The Appointment
Page 9
So, I never bothered with innocence, Dr. Seligman, and I never believed in it, because my split second was too short to make anything but a monster of me, and over the years I have become familiar with not being able to see my own hands at night, with the comfort of not having to keep my days clean. I wonder if you ever get bored or lonely on your mountaintop, Dr. Seligman? If you have a secret cave for your vices. But then, as a Jew, you will go to heaven anyway, so you don’t have to worry. And when you will look down on me from your fluffy cloud surrounded by your frames, dragging my semi-automatic sex robot Martin from hotel room to hotel room, using that beautiful cock you gave me in ways you might think ill-intended, look down on me in kindness. Real kindness, not the self-involved kind of kindness Jason tried to kill me with. For he wasn’t first seen on a mountaintop either, I am sure he first landed in a sewer and spent half his life licking himself clean, but if you look close enough you can always see some shit shining through from underneath his polished crystals. And I don’t know about Mr. Shimada; I’ve never met him, and I don’t know what snowflakes look like in Japan—prettier somehow, I imagine, but to have a mind like his, their tips must at some point have touched something that wasn’t white. Just like K; when I think of him now, I can see all the colours of the rainbow reflected in him, shining for a brief moment before he drowns again, a little diamond illuminating the darkness he was never able to escape. And then I mourn for him, because I know that he never felt his destiny, that he always thought his crystals had been destined for those higher regions, that they had been touched by the Snow Queen and that something had gone wrong when he felt himself dissolving amongst the undiscerning waves. That somehow his life had been one big mistake and that not even his death would have made any difference, that it was all too late. That it had always been too late. I don’t think anyone ever drowned as many times as K, and so I don’t feel responsible for when he drowned for the last time in the crisp winter air. When he finally returned to his parents’ garden and confessed his love for that tree whose branches had grown strong enough over the years to carry his lifeless body through the fading light of a winter’s day. I cannot be held responsible for that, Dr. Seligman; we are not other people’s destinies, and it wasn’t me who planted that tree outside his window and cast that shadow over his childhood, it wasn’t me who showed him how to be scared of the dark. But it’s me who can still feel his colours on my skin, Dr. Seligman. I can still feel the difference between the different kinds of purple, and I wish I had known at the time that colours have histories and that purple is a colour of mourning and of sadness, and that K always covered me in his own sadness and that now I carry his grief with me, because I don’t believe that you can actually wash your hands, or your skin. Something will have gotten into your system before you can reach the water, and our veins are slowly filling with each other’s stories and dirt, each other’s colours and screams; we carry each other’s broken hearts under our skin until one day they block everything and stop the flow of our own blood, and everything bursts in one final moment of despair.
We are each other’s sins, Dr. Seligman, and before you take off your gloves and I get up from this chair, before I put my trousers back on to finally look at your seven frames, before you can see my face again, I want to tell you about my great-grandfather, because I think that you should know where the money for this treatment comes from. He wasn’t a famous Nazi, not one of your seven favourites, which would almost make us relatives, bound together by blood and perversions. I am not even sure he was a proper Nazi; we never met, and you can never trust your relatives’ stories. All I know is that he was a stationmaster and he lived with his wife and his seven children above the station of a little town in Silesia, and because things were going well he bought a piece of land for each of his seven children to build houses on once they were grown, to live happily with their own families, with lots of children running around stealing cake from their many aunts’ cupboards. But that land was never built on; they were displaced at the end of the war, and if you were to go there now, you would find a little forest in the midst of a small Polish town, home to Bambi and his friends, a piece of nature preserved from the evil clutches of civilisation. With bees and wildflowers and owls at night. Almost romantic, you might say, and if you were happy to go on a little walk, I am not exactly sure how long you would have to walk for, but before the sun sets you would reach Auschwitz, or what is left of it, the foundation of all that we are today. But my great-grandfather didn’t work in Auschwitz; he was a devout man, a Catholic who abhorred the use of weapons and would have refused such a duty. He was merely a stationmaster at the last train station before Auschwitz, where the trains often waited overnight, where he made sure that there was no congestion, that everything could run smoothly and the empty trains could return unimpaired. He meant no harm, and when I think of him, Dr. Seligman, I see a little man standing on a platform, wearing some archaic uniform with a hat, almost endearing to a modern eye, looking at those trains and all the hands coming out of those undignified windows at the top, and I see snow, Dr. Seligman, snowflakes landing on their fingers, sent there by the Snow Queen, fragile moments of eternity falling from the sky like angels with their wings cut, their grace disappearing the moment their bodies meet. And I see snow landing on my great-grandfather’s hat, on his shoulders, and on the ground in front of him, and I feel his feet longing for home, but there are too many hours left and the snow keeps falling just like the snowflakes outside your window. Falling to the sound of engines longing for motion, until the hands slowly become invisible to the naked eye and his feet have forgotten about the warmth they have once known. Until eventually the forests grow over all that is sacred, and their branches catch the angels before they hit the ground. Until the sun spreads her legs in surrender, and we are governed by a lifeless moon.
And now, let us turn this body into something else.
A moment of fire in the sky.
Let us leave this place, before it’s invaded by clowns.
Let us be like gold, Dr. Seligman.
Let us change shape across centuries but never disappear.
Let us hold hands.
Let us be warriors.
Acknowledgments
Joachim for making me a French writer.
Jean and Olivier for allowing this to happen.
Heidi and Chris for turning this into an international affair.
Tamara and Lauren for making me feel so welcome.
Jacques, Joely, and Clare at Fitzcarraldo for making blue my favourite colour.
Amy, Jordan, Morgan, and everyone else at Avid Reader Press for the American dream.
Jane for the day in Brighton.
Laurence for allowing me all that space to grow. (And the panda videos.)
T for buying unicorn stationery with me.
Tash for the piercing.
Sam for being the best glitter bitch.
Fair Miriam for all the encouragement.
Stephen for being Stephen.
Peter for proving that Germans can be fun.
Nick for being our Bear.
Paul for the flat in Berlin.
Florian for the friendship.
Derya for the conversations.
Marya for not explaining maths to me.
Matthew for over a decade of tea, cake, and sorrows.
Rémi for the music.
Sergey for the patience.
Gatta and Myshkin for reminding me that most objects are superfluous.
My parents for bringing me into this world.
Maurizio for everything.
More in Literary Fiction
A Man Called Ove
The Woman in Cabin 10
Ordinary Grace
The Lake House
Manhattan Beach
The Japanese Lover
About the Author
KATHARINA VOLCKMER was born in Germany in 1987. She now lives in London, where she works for a literary agency.
The Appointment is her first novel.
@frauvolckmer @frauvolckmer
AvidReaderPress.com
SimonandSchuster.com
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Katharina-Volckmer
@avidreaderpress @avidreaderpress @avidreaderpress
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ISBN 978-1-9821-5017-4
ISBN 978-1-9821-5019-8 (ebook)