Funeral for a Dog: A Novel

by Thomas Pletzinger

  Yes.

  Of course.

  Minä en pelkää.

  She kisses the boy on the forehead and stubs out her cigarette. You smoke too much, says Svensson, serving the boy his dinner. By the time I get cancer, Tuuli replies, we’ll have found a cure. Then she leaves (Tuuli believes in the future).

  to celebrate the occasion

  First the fried egg, later a basket of bread, the bowl of salad, a plate of fruit. Svensson sets the table. The boy stands on his chair and eats with his fingers, we’re again or still drinking wine, red and white, Barolo and Lugana, the boy gets apple juice in a wine glass. Svensson stands at the stove like a television cook, he tosses gnocchi in butter and sage, he praises the boy, he cuts his one-eyed Jack into suitable pieces, occasionally he wipes the boy’s mouth with his apron (the boy’s not afraid).

  Interview (Dirk Svensson, television cook)

  MANDELKERN: Can I help you, Svensson?

  SVENSSON: With the cooking?

  M: Yes. Maybe chop something, cut? Anything.

  S: You can open another bottle of wine to celebrate the occasion.

  M: Where do I find a corkscrew?

  S: In my pants pocket. Here.

  M: My wife loves Barolo.

  S: You’re married?

  M: For two years.

  S: I’m not.

  M: But it’s not that I regard marriage as the only true life plan.

  S: What?

  M: Sorry. Do you live completely alone here?

  S: I’m not lonely.

  M: Did you write and illustrate your book here?

  S: The glasses are up there in the cabinet.

  M: The pictures in your book, are they…

  S: Yes?

  M: In the seclusion of this house, do you even take notice of the success of your book?

  S: I don’t read newspapers, Mandelkern, I don’t own a television.

  M: You live alone with Lua? An unusual constellation for a children’s book author.

  S: What?

  M: I just mean—if I may—that such reclusiveness is somewhat unusual. For a children’s book author. What one imagines when one thinks of a children’s book author. And Lua is no ordinary dog, if I may say so.

  S: Lua and I get along with each other.

  M: How old is Lua actually?

  S: I don’t know, Mandelkern, German shepherds sometimes live to be fifteen years old. Lua is older, Lua is a memory animal.

  M: How long have you had him?

  S: Lua was already here long before us, Mandelkern. He was Claasen’s watchdog, his pack animal, he pulled his children’s sled in winter and the wagon in summer, he has barked from San Salvatore and from Monte Cecchi, he has howled at Napoleon’s Iron Crown of Lombardy, he has bitten the Habsburgs and peed on Mussolini’s leg, he has slept under Klingsor’s balcony and brought Herr Geiser over the mountain. But those are other stories.

  M: Herr Geiser?

  S: Mandelkern! You’re supposed to be a cultural journalist!

  M: And Lua’s leg?

  S: I’ve never seen his leg.

  M: But yesterday you said…

  S: Let’s drink, Mandelkern, the wine’s been breathing long enough. Chin-chin!

  M: To Lua.

  S: To Felix Blaumeiser.

  To the old days!

  he says, but Tuuli doesn’t respond. She drinks without looking at Svensson and stubs out her cigarette in the sink (her wet hair combed back). Then the heavy pan and the fragrant fish between us (the eyes now murky), we eat without a word, only the boy asks sporadic questions and gets selective answers. (Why’s it called a one-eyed Jack? Do dogs like cold fish?) Tuuli cuts an apple for him, later the boy climbs from his chair onto his mother’s lap, lays his head on her chest, and closes his eyes (words fail me). Tuuli enfolds him in her arms and hums the Finnish song that I heard through the wall last night, she removes his shoes and holds his little feet, she herself eats with her left hand (their shared calm, my unexpected emotion). The fish is perfect, the wine a little too warm (Elisabeth would send it back). Svensson and I listen to Tuuli’s singing until our plates are empty too, until the boy has fallen asleep, then Svensson gets up and strokes the sleeping child in Tuuli’s arms on the cheek. He could teach the boy how to fish, he says, pointing to the yellow fishing rod, which is leaning, still in its plastic, in the corner of the room.

  the demotion of the Fiat

  Svensson rekindles the light. Tuuli has brought the boy into the room next to mine and left the door wide open, I wash the plates as if I belonged here. Tuuli is watching me as she smokes my cigarettes (Muratti 2000). These candles, says Svensson, are the last light of the day. He speaks with proud enthusiasm of his house, of the chickens and dogs and chairs, of the view of the opposite shore, he tells about Claasen and Claasen’s wife and Claasen’s sorrow, he talks about the seasons and fishing grounds and plant cycles, about the access road that’s been overgrown for years (the extension of the Via San Rocco into nothingness). He laughs about the demotion of the Fiat from small car to a pen for small animals. Svensson is a feverish storyteller, his stories intertwine, his punch lines flare up in unexpected places, our glasses clink (even Tuuli smiles occasionally). I enjoy listening to Svensson, and he seems to have been waiting for listeners. He pours wine into each of our glasses, he speaks of the local birds and trees and water snakes, there are vipers here too, he says, raising his glass with every joke and then at every sad turn (I’ve given up resistance). If the boy wouldn’t wake up, if the candles wouldn’t burn down, if the next day wouldn’t come, if I didn’t have 3,000 words to write, if Tuuli didn’t have to sleep too (a gap in her teeth when she laughs)—we could sit here forever, I think, why not? But Tuuli downs her glass in one swig and Svensson gets up. He asks for a cigarette, then he leaves. Tuuli refills the boy’s juice glass and pushes it across the table to me (succo di mele). Let’s conclude the evening by drinking something sensible, Manteli, she says, or else tomorrow will be a disaster.

  apple juice

  With a little patience and spit, said Elisabeth, standing up. The digits of the alarm clock at 2:17 AM, down below on Bismarckstrasse the scrape of a bicycle and a mosquito in the room, the summer settled on the roofs. Elisabeth is not a squeamish woman (at first she’d remained dry). I noticed that I was intensely thirsty and Elisabeth’s eventual wetness on my cock was long dry (my own sticky wetness). I first heard the toilet flushing and then the opening and closing of the fridge, Elisabeth was singing “In My Solitude.” Then her singing stopped (it felt as if she were dead). When she returned to the mattress, she pushed me back and kissed me with open lips, from her mouth cold apple juice flowed into me (Elisabeth the woman I’d been waiting for).

  Interview (anniversary of a death)

  MANDELKERN: So are you a doctor?

  TUULI: I’m drunk.

  M: What kind of doctor?

  T: Surgery. In the Charité.

  M: I once read that surgeons are the artisans of the field. Is that true?

  T: I’m not a psychologist, I amputate.

  M: Really?

  T: Yes, Manteli, Lua’s leg was the first body part I cut off. Otherwise Lua wouldn’t be alive today, he would have bled to death ten years ago.

  M: I thought Lua had always been here on the lake.

  T: Poppycock. Did he tell you that?

  M: He did.

  T: Svensson changes stories the way other people change shirts. He’s always done that.

  M: You’re very young for a doctor.

  T: I started early, Manteli, I’m old enough. For surgery and cigarettes, for everything.

  M: I’m smoking again too.

  T: We’re all going to die.

  M: No one said anything about death.

  T: I want to tell you something, Manteli: Tänään on se päivä kun hän kuoli.

  M: Today is the anniversary of a death?

  T: Today death is everywhere. Everything here in Svensson’s house is stories and death. Ju
st take a good look around. The silverware is old, the pictures are of dead animals, the dog will die soon, the access road is overgrown, the chairs are rotten, the house is a ruin. This lake is a grave, and Svensson is sitting on the edge. I can hardly bear it, Manteli. Svensson collects the past so time won’t disappear, so each day isn’t one more day that Felix Blaumeiser is dead, so life won’t go on without him.

  M: The anniversary of Felix Blaumeiser’s death?

  T: Do you speak Finnish, Manteli?

  a match breaks

  Tuuli’s hand then suddenly on my chest, our cigarette in her other one. With this beauty rising toward me I miss the sound of the sliding door and the footsteps on the stairs, but Tuuli jumps back decisively just in time and laughs a mocking “Idiootti” into the room (she doesn’t mean me). Svensson is standing in the doorway, to celebrate the occasion, he repeats, showing us the gin bottle in his hand (a somewhat too-long pause), to celebrate this special occasion,

  Bombay Sapphire,

  and without asking helps himself to a cigarette from my pack (a match breaks). Tuuli’s eyes jump from the bottle to Svensson and back. With the cold cigarette in the corner of his mouth the children’s book author suddenly seems heavier and drunker than he did just minutes ago. He reaches into the cabinet and sets three water glasses on the table. Again he pours, but he’s already lost his sense of moderation, a good deal of gin drips over the rims and onto the table (Tuuli’s lips dashes, Svensson’s cigarette an exclamation point). Tuuli covers the glass with her hand, no-no, she’d prefer red wine.

  We drink

  to the old days (to the good old days, Tuuli, right?)

  to New York Oulu Seraverde (all the places we’ve been, Tuuli!)

  to Lua (to the intact Lua, right?)

  to Lua’s fourth leg (do you remember?)

  to the Europa-Park in Rust (the Euromaus, Tuuli!)

  to streamers and party hats (to celebrate the occasion, Mandelkern!)

  to the holy Mother of God (Nostra Signora)

  to the three of us (he doesn’t mean me).

  Shitty City 2000 (20 x 45, oil on canvas)

  The gin gives us the shakes and Tuuli takes a cigarette from the pack (the opposite of laughter). Svensson pours more gin into his glass, I decline, he leans his head back like a wolf (his words are howls). Svensson fills my glass anyway, Tuuli holds her red wine in her hand. I give her a light, we smoke (a certain nausea). When Svensson finally proposes a toast to “the boy and his pretty, because innocent, mother and his father, whoever he may be,” Tuuli’s glass flies across the table and shatters on the picture behind Svensson (a bloody wine stain on the faces). This night is over. Tuuli has closed the door behind her.

  Caesarean Risk

  On steady feet back into my room (despite the gin not incoherently drunk). My Süddeutsche is still lying on the desk, and instead of describing the wine on the kitchen wall now (heart-shaped, as if it were viscous), I open my notebook again, before my eyes the article and in my head Elisabeth’s vertical surgical scar, from which all the bluishness had already faded when I first touched it. First a vertical incision is made, she said, then in the deeper layers of skin a perpendicular one. We lay on the floorboards in my apartment. She’d already given up long before the doctors decided on the caesarean. Elisabeth speaks soberly about her body. The anesthesiologist had read her the consent form and handed it to her to sign (first epidural anesthesia, later even general anesthetic). Due to the heart sounds it had to be done quickly, another doctor on one side and the midwife on the other had pulled open her belly (she said: they tore me open). She hadn’t seen anything. At this point she’d already suspected the death of the child, probably her own too, after signing she’d already regarded her own body as cold, as if she had signed it away (as if the anesthesiologist were God). She had provided this signature, said Elisabeth, with a promotional ballpoint pen for Sedotussin cough syrup (she said: provided), she remembered exactly. The scars had healed fast, merely a few weeks of profuse discharge, then she had been herself again. I asked where her husband had been at that time. Elisabeth’s reply: it was never fully clear to me how all these things hung together (today she’d want to call that “lucky under the circumstances”).

  Svensson’s books

  I rest my feet on Svensson’s suitcase and listen to the rattle of the dishwashing in the kitchen (Svensson is cleaning up). Then Frisch again with his Montaigne (THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN IN GOOD FAITH, READER), then The Great Encyclopedia of Dog Breeds, then Johnson’s “cat called memory” again (pets, says Elisabeth, are an admission of interpersonal failure and cats unhealthy during pregnancy). Macumba is moored to a buoy, the moon is shining over the water, the oleander is wilting, the chairs are waiting. I’m sitting in front of my notebook and have tried to write Elisabeth’s and my story in good faith, but my sentences dry up under my fingers. Occasionally my words can hold a candle to the world, for a moment they mean everything,

  but that lasts only an instant,

  and this thought too is only pilfered. The room smells of damp stone, even though it isn’t raining (the roof is cracked). Again the thought of Elisabeth and the assignment she has given me, for a moment I’d like to call her, we have important things to talk about, but my telephone is in my suitcase at the Hotel Lido Seegarten. I’m drunk once again, too drunk for research, I can only speculate. I should put aside my pen, I could break open the suitcase, my questions remain:

  —How do I find out who Felix Blaumeiser was?

  —Why does Lua have only three legs?

  —Tuuli says that Svensson can’t paint—who painted those pictures?

  —Who exactly is Kiki Kaufman?

  —How do I open the suitcase?

  —What are the things that Tuuli wants to show me?

  Octopus

  Between the books on our bedroom floor Elisabeth will now be sleeping with the window open, she’ll simply ignore the mosquitoes from the canal. My move into Elisabeth’s apartment: I admired her resolution and absence of melancholy. Elisabeth asked for a weekend, and when she called on Monday and asked me to come to the Octopus furniture store on Lehmweg, the first dumpster had already been collected and with it almost all the furniture and all the old decoration ideas. She wanted us to start with a clean slate, Elisabeth said on the telephone, paint buckets and rollers were ready for painting (the echo of her voice in the empty apartment). On the footpath along the Isekanal a sleeping fisherman and an unexpected quiet in the middle of the city. It was Monday and March, I was ready to dispose of my furniture, so to speak, I felt light (Elisabeth doesn’t cling to things). Elisabeth in the empty showrooms of the furniture store: how she picked out two tables, a bed, and a sofa. I said “I guess so” and meant “yes,” I filled out an order form. We decided on white. At one point Elisabeth spilled paint on her pants and continued to paint half naked. We no longer spoke about her marriage. My marriage, said Elisabeth, has ended up in a dumpster. For weeks I took one box of books each evening to Elisabeth’s apartment on my bike, we spoke of “our apartment.” At night take-out from the Thai place downstairs, where no one seemed to speak German (you never get what you order). In July we lay between our book piles on the newly delivered bed and drank malt beer. We didn’t have to try hard, everything came naturally. At Svensson’s desk I notice the inexplicable similarity between Elisabeth and Tuuli (my unfulfilled assignment, my unanswered questions, my many possibilities). But that isn’t a question. It’s not an answer, either (focus, Mandelkern!).

  golden hairpins

  The second day on Svensson’s lake has passed without hesitation (without concern for my questions). I’m standing in flip-flops in Svensson’s dark ruin, I light a cigarette, open the window, and hang my shirt over the window latch (the pane a mirror, in it Mandelkern bare-chested, smoking). The cicadas and crickets can no longer be heard, I see the dog hobbling sluggishly to the shore again, at the dock he falls heavily on his side. Why is Lua waiting for death down there by the water?
Svensson is nowhere to be seen. Why am I still here? I don’t seem to be bothering Svensson in the least, and Tuuli also seems to want my presence here (my main informant). She brings me water when I’m asleep, she lays her small fingers on my chest (how easily & emptily “beauty” is written, how stupidly this cigarette hangs in the corner of my mouth!). Conjecture: Tuuli and Svensson never touch casually, on the pier in Lugano he grasped her wrist somewhat too forcefully; their relationship has passed its peak, now they’re confronting the consequences. Soon it will be midnight, there’s no more chance of Svensson unmooring his boat today. Elisabeth will now be standing in front of the fridge in our kitchen and drinking water from the bottle, dehydration is one of her new worries. She’ll be thinking about professional and private consequences (I shouldn’t still be here). My decision in the light of the last candle: think more about it tomorrow, get to the bottom of things tomorrow, interview Svensson tomorrow about his work and biography in a completely professional manner (were they in love once, is the boy Svensson’s son). Tomorrow I should ask for an interview in all soberness, leave, and send 3,000 words to the editorial department. But when I empty my pants pockets, I’m suddenly holding Tuuli’s golden hairpin in my hand (I could stay).