If Albert had known what the stars wanted from him, he’d have stopped looking at them. He felt compelled to gaze upwards and try to make sense of the constellations above his head. On a trip to Algier, undertaken to look for traces of Camus in the coral-speckled sand, he met a red-haired woman, who seemed to share his obsession: he found her sitting on the hotel terrace, her head bent towards the night sky for hours. Finally, on his last day, he said to her: “Are you also looking for answers up there that you can’t get down here?” He was hoping for easy companionship and perhaps a little love for the road home to Reykjavik. She did not look at him when she replied: “But no, dear sir, I am quadriplegic, I couldn’t look down if I wanted to. See, I can’t even look at you properly, which is a pity since I do enjoy the sound of your voice.” Albert felt shy and shamed. The woman said, “you must feel like quite a fool now.” Then she asked him, courteously, he thought, which answers he hoped to find among the stars. “I really don’t know,” he said. “I’ve lost track of my question in the course of a lifetime.” – “Perhaps,” she said, “the answers are just as forgettable as the questions were.” He shrugged. It turned out that she was called July in summer and Autumn in fall, and that she had no name during winter and springtime. Over time, she became an excellent substitute for astronomy. Albert loved obsessing about her because she was actually needy and she didn’t just sit there but willingly gave answers to all the questions he could ever think of and sometimes even before he’d thought of them. “How do you do it,” he said, “where do you take your certainty from, dearest.” – “I just don’t think about it too much, Albert,” she said and winked at the universe above making him smile before he rolled her into the bedroom, whose ceiling was painted with hundreds of fluorescent stars each with a small question mark at its centre.
#24/1000. Photo: Seen plain sea-planes by Eley Williams. (Deutsche Übersetzung.) Text by Marcus Speh published in Wilderness House Literary Review 6.3.
6 notes |#