by Joshua Cohen
Because it seems to me that standing amid the rubble you have a choice.
You can rebuild, or you can not rebuild, and if you decide to rebuild then will you rebuild the thing exactly as it was or will you make it new. Either you can go get the exact same masonry and the exact same woods and the semblant rugs and the Aryan atlas figures that uphold the pediment with your name done up in vermeil, to make as faithful a replica as tenable of what you’ve lost, or else you can just hit reset and find an alternate design—other materials—and maybe not even a hotel.
I had this thought at and about the Frankfurter Hof, of course—this outstanding reproduction of a hotel, stolid in its blockbound prewar glory, truly the architectural embodiment of everything the city surrounding it has always aspired to, just acquired and spiffed by a consortium of Sunni hoteliers, apparently—but because I know the future will demand the explicit, let me also state: the questions of whether to make, or not to make, of whether to remake or make new, are just as germane to literature.
“Did Elisabeth Block check in yet?”
The Reception slab was a barricade protecting taste from the shabbiness of frequent flyers. The Hofmeister, Herr Portier, uniformed like a general, had a phone on hold over each shoulder like epaulets—“Are you Mr. Aaron?”
But then he raised a hand as if in salute, and, pressing extensions, transferred his calls to the garage, or wellness spa, or Ruritania.
“Again,” he said, “my regrets. What is your name, sir?”
“Aaron Szlay?” It was a decent guess, and I even spelled it.
He nodded as if to indicate that he was going to vary this performance a bit from the way we’d done it in rehearsal, and then he went to charge my keycard.
The guy behind me reached around to tap his pda on the marble ledge—“What’s the goddamned holdup?”
Herr Portier said, “Please, sir, we today are at the maximum.” And then to me, “Ms. Block has taken care of everything.”
I took the keycard, the luck, and repeated my room number just to have a line.
“Unfortunately we are not able to accommodate upgrade to executive.”
“I understand.”
Throughout this, I have to mention, Herr Portier had barely broken from his screen. I left, but the tapper didn’t advance—not until he finished txting.
The room: I’m guessing we’re already well past that posthistorical point at which it’s still interesting to note that hotelrooms are like film sets—now I’m just assuming they’re designed that way, and that thanks to film itself and to Frankfurt School theory classes the unconscious has once again become the deliberate (the tedious). Everything furniture to fabrics was squiggled and jotted as if all aesthetics were just a hedge against spills. Lamps giving off light to the circumferences of chipboard tables. The TV was atop the desk (the escritoire? secrétaire?), so that I won’t be able to write—if I have to write another hotel sentence I’ll die.
I sprayed myself wethot in my underthings and wrung them out hung, got into bed with the snackbasket. Crumbs. Sky News was doing the invasion of Libya and the occupation of Wall Street. Then Germany’s Next Top Model, they hadn’t translated the title, and then a show I didn’t know, whose every voice was Ad’s, and drooling into maybe, just maybe, sleep.
Until the phone rang, and it kept ringing, because I let it.
I was woken by a knock at the door—which nobody ever does on TV, they just bound in. Unexpected doorknocking is more a staple of the European novel, more ominous.
“Aaron Szlay?” The accent was abominable, even through oak.
The only thing worse than an Aussie or Kiwi intonation is its intermittent use. When it’s Auckland talking, or Melbourne, fine. But when a snatch of downunder drawl erupts from the mouth of a Euro, it’s like blood in your urine. Maleksen said, “I know you’re in, mate.”
“I’m in the bathroom,” and I was flushing the toilet to stall. To stow my tote, hide my Tetbook.
But it wasn’t fitting—not between tank and tile, not beneath the sink, and then, there on the floor and just as I’d left it, paged open to the spot I was in, it was A History of Frankfurt, which had the spatials and heft. I wedged my Tetbook and Principal’s passport too in among the pages, and stashed the volume on the shelf with all the other volumes about life, war, and what to do in town.
Maleksen—he made a fist and put it to my pudge, fistbumped me back to bed until I sat, holding my towel’s knot, pillowed at the headboard.
Then he was in the closet and hatching the roomsafe, at the window taking down the blackout shades. He straddled a clubchair and vented his crotch, dejacked the phone with a boot.
This was my thought, with him just across: this is what my children’s children I’ll never have will look like, will sound like, will be. From nowhere, from everywhere, edged up against crisp cropped skin in desert digifatigues whirring with muscle or device.
Not even his scars were humanizing: the 12 seared bars I counted just told other machines his price.
He unsnapped a pannier, dug out like a black snowglobe, set it on the table between us and dialed around until its northern antipode was palpitating red and on TV the contestants did the fizzle shimmy, dead.
“Gute nacht to you too,” I said.
“You say that only to sleep,” he said. “You must say instead guten abend.”
“What fucking toy is that—an evil baseball?”
“We have here the yammer,” he said. “It is yamming for us all wireless wave frequency and electromagnetic transmission. On multiband level to 1500 MHz for 30m radius. Including all remote neural dragnet spying on human brainwave.”
“Here I was trying to keep my thoughts to myself. It’s a jammer, by the way.”
He tried to wrest a smile, from either of us. “It is very dumb that you left Berlin.”
“Blame yourself,” I said, “I left because I was broke. All you had to do was bring me my cash and still you fucked that up.”
“How is that happening? Do you not get money?”
“Not from you. Not from Balk.”
“I mean from Aaron Szlay, mate. That is why you come here. He gives you money you give to him files? But are they a copy on drive or your computer?”
“What’s it to you? Haven’t you fucked with enough of my technology?”
Maleksen juggled the dark globe, then repanniered it.
“Your trip to NY—breaking into my office? I was waiting for you to bring it up.”
“They let me in, mate—you have no security. b-Leaks is only ensuring there is no copying of files.”
“Why not just ask?”
“Because if we ask we have to trust. You know about this visit to your dumb office as you call it only because you go online, and you are ordered not to do that.”
“I’m not in the Swiss Army, you fuck. I don’t do orders.”
“You must explain this to Thor. To me you must explain your addiction to Zionism. I like only the writings about your wife and the film script, because it is about space travel. The rest of the documents on that computer, no—I think your experiences are maybe not as important as you think they are.”
“Maybe you weren’t supposed to read them?”
“The videos,” he said. “You must turn them over.”
“What?”
“The videos of the interviews, mate.”
“The interviews I did were audio.”
“Any format is acceptable. Just turn them over.”
“The recordings are only on my computer, and my computer’s only in Berlin. Anyway, I don’t do anything without authorization.”
“Thor authoritates.”
“I don’t mean Balk—I mean the man whose life I’d be duping away. We have the same name, they’re on the same contract.”
“He is gridless. We have no coordinates.”
“Writing himself barefoot in the dust of an interior Pradesh. That’s convenient.”
Maleksen stood—“But they are
not secure, mate. The recordings. They can be wiped. Or corrupt.”
“The plan was that I hold the recordings until deadline. If I fuck up the deadline and don’t hand a book in, b-Leaks gets the recordings and goes live. Only then, though. And I have time.”
Maleksen went over to the dresser. Pulled a drawer. The next drawer he pulled off its tracks. He capsized the table there’s no name for.
“What the fuck? This isn’t even my room.”
He went for that shelf that ran opposite the bathroom. His hands under it, frisking. Pushing up on the bolts, shaking the snackbasket, mantelclock. A History of Frankfurt.
“Fuck, stop—will you? I didn’t bring anything with me—the computer’s in Berlin.”
“No,” and he turned, a hand lingering on the shelf. “In Berlin is a flat b-Leaks assigns you. In the flat are insects from the trash of shit hydrogenated cornsyrup America suppers, all over the antiques of senior b-Leaks allies. But in the flat there are no computers.”
“You were there?”
“I am there at times you are not.”
Neighbors, if people in adjacent hotelrooms can be neighbors, were smacking at the walls to quiet down.
I got up from the bed, it took me standing to realize how halfnaked I was. I had one hand to gesture with if I wanted to keep my modesty, or appendages.
I said, “I’ll be back in Berlin—I don’t need to tell you when—I’m sure you’ll find out when before I do. Then we can arrange to talk this out with Balk.”
Maleksen went for the door, but then aboutfaced, took my towel in hand and yanked it clear off. Then he left.
And there it was, my prick.
://
There was no way I was going back to dreamlessness after that—there was no Aar. It was 8:00 on the restored TV and the tickers scrummed the rugby scores. I went fisting my socks prolapsed, and my skidmarked tightywhities. By the time they’d dry frühstück would be over. Petit déjeuner, desayuno, breakfast. The Frankfurter Hof’s laundry service takes 24 hours. I habilimented myself all stiff, retrieved my Tetbook. I left Sky News on for a ruse, left everything in the halogenic heated bathroom on, left the mirror on, left.
I elevatored down to the lobby, lined up behind my nose and became the garnish to a salad of Spanish, Italian, Greek, all propping menus I didn’t have. Printer paper spiralized between clear covers, mss. I made the buffet, filled a plate with what was left of the healthies, fruitsnvegs, before staking out the carbohydrate troughs. Then it was all a matter of doing the school or employee cafeteria dance, whom to sit with, but none of the tables were empty enough, rather any that were just as I approached them were being whisked and stripped.
Some situations were meetings of four people reading and some situations weren’t meetings but also four people reading. Still other business transpired, like the two bedheads blanking their faces above a twotop whose snidely gliding linens suggested footsie, legwork, crotching. Man with a hirsute Mediterranean goat vibe slumped low to gain traction, woman this pale Dutch scullery maid all gyral and shifting her sheath, neither of them speaking too good the English, the only language besides the shoelessness between them. They’d been adulterating everything. Their pdas mated vibrationally amid cutleries, their respective spouses calling—I had to resist picking up. I had to resist removing their footgear from the surrounding chairs and sitting to offer advice—it’s always better to pick up, feign static.
Then toward the pastryside of the buffet in the middle of the room was this big burl of a guy by himself, tunic of a tshirt held together by electrical tape, baggy jeans from the nuclear winter collection, sneaks blatantly inspired by better sneaks, fingerless gloves he pounded into the pockets of a skanky nylon windbreaker. Wiccan roadkill hair parted sparsely in the middle hanging limp like two wimpy black anarchist flags. As I passed I noticed the catalog he was reading, the selfie, his, he was studying below his name, and I stopped without even proceeding into the accompanying bionote. There are no words, there is no word, for having translated my own translator.
“No family is intact,” I said, and settled my plate. “No family is intact but the family of the dead.”
“I am sorry,” clipped, gruff, “but your meaning?”
“So you’ve forgotten the beginning of our book?”
He frowned, “That is the beginning?”
“Sure is.”
Then he said, “Indefinitely,” by which he must’ve meant “undoubtedly” or “indubitably.”
“A pleasure, Dietmar Klug,” I said.
He gripped me weakly, then throttled his neard, his neckbeard.
All the significance was already plated: just behind us were Anglo steamtrays of eggs, lipidinous wursts and rashers of bacon, puddings, hashbrowns, beans, mushrooms, tomato hemispheres, and behind that a jointly controlled French and German zone of what would’ve been a continental frühstück if consumed on another continent, the crepes and quark streusels preserved by marmalades and juice and milk selections from venturing into the Asian stations of noried rice, and yet all he’d hoarded was a, I’ll traduce it for him, canapé.
As I chairbacked my tote and sat against it he picked up that plug of kornbrot and shook its mayosmeared hamfleck into his napkin, then took a dainty bite of the stale rusky round to chew over the coffee or tea question, before finally spitting crust in English, “I would have please a Heifeweizen,” which compelled the server to ask not him but me, “Room number, sir?” Trust Aar to cover the cost.
Dietmar, Diet, had to wiggle his seat out and hunch just to face me. “OK, so first it is complete unjust,” he said.
“What is?”
“OK, so first the amount, with schedule. To do the book by one month is two chapters every day, also Saturday, also Sunday, and that is 10 or 12 hours each and I have children. Second, the way it is that we must receive chapters from you each at a time is maybe how other translators work but not myself. To translate I require the complete text at all times to ensure the consistency and also the style. Consistent mood and style. I know you will say you have the editor to take care of that but you do not edit the same way because I do not have the agent to do this for me. I also have things to say about the contract. But wait.”
“I’m waiting, but you’re getting me mixed up.”
“Ja, ja, you mix me up the worse. The title must not be in German the same. Duskovites means in German just nothing. Dämmerung-Kinder as Schmöker suggested is bad, however, very bad. I will think of the better title for you. I have thought potentials already but we will put in the contract extra if I do that and you use.”
“Again, calm down, you’re talking to the wrong guy.”
“No, I requested to talk with the American publisher because Schmöker would not pass my worries and finally was vengeful of my influence. He said I was to go talk to you directly if I was sure I had a sense. I do, I have a sense. For pertinence this second volume must extend the plot of the twisted horn and to resolve also whether the unicorn can pass between the dimension zippers because in volume 3 it was no but in volumes 2 and 1 it was otherwise and between them nothing was explained about it.”
“I understand.”
“Also for the 10–16 year olds like for my children the erotic pretext of the frozen marquise is not appropriate.”
“Finished?”
“Ja, ja.”
“So you write yourself?” hoping to humor or just waylay his concerns halfway among the condiments, but his beer came.
He muzzled a toast and drank and dripped liberally from his neard, staining the lapels of his windie.
“So what are you translating now?”
He waried, “Truth?”
“Nothing but.”
“Scheiße, other series. You test me that I do not tell but I have read the contracts.”
“This isn’t a test. Trust me to trust your discretion—just moneywork, then?”
“Ja, ja,” he laughed, “translation is for money. Dress and feed two girls with only
English.”
“What would you choose to translate, if the money weren’t an issue?”
“Truth again?”
“Try me.”
“I like translating what I do, the Americans, romane, sachbücher, fiction like not fiction. It is not much, the work, you can even put it all into a computer the syntactics are so basic.”
“American books are written by computer.”
“The series we do is written for children but it is the same as the books for adult, the same identical differentiality, no?”
“Difficulty?”
“Quatsch, quatsch. It’s not very much at all.”
“So the dream is being lived?”
“Or once again if I retire and do not die I will write poesie,” and then he was assessing all around us again, and the ceiling too, as if he were inspecting the sprinkler system.
I said to change it up, “What room are you in?”
“Gallus neighborhood.”
“Do you come every year to the Messe?”
“Every month and every week and day it is like I go to this stumpfes Messe, because I live here.”
Translation, by repetition, “You live here as in Frankfurt?”
“Ich bin ein Frankfurter. Sie sind ein Hamburger.”
The beans and mushrooms were already ladled away, and the tomatoes followed. My mug was cold but the servers were disinclined to refill it, the frühstück hall was sparse with late and sluggard headaches, all the guests who’d make a differentiality today had gone, frühstück hours would be over in 10 or so minutes by the cheapo digiwatch my companion kept switching between his wrists and already even the occupied tables were being bussed.
Last chance, “Keine Familie ist ganz—you remember?”
“A book?”
“A book you did. About Jews, the Shoah. American. 2002, this would’ve been around.”
“I did at that time but also before many books on Juden.”
“Which was your favorite?”
But he was lost to me, “And now if not the books for children it is many books on Islam.”