by Heinz Helle
Praise for Heinz Helle’s Superabundance
‘[A] philosophical tour de force … which aptly showcases Helle’s deadpan humour. This is a linguistically daring portrait of an overwhelmed mind’ Financial Times
‘Fragmentary prose is welded by a hypnotic voice … the unnamed narrator of Heinz Helle’s debut describes his life in New York with remorseless logic’ Guardian
‘Beckettian … excellent … funny’ Independent
‘Darkly humorous … Helle shows us the world with a rare clear-sightedness’ Scotland on Sunday
‘A work of deadpan brilliance and unflinching honesty, chasing down lines of thought normally lost in the cacophony of our daily lives. I had always assumed I was fully conscious until I read this’ Alex Christofi, author of Glass
‘A nearly flawless, driving history of total alienation’ Die Zeit
‘So modern, so cool, so strange’ Hubert Winkels
EUPHORIA
HEINZ HELLE
translated by Kári Driscoll
With the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3 Holford Yard
Bevin Way
London WC1X 9HD
www.serpentstail.com
Euphoria was first published as Eigentlich müssten wir tanzen by
Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin in 2015
Copyright © 2015 by Heinz Helle
Translation copyright © 2017 Kári Driscoll
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author
A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78283 277 5
for Chris
I stood on the shore and talked to the surf BLABLA,
behind me the ruins of Europe.
Heiner Müller
I’m only doing this because I want to go to Heaven.
Sido
1
When it’s too cold to lie down at night we remain standing. We stand close together, back to back to side to front. We turn slowly over the course of the night so that each of us gets a turn in the middle, and from time to time each one of us has to be on the outside. When the sun comes up we look past each other, avoiding eye contact, and we can clearly see out of the corners of our eyes that the others are also looking in some other direction. Each of us is looking somewhere else, each into his own distant nothing, or everything, it doesn’t matter, we don’t look each other in the eye, that would be painful, a different and far greater pain than looking at the sun as it rises. Usually it’s cloudy, and we continue to look past each other and feel relief at the receding cold and the increasing light and we stand huddled together, almost like we did before, on the underground, at rush hour.
2
In the twilight we see a kid. It is sitting a little away from the road, which isn’t really a road so much as a path, and it is sitting upright and casually and introverted, facing the charred remains of a tent, which it is hitting at regular intervals with a rotten branch. We stop. Strangely, the form and circumstance of the child’s body do not trigger any protective impulse in us, nor any emotion or warmth. We look at the kid, see the thin hair on the back of his head, the too-short neck, the short, soft limbs carrying out violent, senseless movements with great seriousness and concentration, as if this were some sort of scientific experiment involving hitting sheets of nylon repeatedly with a charred piece of wood. The kid still looks quite well fed. He will last another week at least, assuming it doesn’t suddenly turn colder. Maybe his mother is just off fetching water or something. We leave him alone. As we start moving again the kid turns around and stares at us. I’m afraid he will start crying because I don’t know what we would do to get him to stop. But he just sizes us up, one after the other, his face totally expressionless. Then he turns to face the burnt-out collapsed tent and hits it with his charred stick again: smack, smack, smack. We move on. After a little while we find his parents, lying in the bushes with their skulls smashed open.
3
The next day it’s darker and a light drizzle sets in, growing imperceptibly denser and denser. It is as if it’s not droplets of water that are falling on us, on the black tar and on the gravel crunching beneath our feet, but rather fine, unbroken streams, like the trickle of a thousand leaky taps. The type of rain whose intensity you don’t notice until you are soaked through, and you stop and look down at yourself and then up at the sky and shake your head in disbelief.
We get off the road. We walk through brown fields, traverse gentle hills, meadows and other open spaces whose function is unclear. Ahead of us is a gigantic, flat block. We walk towards it. It takes longer than we thought. It’s farther away than we thought. It is much, much bigger than we thought. The exterior walls are over thirty feet tall and punctuated by sliding doors of rusty steel and broken glass. Chimneys. A former factory, perhaps. As we circle the bare, angular cube in search of a way in, the rain gets heavier and the sound of the drops on the building’s roof is tinny and bright, it gets louder and less fragmentary and soon the building is transformed into one big resonance chamber, singing a single, high-pitched note.
We find a door frame. The door is gone. We go in, one after the other, and oddly the sound of the rain on the roof is barely audible on the inside. We are in a big, empty hall. The floor is littered with broken glass, abandoned campfires, it smells of old oil, and there are stains left behind by various substances that have seeped into the concrete. The assembly pits reveal that this used to be a place for servicing cars or farming machines. Apart from the stains, the floor, the walls, and the roof on which the rain is falling, there is nothing here. We leave the building and walk on, through the dense rainfall, back to the forest.
4
In the last light we reach a village. Here too all the windows are shuttered, the doors bolted. We encounter no one and find no indication of the inhabitants’ whereabouts. We go into a supermarket through the broken glass door. We walk up and down rows of empty and half-empty shelves. The floor is strewn with torn packaging, broken glass, dented aluminium and squashed cardboard boxes, and everything is shrouded in the inevitable, almost unbearable smell: the smell of all the things that were ever in a supermarket. Packaged soups, crisps, chocolate, cat food, drain cleaner, frozen lasagne, deodorant, beer, rotting meat. We find a pallet of water bottles and a couple of sticks of garlic bread still in their plastic packaging. With our bounty we withdraw into the warmest and safest room of the abandoned complex: the defrosted cold storage room. We eat, we drink, we sit in silence. It’s a good silence, a kind of, See, it’s not so bad, we can make it, we’ll find a way. And we savour the cold garlic bread. The butter tastes good when it’s this hard, you really have to bite it in order to taste the intense flavour. After the exertion of the past few days, the fat is like a revelation. Having made sure we can’t be locked in from the outside, we build a camp out of alternating layers of cardboard and plastic wrapping. We lie down side by side and then we cover ourselves with more layers of cardboard, resting our heads on wads of plastic, the bottles of mineral water within reach. Our breathing doesn’t just sound exhausted. It sounds peaceful.
5
/> A few weeks ago we were in the car. The autobahn was mostly empty, and on either side the grey-green alpine upland was covered in a thin layer of frost. The hard shoulder was covered in gravel and the dirt of weeks past. Another age. And the radio was playing a song that we all claimed not to know and never to have heard before, but now we were all roaring the chorus:
Euphoria!
Forever till the end of time
From now on, only you and I
We were flying up the Irschenberg – in actual fact we were driving, of course, but you always fly up the Irschenberg, never down it. The difference between coming and going is categorical. We were going fast, the noise of the revving engine sounded like courage and determination. To our right groaning lorries, creeping, crawling up the hill: pathetic beasts, fused with their drivers. A docile herd caught in the daily to and fro of the working week, which, to us, ever since we got in the car, had seemed as distant, harmless and controllable as death.
There were five of us. Drygalski, Gruber, Fürst, Golde, and me. We had packed eggs and milk, beer, mince, pasta, Nutella, everything except for bread, which we wanted to buy at the baker’s in the village, down in the valley. We had left the city behind us, the suburb where we had grown up together, the autobahn junctions, the carpet, furniture and DIY stores, the industrial estates that were home to companies with metal detectors and security guards and complicated English names that had something to do with computers. Two in the front, three in the back. We were packed in tight. The ones in the back could have held hands if they had wanted to, but that would have been gay, and in any case, notwithstanding the euphoria we felt at our communal forward motion, we also felt a certain distance from one another; after all, it would never be as much fun as it used to be, just more expensive each year, and really we were all getting too old for this stuff, and besides it now took us at least three days to recover from a decent bender.
On the crest of the Irschenberg, just as we saw the golden arches, one of us shouted, McFlurry!, and another one of us laughed, though the one driving just gave a tired smile and raced on, past the American fast food restaurant whose menu we had known off by heart before we had even learnt to play cards, if we ever even had, and then we drove steeply downhill. Through the wind-screen we saw the Inn valley spread out before us, dark green, empty and silent, all the way to the misty Alps, dissected by six straight lanes of civilisation, trailing on in shimmering red and white. The windscreen wipers squeaked.
6
The following morning we leave the village on foot and take the highway that runs the length of the valley. It takes us around the next mountain, through the next valley, past the next mountain. We pass signs with the names of towns that are probably deserted now, and no sooner have we passed them than we’ve forgotten them again. We see pylons with no wires between them, abandoned petrol stations, supermarkets, holiday homes, vacancy signs, here and there the burnt-out wreck of a car.
We get to a lake. The opposite shore is out of sight; this one is full of charred sailing boats, smashed furniture and bottles, empty packaging and articles of clothing. Bloated corpses. As if anything went away just because you throw it in the water. The only dissolution in sight is the way the gentle waves merge with the low-hanging grey clouds. We’ve quickly seen enough and turn away, towards the small town on the lake shore, the small town presumably built here for the fantastic view it provides of the lake on clear days. We head for the promenade. We walk across the gravel, past the debris, to the street and up the steps to a hotel. We cross a terrace strewn with uprooted parasols, tables and chairs. We walk through the open double doors into the deserted dining hall. Under a heap of dishes in the filthy kitchen we find an unopened bottle of condensed milk. The oily liquid leaves a film behind in our throats. The taste is irrelevant. We tell ourselves that it’s filling.
At the other end of town, in a cluster of low-rise buildings which, according to the adjacent sign, was once the industrial estate, we find an abandoned bowling alley. We walk down the steps, not knowing why, we just keep going. A dull grey falls on the lanes from the skylights overhead. There is no electricity. The bowling pins are gone, perhaps they’re in the pin setter, in any case we can’t see them. After a few minutes’ indecision, our eyes fall on the heavy balls with the three holes lying next to the lanes, dusty and detached, somehow completely normal. So we pick up one after the other and send them barrelling down the empty lanes into the darkness. We listen to them rolling along until they produce a dull thud in the inaccessible padded space behind where the target used to be.
7
In the grey light between the denuded trees the tarmac quickly starts to crack, pushed up by the roots, pushed down by heavy forestry machines. A few minutes later the road surface disintegrates completely, turns to gravel. The gravel thins out; the road becomes a path, the path becomes a track, and the track becomes open ground. I wonder if it’s just the road that is disappearing or if it’s everything, and whether you couldn’t see it as liberating not to have anything telling you which way to go, apart from the trees, wet and black, that emerge at regular intervals from the fog before disappearing behind us again. We avoid them. It is easy and advisable, but otherwise there is nothing to decide or to discuss about which direction we should go in. After a couple of hours we spot something to our right that doesn’t belong here. It isn’t dark, and it isn’t sticking vertically up out of the ground, or lying flat on it, or leaning against one of the other vertical, dark, wooden pillars of this sylvan world order. It is lying there contorted and spastic, seemingly thrown there. The trees around it are strangely splintered, strangely because the jagged splinters that remain after a branch has broken off usually aren’t as black and edgeless as the damp, soft bark. The thing has a round, heavily dented body and a long, thin tail with a fin or a flag at the end, and the thing is yellow, yellower than anything we’ve seen in weeks. We see the bent rotor blades, sticking out at crazy angles, like broken arms and legs. We see the dried blood from the pilot’s body, which is hanging halfway out of the cockpit. We see the smashed glass of the fuselage, the circle of stars on the blue rectangle on the tailfin. And then we see the four large, black letters on the side of the fuselage. And we find it hard to imagine that such people really existed, not too long ago, who would fly through the air observing the traffic conditions on the autobahns in Bavaria and Tyrol.
We search through the wreckage for anything we can use, then we search the bodies. We find a first aid kit, a toolbox, and a manual with international radio codes, but the radio is built-in and broken and none of us is tech-savvy enough to be able to get it out and repair it, so we leave the manual behind and move on. After an hour no one wants to carry the heavy toolbox any more so we leave it in the forest, and two hours later we abandon the first aid kit as well, and we trudge on through our steaming breath and the drizzle and think about the two pilots’ padded uniforms, and their boots and vests, and about how it’s all soaked in blood and rain, and that the only thing from the crash site that we’ve still got is the hammer from the toolbox, and the one carrying that hammer is me.
8
Just a few weeks ago I was in the air. I was completing step fifty-seven of a clearly defined fifty-eight step workflow for the eight hundred and ninety-sixth time, five hundred of which were during my training, four hundred and fifty in the simulator, fifty in the real world, so to speak, somewhere in the Arizona desert, where, together with two instructors from a major German airline, in an otherwise empty Boeing 737, ten times a day, for five days straight, I took off, flew around in a circle, landed, took off, flew in a circle, landed, and so on.
I was flying direct from Mauritius to Frankfurt and I had a little over eleven hours to remind myself that this was the profession I had wanted ever since I knew what a profession was. I was a pilot. The plane was fully booked. There were two hundred and twenty-nine people on board, about whom I knew only two things for certain: they had taken off with me from Mauritius, and
they wanted to land with me in Frankfurt. Unusually for me, I was trying to imagine the view from the open cockpit door, the view behind me, before take-off, before the first class curtains were drawn. I saw heads, each covering portions of the white antimacassars on the headrests. I saw hair. The hair was of all different colours: blond, black, white, grey, red or green or blue. Anyone could fly so long as they bought a ticket and had a passport. I saw ears. Big ears and small ears, hairy ears, round ears, wizened and stunted ears, sticky-out ears, and perfectly ordinary ears. I saw eyes. They were brown, green, black, blue, and they were not all looking straight ahead, in my direction, they were looking out of the window, at the newspaper in front of them, they were staring in silence at the tray table, which was stowed for take-off. I couldn’t see what they were wearing, but I knew they were wearing clothes of all conceivable colours and cuts, in all price ranges, in all styles and fabrics: jeans, suits, shorts, ribbed undershirts, viscose rayon underwear, cotton socks, nylon stockings, leather shoes, rubber running shoes, Birkenstock sandals. I sipped my coffee. I tried to imagine two hundred and twenty-nine hearts. I could feel my own heart beating.
I glanced at the instrument panel and carried out step fifty-eight: the pilot switches to autopilot. We had reached cruising altitude.
9
We are standing by a small artificial lake. The water looks green and blue and completely unnatural, and in the thick reeds on the shore you can see the traces of the farming machines they’ve pushed into the water. A tractor, a combine harvester, a cattle truck carrying cows or pigs or lambs – between the thick bars you can make out legs and heads there underwater, or bodies in any case, something, we don’t know what, but I think: animals. It is an animal transport after all. The silence is broken by a splashing, quiet but distinct, and out of the corner of my eye I can see what has landed in the water, and then I hear Drygalski’s voice: Have you lost your mind? he shouts, but Gruber just shrugs his shoulders.