Funeral for a Dog: A Novel (14 page)

apple juice

With a little patience and spit, said Elisabeth, standing up. The digits of the alarm clock at 2:17 AM, down below on Bismarckstrasse the scrape of a bicycle and a mosquito in the room, the summer settled on the roofs. Elisabeth is not a squeamish woman (at first she’d remained dry). I noticed that I was intensely thirsty and Elisabeth’s eventual wetness on my cock was long dry (my own sticky wetness). I first heard the toilet flushing and then the opening and closing of the fridge, Elisabeth was singing “In My Solitude.” Then her singing stopped (it felt as if she were dead). When she returned to the mattress, she pushed me back and kissed me with open lips, from her mouth cold apple juice flowed into me (Elisabeth the woman I’d been waiting for).

Interview (anniversary of a death)

a match breaks

Tuuli’s hand then suddenly on my chest, our cigarette in her other one. With this beauty rising toward me I miss the sound of the sliding door and the footsteps on the stairs, but Tuuli jumps back decisively just in time and laughs a mocking “
Idiootti
” into the room (she doesn’t mean me). Svensson is standing in the doorway, to celebrate the occasion, he repeats, showing us the gin bottle in his hand (a somewhat too-long pause), to celebrate this special occasion,

Bombay Sapphire,

and without asking helps himself to a cigarette from my pack (a match breaks). Tuuli’s eyes jump from the bottle to Svensson and back. With the cold cigarette in the corner of his mouth the children’s book author suddenly seems heavier and drunker than he did just minutes ago. He reaches into the cabinet and sets three water glasses on the table. Again he pours, but he’s already lost his sense of moderation, a good deal of gin drips over the rims and onto the table (Tuuli’s lips dashes, Svensson’s cigarette an exclamation point). Tuuli covers the glass with her hand, no-no, she’d prefer red wine.

We drink

to the old days (to the good old days, Tuuli, right?)

to New York Oulu Seraverde (all the places we’ve been, Tuuli!)

to Lua (to the intact Lua, right?)

to Lua’s fourth leg (do you remember?)

to the Europa-Park in Rust (the Euromaus, Tuuli!)

to streamers and party hats (to celebrate the occasion, Mandelkern!)

to the holy Mother of God (Nostra Signora)

to the three of us (he doesn’t mean me).

Shitty City 2000 (20 x 45, oil on canvas)

The gin gives us the shakes and Tuuli takes a cigarette from the pack (the opposite of laughter). Svensson pours more gin into his glass, I decline, he leans his head back like a wolf (his words are howls). Svensson fills my glass anyway, Tuuli holds her red wine in her hand. I give her a light, we smoke (a certain nausea). When Svensson finally proposes a toast to “the boy and his pretty, because innocent, mother and his father, whoever he may be,” Tuuli’s glass flies across the table and shatters on the picture behind Svensson (a bloody wine stain on the faces). This night is over. Tuuli has closed the door behind her.

Caesarean Risk

On steady feet back into my room (despite the gin not incoherently drunk). My
Süddeutsche
is still lying on the desk, and instead of describing the wine on the kitchen wall now (heart-shaped, as if it were viscous), I open my notebook again, before my eyes the article and in my head Elisabeth’s vertical surgical scar, from which all the bluishness had already faded when I first touched it. First a vertical incision is made, she said, then in the deeper layers of skin a perpendicular one. We lay on the floorboards in my apartment. She’d already given up long before the doctors decided on the caesarean. Elisabeth speaks soberly about her body. The anesthesiologist had read her the consent form and handed it to her to sign (first epidural anesthesia, later even general anesthetic). Due to the heart sounds it had to be done quickly, another doctor on one side and the midwife on the other had pulled open her belly (she said: they tore me open). She hadn’t seen anything. At this point she’d already suspected the death of the child, probably her own too, after signing she’d already regarded her own body as cold, as if she had signed it away (as if the anesthesiologist were God). She had provided this signature, said Elisabeth, with a promotional ballpoint pen for Sedotussin cough syrup (she said: provided), she remembered exactly. The scars had healed fast, merely a few weeks of profuse discharge, then she had been herself again. I asked where her husband had been at that time. Elisabeth’s reply: it was never fully clear to me how all these things hung together (today she’d want to call that “lucky under the circumstances”).

Svensson’s books

I rest my feet on Svensson’s suitcase and listen to the rattle of the dishwashing in the kitchen (Svensson is cleaning up). Then Frisch again with his Montaigne (THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN IN GOOD FAITH, READER), then
The Great Encyclopedia of Dog Breeds,
then Johnson’s “cat called memory” again (pets, says Elisabeth, are an admission of interpersonal failure and cats unhealthy during pregnancy).
Macumba
is moored to a buoy, the moon is shining over the water, the oleander is wilting, the chairs are waiting. I’m sitting in front of my notebook and have tried to write Elisabeth’s and my story in good faith, but my sentences dry up under my fingers. Occasionally my words can hold a candle to the world, for a moment they mean everything,

but that lasts only an instant,

and this thought too is only pilfered. The room smells of damp stone, even though it isn’t raining (the roof is cracked). Again the thought of Elisabeth and the assignment she has given me, for a moment I’d like to call her, we have important things to talk about, but my telephone is in my suitcase at the Hotel Lido Seegarten. I’m drunk once again, too drunk for research, I can only speculate. I should put aside my pen, I could break open the suitcase, my questions remain:

—How do I find out who Felix Blaumeiser was?

—Why does Lua have only three legs?

—Tuuli says that Svensson can’t paint—who painted those pictures?

—Who exactly is Kiki Kaufman?

—How do I open the suitcase?

—What are the things that Tuuli wants to show me?

Octopus

Between the books on our bedroom floor Elisabeth will now be sleeping with the window open, she’ll simply ignore the mosquitoes from the canal. My move into Elisabeth’s apartment: I admired her resolution and absence of melancholy. Elisabeth asked for a weekend, and when she called on Monday and asked me to come to the Octopus furniture store on Lehmweg, the first dumpster had already been collected and with it almost all the furniture and all the old decoration ideas. She wanted us to start with a clean slate, Elisabeth said on the telephone, paint buckets and rollers were ready for painting (the echo of her voice in the empty apartment). On the footpath along the Isekanal a sleeping fisherman and an unexpected quiet in the middle of the city. It was Monday and March, I was ready to dispose of my furniture, so to speak, I felt light (Elisabeth doesn’t cling to things). Elisabeth in the empty showrooms of the furniture store: how she picked out two tables, a bed, and a sofa. I said “I guess so” and meant “yes,” I filled out an order form. We decided on white. At one point Elisabeth spilled paint on her pants and continued to paint half naked. We no longer spoke about her marriage. My marriage, said Elisabeth, has ended up in a dumpster. For weeks I took one box of books each evening to Elisabeth’s apartment on my bike, we spoke of “our apartment.” At night take-out from the Thai place downstairs, where no one seemed to speak German (you never get what you order). In July we lay between our book piles on the newly delivered bed and drank malt beer. We didn’t have to try hard, everything came naturally. At Svensson’s desk I notice the inexplicable similarity between Elisabeth and Tuuli (my unfulfilled assignment, my unanswered questions, my many possibilities). But that isn’t a question. It’s not an answer, either (focus, Mandelkern!).

golden hairpins

The second day on Svensson’s lake has passed without hesitation (without concern for my questions). I’m standing in flip-flops in Svensson’s dark ruin, I light a cigarette, open the window, and hang my shirt over the window latch (the pane a mirror, in it Mandelkern bare-chested, smoking). The cicadas and crickets can no longer be heard, I see the dog hobbling sluggishly to the shore again, at the dock he falls heavily on his side. Why is Lua waiting for death down there by the water? Svensson is nowhere to be seen. Why am I still here? I don’t seem to be bothering Svensson in the least, and Tuuli also seems to want my presence here (my main informant). She brings me water when I’m asleep, she lays her small fingers on my chest (how easily & emptily “beauty” is written, how stupidly this cigarette hangs in the corner of my mouth!). Conjecture: Tuuli and Svensson never touch casually, on the pier in Lugano he grasped her wrist somewhat too forcefully; their relationship has passed its peak, now they’re confronting the consequences. Soon it will be midnight, there’s no more chance of Svensson unmooring his boat today. Elisabeth will now be standing in front of the fridge in our kitchen and drinking water from the bottle, dehydration is one of her new worries. She’ll be thinking about professional and private consequences (I shouldn’t still be here). My decision in the light of the last candle: think more about it tomorrow, get to the bottom of things tomorrow, interview Svensson tomorrow about his work and biography in a completely professional manner (were they in love once, is the boy Svensson’s son). Tomorrow I should ask for an interview in all soberness, leave, and send 3,000 words to the editorial department. But when I empty my pants pockets, I’m suddenly holding Tuuli’s golden hairpin in my hand (I could stay).

journalistic scrupulousness

The moon over everything an appropriate lighting. I’ve bent Svensson’s paper clips and tried his pens, I’ve searched for the key to the suitcase, I’ve pulled and tugged. Without success. My kneeling in front of the suitcase, Tuuli’s golden hairpin in my hand, the window is wide open:
Macumba
in the water and the lights on the other side of the lake. Do I hear footsteps on the stairs? Do I hear Tuuli singing? Is Svensson still talking? Tuuli’s hairpin is slightly curved and rounded on one end, it’s sturdy enough to turn in the lock, and Svensson’s suitcase (Blaumeiser’s suitcase) acquiesces, it opens with a soft click, and that very second all the lights turn on in the room.

That a night can suddenly be so bright.

That a dog can die so loudly.

Quiet, Lua, quiet!

My wincing and springing to my feet and standing paralyzed: I’m frozen in front of the open suitcase in the brightly lit room, the dying dog by the water is coughing and barking at the same time, down below Svensson is emerging from the house (two tinted lights at the end of the dock, a floodlight with a motion detector on the outside of the house). Tuuli follows him and talks relentlessly at him: it was a fuse,
idiootti
, she only had to flip the switch! Not Claasen, not a power outage, not fallen trees, not heroic independence, not rebelliously refused bill payments, not his retreat from this world,
paskapää
, only his morbid collection of old, useless things, his dumb insistence on a corny idea of the ruin, only his inability to deal with the present. Only a damn fuse (a bogus epiphany)! Then Lua is finally quiet.

in the suitcase

Stones (heavy), flowers (dried), finally: a thick packet, brown paper and tight packing string. I put the packet on the desk (that smell of old suitcases), untie the knots very carefully and remove the paper (journalistic scrupulousness). That a night can be so quiet (that paper can rustle so loudly). I find the light switch and turn off the lamps.

Astroland

Observed from the safe darkness of the room: on the way to the lake Svensson takes off his T-shirt, he leaves his shoes in the grass and tosses his pants aside, Tuuli picks them up and throws them at him furiously (can that be explained?). In the light of the motion detector, Svensson finally stands naked on the dock. For a moment he looks across to the opposite shore, then for a few seconds at Tuuli. She’s still berating him, but I don’t understand what she’s saying. Svensson spreads his arms and dives headfirst and perfectly straight into the black lake (reflection of the sky). The water splashes up over him, the surface evens out, Tuuli is standing alone on the dock. On the other side of the lake shines the yellow tower of Santuario di Nostra Signora della Caravina, in the deeper water is the white buoy, above the lake Monte Cecchi, the moon. Svensson has vanished (everyone is waiting). Svensson doesn’t reappear. The light over the property goes out, because no one is moving.