Postkarten

After a year of online coma, Waxworks and Roustabouts is resurrected. And I'm playing a new angle: I'll be taking you on a virtual tour of my postcard collection-- a hodgepodge of historical photographs, artworks, and oddities I've acquired over the years. With each image, I'll include a short essay, a historical anecdote, a personal recollection, or, as in the case below, an imagined dialogue.  Hope you enjoy. 

How many minutes since the last shelling?

Too long.

Shall we have another?

I told you. I am not thirsty.

One for your friend, then. He must be thirsty. Where did you say you got him?

I heard a wailing from inside the collapsed bunker of the colonel. It was the colonel’s cat.

She was pregnant?

Her head was staved in. All her kittens were dead, except this one.

How did you feed him?

On a wheel of Camembert, hidden in the colonel’s desk drawer, along with a bottle of Armagnac.

The cat drinks Armagnac?

He is not a beer-swilling slob like you. Baudelaire is an aristocrat.

Baudelaire?

Oui.

Aren’t we supposed to be fighting the French? And you name your trench mascots after their poets?

We are not fighting anyone. I am fighting. You are turning a profit.

 Someone has to, or else you’d all be killing each other for nothing. Was Baudelaire the one who said “je suis l’Empire à la fin de la décadence”?

That’s Verlaine. “If rape and deadly poison, daggers and the flame have not embroidered some diverting scenery upon the boring canvas of our destiny, the slackness of our souls, alas! must be to blame." That’s Baudelaire.

Verlaine’s better.

Says the philistine. Drink your beer and be quiet.

When was the last time you were with a woman?

I despise women.

Sure, don’t we all, but that doesn’t stop me from plugging their holes.

Vulgarian.

Queer.

Don’t swear in front of Baudelaire.

The last time I was with a woman was in St. Pauli.  A great plump lump of a woman. With a tangle of blonde hair down below and a dirty ass.

Stop it.

I told her there was twenty extra marks for her if she spread her cheeks and—

I’ve already warned you.

Oh, come off it. You need a drink. It’ll take your mind off your dead boyfriend.

Don’t worry, Baudelaire, when he falls asleep, I’m going to gut him.

What did you say?

Nothing.

The war has changed you, Stefan.

The war has remade me. I resonate at a higher cosmic vibration now.

A higher cosmic vibration! That is priceless.

Your vision of reality is obscured by a thick coat of convention, but I see right through it.

I see a man with shot nerves who shakes so bad he’s one involuntary reflex away from breaking that cat’s neck. I see a man who’s staggering shame and self-contempt has fooled others into thinking he’s some kind of a stoic hero when really he’s just an aspiring suicide. How’s that for a thick coat of convention?

You are hurtling toward the abyss, Georg, only you’re too stupid to take notice.

Shall we play another round of skat, Stefan? Until the next shelling?

Yes, I suppose so. It’s Baudelaire’s turn to shuffle.


*Note: Further research reveals that this photograph is by the Berlin artist Heinrich Zille, and these are not men in a World War One bunker but German gravel-pit guardsmen from the early 1900s. That explains why one man is not wearing a uniform and one is. In fact, in light of this discovery, very little about this picture recalls World War One.  Oops.