Kiki is smiling, she knows those moments, the talking just to keep talking. What this or that person said when no one knew how things would go on at all. She strokes Lua’s head. The rain is now running down the large windows of the SoHo Grand Hotel, Kiki puts her black shoes next to my white ones on the armchair and signals to the waiter for the bill. Stop? I ask, but Kiki says, keep going! Your story is a good story, still no flags or structures or morality, just uncertainty and clarity, it sounds like something out of a book. Lately, I say, I haven’t been sleeping much, lately I’ve been waiting for the appropriate words. Then I finish my drink and pay the whole bill. I hold on to Lua’s leash as we drift along Canal Street in the greasy Chinatown rain, from shop window to shop window, from awning to awning, plucked and smoked chickens on display, electrical appliances and videos, as we lean on garbage cans, as we look into Kiki’s camera and then end up in Kiki’s hotel room, where we take off our wet clothes and hang them on a few hooks. Where we don’t touch each other as Kiki takes pictures of us under the fluorescent lights, the green paint of the walls behind our pale bodies, the light on her sad breasts, on my tired cock. And finally Kiki tells me that this hotel was once the flophouse on the Bowery where Hurstwood suffocated himself out of hopeless love in a gas stove at the end of Sister Carrie. Then she takes Lua’s head in her hands and he closes his eyes. Animals are the hearts of people, I say, Lua is breathing heavily, and I can go to sleep.
August 7, 2005
(Ping-Pong)
Dawn lasts forever (the house drags itself into the day). On the narrow mattress in the corner of Svensson’s study I’m trying to distinguish between sounds and thoughts: the wooden beams, the bedsprings (the ivy is growing). Actually my work could have been done a long time ago, but yesterday toward evening Svensson set plates and glasses and a candle on the kitchen table and between his words and his chewing left no room for questions. He talked about the village on the other side of the rock shelf (Osteno), about the water and about the mountains. He was busy with a knife in the candlelight, I sat at the table and searched for somewhere to start while Tuuli spoke Finnish with the boy. Svensson boiled water for noodles on a gas stove and explained that he’d had no electricity since Friday, a tree had fallen on a power line. There was only water and leftover wine, he wasn’t prepared for guests, not for a personal visit and least of all for journalists (why am I here?). Svensson cooked a tomato and sage sauce, he served an earthenware bowl of radicchio and white beans (his laugh conciliatory). The boy grimaced and dropped his fork on the floor, under the table the dog panted. Svensson, said Tuuli, cutting the noodles into little pieces, no child can twirl spaghetti and no child eats radicchio (not conciliatory). Yes, he knew that. I ate silently and therefore too much, drank some red wine and tasted Elisabeth in it. Tuuli ate and smoked, the boy on her lap fell asleep (half a tomato in his hand dripped on her leg and fell to the floor). As Tuuli finally put the child with his smeared mouth to bed, I remained seated. For a few more minutes I tried to start a conversation with Svensson, but because he was speaking incessantly without talking about himself, I excused myself too (fatigue). Elisabeth’s annoying assignment brought me as far as his kitchen, and I didn’t manage even to ask the routine questions. For the interesting things there was no time (the owner of the suitcase, the boy, Svensson and Tuuli). Later I sat in Svensson’s study and heard Tuuli’s voice in another room singing a Finnish lullaby. I pictured her sitting on the edge of the bed and brushing the boy’s hair from his forehead, I tried to write, but lost my image of her in my words. I fell asleep on Svensson’s mattress and didn’t wake up again until late at night. The cicadas were noisy. I didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know where the others were sleeping (I didn’t know who I was).
Lugano–Chiasso–Malpensa
Now it’s Sunday morning, a rooster is crowing, scattered birds and insects. I wait for the dog’s coughing and the boy’s crying. Nothing. I’m still in Svensson’s house, but no one seems to be aware of me. On the Swiss side of the lake I could have woken up in my own hotel bed, a Sunday newspaper on the terrace, the first game day of the Bundesliga soccer season, etc. My return flight to Hamburg leaves today in the late afternoon, I have to go back to Milan (Lugano–Chiasso–Malpensa). Elisabeth would have tried to discuss my leaving with me, but I’ve made myself unreachable. I should notify the hotel, but I remain lying in the half-light of the study and don’t touch anything (journalistic scrupulousness). I’m expecting Svensson’s footsteps, I’m expecting his knock at the door. Apparently the only way to leave this place is with the boat. Svensson is a mysterious man: he wouldn’t live alone at the end of the world and not want other people around him for no reason. Svensson must not like people. I sit back down at his desk and take notes, so as to retain the important things (the slosh of the water against the dock).
Hotel Norge
In a dark, cheap double room in the Hotel Norge near the Christuskirche, I lay on my back and listened to the surge of the early traffic. My 30th birthday, Elisabeth was already 36, a few weeks earlier we’d met again. This evening we’d first eaten solemnly (loup de mer) and then kept drinking so as to stop time, we drifted through the night. When it began to rain toward morning, we were standing outside the hotel’s glass revolving door (time refused and passed more swiftly). We could go to my place, said Elisabeth. We could also stay here, I said (I don’t know what held me back). The hotel room was five hundred meters from her apartment. At the reception desk I showed the night porter my identification, and Elisabeth searched in her purse for her credit card (our names on a bill together for the first time). The porter is even younger than you, Daniel, she whispered, at least two years. We were drunker than we thought. In the elevator she kissed me as if I belonged to her. She wanted to fuck me right now, she said. (Elisabeth has long talked straight. She has her reasons.) But then she disappeared into the bathroom and stayed there for an unusually long time. I was torn about whether I should open the door, whether we knew each other well enough. I turned the hotel television on and off and wondered whether we could love each other. Later Elisabeth’s retching woke me. She was kneeling over the toilet and vomiting. Would I stay with her anyway, she asked between two regurgitations of fish and wine and bile (please, Daniel?).
my Renault 4
I want to retain the important things (our first hotel bill). Such as my first car, my first kiss, my first girlfriend, my first love, my first betrayal, my first abortion. My preferences and selection criteria, for example. Names with the vowel a in them, maybe, tallness under certain circumstances, maybe an unkitschy femininity, blonde hair possibly, more likely red. It’s now Sunday morning, Elisabeth will have gone home late last night on my bike (the R4 parked on Bismarckstrasse, the windshields murky from the lindens). Now she’s waking up in the bed. Before our wedding I slept with eleven women (I don’t care about numbers, Daniel, said Elisabeth, you can almost count to eleven on two hands). I haven’t yet told her everything about myself that seems important to me:
(1) Carolina. She came to Germany from Warsaw in 1989, at first she didn’t speak much German and later she spoke it very well. Someone or other called her shoes cheap hooker boots, she was the prettiest girl I knew, she had seventy-centimeter-long blonde hair (I measured). We had no idea about sex, we were Catholic, I secretly accompanied her to her babysitting jobs. For a few months I forgot my age (we considered most things possible). We talked a lot, we wanted to take our time and be able to laugh even when having sex. But then it was a deeply serious matter with technical deficiencies (after a year she exchanged me for a boy with a red Toyota). I ran into her again in 2001 at Frankfurt Airport, she had a practical short haircut, she’d married someone from the old days and since then had been living in Menden in the Sauer-land. After Carolina I spent a while just listening when the other boys talked about girls. We called one another by our last names. Pfeifer recorded music tapes (U2), Debus always kissed right away, the rest comes naturally, he said, Hornberg had
a girlfriend and joined her family on trips to the mini-golf course, Petrovic had a southeastern roll in his r, Issel a soulful gaze, Wilson was the shortest and relied on the cute little kid angle. Mandelkern just says too much weird stuff, they said, Mandelkern has Carolina in his bones. In the spring of 1991 I inherited the Renault in excellent condition from my mother (I rarely talk about her death). I picked up a smattering of French, left the Süddeutsche and an issue of Spex on the passenger seat (unread), and learned to search at the right moments for a slip of paper to make a note of a compelling sentence from one of my female passengers. We drove to local art-house cinemas. Within a few months, those who leaned over the dashboard gearshift were:
(2) Nadine,
(3) Tanja,
(4) Eva,
(5) Katrin. I stayed the night in their converted attics amid their application portfolios for art academies, their Janosch novels (Polski Blues), Tori Amos posters, and hammocks (in the end they studied art education). It was probably about proving our adulthood, we blurred our boundaries before we knew them (Tanja and Katrin kissed each other when I wasn’t there).
(6) Hanna. With Hanna I developed the shrinking and dwindling and my it-can’t-go-on-like-this (the discovery of fear). She lived with a biology student in a separate apartment in her parents’ house, he bred geckos. Her mother was from Flensburg and was the examining physician at the district recruiting office (my mother holds the balls of all the eighteen-year-old men in this town and makes them cough, she said). Hanna decided that I should stop with the newspaper thing (she meant the Süddeutsche on the passenger seat of the Renault). Hanna’s father was an Indian engineer with an irritatingly single-minded fixation on the family honor. When Hanna was kneeling in front of me in the bushes behind the stadium one night, I could see her father and the biology student in the parking lot shining flashlights into the parked Renault (my cock in her mouth). I was declared unfit. They always did that when she came home later than arranged, said Hanna, and now cough (Hanna could do whatever she wanted, I wasn’t functioning)!
(7) Britta. With Britta my first wrong turn. In 1994 Hornberg, Pfeifer, and I had left our town and driven the Renault to the university in Hamburg (all of us studying ethnology). For the first time it was about our whole life. Britta was older and beautiful, we talked on the phone for nights on end, I in my early twenties, she three years older. I was astonished by her complete and continuous interest in me. Then one of my friends (Wilson) called her a “stupid horse” in front of me, that made me absurdly insecure, we talked on the phone more rarely and slept together only one more time. And that wasn’t until five years later, drunk and unnoticed, at that same undersized friend’s wedding. I wanted to save us for later, I said, and she laughed at me. In the summer of 2004 she called me again: she was now living in Berlin, she was getting married next week, she was five months pregnant, she just wanted me to know that (I couldn’t have been the father). I was, of all things, driving the R4 on the A24 from Berlin to Hamburg. I said I was sorry, I’d imagined things differently: the two of us and later. Britta’s reply on the phone: but you’re married too, Daniel! I said unnecessarily “yes, but” and the connection broke immediately. Autobahn and life struck me as excessively straight (turning impossible and prohibited).
(8) Carolina. The second Carolina wore red shoes with her blonde hair and was the most honest person I knew. She stood in front of Hornberg, Pfeifer, and me in the lecture hall of the Museum of Ethnology and would mark our first academic papers (“Intensive Agriculture among the Kapauku in New Guinea”). Carolina was Professor Jansen’s assistant and half Finnish, half Swedish. I’d never met a woman who could judge so clearly and run so fast (from her I learned to run, to write, to think). On her lower right leg a tattooed pack of foxes craved the grapes and rowanberries that climbed around her hip bones (the Fable of the Fox and the Grapes/Fabeln om räven och rönnbären). Carolina was twenty-five, she ran marathons and kickboxed (in a sparring session she once broke her opponent’s nose with her fist). After three years I’d completed my studies and she her dissertation. Did I want to go for a doctorate, Professor Jansen asked me, and I said “yes.” When the second Carolina then went back to the University of Helsinki, I brought her to the Hamburg Airport. The unattainable, she said at the security checkpoint, is something different for everyone (I got her assistantship in the witch archive).
(9) Eva. To this day Hornberg doesn’t know anything about it (Eva taught me betrayal). Eva was Hornberg’s second girlfriend and for two years mine at the same time (turn of the millennium on the Port of Hamburg; her tongue piercing rattled against my teeth while Hornberg peed off a landing pier). When he returned from Tanzania in July after three months of field research, Eva was pregnant (Hornberg was depressed from the malaria prophylaxis). I sat in the waiting room of the gynecologist and observed the colorful tropical fish in the octagonal tank (different perspectives through different plates of glass). Eva had decided against the child without asking my opinion (she must have been thinking of Hornberg). She didn’t want to deprive us of all other possibilities, she said. This time I would have been the father (I wanted to live up to the responsibility; I would have managed). When Eva awoke from the sedation, the doctor’s assistant brought coffee and cinnamon buns and stroked her cheek (I didn’t touch her, it struck me as inappropriate). When she called Hornberg in the afternoon and asked him not to contact her anymore, I was sitting on the floor of her room and felt the need to go far away. Hornberg later wrote to me in confidence that he’d wanted to have the child (he wrote “my child”). Then he got the Renault for a few years.
(10) Anne. Shortly thereafter, Professor Jansen’s offer to me of the opportunity to go to Berkeley (winter semester 2000). I’m not eager to see you go, Mandelkern, said Jansen, putting his hand on my shoulder, but you have to get out of here! My dissertation fit the Berkeley department’s profile (media-theory-oriented inquiries into the ethnographic film). There, Anne from Zurich sat in the office next to mine, we talked about documentary and feature films and strategies of direction and of authenticity and were silent at the decisive points (our bodies didn’t mesh; we were nothing but words). Only after a few weeks did we sleep together in her small, shabby room near Ohlone Park (the smell of the seafood restaurant under her fire escape). Our dissertations progressed (our careers, our lives). In March 2001 we found an apartment to share on Delaware Street and San Pablo Avenue, we had a shared language that no one else in Berkeley seemed to speak (children were out of the question; we were academics). Shortly before an important lecture on Stéphane Breton’s strategy of authenticity through the subjective camera, the two airplanes flew into the World Trade Center towers in New York. My lecture and the doctoral conference were postponed until further notice (I never gave the talk). Anne and I fell into a panic. She decided to take the first flight back to Europe and immediately drove to the airport, either I would come with her to Switzerland or we would have to make do with e-mails. I stayed in Berkeley, grieved, and continued to tinker with my dissertation for a while (I wanted to wait and see). Anne discovered her interest in European ethnology. I read my paper again and again, gradually I found myself learning it by heart more than writing it. After a few weeks we broke up amicably and via e-mail (the affection had lost its tangibility).
(11) Laura. In early 2002 I had asked Jansen for permission to cut back on the dissertation for a few months due to financial difficulties. The scholarship had run out, I needed money and was compiling glossaries for GEO (but hurry, Mandelkern, said Jansen, in two years I’m leaving here!). On the way to work one morning someone threw himself in front of the train between Sternschanze and St. Pauli stations, Laura and I sat next to each other on the U-Bahn until the police and the forensic specialists had finished their work (a week before I met Elisabeth in the cafeteria). Laura had a vague resemblance to the second Carolina. We had a coffee in the Portuguese Quarter, she lived not far from there in Neustadt. This story was an attempt (it failed miserably)
.
(12) Elisabeth. You don’t consider the number eleven an impressive tally, Elisabeth. You in the bathroom next to me, your blood on me. You sing “The Linden Tree” (the Renault in front of the house sticky and gray with linden blood). You and I in a parking lot on the Atlantic coast of Brittany, on Mont Ventoux, in a hotel room in Venasque. You and I on a traffic island in Lyon when the Renault gave up in the middle of the summer (we had to replace the engine). You on the bank of the Parseta (our honeymoon). The scar under your belly button. Your red hair, the a in your name, your athletic height, your long-limbed beauty (the green of your eyes).
Funeral for a Dog: A Novel Page 8