Wrecked (21 page)

“I know, Frau Kiehl, I know. Why are you changing your will secretly, without telling Georg?”

“Well, because he always bitches about the fact that I spend so much time thinking about death in general and my own death in particular. You think so, too! He always says, ‘Yes, Elizabeth, but you’re not going to die.’”

“Yes, it’s true. You’re not going to die anytime soon. You are generally healthy. And the chances of something happening to you like what happened to your brothers are extremely low.”

“That’s what my husband says. That I have my head in the sand. Maybe, but I still have an appointment tomorrow, right after my appointment with you.”

“All right, the time is now up, Frau Kiehl. I’ll see you tomorrow. Have fun at the brothel regardless of what I think, okay?”

It makes her horny, doesn’t it? I’m sure it does. My husband always says
she
should be giving
me
money for all the stories I tell her. Other people would pay to hear such salacious stuff. True, but they wouldn’t have such clever responses.

I sit up and straighten my hair. Sometimes I have therapy head. That’s when the hair on the back of my head looks like I’m either an alcoholic who fell asleep during the day or like I’ve just been lying on a couch in therapy. And although I try to be cool about it, I don’t want everyone to know I go to therapy. I adjust my hair, grab my handbag, and look Frau Drescher in the eyes. “Thank you. See you next time. I’ll tell you everything then.” I let go of her hand quickly after a handshake. I talk to her about everything but can never see her while I talk. Then I’m always somewhat surprised at the end of the session when I see her again, as my impression of her has changed a bit since I last saw her, at the beginning of the hour. And touching her hand just doesn’t work, though you have to shake hands in Germany. And I would never bring it up with her, despite the fact that we are supposed to be able to talk about
anything
. But where would that lead us? She’d think I was crazy.

Into the fucking elevator and home to Georg. I’m looking forward to being able to tell him that we can go to the brothel
after all. Now I just have to fight through the eleven-floor ride in the elevator. I can hold my breath, the way I do when I’m scared. Then I’m free and on the way home.

On the way home I feel euphoric. I use therapy and my therapist as a garbage dump. It’s all about managing to stay together forever with my husband.

The only music I listen to in the car is Jan Delay. Other than Elvis, he’s the best in the world. Not just musically. Politically, too. That’s important to me. He fights the tabloids. He’s a member of ATTAC. I listen to him rather than Elvis because I can’t stand Elvis anymore since I cut off contact my father. He taught me about Elvis when I was still a kid. Even before Jan Delay he was the best in the world—even if he was a cretin politically. And it tears my heart in half when I hear Elvis these days because it reminds me of my love for my father. So Jan Delay will have to do.

Using the power-window switches, I put down all the windows so everyone can enjoy the sexiest politically correct music in the world. I pat myself on the shoulder mentally, since once again I’ve done something good for my mental health, for the well-being of our family, for my psychological well-being. The well-being of my marriage. As always when I drive, Accident sits on my shoulder and watches me and my life.

The funeral has to be arranged. It threatens to be hilarious. At least one mentally unstable burn victim, three grieving fathers, seven grieving grandfathers and just as many grandmothers, relatives and other people you never liked, and they all want us to scoot over and make room at the side of the grave. Why are
we even going to go through with it at all? I always thought our family didn’t care what others thought—that we didn’t believe in all that shit. I was always proud of the fact that I came from a totally atheist family. Nobody on my mother or father’s side was baptized. I think it’s fantastic. We pass the tradition of non-believing down from generation to generation, using emotional pressure just the way religious people do to pass down their beliefs. You can’t just leave the field to the missionary impulse of Christians without a fight because you’re too tolerant. Nope. You have to keep a body count. For every convert you get a star. As a reward. That’s what I was trained to do—turn men away from their Catholic families. And it works well, usually by getting them hooked on love and sex.

All the relatives gather in my mother’s hospital room. The fathers are there, and my father has his new wife with him. I say new wife because that’s how she feels to me. She doesn’t belong here. In my opinion she’s disqualified. She married my father shortly after my mother left him. She put herself between my father and us, a classic stepmother. And the way she did that was textbook stepmother stuff.

I was five and my now dead brother four. She considered us fundamentally bad. She always put herself in direct competition with us for our father’s love. She refused to accept that he loved us unconditionally. She always wanted to prove that we weren’t worth it. That was hard enough for all concerned. But on top of that, she also thought we ate too much. She always skimped on us, thinking that they could save money by letting the kids go hungry. She always thought we were too much: too
loud, greedy, gluttonous, egotistical, spoiled. And she let us know at every opportunity.

The worst thing about my stepmother was that she always ruined the rare and valuable time we had together with our beloved father. After my parents split up, we were allowed to see him only one night every two weeks. We missed him so much. Our rich papa, with his red sports car and his cool job in a toy factory. But she was always there. I never saw him try to do anything to protect us from his new wife, either. We wanted that so badly. A sign. A sign of love from a father to his children. Against the crazy wife. Never. He always tried to stay loyal to all sides. Shame.

Except for this one time. A few days after the death of his only son in the accident. They are all in my mother’s hospital room. We had to put together the death notice. To let everyone know about the death of my brothers. Death notices are something that’s no longer necessary in the era of phones, e-mail, and fucking tabloid journalism. This death notice and the invitations to the funeral had to be dated way in the future, because the police had yet to release the bodies. What bodies? Funny. It was all so grotesque. None of us believes in cemeteries, life after death, prayer, any form of Christian ritual. And suddenly this! And everything goes out the window. Unfortunately there’s no alternative atheist version. So, like idiots, we put a notice in the local papers along with an invitation to a funeral in two months at the local Christian cemetery. They nabbed us after all.

Whenever someone dies, the absurd list of those who survive the dead person plays an immense role in the notice. The need to address that at all when someone has just died is ridiculous. Crazy. But with us it plays a huge role, too. Out
of protest, I want to be listed last. It isn’t allowed. This has nothing to do with anybody’s personal will. I have to be at the beginning, along with my mother and my other leftover sister. Mother doesn’t want to be listed next to any man, since she is separated from all of them.

And when we get to the list of fathers and their new wives, my father makes the following monstrous statement: “I don’t want my wife in the notice at all. She hated Harry. She is not allowed to be listed in the notice.”

She is there in the room. She hears this with her own ears. Everyone pauses to let this unbelievable statement sink in. I have to smile inside because I know that my dead brother would have agreed. And that he would have been pleased about this sign of love from his father. Too bad he never experienced something like that while he was still alive.

My father was right. She did hate Harry. Even more than she hated me. Perhaps because he was closer with my father. They looked exactly the same, too. My mother’s genes went into the girls. I look and am like my mother, unfortunately. My brother looked and was like my father. The stepmother accepted her exclusion from the death notice. There wasn’t any room for negotiation anyway. Not given the steady voice with which my father made the statement. What amazes me is that they are still together to this day. He’s still with the wife he didn’t want listed in the death notice of his son because she hated him and let him know that all the time—a little child, who had nothing to do with the botched family situation, who got no mercy from her, ever, until it was too late, because he was dead. Her attitude was set in stone by her absence from our family notice of his death.

They are still married! He lets her stay at his side, set for life. He lives under one roof—in one bed—with the enemy of his dead son. Unbelievable. That alone is sufficient grounds never to have anything to do with them. The rest of the list of remaining survivors was drawn up appropriately, though with a pathetic patchwork family like ours it took a lot more space than usual to list all the fathers, grandmothers, and grandfathers—practically a whole page.

Because of this experience and because of the horrid Christianization of the subsequent funeral, I wrote a will that did some good after my death. I filled out an organ donor form and always carry it with me. I put everything up for donation: labia, clitoris—whoever gets it is going to have some fun!—my eyes, my nonsmoker lungs, heart, dark nipples—they can take
everything
out of me and give it out to the needy. And second, the thing with my ashes going out with the household trash. Even if it’s against the law. It’s in my will, so my next of kin will have to pull it off somehow. I’m against graves and funerals, against sending out letters and worrying if you’ve forgotten someone, against individualizing funerals with photos and music, and most of all against having a grave site where someone has to leave flowers. You can think of dead people without an ugly carved stone marker in the ground. I reject all of that. And for the same reason, I swear
never
to visit my brothers’ graves. What a load of crap. Graves and everything that goes with them. Notices, gravestones, envelopes and invitations, paying for a cemetery plot, appetizers, cakes, the term
funeral feast
, rotgut coffee in giant thermoses, black clothes, people reading from a pulpit, falsely hyping the dead person and leaving out any negative attributes. Fuck you and your dead. I won’t go along with it. Not one bit.

I managed to get away from the hospital one single time. And I was able to sleep at home with my boyfriend. My aunt took over the duty of making sure my mother didn’t kill herself. For one night. And for the first time in ages we had desperate sex. All I could think while we were at it was that I wanted to live.
Fuck me back to life!
It was the only time I ever really abandoned myself with him. And our daughter must have been conceived that night. We had tried for four years prior to that. When I had seen him for the first time I had thought to myself,
I want to have babies with him
. It ended up being just one. In part because I’m shocked at how much work and worry it is bringing up a child. And I know why it worked at that moment. I was already thinking in the hospital that I had to give my mother a new child. She had lost three. Everything that she had to care for was dead, gone. We needed a replacement. Right. That’s the way I thought it out in my traumatized head sitting there in the hospital. And naturally, because that’s the way life goes, after four years of sex without protection and trying to get pregnant, it happened at that exact moment. The oyster was open. This one last time for my boyfriend. It never worked during peaceful times, but as soon as we were on wartime footing,
boom
, it worked.

Then our love fell silent. And the first thing that went bad was the sex.

The birth of my daughter is therefore inseparable from the accident. I can think of dates from that time only with difficulty. It makes my head hurt. It’s as if that period is bounded off with a fence. Whenever someone asks me when my daughter was born, I can’t recall at first—because I hate to think back on that time. It always comes to me like this: when was the accident? She was conceived then, so she must have been born in the
year following the accident. So whenever I think of her birth, I first think of three dead children.

I hated the way Stefan mourned. He receded into himself. He got lethargic and fat. He gained twenty kilograms in a very short time. He also got on my nerves because he seemed most upset about the death of the younger ones. While I was saddest about the oldest. The two things didn’t fit together. Obviously our love was put to an impossible test and failed miserably under the pressure.

I pull into our parking space in front of the building. When you buy a parking space in front of your door, you have to admit you are buried alive. Because you think you need a car but don’t feel like having to find a spot for it each day. I want to get rid of our gasoline-burning car as soon as an affordable four-seat electric car is available. That’s pretty much the only thing we’re doing wrong as far as the environment, but I usually focus on what we’re doing wrong instead of being proud of what we as a family are doing right. I hope Georg is home. It’s not often that we can surprise each other. We’ve been together and married for a long time. You get used to each other. You don’t feel as if you have to do much to try to seem interesting to the other.

I unlock the apartment door with the same hand motion as always and when I step inside I call out hello far too loudly, as I always do, so I can figure out where my husband is. He calls back and I place him in the laundry room. I sniff the air and detect our laundry detergent. It smells of lemon and nuts.

He is an absolute sex machine, pumped with testosterone, but he can do all the household things better than I can. He’s
hanging the washing to dry right now. I go downstairs and thank him for doing it. You should do that once in a while: even when other things start getting taken for granted, I shouldn’t take his household skills—which far exceed mine—for granted. He smiles at me drowsily. It always embarrasses him when I thank him for something like this.