Funeral for a Dog: A Novel (11 page)

Shut up and play, Mandelkern!

he says, and I reply to this inappropriate outburst with another friendly “okay.” The situation is paradoxical: if I lose, Svensson will be silent, and if I win, he won’t want to talk either. Between forceful strokes Svensson now announces the score increasingly loudly and clearly, 15–7, 16–7, 17–7, 18–7, 19–7, 20–7, 21–7. The boy and Tuuli clap their hands. One to one, says Svensson as we change sides again (but not paddles). Svensson takes a drink of water and doesn’t offer me anything. He wants to win. Svensson has hung his T-shirt over a chair, zero to zero in the third and decisive set.

no winner/no loser

But then Svensson serves too low and opens the third set with a net ball. He doesn’t know that he’s playing in the decisive round not only against the sun, but also against my hands’ memory (sharper slices, longer strokes, lower error rate). Ping-Pong is not a sport, said Elisabeth, seeming to doubt my masculinity, Ping-Pong is for school recess. Svensson and I stand opposite each other, our rallies get longer and fiercer. Now it’s about the game and no longer about politeness and my story (decision: I’m not giving up the lead again). I shift into a defensive position and let Svensson go at me. He serves to my backhand, and I return the ball with a sharp slice close over the net. At 19–19, when I just barely return one of his smashes and slip (I land on my knees), Svensson, completely unchallenged, smacks the ball into the net (he wanted to make it too good). Svensson stands there, inhales through his nostrils and lays his paddle on the table. Then he walks to the dock, takes off his shoes, and jumps without comment into the water (dramaturgy of people). Did
Manteli
win? the boy asks, and Tuuli says,

Svensson can’t win.

T
HESE DAYS, WAKING UP IN A PANIC IS THE RULE.
T
HE DOUBLE
plank-bed is screwed to the walls, the room is the exact length of the bed and less than twice as wide. Yesterday I fell asleep naked and I have now woken up under a wool blanket, the time in between has escaped me. Lua is snoring under the bed, and if Lua is snoring, I think, things must be all right. My new suit is hanging on the wall, next to it the room key with a heavy wooden tag: 219. The door is secured from the inside with a padlock. Little by little most of the details come back to me. Kiki Kaufman is asleep next to me, her camera is lying between us on the bed. The Bowery Whitehouse Hotel is not a hotel but a large loft with dark masked windows and tin ceiling tiles. This is where Hurstwood killed himself. The rooms are not rooms but wooden boxes, open on top, with latticework to keep out thieves. In the murky semidarkness I don’t know whether it’s day or night, I don’t have a watch, and I don’t have a headache yet from vodka, champagne, and wine. I told Kiki Kaufman half of the story, now she’s asleep. She’s thin, she has wrapped herself up to her neck in a white sheet, her black curls are spread out around her head like a pillow. Kiki Kaufman’s nose is covered with freckles. I remember West Broadway, Chinatown in the rain, the chickens on their hooks in the windows, the garbage cans, Kiki’s camera, Lua next to the black plastic bags. This city never sleeps, I think, the neon lights never go out. In one of the boxes someone screams, Kiki wakes up, we’re lying side by side. On the third floor of the Bowery Whitehouse Hotel we listen to things: footsteps on the worn-down carpet, the opening of beer cans, then a belch, the toilet at the end of the corridor, the groans of sad people in their boxes. I haven’t yet told Kiki that Tuuli had a boy, or that his name is Samuli, that the two of them are doing well, that I don’t know who the father is, that I hung up before Felix could say the name of the clinic. Samuli arrived two months early, I say, he was actually supposed to be born in Germany, now he’s an American. Kiki asks whether I’m a sort of uncle to him. After a while we hear a giggle outside our box, a rattle of keys. From 218 first the sound of a door closing, then the sound of greedy lips, two fast belt buckles, the squishing sound of the washable mattress. Six o’clock, Kiki whispers, welcome to the desert of the real. Then the tear of a wrapper and the snap of rubber. At least they’re using protection, says Kiki. A man is breathing loudly and clearly, and a woman’s voice directs, back, back, baby. Good. Kiki and I lie on our backs and watch the fan on the ceiling through the latticework. Next to our heads, the panting and smacking goes on for a while, then the two voices and bodies click into their unimaginative in-and-out automatism, the man’s voice sings a hymn, show me those tits, come on, show me those tits, and the woman fills the gaps with the mantra of these days, oh my God, oh my God, but her voice falters more confidently and skillfully than in the television images. Kiki and I don’t move on the rubber mattress, we wait in the groaning of the wooden walls, in the shaking of sleeping boxes 215 to 221, in the New York round of the last days and weeks. We’re not alone, we’re three, Tuuli said. We miscalculated. Kiki Kaufman, Lua, and I listen to 215 breathing, 216 dying, 217 asking for quiet. 221 is cooking packet soup on a gas cooker. We hear a lubricant tube and a lubricant squelch. When 218 then finishes loudly and clearly, Kiki Kaufman grabs a towel from the hook on the washable wall, takes a toothbrush out of a small bag, puts on underpants, a white T-shirt. Kiki walks barefoot out of the room, the last few days have to get washed off, she says. Lua sits up and asks me what we’re going to do now. I don’t know where to go, I answer, and a sign next to the door says
DO NOT leave valuables in room
, but Kiki has left us and the 219 key hanging here.

At ten, Lua, Kiki and I are leaning on the red fire-exit door and drinking vending machine coffee in the lobby. Today the sun is shining, Kiki is wearing a bright summer dress and taking pictures of the homeless people on the bench in front of the Whitehouse. A one-legged man is wearing the stars and stripes around his shoulders and playing a singing saw, he calls Lua his fellow veteran, he gives him a can of Yuengling Lager and puts down the saw on the linoleum when I can’t give him any change. Lua drinks silently, Kiki has brushed and petted him, he has said enough for the moment, and because a minute of silence with George Bush is broadcast on television, for a few seconds it’s unexpectedly quiet. The backpackers have disappeared, says the one-legged man, usually he lives off them. But then the first sirens are coming down the Bowery, the one-legged man picks up the saw again and plays “America the Beautiful,” because Kiki has found another dollar and wants to take pictures. Lua lies at her feet. I get us another coffee, and Kiki says I have to tell her more.

The night from the eleventh to the twelfth of September we spent in my bed, Tuuli slept badly and Lua snored. Eventually I was woken up by the sun or the traffic on the BQE and climbed up to the roof. A little later, Tuuli came up the fire escape and gave me a blanket. I gathered the bottles and cans as she sat in the sun. She had on the purple PricewaterhouseCoopers T-shirt again, I see clearly before my eyes the material stretching across her belly and the cracked white lettering across her breasts. I lay down next to her. It was cold, the tar paper smelled of beer. Lua whimpered down in the apartment, I remember the answering machine coming on. Someone was stuck at some airport and playing pool for money in a hotel lobby. My mother called, then Tuuli’s father, her mother, later the secretary of the Blaumeiser shipping company. In the first rays of sunlight we could see the gray houses of Williamsburg, farther away the brick buildings where the Latinos lived. Apart from the column of smoke, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, in the low sunbeams the sycamores along the street seemed to be shining from within. Was she thirsty too, I asked. I don’t know, said Tuuli, and leaned toward me for a kiss. I taste like shit, I said to be safe, and she leaned back against the chimney. I closed my eyes and thought about nothing but the sun in my face, my headache, and Tuuli’s hand in mine. Down on the street Corner Store Oscar pulled up the metal shutters, put out the garbage, and hung an American flag in the window. And now? asked Tuuli, when Felix later came up to the roof and sat down next to us. You have tar-paper imprints on your face, said Felix, and when I replied that he should stop talking for a few minutes, please, Tuuli removed her hand from mine. Someone had to make coffee.

The singing saw is singing again. There are more and more flags, Kiki interrupts me, and nods to the one-legged man, stars and stripes and rainbows, a time of fresh veterans and new one-legged people is approaching. Breakfast? she asks. Yes, I say, Lua too. When we step into the street from the lobby, the Bowery comes back to me. Right around the corner there are good Bloody Marys, I say, and take Kiki’s hand. It’s the first time I’ve touched her intentionally. Her hand in mine feels realer and warmer than expected. Only now do I notice her eyes. Stop right there! she says after two blocks and takes a picture of Lua and me in front of a construction fence covered with missing-person posters. Burned-out candles, Lua among dried roses and brownish lilies,
missing! missing! missing!
like an aureole around our heads. Behind the fence is the empty garden of the B Bar & Grill, this morning only a fat cat is sitting here under the tree and its turned-off strings of lights, the first leaves are falling. Lua lies down under the table and immediately falls asleep. Here too a television is on. Kiki orders coffee instead of Bloody Marys, as if we always ate breakfast together, and on television Mayor Giuliani is talking about how this city has to shop and live and have breakfast as if everything were completely normal, good morning, New York! Good morning!

Kiki pays and politely says thanks for Lua’s water. That was the last of my money, she says. Under a tree with Kiki, with the credit card in my suit pocket and a coffee in my hand, the world looks distinctly simpler, I think. But then, as Kiki puts her camera on the table and laughs, as she looks at me with interest, as Lua sleeps between our feet, I tell her about the cracked concrete slabs of the Williamsburg piers around noon on September twelfth, the two painters in the sunlight and their portable easels, the smoke over the East River bridges in their oil paints. Everywhere people were standing and staring and talking, the cloud was wafting southward from the World Trade Center, we could smell it. Tuuli sat on a plank, leaning back on her arms, stretching her pointy belly into the sun. I threw stones in the water. A boy with horn-rimmed glasses and a Pavement T-shirt sold Felix pieces of melon from a cooler bag. Cars stopped, photographers took their pictures, two camera crews searched for suitable perspectives, a journalist asked us one by one whether we knew anyone down there, at the site formerly known as the World Trade Center? He moved on without notes. The smoke smells like Seraverde, said Tuuli, throwing a melon rind into the river, like plastic, gasoline, fire, wet earth, and poverty. Lua jumped in after it. A photographer photographed him as he climbed out of the shallow water with the rind in his mouth and shook himself off, the column of smoke in the background.

Which must have been an interesting picture, Kiki Kaufman interrupts me. For two weeks now she’s been taking pictures of the garbage collection and the piles of black garbage bags on the sidewalks, pictures of the police at roadblocks, of the heaps of flowers in front of fire stations, of starved cats and parakeets in evacuated apartments south of Canal Street, of the moral-support crowds lining the West Side Highway toward the south, the
USA! USA! USA!
posters, of bars and cafés and restaurants between Lafayette Street and the Bowery, of drunk people, of crying people, of the bakers in Brooklyn and of American flags in American windows, cars, and trains. Those seconds of this city, says Kiki, have not vanished as irretrievably as others before and after. On the morning of September twelfth, she set out toward New York from Chicago. After the long drive through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, she parked on the other side of the Hudson. As the only passenger heading toward Manhattan she made it on board an evacuation ship only after long discussion. She was inspected several times by police officers and private security services and finally made it through back alleys and restaurants into the restricted area south of Fourteenth Street, into the completely deserted “frozen zone.” The city found itself in a sort of war, but she simply strolled through bars and between garden chairs. She had come too late and was only able to photograph the consequences, not the causes, but those ultimately couldn’t be photographed anyway without a world journey. That was the first displacement of reality. She shot the cameras and camera vans and cameramen, who themselves filmed and photographed ruins and debris and dust, she took pictures of the cameras at Ground Zero, pictures of a German photographer in Brooklyn, an Italian camera crew in lower Manhattan, of French tourists with digital cameras, photojournalists with reflex cameras, children with disposable cameras and artists with Hasselblads. Kiki scratches Lua behind the ears and says that we should hit the road now. I want to show you something, she says, pulling Lua across the courtyard and out into the street, the two of them speak English with each other and walk side by side as if they’ve known each other for years. As we pass David’s Kosher & Halal Meat on the way to Kiki’s car, we buy Lua his breakfast. Kiki clears off the backseat of her green Honda, she puts three shoeboxes full of pictures in the trunk, takes out a blanket, and makes Lua a bed in the back. She gives me a bottle of water, I haven’t drunk water for days, and as Manhattan gradually disappears in the rearview mirror, I unwrap Lua’s first proper meal in days from the wax paper.

Along the way I tell her about Miguel and John and their duplex apartment overlooking Tompkins Square Park. John modeled for Tom Ford and Miguel was his agent. Miguel had invited us, so Tuuli, Felix, and I walked across the Williamsburg Bridge in the late afternoon. Tuuli was breathing heavily, and even Lua had a certain wariness in his dragging gait. Manhattan was quiet, the bridge spanned the river without cars on it. We sat down in front of Miguel’s gigantic television, John was wearing a blue T-shirt with the red inscription
Super-Gay
, from the window we could see the smoke cloud hanging in the cold white light of Ground Zero. Everybody, this is Super-Gay, said Miguel, Super-Gay, this is everybody. The television was muted, in a glass display case were a few bottles of Bombay Sapphire, CNN flickered in our faces. The airplane loops had been dropped from the program, instead there were now images of the clean-up operation, the posters along the highways and green America Under Attack logos. Mayor Giuliani spoke in front of the first homemade missing-person posters on a lamppost. I already can’t watch this shit anymore, said Miguel, America the Beautiful, Bush is hiding somewhere in the clouds over America and suddenly Zero Tolerance Giuliani is the city’s savior, God bless New York, one nation under God, and Rudy will take care of everything, probably he’ll want to be president soon. Miguel took his telephone from the table and pointed to the smoke, God bless America! Tuuli sat on the sofa and drank water, she rolled Felix a cigarette, occasionally she stood up and arched her back and stuck out her belly. On the terrace Miguel talked on the phone and gesticulated in a purple satin bathrobe, I heard Bach’s
Goldberg Variations
from the living room and slowly got drunk again. Miguel yelled something Italian into his phone, took a running start, and slid on his Asian slippers across the marble or fake marble. I wanted to get up and climb down from the roof terrace, walk along Avenue B holding Tuuli’s hand, go through one or two police checkpoints and get into a taxi to the airport. Lua could have stayed with Felix. They would let a pregnant woman through everywhere, Tuuli could have slept awhile at the airport, then we would have drunk Earl Grey and eaten oranges for breakfast. In an advanced stage of pregnancy she would have gotten special treatment and been put on the first flight out and back to Europe. In Helsinki or Berlin we would have already had to wear winter jackets, the child could have been born in the Charité. I could have been the official father. But I remained seated and drank, Tuuli closed her eyes, the moon stared over the rooftops, and eventually Felix poured his beer into Lua’s bowl and we switched to gin.