just some mute imaginary listeners to talk at. You are the reason words exist, because otherwise it would simply be too difficult. And at least you know who he is.
The name K-shev scared me, took me aback. Yet the girl’s flight, her shame, her self-disgust—I thought to myself in the first instant—isn’t it all very unusual? It made me feel compassion for her. But also a sort of suspicion. Fear.
I’ve tried to make sense of it before: the thrill of suspicion is the hidden urge that incites you to crush her with your hands, with your whole body. To force her to scream, to make her cry. To hurt her, to see the real depths, the entire essence. To my regret, I was soon forced to realize that she had told me the truth. She had wanted to escape from the nightmare, but it’s not as easy as simply crossing out your father’s name and taking a new one in its place.
This is most likely why the angel stayed silent: he caught a whiff of compassion. But what angels, what am I even talking about—the truth is always repulsive. Since it is still too early for the truth, let’s console ourselves just a bit longer on the brink of our first meeting, that moment back then.
Perhaps times were different then. I even suspect that they illuminated that which lay ahead, the future, with a shadowless light. Sometimes when I reminisce about a kind of coupling, for example, I’m trying to get at that accumulation of concentrated tenderness. Is it possible that she was perfect, despite her last name? Was it the same with my naïvety—temporarily wonderful, but naïvety all the same. When falling in love we are children, if only for a short while. In general we are children only for a short while, like a brief attack of perfection and light. But enough of that.
>>>
I had this dream—of something like a Communist party headquarters in a provincial town. Or in the capital, but in some rundown neighborhood. Outside the summer heat is stifling. Deathly calm, a park bathed in scorching light that bleaches the green from the trees. The immaculate walkways with whitewashed curbs, all deserted. As usual the bureaucrats are using their work time for something else. Inside the hallways are cool and it would be almost pleasant if it weren’t so cold. Although there aren’t any mummies here, the door-lined tunnels make it feel like some kind of space for preservation, a mausoleum. But never mind all that, what’s important is the content.
The girl is wearing a Pioneer’s uniform, the Communist Youth League. We’re holding hands. We walk along, go up the stairs, turn down one of the hallways, I think it’s the fourth floor, the top one. The sense that we are alone grows even stronger here. And again that same coolness, but when we pass through the small foyer beyond the stairs and head toward the long straight line of darkness—somewhere there the windows behind the false balustrade breathe heat on us through the glass, because of the lights outside.
She is dressed in a Pioneers uniform, like I said: a white blouse, a blue pleated skirt, if that’s what they call those overlapping accordion folds. Her white socks are pulled up a little over her ankles or below the knee—that’s the one thing I’m not quite sure about. Her shoes have no laces, the blue tongues are sticking straight up. Her shoulder-length hair is straight, and she wears it in pigtails behind her ears. But she isn’t wearing the little barrettes that usually keep her bangs out of her eyes. Under her blouse she’s wearing a tank top, cut low under the arms—we all wore those back then, even the girls. All around, like I said, there’s lots of stone, granite, marble, and from time to time the wine stain of the curtains, red pedestals without statues, only here and there peeling names and letters in the flaking gold cellophane used to inscribe mottos. This is a mysterious space I have yet to dive into, at once hollow, empty, yet full of sharp edges—the building itself feels heavy. It is made up of intersecting squares and rectangles. The windows are stately, I don’t know why the windows are so important here, the wooden window casings are themselves embedded in striking granite frames. The railings around the stairs, the floor is gouged by canals, grooves, red spirals, and brass rods that keep the carpet taut against the folds of the staircase. Railings, banisters, polished snails at the end of stone waterfalls on either side of the slide of steps.
We go up to that floor and walk down the hallway. The window at the end shows only light; we are above the treetops. We don’t speak, so as not to get caught. Anticipation.
She, of course, is a virgin. And I press down on that barrier with the whole weight of my body, as if poured into a funnel. A whirlpool that changes my own anatomy: at the very bottom, in the center, the point that I flow through—this is where my heart is. And my belly button as well, and maybe even some steaming spot on my back has been sucked down into this vortex. While up above, all at once my head, legs, and bangs are the leftover silt in the funnel.
She is a virgin, of course, but why is she not wearing panties under her skirt? And that vulgar smile—in her eyes, not on her lips. I, too, am a virgin, perhaps in a more concrete or more specific sense—both of us realize our innocence at the same moment, but of the two of us there’s one who senses that . . .
>>>
Here, in short, is what I want to find out, what I want to clarify in this split-second before the memory is shattered by that internal explosion between two bodies: is that gaze really there, the eyes in that portrait above me, on the wall of the quiet dusky hall we tiptoed into? We’re naked now, her skirt hiked up, my pants down around my knees, shirt unbuttoned. Who is watching us?
But no matter how quickly everything was over, according to the prescription of nature and the summary procedure of the moment, it turns out that time itself, chronology, does not exhaust—and can never exhaust—the energy hidden in the body. Even years later, most probably in my imagination or perhaps not quite, I found myself forced again and again to bend over that body, her body, the object of this coupling, in order to understand. A body that could be the joyful center of my very self, of my very own I. The mirror of my masculinity, if it didn’t represent above all the risk of being accused of a crime.
So that, in short, is what I want to figure out. That’s the very core I’m trying to reach: she is still a part of his body and he is present in hers. What could K-shev’s gaze mean here, because in the dream I didn’t know his name, since she hadn’t yet told me, nor his significance, since at that moment I was still a naïve Pioneer. And now for the explanation: why is it that if you cross out a name, if you have the nerve to repeal it, to change your own family name—why does that still add up to nothing but vain attempts and wasted efforts? The body, the flesh does not play by those rules. The body, the flesh transforms itself according to its own laws.
That’s why this story has turned into such a bodily adventure—no connection is more bodily than inheritance, which makes up the whole of you, yet which you also desperately want to get rid of more than anything. I think that here on the Reeperbahn, in Hamburg, Germany, there is no way to prevent bodies from playing their role. You can couple with bodies, but you can’t run from them. They always get in your way. In the end, you have no choice but to go through.
In this case, I really wasn’t prepared—for the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, that is. My premature exit from the booth and that unfinished scene, which was like the graphic truth about coupling—but without the increasing tenderness, just flesh and color. An act that is far too bodily.
The same problem yet again—the body. I didn’t want to tear my eyes away, but I had to run, I had to get the hell out of there.
>>>
In an ironic twist of fate, K-shev is now dying of cancer in this sterile, private German clinic—as much as it may look like a hospital, it’s obviously little more than a very expensive hospice. The still-breathing corpses lie inside, while outside nobody waits for them anymore. At best, a battle is raging to divide the spoils.
In
