briefcase.
It was a brand-new briefcase, or at least it was new when they put it in the safety deposit box in the bank vault. A very well-insulated place, that vault—I can vouch for that now that I’ve brought the briefcase back to my hotel room and can still catch a scent of new leather, as if it had been bought only yesterday.
To kill time, I measured its height, width, and depth with a pack of cigarettes: 1 × 5 × 3, more or less.
Just as he told me, there is more than a million inside. I’ve never seen so much money in one place. But besides this cliché, I can also tell you that there is nothing optically unusual about this huge amount of cash. Or maybe I was already numb, perhaps my senses were dulled like his from the life-support machines whirring away behind the doors lining the white corridors. You absorb old people’s anesthesia by induction, the opiate of medication, the opiate of age.
He needs the money now, needs it with a fatal urgency, whether his brain realizes it or not. I made sure to confirm this as soon as I arrived. I thought the place would be disgusting, but it was only strangely arid, sterile, quiet. I didn’t experience any revulsion, impatience, or rage. I didn’t feel anything at all inside myself, only on the surface. Instead of the torturous spasm of my whole being that I expected, I experienced only a bodily discomfort, as if I were wearing the wrong-sized clothes or too-tight shoes.
I was uncomfortable in the white hospital chair; my back was to the window and the potted plant next to it. It looked dried out, pressed in an album, even though it was still alive; I even caught the slightly tangy scent of its leaves and the sweetish odor of withering and decay. A hospital room, a room for death. I’m wondering if I shouldn’t look into the old man’s eyes to see: is he thinking about the end?
When I got back after going to the bank, I went straight into the bathroom, undressed, and filled up the tub. Afterward I stood for a long time under the shower. I wanted my body to soften up; it was like some kind of shell had crusted onto me—I know this was just my imagination, but the scrubbing did me good and I no longer saw myself in the fogged-up mirror. Just a huge profusion of bottles in the white steam, little flasks of monochromatic creamy liquids, all in twenty-gram doses for hotel junkies. I didn’t feel like going out yet, so I examined them—most had Italian labels. Care of the body, it seems, carries a whiff of the exotic and distant. No matter whether they’re made in Hong Kong or here, the labels must be in a foreign language—what are people thinking when they choose their dreams? Money is definitely a crucial element. Okay, well here’s the money, I’ve got it. What happens now?
Yes, the money was already on the table when I left the bathroom, stepping barefoot onto the soft carpet. Water dripped all around me as I stood in the center of the room, my head was spinning ever so slightly from the heat, from exhaustion, from the red-eye flight, from impatience to do the deed and from the wavering question mark lodged in my stomach: Why did I do it? Do I even understand what I’m doing now? Do I have to do this? Is it right? Does it mean I’m responsible, that by doing this the blood is on my hands?
Then I flopped down on the still-made bed. The bedspread was clean, but somehow shabby. Sterilized and ostensibly normal, yet with my body’s expanded and cleansed pores I sensed its lack of coziness, overcrowded with reminders of previous guests, sleeping bodies. Of course, all this turned my thoughts back to the hospital, or perhaps it was the opposite: I continued to be there in my mind, until in the end the bed itself from room 308 at the Hotel Hamburg actually began to move toward Krankenstrasse—or better, Krankenhausstrasse—in any case, it was moving toward that Strasse as if toward a test point where I can check with a simple physical touch whether I really am moving or whether I’m dreaming under hypnosis, or both, or most likely some third possibility, or whether I really am fighting my way toward the goal I have set for myself.
>>>
I began to entertain the thought of saying “to hell with all this” and going out and having fun with his money. Whatever his means is a different story, but now isn’t the time for that, not tonight.
Right then, that night, at 8 P.M. as I left the Hotel Hamburg, I was sure that this long day would end by midnight at the latest and with a girl, paid for with cash. Or better yet, with two hired girls. And I would pay them more than I had to, because it would be his money. The booth with the red ceiling and the neon lights was merely a rehearsal. So that I would later be able to last longer with real girls, with prostitutes—I’m not going to come fast, I told myself. And so on.
Those were my plans at eight.
>>>
It is worth noting that this city, with one foot in the sea and the other in the river, has strange pigeons. At first, you mistake them for northern seagulls, but they are actually pigeons, they have a white or dark gray ring around the neck. A sign of something familiar, native, like back home. Here’s the other thing that made an impression on me: As I was wandering around at night, next to the manicured green lawns on either side of the navigation canal, I saw light shadows jumping on the grass. Because of their size, I first thought they were rabbits. But then I saw that they were rats, nonchalantly passing by on some path of their own. Hamburg—a river town, a sea town, northern and very rich. Rats, prostitutes, and the Reeperbahn: they didn’t give the impression of seediness, but quite the opposite, the feeling of stable Saxon comfort, which made it almost fitting to pay for pleasure with his money.
Of course, when I think about that money, the pleasure can only fade, nothing more.
I couldn’t give in that easily, however. I tried to find somebody to blame: the mechanized environment, the change machine, the video player that projected the films on the screen, those monotonous doors, too, and the neon light, the apathetic or overexcited faces, the silhouettes lingering by the windows—the whole disturbing yet quintessentially German erotic system, from which you expect at least a little more chaos, but no. All of these tiny elements pile up like obstacles, speed bumps against accelerating sensitivity, and instead of awakening more excitement, they arouse thought above all. And in the end, maybe even some pangs of conscience, and a little fear.
>>>
Hamburg, early or late. Love is already laid out on the autopsy table. I’m becoming more and more alarmed. Am I ruining my life? Just a month ago, even a week ago I still could’ve turned back. But now I’ve made my move, I’ve rolled the dice. I think some parts of my body are rolling around with them, my head definitely is. Somebody else is calling the shots and making decisions instead of me, someone who looks like me, but in a different form and a different phase, somewhere in the past. That’s why I’ve started to trust that somebody more. But if it turns out that the path from here on out leads me to some final abyss, the figure of that somebody won’t be solid enough; it will disintegrate, leaving me disagreeably alone. Whom will I blame then, who will be the guilty one?
I turn back the clock, then quickly wind it forward, and then back again. I take one of the bundles: new, smooth bills, all hundreds, a hundred times a hundred in a light-blue wrapper. I fan through the stack, the paper passes quickly under my fingers and the identical edges repeat themselves. No motion at all, suspended animation. The silhouette of a bridge reflected in water smacks into the reflections on the bills above it. There are no pedestrians on the bridge, the map in the lower corner is too general, too empty. Where is Hamburg on that map, where am I on Seewartenstrasse, in a gray concrete citadel-hotel on the shore, wrapped in night and glass? The thought of going down to the lobby gives me the chills, but the dangerous thing is that I don’t even know why. I got mixed up in something I had no right to mess with; touching this money, I smell the scent of the leather coffin it was put into, ready for burial. In fact, I was this close to throwing it into the dark waters of the harbor. To the rats. To the girls in the bluish outfits, leaning on eighteenth century façades up there on the street
