Chapter 41 in the closet

Don't think that Oscar only wants to get close to the nurses.I have my professional life after all!The summer term at the Academy of Art had begun, and I had to give up my temporary engraving job during the holidays, because it was time for Oscar to pose for a better pay.The old stylistic devices they used on me had to be put to the test, while they began experimenting with new styles on me and Muse Ulla.They sublated the concrete nature of the two of us as objects, gave up and denied our concrete existence, painted various lines, squares, spirals on canvas and paper, and painted on wallpaper. external things.There is everything in these daily necessities-like paintings, except for the images of Oscar and Ulla, and there is no profound tension.They also added titles that sound like hawkers in the market, such as "Upward Weaving", "Singing Time", and "Red in New Space".These are mainly done by young students who can't even do serious sketching.My old friends around Kuchen and Maroun, and the two brilliant students Zieg and Raskolnikov, who have rich black and color, so don't have to sing for poverty with pale circles and anemic lines hymn.

-------- ①The interest of the younger generation of figurative art has shifted from expressionism and classicism to abstraction. What about Muse Ulla?But she went down to do as the Romans did, revealing that her artistic taste was nothing more than that of arts and crafts.She is obsessed with the new-style wallpaper, and soon forgets the painter Lankers who has left her, but thinks that a middle-aged artist named Maitre's various large-scale decorative paintings are beautiful, cheerful, and funny , quirky, brilliant, even trendy.Myrtle especially loves doctrines or principles in the form of overly sweet Easter eggs.The words "Book of Rites·Le Li": "Musicists are also those who understand ethics." Wula soon got engaged to him, so I won't say much here.She often found engagement opportunities later on.She came to visit me the day before yesterday and brought candy for me and Bruno.She confided to me that she was one step closer to a serious union right now, but that's what she used to say all the time.

At the beginning of the term, Ulla wanted nothing more than to be the muse of the new school, to which the blind—she hadn’t even been aware of it—the school was all that she was.It was Myrtle, her Easter egg painter, who put the flea in her ear, and who gave her a vocabulary as an engagement present, and she tried it out in artistic conversations with me.She talks about interrelationships, layouts, accents, perspectives, drop structures, melting processes, erosion phenomena, and the like.She, who only ate bananas and drank tomato juice during the day, talked about protocells, chromatic atoms, and said that the chromatic atoms on the straight dynamic track of its force field not only found their natural position, but also, beyond that... Ullah talks to me about this during the model's breaks.She talked about it sometimes when we went for coffee in Lating Street.Even after her engagement to the kinetic Easter egg painter had ceased to exist, after her brief interlude with a Lesbos woman, her fling with a boy student of Couchen and her reintegration into the object world, she Still keep that vocabulary.It made her small face look tired, and carved two deep, slightly fanatical lines on either side of the mouth of her muse.

-------- ① Meaning: After telling someone something, he is restless. ② Refers to women who engage in homosexual love. It must be admitted that it was not Raskolnikov's exclusive idea to have Ulla, the muse, pretending to be a nurse standing next to Oscar for painting.After "Our Lady of '49", he painted us again in "The Abduction of Europa", and the white bull is me①.The painting that followed this controversial drawing of abduction was The Fool Healing the Nurse. -------- ①This painting is based on Greek mythology: Zeus turned into a white bull and kidnapped the Phoenician princess Europa.

It was my words that ignited Raskolnikov's imagination.He, red-haired, gloomy, and treacherous, is thinking hard, washing his brushes, staring at Ula wearily, and muttering sins and atonements.At this time, I suggested to him to paint me as a sin and Ulla as atonement; my sin is obvious, and atonement can be symbolized by Ulla wearing a nurse uniform. That remarkable picture was later given another title, a deceptive one, and it was all Raskolnikov's fault.I originally wanted to call this oil painting "Temptation", because in the painting, I hold the doorknob with my right hand, press down, and I am opening the door, and there is a female nurse standing in the room.The painting by Raskolnikov could have been titled "The Doorknob" because I felt it necessary to replace the word "temptation" with a new term, and I suggested the word "doorknob" because the doorknob I would always be willing to let others try the handle protruding from the top, because the door handle on the milky glass door of Sister Dorothea's closet is tried every day by me.I know that Zeidler the hedgehog is away on a business trip at this time, the nurse is in the hospital, and Mrs. Zeidler is in the office of the Mannesmann company.

Oskar left his room with the undrained bathtub, walked into the hallway of Zeidler's suite, stood in front of the nurse's cubicle, and held the doorknob. Until about the middle of June, I tried almost every day, but the door would not budge.I began to think that the nurse had raised her to be an orderly person because of the responsible nature of her job, so it seems I'd better not expect her to be negligent and leave the room unlocked .So one day, when I accidentally found her door unlocked, my stupid, mechanical reaction led me to close the door again. Oscar must have stood in the corridor for several minutes, the skin all over his body was taut, and many thoughts came to his mind at the same time from different sources.With difficulty his mind recommended something like a plan to the flood of ideas.

I first put my own ideas together with other things.Maria and her suitor, I thought, Maria had a suitor, and the suitor gave Maria a coffee pot, and the suitor and Maria went to Apollo on Saturdays, and Maria only called her suitor "you" on holidays , in the store Maria called her suitor "you" because the shop belonged to him... After I had considered Maria and her suitor from this and that point of view, I could not in my poor head Guari figured it out—I opened the milky white glass door. I had previously imagined this to be a windowless room, for the translucent upper half of the door never let a ray of daylight through.Like my room, I reached to the left and found the light switch.The small room was too narrow to be called a room, so a forty-watt light bulb was sufficient to illuminate the whole room.As soon as I looked up, I saw my upper body in the opposite mirror, which was really embarrassing for me.His inverted reflection has nothing to say, so Oskar does not avoid it, and besides, the reflection of the dressing table in the same size in the mirror has a strong attraction for me, which makes Oskar stand on tiptoe.There are several bluish-black spots on the white enamel of the washbasin.Above one end of the washbasin is a marble vanity top, also damaged.The left corner of the stone slab is missing, and at the end of the missing corner is a mirror, which reflects the texture of the marble.There are traces of torn adhesive tape at the defect, revealing that someone once tried to repair it in a clumsy way.I, a stonemason, got itchy when I saw it.I thought of Konev's homemade marble adhesive, which could be used to bind marble chips into durable slabs for the facade of the Great Butcher's House.

After I had dealt with the limestone I knew for a while, I also forgot the maliciously drawn portrait of me in the pesky mirror.That's when I figured out what the name of that particular smell was when I walked in the door. Well, it smells like vinegar.Later, until a few weeks ago, I used the following assumptions to excuse the pungent smell.I'm assuming the nurse washed her hair the day before, and when she rinses it, she mixes cool in the water, even though there's no vinegar bottle on the dresser.Likewise, I have not found cool in other labeled containers.But I kept saying in my heart that if Sister Dorothea could find a modern bathroom in Maria Hospital, there wouldn't be so much trouble: first ask Zeidler's permission, and then go to Zeidler's kitchen to cook Hot water, and then go back to her small room to wash her hair.The head nurse or the hospital management all forbid female nurses to use certain medical equipment in the hospital, so it is also possible that Sister Dorothea had to wash her hair in that enamel basin in front of that uneven mirror.Although there was no vinegar bottle on the dressing table, there were quite a few small bottles and jars on the damp marble.A pack of cotton wool and half a pack of sanitary belt made Oscar dare not check what was in the small jar.But I still think that the contents of the jar are no more than cosmetics, at best harmless ointments.The nurse sticks the comb in the hair brush.I overcame several hurdles before I pulled the comb from between the bristles and got a better look.Well done to me, because at the same moment Oscar made the most important discovery: Nurses have blond hair, maybe ash blond.But one must be careful drawing conclusions from combed dead hair, so let us conclude that Sister Dorothea has fair hair.

Suspiciously stocked combs also suggest that the nurse suffers from alopecia.I immediately thought that the nurse's cap was to blame for this unpleasant and distressing disease for women, but I did not accuse the nurse's cap, because in a well-regulated hospital it is impossible not to wear a nurse's cap. Although the smell of vinegar made Oskar feel bad, the fact that Sister Dorothea had lost her hair inspired in me a loving, caring love ennobled by pity.Characteristic of my person and my situation, I immediately recalled many hair restorers labeled as effective, which I would give to the nurse at the right opportunity.As I pictured this meeting in my head—Oscar imagined it, under a warm, windless summer sky, in a field rolling the wheat—I took my unruly hair out of the comb and smoothed it out. In a bunch, tied in a knot, blown off the dust and dandruff, took out my wallet, hurriedly cleared out a layer, and carefully put the lock of hair inside.

Oskar, who had put the comb on the marble slab for easier handling of his wallet, picked it up again, for I had put my purse and trophies in my jacket pocket.I raised the comb to the light bulb without a cover, let the light pass through it, observed two groups of comb teeth with different hardness, and confirmed that the softer group was missing two teeth, and I couldn't help scratching the comb with the nail of my left index finger. Round head with set of hard teeth.Oskar was delighted to see some of the hairs that shone as I played, which I had deliberately left unplucked so as not to arouse suspicion.

The comb was finally inserted into the hair brush.I leave the dresser and it always feels uneven.On my way to the nurse's bed, I bumped into a kitchen chair with a bra hanging from it. Oscar didn't have anything else in his hand, so he used his fists to fill up the two holes of the support that had been washed torn and faded on all sides, but it couldn't be filled.No, my fists are too hard, too nervous, to move strangely and unfortunately in these two bowls, I don't know what's in them, but I really want to be able to spoon something out of these two bowls every day Come to eat; sometimes vomit, because the milk cake batter sometimes makes people vomit, and then it is sweet, too sweet, or so sweet that even nausea needs a certain taste to stimulate it, thus testing true love. I suddenly remembered Dr. Werner and pulled my fist out of my bra.Dr. Werner disappeared immediately, and I was able to stand beside Sister Dorothea's bed.The nurse's bed!Oskar had often imagined it, but now he saw the same ugly bed frame that framed my sleep and my occasional insomnia in brown paint.I had wished she had a white painted metal bed, lightest bedrails with brass heads, instead of this clumsy, loveless piece of furniture.This is a sleeping altar, even the duvet is carved out of granite.I stood before it for a long time, motionless, heavy-headed, without passion, even incapable of envy.Then I turned away to avoid the unsightly sight.Oscar would never have imagined that Sister Rotheia actually lived and slept in such a cave that he hated so much. I made my way to the dresser again, perhaps to open the little jar that supposedly contained some kind of ointment.At this moment, the wardrobe told me to pay attention to its size, to say that the paint on it was dark brown, to follow the protrusion of its moldings, and finally to open it, because every wardrobe is willing to be opened. I bent the nail that replaced the lock to seal the two doors, and the cabinet door immediately opened with a sigh.There was so much to see that I had to step back, fold my arms, and observe calmly.Oscar doesn't want to stick to the details like when he looks at the dressing table, he doesn't want to make judgments because of pre-existing ideas like when he looks at the nurse's bed, he wants to be full of freshness like God did on the first day of creation Feel welcome to the wardrobe, because the wardrobe also welcomes him with open arms. However, Oskar is an intransigent esthete, and it is impossible for him to give up criticism altogether.Lo and behold, the legs of the chest had been hastily sawn off by a savage, and left a lot of stubble lying flat and deformed on the floor. The inside of the cabinet is well organized and impeccable.The three spaces on the right are stacked with underwear and shirts.Intersecting white, pink and light blue, this blue must be washable, and next to the three grids on the right side of the cabinet door, there are two red and green tarpaulin pockets connected together. Patched, underneath are torn stockings.Compared to the socks Maria was wearing, given by her bosses and suitors, I thought they were not rougher, but thicker and more durable.In the blank space of the closet, a dark white starched nurse's uniform hangs on the hanger on the left.In the upper hat compartment are simple and beautiful nurse's caps, which are sensitive and cannot withstand the touch of a layman's hand.I just glanced at the normal clothing on the left side of the underwear grid.It was all a random selection of bargains, which confirmed what I had hoped for: Sister Dorothea's interest in this part of the costume was modest.On the shelf where the hats were put, three or four bowl-shaped hats were casually stacked on the edge of the nurse's cap, with ridiculous imitation flower patterns pressed one on top of the other, and the whole looked like an unfinished cake.Also in the hat compartment were less than a dozen books with colorful spines leaning against a shoebox of leftover wool.Oscar tilted his head to one side, and had to get closer to read the title of the book.With a forgiving smile, I returned my head to the vertical position, and it turned out that good Sister Dorothea was reading detective novels.However, I have seen enough of the ordinary clothes in the closet.These books lure me closer to the closet, where I am in a favorable position.I then leaned forward into the closet, unable to resist the desire to belong to this closet any longer.I'm going to be part of the wardrobe where Sister Dorothea keeps her not-so-small outfits. There are practical sneakers on the floor of the closet, carefully brushed, just waiting to be worn out, but I don't have to move them.The position of the objects in the closet almost invites me to come in, because Oscar can bend his knees and put his heels on the ground, and stay in the center of the small room without any clothes on his back. The site also has a roof.Just like that, I walked in with a lot of expectations. However, I didn't concentrate right away.Oskar felt that all the furniture and light bulbs in the small room were watching him.To make my stay in the closet more intimate, I try to close the doors.There were difficulties, as the tongue and groove in the door frame was broken, and the upper part of the door was leaking, and the light came into the cabinet, but this was not enough to hinder me.As soon as the door was closed, the smell increased.The smell of old stuff, the smell of clean stuff, no more vinegar, but non-choking moth repellent, a good smell. What was Oscar doing sitting in the closet?He pressed his forehead to Sister Dorothea's professional uniform, a sleeved apron buttoned at the neck, and he found that all the doors to the various wards of the hospital were open.My right hand, perhaps wanting to find a support point, stretched back from the side of the ordinary clothes, groped, lost the center of gravity, grabbed something smooth and flexible, squeezed it, and finally found a pillar, and put my body on it. Slide it along the bar nailed to it, and lean against the back wall of the cabinet.Oscar didn't need to use his right hand to support it anymore, so he stretched it forward to see what was caught behind him. I see a black patent leather belt, but then I see something more.Because the cabinet is dark, the patent leather belt is no longer just itself.It could be something else, something equally smooth and extended, seen on the harbor breakwaters of the New Channel when I was a drummer insisting on the figure of a three-year-old: my poor mother in a crimson lapel Matzerath wears a double-breasted coat, Jan Bronski's coat has velvet lapels, and Oscar's sailor cap has a ribbon with gold letters "HS Seydlitz" embroidered on it. An integral part of this buddy outing.Double-breasted coats and velvet lapels jumped ahead of me and Mom, who couldn't jump in high heels, and they jumped from rock to rock until they reached the lighthouse.Under the lighthouse sits a fisherman with a clothes line next to a potato sack full of salt and something moving.We, we looked at the pockets and the ropes and wondered why this man at the lighthouse was fishing with a clothesline, this guy from the New Channel or Bresen, whoever he came from!He laughed loudly and spat out a brown mass into the water, which swayed on the water beside the breakwater, never advancing or retreating, until it was pecked away by a seagull.The seagull takes everything away, it is not a sensitive pigeon, let alone a female nurse - if you want to keep all the things in white and put them in a cabinet, that is an easy thing to do.You can also refer to white as black, because I was not yet afraid of the black cook, sitting without fear in the closet without being in the closet, but equally fearless standing on the jetty of the New Channel in calm weather superior.In the wardrobe, I hold a patent leather belt.At the jetty, I looked for something else, also black and slippery, but not a patent leather belt.Since I am sitting in the closet, and closets force comparisons, I do the same and call it the black cook.But back then, I didn't take it to heart, I knew more about white things, but I could barely tell the difference between a seagull and Sister Dorothea.I don't think about pigeons and such nonsense, and besides, the day we went to Bressen and then to the jetty, it was not Easter, but Good Friday, and there were no white doves over the lighthouse, under which sat a bird from the new channel That kid, with a clothesline in his hand, sits and spits.Perhaps the boy from Bressen reeled in the rope, pulled it to the end, and then made it clear to others why it took so much effort to pull the rope from the mixed water of the Mottlau.Meanwhile my poor mother laid her hands on Jan Bronski's velvet collar and shoulders, for she was as pale as cheese.She was going to walk away, but she had to watch the guy slap the horse's head against the stone, and smaller sea-green eels rained down from the mane.He pulled out larger, darker eels from the dead body like a screw.At this moment, someone tore a duvet, I mean, here comes the seagulls, swoop over, because when there are three or more seagulls together, it is easy to catch a small eel, and if you want to catch a larger one, you have to It's difficult.At this time, the man opened the black horse's mouth, and propped a piece of wood between the teeth, making the old horse open its mouth and laugh, stretching his furry arms in, grabbing, pinching, and living with me in the closet , Pinch the same.He pulls out, too, the same way I pull out my patent leather belt.He yanked two at a time, flung them through the air, and smacked them against the stone.At this time, the breakfast that had been eaten was spit out of my poor mother's mouth again, coffee with milk, egg whites, egg yolks, and a little jam and white bread crumbs, which was very rich.When the seagull saw it, it immediately leaned over, descended to the height of a floor, spread its wings and swooped down, not to mention the sound.Seagulls have been known to have fierce eyes and never let anyone turn them away.Jan Bronski could not drive them away, he himself was afraid of the seagulls, and covered his big blue childish eyes with his hands.They ignored my drum beats too, and drove right in when I, furious and excited, found some new rhythms on my tin.But my poor mamma couldn't take care of anything, she was fussing about, picking and picking, but she couldn't get anything out, because she didn't eat much.Because mom is trying to stay slim, she goes to women's association gymnastics twice a week, but it doesn't help much, because she eats secretly and always finds small escapes from her determination, like from the new channel The fellow who came, who, by any theory, and whoever was there, thought there was nothing more to come out of, pulled an eel out of the horse's ear as a grand finale.The eel was covered in white as it writhed in the horse's head.It was thrown by the man for a long time, until all the white paste fell off, revealing the eel's patent leather, which shone like a patent leather belt.Let me say by the way that Sister Dorothea wears such a patent leather belt when she goes out in her ordinary clothes without the red cross pin. We turned and went home, although Matzerath wanted to stay, because a Finnish ship of about 1,800 tons came into port and made waves.The guy left the horse's head on the jetty.Immediately afterwards, the horse's head turned white, and it yelled.But it doesn't scream like many horses neighing, but like a cloud screaming, a white cloud, shouting loudly, greedy for food, covering a horse's head.At the time, the sight was a lot more relaxing, since the horse's head was no longer visible, even if one could imagine what lay beneath the frenzied crowd.We were also distracted by the Finnish ship, laden with timber and rusted like the iron railings of the Saspe cemetery.My poor mother looked neither at the Finn nor at the gulls.She has had enough.Although she had not only played but also sang "The Little Seagull Flies to Helgoland" on the piano at my house before, she has not sung it, or any song since.At first she stopped eating fish, but from one good day she started eating a lot of fatty fish again until she couldn't eat any more.No, she made herself bored on purpose, not only with eels, but with life, especially men, and maybe Oscar too.In any case, she had never been able to give up anything before, and suddenly she was content and restrained, and she was buried in Brentau.As for me, on the one hand, I don’t want to give up anything, and on the other hand, I can live without anything, which may be due to her.But the only thing I can't live without is smoked eel, even if it's as expensive as it is right now.It's the same without Sister Dorothea, only I've never seen her, and her patent leather belt seems plain to me, but I can't get rid of it anymore.It goes on and on, and even produces many.So with my free hand I unbuttoned my trousers and brought into focus the image of Sister Dorothea blurred by many patent eels and incoming Finnish ships. Oscar, who was repeatedly brought back to the port breakwater like a relapse, finally with the help of seagulls, gradually returned to the world of Sister Dorothea, at least back to the half of the closet, where there is her empty space. However attractive professional attire.When I finally saw her quite clearly and thought I saw the details of her face, the reed tongue slipped from the damaged groove and the cabinet door swung open with a creak.The sudden light wanted to irritate me.Oscar was in a hurry, for fear of soiling the sleeved apron of Sister Dorothea hanging beside her. Just to make a necessary transition, and to relieve the unexpected tension and fatigue of my sojourn in the closet, I played a game I hadn't done for years, knocking out more or less deftly on the dry back wall of the closet. After a few slack beats, he left the closet and checked again to see if the closet was dirty, and found no place to blame himself, even the patent leather belt was still clean.Well no, there are a few spots where it's dark and has to be wiped down, even in one breath to restore it to its original shape, reminiscent of the eels that were caught in my boyhood on the breakwaters of the harbors of the New Channel. I, Oskar, left Sister Dorothea's cell and turned off the forty-watt light bulb.It was what watched me throughout my visit.