— You are Robert Walser? he asked, reading from a card.
I said I was.
— We are in Albania, he intoned, near the slopes of Ararat. I am the Third Vice-President. Our cellars are full of gold, silver, stocks, notes. As there is a God . . .
And then the door was filled with people, a man with lots of whiskers, clerks, bald men wringing their hands.
— Get him! said Whiskers. Take him to my office. Schmidt, I have told you and told you!
They took the Third Vice-President away, with some effort, leaving me to the gaze of a man who looked at me from top to toe, with disapproval.
— Those shoes, he said, will never do.
RUFZEICHEN in alpine hat, tweed jacket, plus fours, Austrian walking shoes with shredded and tasseled tongues, a stout stick, cigar, monocle, green knit gloves. I came behind in my black English butler’s suit, bowler and umbrella, carrying a picnic basket and a plaid rug.
The count held up his hand without looking back.
— Here, he said.
I spread the rug over meadow flowers and laid the count a place. The silverware tinkled strangely in the fine emptiness of the out of doors. The wineglass would not sit straight. Gnats assembled around the count.
I stood at a respectful distance.
— I tell you, Robert, he said through a mouthful of sandwich, these things did not happen before you came. No, I assure you, they did not, decidedly did not. Our cook Claribel is, I believe, possessed.
— Possessed, your lordship?
— Salt in my coffee, eggshells in the omelet, a glove in the soup . . .
— Most distressing.
— It is mad.
It occurred to me then, who could say why, that the dinosaurs I had been reading the count about from a British magazine were not great lizards but chickens as large as a Lutheran church. No one has seen their skins, or, as it may be, their feathers. Only bones survive. They had three toes, long necks, beaks, dainty forelegs which were possibly wings as useless as a dodo’s. It may have been the count’s savaging of a chicken wing that supplied the idea.
I mentioned the possibility to him, by way of conversation. We were, after all, the only living creatures in miles, give or take a remote eagle and a swarm of gnats.
He gave me a very strange look.
HUMAN NATURE cannot write. Ich schrieb das Buch, weil sie mir nicht gestattete, meine Tage in ihrer Nähe zu verbringen, mich ihr zu widmen, was ich mit wahrer Lust getan hätte. And in the irony of money all ironies are lost.
Potina, Roman deity altarless and distracted, had, in the way of the gods, neither watch, calendar, nor sense of time. She dropped down into the streets of Bern one day, in front of a trolley which almost struck her. Her dress was a thousand years out of fashion, a white wool smock brown with age and riddled hem to yoke by moths who had nibbled the diapered stole of Julia Domna and the stockings of Victoria. Her duty among the immortals was the digestion by infants of their first spoonful of pabulum, whether Ashanti mothers chewing sago and letting it into their babies’ mouths, Eskimo matrons poking blubber down pink gullets, or Helvetian mamas spooning into lips open as wide as an eaglet’s goat cheese and honey.
Whatever, whenever, wherever she was, Dea Potina rubbed her eyes. These dark places behind doors, these wagons that rolled without oxen: these people had married into the gods. She smelled lightning everywhere and saw lamps burning inside crystal fruit, without air to feed the flame. Apollon! she prayed, spell me those written words. And the old voice with the cave echo in it, and the snake hiss, told her that the words said, all of them, one way or another, coin.
But that building is surely a temple. In truth, said Apollon. They are all temples, and all built to hold coins. Then, she said, I am in the country of the dead, and yet I see smiling children, and I smell lightning, which is never of the underrealm. It is the fashion now, Apollon said, to live as if all were Domos Hades. Some ages fancied the ways of the Olympian gods, some the Syrian Mother, some the wastes of Poseidon, some the living gold of wheat and light and children.
Now they have cut from Dis’s realm his gleaming metals and his black slime, his sulphur and salts and poisons, murderous things that they seem to enjoy. But most of all they fancy coin.
EINE ANSICHTSKARTE (Manet’s Monet in His Studio Boat) from Olympia: Yesterday I saw a woman on the streetcar with her little boy who had his head stuck in his chamber pot and was being taken to the doctor to have it pried off. It was over his eyes and ears, and all you could see of him was his mouth open and howling. His mama was in tears, as was her son, though it was probably pipi she kept wiping away. Herzlich, Ollie.
IN THE ETERNAL July of Egypt a scribe once wrote on papyrus she was more comely in her body than all the other women in this world—a FEATHER, ah, and a COIL OF ROPE, oo, she, a SHEPHERD’S CROOK and a LOAF, sett, was, a LUTE, ASP, and MOUTH, nefer, comely, an OWL, m, in, a TWISTED ROPE, LOAF, ARM, SHOULDER, THREE, SEATED WOMAN, SHEPHERD’S CROOK and LOAF, hatset, her body, MOUTH, er, than, BOLT, LOAF, and SEATED WOMAN, set, more than, VAGINA, LOAF, and SEATED WOMAN, khemt, woman, BOWL and LOAF, nebt, any, WATER, LOAF, and DUALITY, enti, who, OWL, m, in, DUCK, pa, the, LAND, ta, world, GRAIL, MOUTH, and ASP, terf, entire.
He wrote, sighed, and passed the leaf to a binder, who stitched it to the next leaf and rolled it around a stick. An anu read the line
