Next World Novella Read online

  ‘You’ve earned yourself a night with me,’ says Hanni, her brown eyes sparkling with all the little gold flecks in them, not indifferent or joking, dead serious. Imagine that! Marek looks at her, or really he looks through her, he sees her – or doesn’t see her – turning away and smiling the way she’s only ever smiled at others, never before at him. As if suddenly he wasn’t still wet behind the ears.

  That night Marek parked in the middle of the traffic island, where he wasn’t woken up by the noise of the rush-hour traffic but by the cops. It would be the first of many encounters between him and the Federal authorities, although they never found any illegal substances in his Dolly van. And least of all Hanni, because deep down Marek was afraid that he had misunderstood her and if he approached her to claim his night she’d only laugh at him for being still wet behind the ears. It was the first of many nights he spent avoiding making his claim.

  Next evening Hanni was acting outrageously normal, nothing to suggest she’d said that totally incredible thing and magically bound one of the customers to her – or however it was that Marek felt while he waited in silence. Whenever he came in to the Maus we could see how awkward he felt and it got worse when Hanni went over to him. Even if she only said one word to him, he was totally speechless. Overnight everything had changed, everything he saw, heard, thought about here. Poor old Marek, we thought, grinning at him from the bar, the brightest of us analyzing him – sharp as a set of knives, we were. His quiet contentment, the sort that accompanies constant hopeless adoration, had been replaced by simple moodiness, we concluded. Or something along those lines.

  Anyway, Marek really set about drinking now; he was the first to arrive in the Maus, and when the buzz and bustle of the place went flat around five in the morning he was the last to order a final beer. But he didn’t really enjoy it any more, you could see that, he even developed an overwhelming grudge against Mutt. Some nights he stayed away, and instead – we knew this from Wolfi, as manager he was duty-bound to gossip – he drove around in his Dolly until his eyes closed of their own accord. If he turned up in the Maus again the next evening or the evening after that, he didn’t tell us anything. Rumour had it that he did some long-haul driving for various jobs; seems he was doing the lighting for a one-man show and travelled either ahead of or behind it on tour. Someone or other said he’d seen him scavenging on a scrap heap like before; he was painting his red Dolly van black, he didn’t answer questions, all he might say, reluctantly, was, ‘I’m not doing DIY stuff, I’m working.’ Others said … oh, there were so many rumours about Marek that finally we stopped wondering about him.

  And what about Hanni? She had better things to do than bother with lads that didn’t have a regular job, didn’t even have a proper roof over their heads. Autumn came. And winter. When Marek had finished doing up his home by punching a skylight in the roof of the Dolly, he drove off to Greece to see his fiancée, the one he’d been with or rather hadn’t been with for a year and a half, probably so that she could sort him out. On the other hand Wolfi claimed that Marek carried Hanni’s phone number around all the time like a talisman, and when drunk enough he’d shown it at the bar, so he’d obviously kept it. He said it was simply because he didn’t have another jacket, just the one into whose breast pocket he’d put the piece of paper that day.

  Perhaps that’s why it all worked out so badly for Marek in the end. Anyway he was back from Greece after only three months. Even if he had to drive most of the way on one cylinder, taking gradients against the wind, hair-raising stuff – as we found out later, much later, when we heard the entire story, all the details – and most likely no one but Marek would have made it. In Salzburg the Austrian customs did him over good and proper; Marek was used to that, he happily explained the oil painting that now covered the bonnet, the customs man was so impressed he forgot to inspect the engine.

  Then it was his German colleague’s turn; the German customs man, however, showed little interest in art but a great deal in Marek’s passport, he took it into his cubby-hole, stayed there for a long time, finally came out saying, ‘Sorry, you’re under arrest.’

  This had to be a joke, said Marek, sounding remarkably lively; the customs man asked for his date of birth just to be on the safe side, nodded yes, there was a search warrant out for this very same Marek Seliger. After they’d taken away his belt and his boots they gave him a cell that was, roughly speaking, three times the size of the mattress in his Dolly, the barred window hardly as big as the new skylight. But why, what was it all about? Although they didn’t know, they did tell him, shrugging, that matters would take their course, was there anyone he wanted to phone? Then Marek, without stopping to think, put his hand in the breast pocket of his jacket and

  For the second time, Schepp had reached a point in his reading where he had to stand up and get some air. He was in such a state that he accused Doro to her face of deliberately distorting the facts, of malicious insinuation. Angrily he asked her why she always had to destroy everything, even in death! Now she had gone and spoilt even this sad day for him, maliciously planning it in advance. He had always, he said, suspected her of, in her quiet way, hatching ideas he’d rather not have known about, of laying plans that then, thank God, she didn’t have the courage to put into practice.

  Of course he still didn’t know what had been on his wife’s mind year in, year out, but he guessed. He had bravely read through what started as a series of corrections, but became a second text superimposed on his own. Doro must have had some entirely different intention in mind in retelling the story. Not only had she consistently changed Hanni’s name to Dana, she was soon renaming the Blaue Maus La Pfiff, and Wolfi became Paulus at the first opportunity, although in fact she had put Paul, which was officially correct but no one called him that – for two pins Schepp would have got his fountain pen and corrected the correction. In the final passage, on the other hand, where Marek was on the road, in Greece, on the Yugoslavian autoput and in jail, Doro started replacing Marek’s name as well. There was no bearing it: ‘Why not at least call him Hinrich?’ she wrote in the margin near where the customs man asked Marek’s date of birth, and on the back of the sheet she added, ‘You’d always have liked to be a Marek, admit it. Someone who for once in his life plays the man and promptly gets his reward. Whereas all your life you’ve only been a genius, one who would rather –’

  It was at this point that Schepp had got up. What had been gnawing at Doro, that she assumed such things about him? What had made her play him off against Marek, call him a ‘hopeless case who had never done anything much in life, and so couldn’t have had the faintest hope of finding a Hanni or a Nanni or a Dana or whatever they might be called. Your little daydreams and nocturnal dreams too?’ Here Schepp had finally left off reading, had had to get some air. Probably he ought to have given Doro a slap in the face there and then, and that would have been that.

  Shaking his head, he looked at her. Had he been wrong about her his entire life? Had she just been pretending all those years?

  ‘That can’t be right,’ he protested, startled by the certainty of his tone, and he added quietly, ‘But I always loved you, didn’t I? And don’t I love you still? Won’t I love you for the rest of my life?’

  Then he fell silent again, and it was so quiet that he heard a humming, a familiar and homely sound, he thought. A sudden premonition, a suspicion quickly becoming certainty that perhaps Doro didn’t want to be loved by him any longer, grabbed him by the throat. Hell, why had he ever written Marek the Drunkard? Why had Doro found the manuscript, why couldn’t she think of anything better to do than read it as a disguised version of the affair that, she was insinuating, he’d had with Dana? A character like Marek had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the married life of Dr Hinrich Schepp, acknowledged as a leading international expert on ancient Chinese script.

  As far as he could remember, he had written Marek the Drunkard at the beginning of the seventies, basing it vaguely on the story of a
college classmate. He had thought it up and put it together in the light of what little he had heard about the man. Schepp had been in his late twenties, an assistant in the department and studying for his doctorate, no Doro or any other woman in the picture. Well, it was probably also the story of the quiet desperation that had crept up on him during those winter evenings of ’72, or was it ’73? Evenings when he hung around the library until the cleaner threw him out, because the room he rented had no heating. Possibly Marek the Drunkard did have a little, a very little, to do with himself, although he had been to the Blaue Maus only once, and until his marriage had been a teetotaller. For Doro simply to equate him with Marek when he neither held a driving licence nor had the money to spend all evening in bars or anywhere else – he couldn’t, wouldn’t accept that.

  On the other hand, and again he felt weak, fragile, on the other hand she could have assumed that the text was new, or written recently, and in that event she was positively bound to think that he was writing to get something off his chest, something he had carefully concealed and hushed up in real life. Schepp immediately calmed down again – how could anyone die with such a dreadful mistaken belief? To be dead, he thought, means above all that you can’t answer questions, you can’t clear things up, you can’t get things straight and see that you may have misunderstood them, so they will also be hopelessly false for other people, if they will stay that way. Schepp stood there savouring this idea, which made him feel both mild and melancholy, and if he wasn’t to weep aloud and hide, that was how he wanted to feel today. He listened for the humming that had just broken off, even the ensuing silence seemed curiously familiar and yet unimaginably vast. To make room for this vastness everything had moved as far back towards the walls as possible, a gigantic silence in a gigantic room, above a gigantic abyss.

  At this point Schepp was almost overcome by desperation concerning his own life, but even before it could unfold completely it had turned into remorse, into the urgent feeling that he should apologize; after all, Doro was not to blame for the confusion she had left behind! It was true that he feared the worst so far as the rest of her corrections were concerned, but it was his own fault, he ought to have told her about Marek the Drunkard years, decades, ago, ought to have shown her the manuscript. Maybe they would have read it together and then destroyed it, yes, that would probably have been the best thing to do. Now it was too late. She lay there like someone who finally had discovered something deliberately kept from her, like a woman who would be bound to feel bitter about this last secret she had torn from her married life to take to the grave, at least that was how she must have seen it. Oh Doro. How stupid, how stupid.

  Although he was horrified by the power of the rigor mortis that had overtaken her – only her torso remained flexible – he nudged her as if to wake her from a bad dream, and although he was also horrified by how cold her body was he kissed her on both cheeks. For a few moments he was not afraid of her any more, he just wanted to warm her and scold her gently, but most of all to be with her. How long had she been lying here, consumed by jealousy and now dead? As if in reply the clock of the Church of the Good Shepherd struck twice. Did that mean it was one-thirty, two-thirty or three-thirty already?

  Never mind. He would stay beside her until he began to turn cold and rigid himself. Not thinking anything, not feeling anything – except for her closeness, which of course would continue undiminished even after her death. Schepp imagined Doro standing by that cold, dark lake, waiting for him. For her it would probably be the merest blink of an eye, then eternity would dawn for him as well. They would be reunited, although in death, who knew, perhaps joined more closely than in life. Always supposing she had been right, always supposing there really was a next world. And supposing an atheist could reach it if someone was waiting for him there. And then could do away, as a matter of priority, with every misunderstanding that hadn’t been discovered in time here below. Schepp felt positively solemn.

  Unfortunately at that very moment he recalled the cardinal error that would have to be cleared up in the next world, the whole story beginning with Marek and perhaps not even ending with Dana, and at the same moment he thought of Doro coming to look for him in La Pfiff years ago and meeting Dana. On an evening that was, at first, like any other, he had been at his usual table beneath the groin-vaulted ceiling and Doro had come through the door like an apparition. You could see at once, from the way she looked, that something had happened; it was surprising enough to see her there all of a sudden – once or twice he had mentioned La Pfiff to her, but never where it was and how you got there.

  It had been Pia who had brought her there, Pia’s surprising phone call, the news that she was getting a divorce. Doro thought that at least Pia’s father could prevent his ‘wild, uncontrollable daughter’ taking this sudden, rash step; he was to call her straight away, she said, and have ‘a firm word’; she herself was at her wits’ end. Oh yes, it was the middle of the day in the US, this couldn’t be put off, after all a divorce wasn’t something you embarked on ‘just because you fancied doing it’, she hoped there was a telephone in the place?

  With these words she had turned to Paulus for help, but before he could find his mobile Dana had brought hers out from beneath her apron. During the entire call with Pia, Schepp had had to watch the two women fall quickly into animated conversation. In the course of which Doro tapped Dana’s tattoo several times; finally she gave her some money and they shook hands. Of course the phone call had done nothing to prevent Pia’s divorce, he could have told Doro right away that it wouldn’t. Pia was as incorrigible as her mother; once she had got something into her head she would go through with it. What came back to him most clearly now, many years later, and seemed a bit strange was the last look that Dana had given Doro, as she had walked away with him – the entire scene had seemed dreadfully embarrassing, everyone in La Pfiff had seen it, and to top it all, that smile Dana gave his wife as she left, one could almost feel jealous! And the way Doro had smiled back! Rather foolishly, he thought now, her entire face shining; normally she hardly perspired at all, but at that moment a light sheen of sweat had appeared on her forehead, her cheeks, even a slight gleam on her upper lip.

  Was it possible that Dana had worked the same magic on Doro as on – well, not just on him, the Professor in the corner, oh no! On every man in La Pfiff who had eyes to see. And ears to hear the charming double entendres of her jokes. And a nose to pick up the sweet smell that followed her. Once again Schepp’s thoughts circled around Dana when he wanted to focus them exclusively on Doro. Dana who had so curtly rejected him – long before Doro’s appearance in La Pfiff – when he had spoken to her about the sign at her throat. Even then he had noticed the bold, tarty look of her, and it had only been his injured pride, his pride as a Sinologist, that had made him ask her about it again the following evening …

  Did she really know what she was carrying around with her, he inquired zealously. Something rather gloomy, an oracular pronouncement upon which old Kung Tze had commented as follows ….

  It was still too subtle for her, Dana had replied, turning away.

  This time Schepp didn’t sit there red-faced for the rest of the evening, this time he was prepared, and when she went outside to smoke he bought a packet of cigarettes from Paulus and went outside too, hypocritically pretending to need a light.

  Was that finally obvious enough?

  It soon became clear that Dana had no idea about her Chinese character. It had simply been ‘the sexiest’ thing she had seen while leafing through the tattoo parlour’s catalogue. Schepp told her at length about the I Ching, although he would have preferred to bite her throat quickly, firmly, where she bore the mark of its twenty-ninth character – that is, if he hadn’t been a respectable elderly gentleman and, well, happily married. By way of a substitute he did his best to confuse Dana with mysterious allusions to the sign; in his gentle didactic manner he was soon on top form, nodded understandingly even when she asked silly questio
ns, praised her intuitive grasp of the oracle, imagined allegorical elements all over the place, new puzzles that only he (in many future sessions with her) would be able to solve, yes, he was determined to trace all the transformations of the macrocosm on the tendon at her throat, yin and yang, heaven and earth, dark and light, soft and firm, and of course south and north, those were the eternal opposites he revealed to her.

  In fact he didn’t have much to say. The little he knew from reading Doro’s books of commentaries could have been summed up in a couple of sentences. Kan, the deep, the abysmal, stood both for a ravine and for the water at the bottom of the ravine; stood for heart, soul, mind; was linked in some way to danger or pointed to danger; and also meant a ‘middle son’, whoever or whatever that might be – how could a woman like Dana understand that when Schepp didn’t understand it himself? A lady-killer of the old school, he gently touched this or that stroke in the complex character of the tattoo with the tip of his forefinger, following the curve as if helping Dana to understand it. Dana’s own responses were confined to, ‘What a one you are!’, ‘Fancy you knowing all this, Professor’, or the merest mocking look. Yet it was an acknowledged fact that on that evening Schepp became a smoker and her constant companion during her breaks outside.

  That didn’t mean that she treated him with more familiarity than the other customers; on the contrary, she even seemed to be protecting the sign on the tendon at her throat from him. Although word got around as to who was serving the drinks at La Pfiff these days, and soon the bar was unusually crowded and noisy, Dana walked the aisles past the tables evening after evening unmolested, untouchable. The bar seemed made for her, large enough to display her various talents, small enough for everyone to see what he had been missing – a stage that meant the world to many of the spectators.