Odd Jobs (111 page)

Food and romantic fantasies crowd these famished pages. Everybody wants to be loved, especially the torturing general. With little overt editorializing, Ms. Hagedorn sketches a nation that has never had much to be proud of, where even the natives feel like strangers. “Two generations, three generations, it really doesn’t matter,” Rio’s father says. “What matters is I feel like a visitor.” A humiliating poverty undermines the First Lady’s dreams of cosmopolitan elegance. She dreams she is in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria, having just chatted with Cristina Ford: “The third elevator’s door slides open without hesitation she steps in she holds up her long
terno
skirt to keep her precious beads from dragging on the floor she looks down at her bare feet the red polish on her toenails is chipped the skin between her toes is cracked and blistered streaked with dirt she is horrified.” Though the narrative at the end flies off into a flurry of artiness, including a prayer to the Virgin and a letter from Pucha to Rio Gonzaga as the author of
Dogeaters
, Ms. Hagedorn’s novel is generally dense with felt observation. Worried upper-class family life, seamy and hypnotic nightlife, suffocating and sinister and impotent political life—it is all here, set down with poetic brightness and grisly comedy. The author sees her native land from both near and far, with ambivalent love, the only kind of love worth writing about.

T
HE
T
ENNIS
P
LAYERS
, by Lars Gustafsson, translated from the Swedish by Yvonne L. Sandstroem. 92 pp. New Directions, 1983.

M
ASKS
, by Fumiko Enchi, translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter. 141 pp. Knopf, 1983.

A M
INOR
A
POCALYPSE
, by Tadeusz Konwicki, translated from the Polish by Richard Lourie. 232 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983.

Lars Gustafsson is a Swede who has read, among much else, Nietzsche; from the German rhapsodist he has learned to combine philosophy and play, a sense of
homo
as both
ludens
and
in extremis
. The first of his intricate, slim novels to be translated into English,
The Death of a Beekeeper
, took the form of a dying man’s diary, and presented piquant apian facts and the soft gray winter landscape of rural Sweden intermingled with the drastic pain of terminal cancer. The second, entitled
The Tennis Players
, is also in the first person, a reminiscence by an affable professorial type who calls himself Lars. He remembers “a happy time” as a Visiting Professor of Swedish Literature at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall of 1974; besides edifying innocent young Americans in the dark ways of Strindberg, Brandes, and Nietzsche, our hero works hard on his tennis game and gets involved in a spooky doubles match whose other participants are: Abel, a former pro and tennis mystic in a wide-brimmed leather hat; Polly, a tiny girl who turns out to be a Texas princess in disguise; and a math whiz called Chris, who works part-time for the Strategic Air Command, monitoring the Southern Air Defense District’s operations computer in Fort Worth. One of Lars’s students, a “very tall, very skinny, and quite mad” black called Bill, has located, in the remote top reaches of the university library (housed, as it happens, in the nineteen-story tower from which the deranged Charles Whitman shot and killed thirteen people one June day in 1966
^‡
), a book printed in
Paris in 1899,
Mémoires d’un chimiste
, by one Zygmunt I. Pietziewszkoczsky; Pietziewszkoczsky’s memoirs indicate that in fact Strindberg was
really
being poisoned and was not just paranoid during the crisis described in his well-known (in Scandinavia) novel of 1897,
Inferno
. At Lars’s suggestion, Chris tries to collate
Inferno
with
Mémoires d’un chimiste
on the giant government computer, precipitating a brief crisis which coincides with a university strike over the political implications of performing
Das Rheingold
and not
Aida
in a campus production, and with a local bigwig’s being caught committing an immoral act in the batter’s box of the local ballpark.

It is farce, but underplayed, and swiftly over, leaving a certain resonance of the personal; the conjunction of sunstruck Texas realities with the intellectual murk of
fin-de-siècle
northern Europe—“a time of coal smoke and absinthe, when Europe starts to give up hope”—is of course one the author lived through. Such cultural simultaneity is a campus commonplace, here especially embodied in the person of Doobie Smith, a Lou Salomé look-alike from Dallas so immersed in her reading that for her “Berlin was still a city of gaslights and dark hansom cabs going through cobbled streets.” Lars, who has been to Berlin, tells us, “She would get impatient with me because I didn’t know literary coffee shops that now exist only as building materials for some hundred feet of the Wall.” Doobie, with her blond hair and chubby hands, was “one of the most committed Nietzscheans I’ve ever met.” It is always interesting to see yourself as others see you, and Mr. Gustafsson’s impressions of America, though not notably harsh, are bracing:

It is such postcards home, rather than the Nordic basketwork intertwining themes from Strindberg, Wagner, and Nietzsche, that catch the American reader’s eye. Mr. Gustafsson is himself both affable and semi-opaque; he uses himself as a prism, deflecting light into unexpected corners. The net effect combines high seriousness and offhand charm. If Susan Sontag were to meet Woody Allen halfway, we might get
jeux d’esprit
of such gently skewed vision and good-natured intellectual effervescence.

Fumiko Enchi is, according to her American publisher’s flap copy, “generally regarded by the Japanese as their most important woman writer.” She was born in 1905, and
Masks
has waited twenty-five years for its publication here. The daughter of a well-known Meiji scholar and the author of a ten-volume translation of Lady Murasaki’s classic
Tale of Genji
, Mrs. Enchi in this short novel describes “a crime that only women could commit” and sheds, in passing, considerable scholarly light upon Nō masks and “spirit possession in the Heian era.” Psychological possession in the modern era enables Mieko Toganō, a poet and widow in her fifties, to manipulate her beautiful widowed daughter-in-law, Yasuko, in a simultaneous romance with two men—Tsuneo Ibuki, a gaunt, married teacher of literature, and Toyoki Mikamé, an overweight, unmarried psychologist. Akio, Yasuko’s husband and Mieko’s son, was killed in an avalanche on Mount Fuji four years before, a scant year after his marriage. Mieko, it develops, conceived Akio and his feeble-minded female twin, Harumé, not with her own late husband, Masatsugu, but with a nameless lover who died in 1937 with the Japanese Army in China. Other characters include: Sadako, Ibuki’s businesslike wife (in whose honor he coins the epigram “A rational woman is as ridiculous as a flower held together with wire”); Yū, the elderly maidservant who has been witness to all that has transpired in the twisted Toganō household; Toé, the daughter of Yorihito Yakushiji, a dying Nō master; and the Rokujō lady, a sinister figure from
The Tale of Genji
who haunts Mieko’s thoughts and the spectral level of this novel. Some of the Nō masks are almost characters in themselves, and the novel’s three chapters are titled after masks: “Ryō no Onna,” “the spirit woman” and emblem of female vengeance; “Masugami,” a mask representing a young madwoman; and “Fukai,” meaning “deep well” or “deep woman,” a mask used in roles depicting middle-aged women.

“It’s very Japanese,” a character says at one point, and so
Masks
does
seem. The descriptive prose sometimes has the evocative precision and quickly shifted perspective of haiku:

Other passages have the flatness of Japanese paintings, full of carefully indicated textures and angles:

Sometimes the prose seems as hard-breathing as a sumo wrestler:

Perhaps the translator should share the blame for the effortfulness of a sentence like

But the author alone has produced the overload of symbols and melodramatic insistences and
dei ex machina
lowered creakily out of the classic literature and drama of the past. Mrs. Enchi’s interpolation of a ten-page essay on the character of the Rokujō lady and the frequent depiction of her own heroines’ faces in terms of Nō masks—“[Mieko’s]
was a face like a Nō mask, while the impression it gave was one of even greater obscurity and elusiveness”—muffle rather than illuminate what is going on among Mieko, Yasuko, and Harumé. Our sense of human event fights through, as it were, the wraps of decreed meaning.

The life that this delicate, mysterious book does have emerges in startling, grotesque gestures and images:

We read that Harumé suffered brain damage from the pressure of Akio’s feet in the womb, that Akio’s body when found after five months under the snow had been torn to the bone along one side of his face, that Yasuko’s body after beginning her affair with Ibuki had in Mieko’s nostrils a peculiar smell—“the sharp pungency of a fish just taken from the sea.” Ibuki, after an interview with the mother and daughter-in-law, “recognized the viscid flow of emotion between Yasuko and Mieko as, he felt, unclean, yet he was aware also of his own paradoxical desire to enter that unclean moistness.” The Japanese psyche, without significant prompting from Christianity or Freud, seeks its own underworld, the fervid unclean flow behind the impassive mask. This restrained culture has produced, in its novels and films of this century, an art of violent imagery and painful beauty. Yasuko remembers how, searching for her husband beneath the snows of Mount Fuji, she thrust down the long steel rod she had been given and how it left each time “a tiny deep hole of a blue that was so pure, so clear, so beautiful, it took my breath away”; and one night she dreams that she stabbed “his dead face straight in the eye.”

The transaction among the women of
Masks
is tortuously complex: Yasuko under Mieko’s spell causes Harumé to be impregnated by her own drugged lover, and the new life thus brought into the world in some way replaces and revenges the child that Mieko miscarried when she was tripped by a nail maliciously fixed at the head of a stair by her husband’s jealous mistress, Aguri. Jealousy, grief, sensuousness, and passivity contribute in inscrutable proportions to this “crime that only women could commit”; the mask of Fukai conceals a deep well indeed. As in Mr. Gustafsson’s brief novel, Americans are seen with a slant from another culture. Yasuko and Ibuki, about to commence their adulterous affair,
observe a young American couple on a train—a woman with flaxen hair and a man whose hair “resembled the fur of a small animal.” The couple caress each other fondly and then “They were asleep, leaning against one another like a pair of tame animals.” To the Swede, as of 1974, we are killers; to the Japanese, as of 1958, we have the innocence of animals.

Tadeusz Konwicki is a Polish writer and film director, born in 1926, who has gone from being an officially approved Socialist Realist to being a dissident whose fiction can be published only in the underground magazine
Zapis
and in the West. A previous novel,
The Polish Complex
, appeared here last year;
A Minor Apocalypse
extends its predecessor’s jaunty, picaresque manner deeper into desperation. In both novels, Konwicki’s heroes have his name and personal history, as if the times are too ramshackle and weary for the conventional concoction of an alter ego. “Weariness and powerlessness were overcoming me. My life was repeating itself and I was repeating myself.… My art, like my life, could be sliced like a sausage.”

In this novel Konwicki awakes with a hangover, though he has not been drinking, and is visited by two fellow writers, Hubert and Rysio, who tell him he has been chosen to set himself on fire at eight o’clock that evening, in front of the Party Central Committee building, as a protest. Our hero’s friends explain to him that since he is a prominent but not indispensable writer, and long obsessed by death anyway, he is a natural candidate; in truth he does not reject their proposal out of hand but mulls it over during a long day of wandering, during which he allows himself to be equipped with a can of gasoline and Swedish matches (Swedish because Polish matches tend not to ignite). Warsaw is collapsing around him—bridges fall, electricity fails, slabs of sandstone fly from the Palace of Culture in the wind—and the city is in the grip of an immense drunken celebration of what on various pages is identified as the fortieth, fiftieth, thirty-fifth, and sixtieth anniversary of the Polish People’s Republic, which dates from 1952. Not only the calendar but the weather is unsteady; the day begins as one of “autumn’s hopeless days” but enjoys some summery intervals and ends in snow. Konwicki visits old friends, an uproarious restaurant called Paradyz, and a Polish film called
Transfusion
, which is advertised on the marquee as a Russian film called
The Radiant Future
. During his perambulations he has various companions, of whom the most constant are Pikush, a many-colored dog, and Tadzio Skorko, an ardent Konwicki fan and aspiring poet who also seems to work for the secret police. Konwicki is repeatedly stopped
by different varieties of police and is tortured by one set of them. He makes love to a red-haired Russian beauty, Nadezhda, and attends a kind of witches’ congress of the fifteen women whose lover he has been at various times of his life. He engages in a great many excited conversations, with representatives of both the establishment and the opposition; but, so long has the unhappy Polish situation been marinating, it is hard to tell one from the other, and no marked conflict exists, just a tangle of wry and futile palaver.