Next World Novella Read online

  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 going on? 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 found only the note with Hanni’s phone number. That wasn’t going to be any help. Hanni! Come to think of it, hadn’t she got him into this shitty situation in the first place? If she hadn’t said that one thing to him, he’d never have driven off. In winter! With summer tyres on the van. All because of a woman who probably didn’t think much of men anyway, and he, Marek, had been made a laughing stock by such a person. He was bloody furious!

  Big Marek. They gave him some time to calm down. Twice he rang for the customs man who had arrested him and who assured him that everything would be all right, the investigating judge had been informed. Finally, after four hours, things started moving, as we found out later, much later, when we heard the entire story, all the details: he was carted all over the place, ended up in the office of the investigating judge, who had apparently just been on the phone to the judge responsible for such matters in Marek’s hometown. And she, the judge in his hometown, had told this judge that the reason for his arrest was an unpaid parking fine, because he had once left the Dolly in a no-parking zone. The reminder had been sent to his parents’ address, which was still Marek’s official place of residence. The letter had probably simply disappeared in a pile of their other post, ditto the summons to turn up in court.

  Marek was no longer a potential enemy of the state or serious offender, he was just a little fish again. After surrendering his savings passbook as bail, he was allowed to leave on the condition that he report to the judge in his hometown within twenty-four hours. That meant … but when he was taken back to the customs office, the officers there had been spending their time checking his Dolly van, and had found a whole list of things that, in their view, made it un-roadworthy. The most serious was the little skylight, not mentioned in the vehicle documents and therefore not passed by the MOT office. They were sorry but the registration of his Dolly van was invalid, he couldn’t continue his journey, and he had to pay a fine of sixty marks. Marek burst into tears. They’d finally got their claws into him.

  But hadn’t he been told, by a higher authority, that he had to turn up back home within twenty-four hours, so surely he must be allowed to leave? The very same customs man who arrested him in the first place now persuades his superior to reinstate Marek’s right to drive the van home. So they tell him to take his old heap of scrap metal to the local MOT office within the next twenty-four hours, and when they hear about his savings passbook they even tear up the sixty-mark fine.

  Marek races on like a world champion. First in driving snow, taking as a guide the space where the central reservation might be; then in heavy rain, water coming in not only through the holes in the van’s floor but also from above; they probably bent the fitting of the skylight out of true during their inspection. When he finally crosses the finishing line here, well after midnight, he goes straight to the Blaue Maus. A notice on the door instantly makes him suspicious. He goes closer, flicking his lighter to read it. ‘Mutt has passed away. Closed for the funeral.’

  Marek half-heartedly rattles the door, he isn’t to know, and in this situation he certainly wouldn’t want to know, that by this time Wolfi has closed down entirely and gone to manage some bar or other in Bavaria, while the notice has been scribbled over quite a lot, so he could have worked out for himself that Mutt must have been dead for some time. Never mind! Marek needs someone he can talk to about his journey, someone who might even console him, and he also needs a place to spend the night that won’t seem as miserable and lonely as his Dolly. He puts his hand in his jacket pocket and finds the piece of paper with Hanni’s phone number, which indeed could come in really handy right about now; after all, she still owes him a night. In fact as soon as he finds a phone kiosk and lets the phone ring on at her place until she answers, she says, ‘Sure,’ or ‘Okay,’ or ‘Are you crazy?’ – we don’t know for certain, but anyway he drives over there.

  When she opens the door to him there are no little gold flecks sparkling in her brown eyes. Far from it, she stares at him like he was some kind of apparition. Marek, however, stammers it all out, confused as he is, what with the rushing in his ears he can hardly hear himself speak. In retrospect all he can remember is that maybe he asked her if she really didn’t fancy men? Only dykes? Imagine that! Anyway, Hanni looks at him so incredulously, and a second later starts laughing so indignantly, that the rushing in his ears stops for a moment, and

  And then what? Then nothing. The text broke off; that was where he had stopped writing. He sat there dumbstruck. In the margin Doro had written, ‘As if he’d have said anything like that in such a situation. Don’t kid yourself, that’s not the end of the story.’ She had continued writing where he had stopped, or, to be more accurate, she had begun rewriting the scene between the lines a few paragraphs earlier. Rewritten it in such a way that it was soon very like the one in which Dana, after her misappropriation of the cash or whatever you want to call it, came back to wait tables at La Pfiff and was as indifferent, yes, indifferent to Schepp as if she had never been sacked without notice and then got her job back only because he lied gallantly on her behalf. Not a single detail remained of the midnight encounter between Marek and Hanni. The end of the story now read:

  Only when Schepp had stood up and gone to the bar to pay did she ask him how she could ever repay him for ‘all that’. There was none of the usual sparkle in her look, though, even on a day like that one where there should have been. In his confusion Schepp droned on, barely able to hear himself speak for the rushing in his ears. In retrospect all he thought he could remember was that he had condescendingly given her to understand that ‘a woman like her’ could presumably only ‘pay in kind, and in instalments’ for what he had spent to get her out of trouble. Dana looked at him so incredulously, and a second later laughed so indignantly, that the rushing in his ears stopped for a moment and everyone looked up.

  ‘Well, better begin right away, then!’ she cried, grabbing him with both hands, bending him back over the bar and leaning over him.

  Not to kiss him – ‘Does that old fool seriously think …?’ – but to spit in his face. When she finally let go of him she was baring her teeth. Schepp struggled up, breathing heavily, and wiped his face with the handkerchief from his breast pocket. A mistake! he would have liked to assure her, a bad joke! Good God, hadn’t he had to put up with many of her own bad jokes? While he was still gasping for air, Dana was already turning away, ripping him to shreds at the top of her voice in front of the remaining customers. It wasn’t long before one of them, a young fellow known as Kiddo, staggered over to the Professor and gave him a lecture, if you could call it that, because Kiddo was so sozzled he could hardly utter a coherent sentence.

  There could be a saint even inside a waitress, that was the gist of it; did that old jerk think he could pester her with his improper advances, did he really think he could fumble her with his grubby paws?

  Normally Schepp would have calmed everyone down quickly with a few rhetorical flourishes, but the young fellow took him by the lapels and pulled him close, bad breath wafting in his face. Someone like him, said Kiddo, needed a good thrashing, he’d earned it, but – and here he pushed Schepp away so that he hit the bar, waiting speechless for what came next – but a man like the Professor wasn’t worth a straight right or left, man to man, he wasn’t even a quarter of a man, so a slap in the face – and here Kiddo gave him a resounding one – would have to do for now. Schepp exited the building.

  And hardly dared to breathe. While reading, his remaining powers of resistance had been extinguished, for – for what Doro had written was strikingly like wha
t had actually happened, practically verbatim, there was no point in denying it. He couldn’t even fool himself any more. Confronted so unexpectedly with the wretched details of that night, he saw the whole scene in his mind’s eye, an intolerably well-lit image surfacing from his memory, an image in which the glances the others shot his way paled in insignificance. As if it hadn’t happened five years ago but just yesterday. He had gone home like a beaten dog swearing never, ever to set foot in La Pfiff again. He could have died of shame; he had wanted only to forget it, keep it secret, suppress it until it had vanished from his memory, until no one knew about it any more, until it had never happened. But Doro, whom he most particularly would not have told about it, appeared very well informed, knew every detail, even knew about that embarrassing request to be paid ‘in kind’.

  Schepp put down the sheet of paper. There was no glossing it over any more. His past faux pas, or rather his offence, or rather the stain on his life, was there in his file in black and white. Doro had deprived him of any opportunity to fashion an alibi through rhetorical manipulation of the facts. He was as deeply ashamed as he had been on that night five years ago, not least of being described as someone not even worth a straight punch, a right or left between equals. Doro had even known about that – and had never said a word.

  There were a few more pages which she used for editorial notes. He had not expected much from those, but now he knew that they would go to the heart of the matter.

  Yet he had so often sat in judgement on himself, oh how he had regretted it, how he had resolved to return to his old life, seeking happiness in the old heroic tales, the brushstrokes of ancient Chinese calligraphy. But happiness was no longer to be found there. He had thrown out the coloured handkerchiefs he’d worn in his breast pocket, he had let his hair grow out and combed it over his bald patch the way he used to. But beneath the surface his thoughts had simply run on. Had he at least begun to avoid La Pfiff, had he chosen to drink in some other bar? No. Perhaps the worst thing was that in spite of his double humiliation – as if Dana’s hadn’t been enough, as if he’d needed another from a young man like Kiddo to open his eyes – he couldn’t bring himself to draw a line under the whole business, that after two or three weeks without being able to whistle his usual goodbye to Dana, he couldn’t stand it any longer. Acting as naturally as possible, he had turned up at La Pfiff again.

  But no one took any notice – because hardly any of the old late-night regulars were still there. The dreary atmosphere of former days was back again. No one minded who came there now, not even if it was Schepp. And this time Paulus didn’t know why Dana had disappeared. Or where she’d gone. Maybe back to Poland, he conjectured; anyhow it was better that way. For the Professor too, he added, stroking his moustache.

  Better that way, yes, certainly. Although of course it was the worst thing of all, it was unbearable. To see Schepp return to his regular table, order his red wine, spend the evenings in silent dialogue, sometimes allowing himself to scan the place as if looking for something in particular – well, no one would have taken him for a renowned international expert in anything. And Doro, whom he had always loved faithfully, stayed the same even in these difficult years. With her natural elegance of mind, she rose quietly above his ingrained melancholy. He was so lonely when they were together, she might have understood that from his clumsy grin, a grin that really meant to be a smile, most really of all an exclamation mark. But at most Doro cocked her head at him and said nothing. Hadn’t she become even a bit cooler, more distant, more reserved, as if, in her intuitively vegetative way, she had picked up on his dismal failure and wanted to avoid it for herself? Was she secretly ashamed for him, was she suffering with him so much that she was hiding her empathy?

  Discontented, Schepp regarded the gloomy sketch of his life, remembering how he had hardly been able to write a line, how in desperation he had looked for old essays and papers that might be worth revising, how he had finally come upon Marek the Drunkard. He remembered staring at the typescript and suddenly recalling the scene he had meant to write decades before, the scene where Marek had to report to the police first thing the next morning and then go to the MOT office. Where after a brief inspection of load-bearing parts he was told that he could count himself lucky to be getting off without a hefty fine, but in any case it would be without his Dolly. No, he would not be allowed to drive it so much as a metre away from the MOT testing station, it was hereby withdrawn from circulation and sent for scrap. There stood Marek with a bag of possessions hurriedly salvaged from his home; he would have liked to have shrugged, but instead the tears were pouring down his cheeks. He had no home any more, there was nothing for it, he’d have to call Hanni and ask if she might additionally allow him a day. But Schepp hadn’t even tried to write this little scene. The manuscript, unread, had soon disappeared under a stack of papers in a cupboard or drawer. And so, somehow, things had gone on and on, day after day. He managed to continue teaching; as for his research, he had stopped nurturing any ambitions in that department long since. His eye fell on the cap of the fountain pen lying under the coffee table, much too far away for him to retrieve it. He didn’t hear the clock of the Church of the Good Shepherd strike four high notes and then four low notes, he didn’t feel another tear run down his cheek. He picked up his manuscript with both hands – what else was there for him to hold on to? – and read what Doro had written at the end of the story.

  No, Hinrich, I know very well that even that can’t be the end. It’s taken me a few years to summon up the courage to think as much and, more to the point, to tell you so. I’m relieved now, even if I find it a little embarrassing, that I had to make use of your old story. Yes, Hinrich, I know you’re not Marek and definitely not Jörn. I’m sure you only worshipped this Hanni from afar, hidden among your friends at the other end of the bar. At the time I probably loved you, my little would-be Marek, more than you ever let yourself dream I might. Did you maybe stay a would-be Marek until your eye operation? Anyway, you were certainly not a man who could make a woman feel secure for an entire lifetime.

  I’ll cheerfully admit to doing violence to that old text of yours; it’s been a while since you used a typewriter. I’ll also confess that at no time was I concerned with correcting your story in any detail – whether misappropriation of cash or destruction of bar fittings was the point at issue, whether it was Jörn or Kiddo or Wolfi or Paul, what difference does it make? I have been speechless in our marriage, and here I finally saw my chance to tell you how hard the last five years have been for me, maybe even the last twenty-five years. Forgive me, I lacked the courage to try to discuss it with you. It seems to me that we were never able to find a means of communication that would have brought us together in anything other than a mundane way. There were the texts you had written and that I edited. Presumably you wouldn’t have paid attention to anything but a written text. If I know you, you wouldn’t understand anything but editorial corrections.

  Understand what?

  Oh, a great deal, Hinrich.

  Firstly: It was a mere single sentence in this little text of yours that caught my eye, a naïve audacious remark you repeated thirty years later in the face of another woman. A shockingly wrong thing said at the wrong time, the kind of thing only men can utter. The first time you probably only thought it or heard it somewhere, but then you actually said it – you dared to say it to a woman like Dana, say it to her face. How angry she was with you! So was I. How could I have been married for twenty-nine years to someone who would so much as venture to think up that remark? What had happened to the shy dreamer of the old days, who had held a woman’s hand for the first time at the age of thirty-five? But then you held it so tightly that I might well have thought it meant a good deal. You became a would-be Marek, or a would-be man instead of a would-be Marek.

  Please forgive me, it is not, of course, just that remark that has made me so angry. It’s the pathetic lover-boy who expresses all his small-minded pathos in it. You’re a ju
mped-up nobody, you have no discretion, no decency, no tact, you have no sensitivity at all even in adultery. And you’re also a failure, Hinrich; oddly enough that hurts me too. Didn’t you buy Dana, at least according to your shabby logic? Wouldn’t you have thrown her down that very same night – you, with her! – on the bar or somewhere else, telling her she had taken money from the till, so that as you saw it she owed you? Shouldn’t it therefore have been repaid, every penny of it, ‘in kind’ – my God, have you any idea how that sounds to a woman? and how has it in fact been repaid? I’m sorry, Hinrich, I am not thinking about morality, I am thinking about style. You’re all the same, men and would-be men, and, to be absolutely clear, I despise you more than ever.

  No, what I wrote yesterday isn’t true; I don’t despise you, you have been punished enough. I am ashamed of you, Hinrich, and I share a little of that shame myself. At the time, anyway, when Dana told me how she had to bring you to your senses, I could have cursed you. If I hadn’t already been cursing you for your nocturnal escapades, your ever-changing affairs, maybe I would have wanted the ground to swallow me up there in front of her. Imagine having a strange woman tell you all that about your own husband.