I’m tired of the Balkans,
that runt of an afterbirth, Bakic was right,
too many rivers, too many forests,
I’m sailing up the Danube,
I’m passing the border,
I’m coming to Bjorn’s home town —
Neuberg-an-der-Donau — he says it just like Miroslav.
The Dough-Now rises in Germany, a European river,
it flows like old Ladino into Sorbian. Donava, Danúbio,
the Radetzky March whistled by a Jew.
It’s 1924, he’s working in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute,
two years before a patent will be issued for a new fumigant
that has many advantages over the old green salts
that are still used for pest control.
Carbon triple bonded to hydrogen
with nitrogen tagged on —
volatile with a low boiling point;
it should be transported at night
in special wagons, tightly sealed containers.
He adds an eye irritant as a safety feature —
so that tears streaming down the face
might alert the user to the presence of an odourless gas.
At the point of application all that’s needed
is a little human warmth to vaporise the crystals.
Once the job’s done the remaining absorbent
can be re-used or treated as garbage.
The blue residue is harmless.
He names the chemical for a cyclone,
a Kekulé, a snake with a tail in its mouth.
Once it enters the lungs, it binds to mitochondria.
A milligram is all it takes to kill a colony of rabbits.
You need to take a course, pass a test,
before they’ll let you handle the stuff.
The paperwork at the institute is a nightmare.
He’s about to knock off for the weekend.
On Fridays he likes to go to the Kaiser-Friedrich Baths,
a Jugendstil time-warp,
with intricate mosaics and frescoes on the walls,
water gushes from the taps. The gentlemen
and ladies swim naked in pools of water.
There are lions standing on plinths.
A marble corridor leads to a lavacrum, a frigidarium,
then showers at the end of the corridor where fumaroles
bellow steam like the mouth of Vesuvius.
He treats himself to a wheat beer,
before going back to the room
where the sauna meister does his worst,
lashing the skin with a switch of birch,
beating the air with a towel,
while the water burns and burns.
Laurence O’Dwyer | Do your job, child
Contents | Mudlark No. 75 (2023)