Doe a Deer
Verena Stefan
translated by Lise Weil
Until Lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters
African saying
When you pass the runover deer in the car, crows start up. The deer lies up high on a snowbank, all four legs sticking up in the air at the edge of the road, right at the spot where I come out of the woods on my snowshoes. A doe. I trudge up to her and turn her on her side. One side is already torn up, an eye is missing. Tracks of coyote and fox lead up to and away from the animal in all directions.
In the woods I'm illiterate. The cold preserves a script of paws, hooves, claws, of bellyfur, of tailhair which has brushed the surface layer of snow — stories of encounters, trysts, of the hunt and the chase — which I could read word for word, if I only knew how to decipher the signs. For this I need a book about animal tracks and a bookstore, Paragraphe, perhaps, or Renaud-Bray, and the good luck to find a parking place in the snowy waste of Montreal. And then for the book Traces d'animaux I also need French-German and German-English dictionaries, so I can study the signs of red fox, raccoon, skunk, porcupine and compare their names in the three languages.
Here is the spread wing of a partridge; there are raccoon footprints in the snow. I learned these tracks from the raccoons themselves; one afternoon they ran by the window, one after the other, three or four of them. I went out to study their prints, the toes sharp and filigree, the paws dainty.
Every day on my walk I read my way along the trees, past boughs that hang lower when snow has fallen, that shoot up again as soon as it melts, past the towering base of an uprooted pine, past a bend and over the frozen brook at the point where the ice takes weight. Under gleaming sunlight I follow the tracks of a coyote, always around midday and still with worried glances over my shoulder. Rose Ausländer's voice in my ear: my mother was once a deah, the way she says deah with her Eastern accent. 1
Years ago, in a bookstore in Rimouski, on a February day on which each footstep was carved out of white or graying snowheaps, snowwalls, snow drifts, I read that, according to Rose Ausländer, the carp in Bukowina is silent in five languages. Elle disait d’ailleurs de cette région que la carpe s’y taisait en cinq langues. Rimouski lay desolate under snow, ice and fog, five hundred kilometers northeast of Montreal on the great river, which was itself covered all the way to its center with ice floes and snowdrifts. I fell silent in four languages and learned snow.
The mirrorcarp/ in pepper aspic/ was silent in five languages, so goes the poem Czernowitz: History in a Nutshell. 2 It would have been silent in Ruthenish, Polish, Yiddish and German. In Czernowitz it seems there were more bookstores than bakeries, the streets were swept with dried rose bouquets and housepets bore the names of Greek gods.
The deer at the edge of the road is more disemboweled every day. First the internal organs disappear, then one leg after another. In the meantime it gets covered by snow flung up by the snowplow. Then only two ears of fur can be seen sticking out of the snowdrift, and that only if you know the spot. When the snowcover sinks again, the animal has become hollower, more picked apart. Day after day I trudge over there and check to see how the cadaver has changed overnight. Piece by piece it is being incorporated somewhere else. I imagine the coyotes racing over here, the foxes too, one after the other. Do they come singly or all at once? Do they scramble to get to the kill, snarl? First rip up the animal, then tear everything edible out of it. Nothing stays behind, nothing is wasted, nothing is buried. Hooves, ears, eyes, there's a use for everything.
Do, a deer, a female deer goes through my head, and I try as I walk on to remember the lines that follow, the ones with which English-speaking schoolchildren here learn the scales, a childrens' rhyme that's not in my blood, do, a deer, a female deer, re, a drop of golden sun, mi, a name I call myself, fa, a long long way to run…, while I think about scripts in time and space, about footsteps and tracks which get covered over again, with snow or with sand. Recently I've felt the urge to improve my French and I watch the evening news on a French-speaking channel. Evenings at 7, if I so desire, Le Monde comes into my living room for half an hour. All the shocking news comes bubbling out of the tube in French, with pleasant abstract concepts that lodge far away from my familiar sensitivities and emotional reactions. To take a simple example, I read and hear L'OTAN as a random arrangement of letters producing no resonance. L'OTAN is not NATO, l'ONU is not the UN. Even boucliers vivants remain abstract; human shields by contrast hits me as close as the German menschliche Schilde.
If I'm really up for learning, I watch, as I do this evening, an edition of Le grand reportage. An installation in the desert appears on the screen, high and low wooden crosses painted pink. Not the friendly playful pink of Christos and Jeanne-Claude's wrappings. To these wooden crosses belong the carelessly buried or simply flung down corpses of women and children in the desert near Ciudad Juarez. The women, all of them dark-skinned, must have been very young, pretty, dainty, and so poor that they were forced to work in one of the maquiladoras in the borderland between Mexico and the USA. Migrant workers who toiled in sweat shops.
Over three hundred and seventy-five women have been killed in the last ten years. The dead that were found all bore the same script on their bodies: torture, rape, mutilation, amputation. When you translate these signs and traces, you end up with porn films, presumably snuff films, i.e. torture and murder before a rolling camera, and the organ trade. The abducted women were held captive several days to two weeks, tortured in a bestial way and finally, after being maimed and murdered, they were thrown away. Now I have to fling open the front door and in the minus 20-degree cold walk a few steps up the path, count the stars that sparkle between the branches in the woods and high up in the sky. Nothing abrading my thoughts, no information, no horror, allow the horror, the noise of information to lapse into deep freeze.
Relatives of the murdered women, mothers, aunts, sisters, cousins, grandmothers, wander the region summer and winter looking for clues. For every one of the victims they install a pink cross. High crosses for the women, low ones for the girls, a memorial of despair, terror, that has also inscribed itself in the landscape. The youngest victims are twelve years old. 3
The women — who go there again and again, brushing off every thornbush, every prickly tuft of grass, tapping the ground with their sticks, turning over stones, throwing them away, leaving behind fleeting traces in the sand that just as soon waft away — don't want to accept the silence, their silenced-to-death daughters, sisters, mothers, cousins, aunts. What do their footprints amount to, the paths they tread in this time and place, in the desert, where no other human traces are to be found?
Was it cruel for the deer? Was it run over by a car, did an angry or frightened person fling it up onto the snowbank? Other animals have preyed on it, gutted it, picked it clean, following the rules of the game. So one might say. That's why I'm looking for the place where the disemboweling happened. I would like it to be a place that, by human standards, is cruelty free; I would like to know a word for the absence of cruelty.
Living in Quebec, I've heard all the shocking news in English and French, the litanies of warscenes, Kosovo, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel, Iraq, Chechnya, Congo, names of groups, fractions, liberation struggles, of suicide assassins both male and female, white collar criminals, a war vocabulary that expands with each new war, that also insinuates into German collateral damage, friendly fire, humanitarian bombing, embedded journalists and thus remains abstract. In order to understand the content of the news, I have to look up a deadly litany in English: briefing, compliance, containment, defection, to deploy, deployment, deterrent, deterrence, to mire in, quagmire, cakewalk, truce, without resort to force.
Certainly this list has long been overtaken, dating as it does from the year 2002, as the US was attacking Iraq. I was sitting with an American friend in a kitchen where I felt safe, having dinner, and we turned the radio on to hear whether the US had already begun to attack or not, there was nothing else to hear since all the stations were playing the same thing, just like on Sept. 11th and then the week after during the memorial service for Sept. 11th. Anyone who wanted to hear or view the news had to follow along with the US media to see what action the US was contemplating at that moment, and before the concept had even come up in the news, we were already embedded in the action. Then we listened to a Canadian journalist reporting out of Baghdad at about four in the morning, the classic time for military attacks, and along with his voice the silence, of which he was speaking, entered the kitchen where we were sitting, the silence of a ghost city behind a pair of miserable sandbags, the silence of empty streets, empty cleaned-out shops with blinds drawn. No traffic, he said, a pair of old men who've stayed behind; we're waiting, everyone is holding their breath.
Didn't I keep hoping to the very last minute, the war will not happen, the peace demonstrations around the world will make it so that a war will not happen; after all in Montreal there were a hundred-fifty-thousand people in the streets. It was thirty degrees below zero and I learned to chant So-So-So-Solidarité! along with the natives.
Farther down along the snowshoepath stands a stocky, rotten maple tree, its main branches protruding symmetrically. Its trunk on one side is covered from top to bottom with fungus, on the other side, it's hollowed out up to my waist. The hollow is filled with ochre-colored bean-shaped scat. Here an animal sleeps, maybe several, like the bundles that hang from a maple branch in front of my window, their soft grumbling sounds waking me at dawn. Porcupines. Both places, the deercorpse and the sleepingtree, are for the animal world a meeting point, a marketplace, a newspaper stand, whereas I, loud and ungainly on my two legs, who can neither read nor understand their language, make myself an appointment in the woods, lumber over there to capture an image on film, move myself along on snowshoes through a landscape empty of humans and densely populated with trees, my destination a place where the immeasurable whiteness is interrupted by rare flecks of color, gold-yellow turds in which are stuck the needles of porcupines, or bloody ribs exposed to the sky.
After two weeks the site in the woods is almost empty. A few tufts of fur are strewn in a circle, an ochre-colored lump of crap lies there, deep frozen through April, while the tourterelles tristes announce snowmelt and spring, a promising, plaintive sound to which my body responds as it used to respond to the song of die Amsel,the blackbird, which is missing from the landscape here, along with its guarantee of spring. The ear here is an ear emptied of the Amsel. Der Amsel unverfälschtes/Vokabular writes Rose Ausländer: the unfalsified vocabulary/of the blackbird. This also in her History in a Nutshell. In Quebec spring announces itself with the call of the tourterelles tristes, though not with a Traubertaube, as it would be called in German; for it was not the call of a Traubertaube that taught me spring here, when I first arrived — when the earth in the middle of April suddenly gave off heat in the the places bare of snow as if for five months a volcano had been slumbering under the snow and ice. In the warmth the great old white pines in front of the houses grew fragrant, a tourterelle triste or mourning dove called and then another one; out of their soft brown-red dovebodies they sent out the springcall, and the Frédérick too began to call, le bruant à gorge blanche, the white-throated sparrow,the Ammerfink. Its call intensified the smell of the pines and heralded summer; on the lake you could stand in a T-shirt on the ice, still a meter thick, and listen to the glugging gurgling rivulets that ran down from the hills. It rained half the night. The whole day thunder rumbled behind the warmth. The ice steamed up, already covered with water. Warm air escaped over it in waves. I learned that spring is sun and ice, ice and fire, light that pours out and is reflected in snow and ice, that spring is white, not green and not adorned with colorful flowers.
To snuff means to extinguish, to annihilate. I first learned this expression in Berlin, almost thirty years ago, and I've never forgotten it. There we heard for the first time that a woman was murdered before a rolling camera and that a new genre of underground film was thus launched, whether it was really the first time, nobody knows. For this of course you can find tracks and paths on the internet. If you begin to search under Ciudad Juarez or Amnesty International or violence against women or feminicide or snuff, you'll find news, reports, analyses, appeals, and visuals, statements from members and affinity groups, information about solidarity actions by woman artists, feminist analyses about the mutilation of the female body, reports from delegations traveling to Ciudad Juarez for events and protests, in four languages, Spanish, English, French and German. After an hour on the net, I'm driven out of the house again, into the snow. But corpses are deposited there too. In Canada over five hundred native women have disappeared since 1985. In winter we hear in the news that once again a native man froze in a snowbank in a state of drunkenness, because everyone drove by or because white policemen dumped him outside a village in the snow.
The desert region near Ciudad Juarez where many of the murdered women were found is known as a "labyrinth of silence." In it is contained the panicked silence that the woman must have felt who arrived at work three minutes late and wasn't allowed to enter. Three minutes late and the door to work, to this cruel labor for four euros a day, to life, is locked, a car comes, there's not another soul on the street. In doremifasolatido she has only come as far as fa: a long long way to run, then her melody is abruptly strangled. She would give her life to be able to run a long, long way, but she has in front of her only a horribly long ordeal before she's murdered. To want simply to live, to have work, to eat, to have love, a family, to be young, to go to work, to dance on the weekends and one day, to cross the border into the promised land, into the United States of Northamerica. Filmmakers, politicians, businessmen, drugdealers, pimps don't even need to go to the trouble of setting up a camp in order to torture and butcher them to pieces. It's enough that they're poor, young, beautiful, dainty, dark-skinned and that they're standing before a locked factory door or obliged to walk through unlighted streets.
Will the war transform itself into a quagmire or a cakewalk? is the question being discussed on US TV several weeks after the attack on Iraq. Quagmire is an expression from the Vietman war; it means to be stuck in the swamp or the mud. A cakewalk, according to Langenscheidts encyclopedic dictionary, 6th edition, 1981, is
1. a)grotesque dance-contest with a cake as a prize (amer. Negro usage)
b) a ballroom or stage dance originating in such a contest
c) the music for such a dance
2. to dance a cakewalk.
3. to walk as in a cakewalk.
The woman who arrived three minutes too late before the locked door of a maquiladora and heard a car stopping beside her knew she was stuck in the mud, in a war that has never been publicly declared. The good thing about the landscape of Quebec is how empty it is of people. There are no thought systems abrading my mind when I walk through the woods. In winter the great cold helps to cleanse tortuous news of its dirt. Bad news should only be broadcast in snow and ice when the earth is frozen, and not in summer, when it's permeated by moist heat, when with every step it reminds us that it breathes and lives.
Do: a deer a female deer
Re: a drop of golden sun
Mi: a name I call myself
Fa: a long long way to run
So: a needle pulling thread
La: a note to follow so
Ti: a drink with jam and bread
Which will bring us back to Do
Notes
1. Meine Mutter war einmal ein Reh from the poem: "Meine Nachtigall" (My Nightingale) by Rose Ausländer. In: Rose Ausländer: Gedichte (S.Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 2001). From time to time I listen to a recording of her poetry read by herself. Meine Mutter war einmal ein Reah, she reads. (back to essay)
2. Rose Ausländer
Czernowitz
"Geschichte in der Nussschale" (ibid)
Gestufte Stadt
im grünen Reifrock
Der Amsel unverfälschtes
Vokabular
Der Spiegelkarpfen
in Pfeffer versulzt
schwieg in fünf Sprachen
Die Zigeunerin
las unser Schicksal
in den Karten
Schwarz-gelb
Die Kinder der Monarchie
träumten deutsche Kultur
Legenden um den Baal-Schem
Aus Sagadura: die Wunder
Nach dem roten Schachspiel
wechseln die Farben
Der Walache erwacht –
schläft wieder ein
Ein Siebenmeilenstiefel
steht vor seinem Bett –
flieht
(return to essay)
3. A seven-year-old girl has since joined them. (return to essay)
working notes
This piece first appeared in a small Swiss quarterly in December 2005 (Reformatio., Zeitschrift für Kultur, Politik, Religion). Initially it was part of a book-length manuscript dealing with (im)migration, dislocation and connection to place and space viewed from inside the body, its visceral and cultural codes. The manuscript went through major changes when I decided to include my story of breast cancer, yet another experience of dislocation in which one has to emigrate temporarily to the country of illness. Several outtakes resulted, this piece among them.
about the author
Verena Stefan is a Swissgerman writer. She left Switzerland in 1968 to live in West-Berlin and elsewhere in Germany for about thirty years before coming to Montreal. Her books include Häutungen / Shedding/ Mues, which was translated into eight European languages, and Rau, wild & frei (Rough, Wild & Free), a collection of comparative essays on the figure of the girl in literature. She was a cotranslator of The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich and Lesbian Peoples. A Dictionary by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig. Her most recent publication is an essay "Here's Your Chance 'n enjoy the show," published in Language Crossings: Negotiating the Self in a Multicultural World. Ed. Karen Ogulnick (Teacher's Press, NY, 2000)
back to top of this page
