Hotel Cartagena

by Simone Buchholz

  ‘Is that a negroni?’ I ask Carla, who’s playing with the glass in her hand.

  ‘What else?’ she says, and her voice sounds as though she’s just found the formula for liquid happiness.

  I’d like a bit of that.

  ‘I’ll have one of those too, please,’ I say.

  Klatsche grins at me, and what a grin he’s got. Shameless and sexy that grin is, almost unbearable, my God, how I’ve missed that grin.

  ‘I thought alcohol had to be see-through,’ he says, taking a swig from his beer.

  ‘Things change,’ I say and look him in the eye for the first time since he popped back into my flat for a bit, a good couple of years ago now, and then left forever. His expression drops into the middle of my heart and explodes. Oh wow, what a mess, now I’ll have to clean everything up again.

  Six months ago, he once tried to call me.

  I didn’t answer.

  Brückner leans over to me and asks quietly if he should swap places with his colleague Inceman. So that we can sit next to each other.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, and reckon that’ll have to do as an answer.

  Inceman and I sit next to each other all the time, at least three times a week we sit next to each other at great length, as a matter of fact. First we walk next to each other through the streets for an eternity, by night, I always walk on his right, maybe because I think I might be able to stand in for his right arm that way, and whenever we reach a place where we can sit next to each other, at a serious bar that is, at a sturdy lump of wood that carries us like a ship, we drink just that precise drop too much that lets us forget histories, sentences, moments and in the end, when we’ve done that long enough for the last scrap of sense to have fallen in the water, we lie on top of one another in bed, mostly in mine.

  He’s never bothered with a flat, he says the whole city’s his flat, and that it’s better that way, feels better.

  So anyway, then we lie around on top of each other and, as if by the by, a couple of earthquakes happen.

  My drink arrives.

  Klatsche shakes his head, pushes his beer aside and orders a pina colada.

  I see: anything you can do, I can do better, bitch.

  Although I think a pina colada’s a bit over the top for tit-for-tat. A mai tai would really have done.

  I raise my glass and toast Faller; the others follow suit.

  ‘To you, Faller,’ I say.

  ‘Well, then,’ he says, ‘to you all.’ And then he stands up.

  Carla claps her hands.

  ‘Speech!’

  She loves speeches.

  ‘Just a little toast,’ says Faller, rubbing his white stubble.

  He stands straight and looks at us.

  He could say that it’s a miracle that we’re here, together at this table. And that each of us deserves great respect for having survived the journey to this day.

  He could say that Carla gets more beautiful with every passing year, that her dark brilliance grows more intense, her face clearer and her curls wilder, the whole world is reflected in her eyes, and if you don’t walk past those eyes quickly enough, you’ll topple in.

  He could say that Rocco’s lost his boyish air, that he’s suddenly, unmistakably, heading for forty, that the second-hand suits he loves wearing so much don’t even look second-hand anymore, they just look as though he’s been wearing them for over twenty years. And that there’s more than simply the lust for adventure rioting in his eyes these days and that now it’s almost soothing to look at him sometimes, whereas, until a couple of years ago, he was always so unsettling for everyone around him, but in a good way.

  He could say that, unlike Rocco, Klatsche never was a boy, but always a grown-up man, except that the genetic lottery handed him that boyish face that he’ll still have in ten years, no matter how hard he plays at being a father. But oh, he’s not even playing at being a father, he is a father now, you can see it in his shoulders, in the way he holds himself, in the slight tiredness, sustained by tenderness, in his eyes, in the slightly broader waist. He’s more stable than ever, and that suits him so well that I ought to break into pieces here and now, like a church window exploding in slow motion, but I pull myself together and just carry on looking unobtrusively at him, and keep on looking at Faller too.

  He could say now that Anne Stanislawski is the future, that she looks like a vixen, cunning and quick and wild and royal at the same time, fervent yet composed. Today, she’s wearing her reddish-blonde hair down, which she rarely does – why is she, oh my God, she’s a strawberry queen, and did she count her freckles when she was a child?

  Faller could say that the silver stripes in Calabretta’s hair suit him very well, the way they’re multiplying and getting more and more out of hand, the way they’re seizing possession of his head, and that he really ought to stop giving a damn about his receding hairline because the liberated brow draws all the attention to his finely carved face, to his unassuming wisdom, to the fact that he’s a man who never, really absolutely never, boasts about anything, who always is the way he is, which is mad really, they don’t make them like that anymore.

  He could say that Brückner and Schulle remind him of his daughters, that casual optimism, that absolute engagement, that respect for all living beings, that somewhat simple but not in the least silly sense of humour, yes, they could be brothers, or Faller’s daughters, and in any case they’re probably simply sons of the north wind.

  He could say that Inceman’s lost right arm is, strictly speaking, on his account, because he was kicked into retirement too early back then, because that’s why they needed a successor, who turned out to be Calabretta, so then they needed a new fourth member for his former team in the murder squad, and because that fourth man then turned out to be Bülent Inceman, previously the hottest shot in drugs. First it was bottoms up, then my heart got blown up, then firebombs rained in through a window, and then his arm was gone.

  Sometimes I wonder if Inceman wishes he’d just stayed put in drugs, then there’d still be a right arm in his life, but then again he wouldn’t have me or the looks that constantly flit back and forth between him and Klatsche.

  Sometimes I wonder that.

  He could have had so much: his peace, wholeness, a wife, a family maybe, all he once wished for before he met me.

  Faller could say that he didn’t actually want to get the evening here started until Stepanovic finally turned up, but, hey, you just never know with him, and in the end you can always trust that he’ll be there when he’s needed.

  Can’t you?

  Won’t he?

  Where is the pea-brain anyway?

  Hey, he can’t leave me on my own here.

  But on the other hand, the bathtub’s full already.

  In that respect.

  Of course, now would be the moment when Faller could say something to me, or about me or for me or right through me, but he doesn’t do that either.

  He says none of all that.

  He tries to sum it up with a helpless but really sweet gesture, with a kind of circle that he draws in the air, then he adds a couple more spirals to it, then puffs out his cheeks and lets the air out again through his teeth, then he gets wet eyes and says something like:

  ‘Yes, then, good, so, well, uh cheers.’

  So now that’s floating over the table like a neon sign, and if I look at all of us like that, you couldn’t actually have put it better.

  He sits down again.

  Carla talks to Rocco, Anne Stanislawski talks to Calabretta, Faller Inceman, Schulle and Brückner make up a flat back four, Klatsche and I look into each other’s eyes. Help.

  ‘So?’ he says.

  ‘So?’ I say.

  ‘What are you up to, then?’

  ‘I’m trying to give up smoking.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since five minutes ago.’

  He shakes his head. ‘Can’t you talk seriously to me?’

  His pina colada arrives, the
re’s a lump of coconut and an impressive disc of pineapple stuck on the side.

  ‘I should talk seriously to someone with a salad in his drink?’

  He breathes in and out again, he rubs his hand over his forehead, and I know that was mean. The waiter gives me an ice-cold look.

  ‘OK, let me take the greens out,’ I say, ‘and then let’s try again.’

  He smiles at me the way he always used to smile at me, with that blend of cheek and love. He pushes his glass over to me, but does so rather too fast, I jam my left hand pretty much into the pineapple, and the leaves or thorns, or whatever they are, as sharp as a dragon’s teeth, rip open the inside of my thumb, I say, ‘wow, deep,’ Klatsche says ‘oh,’ Anne Stanislawski raises her eyebrows and says ‘fuck,’ Carla says we’d better put some disinfectant on it, and stands up to go to the bar, and that’s the exact moment that the first shots are fired.

  St Pauli, summer 1984

  Henning stood at the harbour, the night having just shattered on him. The light and the Elbe were creeping up from the east, they almost sank into the sounds that the morning sent through the city, and that would have been fine by Henning too, just sinking somewhere.

  He looked at the water and watched the ships leaving, the warm wind tickled the back of his neck, he had his hands in his trouser pockets, he was hungry. He still had a little change on him, but it wasn’t even enough for a fish roll.

  He had spent all his money on the girl.

  Elisabeth or whatever her name was.

  He’d met her in the Markthalle, at the Black Flag concert he’d been looking forward to for weeks. When she’d given him a kind of sideways smile, he’d had a few seconds when he didn’t know who he had a bigger crush on, Henry Rollins or her. Then they danced, she was wild and laughed, and that flooded his bloodstream with happiness; after the concert, with all the loud music in his bones, he invited her back to St Pauli; she was kind of scared to come at first, but he talked her three friends round and they all went off to the Kiez together.

  They went on foot; it was warm after all.

  He’d taken the ladies to the Lehmitz, that run-down dive with the tiny, run-down roof terrace over the back yard, where only a chain-link fence separated the people from the sky. Nobody knew exactly why the fence had been put up. Maybe to stop the drunks – there were plenty of them in the Lehmitz – from just jumping into the night.

  They’d stood tightly packed under the chicken wire. Henning had handed out vodka shots, one after another, in between they’d drunk beer, the girls had paid for the beer. There wasn’t necessarily romance in the air, but Henning had put his arm around Elisabeth, or whatever her name was, and when she laughed she kept letting herself sort of fall into him, into his arm, she leant against him with a storm in her hips, her bottom was then on his upper thigh, and so he came closer and closer to her.

  Did the two of them want to go somewhere else, he asked her quietly. She looked at him and nodded, and he’d almost have kissed her right there, but he didn’t dare in front of her friends. They were ladies from the Alster, you could see that in the clothes they were wearing, they had sharp tongues on them, you had to watch out not to get snagged on a barbed remark.

  OK, come on, she said half an hour later, when the friends wanted to go home, and so Henning and Elisabeth or whatever her name was snuck away unnoticed.

  He took her hand when they turned into Davidstrasse and they stopped for a moment up on the corner, with a view of the harbour, and she said: ‘It’s always beautiful, that old place.’

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ said Henning, and she laughed again, and then she gave him a quick kiss and pulled him on.

  Damn, he’d missed the moment.

  But that split-second kiss had left thunderbolts on his lips.

  In the Washington Bar, some guys, friends of hers, were sitting at the bar. Went to school together. Oh yeah, thought Henning, posh school, Abitur, university, of course. Nice for you. He felt like a wally, stupid and rough, and it was only then that he noticed that he was broke too.

  He dug in his trouser pockets and pulled out what remained of his money.

  Hm.

  Well then.

  Tricky.

  She was already sitting between two of the guys, Elisabeth or whatever her name was, and now she was laughing at someone else, she wasn’t even looking at Henning anymore.

  ‘I just need to head home, get some cash,’ he said, not loudly, but quite loud enough.

  Elisabeth or whatever her name was didn’t react. When he walked through the door, he thought he heard an ‘OK, bye’.

  He wasn’t sure if it was even addressed to him.

  And now he was standing here at the port again, like he so often did at around this time, and hating his life. He’d never even met his father, his mother had thrown herself first into life, then drink: these days she was barely coherent. Now and then she had clear moments, when she screamed at him that he was a useless idiot. Henning knew that she actually meant his father, but that didn’t make things better. He was a useless idiot. He’d dropped out of school in year ten with no qualifications, because of maths, he’d broken off his apprenticeship as a mechanic because of his arsehole boss and everything. Now he wiped down tables in a pub, helped in the kitchen, sometimes at the bar. He quite liked standing behind the bar, the rest was shit. He was sure there ought to be more going on in a life. He kept on thinking about getting on a ship and getting away.

  Leaving Hamburg.

  Never coming back.

  Nobody would miss him and he wouldn’t miss anyone either. His friend Kalle, who used to be the only decent guy in the whole neighbourhood, had been dead to him since last year. He’d got in with pimps, with those idiots and their ‘professional’ group, the GMBH, because he’d hoped to get something, big shoulders probably, so that he could finally hit back when his dad went for him with his belt. Now he was those losers’ favourite errand boy and spent all day and half the night running to and fro between the boxing ring in the cellar of the Ritze and all the no-tell hotels. Kalle had told him that his immediate boss wore two watches at once, and because he didn’t see anything funny about that at all, Henning hadn’t spoken a word to him since.

  Those guys had a few screws loose.

  He just wanted to get out of here.

  But maybe not right this summer.

  Summer wasn’t generally all that bad in St Pauli.

  And a big step’s a big step.

  Henning looked into the sky, which was slowly turning pink, a few scraps of cloud seemed like they were on the ropes – just like him. He yawned, keeping his hands in his pockets, turned around and headed home up the Hafentreppe, the harbour steps, back to the room with all the rubbish. The thought of taking a girl back to that room made him grin.

  No woman alive would stand for that, he thought. Sod Elisabeth or whatever her name was.

  On his tenth birthday, Henning had more or less decided that everything would change the moment he turned eighteen. Now he was nineteen and sometimes he was surprised that absolutely nothing had changed, but mostly it made sense to him. Because he’d learnt that things didn’t change just because you made some wish, or even plans. Well, not for people like him. Layabouts, have-nots, thickos. His days were dull, the nights mostly were too, money was short, his heart was lukewarm. Henning didn’t have much good to say about life, it’d always been on the cruddy side, but he knew one thing: this couldn’t be it, this ‘life’ that he’d heard about now and again.

  He’d tried a few things out over the summer, even a couple of those brainless gangs. The Champs. The Breakers. Found nothing, nobody, only trouble. The gangs did stupid stuff. They were unemployed. Well, they couldn’t help that, loads of people were unemployed, but they acted like it was the coolest, made like they were the greatest, but only did small stuff. By day they played ping pong in the youth club on Nobistor, oh God, Henning hated it, it wasn’t even proper table tennis: if they were lucky, they’d acciden
tally shoot balls into each other’s faces, and then act like it had been a massive sporting success. In the evenings there was real sport, because that was when they and the Nazis from Neuwulmstorf met up on the Heiligengeistfeld and smashed each other’s faces in. They’d be making out that they were Thai boxers the whole time, but none of them could get his leg higher than the nearest urinal.

  And basically, Henning had to admit to himself, he quite liked chatting to people he had dealings with. Sadly though, that was just quite hard going with the losers in the gangs. Sometimes he thought they didn’t even have enough words in their heads to be able to hold a conversation.

  In a moment of desperation, or rebellion, Henning had tried again with Kalle. He’d called him, they’d met for a couple of cans of Holsten on the Fischmarkt, just like old times. But Kalle had been kind of high. He’d just babbled stupid stuff, about the whores, the bosses, business. All the time Kalle was talking, Henning found himself thinking about dark cellars, he didn’t know why but that was the image in his head. Then, when he saw that Kalle was wearing two watches on his wrist, he stood up and said: ‘Hey, I’d better be going.’

  He walked home, through the streets he’d known inside and out since he was a kid, he walked past the worn-out corners with the worn-out pubs and the worn-out people in them, and as he left one of a hundred sex cinemas behind him, the way he always left that kind of miserable entertainment behind him, yet still accidentally cast a glance at the men going in and coming out, he was almost unendurably ashamed of the place where he lived. St Pauli was brutal and grey and full of sad pissheads.

  He didn’t even get what was keeping him here anymore.

  He didn’t even rate the girls anymore: admittedly they belonged to the section of humanity that was kind-of-OK, but unfortunately the girls were dumb too. He could set the evenings on fire if he liked a girl. He got on well with them. He was witty, charming, some even said he was smart and had a dangerous mouth, by which they meant an attractive mouth. He did actually think he looked pretty good, his hair was dark blond and glossy, he might be a little too thin, but he was an OK height, so kind of tall enough, and he might only have two pairs of jeans but their fit was great, much better than on all those idiots who had to keep pulling them up because of that martial arts fad. Henning wore his jeans on his hips, mostly with a grey T-shirt and a pale-brown leather jacket that someone had left in a pub, and he’d spent ages practising the walk he’d copied from Steve McQueen, and was actually pretty good at it. Sometimes, when he walked through the streets with a girl, he almost had the feeling that he really was Steve McQueen, yeah man, he looked just like Steve McQueen, didn’t he? He danced with the girls until they laughed in that lovely way that only happy girls laugh.