the deeper water
I go to the bathroom two more times, I lean on the scrawl-covered tiles and order water when I return (the change accumulates next to the notebook). Between retches I search for words for my next decisions. I’m a journalist, I say to the waitress, I’m researching a story. I should leave, I could stay, I could examine Svensson’s manuscript, possibly his attempted autobiography, maybe his Speculations about Felix. I would sleep with Tuuli (I would have decided). I observe a fisherman on the shore and, later, Ceresio, the name of the ferryboat that travels between Lugano and Porlezza. A couple disembarks, the man is carrying a backpack, the woman is holding a child. A few boxes and cartons are thrown onto the metal dock (the mail). The flags along the shore are hanging, the blind Prosecco drinker’s white hair is lying straight (the age of the people on the quay). My body isn’t calming down. The lakes of Ticino, Elisabeth said on Friday on the way back from the restaurant, are deep, in winter the snow never stays there, and in summer they keep their shores pleasantly cool. Lake Lugano is a stable body of water. Not all that back and forth like the Atlantic, not all that burbling like the Baltic Sea. It can be relied on, Mandelkern. In the early afternoon Ceresio could take me back to Lugano, but I remain seated (I myself can’t rely on myself).
“The Master of Chickens
(Profile of Dirk Svensson/about 270 words)”
On the pier it’s almost windless. Scattered clouds hang around the peaks of the Ticino mountains on the shore of Lago di Lugano. Under the lindens and palms of the lakeside promenade walk extraordinarily well-dressed women and men, radiant with worldliness, they drink Campari under cypresses. Lugano is beautiful, and the Ticino city knows it too. It was not for nothing that the grandmasters of German literature strolled here. Hermann Hesse wrote for fourteen years in Montagnola in the hills overlooking the city and painted his famous watercolors, and Thomas Mann was particularly fond of drinking his Sunday tea in the cafés of the Piazza della Riforma. Two generations of writers and one world war later, this city remains a hub for rich, beautiful, and smart people. And then, true to style, Dirk Svensson appears for the interview with his boat—as might be expected from a successful author. His first children’s book struck the nerve of the times: The Story of Leo and the Notmuch has already sold 100,000 copies, and sales are projected to more than double. But of course the first impression is deceptive: instead of the expected light summer suit, Svensson is wearing an old T-shirt, his boat is a wooden tub with an outboard. In the stern sits a black, ugly dog, a kind of German shepherd with a gray spot on his chest and only three legs. Dirk Svensson is a woodcutter in a fishing trawler, exactly as I imagined a media-shy children’s book author. “Climb aboard,” says Svensson, “come along!” The small wooden boat named Macumba rocks alarmingly as I…
It can’t go on like this, Mandelkern!
About Osteno? I’m not writing about Osteno, I explain to the waitress, the story only takes place here, it’s a profile of a children’s book author residing here. Residing? The waitress doesn’t know the word. Yes, I say, Dirk Svensson. Si, she says, Svensson and Kiki are the only foreigners who stay well into autumn. I feel nauseous again, suddenly the waitress’s sentences contain incomprehensible words and names. They’re artists, she says, and so only half tourists, the other half belongs here. They’re famous in some way, that much she knows, the only celebrities on this end of the lake (lo scrittore, she says, l’artista). Despite that, the two of them have stayed normal, says the waitress, as she prepares the coffee and refills the card players’ glasses with Prosecco, welcome guests, thank God (the roar of the espresso machine grates off a layer of my composure). The waitress points behind her. On the wall: a framed mirror (image: the intact New York skyline in black and pink), a signed poster of Valentino Rossi in front of a motorcycle (signature printed on). Between them a picture that also must have been painted by Kiki (Lua and a dark-haired toddler sleeping between red chair legs). That’s Lua, says the waitress, il buon samaritano a tre gambe. The dog is faithful, she says, how do you say? Faithful until death? Obbedienza cieca? Last summer Lua could still walk, and the three of them came here for coffee every day. The waitress imitates Lua’s bark (she only manages his cough, she smokes too much). Isabella was born in Lugano too, sweet little Isabella (I don’t ask who Isabella is).
False assumption: the Italians here don’t want Svensson.
The waitress lights a cigarette, pulls out a photograph from under the counter and asks: is your book a sad story? Take this, she says and hands me the photo, a souvenir. My reply: I’m writing for a newspaper, for a book you need years and a real story. In the photo: Osteno in deep snow, two children playing under the small but already pruned lindens along the shore, the bar in a real house: “Caffè del Porto, Osteno, Invierno 1939/40.” The waitress points to the bar furniture, to the pictures on the wall, to the tacky sofa, to the pinball machine, to the toy vending machine, to the card-playing men, out the window, to the red chairs, to the lake, to the opposite shore. Newspaper or book, she says, Osteno is a good place for sad stories.
What I’ve found out:
Elisabeth wants a profile of the children’s book author Dirk Svensson, so I flew to Milan. Svensson’s dog Lua really does have only three legs, he’s old and will soon die. Felix Blaumeiser is already dead. Svensson didn’t draw the pictures in his children’s book himself, he’s not an illustrator, all the pictures are by Kiki Kaufman. Kiki Kaufman is not here on the lake. Svensson seems to have been expecting Tuuli and the boy. Svensson’s reclusiveness is his concentration. Svensson is a man of rituals. He cultivates his own vegetables, he breeds chickens, sometimes he takes the boat to the supermarket, otherwise he doesn’t go anywhere. Under his desk is Blaumeiser’s suitcase, in it is Svensson’s Astroland manuscript. I’m a slow reader, but I devoured it in a night. I’m piecing together Svensson from what I see and hear and read, but the manuscript is lying unfinished in the suitcase (Svensson is a memory animal). The Story of Leo and the Notmuch is taken from his life as much as Astroland (this line of thought is naïve biographism, Elisabeth would say, you yourself should know that with your literary studies minor, art and life are two completely different things). I take Svensson’s stories at face value, even though I should be more careful (my considerations are based on the interpretive principle of the critic Louis Simpson: “my rule has been to give these matters as much importance as he himself gave them”). Now I want to get to the bottom of his strangeness after all. Svensson is no stranger than I am. I should investigate Tuuli’s divided love (either Blaumeiser is the boy’s father or Svensson is), Felix Blaumeiser’s drinking habits, his carelessness, his death, finally Svensson’s tendency to flee.
write or leave?
In the early afternoon I’m still sitting in the Bar del Porto in Osteno (on the brink of vomiting for the fourth time). Another attempt to decide, another attempt to fulfill my assignment and write the profile as planned (another attempt to go back to Elisabeth). I could take an early train home and start the profile from scratch on the way. I would write the last lines as the train went through the Free Port of Hamburg, past the wholesale fruit market, the warehouse district, the Deichtorhallen galleries. I should could would, but my stomach wants to wring itself out, my body wants to stay. On the table in front of me lie the notebooks and the change, the clock in the Bar del Porto shows 1:15 PM (the smell of toast and cigarettes). In a few minutes the ferry will dock, pick up passengers and cast off again. I have to decide. The coins would be enough for a phone call, I think, I could ask Elisabeth for another day (I would only have to scrape the chewing gum off the pay phone).
phone call (straightening things out)
INTERN: Culture pages, Elisabeth Emmerich’s office, what can I do for you?
MANDELKERN: Mandelkern. I’d like to speak to my wife.
I: Who’s calling, please?
M: It’s Mandelkern.
I: Who?
M: My wife, please. Frau Emmerich?
M: No! DA-NI-EL MAN-DEL-KERN? Hello?
I: I really can barely understand you.
M: It’s urgent!
I: Herr Mandelkern? Where are you?
M: I’m still here.
I: Where exactly is here?
M: I’m sitting here in a café at the end of the world and have to throw up every five minutes. I have fish poisoning. Please tell that to my wife.
I: Frau Emmerich wants me to tell you that we’ve been worried. It’s been raining for days.
M: Who? We?
I: We thought you’d drowned. Frau Emmerich wants me to ask you what you’re thinking. Your phone is turned off, you’re not in the hotel. That’s fucked up, those are Frau Emmerich’s exact words. To drown without a word.
M: I ate fish. Filetto di persico. And now I’m throwing up. Tell that to my wife.
I: What’s going on with the profile?
M: There really is a story here. Several, even. Svensson has written something like an autobiography. I’m in the middle of it. I’ve taken a lot of notes. I need some more time.
I: Frau Emmerich wants me to ask you whether ethnology is getting in your way again.
M: What? No.—Maybe.
I: Herr Mandelkern?
M: I’m on death’s trail.
I: Now I can’t hear you again. The line is really bad.
M: Why did I have to be the one to come here? It’s not that simple, tell that to my wife!
I:—
M: I’m going to stay longer, do you hear me? Your research was terrible, by the way! Do you hear me?
I:—
M: Elisabeth?
plastic cups & imagination
It’s the creeping professionalization of our love that I can’t bear, its purposefulness. Elisabeth is a goal-directed woman, her voice sings resistance to pieces (Elisabeth and I are slipping away from each other). She took over the editorship of the culture pages, she’s 38 years old. I’d like to have your problems, Mandelkern, she said, maybe there’s a good story there. That’s what she wants (now she wants a child).
Ceresio 13:20
I’m watching the ship depart. The swallows high in the sky, the fog has dispersed. I already missed my return flight yesterday, the 13:20 ferry has just cast off with a loud blast of its horn and is crossing the lake (I can no longer leave this place today, not even if I wanted to). I will stay. My body will recover, I remember that “the ethnologist should physically work and dance, but also suffer. Stoller stresses the importance of experiences of illness and temporary paralysis” (here Spittler is referring to Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology). I’ve already filled the first notebook (Semikolon, blue), the second and red notebook is lying in front of me and waiting.
How can someone really tell his own story?
I follow the waitress’s recommendation and don’t drink any more coffee (the gray chewing gum under my fingernails after I scraped it off the coin slot). She asks if I’d like Prosecco instead. Grazie, I say, grazie (everyone wants decisions). I pay. Svensson still hasn’t returned, I can no longer wait for him and Macumba (I have to finally sleep). The waitress takes my money and points along the shore to the end of the Via San Rocco and farther into the woods (the extension into nothingness). Then another kilometer. She’ll tell Svensson that I’ve already left, she says, and points to a stack of letters behind the bar, he comes every afternoon for the mail anyway. Arrivederci, scrittore, she says (apparently she means me).
with his back to the wall
High above the village, at the end of the Via San Rocco, there’s a thrown-together park bench between two dumpsters: two blocks of stone, two screwed-on planks (civilization reaches to this point). The road peters out in a gravelly dead end. Next to the dumpsters lie the same black plastic bags as on Svensson’s property. From up here Osteno is indistinguishable from the other villages on the lake (wood, stones, and ferryboats are the same color in this region, a weathered red or orange). Svensson’s ruin is somewhere down there on the water to the north, wedged between the green lake and the wooded cliff wall of Monte Cecchi. It can be reached only by a narrow road that must have been drivable at some point years ago (now Svensson’s chickens live in the Fiat, the ivy creeps over the mossy windows). Here the trees don’t have it easy, I think, but trees grow on the steepest slopes (Svensson lives with his back to the wall).
Ficus elastica
On a Sunday morning during our first summer Elisabeth and I ended up at the Hamburg fish market, the market vendors cried their wares, we ordered coffee and bratwurst, we didn’t want to stay long. Away from the stalls we fed two ducks in the oily harbor water. Our few mutual friends we’d forgotten in the Pudel Club (the red of her hair between the strings of lights). Elisabeth dispelled my caution, I peed in the entrance to a warehouse. On the Elbe a single pilot boat. When I returned, Elisabeth had bought a rubber plant (Ficus elastica). For us, she said, taking the flowerpot off the quay wall: now we should get out of here (the rust on the bollards). Later, in the taxi heading toward Hoheluft, she said that starting now I had to really touch her, she wasn’t made of cotton candy (Elisabeth’s tangibility).
Let’s push things forward
In the late summer Elisabeth and I grew together. When it got dark we smoked barely dried weed from our neighbor’s window box, we walked through cobblestone streets, our footsteps resounded between the buildings (Elisabeth was the only woman in the city). When the bars chained up their chairs, we lay down by the Eimsbüttel canals or next to the rose beds in the Planten un Blomen park. Elisabeth said that she wanted to see me always, and I fell asleep early in the morning only so as to wake up next to her again around noon. We bought ice cream at the twenty-four-hour gas station (Langnese, Aral), we listened to British pop music, we waited for the Hamburger Morgenpost. Most of the time we awoke in my apartment on Marthastrasse, sometimes at her place too. Once I got up and said I had to go now, sometimes it was too much. Yes, said Elisabeth, but it’s never enough (we were both right).
Are Svensson’s stories made up?
Over the lake in front of Osteno a gray haze has replaced the fog. Claasen is his own crematorium, Svensson said yesterday, but the smoke isn’t coming from the woods above Svensson’s house (Claasen’s direction). The cloud is spreading over the lake from beyond the village. This morning Svensson mentioned a quarry in Osteno, its lack of orders (Svensson makes up his stories as he pleases; I shouldn’t believe him). At the path’s entrance a sign: Attenti al Cane/Warnung vor dem Hund/Beware of the Dog.
What exactly do you actually want, Elisabeth?
Elisabeth and I on a Thursday evening in autumn on the way to the Literaturhaus on the Outer Alster Lake, we were supposed to meet her still-husband. I’d like to introduce Mandelkern to you, Elisabeth had said on the phone, Mandelkern makes my everyday life easier (I stood next to her and felt like a teenager). Elisabeth had already been living alone for years, she was still married only on paper. There was still some time and it was a clear evening, so we got out of the taxi on Schöne Aussicht, we wanted to walk the last stretch. When I asked why this meeting was necessary, Elisabeth pulled me into a rhododendron by the Wolfgang Borchert memorial. We’re reasonable people, said Elisabeth, clamping my head in her hands (vise). Take your finger, Mandelkern, she said, I want you to mark my pussy (words fail me). But she showed consideration for the people out for a stroll and came only softly or not at all, We are the generation without ties and without depth was engraved on the Borchert stone, a large dog crawled to us in the undergrowth and was whistled back (different generation, different abyss). Elisabeth believed in clear boundaries and was about to set one. Wash your finger, said Elisabeth, he doesn’t have to smell us right away. What exactly do you actually want? I asked. Elisabeth’s reply: I want to sense where I belong (we once belonged to each other, I remember). Later we were sittin
g at one of the back tables in the large hall of the Literaturhaus Café, when Elisabeth’s husband canceled our meeting. Not much later he went into retirement, the divorce they settled the next spring, I never met him.
Attenti al Cane!
I’m sitting at the end of the Via San Rocco in front of my last bile and my inability to leave (coffee and soul), when Tuuli is suddenly standing next to me. The boy behind her seems intimidated by the sight of the helpless man (Mandelkern). She’s holding a black garbage bag in her hand. My body’s acting crazy, I say to Tuuli between two retches, an influenzal infection maybe. We would definitely detect a fever, I say, but then I can’t go on talking because I have to gag (one has a high temperature when the body is fighting something, says Elisabeth). When not even bile is coming up anymore, Tuuli tosses the garbage bag into the heap and hands me a handkerchief:
Funeral for a Dog: A Novel Page 17