Funeral for a Dog: A Novel (8 page)

Lua likes cheeseburgers, says Kiki, she knew that already. Yesterday she had been photographing the half-naked bakers in front of their ovens before she found me and Lua, that direct rawness, that perceptible heat, the belly of the city. Lua and I seemed to her like the image of the amputated country. That’s a different subject, I reply, but I still haven’t gotten to my own, I’ll stick to it, it’s still about

Tuuli, seven months pregnant and still not there. We didn’t know where she was, we were too anxious to talk nonsense. On the answering machine, there were twelve messages from Germany, we couldn’t call back, we wanted to keep the phone line free for Tuuli. Felix, Lua, and I sat around and watched the airplanes on television, the fire, the running people, the dust clouds, the updates, eyewitness reports and amateur videos, the we-will-hunt-them-down-and-punish-those-responsible loop. When there was a knock at the door, we gave a start. In the doorway stood Tuuli, in jeans and a bright purple PricewaterhouseCoopers promotional T-shirt that was actually much too large. She’d rolled up her pants legs, the T-shirt stretched over her belly. She looked like she was in disguise, her pregnant belly seemed, like the clothes, not to belong to her body. In her hand she was holding Felix’s huge leather suitcase. I’m sorry, she said, looking around the room. The light on the unwashed windowpanes was dark orange, almost red. In the morning she’d been standing on the roof terrace and observing the burning of the towers as if paralyzed, then the first one came down. The hotel was evacuated, she’d had to put on a gas mask. She’d gone down the stairs and out of the building, by boat to New Jersey, and came here over the bridges to the north. She hadn’t been able to reach us. She was sorry. In the suitcase there was only a bathrobe. Felix fell back on the sofa, he let out air like an inflatable animal from which the plug has been pulled. Your pants are too big, he said weakly, the T-shirt color looks fantastic on you. I turned down the television, Mayor Giuliani at a press conference, they were now certain that there was no poison gas on board and that there were no biological agents. In the factories of New Jersey, Tuuli whispered, they wear clothes like these, then Felix put a hand on her dust-covered cheek. It’s all right, he said, we were worried about you. There’s still chocolate ice cream in the fridge, I said. Felix opened two more beers and we watched Tuuli as she very intently and carefully spooned the whole cup of ice cream. Here we were and we couldn’t get away, no trains were leaving, no buses were running, no airplane was permitted to take off, all the bridges were closed. We expected the worst and had no idea what the worst could be, but

Kiki interrupts me at this point. I can imagine the light, she says, setting her glass on the knee-high table, not the worst. She wakes Lua and positions his head on the arm of my chair, she takes a picture of the two of us through her wine glass. You guys are drunk again, says Lua, and I’m glad he’s finally breaking his silence, because he’s been too quiet today, and Kiki Kaufman with the camera doesn’t object when I gesture for more wine, when I decline to taste and approve, when the waiters in light of my story and the camera finally replace Kiki’s white wine glass with a larger one. She presses the shutter release and raises her filled glass first to me, then to the window and toward the sky, as if she were saying thanks for the invitation. She nods as if she were joining Tuuli and Felix and me, as if she were climbing with her camera out the window and up the fire escape to us and sitting down with us on the edge of the roof, as if she were watching

as Tuuli wiped the dust off the lens of her camera with her sleeve. We were sitting on the roof over Lorimer Street. The answering machine in the apartment clicked on, Lua howled with the sirens. Felix and I took turns climbing down to get more beer. The lines were jammed, we couldn’t use the phone. Tuuli stared for a long time at a blank billboard over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which obstructed the view of the place where that morning the towers had still stood. She looked mellower now than she had at the kitchen table. Felix was talking about the smoke cloud, how strangely beautiful and aflame it was in the sunset, and Tuuli’s tears smeared the ash on her face. Felix sat down next to her on the edge of the roof and said, your tears are smudging. He leaned toward her for a kiss. In one hand he was holding a beer can, the other was placed on the fine blonde hair on the back of Tuuli’s neck. I kneeled down between the two of them, took the camera, and Felix lifted his beer into the picture at the right moment and asked

Can you look right over here? Kiki stops me, and I hold my glass up to her camera eye. Please don’t interrupt me, I say, cameras don’t talk. I’m drunk, I hold on to Lua’s collar, I put down the wine, and Kiki photographs herself and me and Lua in the dark window and West Broadway in the rain on the other side. I remember

the sky like a soap bubble over the roof of 37 Lorimer Street, the sun behind the smoke and the billboard, the pale searchlights over lower Manhattan, familiar from operating rooms and film sets. I remember Felix and Tuuli sitting next to each other on the edge of the roof and more and more ambulances on the BQE. How Tuuli began to roll a joint for us, how she watched her fingers as she did so, how she sang softly to herself, how Felix and I listened to ourselves breathing, how Tuuli’s song mingled with the singing of the Latino regulars in front of Oscar’s corner store below, how Felix stood up after a while and claimed that Colombians were used to things like this: Colombians sang all the time, they had civil war and blown-up airplanes every day, they didn’t even notice days like today anymore, that was a good solution. Anyway, said Felix, did we know that Bryan Adams and Keanu Reeves always shared a hotel room when they were in New York, at the Mark Hotel on Seventy-seventh Street and Madison Avenue.

Are they fucking? Kiki Kaufman laughs, and Lua is sleeping with a heavy head on his remaining front paw, he knows Felix’s and my stories, he knows my questions and Felix’s answers,

they’re fucking, said Felix, yup. Couldn’t Bryan Adams be Keanu Reeves’s father? It didn’t matter, the two of them were fucking. We laughed and clinked our beers, Tuuli sat on the edge of the roof and watched the ambulances on their way to Manhattan. People were jumping out, she said, a little boy next to me on the roof saw people falling onto the plaza, he asked, “Why are the birds burning, Mom?” Probably, said Tuuli, jumping is faster than burning, probably when it comes to dying, speed matters. She was done with the joint, Felix lit it and smoked between index finger and thumb, as if we were soldiers on watch, as if we had to conceal the burning tip, as if weapons were pointed at us, as if we were being observed, no open containers, no animals, no weapons. Then he leaned his head back and exhaled. Jumping is always better than burning or drowning, said Felix, he’d once fallen out a window himself, dislocated his shoulder and broken his tailbone, had he ever told us about that before? He’d told us, but when one of us is talking, the others can be silent, so we didn’t interrupt him. Felix sat down on the edge of the roof, smoked and talked to himself. Down in the apartment the answering machine was recording messages again, someone wanted to know whether we were still alive. We lay on the roof as if in the beyond and listened to the voices from the other side of the world. We didn’t answer, we couldn’t move. Tuuli held her belly as if she had pains. I touched the back of her sweaty neck, her neck hairs were sticky. I thought you were dead, I said, and Tuuli bent over the edge. What are you guys talking about, she asked, and her voice sounded faded like the voices on the answering machine. Maybe that had to do with the fact that, a few seconds later, she puked very softly off the roof. Tuuli stood up and spat, we’re done for, that was it, she said. I could have wiped the dust off Tuuli’s face, given her clothes that fit her, declined the next beer and filled up Lua’s bowl maybe, I could have offered her my toothbrush and my bed, myself too. I should have told her to get some sleep, tomorrow this world would definitely look different. But I waited too long. Nothing better occurs to you? Lua asked me. Tonight your words mean the exact same thing as your silence, he said. Felix brought a guitar up, he played something by Johnny Cash and pissed off the roof at the same time. In front of Corner Store Oscar’s corner store the Colombians were drinking and singing their laments on Skillman Avenue, aah, more beer for the angels of Lorimer Street, said Corner Store Oscar, with his half-shot-off lower jaw, people are drinking today like there’s no tomorrow. On the store’s steps one of the Colombians was drumming on plastic paint buckets, the guy in the Argentinian soccer jersey was banging two beer bottles together, a Cuban regular was playing ukulele, Corner Store Oscar was shaking his keys. He was out of Rolling Rock, Budweiser, Coors Light. A six-pack of Pabst, I said, and Lua next to me ordered the same. Maybe so Corner Store Oscar wouldn’t have to go for the beer twice, because in summer it’s very warm even at night in New York. We and the beer brands are going downhill, said Lua, and when I returned to the roof, Tuuli looked up from Felix’s mouth. We’re not alone, she lied, we’re three. I turned around and climbed back down to give word of our survival. The lines were finally free again.

Kiki is smiling, she knows those moments, the talking just to keep talking. What this or that person said when no one knew how things would go on at all. She strokes Lua’s head. The rain is now running down the large windows of the SoHo Grand Hotel, Kiki puts her black shoes next to my white ones on the armchair and signals to the waiter for the bill. Stop? I ask, but Kiki says, keep going! Your story is a good story, still no flags or structures or morality, just uncertainty and clarity, it sounds like something out of a book. Lately, I say, I haven’t been sleeping much, lately I’ve been waiting for the appropriate words. Then I finish my drink and pay the whole bill. I hold on to Lua’s leash as we drift along Canal Street in the greasy Chinatown rain, from shop window to shop window, from awning to awning, plucked and smoked chickens on display, electrical appliances and videos, as we lean on garbage cans, as we look into Kiki’s camera and then end up in Kiki’s hotel room, where we take off our wet clothes and hang them on a few hooks. Where we don’t touch each other as Kiki takes pictures of us under the fluorescent lights, the green paint of the walls behind our pale bodies, the light on her sad breasts, on my tired cock. And finally Kiki tells me that this hotel was once the flophouse on the Bowery where Hurstwood suffocated himself out of hopeless love in a gas stove at the end of
Sister Carrie
. Then she takes Lua’s head in her hands and he closes his eyes. Animals are the hearts of people, I say, Lua is breathing heavily, and I can go to sleep.

(Ping-Pong)

Dawn lasts forever (the house drags itself into the day). On the narrow mattress in the corner of Svensson’s study I’m trying to distinguish between sounds and thoughts: the wooden beams, the bedsprings (the ivy is growing). Actually my work could have been done a long time ago, but yesterday toward evening Svensson set plates and glasses and a candle on the kitchen table and between his words and his chewing left no room for questions. He talked about the village on the other side of the rock shelf (Osteno), about the water and about the mountains. He was busy with a knife in the candlelight, I sat at the table and searched for somewhere to start while Tuuli spoke Finnish with the boy. Svensson boiled water for noodles on a gas stove and explained that he’d had no electricity since Friday, a tree had fallen on a power line. There was only water and leftover wine, he wasn’t prepared for guests, not for a personal visit and least of all for journalists (why am I here?). Svensson cooked a tomato and sage sauce, he served an earthenware bowl of radicchio and white beans (his laugh conciliatory). The boy grimaced and dropped his fork on the floor, under the table the dog panted. Svensson, said Tuuli, cutting the noodles into little pieces, no child can twirl spaghetti and no child eats radicchio (not conciliatory). Yes, he knew that. I ate silently and therefore too much, drank some red wine and tasted Elisabeth in it. Tuuli ate and smoked, the boy on her lap fell asleep (half a tomato in his hand dripped on her leg and fell to the floor). As Tuuli finally put the child with his smeared mouth to bed, I remained seated. For a few more minutes I tried to start a conversation with Svensson, but because he was speaking incessantly without talking about himself, I excused myself too (fatigue). Elisabeth’s annoying assignment brought me as far as his kitchen, and I didn’t manage even to ask the routine questions. For the interesting things there was no time (the owner of the suitcase, the boy, Svensson and Tuuli). Later I sat in Svensson’s study and heard Tuuli’s voice in another room singing a Finnish lullaby. I pictured her sitting on the edge of the bed and brushing the boy’s hair from his forehead, I tried to write, but lost my image of her in my words. I fell asleep on Svensson’s mattress and didn’t wake up again until late at night. The cicadas were noisy. I didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know where the others were sleeping (I didn’t know who I was).

Lugano–Chiasso–Malpensa

Now it’s Sunday morning, a rooster is crowing, scattered birds and insects. I wait for the dog’s coughing and the boy’s crying. Nothing. I’m still in Svensson’s house, but no one seems to be aware of me. On the Swiss side of the lake I could have woken up in my own hotel bed, a Sunday newspaper on the terrace, the first game day of the Bundesliga soccer season, etc. My return flight to Hamburg leaves today in the late afternoon, I have to go back to Milan (Lugano–Chiasso–Malpensa). Elisabeth would have tried to discuss my leaving with me, but I’ve made myself unreachable. I should notify the hotel, but I remain lying in the half-light of the study and don’t touch anything (journalistic scrupulousness). I’m expecting Svensson’s footsteps, I’m expecting his knock at the door. Apparently the only way to leave this place is with the boat. Svensson is a mysterious man: he wouldn’t live alone at the end of the world and not want other people around him for no reason. Svensson must not like people. I sit back down at his desk and take notes, so as to retain the important things (the slosh of the water against the dock).

Hotel Norge

In a dark, cheap double room in the Hotel Norge near the Christuskirche, I lay on my back and listened to the surge of the early traffic. My 30th birthday, Elisabeth was already 36, a few weeks earlier we’d met again. This evening we’d first eaten solemnly (loup de mer) and then kept drinking so as to stop time, we drifted through the night. When it began to rain toward morning, we were standing outside the hotel’s glass revolving door (time refused and passed more swiftly). We could go to my place, said Elisabeth. We could also stay here, I said (I don’t know what held me back). The hotel room was five hundred meters from her apartment. At the reception desk I showed the night porter my identification, and Elisabeth searched in her purse for her credit card (our names on a bill together for the first time). The porter is even younger than you, Daniel, she whispered, at least two years. We were drunker than we thought. In the elevator she kissed me as if I belonged to her. She wanted to fuck me right now, she said. (Elisabeth has long talked straight. She has her reasons.) But then she disappeared into the bathroom and stayed there for an unusually long time. I was torn about whether I should open the door, whether we knew each other well enough. I turned the hotel television on and off and wondered whether we could love each other. Later Elisabeth’s retching woke me. She was kneeling over the toilet and vomiting. Would I stay with her anyway, she asked between two regurgitations of fish and wine and bile (please, Daniel?).

my Renault 4

I want to retain the important things (our first hotel bill). Such as my first car, my first kiss, my first girlfriend, my first love, my first betrayal, my first abortion. My preferences and selection criteria, for example. Names with the vowel
a
in them, maybe, tallness under certain circumstances, maybe an unkitschy femininity, blonde hair possibly, more likely red. It’s now Sunday morning, Elisabeth will have gone home late last night on my bike (the R4 parked on Bismarckstrasse, the windshields murky from the lindens). Now she’s waking up in the bed. Before our wedding I slept with eleven women (I don’t care about numbers, Daniel, said Elisabeth, you can almost count to eleven on two hands). I haven’t yet told her everything about myself that seems important to me:

(1) Carolina. She came to Germany from Warsaw in 1989, at first she didn’t speak much German and later she spoke it very well. Someone or other called her shoes cheap hooker boots, she was the prettiest girl I knew, she had seventy-centimeter-long blonde hair (I measured). We had no idea about sex, we were Catholic, I secretly accompanied her to her babysitting jobs. For a few months I forgot my age (we considered most things possible). We talked a lot, we wanted to take our time and be able to laugh even when having sex. But then it was a deeply serious matter with technical deficiencies (after a year she exchanged me for a boy with a red Toyota). I ran into her again in 2001 at Frankfurt Airport, she had a practical short haircut, she’d married someone from the old days and since then had been living in Menden in the Sauer-land. After Carolina I spent a while just listening when the other boys talked about girls. We called one another by our last names. Pfeifer recorded music tapes (U2), Debus always kissed right away, the rest comes naturally, he said, Hornberg had a girlfriend and joined her family on trips to the mini-golf course, Petrovic had a southeastern roll in his
r
, Issel a soulful gaze, Wilson was the shortest and relied on the cute little kid angle. Mandelkern just says too much weird stuff, they said, Mandelkern has Carolina in his bones. In the spring of 1991 I inherited the Renault in excellent condition from my mother (I rarely talk about her death). I picked up a smattering of French, left the
Süddeutsche
and an issue of
Spex
on the passenger seat (unread), and learned to search at the right moments for a slip of paper to make a note of a compelling sentence from one of my female passengers. We drove to local art-house cinemas. Within a few months, those who leaned over the dashboard gearshift were:

(2) Nadine,

(3) Tanja,

(4) Eva,

(5) Katrin. I stayed the night in their converted attics amid their application portfolios for art academies, their Janosch novels (
Polski Blues
), Tori Amos posters, and hammocks (in the end they studied art education). It was probably about proving our adulthood, we blurred our boundaries before we knew them (Tanja and Katrin kissed each other when I wasn’t there).

(6) Hanna. With Hanna I developed the shrinking and dwindling and my it-can’t-go-on-like-this (the discovery of fear). She lived with a biology student in a separate apartment in her parents’ house, he bred geckos. Her mother was from Flensburg and was the examining physician at the district recruiting office (my mother holds the balls of all the eighteen-year-old men in this town and makes them cough, she said). Hanna decided that I should stop with the newspaper thing (she meant the
Süddeutsche
on the passenger seat of the Renault). Hanna’s father was an Indian engineer with an irritatingly single-minded fixation on the family honor. When Hanna was kneeling in front of me in the bushes behind the stadium one night, I could see her father and the biology student in the parking lot shining flashlights into the parked Renault (my cock in her mouth). I was declared unfit. They always did that when she came home later than arranged, said Hanna, and now cough (Hanna could do whatever she wanted, I wasn’t functioning)!

(7) Britta. With Britta my first wrong turn. In 1994 Hornberg, Pfeifer, and I had left our town and driven the Renault to the university in Hamburg (all of us studying ethnology). For the first time it was about our whole life. Britta was older and beautiful, we talked on the phone for nights on end, I in my early twenties, she three years older. I was astonished by her complete and continuous interest in me. Then one of my friends (Wilson) called her a “stupid horse” in front of me, that made me absurdly insecure, we talked on the phone more rarely and slept together only one more time. And that wasn’t until five years later, drunk and unnoticed, at that same undersized friend’s wedding. I wanted to save us for later, I said, and she laughed at me. In the summer of 2004 she called me again: she was now living in Berlin, she was getting married next week, she was five months pregnant, she just wanted me to know that (I couldn’t have been the father). I was, of all things, driving the R4 on the A24 from Berlin to Hamburg. I said I was sorry, I’d imagined things differently: the two of us and later. Britta’s reply on the phone: but you’re married too, Daniel! I said unnecessarily “yes, but” and the connection broke immediately. Autobahn and life struck me as excessively straight (turning impossible and prohibited).

(8) Carolina. The second Carolina wore red shoes with her blonde hair and was the most honest person I knew. She stood in front of Hornberg, Pfeifer, and me in the lecture hall of the Museum of Ethnology and would mark our first academic papers (“Intensive Agriculture among the Kapauku in New Guinea”). Carolina was Professor Jansen’s assistant and half Finnish, half Swedish. I’d never met a woman who could judge so clearly and run so fast (from her I learned to run, to write, to think). On her lower right leg a tattooed pack of foxes craved the grapes and rowanberries that climbed around her hip bones (the Fable of the Fox and the Grapes/
Fabeln om räven och rönnbären
). Carolina was twenty-five, she ran marathons and kickboxed (in a sparring session she once broke her opponent’s nose with her fist). After three years I’d completed my studies and she her dissertation. Did I want to go for a doctorate, Professor Jansen asked me, and I said “yes.” When the second Carolina then went back to the University of Helsinki, I brought her to the Hamburg Airport. The unattainable, she said at the security checkpoint, is something different for everyone (I got her assistantship in the witch archive).

(9) Eva. To this day Hornberg doesn’t know anything about it (Eva taught me betrayal). Eva was Hornberg’s second girlfriend and for two years mine at the same time (turn of the millennium on the Port of Hamburg; her tongue piercing rattled against my teeth while Hornberg peed off a landing pier). When he returned from Tanzania in July after three months of field research, Eva was pregnant (Hornberg was depressed from the malaria prophylaxis). I sat in the waiting room of the gynecologist and observed the colorful tropical fish in the octagonal tank (different perspectives through different plates of glass). Eva had decided against the child without asking my opinion (she must have been thinking of Hornberg). She didn’t want to deprive us of all other possibilities, she said. This time I would have been the father (I wanted to live up to the responsibility; I would have managed). When Eva awoke from the sedation, the doctor’s assistant brought coffee and cinnamon buns and stroked her cheek (I didn’t touch her, it struck me as inappropriate). When she called Hornberg in the afternoon and asked him not to contact her anymore, I was sitting on the floor of her room and felt the need to go far away. Hornberg later wrote to me in confidence that he’d wanted to have the child (he wrote “my child”). Then he got the Renault for a few years.

(10) Anne. Shortly thereafter, Professor Jansen’s offer to me of the opportunity to go to Berkeley (winter semester 2000). I’m not eager to see you go, Mandelkern, said Jansen, putting his hand on my shoulder, but you have to get out of here! My dissertation fit the Berkeley department’s profile (media-theory-oriented inquiries into the ethnographic film). There, Anne from Zurich sat in the office next to mine, we talked about documentary and feature films and strategies of direction and of authenticity and were silent at the decisive points (our bodies didn’t mesh; we were nothing but words). Only after a few weeks did we sleep together in her small, shabby room near Ohlone Park (the smell of the seafood restaurant under her fire escape). Our dissertations progressed (our careers, our lives). In March 2001 we found an apartment to share on Delaware Street and San Pablo Avenue, we had a shared language that no one else in Berkeley seemed to speak (children were out of the question; we were academics). Shortly before an important lecture on Stéphane Breton’s strategy of authenticity through the subjective camera, the two airplanes flew into the World Trade Center towers in New York. My lecture and the doctoral conference were postponed until further notice (I never gave the talk). Anne and I fell into a panic. She decided to take the first flight back to Europe and immediately drove to the airport, either I would come with her to Switzerland or we would have to make do with e-mails. I stayed in Berkeley, grieved, and continued to tinker with my dissertation for a while (I wanted to wait and see). Anne discovered her interest in European ethnology. I read my paper again and again, gradually I found myself learning it by heart more than writing it. After a few weeks we broke up amicably and via e-mail (the affection had lost its tangibility).