TE23 Double Feature

The Lamentations of Zeno

Ilija Trojanow

pointless to calculate the volume of melt for this September, to take the balance of the summer. There was nothing left to measure, not on this mountain. At some point I got back on my feet and climbed uphill, heading no place in particular. On the steeper terrain a stump of ice had survived in the shadow of a desk-sized rock, it served as a temporary support, I set down my notebook, the wind leafed through the pages. What hadn’t we measured and weighed? And what of all the findings we had compiled, the models we had constructed, the warnings we had issued in careful scientific format? The pages of futility are filled with noble ambitions, they need to be torn out, every last one, our methods have failed us utterly. We had issued warnings, but in vain, things only worsened with every passing year. Only when it is too late do people hear Cassandra’s voice: today even more sanguine souls have joined the chorus of doomsayers. Nevertheless I hadn’t foreseen this degree of destruction, 26

not when the snout disappeared (I had just turned fifty), not when the tongue broke off and the calved ice melted away as quickly as it did (I had just turned sixty), and now this blow from the blind spot of our calculated optimism. If even the experts are surprised by the terrible speed of the demise, whose intervention can still save anything, whose point of view matters, since everyone else harkens to the rotten call of comfort and convenience? My work had consisted in documenting our delinquency—the father confessor masquerading as a scientist. I pounded my fists on the stone table, in my pain I thought of the girls on the train, chewing with difficulty on the gum of life, these three girls who pass in the world as innocent. But what is that kind of innocence worth, when we all know they’re bound to wind up guilty? That is what lies ahead for them as well as for us, they will continue this devastation, they will go on destroying the 27