Donna Stonecipher
Inlay 7 (Franz Kafka)
Inlay 7 (Franz Kafka)
1.
He travelled to Japan but he didn’t see any geishas. He travelled to Kenya but he didn’t see any giraffes. When he opened the book, he was surprised to find inside it another book. After a bad night in room 536, the hotel pool swallowed him like a square blue mouth swallowing a sleeping pill.
2.
It is hard to rip up a photograph with a face in it. In the tiniest torn-up piece, the face is still intact. The face lies smiling up from the bottom of the wastebasket, and then smiles as it falls out of the garbage truck onto a lawn, and then smiles as it drifts slowly across the city back to your door.
3.
Young people from the less powerful country came over to study the language of the more powerful neighboring country. The questionnaire found that, within a small margin of error, such-and-such percentage of women prefer to be on their knees while performing such-and-such sexual acts.
4.
She felt like crying when she read in the paper that déjà vu was a chemical reaction in the body and not a magical window into existences previous and future at all. The oval mirror hanging by a black ribbon above the mantel reflected part of the dark sofa and the smile on the porcelain geisha lamp.
5.
The Russian exile with blue eyes admitted — not without a certain pride — that he had an accent in every language: A Russian accent speaking German, a German accent speaking Russian, an indeterminate accent speaking English, and an English accent when speaking indeterminately.
6.
The language liquefaction. Sexy attempts at traction. A smattering of satisfaction. He held the word up to the light like a spectacularly faceted chit. She wondered if it were true what she had read, that when one speaks a foreign language, one cannot help but become a member of that foreign tribe.
“What you say sounds reasonable enough,” said the man, “but I refuse to be bribed. I am here to whip people, and whip them I shall.”
7.
The silent majority stared hard at the vocal minority. More and more, there were eyes closing as velvet curtains descended upon screens. More and more, there were hands turning on electric lights in the daytime. More and more, there were cosmopolitans carefully examining tropical flowers in the dark.
8.
The young people from the less powerful country did not stop to admire the complicated beauty of their new language’s intricate grammar. They made neat vocabulary lists in cheap notebooks, and in their own language made fun of the professor’s hair, glasses, clothing, shoes, and laugh.
9.
In Paris the American girl speaking French began almost imperceptibly to bat her eyelashes. In St. Paul the German boy speaking English had the urge to fill silences almost before they began. One of the most marvelous memories of her life, she said, was of having déjà vu of having had déjà vu.
10.
He travelled to France but he didn’t see any existentialists. He travelled to Italy but he didn’t see dolce far niente. He travelled to China but he didn’t see any panda bears. He travelled to California but he didn’t see any surfers. Nevertheless his shell collection, with every vacation, grew.