1001 Nights Cast

The mouth that I knew inside out was invisible as the broken song burst through the cabaret. All you could see was a ferocious cardboard mask, tall as the pope’s hat, stuck on a small black-clad body. I knew every syllable booming through its paper fangs and red slash beneath the drooping moustache of twine.

‘…oo blanc cacadou Beaucoup beaucoup mange Vraiment oo blanc cacadou’

The mask was one created overnight by his childhood friend Janco, though it was I who tracked down the ‘blanc cacadou’. I found Cacatua pastinator—a bare eyed, short billed, little corella, a common creature of the bush with plumage often dirty—in an ornithology guide. Apparently these birds associate with other cockatoos and mass in immense and noisy flocks. In the land of cuckoo clocks these wild cacadous appeared like an amazing feathered proletariat from the great south land.

Tristan realised I was much better at researching than dressmaking, after I made him a black caftan by sticking rough squares of Hessian to sheets of cardboard retrieved from the book-binders. He flattered me by calling it an abstract Cubist assemblage. Even the cabaret’s Dutch landlord, an old sailor, Jan Ephraim, who had been a trader in Africa said I should stick to books. I was hopping mad, half hoping that the wild movements of their ‘musique et danse negre’, set to the beat of frenetic pseudo-African drumming, would unfrock him, exposing the underwear his mother sent from Romania.

When he first appeared at my inquiry desk in the Zurich Public Library in early 1916, I thought he must have been the son of a foreign diplomat or a banker so immaculately attired was he in an elegant Italian suit, well-starched collar and tie carrying a straw boater and wearing a monocle! I never imagined a revolutionary poet would come dressed in the garments of the haute bourgeois. I came to learn that everything about these Romanians was not to be trusted. His book requests were most unusual. He began systematically working his way through the Zeitschrift Ethnologie and other narratives taken from the mouths of African natives, mixed in with extensive slabs from Hassidic dance scores. Over several months as the volumes mounted around his desk it looked like he was preparing for his own trench warfare. I was in fact not too far off the mark.

It was only when he discovered the first couple of instalments issued by the Volker Museum in Frankfurt of Pastor Strehlow’s work Die totemistischen Kulte der Aranda—und Loritja-Stämme that we started to talk. He needed to check my German against the words he was translating into French. He had by then two notebooks full of closely written translations working feverishly with a Larousse. He devoured Pastor Strehlow’s volumes, showing me the transcribed Aboriginal songs alongside the two different German translations. He would only use the exact word-for-word version, resisting the smoother poems for the brutal fragments, as they carried ‘the magic of the word.’ He wanted to hear the sound of two foreign tongues rubbing up against the strange rhythms. Their repeating chants used four or five distinct phrases which he described as ‘lithe and graceful as snakes.’ I teased him about all this tongue work and his foreign affairs. He loved ‘the thought (that) is made in the mouth’ and wanted the songs to have ‘a fragmentation short of nonsense and…a meaning short of narration.’

But that made him very dark on anyone who dismissed the Aboriginal songs as primitive repetitions. He would accuse them of being deaf and dumb. He had fierce battles with one of the German exiles which meant that sometimes I had to pull him away from back-stage punch ups in the middle of the night. His main argument was with Hulsenbeck who had invented his own sound poems called Negergedichte which were pitched against the imperialist warmongers. But no one owns blackness, least of all a German, Tristan bellowed. He began to mock the mock chant of ‘umba, umba’ singing the Communist Manifesto in bad German. Hulsenbeck was furious, accusing him of grinding out ‘Negro verses which he palmed off as accidentally discovered remains of a Bantu or Winnetu culture, again to the amazement of the Swiss.’ Tristan never did divulge his sources, he didn’t care who thought he was a fake, he knew his secrets were safe with me.

One morning before we arrived at the library he insisted that there was something special he wanted me to see. In my tea break I left the staff room early to meet him at what had become his habitual haunt. From his tower of Babel, he pulled out a slim volume, it was Die Arande. Opening the first page with unusual solemnity he pointed to a photograph captioned in German, ‘The four black men who told the most legends’. It was as though he were introducing me to his masters. He said enigmatically, ‘they own the time’. The men were kneeling in a row, dressed in rough versions of European trousers and jackets but had removed their felt hats so their faces could be seen clearly in the hard light of Central Australia. Even though it was a course reproduction you could make out the outline of a strange mountain range behind them, with thin straggly trees, which must be the eucalyptus. There was a billy can hanging from one bough. It must have been their camp site, their own reading room and library. The men did not look like primitives or performing savages at all as they stared hard into the lens. They were more like the old rabbis from the Israelite school back in Moinesti who had taught him to sing Hassidic chants.

It was only when I found his passport that I realised his name was itself an invention, meaning in Romanian ‘sad in his own country.’ He explained that in Yiddish ‘tzure’ means ‘misery’, but is pronounced in Hebrew as ‘tsara’.