Funeral for a Dog: A Novel (21 page)

(The screams of the animals)

In the afternoon the lake is smooth like oil. Tuuli’s prescription for me was to stay. My headache has gone away, I drank Tuuli’s Chiarella with all due caution (tepid water is good for the stomach). From the window: an oddly flat tourist steamer, its foghorn can’t be heard until a few seconds after a white cloud comes out of it (time can be seen). I’m sitting in front of my notebook again, I’m observing the steamer on its way across the lake toward Lugano. Svensson is no stranger than I am (we both write ourselves). He looks to the past, Tuuli looks to the future, I look at the ships. Everything that’s more than a hundred meters away exists in a different time (Elisabeth).

Profiles & Strangeness

In the autumn of 2004 I temporarily broke off my dissertation, because Elisabeth’s editorial department could use me (I wanted to be with her). In editorial meetings my wife thinks of me as Mandelkern, the freelance cultural journalist. My dissertation has been shelved, I haven’t added a word for months (the abortive ethnologist). Elisabeth and I have confused our life with our work. Participant observation is the reflexive gaze upon others and therefore upon oneself (Bronislaw Malinowski was nonetheless a ladykiller). I’m Mandelkern when I write my articles, my profiles, my reviews of strangeness. From time to time I’m paid reasonably for my work. Elisabeth is a woman with history and a future. She calls me Daniel when I don’t talk back to her. Why don’t you go ahead and do something with actual consequences sometime, she said, you need to be somewhat more decisive for this world (Elisabeth’s voice).

Are Svensson’s stories made up?

I put aside the notebook and pick up the binoculars (a mixture of conscience and anticipation). By the water: Tuuli and the boy are feeding the swan, Svensson is chopping wood with an ax, Lua is still breathing. Svensson keeps carrying new wood from the open shed, he stands amid logs and tinder (Svensson is building a pyre). As long as I hear the splintering, I can open Blaumeiser’s suitcase again. It takes me less than two seconds, the lock and Tuuli’s hairpin click into place. Next to all sorts of stones (flat, light, dark, angular, small, large) and a map of Brazil (little crosses at places with interesting-sounding names) lies Svensson’s stack of paper.

Salvation and Insight

Stories don’t help, Svensson has noted down. He wanted to write his story out of his bones, but didn’t finish it. New York, for example: I’ve read Svensson’s September eleventh, about Tuuli, Svensson, and Felix on the roof, stiff with uncertainty or fear. I’ve read about Kiki Kaufman and her camera, about Svensson’s escape attempts: he left Felix and Tuuli and escaped with Kiki Kaufman to Coney Island. I’ve seen the television footage of the World Trade Center countless times (there’s no getting around those images), but Svensson has written those days differently, he has sketched his New York as he wanted to see it. In the margin he noted in red handwriting: Kiki Kaufman—salvation and insight. What remain are a PricewaterhouseCoopers T-shirt and the photo in a green plastic frame, taken on a roof in Williamsburg, Tuuli pregnant, Blaumeiser laughing. What remain are words: Dreiser’s
Sister Carrie
and Frisch’s
Montauk
, Svensson’s manuscript in the suitcase.

Horrifying! Horrific!

From September 11, 2001, this image remains: my lathered face in the bathroom mirror of the apartment in Berkeley, when the telephone rings and the department secretary informs me that the Third World War is imminent (World War Three around the corner, she says, you better turn on the TV, Daniel, it’s horrifying! Horrific!). I’d been a doctoral student of anthropology at UC Berkeley for just under a year, my girlfriend, Anne, and I were sharing a small apartment. We’d thought we understood things: that our world was a barely comprehensible and yet somehow structured chaos of television and books and movies and newspapers and music. That this chaos of art, media, and bodies touched, of wounds dealt, would ultimately coalesce into a complete picture. Sorry, I said, I’m all covered in shaving cream (the dried foam on my face, the blood from the little cuts). Don’t, said the secretary, the beard looks good on you. My conference lecture was canceled half an hour later:

9/11/2001, 11:15 AM, Kroeber Hall, Authenticity in Documentary Film (D. Mandelkern, Hamburg/GER)

Later I sat half-shaven on the edge of the bed, my lecture scattered on the floor, the images of the collapsing towers before my eyes for the very first time. Anne came home from the university and shook me. She wanted to immediately pack our things and go back to Europe. In
Astroland
at this time Dirk Svensson and Felix Blaumeiser are worrying about Tuuli. They’ve smelled the smoke I watched on television. Here in Svensson’s house on the lake the unplastered walls and Kiki Kaufman’s pictures of ruins and the cameras in front of them. Anne took one of the first flights back to Zurich, I stayed another few months and sat alternately in front of the television and my dissertation (so much for the authenticity of images). I didn’t write another word and learned almost my whole manuscript by heart. I flipped through magazines and books and didn’t have a wet shave again until I met Elisabeth. Not out of superstition or trauma, but because she finds it more direct (it is actually more pleasant).

Svensson unpacks

Svensson was in the supermarket. As the mute swan flies in for a landing, there’s a slight breeze, the oleander sheds its flowers. The dog is still lying motionlessly by the water. Tuuli is sitting on the stone bench under the oleander, she’s smoking and observing her son and Svensson. Now and then a flower falls on the table or in her hair, now and then she says something and the boy turns around to her. Svensson puts his Los Angeles Lakers cap on Samy’s head (he adjusts it to the boy’s size). He lugs a few cartons ashore, vegetables, several boxes of bottles. The boy helps him unload, he gets a small, pink box with a light blue bow and puts it down next to Tuuli in the oleander flowers (pastry shop). The ailing dog lifts his head once again when Svensson kneels down next to him in the grass and buries his face in the fur on the back of his neck.

Stories people tell themselves about themselves

The
Astroland
manuscript is lying in front of me. Elisabeth is right: there’s a story here (Svensson’s colorful Third World, the story of the dog, the cockfight). I wonder whether something fishy’s going on. I’m an ethnologist, and Svensson writes a story about cockfighting, of all things? I remember Clifford Geertz’s “Deep Play”: “The cockfight’s function, if you want to call it that, is interpretive: it is a Balinese reading of Balinese experience; a story they tell themselves about themselves.” I can stay as long as Tuuli the doctor prescribes, she has diagnosed my curiosity. What’s still missing: Felix Blaumeiser’s death, the story of this last and most important death in Svensson’s stack of paper (Svensson’s guilt and Tuuli’s contribution). Decision: save from Svensson’s stories what I can. Copying it down is out of the question, I won’t have enough time. I’ll have to steal.

interference with the research plan

The blows of the ax on the shore break off. When I look out the window, Tuuli kisses the boy on his forehead and points up to my window. The boy nods, takes the pink box, which is waiting in the grass, kneels down next to Lua in the oleander flowers, and whispers something in his ear. Are they sending the boy to me, are they putting him in my care? Since I’ve been here, I haven’t seen Tuuli and Svensson talk with each other (why is Tuuli here?). I hurriedly close the suitcase (from my dissertation: “Communication and interaction with members of the ethnos under investigation can occasionally interfere with the original research plan; occasionally they bring it to a complete standstill. Therefore participant observation always entails balancing one’s own research objective with the conditions of the investigation and modifying it if necessary.”). By the time I’m back at the window, the boy is running toward the house with the box in his hand.

Interview (Samuli)

between Christmas and New Year’s Day

On a blue winter Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s Day Elisabeth began, at first without discernible cause, to tell a story. We were lying on the bed and had been reading to each other, we’d been laughing. Both of them had been against the fashions of the moment, Elisabeth said suddenly, her husband had preferred something biblical, she something moderately Nordic (something imperishable: Jonas, Lasse, Joakim). But the child never got the name she’d had in mind, she said, he died before she and her husband could agree. Elisabeth emptied her cup of yogurt, I closed the book (the clink of her spoon). When she regained consciousness after the anesthesia, her husband already knew about the child’s death. He sat at the table next to several bunches of ten tulips and looked at the muted television. At that moment their marriage was over (the tragedy of wrapped flowers). In hindsight she would remember her husband’s facial expression as old and resigned. Even in retrospect she couldn’t really believe that he’d bought flowers after the boy’s death, as if there were something to celebrate.

Johannes Emmerich

She had seen the boy only for a few minutes. Elisabeth was lying stretched out stiffly next to me on the bed and looking at the ceiling, down on the street a bus drove by (the hiss of the hydraulic doors). Her husband had taken on the washing of the child, the measurements and weighing, finally the filling out of the documents for the registry office. She had still been almost completely anesthetized. Her husband had to register the birth, said Elisabeth, even though the death certificate was already lying on the table next to him. That’s how the child ended up with his name (Johannes). When she finally awoke from her half-conscious state, she and her husband were silent for a few minutes.
He
was silent, she said, she herself, due to the intubation and repeated vomiting, that is, due to the acid and minimal injuries to her pharynx, couldn’t speak at all. Then her husband grasped her left hand and began to speak (in her right hand the tube for saline solution and painkiller). For a long time she couldn’t cry or react appropriately, she was numb (lifeless, she said). I remained lying and hesitated, I didn’t know what to do with my hands, I felt like I was too young. The child, wrapped in a towel, had been brought from the postmortem unit for the good-bye, around noon her parents and the designated godparents had relieved her husband in short shifts. Elisabeth was lying motionlessly next to me (I would only have to turn my head). The clinic had scheduled the autopsy for the days to follow and summoned a mortician. Usually the clinic psychologist arrived immediately in such cases, but it was the 1996 New Year and there was a lot to do, she explained. Christmas and New Year’s Day are the preferred dates for suicide attempts. I didn’t say anything (words failed me). I should still touch her, said Elisabeth, she wasn’t made of cotton candy. But when I then brushed her hair aside, she bit her upper lip bloody. Pro forma the police had to be informed, the autopsy was compulsory due to the initially unknown cause of death. A few weeks before the birth all they’d been able to detect with ultrasound was a narrowing of the unborn child’s small intestine (duodenal stenosis), which had not indicated a risk for the birth, all that had been discussed was a later surgical widening. Elisabeth got up and opened the window, then closed it again a moment later. It had actually been duodenal atresia. Under the stress of the prolonged birth the child had to vomit (Elisabeth in the middle of the room alone, not even the furniture, not even I). That wouldn’t have been an unusual occurrence either, but the bile had been unable to flow downward because the small intestine was obstructed. It had therefore been forced to escape upward from the duodenum. When the child had ultimately inhaled the vomited bile as he gasped for his first air, the strong acid had irreparably corroded the upper layer of the lungs, as a result the child could apparently no longer receive artificial respiration (he must have struggled for air, she supposed). Because the death was an internal clinic matter, Elisabeth explained to me, the police investigations had already been concluded before they even commenced (she had never been alone with the boy). She lay back down on the bed, and I finally tried to hug her. But when Elisabeth then saw that I had tears in my eyes, she ran her fingers over my face as if she had to console me.

coarse granite

They’d hesitated, said Elisabeth, as we later walked along the frozen Elbe beach. She and her husband hadn’t separated immediately. The sun was shining, the beach full of strollers and frolicking dogs. The child’s death had been a break in the perspective of their relationship (from that point on they’d had increasing differences). It was several years before she was able to part from her husband, Elisabeth explained, they’d first had to become friends in order to get out of each other’s way (she had already stopped saying “my husband” when we met, she called him by his first name). The child was buried in the Niendorf cemetery, they still met for visits to the grave at irregular intervals. At that time her husband had supported Elisabeth’s desire to focus for a while on her studies and afterward on her work. Back then they’d still occasionally been of one mind. During her last year and a half at the university, she’d already worked her way up in various editorial departments of Gruner + Jahr (he had supported her in that to the best of his ability). Elisabeth looked across to the cranes and dry docks. She felt for my hand. She’d meanwhile grown accustomed to the boy’s name on the gravestone (blackened steel on coarse granite). Her husband, though, would never go to the grave alone. It astonishes me, Elisabeth then said, turning to me, that it gets visibly harder for him. She seemed to want to laugh. Though he was now in Hamburg only occasionally, the lost possibility plagued him (he’s getting more melancholy, said Elisabeth, almost even pathologically so). He had two adult children from his first marriage, but he was focusing more and more on the missed opportunities of his life. Elisabeth leaned her head on my chest. She, on the other hand, had the past, the future, and me (I have you, Daniel).