by Henning Koch
Who the hell was she?
Have You Met Lumpa?
* * *
WHEN SUSAN OPEN THE DOOR SHE LOOKED UTTERLY UNCHANGED, STILL WEARING THAT AIR HOSTESS UNIFORM AFTER ALL THOSE YEARS: a blue cotton/polyester skirt to her knees; black indistinct shoes with low heels; a white silk blouse; and a splash of Hermés scarf in case anyone should be so bold as to glance at her tubular white throat.
Also: that trademark smile, dazzling, slightly insincere.
“Robert, where have you been? Haven’t seen you for an absolute age! Come in!” She led me into her nondescript suburban Cambridge home, and I followed her down an intestinal corridor. “Earl Grey or Darjeeling?” she called out over her shoulder, on her way into the kitchen.
“I don’t suppose you have any of the non-smoked variety?”
“Ha! Now sit down and tell me everything.” Returning, she sank into a sofa, from which she surveyed me, crossing her hands in her lap. “Are you still keeping up with Jane?”
“Jane? Who’s Jane?”
“Jane. That girl doing philosophy, the one who lisped. I thought she was lovely.”
“Susan, that was twenty years ago.”
“Well some people do stay in touch, you know.”
“Jane is living in Rotterdam. Married to an optician, I think.”
“Sounds boring, the way you put it.” She wrinkled her nose, smiled. “Mind you, who am I to say anything? I live in a bungalow. I never imagined for one moment I would end up in a bungalow. Robert, I’m your classic spinster, although I still get men sniffing at me. I do everything you’d expect me to, and of course I’m far too middle class not to play bridge.” She stood up. “Now what about that tea? Or would you prefer something stronger?”
“I could have a gin.”
“Of course you could, Robert. Gin is one of life’s little survival kits.”
She walked over to a sideboard and mixed me a drink, adding a couple of ice-cubes. “What about your wife, what happened to her?”
“You know about my wife?”
“Robert, I know absolutely everything. It’s because I’m a letter-writer.”
“So you’ll know she left me, then. Or I left her.”
“People are terribly vague, aren’t they?”
“I suppose I made myself impossible. So she walked out on me while I was abroad. By the time I got back she’d already gone, taking most of the furniture. Made one feel it was a different house. No towels. Dust everywhere. Mattress on the floor. I grew to bloody hate London, I really did. That’s when I moved to the Languedoc.”
“Dear Robert must be the only person in the world who hated living in a nice comfortable Georgian house in London.”
“Oh I can assure you many people hate London, but it’s not actually London they hate at all.”
“What do they hate, Robert?” She laughed with that plaintive crystal sound of hers, like someone about to burst into tears. “Oh this is just like university! You haven’t changed a bit.”
“They hate themselves, Susan. People hate themselves, but they blame it on everyone else.” I stopped, and looked at her. “You seem quite happy. Content, really.”
“Oh I am. I love my life, small as it is, unimportant, all my dreams gone up in smoke. Dreams are enemies that come to us in our youth.”
I let that grand statement hang in the air, after considering it from all angles.
In the corner of my eye I sensed a movement at floor level. A kind of wobbling, lolloping motion. And then I saw it: A square, grey jellified lump propelling itself over the carpet, about the size of a small dog. It moved towards us, taking about a minute to cross the floor.
“Have you met Lumpa?” Susan asked. “My Japanese pet.”
“What is it?”
“He’s a kind of amoeba. A single-cell organism, they call it, which is rather a rude way of describing a living thing. I mean, we don’t refer to humans as bipeds, do we?”
“It doesn’t speak Japanese, I take it?”
“Don’t be silly. How would I communicate with it if it spoke Japanese?” She laughed. “I just mean it was invented in Japan.”
“Do you take it for walks?”
“Don’t be ridiculous! Lumpa would hate that. Lumpa likes to lounge around the house with me, watching television and reading books. Don’t you Lumpa?”
By now the thing had reached her legs, and was more or less wobbling against her ankles. Susan reached down and stroked its smooth skin. It trembled slightly when it sensed human contact. “This is the only thing that’s ever loved me,” she added. “And that includes you, Robert. Most men don’t like cuddling. You know that, being one yourself. In fact they’d rather not see you at all, unless they’ve got nookie on their minds.”
I looked away to avoid something pointed in her stare. Surely she did not think I had come for that?
Susan had obviously grown a bit strange in her isolation. Then, when I thought about it, I realized she’d always been strange. Before I could think of anything to say, she stood up. “I think it’s time for your lunch, isn’t it?”
I was overcome by dread at the thought of some ghastly comfort food lurking in her oven, and I was just about to open my mouth to signal that I had already eaten, when she disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a bowl and a whisk. She cracked two eggs into some milk, then whisked the mixture.
Lumpa had already begun moving towards me, the next available source of warmth. Thankfully once it sensed her coming back it stopped and lolloped back to her.
She patted it. “They’re very easy to feed, far easier than dogs or cats. They’re much more human, somehow; plus, no hair on the carpet.”
I gave the wobbly thing a sceptical look. “What’s human about it?”
“Now he’s going to have his dinner, aren’t you, Lumpa?” said Susan. “I love his warm skin. He’s very sensual, you know, considering he reproduces by splitting himself in two. That means he doesn’t even have a thingy.”
She stroked its back and then, once it was practically vibrating with pleasure, poured the contents of the bowl into a little depression she had made in its back or stomach or head, whatever the case was. Lumpa, as I will condescend to call it, seemed to be savoring the egg mixture, which it absorbed like a sponge.
Susan dipped her finger into her gin and tonic, and ran it across Lumpa’s back.
“Today there’s a treat,” she said, “Because Robert’s come to see us after all these years.”
We sat in silence for a while. I was puzzled, never having seen a large amoeba before, and also repulsed by the whole thing: a lonely woman lavishing her thwarted love on a single-cell pet, watched by a lover of old come to revisit what he knew twenty years ago.
As if reading my mind, she continued. “Some people can’t stand him. Many of my friends think I’ve gone absolutely potty.”
“Really?”
“Yes, and you do too, Robert. Don’t be so bloody devious. You were always devious, and nothing’s changed, has it?”
“Why do you call it Lumpa?”
“Because that’s what it said on the packet. When he arrived in the post he was in a dormant state, he only started moving around once he was fed.”
I sat listening for a long while without interrupting her. In fact, I watched her with growing alarm, much as one does a mental patient in a hospital, wondering how much further she would go. Would there be an end to the madness, or was it infinite? This was just how she used to be while we lay postprandial and post-coital in her bed in the hall of residence at university. In those days I had listened with half a mind.
“When those dreadful people flew the planes into the World Trade Center,” she began, “Lumpa would have survived. He’d have been fine. He would have jumped out of the window, and when he hit the ground he would have been smashed into hundreds of little pieces. But every little piece would crawl off and start a new life, every little piece of Lumpa would still be Lumpa, every piece would grow and then divide a
nd sub-divide, because Lumpa can’t be extinguished. He has a great zest for life. He is always the same, absolutely content. He wobbles along like a dear little thing. He’s not exactly handsome but he doesn’t mind. He’s never in a bad mood, always affectionate.”
The image of Lumpa in a thousand pieces on a Manhattan sidewalk was pathetic. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair.
To cap it all, Susan unscrewed the lid from a jar of Marmite and spread some of the foul-smelling paste over Lumpa’s back.
Lumpa shivered and seemed to savor the goodness of B12.
“Now wait there,” said Susan. “Digest while I rustle up some lunch for Robert.”
Before I could say anything she had gone into the kitchen to wash her hands, returning with plates and cutlery. I could see her opening the oven where she was harboring what looked like a mushroom omelette. While she was bustling about in there, I examined Lumpa in more detail. On a conceptual level, I found its being deeply offensive, the way it would have crawled quite happily to anyone, possibly even a serial killer or wife-beater, giving to each its very own unconditional love. Even on a microcosmic level there was something disgusting about little tiny cells of Lumpa wobbling about in search of sustenance.
On an analytical level, I realized this was the very basis of all life on earth. The very air we breathed was full of minute Lumpas, all pursuing their meaningless lives without any awareness of their purpose.
I forced myself to touch Lumpa. Its skin was warm, quite dry, almost like human skin.
As soon as Lumpa felt my touch, it started vibrating and I fancied I could make out some strange throbbing sounds from its jellified body.
I pulled my hand away, but Lumpa was not content. Lumpa started coming for me. There was something absolutely irrepressible about its movement, and I realized that wherever I went in the world, Lumpa would always be following me like a heat-seeking blob. Whenever I slept, I would wake up to find it nestling against my body.
Susan called out from the kitchen. “Do you want cheese on your omelette?”
Her question was like an accusation. She must have known that I wanted nothing less than a cheese and mushroom omelette.
“No thanks, Susan! No cheese!”
I picked up a little fork from my tea-tray and with all my might drove it up to the hilt into Lumpa’s body. For a moment it stopped moving and seemed to shiver with discomfort, then redoubled its efforts to get even closer to me, in a soft, warm place where nothing could hurt it.
The fork stuck out of its back like an absurd mast. There was no blood, of course, just a tiny bit of ooze.
I stood up and very quietly tiptoed down the carpeted corridor to the front door, which clicked too noisily behind me.
Keeping an eye over my shoulder, I walked smartly back to my car.
Little Rabbit
* * *
BACK IN THOSE DAYS, I WASN'T SLEEPING SO WELL. I kept having dreams about being a criminal on trial. In the dreams, it was a stifling hot summer somewhere in Central Europe. I sat beside my lawyer through interminable afternoons, listening to the shuffling and fidgeting of the spectators behind me. Overhead, the high windows let in a stream of filtered sunlight, palely reflecting the brilliance of its source.
Once awake, I made notes in my dream diary:
“The judge is in his early sixties, a stern and judicious presence with silver temples. His hard voice rings out, and as I listen to his ranting speeches globules of his spit arc wildly across the courtroom…”
My therapist said I had melodramatic tendencies, although she assured me this was quite normal. At night I’d lie there in my bed, wondering at my transformation into a malcontent. Where was that well-adjusted young man I used to be, the graduate with his loafers, his navy blue sweater, his straightforward willingness to discuss Keats’s letters?
A Brazilian samba-bard wrote in one of his songs: “I am not navigating the sea, the sea is navigating me.” This seemed to touch on some pertinent truth, as a vast ocean beyond my understanding had entered my body, leaving me gasping.
One day I woke up and things snapped into place, snapped into place and fell apart like a rotten fruit.
Until recently, I’d been living a fairly satisfactory life. Like most of my friends I considered myself a potential film director or, failing that, an installation artist or multimedia specialist. I spent a lot of my time sitting around in cafés discussing films and exhibitions, or filling in forms, grant applications and such like. I lived in a fantastic apartment in Belsize Park, London, on a street where Tim Burton and Helena Bonham-Carter were often seen, he wearing his weird pink airman’s goggles, she like a bony, sexy witch wrapped up in a feather boa. I used to have fantasies of going up to Tim and telling him about one of my projects, director to director so to speak, but of course I had never directed a film.
In those days I was always planning my next move, trying to figure out how to shin up the greasy old pole. At the beginning of May each year, regular as a migrating grey-lag goose, I’d pack my suitcase and head off to Cannes Film Festival for another round of taunts and ritual humiliation devised by fatter and more devious men or sharp-heeled castrators.
My efforts seemed to count for nothing, none of my feature film scripts had ever gone into production. Most of my disposable income was spent on coffee and snacks in a local Soho café where a whole bunch of fledgling screenwriters liked to sit with their laptops, thoughtfully scratching their immature beards while knocking up the latest magnum opus and waiting for Tim Burton to walk past. But what were we all really waiting for?—that’s the question I ask myself now.
That famous oasis we yearned for—the one where Warren Beatty and Julie Christie sat conversing pleasantly on one’s Malibu terrace, as one emerged firing witty, semi-automatic wise-cracks—was really a desert. It was a euphemism for a large, comfortable house in Hampstead Heath full of kitchen machines and haunted by a frustrated woman with large haunches who seemed to spend most of her time either trying not to eat cake or wishing we’d go out for dinner more often. The prospect of divorce hung over the whole scenario like a vulture.
Each morning, as one opened one’s eyes and heard Julie Christie cackling out there on the terrace while Warren lit his sixty-third cigarette, it grew clearer that nothing but ambition had led one here. The substantive nightmare was composed of fantasy.
For that reason I had chosen to remain single though I was thirty-six. A snide friend of mine by name of Clarissa taunted me once that I did not want a real woman with warts and blemishes, I wanted a Barbie doll that was alive. Which was not strictly true. I don’t find Barbie very attractive. Her hips are non-existent and she’s sickeningly neurotic with all her accessories. Imagine the hours by the mirror before she’d leave the house, scarcely able to walk in her pin-cushion shoes? If you asked Barbie who Krishnamurti was, she’d probably very sweetly tell you he was a Bengali corn-snack or possibly a lesser actor with a walk-on part in a Bollywood musical.
Women, for the most part, were in the mud-bath with the rest of us, grappling and kicking and farting in the slime while crowds of barbarians stood roaring and heckling and clapping. Women read erudite books on their sexuality, invented whole creeds of female empowerment which centered on the sacred right of twiddling the nether parts of whomsoever they liked. Then of course there were the diagrams of the topography of one’s genitalia in the glossy self-help manuals: If you press here, you will feel a pleasant sensation. Slide your finger over this thing, and an immediate gushing orgasm will surprise you greatly.
In my home there was no food bubbling in the cooking pots, no irate thirty-something woman eating celery and spending hours on the treadmill, no teeming children rampaging through the house, throwing water-balloons at each other and short-circuiting the television.
And now we come to the operative point. In my diaries, all packed up now and kept in a locked suitcase under the sofa, I had some poems I wrote about a fictitious daughter named Little Rabbit. When Little Rabbi
t came along, she would change my world. With her radiance and energy she would transform the universe and, like a bright beam of love, be the flame under the morning kettle, the key in the ignition, the electrical current in the fan keeping me cool through the summers. Little Rabbit would march into my existence in the manner of the Red Army entering Warsaw, looting the art museum and aiming bazookas at the Cabinet Office with its hushed corridors and waxed floors.
In my poem, I wrote, “Little Rabbit, you are not very polite,/ But in your way you will redeem/ Each thing I ever felt…”
And this was where I always got stuck, when I was with my shrink. You see, I felt it was wrong expecting some poor little kid to redeem an eternal child like me. My shrink disagreed. She told me these types of hopes were metaphorical on the whole, a way of structuring reality to make it palatable to the suffering individual. Furthermore, when you’re wiping your baby’s arse at four in the morning, it’s important to bear in mind that this screaming and obnoxious little thing is actually your redemption.
She also explained that people tended to see themselves in a dramatic sense, as figures on a fresco or perhaps an Etruscan vase. Running, reaching, singing, playing a dulcimer, or kissing. Love is that moment when the figure on the urn suddenly breaks through the void and catches up with the supreme immortal runner whose sinewy legs confidently scale mountains; the moment when the protagonist supersedes humanity, outpacing divinity for an instant and snatching the bunch of golden grapes out of the hands of the outraged god; then, bare feet drumming against the warm sandy earth, slowing down and coming to rest in a grove somewhere at the edge of the world where a woman waits, a woman with dark moist eyes.
After this victory comes the life of repose, the earned stillness, the sacred fire burning in the evenings, the meat dripping with fat, the fragrance of olive leaves crackling as they burn, and from that time the children start coming forth like a sort of ultimate harvest, perfectly made like tiny Swiss watches, all the parts spinning and turning and whirring and ticking.