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I. Death of a Dictator.
Claus and Lucas are brothers and they are twins. Their names are anagrams of the same five letters.
The translation in an unidentified city in Eastern Europe, childhood under the harsh gaze of a relative, the war. They never cry. They never play. They work, study. They do endurance exercises, discipline exercises. To get used to pain, to get used to deprivation. To habituate themselves. Pain is needed. Desensitization is needed. Exercises to toughen the body, exercises to toughen the spirit, exercises of blindness, exercises of deafness, exercises of fasting, begging, cruelty. They hurl atrocious and evil insults at each other to prepare for humiliation. Hands over a flame, alcohol on wounds, cuts, reciprocal slaps. It is someone else who feels pain, it is someone else who burns, who cuts, who suffers. Crying is of no use. They no longer cry. They do not like to say thank you and they never forget anything. They boast, they humiliate in turn, they blackmail, they accuse and it doesn't matter if the accusations are true or false, they know that the essential is the slander. They go for walks during the alarms, when people hide, the city lights are off, the streets are deserted and it is forbidden to turn on the lamps before perfectly darkening the windows.
They don't like any of this at all, and that is why, they say, they must get used to it.
Cold house, dirty house, black with grease, soot, layers of grease, dingy rags, boiler house, boiling house. They act and exist simultaneously. They speak correctly, they have composition lessons. Spelling lessons, reading, calculations, math, they do mnemonic exercises, study the dictionary for synonyms, antonyms. They write the great notebook.
To determine its quality they choose the categories Good and Not Good, the theme must be true. The words that define feelings are very vague; it is better to avoid using them and stick to the description of objects, of human beings and of oneself, that is to the faithful description of facts.
They never play. They work, study, do exercises. For months they polish, varnish the skull and bones of their mother and a newborn, hang the woman's skeleton from a rafter in the attic and attach the newborn's to her neck. Claus and Lucas have a razor, next to the Bible.
Victor, on the other hand, strangled his sister and sat at the desk to write. He typed next to his sister's body. The silent presence of his sister in the other room bothered him, it always bothered him, she entered his room with every kind of pretext, in the evening she forced him to go to the living room to listen to stupid chatter. When she stopped struggling, Victor ejaculated. Now, she is nothing but a heap of ashes. At the cemetery, a gravedigger eats lard with onions. In the city, there is no doctor. Many people die this way, for lack of care, during the war. Claus and Lucas, they never forget anything. They do not know the meaning of the word, no one does. Above them, illuminated by the light above the skylight, swing, hanging from a beam, the skeletons of the mother and the child. The black bonfires they have seen from above are charred corpses. Some have been burned well, only bones remain, in the border area.
What happened, Mathias? You hurt me, you know? You hurt me too, but you don't know.
And It’s just another nightmare. The winter, the charnel house. The depressed zones.
II. Sonata in Kőszeg.
Ágota Kristóf (Csikvánd, 1935 – Neuchâtel, 2011) was a Hungarian writer and playwright who lived in Switzerland. She was not a prolific author, initially experimenting with radio writing, then producing few things for the theater, subsequently publishing collections of poems and a few novels.
In Switzerland, she worked in a watch factory assembling verses and stanzas. Working in a factory.
There she could focus on writing, on her thoughts. Next to the machine she used there were sheets on which she wrote her things, and it was the mechanical cadence of the machines that gave her the regular rhythm to pace her poetry, her prose.
“La trilogie des jumeaux” is the complete work of three medium-long novels: Le grand cahier (1986), La preuve (1988), Le troisième mensonge (1991), published in Italy by Einaudi, in Turin, in 1998. The edition images of the publishing house narrate and intuitively mirror, in fact, the two sides that a first oversight removes the most diverse developments of the story. A work with veristic facial traits, futurist degree, full of impostures and distortions, of symbioses of primordial understanding and subsequent freezing estrangement.
Kristóf's selected and sectioned style is dry, sharp, direct, without virtuosity. Austere, subtractive. Style is her stiletto. Parataxis nailed fused with the avio smell of iron, eliminates adjectivation, imagination. War, bourgeoisie, the drama of daylight, the modern.
Trilogy of the City of K. is a continuous mise en abyme, more levels and dimensions of modular truth in sections of discontinuous sequences, a Droste effect of changes and confusion of perspective and a Rashomon-like authorial effect, make it a type of novel suite of dissociation, duplication, deconstruction. The narrative source alternates, fast: a we, a he, a double I. The theme of evil that happens as a necessary element of existence, ordinary pain in times of war and peace, a great removed in its heart that, like all removals, survives and becomes alive underground, imaginary doubles, incest, mutilation, suicide.
The individual, the indivisible of the 20th Century that disunites in solitude and isolation. Not everything needs to be understood clearly. What matters is not the plot, but what it does not contain.
Nothing is true, everything is permitted. A meta-literary enigma. Oil.
The trilogy is also a consideration on writing and its rewriting, on the inner exile of writing per se as a space of self-construction, and on writing in another language. The issue of the French language as a challenge, an elementary challenge for an illiterate person. Someone killed themselves with gas, someone else by shooting themselves in the head, decades after 1956. There is no war, there is no post-war, there is no peace, there will never be peace, as in a novel of the absurd, as in a novel of cruelty. Thus one builds the years, thus one builds death.
III. Threnody of Kvándstaat.
“Dear son, try not to get well. We are fine without you. We don’t miss you at all. We hope you stay where you are, because we have no intention of keeping a handicapped person in the house. Anyway, we send you a kiss, and you try to be good because those who take care of you are to be admired. We wouldn’t do the same thing. We are lucky that there is someone else to do for you what we should do, because in our family where everyone is in good health we no longer have a place for you. Your parents, your sisters, your brothers”.
P.S.E.: “You can cry as much as you want, it won’t help you get the apple back in your hand, clumsy”.
One cannot love life. The dead are everywhere and nowhere, and until evening they await death.
People are afraid to be seen going to church and the big church is cold, almost empty. Above the houses and life, gray and light fog. Winter is very cold this year. It's the last day of the year. A great cold from the north has seized the land, an icy fog stagnates over the deserted city. In front of the large neon-lit textile factory a society founded on money. There is no room for questions concerning life. Thirty years in dead solitude. The sun, the wind, the night, the moon, the stars, the clouds, the rain, the snow, everything was wonder. They walked on roofs, they were never afraid of falling. They were young, they didn’t suffer from vertigo. Laughs: Don’t be afraid, I won’t fall, I know how to fly.
Every night I glide over the city. Before the sun, the light, the moon and the stars darken and the clouds return.
Time escapes modern time. Now streets, alleys, and passages are illuminated, there is no more war, there is no more blackout nor curfew. There is no more youth in this empty city. We find ourselves aged in the reflection of a window drawing the calm, quiet lives of others, watching the nights descend on the city. Solitude, insomnia, physical, nervous fatigue. Dark, silence in the night.
- I am seriously ill. Today it has been a year since I found out.
- Do not be sentimental. Everything dies.
Claus says: My head is a bit disturbed from the bombings.
It happened when I was a child. I was still a child. But I have not forgotten anything.
Lucas says: I will never have peace.
Claus is never seen in public and nothing is known about his private life. When he writes he is in a hurry to see her go to bed. In fact, he says that when he writes he must be absolutely alone. He needs silence and solitude. Claus says that during the day there are too many things that disturb him. He has to do the shopping, prepare meals, and especially there are the noises of the street. He cannot stand either music or the screams and laughter of those who are having fun. People are so happy that they don’t even love.
Before writing he puts on a robe, afterward, he must go alone to his room.
The report that contains three lies: European Selection - Eastern Sector.
Sophie. Clara. The tailor's shop. The library. Peter looks at the garden sinking into the night.
Lucas would repeat to himself that it is useless to be intelligent. It would be better to be blonde and beautiful. He would say that the ideal place to sleep was the grave of a loved one. Lucas would say madness is an illness like any other. Nullification, no consolation. Life is of total uselessness, it is nonsense, aberration, infinite suffering. Claus and Lucas return to the cemetery every day.
Soon death will erase everything. The train is a good idea. Trilogy of the City of K.
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