apple juice
With a little patience and spit, said Elisabeth, standing up. The digits of the alarm clock at 2:17 AM, down below on Bismarckstrasse the scrape of a bicycle and a mosquito in the room, the summer settled on the roofs. Elisabeth is not a squeamish woman (at first she’d remained dry). I noticed that I was intensely thirsty and Elisabeth’s eventual wetness on my cock was long dry (my own sticky wetness). I first heard the toilet flushing and then the opening and closing of the fridge, Elisabeth was singing “In My Solitude.” Then her singing stopped (it felt as if she were dead). When she returned to the mattress, she pushed me back and kissed me with open lips, from her mouth cold apple juice flowed into me (Elisabeth the woman I’d been waiting for).
Interview (anniversary of a death)
MANDELKERN: So are you a doctor?
TUULI: I’m drunk.
M: What kind of doctor?
T: Surgery. In the Charité.
M: I once read that surgeons are the artisans of the field. Is that true?
T: I’m not a psychologist, I amputate.
M: Really?
T: Yes, Manteli, Lua’s leg was the first body part I cut off. Otherwise Lua wouldn’t be alive today, he would have bled to death ten years ago.
M: I thought Lua had always been here on the lake.
T: Poppycock. Did he tell you that?
M: He did.
T: Svensson changes stories the way other people change shirts. He’s always done that.
M: You’re very young for a doctor.
T: I started early, Manteli, I’m old enough. For surgery and cigarettes, for everything.
M: I’m smoking again too.
T: We’re all going to die.
M: No one said anything about death.
T: I want to tell you something, Manteli: Tänään on se päivä kun hän kuoli.
M: Today is the anniversary of a death?
T: Today death is everywhere. Everything here in Svensson’s house is stories and death. Just take a good look around. The silverware is old, the pictures are of dead animals, the dog will die soon, the access road is overgrown, the chairs are rotten, the house is a ruin. This lake is a grave, and Svensson is sitting on the edge. I can hardly bear it, Manteli. Svensson collects the past so time won’t disappear, so each day isn’t one more day that Felix Blaumeiser is dead, so life won’t go on without him.
M: The anniversary of Felix Blaumeiser’s death?
T: Do you speak Finnish, Manteli?
a match breaks
Tuuli’s hand then suddenly on my chest, our cigarette in her other one. With this beauty rising toward me I miss the sound of the sliding door and the footsteps on the stairs, but Tuuli jumps back decisively just in time and laughs a mocking “Idiootti” into the room (she doesn’t mean me). Svensson is standing in the doorway, to celebrate the occasion, he repeats, showing us the gin bottle in his hand (a somewhat too-long pause), to celebrate this special occasion,
Bombay Sapphire,
and without asking helps himself to a cigarette from my pack (a match breaks). Tuuli’s eyes jump from the bottle to Svensson and back. With the cold cigarette in the corner of his mouth the children’s book author suddenly seems heavier and drunker than he did just minutes ago. He reaches into the cabinet and sets three water glasses on the table. Again he pours, but he’s already lost his sense of moderation, a good deal of gin drips over the rims and onto the table (Tuuli’s lips dashes, Svensson’s cigarette an exclamation point). Tuuli covers the glass with her hand, no-no, she’d prefer red wine.
We drink
to the old days (to the good old days, Tuuli, right?)
to New York Oulu Seraverde (all the places we’ve been, Tuuli!)
to Lua (to the intact Lua, right?)
to Lua’s fourth leg (do you remember?)
to the Europa-Park in Rust (the Euromaus, Tuuli!)
to streamers and party hats (to celebrate the occasion, Mandelkern!)
to the holy Mother of God (Nostra Signora)
to the three of us (he doesn’t mean me).
Shitty City 2000 (20 x 45, oil on canvas)
The gin gives us the shakes and Tuuli takes a cigarette from the pack (the opposite of laughter). Svensson pours more gin into his glass, I decline, he leans his head back like a wolf (his words are howls). Svensson fills my glass anyway, Tuuli holds her red wine in her hand. I give her a light, we smoke (a certain nausea). When Svensson finally proposes a toast to “the boy and his pretty, because innocent, mother and his father, whoever he may be,” Tuuli’s glass flies across the table and shatters on the picture behind Svensson (a bloody wine stain on the faces). This night is over. Tuuli has closed the door behind her.
Caesarean Risk
On steady feet back into my room (despite the gin not incoherently drunk). My Süddeutsche is still lying on the desk, and instead of describing the wine on the kitchen wall now (heart-shaped, as if it were viscous), I open my notebook again, before my eyes the article and in my head Elisabeth’s vertical surgical scar, from which all the bluishness had already faded when I first touched it. First a vertical incision is made, she said, then in the deeper layers of skin a perpendicular one. We lay on the floorboards in my apartment. She’d already given up long before the doctors decided on the caesarean. Elisabeth speaks soberly about her body. The anesthesiologist had read her the consent form and handed it to her to sign (first epidural anesthesia, later even general anesthetic). Due to the heart sounds it had to be done quickly, another doctor on one side and the midwife on the other had pulled open her belly (she said: they tore me open). She hadn’t seen anything. At this point she’d already suspected the death of the child, probably her own too, after signing she’d already regarded her own body as cold, as if she had signed it away (as if the anesthesiologist were God). She had provided this signature, said Elisabeth, with a promotional ballpoint pen for Sedotussin cough syrup (she said: provided), she remembered exactly. The scars had healed fast, merely a few weeks of profuse discharge, then she had been herself again. I asked where her husband had been at that time. Elisabeth’s reply: it was never fully clear to me how all these things hung together (today she’d want to call that “lucky under the circumstances”).
Svensson’s books
I rest my feet on Svensson’s suitcase and listen to the rattle of the dishwashing in the kitchen (Svensson is cleaning up). Then Frisch again with his Montaigne (THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN IN GOOD FAITH, READER), then The Great Encyclopedia of Dog Breeds, then Johnson’s “cat called memory” again (pets, says Elisabeth, are an admission of interpersonal failure and cats unhealthy during pregnancy). Macumba is moored to a buoy, the moon is shining over the water, the oleander is wilting, the chairs are waiting. I’m sitting in front of my notebook and have tried to write Elisabeth’s and my story in good faith, but my sentences dry up under my fingers. Occasionally my words can hold a candle to the world, for a moment they mean everything,
but that lasts only an instant,
and this thought too is only pilfered. The room smells of damp stone, even though it isn’t raining (the roof is cracked). Again the thought of Elisabeth and the assignment she has given me, for a moment I’d like to call her, we have important things to talk about, but my telephone is in my suitcase at the Hotel Lido Seegarten. I’m drunk once again, too drunk for research, I can only speculate. I should put aside my pen, I could break open the suitcase, my questions remain: