The Ice Saints (excerpt)

this is an excerpt from the novel The Ice Saints, published in Slovenian by Beletrina in 2023

translated by the author

Marseille, July 2009

“‘Oh! Oh!’ he whispered. ‘From whence this thought? Since only the dead leave here freely, let us take their place.’”

DUMAS

“All healthy beings more or less wished death upon the people they loved. The attorney interrupted me here and seemed very upset.”

CAMUS

“Bartlebooth saw the core of his passion precisely in this feeling of inescapability: a certain stuntedness, mulling over, an opaque numbness in the compulsive search for something formless which he could only allude to in murmurs.”

PEREC

Tiny, dearest

I am writing this with my back against our good mother, as the folks of Marseille call her, the Notre Dame de la Garde, while enjoying an insane view of the sea, the city, the marina, the cathedral by the marina, of all this magnificent July. A couple of American and Canadian tourists we spent the last few days together are somewhere nearby. They made some distasteful jokes about Nazi Germany on the way up when I suddenly stopped and told them with disgust that my grandfather perished in one of the camps. Things turned very awkward, they tried to apologize in all their silly ways, when I told them that he fell off the watchtower. It took them a few confused seconds before they all went howling with laughter. I couldn’t believe they never heard it before. Americans and Canadians, imagine, and they never heard it before.

I can see the little island where the Count of Monte Cristo plotted his revenge. You would definitely enjoy the book, go and get it from the library if you haven’t read it yet, you get hooked immediately and even though the thing is massive you are done with it one two three. The rock with the prison juts out of the sea like a nutshell. The surface of the sea glimmers. The wind is so comfortable. I push my back against our lady and feel entirely safe. You will not believe this, but there is a tiny red square on my back. When I took off my shirt in the hostel everybody laughed at me.

The second day I was here, I went to the beach by myself. I took the bus and I was wary of the pickpockets and crime which Marseille is supposedly full of … I had to buy a beach towel beforehand; either I forgot to take it with me or I just didn’t think I would be spending much time on the beach, but once I was here it naturally made sense to jump into the sea on the French riviera, right? Anyway, I bought a towel and sunscreen and took the bus to the beach. I had my documents with me because I did not want to leave them at the hostel. I buried them in the sand under the towel and applied sunscreen all over my body except, you guessed it, over the tiny red square on my back that I couldn’t reach with my fingers. So, that’s the sunburn. It is too small for the pain to be any worse than a slight irritation, but it looks very funny, like a cubist version of that red Indian dot. Only mine is not on my forehead. I am now married to the beach in Marseille. Don’t be jealous.

I took a few quick dives into the sea, but I was so worried about my documents that I immediately ran back to the towel. When I returned to the hostel one of the Canadians was sunburnt all over like a boiled crab and he said someone snatched his wallet from his pocket on the bus. There was an American girl in front of the entrance, cleaning dog shit from the sole of her sandal with a stick. The shit is everywhere, you cannot believe how poorly the French treat their streets. But if you are careful where you walk it is not hard to avoid. Of course, the American girl was wandering around with her mouth open, looking up.

If I squint, I get the impression that I can see the faint outline of Algeria on the horizon. Algeria, can you imagine. Do you remember that black and white movie, the army and the revolution and the revolt. All those stories. And that Godard movie, you remember, when they tortured him under the shower and with the candle. The apartment … the hostel is owned by an Algerian dude with a bald conical head and an unbelievably small, pointy nose, like he had work on it done at least ten times too many. He speaks seven languages fluently and he told me that a person acquires a new skin with every new language they learn. My French is still very poor, meaning I have barely enough of it for a sorry red square on my back. And he demonstrated his capabilities and all his different skins and personalities with each new guest walking through the door. He even struck a conversation with the Swedish girls and that really looked impressive. An Algerian dude, going on in Swedish. The Swedish girls are very beautiful, but do not worry, I do not have time for women.

He turned his apartment into a hostel, he has his own bedroom with a bathroom, the kitchen is common, and the other two bedrooms (there used to be three, but he took down a wall) are filled to the corner with bunk beds. And then we all sleep in there like rabbits in a paddock. Only I’m sure that the rabbits don’t make so much noise. There is nothing worse than waking up in the middle of the night, enveloped in the concerto of the world’s most discordant orchestra, of all nozzles and registries, all colors and rhythm, calmly sawing its cacophony into the pitch black. You think it will be impossible to fall back asleep, but you doze off nonetheless, adding your own gurgling to the sound.

Even on the train everyone was warning me about Marseille, that it is dangerous and full of Africans and Arabs … I am trying not to think of Meursault because I immediately become superstitious and grow worried about Mara, everything is alright with her, yes? I will see her again, won’t I? Please, our lady of the guard, keep my Mara and Tinkara safe, so that I can see them again. Keep them healthy and clear minded … I am pushing against her now with my back. You cannot imagine how beautiful it is here. I feel like I could float to the edge of the horizon. Nothing bad can happen to me. But then I think of Mara. The French call their mothers mêre, mêre Mara. Camus and the Arabs and the gleam of a knife’s blade in the sun. The cries of hatred. I remember reading it, but here, in the shelter of our lady, our mother, our mêre, as the folks from Marseille call her, it all seems so harmless, like it is all just children playing with their wooden swords, all literature a theatrical act of just one man, a single voice, masquerading into all these terrifying phenomena only to bring a smile to the face of a local kid, only to charm a pretty girl.

But I saw an Arab, dressed in beige linen, how he made his way among the rich who were rolling off their yachts and boats down there in the marina, Russians and Italians and Spaniards, all deeply tanned, wearing white shirts, with chains of gold around their necks, under hats and caps, holding onto the arms of their ladies, wrinkled by the decades under the sun, yet still dignified, still beautiful, and I saw how he held his arms up behind him like wings, elbows raised, and with thrusts of his whole body sent them like tentacles or a pair of whips, snap, snap, all over the crowd he was walking through, snatching the wallets and bracelets and banknotes off their bodies like expertly picking off fleas.

And I realized it is not that difficult to protect yourself from pickpockets. You just have to keep it deep inside. If it ever falls out on its own, it is also easy to steal. But if you can do a somersault while the wallet stays in, then the pickpocket has no chance. That Canadian guy, who was sunburnt from head to toe and was missing his wallet, could not even say for certain whether it was actually stolen or if it simply fell out of his pocket on the bus. That tells you everything you need to know. But if you are from Canada, you simply go to the post office like he did, call home and the Western Union wires you enough money I could spend the next five years in France, not just another two weeks.

This American girl I met when she was cleaning shit off her sandals has a tree tattooed across her entire back. One of the American guys kept harassing her to show it and when she finally did, he began to explain that in the Native communities it is a death sentence to have an image of a tree tattooed on your body if you do not have royal blood.

I do not understand why anyone would threaten Native death sentences on a day as nice as this, but when these Americans leave their country, they all act like they landed on Mars anyway. I am also almost sure that the Native authority does not reach across the Atlantic and certainly holds no force here in the embrace of our guardian lady, standing on a hill above the city, protecting us all from stupidity.

Yesterday, I took the bus and drove thirty minutes out of the center to see Le Corbusier’s apartment building. Tinkara, I am telling you, if I ever find myself in anything like it for more than seven hours, I will immediately kill myself. A giant thing, as if you took all the apartment buildings from our city and put them together and upright and then made each little square of an apartment identical to all the others. Another democratic experiment, by the looks of it. New forms of coexistence in the city. I read Perec’s novel Life, an instruction manual; remember when I told you about that painter who visits ports and paints them, then turns the paintings into puzzles and puts the puzzles back together and then goes back to the ports where they were painted and dissolves the paintings in the ocean? The author was a member of the literary group Oulipo, and I will also use experimental procedures in my book, something mathematical, I just need to figure out what; he used the schematics of an apartment building for his novel and then described what is happening in the apartments by jumping with a chess knight figure across the schematics, two forward and one to the side. But if you used a knight to jump across Corbusier’s building, you could write a thousand-page novel where one single story would be repeated without end.

After five years of living in this building all the residents have become identical to one another. They wash their dishes in the same way, set them to dry in the exact same order, they lean over their kids in the same way when they put them to bed and their kisses smell of the same toothpaste. In the morning, they leave for work in a straight line, and at work they do slightly different things, but these differences all fade by the time they come home, when they become identical again, with the same dreams, same snoring, making love in the same way and all experiencing a single giant orgasm at the same time all together.

Maybe I should write a novel like this, a hundred thousand pages with the same story repeated a hundred thousand times. Then I would read it a hundred thousand times in a hundred thousand different apartments: this would then be the marketing campaign or an artistic performance, depending on how cynical one feels. If I could visit five apartments a day, I would be done with the thing in twenty thousand days … and this is, turning it in my head, what, sixty years? If I visited fifty apartments a day, I could read the whole thing through in six years. Which would of course only be possible in a world full of Le Corbusier’s buildings, whereas in the world we live in, where things are random and cobbled together, where there is space also for something other than a series of repeating patterns of the identical man, this type of project is impossible and thank God for that.

This American girl who was cleaning the shit off her shoe and has a color tattoo of a tree on her back invited me to join her on the visit to the Palais du Pharo. In roughly the same direction I took the bus to the beach, there is a hill with walls at the top and behind the walls there are beautiful gardens full of statues and a big palace that Napoleon the 3rd built for a princess. We did the classical tourist sightseeing tour, then sat on a bench and stared at the sea – now, when I raise my eyes off the paper I see her, the American girl, in an animated argument with the rest of the Americans and the Canadians on the other side of our guardian lady’s courtyard, maybe they are wondering where I went – and she told me she is going to volunteer with the peace corps in Senegal, and I told her about you. I felt her head coming in closer the entire time we talked but I jumped away right before it would be too late. You do not have to worry.

Then we went to a kebab place and when I performed my broken French the guy behind the counter told me, and she translated, that I must speak French no matter what or I will never learn the language. If you want to understand, you must talk. I nodded and smiled, and she kept looking at me like I’m a tasty pretzel. I am sorry if it is difficult for you to read this, but I need to write it all down exactly as it was, I want to remember it all, I want to be sincere and write what I feel because otherwise what is the point? The books where fools just invent ways to seem cool are only read by other fools. We all got drunk in the evening and I told an older French lady which books of French authors I’ve read, and she told me I most likely read more of them than ninety percent of the city. And yet they remain French while I, even if I read them all, will never be. Doesn’t make sense.

Rimbaud died in Marseille.

They sawed his leg off.

Cancer of the bone.

I think that when I wake up in the morning and go to a nearby bar and order coffee with milk and a coke, I am worthy of being loved. I do not know why they look at me so strangely. All the guys are falling all over each other to charm the women, while I actually have done something to admire and yet they look down on me. Do they know anything about Rimbaud? Did they watch all Godard’s and Truffaut’s movies? Did they watch L’Atalante? Did they watch Les Enfants du Paradis? Do they even have any idea who Antoine Doinel is?

When I am wearing my striped blue and white T-shirt the owner of the hostel calls me a good guy and he tells me: but do you know this pattern was designed by a Frenchman, Yves Klein? Did you know that a striped T-shirt was invented by a Frenchman? Before him, stripes were unknown. Everything straight was as tangled as overcooked tagliatelle, until a Frenchman came along and invented a striped T-shirt.

I think that Rimbaud was sitting right here, with his back to our lady who guards us, and wrote poems in his mind and cursed the pain in his leg before they sawed it off.

The Americans and Canadians are coming back, it looks like they calmed down. We will go for a coffee and say goodbye to each other. Tomorrow, I will be far away. Tell Mara I will be home soon.

Love, Leon

P. S. I am scribbling this in a hurry before I throw it in the mailbox because I just thought of it so please if the envelope is ripped a bit don’t worry nobody is reading it just please please please do not throw the letters away

P. P. S. Somebody plastered the mailbox with shit, maybe he was mad that it’s everywhere, anyway, I went to the post office and now I’ve been standing in line for an hour already. If you ever decide to get a tattoo, don’t get a tattoo with color, because the colors look nice at first, but then they fade.