Chiarella
I wake up when the bedroom door is shut softly from outside. The pigeons are cooing, now and then chainsaws and the splintering of falling trees, the swallows merely little dots in absolute blue (the afternoon sky completely cloudless over the smooth lake). The small, pretty mother in the green bikini was in my room while I was sleeping. Her scent is still hanging in the air. On the floor next to my head is an open bottle of water (Chiarella) and a glass (Duralex), under them a torn-out page from my notebook with a handwritten note. The passing thought of not reading the note and leaving Svensson’s ruin. But I don’t know the way, and my plane to Hamburg has already taken off without me (this is your story now, Mandelkern). This evening Elisabeth will close up her office and return to our apartment, but I won’t be there. Mandelkern, she’ll ask, are you there? Elisabeth will wait and wonder where I am. Mandelkern? Whether I’m going to come back at all. Daniel? Whether I’ve decided against our marriage.
between the animals
Another note: “Do we want to conduct an immanent analysis of the concept ‘relationship’ and jettison all contextual references, Prof. Mandelkern?” Elisabeth wrote the message on a promotional postcard for the Brittany tourism agency and put it in my papers, I found it at work in the Museum of Ethnology on Rotherbaumchaussee (my laughter in the witch archive). Back then I divided my time between Elisabeth, my dissertation, and work at GEO. Then our first trip together in spring 2003 to the Atlantic, Elisabeth’s divorce was on the horizon, but I didn’t hear anything about that (she kept all that separate from me). We parked the Renault in the middle of a village square, the restaurant (Le Pélican) was a large room with three long tables and no menus, there were carrots and lobsters for everyone. I had to understand, Elisabeth said, as she opened her lobster claws more skillfully than anyone else at the table, that her first marriage took place at another time and in another place (the sound of the nutcracker in her nimble fingers). Yes, I said, I did understand that. Around us French was being spoken, we drank wine from scratched decanters.
Chin-chin!
said Elisabeth, between the lobsters she shared cigarettes with a retired foreign currency dealer from Paris, I had to dance with his granddaughter. At night we refilled the Renault’s cooling water from the fountain and I drove us past fields and stone walls, Elisabeth with her eyes closed in the backseat, she sang “Der Rote Wedding”(Rotfront! she sang, Rotfront!). Then we slept on a wool blanket next to a few menhirs (back then we were the same age).
Petrarch & Simpson
Elisabeth and I made a loop around France (we circled each other). We drove the Renault through Brittany, then along the Spanish border and the Côte d’Azur, we slept in the places that the guidebooks passed over. Every morning I woke up two hours before Elisabeth, read essays, and wrote my notes. She abstained from croissants, I got used to black coffee and observed Elisabeth sleeping in the various pension beds (I failed at sketching her beauty). When she woke up, we immediately set off. She sat in the passenger seat of the Renault and read to me from culinary guides. Two warm meals a day, I got used to Ricard and Pernot and entrails (I still sometimes hated brains and intestines). Elisabeth ordered the red wines, we drank them together. I always got to drive, sometimes she talked on the phone with her husband and I tried not to listen (we learned our rituals). One weekend we visited two of her writer friends in a small village at the foot of Mont Ventoux (Venasque), they spent the summer there with their novels and plays (this is Daniel, said Elisabeth, you’re going to have to like him, I love him). After two days of conversations about books and plays and the view of the bare mountain I wanted to move on (Côte Luberon, Côte du Rhône). Elisabeth chose the memorial to the racing cyclist and first doping fatality Tom Simpson (her strange interest in cyclists, the races themselves she never followed). As we finally forced the Renault torturously over the summit, she read to me from Petrarch, However, the mountains of the province of Lyons could be seen very clearly to the right, and to the left the sea at Marseille and at the distance of several days the one that beats upon Aigues Mortes. The Rhône itself was beneath my eyes. At the Simpson memorial she placed a full bottle of wine next to dozens of water bottles, flowers, and jerseys. Simpson died of dehydration, she explained, and I took note of her words, he’d ingested only whisky and wine and amphetamines (“put me back on my bike” were his last words, or maybe “go on, go on,” they haven’t been precisely imparted).
Gulf of Marseille
Change of drivers on top of the windy mountain: Elisabeth’s absolutely unambiguous kiss when we came out of the station on the summit. In the writers’ small house we’d had to sleep in a walk-through room, the female dramatist’s two small children had jumped on our blanket in the morning (sex was unthinkable). I remember that Elisabeth on the hairpin turns on the lower third of the mountain pulled her skirt up and her underpants to the side. I want to come now, she said (she spoke of her bestial lust, I had to concentrate on gorges and sheep). Both of us stared at the narrow, winding road, Elisabeth came with her eyes on inwardly directed emptiness, I concentrated simultaneously on my finger on her pussy and the emergency brake of the Renault. A cyclist overtook us at the decisive moment, Elisabeth had stepped too abruptly on the brake (we laughed, we risked a rear-end collision together). When we reached the beach near Martigues, we parked between the refineries on the left and an industrial port on the right. Artificial palms, fish stalls abandoned in the midday heat, an old man was holding a kite in the air for his grandson (light blue water, light blue sky). Elisabeth and I hopped along the brightly shining stones of the jetty, we bought deep-fried fish and cold soda, we sat in the spraying groundswell. I remember exactly how the rust-red of the refineries was reflected in Elisabeth’s sunglasses as she opened a can of soda and told me with a laugh that she wanted to be with me always, I was so wonderfully practical, extraordinarily practical, especially when traveling (I had to laugh at that).
between the books
I lack 3,000 words for Svensson’s strangeness. Right now Harnisch must be at the most expensive restaurant in Châtenay-Malabry thinking about morality and urine (his return trip directly after the press conference of the anti-doping laboratory; but no one knows when that will be), Elisabeth will be doing a little more work at home. Where to begin? I look at Svensson’s books standing on the desk, I wonder why his shelves are almost empty. Did Svensson throw the books in the garbage bags, is he disposing of his library? Is that where the smoke is coming from? The remaining books are standing there as if they were arranged for me (as if I were supposed to read Svensson’s thoughts). For example: Uwe Johnson’s Jahrestage. In front of me stands only volume 2 of the first edition, in our bedroom in Hamburg a red and black collected edition is lying on the floor, read and flagged, the most famous quote on the spine (the cat called memory). Svensson’s books, my books, Elisabeth’s books. For example: Max Frisch’s Montauk. On our honeymoon trip to Kolberg I talked to Elisabeth about it often enough (and she to me). We had only one weekend in the summer and wanted to get this formality over with. Elisabeth reminded me of Lynn, the Baltic Sea region of Frisch’s Long Island. The destination (Kolberg) was her idea, she wanted to bring together her past and her future, she said. I wanted to see her without everything else (without husband, without work, without St. Michaelis in the background, without St. Petri). Continuing along Svensson’s thinned-out shelf: Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie I’ve never read, Svensson’s copy torn and sticky, full of underlined passages and margin notes, on the flyleaf a phone number (646-299-1036 Kiki Kaufman!).
Manteli,
You’re still here! This house, these pictures, this garbage. All this is not my fault. Svensson talks melancholy nonsense: he has the world in his rearview mirror, his heart is a book. These old stories, these fictions. This nostalgia! Poppycock! You write all the time, Manteli. I believe: there’s nothing true about all this and nothing lasts forever, books, pictures, scribblings. There are more important things. Ther
e are things that are worth it. If you stay, I’ll show them to you.
Kauniita unia,
Tuuli
How do I get out of here?
Tuuli wants to show me things. I’m sitting at the desk and reading the message again and again: things that are worth it? Tuuli was standing next to me in a bikini as I was sleeping, she tore a page out of my notebook and wrote to me. Tuuli seems to know what she’s talking about (in that she reminds me of Elisabeth). She must know what the important things are: not words and notes, not the old stories and Svensson’s fictions, not pictures. The passing thought that she’s not here because of Svensson, not because of the boy and not because of Felix. Maybe Tuuli’s here because of me, maybe we were supposed to meet. Maybe all this is about fate (making connections where there are no connections). I remain seated at the desk. What holds me back I don’t know. Kauniita unia means “sweet dreams,” I remember that from my time with the second Carolina. Tomorrow I have to leave, I think, but then: I could stay.
Elisabeth and Daniel
The question of what’s worth it and what’s special? Elisabeth and I read each other like city maps (we moved into the back courtyards of our city). We exchanged the isolated tables of the Gruner + Jahr cafeteria for late-night bars, we slept together in my apartment (sometimes in hotels). But that’s not right. I can’t remember whether snow fell in the winter of 2002 and whether it remained on the ground, what was in the newspapers at that time, whether I had a cold. I must have sat in the office all day, leafing through proofs and waiting for evening. Elisabeth was still married, her husband worked for the publishing company too, we should keep that in mind, she said. Sometimes I saw her for days at a time only in a completely official capacity at tables full of journalists (she requested those days). Elisabeth is a pragmatist. But that’s not right either: I ignored the thought of her husband. For a few months we actually lived as if it were just the two of us, everything else was of only superficial concern. At her desk with a view of St. Michaelis Elisabeth wrote easily digestible but honest articles (strong women, good-looking men, new movie releases), she called this arrangement a “quite acceptable backdrop against which she could perform her life,” I compiled glossaries for GEOkompakt (“The Wonder of Humanity”) and spent mornings in the Museum of Ethnology. We had no mission outside of ourselves (I found her red hair in the corners of my apartment). From our words and thoughts we designed streets and moved more purposefully, maybe more meaningfully, in them (she showed me the remote map quadrants), we used our bodies (I went beyond my boundaries).
Who exactly is Daniel Mandelkern?
In my head this image remains: Elisabeth and I in bed in the Bismarckstrasse apartment, yogurt jars and red wine bottles, on the floor next to us on the right and left our books, on my side:
The Water-Method Man by John Irving
Montauk by Max Frisch
The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
A Diary in the Strictest Sense of the Term by Bronislaw Malinowski.
Auberge la Fontaine
I first heard the name Dirk Svensson at dinner with Elisabeth’s friends in Venasque (Auberge la Fontaine). Elisabeth and I were again spending a few days in Provence, we were celebrating her thirty-sixth birthday (April 1). We return again and again to our places, we go to the same restaurants and bars, we stay in the same rooms (Brittany, Provence, the Baltic Sea). This time we flew to Marseille and rented a car there (the Renault could no longer handle long distances, said Elisabeth, even though I’d love to sit next to you again for days, Daniel). In the middle of the small restaurant stood a grand piano, around it four tables and only a few audience members. Before dinner we drank and listened to Schubert’s four-hand military marches, then Poulenc (we soaked thoughts in wine like plums). The pianist looked like Woody Allen, his accompanist wore a black evening dress (her heavy body from behind an upside-down heart). Elisabeth didn’t have to introduce me, her friends knew me: the dramatist, the writer (we already had a shared story). At the next table an old woman played along with every single note on the wooden table. They were here to think, said the dramatist, without all the networking and the usual milieu. I salted my soup, whereupon the writer stood up and with an appropriate degree of conspicuousness threw the saltshaker out the window into the village fountain. It was about the genuine gaze, he said, raising his glass: to the natural beauty of meals and women (Elisabeth’s French laugh)! At some point between foie gras and cheese tasting (plateau de fromage), he leaned over to me and asked whether I’d heard of Dirk Svensson, now that was an author a journalist like me should write an article about. A strange man, Mandelkern! Elisabeth nodded, I laughed too.
on Elisabeth’s side
Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Jahrestage by Uwe Johnson
Kinder und Tod by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Das Dekameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
Die Hebammensprechstunde by Ingeborg Stadelmann
Die Besteigung des Mont Ventoux by Francesco Petrarca
Who exactly is Elisabeth Edda Emmerich?
the 3-step system
First we speak about visible things. Because the power is still out (Claasen set a fire, Claasen chopped down trees, Claasen this, Claasen that), we’re sitting in the kitchen and watching and listening to Svensson (a transistor radio sits silently on a shelf). Filetto di persico con salvia, he says, taking a heavy pan from a hook, someone should fetch the sage from the terra-cotta pot in the garden. The boy has already forgotten his cut and wound, and Tuuli allows him to pick the sage by himself (he brings back oleander flowers). From the water we hear the dog coughing. The boy should also take a look in the chicken coop, says Svensson, setting three glasses of wine on the table, maybe they laid an egg this morning. Tuuli is smoking. This is how things look: a late afternoon with friends, the sun will set, and we’ll talk, we’ll pass around Autan (against the mosquitoes), we’ll refill one another’s glasses (against the silence). Svensson takes the packet with the fish from the sink, he praises cooking with gas (the directness of the manual procedure), he explains the secret to cooking good fish, the “3-step system,” he says (filleting, souring, salting—dispels odor and refines taste). Svensson praises the boy and lays out on the table the sage leaves he’s now found (he’s a real botanist, says Svensson, a plant expert and biologist). He drops some butter in the pan and holds up to the light the egg the boy has brought. He lays the soggy wax paper on the table in front of Tuuli, she should operate on the fish, he says, that’s always been the task of the doctor in the house. Svensson laughs, and Tuuli asks whether the fish hasn’t been refrigerated all day. Yes, the power’s out, says Svensson, but the fish here on the lake are almost too fresh to eat. To celebrate the occasion, he says, raising his glass, to celebrate this special occasion (a watery red trail of blood on the table).
Elisabeth (red)
Our honeymoon lasted three days and took us to Kolberg. Everything we needed fit in the Renault. The summer of 2003 was a summer of record-breaking heat (we were wearing a wedding dress and shorts). At the Eimsbüttel marriage bureau the throwing of rice was prohibited, and the paternoster elevator tore a snag in Elisabeth’s red dress. All you have to do is stand still, she said, and it goes continuously up and down. My grandmother brought lilies (Elisabeth’s parents took her between them). After the wedding we ate lunch in the Four Seasons Hotel and set off immediately afterward (we hadn’t even reserved a table). Maybe another life is a simpler life. The language of flowers is a foreign language, Elisabeth said later on the country road. She has been married, she has lost a child, now she wants to risk it again (her bulky baggage). I drove and Elisabeth read to me from an old newspaper, it took us two hours to reach the sea at Lübeck, we’d left everything behind.
wedding dress (red)
In my head this image remains: Elisabeth and I on a Baltic Sea beach beyond the Priwall Peninsula, the red wedding dress spread out under us (sea buckthorn and stunted pine
s). Elisabeth is eating peppered mackerel directly from the wax paper with her fingers. I fall asleep, and when I wake up storm clouds have blotted out the sun. Lightning flashes, the beach is empty, I’m alone (the wax paper and the dress lie crumpled in the beach grass). No wind, no rain, no thunder. Suddenly Elisabeth surfaces from the completely smooth water and comes toward me (she has nothing on). Behind her the Baltic Sea begins to foam, a balloon wafts over the water (red). When she sits on me, even though she moves much slower than usual, she comes much too fast (outside wet gooseflesh and inside unexpectedly warm). I follow suit, then the thunder, then the rain (as if she were responsible for all this). Elisabeth says that she loves me and wipes herself clean with the wedding dress, I’m forbidden to use that against her. Elisabeth laughs, I laugh too.
our strange preferences
We continued with the red: Elisabeth and I at the balustrade of the Klütz Mill, the wedding dress folded in the Renault. The sun was setting (a small detail). Elisabeth was wearing a white T-shirt, her hair tied back with a rubber band. She ordered plaice with red wine, I hesitated at the thought. If I may, said the waiter, to go with the plaice we have an excellent Chateauneuf du Pape. But it’s not about tailoring things to convention, Elisabeth declared, everyone has his own strange preferences. Isn’t that right, Mandelkern? The sun clear over the fields and flying wheat husks and swarms of mosquitoes. The same for me, I said (back then I thought we were forever). Elisabeth laughed, I laughed too.
one-eyed Jack
Tuuli asks for implements and Svensson puts bowls (red plastic) and a knife block on the table. She chooses the smallest and tests the blade with her index finger, then she sharpens it and Svensson refills our wine. The passing thought of asking my questions now without warning into the silent room and waiting for clear answers (the sound of the blade on the stone). I lay my book and pen on the table quite conspicuously, but then I don’t ask after all. Instead I watch Tuuli filleting the fish: her fingers trace the creatures’ bellies, they open the backs, lay bare the hearts, gills, liver, intestines. Even Svensson stops talking (when no one replies, there’s nothing to say). Tuuli is adept, she has no inhibitions, she doesn’t hesitate, she first wipes the blood with a towel and then brushes her blonde hair from her face. She shows the dead fish to the boy, Svensson and I follow her explanations. May I have the heart, Äiti? asks the boy, but Tuuli throws it in the plastic bowl with the other remains, wipes the blade clean, and lights a cigarette. Hearts are not for people, she says, hearts are for the dog. Besides, Svensson adds, the fried egg is ready (may I serve, sir? one-eyed Jack?). Over the lake the heron is flying slowly, farther out is a steamer with strings of lights. Tuuli says she’s going swimming now, it will be dark soon and she doesn’t like swimming in the dark, could we manage without her for a little while?
Funeral for a Dog: A Novel Page 12