I got into the taxi. Even now I can hear the boy leaping onto the car. I just thought — Well, there’s another dent, as if this sort of damage was a normal risk in the business of transporting tourists. I didn’t want to see anything else, hear anything else. I wanted the farce I had wandered into to come to an end.
I have no idea how he was able to hang on. With his fingernails in a crack somewhere? Or with the palms of his hands, his feet on the bumper? The driver of a car that passed us pointed to the boy on our trunk and shook his head.
I wasn’t about to be blackmailed, I was determined to have my way in this.
Did it take me one minute, two minutes, before I shouted: “Stop, please, stop!”?
The taxi slowed down until we were moving at a walking pace, the boy jumped off, and the driver said, “Good idea,” as he nodded to me in the mirror but filled the silence that had reigned until now with complaints that fifteen pounds wasn’t enough.
I don’t know if it was while I was still in the taxi that I tried to imagine what it would have sounded like if the boy had slipped off. With the windows rolled up, we probably wouldn’t have heard a thing.
The cabbie wanted ten euros instead of fifteen pounds. I gave him thirty pounds, just to get away quickly.
Sheila and Samir were sitting in the hotel lobby. I think her hand was on his knee. But I didn’t care about that now. Yes, I even found it annoying when she arrived in the room ten minutes later. I heard her use the bathroom, heard her lie down, turn on her nightstand light, turn it off again soon after, and fall asleep.
The next day she was never more than twenty feet from my side, about the distance from our breakfast table to the buffet, or from the lectern to the first row at the Goethe-Institut that evening. Over breakfast — Samir was nowhere to be seen — I told Hoda, whom I had no choice but to introduce to Sheila, about the boy at the rear windshield. Hoda scowled. It was a game, a way of testing their courage. If something went wrong it wasn’t the taxi driver they went after, but the person with the wherewithal.
I scarcely remember that last day. I tried to cancel the interview before the reading because I simply couldn’t utter another word — but for some strange reason it went okay in English. My head almost exploded during the reading.
It was still dark the next morning as we rode through empty streets to the airport. I had no idea how I would manage the long trek to check-in, then on to passport control, security, and finally the gate, with drafts blowing from all sides. And then came changing planes in Paris and standing for long minutes in the February wind of an open jet bridge, Sheila with the brown doll under her arm.
After landing in Berlin, as we waited for our luggage I listened to my mailbox. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe the Sheila beside me had nothing to do with the Sheila I heard on the mailbox. But I didn’t have the strength to separate one from the other.
As I said, I’ve told the story often, very often, and have even written it all down now, but despite my expectations, it has lost none of its dreadfulness — on the contrary, sometimes I think it’s worse. Nothing happened, I tell myself, nothing happened, I was lucky, everybody says so. But I live in the fear that I missed the one chance I had of breaking out of that moment, and that I am caught up in it now, for as long — oh, I don’t know — for as long perhaps as it takes for a miracle to happen and, without a moment’s hesitation, for me to shout “Stop, stop, stop!”
Not Literature, or, Epiphany on a Sunday Evening
Maybe I had had a little too much to drink. That would be the simplest explanation, of course, but any other explanation … well, what can I say.…
I can only provide you with bits and pieces of the context, but as for the heart of the matter — you’re going to think I’m loony. Either you recognize it, or …
From the outside looking in things often seem so simple.
It’s been several weeks now, anyway. It was on a Sunday. To escape the heat for one day at least, we had driven out to our dacha near Prieros. It’s always three or four degrees cooler under the pines than in Berlin. Clara and Franziska can run around naked, we can wear shorts, everybody doing their own thing, and it’s just a stone’s throw to the lake.
Around noon my mother arrived, with a big bowl of potato salad in the trunk — I’ve known that ivory-colored bowl ever since I can remember. That bowl has, so to speak, always been there. And shortly after my mother’s arrival, M. and E. showed up — two girlfriends who weren’t supposed to arrive till later in the afternoon. It was a little embarrassing to have them catch me raking up pinecones and needles between the terrace and the shed. But believe me, it’s very pleasant to walk over the moss barefoot. Besides, it would be pretty obvious if there were twigs, cones, and needles only at our place. Raking is just part of the routine for a rental property like this.
The heat meant that the electric grill was the only possible solution. The sausages and shashlik were from the supermarket, but they have very good meats. I seldom drink beer in the middle of the day, I’m a person who generally doesn’t drink much at all. But what’s grilling without beer? It was hot and I was thirsty, and the beer, left in the cellar from the time before, was cooled just right. I drank one or two bottles while I worked the grill and then one or two at the table. Everyone was drinking beer, except for the kids of course. The case was empty in no time. M. and E., agreeing as a couple, made fun of our diet potato salad, as well as the crumbly shortcake, the glaze was the only thing holding the strawberries together. But they polished off the potato salad all the same, and the sausages too. Natalia and I enjoyed the shortcake just as it was.
In the hope that the children would nap, Natalia and I set out on a tour with the double stroller, but the neighbors’ dogs started barking, and Franziska kept going “Bowwow! Bowwow!” and Clara copied her. We gave up trying to get them to nap, packed up our swim things, and headed for the lake. Natalia and I swam to the far shore, while M. and E. sunbathed and my mother sat in a tied-up boat with Clara and Franziska and sailed off to America, back and forth, back and forth. In America, said E., whose son lives in California, we wouldn’t be allowed to let the kids run around naked like this. Perfectly possible it would soon be like America here too, I thought. First the States, then here.
Before M. and E. took off we drank the prosecco they had brought — prosecco is their favorite drink — because it was finally chilled enough, and ate the rest of the shortcake along with what whipped cream was left. Then M. and E. drove off. We stood in the wooded lane and waved good-bye, and they waved from both sides of the car. The sun was shining through the pines and the dust they kicked up, and Natalia said we should stay the night — it would work if we drove back to Berlin early the next morning.
“We should have thought about that earlier,” I said, as if we hadn’t had a real Sunday. “Come on, kids,” my mother said. “It’s time for us to settle in nice and cozy now.”
No one wanted to clear the table or do dishes. My mother just set the milk in the fridge. “Ah, there’s still another bottle of prosecco,” she called from inside.
“We’ll drink it as our reward,” I said. I have no idea what sort of reward I had in mind, but it was hot and it was really good prosecco.
I can well imagine how all this sounds to strangers’ ears — pigging out and boozing.