V-2 - Chapter 9 - The dearest canvases in his soul's gallery

[Robin Landseadel]

		The next day her body was washed up on the beach.
	She had perished in a sea they would perhaps· never
	succeed in calming any part of. Jackals had eaten her
	breasts. . .

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Later:

		The purple spots on his legs had gone.

		Hedwig giggled. "They made you look like a hyena."

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	. . . It seemed then that something had at last been
	brought to consummation since his arrival centuries
	ago on the troop ship Habicht, that had only as
	obviousness and immediacy to do with the sergeant-
	pederast's preference as to women or that old
	bubonic plague injection. . .

The one that made the men's breasts all swell up.

				. . .If it were parable (which
	he doubted) it probably went to illustrate the
	progress of appetite or evolution of indulgence, both
	in a direction he found unpleasant to contemplate.
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Recall that the first time we get "Up close and personal" with Foppl,  
he's beating a black man to death. On our way into Sarah's Story,  
we're given a campy little dance number with Foppl and Vera:

	So, come away from him,
	Take my hand instead,

	Let the dead get to the task of burying their dead;
	Through that hidden door again,

	Bravo for '04 again; I'm a Deutschesudwestafrikaner in love ...

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What is to follow is a single sentence [interrupted by yours truly  
once, to demonstrate an earlier echo] of massive proportions, bringing  
Sarah's Story to a close.

	If a season like the Great Rebellion ever came to him
	again, he feared, it could never be in that same
	personal, random array of picaresque acts he was to
	recall and celebrate in later years at best furious and
	nostalgic; but rather with a logic that chilled the
	comfortable perversity of the heart, that substituted
	capability for character, deliberate scheme for
	political epiphany (so incomparably African); and for
	Sarah, the sjambok, the dances of death between
	Warmbad and Keetmanshoop, the taut haunches of
	his Firelily, the black corpse impaled on a thorn tree
	in a river swollen with sudden rain, for these the dearest
	canvases in his soul's gallery, it was to substitute the
	bleak, abstracted and for him rather meaningless
	hanging on which he now turned his back, but which
	was to backdrop his retreat until he reached the Other
	Wall, the engineering design for a world he knew with
	numb leeriness nothing could now keep from becoming
	reality . . .

Earlier:

	"From Munich, and never heard of Hitler," said
	Weissmann, as if "Hitler" were the name of an
	avant-garde play. "What the hell's wrong with
	young people." Light from the green overhead
	lamp turned his spectacles to twin, tender leaves,
	giving him a gentle look.

	"I'm an engineer, you see. Politics isn't my line."

	"Someday we'll need you," Weissmann told him,
	"for something or other, I'm sure. Specialized and
	limited as you are, you fellows will be valuable.
	I didn't mean to get angry."

	"Politics is a kind of engineering, isn't it. With
	people as your raw material."

	"I don't know," Weissmann said. "Tell me, how
	long are you staying in this part of the world."

	''No longer than I have to. Six months? it's indefinite."

	"If I could put you in the way of something, oh, with
	a little authority to it, not really involving much of your
	time ... " "Organizing, you'd call it?"

	"Yes, you're sharp. You knew right away, didn't you. Yes.
  	You are my man. The young people especially,
	Mondaugen, because you see-I know this won't be
	repeated-we could be getting it back."

	256/257

"Someday we'll need you" really says it all. Mondaugen turned out to  
Be Weissmann's man after all, if not his lover.


	. . . a world whose full despair he, at the vantage of
	eighteen years later, couldn't even find adequate
	parables for, but a design whose first fumbling sketches
	he thought must have been done the year after Jacob
	Marengo died, on that terrible coast, where the beach
	between Luderitzbucht and the cemetery was actually
	littered each morning with a score of identical female
	corpses, an agglomeration no more substantial-looking
	than seaweed against the unhealthy yellow sand; where
	the soul's passage was more a mass migration across
	that choppy fetch of Atlantic the wind never left alone,
	from an island of low cloud, like an anchored prison
	ship, to simple integration with the unimaginable
	mass of their continent; where' the single line of track
	still edged toward a Keetmanshoop that could in no
	conceivable iconology be any part of the Kingdom of
	death; where, finally, humanity was reduced, out of a
	necessity which in his loonier moments he could
	almost believe was only DeutschSudwest-Afrika's
	(actually he knew better), out of a confrontation the
	young of one's contemporaries, God help them, had
	yet to make, humanity was reduced to a nervous,
	disquieted, forever inadequate but indissoluble
	Popular Front against deceptively unpolitical and
	apparently minor enemies, enemies that would be with
	him to the grave: a sun with no shape, a beach alien
	as the moon's antarctic, restless concubines in barbed
	wire, salt mists, alkaline earth, the Benguela Current
	that would never cease bringing sand to raise the
	harbor floor, the inertia of rock, the frailty of flesh,
	the structural unreliability of thorns; the unheard
	whimper of a dying woman; the frightening but
	necessary cry of the strand wolf in the fog.

	V., 289/291 HPMC