Funeral for a Dog: A Novel

by Thomas Pletzinger

  Salvation and Insight

  Stories don’t help, Svensson has noted down. He wanted to write his story out of his bones, but didn’t finish it. New York, for example: I’ve read Svensson’s September eleventh, about Tuuli, Svensson, and Felix on the roof, stiff with uncertainty or fear. I’ve read about Kiki Kaufman and her camera, about Svensson’s escape attempts: he left Felix and Tuuli and escaped with Kiki Kaufman to Coney Island. I’ve seen the television footage of the World Trade Center countless times (there’s no getting around those images), but Svensson has written those days differently, he has sketched his New York as he wanted to see it. In the margin he noted in red handwriting: Kiki Kaufman—salvation and insight. What remain are a PricewaterhouseCoopers T-shirt and the photo in a green plastic frame, taken on a roof in Williamsburg, Tuuli pregnant, Blaumeiser laughing. What remain are words: Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Frisch’s Montauk, Svensson’s manuscript in the suitcase.

  Horrifying! Horrific!

  From September 11, 2001, this image remains: my lathered face in the bathroom mirror of the apartment in Berkeley, when the telephone rings and the department secretary informs me that the Third World War is imminent (World War Three around the corner, she says, you better turn on the TV, Daniel, it’s horrifying! Horrific!). I’d been a doctoral student of anthropology at UC Berkeley for just under a year, my girlfriend, Anne, and I were sharing a small apartment. We’d thought we understood things: that our world was a barely comprehensible and yet somehow structured chaos of television and books and movies and newspapers and music. That this chaos of art, media, and bodies touched, of wounds dealt, would ultimately coalesce into a complete picture. Sorry, I said, I’m all covered in shaving cream (the dried foam on my face, the blood from the little cuts). Don’t, said the secretary, the beard looks good on you. My conference lecture was canceled half an hour later:

  9/11/2001, 11:15 AM, Kroeber Hall, Authenticity in Documentary Film (D. Mandelkern, Hamburg/GER)

  Later I sat half-shaven on the edge of the bed, my lecture scattered on the floor, the images of the collapsing towers before my eyes for the very first time. Anne came home from the university and shook me. She wanted to immediately pack our things and go back to Europe. In Astroland at this time Dirk Svensson and Felix Blaumeiser are worrying about Tuuli. They’ve smelled the smoke I watched on television. Here in Svensson’s house on the lake the unplastered walls and Kiki Kaufman’s pictures of ruins and the cameras in front of them. Anne took one of the first flights back to Zurich, I stayed another few months and sat alternately in front of the television and my dissertation (so much for the authenticity of images). I didn’t write another word and learned almost my whole manuscript by heart. I flipped through magazines and books and didn’t have a wet shave again until I met Elisabeth. Not out of superstition or trauma, but because she finds it more direct (it is actually more pleasant).

  Svensson unpacks

  Svensson was in the supermarket. As the mute swan flies in for a landing, there’s a slight breeze, the oleander sheds its flowers. The dog is still lying motionlessly by the water. Tuuli is sitting on the stone bench under the oleander, she’s smoking and observing her son and Svensson. Now and then a flower falls on the table or in her hair, now and then she says something and the boy turns around to her. Svensson puts his Los Angeles Lakers cap on Samy’s head (he adjusts it to the boy’s size). He lugs a few cartons ashore, vegetables, several boxes of bottles. The boy helps him unload, he gets a small, pink box with a light blue bow and puts it down next to Tuuli in the oleander flowers (pastry shop). The ailing dog lifts his head once again when Svensson kneels down next to him in the grass and buries his face in the fur on the back of his neck.

  Stories people tell themselves about themselves

  The Astroland manuscript is lying in front of me. Elisabeth is right: there’s a story here (Svensson’s colorful Third World, the story of the dog, the cockfight). I wonder whether something fishy’s going on. I’m an ethnologist, and Svensson writes a story about cockfighting, of all things? I remember Clifford Geertz’s “Deep Play”: “The cockfight’s function, if you want to call it that, is interpretive: it is a Balinese reading of Balinese experience; a story they tell themselves about themselves.” I can stay as long as Tuuli the doctor prescribes, she has diagnosed my curiosity. What’s still missing: Felix Blaumeiser’s death, the story of this last and most important death in Svensson’s stack of paper (Svensson’s guilt and Tuuli’s contribution). Decision: save from Svensson’s stories what I can. Copying it down is out of the question, I won’t have enough time. I’ll have to steal.

  interference with the research plan

  The blows of the ax on the shore break off. When I look out the window, Tuuli kisses the boy on his forehead and points up to my window. The boy nods, takes the pink box, which is waiting in the grass, kneels down next to Lua in the oleander flowers, and whispers something in his ear. Are they sending the boy to me, are they putting him in my care? Since I’ve been here, I haven’t seen Tuuli and Svensson talk with each other (why is Tuuli here?). I hurriedly close the suitcase (from my dissertation: “Communication and interaction with members of the ethnos under investigation can occasionally interfere with the original research plan; occasionally they bring it to a complete standstill. Therefore participant observation always entails balancing one’s own research objective with the conditions of the investigation and modifying it if necessary.”). By the time I’m back at the window, the boy is running toward the house with the box in his hand.

  Interview (Samuli)

  MANDELKERN: Hello, Samuli. Samy.

  SAMULI:—

  M: Come in, don’t be afraid. I’m just sitting here and writing.

  S:—

  M: Did you climb up here all by yourself?

  S:—

  M: Not bad, my friend. What have you got there? Did you get a gift?

  S:—

  M: For me?

  S:—

  M: Cake! That’s really nice of you, Samuli, thank you very much. Do you want some too?

  S:—

  M: Red or blue? Would you rather have strawberry or this here? I’ll take the blue piece. It’s blueberry, I think.

  S:—

  M: Strawberry’s better, right? Here.

  S:—

  M: Do you like it?

  S:—

  M: Can you draw? I mean: do you want to draw? There are a few crayons here. I’ll keep writing while you draw?

  S:—

  M: Here. Blue for the sky. Yellow for the sun. Green for the water snake. Red for the flowers.

  S:—

  M: What’s that? A grocery receipt? You want to draw on a grocery receipt?

  S: I’m writing a prescription, Manteli.

  M: You’re a little doctor, right? Like your mother. You’ve come just in time, because I have a stomachache.

  S: I’m drawing a prescription for Lua.

  M: Great.

  S: Lua shouldn’t die sad.

  between Christmas and New Year’s Day

  On a blue winter Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s Day Elisabeth began, at first without discernible cause, to tell a story. We were lying on the bed and had been reading to each other, we’d been laughing. Both of them had been against the fashions of the moment, Elisabeth said suddenly, her husband had preferred something biblical, she something moderately Nordic (something imperishable: Jonas, Lasse, Joakim). But the child never got the name she’d had in mind, she said, he died before she and her husband could agree. Elisabeth emptied her cup of yogurt, I closed the book (the clink of her spoon). When she regained consciousness after the anesthesia, her husband already knew about the child’s death. He sat at the table next to several bunches of ten tulips and looked at the muted television. At that moment their marriage was over (the tragedy of wrapped flowers). In hindsight she would remember her husband’s facial expression as old and resigned. Even in retrospect she couldn’t really believe that he’d bough
t flowers after the boy’s death, as if there were something to celebrate.

  Johannes Emmerich

  She had seen the boy only for a few minutes. Elisabeth was lying stretched out stiffly next to me on the bed and looking at the ceiling, down on the street a bus drove by (the hiss of the hydraulic doors). Her husband had taken on the washing of the child, the measurements and weighing, finally the filling out of the documents for the registry office. She had still been almost completely anesthetized. Her husband had to register the birth, said Elisabeth, even though the death certificate was already lying on the table next to him. That’s how the child ended up with his name (Johannes). When she finally awoke from her half-conscious state, she and her husband were silent for a few minutes. He was silent, she said, she herself, due to the intubation and repeated vomiting, that is, due to the acid and minimal injuries to her pharynx, couldn’t speak at all. Then her husband grasped her left hand and began to speak (in her right hand the tube for saline solution and painkiller). For a long time she couldn’t cry or react appropriately, she was numb (lifeless, she said). I remained lying and hesitated, I didn’t know what to do with my hands, I felt like I was too young. The child, wrapped in a towel, had been brought from the postmortem unit for the good-bye, around noon her parents and the designated godparents had relieved her husband in short shifts. Elisabeth was lying motionlessly next to me (I would only have to turn my head). The clinic had scheduled the autopsy for the days to follow and summoned a mortician. Usually the clinic psychologist arrived immediately in such cases, but it was the 1996 New Year and there was a lot to do, she explained. Christmas and New Year’s Day are the preferred dates for suicide attempts. I didn’t say anything (words failed me). I should still touch her, said Elisabeth, she wasn’t made of cotton candy. But when I then brushed her hair aside, she bit her upper lip bloody. Pro forma the police had to be informed, the autopsy was compulsory due to the initially unknown cause of death. A few weeks before the birth all they’d been able to detect with ultrasound was a narrowing of the unborn child’s small intestine (duodenal stenosis), which had not indicated a risk for the birth, all that had been discussed was a later surgical widening. Elisabeth got up and opened the window, then closed it again a moment later. It had actually been duodenal atresia. Under the stress of the prolonged birth the child had to vomit (Elisabeth in the middle of the room alone, not even the furniture, not even I). That wouldn’t have been an unusual occurrence either, but the bile had been unable to flow downward because the small intestine was obstructed. It had therefore been forced to escape upward from the duodenum. When the child had ultimately inhaled the vomited bile as he gasped for his first air, the strong acid had irreparably corroded the upper layer of the lungs, as a result the child could apparently no longer receive artificial respiration (he must have struggled for air, she supposed). Because the death was an internal clinic matter, Elisabeth explained to me, the police investigations had already been concluded before they even commenced (she had never been alone with the boy). She lay back down on the bed, and I finally tried to hug her. But when Elisabeth then saw that I had tears in my eyes, she ran her fingers over my face as if she had to console me.

  coarse granite

  They’d hesitated, said Elisabeth, as we later walked along the frozen Elbe beach. She and her husband hadn’t separated immediately. The sun was shining, the beach full of strollers and frolicking dogs. The child’s death had been a break in the perspective of their relationship (from that point on they’d had increasing differences). It was several years before she was able to part from her husband, Elisabeth explained, they’d first had to become friends in order to get out of each other’s way (she had already stopped saying “my husband” when we met, she called him by his first name). The child was buried in the Niendorf cemetery, they still met for visits to the grave at irregular intervals. At that time her husband had supported Elisabeth’s desire to focus for a while on her studies and afterward on her work. Back then they’d still occasionally been of one mind. During her last year and a half at the university, she’d already worked her way up in various editorial departments of Gruner + Jahr (he had supported her in that to the best of his ability). Elisabeth looked across to the cranes and dry docks. She felt for my hand. She’d meanwhile grown accustomed to the boy’s name on the gravestone (blackened steel on coarse granite). Her husband, though, would never go to the grave alone. It astonishes me, Elisabeth then said, turning to me, that it gets visibly harder for him. She seemed to want to laugh. Though he was now in Hamburg only occasionally, the lost possibility plagued him (he’s getting more melancholy, said Elisabeth, almost even pathologically so). He had two adult children from his first marriage, but he was focusing more and more on the missed opportunities of his life. Elisabeth leaned her head on my chest. She, on the other hand, had the past, the future, and me (I have you, Daniel).

  Is that so, Elisabeth?

  The screams startle me, but the boy is unruffled. He’s still kneeling on the floor of Svensson’s study and drawing pictures only he comprehends (I can’t interpret children’s pictures). The sun, he says, holding the green crayon in his fist. Lua, he laughs, scribbling a bright red on the white wall below the window. Äiti, he whispers, decorating the sun. The screaming by the water doesn’t stop. The screaming gets louder. Svensson is standing bare-chested by the water, holding a brown rooster in the air by its feet (William Wordsworth). He’s standing on the dock, he’s spinning the animal in circles like a swing carousel, he’s spinning the orientation out of its head (his arm a swing). Lua lifts his head. The dog rolls heavily from one flank onto the other, he puts his remaining foreleg into this roll, his hind legs he braces in the flowers, then he gets to his feet, lurches a bit to the side, and is standing. Tuuli is waiting off to the side and watching Svensson (the panicked fluttering of the other rooster behind the windshield of the Fiat 128 Sport L). Svensson with the dazed rooster in his hand approaches the firewood block on which he was just chopping wood and picks up the ax. William Wordsworth slowly opens a wing and closes it again, then Svensson chops off his head. He holds the bird like a wet umbrella, its blood drips on the ground and the dock. He hangs the empty animal on a chair and gets Robby Naish from the Fiat. Svensson has to spin the white rooster much longer, he doesn’t get the neck until the third blow into the bloody fluttering (it surprises me that the dead bodies remain completely motionless, I was expecting a headless escape). Then everything is the same as always: the pigeons are cooing, the cicadas are making their shrill noise, Daisy Duck, the hen, is clucking on the roof of the blue Fiat. Lua is lying heavy and black on his side in the sea of oleander flowers, in the hiss of the mute swan. Svensson steps over the blood on the planks and jumps in the lake. Tuuli takes the animals’ heads and bodies and walks toward the house. Far beyond the white buoy Svensson resurfaces and waves (Lua is too old to lift his head again).

  bikini (green)

  As the roosters were dying, the boy disappeared, I hear his small footsteps on the stairs. He took the stuffed mouse in its blue overalls with him. His crayons are lying scattered in the room, he drew on the paper, the grocery receipt, the walls, and the floor too. The window is open, in the vine and the ivy wasps are buzzing, occasionally one flies in and lands on the dark wood (my headache gives way to fatigue). Svensson far out in the water a tiny dot, he’s swimming back and forth. Tuuli in a green bikini comes out of the house, she’s moving as if no one could see her. My fingers are slow as I make a note of “Tuuli in a green bikini,” as I write “the blood on the planks.” She sets her sunglasses on the dock and takes off the bikini, first the bottom, then the top (her small breasts in the afternoon light). Her left foot is standing in the middle of the roosters’ blood, she leaves three dark footprints on the way to the water. Without any hesitation Tuuli dives headfirst into the lake (I at the window like James Stewart).

  the little doctor

  Samy is standing next to the black dog and listening to his chest with t
he chair-leg stethoscope (the animal twice as heavy as the child). Lua has stopped coughing, what is happening and being said down by the water now remains soundless in the drone of the wasps. Samy moves closer and closer to the dog. He carefully lifts one of the animal’s ears and looks inside, he feels Lua’s missing foreleg with his fingers, he touches his scar. Through the binoculars I can’t discern any movement of the flanks. The dog lets the little doctor do as he likes, maybe he’s already dead. Eventually the boy puts down the chair leg. He’s no longer afraid of the dog and lays his ear on his chest, directly on the light spot. With both arms he reaches around the animal’s neck, he plunges his face into the dark fur, as Svensson did before (Lua is a perishing animal). Svensson sits down next to Samy in the grass. They lift Lua’s ears, examine his paws and his speckled fur, they pull Lua’s jowls to the side, Samy examines his teeth (face to face). He seems to be explaining something to Svensson, who then takes the cap off the boy’s head and strokes his blond hair. He lays his hand on Samy’s shoulder and gestures to the small church on the opposite shore, in the setting sun its yellow turns into a glow. Svensson talks and gestures to the sleeping mountain over Cima, he points to the boat in front of him moored to the dock, he points to himself, he points to the house and maybe to Tuuli out in the lake. Svensson points to the blood-smeared planks of the dock (he must be telling the child the truth). Svensson’s world is a more beautiful place than I expected. The swallows high up above the lake, in the evening sun only two water-skiers very far out (practicing at a standstill). For two days they’ve been predicting rain, for two days the view has remained clear, for two days Lugano has stood in the distance like an admonition, at night the city twinkles like a home. Svensson gets his mail at the Bar del Porto, he turned his real life into a fictitious story and sold more than 100,000 copies. He has pigeons and swallows, crickets and cicadas. He slaughters his chickens when he pleases, he erases his characters. Svensson apparently doesn’t live alone here (Kiki Kaufman: salvation and insight).