Next World Novella (10 page)

No, Hinrich, I know very well that even that can’t be the end. It’s taken me a few years to summon up the courage to think as much and, more to the point, to tell you so. I’m relieved now, even if I find it a little embarrassing, that I had to make use of your old story. Yes, Hinrich, I know you’re not Marek and definitely not Jörn. I’m sure you only worshipped this Hanni from afar, hidden among your friends at the other end of the bar. At the time I probably loved you, my little would-be Marek, more than you ever let yourself dream I might. Did you maybe stay a would-be Marek until your eye operation? Anyway, you were certainly not a man who could make a woman feel secure for an entire lifetime.

I’ll cheerfully admit to doing violence to that old text of yours; it’s been a while since you used a typewriter. I’ll also confess that at no time was I concerned with correcting your story in any detail – whether misappropriation of cash or destruction of bar fittings was the point at issue, whether it was Jörn or Kiddo or Wolfi or Paul, what difference does it make? I have been speechless in our marriage, and here I finally saw my chance to tell you how hard the last five years have been for me, maybe even the last twenty-five years. Forgive me, I lacked the courage to try to discuss it with you. It seems to me that we were never able to find a means of communication that would have brought us together in anything other than a mundane way. There were the texts you had written and that I edited. Presumably you wouldn’t have paid attention to anything but a written text. If I know you, you wouldn’t understand anything but editorial corrections.

Understand what?

Oh, a great deal, Hinrich.

Firstly: It was a mere single sentence in this little text of yours that caught my eye, a naïve audacious remark you repeated thirty years later in the face of another woman. A shockingly wrong thing said at the wrong time, the kind of thing only men can utter. The first time you probably only thought it or heard it somewhere, but then you actually said it – you dared to say it to a woman like Dana, say it to her face. How angry she was with you! So was I. How could I have been married for twenty-nine years to someone who would so much as venture to think up that remark? What had happened to the shy dreamer of the old days, who had held a woman’s hand for the first time at the age of
thirty-five
? But then you held it so tightly that I might well have thought it meant a good deal. You became a would-be Marek, or a would-be man instead of a would-be Marek.

Please forgive me, it is not, of course, just that remark that has made me so angry. It’s the pathetic lover-boy who expresses all his small-minded pathos in it. You’re a jumped-up nobody, you have no discretion, no decency, no tact, you have no sensitivity at all even in adultery. And you’re also a failure, Hinrich; oddly enough that hurts me too. Didn’t you buy Dana, at least according to your shabby logic? Wouldn’t you have thrown her down that very same night – you, with her! – on the bar or somewhere else, telling her she
had
taken money from the till, so that as you saw it she owed you? Shouldn’t it therefore have been repaid, every penny of it, ‘in kind’ – my God, have you any idea how that sounds to a woman? and how has it in fact been repaid? I’m sorry, Hinrich, I am not thinking about morality, I am thinking about style. You’re all the same, men and would-be men, and, to be absolutely clear, I despise you more than ever.

No, what I wrote yesterday isn’t true; I don’t despise you, you have been punished enough. I am ashamed of you, Hinrich, and I share a little of that shame myself. At the time, anyway, when Dana told me how she had to bring you to your senses, I could have cursed you. If I hadn’t already been cursing you for your nocturnal escapades, your ever-changing affairs, maybe I would have wanted the ground to swallow me up there in front of her. Imagine having a strange woman tell you all that about your own husband.

Yet I wasn’t as surprised as you might think. Did you suppose I wouldn’t notice anything? Yes, while you were still groping your way through life half blind, I was good enough for you. While I was editing what you wrote, you were happy to assure me that you would even hold my hand in the next world. But as soon as you could see properly, whose hand did you hold? You owe me an explanation, Hinrich. Do you seriously think I never noticed how much you had changed? How you turned away from what had meant everything to you before? And, let me say in passing, what it meant to me. Did you think I would just sit back and let it happen, when I had wanted to be happy with you for ever? I gave you my word in front of witnesses, could you forget that?

Yes, you could. You left me. Not physically, I know, but in every other way. Because I am now, at last, also leaving you, I will call you Schepp again, so that you understand I take this seriously, I really have drawn a line underneath it. The Hinrich I knew and loved, and with whom I hoped to grow old, disappeared from my life after his eye operation. Only the pathetic remains are left. Yes, Schepp, you read that correctly, and because I am leaving you I want to have it out in the clear light of day and

At this point Schepp was overwhelmed by helpless, hysterical laughter, which gave him a fright. He then stared into space for a while, finally blew his nose and said, a distinct note of doubt in his voice, ‘Then this really is a farewell letter? She surely won’t have done herself, well, an injury – done anything silly?’

No, Schepp had no tears left; all he could do was read on, and there were only about a dozen pages left. He had good reason to wonder what that woman Dana had said about him; he knew she could be economical with the truth. Oh, how could Doro be so credulous, how could she believe what a woman like Dana said? Now that she didn’t even want to call him by his first name, did he have to call her Fräulein Dorothee again, maybe even Fräulein von Hagelstein? He glanced at the parquet beneath the slanting rays of the afternoon sun, where remnants of his life lay scattered. Now, in the softer light, he could make out details of the photographs without squinting. There could easily have been some memory or other among them, he could have dived down, submerged himself instead of giving himself over to what he still had to read. But he did not. He plucked up his courage and did not stop again.

Yes, Schepp, what you have read is correct; because I am leaving you, I want to have it out in the clear light of day and confess something to you. I too have been unfaithful, for at least as long as you and with far greater consistency. Not the way you are imagining. Although of course I was crazy about her, used every opportunity to meet up with her – at least I can understand you there. How strong she was, bubbling over with
joie de vivre
, the life force. When I saw her the first time, leaning against the bar, I knew instantly what drove you there evening after evening. After all, I’d felt for weeks that you had changed completely, I sensed it after that night you came home so late, not really of this world, or at least not entirely responsible for your actions.

You could be forgiven for that, I know that now. But asking to borrow my commentaries on the I Ching the very next day, keeping the book for weeks on end – the I Ching, of all things, the text you usually refer to with mild derision, don’t you think that was a bit tasteless? Or did you really think me so simple-minded? Did you actually not care? Unloved wives are jealous. You underestimate a placid surface; it masks hidden depths. The quieter I became, the more violent I felt inside. And I’m not supposed to get upset. But high blood pressure doesn’t count for much when you’re coming to terms with your husband’s baser instincts.

Once you start seeking, you find. Even if at first all you find is a short yellowed typescript – why did you never tell me that you’d tried your hand at a novel? Or was it just going to be a short story? At any rate, you went at it, shall we say, full tilt in a way I’d never have expected you to. Forgive me, but did you really write it yourself? You weren’t the kind of man who stood at the bar, you were much more of an outsider, like Marek – were you trying to write about yourself? Well, you weren’t nearly as unworldly as I thought you were before your operation. If I’d guessed … would I have fallen in love with such a Schepp?

But back to Dana. The way you kept looking at her while you were talking on the phone to Pia! You clearly cared so little about our daughter’s divorce that I immediately drew my own conclusions. It probably escaped your notice, in fact of course it escaped your notice, that I made a date that very evening to meet up with Dana. As soon as I saw that sign tattooed on her throat, everything was clear; I was electrified:
Kan
, the double water sign, I’d meditated on it for years, it couldn’t be a coincidence. I had to approach her. And so I did. Dana had wanted to be approached, as I now know. Or do you think she met up with anyone and everyone just for fun? Not that she didn’t enjoy it, she certainly wouldn’t have done anything that she didn’t want to do. But she made sure she got paid. I pretended I merely wanted to pass the time while you were on the phone to Pia, said something along the lines of, ‘Do you know what you actually got stuck with there?’

Dana thought I was cracking a joke and rolled her eyes. ‘A helluva lot of men.’

‘A helluva lot of water, as it happens.’ Did she want to know more?

‘That’s a new one on me!’ Yes, she said, she was extremely interested, she loved water, she’d always been a good swimmer.

She pretended she thought the sign was just some kind of modern graphic art. But when, probably inspired by the
Kan
sign itself, I said I could tell her more about the meaning of her Chinese character, she agreed at once. I found out later that you had approached her in the same way. Do you in fact have any idea what
Kan
means? I didn’t fail to notice that you were collecting information from my commentaries, you even underlined the relevant passages. But one doesn’t come to understand the I Ching within a few days. For that to happen you have to make a serious study of it. You may not believe me, but in secretly making a first date with Dana, naïve as I was, all I wanted was to protect you from her. She would have robbed you blind, I thought, she would have ruined you, a man like you would have been right up her street – if at the last minute you didn’t do something so foolish that it would hurt her pride. You underestimated her pride. Otherwise, who knows, she might not have remained so aloof.

When I found out that there was not, as I’d originally assumed, an affectionate understanding between the two of you, I immediately decided to prevent one from forming. Admittedly, even then I was not uninterested in Dana myself. Be that as it may, I wanted there to be something between her and me, something stronger than you could imagine in your besotted intriguing – do you understand? I got in before you did. I seduced her. Oh no, not in the way you’re thinking with your pathetically one-sided imagination. But no less tenaciously and, above all, far more consistently.

At first I was a somewhat unexpected confidante to whom Dana could tell everything about you that I didn’t want to know. She scornfully enumerated all your earlier affairs and would-be affairs. I don’t have to tell you about those, I’m sure. It’s amazing what she knew about you. She told me in detail how you pursued her from the first moment, with looks, with insinuating remarks. Soon even intruding on her smoking breaks, when she really would have liked to be on her own. You deserved to be rejected unreservedly. But I wanted to be sure, so on the day after you received that slap in the face I went from being her confidante to being her accomplice – we’d been meeting up regularly for a long time, exchanging information about you – and got her a new mobile and phone contract. Yes, you have me to thank for being eventually unable to reach her on that number. You’re surprised, I’m sure; you wouldn’t have thought it of me, would you? I often listened to your messages on the old mobile later, when my determination began to waver. Do I have to repeat what you cooed and whistled to her? Astonishing to think what an amorous fool is hidden inside even you. I’d never have suspected you of such folly.

Back to Dana. At first I didn’t take any real interest in her, apart from her tattoo. We found her a job at another bar a few streets away, where she could wait tables again until one of the men chasing her would turn too insistent. That should have been the moment for me to say goodbye to her. But by then I could no longer do it. I wanted to win her for myself. Isn’t she a fascinating person? You’d be the last to contradict me. Isn’t she, how shall I put it, isn’t she a woman through and through?

No, it’s not how you think it is. She didn’t have half as many affairs as you assume, in fact not a single one; after all, she had other worries. A family to feed, mother, grandmother, child – you’d never have dreamt that she’s a mother, would you? Her little boy is growing up in the same farmhouse where she grew up instead of at home with her parents. The fields have been sold off, it seems that nothing is left from the old days except the misery. ‘Either it was raining or the gate at the level crossing was closed,’ that’s how Dana summed it up. She’d already done ‘everything she could’ to make sure her family could manage, everything – do you know what that means? I’d rather not imagine it in any detail. Without sometimes fleecing one or another of the men pursuing her tenaciously, without going off with some of the takings now and then, she couldn’t have coped. And then that curse that seemed to pursue her, always driving her on. Fundamentally she was always fleeing. How else could she escape from the importunate world?

You know what I mean. You’re condemned to know. In spite of everything, she was very much at ease in her own body; maybe that was what I most admired – she was so incurably healthy. While making herself out to be impulsive, confused, unpredictable, she was clear-minded and realistic and focused about what she wanted – and she almost always got it.