Turning Danger into Performance – Night Pieces

Virgil’s ancestors kept a community alive for centuries on the Iranian-Iraqi border. They saw themselves as heirs to the House of Omri and practiced their faith in cryptic ways. They lacked any connection to a broader religious order. A few families scattered to Maalula, a Christian stronghold in Syria. Some people there have believed themselves to be Greeks ever since Alexander the Great and therefore imagine themselves to be living in a diaspora.

Aramaeans who emigrated from Maalula to Turkey a hundred years ago are perceived by Turks as Christian Syrians. The Jewish Kurd Virgil is regarded in Ederthal as a Muslim Arab. He sits in the hotel lobby in Chiavenna and studies the crowd. He breaks it down according to a scheme. First he makes broad classifications: status, origin, attitude, limitations that shape a person’s manner of movement, indications of concealed ailments, pregnancies, and weapons.

On the second pass, Virgil concentrates on what is pronounced and accentuated.

He observes sources of light, entrances, the routes taken by the staff. Carelessness. Haste. Minor disruptions. Nodal points. Pitfalls. Elevations molded by the rubbish hidden beneath carpets. The discretion of every hidden operation. All the while, the observer gives the impression of someone fully occupied with himself. He conceals his interests more out of habit than necessity. He is training.

The emissary appears and taps one nostril with his right index finger. That is a question. Virgil places a hand beneath his chin. That is the answer. The follower draws in his lower lip. An angel of the abyss has understood.

He comes from a Spanish family that converted to Christianity under the inquisitorial rule of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. People stigmatized them with the name of a vegetable and believed neither in the sincerity of their apostasy nor in their Catholic zeal. Perhaps, in time, the family would have become Christian like any ordinary soul and shed its marks of distinction, had it only been left in peace. The Inquisition was obsessed with the present. It wanted no converts in its Catholic house. The follower’s ancestors fled the blood courts to Morocco, where being Jewish became their salvation. The Sultan looked after his Sephardim. For them, happy centuries began.

The follower withdraws toward the bar. Nothing careless attaches itself to him. Every step calculates attack and defense on the levels of: a) bodily weapons only, b) plus a melee weapon, c) plus a firearm. As a professional, Virgil regards the synchronization with approval.

No one can approach him unnoticed. It would be a mistake to rely on the element of surprise. Even in sleep Virgil remains prepared. Yet he appears completely carefree.

Night Pieces

The night pieces intertwine with Alisa’s dreams and enchant her as she sleeps. She nestles against Virgil, who embraces her from behind. A gentle glow smolders. Virgil enters a dream of his beloved. The hotel-room furniture is slightly battered; the house has seen better days. Nevertheless, it is fully booked.

Alisa and Virgil go hiking every day. Normally they return only in the early evening, after which they complete a course devised by Virgil in the wellness area. Both enjoy swimming, and they also like lounging lazily in whirlpools arranged phantasmagorically within a landscape of plaster grottoes. They always return to their room hot for one another. Later they can be seen in town. They stroll and make the rounds of the bars, soaking up the atmosphere and giving their conversation unfamiliar backdrops.

Two Weeks Later

They park in the station square, a station that feels like the end of the world between embankments. A few meters farther on, one collides with the artifice of a world-city airport. In the shadow cast by the spectacle, Alisa and Virgil thread their way through a tribunal of shards from a modernity sinking into twilight, with Dalí’s melting spectacles rendered as mosaics. The two make their way to the barrier-free entrance of a gallery. Model graduates of the Schwarzenegger Academy guard the entrance with an Old Testament severity. The elaborately printed invitations that Alisa waves before their noses prompt the draconians to increase the space between themselves ever so slightly.

Expansive facial expressions become welcoming ones.

In a society where seconds and centimeters matter, the accessibility of these giants reduces many others to the stature of a pitiful little heap. In one of her uncles from the Gerster line, Alisa observes the agility of a deflated sack. For a long time he has been the lover of the former mayor, who herself is married to a forceful man. She indulges in the pudgy family friend the way one keeps an old muff. Nothing can diminish her appearance.

An illegally immigrated Guatemalan woman stands about as the cloakroom attendant. She comes from the region of the great impact that launched humanity’s mouse-sized ancestors into the race—the chance of Yucatán. An empty tip jar sits on her counter. Her dress reminds Alisa of her mother’s worn-down slippers.

Variations of cruelty and kitsch pass through her mind.

No before. No after. That is what the truth we cannot comprehend looks like. Temporal sequences are merely structural elements in the story called life. The Guatemalan woman has the naked, drained gaze of the shipwrecked. A painting reminds Alisa of a catastrophe that has become part of the collective memory through its imagery. On January 28, 1986, NASA’s STS-51-L mission ended almost immediately after launch. The space shuttle disintegrated into an image. A many-coiled plume of explosion meandered across the sky. The world had never seen anything like it. Among the victims of the disaster was Judith Arlene “Judy” Resnik, whose parents had come from Ukraine to Ohio.