Brecht’s Tango
As a species we have been wildly successful and now it’s done. The world is our ashtray, our parking lot, our spittoon. The masses are happy. The masses are comfortable. The masses are in my face.
I do not hail from the masses. I am an individual, an individual who nevertheless is aware that the good of the many outweighs the good of the few. Yet I am heinously priggish. My entire being is pickled in the desire to flatten the conviviality that makes their hearts sing. I am out to restrict, regulate, smother, strangle, and enact edicts to squeeze the life out of lusty folk who just want to have a good time.
I cannot do this, so I soothe myself with the homily that tolerance is an enlightened virtue. Naturally, I put this in the context of an elite (me) tolerating the barbarian, but I am fooling myself. It is, in fact, the rabbit tolerating the hawk, the bait the bear, in other words, delusional suicide. It also leads to “collateral abuse.”
Each butt tossed still burning, without a backward glance, at my feet is a personal assault. The cars in the courtyard, the curbside trash, the lotto I didn’t win again—are personal. I make them personal. I have to. I have a superstitious mind. I use every one of those events to elaborate a perfectly factitious relationship between me and the impersonal forces of the universe. My efforts have been successful; I have by now riveted myself quite snugly into my own perfectly private, consummately personal iron maiden. The relationship is fixed.
§
My perspective of the ancient enmity between the masses and me has been jaded somewhat by the shabby corner of Munich from which my engagements have sallied these past 20 years. Along the west side of my courtyard runs the Dachauerstraße, a name freighted with ominous ballast. It’s a long street, but mount your bike at my place and pedal northwestwards for about two hours and you will get there. Two blocks south, the seedy artery ends at the main train station, also not the best address.
The street was shabby when I moved here—I’m talking 1986, but it was lined with businesses I did not hesitate to frequent: a photo and copy shop, an optician’s, a hat shop, a dress shop, a bakery. The most suspect profession practiced along those curbs was that plied by a preoccupied guy in a well-worn cardigan who slouched at his counter day in and day out without looking anywhere much but down, his every loose thread and hair betraying the shifty truth: philatelist cum numismatist. Yes, that modest business owner bought, sold, and traded stamps and coins. He was obviously not in it for the money. Very respectable indeed.
Perhaps business was not too good as the years went by, or perhaps too good, you tell me: long-term leases were discontinued, those shops went away, and in came more casinos than even gamblers require; Internet call shops; pawn shops with their golden wares dangling in battle array against the shop windows; a weapons shop, whose display of knives, guns, and assault gadgets never fails to draw a swarm of oglers (what inspirational effervescence do all those naked blades release?); a sex shop, which (shrewdly) never seems to draw anyone; and right above that—for the more sophisticated and better heeled—Boobs Table Dance. Yes, that’s right. B O O B S Table Dance. The blocky blue-and-white letters proclaim it proudly from the windowless second story of the shedlike structure where, I assume, the table dancing goes on. (Let me interject here that in Germany I have seen names you wouldn’t believe gracing shops ostensibly intent on conducting serious business with serious consumers, the best of the worst being a hardware store called Suckful and a stationary store dubbed Fuckoff. So suspend your disbelief and add Boobs Table Dance to the list.)
§
My allergy to the masses suppurated one hot July evening in a confrontation that grew exceedingly personal, and my reaction to it both surprised and disturbed me.
I was in the kitchen of my fifth-story apartment fixing dinner with my friend when a dog on a nearby street started barking. We kept to our work, which involved a lot of scrubbing and chopping and peeling, what anyone would do who was fixing salad, asparagus, and mashed potatoes. The dog kept barking. We continued preparing dinner. The dog kept barking, although pauses began to occur which I well understood: it was getting tired. That did not mean relief: the barking was resumed, volume undiminished, as soon as it had recovered strength, for which it required about 10 seconds. After a vain half hour of expecting the owner to exit from some shop and lead its beast away, I went out onto the terrace to investigate. On looking down, I was unpleasantly surprised to find the dog, not waiting by some shop entrance on the Dachauerstraße, but tied to a pole in the middle of our courtyard with no one at all in sight, including no owner. In a flush of indignation, I left my vegetables and butter sauce and hurried downstairs and out the door.
“Is that your dog?” I called to two young women who were emerging from another entrance of my apartment building. No, they shook their heads. They were coming out for the same reason I was: to stop the barking.
The source of our annoyance was a handsome, shorthaired dog tied by the neck to a metal pole of a bare arbor on so short a tether that it couldn’t stand without hanging its head. It cowered away from me as I approached. From the set of its mouth, I was not positive it would not bite. I halted, but made shushing noises, and the dog grew quiet. The blond woman of the pair remarked how unkind it was to leave a dog tied up in that heat without water or companionship, especially when the dog so obviously objected to the treatment. We wondered if the dog had been abandoned. Its wide leather collar bore no license.
The dog began barking again. Again I shushed it. It backed away, afraid and uncertain. I squatted down near the metal pole it was bound to and let my hands fall limply out in front of me. The dog came forward to sniff my hands, showing no sign whatsoever of aggression, and within seconds was huddled under my arm. As I patted it, we discussed what we could do. The blond woman suggested we wait. I thought we should take the dog to the police. As soon as I had unwound the leash from the pole to give it some freedom of movement, the dog began pulling with a strength I was unprepared for. I assumed it needed to go into the bushes, badly. But it pulled right past the bushes, heading out of the courtyard altogether. It wanted to go somewhere out of sight, somewhere specific. As it tugged for all it was worth, it dawned on us. “He’ll take us to the owner!” the blond woman exclaimed. Off we set in the highest hopes of so simply resolving our dilemma, the blond woman now holding the leash and giggling self-consciously.
The dog led us out of our courtyard, through a much smaller courtyard, and onto the Dachauerstraße. To the right were a couple of cafes. It pulled resolutely past the first one, which seemed closed, but insisted on entering the second, where sounds of people eating, drinking, and making merry could be heard through the open door. “Is the owner in there?” we wondered. We restrained the dog, but dawdled conspicuously in the entranceway for several minutes to no effect. The dog must just be hungry, we concluded and, pulling it away with us, were effecting a huddled retreat when a voice bellowed imperiously behind us:
“What are you doing with my dog?”
We turned to see a tall, plump young woman of dark skin, dark eyes, and accusing demeanor sailing towards us.
The blond woman wailed: “We can’t stand it anymore. He’s been barking all evening.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” the woman declared, as if that stamped us as liars, but may rather have been a critical clue as to why she chose to park her dog where she had; she wouldn’t have to listen to it. To reinforce her rectitude, she heaved a weighty salvo: “He has to learn to be alone!”
“Not in our courtyard,” I said.
Then pang!
The woman turned on me in unbridled rage. “You! You!” she screeched, advancing on me and pointing with outstretched arm. “I’m not going to answer you! The likes of you! Not the likes of you standing there! Standing there like that!” She folded her arms and began thrusting one shoulder then the other at me in mockery, I suppose, of how I was standing. My arms were crossed, it’s true, but I was not thrusting my shoulders forward. “Looking at me like that!” She pursed her full lips and waggled her head as if smearing in it a mound of soft lard, while scowling at me and continuing to advance. It was a little bizarre. “I’ll have nothing to do with you!” she screamed, shooing me vigorously away.
I was dumbfounded. Why single me out? Had I assaulted her with looks to kill, so to speak? I had no doubt I looked strained, and middle-aged strain does tend to look severe. I was at least 20 years older than my companions. Surely she saw that and considered me the easiest mark. Or was it my size? I was also the smallest, the simplest to quash. Did she sense I was American and pitch me as an enemy of Islam, of which cohesive body she could easily have been a member? Maybe she simply found three adversaries too many for her, and in attempting to shake loose at least one, quite naturally targeted the oldest, the smallest, the weakest.
Although she said she was not going to deal with me, she spent several long minutes doing just that. Luckily, my staunch allies held their ground, but our blond spokesperson’s faltering defense boiled down to a weak: leave your dog to bark somewhere else. The bellicose woman blustered that her dog was only seven months old and repeated that it had to learn to be alone.
“But not in our courtyard,” I made my second statement, also a repetition. Nothing new was being said.
“You!” The woman’s fury flared again and again was directed exclusively at me. “I won’t even talk to you!” She stamped and shimmied and lambasted me with a great deal of talk about my evil stance, my evil looks, my evil intolerance.
What was going on?
Again she advanced on me and again I stood resolute. If her intention was to step on me, then that was what she was going to have to do. She retreated instead to take up the argument with the blond woman, although I cannot imagine and do not recall what else there was to say. At this juncture, I turned to the silent third woman of our coterie and told her my presence was causing more harm than good. We understood each other and I was gone.
On resuming my station in the kitchen, I was satisfied to note that the barking did not begin again. We had gained our objective, never mind how. But I did mind how. I minded very much. The encounter made me feel awful. I spent the rest of the evening mulling over what I had done to provoke the woman and what I could have done to have prevented it. Stand differently? Smile? Uncross my arms? I certainly felt I had caused of the incident.
I was also keenly grateful that I had been able to gain anonymity by simply turning a corner and slipping into the courtyard. How different it would have been had we been inhabitants of a rural village or prisoners in the same cell. That woman could well have proven to be the nightmare of my existence.
Still, the assault smarted badly. How much worse would it have been had the encounter been of actual substance? What if the world went mad and began rounding up little, middle-aged ladies for use in Siberian logging camps? Would I accept the blame for that, too? After all, the dog owner hadn’t accused me of doing anything, but of being something, which I couldn’t deny. The accusation hit the mark, and I responded with a powerful resonance of guilt and remorse.
Brecht did say the victim is always guilty. I had just served as proof of that pudding. One hot summer afternoon many years ago, I witnessed a startling, comic-book application of that same horrid principle, an application that should have been rejected out of hand, but wasn’t. A little girl was pushed into a swimming pool by an older boy. The lifeguard, perhaps a little too young for the station, made the girl sit on the wall alongside the boy for some arbitrary duration. To those who questioned his judgment he remarked, it takes two to tango.
I say, Mr. Lifeguard, it’s not always a tango. But Brecht knew and we know: we live in a world of intractable forces.
The lady supped.
The dog barked.
We tangoed.