du hast schon augen (you have beautiful eyes) By Evangeline Holtz-Schramek

 ​Chaim Dönnewa CC




du hast schon augen (you have beautiful eyes)

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I had a Greek professor – in my line of work (those who strive to become doctors of philosophy), we do executive administration and personal assistant-type stuff for senior academics. It’s an intellectual apprenticeship but knowledge must be caught like clasping hands around glowbugs and occur whilst one is doing other things, like thematizing someone else’s bookshelf or finding out how much it would cost to fly in their boss’s friend from the wilds outside Edmonton. She was Greek but taught Literature in English. She brought her mother over from the continent to have her live nearby in an old people community in the Casa Loma foothills, high walls and hedgerows, other Greek speakers in the building. I was there trying to speak with her – we stopped in on our way to do some catering logistics for a thought party – but my professor had to translate. The story her mother most wanted to tell me was that she had kept her apartment in Thessaloniki: did I want to see the key? She was going to show me anyways. She pulled it from a small wooden box she kept on her vanity, opened her fingers to show it resting jewel-like on her palm, scotch tape begrudgingly affixing a fleck of white paper with a number made of a triangle on it to its small bronze chest. On the way out along the carpet to the elevator, I asked my professor when she would take her mother back, and the answer was that she would not. The fantasy of the Casa Loma apartment only worked because she thought she could leave it; having the key made her feel like she still could.

i

I kept a small piece of land on an island in the Strait of Georgia in the Pacific Northwest, no key required, but only accessible by private boat and I would need to build a shelter there to make it habitable. I had these three friends there, they already had shacks they had inherited from their parents. They had dogs who ripped around the beaches, and they lumbered about with snuggies on their tallcans. There was a dock that was owned by the regional district and one dirt road that led to my friends’ cabins. To get to my land you would have to go past theirs and up into the forest where there was a clearing my patriarchs had made, there were even parts of their fingers in the meadows they had forged. A chainsawed-off top half of a middle finger feels too OG Christian Andersen for this story, a fuck-you gone too far. But this detail is not a metaphor, it happened.

I got the land as my custody settlement (which is too clinical an epithet for the things I had to go through to get it), and because my grandfather was the island’s original developer (I shouldn’t say original because stolen land). But he was the first white guy to begin to sell off parcels of it to other white guys looking to expand their dominion beyond Vancouver real estate to rural areas. He sold “more space,” “more privacy.” This was back when privacy was in great supply so prospective buyers needed a little convincing. Nowadays this is the Malibu of the north or the Hyannis Port of the west, but it wasn’t when my grandfather started; perhaps he cultivated such a sensibility. I had thought myself impermeable to the marketing. I didn’t want to Instagram it or try and bring others into it – just to be in it, wearing nothing but an old trench coat and growing zucchinis the size of small terriers was enough. Then again, maybe this particular vision of me doing just this was the message he had been incepting.

ii

All I wanted was that trench coat plus zucchini potential, but I had to keep staying away for lengths of time that harmed me. Staying away required a form of dissociation I now see in middle-aged parents particularly who can no longer make the kinds of changes to their lives they believed possible when they were unencumbered. Their dissociation involves planning vacations and telling other people about them, or re-renovating their homes to the point that they no longer inhabit the same domicile. Malcolm Gladwell explains Heraclitus’ Mereological Theory of Identity in a podcast about golf-club membership: a thing is a thing because of the sum of its component parts, so if you change the parts you change the thing.

~

My dissociation looked different at first – I was still young when it came on. I knew I had to be away because I couldn’t learn what I needed to being tethered to a remote isle in Vancouver’s orbit. Outwardly I moved towards what I thought life was but inwardly I just cradled my invisible key and obliterated my longing through intricate affairs with human substances, dubious vocational decisions, and sucking on words.

It felt like:

i had a lover who called me ‘holt renfrew.’ did I represent the ‘organized disorder’ of the department store to him? did he have to wayfind my parts? he told me I could be the next lena dunham. i said, ‘I can’t write about my sex life until I’m no longer a sex object.’

iii

there is a woman (woman?) standing in the mid-day-week-day rain in her purple leggings, soaked sweater, shoes without socks like a kindergartener who dresses herself. what if you’re a hologram, a gortex, a face half taylor hansen half cameron diaz, a vincent adultman sans multiple heartbeats? no contouring – just hollow cheeked from hunger.

no rest in weeks so booked a tanning bed pod at schipol for twenty roaring bright minutes. tiny goggles they told me were single use but i put them in the pocket of my long coat anyways. it’s what you do, alte (a knowing phrase – you know what I mean, man?). i tried to make moabit a monkey bar to solve my can’t-go-home dilemma, ended up on the hana ulfer with boymen, skinny lumps comprised of equal parts ego and drama concealed by a hoodie, a career as a visual mediologist, and affect as flat at the spree.

i only believe that there is a conductor driving the train because of the stops i am let out at and the characters who end up across from me. don’t look back, nein blick (no look!). i am full of conversations only my subconscious remembers, like this one that shoots up as I fumble an
empty press-pack of aspirin.

iv

collect me like sand in a plastic red pail, mold me on this vinyl seat, just want to stick my tongue in your mouth but we are on a bus and I am an adult now. he puts on a scarf and winds it, rolls a joint, smokes it looking out over quebec and national, a monorail, a blinking scienceworld-orb dulled into the greyscape. he undercooks me a poached egg. i put my head on his shoulder as we watch a preview of a movie we will never be able to see together, yolk travelling faster than my fork can gather.

this comedown impossible to swallow, a wooden domino. the sun going down over farmland bitter-dry, saskatoonish of the global south, fog rising cold like a ghost-witch behind bars, i’m huddled wearing everything i own, my sooty un-fingered gloves cupping a hot cylinder of anything, attempting to scrawl in english backwards and upright, chasing real things i can’t see.

~

I tried all these things but kept wondering: How many people could I collapse into you? You an island, you a future, you in a beach chair; me watching over you in my trench coat. The therapist would say that this was about the man missing half of his middle finger. But I had dealt with that during the first circle of chaos.

Which circle is this one:

bruised from playing submission / head full of someone else’s myth

v

when i think of earthquakes in japan, i want to improve my german. i fret for herr kwon, my ex-lover, implementor of hematomas, being scooped out of his country town outside osaka, riding his longboard atop the tsunami to my window where i reside in the ass of a swiss chocolate shop. it’s always either ski gear, watches, or chocolate in the alps – a chunk of range that these over- affluent smugged-up folx think they own. in english march is a verb, but in deutsch it is a planet. which language is right, who gets to say what this month is? i march through it, this is what it is. i strive to keep my inner sponge wet at all costs.

in lauterbrunnen, the base jumpers like black fireflies against the white-grey of the Eiger, vertical sparks. a cluster of june bugs on a Ricola-package-inspired path all lying on their backs, legs wriggling. i go back at 3am in my long coat, turn each one of them over. danny is a streetwise doll. they call him a “puppa” here, but they are taking the piss – puppa is what I am, a female doll, the Swiss-German term for “migrant sex worker.” He is a cockney magician also surviving here; also surviving the label under which he was imported.

~

In my busted english I called it ‘handies for nap naps’ but nap naps meant more than just a place to lie down; it was the drugs that made you tired too and the fun that held all these moments together. These words, fun, cool, do not translate to any page – they are pure affect, you only know them when they course through you, when you’re empowered like a one-hundred-and- eleven-pound bouncer stalking around a club where the dj, Hanzi, will play that cheesy song about airplanes (“I could really use a wish right now”) as soon as you stroll into his field of vision. You some off-brand non-genius warhol of the swiss alps.

vi

Identity fatigue was a buzzkill. Switzerland’s caste system means that if you are brought in on a visa for a specific vocation then that mantle is your halo – people can see it even on your day off, when you go to Zurich for the weekend, or buy muesli at a shop outside of the bounds of your canton. I had money (Francs, Euros – the real shit), unfettered access to obscene extracurriculars (I could now somehow identify as a paraglider), and knew everyone on the darkside of this world. My only friends were basejumpers, dudes who worked oil rigs half the year so they could jump off mountain tops in squirrel suits the other half, and magicians who played pool against my businessmen for a living. I had people calling me “liebling sternbild” and teaching me words like liebling sternbild (my darling constellation). I had thought that all I wanted was language in my mouth, melting like those Ricolas. I had all these things, a life.

A constellation to some; a pariah to the Swiss. They strolled by me as I smoked a riverside kiffe (spliff), black coattails resting on small white flowers, greasy blonde hair as blinders, with their sweaters tied like royal capes around their shoulders, knowing what I was. Knowing in this line of work (of the handies and nap naps varietals) was codified by the male locals through their recitation of the line “du hast schon augen.” When they said it they looked knowingly first at your cleavage and then the corners of their lips would turn up before they gave you an unblinking wink; Tyra Banks would say smize. They felt ownership of this joke, it was correct to their minds since their tax dollars offset your wages. That knowing was what reduced me, a june bug flipped, staring up at a sternbild, wondering how I would get out. This time it wasn’t someone in a long coat picking me up. It was you leaving the place I was trying to get back to.

vii

People use that expression where they equate someone with furniture. When the text came from my estranged-ish half-brother, “merry christmas G. was the horrible news passed on to you?,” I was full june-bugging. Danny and I had partied until the bakery opened, 5am streuselkuchen with hot oozing berry jam, menthol cigarette rings like the caterpillar in wunderland. News – I think someone in the extended family, tons of them, many I don’t think of, especially nowadays in my alternate time zone where my responsibilities are to my transplanted meadows, writing books, and the schedules of the international businessmen. They would come into our toy-set train station, apparitions with gym bags, Clooney-like, eyes flooding with dissociation, trying to remember which exotic name they had me under in their handy (mobile).

You, the beach chair, were supposed to stay where you were: bearded dog yowling amok while you did gainers off the dock. Every single time we thought you would hit your head on the dock’s lip, but you never did – you just swirled through the air, the big Italian-logger mass of you, moving at perfect Kubrick satellite speed, plus-sized Olympian. Everyone that had left me before had had a diagnosis with a corresponding goal post, or was an intimate I became too close to, so much that a recoil was warranted. The guy with the finger – he left, too – but that’s what bio dads did before they started getting cancelled for it. You weren’t supposed to leave. Jenna conjectured “widow maker,” but you weren’t yet married so it shouldn’t have applied. Where I come from, furniture only left when it was thrown off a dock onto a pirate’s salvage barge.

viii

The more I learned about life the more I realized that what we all needed was someone to talk to, talk without thought, and someone to show our nipples to. I remembered an evening fugue where I sat over an open fire and burned every single page of a lonely planet india in Varanasi, rip by rip. It was an outdoor balcony and my bubas (friends) only half-watched; by then they were used to the strangeness of a small white person with no apparent compass. I knew that you could see my performance art, even all the way on the other side of the world, where to you it was only 10:34am. Your eyes would barely be opening, you’d be hung to the balls, dreaming of the open water – and you would understand it, the fat book crammed with text prescribing what white people should do in a place, being burned, page by page, by this long- coated person, despite you having received zero education in abramovićs.

~

How to go back now when the thing is no longer the thing?





​Evangeline Holtz-Schramek (she/they) is a writer who mothers on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes and who is from the Pacific Northwest. You can read her creative and critical writing in many different venues across literary and academic spaces. Evangeline was recently shortlisted for the Foster Prize for Poetry in CV2 for their piece, "on the beach chair," and won The Ampersand Review's Creative Nonfiction Essay prize for their piece, "ggirl in five acts."
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