Three Stories

By Arthur Mandal.

Moebius Child

He could not say when, or how, or exactly where he first felt the urge—only that when it came to him, it had the quality of irresistibility, of absolute compulsion. At two, he was already crawling in circles. There were shaky videos of him, with muffled background laughter: footage of his little twitching body, going round and round large squares of linoleum, patio, lawn. At four he discovered triangles; at five, squares, rhomboids, polygons. As life went on, he took the jokes and jibes well: he could not run in certain parks, found it hard to walk around older cities. No forest ambles for him. Snakes and crabs filled him with disgust. Deserts horrified him. His workplaces immediately dictated his home addresses or vice versa. Life was exhausting: always buying return tickets, no mystery tours, no surprise parties. The ridicule matured him quickly, made him kinder, forgiving, ironically more flexible, even as the patterned contours of his life grew ever more rigid.

Only alcohol magically suspended these compulsions, though he did not know whether to curse or nurture it. Only alcohol temporarily wiped the lines and shapes out of his life, erased the corners and curves from his horizon. It only saddened him that he could never really remember his freedom. At best, a half-recollected ramble stayed with him, the memory of a snaking, stumbled walk. In any event, he met her while he was drunk. Like him, she was a lawyer; like him, she made a living out of the observation of structures. She knew what he was when she kissed him. They spent a year together, commuting between four equidistant points in the north-east of the city.

He died young, unexpectedly, with no pattern to save him. Whatever was inside him didn’t bother to observe right angles, or trajectories, or convergence. He had always known these things existed, but they were always on the outside—something in front of him, something he could maneuver around. It was no compensation that he spent his last days in a perfectly cuboid room. It outraged him that something so asymmetrical could put an end to him. But since his anger was possessed of no more logic than the thing which consumed him, in the end even his outrage was not enough.

Language Learning

He was trying to learn a language, but the barking of the dog would not stop. From left to right, he painted out each letter, again and again. He spent entire weekends doing this. He was in love with the names of the letters, their shapes, the Semitic beauty of their strokes: Dalet, Gimel, Qof. He loved their precision, their detail, their deep, ancient hatreds. He admired the dramatic expectations they had of him, the absurd demands they made of him; he loved the dark, primeval violence they threatened him with.

“I can’t think because of your dog,” he told his neighbour.

His neighbour, a gruff woman, didn’t apologise. Instead, she invited him indoors. He explained the situation. Soon, after a stand-off, they were learning together. Sheets of letters began to appear, in increasingly well-written script, on top of the solid oaken dining table in her living room. They consulted websites, bought dictionaries, drove miles to retail outlets to buy specific pens they had been instructed to acquire. In the evenings, a magical wind would blow through the both of them, and fluttering sheets of ink-wet script would billow out from beneath their fingers in reply. He told her he had no idea where the language came from.

“It saddens me to think,” she said one day, “that I’ve spent most of my life never knowing these letters even existed.”

This aroused only partial pity in him. He was not that much younger than her. He thought of his own lost years, his wasted energies, his sterile, pointless relationships. “Time’s relative,” was all he could say. “Whatever time you spend on this now, stretches to compensate for all the years you spent on coming to this point.”

She said, “You brought me to this point.” She often talked like this. It made him feel like a prophet. Only the dog remained an obstacle. He could see that it was perhaps the only friend she had ever had. Nevertheless, he gave voice to a proposition to which she at first responded with stubborn silence.

“It would be a tremendous gift,” he said after a time.

“I found him when he was a puppy,” she told him.

“Everything you ever wanted to do would concentrate itself in this act,” he said.

“He whines for me when I’m gone,” she said. “He never knew his mother or father.”

“Its love would be added to your love,” he said. “It would be unparalleled”.

“I’m not sure,” she said.

“Of course you’re not sure,” he told her. “You have a finite mortal consciousness.”

The example of Isaac was not sufficient to persuade her. Too familiar, too well-known, she had already normalized the import of the event. He could see the sin in her, the sin he was fighting with, and when he spoke again he had already negotiated it. He told her now of a law which forbade dogs from entering the temple. He told her of a dog whose barking had betrayed the Israelites to the Edomites. He mentioned a line from the Zohar which said no dog could be tolerated in the Ascendance. All of these references he made up, and took upon himself the sin of doing so.

“Next week,” she said. “Give me one week.”

After a week he said, “It’s either me or him.”

“Give me tomorrow,” she said. “You’ve no idea how hard this is for me.”

It disappointed him that she was so feeble, but when he came around again the following day he was trembling with excitement. He felt himself at the beginning of something luminous, epiphanic, extraordinary. A thousand senses in him were waiting to be released. When he saw her come to the door, gun in hand, her face bright and wet with tears, he knew they were both close to everything they had prepared for.

Idea for a Tragedy

Idea for a tragedy: a Bulgarian woman wants to live in Berlin. She orders a map of the city, copies it painstakingly onto a large stretch of canvas. She reads every book she can find about Berlin, or by somebody from Berlin. She watches films with the city as a backdrop, listens to music that mentions its streets, landmarks, history. The woman buys a roll of wallpaper and, on its reverse, begins to write out each of the city’s four thousand byways in cheap blue ballpoint: Ackerstrasse, Bleibtreustrasse, Chausseestrasse, Ebertstrasse. The names fascinate her so much that, when she is finished, she begins to memorise them in long, sweeping sections, in the same way someone drains a large glass of beer in deep, satisfying drafts.

She looks around her own small city, liking only those aspects which seem to her to resemble Berlin, and finds depressing anything which offers any degree of disparity. When people challenge her views, she insults them. When friends question her sanity, she abandons them. She becomes convinced that she was actually born in Berlin in a previous life, but did something terrible and was punished with exile in her successive existences.

The death of a relative finally frees her. On the train to Berlin, she wonders whether her aunt’s death will always mean this freedom for her. It is a long journey, through the Balkans and the Alps. In Timișoara a family of refugees tries to steal her food. In Bratislava she argues violently with two men about her seat. She reads Hans Fallada, Alfred Döblin, Bertolt Brecht, in Bulgarian translation, underlining in her cheap blue ballpoint the lines that particularly move her. The passengers around her eye her curiously as she cries from time to time at certain points in the books.

Two days after arriving in Berlin, she meets the woman with braided hair. This is a woman who looks like her, walks with her gait, seems to share her dress sense. They speak in broken English. For the Bulgarian woman, it feels like she is talking to herself. They walk together for thirty-seven minutes along the edge of the Spree, between Friedrichstrasse station and the Bode-Museum. But the woman with braided hair tells the Bulgarian woman how much she hates Berlin; how it is a cursed city, a city that humiliates people, breaks them on every level of their being, debases them in a way only a sadist would know how. She tells her there is no future for her in Berlin, nothing its cold cruelty can offer her but years of exhausting loneliness—not even peaceful loneliness, says the woman, but exhausting loneliness—and so the woman says she is going to kill herself. She warns the Bulgarian woman that everything she has been told about the city is a lie. She urges her to leave before it is too late.

Five days later, in the small town of Shabla, on the eastern coast of Bulgaria, a double homicide/suicide is recorded on a beach. Nothing to identify the victims is found on either of the bodies, which are joined together at the wrist by a single strand of rope. Despite insufficient evidence, a connection to trafficking gangs in the area is not ruled out.