Softcore

by Zolghadr, Tirdad;

  Weekends, I would read Salinger, Hesse or Camus, or go through my parents’ record collection, scrutinizing the album covers and straining to understand the lyrics, assuming there must be some deeper sense eluding me. Elton John’s Greatest Hits Volume Two sported a particularly mystifying visual pun which would preoccupy me for hours on end, involving a pair of idiotic red sunglasses and a cricket pitch. Burning out his fuse up here alone. And I think it’s gonna be a long long time. Hidden from view and thus long forgotten, propped up between the records, was a children’s book called Action Jackson, featuring Jackson Pollock paintings as color-by-numbers motifs. Although I never actually colored anything in, I for some reason immensely cherished the fact that the flimsy cardboard booklet was forever to be surreptitiously, secretly stashed between the vinyl records on display.

  My parents’ VHS collection consisted of The Deer Hunter, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Flintstones, Return of the Jedi and a small handful of soft porn movies. I watched each tape at least once every month. One scene I still enjoy thinking back to is that of a plump woman at the movies, unbuttoning her blouse to expose large breasts mysteriously gleaming in the dark of the film theatre. She stands up and walks down the aisle to sit on some guy’s lap, who takes her from behind as she faces the movie screen.

  Nor have I forgotten the medals-of-honor ceremony in the closing scene of Return of the Jedi, nor Robert de Niro telling Christopher Walken to ‘remember the trees, remember the trees’, just before Walken smiles so very sweetly and shoots a bullet through his own head. But I never cared much for The Flintstones, and the one thing I can remember from The Thomas Crown Affair, despite seeing the movie well over forty times, is the refrain to ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’, and my mother humming to the tune as she prepared lamb stew with red beans and fenugreek leaves, or Peri-Peri vegetable choux puffs with chilli prawn salsa, reinventing the lyrics as she went along, which always enraged me beyond measure.

  One summery morning, I heard the neighbors screaming at the street kids very loudly, with more angry nasal vehemence than ever before. The kids had lured Matze to the garden gate with a chunk of meat and hurled a large brick over the six-foot wall with such precision that it landed exactly on Matze’s head, smashing his skull to a sticky slush puppy purée of tongue, brain marrow and blood, tiny, postfigurative Action Jackson blobs and splotches spreading out across the front yard.

  Travel

  ‘Everything freezes over,’ says San. ‘We must reach Hamburg before midnight.’ The car is crawling up the autobahn through a snowstorm at thirty kilometers per hour.

  San and I had hooked up the night before, at an untamed soirée in Stella’s six-bedroom Munich apartment. Stella herself had left for an Art Brut convention in New York, but did leave the keys for us at the information desk at Munich airport, with a note saying we were welcome to stay at her place. Goes without saying I even invited friends over so they can keep you guys company, very sweet of me I know I know.

  As Stella’s friends started showing up in drunken, drugged, squealing parties of four or five, San and I decided to leave the front door open and retreated to Stella’s bedroom, where we took turns smoking freebase from a glass bong shaped into a bust of Michael Jackson holding Bubbles on one arm. We took our time going through her record collection and settled for the heated but enjoyable exclamations of a Speed Metal band from Kassel. Fack Tschortsch Dabbel You Bush sat cräzy män wis bullshit in se bräääin.

  After finishing everything we could find in Stella’s drawers, San and I started flicking through Polaroid snapshots of a seaside vacation that were scattered carelessly all over the Sterling leather club chair in the living room. Obnoxious portraits of prim, well-groomed men and women in their thirties, posing at tourist locations, from the Eiffel Tower to the Acropolis, making quite an effort to look ironic. The snapshots belonged to a drug buddy of Stella’s in a silver-gilt Dior dress, who had to be carried home after tripping over someone’s leg and knocking her head on the edge of the triangular glass coffee table, spreading patches of blood in that amusing, Jackson Pollock pattern over the white bearskin on the floor.

  One of the snapshots, taken at what appeared to be a corporate reception at the Hauser & Wirth in St Petersburg, included a familiar, stocky figure in a loose-fitting suit. After scrutinizing the picture under the table lamp, I believed I recognized the man to be Tarofi, although I couldn’t be entirely sure, since a champagne glass was partially obscuring his face.

  San eventually suggested I join her for a weekend in Hamburg. Since Stella visibly had no intention of returning to Munich any time soon, I agreed, and now San, the seven-foot tall Tehran Newsweek correspondent, a woman with conspicuous grey-green eyes, intimidating cheekbones and a deep, booming voice, is leading me through screaming snowstorms, up sleeted highways on a northward passage to Hamburg, in a dark-blue Audi A3 rental.

  Yesterday, thousands were forced to spend the night on Germany’s snowy motorways, as policemen shuffled up and down, knocking on windows and offering hot tea and checked blankets.

  On the back seat of the Audi A3 Sportback is a silent, vaguely Turkmen or Uzbek couple, who San discovered hitchhiking at a BP petrol station, bundled in countless layers of winter wear. The prospect of spending a night on the autobahn with San, her Chris de Burgh CDs and an imposing, motionless monument of lamb’s wool and padded polyester makes me feel deeply, resolutely sorry for myself.

  ‘Save time,’ San says in an oddly robotic tone, speaking in baby English in the hope of the passengers in the back seat understanding her. ‘At next restaurant: no eating, just drinking.’ She turns to me. ‘I think they’re from Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan or something.’

  I sigh very quietly to myself, then turn around to speak to the couple. ‘Turkmenistan?’ I ask, ‘Uzbekistan? Pakistan?’ I can see them grinning from under their anorak hoods. ‘Ma hamzaban hastim,’ they chirp in Farsi, with the endearing, pathetic twitter of an Afghani accent. ‘We are from the honorable nation of Afghanistan!’ They nod and smile at me in a hopeful and strained sort of way. I don’t answer, but slowly turn back to San.

  ‘Afghanis,’ I tell her.

  ‘No eating. Just drinking,’ she says, presumably oblivious to what I just told her, thumping her palms against the steering wheel for emphasis. As we approach a sign announcing the next Autobahnraststätte, Nürnberg-Feucht West, she asks, ‘Did you know: I am Protestant. Polish Protestant.’ She underlines what is ostensibly a sensational contradiction in terms by pointing a finger to the left-hand side of the windscreen. ‘Polish.’ And then to the right. ‘Protestant! Me: San: Polish and Protestant. Have you heard of Adam Malysz, ski-jumper? He’s a Polish Protestant. And Prime Minister Buzek, him too.’

  Outside, there’s little sign of the weather clearing up in time. The snowstorm appears to be worsening by the hour, and as we crawl towards the restaurant, San tells her passengers about the Swedish–Protestant invasions of Poland during the seventeenth century. This was when the Polish flirtation with Protestantism came to an abrupt end, and the nation reunited under the banner of Catholicism.

  Waaaa-oo, says Chris de Burgh. Don’t pay the ferryman, waaoo-oh.

  The murky Nordic display around us puts me in a wistful mood, raising Byronic childhood memories. Action Jackson, Matze, Uncle Tan, who was born and raised in Hamburg, incidentally. Tan Christenhuber with his astonishingly thick, white hair, his St Pauli T-shirts, his comical asides in Plattdeutsch, his pickled eels and delightful digressions into dinner table anthropology. During a champagne breakfast when I was only ten, Tan prompted a nervous row with the Norwegian deputy ambassador by claiming Michigan and Minnesota suffered from a long tradition of Norwegian males running amok during the first two weeks of January.

  Due to an obscure influence of bio-social genetics, mechanisms of evolutionary psychology still largely unknown to science, it was, Tan insisted, specifically Norwegian men who spent too much time alone in their log cabins who were known to embark unexpect
edly on murderous rampages in their immediate surroundings. In Minnesota, over the two or three coldest weeks of the year, the radio regularly issued warnings, urging single Norwegians to seek the company of others. The Swedes, on the other hand, had no such inclinations. Nor did Danes, Finns or Icelanders. Today, you might wonder whether Norwegians would make better undercover sleepers than other Scandinavian natives, or whether, on the contrary, it made them more impulsive and thus less workable.

  Upon reaching Nürnberg-Feucht, we sit down at three different tables for tea and coffee, then regroup by the Audi fifteen minutes later. After another hour of driving through wet highway sludge in complete silence, the Afghani sitting behind me leans forward and squeezes his head between the window pane and the headrest and starts reproaching the ‘racism and bigotry and religious intolerance of today’s Europe’. I do my utmost to ignore him, grimacing at his warm, spicy breath in my right ear. After a few minutes, the man withdraws his head and searches a bright red anorak until he finds a Granny Smith, which he peels with a tiny Swiss Army knife. His wife watches him, visibly amused.

  ‘You’re being unfair, you know. Remember the Swedes? Veeery different. Veeery progressive. That’s also what Uncle Golmohamad told us last time. Veeery progressive. What was that gentleman’s name? Per Albin Hansson.’ She looks out the window at the misty panorama surrounding us on all sides. ‘Grave and tragic would it be’, she says, ‘should the enemies of progress be successful in dividing those who belong together naturally, who together must solve the challenge of changing class society into a democratic folkhem, and who together must – ’

  ‘So anyway. Tell me, you guys.’ San is visibly tired of the melodic mewling of whiny Asian sing-song. She glances up at the rearview mirror. ‘Where you from? You from Pakistan? Uzbekistan?’

  When no one answers San’s question she, for some reason, elaborates on General Musharraf and on the merit that is always due for tidying up a messy situation. ‘When Pakistan government bad, when government do nothing, someone must say: “OK. Enough! Basta! I am boss. Big boss.” No? You don’t think so?’ The light outside has grown dim. San looks eerie in the half-light.

  It’s early evening, and San announces a second recess at the next restaurant. ‘Here, not drinking.’ She thumps one palm against the steering wheel. ‘Eating. But drinking, no? Or washing hands. Meet in twenty minutes max.’

  At this, I turn around and smile at my fellow passengers, saying San needed a good, long rest, and that we’d be meeting in front of the car in no less than an hour. At the highway bistro, I order a Schweinsbratwurst with thick, brown onion sauce and French fries. When I meet San in the parking lot, I’m five minutes late.

  ‘Where are the other two?’

  ‘I saw them thumbing a lift at the exit,’ I tell her. ‘Someone gave them a ride.’

  ‘Good for them.’

  An hour later San has run out of CDs and is flicking through the radio channels on the rental car stereo. To my disgust, she chances upon an old Red Hot Chili Peppers track. Pomm Pomm. With history books all full of shit, I become the anarchist. Pomm Pomm. Siggadigong. Pomm Pomm.

  Although we’re still held up by the occasional snow-struck traffic jam, I’m relieved to see we’re making good time and will probably be reaching Hamburg before midnight. I’m doing my best to look forward to Hamburg after all. Most of the family eventually settled down here. Back when they first moved to Germany, they used to ship their own Basmati rice from Iran. This was during the eighties, when northern Europe had yet to discover the likes of even Mozzarella and Balsamico, and you couldn’t find much by way of rice besides Uncle Ben’s in neonorange cardboard boxes. Hence the two tons’ worth of Basmati every February, with the stock used up precisely within a year. Two tons of butter-crusted rice cakes with saffron and sour berries.

  Hamburg Iranians are different to, say, Tokyo Iranians, who are cheap labor, the Great Unwashed, living under park benches. Then there are the Stockholm Iranians, who are mostly Maoists, Neo-Leninists, Trotskyists, Post-Stalinists, Social Democrats, ‘Third Way’ Communists or Islamic Socialists in exile and who spend much of their free time holding each other responsible for the dismal downfall of the Iranian left and similar calamities. But the Hamburg Iranians are largely merchants. Bon chic, bon gens. Et franchement très discret. Nothing to do with LA Iranians either, pretentious Tehrangelinos, Westwood monarchists with their black BMWs and marble columns. The Norddeutsche, they appreciate these things. Many an Ingrid, many an Ole, convinced they’re paying me a compliment, have assured me that we Persians are not like the others. Your culture is much closer to ours. Nicht wie die Araber.

  Pomm Pomm, say the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Siggadigong. Boo-wack.

  Besides Ingrids and Oles, I also know Bosnians in Hamburg. They play arty, minimal, catchy rock music at the Goldener Pudels Klub and wear geeky suits and ironic moustaches. The Yugo thing. When it comes to metrosexual nostalgie de la boue, Balkan is better. San finally reaches over and changes the frequency to the soothing voice of an elderly woman hosting a program on Norse gods and legends, including Tån.

  If I remember correctly, rumor had it that only shortly after the incident with Matze the Action Jackson slush puppy, Uncle Tan Christenhuber ran off with his Nigerian golf tutor, and the two settled down to lead a secluded life in a Hamburg suburb. But more recently, Tan had taken to threatening his lover with a penknife, in all sorts of public places, until she eventually wound up throwing herself under a tourist bus in Schleswig-Holstein. According to the radio, in any case, Tån is god of war or, more precisely, god of the formalities of war, of negotiations and treaties. But also god of justice, and of athletics. Apparently, wolf Fenrir bit Tån’s hand off. The radio lecturer happens to find this very exciting.

  I consider sharing the golf tutor suicide story with San, but I’m a little too drained and tired. But I have, in the end, succeeded in looking forward to Hamburg. Redbrick buildings, polite shopkeepers, ironic Bosnians. Hamburg, as Stella once explained, is the only German city which has long been free of the influence of feudal aristocracy, proudly flaunting a rigorously bourgeois identity, an unbending belief in free trade and the impersonal, libertarian public sphere. Hamburg is also the best place to buy pickled eel and herring and has an affordable red-light district, along with a fetching art scene, replete with moustaches.

  Staring at the shuttered stores along the sidewalks, still drawing on the Byronic melancholia of the misty February afternoon, I try to pinpoint the last time I saw Stella. It must have been at the Munich workshop on ‘Radio and Cellphone Remote Release Connectivity’ over a year ago, Stella in her snakeskin boots and beaded dress by Hossein Balali. I’ve always been impressed by Stella’s uncompromising lifestyle choices, which include her inclination to try every single hard drug on the German market at least twice, preferably at spontaneous dance parties in her own living room, to which she’ll invite whoever happens to be in Café Schumann’s at closing time.

  Thinking back to the freebase last night, I’m reminded of the snapshot we discovered of Tarofi raising his glass in a toast. At first, I’d been amused to learn that Tarofi travelled to St Petersburg and frequented venues of the kind, but the longer I considered the chances of an amateur fruit farmer and repentant government hitman spending free time at a Hauser & Wirth, the more the tacky implausibility of the scenario, like a cheesy TV adaptation of Glamorama, began to vex and irritate. San is asking me whether I’d ever been to Slovakia. When I don’t answer, she mumbles to herself in Polish, switches off the radio and turns right, towards Odmarschen.

  Checking into the hotel, I ask the short and rather unironically mustachioed receptionist for directions. ‘Just tell me which direction is north,’ I ask him, ‘Once I know where north is, I’ll find my way around.’

  The man takes a while to think, alternately caressing his moustache and his left eyebrow with his thumb, then points straight ahead and says, ‘That’s north’. I am about to thank him and leave when t
he receptionist slowly points to his right and says, ‘And down there, that’s south.’

  ‘North, straight ahead. South to your right.’

  ‘Yes,’ he answers and offers a shy and frisky little smile. A true Virilio this man is. Temporal dissemination of spatiality, virtual densities of space-time.

  In my room, heavily marked by terracotta walls and Jugendstil wrought-iron table lamps, I turn on the TV to an audio background of alternating British, German, French and Italian newscasters forever reiterating and summarizing the recent arrest of Al Qaida sleepers in New York, Hamburg and, for some reason, Milan. Their identities are reconstructed through mugshots, family portraits from the eighties and neighborhood anecdotes in Italian and Plattdeutsch. Always such a decent nice guy I’m just shocked I can’t believe it.

  Every other sleeper, as Stella loves to jovially point out, turns out to be a fils à papa, upper-class academic do-gooders, annoying ideologues out to change the world at large for its own good. UK diplomas, Mercedes cabriolets, Bally loafers.

  Every few minutes I start thumbing through a stack of notebooks in my black Crespo bag, or walking over to the window to stare at pedestrians lumbering through the urban snowscape.

  It’s an early Monday afternoon, and I’m just about to hand over my key to the moustachioed, chronotopic marvel at the reception desk when I’m approached by a group of girls with Doc Martens, henna-dyed hair and kaleidoscopic cotton scarves around their necks.

  ‘Jew know the why to the Hafenstrasse? Jew juss ge’iaa too, yeh? Juss go’iaa in from ’Eafrow, we did. Where you from?’ They all have the same blue-green eyes of hypnotic proportions, rosy cheeks, weak chins and waggish London accents.

  ‘Iran, yeh? You juss ge’iaa from Iran thass so weird yeh. Like vey’ave direct flight to Europe an’ everyfing. So. Woss Iran like?’