Simon shrugged. Apparently. It got stranded here at some point or other.
There’s a dedication in it: For you from me. I recognize the handwriting. It’s my book!
Tadeusz suddenly stands up. So suddenly that the smell of cold frying fat wafts over to me. As if he’d spent the night in a McDonald’s. Tadeusz rises onto the tips of his toes, lifts his arms out to the side and tries not to lose his balance. As he does so, he watches the student, who nods eagerly. It seems to be some kind of object lesson. Tadeusz sways, starts to tumble, rows with his arms. He looks like, unbelievable how much he looks like Giacometti’s Falling Man. The one I’d looked for in the exhibition in vain, out in the world somewhere on loan.
I’m no longer looking at him out of the corner of my eye. I turn to face him and stare at him openly. At that moment, his expression changes. His age. His sex. His appearance. He is a young go-getter, a desperately suicidal woman, a dancer on the volcano, an ignorant and stubborn young lady. For a second he looks like my ailing mother-in-law. I can hear Philipp’s voice: Don’t look down! If you look down, you’re lost.
Before Tadeusz falls forward, he stops. He looks at me. Tadeusz, I say. His face crumples. He blurts out: Wonderful, that’s just wonderful!
Wonders are many, I think, as I had thought earlier when I heard him say, in his heavy Polish accent with its open vowels: But nothing is more wonderful than man.
Sophocles (Sahphocles!). Tadeusz laughs. He straightens up, spreads his arms and gives me a hug. I look over his shoulder at the beautiful student who is sitting there, smiling indifferently. Tadeusz hugs me tight and holds me close. Man, oh man, he cries, how are you?
11
Last trip
I dreamt about him last night. He said his name was Jakob. Jakob? My twelve-year-Jakob? No, he looked completely different, younger, more beautiful. Even more beautiful, since my twelve-year-Jakob was quite beautiful. But this Jakob last night.... There are men who are so beautiful your heart skips a beat when you see them—he was one of them. With fathomless green eyes, thick dark curls, prominent cheekbones and curved nostrils, soft lips and a slight gap between his front teeth. One of those. He seemed to know me. Does the time still work for you? he asked and I nodded. Good, then I’ll pick you up at seven, as agreed, right? I nodded again or rather kept nodding. I was surprised not to have any idea about what we’d agreed on, but didn’t want to ask in case he’d mistaken me for someone else. His accent was familiar. He came from Zurich, like me. But why was he speaking High German to me? So it was a mix-up? Looking forward to tonight, I said in dialect, but he just smiled awkwardly, the way Swiss do when foreigners try to speak in our idiom. Hello, I’m born and bred! Of course, he said in High German, see you at seven! And he disappeared. Who can hold a grudge against such beauty? Not me. I was out of my mind with joy, I trembled with happiness and excitement, stumbled into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. The deep furrow in my brow. There was knocking. Hello? Who’s there? Knocking.
Short / short short / long long / short
Short / short short / long long / short
Short / short short / long long / short
I grabbed my temples. Find something else to do instead of knocking, I said and switched off the light in the windowless bathroom. Darkness. Then this boy, this Jakob, I’ll call him One-More-Jakob. No: Jakob Two. No: Jakob Junior. Yes: better than: Jakob Reloaded. Then this Jakob Junior opened the door and put his hand on my heart. Get your paws off, I said, but he didn’t listen, quite the contrary. His hands were all over. But he suddenly stepped back. Excuse me, he said, I have to do something real quick. He pulled out his communication and data device and started jabbing hectically at the little screen, in the light of which his face glowed green but his eyes looked black and dead.
Jakob?
Not now, he hissed. I shrank back and straightened my sweater.
Later, we went to get something to eat. A candle flickered between us. His mouth shone, the wings of his nose quivered, trembled, wanted to take flight. Jakob Junior (should I go with a nickname? How about J.J.?) slid the tip of his tongue over the gap in his teeth as if to push out an intruder and pushed the candle aside. His mouth moved toward mine. Just before our lips touched, he shrank back and said (this time sounding not at all Swiss, but more like he was imitating the French waiter) that he forgot something. He jumped up, pulled his portable office from his pocket and hurried outside. Now I knew for sure. I recognized that behavior and had sworn to myself that I’d recognize it in the future, too. Now I was recognizing it even in my dreams.
Listen Jakob, I said when he came back to the table, were you, is it possible that you’re playing?
He looked at me with his unbelievably green eyes.
You mean with you? he asked.
No, I mean, are you a gambler?
For several seconds a whole range of expressions flitted across his face, astonishment gave way to amusement, then outrage and fear. He laughed, denied, admitted.
I am, he said and his face relaxed. How did you know?
I’m married to a gambler.
Aha!
He had told me for years that his sudden bursts of digital activity were professional, that his job was demanding. He would suddenly remember something he had to take care of right in the middle of the nicest moments. And like in the theater: always a fire to put out. Nothing could ever wait. It was always something that had to be done immediately.
So your husband works in the theater? J.J. asked (it remains to be seen if the nickname will win me over).
Yes, I answered, on the set.
And what does he play?
Sometimes poker, usually he bets on sports.
Strange, J.J. (well ... ) says, just like me!
He joined in a conversation in which, because he was so eager to learn, I explained everything about my husband’s gambling, at least as much as I knew, and about his debts, his therapy, and that’s where my dream ended and I woke up.
My first thought was: The man of my dreams is a gambler—you get what you wish for, so to speak. I fell back onto my pillow, flipped onto my stomach, and buried my head in the pillows. Oddly enough, even though I was completely awake I was able, in this position, to continue my dialogue with J.J. (yes, I’m gradually getting used to it). I asked him how high his debts were (manageable) and whether he could cover dinner, since I had no money (of course). He didn’t seem offended when I added: I don’t need more than one gambler in my life. He waved the French waiter to our table, handed him his credit card, no longer speaking with a French accent, but pure stage German. He seemed to be a linguistic chameleon. However, the French waiter promptly handed it back. I’m sorry, Monsieur, we only take silver, gold, or cash, he said.
And so I paid, after all. It would have been too good: too beautiful a man, too beautiful an invitation.
My dog trots up to the bed. She stretches, perks up her ears, gives me a demanding look. I stand up. She jumps. If I, as an old lady, still look forward to mealtimes this much, then I’ll be happy. My dog licks her chops. She drools. She leads me, prancing, to the kitchen.
I’m sitting in tram number 13, heading out of town. I’m going to visit my grandmother. She’s on the Hönggerberg and it’s the first time since she was buried that I’ve gone to see her. On Meierhofplatz I have to change to the bus. I wait for bus number 38 for more than half an hour, even though it goes on the half-hour and we are in—hello, where are we now?—Switzerland. In Hamburg, I wait for the bus for hours, but I won’t put up with that here. It’s Sunday, after all, there’s no traffic, no snow—no ice, that is—no disruptions, no problems. I’m thinking about calling the dispatcher of the municipal public transportation that’s listed next to the bus schedule, when I see the bus turn the corner. I am the only passenger, not counting my dog. The driver wishes me a lovely and peaceful third advent. I’m speechless. Then I say: You, too.
I’ve been in the city for more than a month without visiting her.
Without having thought much about her. Even though I would claim that not a day goes by when I don’t think of my grandmother, I know I didn’t think of her once over the past few weeks. And I didn’t miss her. Today, again, I feel like I’m just dropping in to see her in her kitchen on a Sunday afternoon on my way somewhere else, like I used to, without a present—she never had time for presents, stupid things, take it with you please—and naturally without flowers since she reacted to flowers as if she were highly allergic. Get them out of my sight! How much did you spend on them? You might as well have thrown your money away!
I can hear her voice in my ear and I have to laugh. You could not bribe my grandmother. She loved me, her other grandchildren weren’t as lucky.
Love is not something you choose, dear heart. That’s the sentence that echoes in my mind most clearly, the sentence she said more often than just about any other. Love is not something you choose. It was doubly true in her case. She liked Grandfather, she couldn’t do anything about it. All he had to do was look at her and she said yes before he even asked anything. Yes. Yes to everything. And he was the only one interested. She was already over twenty, her parents were pressuring her, if you’re an old maid, no one will want you. And so she married because she wanted to without really wanting to—and because she had to. This entire time, I’m thinking only of her, even though her husband lies next to her. When I visit her, I visit him. Grandfather. You are so pale, so very distant, you no longer have a face or a voice and yet you’ve only been dead a little longer than she has. Keep sleeping!
How did Grandmother do it? How did she love this man so deeply? He made life difficult at the end with his unbearable disgust with the world, his horror of everything human (himself included) and everything temporal. He would announce that he loved only God, the eternal, the perfect, the one God. It sounded especially poisonous when he said this in my grandmother’s presence, with a sidelong glance at her and in a tone that was more final than death. His offensive behavior and pronouncements could not harm her love. Still, she wished for his death more ardently than she’d desired her wedding more than fifty years earlier. She could hardly wait for him to die and yet, when the time came, she didn’t know what to do with her love and soon leapt after him.
Dogs aren’t allowed in the cemetery. I tie my dog’s leash to the fence and say: Wait. Be good. Don’t bark. I take a few steps, turn and put my finger to my lips. My dog barks. Quiet, I call and hurry away. Just don’t look back.
Grandmother and Grandfather are my only relatives who were buried. All the others were cremated and scattered or put on a shelf. My grandparents’ plot will last for another year or two, then the “use period” will expire, eternity will be over, the lease will have run out, the house vacated (well, recycled, the bones will stay in the ground, they will be “properly buried deeper in the same plot”) and rented out again.
I can’t find it. I thought it would be impossible to forget the spot and the path leading to it, but now I’m wandering around the graveyard, with a map in my hands, on which the layout of the graves is indicated using letters for sections and numbers for the plots. I don’t know the number of the plot or which section they’re buried in. On Sundays the cemetery office is closed. Whom can I ask?
As long as Grandfather was still alive, Grandmother liked to talk about death, always about her own. How she wanted to be buried at sea. She had a lifelong yearning to be near water, a lifelong feeling that the mountains were beautiful but also alien, a lifelong apprehension that perhaps she might have come from somewhere else originally.
What a cabbage head, Grandfather would exclaim, where else could you possibly have come from? You’re from Galgenen in Schwyz, period, the end.
What does he know, Grandmother would say so softly that he couldn’t hear her, even as a little child I dreamt of the sea, light-hearted, laughing child that I was.
That’s right, Undine, Grandfather would call out and Grandmother would answer: Why are you pricking up your ears? Read your newspaper.
But after Grandfather died, she never mentioned the sea again. It was clear that she would never leave him alone in his grave. Love for him had given her a soul, she said. Loving and suffering and ensouled. Once, when she asked me what I wanted to study after graduation, I answered literature, and she said: There must be something beautiful, but also extremely awful about a soul. Would it not be better never to partake of one?
What is that?
I would like to have that put on my gravestone.
But Grandma, you want to be thrown into the sea, where can they put a gravestone?
You’re right, she said. But you should read Undine sometime!
I nodded and smiled and thought, what am I supposed to do with a tearjerker like that?
I’ve found it. I’m standing right in front of it. In my memory, it was completely different. Splendid and covered with flowers. Just two names and four dates and a practical evergreen. And now I’m completely shaken, and I have to concentrate with all my might on the two As in their first names not to break down and weep.
On the way home in the number 38 bus, I talk to Jakob Junior. Without my noticing, he had slipped into the seat across from me and gives me a slightly gap-toothed smile. Hello.
Oh, hello, what are you doing here?
Those eyes should be outlawed. That green, that look should at least be put under house arrest. Jakob Junior smiles and doesn’t answer. (Actually we’d moved beyond that, onto nicknames. So:) J.J. smiles. J.J. doesn’t answer (the nickname works!).
The bus driver is a different one, but he says the same thing: I wish you a lovely and peaceful third advent. His accent is from Sankt Gallen.
Isn’t that strange, J.J.?
They’ve been instructed, he answers calmly, in the same Sankt Gallen accent as the driver. You’ll never hear a spontaneous sentence from them. The reason is: They’re preparing us for the robots that will be driving our public buses starting next year. Why are you calling me J.J.?
Robots? Are you serious?
He just looks at me. Opaque sunglasses, that’s what he should be ordered to wear!
Why J.J.? he asks.
Because I already have one Jakob in my life.
What happened to him?
I left him to marry my husband.
The gambler?
Exactly.
That sounds like a bad trade, he says, a Jakob for a gambler. (That Sankt Gallen accent gives me the jitters!)
You should talk, you’re both! Are you more Jakob or gambler?
Phew, that’s too complicated for me, J.J. says and grins (this is new, he grins! And when he does, his soft lips turn into lovely, hilly landscape). I’d rather hear about your ex-Jakob!
He’s an actor, I answer, and that is, in fact, the first thing that occurs to me. We met twenty years ago at the Theater Academy. Each person creates and shapes his or her own reality—we learned that there. But somehow our reality created a life of its own and wouldn’t let us shape it. It did whatever it wanted to! And that was never actually what we wanted. (I tried out a grin, too.) For twelve years we were a couple, but lived in different cities for most of it, trying to have careers and to become rich and famous.
J.J. looks at me closely. I have the feeling you’re treating me like a child, he says.
Like a child—I immediately start to feel maternal and that’s the last thing I need. I’m not treating anyone like a child, I say, not even my two young children who have been waiting for me at home for a month, and before I start playing anyone else’s mother I’m first going to catch up on what I’ve missed, got it? And since when do you come from Sankt Gallen?
He whistles appreciatively. Of course, he says. He ignores my last question. But back to your career, it didn’t work out? he asks.
Well, you know, our standards were too high. Especially Jakob’s. I just wanted the opportunity to work with good people. He, however, wanted more: recognition, respect, influence.
And?
And?
I tried several times. One attempt was getting myself a dog.
This old mutt? He points to my dog who has curled up on the floor of the bus.
She’s a regular beauty, isn’t she?
That’s clear. And then?
Another attempt was to fall in love. But that didn’t work. Despite countless affairs. Until Philipp, my husband.
J.J. sighed. Love...,he began, but didn’t finish the sentence.
What about love?
J.J. sighed. Sighing suits him spectacularly, too.
What do you know about love? You’re much too young and much too beautiful.
Seriously, you think I’m beautiful?
Yes. You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.
Then the congratulations go to you, you’re the one who made me so beautiful.
No, you just appeared to me that way, complete and gorgeous, last night in my dream. The only thing I’ve done is transpose you into daytime.
And what will happen with us now?
We have to get off at this stop, come!
The number 13 tram is ready to go. We run and all three of us manage to board—my dog, me, and J.J. (in that order)—before the doors close.
We sit down. J.J. stares out the window for a while. Then he asks: And what happened to Jakob?
I can’t say exactly. It was more than seven years ago. What do you think it’s like when you die, he’d asked, is it like unplugging the TV? There was that last trip after I left him. He showed up at the literary festival to which I’d been invited. He lived in Bonn at the time and had driven all night with my dog in the car. I’d left her with him the week before, as always when I couldn’t take care of her. He appeared in front of me one morning in the breakfast room of the hotel in Solothurn, and I didn’t have the heart to ask him to leave. After my reading (my book smelled of Philipp’s aftershave, Jakob understood right away. Good lord, how ridiculous this is, he said), I drove with him to my brother’s in Zurich. He had to get some sleep, after all. It was our last car ride together. As usual, he named everything he saw. On that last drive, too, he constantly relayed his observations (or rather: sightings) and I could hardly stand it. I had to clench my teeth in order not to scream at him to be quiet, to finally just stop talking. Exit 48, Oftringen/Zofingen, 80 kph on wet roads, highway service area Kölliken-Nord in 500 meters, caution slippery conditions. He was so tired, he could hardly speak. He articulated the syllables slowly and with a groan as if he had been stabbed in the chest and was struggling to stay conscious despite indescribable pain. And just when I thought he was about to fall asleep mid-sentence, he sat up straight and said: Since I’ve no longer been driving alone, since I’ve had the dog with me, it’s almost fun to say out loud everything I see. He had objected to my getting a dog. He didn’t want her. And now she was the only one who listened to him. No wonder he didn’t want to give her up. She’s staying with me, he said.
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