Funeral for a Dog: A Novel

by Thomas Pletzinger

  You should actually write something good again sometime, Mandelkern!

  So that she wouldn’t keep talking, I stood up and tried to kiss her. We wrestled, we looked resolutely past each other, then she caught me on the upper lip with her elbow, reflexively I grabbed her wrist a bit too tightly. Her incredulous laugh as I let go of her and felt my upper lip for blood (our work is coming between our lives). Somewhat later, and finally drunk, we ended up in bed after all, for the last few weeks sex for Elisabeth and me has been a question of drunkenness, and maybe we had to ignore the condoms next to the bed (her pills in the old pencil box from school, three names carved into the back, I couldn’t find much else from her life before me). As we rolled over each other and I slipped out of her for a moment, Elisabeth said: Nothing is going to grow in me today, now hold still, Mandelkern! Elisabeth suspects my plans for the childless months and years to come (up to now I haven’t been able to say anything to her; I can’t manage to do it). Elisabeth knows: sometimes one wrong word is all it takes, and I shrink and dwindle and get up and go to the window, only to look out at the darker end of Bismarckstrasse and say it can’t go on like this (in summer you can’t see the streetlights through the leaves of the chestnut trees). So I held still (so I decided to take the plane).

  Daniel Daniel

  Elisabeth and I live in a prewar apartment that is too large and too expensive for my means on the corner of Bismarckstrasse and Mansteinstrasse. Bedroom, living room, study. We got married in the summer of 2003. I love Elisabeth. I’m educated as an ethnologist and work as a freelance journalist writing for the culture pages. I struggle as everyone struggles. We have an empty room that we call a guest room. Elisabeth is a beautiful woman. I drive a twenty-year-old Renault 4. Maybe another life is a better life. With our salaries the only sensible thing, says Elisabeth, is for me to pay the rent and you the telephone bill. Elisabeth is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever lived in a prewar apartment with. For me, ethnology has nothing to do with Papua New Guinea. I wear a wedding ring on my left hand (brushed silver). Elisabeth has stopped taking the pill, now she wants a child. Elisabeth is a sober woman. She had a child, she lost it, she wants to risk it again. Nothing is going to grow in here, said Elisabeth. So I held still. Then Elisabeth cried Daniel Daniel, she cried Daniel right in my face, she must have really meant me.

  Barbaresco

  Stood in the hallway in front of the floor-length mirror and finished off the wine. Looked at the blood on me, the streaks next to my belly button, and from behind me Elisabeth reached into the dried blood on my cock, into her own dried blood on my cock and in my pubic hair, and said, Tomorrow in the battle think on me (my cock a blunt sword; Elisabeth and I warlike: we grind ourselves dull against each other, we strike our blades jagged). As I was about to wash off the blood in the bathroom, Elisabeth was sitting on the toilet and said, you know, Daniel Mandelkern, I’m waiting for you to decide (the bluntness of pissing women).

  Yes / No / Maybe

  Elisabeth was waiting for a decision, I was standing all sticky in front of the sink. She brushed her hair back behind her ears and reached for the toilet paper. Mandelkern? I must have been staring at her. Daniel? She wiped herself clean and flushed. Suddenly Elisabeth was everywhere: I saw and heard and smelled and tasted her, her blood on me, her wine in my mouth, I felt for my swollen lip, my tongue ran over the fine cut on the inside, which was still bleeding (her accidental elbow). You look like an idiot staring at a math test, said Elisabeth. Did I understand what she’d said? Yes, I said, and kept staring, no, I said, maybe (dashboardgearshift-Italy-university-Mandelkern-Hamburg-Berkeley-blood-almond-ethnology-time-Barolo-Breton-child-Renault-Anne-Laura-Eva-Hornberg-CarolinaOne-PetShopBoys-Katrin-Britta-paternoster-Kolberg-matrilineality-Geertz-Svensson-octahedron-aquarium-aquarium-couvade-Venasque-Malinowski-nostalgiatourists). One minute, I said, and spit in the bathtub. I turned my back on Elisabeth and shut the bathroom door behind me, I gathered up my scattered clothes and got the folders from the dark kitchen. Then I took the suitcase and left.

  my headings, my categories

  I’m actually an ethnologist. In America I’m a cultural anthropologist. I observe people, I collect conversations, I probe hierarchies, I take pictures, I sort texts, I catalogue materials, I assemble my ideas. In England I’m a social anthropologist. For almost two years I’ve been writing for Elisabeth’s editorial department. I’ve questioned and profiled people for her, I’ve taken down life stories in shorthand and summarized worldviews, I’ve fulfilled her requests. I conduct interviews and write portraits, framed by days of silence in airplanes, hotels, and bus stations. I take notes because I want to put things in order (I want to sort myself out).

  Why take notes instead of going back?

  I hold the pen in my hand and write, I make a note of myself (Daniel Mandelkern). I don’t let much pass without remark, I make a note of almost everything (airport terminals, newspapers, cigarette prices, black German shepherds with three legs). I write my body: diarrhea, three-and-a-half liters of wine last night, the two of us. I’m still waiting alone at the gate. The red wine didn’t agree with me (headache). Later I want to write Elisabeth’s hair, her blood on me, still later the chatter a few seats down, the two Italian women are still sitting there, my Italian is miserable, hence the word “chatter.” I make a note of my anxiety, my happiness and hesitation, I write:

  Elisabeth Elisabeth Elisabeth,

  the third time with distinct reproach in my handwriting. I make a note that it doesn’t do you any good to be married to your boss, that it’s wrong to work for your wife, that a child won’t solve our problem. That it can’t go on like this, Elisabeth! With a paper cup of coffee and my first cigarette in months, I’m sitting in the nonsmoking waiting area of the Hamburg Airport. I write “nonsmoking waiting area” even though I’m now smoking, even though no one besides me is waiting (so much for truth).

  my thin skin

  Why a bus now, of all things? But I can’t get off and walk the few meters to the airplane (departure begins with the hiss of the hydraulic doors). The accordion bus only half full, with colorful summer shirts, a few carry-on travelers and frequent fliers, most of them on the phone. I have to put up with the rocking (in the mirror over the bus door: red wine residue on my lips). The wine didn’t agree with me, the wine was just too much wine. I wonder if I should call Elisabeth. I’d wake her, and then I wouldn’t be the only one feeling wretched. She’ll want to go on sleeping despite her headache (our last, half-empty bottle next to the red digits of the alarm clock). I’d have to explain to her why I left. I’d have to talk about decisions and wanting a child and life plans. I’d have to tell Elisabeth I’m having doubts about marriage (about our marriage). I might utter the word “divorce,” I might quote my mother: it’s not what you say but how you say it. I don’t call, I buried my telephone in the suitcase (such thoughts, such strategies, such cruelties).

  Suomi

  A few seats in front of me on the bus, a woman with a child. It’s not the green of her tank top that makes me notice her. She lights a cigarette. The woman is very small, her back slightly bent, the vertebrae on the nape of her neck clearly visible, short blonde hair held back by a tacky hair band (pink roses on a black background), her flowered skirt a little too short (her feet are resting on the wheel hump). I see her from behind, I have a hard time imagining a face to go with this back and this hair band. She has no baggage, in her small hand she’s holding only a pack of cigarettes and a passport (Suomi—Finland). She’s smoking even though it’s prohibited (like me). The boy clutches a small, light-blue backpack on his lap. Three, maybe five years old, I can’t tell the ages of children (his light hair—her light hair). Hard to imagine: her body as the body of a mother. Elisabeth is longer-limbed than this woman (Elisabeth with the skin of a redhead, her age is visible only in the corners of her eyes and around the caesarean scar below her belly button). Nonsmoking bus! cries a man, but the woman ignores him and turns around to me a
s if I were the one who had admonished her. She smiles at me (obstinate and condescending, Elisabeth is a master of this exact same expression). The boy whispers something in her ear. The Nordic sky outside the windows hangs over the pines (airfield, Niendorf), the bright asphalt, and the engines. The woman turns back around and strokes the boy’s hair, gives him the passport and the pack of cigarettes, he stows them in his backpack (she’s careful not to blow smoke in his direction). The bus leans into one last turn and stops by a small plane. I’m going to take a walk around the airplane now, Mama, says the boy. He takes the backpack and climbs carefully off the bus. His eyes scrutinize his mother behind the bus window.

  She stays where she is

  until the driver finally asks her to get off, and she stamps out the cigarette on the airfield with her heel as pointedly as if the driver were the one in the wrong (dark-green Converse). The boy carries his small backpack up the stairs (one step at a time, his legs are too short), stops for a moment in front of the oval door and takes a big step over the threshold without looking back. Only then does she follow him, and I her.

  Flight LH 3920

  I ended up getting a window seat, and the airplane turns me away from the terminal. I notice a gray heron standing on the other side of the airfield, it soars into the air and disappears in the bright fog. The business travelers around me are talking on their phones, a crash caused by the use of electronic devices on board is now briefly my only worry. I don’t have to be warned, even though I don’t understand what telephones and computers have to do with the navigation of an airplane (I buried my telephone in my luggage). In the row in front of me, the woman in the green tank top, next to her the blond boy is standing on the seat and looking at me (light blue eyes, no resemblance in their faces). The woman climbs up on the seat too and takes a book out of the backpack in the overhead compartment (her somewhat too-round face and her tired eyes).

  my own STORY

  I’m preparing myself. The meticulous intern has compiled 90 pages of material, catalogues and reviews, as well as this children’s book (title: The Story of Leo and the Notmuch). She even printed out a city map of Lugano. There’s not one interview, no real profile, there are only brief bios and conjectures about Dirk Svensson. His book has so far sold more than 100,000 copies as of July 31, the publisher optimistically anticipates double that. The book is to be translated into at least 17 languages, despite the rhymes, even into Icelandic, an American edition is already available. It’s already a huge success. My colleague Jagla speaks of “a relevance that is rare in children’s books,” the New York Times of “fundamental accuracy of statement, rarely found in children’s literature.” Who copied whom here? On top of the stack lies a message from Elisabeth: “My Mandelkern, the story of Leo and the Notmuch. You’re meeting on Saturday in Lugano at the Riva Albertolli pier, right by the green pedal boats. The Hotel Lido Seegarten is beautiful. This is your story now. Think about it! Elisabeth.”

  Think about it, Mandelkern!

  She must have added the note before our fight. My Mandelkern! Think about it! 90 pages of children’s book reviews, Elisabeth’s enclosed commanding tone, an ambiguous assignment, my relegation to the countryside. Elisabeth demanded a decision, I resisted (my spitting, turning around, closing the doors). On instructions from my wife and superior, with a printed-out city map on a plane to Milan, on the way to a boat dock in Lugano, below us Niendorf and farther down Eimsbüttel and the Alster (my window and the ducking pines on the edge of the airfield, the howling takeoff, no complications). Elisabeth will be waking up now and vomiting the wine; she drinks so she can listen without correcting me. I drink so I can talk and not just have to listen; yesterday she drank more than I did. Then the clouds between us and the earth, the disappearance of the Fasten Seatbelts sign, a stewardess who’s at least sixty years old, two mineral waters for the headache. I read in the research folders: Lake Lugano is a lake in the south of the canton of Ticino, half in Switzerland and half in Italy, named after the city of Lugano, also known as Lago Ceresio, deepest point 288 meters. Hermann Hesse lived in Montagnola in the hills overlooking the lake (and who exactly is this Svensson? my wife’s large handwriting quotes me on a photocopied page). Elisabeth’s professional instructions: a profile of 3,000 words. In the roar of the airplane the small woman in front of me reads to the small boy from a book: The Story of Leo and the Notmuch, she reads, begins like this.

  Who exactly is Daniel Mandelkern?

  A journalist on a business trip in an airplane bathroom, his wife’s dried blood on his hands (Elisabeth, I think, Elisabeth). It confuses me that the small woman is reading Svensson’s children’s book, of all things, to the boy. I stand ducking in front of the mirror and scrutinize myself: I look tired, unshaven, and hungover, a red wine stain on my white shirtsleeve, flip-flops on my feet, my suit pants open. I ask myself in the mirror—I ask you, Elisabeth—how it could have gone this far. In the much too low-ceilinged airplane bathroom of flight LH 3920, bent over and with a forced smile, I wonder when we lost our first names. We were once able to talk to each other, we were once the same age, we once knew who we were (we were once: us).

  We once knew each other, Elisabeth!

  I hold my shirt up under my chin and try to get the blood off my belly and out of my pubic hair with paper towels, but the towels come apart and crumble. Your blood won’t go away. I feel the fine cut in my upper lip, the plane must already be in the airspace over Frankfurt, but the word “divorce” hangs persistently in the air (the possibility of another life). When someone knocks a second time on the bathroom door, I pull my ring off my finger and stick it in my pants pocket (E. E. E.). I roll up my shirtsleeves and brush my teeth with water (the small, pretty mother shouldn’t see the red wine).

  you and I

  The white frame of the mirror in the hallway makes an old family picture of you and me (black and white in the moonlight), probably a bit too dark and a bit too naked for a family album. A picture we discover later in a shoebox and find much too real for official memory.

  the north-south weather divide

  Since our takeoff in Hamburg there’s been a thick blanket of clouds below the airplane. The small woman looks at me a bit too long as she passes me on the way to the bathroom (she’s changed her hair band). I’m only on this plane, I think, because my boss has given me this annoying assignment. Instead of talking to my wife, I’m on the way to Lugano. My wedding ring is in my pants pocket, but Elisabeth’s blood couldn’t be washed off. The small woman smiles, I smile back. The pilot’s announcement interrupts our look: we’re flying over the St. Gotthard Pass, he says, below us the north-south weather divide. I look out the window, the blanket of clouds breaks over the rugged mountains. Behind us I can still make out veils of rain, toward the south the mountains are in sunlight, deserted, the roads and paths hard to distinguish (scattered houses). If she and I lived down there, I think, no one would know us (another life).

  Caesarean Risk

  is printed on the front page of the Süddeutsche. On my right a man stirring salt into his tomato juice, then vodka. An article on birth rates and caesarean statistics. After the first operation women are less likely to get pregnant again, it reads. It’s possible that women intentionally avoid another pregnancy because the caesarean was such a negative experience, says Siladitya Bhattacharya, of the University of Aberdeen. Due to pains and inflammations that occur after the operation, women often don’t wish to give birth again. Elisabeth wants to risk it again (drinking on flights, headaches). I ask for another water with the cheese sandwich (the habit of taking an interest in the local cuisine when traveling; Taleggio and Quartirolo, Elisabeth loves cheese). Once Elisabeth ordered eight cases of Barbaresco at Christl’s Comestibles on Grindelallee, and I felt like a child signing for the delivery.

  (making connections where there are no connections)

  While the pretty mother reads to the boy, I leaf through the book and look at the pictures. At one point her reading voice
breaks off and the boy starts over from the beginning. I read on. Leo and the Notmuch, the five-year-old Leo loses his best friend (is death for children like moving away?). For a whole summer he sits in his room and makes up stories. When his mother knocks and asks what he’s doing in his room, he answers: not much. Does he miss his friend? Not much, always: not much. Leo’s stories are the Notmuch (what kind of an idea is a Notmuch? It’s not nothing, at least).

  Daniel & Mandelkern

  Before my eyes this image remains: a man named Mandelkern lies still on his back (me), a woman named Elisabeth comes, straddling him, staring into the emptiness of her head, clasps her ankles with her hands (you). Several times she screams his first name into the air between them, and when he later asks the reason why (why Daniel Daniel), she answers that she always thinks that when he doesn’t talk back to her. Elisabeth laughs, Mandelkern doesn’t.

  Lost & Found

  My baggage has not arrived in Milan, I’m informed by the woman working at the Lost & Found, at least that’s what the system says. The suitcase is probably in Frankfurt, most likely due to the last minute rebooking, I arrived earlier than my baggage. There is no sense in cursing now. I leave the address of the hotel: Hotel Lido Seegarten, Viale Castagnola 24, CH-6906 Lugano (I’ll have to record the interview with pen and paper).