Thereafter, my dream . . .
•
Or another time, a year earlier, the period of my martyrdom. The no less remarkable creature whom I loved during that period was named Dawn. An American. Twenty-one years old. Extremely beautiful. A fashion model by profession. A psychopath. A virgin when I met her (soon no longer, but God alone knows with what terrible effort). Drove me crazy with her unpredictable ways.
At present, she’s vanished somewhere in Paris, I’m stuck in Hamburg, Wohlfahrt has promised me a movie, as usual it’s taking forever but I can’t get away, I’m in hot water, Christa’s suing me for her alimony, I’ve got to scrape up the money for my son’s tuition, creditors are beating down my door, my friends here (Rönnekamp, Schwab) are avoiding me like a leper, I’ve milked all of them for cash, Big-Time Publisher Scherping won’t give another penny for the book I’ve been promising him for years.
Yet daily, nightly, I phone away a fortune. It took me two weeks to find out that Dawn had landed in the Hôtel Épicure again, heaven only knows in what condition. In any case, I can’t get her to the phone: morning noon and night I talk to Madame, to the handsome Pole, I leave messages that are never passed on, directions no one gives a damn about, I act like a total lunatic. Strangely enough, I’m working marvelously despite everything, I’ve written two presentable chapters of my book, it took me only a few hours to hand Wohlfahrt a treatment based on a subject now popular with distributors and he was jubilant (“Damn it, baby, we’re gonna knock those guys on their asses!”), and on the side, I’ve got three subjects of my own that I’m penning, or rather ballpointing: the words are simply scurrying across the paper. And I’m getting fatter and fatter. The broad is fattening me up.
The broad: a chance conquest. Not undeliberate: I’ve been separated from Dawn for over a month, haven’t touched another woman (to put it in cultivated terms); this probably explains a good portion of my hysteria, a symptom of abstinence I’m not used to. Besides, when it comes to monogamous relationships, I have an obnoxious tendency to overcommit myself—and one can see what comes of it, one can tell by the telephone bill. I am at the mercy of the women I love, I become burdensome, like any dependent does sooner or later; love is a child’s game—so cruel, so destructive, so ruthless, so stupid, and woe to him who loses, for in the struggle of the sexual organs there is no mercy, and the colder party has the upper hand. In short, I need distance—from Dawn, myself, the situation (hommage à Monsieur Benn!). Soon I no longer feel like a man; if a woman were to carry on the way I’ve been doing these past few weeks, she’d disgust you and you’d tell her to go to hell; with a man, this is really demeaning, humiliating. A matter of convention, I know; I can ask myself ten times a day why it’s not manly to love a woman, but it just isn’t, at least not the way I do it, it’s downright ludicrous, and who wants to be a slaveholder? But the broad is, as it were, a fitness exercise. An erotic lightning rod. A spiritual garbage incinerator. A marvelous person.
The broad. I got to know her when registering at the immigration office. As a stateless person, I had to renew my residency permit. As usual, hours were spent waiting in the corridor, wedged in between foreign workers and other ungroomed types, all of them my brethren: circus performers, peddlers, Maghrebinian students, Calabresi, Sicilians, Hungarian refugees, they change their countries but not their shirts, they smell of the shabby clothes they sleep in, hang around government offices, smoke foul-smelling cigarettes, cough up their mucus in the corner spittoon as if they were vomiting. Then who should come walking down the corridor but her: a very well groomed petite bourgeoise, bloody fucking middle-class, with the accent on the second adjective, I hope. Her clothes are as flawless as they are tasteless—a bottle-green suit with a nutria collar, a bizarre plant of a hat—the whole creature medium height, a bit plump, which I like (my Viennese formative years), in her late twenties (earlier, they can’t screw, too embarrassed or too curious, inhibited; anyway she probably lets go completely), correspondingly sassy—acts as though she didn’t see me, yet her nostrils flare like a mare’s at the stud station. The strenuous effort to take no notice of me makes her movements jerky; I sit poised on the bench, my legs crossed, I look her over with insolent thoroughness: the hat above all, the breasts (voluptuously snug in Maidenform), the handbag, the ass, the legs (excellent: narrow of ankle, full of calf; see my poor heart it’s split in half). My inspection ended, I look away again: neither satisfied nor disappointed, I have merely registered her; I soundlessly whistle a little tune over my lips, peering absently through the window into the pale coastal sky.
I am convinced she’s followed every detail of the game; it doesn’t matter whether she’s seen through it; all the same, it sparks the desired reactions. Now she really becomes aware of herself (and her awkwardness) but switches to the offensive, becomes aggressive in a feminine way, stands ostentatiously (with her back to me) at the window, through which I stare into the anemic heavenly void, but then she turns around, cuts my line of sight again and (certain of not leaving my field of vision) goes to the office door. Very attentively reads the letters of name groups on the door as well as the names of the officials processing the respective group: A–E, Handke; F–K, Löschmann; L–R, Janitzki; S–Z, Kühnle. By all means, study it as carefully as you can, my dear lady. There are situations that, at first blush, seem ineluctable, this can be confirmed by Nadine; they become all the more piquant if you delay them, in your circles especially this is probably considered good form (à propos: in art, too, delay is most helpful). But she is more discerning than she appeared to be, and comes back quite emphatically, recrossing my line of vision (hung out, like an Elbe fisherman’s line with an earthworm on the hook, in the watery distance beyond the windowpane). Before she can make any further decisions, I shift (to offer her room) half a buttock over on the bench. She promptly sits down; I naturally pay her no heed, absentmindedly light a Rothman taken from the Fabergé case, exude the fragrance of a victorious power. This must collide with early impressions of hers: budding twelve-year-old girl with half a kilo of black-market butter under her skirt goes through the British checkpoint at Aumühle, the last urban transport station on the way to Lauenburg; will the soldiers search her for it? . . . Such experiences make this generation accessible. Early humiliation and anxiety always do a fine job of preparing the erotic soil; smells, for instance cigarette smoke, are an excellent device for stirring up this past in the subconscious; phonograph records come later. Now, the sensoria of the left half of my body register that she has taken the bait, it becomes perceptibly warmer between us, from the corner of her eye she gauges my suit, the quality of my linen, and presumably the quantity of the hair on my chest—well, what do you think of me, dear lady? A distinguished foreigner, no doubt (shit, as if he needed to go to the immigration office, he looks like James Bond; even the Persian nut importer sends someone to take care of this kind of business for him, doesn’t matter if it’s his own brother-in-law). Still and all, I am a writer, a film writer, interested in milieu studies; this immigration office is without a doubt a literary gold mine, with all these colorful destinies, wouldn’t you agree? Why, these citizens of serf nations could give you the plots for entire novels, nowhere else could you find such a wealth of diverse human situations, at least not in humdrum West Germany; we all know that sociology is invalidated by the society of equality, one need only know the phenotype. Here, however, true life can still be found, although ultimately no one gives a shit. I shoot my hand out from my sleeve, look at my now visible (to her as well as me) Cartier watch, then turn to her with no transition, as though continuing an only just interrupted conversation, and say, “I hope you’ve brought along enough time.” And she very willingly replies, “Oh, this is nothing new for me.” She speaks (as expected) a penetrating Hamburg German, in the direction of Harburg. I ask her disingenuously, “You’re not German?” She is German, but her husband is Lithuanian, only they’re divorced (there you are), but her citizenship still isn’t clea
red up, “all this endless bureaucracy,” and last year she wanted to go to Italy. One thing leads to another, and three hours later I’m lying in her bed, a Murphy on the wall of a ten-by-twelve-foot room; she lives in a studio flat with a bathroom and kitchenette in a high-rise development somewhere in the wasteland behind the Hagenbeck Zoo, but she does have “a bit of a yard” (dropping her r’s the way people do in Hamburg), fourteen feet wide, thirty-five feet long, the flanks shielded by two strips of canvas against neighborly in-sight (at least from next door); between these strips, the eye rolls as though down a bowling alley (with a leap over the pathetic asters at the far end) into the yawning void of the planned central green space. The housing development is still young, no lawn has been started as yet, but chamomiles, a resistant weed, are stinting out of the mortar-laced soil, a slum-summer breeze that endures year-round seems to have settled in, there is apparently no other season, in any case the playground is as good as finished, it will open next year (the year after at the latest), red and yellow and green and violet paint, the iron pipework of the swings, monkey bars, and slide are already looming from the cement-framed gravel (a Paul Klee execution site: gallows and torture wheel for little stick figures with zeros for heads). Farther along, at a dramatic standstill, the concrete squadron of the high-rises in triad echelons comes thundering toward the playground: instead of gun turrets, the box balconies emerge from the hatches. At sunrise and at sundown, the shadows of the nine (or twelve) giant phalluses (three are always in reserve) shoot east to west, then west to east, across the bare surface whose border is the skyline, there’s nothing beyond it, the world ends there in Ptolemaic fashion, we live right on its edge. Here in the foreground, on the wide (first) step of the three composition-stone steps, under a green sunshade with stitched-on toadstools, there are two chaise longues and a small wheeled table with a bottle holder, ringed by six flower pots with hyacinth bulbs, two with brownishly proliferating asparagus, three geraniums, and one mimosa (donated by myself and now without blossoms). Here, I make myself at home when visiting her. It’s already quite cool out, there is supposed to be snow in the Alpine foothills, but I’m a fresh-air fiend, I get claustrophobic in the little apartment, she understands. Our relationship has become quite close in a rather loose way. The incredible has happened: In a city where (as my experiences during my married years with Christa taught me) each and every one of the two and a half million inhabitants (not counting the perioecians) knows everybody else, knows everything about him, has all sorts of connections with him, can check every step he takes (and usually does), she has no idea who I am, our circles never cross, my present Middle Kingdom (like all earlier ones) is on a different planet from hers. She seems to take me for a businessman occasionally passing through (with a touch of the exotic, though: an Austrian? an Argentine German?), she doesn’t ask me for details or particulars, not even where I live when I don’t spend the night with her (which I seldom do), or if and when I’m coming again. I call her up when I feel like it (at my age, anyway, such needs are irresistible at most three times a week), and simply say, “Are you going to be home this afternoon?” It sounds (and is meant to sound) as prosaic as asking, when you enter a train compartment, “Is this seat taken?” And she’s never answered anything but “What time are you coming?” She always speaks in the same monotonous, slightly nasal tone; suburban bleakness then settles into the earpiece, the emptiness of drab, lonesome Sunday afternoons; already spiritually groggy, I show up at her place at the announced time—and then I have to pull off a one-hundred-eighty-degree readjustment act. Adapting to the reality of the 1960s is not easy for me: when, for instance, I reach the building door (I always need at least a panicky half hour to find the right one: one of thirty-six perfectly similar building doors in twelve perfectly identical concrete blocks), I press the button under a certain (her?) name in the aluminum plate (one of sixty-six Bakelite buttons in punched holes under sixty-six perfectly similar cellophane-covered plastic name platelets in twenty-two triple rows like an accordion keyboard—and just what is her name?). At such times, I feel I’m being sucked into a vacuum. I realize these are merely behavioral problems. With a little more practice (perhaps consultation with a psychologist: Professor Hertzog would doubtless make himself available), I could soon easily get the better of them, above all, rid myself of the neurotic associations that still occur. With the venomous buzzing of a wasp squashed under a shoe, the door lock springs open behind my left renal area. The buzzing has something definitive, irrevocable about it: that’s how the automatic lock snaps open and shut on the solitary-confinement cell of a prisoner serving a life sentence. Yet I am entering an apartment house in which the community should be burgeoning; why then are these buildings so empty? These termite houses should be teeming with people, whole tribes must be living here, but you don’t see them, you barely hear them (and if you do, they’re abstracted into a hum of plumbing). Nevertheless, I picture them as anthropomorphic, flattened like the trolls in a Dubuffet painting and yet palpitating (the insane Maupassant foresaw them in the horlà, who comes after man). I won’t run into them, alas. They have been swallowed up by the residential mechanism, incorporated into it without a trace. I cannot expect any more spiritual utterance than a question from a fetal voice emerging from the sieve holes of the mouthpiece under the buzzer-and-name-platelet mountings before the door lock springs open, a question wrapped in rustling tinfoil and pickled in machine oil: “Hello? Who is it?”
Abel and Cain Page 51
