Reading Matter

Sometimes I’m happy to have a useful pest. During the afternoons he comes to me, I skim contentedly through my books like a language student, never penetrating the surface. Left to my own devices, though, I easily go astray. I tend to lose my bearings and stumble into the text, leaving it more or less to chance whether I manage to escape unharmed.

Once again I’m reading Michaux, who I love for his clear style. Thanks to my son, I can sit back and read without a care, but I suppose I should be on my guard. Each paragraph is translucent like an ice cube, but there’s always a surprise, a dozing goldfish waiting to wriggle on a warm tongue.

Michaux is damn good. As far as I know, he never had children, steered clear of everything as long as he lived, and had the interesting habit of drawing a blue line on a piece of paper when he wanted to spend the evening with his frogs. Having drawn the line, he would sit and wait for things to come to life, surrounding himself with so much splashing and dripping that he had to be careful not to get wet feet.

Michaux was a magician, and I don’t even notice the sticky web he spins around me when he holds a wooden spoon over the line, just to see what happens. Of course, a splash of water covers the spoon, and as everyone knows, it doesn’t take long for frogs to move in once decent conditions are at hand. Michaux can lean back, content with his work, and listen to the evening song of
the frogs. And me?

In the meantime, my son has scrambled through the open kitchen window into the garden wilderness outside, and seems to have discovered a dead toad in the compost heap. With cries of joy, he carries his find across the lawn,
whilst the toad dangles from his hand like a tiny aligator.

I am forced to put down the book to establish order. Ideally, I would like to throw the mostly decomposed toad straight in the rubbish bin, but my son starts screaming as if I’d threatened to hit him. I’m left with no alternative but to shove the corpse in a netting tea strainer, bound fast
by a rubber band around its mummified neck. Stroking it, I hope, will distract my son from his troubled thoughts and, in the event, he calms down with surprising speed, carrying away the body to put with his other cuddly toys. This leaves me to return to my reading. Where was I?

Ah, Michaux! You’ve captivated me. You are the wave that carries me, weaving me into your blue cocoon, hurling me down the well and forcing me to dance across the backs of slippery, voracious crocodiles, all because...

By chance, my gaze wanders towards my son. He’s sitting at my feet, playing absent-mindedly with the bread knife. Blood is coming from his mouth. He’s probably cut himself. He’s bleeding heavily, but as luck would have it, he’s not crying. After all, the walls are thin and the neighbours have
an obsession with coming to the rescue in every private drama.

For the sake of caution, I take the book and place it in the bread bin. You never know what might happen in the heat of the moment; some dirt on the cover or a torn page! Anyone with children will doubtlessly understand.

In order to dam the flood, I reach for the washing-up sponge, wrap it in the tea towel I use for hot pans and shove it in the boy’s mouth. For a moment, the bleeding ceases, and he flashes me a strange and conspiratorial
smile.

Having done everything humanly possible, I can only reasonably let the natural healing process take over. Suitably reassured, I remove the book from the bread bin, return to my chair and look for the bit where the crocodile
is about to...

You wouldn’t believe it! I can’t seem to find the passage, even though I‘d carefully noted it beforehand. Then again, it’s not much wonder, seeing that my child is busy slicing open his tongue with a bread knife. His tongue! Try and picture that! And then all that blood everywhere.

There! What an incredible relief. I’ve just found the right paragraph. Suddenly I can see Michaux, the well, the stones, the damp walls all around and the circular glimpse of sky above me. I can smell the brackish water and hear the singing of frogs with the whiplash- crack of crocodile
tails. I even dance across the backs of the animals, whilst all the while my son is silently driving the tip of the bread knife into his index finger, right down to the bone. How on earth could I have neglected to take it away from him?
It certainly baffles me.

And now, I read, smell, taste and feel the soft skinned crocodiles, the well and Michaux, unaware that the lad is clambering out of the window again towards freedom. These crocodiles! An unimaginable feeling tickles the
soles of my feet, whilst my son reaches the garden fence and begins to climb.

This Michaux! Automatically, I lick my lips. His style is so convincing, so forceful that in this precise moment, my son gets himself entangled in the barbed wire I laid out to protect us from the neighbours. And of course, the
neighbour materialises on the scene, an impulsive ogre of a man, a barbaric creature who probably hasn’t read a book in his entire life. I’d put money on it.

Plucking my son from the wire, he clamps him under his arm like a trophy, stomps through the garden and, in a single bound, jumps through the open kitchen window. Suddenly, the wonderful blue cocoon is torn apart and the crocodiles I’m dancing on panic, shattering the world around me. I’m
seized by a mighty whirlpool, a perilous eddy of words which sucks me under, deeper and deeper. Turmoil!, Strife! Really, one should be prepared for such things
when reading Michaux.

And my son, this useful pest who I love more than anything else, dangles helplessly, thrashing about between the appalling tentacles of this beastly neighbour. In my own kitchen, he begins to loom up before me and tears the
book, my book, from my hands, hurling it into the corner like a toad. Then he begins to scream, a cacaphony so terrible that for the moment, reading is out of the question.

It’s a shame, really.

Michaux is seldom understood.

Translation by Daniel Roskowicz

^

Biography

Born in 1959 in Kerken (North Rhine-Westphalia) Childhood in the countryside Doctorate in German literature and
philosophy Since 1988- independent author with a teaching position at the Technical University in Aachen, where he lives and works. Publications: Rührmichnichtan, Verweigerungsgeschichten, (Touch-me-not, Stories of
denial), 1988, Können Zähne fliegen? (Can teeth fly?)-with F.Kusch-, 1990, Gestatten: Quall (Grotesques), 1990,
Auf dem Heimweg (On the Way Home), 1995, Mississippi Maastricht, 1996, Tiefer als der Tag (Deeper than the Day), 1997, Der Römerschatz (The Roman Treasure)-pseudonym R. Schalk-, 1998, Tod eines Sofamelkers (The Death of a Sofa Milker), 1999, Prizes, Awards, Nominations, Prizes for verse and prose at the North Rhine-Westphalian Authors’
Congress (1988), Shortlisting for the German Literary Award for Short Fiction (1994), Literary grant from the town of Aachen (1990), Literary grant from the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (1992), Paul Maar Grant for Literature (2000)