by DBC Pierre
“Frederick,” I hear my voice say. “The mouse.”
“Frederick, Frederick. Haa! And what are you doing in Berlin? How long you stay?”
“Hm. Not long, I think.”
“Mein Gott. All those years. You must be—?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five. Haa. Mein Gott. And still understanding German!”
And so, with nods and whines, Specht’s long, yellow, carious teeth bob around till the first awkward silence arrives: that deflation of reacquaintance, when after a minute it becomes clear that all has been said.
I toy with my cup, sifting through rinds of hope in my mind. He could still be a magnate—look at Warren Buffett, an ordinary man in spite of his billions. There might still be a club, he might’ve passed it on to a next generation of libertine, even to a son, for all I know. This would be consistent with Berlin, with modesty, with his Eastern roots. He might be living a homage to survival, a homely retirement after his wild excess.
But then: a smell of unclean laundry wafts off Gerd Specht.
“You see the changes.” He nods out through the window. “Everything clean and commercial. But Berlin’s still poor. ‘Poor but sexy,’ that’s what our mayor says. Haa. Of course, nothing like before reunification. That was really something, I guess you won’t remember. Do you believe your father was the first Westerner I spoke to? And a week later we had a business. That’s how it was. Of course, he needed a local person to sign legal papers in those days.”
Gerd leans back as the girl serves coffees. Having found a topic to erase awkward silence, he chats away with that wistful vigor of older people who mostly reminisce to themselves.
“Bah, well”—he frowns—“when the wall came down, don’t think everyone was here waiting to be rescued. In fact we were quite insulted. The German Democratic Republic was an idea we believed in. Many still do. Of course, like any government it had its problems. Communism is ambitious for a society, much more than capitalism, and not a fast system to arrange. But don’t believe all the stories about Stasi control, it wasn’t so bad. We believed in our state, and we were all in it together. Over the wall you could get a hundred types of cheese, while we could only get three—but we could only get them together, that was the main thing. That’s what the West never understood. They treated us like refugees, and it wasn’t that way. The collapse of the wall proved to us that they were exactly as we had thought—individualistic and arrogant. For them it was just a chance to be patronizing and to advertise global capitalism. But now look. Reunification wasn’t so good for us. Don’t think East Germans fell into jobs and went shopping. Even today we’re treated differently.”
“Still today? I didn’t realize that.”
“No, ja, it’s mostly East Germans who stayed unemployed.”
The theme stirs sediments in Gerd. He stops to savor them with a chew of his lip, then slaps his thick hands on the table. “So—how did you manage to find me? When you mentioned the Pego I nearly fell over!”
There comes a time in certain nightmares when it’s best to find the end and let it kill you. This is such a time. I draw breath and play my only shot: “Well—my father said he left behind some unfinished business.”
The words just hang between us.
After a pause, Gerd slowly nods. “So, and it’s true. I never thought I’d see you again. But it’s a long time ago, those were old deutschmark. Tell your father to keep his money, I couldn’t take it now. Bah.”
I look down into my empty cup.
“Though I admit he left me in a bad position. What he took wasn’t profit, it was operating capital from the business. After a week it was a desperate situation. He didn’t say where he went. The club was in my name, but there was nothing to pay the suppliers. The Pego had to close. After that I couldn’t open anything in Prenzlauer Berg or Mitte, nobody would touch me. When I got married, Gisela’s father helped us get started again, and we put the next business in her name.”
“I’m really sorry. I didn’t know that.”
“Ach, don’t worry. Nothing to do with you. I wouldn’t have mentioned it if you didn’t bring it up yourself. Young adventures from long ago.”
“Well”—I look around—“you found a great home for the club.”
“Haa—” His whine curls out of hearing range. “I mean the next little business.” As he says it, the girl catches his eye from the kiosk, holding up a packet.
“How many today?” he asks her.
“Two,” she says.
“Then leave the rest there, they’ll be fine. My mother used to eat them after a week, so four days is fine. And how many Würstchen?”
“Three—plus one for Gunnar.”
“Eh? But you didn’t give him bockwurst? We had to get those from Kaiser’s, remember, they’re like sixty cents each.”
“There’s nothing else,” says the girl.
“No, yes there is, there’s wieners in the tray, look again. Anna, that’s like sixty cents you give away! Next time he gets wiener. Take the bockwurst out of sight if you see him coming around.” Gerd frowns before turning to me: “Sorry—this is Anna, who helps us before taking her holidays—to where, Anna? America? A literature thing?”
“Pff.” The girl gives a joyless smile. “Galápagos Islands, an ecotour. To see the giant tortoises, I’ve only told you ten times. Don’t you remember the video, about Lonesome George? Did he look like a literary figure?”
“Ah, ja, the famous turtle.” He nods, turning to me. “So that’s Anna, and here we are. No more club. Now it’s our little Café-Imbiss. Well, a kiosk, really. But soon the airport closes. We’ll have to find something else. Gisela wanted a flower shop. Perhaps I would like that too. Flowers instead of coffee—haa.”
I stare numbly at the kiosk.
“Gisela,” he prompts, “my wife—who was here before.”
“Ah.” I nod. “Really? I’m sorry if I seemed rude.”
“Ach. She has her days.”
“Well. It seems a shame to close the airport.”
“Ja, isn’t it? When we arrived there was lots of hope for Tempelhof. Services were growing. For years it was doing fine—did you see the old Billy Wilder films? That’s Tempelhof in the old days. Bah, but now it costs the city nine million a year just to keep the building alive. Not profitable. Also the Green Party doesn’t want it. We had a vote in Berlin, even Angela Merkel wanted to keep it—but not enough Berliners came out to vote. So it closes just now. Kaput.”
I nod at my cup, hunting words to fill this void left by plummeting Fortune.
“Ja, so.” Gerd taps his fingers. “Tempelhof. Imbiss. Gerd Specht. If your father wants to visit, he can come. Let’s forget the past. What’s he doing these days?”
“Hm. Good question. He also had a café once, but it didn’t last.”
“Bah, food. Did he tell you we tried it in the club? Sent us crazy after a week. Mustard all on the floor. Bah. Forget it.”
Ah, well. Here, posthumous friend, we descend to Fortune’s most bitter, ironic crypt, its lowest one, deep beneath the Valhalla trodden by the merely blighted. Reaching this rock bottom, my heart just lies down to die. And note: though it owes its descent to a loss of hope, its terminus is a worse place still—my shame at having blustered here to get heavy with this mild and wistful Geppetto.
Ah, Gerd Specht. His little kiosk and his Frau. His transistor radio burbling evergreens. A timeless portrait of all that redeems a cardigan and makes it heartbreaking.
I doubt I’ve felt so low in my life.
“So.” He rises with a grunt. “Time to clean the mighty Imbiss, it won’t clean itself—haa.”
I hoist myself after him, ready to slink away. New images come of Smuts hanging from a ceiling by his belt. And in the midst of this stifling ballet, Gerd pauses, look
s at me, and says with a gleam in his eye: “Oh, but Gabriel—if you’re still around on Friday, I invite you to a special party. Something you can’t believe. And with some real food. Here at Tempelhof, in the evening. Well, you might be busy—but you’re welcome if you’d like to come.”
“Thank you.” I slide some coins across the table for my coffee.
“Bah.” He waves them away. “My contribution to the arts. I hope you’re still doing your poetry? And tell your father to call if he likes. Pego Café-Imbiss—I even kept the name, for old times’ sake.”
I smile sadly at Gerd. “I never asked Dad what Pego meant.”
“It’s how Paul Gauguin sometimes signed his work.” He checks for Anna before lowering his voice: “An old English sailor’s word for cock—haa!”
Watching his cardigan hover into the kiosk, I wonder if there was ever a youth, in the sense we know it, in Gerd Specht’s life. Would his “special party’’ throw new light?
Who knows? It doesn’t matter now.
I’m almost out the door when I remember the bottle of Marius, and turn back to present it to him through the cubbyhole.
Gerd takes it, beaming like a grandfather: “Nein! For me? Too much!”
At this instant the radio launches into John Denver. “Annie’s Song.” Gerd freezes, looking down at the bottle. I watch his face grow taut with feeling, and I turn and walk away, buffeted by sentiments from this most cloying of songs.
A cloud of pathos and shame follows me from the building. In my ridiculous suit, with my fur. I turn to see Gerd’s loose-fitting hand wave goodbye from the kiosk, and it stirs me like a wave from a train of children fleeing war.
Then I slither out of the monolith.
Outside, all is massive and built of stone. None of it will ever move again. The sky is still, and newly clouded. Trees without leaves are black against it. They don’t move either. And beneath them, in a space the size of a bathroom, lies Gerd Specht’s world.
The real world.
Trudging down Mehringdamm, I know what I must do. Whether under a train, or off a bridge. Whether by poison or drowning. It doesn’t matter. After collecting my bag from the Piratenburg, I find an Internet café and immerse myself in helpful information, to cement my mood, to install the right mindset. The Web is useful in this respect, even throwing up academic papers from a seminar entitled “Death, Decay & Disposal after Post-Modernity.” Among the papers are some succulent gems which I read like holy scriptures, even mouthing the words to myself, themes such as “Stillbirth: An Argument in Favor by the Aged and Dying” and “Beyond Hygiene: Crematoria and Cremation as Statements of Post-Facto Suicide.” I wallow with these and other morsels until I’m a clean machine, empty of whim and desire.
I don’t know what to tell Smuts. Probably best not to call. Rather I should dial my father and call him a cunt. Because once again my future founders on the wreckage of his selfish past. My situation stinks of his being here before me, him and a generation of larcenous babies that never grew up.
A state accompanies hopelessness which removes the urge to even drink. A sort of kill switch, I suppose. I pass the bars on Mehringdamm without stopping, pass the curry-wurst stall over Yorckstrasse where patrons stoop against the chill with their pommes and wurst and beer. And from here I take a cab to the Kastanienhof, where I lie blank-faced on my bed, watching nothing happen in the sky through the window. The Enthusiasms have shown their hand. An end-play indeed. This was them removing obstacles to death, bursting the hopes that are most ludicrous in retrospect; the ones that are always last hopes. I pull out my notepad and pretend to scribble some last tips and anecdotes from limbo. These very notes, in fact. But thinking about them, maybe they don’t matter either. You’ll be the only judge, unless they’re crushed under the wheels of a train, or washed down the River Spree.
It turns dark outside. At some point the phone rings in my room. It takes me a few moments to identify the ringing, and when I locate the receiver I find Smuts on the line:
“Gabriel,” he hisses.
I sit up. Hearing my given name is rarely a good sign.
“Listen carefully—I’m on the lawyer’s mobile. Take down this number, we won’t be able to talk anymore.”
“What?”
“His name’s Satou, take the number.”
I rummage under the sheets for my notepad.
“The case is going to shit—but listen, the Basque’s hooked on your venue, hooked like a fish. Not on my original plan but on some event of his, probably one of his high-end deals, maybe even a banquet. His ears pricked up big time, uh. Naturally I told him it was our club, he had to work through us—you know, son of the founder, decadent situation, et cetera.”
“Hm—well, actually I’ve some bad news on that front.”
“He’s always looking for rare venues, hunting the unicorn, and I told him everything you told me, kilometers long, planes to the tables, et cetera. I’ve never heard him so quiet, fucking incredible, just listening, and hey—”
“Smuts—”
“No, listen, listen—if it turns out to be for one of his banquets, he’ll sacrifice Yoshida in a second. He lives for those events, I’m telling you. Keep your fingers crossed. Fuck, you wouldn’t believe where my head’s at, I’m living in dog years over here. It’s like being nailed to the fucking wheel of Fortune. My head’s raw from the little rubber clacker thing!”
“The what?”
“You know—on the wheel of Fortune. The thing that clacks over all the pegs. The money, the sofa, the fridge-freezer.”
“I’m not sure Fortuna’s wheel has the clacker thing. Not as classically described.”
“Shh, anyway, listen—one last job and we’re home safe: the Basque wants you to meet a man there. A trusted German contact of his, just to confirm what you’ve got.”
“Smuts—there is no club.”
“Not an interview, not a pitch. Just a drink, and talk to the guy, who’s local, and he can give Didi the thumbs-up. I’ve given him your number, so stay by the phone, those boys will move fast.”
“There isn’t a venue. It ended up being a kiosk.”
“It’s a first contact, that’s all. Only fair to get a local opinion. And you’ll have an excellent drink, Didi’s people are always high-flyers. Rich boys, most of them, seriously decadent. But listen: you’ll have to play him like a fish. Dress the part, play it cool.”
“The club’s gone. There’s only a kiosk.”
A ball finally rolls in the brainatelle: “Uh?”
“A kiosk.”
“What? Kilometers long?”
“It fits three people, standing.”
“What? What are you saying? Putain?”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no, listen—don’t pull my chain, uh? All you have to do is tell the man what you told me. Never mind three people—tell him what you told me, exactly. Uh?”
“The problem is—”
“No! No problems! Did you make the building up?”
“No, but—”
“Then meet the fucking man! Tell him what you told me! Shift the game to the next level. You have to do it. And find a fucking venue, borrow one for a day, do something. Gabriel!”
“But have they just abandoned the investigation altogether?”
A pause hisses down the line. “Putain—the old guy didn’t make it. He passed away in the night. They’re moving me to a prison. This is for real now.”
15
I stir in the early morning still clutching my notepad. Bird cries pelt the window on nature’s behalf, designed as they are to trumpet her rule. Babies must also be waking in their boxes, hungering together with businessmen and bankers to assert their tyrannical grip.* How is it, I wonder, that those creatures most given to puffing themselves up and crowing th
eir worth revere the early morning? Surely such behavior shows not an ascent but a descent, from civilization to crude zoology, there to join strutting cockerels and gorillas beating their chests.
In fact differing only in that gorillas save on the suit and tie.
Raising myself onto an elbow, I go to work on a booger turned hard in my nose. After painstaking excavation I manage to pull out a diamantine latticework sleeve, a perfect little cast of my nostril, still candied with cocaine and set with tiny rubies of blood.
I pop it into my mouth and jolt into the day.
Feelings and schemes load inside me, but I find them a turbulent mix, calling for decisions and bravery. Again we see inverse proportion at work, demanding maximum bravado at the point of least hope. Ah, these wretched cones. What’s clear is that I must die before this wormhole of a cone gets any deeper or darker. Before another morning like this one comes jeering. I fall back onto my pillow, exhausted with it all, and for some reason as I start to doze I’m visited by an image of my mother, as best I remember her gangling softness and quick, humble eyes. There she is, grinning through a crowd of teeth, in the days before learning that her husband’s whims counted for more than her, for more than us, before learning that a pressing, unfinished matter would pull him away, and that the unfinished matter was simply his childhood. There she is before all the things she was raised to care about were no longer fashionable, before they were scorned because scorn sold more products, before she herself was scorned for having no greater ambition than to fill a house with love. There she is, that beautiful soul, smiling.
In the moment before it all turned to dust.
In the moment before dismay.
In the moment before.
How I wish I could hug her. What I wouldn’t give to hug her now, that smiling, woolly person. And how important are the hugs we never had. Because some things do matter. Some things matter very much.
While others don’t matter at all.
My eyes grow hot, and I wrest myself back to the moment. I must speak to Smuts’s contact. Perhaps he’ll be satisfied with a few vagrant words, a promise of something in progress. Anyway, death is a moment away if things get too hard. I could leave a sworn statement about the fish. I could attribute my death to the injustice of it, or even take the sword on Smuts’s behalf, avenge the old man in the Japanese way. Make the ignoble noble, trade suicide for hara-kiri. All these myriad tools are at my disposal. All these countless devices, numbering one, which is death.