Best European Fiction 2013 (42 page)

“This’ll cost,” I say to him. “This is an expensive conversation you’re having.”

“No,” he says, “this is the staff table. And I’m talking to the bartender.”

“Trust me,” I say, “it’s going to cost. It’s like riding in four taxis at once.”

“Bull,” he says, “we’re talking about Romania.”

“Bull,” say the girls.

“Then we’re agreed,” I say, “we’re agreed that I’m paranoid.”

I join the little circle, which consists of:

1. The mulatto girl, 24 and skeptical

2. A fair-haired woman who introduces herself as an alcoholic

3. One with short hair and a small face that she’s just had lifted

4. The bartender

“Mein Schatz,” my darling says when she catches sight of me (the Chinese are about to leave) and climbs onto a stool behind me and flings her arms around me. “Camilla and the horse,” she says to the others, pointing at my husband and me. Then she wags a finger in the air in front of her nose and corrects herself: “Prince Charles,” she says, pointing at my husband.

I pay a suitable compliment to the mulatto girl’s performance and then ask her: “Would you like to buy him? He’s a little old, but he’s good.”

She hasn’t yet managed to reply when the alcoholic leans across the table and introduces herself again as an alcoholic. I tell her that she is highly talented and very beautiful and encourage her to stop drinking and feel good about herself. I show her how I pat myself on the shoulder every day, unfortunately I can’t remember what this maneuver is called, but it works (with each passing day I am more and more at peace with myself), I got it from an article in
Reader’s Digest
. I make her promise not to go back to drinking the next morning, I start seeing myself as a sort of barfoot doctor, walking from bar to bar, I order champagne for the whole table to celebrate the alcoholic’s decision, and my darling kisses me, her tongue is very pointy, mine is very dry, this will be expensive, and I tell them that my love life with my husband is like a looong German porno film, he is a stud-boy, he’s cracking up, I’m totally cracking up too, one of my darling’s breasts has fallen out of her blouse and her skirt has twisted halfway around, she’s on the verge of cracking up too but she strokes me and strokes me, now she wants to go home, so I slap her but not really hard.

“She hit me,” my darling says, astonished.

“It’s on account of love,” says the one with the small face, “I prefer men, but once in a while I have a woman.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I say, it’s dawn and I ask what it would cost for her to stay just one more hour, oh please-please-pretty-please but she lives faaar out in the suburbs. I picture my darling alone in the subway, alone on the suburban train. I want to buy more champagne for her, for everyone.

We have to leave now, the club is closing, it’s seven o’clock, I have a husband who fucks like a stallion, I weep, and “Oooh,” they coo at the sight of the tears: “It’s true love,” I give the alcoholic a final admonition, now she’s got to manage without her coach, because now Camilla and the horse are leaving, “No no wait: Prince Charles,” my horse is my crutch on this piercingly bright morning; it’s suddenly the last summer ever.

I wish I were Žižek. Žižek can get everything to hang together, if I were Žižek then right now I would be lying in a Punic bordello and having a fucking match with Houellebecq, the hookers wouldn’t be trafficked, merely glob-al-ized neigh-bors at sex-u-al la-bors—can’t you
hear
that as sung by Gregorian monks, or maybe a castrato: global-ized neigh-bors at sex-u-al la-bors.

Aaah, that very human, that all too Žižekian urge toward coherence where there is none. What is it that I can’t get to hang together? My memory? My love life? We’ll have to examine all this more closely.

I miss my Romanian darling. I never found out her name. My husband says: if you want to see her again you’d better hurry back there, these people move around a lot. By which he means that she may already be working at a different club, in a different city; or that so many people have glided through her hands that she’s forgotten me, or stands a good chance of soon doing so.

“These people move around a lot”: the statement surprised me. As if he were in possession of experience I didn’t know about—and now he was lifting a corner of the curtain.

At first
I
couldn’t remember
her
either. I mean: I couldn’t picture her. And I couldn’t really remember what had happened.

First of all, when I woke up a little later that day after only a couple of hours’ sleep (we left the club at seven o’clock and stepped out into a morning whose light was like a needle, I weeping over my lost love, over parting as such, over life’s brevity) and with a terrible hangover, or sooner, still drunk perhaps—first of all I found in my purse her address and phone number, which I’d forced out of her and which she’d handed me with a shrug (maybe they were fake), and I quickly tore the note into tiny shreds and flushed them down the toilet so as not to be tempted to contact her. A memory arrives, on Platform Cortex, as somber as a freight train. One loss hauls the thought of another along with it. One loss opens the door for another that opens the tear ducts. Even as a child I always feared the worst. I was secretly in love with a boy in my class and wrote him love letters that weren’t intended for his eyes, never never, my love was hopeless, I wrote the letters (
well, they weren’t exactly Shakespeare, were they
) because he felt closer and closer as I wrote them, while I was communicating, while I put his name and mine together inside a heart. Out of fear that these letters might nonetheless fall into his hands, or into anyone’s hands, for that matter, immediately after writing them I tore them into shreds and threw them into the toilet. No sooner had I flushed them down than the nightmare began. I imagined him coming into his bathroom many kilometers away from mine, only to find, backed up into his toilet—my ripped-up letters, which he would immediately fish out of the water, dry out, and paste together. After which he would throw his head back and laugh, and I would switch schools. A fatal flaw in the sewage system was to blame for this horror: his pipes and mine were connected! The next time I burned my love letter. The breeze caught a few scorched flakes and blew them out the window. After that I took to daydreaming and in this way avoided leaving any evidence. Now the memory is departing from Platform Cortex, do not cross the tracks. And take care to secure your valuables.

We found ourselves on the twenty-fifth floor of a hotel on Alexanderplatz, at the same height as the restaurant on the TV Tower. I could draw the curtains and make the small hotel room darker, even more enclosed, or I could provide a clear view of my misery. Not that I believed anyone could peer into our hotel room from the restaurant on the TV Tower; that would require binoculars. Not that I believed anyone would think of doing that. No, it was just that the TV Tower itself seemed observant, a stout observer with blinking red eyes right outside the window.

The toilet and shower were located inside a glass room with walls of green mottled glass
in
the hotel room—a shower cabinet with toilet. I threw up for a long time, disgustingly, inside this small cage where it was hard to get on your knees and where the sounds you made were in no way blocked from reaching the surrounding room (I hoped that Charles was deep asleep). Who could puke without a sound, like silent rain. Like the expression, “the life running out of you.” As if life were a little stream. I did it in convulsive jerks, kneeling, in the most humiliating position, arms flung around the white bowl, embracing it (how much more I would have preferred to be kneeling among sheep at a stream and drinking; among sheep).

Come to that, I have always imagined that my death would play out in a bathroom, a very clean bathroom, an almost antiseptic death, I’d be leaning against white enamel, a foretaste of the coffin’s white tranquillity, but I hope my death bathroom will be larger than the cabinet in the hotel room on Alexanderplatz, with a bit more space, a bit more
Totesraum,
if you please. After I’d thrown up I lay down in my bed with closed eyes and tried to remember. Beside me was the snoring of Prince Charles.

The first thing Charles did when he woke was to squeeze my hand. A little squeeze that means: we belong together, we two, even though other people captured our interest last night. Or it could also mean: I didn’t hear you throwing up. Very reassuring, very loving. I squeezed back. After that he leapt up and started rooting around in his pockets and pulling out all the receipts from the night’s party. His credit card had been swiped quite a few times. We hadn’t been able to use the card in the club, they wanted cold cash, and the bartender had offered to have Charles driven to an ATM in the club’s white six-door Cadillac with tinted windows, the kind that looks like an oversized hearse (if I could choose my own death, I would be run over by a hearse, Death is as close as a
wife
/ the hollow-cheeked attendant of my
life,
tra-la-la, it sounds like one of my friend Alma’s limping, foot-dragging verses, the undertaker would pick me up from the street and put my bruised body on top of a coffin, skip the hospital and the funeral parlor too, straight to the point, right into the grave), or more precisely, at least in this instance, like a bordello on wheels. Charles had declined. He was quite capable of walking. And that’s what he had done—a good many times—back and forth between the club and the ATM, and here was the evidence of all his promenades, a mound of crumpled receipts.

“Uh-oh,” he said, “it was an expensive night.”

“Let’s just see how much cash we have lying around in our pockets,” I said optimistically.

But there wasn’t much.

“We spent 9,000 last night.”

“Euros?”

“Kroner.”

“How much is that in euros?”

“Why do you want it in euros?”

“How much is it in yen?”

He looked at me. And I knew we were thinking the same thing. He had claimed it was gratis, free and clear, to talk to the girls at the staff table about Romania’s standard of living etcetera, etcetera, and I had known it would be expensive, we would end up paying for all their drinks as long as the conversation continued. I didn’t say anything. I thereby doubled my pleasure: not only had I been right, but now I could show my magnanimity by not saying anything. I smiled at him. And raked in my chips. After that we started discussing whether there was any possible way to deduct the expense. Charles is a food reviewer. But even though we’d sat in the club and dipped nachos into avocado dip (from a can), the place could hardly be called a restaurant. I felt sick again and said, “Dear, sweet Charles, would you mind going out for a good long while?”

“Out into the corridor?”

I nodded: “Yes, but hurry.”

He quickly pulled on pants and a shirt and opened the door to the corridor. As I squeezed into the cabinet he said, “You know, don’t you, that a party carried all the way to its conclusion is a suicide.”

The Balcony
. Genet.

“Yes,” I answered, “we should have chosen the boring lilies of the field.”

“Genet,” he said and closed the door.

We’ve just read
The Balcony
. We read aloud to each other before we go to sleep. I read novels, poems, plays aloud to Charles. And Charles reads recipes to me. In the preface to one of his cookbooks it says that there’s nothing to prevent people from living to the age of 140. That’s the book we cook from. When he’s done reading aloud, we’re terrifically hungry. We run out to the kitchen, and that’s why we’ve grown a little—just a little—too heavy. As long as we travel together down the heaping highway of life, where your spare tire is mine and my spare tire is yours.

My only keepsake of her is her lighter. Charles found it in his jacket pocket and gave it to me. It’s black. With palm trees. And a couple in evening dress, dancing. You can make out a bungalow behind them. Slim and elegant, they dance away the bottomless tropical night. He in a tuxedo, she in a white cocktail dress. He with one hand on her back, which arches alluringly, the hand placed precisely there, in the arching small of it. She with a hand on one of his shoulders, broad in the tailor-made jacket. A waiter holding a tray is about to cross the bungalow’s patio. Bungalow from
bangla,
a one-storeyed house for Europeans in India. It’s another era. All in all, I gather, very colonial (it’s as if the only thing missing is some pillars, there should have been a house with colonial columns), very hot, the ocean isn’t very far away, and there are snakes in the grass. It happens that a snake gets into the bungalow. Then the servants start screaming, and the woman in the white dress screams even louder. Small underdeveloped men wearing kurtas, men as spindly as crickets, come running in from the garden with sharp instruments and make short work of it. The chauffeur is leaning against the large car, bored, he’s lit one of his master’s cigars and has to smoke it furtively, hidden in his hand, if that’s possible with cigars. The couple are in an early phase of their marriage. It still occurs to them to dance out on the patio at night.

I keep the lighter. It’s a memento. At one point I drew her onto the dance floor—I danced out onto it first and, deeply intoxicated as I was, spread my arms like a figure skater and cried, “I’m an architect!” Though I’m not.

Charles and the little gathering at the staff table, consisting of the alcoholic, the mulatto girl, the bartender, and the short-haired woman who’d recently had a facelift and whose small face reminded me of a taut raisin, observed us, cooing. I had an awful lot of clothing on. A calf-length skirt, flat-heeled boots, and a thick black sweater. She was more suitably dressed—more lightly. I probably resembled an aging, somewhat overly plump panther. Still possessed of a certain litheness. But. By that time she was already longing to get home. When we sat down the bartender said, pointing at Charles: “He has children.”