by SJ Naudé
‘Peace,’ the young man says from beneath his fringe when he takes his joint back, as if it were California, circa 1964. The marijuana paralyses his limbs.
Joschka is like a charged wire. The cocaine makes him quick and hard; he walks with heavy feet across the wobbling floats. It is as if he has somewhere to go, something to do. A monumental destination and a heroic act, something requiring superhuman effort. Far ahead of him there appears to be a vision – radiating, blinding – of another city. That which is here, right in front of him, is not enough, just an obstruction in the wide, straight road he is on.
He tries to ignore Joschka for a moment, focusing his attention on the blonde girl next to him (one of many that night), sunk into a pyramid of cushions. A perfect young Aryan specimen. They smile at each other, at first without saying anything. The air is like honey between them. He mentions it. There are fireflies around his feet, and around hers.
‘Shhh,’ she says, and giggles a little.
With a finger on her lips, she points at the fireflies and whispers: ‘Sie möchten Honig trinken.’ They want to drink honey.
She takes him by the hand, pulls him down onto the cushions. He stretches out and starts relaxing, his head against hers, the tips of her hair against his cheek.
‘Wie heisst du?’ she enquires about his name, her sweet breath in his ear.
His tongue is sluggish. ‘Was bedeutet schon ein Name?’ What’s in a name?
She shudders, folds her arms against the cool air.
‘The dew,’ she says, ‘is falling asleep in the folds of my clothes.’
They both look languidly towards her friend, who is blowing soap bubbles through a plastic ring. The three of them stare with exaggerated astonishment at the shiny little rainbows on each bubble. The blower extends her hand, attempting to catch the bubbles. She fails, then bends forward, slowly, as if burrowing through molasses, and drags her fingers through the reflections of buildings on the water. Underneath him, the float is rocking. He is floating on the shimmering city.
Bubbles keep gliding and bursting. Just the slightest soapy spray remains of each bubble when it disappears. Joschka is behind him unexpectedly, his fingertips resting lightly on his head. It is when he draws back, he knows, or now recalls, when he stops following, that Joschka comes and finds him. He keeps forgetting. His skin erupts in goose pimples. He looks intently at his own sleeve. While he is staring, a drop condenses there, on the black leather. Out of the honey-like air.
With a thick tongue, without looking up, he says, ‘How slowly the dew is forming, Joschka: like lava hardening into a landscape, a continent breaking apart …’
His eyes close while he is speaking, then open slowly when he forgets his words. Fog is approaching across the water, from below the bridge. It changes the air around the floats, brings a certain restlessness. He tries to look through it, at what is drifting behind it. Joschka’s fingers, he realises, are no longer on his head.
‘ … like a pearl growing in an oyster.’
Joschka is not within hearing distance any more.
Other clear fragments: A small restaurant on a busy street in Mitte. Spanish hams hanging above the counter, swaying in the air-conditioning. Joschka is smoking with someone outside – an Ebermud or Wolfgang or Camilla – and crowing with laughter. He is alone in here. The lights are too bright and he is hungry. He keeps looking at the hams. They leave without eating.
A brief interlude at a party in a Jugendstil apartment in Charlottenburg. The ceilings are four metres high and there are wide sash windows on each side. He stares at the graffiti on the ornate ceilings, at the crystal chandeliers, dim with dust. Joschka is standing on his own in the double doorway between the connecting rooms; he has stopped speaking. But his dark beauty is enough, his mere presence. The crowd is still swirling around him, now more than ever. Around his long, thin legs, small buttocks, high, broad shoulders, around his cheekbones, almost Asiatic, sharply chiselled below his black eyes.
An underground party in Kreuzberg. They struggle to find it. The man with them in the taxi will get them in, even though they are not on the guest list. These things are secret, such squatter parties in empty public buildings. At the first whiff, the Polizei will come and break it all up. The man is on his cellphone, engaged in endless conversations, trying to establish the exact location. In between the man is giving directions to the frustrated driver. He is talking at breakneck speed. (Is he on amphetamines?) A few harsh words are exchanged. They arrive at what must be an old school or government building. The man on the phone is still getting instructions as they walk. He has a torch; they slip in through a side entrance. They get lost, walk back and forth through corridors and a courtyard; over and over again they turn back and into other corridors. It must be the wrong place – there is no sign of life, just more corridors and windows nailed shut with chipboard. Then they feel the heavy bass of the music in their bones before they can hear it.
Later, in the early-morning hours: Berghain nightclub in an old power station. The music is hardcore Berlin industrial; it has a sharp silvery velocity, a frequency just short of frenzy. Narrow stairways cut upwards through the colossal central space, in different directions, to different floors. High against the walls are windows, old pulley systems and transformers. Behind the bar: counters, chunks of greasy machinery. On one level, just next to the dance floor, there is a long row of elevated cells. What the original use of these might have been, he could not say. Now couples are standing in these little cages, kissing, visible from two sides. Like something from a science-fiction film: robots learning human emotions, or a laboratory in which the state monitors and controls reproduction. A man climbs out of a cell right next to him. The girl gets out on the other side. The man turns towards him, addresses him:
‘Ich kann mich nicht an deinen Namen erinnern.’ I can’t recall your name.
He has never met the man, he is not one of Joschka’s crowd. ‘Name, mein Freund, ist Schall und Rauch,’ he responds. A name, my friend, is just smoke and mirrors.
Joschka is behind him, wary and suspicious of the stranger. Joschka’s eyes are blacker than usual, with lightning in them. Joschka takes him by the hand, leads him to the heat of bodies on the dance floor. They do not move, they just look at each other. Amongst the dancers accelerating like phantoms, they slow down. He rests his head on Joschka’s shoulder. Joschka’s cool palm folds around the back of his head. Against Joschka’s bare chest gleams a slender silver Jesus. Any tension there may ever have been between them, or ever could be, is resolved in such moments. Joschka’s other hand is searching for his. There is distress in the hand. Within a split second the entire world falls into place.
A car ride through a deserted Potsdamer Platz with someone, an architect (Kai? Leander? Sven?), pointing out the different buildings. Like a disinfected piece of North America amidst the grittiness. He looks up at the buildings. The rising sun flashes against glass cliffs. There is no one else on the roads.
Back in Aarik and Wilfred’s flat. They close the curtains against the morning glow. The curtains are thick, shutting out the light completely. After a few minutes in the dark, Joschka rolls over towards him. There is a vehemence about Joschka. He holds on tightly, his feverish night trip finds a purpose. Joschka directs his head down towards the Jesus on his chest. Two shaven heads like moles in the dark room. The heads bob and nibble, fall backwards and gulp for a different kind of air: the thinner, higher atmosphere. Joschka’s straining, all night long, towards something utterly distant, is at an end.
‘This is where you’ve been heading,’ he whispers to Joschka. ‘I can feel it in you.’
He is infinitely tender towards Joschka, as always. The tenderness is gulped down thirstily. Joschka is visibly flooded with calmness; within seconds he is asleep, head in the crook of his arm. Joschka’s short hair under his fingers is as soft as fox fur. He, however, is lying with his eyes wide open. The clashing signals in his blood short-circuit his synapses.
‘Where is it coming from?’
Joschka looks down with amazement, touches his nose, from which, it turns out, blood is pouring uninterruptedly.
‘It’s me,’ he says, ‘from me.’
Like the aftermath of an accident, so it seems, or a fight. He looks down too, touches his chest. The silver Jesus has carved him. Two short, deep cuts. Painless.
‘And from me.’
Through the slit in the curtains and the open window golden light is shining. A few leaves whirl through; one clings to his upper back. A dove perches on the window sill.
‘How darkly he is staggering aloft, how intoxicatingly, your dragon-prince,’ the dove says. ‘You can expect a terrifyingly beautiful death.’
He is astonished that he can suddenly understand it, the language of birds. Too astonished to engage the dove in conversation.
We are back in Bavaria now, a few days later. Saturday. Joschka locks the oldest part of the castle, die Ruine as the family calls it, behind them as they exit. Joschka called him back up from the cellar.
‘Who knows,’ he said, ‘what one might encounter down there.’
The large key is comical in Joschka’s hand, a prop for an Alice in Wonderland film.
The child, Joschka’s nephew, eleven-year-old Maximilian, is showing them the rest of the castle. A serious child. A stout-hearted miniature guide. There is a well-preserved seventeenth-century section, more knights standing heavily in corners, old swords hanging from hooks on the wall. Pointed Gothic windows with lead glass as murky as silt. Maximilian climbs on a sofa with his Nike sneakers and points out Alexander the Great in an oil painting. The Nike-feet keep disappearing in front of him, around corners, up steep stairs carved from stone. Maximilian shows him the three-hundred-year-old toilet. It hangs out over the abyss. Through the stone bowl, one can see all the way to the bottom of the valley. How unlikely his relationship with Joschka is, he thinks while peering down the ur-toilet. In London their lives are light years apart. For eight years he has been a management consultant at one of the prestigious multinational firms. In the beginning he did not think it would last. It would be a role he endured temporarily before switching to something that better suited his temperament and natural rhythms. An academic post, perhaps, or a job at an international NGO. But over the years your resistance to the corporate common denominators weakens: the narrow spectrum of values and driving forces, the agendas and manoeuvres. It seeps into you. You allow your productive capacity to be hijacked. You build a fort. You look after your interests. You accumulate wealth. You make your alliances, you reconfigure your alliances. You plot your route. You persuade, you withhold, you buy off. You play the game. Well, he has had enough of the game. It bores him to death.
And his social circle in London? Of this too he has had more than enough: the small bourgeois clique of ethically minded types. The Oxbridge and Ivy League champagne socialists from Islington and Camden with their polite vegetarian dinner parties where the financial crisis, global warming, Middle Eastern politics, auctions of mid-century Danish design furniture and the Royal Opera House’s productions of contemporary opera come up in conversation.
Joschka was the antidote to the whole lot. Joschka awoke him from his slumber, where he was lying on the bottom like a fish with gills hardly stirring. Made him shoot upwards and break through the surface, gulping. Everything that felt self-satisfied and predictable and stale and worn was cast out, all with a snap of the fingers. Joschka does not own a penny and has no interest in pounds. No mortgage, no insurance and no private medical care. He rents a room in the heart of London. He has hands that are capable of anything. Hands that start shaping each day when it breaks. Hands that track the shape of whichever body may be at hand that day. Hands that knead and mould dough. He works as a pâtissier in a Regent’s Park restaurant. Each day he throws himself into his work with utter surrender, the creation of things that are sweet and full of visual drama. Handmade chocolates, metre-high French wedding cakes of stacked profiteroles, almond mousse as light as a feather. And more hearty, earthy things: lush cheesecakes, dense and nutty Levantine pastries from which honey drips, heavy English puddings soaked with brandy or custard.
He too became an object of Joschka’s complete dedication. There was enough scorching light behind Joschka’s eyes, enthusiasm like white heat, to propel them both like a rocket. There were, admittedly, many other forms of self-surrender; this he understood early on – ways in which Joschka sought sweet oblivion. Vergessenheit. The signs were there: the ways in which Joschka instinctively knew the underbelly of the city, could read it immediately, the snippets he divulged about his life in Berlin. There were fiery and unknowable impulses just below the smooth skin. A frail bravado, an unsettling unpredictability. Above all, he possessed a hungry kind of beauty. Simultaneously vulnerable and careless. Glowing and chiselled. The eyes of a stag. Tattoos from Pacific islands on veined forearms.
Joschka came to cook for him in the winter darkness, in his spacious apartment in a converted warehouse on the Thames. Heavy Middle-European flavours floating through the spotless minimalism and out over the brown river: soups with dumplings, rabbit, schnitzels, liver. The clinical kitchen was being put to use for the first time since he had moved in. He could see that, for Joschka, it was a joy to have such a virginal kitchen to himself. Joschka was baking, his head bowed forward in concentration. He was caring for him. This was but one of Joschka’s faces, the man fixated on his cakes. There were several Joschkas: the careless one, the caring one, the baking one, the one with the velvet eyes who would sometimes simply disappear in the city, in the streets, for days on end, not answering his phone, who would thereafter sleep for two or three days non-stop before rising and appearing again, a little paler and leaner, but more glowing than ever. He did not ask Joschka questions about these absences. For reasons he cannot explain, it did not matter. There were few things about which they asked each other questions. That is how it was. Only in Berlin did he start gaining a better understanding of Joschka’s surrender to lost time, the vanished days.
‘Why do they not live in this part of the castle?’ he asks Joschka when Maximilian leads him out into the courtyard, where there is a patch of grass, dead flowerbeds and a deep well. ‘It looks quite liveable.’
‘There’s no heating,’ says Joschka, ‘and, apart from the antique toilet, no bathroom.’
The castle complex consists of several buildings from several periods. It is built in a ring and faces a courtyard garden. On the outside, the walls are thick and there are small windows overlooking the moat and the valley below. The family live in the smallest building, a nineteenth-century house with a steep pitched roof. A small place within a large place. Joschka’s brother-in-law works as an insurance broker, his sister as a nurse in the American army base nearby. Even though they live in this rambling place on a clifftop, they are like any German family in a cramped village house. There is a small backyard, just a shard of concrete above the abyss, enclosed with a wire fence. Inside is a Doberman. Through the fence it has a view over the valley. It barks at every movement below. Or, sometimes, for no apparent reason. The animal is sick, it seems. The ribs show, the tail remains tucked between its legs. Foam has dried around the mouth. Its bark is dry and raw.
Joschka’s mother calls and announces she is coming to visit. Joschka stiffens when his sister tells him. Tension descends over the house. It takes an hour before she arrives; she is coming from somewhere nea
r the Czech border. A neighbour is bringing her.
‘I must warn you about my mom,’ says Joschka. ‘She is basically a tramp, a Landstreicherin.’
During the visit, the house is filled with uncomfortable silences and impenetrable dynamics. The woman is unkempt and short and wide. She does indeed look as if she sometimes roams the countryside, as if she is sleeping rough. He cannot but wonder how such an unattractive woman could have given birth to such a beautiful son. An alcoholic, that is clear, and perhaps on various kinds of pills too. Her speech is slurred, her dialect, Bavarian, is in any event too strong for him to follow properly.
After the visit, Joschka is visibly disturbed. They take Alice’s magic key and escape to the room in die Ruine, away from the little family, the little house. They stand in front of the small window, houses like toys in the valley below them.
‘Tell me about your mother.’
Joschka looks fleetingly at him and away again.
‘What’s there to say? She wasn’t a mother.’
Joschka says nothing more. He probes. Joschka shrugs his shoulders moodily.
‘It’s not an interesting story. Nothing new, nothing unusual.’
He goes on reluctantly. Almost from the beginning, she was alone with the two of them, his father having vanished early on. For as long as he can remember, she drank. His sister, just two years older than him, packed his schoolbag in the mornings and made breakfast. He recounts how his mother would often disappear, sometimes for weeks, how they had to make do on their own, had to ask neighbours for food, or his aunt in a neighbouring town. One evening, he continues, after she had been away for a week or so, he heard the front door opening. He jumped out of bed and there she was, in the corridor. He locked his arms around her waist, refused to let go. ‘Are you back now? Can you please never leave again?’ He made her promise, and she did, repeatedly. ‘I’m back. Here with you. Forever.’ She loosened his arms, put him to bed. He lay there, listening to her fussing in her room. After a while, just before dozing off, he heard the sound of the door-latch. A car engine. He jumped up, ran out. Too late: she was gone. She just came home to pack a suitcase. This time she did not return. For a month they managed on their own, but, in the end, when they ran out of food and there wasn’t a pfennig left in the house, they went to live with his aunt.