Next World Novella (7 page)

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 questions, 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.

Those spectators obeyed her every word; they ate out of her hand, drank whatever she served them, and although something quite different might have been ordered, no one dared respond to her pert remarks. For although Dana cast her spell over everyone with her charm and her slight eastern accent, and even the women turned to look at her, at heart she was the opposite of flirtatious. When one of the customers, a hopeful young man whom they all called Kiddo, began describing her with enthusiasm as the best bad waitress he’d ever come across, she could probably do almost anything, shouldn’t they think of her as a kind of minder or nurse instead – well, she whirled round at once and silenced not only him but all the others drinking in the bar. ‘Anyone here want to be minded?’ she inquired in an undertone, looking so slowly from table to table that everyone felt they’d been caught in some guilty act and devoted themselves to their glasses. But Kiddo, a dubious character of unattractively unwashed appearance with a face inviting a slap and bushy side-whiskers that almost came down to his chin, as if that made him a real man – Kiddo ducked into the crowd standing at the bar and was seen no more that evening.

Schepp registered that with pleasure. His gaze followed Dana while she strode around the room as if shooting from the hip, furious down to the tips of her toes. He didn’t yet know that she had an unsuccessful career as a dancer behind her, but he could see it, good God, he could see it. The fact that that career had been a failure, a few short engagements in third-class shows, made no difference when he learnt about it later. He was no wiser on the vital point: had she exerted her obvious talents only to drive men crazy – or women as well? An excitingly terrible idea.

Schepp sat. Schepp drank. Schepp waited. Was he not the only one who knew what Dana was really like? Hadn’t he seen it with his own eyes? He was always trying to extract a revelation from her when he followed her outside. He discovered all sorts of things, but not what he was hoping to discover. After a few weeks he knew a good deal about the circumstances of her life, the past circumstances of her life, because she liked to tell him about her childhood with her grandmother in Galicia, and how she had helped out in the fields as a little girl; they’d even had a television, a tractor, there was an uncle in America, in short it had been a golden age – but she was airily elusive so far as her present life was concerned, she reacted to questions both impulsively and confusingly: ‘Well, of course, Professor, a bit of fun makes things even more fun.’ Was that supposed to mean – ? Was it just naïve chatter, or was there subtle calculation behind it?

Dana. As every single one of his questions led only to more questions, never to a definite answer, Schepp thought her capable of anything. He often found her out in a lie; she was both a talkative and a muddled creature who seemed to have forgotten how a sentence had begun by the time she reached the end of it – her brain was a labyrinth of blind alleys, what she said was surprising, sometimes amusing, but above all a strain on the listener, or at least on a listener like Schepp, who doubted and even despaired of her mind when she talked to him. Until the image of a mobile hanging from the ceiling occurred to him. Yes, he said to himself, that may be how her mind functions, each thought fitted separately to make up a constantly circling structure, moved forwards by the slightest breath of air, next moment backwards or upwards, downwards, something that seemed puzzlingly fickle and unpredictable, but in reality was nothing but a natural process, the outcome of a change in air current rather than thought process.

Soon there was no resisting Dana’s erratic way of conversing. It was something of a borderline experience for the honest scholar he had been all his life: he understood that when he talked to her it wasn’t the meaning but the sound of the words that mattered. From then on he stopped speaking logically to her, no more arguing, insisting, deploying his brilliance; instead he indulged in a sweet buzz of sound, rhetorically dressing up an absence of meaning. Dana would sometimes smile at him with her big, empty eyes, a reward worth more than any international recognition he had ever received.