Daniel Mandelkern?
In the afternoon Elisabeth will be going for a run along the canal, singing Celentano (Isekanal). The summer of 2003 was a summer of record-breaking heat. I know where my name comes from: my parents called themselves Mandler (they had to flee anyway). Elisabeth calls orgasms milky moments. I never liked telemarketing. Ethnology is a science, it’s about the eye of a stranger on human groups. My grandfather is said to have gone bald too (on my mother’s side). It’s not up for discussion, Elisabeth said, I’m wearing red when we get married! Genealogically I’m not Jewish, but I am circumcised. Elisabeth is five years older than I, but doesn’t look it, she says: I have a great metabolism. I’m not a practicing Catholic, but I remember my first confession. To write about art is art. In Hamburg I’ve moved four times: Dithmarscher Strasse, Schulterblatt, Marthastrasse, Bismarckstrasse, and I’ve always lived with women. My father’s marriage to the youngest daughter of a member of the Quickborn Catholic youth movement in postwar Essen was problematic solely due to the age difference (he died in 1974, she in 1990). I’ve slept with twelve women. I speak German, English, a little bit of French, Swedish, Finnish, miserable Italian. To write about sports is art too. I manage as everyone manages. Elisabeth has stopped taking the pill, now she wants to have a child. I want you to decide, she says.
Why a children’s book?
Svensson steers the boat slowly and in wide curves across the smooth lake. The dog lifts his foreleg onto the railing and barks at the water’s surface (focused and dull as if something were there). Svensson puts his hand on the dog’s head. When a gray motorboat approaches, Svensson says customs, passports (Guardia di Finanza). He decelerates with a quick hand motion, the motor sputters, there’s a smell of gas (multihued streaks on the smooth water). Macumba drifts on the lake. Here is the deepest point, Svensson says to the boy, 288 meters, no light penetrates down there, down there all the fish are white. The boy slowly makes his way to the middle of the boat (can children conceive of depth?). We have our passports ready, but the man at the steering wheel sees Svensson and the black dog, he shouts something Italian, Svensson shouts back. Both give a thumbs-up. The customs boat turns away with a deep roar of its motor, Macumba rocks alarmingly.
I had a fleeting acquaintance with Elisabeth
She entered the office, ABC Market and Opinion Polls, a tight Union Jack T-shirt over a pregnant belly (short hair, a dark henna red), and for a whole autumn sat two computers down from me every day, including Sundays. Sometimes I listened to her, she was efficient. We rarely talked (I smoked on the balcony during the break, she drank tea in the kitchen), and when it got too cold to smoke on the balcony, it must have been November 1996, overnight she became my superior for the first time (supervisor). One evening after work, as I walked through the snow a few meters behind her on the way to the Hamburger Strasse U-Bahn station, she sang softly to herself, “There are some who are in darkness / And the others are in light / And you see the ones in brightness / Those in darkness drop from sight.” A few weeks later she was gone. Our colleagues assumed the child had been born. On the supermarket studies she’d been the best interviewer from the start, the manager said later in a training session, her voice had exactly the right register for market research, a frequency that sang resistance to pieces.
master of chairs, master of chickens
Svensson spreads his arms. This is where we live, he says (a children’s book author and his three-legged dog). A narrow but tall stone house surrounded by cypresses, an oleander, and a gigantic sycamore. Svensson has moored Macumba to the dock and helps us ashore one after another: first Tuuli, then the boy, then me, and finally the dog. In front of us there’s a stone table and two stone benches covered with moss and pine needles (the benches shouldered by lions), next to them garden chairs with flaking white lacquer. Stainless garden chairs, an inflatable plastic armchair (blue, not much air). Also: wicker chairs, a few wooden chairs with warped and cracked plywood seats (on two of them large stones), next to them garden lounge chairs with mildewed cushions, also bare lounge chairs. And still more: a chair made of green lacquered metal (with canvas upholstery), folding chairs made of pale red wood, a granite table with two granite benches, white plastic chairs, blue plastic chairs, pink plastic chairs, four green children’s chairs with a red children’s table. There are terra-cotta pots, intact ones and broken ones, big ones and small ones, upright ones, overturned ones, empty ones and planted ones (tomatoes, herbs, kumquats). There’s a circular saw and a stack of gray plastic pipes and rain gutters, next to them bags of cement. Behind and off to the side of the house a shed, next to the shed the garbage: a heap of black plastic bags, cardboard boxes, a boat’s mast, a printer and a computer monitor with smashed screen (a surprised mouth, toothless). On a jutting branch of the gigantic sycamore hangs a child’s wooden swing, a basketball hoop is screwed to the trunk. Under it a Ping-Pong table (I could challenge Svensson).
against the fox
Svensson leads us around the property. A small blue car with open driver’s-side door is parked at the edge of the woods (FIAT 128 Sport L), covered in ivy and moss. Standing on the Fiat are two bored roosters (brown, white). Svensson introduces them: This is William Wordsworth, he says, and here we have Robby Naish. Under the oleander another chicken is pecking around in the wilted flowers on the ground. Daisy Duck, says Svensson, the hen. The white rooster crows, the boy laughs: cock-a-doodle-doo. Tuuli kneels next to him and, shaking her head, watches Svensson scatter seeds in the Fiat and slam the door. For a home, says Svensson, you need seventy-seven chairs, three chickens and a dog to guard against the fox.
Heiligengeistfeld
At first we didn’t recognize each other. Because her hair was long and the T-shirt with the British flag long since discarded, five years later Elisabeth and I again worked for months in the same building without talking to each other (I never managed to find the T-shirt). Then it was she who rammed her tray into my back in the Gruner + Jahr cafeteria at noon and didn’t apologize until early evening in the Baumwall U-Bahn station. She recited the prescribed salutation of the market and opinion polling company: Hello-my-name-is, I’m-calling-on-behalf-of, jogging my memory (her voice sings resistance to pieces). We talked about this and that, such as the port (the launches and cruise ships), her editorial department (Brigitte culture section) and my freelance work (GEOkompakt). Elisabeth seemed glad to see me, but when I asked her how long it had been since our sad interlude in market research (Esso, Wal-Mart), her child must already be five by now, between St. Pauli and Heiligengeistfeld Elisabeth suddenly said that she had to get off here, here was her home (she actually said: here is my home!), even though she’d previously mentioned the Generals’ Quarter.
Yoko Mono
Elisabeth is a sober woman. She steered me through that evening and through the things that had to be clarified, places of residence, visions, and finally bodies. The whole time she looked me in the eyes (her voice a taxi). I’d jumped off the train behind her, and then she’d taken me along to a bar on Markt-strasse (Yoko Mono). She ordered wine, Barbera, she called out, with her right hand she bunched up her hair and tucked it behind her ears. I’d already gotten used to her face. When I quoted from an old book after the third glass (red hair, red hair, I tear it out, make a broom to fly about), she looked at me, lifted her glass to her mouth, and I noticed for the first time her swallow and her delicate neck. She undid one of her hairpins and took a calculable risk as she quoted the saying “rusty roof, damp cellar.” Several blocks farther, she nonetheless said goodbye to me for now without a touch (at the corner of Bismarckstrasse and Scheideweg, of all places). We could see each other tomorrow afternoon in the cafeteria, she said.