Perat The Masochist

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-912545-30-8
Verlag: Istros Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 220 Seiten

Why would people trouble themselves with the facts, when fiction is so much more enticing? Designed as a historical novel, The Masochist forges an intimate portrait of a young, tenacious woman who, in uncertain times at the end of the 19th century, chose an uncertain path - the only path that could lead her to freedom. On Christmas Eve 1874, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whom history would remember as the most famous masochist, left his home in Bruck an der Mur in Austria for the unknown. The novel surmises he didn't come back alone, but brought with him a new family member: a tiny red-haired girl he found in the forests around Lemberg/ Lviv. The Masochist is the memoir of Nadezhda Moser, the woman this little girl becomes, a fictional character who forces her way among the historical figures of the time. This is a pseudo-autobiographical novel that returns post-postmodernism to modernism and offers an intimate portrayal of the limits of women's desire and freedom against the backdrop of ethnic, class and gender tensions of an empire that hasn't yet perceived its decline had already begun.

Katja Perat is one of the leading poetic voices of her generation. Her first poetry collection The Best Have Fallen (Najbolj?i so padli) came out in 2011 and received both the Best Debut Award and the Kriti?ko sito Award, an award bestowed by the Slovenian Literary Critics' Association for best book of the year. Her second book of poetry Value-Added Tax (Davek na dodano vrednost, 2014) was also extremely well received. The Masochist (Mazohistka), published in May 2018, is her first novel.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Perat, Katja

Leseproben

If the facts indicate otherwise, then too bad for the facts.

1

“You don’t look anything like him,” the innkeeper said, his eyes narrowing in disbelief. His German was harsh, but impeccable. He tried his utmost to keep others from accusing him of not trying his utmost. Even his lodgings, circumstances aside, testified to his pedantry. It was a hole in the wall three doors down from the Armenian Orthodox church, in the centre of town (although, truth to tell, was anything in Lemberg really downtown), squeezed in between the neighbouring buildings and the street, upholstered with drunks, and yet every tablecloth, every drinking glass was neatly arranged in its place, as if in a showroom. He had to be trying his utmost – the innkeeper – to keep order in this place, with nobody looking, with everything constantly straining towards chaos.

“You don’t look a thing like him.” And to be perfectly honest, I didn’t. I looked much more like this stranger of an innkeeper, if only with respect to our hair colour, than I looked like Leopold. It would have been quite the comedy if it actually turned out that this man was my father.

His tone of voice hinted that I should take the emphasis on the difference as a compliment, although there was no warmth to accompany it. The determination with which he sustained the conversation surprised me a bit; particularly because it was obvious it gave him no pleasure. He asked his questions – where I was from, where I was going – questions that, asked in a different way, might have seemed frivolous, but which his inborn sense of annoyance made seem like an interrogation. He wasn’t exactly what you’d call the salt of the earth, this innkeeper. He was cold and practical, not effusive. At the mention of my surname he immediately recalled the old chief of police, a good man, he said, and only then recollected that the police chief had a son, who apparently had become a writer, he said.

“With quite a vivid imagination, I’ve heard tell,” he said as he wiped a glass dry. “Imagining that you’re being whipped by women in furs, that’s a fantasy that only somebody who’s never been whipped can indulge. You don’t look a thing like him.”

What he really meant to say was that Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was a disgusting human being, but you somehow seem likeable. “Are you sure you’re his daughter?”

Although, strictly speaking, it wasn’t the truth, Leopold would gladly tell anyone who had a moment to spare the story of his
wild child.

“This is Nada, my wild child,” he would say and repeat until it finally stuck and everyone who knew him also knew that he had adopted and was raising a wild child. Considering the fact that he found me when I was barely a day old, there hadn’t been even the slightest chance that I’d grown up in a cage kept by some madman or been raised by Carpathian mountain men, or by wolves, but why bother with facts when fiction is so much more useful?

Judging from the way Leopold peddled the story of my birth, you could tell that it would have best served his interests if I’d had no human parents at all. He also liked to emphasize that, no, he really wasn’t my father, as though he couldn’t imagine that the girl who placed all her trust and all the love of her childhood in him would ever take that as the most fundamental, the most unconditional rejection of all. Yes, I suppose he loved me, but his love could really be useless.

How unfair, I often thought after Anna died, that the woman for whom my birth and the pregnancy preceding it, and possibly even the love that preceded the pregnancy had been real concerns – that that woman never found her way into Leopold’s stories, despite the fact that Leopold always liked to say that women, not men, were the ones who should be entrusted with history.

I know. No child witnesses her own birth, but there was something about the way Leopold cast the story of my birth as a mystery that made me feel from early on that I knew less about myself than others did. He had two contradictory theories, both of them fantastic, both of them beautiful, but neither of them true. According to the first theory I’d grown up out of the earth. According to the second I’d been dropped from the sky.

The first went something like this: on Christmas Day 1874 Leopold disappeared without a trace. Later it turned out that after a years-long absence he paid a short visit to Lemberg. As befits a deep thinker and cosmopolitan who wants to contemplate life, one afternoon he set out on a walk through the woods, where atop a heap of broken branches and new-fallen snow he discovered a basket. And wherever there’s a basket, so the fairy tales go, there must be a child. Alive, by some miracle.

It was so easy to share in his joy. Leopold was too much of an enthusiast and his sense of reality too weak for him to pause to entertain second thoughts. He removed the cloth that covered the basket (in his telling the cloth was chequered, as per tradition) and beheld my eyes (in his telling as traditionally dark as the night sky over the Carpathians – Leopold was so fond of exaggerating). As far as Leopold was concerned, there wasn’t a doubt. And thus his wild child project was born scarcely a day later, I’d wager, than me. It was clear to him: the girl that he’d found in the forest was no mere girl. She was the essence of the Slavonic soul, and how could she not be, when, like every idea worth its name, she’d sprouted straight out of the earth of her homeland. Perhaps that’s why he was fond of repeating that, no, he wasn’t my father (but that’s incredible, she’s the spitting image of you, someone would invariably say, even though it wasn’t true), because he bore the mark of guilt. His blood was the blood of the oppressor, while I had to remain pure. I had to at least retain the potential, if only I chose (and oh, how he tried to get me to choose), to play my historical role. It was never a hundred per cent clear what that role was supposed to be, what were its practical aspects, or with what political means I was supposed to perform it, but the goal, as hazy as it was, was clear from the start: I’d been born to wipe out inequities and set wrongs to right. Although he was generally fond of singing paeans of praise to his homeland’s ethnic diversity, he often hinted that I could become the Liberté of the Slavs. Though if I insisted, I could of course make do with less, but what a shame, what a terrible shame that would be, considering everything that had been vouchsafed me as a birthright.

The second story began like the first, but instead of historical it assumed metaphysical dimensions. Leopold had vanished in the dead of night, stumbling off in a delirium to discover his roots. Lemberg, the forest and the child in the basket were unchanging props. But this time the child, a red-haired girl, didn’t sprout from the earth, but fell to earth like a shooting star in the frigid winter night, like a fallen angel sent to enchant all the mortals it might encounter and rule over their hearts. As I’ve mentioned, Leopold loved extremes.

I realized that my birth was a kind of literature for him. I was like Athena, born straight out of his head. Like other mythological creatures, I’d been created to presage something more significant than myself. But the child refuses to presage anything. The child wants to be significant in its own right.

You have to know this: Leopold adored cats. Wherever he went, he always brought a cat back with him that was at least as cute as it was abandoned – and each time it was impossible to say which quality weighed more for him, the cuteness or the abandonment. It wasn’t long before I realized that I occupied a similar niche in his life. I was a stray orange tabby that drew his attention and got itself taken home, so that he could distract himself with it for a minute or two when he didn’t have anything more important to do.

So in short, no, I wasn’t really Leopold’s daughter. Despite that, I wanted to protect him from the avalanche of scorn that the innkeeper’s heedless mention of Leopold’s masochism threatened, the thoughtless cruelty of the little people whose cause he took up so often, but who saw in him little more than an unctuous aristocrat who could afford the luxury of a perverse imagination, because reality treated him with kid gloves and spared him any real concerns. It was all too easy for me to imagine my mother, a peasant, an actress, a Gypsy, or whatever she was, a pissed-off woman shoving her way through the saloon door and sitting down at the bar, ordering, tossing her drink back, and seeing me the way that innkeeper saw Leopold. As though everything that haunts me is meaningless, hollow, made up. If I knew how to say something to protect Leopold from ridicule, I’d be protecting myself, too, in a way. But I couldn’t. He was too angry, the innkeeper was, to leave any room for compassion. It was small comfort to me that I wasn’t the object of his rage. If not physically, then at least spiritually Leopold and I were too much alike for me not to feel personally offended by anyone who offended him.

I disappeared from Vienna with the same melodramatic flair that he did. As if to say, “There, now that I’m gone, I dare you to fathom the extent of your loss.” And, like him, I also couldn’t quite figure out how to soften the disappointment brought about by the chasm separating my expectations from reality. I don’t know exactly what I was hoping for from Lemberg when I got on the train. That...