J.J. looks at me disconsolately. All the green has drained from his eyes.
But as I see, not even the mutt stayed with him. That sounds so lonely, so sad. Damn, who wants to hear a story like that.
Don’t worry, J.J., the story turns happy: Jakob is a TV-star. He has money, friends, and women galore.
J.J. looks at me and shakes his head. His dark curls tremble. You don’t understand a thing, he says. Next stop Schwert, the recorded voice announces. I have to get out here, J.J. says and is gone.
My dog jumps up and wants to follow him. Here, I say, come here. Stay. She pricks up her ears, sits on her haunches, and whines. I stroke her head. OK, it’s all OK. The number 13 drives on. Where it is headed is clear. Next stop Alte Trotte. But where am I headed? I’ve been back in my hometown for over a month—in search of? What? An alternative? A new start? That’s not possible. I’ve tried often enough: running off, leaving everything behind, new city, new luck, new man, new happiness. It doesn’t work. The least I can hope for is a reason to continue. But do I really need to find one? Won’t everything go on and on, regardless, one way or another? Isn’t the reason I’ve been wandering around this city for a month, poking around in the past, far from my husband, my children, my real life precisely this: that I’m not able to pull out, to simply jump off, to stop the carousel for a moment and get a clear picture of it all, so that I can decide if and when I’ll climb back on and which horse I’ll ride?
My eyes sting. I’m homesick. For my children, for my grandmother, for times that are long gone and a promising future, for love, for all the people I’ve lost along the way. For you. For home. Even for the beautiful J.J., whom I only met last night, who sprang from my head and has now run off.
But I still have you, my girl, don’t I? My dog whines and pulls toward the exit. I hold her back. Stay. Here. With me. Stay. She looks like she’s thinking it over.
Keep going, we’ve got to keep going, I say and take out my notebook. At least I write every day. At least I can do that, with my dog nearby, at my feet: I keep writing this book and my life. Am I writing it or it me? My dog whines. And then I say something to her I’ve never said before. I say lie down in English. How should she know what it means? And yet, she looks at me, stops, lies down.
The first dogs I got to know were border collies, work dogs that herd sheep. They’d been trained in Scotland and were frighteningly good at following commands like: come by, steady, that’ll do, or even lie down. Although I never grew fond of these dogs, I admired their intelligence and their work ethic. When I finally decided to get a dog almost ten years later, it had to be a border collie (against the advice from everyone around me who all said something to the effect of: Those dogs require consistency, clarity, a sense of responsibility. Not qualities, apparently, anyone ascribed to me.). These are not dogs for beginners, one expert told me, get yourself a mixed breed. They’re less susceptible to illness and friendlier. That sounded good to me. When I saw eight border collie mix puppies advertised in a free newspaper, I grabbed the opportunity, literally. One after the other, I put each of them on the palm of my hand. The second to last, all black with a white muzzle, fell asleep immediately. I’ll take him.
Her, the owner said, she’s a bitch.
That’s an ugly word.
Well, I can’t call her mistress, you’re the mistress.
The correct term in German was Betze, but like bicce from Old English, it’s no longer used. So there’s female dog.
Mine is love-crazed, greedy, immoral, inspiring. I’ve been writing since she started lying at my feet. I can’t bear to imagine what life will be like without her one day. One day? That day is not so far away. In two months, she’ll be eleven. A few weeks ago, I was at the hairdresser’s. Her salon is the gossip nerve center of the neighborhood. For fear she might know more about my husband’s debts, his creditors, and his gambling addiction than I do, I’d not been there since early March. A lot can happen in eight months. She had gotten a new dog, the old one had had cancer. We had a nice hospice period, she said.
What did you do with him then? Buried him?
Sank, not buried, she said. I already have three dog graves to take care of, that’s enough. A burial at sea. We sailed out to deep water and let him down in a body bag filled with sand. It was beautiful.
Why does this occur to me right now? It was beautiful. Yes, my grandmother would have liked it, too.
I sigh, but it probably isn’t as becoming for me as for J.J. Night is already falling. I turn to my dog.
So, you understand English now.
She doesn’t react.
Hello? Get up!
Nothing.
That’ll do!
Nothing.
Come by.
Nothing.
Once a month I take her to the vet. Why does this occur to me right now? She hates it. On the way there, she’s already trembling from head to tail. In the waiting room, it escalates to shuddering. At some point, I’ll have taken her for the last time, but the idea that she might die in a place she never wanted to go is unbearable. Maybe the vet makes house calls? I’d rather give her the shots myself.
She lays her head on my knee.
I run through all the English commands again and how about this: sometimes it works, sometimes not.
Simon, who has been giving me shelter for a month now, is spending the weekend in the mountains. Help yourself, he told me, but I don’t want to. I examine his refrigerator and kitchen shelves and abstain. I sit at the kitchen table and try to write, then take a bottle of red wine from the buffet after all and start looking for a corkscrew in all the cabinets, closets, and drawers. In vain. I put the bottle on the table.
And now?
Two possibilities: electric screwdriver or hammer. That’s J.J.’s voice—but speaking with my husband’s north German accent! He sits across from me, arms crossed.
J.J.! Where’d you come from?
He rolls his beautiful eyes, annoyed.
I mean, where exactly do you come from? You sound like you’re from Zurich, France, most recently from Sankt Gallen, and now? You come from someplace completely different, always different. Now you sound like you’re from the Nordheide.
He shrugs. You should know.
Then I’ll tell you outright: J.J. my dear, you’re from Buchholz. You’re surprised, hunh? Am I right?
If you say so.
His bad mood is irritating me. Brief silence.
What now? I ask, and tap my fingernail against the neck of the bottle. J.J. grimaces. Horrible noise. He shudders. So are there any tools in this place?
A hammer.
I’d rather use an electric drill.
Haven’t seen one around here yet, I say, and get the hammer from the kitchen cupboard. I ask: Me or you?
You, J.J. says. He helps me position the bottle so that the neck hangs over the sink. He shows me where I should hold it, where I should hit it, and advises me to hold the bottle upright immediately after hitting it so nothing goes down the drain in exactly the dialect my husband would have used. J.J. winks at me. He’s a sly one. Here we go!
Oh, that didn’t work. What a mess. A bit of wine swims around the mound on the bottom of the bottle. I pour it into a glass through a tea strainer. Cheers!
Hopefully you’ll survive, J.J. says, the finest splinters are the most dangerous!
I drink. J.J. watches me.
It occurred to me in the tram that you’re not gambling today, I say, Sunday rest?
Why do you want to know when and if I’m gambling?
When I think of last night: you seemed absent, frenzied, you were constantly excusing yourself to go around the corner and fiddle with your cell phone.
That was for other reasons, amorous ones, J.J. says.
I don’t believe you.
But it’s true! I’ve got another woman or two after me.
Another?
Yes, aside from you.
You just want to change the subject.
You’re like my husband. He told me for years that his manic fumbling with his cell phone was for his work.
You never thought he might be betraying you?
Yes, but it turned out that he wasn’t sending messages to other women, but to bookies. Just like you!
Listen to me, says J.J., the boy from Buchholz in der Nordheide, now sounding very sure of himself: When I want to gamble without anyone knowing, I know how to do it.
I say nothing. I swallow.
How did you find out, anyway, about your husband? he asks.
I didn’t. Uncle Günter called me up one day and asked what exactly our plans were for summer vacation.
It’s early March, Uncle Günter, I answered, we don’t have any plans yet.
But Philipp wanted to borrow five thousand euros to book your flights!
I can’t believe Philipp told such a lame lie. He’s actually very good at lying.
J.J. laughs. I believe it, he says, and he’s had lots of practice, like every gambler! I’ll tell you why your husband told such a lame lie! It’s very simple: he believed it! And it was his only chance. He was in debt up to his neck, so he needed a large sum to win big. I’ll bet you he believed his plan would work, that he would double his five thousand euros and double them again, that he’d be able to clear his debts and take his family on a nice vacation.
I don’t bet with gamblers, J.J.
I don’t get it.
You said: I’ll bet you.
That’s just something people say. J.J. stopped talking.
I look at him for a long time. Did I really put together this gorgeous face? I can’t imagine. Next to his dark curls, his skin looks almost transparent, his deep green eyes gleam like polished marble, his lips are ruddy from speaking.
I think of what Philipp said when I met him: First you build a mock-up, then the stage set. You think about what you want, build a small model of it, then the life-size version. Done. Everyone is master of his own fate.
Does he still think this? And: Does it apply to gamblers? Despite his failures?
J.J. has followed my thoughts. He nods. Once a gambler, always a gambler, he says.
Then tell me, J.J., from a gambler to a gambler’s wife: Why do you gamble?
I gave it up, forever and always.
Is that right?
You sound skeptical.
I am.
It’s not easy to believe a gambler, hunh?
No. So you don’t gamble anymore. I see. And why did you gamble before?
It’s exciting. It’s easy. You can win or lose. Life, on the other hand, is rarely simple and it’s not always easy to tell if you’re up or down, if you’re on a roll, if you’ve hit the mark or are on your way straight down.
Silence. I think it over.
The furrow in your forehead looks like a deep, clean cut, J.J. says.
I nod. But a bloodless one, I reply.
I empty the glass. I don’t feel any splinters or shards.
I’m going to sleep, J.J. Get lost now, I say, go on, time to go! My dog briefly cocks one ear when he goes out the door, then she falls back asleep.
I lie alone in Simon’s bed and think of Philipp.
Love is not something you choose. I think of my grandmother. Of Undine, Andreas, Petrus, Jakob, Tadeusz. The finest splinters are the most dangerous. Are they all coming back? Does anything ever really end?
12
Beginning, again
No verticals, all scattered and lying.
—SAMUEL BECKETT, BREATH
I tried to tell the story without you but it won’t work. You are and you remain. I can’t get over you that easily. Just because I left you out doesn’t mean you’re gone. As long as I haven’t told about you, I can’t go back, I can’t go anywhere, I can’t get away.
For almost six weeks I’ve been sitting at Simon’s kitchen table in Zurich and writing. By hand, even though I hate it, but my computer’s at home in Hamburg, so I’m writing in graph-paper notebooks that always fill up.
I’ve got a photograph of my two sons with me. They’re sitting in the bathtub, splashing me. I remember that I yelled are you out of your minds at them and it was if I’d given them a command to scoop water at me by the handful. They screamed with delight, I screamed in outrage the camera’s for shit now. For shit, for shit! They both howled and didn’t calm down until they were shivering with cold because there was hardly any water left in the tub. When I look at the picture, I can hear them, see them screaming. I hear them laughing, see them shivering, even crying because, in the end, I pulled the stopper out and lifted them out of the tub.
But most of all I see you. And me. How we sit in the tub together and say no, no Mommy, we’re not coming out, we want to stay in here forever. And the water’s warm, and when we pee in it, it gets even warmer. Luckily, our big brother, who said that you’ll be paralyzed if you go in the tub, isn’t there and so we go whenever we can. We believe our big brother, we’re afraid. It’s deliciously frightening, when you go. You hold it briefly, the stream, your breath, time, fear—and then? I can still move! Look! And you? We got away with it, one more time, we’re home free, we did it.
He looks just like you, the little one. It’s crazy. This child absolutely wants to come into this world, the gynecologist had said. It’s been three years since I got pregnant, one month after my miscarriage. And a few weeks after that, in the morning on New Year’s Day, blood in the toilet bowl, I knew what it meant, didn’t believe it, instead I believed: this child absolutely wants to come into this world, and I was right. How wonderful that you’re here, I said, when he arrived, battered and blue, and looked at me with his little mole eyes. One was blood-red, the left one, a blood vessel has burst during delivery. For weeks it didn’t seem to want to heal. But then, all of a sudden, the baby was bewilderingly beautiful. Pink, smooth, blue-eyed. Where did he get those blue eyes? We all have dark eyes, my husband, our firstborn, and I. Where did he get those blue eyes? They’re your eyes.
We took care of one another, even back then, when you were two and I was four, the same age as my children are now, and took turns peeing in the bathtub. I took care of you, the middle one of the little one, you of me, the little one of the middle one. Took care that the big one didn’t catch us going in the tub, took care that he didn’t hold us under water too long. Took care that no one caught us licking the wrinkled soles of each other’s feet after the bath, before going to bed, and we laughed so hard when we did that, we cried.
Later, when we no longer went in the tub, we never let each other out of sight when we went swimming in the lake. You were with your friends, I was with mine. People drowned every year and the spot where our swimming area was located was considered especially dangerous. The shore fell away steeply, there was talk of underground caves, of unpredictable currents that would drag you into them if you swam too deep underwater. Be careful, our mother said, watch out for each other is what we understood. The swimming area was at the bottom of a hill. You could look down at the swimmers from the upper sunbathing lawn and see not just their heads but their entire bodies in the dark green water. You could follow their movements in the water, could see if they sank gradually or thrashed about because: before someone drowns, he usually has cramps, the lifeguard told us, and: when someone’s floundering, he needs help.
I didn’t let you out of my sight and sometimes, when you and your friends got rowdy and dunked each other underwater, I got so worked up I wanted to slap you. You just laughed at me. But when I swam out or jumped from the raft again and again with my friends, I would see you standing on the upper lawn, watching, even after you said, whatever you want to do.
Once someone really did drown. I was watching him closely at the time. At eleven-years-old, I’d never seen someone like that. He’s Tunisian, people said, he lives with Mrs. Rindlisbacher, she brought him back from vacation, though he could be her son. He lay on the raft and glistened in the sun. He helped my friend and me lift our inflatable mats onto the ra
ft as we threw them into the water and jumped onto them again and again. He stretched out his hand, pulled us up, laughed with us, and even, after a while, started pushing us off the raft just before we were about to jump, again and again. I forgot you for him, forgot to keep an eye on you, forgot so completely that I didn’t even know if you were still there. At some point, the Tunisian dived off the raft and swam out to sea with strong, quick strokes. Suddenly he raised an arm and shouted something no one understood. Help, my friend and I translated on the raft, and a few swimmers looked at us in astonishment, others with irritation, we didn’t need any help. Out there, we screamed, don’t you see, out there! The lifeguard dived into the water, T-shirt, whistle, and all, but he was too slow. Get the scuba diver, he shouted before even reaching the Tunisian, who had just gone under.
Because of the hill, the helicopter landed in the middle of the shore road, and traffic was blocked. All was quiet. We gathered around the paramedics and watched the emergency doctor in silence as he pushed on the dead man’s chest with all his body weight. A gush of water came out, a gush of blood, nothing more. You slipped your hand into mine and squeezed. We got home late for dinner and mother scolded us. You looked at me, we didn’t say anything and were sent to bed without dinner.
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