Seven Nights

by Simon Strauß

  The pretty one with the Eton crop is rhapsodizing about pneumatic tubes. Last month, she deleted her Tinder account. She wanted to win back serendipity. She wanted to want to be surprised again. She would show Suspenders what he was missing. “To make him jealous once, just once. To feel his fearful look from the other side of the room. To see doubt in his face. Just once.”

  His mouth is greedily glued to foreign lips. He’s a man without a sense for the question: “What now?” To feel grand in front of her, irresistible and wild, he has to go groping other women. Had to lick others’ necks and push his hands into random strangers’ sweaty underwear. “I am a Man! Who more than I? / If any, let him spring.” These first lines of Schiller’s poem are always at the ready when he has to justify his desire.

  In the early days, there’d been the great promise of departure. The dream of endless evenings in the south. Someone who would count her freckles and protect her from mosquitoes, who would sail with her into the sunrise and never talk of skinnier girls. They had jointly picked out the suspenders, in a workwear shop in the harbor district of Athens. Later, on the ferry to Icaria, their lovemaking had been so intense, they nearly fell overboard. Not much remains. A few fierce exchanges and a first gray hair in the ear. She had dreamed of black and white family photos and of a wedding night in a tree house. But now he’s been making out for hours with a busty noblewoman. The morning yoga on the carpet in their prewar apartment (not his, his mother’s), the joint sweating and wheezing, hadn’t been great for their love life. Neither had the shared toothpaste.

  The roulette table is the meeting point for those out of luck. What they are missing in love must be attainable in a game. They put everything on black, their color of hope. My arm reaches for a female hip. Evolutionary biology designed it well: a chimpanzee baby can easily rest on the hip bone of his mother, to free her hands to search for food.

  And not even jealousy is reserved for humans: the rhinoceros hornbill, one of the biggest hornbilled birds of the southeast Asian rainforests, who lives off fruit and large insects, uses his large beak primarily to wall in his pregnant mate, preventing her from leaving the nest. The only remaining opening is a small crack for feeding, which separates the female completely from the outside world. Locked into her treehouse prison she leads a sad existence. It is only when the young birds are fully fledged and the female has regenerated her plumage that the nesting hole is opened again. If the male dies in the meantime, the female and the young birds starve to death…

  Finally, my arm finds the hip of the Fallada fan. Finally, something to hold onto on this noncommittal evening. In the cinema I have heard it as often as I have forgotten it in real life: The one sentence that says it all. That is reassuring and at the same time dangerous, direct and yet discreet, and it tends to mention “your eyes” or “your radiating smile.” In any case, it is mostly just a sentence, a main clause without branches, in between the first glance and the first kiss. Only those who take the narrow strip of the first encounter with momentum have a chance.

  I ask her about lust. About the words, the smells, the colors she associates with it. About the images. With a smile she brushes my arm off her hip and starts talking. Of Spain, of a bull fight, of a lavender field under the stars. Lust to her is the spring in their steps down to the lake, when they both know that in a moment all clothes and inhibitions will fall. Lust is the jump into the dark water, the first touch underneath the surface, the quiet whisper, close to the ear, she says. Resistance to her would be futile.

  She smiles rakishly. Is that an offer? An invitation to continue? “And what about you?” she asks. I tell her about Rodin, about the bronze statue in Paris, the naked girl gathering her hair. Arms crossed overhead, back straight, chest out. Her eyes are closed. She dreams of a tender, tight embrace, coming out of nowhere and leading to nothing. She longs for Kleist’s “Oh!”. Romanticizes innocently and knows nothing of Freud and his demystifications.

  I put my arm around her and tilt my head back. I used to button my shirt low, hoping I looked like James Dean. How he would walk on the dusty desert path in Giant, drunk and disgusted with his own life, the future bust, the end in sight. And then his shirt is unbuttoned by the wind. That, too, is lust, I say: the sweaty, dirty chest of a beautiful man. Sweat as a real promise, not the fake product from the gym.

  She turns away with a smile, disappears into the bathroom. I stay behind and reassure myself: this is the intimacy I’m longing for, my wish for free lust within immediate reach.

  The bed is the last space in which there are no rules, no conditions. You can devote and abandon yourself until the church bells ring and the bread and soft cheese arrive at the front door. Jeanne Moreau, the cigarette afterward, those were victory signs from a world in which you could be sure that the sun was the only witness.

  “What do you miss?” someone once asked Beckett. His answer was: “Beauty.”

  But going for a walk in Hyde Park on a sunny late summer day, a journalist with him exclaimed how beautiful the day was and what a joy it was to live that precise moment, and Beckett supposedly said: “No sir, I wouldn’t go that far.”

  Between beauty and despair there is only one word: lust. It cannot be provoked. Decorating the bathtub with tea candles and dried lavender doesn’t help. Being naked doesn’t prompt it either. Beautiful breasts can be cold. Strong arms can feel hollow. Those who intentionally search for lust will not find it. They will have to make do with a bit of greed, a bit of instinct. It doesn’t come to the shower in the drunken morning hours when four friendly strangers are rubbing against each other. It doesn’t come to palm trees or DJ rigs. Let alone roulette tables.

  But then at the end, when everyone has left, removed their masks, somebody rubs my back with a warm hand. The girl from the milk glass window at the reception has waited for me, a stranger’s soul in a dark forest. Two who got away, now lying next to each other among the shattered wine glasses. The dreams had all crashed. But then she entered through the door, turned off the light and dispelled the shame. Those who are found by lust won’t be helped by velvet or exotic fruit. They are led away defenselessly. And won’t be released from it easily. No matter how often the phone rings upstairs, no matter how heavily the branches beat against the window.

  VII

  IRA

  Anger has dirt under its fingernails. It scratches the varnish, scratches and tears until the skin opens, until nerves are raw and exposed. Sitting at the stone table, playing cards? That is an image for later days. Before then, at twenty-five or twenty-six or twenty-seven, you have to talk big. Otherwise, you’ll always speak in a whisper and the cards will never be reshuffled.

  My mirror self sits next to me in the car. Not a friend, not a stranger. A man in between. The handshake has gotten agreeable over time. He briefly looks me in the eye, then past me, into the distance. He’s not quite there yet, or a step ahead, already on to the next job, the next deal. He holds the steering wheel like a young entrepreneur, with one hand, as the left one hangs nonchalantly out the window.

  Cars are not a matter of perspective. They’ve always been dirty, much too big, and there’s never a parking spot nearby. Little Tree air fresheners sway from the rearview mirror like nasty traitors. The backrest leans too far back. The seat is scalding and the seatbelt warning chimes every second. The tank is almost empty and there’s spilled milk in the trunk again. The car offers a refuge only for old men who like to spread their legs. Those who feel bossed around, constricted and emasculated by the current conditions. Those conditions have changed, worsened. Even secretaries are no longer what they once were. Only behind the wheel does the world still belong to those who once conquered it.

  Our pockets are full. We share cars and points of view that we never longed to have, hurry from one late-arrival to the next—always with an excuse, a little one-liner—we’ve always had the feeling of being on the right side and will never understand how impor
tant it is to do the wrong thing first. To go full sail in the wrong direction, against the current, against the wind.

  That’s our misfortune. That we never knew how to start the day without a bowl of muesli on the table. Without wanting to please anyone. Without any tobacco that we can roll to prove to the world how basic we live. Natural smoking now means to sit cross-legged and to lick creased papers. The days of Marlboro cowboys riding without saddles are long gone. Their lassos are gathering dust in the stable. These days, they use electronic voice boxes.

  When we met for the first time, one afternoon during the week in a cafe, the tension was palpable. He spoke fast and much and we immediately started dreaming together. Or rather: pretended to dream. Of an honest, sparking life. Of time. Of time we would use together to work on a blueprint, a manifesto. Nothing ever came of it. Not even a few lines in double-size font. Instead, many evenings when other things were more important. We held salons, threw parties, invited friends, introduced each other, talked, emptied other people’s glasses. At the end, when we were each tucked into our freshly washed bedding, we sent each other a short text. Reassured each other that the real task still lay ahead, that we’d start working on it soon. “The age needs us,” he once wrote. “Who if not us?” And I answered him, like Schiller would answer Goethe: “The last companions on a journey always have the most to say to each other.” The only thing that offended me was that he always signed with his last name.

  In the meantime, the others presented their books. Read at book launches in the sunset on roof decks. Described their everyday lives, their pain, their suffering and fake companionship. They found their own writing so funny. Had to giggle at every word, every syllable. In the end, it doesn’t matter. Everything is encased in the bulletproof glass of irony. At these readings, we shot each other quick looks, convinced that our words would matter more. But we never wrote on these nights. Just that message again, the promise: More later.

  Now he is sitting in the car (rented—what else?). He’s driving and the clock is ticking along. The finish line is always in sight, a detour to Rome, but a real breakout doesn’t happen this time either. This conversation, too, will stay clear of decisive turns. We had wanted to search for something that would shake up our lives, something worth fighting for. But now he tells me about his best friend’s wedding. He was the best man. He wrote a long speech for him, even practiced it a few times in front of a mirror. And then, on the night of the wedding, at the dinner when he wanted to deliver it, the couple was caught up with the kids, constantly going off into the adjacent room to play Playmobil and count paper streamers. After dessert he made a last effort, but then the lights went out and the guests danced under the moonlight, accompanied by Britney Spears. The speech, the manuscript, he ended up leaving at the coat check, with a post-it: All best and till soon.

  Having children is not enough. You have to make up a life along with it. Otherwise the child remains a golden calf around which the parents are dancing as if mad. He says and sighs loudly.

  I listen. I concur. We can always agree on a counter position. But we keep postponing our own blueprint. Maybe there is no longer a need for utopias. Maybe a life without longing for a future is possible. Maybe it’s not just possible but expedient? Finally grab the lid and take the pot off the stove. It has been boiling long enough, the old ideological soup… As he is talking like this, forming sentences as if they could also mean something entirely different, as if they were just exchangeable and without a deeper meaning, I feel doubt creeping up again. My doubt of him. And of myself. Because over time he has become my mirror. I saw in him what counts. Or rather: what I thought counted.

  Once on a summer evening on the balcony at the goodbye party for a mutual friend, a young man from Syria joined us. Electrical engineer with certificates. In Germany for a year and already he had a real joke up his sleeve: “The road to hell is paved with government forms.” The institutions didn’t want to recognize his qualifications, and so he—former CEO of his own company in Syria—had to start over as an apprentice. On the night of his escape he had to leave behind his parents and wife, his family shredded by bullets. No last look into their faces, no goodbye, no chance for revenge. Just away, off into strange lands. And there he was and couldn’t help it, he had to tell us, awful stories but in a soft voice. He read a poem to us, first in Arabic, then in German. And we drank beer, stood alongside and didn’t know what to do.

  Searched for reassurance in each other’s eyes. I admired and loved my friend for this, that in this moment he wasn’t too quick to offer his condolences, didn’t make random pitying statements toward him, whose tale made us swallow our jokes. All he did was pull his hands out of his pockets, as if to spring to attention in front of this man, who bears his fate proudly, as others do their medals.

  These were always only isolated moments. The times in which I felt trust in him. Respect even. I liked his way of speaking, always a little too fast, always a little rough, as if to show that he didn’t have to prove anything. He never showed off with his language. Never used words that were too big for him, or seemed borrowed. He rented cars, but the words he wanted to own. I liked him, because he boasted with things that had long lost their importance for others. With sports, for example. His successes as a boxer, his tough right-handers. He proudly told of often getting unbidden invites to competitions, like an editor who might brag about how many unsolicited manuscripts they receive every day.

  And with his passion for women. Whenever I met him, he had just had a fight with his Russian girlfriend, who suspected him of cheating, threw his things out the window or simply left. It often happened that she called him and yelled at him loud enough for everyone to hear. Then sometimes I would take the phone from him and talk her down like a little child that had just woken up in the house alone.

  I’m sure he cheated on her. But I always held a protective hand over him. Because I knew that he didn’t mean to cheat on her, but that he just wanted to see himself as an adventurer. I took this Catholic shortcut with him. Others might have called it Machismo, but I thought of Last Tango in Paris. There was one thing we agreed on: The world as it was could use a little more magic. Enchantment was to be one of our keywords, should ideally appear in the first paragraph. Marinetti had written “a roaring car that seems to run on grapeshot is more beautiful than The Victory of Samothrace.” Instead I had hoped we would be writing of the beauty of the glowing meadow. Of the necessity to step out of the gloomy data thicket, where you can no longer even find the starting point.

  But eventually, my hope was lost. After a final dinner with him, in which there was a lot of big talk, as usual, my doubts grew about whether he was the right one to get the ball rolling.

  And now we are sitting in the car and he’s talking about how much he had to drink the night before, how high his blood alcohol might still be. And somehow our conversation lands on the big question. And suddenly he makes a dismissive remark about my attempts to put the dissatisfaction into words, says something like: “It’s always just about the revolution—you repeat yourself and there are no consequences. You need to keep your nose to the grindstone, otherwise nothing will ever come of it.” He says this with such clarity, with so much venom that I would love to tear off the windshield wipers and stuff them down his throat. My head is spinning and I ask him to stop the car.

  Sometimes a wrong word, a wrong sentence is all it takes to forever lose trust. A night, half asleep at half past two, can set the course for your life. A careless confession, a wrong name at the wrong place at the wrong time, and suddenly the path that just seemed wide open is blocked forever. The wrath that attacks, that sneaks out from the core and digs into every perceptible fiber. And when the wrath is there, when it has been called, it’s hard to get under control.

  Wrath seems to be an emotion from a different time. It makes you think of comic strips or family fathers in the fifties. It has been a long time since anyone m
entioned the wrath of God.

  The New Testament was a better fit for our time, a Protestant minister recently said. As if you could just subsume the inscrutable into the state of shallow contentment, in which the flags forever fly at half-mast, without anyone being able to say what is being mourned.

  Wrath has become a pathology. The angry person is a radical endangering the comfortable emotional state of the masses. Never was consensus valued as highly as it is today.

  In the wide squares of Athens and Rome the anger of the young orator was the litmus test of his character. Those who weren’t at least once shaken by anger, who didn’t tear their clothes and stomp their heels sharply into the ground, were viewed with suspicion by Greeks and Romans. Seen as vain dazzlers, good-for-nothings. Today the opposite is true: Those who are angry are regarded as nuts. Those who speak of wrath are placed under suspicion, labeled anti-democrat. We doubt the status quo so little, are so addicted to harmony, that every impulsive thought seems dangerous to us. The ideal of opposition has deteriorated to a flimsy gesture.

  When Stefan Zweig—1940 in Brazil at a writers convention—was pressed by the journalists to speak out, to draft a pamphlet against Hitler, he refused. He, the Jew, who had been displaced and humiliated, exiled and betrayed, replied: “Gentlemen, I cannot write against something, I can only write for something.” Zweig spoke about the futility of resistance when surrounded by those who all think like you. In a situation in which everyone is of the same opinion from the start, the call for resistance is meaningless, since it doesn’t bear any consequence. Only where you’re in a minority, where the rallying cry of the others sound louder, only here is resistance a heroic deed.