Sylvie Germain - Magnus

And all of a sudden, what was conspiring in his fevered brain just now as he staggered beneath the sun explodes in his body stretched out on the ground, riddled with the cries of insects: a tidal wave of vibrant visions sweeps through him. But his father does not figure in any of them. The rush of jolted memories that overwhelm him rise from elsewhere, from further back; it is an upsurge originating in the middle of the night that he died — he, Adam Schmalker, before he took that name, and even before he was called Franz-Georg Dunkeltal.

Long, long before.

Before. In the quick of the present moment.

He hears the bellowing of a monumental organ, deafening clashes of cymbals, the roll of millions of drums. An insane orchestra plays in the sky. It plays with instruments of steel, of fire. The tumult even reaches underground, and the ground quakes and screams.

It is a discordant choir of men and women of all ages, children, infants, dogs, screaming in response to the orchestra’s din, and this choir that was huddled close together underground suddenly disperses in a frantic rush. Its clamour spills out into the open, scatters across the face of the earth, fragments. He is one of the fragments of that pulverized clamour. He runs, shrieking and crying.

He sees the sky combust, burst like a dyke and torrents of black lava, blazing meteorites, sulphur-white flashes of lightning pour through the cracks. The insane orchestra is playing with fire, in a total frenzy.

He sees human beings and animals turn into live torches, others melt into the liquefied asphalt slushing in the gutted streets, and yet others blown apart.

He sees trees rise up in the air at an angle, enormous flame-trailing javelins that plunge into the fronts of houses while windowpanes shatter, chimneys, tiles and beams go flying.

He sees water blaze in the harbour, in the canals, rivers, ponds, gutters. Everywhere water catches fire and evaporates with a hiss. It ignites even in the tears on the faces of the distraught, of the dying.

He smells the acrid stench of burnt flesh, the nauseating sweetness of boiled flesh, the stink of blood and guts. Stones, pavings, timber frames are reduced to no more than black sand, gravel, bits of charcoal.

He sees coils of garish yellow, spills of bright red, splashes of blinding orange falling from the sky, lacerating the darkness. An orgy of colours at once viscous and limpid. Gigantic gobs of scarlet and gold to crown the perished city.

He hears the gobs of colour rumble and suddenly among the disjointed puppets running in all directions he sees a woman engulfed from head to toe in saffron flames dance a frenetic solitary waltz, emitting piercing screams. He sees her collapse, writhe for a few seconds more and…

And then nothing.

That’s all. He sees and hears nothing more, just that torch-woman reduced to a shapeless heap of reddening black that smokes and stinks. His mother? A fairy? A witch? A tree-trunk? A lightning-struck angel? A stranger?

He watches her. Watches her burn to a cinder. With eyes wide open, he watches her disappear from sight, disappear from his life. With eyes wide open, eyes blinded, he watches and watches…

The mouth of hell is the orifice by which mankind is swallowed up — and here we recognize the famous theme of the descent into Hades. It is also the place from which voices emerge … The echo is a form of sound inscribed in time and produced in certain contexts favourable to the reflection of an original sound…

The future of an echo is a wall, an obstacle, a sentence of death. The echo impacts with something that sends it back into the past. An echo is a moving sound but one that travels backwards, with no hope of ever becoming other or different; its destiny is extinction.

Fabienne Bradu, Echoes of Pàramo

Hamburg. The hour of Gomorrah.

The operation of destruction strove to prove itself worthy of this title of devastation. In the warmth of a summer’s night it staged a monstrous opera in so rapid a sequence of acts they were indistinguishable one from the other.

‘ Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground .’

Among the inhabitants is a little boy of five and a half. He is asleep, curled up round his teddy bear, in a cellar crowded with people. But the cellars are derisory shelters, rat traps when everything caves in on top of them, and the survivors rush to escape from the hideout strewn with shattered bodies. They flee into streets lined now with nothing but stumps of smoking walls. Distraught and shrieking, they go running to add to the uproar of Gomorrah, where screams keep rising from here and there, suddenly falling silent to resume elsewhere — other screams yet always alike.

The little boy, wrenched from sleep, runs without comprehending anything, and mingles his crying with the great ambient din. His crying turns to sobs when the hand that was holding his suddenly lets go. He is alone in the crowd, all alone in his nightmare. For he is still asleep, asleep on his feet, running and crying. But his crying suddenly ceases when he sees the woman who was holding his hand start to waltz in the mud and ruins with a great bird of fire fastened on her back. The predator spreads its radiant wings and envelops the woman in them from head to foot. Before this abduction of amazing speed, of fierce beauty, the little boy swallows his saliva like a stone, in the same gulp losing all the words, all the names he ever knew.

Hamburg, the moment of obliteration.

‘ And Abraham … looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace .’

The child is not Abraham, just a little boy clutching his teddy bear very tightly to his chest, and his gaze splinters. Death takes him alive there, before the furnace, leaving him dead to his memory, to the language he spoke, to his name. His soul is petrified, his heart condenses into a block of salt. In counterpoint to the celestial conflagrations and outcry of the shattered city, he hears the thud of his salty heart beating inside the fabric body of the bear whose muzzle is crushed against his throat, whose buttercup eyes are pressed to his neck. The heat all around is suffocating, the air thick with sooty dust and gas. Only the teddy bear’s eyes seem to have preserved a miraculous clarity and gentleness.

Hamburg, zero hour.

‘ But [Lot’s] wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt .’

In this temporal gap a little boy who has only just died is brutally delivered back into the world, cast completely naked into one of the world’s craters. He knows nothing about himself any more. He cannot distinguish between his own body and that of the teddy bear with rununculus eyes. He now knows nothing about humanity, he confuses the human voice with the tumultuous din — of explosions, of avalanches of stones, beams and metal, of the forest of flames sweeping across the demolished town, of the wails of the dying and the screams of deranged survivors. He knows nothing any more of his language. Words are but sounds chaotically crowded into the furnace-press of war, producing a slimy run-off stinking of blood and carbonized flesh, of sulphur, gas and smoke. A greasy black run-off streaked with glittering gashes of yellow and scarlet.

Hamburg, daybreak following Gomorrah.