Ján Johanides - Berlin in the Afternoon, at a Quarter to Winter

The much-awarded writer Ignác L., whose long fingers, suitable for playing the violin, were the “color of unwashed beef tripe”, has written a play, provocatively titled The Master of the Uncut Ear, and which, being set in Hammurabi's Babylon has nothing at all to do with the German Democratic Republic, though the police who arrest Ignác are convinced it does; and the play, read aloud only once, has caused the suffering of all who have heard it, resulting thus far in one account of madness and one suicide,

Ignác L., during his university years, was a young man concerned primarily with literature, foregoing fashion, food and comfort in the quest to ensure a steady stream of books, some rare, others not; his hair is bespattered with dandruff and his shoes are tiny and tight, almost child-like – to quote Ján Johanides:

this mule who notices the seasons of the year only when walking to catch the bus or depending on what shape his shoes are in the evening, only happy after he's spent all day patiently rummaging around in second-hand bookstores, even though all he's succeeded in discovering is a tattered, restitched little volume rebound with a flimsy cord, but it's just what he was looking for, unless it's one of those days he's going to bring home a two-kilo dictionary in half-leather binding or an expensive and sought-after textbook of ancient Persian from the last century, published in a tiny edition, or else a miniature ancient-Greek/German dictionary,

the quote comes from Berlin in the Afternoon, at a Quarter to Winter, a short story by the late Slovak writer Johanides that is concerned with murder, the role of the writer and, later in the piece, with the importance that art may (or may not) play in determining the life and fate of a man, though Johanides avoids providing any specific answers to these questions, instead being content to raise and examine them through the prism of metaphor and the saturation of (not quite) contemporary Slovak/East German history,

Ignác loves Lily; he feels somewhat comfortable in her presence and, one day, along with his friend Kurt they go together for a beer on Leipziger Strasse; later they are asked for their papers and Ignác, unsettled due to his unfamiliarity with their current location, seems hesitant, guilty, and suspicious, though the guard waves them away; Ignác refers to the lights of the border, calling them a “beautiful racetrack”,

Kurt laughed and Lily laughed and none of them knew they would lock Ignác up the next day and that four days later, in the afternoon, at 5:15, when the same mild breeze they'd felt on their walk would start up again, that same breeze that had blown when they'd laughed after their exam, Lily would jump from a window in her brick-red coast; they laughed in the breeze without knowing that soon Lily would be consumed by that coat, since her legs would be compressed all the way to her chest because of the impact, and that it would look like only her coat were lying there,

and thus the darkness, which Johanides hinted at in the opening paragraph of his story (the murder) seems now to be coming into fruition, and the story takes a black turn, shifting away from Ignác and to the funeral of Lily, forever a university student; her father, the pastor, is too drunk to properly perform his duties at the funeral, instead allowing himself to be carried away, sobbing, as a serious three-year-old boy throws his toy fire engine on top of the coffin as the earth is piled on,

Johanides makes the Pastor the primary character now, describing in great detail his journey to Dresden (though he tells his family he is off to Rostock to see his sister during this grave hour), where he buys a shabby jacket, ill-fitting shirt, a new cheap wallet, and sundry writing materials; in the hotel he remembers back to his own university days, and drinks gin while writing, at times incoherently and at times with the razor-like focus of a man saying all that he must say because he knows he has no other time but now to say it, to an old friend, Otto, with whom he once studied Vincent van Gogh, and who has now, in his middle-years, become a high-ranking bureaucrat in the Party, a level of whoredom which, to the Pastor, seems far greater than his own, much smaller, prostitution,

the Pastor writes of youth, of art, of homosexuality and the hints of it in others, of failure, of mistakes, misfortune and regret; he takes Otto to task for his actions, imploring this cold bureaucrat who was once his friend to please, if possible, read his (the Pastor's) note and forgive, if possible, the actions of one Ignác, and also to remember their university days; the Pastor, drunk enough to numb the pain and mad and grief-stricken enough to commit the deed, severs his ear in a homage to van Gogh,

Ján Johanides short story, Berlin in the Afternoon, at a Quarter to Winter, is all of a piece, an 8-page long sentence, broken loosely into paragraphs, which allows the writer to create the sensation of endlessly penetrating his subject, as though he is circling around his themes in a slow descending spiral, never quite managing to rest; the story is like an onion, successfully unpeeling to reveal, as always, more onion; where Johanides is successful is in his use of an over-arching theme to unit the disparate sections of the plot together; the character of Ignác is taken up, examined, then dropped, and then the character of the Pastor is taken up, examined, and then dropped, and then the stifling nature of East Germany is taken up, examined, and then dropped, and then we return to Ignác, where the story is rounded off and completed – but what is never dropped, and remains examined throughout, is the place of art, it’s use when it seems it has no use, and the terrible tragedies its misuse can cause, or put more simply, the question of art for a world that doesn’t care for it, where brutal petty bureaucrats are educated, intellectual, and it doesn’t matter. The sweep of history marches on, and the first against the wall are the artists and the dispossessed.

See Also

Other stories from the The Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. XXX, #2 Slovak Fiction issue include:
---Hochel, Braňo - My Best Story
---Juráňová, Jana - Clips
---Karvaš, Peter - Xerox of a Document about One Half of (the Art of) Life
---Kompaníková, Monika - Slávko
---Kovalyk, Uršuľa - Mrs. Agnes's Bathroom
---Rankov, Pavol - The Period in Which We Live
---Šimko, Dušan - Excursion to Dubrovnik

Related Works:
---Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius - another (longer) piece all in one sentence.

Also of interest:
---Other titles under review from The Dalkey Archive Press
---Index of short stories under review