I may learn the password but the language of the tribe will always elude me, won't it?– Lieutenant Yolland, Translations by Brian Friel I. Courtney Love wrote Doll Parts in a bathroom in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She emerged after twenty minutes with her arm covered in sharpie. She had run out of paper. It was a song about Cobain, who she heard was sleeping with other girls. She remembers playing it for the first time an hour later, at the Virgin Megastore in Boston, which would not open for another decade. I couldn't find a photo, but I imagine the lyrics were visible on her arm. I want to be the girl with the most cake II. I'm at my pub, the Wolfhound. A man asks me about the "bare reef otter straat", which sounds tropical. The map on his phone tells him it has a liquor store but not how to pronounce Barrevoetestraat. The bare foot street was named after a sisters' convent. If you look above the Cannabis Café, which has subtropical yuccas in the window, you'll find a barefooted man. III. In 1981, the oldest member of Depeche Mode was 21. They looked much younger. They looked like choir boys with a synth. The boy with the synth was Martin Gore. "Just Can't Get Enough", their first big hit, is a puppy-dog song about a crush. There's a rainbow and burning love and an angel appears. It has the emotional vocabulary of the 1950s, which requires a vow of chastity. In Virginia Turbett's archive, the 1981 photos look like a warm-up drill for a high school talent show. Anton Corbijn photographed them in the same location a couple of months later. It was a professional assignment for NME; he wasn't drawn to the music. The shoot was inside a bomb-damaged, deconsecrated church in London. Decades later, in a retrospective about his work, Corbijn talks about that early photo of Martin Gore. It's this young band, he says, and suddenly you see a cross in there. As if it were an accident. Both the Christ figure, and taking Depeche Mode seriously. IV. Early in their relationship, Love sent Cobain a heart-shaped box. It held small objects, among them the head of a doll. V. Anton Corbijn directed the video for Heart-Shaped Box. It was about kids with cancer. It was also about Courtney Love. Love later said part of it is about Kim Gordon. I don't think it matters. Corbijn shot in color, converted the footage to black and white, then sent it to subtropical Mexico to paint each frame by hand. The end result was a simulated technicolor effect. It looks like a puppet show with Jesus, crows, poppies, a hospital bed, Santa hats, and pink magenta skies. The concept notes in Cobain's notebook read: William and I sitting across from one another at a table(Black and white) lots of Blinding Sun from the windows behind usholding hands staring into eachothers eyesHe gropes me from behind and falls dead on top of memedical footage of sperm flowing through PenisA ghost vapor comes out of his chest and groin area and enters me Bodyduring Solo. Violin shots. Chris as New Wave keyboardist, and very quick edits of strobe lightimage of little 3 year old white, arian, blonde girl in KKK outfit being led by the hand of a KKK parentSame violet colors as in the New Order videoAnimation Doll footageClose up of lillies lying on lighted draft Boardfootage of Anatomy models from Kurts collection These notes never went to Corbijn. Cobain sent another version by fax, which would have quickly faded away. VI. At my pub again, the Wolfhound. A regular tells a tourist that Mozart used to play the Müller organ. (He played it once, when he was ten.) It was 9:30 in the evening and the Damiaatjes were ringing. Chopin played there too, he continued. He didn't, but now Chopin appeared like a ghost, accompanying me inside, ascending the stairs of the pub with me, the spiralling chromatic rise of pindakaas puke terracotta red, and I could even see Horowitz playing that heroic Polonaise to a militantly enthusiastic salon. Chopin died before he was 40. Out of fear of being buried alive, he begged for an autopsy. His heart was submerged in a jar of cognac and carried by his sister Ludwika back to Poland. It's stored inside a pillar at the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw. The rest of the body is in Paris. The transport contained: two buststwo death masksthe mould used for the masksseveral dozen engravings or printstwo small bowls or drinking vesselsthree cupsone small pot or mugone flask or decorative bottle Ludwika also had with her the letters of his lover, George Sand. They went no further than Mysłowice, the last town before the border. She left them with a friend, meaning to send for them later. And the first line of the inventory, handwritten by Ludwika: Pudełko z sercemA box containing the heart. VII. Three years after the death, Liszt published a Life of Chopin. In it he recounts someone wanting to know by what name Chopin called "the strange emotion inclosed in his compositions, like ashes of the unknown dead in superbly sculptured urns of the purest alabaster". The answer: He had never been free from a feeling which might almost be said to form the soil of his heart, and for which he could find no appropriate expression except in his own language, no other possessing a term equivalent to the Polish word: ZAL! ZAL! Strange substantive, embracing a strange diversity, a strange philosophy! Susceptible of different regimens, it includes all the tenderness, all the humility of a regret borne with resignation and without a murmur, while bowing before the fiat of necessity, the inscrutable decrees of Providence: but, changing its character, and assuming the regimen indirect as soon as it is addressed to man, it signifies excitement, agitation, rancor, revolt full of reproach, premeditated vengeance, menace never ceasing to threaten if retaliation should ever become possible, feeding itself meanwhile with a bitter, if sterile hatred.