To this day he goes there often.
I see, responded Lady Erna, who wasn’t especially fond of her husband’s favorite students and found interesting only those who visibly disliked or positively detested him.
Now I understand, she added with a certain reserve. And what’s the name of the young man, she asked. I mean the name of your son.
Himself in the Magic Mirror
He could not go back during the next few days because of the steady quiet rain. Or rather, it was as if the fog were drizzling. It did not want to stop. On days like these, the city fills up with vapors, heavy clouds settle on it, and under the wheels of automobiles the rain sizzles steadily.
Döhring waited for it to stop.
Standing by the window, he was staring at the slowly bursting bubbles of the raindrops. He was gazing at this simple phenomenon obeying the simple laws of physics, and drew the conclusion that he had not gone out of his mind. He could endure this. Perhaps he’d manage to separate his continuous dream from his normal life. At least he had left no trace of anything; he’d cleaned up everything. He hoped there’d be no consequences. No telephone rang. Even if it did, he wouldn’t pick it up, because the state of emergency still made his soul shudder. He did not go downstairs to check the mail. He wouldn’t find anything but junk mail anyway. Before stepping out of here into the hostile outside world, he wished to return to that rational self of his that perhaps never existed.
Now he knew.
He took out a map to study his innocent outings of the previous days.
Maps are rational objects; they deal with physical differences based on observation and are checked with precise measurements.
The body of water he had discovered on his first day in Berlin was probably Teufelssee, Devil’s Lake.
He found a similar small lake on the map called Pechsee, Pitch Lake, probably because of its dark water. He couldn’t decide with absolute certainty which of the two was the one he had been to. On his second excursion, however, he definitely rode as far as the Havel river, next to the Grunewald Tower. While studying the interconnected blue spots of lakes and rivers on the map, he had an irresistible urge to go to the water, to be on the move, to swim, to feel his limbs.
Let the water wash the night out of his skin.
Not to smell the shit anymore.
There were other kinds of lake on the map. But the rain would not let up. His aunt’s top-floor apartment was just under the roof. It had only five rooms and only one of these was disproportionately larger than the rest. An empty, evenly bright, barn-size room that the sun never penetrated. One wall, sectioned by densely set high windows, faced north, and from here one could step out on a balcony larger than the floor space of the entire apartment.
The rain clouds were coming from the north, hopelessly and heavily, one could not see their end. The northerly sky was divided by the dark stripes of the vertical structural beams. He could see far above the roofs, but nothing else. For security reasons, the solid white brick baluster had been built high enough to make leaning over it impossible. Originally, this is where his aunt wanted to store her collection of paintings, but then she and her agent found the bank in Düsseldorf more secure. Only a single, rather insignificant item from the entire collection was placed on the empty white wall, under the dark-colored, arced beams.
It felt as if one were standing in an empty church nave. And what was interesting was that on the painting itself there was nothing to be seen but white walls and beams, a fire and colorful flames, or something like that.
On this long and eventless rainy morning Döhring purchased those small, translucent underpants he has been wearing ever since. More precisely, that’s when he bought the first two, a purple one and a sulphur-yellow one.
Later he returned to the store several times to buy himself a turquoise one, two different red ones, more in black, green, purple, and even silver. And they were not inexpensive. He was sorry he had to leave all the others in the store. Buying them had become a mysterious passion that he was trying to keep a secret from himself.
Already on the very first occasion, he would have wanted to purchase a pink one but didn’t dare, not then and not afterward. There were colors he simply denied himself.
Had he bought it, he might as well have changed his skin.
But that was exactly what he didn’t dare do; instead, he bought the others.
Perhaps, originally, he did not even go out that morning to go shopping. He did not need any underpants. In general, he did not buy things for himself; he wasn’t even present when shoes were bought for him. His stepmother, a passionate shopper, especially at big sales, bought everything for him, and from his aunt he kept receiving finer items. This apparently sensible division of labor between the two women was also a kind of sly competition. One flaunted her frugality, the other her generosity. He had to do nothing to maintain and enlarge his wardrobe, and he wasn’t really interested in it; he had grown used to being cared for by the two women. Perhaps this is what made him so dependent and was also the reason he eventually let himself be seduced by a third one.
On the rainy street, among umbrella-carrying pedestrians, it occurred to him he might need better bathing trunks. One thinks of lots of things that luckily one forgets in the next moment.
He found the store somewhere behind Wittenberg Square; in the store window, torsos sunk in sand and rolled-away heads were lying about.
As soon as he entered, the salesgirl unerringly sensed the lost country boy in him. She pounced on him at the door with a fawning, well-rehearsed sales pitch, oh yes, those splendid little bathing suits, of course, and she’d also have something special to recommend. Would the gentleman follow her, please. One would think that underwear was really a little nothing, a small piece of colored artificial fabric, without realizing that the simplest things demand the most refined art.
Döhring not only had no idea that he had wandered into the city’s most expensive undergarment establishment but was also unaware that here they sold underwear made to the most exceptional requirements, and to satisfy these requirements they were willing to go to great lengths, the sky was the limit.
There is this brand-new material, the salesgirl was explaining, evenly and with great enthusiasm, while quickly and purposefully leading him into the spacious, mysterious interior of the store. It’s called living, breathing polyurethane, the realized dream of the age, if one may put it that way. It is the first synthetic that successfully combines the positive characteristics of natural materials with those of artificial ones.
It’s the invention of the century, and of course we can thank several earlier scientific achievements for its existence. It is thin, easy to wash, prevents perspiration, dries in seconds, dries in the natural warmth of the body without stifling the skin in the least, and because it is like silk or velvet to the touch, it never causes a rash. It’s available in every hue on the color scale; its design is so clever and handsome it can be worn as either underpants or swimming trunks, which makes it very comfortable; one might say it frees one from the last inconvenience and, what’s more, from the least inhibition, which, until now, in the absence of this material, no designer had managed to solve.
This was nothing less than a hit at the very center of the bull’s-eye. As a result, we now have a wide-pored, breathing, elastic material, silky to the touch, willing to adhere to the body as a second layer of skin.
She is confident in claiming that this material can perform miracles on the body.
It will not expand, won’t lose its shape, won’t lose its color. One wears it as one’s own epidermis, and would never be caught in the embarrassing situation in which one couldn’t undress in anyone’s company, at any time.