricately woven tissue of life. Our group of five was a tiny needle craving for fixing the ruptures we encountered on our way. However, the quest we led (more or less unintentionally) had nothing to do with this conflict, although we felt mutual influences and even interference.
The big conflict of the novel is a framework in which our quest occurs. It is neither the topic nor the plot, but of course it is one important theme. Without this conflict, which put us under unpleasant pressure, we would never have understood what we were looking for.
Nine
Was there a day without conflict? Frankly, I don't know. We observed the minor conflicts between Irina and the sign hunter – they were like daily salt. When the sign hunter had an argument with his daughter, Irina came between and continued the quarrel her way. That she never used the whip in such context, was a surprise in the beginning, but more and more it made sense to us and seemed logical.
Even I wasn't spared! My conflict with the surgeon I needed to cure my cough, took the form of a grotesque. Not able to retort as I should have done (because these cough attacks tortured me incessantly), I felt ignored, and when the doctor climbed across the ceiling like a human spider, I found myself in a nightmare. Of course, he didn't cure my cough and it was luck to lose the bacilli (maybe with the help of our evening pizzas) just in time to discover Irina's amorousness.
We saw the conflict between the racist homeless and other people on the street, very often foreigners or belonging to other ethnicities. This conflict was extended to include us in the man's hatred, and later it focussed on our group, with the help of the militant Muslim, who had experienced the homeless' hostility before. We had to realize that negative forces sometimes (or often?) ally in spite of their controversial ideologies.
There was the conflict between the drug dealers and the police, who we called for help when things tended to become a legal affair. The small conflict caused by the true interest of the salesman, his affinity toward Irina and her sudden understanding that she may have gone too far. That I took responsibility for Lea so late, after Irina had announced the near ending, wasn't a conflict but the understanding that nothing in life will happen as one may have planned.
So was there a day without conflict? If there was, I presume it only seemed so because I wasn't able to narrate every single minute. Even a narrator is not omniscient.
Ten
Maybe today's text is a kind of confession. Language models? What the hell have language models to do with my novel? This is my text, my own and personal text and I won't allow any other author, dead or alive, to put his fingerprints in my writing. I wouldn't say that there exist no influence, no impact, no leverage – no, each writer is a reader, too, and it will not be possible to switch all this away. However, these influences belong to my experiences and it is my mind that changes experiences and draws something new from them. Thus, despite of my reading experiences, there is a story creating itself out of my mind, out of my heart (yes, I prefer this notion), out of my imagination, of my fears and my love. There is only one licit language model and this is my own.
Was that a confession? No, I don't believe so. But I'm not finished yet. If I would ever consider a language model, it would hardly be such names as Shakespeare (that's no oldish drama what I'm writing), Faulkner (excellent, but neither my generation nor geography), Hemingway (come on, let's keep some seriousness), Rowling (hey, could someone give her some English lessons?), etc. The names I could (at least in theory) consider, would be Franz Kafka (my greatest), Thomas Bernhard (excellent language skills), Marianne Fritz (it's a shame that the 3000 pages and more monster books of this lady haven't been translated), Elfriede Jelinek (no comment necessary) or Franz Werfel (another greatest if I dare say), but they didn't write like me and I believe they had their own personal reasons (apart from the fact that they all were/are older than I am).
Since I am Austrian and my native language is German, my novel will be written in German. And as I said before, there is no language model I would use, neither from the English nor the Austrian nor any other literature.
The German title will be Klampfernassen, a word, which does not exist. In English this would be something like Struglasses.
Explanation: One day the sign hunter almost resigns and tells Irina how hopeless he judges their venture, he tells her a wish and evokes a »struggle of the masses« (which is also insinuating an element of Marxism). Lea, who sits at the same table, does not know the word and misunderstands it. As she repeats it eventually, she says that her father would do »struglasses« every night.
(In German »Kampf der Massen« becomes »Klampfernassen«.)
Eleven
They come together. They sit around in an apartment, which is paid by an external. In the beginning it is not clear if this joining apartment is something like the unique scene of a drama where all or almost all events will happen. The apartment is paid by a salesman who rarely shows up. And very quickly two things will become clear: first, the joining apartment is a base (not like a military base because for me there is no positive aspect in military things) for all endeavors; second, it isn't they but we.
In the beginning, we are four persons, if we don't count the sign hunter's daughter. Eventually, our group of five is completed when Marie-Zoé arrives unexpectedly for most of us.
Without knowing it exactly, we are pursuing a quest. In fact, we believe we would do something useful when we go for the homeless and the stranded in Vienna's inner city (the German name of Vienna's downdown is Innere Stadt, thus inner city), we believe we would do a job in the name of humaneness, a job the authorities ignore and private organizations cannot fulfill anymore. We believe that the help we can give to some of the directionless people we encounter, would be the sense of our meetings, the sense of our evenings and our nightly doings.
The story, which is perhaps the true story behind my narration, develops rather in obscurity, unnoticed by others and even unseen by ourselves. The symbolic nickname of the sign hunter marks a point of departure. What we are seeking, is the power of the word, and, thus doing, a way to regain this power. We will come across the beacon collector but no one but the ten year old Lea will be able to comprehend that in his residence crammed with books lies an answer and a finishing line. However, her just awakened eloquence does not suffice to show us the light we are craving for.
The roles are decided. Whereas my four friends, the sign hunter and Irina, Marie-Zoé and Beat, will finally disappear in the night as a sound of relief, my own role of the narrator will be enriched with the responsibility for Lea, which I will be able to accept after Irina's love has strengthened me. The spire of St. Stephen's Cathedral will be the final testimony of a quest whose end is just another beginning because each gain will have to be earned again and again and again.
Twelve
So it is the sign hunter who stands up in the middle of the room, laughs loudly and waits for Irina's reaction. Of course, the Russian lady draws the whip, creating sparkling noises all around the sign hunter's head.
»You really know what you're seeking?«, she asks.
Foolishly nodding, the sign hunter sighs.
»Then tell me«, she demands.
»We are seeking the losers, the sick and the lost. Aren't we?«
Irina smirks: »Listen, the sick loser, that is you, so get lost!«
Flabbergasted, the sign hunter begins to whine because Irina's words are hitting his mind, but the sense remains a secret to him. »Explain, explain!«, he shouts.
»Will it need my whip?«
»Oh no!«
»The whip will hunt, but signs may disappear when losers lose their sickness. Listen, what a loser needs is knowledge, something that you never found on our way.«
»Speak clearly!«
Irina, smirking, lets her whip explain, while the sign hunter jumps around like a dwarf enraged. To the public of the theater she says: »Remember how to tease them, ladies!«
Thirteen
Symbols proliferate. Not only do they convey important messages, they are likely to embody a kind of skeleton of the novel. Symbolic meanings are the hidden components of my text.
Irina personalizes several properties of femininity, which span from male fantasies to militant feminism – the abundance of feelings that lies between these poles form the dazzling personality of the Russian lady.
What is the group of five friends searching for? In fact, they never talk about it and it becomes clear to the reader that they don't know it themselves, or at least not exactly. Nightly excursions are a façade of what they really have to do. Would social engagement – as demonstrated every night – manifest their true destination? Or would the search rather connect to something that has to do with language and reading? Some encounters, some objects, some sayings seem to whisper it.
And who the hell is the beacon collector? What does he collect? Beacons? Really really beacons? What is meant by this world? The beacon collector's denomination is written on the apartment's door, where Lea reads it even before the others have realized that there are some characters scribbled. The written world turns out to be the beacon collector's world. Lea wants to dive into this world so unknown to her, and Irina, with my modest help, supports her. Maybe the solution the friends are seeking, lies in the beacon collector's universe.
So it ends up with the sign hunter, the person, who carries a key in his own name. However, I'm not sure if he will be able to recognize the necessity of his contribution. Not without Irina, not without her emotions, not without her wit.
Symbols? They are not to be explained bluntly, because a symbol's nature is to be associated with the reader's own spirit.
(in: INKsters' Anthology October 2007, Second Life)