In the stairwell, Zündel rather belatedly began to prepare for the reunion with Magda. Palpitations after five years of married life – I defy anyone else to do that. A gratin of leeks would do me fine, I’d be a bit disappointed if it was canned ravioli. Funny, ringing my own doorbell. Technically speaking, humiliating. Especially with no one answering. She’s bound to be in the shower, where’ve I got my key?
Dear Konrad, I forgot to tell you I’ve got my women’s group tonight. Don’t wait up. Sleep tight. M.
Armed with his note, Zündel stalked through the flat. No little platter put out for him anywhere. Just the lime green plastic dish on the kitchen floor had a few lumps of catfood in it. – A year ago, I would have felt sorry for myself in this situation, but I’ve toughened up now, he thought, fighting back tears.
He ate a pear.
Later, he lay in the bathtub, not singing. He spoke: Ladies and gentlemen, singing in the bath is a cliché. Then he eyed the geyser and said in Magda’s intonation: You know what, Koni, I think the liberation of women will be a good thing for you men as well! – Here’s how! exclaimed Zündel, and let slip a resounding fart.
Before going to sleep, he bore a small missive into Magda’s room and left it on her pillow: My dear wife, your accelerated development awes and impresses me! Sleep tight! Your K.
They had a late and surprisingly relaxed breakfast together, Konrad chatting about the blows of fate he had suffered, and since Magda was sympathetic, managing the occasional superior laugh. – My poor little man, she said. He unfurled his upper lip, and lisped: I like you very much, but I’m still going to bare my teeth at you. – Whereupon Magda said: I need to have a word with you, Konrad.
Magda: It was our decision – and we came to it jointly – that we would spend this summer apart. You said yourself it wasn’t normal the way we’ve been cooped up together for years. Fine. You leave. And three days later, you’re back again! And you leave a note on my pillow making fun of me. Have you any idea how aggressive that makes me feel? I’m no longer prepared to pay for my self-actualization in feelings of guilt toward you. I’m fed up with your touch on the hand-brake. And to be perfectly frank about it: the minute you left, I could feel myself flower, I could breathe again, there was fresh air.
Konrad: Your sentences have that je ne sais quoi of women’s group about them. Your show of frankness is just as much “in” at the moment as your silly carrot trousers. At the same time, not one of those malcontent ladies is able to put a definition on self-actualization. It’s nothing but gobbledygook! – Why don’t we split up, I’ll move out.
Magda: “Why don’t we split up,” that’s all you ever say, that’s your way of dodging conflict and silencing discussion.
Konrad: I impede your development, I poison your air, I choke you, I am responsible for your feelings of guilt – what is there to discuss? It’s an open and shut case. It’s an open and shut case, even though I’d be grateful for one single concrete instance, because I don’t actually know what you’re talking about.
Magda: You always have something against me. Ever since we’ve known each other, you’ve found fault with me! All the self-confidence I’ve lost in those years, because everything about me seems to irritate you. Surely you can’t mean me to be afraid of you.
Konrad: Bloody hell, now what if you came out with one single example! What irritates me about you? What the fuck is meant to be irritating me so much?
Magda: Well, these trousers, to begin with.
Konrad: All right, touché. But god knows they’re hardly essential.
Magda: Just a moment ago, after you got up, you came into the bathroom and asked me with barely concealed annoyance: Why do you always make that funny sound when you gargle?
Konrad: I’ve got a point, too. Your gargling is bizarre. Twice a day it makes my hair stand on end.
Magda: See.
Konrad: I was just having a laugh. Couldn’t you tell? Magda: No no no. I should hate you.
Etc.
Before long, they felt so desperate and cold and rejected that they went to bed together. And it was as though their bodies took no notice of the difficulties upstairs. Their flesh was still willing, still had the strength to overrule their dissident brains.
Half past three found Zündel in the dentist’s waiting room, gripped by the weekly horoscope he found in one of the magazines. Each rubric, Life, Love, and Personal Finances offered a significant message for him. Sometimes you just need to give your heart a little push, it said under “Love.” And the sector “Life” called for action as well: “Correct a certain error right away!” – He felt so profoundly addressed by this little astrological finger-wagging that he decided to act on it.
Just before five, Zündel was instructed to rinse for the last time. The freshly cemented tooth was merely temporary; the permanent replacement, which would be a perfect fit in form and color, needed to be made specially, and that would take a few weeks. But even the aesthetically less-than-perfect stand-in would, the dentist assured him, allow him to go on living and eating perfectly safely until further notice.
A chipper Zündel left the practice. And since he felt pretty much on top of things, he decided to stop off at his local.
At the usual table, as expected, he ran into some of the gang, whose effusive greetings moved him. Two of the women hugged him so hard he felt a little dizzy, though he well understood the premium on physical contact. – The talk happened to be of literature, and Zündel ordered: Don’t mind me, carry on!
He heard: the new inwardness is just the traditional shopping and fucking squared. – Exactly. And so much odious solipsism finally makes you yawn. – Absolutely, you have to hand it to the old guard, they still have a sense of social engagement, our egocentric youngsters could learn a thing or two from them. – Believe me, in another two or three years no one will want to hear about Gen X anymore and those navel gazers will be washed up.
Zündel took advantage of the laughter to make good his disappearance. He felt relieved not to have been asked what he thought. – I know I suffer from muscular tension in my neck, he thought, but is it really any more than bracing against a perceived threat? Strange scene at the pub just now. More and more people strike me as unnatural and pretentious, but at the same time the disinhibited ones arouse my suspicion. And I keep meeting more and more principled characters, shrill creatures. But the undogmatic ratfinks aren’t my cup of tea either. – Well, time to go home. Scary thought.
At home, he remembered something a painter friend of his had said: We have an ideal set up, my wife and I, we only communicate in writing. – Magda was out. Only this time there wasn’t just a scrap of paper on the table waiting for him, but two full sheets of A4.
First sheet:
Dear K. I’m going to Bern for a few days to stay with Helen. Distance at the moment is more useful than these titanic rows. – In case you should have any plans to go anywhere yourself, please let me know. – I’ve just sat down again and made a list of all the things you have against me. It’s a kind of postscript to our argument of this morning. The “concrete examples” you asked for, remember. – Ciao, look after yourself. Magda.
Second sheet:
Things you don’t like about me: That I turn on the hot water tap unnecessarily vigorously, that I tip the Nescafé out of the jar into my cup instead of using a spoon, that I squeeze the top of the toothpaste tube, and never fold up the bottom, that I am sometimes rough when I wind the clock, that I use too many fashionable expressions, that when pouring wine I forget to hold the bottle over the label, that I fail to put LPs back in the correct place after listening to them, that I leave the light on in the bathroom, that I always slouch around in jeans, and hardly ever put on a nice skirt, that I have an aggressive telephone manner, that I’m like two different people when we’re in company and by ourselves, that I henna my hair, that I tend to give up novels half way through, that instead of a proper purse, I carry my change around in a ropy old tin can, that I put the stress on the wrong syllable with some words, that my M’s aren’t like the rest of my handwriting, that I walk around the kitchen in bare feet and then complain about getting a sore throat, that I scrape butter off the top of a pat with my knife, instead of cutting off a little bit at the side, that . . .
Zündel sat impassively at the table. After a few seconds he unleashed such a piercing yell that the cat leaped up and shook itself: Goddamned bloody women!
Time for another bath. Bath and bed, he thought, everything else is hyperborean. Teeth-chattering glacial moraine of a world. Still, better an icicle than a warmth-craving eejit. Subzero is the battle-cry! No to the womb. No to the man craving the return thereto. Long live the deep freeze! Long live the steel filing cabinet!
Eventually a man has to grow up, Herr Zündel, isn’t that right, show a little maturity, a little toughness, everyone knows that baths are for babies. It’s time to get real, Herr Zündel, and in real life people take cold showers: that steels, toughens, makes a man of you. All the whiners, Herr Zündel, all the sissies and softies, the humanists, the pacifists, the utopians, the idealists, in short, that mawkish minority that has never managed to free itself from bed and bath, they’re always rabbiting on about warmth and protection, and any sober citizen, Herr Zündel, will recognize these wimps a mile away by their floppy attitude.
Zündel added more hot water and replied: Mr. Mature Gentleman, sir, I am sorry I am still talking to the likes of you. I am now over thirty and I still lack the decency to break off all contact with you and the likes of you, you nameless monstrous specimens. Cool and steely, martial and self-opinionated, upright and manly, you trample into the dirt whatever doesn’t worship at your cult of death, you mummies, you caterpillar tracks, you polar miseries. Verily I say unto you: Something sensitive will make its way through this life sooner than anything brutish will get into Heaven.
Perhaps I was exaggerating, thought Zündel, as he pulled out the plug. Neither will anything sensitive get through life, nor will anything brutish fail to make it to heaven. The heavenly hosts that surround Our Father are after all hosts, and that doesn’t sound sensitive to me. And basically no one can be too upset with the fact that He prefers the enthusiasts who admire His creation, seeing it as an adventure playground for pachyderms, with promotion beckoning for outstanding valor. Or is Our Father supposed to admit those trials who all their lives complain about His Cosmos, and berate Him? Is Heaven a fit place for broken-backed whingers? Are wing-weary melancholiacs suitable angel material? Is there not a place for them all where their craving for warmth can be satisfied and more – a place of a thousand flickering fires?
When Zündel climbed out of the bath, he thought: I don’t understand much, but I’d like not to understand anything at all. I’d like to wake up one day and feel: all right, this is it, as of today, we’re going to have no more intellection. The end of approbation. The end of condemnation. I want to be able to sit on a park bench and say: You know, I really couldn’t care less.