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The Redhead

Roberto Bolano

She was eighteen and she was fixed up in the drug trade. Back then I saw her all the time, but if I had to make a police sketch of her now, I don't think I could. I know she had an aquiline nose, and for a few months she was a redhead; I know I heard her laugh once or twice from the window of a restaurant as I was waiting for a taxi or just walking past in the rain. She was eighteen and once every two weeks she went to bed with a cop from the Narcotics Squad. In my dreams she wears jeans and a black sweater and the few times she turns to look at me she laughs a dumb laugh. The cop would get her down on all fours and kneel by the outlet. The vibrator was dead but he'd rigged it to work on electric current. The sun filters through the green of the curtains, she's asleep with her tights around her ankles, face down, her hair covering her face. In the next scene I see her in the bathroom, looking in the mirror, then she says good morning and smiles. She was a sweet girl and she didn't avoid certain obligations: I mean sometimes she might try to cheer you up or loan you money. The cop had a huge dick, at least three inches longer than the dildo, and he hardly ever fucked her with it. I guess that's how he liked it. He stared with teary eyes at his erect cock. She watched him from the bed…
She smoked Camel Lights and maybe at some point she imagined that the furniture in the room and even her lover were empty things that she had to invest with meaning ... Purple-tinted scene: before she pulls down her tights, she tells him about her day...
'Everything is disgustingly still, frozen somewhere in the air.' Hotel-room lamp. A stencilled pattern, dark green. Frayed rug. Girl on all fours who moans as the vibrator enters her cunt. She had long legs and she was eighteen, in those days she was in the drug trade and she was doing all right, she even opened a bank account and bought a motorcycle. It may seem strange but I never wanted to sleep with her. Someone applauds from a dark corner. The policeman would snuggle up beside her and take her hands. Then he would guide them to his crotch and she could spend an hour or two getting him off. That winter she wore a red knee-length wool coat. My voice fades, splinters. She was just a sad girl, I think, lost now among the multitudes. She looked in the mirror and asked, 'Did you do anything nice today?' The cop from Narcotics walked away down an avenue of larches. His eyes were cold, sometimes I saw him in my dreams sitting in the waiting room of a bus station. Loneliness is an aspect of natural human egotism. One day the person you love will say she doesn't love you and you won't understand. It happened to me. I would've liked her to tell me how to endure her absence. She didn't say anything. Only the inventors survive. In my dream, a skinny old bum comes up to the policeman to ask for a light. When the policeman reaches into his pocket for a lighter the bum sticks him with a knife. The cop falls without a sound. (I'm sitting very still in my room in Distrito V; all that moves is my arm to raise a cigarette to my lips.) Now it's her turn to be lost. Adolescent faces stream by in the car's rear-view mirror. A nervous tic. Fissure, half saliva, half coffee, in the bottom lip. The redhead walks her motorcycle away down a tree-lined street ...
'Disgustingly still' ... 'She says to the fog: it's all right, I'm staying with you' ...+ 


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ZEPPELIN

Herta Muller

TRANSLATED BY PHILIP BOEHM

Behind the factory is a place with no coke ovens, no extractor fans, no steaming pipes, where the tracks come to an end, where all we can see from the mouth of the coal silo is a heap of rubble overgrown with flowering weeds, a pitiful bare patch of earth at the edge of the wilderness, criss-crossed by well-trodden paths. There, out of sight to all but the white cloud drifting far across the steppe from the cooling tower, is a gigantic rusted pipe, a discarded seamless steel tube from before the war. The pipe is seven or eight metres long and two metres high and has been welded together at the end closest to the silo. The end that faces the wilderness is open. A mighty pipe, no one knows how it wound up here. But everyone knows what purpose it has served since we arrived in the camp. It's called the Zeppelin.
    This Zeppelin may not float high and silver in the sky, but it does set your mind adrift. It's a by-the-hour hotel tolerated by the camp administration and the bosses, the nachalniks - a trysting place where the women from our camp meet with German POWs who are clearing the rubble in the wasteland or in the bombed-out factories. Wildcat weddings was how Anton Kovacs put it: open your eyes sometime when you're shovelling coal, he told me.
    As late as the summer of Stalingrad, that last summer on the veranda at home, a love-thirsty female voice had spoken from the radio, her accent straight from the Reich: Every German woman should give the Fuhrer a child. My aunt Fini asked my mother: How are we to do that? Is the Fuhrer planning to come here to Siebenburgen every night, or are we supposed to line up one by one and visit him in the Reich?
    We were eating jugged hare; my mother licked the sauce off a bay leaf, pulling the leaf slowly through her mouth. And when she had licked it clean, she stuck it in her buttonhole. I thought they were only pretending to make fun of him. The twinkle in their eyes suggested they'd be more than a little happy to oblige. My father noticed as well: he wrinkled his forehead and forgot to chew for a while. And my grandmother said: I thought you didn't like men with moustaches. Send the Fuhrer a telegram that he better shave first.
    Since the silo yard was vacant after work and the sun still glaring high above the grass, I went down the path to the Zeppelin and looked inside. The front of the pipe was shadowy, the middle was very dim and the back was pitch dark. The next day I opened my eyes while I was shovelling coal. Late in the afternoon I saw three or four men coming through the weeds. They wore quilted work jackets like ours, except theirs had stripes. Just outside the Zeppelin they sat down in the grass up to their necks. Soon a torn pillowcase appeared on a stick outside the pipe - a sign for occupied. A while later the little flag was gone. Then it quickly reappeared and disappeared once more. As soon as the first men had gone, the next three or four came and sat down in the grass.
I also saw how the women work brigades covered for each other.
While three or four wandered off into the weeds, the others engaged the nachalnik in conversation. When he asked about the ones that had stepped away they explained it was because of stomach cramps and diarrhoea. That was true, too, at least for some - but of course he couldn't tell for how many. The nachalnik chewed on his lip and listened for a while, but then kept turning his head more and more frequently in the direction of the Zeppelin. At that point I saw how the women had to switch tactics; they whispered to our singer, Loni Mich, who began singing loud enough to shatter glass - drowning out all the noise made by our shovelling:

    Evening silence on the vale
    Except a lonely nightingale 

    - and suddenly all the ones who had disappeared were back. They crowded in among us and shovelled away as if nothing had happened.
    I liked the name Zeppelin: it resonated with the silvery forgetting of our misery, with the quick, catlike coupling ... I realized that these unknown German men had everything our men were lacking. They had been sent by the Fuhrer into the world as warriors, and they were also the right age, neither childishly young nor overripe like our men were. Of course they, too, were miserable and degraded, but they had seen battle, had fought in the war. For our women they were heroes, a notch above the forced laborers, and offered more than evening love in a barrack bed behind a blanket. The evening love remained indispensable. But for our women it smelled of their own hardship, the same coal and the same longing for home. And it always led to the same give and take. The man provided the food; the woman cleaned and consoled. Love in the Zeppelin was free of every worry except for the hoisting and lowering of the little white flag.
    Anton Kovacs was convinced I would disapprove of the women going to the Zeppelin. No one could have guessed that I understood them all too well, that I knew all about arousal in pulled-down pants, about stray desires and gasping delight in the alder park and the Neptune baths. No one could imagine that I was reliving my own trysts, more and more often: Swallow, Fir, Ear, Thread, Oriole, Cap, Hare, Cat, Seagull. Then Pearl. No one had any idea I was carrying so many cover names in my head, and so much silence on my back.
    Even inside the Zeppelin, love had its seasons. The wildcat weddings came to end in our second year, first because of the winter and later because of the hunger. When the hunger angel was running rampant during the skin-and-bones time, when male and female could not be distinguished from each other, coal was still unloaded at the silo. But the path in the weeds was overgrown. Purple-tufted vetch clambered among the white yarrow and the red orache, the blue burdocks bloomed and the thistles as well. The Zeppelin slept and belonged to the rust, just like the coal belonged to the camp, the grass belonged to the steppe and we belonged to hunger. _

GRANTA, Spring, 2010
Sex

Note: Tờ Granta, số mới nhất, sex, có truyện ngắn trên.
Làm Gấu nhớ một truyện ngắn của Thảo Trường, viết về cuộc tình qua hàng rào giây kẽm gai, ở trong tù, giữa một nữ và nam tù nhân. Làm nhớ Nhà Hội của Amis.

Và nhất là, làm nhớ cú "sex" ở trại tù Đỗ Hòa!

Nhưng cái xen, hàng đêm Đức Quốc Trưởng phải hì hục tiếp các cháu gái ngoan, đứng xếp hàng chờ tới lượt, mới thú!
Nó làm nhớ đến mệnh lệnh của Bắc Bộ Phủ, gởi tới đám tập kết, năm 1954, mỗi anh phải làm một em Miền Nam mang bầu, trước khi ra Hà Lội trình diện Bác!

Nhớ nhắc Bác cạo râu đấy nhé:
Send the Fuhrer a telegram that he better shave first.

Zeppelin

Là ou il n'y a pas de batteries de coke, d'exhausteurs ni de tuyaux dégageant de la vapeur, ou seul le nuage blanc de la tour de refroidissement nous regarde de très haut en s'envolant au loin vers la steppe, où les derniers rails prennent fin et où, en déchargeant du charbon depuis la Iama, nous ne voyons que des herbes folies fleurissant dans les gravats, bref à l'endroit où, derrière l'usine, la terre est parfaitement dépouillée et sordide avant de se muer en plaine désertique, se croisent des sentiers battus. Et ils vont vers une énorme conduite rouillée, une conduite Mannesmann d'avant-guerre qu'on a mise au rebut. Elle fait sept ou huit mètres de long et deux de haut. En direction de la Iama, son chevet est fermé par une soudure; on dirait une citerne. À l'autre bout, au pied, elle s'ouvre sur des terres incultes. Cette imposante conduite, nul ne sait comment elle s'est retrouvée là. Mais depuis notre arrivée au camp, nous savons au moins à quoi elle peut servir. Tout le monde l'appelle le ZEPPELIN.

Ce zeppelin ne plane pas dans le ciel avec une lueur argentée, mais il fait planer les têtes. C'est un hotel de passe toléré par la direction du camp et les natchalniki, les surveillants. Nos femmes y retrouvent des prisonniers de guerre allemands qui déblaient des gravats dans les parages, soit sur les terres incultes, soit dans les usines bombardées, Selon le mot d' Anton Kowatsch, ils viennent copuler comme des chats avec nos femmes. Ouvre done l'oeil, quand tu es au charbon. Même durant l'été de Stalingrad, le dernier été passé à la maison, dans la véranda, une Allemande du Reich à la voix lascive disait à la radio: Chaque femme allemande offre un enfant au Fuhrer. Ma tante Fine avait demandé à ma mère: comment va-t-on s'y prendre, est-ce que le Fuhrer va venir nous voir tous les soirs en Transylvanie, ou bien est-ce qu'on ira le retrouver chez lui, les unes après les autres ...

II y avait du lièvre à l'aigre-douce et ma mère a léché la sauce d'une feuille de laurier en la passant lentement sur sa langue. Elle l'a bien nettoyée, puis elle se l'est mise à la boutonnière. J'ai compris que ma mère et ma tante faisaient juste semblant de se moquer du Fuhrer : à leurs yeux pétillants, on voyait qu'elles en avaient envie, et pas qu'un peu. Mon père s'en est apercu lui aussi et, le front soucieux, il a oublié de macher pendant un moment. Ma grand-mère a mis son grain de sel : et moi qui croyais que vous n'aimiez pas les moustachus... Envoyez donc un télégramme au Fuhrer pour qu'il se rase la moustache avant.

Comme la Iama etait abandonnée après le travail et que le soleil était encore aveuglant, au-dessus des herbes folles, j'ai pris le sentier du zeppelin pour regarder dedans. L'entrée du tunnel était dans l'ombre, le milieu était obscur, et le fond noir comme de l'encre. Le lendemain, j'ai ouvert les yeux en pelletant le charbon. À la fin de l'après-midi, j'ai vu des hommes traverser les mauvaises herbes par groupes de trois ou quatre. Leurs poukhoaikas étaient différentes des nôtres, ells avaient des rayures. Peu avant d'arriver au zeppelin, ils s'assirent dans l'herbe, qui leur montait jusqu'à la tête. Bientôt, ils accrocherent une taie d'oreiller en lambeaux au bout d'un bâton, à l'entrée du tunnel, pour dire que c'était occupé. Peu après, ce drapeau disparut. On le remit, puis on l'enleva. Dès le départ des premiers hommes, il en arriva trois ou quatre autres, qui s'installèrent dans l'herbe.

Je vis aussi que des brigades entières de femmes couvraient ces copulations furtives. Tandis que trois ou quatre femmes s'enfoncaient dans les hautes herbes, les autres engageaient des conversations avec le natchalnik.  S'il posait malgré tout des questions sur les femmes qui manquaient, les autres expliquaient qu'elles avaient du aller dans les hautes herbes, à cause des maux de ventre et de la diarrhée. Du reste, c'était en partie vrai, mais il ne pouvait pas aller vérifier à quel point. Le natchalnik se mordillait les lèvres, écoutait pendant un certain temps, puis tournait la tête de plus en plus souvent en direction du zeppelin. À compter de ce moment-là, je remarquai l'intervention des femmes : elles chuchoterent quelque chose à l'oreille de notre chanteuse Loni Mich, qui se mit à siffier en émettant un son suraigu, à faire vibrer le verre, plus fort que le vacarme des pelles :

Le calme s'étend sur cette soirée
Seul rossignol dans la vallée

Et brusquement, toutes celles qui avaient disparu ressurgirent pour se frayer un chemin entre nous et pelleter comme si de rien n'était.
Zeppelin, ce nom me plaisait, il s'accordait bien avec l'oubli argenté de notre misère, avec ces accouplements rapides comme ceux des chats. Je comprenais que tous ces Allemands venus d'ailleurs avaient quelque chose qui manquait à nos hommes. Ces soldats, le Fuhrer les avait envoys par monts et vaux, et ils avaient juste l'âge voulu : ce n'étaient ni des jeunots, ni des vétérans comme nos hommes. Ils étaient tout aussi misérables et décatis, mais ils avaient fait la guerre. Pour nos femmes, ces héros étaient préferables aux amours nocturnes dans le lit superposé d'un travailleur de force, sous une couverture. Ces amours nocturnes n'en demeuraient pas moins indispensables. Mais pour nos femmes, elles avaient l'odeur de leurs propres peines, du même charbon, du même mal du pays. Et elles débouchaient toujours sur l'échange, ce qu'on donnait et prenait au quotidien. L'homme devait s'occuper de la nourriture, la femme était pourvoyeuse de linge et de reconfort. Dans le zeppelin, l'amour n'avait d'autre souci que de hisser le drapeau blanc et de le mettre en berne.
Anton Kowatsch ne s'en doutait pas, mais j'étais content que ces femmes aient le zeppelin. À son insu, je suivais la même piste dans ma tête : étant initié, je connaissais les émois qui troussent, le désir qui rôde et les happements du bonheur, au parc des aulnes ou aux bains Neptune. Personne ne s'en doutait, mais je faisais bien souvent defiler mes rendez-vous dans ma tête: L'HIRONDELLE, LE SAPIN, L'OREILLE, LE FIL, LE LORIOT, LE BONNET, LE LIÈVRE, LE CHAT, LA MOUETTE. Et LA PERLE.
Personne ne m'aurait cru capable d'avoir tous ces noms de code dans la tête, et autant de silence dans la nuque. L'amour a ses saisons, même au zeppelin. La deuxième année, l'hiver y mit un terme. Puis ce fut la faim. Quand l'ange de la faim nous suivit partout avec frénesie, au temps de la peau sur les os, rendant les bonshommes impossibles à distinguer des bonnes femmes, on se remit à aller au charbon. Les mauvaises herbes bouchaient les sentiers. La luzerne des champs enroulait ses vrilles mauves entre la blanche mille-feuille et la belle-dame rouge, à côté des bardanes bleues et des chardons en fieur. Le zeppelin dormait, livré à la rouille, comme le charbon l'était au camp, les herbes a la steppe, et nous a la faim.

Herta Muller