Blue Self-Portrait

absence which is not nothing but rather a gap, the gap when a live person disappears but a dead one you have to laugh, people who talk to the dead are lacking a bit of life but here in Dorotheenstadt talking is possible, the cadavers of Brecht and Eisler and Weigel and Dessau, we can talk to them. You can stay as long as you like before the tomb of a dead man he won’t say a word that hasn’t already been said, when it’s said it’s said and when you’re dead it’s too late, but not at Dorotheenstadt, dead isn’t too late, the pianist rests his hand on the girl’s topmost vertebrae, standing face-to-face with decomposition, meditative as if for the first time, her neck under his fingers he knows she knows, doesn’t explain, Oh no never more but sees her hair flying it’s a song from after the war, the street in the locks of girls gone gathering, the wind rushing in do you remember down those ravaged streets of Berlin, Oh those post-war girls just like you, no hairpins to pull out no more needles to ply, no more babies to change, the bedraggled daughters of cadavers going to scrabble under fallen stones for firewood and sparks of life, you like those girls, the pianist thinks, his fingers on her vertebrae as though on the white keys, the girl feels the virtuoso pressure on her neck, you forget everything, tomorrow same as yesterday you’ll have forgotten him, he plants the chord across the white keys and makes her turn around, gently to me turn around look at me, he murmurs and smiles then, she sees his teeth, will think oh beautiful teeth, and the handsome mouth the girl thinks naturally his smile also very fine, a charming laugh between things said and those still potential, to speak and talk of the decomposition required for composition or for anything at all the main thing’s the mouth, look you can count the teeth inside, and he’s aware of the tongue’s invitation, knows his tongue, uses it to talk of the effects of decomposition upon composition, would like to hold it for another time because what’s the good, she already knows all about Dorotheenstadt, without experience but as if by magic she’s understood it all, I can see you know the pianist says to the girl but please look at my mouth moving, twist your hair round your finger and untwist it, now love my teeth, not only my teeth or my mouth or the totality of the whole, these black and burning eyes my rifles trained on you, how not to crumble into flames before these pistol eyes, girls love it, and down the forehead curls fall, and over temples and neck the tumbling of hair still damp from the post-war rains, she understands of course she understands but what? The rains here don’t last, says the pianist covering the girl with a section of his coat, he guides her towards Brecht’s house, come little blind girl and shelter at Madame Weigel’s, for she refuses to understand, nothing, understands nothing, in truth zero comprehension in the girl’s silence, no point talking about decomposition with her understanding none of it, he thrilled to her incomprehension and didn’t, wanted nothing to do with the girl and wanted her, the rope affects the leap, just once I’d like to break my neck. Since I was very young, here’s how he justifies it, yes very young, going back to that time, whoever hasn’t experienced benevolent understanding in their very earliest hours has been deprived, how does one grow up with such deprivation, with what damage, he tries to convince himself, understanding and benevolence brought together around the cradle unmissable, of course plenty of babies do miss out, the majority if you go with the stats, those babies have counted that out even before breathing their first, make do for the most part with the air they’re breathing, a joy for a number of babies, actually for the great majority, growing up misunderstood and neglected, never dream of a better fate, you don’t see what’s missing, you have to have known benevolent understanding in order to miss it, then we’ll always be missing it more or less acutely because there’s never enough understanding nor enough benevolence, the babies who lack for nothing are those that never had anything and yet become someone the pianist pondered watching the girl’s lungs, lungs that are easy to see because her breasts are hardly there, just enough of them to give way for breathing, just enough so you’d like to kiss them but not to nestle or shelter in them, no those breasts are not a refuge, you see the lungs take their dose of fresh air like the very first breath, no refuge here, keine Mutterbrust he tells himself in German, remembering the Mutterbrust his Mummy’s bosom but what did he do next? He hears the post-war lullaby, never thought he could sleep without the song that ruled the airwaves after the war, a whisper of exile beneath the mosquito net, a narrow escape, wonders why men and the artists among them and the children within them drift their whole lives from that nostalgia of the post-war and women’s scents identical to the one that rose sweaty from the twin cushions of the Mutterbrust, ash on honey, sweat on cheek to slumber here, from one bosom to the next always that understanding, the fall of the Third Reich was not enough to put a stop to the power of the Mutterbrust. The question once arisen the possible reply, due to this girl the question, the mother’s answer, because he’d talked to the girl about decomposition, watching the girl look at him without benevolent understanding, he’d like to have the girl but doesn’t want her, he’s dying to have this girl listen to him talk about decomposition, a single enduring smile from this girl and he would have