Next World Novella (6 page)

This was
too
subtle for her, said Dana, turning away.

Schepp sat there red-faced for the rest of the evening, not sure whether he should feel more offended as a man or as an academic. Even now, years later, he was overcome by embarrassment when he conjured up the scene; he ought really to have given Dana a slap in the face there and then, and that would have been that. Especially when he thought of her scent, some cheap Polish perfume that gave her an improper air, as if both the perfume and the woman were cheap and available.

He shook himself, pulled a face, as if his room, too, were full of Dana’s objectionable perfume. He certainly wasn’t going to think about that today. It was highly unsuitable, and damn it all, he had thought of that woman Dana far too often, thought of her every day. Every night. Well? Did that make him a worse human being, a worse husband; hadn’t he always lavished care and attention on Doro? Although, even so, it was a long time, yes, a very long time since he had actually touched her.

Good God, it happened to so many men, it didn’t have to mean anything.

Schepp forced himself back to the present. How long had he been kneeling in front of Doro? I always loved you, you know I did.

But you don’t know about Dana, he thought, getting up with difficulty. His knees hurt. He stepped away from Doro and the
chaise-longue
. He had always thought that she had known nothing about all that, nothing at all. And in actual fact it really hadn’t been anything more than a few rather unseemly passing thoughts. Why had he lapsed into thinking about Dana today, anyway? Shaking his head, Schepp set off along the fishbone pattern of the parquet. How could he be recalling such a person in the presence of death? How she repelled him in retrospect, how he despised her, how he hated her!

His right hand beat time in the air to his muttered exclamations of annoyance, index and little fingers extended, the rest of his hand clenched into a fist. Until he remembered why he had thought of Dana, whereupon his hand stopped in mid-air and dropped powerlessly to his side. It was Doro’s own fault! There was a sudden rushing in his ears as if the ground were about to give way beneath him. As he clung to his desk, however, his sense of equilibrium was restored. After he had said out loud several times that Dana was really, really entirely different from Hanni, you could almost say her opposite – surely that was obvious, he hoped that showed once and for all how absurd Doro’s corrections were – he remembered what his initial intention had been. Wasn’t he going to keep a vigil at Doro’s side? Wasn’t this his chance to read her final message? He had to continue the reading, never mind Hanni, never mind Dana.

He returned to the
chaise-longue
, picked up the sheets of paper from the floor and put them in order. He looked for that passage with Marek, the scene in which he spoke up to defend – no, not Dana – to defend Hanni. Schepp decided to ignore that comment in the margin, even though Doro had stuck to it consistently, crossing out Hanni’s name every time and changing it to Dana’s. It was no use, he had promised her to read the manuscript.

Next day there’s no one waiting tables in the Blaue Maus. After much questioning we find out from Wolfi that he’s seen this coming from the beginning, it couldn’t end well, a girl who carries on with the customers has no place here. Now what? Now nothing. Still nothing the next evening and the next one. When we threaten to go and drink wherever Hanni turns up if he doesn’t take her back of his own free will, Wolfi assures us that he’d rather go bust. But it’s not her fault, says none other than Marek, raising his voice and pointing at Big Jörn, who has actually dared to turn up again and who’s grinning broadly at all of us with a big plaster on his nose. He’s the one who ought to be banned from this bar, not Hanni.

Almost two weeks went by, and whatever we said Wolfi stuck to his guns, pointing out the damage that had been done. But then one day Marek takes his savings passbook out of his jacket and shoves it over to him, asking him to see if the sum in it comes to enough. Wolfi pulls back his ponytail, looking awkward. We all crowd round, we say what a good lad young Marek is, we urge Wolfi to get a grip, we say we’ll contribute too if necessary. But it’s enough.

Okay, says Wolfi, sweeping the passbook off the bar, he’s no monster. He lifts the telephone receiver and hands it to the surprised Marek. As a reward he can give her the good news himself.

Much laughter. We all raise our glasses to Marek, our saviour, and tell him to have courage.

Then what? In his excitement Marek can hardly find the right holes in the dial for all the numbers Wolfi dictates out of a notebook, Wolfi has to write them down on an order pad. Then the phone is answered. He stammers a bit and says, ‘It’s the Blaue Maus here,’ words which are hailed raucously even at the tables furthest back. Marek now has to shout to make himself heard. Everything’s
topsy-turvy
here, he says, she can hear that for herself, Wolfi urgently needs reinforcements, this evening would be best or at least starting tomorrow, she’s missed a lot. Later he claims he didn’t say the last bit, but all of us crowding round him, we all of us heard it. To our other questions he replies with a silent nod. We take it as a good sign, we pat him on the back, we buy him a drink. And so it goes for the rest of the evening until Marek’s completely pissed. Only Big Jörn sneers and says he doesn’t know what’s up with us all of a sudden. That girl Hanni is ‘totally crazy, totally frigid’, he claims, she only does it ‘with other dykes’. And on and on until he’s thrown out again, this time by Wolfi.

Next day Hanni’s back, waitressing like she’s never been away. She thanks Marek by ignoring him while letting anyone else raise his glass to her and buy her a tequila. Although Mutt is safe amongst all this turmoil, Marek sees to him regularly, making sure he’s okay. Only when dawn breaks and most people have left does Hanni approach him. Instead of cashing up, she bends right over him, her silver earring dangling in his face, and whispers to him just loud enough for those of us still there to hear, telling him that – and here he goes rigid with shock, maybe hoping he heard wrong or he’s drunk, but no …

‘You’ve earned yourself a night with me,’ says Hanni, her brown eyes sparkling with all the little gold flecks in them, not indifferent or joking, dead serious. Imagine that! Marek looks at her, or really he looks through her, he sees her – or doesn’t see her – turning away and smiling the way she’s only ever smiled at others, never before at him. As if suddenly he wasn’t still wet behind the ears.

That night Marek parked in the middle of the traffic island, where he wasn’t woken up by the noise of the rush-hour traffic but by the cops. It would be the first of many encounters between him and the Federal authorities, although they never found any illegal substances in his Dolly van. And least of all Hanni, because deep down Marek was afraid that he had misunderstood her and if he approached her to claim his night she’d only laugh at him for being still wet behind the ears. It was the first of many nights he spent avoiding making his claim.

Next evening Hanni was acting outrageously normal, nothing to suggest she’d said that totally incredible thing and magically bound one of the customers to her – or however it was that Marek felt while he waited in silence. Whenever he came in to the Maus we could see how awkward he felt and it got worse when Hanni went over to him. Even if she only said one word to him, he was totally speechless. Overnight everything had changed, everything he saw, heard, thought about here. Poor old Marek, we thought, grinning at him from the bar, the brightest of us analyzing him – sharp as a set of knives, we were. His quiet contentment, the sort that accompanies constant hopeless adoration, had been replaced by simple moodiness, we concluded. Or something along those lines.

Anyway, Marek really set about drinking now; he was the first to arrive in the Maus, and when the buzz and bustle of the place went flat around five in the morning he was the last to order a final beer. But he didn’t really enjoy it any more, you could see that, he even developed an overwhelming grudge against Mutt. Some nights he stayed away, and instead – we knew this from Wolfi, as manager he was duty-bound to gossip – he drove around in his Dolly until his eyes closed of their own accord. If he turned up in the Maus again the next evening or the evening after that, he didn’t tell us anything. Rumour had it that he did some long-haul driving for various jobs; seems he was doing the lighting for a one-man show and travelled either ahead of or behind it on tour. Someone or other said he’d seen him scavenging on a scrap heap like before; he was painting his red Dolly van black, he didn’t answer questions, all he might say, reluctantly, was, ‘I’m not doing DIY stuff, I’m working.’ Others said … oh, there were so many rumours about Marek that finally we stopped wondering about him.

And what about Hanni? She had better things to do than bother with lads that didn’t have a regular job, didn’t even have a proper roof over their heads. Autumn came. And winter. When Marek had finished doing up his home by punching a skylight in the roof of the Dolly, he drove off to Greece to see his fiancée, the one he’d been with or rather hadn’t been with for a year and a half, probably so that she could sort him out. On the other hand Wolfi claimed that Marek carried Hanni’s phone number around all the time like a talisman, and when drunk enough he’d shown it at the bar, so he’d obviously kept it. He said it was simply because he didn’t have another jacket, just the one into whose breast pocket he’d put the piece of paper that day.

Perhaps that’s why it all worked out so badly for Marek in the end. Anyway he was back from Greece after only three months. Even if he had to drive most of the way on one cylinder, taking gradients against the wind, hair-raising stuff – as we found out later, much later, when we heard the entire story, all the details – and most likely no one but Marek would have made it. In Salzburg the Austrian customs did him over good and proper; Marek was used to that, he happily explained the oil painting that now covered the bonnet, the customs man was so impressed he forgot to inspect the engine.

Then it was his German colleague’s turn; the German customs man, however, showed little interest in art but a great deal in Marek’s passport, he took it into his cubby-hole, stayed there for a long time, finally came out saying, ‘Sorry, you’re under arrest.’

This had to be a joke, said Marek, sounding remarkably lively; the customs man asked for his date of birth just to be on the safe side, nodded yes, there was a search warrant out for this very same Marek Seliger. After they’d taken away his belt and his boots they gave him a cell that was, roughly speaking, three times the size of the mattress in his Dolly, the barred window hardly as big as the new skylight. But why, what was it all about? Although they didn’t know, they did tell him, shrugging, that matters would take their course, was there anyone he wanted to phone? Then Marek, without stopping to think, put his hand in the breast pocket of his jacket and

For the second time, Schepp had reached a point in his reading where he had to stand up and get some air. He was in such a state that he accused Doro to her face of deliberately distorting the facts, of malicious insinuation. Angrily he asked her why she always had to destroy everything, even in death! Now she had gone and spoilt even this sad day for him, maliciously planning it in advance. He had always, he said, suspected her of, in her quiet way, hatching ideas he’d rather not have known about, of laying plans that then, thank God, she didn’t have the courage to put into practice.

Of course he still didn’t know what had been on his wife’s mind year in, year out, but he guessed. He had bravely read through what started as a series of corrections, but became a second text superimposed on his own. Doro must have had some entirely different intention in mind in retelling the story. Not only had she consistently changed Hanni’s name to Dana, she was soon renaming the Blaue Maus La Pfiff, and Wolfi became Paulus at the first opportunity, although in fact she had put Paul, which was officially correct but no one called him that – for two pins Schepp would have got his fountain pen and corrected the correction. In the final passage, on the other hand, where Marek was on the road, in Greece, on the Yugoslavian
autoput
and in jail, Doro started replacing Marek’s name as well. There was no bearing it: ‘Why not at least call him Hinrich?’ she wrote in the margin near where the customs man asked Marek’s date of birth, and on the back of the sheet she added, ‘You’d always have liked to be a Marek, admit it. Someone who for once in his life plays the man and promptly gets his reward. Whereas all your life you’ve only been a genius, one who would rather –’

It was at this point that Schepp had got up. What had been gnawing at Doro, that she assumed such things about him? What had made her play him off against Marek, call him a ‘hopeless case who had never done anything much in life, and so couldn’t have had the faintest hope of finding a Hanni or a Nanni or a Dana or whatever they might be called. Your little daydreams and nocturnal dreams too?’ Here Schepp had finally left off reading, had had to get some air. Probably he ought to have given Doro a slap in the face there and then, and that would have been that.

Shaking his head, he looked at her. Had he been wrong about her his entire life? Had she just been pretending all those years?

‘That can’t be right,’ he protested, startled by the certainty of his tone, and he added quietly, ‘But I always loved you, didn’t I? And don’t I love you still? Won’t I love you for the rest of my life?’

Then he fell silent again, and it was so quiet that he heard a humming, a familiar and homely sound, he thought. A sudden premonition, a suspicion quickly becoming certainty that perhaps Doro didn’t want to be loved by him any longer, grabbed him by the throat. Hell, why had he ever written
Marek the Drunkard
? Why had Doro found the manuscript, why couldn’t she think of anything better to do than read it as a disguised version of the affair that, she was insinuating, he’d had with Dana? A character like Marek had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the married life of Dr Hinrich Schepp, acknowledged as a leading international expert on ancient Chinese script.