Amberville

Chapter 13

It sounds so frigging unbelievable,” said Tom-Tom, who was standing in the kitchen, searching for rusks in one of the cupboards over the counter.

“But I swear,” Sam Gazelle whined, wretched and irritated at the same time. “How wrong do you think a person can see?”
“It sounds unbelievable,” agreed Eric.
“I’m telling you, it was ChauffeurTiger,” Sam repeated for the third time.
The crow found the package of rusks and sat down next to Sam.
“Who had turned into some frigging DeliveryTiger?” said Tom-Tom skeptically, putting a rusk into his mouth.
Sam threw out his hands. That’s the way it was. Without a doubt. Without the dramatic hood that the Chauffeurs wore, and dressed instead in the Deliverymen’s typical green uniform, a bit reminiscent of the bus drivers’ jackets and peaked caps, it had been none other than ChauffeurTiger who had sat behind the wheel of a green pickup, with one of the two wolves beside him.
“Hmm,” said Snake Marek, for once markedly laconic.
They sat around the kitchen table, Sam on the edge, all staring incredulously at him. The Morning Weather was in the process of letting up and the rain would cease any minute now. It was Tuesday morning, just over two weeks since they’d started their surveillance of Hotel Esplanade, and Eric had almost forgotten how the apartment looked in daylight. The parquet floor shone with an oiled luster, and even the sticky ring marks from beer bottles on the kitchen table looked more pleasant during the day. Sam had emptied out a carton of breakfast cereal, honey-glazed rice puffs, and Tom-Tom sat down by mistake on the chair where the cereal had ended up. The crushed puffs now spread a sweetish smell through the apartment which was not at all unpleasant.
“You may believe what you want to,” said Sam bitterly.
“I believe you,” said Eric. “But it still sounds unbelievable.”
“It’s just that…oh, what the hell, you have seen things before…” said Tom-Tom, swallowing his third biscuit. “The kinds of things you’ve told us about. Hell’s dragons and colors and…you know…those sort of frigging…roller-coaster rides.”
Sam put on a wounded expression. The white and black rings that made his eyes seem bigger than they were reinforced his innocence, and the corners of his eyes glistened as though from tears. He put his head to one side and stroked his broken horn.
“I hadn’t taken anything for several hours. At least,” he whined. “That is really narrow-minded. Believe me, after all the years that I’ve used a little…extra stimulation…you learn to see the difference between reality and fantasy. It’s only in reality that my little energizers run out.”
“No, damn it,” Tom-Tom now tried to take back what he’d said, “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s clear as hell that I believe you. It’s just…no…damn it, then, I believe you.”
The crow’s words subsided in a silence that might be called reflective. Snake broke the silence.
“It’s not implausible,” he said, wriggling up onto the kitchen table.
They all looked at him with a certain surprise. Up till then Snake had sat silently, weighing arguments for and against. Finally he’d made his decision, and this despite his contempt for the gazelle, which he no longer concealed.
“Apart from the fact that there only remains a sliver of credibility in our little gazelle, who seems to do whatever it takes to get a little attention from our straight-backed lead bear,” Snake began with venomous irony, whereupon protests were heard around the table, “it’s not at all implausible. One might say that it’s actually just the opposite: rather obvious. Chauffeurs and Deliverymen are only different sides of the same coin. It’s so foolishly predictable that it’s amazing no one has uncovered them before. In addition, from the perspective of the authorities, it’s rational. One contract, one garage, one rent…”
“…and one transfer!” said Eric.
The thought struck him when he had his guard down. He got up from the chair with such force that it fell to the floor.
“The lists,” he said, without even noticing Snake’s irritation at being yet again interrupted in the midst of a lengthy statement. “I know how they handle the Cub List at the ministry. How the transfer itself takes place. Are you imagining that there really is a Death List, and that it’s delivered at the same time?”
Sam nodded enthusiastically.
“Darling, that doesn’t sound improbable at all,” he said.
“I don’t really flipping get it,” said Tom-Tom.
He was still hungry, but didn’t want to take more biscuits as there were only three left.
“But it’s…”
“What?” asked Snake.
“It’s today.”
Eric nodded without anyone understanding what he meant. Since the four of them had shut themselves up in the apartment at Yiala’s Arch, none of them had been concerned about what day it was. The nights had come, the days had passed, at a more and more ominous pace.
“It’s the sixteenth today,” said Eric. “And it’s on the sixteenth that the transfer takes place.”
He was so agitated he was shaking.
“That’s this evening!” he repeated.
“Is he talking about that frigging Cub List now?”
Tom-Tom put the question right out into the room.
“It’s about both lists,” said Sam. “I think.”
“But we don’t know that,” said Tom-Tom Crow, mostly to make the matter clear to himself. “Eric knows what they do with the Cub List, but if it’s the same frigging way with the Death List? We don’t know that, do we?”
“It’s this evening,” Eric repeated to himself.
“Finally we’re getting out of here,” said Snake.





TWILIGHT, 3

When the sun sank behind the horizon and the last breath of daylight colored the sky dark pink and dull red, when the Evening Storm was at hand and could be sensed in the bushes and the crowns of the trees, sometimes he felt ill at ease, reminded of forces that were beyond his control. Then he fled deep down under the ground, to the catacombs that had been constructed by long-forgotten generations, to which the light of day would never reach. There he might wander around and marvel at these endless passageways and crypts where secret societies had held their meetings, where business deals were struck, and where secrets were buried for all time. Deeper and deeper down under the earth he went along a route that wound through the very bedrock, lit up only by the torch he brought with him. The air became damper and damper, full of earth and stone dust; the chill caused him to shake and feel at home. When he’d walked for over a half hour he reduced his pace. It was getting hard to breathe, and he rationed his oxygen. The system of tunnels was several miles long; neither he nor anyone else knew its full extent; it had been built, extended, and added onto for hundreds of years; there wasn’t just one but many architects, and a map would never be drawn. Everyone in the city knew about the tunnels, but there weren’t many who knew how to find an entrance. He himself knew of two, but it was maintained that there were ten of them. He’d investigated a few kilometers in each direction from his starting points, but he didn’t want to go farther than that. It wasn’t necessary, either.

A few meters after the tunnel had become so narrow that he was forced to crouch, it divided in three directions. He took the middle route, a broad but low passage which after ten or so meters came to an end in a small crypt. He extended the torch in front of him and lit up the wall. From out of the ground a cat’s head was sticking up.
“Boo,” he said.
The cat didn’t react. He extended the torch closer to the cat’s eyes, and the cat’s left eyelid seemed to jerk weakly.
Fascinating, he thought.
He’d buried the cat thirteen days earlier, and there was still life in it. He could of course have buried the cat’s head as well, but he was interested to see what would happen. Presumably the loose-tongued cat that had tattled to Dove would never die, but instead live down here in an eternity of eternities. He was not alone in wondering what really happened after the Chauffeurs fetched you.
Soon enough he would see, he thought drily.
He turned around and went back the same way he’d come. He still walked slowly. The chill caused him to move slowly, but it contributed to his thinking swiftly. It didn’t worry him that Eric Bear had succeeded in tracking the Chauffeurs to the hotel down in Yok. Without bothering in the least about the matter, he’d known for a long time that the Chauffeurs camped out at the Esplanade. On the other hand, it made him wary that Nicholas Dove had paid a visit to Sam Gazelle’s apartment the other day. The harder Dove pressed, the greater the risk that the bear would be forced to become truly creative. And Dove was an opponent who couldn’t be defeated without the type of repeated, much-discussed confrontations that he especially disliked.
He stopped. Had he heard a neighing behind him? Was it the cat who had managed to pull itself together for a small sound? He stood dead quiet, listening. Then it was heard again, the growling from his own belly. He smiled. He was hungry.


When he came back up out of the catacombs, the sun had gone down and darkness had overtaken the sky. This was a relief. He felt starved, and decided to visit one of the cafés open in the evening which had spread across the city like weeds the last few years. He didn’t like to move about openly on the streets, he avoided that as often as possible. Before it hadn’t felt like that at all, but now he’d become furtive. There were occasions, however, like this evening, when he made exceptions to the rule.
He regretted it the moment he stepped into the café. He thought everyone was looking at him, and he quickly sank down into a booth far inside the place. He ordered pancakes, syrup, and coffee, knowing it was unhealthy, but hunger conquered good sense.
Thank heavens for Snake Marek, he thought. Services and counterservices. Manipulations and promises. With Marek on the scene as a mole quite near the bear, he in any case didn’t need to worry that something would happen that he wouldn’t find out about.
They would never get anywhere.
Then the pancakes came to the table and he lost interest in Eric Bear and the Death List.





HYENA BATAILLE

Worse than pain, worse than treachery and beatings. Worse than the most intense anxiety or the most dreadful humiliation; worse than all of this is cursed memory. Days on end can go by, then the clouds draw in over the city, the sky darkens, and rain dampens the wrecked cars around the place where I live: large raindrops that indolently settle onto mangled metal car bodies. Then the past forces its way through the membrane of time, in the empty hole in my chest a heart is pulsing anew. And when I awaken and everything around me is refuse and putrefaction, the collision between then and now is violent. It causes me to lose my breath. This cursed Garbage Dump was my destiny long before I came here.



I met Nicole Fox through an editor at the publishing house—I don’t recall his name. I still hadn’t published my first book; my collection of poems, to which I’d given the title approach…honeysuckle, would be coming out the following week and I was already scared to death about its reception. I don’t know if what frightened me most was the thought of being publicly criticized, or if it would be worse to be passed over in silence. It seemed to me that the looks I encountered everywhere were insidious and scornful and I was on my way to the exit at high speed when I stumbled over Nicole Fox.
She was sitting in an armchair, and her long legs became my deliverance. I fell like a tree, but thank goodness she was the only one who noticed. Together we fled from the place. Nicole became my savior and my deliverance. Life before I met her had been a single long denial, and the poetry collection was the climax of wretchedness. The poems had been written over a period of ten years, and when I locked myself into the cellar of a condemned building in Yok with cigarettes and moonshine alcohol, I didn’t give a thought to tomorrow. I’d pissed on my friends, betrayed my family, and done my best to strip myself of all pride and dignity. It was a wreck who stumbled into that cellar in Yok. I drank to fall asleep. I relieved myself on the floor in a corner of the room, but after a few days I didn’t shit anymore because I didn’t have anything to excrete. It was the pains in my stomach that finally forced me out of that cellar. The poems were finished, I don’t know if they’d been finished for weeks or only for a day or two, but with the manuscript under my arm I made my way up to the street. I cringed in the sunlight, I thought that the wind was ripping and tearing my fur, and I thought everyone I encountered was staring at me. I walked hour after hour with my gaze on the colorful asphalt until I suddenly recognized where I was. I was in Angela’s neighborhood. Because I didn’t have anywhere else to go, and I knew where she hid the key, I let myself into her empty apartment and managed to eat my way through the major part of the contents of her refrigerator before she came home. When she saw me she screamed like the guenon that she was, and she didn’t stop screaming before I left. I forgot the manuscript on her kitchen table, but didn’t have the energy to go back and fuss about it. The poems weren’t worth it. Out of pure sadism Angela turned the manuscript in to Doomsbury Verlag. The result was that an editor from Doomsbury found me at the Century Bar just over a week later. He paid my tab—that was the condition for me being able to leave the place—and with that, half of my advance for the poems was used up. Out on the street I sobered up enough that I could sign the contract. But I was nonetheless pleased; I would make my debut as a poet.


When my first book of poems was reviewed I’d been living at home with Nicole Fox for the past several days. She smelled of meadow flowers, she knew what I would say before I said it, and she had perfect pitch for when I wanted to be close and when I needed space. I was still a miserable animal without anything to risk, without spine or value, but with every day that I spent with Nicole something was growing inside me. It was self-worth. approach…honeysuckle received an effusively warm reception. Without my understanding it—because I was a fool in heart and soul—it was my living together with Nicole Fox that gave me strength, and not the cane-wielding critics at the daily papers. But I believed that my newly awakened power had to do with the book, and, with Nicole’s enthusiastic approval, I set out into the city to fill my arms with application forms. My life as a paralyzed hyena was over; I was intoxicated by a sense of my own will. Together with my beautiful fox, I sat the entire day and half the night, filling in small squares and writing my name on dotted lines. I applied for grants and jobs, for the first time in my life.
Everything went so fast. After many tough years of life without content, it seemed as though everything happened overnight. A marvelous everyday life emerged together with Nicole Fox. She was living in a roomy two-room apartment in Tourquai, and her neighborhood was a universe that unexpectedly opened itself to me. There was the bakery that sold bread over counters out toward the sidewalk, which is why there was always the aroma of fresh-baked rolls on the street. There was the café at the corner by the park where the milk foam was always shaped into a heart. Nicole and I lived in this idyllic state. The months passed, and finally we were on our way to being caught by grim reality that sent us insistent reminders of telephone, water, and electrical bills. It was then that I got my grant. One day in August, an anonymous, brown envelope from the Ministry of Culture’s Office of Grants was lying on the hallway floor in all modesty. We celebrated that evening with a bottle of champagne, but we had a bad conscience from having been extravagant and skipped breakfast the next morning.
It was a lovely time.


Hindsight’s common sense fills us with the knowledge of that which was, and that which is to come. But you have to be loyal to your younger self. What I did then, I could not have done better.
It took time to gather together the sequel to my first collection of poems. I was filled with life: I had begun not just one but two degree programs, one whose purpose was to complement the sorts of things I had gone without, and a second in order to go further in life. The poems I wrote became short and empty, light as air and just as transient. Nicole read them, and, without taking the enjoyment from me, she was definite in her criticism. Between the first collection and the happy verses I was squeezing out of me there was now a chasm. This chasm, said my wise fox, was considerably more interesting than the verses at hand.
We got married. I had no expectations about the ceremony itself. I was neither a believer nor an atheist, I didn’t have time to invite either relatives or friends, and yet I felt so proud that I was about to burst. In a little pavilion in Parc Clemeaux where the Afternoon Weather struck drumrolls against the roof, such that the deacon was forced to raise his voice: there I wed Nicole Fox. It felt like I made her my property, and I was ashamed of that feeling. We had dinner at a nice restaurant on Rue Dalida, and then Nicole fell asleep, worn out, at midnight. I sat up writing without interruption. It became a long suite of poems about hes and shes. The words dripped with self-loathing and shame over my sex, but I had no idea where all these feelings came from. Later, attentive readers would understand that there was something affected about this collection, whereupon I became very upset. But the poems were good. Nicole read them when I was finished the following evening, and she congratulated me for having found the way out that I had unconsciously sought. Here I had a worthy successor to approach…honeysuckle.
Book number two received respectful treatment as well. By this time I had finished my basic courses and had just begun doctoral studies in comparative literature. The book became the starting point for a debate about genre which I lost interest in after the first article. I applied for a new grant with the Ministry of Culture, and when I got the money, Nicole and I began to think in earnest about having cubs.
We decided to be just as wise and organized in becoming parents as we had been impulsive and passionate in our two-someness. I immediately began to plan for my next book, and at the same time applied for yet another grant. Along with the miserable compensation I got from the Comparative Literature Department, we could get by on the money. We applied to the Cub List.
The third collection didn’t offer the same birth pangs at all as the second had, and my stern, wise fox confirmed what I felt myself. Something new was in the process of being born in my writing career, something grander and more original than I had accomplished before. With every day our application for a cub climbed up the long waiting list, and poem was added to poem without the quality going down. Nicole observed the connection as obvious.


Then my life was crushed. The annihilation was meticulous and definitive. During the years to come I would curse the day I forgot the manuscript on Angela’s kitchen table, the evening I stumbled over Nicole Fox’s legs; if I hadn’t learned what happiness was, it could never have been taken away from me. And it all depended on a single animal. Snake Marek.
I didn’t even know he existed. During the entire humiliating and drawn-out process that was my case, I didn’t know that Snake Marek existed. I found that out much later, by chance; it’s not interesting and doesn’t add anything to the story. The important thing is what he did. The decisive thing is the way in which he sat deep inside the dark culvert of the Ministry of Culture, letting bitterness ooze out of every stitch of his insignificant body. With my first two poetry collections I had passed his Argus eyes, but the third time my application forms were on his desk he caught sight of me. And for some reason that spiteful reptile decided to crush me. One day I received a letter saying that my grant money would not be coming. A new decision had been made, it read, and it had been decided to freeze my grant “for the time being.”
I didn’t take this seriously. I tried to reach one of the assistants at the Office of Grants on the phone, without success. Then I let the matter rest. When I mentioned in passing my worry to Nicole, she became hopping mad.
She initiated a massive apparatus. They couldn’t be serious, you didn’t do this kind of thing to the few geniuses that the city had produced. Nicole wrote petitions and organized debates (which were not particularly well attended). She wrote letters to the editor and tried to get others to do the same thing (but only one was published). And when at last she threatened a sit-down strike outside the Office of Grants, she finally got a response. An assistant—it proved much later to be Snake Marek himself—wrote an open letter in response. The letter was sent to the arts editors at the newspapers, to the Department of Comparative Literature, and home to me and Nicole. “The quality of Bataille’s poetry,” it read, “is such that a grant would send the wrong signals.” Neither more nor less.


Perhaps I could have brought myself through the ordeal if that letter hadn’t been written. I would have been able to lie low for a few months and then dared to come out of the apartment. Looked my colleagues in the eyes again after the summer, perhaps even smiled apologetically at Nicole Fox’s exaggerated reaction. But the Ministry of Culture had written its letter, and the wording was diabolical. Everyone could freely interpret what was wrong with my poetry. It proved that I had detractors everywhere, snipers who were only waiting for the right moment.
I didn’t retaliate. Despite Nicole’s irritation, I didn’t retaliate, I pulled the blanket even farther up over my head and stayed in bed. Day and night. The second collection of poems deserved criticism, I knew that better than anyone, I’d known it the whole time without daring to admit it. The pathos that carried the collection was fictional, I’d never been concerned with any battle of the sexes. Whatever Nicole said, I couldn’t get away from the feeling of being exposed. I had Nicole bring home alcohol so that I could use the sleeping pills I’d squirreled away over the years. They worked better combined with alcohol, and I slept away a few days in a kind of unpleasant daze. It was too damn selfish; Nicole needed support, but I had a hard time putting up with myself, and the thought of finding the energy to carry her as well was impossible. When the alcohol was gone and I came to my senses again, it was the middle of the night and coal black outside the windows; I jumped out of bed and burned the almost-finished manuscript of the third collection in the sink. Nicole, who’d been sleeping on the couch in the living room, was wakened by the smoke, but by then it was too late. Together we stood and watched how the charred papers writhed in pain.


The animals at Doomsbury Verlag had of course gotten cold feet when I’d been publicly criticized. But because they knew that I had come a long way with the approaching collection, they felt pleasantly secure. When I told them that there no longer was any third book, the news spread lightning-fast across the whole city. I was lying drugged in my bed and had no idea what was about to happen.
I don’t know which of all the mendacious versions of my condition reached my colleagues at the university department, but that doesn’t matter. They understood that conditions had changed. In our society it’s money that rules. Giving me the professorship that I had long considered mine was now out of the question. The venerable professors let one of the mice in the office call and convey the decision. My services were no longer required. How could they do that? Morally it was despicable, and it was a question as to whether it was even legal. One of the professors got in touch with me many years later, clearly tormented by his rotting conscience, and let me read the protocol of the meeting they’d had. The protocol was likely set up as evidence in case I should protest. I was described as a labile lunatic who not only was equally mediocre in my research and my poetic practice, but besides had become an abuser of pills with pyromaniac tendencies. What I needed was hospitalization, not one of the few permanent positions in the department.
I had no more than managed to digest the message from the university when the real catastrophe occurred. In some weird way the news that I would neither get my grant nor retain my job was all over town in no time, and two days later we got a letter from the Cub List. Without incomes we were being removed from the list for the time being, it read. Impudently we were encouraged, however, to make a new attempt when our personal financial situation had improved. I recall the morning when the letter came; it still lives on in my nightmares. I got up, thinking that everything had been taken from me. I got up, believing that I was already standing at the bottom of the hole of life. But that morning I understood that nothing had been as important to me as Nicole Fox.
Across from me at the kitchen table sat my beloved fox. I had become accustomed to seeing a fire burning in her eyes. It had burned there since the day we met, and the injustices of the last few weeks had caused it to flame up. The letter from the Cub List extinguished that fire for all time.
“My love,” I said. “It…it’s going to work out.”
I had nothing else to say. She didn’t answer. She remained mute for several days. Our roles were reversed: she went into a kind of coma and I did my best to entice her back to life. For me this was perfect; I could finally put away my own pain and concentrate on someone else. Practical tasks kept me occupied. I bought and prepared food, I did dishes and laundry. And I consoled and consoled. Nicole did as I asked, she got up and got dressed, she ate the food I prepared, and she listened to me talk. But she was in a world of her own where I couldn’t get to her, and I didn’t know what was going on in her mind.
After a lunch that we ate in our kitchen in Tourquai a week or so after the letter from the Cub List, she got up, went directly into the bedroom, pulled out the suitcase from under the bed, and started packing her clothes. I’d followed her into the bedroom because I felt that something was going on, and when she started packing I asked what she was doing. She didn’t answer, simply continued calmly folding her clothes and setting them in small heaps in the suitcase. I asked again. She didn’t seem to hear me. I became furious; it must have been the result of the entire drawn-out process I’d gone through. I rushed over to the bed, throwing the suitcase and the neatly folded clothes onto the floor and screaming at her with the full force of my lungs. She looked me straight in the eyes and said with studied clarity, “I’m leaving you now.”
And I realized that there was nothing I could do about it.


The rest of the story is uninteresting. I became what I am. I took a swing at someone when I was drunk, I kicked someone else—I don’t know who they were, and that has no significance. I again became what I’d been before those weeks in the cellar and my first poetry collection. I fought because I wanted to, because it felt good, and then: because there was always someone who paid me. Much later I wound up in jail; during the first time at the correctional facility I was forced to remain sober and I learned to close myself off. I realized that it was a matter of concentration. I focused, wiping out everything that had happened between the cellar in Yok and the first drunken fistfight. In time I understood that prison was exactly like the city outside. I started fighting again, I got paid just like before, and thanks to the payment I could flee from my memories with the help of drugs. They were needed those days when I didn’t have the energy to concentrate. I can forget everything, except this: Snake Marek is the animal who for no reason froze my third grant and crushed my life. This I will never forget.