I asked the undertaker for a lock, but he took a scalp – judging by the thickness of the envelopes, closer to two scalps, a Native Indian with his own business. These envelopes lie in my chest of drawers, sharing the drawer with my socks and underwear, my hands find them when I rummage around inside; or I see a corner poking up, the escape of a white sail through black reefs (of socks and underpants). I have never again considered opening them. I once dared to peek inside, and there was plenty, overwhelming quantities of white rustling hair and the memory of the pink scalps (his was also spotted), and what it was like to stroke their hair, those dear old dogs. I am not in the habit of fetishizing. But am I not ascribing value and power to the hair in these envelopes… should it be called sentimental value? Should it be called the pars pro toto value? Should it just be called a dear memory? In any case I cannot bin it. My parents’ hair. It ought to have been burnt, along with them. Now I am left with it. It is a practical problem that I am confronted with. It is a long time since I clung to life by a thread, alone and forsaken, and called out to my parents, but then they had long since flown off to heaven, dogs have mercy on me.
Why I call them dogs: sitting here at my side, or rather slouched, just like its master (me), as always reflecting my state of mind, their young substitute, their replacement on the road of life, with a mouldy odour coming from its mouth, the little dog, the young dog that entered my life when they died/and left the world desolate, and in whose company I have walked away my grief for them while in some or other sense I always experienced it (the young dog) as their alter ego, reincarnation, ghost, a rutting version.
Of course I could just leave it (the hair) there, then someone in a hundred years will find the chest of drawers in a lumber room and open the drawer, and it might unfold for the person in question like it did in Guy de Maupassant’s short story ‘A Tress of Hair’ where a rich young man, a lover of beautiful things, finds in a piece of Venetian furniture from the seventeenth century, in a secret drawer, placed on a bed of velvet, an enormous and long light-haired plait. This young man already feels like this in advance:
‘The past attracts me, the present terrifies me because the future means death.’
So it suits his nature to begin to love the object of the past such as the hair is. He has the plait and conjures up the entire woman. He caresses it, sleeps with it, makes it his companion and takes it with him to the theatre whereby the trap snaps shut:
‘But they saw her… they guessed… they arrested me. They put me in prison like a criminal. They took her. Oh, misery!’
Before the young man finds the hair, the Venetian furniture seems irresistibly alluring, he has to own it. Personally I see my own light-blue, slightly heavy chest of drawers first and foremost as a practical arrangement, as a piece of furniture tasked with containing many things, also far too many, whose key often disappears, and whose small hinges hang and dangle and could use a few screws. My chest of drawers, this awkward enveloper of the hair, is of little attraction. I can certainly stay away from it. I am not drawn towards it and its wavy mess. But I can well imagine a man in the future, or a woman for that matter, finding these envelopes and falling in love with the contents, this twinned hair, white and rustling, and let it fall down over her face like a forgiving rain. Afterwards it might be difficult to pick it up again, my dear dogs had short hair, it is not like the long plait in the story, a single beautiful piece, but many small (pieces). Oh, all these locks. If the sensitive person wishes to repeat the action (let it rain down over the face) then he or she must first sweep up the hair and stuff it back in the yellowed brittle envelopes, and would the broom not kill the romance; but without the broom, with the romance the desire the love unchallenged, there can only be talk of a single meeting between face and hair. I imagine the entire thing taking place in an attic.
Camilla’s Indian friend is Sikh and keeps her hair covered. She is not allowed to cut it. Whatever she combs off or loses, she carefully burns. I no longer remember her explanation why, according to her religion, she has to do that, but I can ask again. In any case one day I visited Charles and Camilla, their Indian friend had stayed overnight at their place and had (obviously) just been in the shower and washed her hair. She sat in a small room behind the kitchen, Camilla’s study. She shouted ‘hi’ to me. ‘Hi,’ I shouted back. The door to the room was ajar. All the way along the kitchen counter, in the height between the kitchen cupboards and the kitchen counter, there are mirrors mounted. Camilla has for years talked about replacing them with tiles, because the mirrors constantly get stained with spray of water and grease and have to be polished. I sat in the kitchen with my back to the small room and facing the mirrors. In there I saw (suddenly) this secret hair. It was long and black and shiny, the owner shook her head as she brushed the hair, and the wonderful hair disappeared from the mirror and then reappeared. She knew that I was in the kitchen, that the door was ajar. But maybe she did not think about the mirrors. What more can I say other than: it was a beautiful sight. She is a slightly lean and yellowish and often afflicted person. I think that she showed me her hair. To rise in my esteem.
There are some, for example Alwilda, who think that I am a parent-lover, that I lived and continue to live in a symbiosis with the dear dogs, that I cannot cut the umbilical cord, and whatever else there are of strings and ties (around the neck, like millstones). To that I reply: ‘Alwilda and others! If that was the case, do you not think that I would constantly be poking my nose into the envelopes?’
(Yes, yes, it is settled here.)
Then I did it all the same, I opened the envelopes, I defied the ban I had set for myself. And the affection almost knocked me out cold.
(‘Dog’ was a word to keep the longing at bay, cynical from kyon, dog, right?)
I could not stand it and tried to tell myself: Paul Celan’s mum’s hair, for example, was never allowed to turn white, pull yourself together.
(Then I heard my psychologist’s voice: Now give yourself permission to be in the feeling, Edward.
The psychologist’s utopia: a mind in unison.
According to him (my psychologist), a person ought to start to see a psychologist soon after birth, in order to get a running start; avoid blockages, accumulations; the psychologist as a chimney sweep, equipped with a long pipe or is it a large brush, to knock out the soot. Apropos outfits, the other day I had to call for ‘the wasp man’ to get him to remove a large wasp’s nest, and he arrived, wearing a white silky full-body outfit with collars and an incredible tool wound around the arm, extremely mythological, if only I could say he had met the chimney sweep on the way out.)