Elephant Chronicles E-Book

Sînziana Păltineanu

• Herausgeber: Fiktion
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 135

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The protagonist of Romanian writer and historian Sînziana Păltineanu’s debut novel Elephant Chronicles is a person free of financial concerns who explores a fluid world of temporalities. Fragments, fungi, shadows, and teddy bears accompany this character, who quickly turns to the local archives as an entry point into a past world of sensibilities.

Leseprobe

Credits

First published by Fiktion, Berlin, 2015www.fiktion.cc ISBN: 978-3-944818-86-3

Project Directors Mathias Gatza, Ingo Niermann (Publishing Program) Henriette Gallus (Communications) Julia Stoff (Management)

Editor Charis Conn

Consulting Editor and Proofreader Alexander Scrimgeour

Design Identity Vela Arbutina

Web Development Maxwell Simmer (Version House)

The copyright for the text remains with the author.

Fiktion is backed by the nonprofit association Fiktion e.V. It is organized in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, and financed by a grant from the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

Fiktion e.V., c/o Mathias Gatza, Sredzkistraße 57, 10405 Berlin

Chairs Mathias Gatza, Ingo Niermann

Sînziana Păltineanu ELEPHANT CHRONICLES

To R.

In Defense of a Storyteller

At 2 o’clock on Monday a person appeared in the middle of the parking lot as if from nowhere. He was wearing an orange jacket and ordinary blue jeans. He stared at the little green tree in front of him and touched one of the leaves. After that, he went to the next tree, which was a little leafier, and circled it in wonder. He had nothing of the scientific curiosity of a botanist. He was not staring at the tree in order to conquer or to know, but merely to sense. A white and red braiding hung from a bough, but it probably remained unnoticed. The man was not familiar with the fluttering Bulgarian symbol of spring so the braiding couldn’t have made him think of the wishes someone may have ceremoniously muttered in secret when attaching the symbol to a blossom. Had he been interested only in linguistics, Saussure’s tree might have completely overshadowed his spring experience. But, fortunately, the man in orange genuinely responded only to colors and textures.

The fact that it was already late spring made his demeanor seem strangely anachronistic. Either he had just arrived from a wintry Nordic country, or he was one of those people for whom weekends started on Tuesdays and ended on Fridays, leaving the rest of the days for proper work. And indeed, a different cycle spun his life. He took his predisposition to observe obscure details as a sign of alertness, and he was proud of it. By contrast, others interpreted it as useless daydreaming or, worse, shameful mental laziness. In truth, he was most at peace with himself when he successfully induced a state of laziness followed smoothly by boredom. He had no desire to explain to anyone why he sought laziness and boredom while others got an adrenaline rush from bouts of productivity. He put a stop to such inquiries with a shy smile, challenging his condescending interlocutor to a game of table tennis to take place as soon as possible, either in a nearby park or on a university campus. That way, he could at least prove his physical alertness. He understood these games as some sort of territories of compromise into which he could lure others. As the ball pinged and ponged, he forced his adversaries to admit — if only to themselves — that it was more rewarding to expand the meanings of words than to match a person with a definition. The dictionary-minded others would never even have a chance to understand his double game at table tennis, because the person in orange was nearly silent during these games. Only the empty sound of a plastic ball punctuated the interaction. He never shared his conclusions about different kinds of alertness or his inner monologues about concepts or labels with his opponents. At the tennis table, the points scored never came in sentences or arguments, but only in numbers, which he arranged like eggs in egg cartons in one corner of his mind while on the main stage he triumphed in both games, graciously concealing his double victory. Such was his imagination; such was our character in springtime.

In winter, his field of curiosity was frozen. In the mass of ice that was the city, he conceived of the public bus as a warm, moving tunnel. He felt safe there, making sure to always occupy a seat next to a heater (when available) and close to a window. This is where he liked to experience winter: in his projection of a warm continuum, protected by windows. From his seat, he enjoyed watching the schoolchildren playing their winter games and carrying their heavy satchels. They threw snowballs at each other from positions on both sides of the street, but oftentimes their trajectory intersected the bus windows, their smashing sound causing his face to break into an instantaneous smile. Under no imaginable circumstances would he have traded his sheltered seat on the bus for the glorifying moment of being the one who was hitting the bus with snowballs. In his moving tunnel, whose retired captain he was, he felt safe and protected, almost untouchable. Or so it seemed, until one day in winter when his comfortable soap bubble burst.

At a crossroads, the bus window, colored by red traffic lights, seemed to blush and smile back at him. But the passenger’s mind was busy with memory flashes so this outer detail slipped by unobserved. A few moments later the bus continued its journey with a squeaky turn to the left, and his head carelessly leaned in the same direction, as if approving the change of course. At 3 o’clock — the direction, not the time — he noticed a picturesque humpbacked woman, born in another century, waiting at the pedestrian crossing. She was leaning against a shopping cart with a human dignity that not many old people now possess. He was enthralled. And while she waited, he began searching for details like a mouse for cheese. Soon enough he noticed that her frozen red nose was dripping. Under the magnifying glass of his imagination, this mysteriously translucent blob began to gain grotesque proportions. The woman’s contours seemed to explode in billions of pixels while he concentrated on the flickering and enlarging, but not yet frozen, drop.

As if in a trance, he simply couldn’t look away. And then it happened in a second, like all edifying things: his tunnel disappeared, and for a few minutes he found himself encircled by questions and doubts. How could this mucus drop shatter his heart’s contentment, his pleasant and sheltered journey? Why was a mucus blob more powerful than his soap bubble? Winter, or rather his lack of understanding of winter, had made him create a tunnel for himself as best he could. He was not an architect; he was not a construction engineer. He had a strong personal distaste for concrete. So all he could do was to create a safe and warm tunnel on which he had worked every single day since the first snow fell that year. And now, all of a sudden, he felt a cold winter shiver on his spine and realized that a mucus blob had undermined his soothing construct. He saw no other escape than to let his body slowly sink into the irony of the situation. Who else could he blame but himself for underestimating the hypnotic power of a translucent mucus blob? He usually wiped it off, with a handkerchief and a quick move, just like anyone else would do.

But this time he carried on his analysis, and weighed her blob and his soap bubble. He was well aware of how much time he had invested in creating this warm, comfortable zone for himself. From the beginning of winter, he had expected that the demise of his tunnel would come from within, from drunk, aggressive passengers or possibly from a curious rat. He had even prepared an imaginary shield against such prosaic, subversive agents, keeping it at hand, in his trousers’ left pocket. On a couple of late-night trips he really came within a whisker of using it to defend his construct, but then he always decided against it. It wasn’t yet worth it, he thought. He carried around this imaginary shield — a combination of burning magnifying glass and blinding mirror — with the ease and reassurance that some other people walked around with pepper spray in their bags. And the fact that no one had ever seen or felt the effects of his shield didn’t mean that he couldn’t have used it in case of emergency. Had this moment come? The image of the dignified old woman, with a dripping red nose, freezing in the street, had left him completely puzzled and his imaginary shield useless.

And as he ruminated over the question of how fragile and vulnerable the constructs of his imagination were, it finally occurred to him that maybe he could not stand the fragility of his never-ending stories anymore. One option was to end them himself, and to blow them away as one does soap bubbles, or as if blowing one’s nose for that matter. What bothered him the most was that an exterior element was powerful enough not only to interrupt or alter his imaginary projection, but to terminate it completely. But he knew he was playing hide-and-seek with himself. The force that undermined his own tunnel construct was just another product of his imagination filter. Ending his tunnel this way was a mildly vengeful, but most definitely liberating act for the man in orange. After all, he had become unacceptably numbed by the pride and comfort he took in his tunnel. Under these circumstances, which he considered averagely boring, he thought of the mucus blob as encapsulating the entirety of humanity with which he’d lost touch. He decided to subtly implode his construct. In his cocoon-world, he equated the blob with a terrorist bomb in a metropolis. So he planted it and got off the bus.

It would be unwise to judge the man’s mental maneuverings, since his business was his alone. If some deemed his formulations, and most likely his character too, incongruous, they must have misunderstood him in the first place. Very few could speak in his defense. Among them were two employees of the local archives in an insignificant outlying town where L.L. had recently moved. It must have been the same winter when L.L. encountered the underestimated mucus blob, which, on the destructive and playful spur of the moment, he decided to blow out of his way. After that wink of delight, he carried on as if nothing of interest had happened. He chose his favorite route to the local archives and went back to his long-standing practice: reading old news and telling stories to the archivists — sometimes once a week, sometimes once a month. He would diligently carry on this activity throughout the following four seasons. Despite the first impression he gave of being a bizarre and anachronistic character, the man in orange — or Mr. L.L., as he was known to these employees — did maintain some human relationships.

According to one intimate conversation between the archivists, at first sight L.L. appeared to be a curious spirit primarily due to his ceremonious way of touching objects and of being in the reading room. Here, at a table with high stacks of old newspapers and documents published in many languages, Mr. L.L. felt he was in the right place. In the archivists’ initial view, he seemed to come from nowhere to do almost nothing of importance. Except tell them stories based on the archival holdings he investigated under their intrigued eyes. So, as winter weeks passed by, they grew fond of Mr. L.L. and treated him with a mix of gentleness and curiosity, which was the way they used to treat their documents when they first started out in this profession some decades ago.

But this affection was yet to grow and be shared by Mr. L.L. During the first several weeks, the relationship he began developing with the archivists was similar to that between a regular bar customer and some friendly waiters. At a certain hour, he would come in and sit down at the same table with the quietness with which a woman would place her hat next to her on a church pew.

Mr. L.L. had one small problem with the archive and its keepers. He had never managed to get across a simple message to the archivists: the use of “Mister,” up and down the archives, irritated him. He wasn’t worried that the archivists’ use of the title might threaten to transform him into a marble statue of a dead thinker — though that thought would sicken L.L., who had little in common with most contemporary scholars. Instead, the issue was related to his monologues about labels and definitions. This time, it was about his personal preference for gender-neutral pronouns when strangers referred to hir in the third person. Yet he never dared to explicitly communicate his wish to them. Only in his verbal interactions with friends did L.L. place a firm demand: they were asked to alternate between the uses of female and male third-person pronouns when referring to hir. All the archivists could think of — because of L.L.’s deep raspy voice, hir way of mumbling, and hir dark circles — was Benicio del Toro. And indeed, in addition to these features, the charismatic actor and L.L. had in common a tendency to give almost monosyllabic answers. Such answers made the questioners formulate ridiculous follow-up questions that broke down the initial query into at least five different ones. To jump from the Benicio del Toro association to a question like “Hi, so which pronoun should we use to refer to you in the third person today?” would have surpassed all expectations, given the setting and the actors’ conventional patters of thought. But be that as it may, the use of pronouns was the only discomfort that L.L. felt in the archives, the storytelling time remaining a highlight of the week or month for all involved.

Despite the first impression he gave of being merely a dreamer, L.L. was actually a complex person of many gifts. His foreign language skills almost equaled those of a seasoned historian and well surpassed those of a linguist. Rumor had it that in his youth, L.L. had started learning languages because he believed that one who spoke many languages would never starve. Later on, when L.L. reached his thirties, he decided against making money from his language proficiency thanks to a streak of luck that brought him financial security for a modest future and allowed him to avoid soiling his interest in languages with the profit motive. Instead, L.L. dedicated more and more of his time to reading about what the immediate concerns and thoughts of the future looked like in the remote past. As such, in his third decade of life L.L.’s use of languages bore no pragmatic or formal relation to his community. The older he got, the more convinced L.L. grew that his constant use of several foreign languages constituted — paradoxically — an escape from communication. As an experiment, L.L. allocated a fairly long period of time to jumping from the comfort or discomfort of one linguistic circle into the next one, without interruption. Behind him followed only the loud sound of a string of broken sentences, which most often led to a local archive. Now, at the beginning of his fourth decade of life, L.L. realized that for better or for worse, he preferred this mixed bag of discomfort and play to sticking to one language. A local and curious eye could sometimes spot L.L. wandering around the town with his head wrapped up in a colorful bag of foreign languages. He often stumbled.

Throughout his thirties, L.L. took issue with accepted definitions and identities more and more. But it was not a debate on identity that he would wage in academic journals or book prefaces; it simply was a straightforward and personal battle that L.L. had to fight. Regardless of his skills or upbringing, L.L. dared describe himself loosely as a “freelancer in the humanities.” Upon insistent questioning, he’d further explain his occupation as an occasionally paid factotum with a flexible range of hobbies. (In his own mind, L.L. would once again translate “hobbies” to “failed professions.”) Either way, he would provide the most evasive answers possible, and when the conversation reached this low, his questioners found it better not to press the issue further. One thing was sure: L.L. was driven by resentment toward hyper-professionalization and pulsing career pressure. By concealing anything that had to do with his formal education, L.L. hoped to secure for himself a marginal — and enjoyable — position in any society he decided to visit, where he could afford to plunge in between skyscrapers of categories and professions at will.