Next World Novella Read online

  Even when the children were still at home, and he was glad to get an hour or two in the evenings to devote to the heroic tales of the Tang dynasty or the brushstrokes of Song calligraphy, Doro had sometimes, surprisingly, come back out of her bedroom and over to him at his desk to – well, to say or do what? He had never known what to make of it, and if he asked her for an explanation she quite often went away looking offended. As if she had wanted to bring him out of his shell. Yet these kind of approaches had never been helpful. You have to tackle difficulties head on, systematically, and what use was it now – Schepp was back in the full flow of his perorations, once again speaking emphatically and clearly like a tutor lecturing a difficult examination candidate – what use was it now to drop Dana’s name at the very first opportunity and then abandon him with it? Things have to make sense before they can be cleared up, right?

  The Dana business was long ago and forgotten now. Still, at the very least, you should begin at the beginning to leave no room for doubt. And anyway, this wasn’t how he had imagined their farewell, so full of misunderstandings. The beginning had certainly been his operation. No, actually it had all started in his childhood. Even at the age of five he spent most of his time with books, his glasses would have only got in the way playing football. Yes, it had all started in his childhood, which had consisted mostly of being teased. At least he couldn’t be beaten up; he was so short-sighted that he was thought unable to defend himself, almost on a par with a girl. And if it hadn’t started in his childhood then definitely in his youth, a time of renunciation. Where his contemporaries succeeded, he stood aside. Luckily the details eluded him because he saw anything that was more than three to five metres away only in indistinct outline. Of course he noticed that something was going on. He just didn’t let on, learned another language instead. And although at university he was at last considered a genius and quietly admired, he still always had to stand aside when the real prizes were handed out.

  Admittedly his tranquil life as a research fellow rather than a university professor had its advantages; he didn’t have to bother with feminist Sinology, or modern business Chinese or even online-chat Chinese, all ghastly prospects for a committed scholar like him, devoted to the study of primary sources. You could escape such horrors only by burying yourself in the ancient texts. Nevertheless he had loved life in his own guarded way, and after all he had been lucky once. Although looking back he couldn’t understand why a woman like Dorothee Wilhelmine Renate, Countess von Hagelstein had chosen him. Then, in the summer of 2003, after more than two wonderful peaceful decades with her, on his doctor’s advice, he had laser surgery on his eyes. Whereupon the tranquillity ended.

  It was terrible to see the world in such detail, so sharply outlined, all of a sudden! It had always been so comfortably impersonal in its remote milkiness; Schepp hadn’t felt he was missing anything. Now it dazzled him with a confusingly large number of details – could someone like Doro, who had never had any problems with her eyes, ever have imagined that? Overnight his life seemed like one long missed opportunity. If he had previously renounced a great deal, never complained, he was now determined to make up for it. Schepp developed a need for other people which he had never believed possible. He wanted to participate in just about everything, at least as a spectator. And because of all these needs and wants, peace of mind became a thing of the past.

  First he encountered afresh his hand-picked coterie of students. Then he realized that it was possible to go to a nearby bar or café after seminars to continue their conversations in a more informal setting, and to develop relationships. Oh, Schepp was so curious about everything and everyone. He was as hungry for the world as if anything that had satisfied him before no longer counted. As if he had to reinvent himself from scratch and prove himself like a man who had no more excuses left. Not that he had serious ambitions, heaven forbid! But to be open and receptive to everything that previously had been out of sight, out of reach – up to a point, of course; after all, Schepp was married – well, to be receptive to everything there was to be seen and perhaps studied more closely, he should expect that of himself, shouldn’t he?

  Then came a hot, humid July evening. The unworldly scholar had turned into a positive charmer and in the protective circle of his students had become familiar with the few bars around the Free University campus. A PhD student had suggested the dimly lit La Pfiff because it was delightfully empty. This is the moment when Dana appears in the picture, although at the time of course no one knew her name; she was merely an unknown woman standing at the bar. At first glance a woman in a trouser suit, everything about her luxurious, accompanied by a gentleman and another lady. At second glance a woman with short hair neatly parted, strikingly pale skin, alarmingly large eye sockets with weary dark eyes. When she turned her bony face with its prominent cheekbones towards the man on her left or the lady on her right, that was sufficiently exciting for a man like Schepp.

  And then suddenly he saw her in the arms of the man – no, really the man was in hers – he was unable to fend her off. Schepp drained his glass of red wine in a single swallow. His PhD students could discuss what they liked, he had eyes only for the unknown woman. She surely was going to kiss the man right into the ground any moment now. Then she calmly raised her right leg – or was it her left leg? Made no difference – and wrapped it around his hips, drawing him closer, her tongue working in his mouth unabated as if she wanted to devour him there and then. The next moment, however, she was pushing him away, turning from him to the lady, who had been watching with interest, and smiling.

  That ought to have been enough for one evening. But then came the kiss between the two women! At first Schepp was sure his eyes must be deceiving him when he saw the unknown woman in the arms of the other lady, whom she did not just allow to kiss her – by now he really couldn’t believe his eyes – oh no! The lady bit the unknown woman’s neck. When she finally moved away, Schepp saw a mark on the skin. A dark blue tattoo the size of an one-euro coin. A few moments later they were all three standing at the bar as if nothing had happened. Schepp’s mouth was dry. For the rest of the evening he couldn’t help looking over at them frequently, especially at the alluring unknown woman. Soon he was certain about the sign. It sat right over one of the tendons at her throat, small enough to move every time she turned her head, and she turned her head frequently.

  Just once that evening her eyes met his, staring him down, forcing him to look away – what a humiliation – before they went on scanning the room. When she finally left with the other two, heading out into a night seemingly so vast that Schepp felt he could see the stars sparkling from where he sat, she passed close to him, and at last he could recognize the sign on her neck, a Chinese character. As he tried to decipher it, he almost became frightened, for he realized that he had seen it often, but where? The curve of the brushstroke was familiar, although it had not been elegantly executed as a tattoo; it was the sign for … what? Schepp mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. It took him some time to realize that such a coincidence was not the work of Fate, least of all deliberately arranged for him. And that he too could go home now.

  After that he dreamt of the sign at night. When Doro regarded him inquiringly during the day he looked down at the floor, ashamed. What could he have said to her? That evening an extraordinary thing had occurred in his life, a life that so far had known only an extraordinary absence of experience. From then on he kept a frequent eye on the scene of this event to see if there would be a sequel. Oh, he had no ambitions of his own; it would only have been a case of looking, of participating in something he imagined as the simultaneous height of depravity and of bliss.

  The devotion he had always received at home now became almost like a burden. He avoided it as much as he could. Yet it was Doro who solved the puzzle of the tattoo: as he sat in her room one afternoon at their usual time with a pot of green tea, his eye fell on the sign quite by chance. There it was among the other sixty-three signs of the
I Ching; Doro had hung them on the wall here as well. Schepp stood right in front it; he couldn’t possibly miss it. How beautiful it was when written by a master of calligraphy! He immediately asked Doro whether he could borrow one of her commentaries, if possible the Southern Commentaries, if she could spare the book. Doro raised an eyebrow in surprise. But how could he have explained himself?

  Having found the sign and studied it almost daily, his peace of mind was definitely gone. The unknown woman, however, stood him up evening after evening, though he became a regular at the bar, exchanging banter with this or that member of the staff. Paul, the manager, a jovial soul in his late forties with a well-tended moustache, known to everyone as Paulus, would greet him with, ‘Evening, Professor, doing okay, are we?’ Paulus spent most of the evening behind the bar, an equable presence washing up glasses as if the goings-on were beneath his notice. La Pfiff was not plugged into the cultured bohemian milieu of the digital age; customers came in and either backed straight out again or didn’t leave until hours later. By midnight everyone had both argued and fraternized with everyone else. In his own fashion, anyway, Schepp became part of it.

  It was useful that La Pfiff was within walking distance of his apartment. The regular course of his days now gave way to an irregularity that in the end became routine, although it was the opposite of the former kind. Hitherto a man of the old school who combed his remaining hair over his bald patch and vacillated between melancholy and megalomania, Schepp took to shaving his head, chose colourful handkerchiefs for his breast pocket, bought stronger aftershave, gained a certain authority with the occasional clever quibble that earned him a laugh – oh, he was tired of his reasonable mind. He hardly did any research; soon he wasn’t even publishing, and there was an admixture of mockery in the respectful empathy he now encountered from his full-time colleagues at the University. He once even overheard someone calling him Professor Unrat, after the nickname – Professor Garbage – of Professor Raat, the protagonist of Heinrich Mann’s novel. What did PhD students know about anything anyway? He also, and for the first time, offered an introductory course on the I Ching, much to the surprise of Doro, whom he now only ever saw when they drank tea together in the afternoon.

  It could probably have gone on like this for ever. But then she reappeared – the woman of whom he thought every day with a shiver of admiration. Schepp had long given up any hope of seeing her again, but when he entered La Pfiff one evening he almost stumbled into her. There was no doubt, it was definitely her. With that Chinese character tattooed on her throat she was unmistakably branded. For a Sinologist, that was not a coincidence, but had been arranged by Fate especially for him, the only one there who understood the sign. She was standing at the bar with a tray in her hands on which Paulus was placing a round of drinks. She had come back.

  This time to work as a waitress.

  Her name was Dana, and she was from Poland ‘or somewhere in the east’. Paulus knew almost nothing about her. No, he couldn’t remember ever having seen her at La Pfiff before. Or if he did he wasn’t saying, and Schepp was careful not to mention it. For the rest of the evening he watched her as casually as he could; he was bound to glance at a new waitress now and then. Once more their eyes met briefly, once more hers rested on him without any interest. When she served him she even asked the same question she had asked at the table next to his:

  Where had a nice lad like him left his girlfriend this evening?

  Schepp gulped down the contents of his glass so that he could order another drink quickly. This time he asked her straight out about her tattoo, saying he had seen her here in the summer, he was certain that he knew her.

  In her charming accent Dana replied that she knew him and his sort too, and particularly that trick; he’d have to think up something subtler.

  ‘Oh, please!’ objected Schepp. It wasn’t like that at all, as a Sinologist he must protest, he’d have known a sign like the one on her neck with his eyes closed! He would in fact have liked to have leapt to his feet and bitten her right on that spot. He didn’t say that, of course. Instead he asked whether she knew what a fateful mark she was carrying, an oracular pronouncement of which Kung Tze himself had said –

  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 …