All is law. It’s because of desire. The law makes its nest in the peel of desire. Go on: you
will not enter. If you did not desire to go, there would be a chance that the door would
open. I went to Israelica Street. And then the cemetery was closed. So we went around
the cemetery which is immense. I had no hope. Every now and again there were portals
of forged iron, the car drove by the portals, heavily chained. All were closed. At one
particular moment, the car stopped near a large rusted portal with chained iron bars. I
pressed myself against the portal, because it was written you will press yourself against
the rusted portal of the promised land, I had forgotten. And there before me was Kafka’s
tomb, and I was before him.
It is a clean tomb, modern, the stone is a raised stone, those who have seen it before
me say it is black, but this one is white, my one, the one I saw standing facing me
standing facing it was thin white upright, my size. It was turned toward me and on its
brow the words Dr Franz Kafka looked at me.
I have already seen this tomb look at me with eyes metamorphosed into letters of a
name. It was in the cemetery of Algiers, I looked at my father look at me with his eyes
that said his name gravely to me, as do children and dead people: Dr Georges Cixous.
So standing face to face my hands on the rusted bars I knew that I always looked for
the same face solemnly simplified to childhood.
The tomb and I were separated by the high locked portal, and it was good. Desire and
fear answered together was unhoped-for. I clutched the bars.
There are three cities I would like to go to and I will never make it. Though I can do
everything to try to get there, in reality I do not make it, I mean it’s impossible for me to
find myself there in the flesh in the streets in the squares in the roads in the walls bridges
towers cathedrals façades courtyards quays rivers and oceans, they are still well guarded.
These are the cities I have the most meditated on, lay siege to frequented and run through
in dreams in stories in guides I have studied them in dictionaries I have lived in them if
not in this life then in another life.
Promised Pragues. You dream of going. You cannot go. What would happen if you
went?
How can one not go to Athens even while going there? Freud asked himself for
decades until the September day when he decided to go to Corfu from Trieste where he
was staying with his brother. ‘Corfu?!’ a friend said to him. ‘In the middle of summer?
Insanity! You would be better off going to Athens for 3 days.’ And indeed the Lloyd’s
steamer left that afternoon, but the two brothers were not at all sure. Therefore they were
quite surprised when in spite of everything that was opposed to Athens they found
themselves there, they were standing on the Acropolis in reality, but Freud only half
believed it: it all existed as the two brothers had learned in school. From the schoolbook
to the landscape the consequence was quite good. It was too beautiful to be true. But
Freud never would have been able to find himself in Athens either totally or half-way if
he had not decided to go to Corfu.
And where should I go, to what city other than Prague so as to arrive in Prague only
by guile or by chance without having wanted it?
I went to Vienna. Walking down the Berggasse at a sharp slope to ring at Dr Freud’s
door, I felt Prague breathing a short distance away. There we were on the road that
separates-unites Vienna and Prague. The car went neither to the right nor to the left. We
passed a few kilometers from Trnava where Michael Klein my grandfather was born. I
Hélène Cixous 287