the ethnological phenomenon of the informant switch
I’ve misjudged the weather conditions. As Tuuli’s imprint on me slowly disappears and the smoke disperses, I sit down at the desk, my feet on Svensson’s suitcase. My wedding ring is still lying on the two black folders. I’ve gotten into a situation that I wasn’t expecting. I didn’t resist (vodka and the possibility of another life). Nonetheless, everything remains as always: the pigeon droppings, and the swallows are flying again, higher than they were earlier this morning. I hear the rubberized closing of the refrigerator door, Bella’s squealing, the two women’s English. Svensson has gone to the village with the boy and the dog. I’m an ethnologist and literary scholar, I’ve learned to distinguish between text and life (I’ve forgotten what I learned). I should write that I don’t know these people, but I’ve stumbled into Svensson’s manuscript, I’ve kissed one of his characters and have just shook another one’s hand. From the kitchen Bella’s noise and the smell of onions in butter (ethnology increasingly differentiates itself from neighboring disciplines through the method of participant observation rather than through its focus on the so-called “culturally alien” as its object of investigation, Spittler 2001, if I remember correctly). I wonder:
— Have I lost scientific distance toward the object of the investigation?
— What does all this have to do with me?
the limits of the text
What is not in Svensson’s manuscript: whether Svensson and Kiki ever reached Montauk. What drove them back to Europe. When they decided to step out of time. How old Lua is. Whether Svensson has stepped out of time at all. Felix Blaumeiser is dead, I’ve been able to find that out, but not where he’s buried. Why Tuuli works in Berlin but was sitting, of all places, in my airport bus at the Hamburg Airport, why our journeys then led to the same destination (her lips on mine, my lips on hers).
onions in butter
Elisabeth’s and my honeymoon ended in a Polish hotel in the Kolberg (Kołobrzeg) Old City, the rooms in the back facing the courtyard, below the bedroom window a single sheep. The town house that had belonged to Elisabeth’s grandparents was on the other side of the street, in the garden hung a Polish flag on a rickety pole. The plaster was flaking off the walls, the old windows had been replaced by thermal panes in plastic frames, behind a curtain in a small bay window stood a child, observing us. This is where they lived, said Elisabeth, number 17, in the back of the house was my grandfather’s practice. Elisabeth and I walked up and down the bank of the Persante (Parseta), we ate dinner at an inn, herring in oil, potatoes and beer. We could have lived here, I said, if it hadn’t been for the war, for example, if not for this and if not for that, and Elisabeth smiled and kissed me. That, she declared, is nonsense, though charming. You couldn’t escape the past, that was obvious, but we shouldn’t forget the future on account of that. Crossroads were crossroads, and decisions were decisions, Elisabeth took my hand: she had decided on me and on now. After the third beer she kissed me again and longer (the taste of onions in butter). The Poles at the bar saw in us nostalgia tourists of the third generation, not honeymooners, the food was mediocre, and the men’s eyes were hostile, they hadn’t reckoned with Elisabeth’s beauty. The next morning she rolled up the red wedding dress, we brushed our teeth, the water tasted like metal. Heading back westward, we drove over cobblestones, across the border of the voivodeship, later through the tree-lined streets of Mecklenburg, we picked apples and bought cider in plastic bottles on the roadside. As we rolled onto the Priwall ferry, Elisabeth took her phone out of the glove compartment, turned it on and declared our future open (that’s how she expressed herself). Now I’m sitting in Svensson’s house at Svensson’s desk, but nonetheless hear Elisabeth bustling about in the kitchen, the sound of uncorked red wine bottles in our possible kitchens in Hamburg, Kolberg or Saint-Malo, in Venasque or Sausset-les-Pins, in New York as far as I’m concerned, maybe Lugano, in one of our possible lives. I hear the sound of my name from her mouth (Daniel Daniel), her precise, earnest laughter, I see her hair and her scars, the light skin of her body, easy to imagine as the body of a mother, her thin and nonetheless strong arms, her hair pulled back, Elisabeth always ties and pins her hair off her neck, the vein on her forehead, now her lips on mine (our bodies did fit after all), and from the kitchen a woman calls my name,
Manteli, Manteli,
but I don’t move, I don’t allow myself to be interrupted. Shh, replies Kiki’s voice in English, let him sleep (even though I’m not sleeping), and Bella’s sounds mingle with the hiss of the gas stove and the sizzling fat, with the clacking of the knife and the stirring of the spoons, with the onion and butter vapors, with Wordsworth in the oven and Naish in the soup, with the outboards on the lake and the pigeons on the roof, with the soft and ever softer voices of the two women in Svensson’s house, in Svensson’s book, in Svensson’s life.
our professionalism
Elisabeth and I had arranged to meet in the late afternoon at Café Paris near the Hamburg city hall marketplace, it must have been in the autumn of 2004. There was something to celebrate, she’d said on the phone. We ordered Ricard and merguez frites, then she informed me that I could begin in the editorial department, though I’d have to be more readily available than I’d been up to that point (Elisabeth doesn’t hesitate). In the winter of 2003 I’d offered a feature and two profiles to Elisabeth’s department, all three had been bought and printed (“Michael Moore and Peter Krieg: Didactic Montage in Documentary Film” the editors turned into “Michael Moore’s Krieg”). That isn’t going to work, I said, pouring water into Elisabeth’s anise liqueur, Professor Jansen is demanding the exact same thing for my dissertation, on top of that there’s the work in the witch archive and at GEO. The waiter placed the merguez between us. Here too Elisabeth pinned a strand of her hair back from her forehead, this might be the chance of your life, Daniel. She had even been able to negotiate a steady salary. As an ethnologist, after all, I couldn’t necessarily expect always to earn enough money to afford life in Central Europe. Elisabeth laughed, I knocked back the Ricard. Or did I want to go to Tanzania to do field research like Hornberg? Elisabeth licked the grease off her slender fingers and ordered more wine, we ate, I reflected, we drank. And here was the best part, she added: she herself would be my direct superior, wouldn’t that just be crazy, Mandelkern? The momentary reflex to have to reject her offer (the crumpled-up napkin on Elisabeth’s plate a mushroom cloud). I have only the last third of my dissertation left to write and can definitely imagine staying at the university, I said (Jansen had already hinted at the possibility several times). Elisabeth said that I could always imagine lots of things, she’d relieve me of the decision for now. You can’t eat possibilities, Mandelkern, eventualities aren’t enough to fill us up! The way she imagined our working together, we could connect work and private life, our marriage could be a symbiosis.
my dissertation
Elisabeth and I came to an agreement that same night on my regular freelance position in her department (we always come to an agreement). Not without a twinge of melancholy I quit my glossarist job, I cleared my desk in the witch archive, and explained the new situation to Professor Jansen. The main thing, he urged me in his office in the Museum of Ethnology, is that you don’t hesitate too long, Daniel. In 2006 I’m retiring, and by then we should have put your project behind us. Immediately after the conversation I rode my bike to Elisabeth’s office and from there took the train directly to Munich and Berlin and back to Hamburg, jumping right into writing a story about suicides in opera houses and theaters. During the first months I read my ethnological essays in train compartments, cafés, and airport waiting areas and worked on my dissertation on weekends. When Jansen asked me about new pages at our occasional lunches together, I strung him along (he read my articles in the newspaper and knew that my explanations were excuses). Then I wrote him a letter by hand and requested a break, the balancing act between journalistic and academic writing had temporarily become an unproductive situation. In the everyday routine of newspaper reporting, though, there were always new opportunities for shorter field studies, I wrote, so I would by no means lose sight of ethnology and my topic. Therefore, I would ask him not to write me off. I read the letter to Elisabeth before I sent it. Strangeness, she laughed, really is your specialty, Mandelkern.