Night Scales: A Fable for Klara K.
April 19, 2010 by Chris Tysh
Night Scales: A Fable for Klara K. deals with the poetics of memory and subjectivity. More specifically, this text dramatizes my mother’s life as a Holocaust survivor and exilic subject in post-war Paris.
If Adorno’s often cited pronouncement, “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” has any relevance today, it is only to mark the limits and ambivalence of any artistic attempt at responding to this historical material. And in spite of a rather large scholarly output on representations of Holocaust, there have been few poetic or dramatic productions. Night Scales’ objective is to convey that poetic language is the proper medium for such an experience and that “the writing of disaster,” as Maurice Blanchot aptly calls it, becomes its own ethical wager.
One way to avoid the essentializing versions of the Shoah and their attendant idealisms, is to disarrange time, fracture the notion of lost origins and plenitude, and instead give shape to the dispersed lines, to the orphaned forms, where meaning resides, where it cancels death, silence and forgetting.
Written in a series of poetic scenes, the play borrows the jump-cut and montage techniques of cinema to better account for the spatio-temporal fragmentation which characterizes the life of my protagonist, Klara K. While retaining their specific traits and markers, the dramatic personae nonetheless express a measure of anonymity as if the unspeakable, the incomparable suffering, the fallen time, must pass through the one without a name. Memory or Mnemosyne functions as the play’s intermittence principle, signaling the oscillation between repression and recovery; between before and now; between the absence and the word.
Rather than follow a chronological development, which would falsely posit a secure sense of progress and continuity in terms of the lived events and memory’s mediating system, Night Scales foregrounds a series of displacements, reversals and repetitions to convey the tribulations of Klara’s condition as diasporic subject and young woman, come to recover her life on the shoals of war.
Out of the shadowy, always tenuous signs of those “years of lead”— to borrow German filmmaker Margareta von Trotte’s title — a pool of images haunts me: in peasant skirts, a young woman flees a building while the Gestapo makes its entrance — on a train, caught with a silver tray and taken for a thief, mother murmurs to herself, “better a thief than a Jew”— later, she spit shines the F?hrer’s portrait — May 1945, as the local obermeister is led in handcuffs between a double hedge of US soldiers, mother and her girlfriend throw him a coat — I see her in her radiant youth, in her unbelievable compassion, in her hunger to live on. It becomes my legacy to find a language, a speech act, supple enough to install that radiant figure, that white flag against dying.
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Prologue
Begin with a quotation:
She (softly): … Listen to me.
Like you, I know what it is to forget.
He: No, you don’t know what it is to forget.
She: Like you, I have a memory. I know what it is to forget.
He: No, you don’t have a memory.
She: Like you, I too have tried with all my might not to forget. Like you, I forgot.
Like you, I wanted to have an inconsolable memory, a memory of shadows and stone.
End quotation.
Write, “The translation begins”:
A platform bed on the stage, barren, exposed walls, as if unfinished. Tears and events. After the stopped clock. After disaster. Artfully reconstituted. Boarded up windows, the ramshackle brigade of personal effects of someone on the run, a suitcase in hand.
Write, “Ich habe alles fergessen.”
What do you see, Mnemosyne? Do you hear the trains? You once counted them,
un deux trois quatre cinq six under the mute gray sky. Is it time yet? Is it
someone you once knew, soft pale shawl left behind where one enters at
night like a thief or ghost walking on bones, dogs smelling your blood,
stain on back of skirt spreading whistling the warning, “tear up the photo, now,”
tell them how you swallow each pellet until you finger nothing more than the torn
lining of a winter coat. For an eternity, framed in the doorway I summon you like
that. I pose you as if history didn’t have a hand in it, didn’t sew your garment
herself, stitch by ruinous stitch, the green felt you parade in after the Libération,
all eyes agog as you march on, oblivious to the chain of signs: “How dare she
wear that boche rag now?”
I find it hard not to return to yesterday’s bind shown today too heavy for words,
too deep, it seems, for the measure between lines, blown off shards.
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Night Scales (A fable for Klara K) will be playing at the Hilberry Studio Theatre in Detroit on April 22-24 and April 29-May 1 at 8:00 p.m.
