The 13.5 Lives of Captain Bluebear

by Walter Moers

  ‘That was one of the Invisibles,’ Chemluth explained.

  ‘Invisible people, you mean?’

  ‘Gah. They’re invisible.’

  Side by side, Chemluth and I made our way in silence to the Ilstatna, the big shopping street where we hoped to drum up some breakfast. Chemluth had become rather subdued, perhaps because he felt embarrassed to have landed me in such a predicament.

  He made strenuous efforts to cadge a few pyras and placate me with a modest breakfast at a Wolpertinger chess café, where Wolpertingers sat over their chess boards from early morning onwards, growling angrily whenever their opponent made a move.

  After the events of the night I realized that anyone who hoped to survive in this city needed a roof over his head. For that you needed money, and to get money you needed a job. I was firmly resolved to look for work. Chemluth found this a highly unappealing idea.

  ‘Work?’ he said with distaste. ‘No, let’s go busking. I’ll sing, you dance.’

  ‘I’m not a dancing bear.’

  ‘Gah,’ he sighed. ‘I realize that.’

  Various jobs

  Finding work in Atlantis was no problem. For the first few weeks Chemluth and I worked in a furdressing salon. There was always a demand for hairpickers, whose job it was to remove tufts of hair from combs and brushes, sort them into their various types, and deliver them to the wigmakers. We spent our days and nights teasing troll hair out of brushes, sorting it carefully, and putting it in paper bags. It wasn’t exactly pleasant, coaxing former cave-dwellers’ often rank and greasy hair out of a comb, especially when you got your fingers bitten by the lice that infested it.

  We soon moved on to one of the spitting taverns that employed sweepers to clear away the nauseating mishmash of sawdust and spittle and scatter fresh sawdust in its place, twenty-four hours a day. It was easy work, but not particularly hygienic. You had to be constantly on your guard to dodge jets of saliva, because sweepers were the customers’ favourite target.

  Working for the bloodbroker

  Our next employer was a bloodbroker. You could work in such establishments as a labeller responsible for ensuring that the many different kinds of blood did not get mixed up. This was a definite step up the professional ladder. I felt like a salesman in a wine merchant’s. You had to have a precise knowledge of each type of blood in stock, determine its origin, blood group and vintage, and tell whether it came from a troll, a dwarf, an elf, or some other creature.

  There was green blood from Irish goblins, white blood from Flemish aquasprites, blue blood from aristocratic Norselanders, yellow blood from Rickshaw Demons, and, of course, red blood of every shade ranging from dark red Minotaur blood to the translucent red of the Hackonians (a rosé, so to speak).

  It was not overly pleasant to watch our Werewolf bosses at work. Anyone who sold his blood was not only looked down on but treated accordingly. On one occasion, in the days before I started work at the bloodbroker’s, I myself had donated some blood. I was made to sit on a crude wooden chair while one of the Werewolves prepared to insert the needle. Then he bent over me and asked, ‘With or without anaesthetic?’

  ‘With, please,’ I replied.

  The last thing I saw was his fist as it slammed into my jaw.

  The House of Horrors

  After that we worked as ‘screamers’ for a waxworks. Bearing in mind that Yetis and Rickshaw Demons were an everyday sight in Atlantis, the reader may perhaps form some idea of the horrific exhibits a waxworks had to display in order to terrify the city’s inhabitants. It was our job to hide behind the wax figures and, if customers were not sufficiently intimidated, freeze the blood in their veins with spine-chilling screams.

  Although this was quite fun for a few days, we grew hoarser and hoarser. Besides, the job was not without its dangers, and we abandoned it after our third set-to with a family of Yetis.

  It would undoubtedly be easier to list the jobs we didn’t sample than the ones we actually took. To name only some, we worked as street sweepers and lamp trimmers, leaflet distributors and cemetery gardeners, chess café waiters and trouser pressers, errand boys and night watchmen, barkers and billboard scrapers, newspaper boys and fish sorters – none of them forms of activity requiring much in the way of qualifications. I should have liked to do a job that made the most of my comprehensive Nocturnal Academy education, but this was harder than I had thought.

  To obtain a teaching post you had to have spent years working your way up through Atlantis’s intricate educational system, and nearly every learned profession required hard-to-get permits from mysterious government departments. You could get nowhere without a Norselander rubber stamp, and that was available only to those who queued up for months on end, paid bribes to the competent authority, or had a Norselander in the family. All the professions were controlled by obscure committees. In short, organized chaos prevailed here as elsewhere. So I resigned myself to these temporary jobs until a profession worthy of my qualifications came my way. The high point of my career to date was topping-spreader in a Pooph pizzeria. And Chemluth was my assistant.

  Chemluth the womanizer

  Chemluth Havanna, I regret to say, was an inveterate womanizer. He went in search of suitable partners whenever time permitted. Even during the period we spent trying a wide variety of temporary jobs, I counted seventy-seven occasions on which he made assignations with Atlanteans of the feminine gender. I’ve never quite grasped how he managed it. Let’s not beat about the bush: Chemluth was a dwarf, and dwarfs are small by definition. He wasn’t particularly handsome either, what with his potato nose and clawed feet, but he evidently had what it took. He had only to accost some completely unknown female in the street, and within half an hour he would be holding hands with her in a café and crooning romantic rain-forest ditties in her ear.

  Whether it was his fiery gaze or the numerous Rs he rolled in his throat, no Atlantean female of any species was proof against his charms. He dated dwarfs, gnomes, Norselanders, elves, druidesses, and once, even, a Yeti’s fiancée. This earned him a thorough thrashing from her Yeti brothers.

  But none of these relationships lasted longer than a day, and the reason for their swift dissolution was always the same.

  ‘Gah, not enough hair,’ Chemluth would sigh whenever he returned from one of his assignations.

  He hankered after a girl that had more hair than all the rest – no ordinary pipe dream, but such was Chemluth’s ideal – and even in a city like Atlantis, which harboured many creatures even more hirsute than a bear, he failed to find the female of his dreams.

  The corkscrew tower

  We were now able to afford a small apartment in East Lisnatat: two rooms, kitchen, and a lavatory on the landing (which we unfortunately had to share with several Bluddums). It was situated in one of Atlantis’s five Babylonian corkscrew towers. These were gigantic skyscrapers in the shape of truncated cones with huge stairways spiralling up the outside, hence their name. All the towers had been left half-finished, the Babylonians’ typical mode of construction and one that doubtless accounted for the fact that they never really managed to gain a foothold in the real estate business. No one had ever completed these ruins because of their total failure to comply with building regulations, so City Hall leased them at extremely low rents rather than leave them unoccupied and abandon yet another building to the Kackertratts.

  Another reason for the affordable rent was the exterior stairway. This being the only means of reaching your apartment, the higher up you lived the more strenuous the climb – and the lower the rent. We lived on the 200th floor, right at the top. The view of Atlantis was enough to knock you sideways. So was the wind that blew in through the unglazed windows.

  But on balmy summer nights we enjoyed sitting outside on the stone steps, watching the blue streaks of greased lightning that flickered all over the enormous city. Whole streets would become rivers of blue light for seconds at a time, while we sat up there like gods, as if we had created it all. />
  Life in a Babylonian corkscrew tower may safely be described as adventurous. Only the more reckless and less vertigo-prone denizens of Atlantis dared to occcupy these half-ruined buildings, a fact that made them risky to live in. Our own tower was populated mainly by Troglotrolls, Mountain Dwarfs, Bluddums, and Yetis, an uncouth bunch with little consideration for their neighbours. The South Zamonian Mountain Dwarfs celebrated at least one wedding a week because they were always swapping spouses, and every wedding was the occasion of a riotous party at which all their relations were present by invitation and a brass band played Mountain Dwarf music. Mountain Dwarf Music was played on phnagguffs, instruments resembling alphorns with cymbals mounted on them. The phnagguffists bashed the latter with an iron drumstick while blowing into the mouthpiece. Phnagguffs were so long that they projected out of the windows, which made the noise pollution even worse, but this counted for little because there wasn’t a door or window pane in the entire building. The rest of the wedding guests did their utmost to drown the phnagguff music with curses, that being the traditional way in which South Zamonian Mountain Dwarfs congratulate a bride and groom.

  There was no point in complaining, not unless you thought it desirable to be beaten up by a gang of Mountain Dwarfs and dangled upside down from the 200th floor until you apologized, a procedure to which Chemluth was subjected at six o’clock one morning, when he begged a Mountain Dwarf brass band at least to muffle their iron drumsticks with hand towels.

  The Bluddums in the next-door apartment were clearly in some shady line of business. They slept by day, snoring loudly for the most part, and were visited at night by other Bluddums with whom they performed strange rituals that entailed coughing in unison into tin buckets. When a Bluddum goes to the lavatory you mustn’t expect him to emerge for three hours. You will also have to wait another hour before you can enter it without losing consciousness, and the noises he produces inside are even more horrific than those he makes when coughing into a tin bucket.

  The Yetis, though good-natured types at heart, had a regrettable tendency to sleepwalk when the moon was full. They would breeze into other people’s apartments and throw out any pieces of furniture small enough to go through the windows. No one had the temerity to wake a somnambulant Yeti because it was rumoured that someone had risked it and gone the way of his furniture.

  Getting home could be a perilous adventure in itself, particularly in winter, when the outside stairway was slippery with ice and a blizzard was blowing, or during violent summer thunderstorms, when the shafts of lightning made you feel like a target in a shooting gallery.

  All our homes were open to the elements, as I have said, so a little cloud could sail in one window, deposit its load of rain on the living-room carpet, and disappear out the other. During thunderstorms, dense black masses of cloud would come rolling in and blind us until some ball lightning exploded inside them. The reader can have no idea how loud a thunderclap sounds at source. One went off right beside my head while I was asleep, and I’ve had this high-pitched whistle in my left ear ever since.

  On hot summer days our elevated position was a great advantage because we were always fanned by a cool breeze, but in winter the apartment was constantly blanketed in snow. We built ourselves a little igloo to sleep in until the spring sunshine melted it.

  But the apartment was our home, my first real home, paid for out of money I had earned myself (120 copper pyras a month) and relatively safe from vampires and Kackertratts, none of which would venture into a building occupied mainly by uncouth louts with hands the size of coal shovels.

  Only when the earth shook (as it did at least once a week) did we wish we lived in a smaller, stouter structure. It was said that no building in Atlantis had ever been demolished by an earthquake, but in my opinion it was only a matter of time before this happened, at least in the case of a corkscrew tower. The walls and floors groaned like spirits in torment, plaster rattled down cavities, and furniture promenaded across the apartment as if it had come to life. Earthquakes could be life-threatening if you were on the outside stairway, and I was nearly shaken off into space on two occasions.

  The Pooph pizzeria

  Working at the Pooph pizzeria was the first job I had in Atlantis that taught me a lifelong skill, namely, cooking. The restaurant’s head chef and proprietor, a potbellied Pooph named Nabab Yeo, was a master of his craft, and had been awarded four golden spoons by the Association of Norselander Gourmets.

  Pizzas, being designed for fast-food customers and counter sales, were not the only items on the menu.

  The back kitchen was where Nabab cooked in earnest for a regular clientele of well-heeled epicures. Whenever I got the chance I used to peer over his shoulder and watch him prepare his specialities.

  Nabab Yeo

  That was how I learnt to braise pork chops in beer, simmer boiled beef to a turn, rinse scalded artichokes, and gratinate oysters (with a mixture of chopped spinach, Gruyère cheese, and breadcrumbs). Nabab showed me the only authentic way of preparing spaghetti (boil for twelve minutes, don’t rinse, simply remove from the hot water, allow it to drain, pour melted butter over it, fold in two raw egg yolks, squeeze a clove of garlic over it, mix well, and serve); how to simmer an oxtail over a low flame until you can flake the meat with a spoon (cooking time: five hours minimum); how to poach eggs in red wine till they’re soft as wax; how to beat a veal cutlet (with the flat of a large knife, never with a meat mallet!); what cheese goes best with rocket (South Zamonian pecorino); and how to eat a poussin (in your fingers only). Nabab not only divulged a never-ending series of recipes but knew the correct answers to the most abstruse nutritional problems. Being a historian of dietetics in his spare time, he was a walking gourmet’s encyclopedia. He could tell you the calorific value of every foodstuff, both existing and extinct. He knew every edible plant and spice that had ever grown in Zamonia. There used, for instance, to be a spice named pelverin that could turn any food into a delicacy. It was extracted from the pelv, a plant the Bluddums had eradicated because they thought it harboured the Devil. Nabab told me of plants that yielded yogurt, of the legendary megastrawberries of Dullsgard, which could reputedly grow to the size of a house, and of pimmagons, peat eggs that tasted like baked bananas.

  But he waxed truly rhapsodic when he spoke of his special field, the blending of flavours. Nabab Yeo believed that a menu should embody as many different ingredients and courses, spices and calories, as possible. It was breathtaking, the audacious combinations of tastes he produced. I once saw him braise a fish in honey and deep-fry a salted peach. He stuffed chickens with liquid chocolate and tossed noodles in cinnamon, but none of his customers ever complained; on the contrary, the restaurant rang with their cries of delight. The greater the number of foods a creature consumed in its life, the more meaningful its existence: such was Nabab Yeo’s philosophy.

  I was not privileged to assist him, because Chemluth and I worked shifts in the pizza section, where I had risen to the rank of senior topping-spreader thanks to a bright idea that occurred to me one day: I took one pizza, complete with topping, and superimposed it on another. This double pizza not only led to my promotion but became one of the restaurant’s best-sellers. Chemluth, my assistant, deftly tossed me the olives, onion rings, slices of salami, sardines, mushrooms, and gobbets of tuna and ham with which I decorated my works of art. There were always a few Atlanteans watching us at work with their noses flattened against our window. This presented Chemluth with a welcome opportunity to show off in front of members of the fair sex and make dates with them, especially when the females in question had exceptionally luxuriant heads of hair.

  At home, whenever we weren’t trying to grab some sleep between Mountain Dwarf weddings, I used to pass on some of the knowledge I’d acquired at the Nocturnal Academy. In return, Chemluth taught me a few flamencação movements.

  At night, smitten with homesickness, he would speak of his native tobacco plantations. Hearing him sob as he raved about their
creeper-entwined beauty, I couldn’t help recalling Qwerty Uiop’s equally emotional accounts of the 2364th Dimension.

  Wednesdays in Atlantis

  Wednesdays were the best thing about Atlantis. The middle of the week was a traditional holiday there. Everyone stopped work and celebrated the fact that half the week was over.

  On Wednesdays the whole of the city’s working population slept late, picnicked in the parks, or attended one of the cultural functions of which Atlantis had more to offer than any city in the known world.

  * * *

  Pizza Sandwich á la Bluebear

  Ingredients for the dough: 10 grams yeast, 200 grams flour, pinch of sugar, 1/4 teaspoonful salt

  Topping: 150 grams mozzarella, four puréed tomatoes, six sardines, four slices of salami, five halved olives, 100 grams raw ham, one can of tuna, some fresh basil, onion rings, capers, grated parmesan.

  Method of preparation: Mix the dough ingredients with two tablespoonfuls of water, knead well, leave for 30 minutes, then roll out. Apply topping in the following order: tomato purée, mozarella, remaining ingredients. Repeat the entire process, cook both pizzas in the oven for 15 minutes, place one pizza on top of the other, and serve piping hot.

  * * *

  A glance at one page in the Atlantean Advertiser revealed a whole host of current attractions. The following are only a selection:

  Zemm Zeggliu and the Norselanders, a combo from West Zamonia, were playing at a rave in the Banned Bunker, a kind of subterranean dance hall beneath one of the city’s lakes. There were no genuine Norselanders in the band, of course (they would have been far too snobbish), merely Bluddums disguised as Norselanders. This was pretty daring in itself, because the Norselanders were very quick to take offence and didn’t hesitate to sue other creatures for defamation.