Von Langenau shifts in his saddle and says: "Marquis Now he has nothing more to say. He is like a child who wants to sleep. Dust settles on his fine white lace collar; he does not notice it.
He is slowly wilting in his velvet saddle. Read the original in Slovak. Get Off! Though her work has been widely translated throughout Europe, Seeing People Off is her English-language debut. Beatrice Smigasiewicz is a Fulbright scholar living in Warsaw and an editor-at-large for Asymptote. Rilke I'm thirty-five and I'm a ropewalker.
If you stretched seven long ropes across the city I live in, you could cover each of my footsteps and diagram each of my paths. A regular rope would do, since my stride is narrow and my paths are like straight lines or two-dimensional line segments, not unlike those of the chess player who at one point decided to incorporate chess moves into his life.
He moved across the city the way he moved across the board, changing paths and imagining his life as a game—now, that ended badly. It seems to me that these times are unfavorable to walking. I remember once, when the Pope came to town, a girlfriend of mine headed for the empty church where he was scheduled to hold mass. She went a day prior because she knew she wouldn't be able to get in a day later because of the crowds.
For half a day she walked the empty church, methodically and diligently, and when I say walked, I mean she put one foot right in front of the other, touching heel to toe, covering the entire floor space, hoping that her soles would meet the Pope's.
