Funeral for a Dog: A Novel (9 page)

(11) Laura. In early 2002 I had asked Jansen for permission to cut back on the dissertation for a few months due to financial difficulties. The scholarship had run out, I needed money and was compiling glossaries for
GEO
(but hurry, Mandelkern, said Jansen, in two years I’m leaving here!). On the way to work one morning someone threw himself in front of the train between Sternschanze and St. Pauli stations, Laura and I sat next to each other on the U-Bahn until the police and the forensic specialists had finished their work (a week before I met Elisabeth in the cafeteria). Laura had a vague resemblance to the second Carolina. We had a coffee in the Portuguese Quarter, she lived not far from there in Neustadt. This story was an attempt (it failed miserably).

(12) Elisabeth. You don’t consider the number eleven an impressive tally, Elisabeth. You in the bathroom next to me, your blood on me. You sing “The Linden Tree” (the Renault in front of the house sticky and gray with linden blood). You and I in a parking lot on the Atlantic coast of Brittany, on Mont Ventoux, in a hotel room in Venasque. You and I on a traffic island in Lyon when the Renault gave up in the middle of the summer (we had to replace the engine). You on the bank of the Parseta (our honeymoon). The scar under your belly button. Your red hair, the
a
in your name, your athletic height, your long-limbed beauty (the green of your eyes).

Adho Mukha Svanasana

I got distracted. First, with the sun, the noise of the birds, the ledge outside Svensson’s window is thickly crusted with pigeon droppings. Elisabeth is a consistent woman, she will now be jogging along the canal on the way to yoga, as she does every Sunday morning. After the wedding she kept her maiden name, I’m not you, she says, and you’re not me, Mandelkern (Elisabeth Edda Emmerich). For the two of us a double name was out of the question. It’s only logical that her spine is all but stiff despite years of practice, says Elisabeth. I practice and practice and practice, she says, and you bend like green wood in the slightest breeze. She’s right: I can do the crow, I can do the crane, I can do the dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana). Later Elisabeth will have a cup of tea in the Schanzenviertel area. She stopped drinking coffee, she doesn’t use her espresso pot anymore. Though caffeine in the months before pregnancy has no known harmful consequences, she says, there’s no need to tempt fate (these days there’s chai everywhere). I left the apartment without a word.

Method Section: Participant Observation

I know the first sentence of my dissertation by heart: “Since Malinowski’s field studies on the Trobriand Islands, participant observation has been regarded as a standard method of ethnographic field research.” Svensson has told me nothing of significance since yesterday afternoon. I should be patient (ethnological principle: “Silence is the older brother of the word”). I should observe the structure of the ethnos under investigation (the animals wake up first). I should find a main informant (Tuuli). I could work with the pitiful scientific methods I have at my disposal here, I could count (three chickens), I could measure (Tuuli’s height), I could time (the minutes for the return journey to Lugano).

my pitiful methods

Now the wasps are buzzing in the undergrowth below the open window. Svensson and the dog are slowly walking toward the shore through a haze of dew and spiderwebs (Optolyth). I hear the chickens clucking. Lua’s gait is heavy, only the missing leg puts some motion into the animal. Svensson, wearing blue shorts and sneakers, grabs Lua’s ears and ruffles the fur on his head. Svensson is shirtless, he’s much more robust than in the photo in his book, he stretches his thighs and calves, then he does sit-ups and push-ups. On the smooth lake two fishermen in a wooden boat are floating by incredibly slowly, one of the two catches a fish at this very instant, frees it from the hook, and throws it back in the water (the whistled melody of the other). Suddenly Svensson stands up, puts on the purple T-shirt, and disappears in the undergrowth behind the Fiat (the purple of a Mass vestment). With the binoculars I can see how the coughing shakes the dog’s flanks (under “C” as in “cough” in the
Great Encyclopedia of Dog Breeds
various possibilities: canine distemper, for example; for dogs amputations are almost always accompanied by intense arthrosis of the compensating joint, in contrast to human beings, dogs do not perceive missing extremities as a psychic burden: “dogs live in the moment”). The suitcase is still under the desk, the paper clips still bend in the lock (an advertising sticker scrawled over with a felt-tip pen: Beer makes you schmart, it made Thrifty Felix wiser!).

my morbid idyll

The reader at the tower window, the vines are reclaiming the stones, an animal is dying, the chickens are strolling around the ruin (Romanticism). For a 3,000-word author profile, that won’t be enough. I lack the starting point for a story (about the writer in the ivory tower there’s nothing plausible left to be said), I think of Malinowski: “In this type of work, it is good for the ethnographer to put aside camera, notebook and pencil, and to join himself in what is going on.” So I put aside the pen to finally speak with Svensson.

Lua’s threat

So early in the morning the air is already warmer than yesterday in Hamburg. From a small balcony high above the ground, a much too narrow and much too steep wooden staircase leads down along the wall of the house (three steps are missing), swallows and pigeons are fluttering in the exposed gables, wasps are buzzing around my head. As I walk down to the dock, Lua lifts his head and looks at me. On the lake drift flowers, leaves, plastic bottles (the lake a stained mirror). It must be eight o’clock now, I think for a few unexpected seconds of Elisabeth (under the lindens in front of our house she’s searching for her key; Svensson’s ruin lies like a garbage bag ready for collection next to the Asian take-out place on the ground floor of 88 Bismarckstrasse). The noise of the wasps and the gurgle of the water are sounds that make you lonely, I would miss the breathing of the city here (the first buses, the first S-Bahn). Is anyone here? I ask. The two fishermen now row past me farther away from the shore, I raise my hand, but they don’t return the greeting (I don’t belong here). I walk very slowly and in a cautious curve back to the house, Lua’s eyes follow me. Then the old dog suddenly sits up and barks at me threateningly and darkly, as if I were an intruder (as if I were getting too close to his secret). Tuuli? I ask, Svensson? Nothing. I’m alone with the three-legged dog.

museum

Svensson lives in the front and intact part of the narrow house, in the back wild vine and ivy are growing in through the windows and the cracked roof. The rusty door of the shed is locked, in front of it are the circular saw, the stack of plastic pipes, and a toolbox (green and yellow). The grass has grown high, even though there’s a lawn mower resting in the middle of the meadow. The ground floor with a fireplace and floor-length windows facing the lake, stone steps are set in the wall on the left (without railing), a gallery runs along three sides of the room, above is the entrance to the sparse kitchen. Svensson’s house is Svensson’s museum. It’s now light enough to view the pictures on the walls. I recognize the drawings from
The Story of Leo and the Notmuch
(I walk through Svensson’s book). On the ground floor several portraits are hanging on the unplastered walls, oil on canvas, almost always showing Svensson in urban scenes, subway signs maybe, the Chrysler Building probably (New York). Settings and backgrounds fray at the edges, undercoats show through, sometimes the canvas too. On the other hand: Svensson’s face is always clear and distinct, his eyes don’t smile, his gaze bores directly into the viewer (can a painter look at himself this way?). I walk from painting to painting: Svensson in a suit in front of a take-out place in Chinatown (maybe), in the background hang chickens (naked and iodine-yellow, headfirst), Svensson naked on a bed against a splotchy green background without perspective, Svensson and Lua on steps. In the right lower corner of most of the paintings, two black letters (another pseudonym?):

k; k;

Finally, on the wall above the wooden table, a painting of Svensson on his Italian dock, some fleeting rings in the water, otherwise it’s dark. Svensson is holding a hand in the air, in the darkness on the opposite shore a yellow light, on the lower edge in the same yellow

THE GREAT SVENSSON

(Can he be serious?)

She offered herself to me

An afternoon in August 2003: Elisabeth and I on our bikes on the way back from the Kaifu-Bad swimming pools. First we’d talked about this and that, then very theoretically about sex, about the individual body in a visual society, all day we’d lain side by side on a towel, the pool full of children’s noise, piked somersaults, beer cans and cigarettes in the wet fingers of thin sixteen-year-old girls. Back in my apartment we left the bikes unlocked in front of the building (Marthastrasse), the clammy beach bag lay next to the dresser. Elisabeth held on to my pull-up bar with one hand, I buried my face in the scanty flesh of her stretched shoulder, reached for her surprisingly large breasts (in comparison) and Elisabeth threw her red bikini bottom on the living room floorboards. Dust hung in the room. I never told you that I’m married, said Elisabeth, arching her back (she offered herself to me).

Could she be serious?

I’m standing in the dark stairwell. Is no one here? The door to what seems to be Svensson’s bedroom is wide open: a small room, a bed (white sheets, two pillows), next to it a blue and yellow baby changing table. In an open closet shirts wrapped in plastic, folded towels, suits, shorts, T-shirts (
Lavasecco Sole
—
Lavanderia & Stireria
). Some hangers with black dresses and skirts in bright colors, women’s underwear and flip-flops. Then: a box of diapers (Pampers, Italian packaging). A baby changing table and diapers? The passing thought once again that Svensson must have been waiting for Tuuli and the boy, that he’s the boy’s father, that he got everything ready. An airplane mobile? A stuffed mouse?

What’s all this about?

The kitchen window is open, the pots are neatly stacked, dappled sunlight on the floor, Lua’s bowl in the corner (this museum is inhabited). At the head of the table a high chair for a toddler (the boy is too big for this chair). The walls are covered with framed photos, smaller canvases, thumbtacked sketches, here too sand, gravel, paper bags, admission tickets, and scraps of newspaper pressed into the paint. From up close concrete motifs, from a distance intentional errors of perspective and proportion. Svensson always too big or too small, standing out from the vanishing lines of the street, floating over steps, driving a taxi (someone who paints himself so often is a lonely man). I try to count the pictures and lose track (my empirical methods). I should call Elisabeth, I could take the boat and escape across the lake, but I remain in Svensson’s kitchen (Svensson’s museum). Above the sink hangs a mirrored cabinet as in bathrooms, but Svensson’s house has no bath, only a yellow-tiled water closet (Svensson has only the lake). I have a story to write, I should do research, so I get my notebook from the room, so I open the cabinet (journalistic dubiousness).

counts and measurements

—Double-Tipped Cotton Q-Tips,

—a glass with toothbrushes (3), one of them a child’s toothbrush,

—Crest toothpaste + Scope (stinks),

—Blendi toothpaste,

—40-pack of Tampax Regular Absorbency Tampons,

—month-pack of Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo Birth Control Pills

—a Minnie Mouse hairbrush and

—a toiletry bag made of fake fur labeled KIKI (in it a receipt for $8.45 from the drugstore chain Duane Reade #345, 460 Eighth Avenue, New York, dated November 18, 2004).

I close the cabinet. Svensson doesn’t live alone here (so much for truth).

Sampson

On a Sunday morning in the fall of 2004, stood naked in front of the bathroom cabinet and shaved off a week’s growth of beard. Elisabeth sat on the edge of the bathtub and watched me (we no longer knocked on bathroom doors). For Elisabeth body and word are in step. Hold still, she said, and took the electric shaver from my hand. When I asked what she was up to (why did I submit to this?), Elisabeth said, I’m going to shear you (my pubic hair on the tiles). The sex is more direct that way. Elisabeth knows what she’s talking about when she talks about her body. So I held still.

research

On the refrigerator door hangs another Polaroid. I recognize Lua, I recognize Tuuli, her face on a white sheet, framed by her long hair (when did she cut it off?). On her right lies Svensson wearing a fur cap, on her left a blond man with a few days’ growth of beard, he’s holding the camera. On the lower edge of the picture the black Lua, forced into a blue hooded anorak. All three are looking into the camera (three mouths and a shared smile). I put down my notebook on the kitchen table and notice Tuuli’s cool beauty, I wonder how her hair smells this morning. Is the second man next to her Felix Blaumeiser? On the white strip under the picture in thin handwriting with a ballpoint pen: Shitty Paradise City 2000.

my wet feet

Bring back whatever you can get, Mandelkern! Elisabeth ordered on Friday. We can’t send a photographer, so you should handle that yourself. The passing thought of taking the picture from the fridge and pocketing it. Svensson wouldn’t notice before my departure. The image tells a story: Svensson can laugh, Svensson wears funny fur caps, Svensson has good-looking friends, Svensson’s success is justified (such assumptions, such connections, such ideas). Readers want to recognize themselves behind the facade of strangeness, says Elisabeth, and I recall a sentence from my dissertation: “It is of foremost importance that the methodological approach of participant observation seek a ‘perception with all the senses.’” I actually hold Tuuli’s picture under my nose and inhale deeply, but then she herself is standing there in the light in front of the window, holding the boy: Good morning,
Karvasmanteli
, she says,