Funeral for a Dog: A Novel (28 page)

We’re sad, you know?

Kiki is drawing, I’m taking notes. The sound of the nocturnal water, the soft breathing of the children, the waxy scratching of the crayons on the paper (Kiki Kaufman and I are practicing our professions). When Kiki finally puts aside her implements, it must be one o’clock. I ask Kiki whether she and Svensson are married, even though she’s now leaning against the wall with her eyes closed.
Nein
, she says,
nein
. Why not? No reason. Are these questions too personal? No, Kiki is still whispering, not at all (she doesn’t even open her eyes). The passing thought that Svensson must have felt just as calm with her as I do now (Kiki Kaufman: salvation and insight, he wrote). Svensson and she met by chance, says Kiki, in New York in 2001, those were unambiguous times, either good or evil, and in the middle of all that they crossed paths. Kiki laughs softly and opens her eyes. Of course they could have just gotten married to avoid visa problems, but by the time they became aware of this possibility, they were already sitting in a taxi on the way to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. She asks me whether I’m interested in things like this. Yes, I say, I still have a lot of questions—for example, what’s going to happen with the dog. Kiki stands up and says, I’m drunk. Svensson will bury him under the oleander, she says, nodding toward the window, you want some coffee?

Who exactly was Felix Blaumeiser?

When Kiki brings the coffee, the property is again bathed in cold floodlight beams (against the fox). Tuuli and Svensson are sitting on the dock, the suitcase full of stones and paper between them, the dead dog still on his blanket. The floodlight flashes on when Svensson throws a stone into the water, the light reaches it in midair (the white plunge into the black lake). We’re standing by the window and drinking coffee, Svensson’s stone breaks through the surface and makes ripples, after a few seconds the light goes out (a silent theater). The motion detector is working again, I say. Chickens and rats don’t set off the light, says Kiki, large movements are necessary for that. Lua’s death is actually such a movement, and the next time the light flashes on, Svensson has flung a stone out of the light (we don’t see the bright splash). Even from up here I can see
Astroland
lying in the suitcase. Svensson and Felix knew each other since they were kids, Kiki now says more to herself than to me, Lua entered their lives the same night as Tuuli, he’s been with them almost ten years. Kiki seems astonished by her words:

Lua is dead now.

Down by the water Tuuli and Svensson are lifting the dog from his blanket and laying him down in the suitcase (Lua doesn’t fit). They grasp his hind legs and push them carefully toward Lua’s body, the lone foreleg Svensson likewise bends into place (they’re curling Lua up like a baby). The floodlight is staying on now, because Tuuli is running back and forth between oleander and suitcase, she’s picking oleander flowers and scattering them handful after handful over the dog in the suitcase. Svensson bends down over the dog and lays his ear on the dog’s chest (he wants to be sure). Kiki is standing in the pale reflection of the floodlight. Do things like that make no difference to her, I ask Kiki, and she looks at me in surprise. This really is sad, she says, brushing the sleeping boy’s hair from his forehead. Lua has always been with Svensson, just as Tuuli and Felix and Samy have always been with him (
hier und hier
, she says, pointing to her chest and her forehead). After Felix’s death the rings just weren’t linked anymore, she says, you can see that from a distance (can’t you, Daniel?). By the shore Svensson and Tuuli are now closing the suitcase, they’re pushing and pressing, then the heavy lock catches. On the night of New Year’s Eve between 2000 and 2001 they reached the ideal state, on the coldest night of the year, says Kiki, Svensson has told her that over and over again. She asks whether I can visualize the picture in the kitchen. Yes, I say, Shitty City 2000, right? I remember that early chapter from
Astroland
: the hotel room, the breakfast, the dog wearing a hood (this isn’t the first time Kiki has told this story, I think, she really is drunk). Svensson puts the suitcase in Lua’s favorite spot on the boat (bulky baggage). The momentary idea that I’ve met Svensson only in the stories that might now become Lua’s funerary object. The man by the lake has remained hidden from me. Exactly, says Kiki, interrupting my memory. After those days everything slowly came apart. Tuuli and Svensson walk across the meadow toward the house. Kiki takes Bella from the mattress as she brushes her brown curls behind her ear. At the thought of Elisabeth in this exact position, bent over her desk as far as I’m concerned, holding her red hair away from her face, over a child as far as I’m concerned, I’m overcome by an unannounced wave of emotion. Good night, Kiki says before she leaves, and I swallow my tears in the dark. I look at the piece of paper she was drawing on while we were talking: the wilting oleander, the dying Lua, the Borromean rings. Kiki has forgotten Samuli. Good night, I say, and remain standing at the window (the last spectator).

the fox

The opening and closing of the bathroom door, then the night. The yellow church on the other side of the lake has long since ceased to glow. It’s dark, the coffee was too much. Shitty City is the name of the Polaroid, and Shitty City is the name of Kiki’s painting in the kitchen (her signature is missing). Shitty City is the
Astroland
chapter that Tuuli read to me. The story of the turn of a year in Finland. I’m lying on my back and listening to a nocturnal motorboat far out on the lake, I gaze at the mobile in the dark, Samuli, for a while I was still hearing sounds from the kitchen, voices and glasses. I’m waiting for sleep. I think about Elisabeth, about the unwritten profile, about my own story. Tuuli hasn’t come yet to get the boy, the door is wide open (I haven’t heard her singing). I’m lying awake and thinking about a series of New Year’s Eves, early New Year’s Eves and fondue with my mother, later with Hornberg and Eva at the Port of Hamburg, 2001 alone in Berkeley, the first New Year’s Eve with Elisabeth, but then my thoughts find their way back to the supposedly perfect moment in
Astroland
, the story told by Svensson and Tuuli and Kiki. But Svensson’s manuscript is now lying in Blaumeiser’s suitcase and waiting to be buried (Lua’s coffin). The new computer is on the desk (inner emptiness). I wonder whether Svensson has a copy of
Astroland
. Kiki seems not to have read it, but she destroyed the computer. Tuuli and I might be the only people who know
Astroland
(I would be the one who didn’t save it). I turn Tuuli’s hairpin in my fingers. The suitcase is on the boat, in it the perfect moment and Tuuli’s prophesy of its passing. The house is asleep, so I get up. On the desk in front of me the two research folders: I open them and take out the photocopied material. With superficially researched information on Svensson I came here, I will leave with his story. My journalistic precision: I will exchange page by page (Svensson won’t notice). I creep out of the house, past Tuuli’s open door, past Kiki and Svensson and Bella’s room, then through the kitchen and the large room on the ground floor. Nothing. I slide open the glass door and walk barefoot through the damp grass. I notice my fear of Lua, the dead watchdog, of his bark, of his teeth. I walk on nonetheless, and only stop when the floodlight on the house suddenly again illuminates the property as bright as day. Everyone will be able to see me, I think, and once my eyes have adjusted to the brightness, I notice the fox next to the Fiat, stiff as I, frightened as I (the brownish red fur shaggy, its eyes are glowing in the floodlight).

Shitty Paradise City

As fast as the light came, the fox is gone again (we stared into each other’s eyes). I walk to the edge of the property and wait for the darkness. When the floodlight goes out, I decide to take the risk (I have to be fast to avoid notice). I inhale and run to the dock. With a slight delay the light flashes on, I jump into the boat and duck as low as possible. The suitcase is now lying in Lua’s spot in the stern. After a few seconds the light disappears, and because I approach the suitcase in slow motion, it stays dark. I take Tuuli’s hairpin out of my pants pocket, I exhale, I turn it in the suitcase’s lock and feel the slight resistance of the metal (I’ve been practicing the movement for days). I keep turning, the lock opens with a soft click (even in the moonlight “Felix Blaumeiser” can be read on the tag).
Macumba
is rocking, I balance out the automatic light. In the shallow water near the shore, the swan is sleeping, its head under its wings. I open the suitcase. Only a single cicada is louder than my research. Wrapped in the blanket, Lua is lying stiff and strangely bent between oleander flowers and paper and is pretending to be asleep (
Astroland
under his head a pillow, stuffed with memory). I have to lift up his bony head briefly so as to be able to pull away the manuscript under him. In the moonlight Lua seems to nod, his fur has grown cold (the ethnologist as grave robber). Despite the darkness, I find the chapters I’m looking for, and replace them page by page with photocopied book plugs, reviews, brief bios. Then I wrap up the manuscript again and push it under the black dog’s head. I’m careful not to bend his ears, I stroke his snout, I wish the brave Lua a good night.
Älä pelkää
, Lua, I say, sleep well, you’ve earned it.

W
HAT YOU DON’T HOLD ON TO DISAPPEARS.
A
HOTEL ROOM ON
the second floor, a clock was ticking. I lay between Felix and Tuuli and smelled the darkness yawning. A double bed and Tuuli’s hand on my neck, her smell in my ear and Felix’s leg over mine. It’s bitterly cold in Oulu, I thought, and the darkness is a black dog. We lay under blankets and jackets, the heat vent was breathing dryly and uselessly, at midnight the champagne in the glasses was frozen. The darkness rose and sank calmly, through the closed blinds fell the red remains of the neon sign next door:
Ravintola
, firecrackers exploded on the street. The darkness lay at our feet. Felix: in this cold having your own fur doesn’t help anymore. So he put his blue parka on Lua and tied the left sleeve in a knot. Lua lay there like a disabled veteran. In this cold only liquor and other bodies help, said Felix, at which point Lua yawned and I could smell his yawn, it must have been morning now, even if I couldn’t see the clock, the morning of the first day of the new year, and I asked into the dark, is anyone hungry? and Tuuli said, breakfast for three.

The bright light downstairs in the lobby: three anti-depression lamps over the buffet. In the constant night of the train station hotel Turisti there was only a Japanese man in a Santa Claus costume sitting at a table and drinking his Crazy Reindeer as he’d been doing last night. He blew a streamer toward me. At reception a woman with a fur cap and a cigarette was mopping the remnants of New Year’s Eve off the floor, the cleaning bucket was boiling, the water was steaming on the linoleum. Outside the window someone had spray-painted black letters on the wall across from the hotel:
Paska kaupunki.
I loaded up a tray. Breakfast for three, Tuuli had said, so I took toast for three and cranberry marmalade and butter and milk, corn flakes and coffee and packaged cheese on a stick. Lua liked Lapin Kulta beer, so I took a few cans, Tuuli loved apples, I took a Braeburn. Then: two vodkas in little plastic bottles and orange juice, because Felix chased liquor with juice. I took the last three mandarin oranges and juggled, then one fell on the floor and rolled to the feet of the cleaning woman with the cap. The Japanese man was waiting in the Finnish night and humming in the empty lobby, he was waiting for the air guitar world championships of Oulu and for the next morning sometime in March, he was sitting in the antidepressant light of the hotel lobby and plucking Guns n’ Roses on his invisible instrument. Breakfast wasn’t included here, I paid at reception and got permission to take the toaster with me. Shitty city, said the woman with the cap, when I asked about the writing on the wall,
paska kaupunki
means shitty city.

At least this: Felix with the Polaroid camera. In the room the breakfast was waiting on the floor, I was standing by the window and observing the frost patterns on the glass. The snow on the train station plaza was glowing orange, we could still hear individual firecrackers exploding and shards clinking. Behind me Tuuli and Felix lay intertwined in the blankets and jackets. Our car was parked under the streetlamp, freezing. We’d come from Rovaniemi, we were on the way to Helsinki, now we were stuck in Oulu, because the car couldn’t go on at thirty-nine degrees below zero. The coldest day of the year. In Rovaniemi Tuuli’s father had a snail farm, and in the winter he sold the deep-frozen animals in the shopping mall, eat, eat, he said on Christmas, please eat! Breakfast! I said now, opening a can of Lapin Kulta for the dog, please eat! Lua woke up and rolled off the bed, under Felix’s hood he looked like a monk. Tuuli reached out her hand to me, and I poured the beer in Lua’s plastic bowl. The monk drank beer, the disabled veteran greedily emptied the bowl, my thermal underwear struck sparks into the darkness as I took off my ski pants and Tuuli’s hand followed into her cave of blankets and jackets. Tuuli’s smell might have condensed, she bit into the apple, and Felix said: stay still! The coffee’s getting cold, I said to Tuuli’s mouth, and her warm tongue made the word “cold” melt. I drank the apple taste from her mouth. Felix put aside the camera, his hand moved between Tuuli’s legs, our breath hung over us in the cold like a cloud, Lua drank his New Year’s beer, firecrackers exploded, we wore our caps. We are here, said the dog, lying down in front of his bowl, we are here where we belong.

We leaned our heads together, and Felix held up one picture after another over us. Santa Claus is waiting down in the lobby, I said. Once, whispered Tuuli, Santa Claus wore a white coat and shone in the sky like the brightest star with the longest tail. Tuuli took Felix’s right hand and my left in her small fingers, I could smell Felix’s liquor breath and Tuuli like hot lemonade on his fingers. Santa Claus rode on his noblest elk, whispered Tuuli, the most faithful animal with fur like snow and a heart of gold, it carried him everywhere and always brought him back home. But one day they ended up in the worst snowstorm since the beginning of time. Tuuli’s fingers trembled. It was so terribly cold that the lakes froze to the bottom and the air cracked. Santa Claus and his faithful friend were buried in the high snow of Rovaniemi and looked death in the eye, his red beard turned to ice, and his heart froze. If we warm each other, master, said the elk, then we’ll live. But Santa Claus grabbed an icicle and stabbed the elk with his fur like snow and his heart of gold, he opened the soft belly with a sharp shard, he buried himself inside the animal, he soaked his white coat in warm blood, he slept between the stomach and the heart of his faithful friend and so survived the cold and the storm. On the street someone was shooting flares, and we read the colors on the walls of the room. Nothing, said Tuuli, nothing is true and nothing lasts forever. We’re not alone, said Felix, clasping our hands, we’re three.
Paska kaupunki
, said Lua on the floor. Felix threw aside the blanket and got up, take me down to the paradise city. The cold crept between our bodies. A good year, said Tuuli, kissing me on the forehead and Felix on the neck, happy New Year, you two. My loves, she said.