Funeral for a Dog: A Novel (12 page)

The delivery’s here, said Super-Gay. The deliveryman looked like a bike courier and brought coke with a receipt. We’re first, said Miguel, so the two of them went into the bathroom. Why, no one knew, maybe it was due to a general, vague fear. Felix and I were coke partners, Tuuli watched us. For each round Miguel and John left us two very neat lines on the toilet lid. After the first round my tar-paper fatigue was gone, after the second I was praising Bret Easton Ellis. By the window Felix and John talked about the gin and how Bombay Sapphire had to be drunk straight no matter what, at the very most on the rocks, and so on, the cloud and the light, the visual sensation, the bright sound of Miguel’s doorbell. Someone put on electronic music. A few people joined us in the kitchen, Felix switched to whisky, Miguel gave Lua still more beer and pulled him by the tail in a circle, Super-Gay ordered pizza, Felix sushi, Miguel: so what are we going to do now, foreign policy, all this is a reaction to fucked-up imperialism, this attack is only the beginning. Right, right. Lua vomited on the marble, the doorbell rang, people dropped by, deliverymen, messengers, couriers and DJs, writers, journalists, musicians.

The roller coaster is lying there like a slain dragon, Astroland is still empty. Kiki parks her Honda in the no-standing zone next to the Shore Hotel on Surf Avenue. At Nathan’s we buy hot dogs with onions and sauerkraut, hot dogs with chili, cheeseburgers, french fries with ketchup, soda for two. I carry the bag, Kiki her camera, Lua drags his leash behind him. Even Coney Island is full of flags now, they’re pinned to the padded coat of a Russian woman on Brighton Beach, they’re painted on the clam and beer stands, on the wheels of a Korean War veteran’s wheelchair, they billow over Astroland, they flutter blue and red and silvery over the boardwalk. Lua poses for Kiki next to the fishermen on the pier and in front of an army recruiting station. He looks boldly at the camera, we buy him cotton candy. A few more booths, then an empty, fenced-in lot with withered grass and paint stains, above it a garland of letters spelling
Shoot the Freak
shines into the sky. Painted in fairground-blue and carnival-yellow, the price is flaking off the walls,
3 for $1,
as is the announcement
Live Target! Paintball Freak! Moving Target! Shoot the Freak!
Kiki says that after the war rhetoric of the last two weeks what she’d like most of all is to shoot at someone herself, but around noon the shooting galleries are closed. Kiki takes pictures of Lua and me amid the bright colors. In the can toss I win a bottle of sugary sparkling wine, the good French stuff, says the woman at the counter, you know?—We do, says Kiki. She pops the cork, and Lua drinks the Coney Island champagne from the soda cup.

Later we sit on the beach next to a playground made of plastic: climbing cube, a few ladders, a slide. The Atlantic lies flat on its back, Astroland holds still. For the first time in weeks Lua gets to run free, for the first time I see the two warships on the horizon. Kiki takes only small sips, she has to get back on the road later, she says. She doesn’t say where she’s going. The September sun is now slanting steeply over the beach, two old men with metal detectors stroll slowly from right to left, occasionally one of them finds a syringe, bottle cap, or coin. Lua plods along the beach and toward us on his three legs, he flops down on the sand between us and says he’s going to take his nap now. Kiki speaks of the beauty of this desolate area, of the decay that resides in places like this, she points to the apartment blocks of red brick behind the booths and carnival rides, one joyous sadness after another, she says, and photographs Lua and me at the bottom of the slide. Have you been together long? she asks, and I answer, yes, very long. And that I’ll tell her about Lua’s fourth leg and the Heckler & Koch that shot it off. There was still a lot to tell and explain, such as the blood on my T-shirt and my cigarettes. Such as why I’m here now and not with Tuuli and Felix, such as the child. When? Once I’ve put the last several days behind me, the good-bye first. Kiki packs up her camera and leans on me. Finish your story, Svensson!

Tuuli shut the bathroom door and turned the key. On the toilet lid there was only one line of cocaine. Last round, said Felix, as always. One of us gets the coke, one of us gets Tuuli. Things were what they were. I remember how Tuuli kneeled down between Felix and me on the tiles. Svensson? she asked me, and rummaged in the pockets of her too-large jeans. Yes, I said. She found a coin and showed it to us like a second in a duel. Felix? Tuuli nodded at Felix. I looked first into his face and then at myself in the mirror, our eyes were like dark winter puddles edged with ice. We raised our glasses. Eyes shut! said Tuuli, but I didn’t obey. We sat down on the floor, I leaned my head against the wall and looked at Tuuli. Behind a massive block of frosted glass at her back shimmered fluorescent lights, from hidden speakers came the same music as in the apartment, even here in the bathroom a small television was on. I took a sip of my gin and put the heavy glass on the toilet lid. Then Tuuli ran her hand over my eyes as if I were dead. In Miguel’s black-tiled bathroom I sat on the floor between the toilet and heated towel racks and suddenly no longer knew exactly who I was. For a few seconds I stopped being Dirk Svensson. I remember the clink of the tossed coin on the tiles and that I opened my eyes again even though it was prohibited. Tuuli put the coin back in her pocket and smiled at me. She swept up a few grains of coke with her index finger and stuck it in Felix’s mouth as if he were a baby. He licked it off with his eyes closed. I’d lost, maybe I’d won, that night it couldn’t be decided. I took the bill from the toilet lid and snorted the last line with my left nostril, then Tuuli leaned over the toilet and kissed me. Felix sat next to us with his eyes closed and drank his gin, smiling. Had he opened his eyes, maybe everything would have turned out differently. The bitter cocaine dripped into the back of my throat, and Tuuli’s tongue tasted numbly of smoke and juniper berries. Okay, I said, and ran my fingers over Tuuli’s pregnant belly under the PricewaterhouseCoopers T-shirt she was still wearing, my hands on her breasts, on the back of her neck, and suddenly the last several days and weeks and years and past and future contracted meaningfully and clearly in her lips. Tuuli took my hand, kissed it, and placed it back in my lap. Then someone pounded on the door, told us to open up, the taxi was here. Felix, still squeezing his eyes shut, let us guide him out of the apartment. On the way out I drained my gin and my nose began to bleed on Tuuli’s T-shirt.

The taxi crossed the bridge back to Williamsburg, the lights of the Manhattan Bridge shimmered in the dawn of September 14, on the riverbank below us the factories were asleep. Felix gave the taxi driver a tip and bought a flask of whisky from Corner Store Oscar with the change, I pulled the drunk dog home. Tuuli almost fell asleep walking. We gave Lua a shower with tepid water, we didn’t want to frighten him. I had surrendered control to the cocaine and opened another bottle of beer, Felix had unscrewed the flask. The muted television showed dancing women in Afghanistan or Iraq or Silvercup Studios on the river. Then Tuuli emerged freshly showered and naked from the bathroom. She tossed me the purple T-shirt, her naked belly and her breasts flickered in the light of the television. She lay down next to Felix. He laid his hands on her belly as if it belonged to him. Tuuli yawned and repeated that they were not alone but were three. She fell asleep immediately. I remember that at that moment I put down my beer and stood up, that I took Felix’s flask and Tuuli’s T-shirt, that I shut the door behind me and woke Lua. That I then walked down Lorimer Street and turned the next corner, past Settepani and the cardboard box huts under the BQE, first north, then west, later anywhere, away from Tuuli and Felix in my bed and surrounded by my books.

Now, two weeks later on the Coney Island beach, Kiki Kaufman takes my hand in hers, the hand with the hole in the middle, and under her fingers the throb in the wound disappears. The three of you miscalculated, she says, you’re like Borromean rings. Lua’s still sleeping, and Kiki takes advantage of his sleeping and his looking away, she strokes me around the eyes as if she were wiping away a tear. A little boy in a bathing suit walks across the beach to the water, dragging an inflated rubber Superman behind him. Kiki holds my wounded hand to her cheek and asks if I want to come along to Fire Island, maybe to Sagaponack, to Great Neck or Port Washington, even better all the way to the end of the island, to Montauk, where there’s a lighthouse and a proper view of the Atlantic, the deeper water. For two weeks now she’s been taking pictures of rubble, of Lua and me in my bloody T-shirt. Kiki shines in the autumn sun as she talks about her pictures. For two weeks she’s basically been a camera, now it’s enough. She has recorded how the city’s been divided into war and peace, she’s photographed the hoisting of flags for and against, and both would have stood equally well in the wind. She has understood that she’s always seen things too simply. Kiki sits in the sand and smiles at me. What you could see with your own eyes, what you could touch, she says, never made it onto the television sets. She’s been taking pictures to verify her own perception, she has failed. Kiki wakes Lua and tosses him the last cheeseburger. Her toes dig in the sand and find a bottle cap, they give it to me. Ultimately her camera is only a crutch for her ideas, she says, for her it’s about making something new out of the photos and stories, she still has some paint in the car. We should head off. Kiki is right: I’ve told enough, I’ve drunk too much and eaten too little, I think, burying my telephone and Tuuli’s collected cigarettes in the sand. Kiki is right, I think, we should get out of here. I’ll climb into her Honda, drive past the carousels and the shooting galleries, down Surf Avenue, under the F train and along the ocean. A view would be good, I say to Kiki Kaufman, let’s go to Montauk.

(The deeper water)

It looked like a storm, the clouds were still hanging in the San Gottardo, Svensson said after the Ping-Pong match, fetching a bottle of Lugana from the kitchen, they would be here sometime in the afternoon (north-south weather divide). He didn’t usually drink, he said, as he uncorked the bottle. Only today. And when he did drink a glass on special occasions, he didn’t move his boat an inch. So I could safely take a sip myself, because I would be staying here (he was still wet from his dip). Svensson simply refused to take me, and at the same time he raised his wine glass as if there were something to celebrate:

Chin-chin!

So I sat with Tuuli, Svensson, and his seventy-seven chairs, and to my own astonishment I took the glass handed to me without hesitation and said “to the storm” (the first cicadas in the oleander). Despite my departure plans, despite my flight booking, and even though my luggage is waiting for me. Maybe tomorrow, Svensson laughed, and I tried not to let any indignation show (my superior and wife is waiting too). Svensson refuses me Ping-Pong victories and answers, then he hands me a glass and wants me to stay (he exploits the full potential of his silence). Chin-chin! The momentary question of why Svensson doesn’t want to get rid of me. Tuuli and he don’t seem to talk to each other much, I don’t seem to be intruding here. There was something to celebrate, Svensson said, and maybe he needs witnesses for this celebration. The three of them paid no further attention to me: Svensson emptied his wine in one gulp and carried a few of the black garbage bags across the property, Tuuli took off her nightshirt and changed into a green bikini as if I weren’t there. She lay down on an intact lounge chair in the shade of the oleander and smoked, only occasionally she smiled in my direction. The boy examined the dog with a broken chair leg as if with a stethoscope. I strolled back and forth across the property, I weighed my possibilities, I played with the ring in my pocket, I watched the playing boy, finally I gave up my scheduled plan (“To enable the perception of social life with all the senses, the ethnological method of participant observation is traditionally based on long field stays within the group under investigation”). In the early afternoon I then fell asleep in Svensson’s room without another thought about the return flight (maybe I wanted to miss the flight).

Chiarella

I wake up when the bedroom door is shut softly from outside. The pigeons are cooing, now and then chainsaws and the splintering of falling trees, the swallows merely little dots in absolute blue (the afternoon sky completely cloudless over the smooth lake). The small, pretty mother in the green bikini was in my room while I was sleeping. Her scent is still hanging in the air. On the floor next to my head is an open bottle of water (Chiarella) and a glass (Duralex), under them a torn-out page from my notebook with a handwritten note. The passing thought of not reading the note and leaving Svensson’s ruin. But I don’t know the way, and my plane to Hamburg has already taken off without me (this is your story now, Mandelkern). This evening Elisabeth will close up her office and return to our apartment, but I won’t be there. Mandelkern, she’ll ask, are you there? Elisabeth will wait and wonder where I am. Mandelkern? Whether I’m going to come back at all. Daniel? Whether I’ve decided against our marriage.

between the animals

Another note: “Do we want to conduct an immanent analysis of the concept ‘relationship’ and jettison all contextual references, Prof. Mandelkern?” Elisabeth wrote the message on a promotional postcard for the Brittany tourism agency and put it in my papers, I found it at work in the Museum of Ethnology on Rotherbaumchaussee (my laughter in the witch archive). Back then I divided my time between Elisabeth, my dissertation, and work at
GEO
. Then our first trip together in spring 2003 to the Atlantic, Elisabeth’s divorce was on the horizon, but I didn’t hear anything about that (she kept all that separate from me). We parked the Renault in the middle of a village square, the restaurant (Le Pélican) was a large room with three long tables and no menus, there were carrots and lobsters for everyone. I had to understand, Elisabeth said, as she opened her lobster claws more skillfully than anyone else at the table, that her first marriage took place at another time and in another place (the sound of the nutcracker in her nimble fingers). Yes, I said, I did understand that. Around us French was being spoken, we drank wine from scratched decanters.

Chin-chin!

said Elisabeth, between the lobsters she shared cigarettes with a retired foreign currency dealer from Paris, I had to dance with his granddaughter. At night we refilled the Renault’s cooling water from the fountain and I drove us past fields and stone walls, Elisabeth with her eyes closed in the backseat, she sang “
Der Rote Wedding
”(
Rotfront!
she sang,
Rotfront!
). Then we slept on a wool blanket next to a few menhirs (back then we were the same age).

Petrarch & Simpson

Elisabeth and I made a loop around France (we circled each other). We drove the Renault through Brittany, then along the Spanish border and the Côte d’Azur, we slept in the places that the guidebooks passed over. Every morning I woke up two hours before Elisabeth, read essays, and wrote my notes. She abstained from croissants, I got used to black coffee and observed Elisabeth sleeping in the various pension beds (I failed at sketching her beauty). When she woke up, we immediately set off. She sat in the passenger seat of the Renault and read to me from culinary guides. Two warm meals a day, I got used to Ricard and Pernot and entrails (I still sometimes hated brains and intestines). Elisabeth ordered the red wines, we drank them together. I always got to drive, sometimes she talked on the phone with her husband and I tried not to listen (we learned our rituals). One weekend we visited two of her writer friends in a small village at the foot of Mont Ventoux (Venasque), they spent the summer there with their novels and plays (this is Daniel, said Elisabeth, you’re going to have to like him, I love him). After two days of conversations about books and plays and the view of the bare mountain I wanted to move on (Côte Luberon, Côte du Rhône). Elisabeth chose the memorial to the racing cyclist and first doping fatality Tom Simpson (her strange interest in cyclists, the races themselves she never followed). As we finally forced the Renault torturously over the summit, she read to me from Petrarch,
However, the mountains of the province of Lyons could be seen very clearly to the right, and to the left the sea at Marseille and at the distance of several days the one that beats upon Aigues Mortes. The Rhône itself was beneath my eyes.
At the Simpson memorial she placed a full bottle of wine next to dozens of water bottles, flowers, and jerseys. Simpson died of dehydration, she explained, and I took note of her words, he’d ingested only whisky and wine and amphetamines (“put me back on my bike” were his last words, or maybe “go on, go on,” they haven’t been precisely imparted).

Gulf of Marseille

Change of drivers on top of the windy mountain: Elisabeth’s absolutely unambiguous kiss when we came out of the station on the summit. In the writers’ small house we’d had to sleep in a walk-through room, the female dramatist’s two small children had jumped on our blanket in the morning (sex was unthinkable). I remember that Elisabeth on the hairpin turns on the lower third of the mountain pulled her skirt up and her underpants to the side. I want to come now, she said (she spoke of her bestial lust, I had to concentrate on gorges and sheep). Both of us stared at the narrow, winding road, Elisabeth came with her eyes on inwardly directed emptiness, I concentrated simultaneously on my finger on her pussy and the emergency brake of the Renault. A cyclist overtook us at the decisive moment, Elisabeth had stepped too abruptly on the brake (we laughed, we risked a rear-end collision together). When we reached the beach near Martigues, we parked between the refineries on the left and an industrial port on the right. Artificial palms, fish stalls abandoned in the midday heat, an old man was holding a kite in the air for his grandson (light blue water, light blue sky). Elisabeth and I hopped along the brightly shining stones of the jetty, we bought deep-fried fish and cold soda, we sat in the spraying groundswell. I remember exactly how the rust-red of the refineries was reflected in Elisabeth’s sunglasses as she opened a can of soda and told me with a laugh that she wanted to be with me always, I was so wonderfully practical, extraordinarily practical, especially when traveling (I had to laugh at that).

between the books

I lack 3,000 words for Svensson’s strangeness. Right now Harnisch must be at the most expensive restaurant in Châtenay-Malabry thinking about morality and urine (his return trip directly after the press conference of the anti-doping laboratory; but no one knows when that will be), Elisabeth will be doing a little more work at home. Where to begin? I look at Svensson’s books standing on the desk, I wonder why his shelves are almost empty. Did Svensson throw the books in the garbage bags, is he disposing of his library? Is that where the smoke is coming from? The remaining books are standing there as if they were arranged for me (as if I were supposed to read Svensson’s thoughts). For example: Uwe Johnson’s
Jahrestage.
In front of me stands only volume 2 of the first edition, in our bedroom in Hamburg a red and black collected edition is lying on the floor, read and flagged, the most famous quote on the spine (the cat called memory). Svensson’s books, my books, Elisabeth’s books. For example: Max Frisch’s
Montauk
. On our honeymoon trip to Kolberg I talked to Elisabeth about it often enough (and she to me). We had only one weekend in the summer and wanted to get this formality over with. Elisabeth reminded me of Lynn, the Baltic Sea region of Frisch’s Long Island. The destination (Kolberg) was her idea, she wanted to bring together her past and her future, she said. I wanted to see her without everything else (without husband, without work, without St. Michaelis in the background, without St. Petri). Continuing along Svensson’s thinned-out shelf: Theodore Dreiser’s
Sister Carrie
I’ve never read, Svensson’s copy torn and sticky, full of underlined passages and margin notes, on the flyleaf a phone number (646-299-1036 Kiki Kaufman!).

Manteli,

You’re still here! This house, these pictures, this garbage. All this is not my fault. Svensson talks melancholy nonsense: he has the world in his rearview mirror, his heart is a book. These old stories, these fictions. This nostalgia! Poppycock! You write all the time, Manteli. I believe: there’s nothing true about all this and nothing lasts forever, books, pictures, scribblings. There are more important things. There are things that are worth it. If you stay, I’ll show them to you.

Kauniita unia,

Tuuli

How do I get out of here?

Tuuli wants to show me things. I’m sitting at the desk and reading the message again and again: things that are worth it? Tuuli was standing next to me in a bikini as I was sleeping, she tore a page out of my notebook and wrote to me. Tuuli seems to know what she’s talking about (in that she reminds me of Elisabeth). She must know what the important things are: not words and notes, not the old stories and Svensson’s fictions, not pictures. The passing thought that she’s not here because of Svensson, not because of the boy and not because of Felix. Maybe Tuuli’s here because of me, maybe we were supposed to meet. Maybe all this is about fate (making connections where there are no connections). I remain seated at the desk. What holds me back I don’t know.
Kauniita unia
means “sweet dreams,” I remember that from my time with the second Carolina. Tomorrow I have to leave, I think, but then: I could stay.

Elisabeth and Daniel

The question of what’s worth it and what’s special? Elisabeth and I read each other like city maps (we moved into the back courtyards of our city). We exchanged the isolated tables of the Gruner + Jahr cafeteria for late-night bars, we slept together in my apartment (sometimes in hotels). But that’s not right. I can’t remember whether snow fell in the winter of 2002 and whether it remained on the ground, what was in the newspapers at that time, whether I had a cold. I must have sat in the office all day, leafing through proofs and waiting for evening. Elisabeth was still married, her husband worked for the publishing company too, we should keep that in mind, she said. Sometimes I saw her for days at a time only in a completely official capacity at tables full of journalists (she requested those days). Elisabeth is a pragmatist. But that’s not right either: I ignored the thought of her husband. For a few months we actually lived as if it were just the two of us, everything else was of only superficial concern. At her desk with a view of St. Michaelis Elisabeth wrote easily digestible but honest articles (strong women, good-looking men, new movie releases), she called this arrangement a “quite acceptable backdrop against which she could perform her life,” I compiled glossaries for
GEOkompakt
(“The Wonder of Humanity”) and spent mornings in the Museum of Ethnology. We had no mission outside of ourselves (I found her red hair in the corners of my apartment). From our words and thoughts we designed streets and moved more purposefully, maybe more meaningfully, in them (she showed me the remote map quadrants), we used our bodies (I went beyond my boundaries).

Who exactly is Daniel Mandelkern?

In my head this image remains: Elisabeth and I in bed in the Bismarckstrasse apartment, yogurt jars and red wine bottles, on the floor next to us on the right and left our books, on my side:

The Water-Method Man
by John Irving

Montauk
by Max Frisch

The Ghost Writer
by Philip Roth

A Diary in the Strictest Sense of the Term
by Bronislaw Malinowski.