Some say, yes, you’re obligated to invent, it can’t be any good otherwise. But I don’t want to invent things. All that matters to me in this case is to be fair to Boris and that night. The subtitle was wrong, plain and simple. There are no novellas in everyday life. So I crossed out the subtitle, and will continue the way I planned from the start.
Although it was a Thursday, strangely enough no one seemed to be in a hurry. Boris, now in blue-and-white Adidas sweats, set the table and said that actually he hadn’t invited us for breakfast too. When I joined him in the kitchen, he signaled for me to close the door. Leaning against the kitchen window, he asked, “Well, what do you think of her?”
“Wonderful, absolutely wonderful,” I said.
“Except of course that she doesn’t look at all like me.”
“Why should she—”
“It wasn’t what I had in mind, I can tell you,” he interrupted, “for a girl like that to show up and say, ‘Hi, Dad!’ She doesn’t look at all like me. I’ve demanded a blood test. Which has really pissed her mother off, and her, too, of course. But I want the test. How we’ll take it from there is our business, but it needs to be clear-cut, don’t you think?”
Boris went on talking for a while. He also said that if Elvira absolutely didn’t want to live with him, he’d pay for a student pad of her own. The more he thought about it, the better he liked the idea of having a daughter.
I never explained to Boris about my — about our — misunderstanding. Perhaps he had intended it that way. That may well be. I congratulated him on having a daughter.
“We’ll see, we’ll see,” he said. “Awful name. I would never have named her Elvira. But that’s just like her, her mother, just like her!”
After his death Elvira took care of all the formalities. She had a funeral notice printed up and sent to everyone in his address book. There were about fifty people. We immediately recognized Elvira’s mother, Elvira is her spitting image.
I found it a little inadequate that there was nothing except some music. Susanne said I should have spoken, I was his only friend, after all. But in fact we didn’t know each other at all. I could have told them about that evening. But you don’t do that sort of thing extemporaneously, at least I can’t.
Last week we visited Elvira. She’s going to put the apartment up for rent and pay off the mortgage that way. On the dining table was an old dark red tin box. On top of it was a black-and-white photograph. It was of my kindergarten class on monkey bars. Except for two little girls, everyone had risked climbing higher than I had. The next group was waiting in the background. Between my shoulders and the sandals of my friend Lutz Janke, someone had penned in a line with an arrow, pointing to the head of a rather tall boy. I asked if I could have the photograph, a request I realized was presumptuous the moment I made it. But Elvira had evidently expected it and was happy I asked, at any rate she smiled and with no hesitation gave me the photo.
One More Story
“He wouldn’t even take the train if there were a nonstop flight from Budapest to Berlin on Sundays. That at least is what he said at the end of his interview with Katalin K., a Hungarian journalist, who had offered to help him buy his train ticket for Budapest — for Vienna-Budapest.”
Perhaps a style modeled on a police report would best suit this story, an impersonal tone, sentences without a first-person narrator. The attentive reader would know right off that the real reason for the trip did not necessarily correspond to the reason provided by our traveler (for whom a name is easily found). The phrase, “that at least is what he said”—with emphasis on the verb — would clearly indicate that fact.
It is always tempting to switch from the first-person to the third-person. This third person ends up coming off a little shabbily, and the experience writes itself. But that won’t work in this case, at least when it comes to the crucial turn of events — that is, when our traveler is sitting across from the woman, whose name could be Petra or Katja and whom (during their years together, or better, the years of his alliance with this Petra or Katja) he had called his wife. Or am I mistaken? Might it not possibly be more effective — at that critical juncture — to avoid any sort of commentary and to regard the first-person narrator strictly from the outside (that is, as our traveler) and thus subject him to the same scrutiny to which all other figures are exposed? I don’t know.
I will nevertheless attempt to speak of myself and of how life shows a tendency to imitate literature.
On that Sunday, April 25, 2004—the last day, that is, of the Budapest Book Fair, where Germany had been the featured guest country — I had been struck by the possibly fruitful idea (depending on my mood I’m inclined to read frightful for fruitful, and vice versa) of making the trip to Vienna to present Petra with the manuscript of my story “Incident in Petersburg,” in which the first-person narrator is mugged. That had in fact happened to me. I am convinced that the mugging could have occurred only because I had not been paying attention, because my mind had still been wandering in Vienna with Petra. I had flown from Vienna to St. Petersburg on the same day we had separated. In my story the “incident” became a kind of framework for my memories of Petra.
Of course I could have sent the story to her without commentary and waited to see what happened. But I thought it would be better — since Vienna was suddenly so close — to tell Petra face to face that for once, apart from a change of names (Petra or Katja), I had invented nothing.
I called her from Budapest — the same number, the same ring tone as back then — and left a message on her answering machine. When I returned to the hotel, I found a note with a check mark on the line “Please return call,” above which stood the familiar number — which once again was answered only by a machine. I gave the date, time, and place of arrival, 12:20 p.m., West Station, and my time of departure, 3:45 p.m. I asked if it would be all right with her for us to meet at one o’clock, “just for an hour or so,” and promised to pay for her lunch. I proposed we meet at the Museum Quarter, and concluded by saying my cell phone number was still the same. If Petra didn’t appear, I planned to visit the Museum Quarter, which had first opened shortly after our separation.
Just buying my round-trip ticket on Friday made me feel like I was giving myself a present, treating myself to a luxury — even though it was a second-class ticket for which I had to fork over a mere thirty-four euros. It was strange to plan a trip on my own, to travel at no one’s invitation, and pay for the ticket out of my own pocket.
Sunday-morning rain summarizes the view that Budapest offers me at the level of a car window. The images blur together, turning gray as the asphalt, which looks bubbly somehow. The radio startles me, sniveling, “and all the bells were tolling,” the driver turns around and nods to me. “Am Tag, als Conny Cramer starb, und alle Glocken klangen, am Tag, als Conny Cramer starb, und alle Freunde weinten um ihn, das war ein schwerer Tag.…” I get it now — a German song, especially for me.
The car belongs to the hotel, the meter hasn’t been turned on. As we pull up at Keleti pu., the sense I’m being well taken care of leaves me downright euphoric. I would never call the Keleti pu. East Station. The Keleti pu. — the last time I stood there was in the summer of 1989. Vacation trips to Budapest began and ended at the Keleti pu., marked the start and finish of hitchhiking tours to Bulgaria — a train station almost as familiar to me as the Neustädter in Dresden.
The driver and I say good-bye with a handshake. I have plenty of time and no baggage except a shoulder bag with a half-liter bottle of water, a book by István Örkény, my notebook, which I always carry with me and never use, the blue folder with the manuscript of “Incident in Petersburg,” my wallet, and my passport. “I’m going to Vienna,” I whisper as I climb the stairs to the main entrance and, once at the top, turn around as if I’m about to say good-bye for good. “I’m going to Vienna.” A blue Michelin Man waves to me from a rooftop, blue is also the color of the Trabant in a row of parked cars, more than half of them made in Germany. And all the while I’m looking around — my hand pressed to my shoulder bag — there’s not a beggar in sight, no one wants anything from me, not even a wino stumbles by. As far back as May 1979, the first time I left from here, loaded down with books from the GDR Cultural Center and S. Fischer pocketbooks from a shop on Váci-utca, I dreamed that I was a writer on his way to Vienna. For twenty-five years that had meant something very different. Or I could also say that twenty-five years ago it still had a very real meaning.