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Today I met and bought a motorcycle with Hannes Graff. He's a nice person. At loose ends, though.
And despite his countless recovering baths, I can tell you that Hannes Graff was at loose ends still.
And there were more twinges from the notebook:
What Drazha Mihailovich said at his trial: 'I wanted much ... I started much ... but the gale of the world blew away me and my work.'
Well, Siggy, I'm not so sure. I don't think it was the gale of the world that got you. Like so many other unfitted parts of your history and your scheme, I'm not convinced by any logic to your comparisons - only hinted, or leapt to, and not clear.
It was no gale of the world that got you, Sig. You made your own breeze, and it blew you away.
Loose Ends
THE HONEYBEE, POLLINIFEROUS: Any of certain socially-minded, honey-producing bees (genus Apis and allied genera), especially the species Apis mellifera, native to Europe, raised for their honey and wax and pollinating services in much of the world.
The honeybee has several parts.
Most of which, in varying mashed and torn conditions, I discovered - as Siggy might have put it:
In my trouser cuffs
And socks.
In my underwear
And armpit hair.
Little bee bits,
Here and there.
A thorax part in the spiral binder of Siggy's notebook; a hairy pair of posterior legs on the bathroom floor - where, I guess, I was shucked out of my clothes and
dunked for the first time in soothing salts; antennae, eyes and heads, nasty abdomens and lovely wings, in countless folds and pockets of Siggy's honey-ruined duckjacket.
I found whole bees too. One of which I slowly drowned in the bathtub, but I think it was already dead.
For a few days, Hannes Graff soaked all his loose ends, and was not allowed visitors. Frau Tratt tended to me.
Ironic, I thought, that she who'd taken such great offence to Siggy's startling nakedness should be at ease with mine. Insulting, I thought. But Auntie Tratt excused herself on account of her age.
'Someone's got to tend to you,' she said. 'Could you afford a doctor? There's already some debt outstanding to me, you know. And I could be your grandmother, you know. It's just another little bare bottom to me.'
And I thought: There couldn't have been so very many little bare bottoms for you, at any time.
But she was daily there, with soups and sponges; my general puffiness going down under her eyes.
'They took a liking to your neck,' she said - the cruel old bitch - and she evaded my questions about what they were doing with Siggy. If they were treating the body or anything.
Of course, I didn't need to be told he was dead. There was just this endless bringing back of his parts to me. His duckjacket, his pipes, his notebook.
Formally, Frau Tratt would inquire, 'Where is he to be sent?'
This before I'd read enough of the notebook to have visions of his relatives.
Later, when I could read, I pictured a weary Watzek-Trummer, tired of burial responsibilities. In one way or another, on hand for two generations of deaths in a family - endings direct and absolute, and endings only implied.
Siggy certainly had to go to Kaprun, but I couldn't imagine him there - for a few days beflowered, resting in the room with the Grand Prix racer, 1939.
