Frankfurt’s night has such a particular way of brushing the skin, a cold that slips in through the seam of my black coat; it settles in the chest like an old coin, and in my mind, I walk at nineteen with a new shadow I still have not fully deciphered even today; I cross the station with my eyes stuck to the posters and to the steam of other mouths, as if the breath of others could lend me a provisional faith; because since December 1999 the city seems written in a language I recognize and, all the same, it does not claim me, a paternal tongue that turns to glass in my hands, and I think of him, of my father, eccentric teacher of German origin, promoter of cultural corridors and writer on the margin, and I see him bent over a table that no longer exists, surrounded by ten thousand books as by a silent audience, and above all I smell him, that overwhelming tobacco that was his signature and his coat, that smoke that left a warm film on the lamp and another on my memory.
The house where he died appears to me like a dream that always repeats the same piece of furniture, shelves up to the ceiling, aged paper, an ash that never quite falls, and suddenly I realize I keep looking for him where he was most himself, among spines, marginal notes, clippings, dedications that were not for me and that now pierce me with someone else’s intimacy. I write to you, Antje, to the one who still believes the guardian angel sits on the edge of the bed and listens, as he used to say, to the one who still does not suspect how far a protection can become when a death breaks in, an icy voice, under the water.
Twenty six years later, I open boxes, I open sealed rooms, each inherited book weighs more than its paper, it has the thickness of what was not said, and when I turn the pages I feel under my fingers a fine dust, almost sweet, that mingles with old tobacco and brings back a minimal scene, my father laughing, correcting someone with cruel tenderness, dropping a German word where everyone expected Spanish, making contradiction a method. I write to you, Antje, the former gothic girl who believed in the beauty of the dark, sheltered in music basements accompanied by Bach and Wagner, the girl with lips painted black, not out of simple rebellion but out of hunger for belonging, and yet belonging unravels now when I try to touch it, especially the rest of my German family who look at me as if I were a passing relative, a detail in a photograph they have no interest in cleaning.
There was an instant, perhaps small, perhaps enormous, when that thread snapped, and since then an exile no one declared has hurt me, an exile of family table, of language, of letters that no longer arrive, and feminism is growing in me like a new bone, it teaches me to look at inheritances with suspicion, to distrust the pedestal where I placed my father, to admit his genius also took up too much space, that his smoke too was a kind of domestic government, that my admiration sometimes looked too much like a renunciation, and today, frozen January afternoon, Defiance, dark ribbon, I take a volume at random, and from between the pages a note of his falls, ink faded, a sentence I cannot manage to understand and I feel a simple, physical blow, as if memory had elbows.
I remember that night, with almost twenty years edging into the calendars, when I went to a séance in an apartment with white walls in Heidelberg; someone turned off the light and the town stayed the same behind the window, indifferent and perfect, and around a table our hands hesitated, found each other, tightened, breathing became a small animal, so I did not expect miracles, I said it so as not to fall, but when today I speak his name the air changes its density, not like in stories but the way a room changes when a person enters, and I feel again, with a bitter variation, the smell of tobacco, as warning, as if grief had ways of speaking without granting answers.
I ask myself whether reconciliation exists after death and what appears is a scene of archaeology, the patient work of unearthing, of accepting that to love was also to argue, that blood does not guarantee a home, that the angel can move away to force you to walk without its shadow, and on the way back, I cross the bridge with my hands in my pockets; books wait for me in stacks and I find myself again reflected in the tram’s glass, I see double, the daughter and the orphan, the foreigner and the one who insists, and in that reflection I think that from the ashes of an idol a more proper name can be born, Antje, whispered, so as not to summon anyone.
I have privileged an intimate second person addressed to the past self to intensify doubling and self inquiry without slipping into explicit confession, the semantic field of cold and archive sustains the dreamlike atmosphere, while tobacco and paper dust return as a sensory leitmotif with an affective variation, long sentences of enveloping cadence are interrupted by brief blows to mimic grief’s swell and its irregular breathing, the tension between belonging and exile, admiration and critique, seeks a melancholy that does not close off the mystery.
antjedieckmann.com 