Shortly before his mother’s death he sees her naked for the first time in his life.
He enters the bedroom. The bathroom door has been left open, in case she should fall or lose consciousness. It frames her: the body shapeless, the small towel she quickly presses against herself too small to cover her lower abdomen. Each pubic hair with a drop of clear water clinging to the tip. They both look away. Later they pretend it never happened.
Let’s first go back in time, a few months, to where he is standing, halfway down the cellar stairs, looking up at Joschka. Joschka is hesitant, calling him back, a large old-fashioned key in his hand. They are staying at Joschka’s brother-in-law’s castle, Burg Heimhof, in the Oberpfalz, not far from Nuremberg.
The castle sits on a rocky promontory, overlooking a quiet little Bavarian valley through which a Harley Davidson roars once or twice a day. The castle has a waterless moat on one side; on the other side it overlooks the edge of the cliff. The moat is overgrown and scattered with rubble. There is an eighteenth-century gate with metal-plated doors and ornamental carpentry. The part of the castle in which they are standing dates from the eleventh century. It is five storeys high. The oak floors have partially collapsed. The stairs, too, are broken off in places: as you ascend, they suddenly vanish. If you look down, you can see through three floors, all the way to the stairs descending to the cellar. If you look up, there are pigeons beneath heavy beams, light radiating through holes in the roof. The broken lines of the floors and stairs and beams form a three-dimensional diagram, an optical illusion. It is hard to get a grip on scale. Through openings in the wall you can see fragments of the valley and surrounding hills and forests, the hamlet at the foot. On the metre-wide sills there are birds’ nests.
Joschka’s brother-in-law, whose parents bought this castle from the German government for a song shortly after the war, has been restoring one room on the middle floor for decades. Painfully precise: wall paintings of knights and unicorns, floors and ceilings of reclaimed Southern German oak, torches on the walls. A knight’s armour stands in the corner with a lance clutched in the gauntlet. You could imagine that he is still in there.
A strange sensation: standing in a beautiful room, but when you open a door, you are in a ruin.
Or let’s go back a week further. Berlin. They are staying with Joschka’s friends Aarik and Wilfred in Kreuzberg. Joschka lived in Berlin for a few years before moving to London, where they met. It is Joschka’s opportunity to show him his Berlin, everything from the sublime to the abject. Mostly the abject.
On the first evening there, they go out on the town. They move from bar to restaurant to party to bar to party to underground event to nightclub. They meet friends of Joschka’s, and acquaintances. And friends and acquaintances of friends and acquaintances. Joschka snorts too much cocaine in toilets. He moves with purpose, as if heading somewhere, as if his feet are lifting off the street. There are taxis, long walks through wide streets, lifts in speeding cars. From Kreuzberg to Schöneberg to Mitte, to Prenzlauer Berg and back to Mitte. They join people and take their leave, meet and move on: a night of greeting and departure, of random trips and changes of direction. He drinks too much himself, swallows or snorts things he is offered without knowing what they are. There are times when they linger – sometimes it feels like an eternity, sometimes like seconds – in apartments all over town. The places of friends and acquaintances – or those of strangers. Fragmented conversations, shared cigarettes. Apartments overlooking courtyard gardens, one on the Landwehrkanal, a penthouse by the Spree, a place in Mitte deep inside the Hackesche Höfe, another next to the gardens of Schloss Charlottenburg. A place in a massive Communist-era block by Alexanderplatz. Here he stands on a little concrete balcony next to a blonde nymph dressed in metallic tights. The Fernsehturm’s sphere hovers above them like a disco ball.
Everywhere there are people; all of them know Joschka. They remember him or know of him, have something to say about him (‘ein wilder Junge, this guy of yours,’ or someone nodding in Joschka’s direction, a kind of hero worship in his eyes: ‘Der dunkle Prinz des Nachtlebens dieser Stadt, dein Freund’) . Joschka as the dark prince of Berlin nightlife: he is not all that surprised. He meets all of those milling around Joschka, immediately forgets their names again. In one place there are Ulrich, Aloysius, Ebermud, Detlef, Ida and Petra. Elsewhere there are Arno, Theodulf, Finn, Christian, Ava, Till, Lauri, Eriulf, Hilderic, Reiner and Ervig. In diverse places they encounter Sven, Nardo, Hugo and Wolfgang. And then there are also Ladewig, Kai, Adelfriede, Leander, Monika, Arno, Irnfried … Or similar names. There is no end to the list.
Later he will be unable to recall large parts of that night. In reality it was probably two or three nights, people and events having since merged. Like shadows observed through a smoke-blackened pane.
There are nevertheless chunks of time he remembers clearly, jutting out like shards of glass.
At some point in the early evening they are at a bar in Kreuzberg. They park on a bridge, descend the stairs and walk along the canal. Ahead of them, lanterns are hanging over the water. Wooden floats are anchored to the banks. On these, people are lying and sitting on cushions under sweet marijuana clouds. Next to the open-air bar counter, someone is spinning über-cool Berlin lounge music. The floats wobble as they walk across them. He gets the feeling, and not for the first time, that Joschka is leaving him behind, that he cannot catch up with him. He can only follow. He looks at Joschka’s proud shoulders from behind. It belongs to him, this city, to Joschka. He takes a puff on a stranger’s joint, thinking it might help.
‘Peace,’ the young man says from beneath his fringe when he takes his joint back, as if it were California, circa 1964. The marijuana paralyses his limbs.
Joschka is like a charged wire. The cocaine makes him quick and hard; he walks with heavy feet across the wobbling floats. It is as if he has somewhere to go, something to do. A monumental destination and a heroic act, something requiring superhuman effort. Far ahead of him there appears to be a vision – radiating, blinding – of another city. That which is here, right in front of him, is not enough, just an obstruction in the wide, straight road he is on.
He tries to ignore Joschka for a moment, focusing his attention on the blonde girl next to him (one of many that night), sunk into a pyramid of cushions. A perfect young Aryan specimen. They smile at each other, at first without saying anything. The air is like honey between them. He mentions it. There are fireflies around his feet, and around hers.
‘Shhh,’ she says, and giggles a little.
With a finger on her lips, she points at the fireflies and whispers: ‘Sie möchten Honig trinken.’ They want to drink honey.
She takes him by the hand, pulls him down onto the cushions. He stretches out and starts relaxing, his head against hers, the tips of her hair against his cheek.
‘Wie heisst du?’ she enquires about his name, her sweet breath in his ear.
His tongue is sluggish. ‘Was bedeutet schon ein Name?’ What’s in a name?
She shudders, folds her arms against the cool air.
‘The dew,’ she says, ‘is falling asleep in the folds of my clothes.’
They both look languidly towards her friend, who is blowing soap bubbles through a plastic ring. The three of them stare with exaggerated astonishment at the shiny little rainbows on each bubble. The blower extends her hand, attempting to catch the bubbles. She fails, then bends forward, slowly, as if burrowing through molasses, and drags her fingers through the reflections of buildings on the water. Underneath him, the float is rocking. He is floating on the shimmering city.
Bubbles keep gliding and bursting. Just the slightest soapy spray remains of each bubble when it disappears. Joschka is behind him unexpectedly, his fingertips resting lightly on his head. It is when he draws back, he knows, or now recalls, when he stops following, that Joschka comes and finds him. He keeps forgetting. His skin erupts in goose pimples. He looks intently at his own sleeve. While he is staring, a drop condenses there, on the black leather. Out of the honey-like air.
With a thick tongue, without looking up, he says, ‘How slowly the dew is forming, Joschka: like lava hardening into a landscape, a continent breaking apart …’
His eyes close while he is speaking, then open slowly when he forgets his words. Fog is approaching across the water, from below the bridge. It changes the air around the floats, brings a certain restlessness. He tries to look through it, at what is drifting behind it. Joschka’s fingers, he realises, are no longer on his head.
‘ … like a pearl growing in an oyster.’
Joschka is not within hearing distance any more.
Other clear fragments: A small restaurant on a busy street in Mitte. Spanish hams hanging above the counter, swaying in the air-conditioning. Joschka is smoking with someone outside – an Ebermud or Wolfgang or Camilla – and crowing with laughter. He is alone in here. The lights are too bright and he is hungry. He keeps looking at the hams. They leave without eating.
A brief interlude at a party in a Jugendstil apartment in Charlottenburg. The ceilings are four metres high and there are wide sash windows on each side. He stares at the graffiti on the ornate ceilings, at the crystal chandeliers, dim with dust. Joschka is standing on his own in the double doorway between the connecting rooms; he has stopped speaking. But his dark beauty is enough, his mere presence. The crowd is still swirling around him, now more than ever. Around his long, thin legs, small buttocks, high, broad shoulders, around his cheekbones, almost Asiatic, sharply chiselled below his black eyes.
An underground party in Kreuzberg. They struggle to find it. The man with them in the taxi will get them in, even though they are not on the guest list. These things are secret, such squatter parties in empty public buildings. At the first whiff, the Polizei will come and break it all up. The man is on his cellphone, engaged in endless conversations, trying to establish the exact location. In between the man is giving directions to the frustrated driver. He is talking at breakneck speed. (Is he on amphetamines?) A few harsh words are exchanged. They arrive at what must be an old school or government building. The man on the phone is still getting instructions as they walk. He has a torch; they slip in through a side entrance. They get lost, walk back and forth through corridors and a courtyard; over and over again they turn back and into other corridors. It must be the wrong place – there is no sign of life, just more corridors and windows nailed shut with chipboard. Then they feel the heavy bass of the music in their bones before they can hear it.
Later, in the early-morning hours: Berghain nightclub in an old power station. The music is hardcore Berlin industrial; it has a sharp silvery velocity, a frequency just short of frenzy. Narrow stairways cut upwards through the colossal central space, in different directions, to different floors. High against the walls are windows, old pulley systems and transformers. Behind the bar: counters, chunks of greasy machinery. On one level, just next to the dance floor, there is a long row of elevated cells. What the original use of these might have been, he could not say. Now couples are standing in these little cages, kissing, visible from two sides. Like something from a science-fiction film: robots learning human emotions, or a laboratory in which the state monitors and controls reproduction. A man climbs out of a cell right next to him. The girl gets out on the other side. The man turns towards him, addresses him:
‘Ich kann mich nicht an deinen Namen erinnern.’ I can’t recall your name.
He has never met the man, he is not one of Joschka’s crowd. ‘Name, mein Freund, ist Schall und Rauch,’ he responds. A name, my friend, is just smoke and mirrors.
Joschka is behind him, wary and suspicious of the stranger. Joschka’s eyes are blacker than usual, with lightning in them. Joschka takes him by the hand, leads him to the heat of bodies on the dance floor. They do not move, they just look at each other. Amongst the dancers accelerating like phantoms, they slow down. He rests his head on Joschka’s shoulder. Joschka’s cool palm folds around the back of his head. Against Joschka’s bare chest gleams a slender silver Jesus. Any tension there may ever have been between them, or ever could be, is resolved in such moments. Joschka’s other hand is searching for his. There is distress in the hand. Within a split second the entire world falls into place.
A car ride through a deserted Potsdamer Platz with someone, an architect (Kai? Leander? Sven?), pointing out the different buildings. Like a disinfected piece of North America amidst the grittiness. He looks up at the buildings. The rising sun flashes against glass cliffs. There is no one else on the roads.
Back in Aarik and Wilfred’s flat. They close the curtains against the morning glow. The curtains are thick, shutting out the light completely. After a few minutes in the dark, Joschka rolls over towards him. There is a vehemence about Joschka. He holds on tightly, his feverish night trip finds a purpose. Joschka directs his head down towards the Jesus on his chest. Two shaven heads like moles in the dark room. The heads bob and nibble, fall backwards and gulp for a different kind of air: the thinner, higher atmosphere. Joschka’s straining, all night long, towards something utterly distant, is at an end.
‘This is where you’ve been heading,’ he whispers to Joschka. ‘I can feel it in you.’
He is infinitely tender towards Joschka, as always. The tenderness is gulped down thirstily. Joschka is visibly flooded with calmness; within seconds he is asleep, head in the crook of his arm. Joschka’s short hair under his fingers is as soft as fox fur. He, however, is lying with his eyes wide open. The clashing signals in his blood short-circuit his synapses.
Not long after, Joschka is awake. The gleaming city on the horizon has moved further away yet again. Joschka is searching for a new destination, one inside another body. They are both on their knees on the bed, devouring. Then he tastes iron. Something is wet on his lips and chest. Joschka is undeterred, but he detaches himself. He opens a slit in the curtains, lets the sun in: Joschka naked on his knees on the white sheet. Over his face and chest, bright blood in wild brush strokes. He looks at himself in the mirror. The same. As if he has been tearing at prey.
‘Where is it coming from?’
Joschka looks down with amazement, touches his nose, from which, it turns out, blood is pouring uninterruptedly.
‘It’s me,’ he says, ‘from me.’
Like the aftermath of an accident, so it seems, or a fight. He looks down too, touches his chest. The silver Jesus has carved him. Two short, deep cuts. Painless.
‘And from me.’
Through the slit in the curtains and the open window golden light is shining. A few leaves whirl through; one clings to his upper back. A dove perches on the window sill.
‘How darkly he is staggering aloft, how intoxicatingly, your dragon-prince,’ the dove says. ‘You can expect a terrifyingly beautiful death.’
He is astonished that he can suddenly understand it, the language of birds. Too astonished to engage the dove in conversation.
We are back in Bavaria now, a few days later. Saturday. Joschka locks the oldest part of the castle, die Ruine as the family calls it, behind them as they exit. Joschka called him back up from the cellar.
‘Who knows,’ he said, ‘what one might encounter down there.’
The large key is comical in Joschka’s hand, a prop for an Alice in Wonderland film.
The child, Joschka’s nephew, eleven-year-old Maximilian, is showing them the rest of the castle. A serious child. A stout-hearted miniature guide. There is a well-preserved seventeenth-century section, more knights standing heavily in corners, old swords hanging from hooks on the wall. Pointed Gothic windows with lead glass as murky as silt. Maximilian climbs on a sofa with his Nike sneakers and points out Alexander the Great in an oil painting. The Nike-feet keep disappearing in front of him, around corners, up steep stairs carved from stone. Maximilian shows him the three-hundred-year-old toilet. It hangs out over the abyss. Through the stone bowl, one can see all the way to the bottom of the valley. How unlikely his relationship with Joschka is, he thinks while peering down the ur-toilet. In London their lives are light years apart. For eight years he has been a management consultant at one of the prestigious multinational firms. In the beginning he did not think it would last. It would be a role he endured temporarily before switching to something that better suited his temperament and natural rhythms. An academic post, perhaps, or a job at an international NGO. But over the years your resistance to the corporate common denominators weakens: the narrow spectrum of values and driving forces, the agendas and manoeuvres. It seeps into you. You allow your productive capacity to be hijacked. You build a fort. You look after your interests. You accumulate wealth. You make your alliances, you reconfigure your alliances. You plot your route. You persuade, you withhold, you buy off. You play the game. Well, he has had enough of the game. It bores him to death.
And his social circle in London? Of this too he has had more than enough: the small bourgeois clique of ethically minded types. The Oxbridge and Ivy League champagne socialists from Islington and Camden with their polite vegetarian dinner parties where the financial crisis, global warming, Middle Eastern politics, auctions of mid-century Danish design furniture and the Royal Opera House’s productions of contemporary opera come up in conversation.
Joschka was the antidote to the whole lot. Joschka awoke him from his slumber, where he was lying on the bottom like a fish with gills hardly stirring. Made him shoot upwards and break through the surface, gulping. Everything that felt self-satisfied and predictable and stale and worn was cast out, all with a snap of the fingers. Joschka does not own a penny and has no interest in pounds. No mortgage, no insurance and no private medical care. He rents a room in the heart of London. He has hands that are capable of anything. Hands that start shaping each day when it breaks. Hands that track the shape of whichever body may be at hand that day. Hands that knead and mould dough. He works as a pâtissier in a Regent’s Park restaurant. Each day he throws himself into his work with utter surrender, the creation of things that are sweet and full of visual drama. Handmade chocolates, metre-high French wedding cakes of stacked profiteroles, almond mousse as light as a feather. And more hearty, earthy things: lush cheesecakes, dense and nutty Levantine pastries from which honey drips, heavy English puddings soaked with brandy or custard.
He too became an object of Joschka’s complete dedication. There was enough scorching light behind Joschka’s eyes, enthusiasm like white heat, to propel them both like a rocket. There were, admittedly, many other forms of self-surrender; this he understood early on – ways in which Joschka sought sweet oblivion. Vergessenheit. The signs were there: the ways in which Joschka instinctively knew the underbelly of the city, could read it immediately, the snippets he divulged about his life in Berlin. There were fiery and unknowable impulses just below the smooth skin. A frail bravado, an unsettling unpredictability. Above all, he possessed a hungry kind of beauty. Simultaneously vulnerable and careless. Glowing and chiselled. The eyes of a stag. Tattoos from Pacific islands on veined forearms.
Joschka came to cook for him in the winter darkness, in his spacious apartment in a converted warehouse on the Thames. Heavy Middle-European flavours floating through the spotless minimalism and out over the brown river: soups with dumplings, rabbit, schnitzels, liver. The clinical kitchen was being put to use for the first time since he had moved in. He could see that, for Joschka, it was a joy to have such a virginal kitchen to himself. Joschka was baking, his head bowed forward in concentration. He was caring for him. This was but one of Joschka’s faces, the man fixated on his cakes. There were several Joschkas: the careless one, the caring one, the baking one, the one with the velvet eyes who would sometimes simply disappear in the city, in the streets, for days on end, not answering his phone, who would thereafter sleep for two or three days non-stop before rising and appearing again, a little paler and leaner, but more glowing than ever. He did not ask Joschka questions about these absences. For reasons he cannot explain, it did not matter. There were few things about which they asked each other questions. That is how it was. Only in Berlin did he start gaining a better understanding of Joschka’s surrender to lost time, the vanished days.
‘Why do they not live in this part of the castle?’ he asks Joschka when Maximilian leads him out into the courtyard, where there is a patch of grass, dead flowerbeds and a deep well. ‘It looks quite liveable.’
‘There’s no heating,’ says Joschka, ‘and, apart from the antique toilet, no bathroom.’
The castle complex consists of several buildings from several periods. It is built in a ring and faces a courtyard garden. On the outside, the walls are thick and there are small windows overlooking the moat and the valley below. The family live in the smallest building, a nineteenth-century house with a steep pitched roof. A small place within a large place. Joschka’s brother-in-law works as an insurance broker, his sister as a nurse in the American army base nearby. Even though they live in this rambling place on a clifftop, they are like any German family in a cramped village house. There is a small backyard, just a shard of concrete above the abyss, enclosed with a wire fence. Inside is a Doberman. Through the fence it has a view over the valley. It barks at every movement below. Or, sometimes, for no apparent reason. The animal is sick, it seems. The ribs show, the tail remains tucked between its legs. Foam has dried around the mouth. Its bark is dry and raw.
Joschka’s mother calls and announces she is coming to visit. Joschka stiffens when his sister tells him. Tension descends over the house. It takes an hour before she arrives; she is coming from somewhere near the Czech border. A neighbour is bringing her.
‘I must warn you about my mom,’ says Joschka. ‘She is basically a tramp, a Landstreicherin.’
During the visit, the house is filled with uncomfortable silences and impenetrable dynamics. The woman is unkempt and short and wide. She does indeed look as if she sometimes roams the countryside, as if she is sleeping rough. He cannot but wonder how such an unattractive woman could have given birth to such a beautiful son. An alcoholic, that is clear, and perhaps on various kinds of pills too. Her speech is slurred, her dialect, Bavarian, is in any event too strong for him to follow properly.
After the visit, Joschka is visibly disturbed. They take Alice’s magic key and escape to the room in die Ruine, away from the little family, the little house. They stand in front of the small window, houses like toys in the valley below them.
‘Tell me about your mother.’
Joschka looks fleetingly at him and away again.
‘What’s there to say? She wasn’t a mother.’
Joschka says nothing more. He probes. Joschka shrugs his shoulders moodily.
‘It’s not an interesting story. Nothing new, nothing unusual.’
He goes on reluctantly. Almost from the beginning, she was alone with the two of them, his father having vanished early on. For as long as he can remember, she drank. His sister, just two years older than him, packed his schoolbag in the mornings and made breakfast. He recounts how his mother would often disappear, sometimes for weeks, how they had to make do on their own, had to ask neighbours for food, or his aunt in a neighbouring town. One evening, he continues, after she had been away for a week or so, he heard the front door opening. He jumped out of bed and there she was, in the corridor. He locked his arms around her waist, refused to let go. ‘Are you back now? Can you please never leave again?’ He made her promise, and she did, repeatedly. ‘I’m back. Here with you. Forever.’ She loosened his arms, put him to bed. He lay there, listening to her fussing in her room. After a while, just before dozing off, he heard the sound of the door-latch. A car engine. He jumped up, ran out. Too late: she was gone. She just came home to pack a suitcase. This time she did not return. For a month they managed on their own, but, in the end, when they ran out of food and there wasn’t a pfennig left in the house, they went to live with his aunt.
A call for him late afternoon on his cellphone. It is his own mother, from South Africa. He shifts from one corner of his mind to another, through all the rooms in between. His parents still live in South Africa, even though all their children have left the country. They own a farm there. An old family farm, inherited. They rarely go to the place nowadays; it is no longer safe. His mother harbours a deep nostalgia that nevertheless draws her back there. On the farm is a newer house, as well as a crumbling hundred-year-old farmhouse.
In front of the old farmhouse, next to the half-collapsed sandstone pergola, there grows an old crabapple tree that she remembers as a young tree, before the new house was built. She remembers the shade, has often told him how she played underneath it as a child. Now it is old, knotty. In summertime, when the fruit becomes too heavy to carry, branches tear and collapse in the dust, apple clusters and all. When he was young, apples were steamed and stewed for lunches in the new house. Sugar was added to counter the sourness. When served as part of a plate of food, it was brown, half-caramelised. Sweetly sour. Nowhere else has he ever encountered exactly such apples. When raw, they were inconceivably sour. One’s face involuntarily screwed up when you bit into it.
‘The tree is dying,’ she now says over the phone, ‘branch by branch.’
They took a cutting to a botanist, she explains, and he had never encountered the species. She is having it grafted. They are using the trunk of a hardened European apple tree. Notches will be cut into it and buds carved from the crabapple tree will be inserted. Then it will be wrapped in cloth, like dressing a wound with bandage. They will replant the new tree at the new house when the grafts have taken, when it starts budding with the new season’s blossoms.
‘Is that all you called to say?’
Usually she only calls when there is important news, whether good or bad. His parents are not of the Skype generation. Long-distance calls are not for conversation, but for conveying information. Sometimes more than one call is required, sometimes the ground has to be prepared first.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘that is all.’ (He doubts it.)
The jump in his mind to South Africa is too great, too fast. He returns to Bavaria, to the Oberpfalz. To Joschka, of whom his mother has never heard and never will.
Joschka wants to cook a large dinner for them all. They are standing in Kaufland, a supermarket on the fringes of Nuremberg. It is the largest supermarket he has ever been in. The dairy products disappear into infinity. It is fresh and bright in here, like spring. Joschka looks intently at the refrigerated shelf, as if searching for an ingredient.
‘There is something,’ says Joschka, ‘I have to tell you. About the blood, the other night.’
He can feel the cool air against his temple. He waits for the rest.
‘You should get tested.’
For a few moments he is silent.
‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’
Joschka turns away, starts packing things into his basket, things they do not need. He looks at Joschka as he is walking away, through the fog that is rolling from the fridges. There is a tingling feeling in his upper back.
Back at home, Joschka takes the key and they ascend the stairs in die Ruine.
‘Where can I have myself tested?’ His voice is pinched.
He does not ask Joschka other questions, about his history, whether he is on medication. He is considering his own options. Too late now, anyhow, for post-exposure prophylaxis.
‘There’s a clinic in Nuremberg. It’ll be open on Monday. We’ll have to wait.’
‘Wait? Wait!’
His voice penetrates the walls. Somewhere higher up, pigeons flutter between oak beams.
Joschka looks down at the floor, speaking slowly. ‘It wasn’t easy, you know, having to tell you …’
‘Enough, please.’
Until now it has always been possible to declare any seed of doubt, any sign of indifference towards him from Joschka, void. The slightest touch between them would exorcise any uncertainty regarding their connection. The touch would make him understand Joschka’s quirks, made him endlessly patient with him: his bravado, his instinct to pull away feverishly and be deeply needy at the same time. Perhaps that is what Joschka found in him. And a hesitant promise of safekeeping. And what did he find in Joschka? Apart from the fact that Joschka came to redeem him from his worn world, there is a lot which he draws from Joschka, but he understands little of the mechanisms as yet; he will still have to work it out for himself. For the time being, he can only understand Joschka in strings of images. Joschka ignites a blowtorch in his chest, that he knows. Joschka lifts his heart, lends him a comet’s speed and brightness, makes him as weightless as a bat. With Joschka he has been simultaneously untouchable – immortal – and a target for danger. Simultaneously armour-plated and flayed.
Now he sees Joschka stripped of imagery. He avoids the smoothness of Joschka’s skin. He is filled with urgency and disquiet, worry about himself mingled with concern for Joschka and the implications of his disclosure.
He is playing with Maximilian in the courtyard garden. They are kicking a ball back and forth, sometimes too far, so that it bounces off thick walls. Joschka is sitting in a rusty garden chair, watching. Back and forth the ball goes. The child cannot get enough of the game. They do not utter a word. They throw, then they kick. An hour passes. The sun is baking down. The child does not smile, does not say a thing. The game is all seriousness. He kicks the ball too hard; it ends up in the well. They both look over the edge; it is lying at the bottom, a red dot on a heap of rubbish.
‘Warte hier,’ says Maximilian, asking him not to go. Running into the house, the boy looks over his shoulder to make sure he stays.
He brings two plastic swords and shields from his room. They cross swords, again and again. Stand back, charge. Joschka is sitting in the sun. Blades are clashing with a clacking noise. On the other side of the house the Doberman is barking. Incessantly, hoarsely. He looks at Joschka from the corner of his eye, mouth tense, muscles increasingly tightened. The blunt swords keep on smacking, against the shields, against each other. Joschka jumps like a wound coil from his chair.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ he says. ‘Come with me.’
‘I’m playing.’
Maximilian looks, sword by his side. Joschka exits the gate, the heavy door swings open, he disappears alone over the moat bridge.
He holds his sword aloft. Maximilian too. They start again.
Half an hour later, Joschka is back. He and the child are sweating, but they do not stop. The swords hit each other with a rhythm distinct from that of the dog’s thirsty bark. He gains ground, retreats, lets Maximilian move forward. They stop, hold the swords in the air, start again, take turns driving each other back.
Joschka has a sheaf of yellow wild flowers in his arms, carrying it like a child against his tattoos. When Joschka passes behind him, he can smell the forest outside the thick walls. The instant consolation offered by the shadow falling over him, as soothing and intimate as moss, makes him want to sob. Their shadows slip through each other and then Joschka is gone, inside the house.
‘Let’s put away the swords, Maxi.’
Joschka puts the flowers in an earthenware ewer in their room. He does not remark on it. Joschka avoids looking at him. Within a day he will have forgotten Joschka’s eyes. Already he has trouble picturing them – sometimes so black, at other times so transparent.
Maximilian had to vacate his room for him and Joschka; the boy is sleeping with his parents in the only other bedroom. The room is filled with children’s things. Books with stories about knights, an encyclopedia showing different types of knight’s armour, swords and shields. A book about the forging of blades in previous times, about castles and city states of the Middle Ages. One containing children’s versions of Germanic and Nordic myths. There is a Lego set with plastic panels for building castle walls, little pointed flags for clicking onto the crenellations. A miniature trap door, operated with a crank between the index finger and thumb. A garrison of knights on horseback, arrangeable in battle formations. In a corner there is a box with lances and plastic swords in sheaths.
They sleep on bunk beds with children’s bedding. The duvets are virtually the only items in the room without a medieval theme. His has a pattern of aeroplanes on it, Joschka’s has red racing cars. He gets the top bunk, Joschka the bottom one. Before switching off the light, they lie in silence for a long time. They cannot see each other. His feet are sticking out from under the duvet, over the end of the bed. Joschka’s are probably hanging out even further.
They sleep restlessly amongst the toys, with cars and planes beneath their chins. When he gets up to go to the bathroom, he bends over to look out the small window. The dog is still barking ceaselessly. Above the back door there is an outdoor light. On the bright cement, the animal is contracting into spasms when the noise tears from him, as if he is vomiting. Is it not bothering anyone else? He looks in Joschka’s direction, but he is invisible in the dark. Is he sleeping or are his eyes open? Is Joschka looking at him as he is looking back at the dog? The ribs suck in, the desiccated body convulses. The eyes are glassy, the mouth foaming. When the dog notices him, he stops for a moment, looks down the quiet valley and then starts again. Like a tubercular cough. He looks at the outlines of the hills surrounding the valley. The barking is projected onto the entire landscape. Everything looks like the sound from the dog’s dry lungs.
When he returns to bed, he sees that Joschka is lying with his knees pulled close to his chest, curled up tightly against the barking. He thinks about how everything will end after this weekend. He thinks of Joschka’s shadow, soft and cool and intimate. Of how that is all that will remain.
Sunday. He does not eat breakfast, Joschka neither. Joschka’s sister and brother-in-law left early with Maximilian for the morning mass in the white baroque church whose spire rises above the pine trees at the other end of the valley. The fridge is droning and the wall clock ticking.
‘Shall we get out of here for a while?’ Joschka asks.
‘I’m not really in the mood.’
‘How about Bayreuth?’
Before they came, he told Joschka he would like to visit Bayreuth to see the opera house and Haus Wahnfried, Wagner’s villa.
‘Come,’ Joschka says, ‘come.’
He gives in. They drive in silence.
They walk through Haus Wahnfried. The sacred atmosphere would normally irritate him, the way in which the place is curated so as to render one complicit in worshipping the master, but his attention is elsewhere. All of this makes no impression on him. He is listening to his own footsteps, and Joschka’s. In the main room, the salon-cum-music-room, they walk along opposite walls. The room protrudes into the garden, in a half-circle with large windows. Here they meet, here they come face to face with each other, each with a hand on the grand piano. They look out into the garden, to the granite grave of the god himself. Far back, beyond a fountain. Joschka looks down at the piano.
‘Will we never look each other in the eye again?’
It is Joschka who says this, before moving away. On the piano, on the black lacquer, the shape of his hand remains for a few seconds in a whisper of vapour before it disappears.
After lunch, back home in the castle, they visit Joschka’s aunt. She is ninety-two. When Joschka first asks him to come along, he says: ‘You go. I don’t feel up to it.’
He is lying on the aeroplane-patterned duvet, facing the wall.
‘Please,’ Joschka says behind his back. ‘I told her about you. She’s expecting both of us. She wants me to come and show you to her. Please.’
They go. The aunt is small and fit and shy. Never married. Her speech is nasal (a split palate). She would go to pick chanterelles at dawn, on her daily wander through the woods, before swimming twenty-four lengths in the pool at the American army base. The house smells yeasty, of the fresh mushrooms, of soil. And chocolate cake. Chlorine, when one gets close to her. In her presence there is a new Joschka, softened to the core.
‘I taught him to bake, this Junge,’ she says while taking the cake from the oven, Joschka beaming behind her in the heat. There is apple tart too.
They come from her garden, she tells them. The apples.
To demonstrate, she opens the window and picks an apple from one of the branches abutting the house. She is wiry, as he sees when she bends over. A forest woman, a survivor. She offers him the apple.
Back home, he says, ‘I am going for a walk.’
‘I’m coming with you,’ Joschka says.
‘No, alone.’
Outside the gates, he walks along a curved footpath, further up the hill. He walks past a small wooden hut, a forest ranger’s house. He stops for a moment, looks out over the next valley, parallel to the one overlooked by Burg Heimhof. Downy seeds drift around him, catching the sunlight. There are white butterflies around his feet. The path turns increasingly wet and slippery where it approaches the forest. It reminds him of an Anselm Kiefer exhibition he and Joschka saw in London, in the white subterranean cube of a Mayfair gallery. Canvases ten metres wide layered with paint and mud as deep as the span of a man’s hand. One could not refrain from touching it. It was not the representation of a landscape of mud and sludge. It was the landscape itself.
Then he is in the forest.
When he closes his eyes, he is no longer in a pine forest, but in the cliché of the German forest. A dim place of antique oaks with interlocking branches. He wants to feel all the things that hover here right on his skin, wants to shift them across each other like a quadruple exposure: myths and music, history and landscape. A richly decorated Szene. It is becoming colder the deeper he goes. In this air, one could perhaps even, with sufficient concentration, stir up all the twentieth-century European horrors. He stops, opens his eyes. It is just a dead forest. Absolute silence. The signs are hidden, the codes illegible beneath the floor of pine needles, antique blood seeped deep into dark soil. Out there, from where the light is filtering in through the forest’s edge, the Vierte Reich reigns: American military bases, BMWs and highways like deep blue rivers. It is the outside realm that gives the forest meaning, not the other way around. It renders the forest small and harmless. The force drained from everything, the claws filed blunt.
His cellphone rings in his pocket. A muted sound amongst the pine needles. He is surprised there is signal coverage here. It is his father.
‘It is about your mother,’ his father says, his voice unsteady. ‘She wanted to tell you yesterday, but she couldn’t.’
‘What is it? What did she want to say?’
‘She wanted to tell you, but couldn’t.’ His father’s voice is strange. He utters a wild sob. ‘She is ill. Liver cancer. It’s spread to the lungs. And the brain. There won’t be treatment.’
His father puts down the receiver. He leaves the path, deeper into the forest. As he walks, the tears come.
A miniature scene is all he is capable of. He can only put together the small pictures, in a chaotic fashion: he and Joschka, fragments of the castle, the house with the room full of plastic swords, the fragments of forest around him, his own worry and sorrow. His mother: she stays on the edge of the photo, too over-exposed to recognise, the continent where she finds herself too cut off from everything northern.
He stops, looks up, listens for birds. All he can hear are the lines, something from his school days, which he now starts reciting:
Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögellein schweigen im Walde—
The voice of a bird, somewhere above the pines (they will not venture into the dead dusk down here), sweeps away the calm peaks and windless treetops of the poem: ‘Sie bricht herein! Sie bricht herein! Die dunkle Nacht der Seele …’
‘Don’t bother,’ he says, ‘with the warnings and the mockery. It’s already enveloping me from all sides.’
He gets bored of being lost. Time to go back; soon the sun will set. He crosses paths he has probably walked on before, encounters a pile of pine trunks he is convinced he recognises. Sometimes he sees light and thinks it is the forest edge, but then it turns out to be a clearing. He crosses open areas with wild flowers that look familiar, a square of blue sky above him. He is starting to get worried. Occasionally he encounters a viewing tower for fire watchers. He climbs the ladder of one such tower, hoping he might be able to see Burg Heimhof on its rock amidst the forests and valleys. When he has almost reached the top, he finds the trap door above him locked shut, confirmed with a sign: Zutritt verboten.
He wanders around for another hour, searching for light. Then he hears the bass line of music. He follows the sound. Furious German rap. He imagines a skinhead next to a boom box, tattooed on his neck or shaven temple. Then the music is joined by light. He is out. In a dark fold against a northern slope, a small village with featureless modern houses. Right up against the mythical/non-mythical forest. Two young men with spits in their hands. They are roasting bratwurst over open flames, the music emanating from the house. He needs to cross a corner of their garden. They look at him. He does not look at the spits. He walks along a tarred road, there are road signs, he emerges in the valley below the castle. He sees the place from a new angle. From down here it seems like an extension of the cliff.
Upon his return, the little house in the castle smells of baking. Joschka is at work in the kitchen. He avoids the kitchen, goes to lie down on the plane-patterned duvet.
Later, Joschka comes and lies down too. He tells Joschka the news about his mother while looking up at the ceiling. He does it reluctantly. It feels wrong given their newfound strangeness towards each other, but there is no one else to share it with. Joschka is quiet for a long time.
‘I would be lying if I said I know how it feels. As far as I’m concerned, my mother has been dead for a long time. I don’t remember.’
He catches an early-morning train to Nuremberg. First he visits the clinic, then gets a taxi to the airport. From there he will fly to Frankfurt, where he will wait a few hours for the evening flight to South Africa that he booked the previous night.
He is waiting to board in Nuremberg airport. The airport building displays the kind of watered-down architectural modernism that has become the common denominator of airports everywhere in the West: row upon row of structural glass plates in a steel frame. One could be anywhere in the extra-sylvan world, in the Vierte Reich. And yet, in the distance beyond the runway, the hills are briefly visible, and the dark green of pine forests, before the fog closes in.
He has a box of biscuits with him, German biscuits that Joschka baked and shoved in his hands when he left. He just looked at it without saying anything.
‘Let me know when you’re coming back to London,’ Joschka said, eyes still avoiding his own. Joschka’s hand is burrowing into his, like a small forest creature in distress.
We return to where we started, the nude scene in the bathroom. As mentioned, neither he nor his mother says a word about it. It is as if it never happened. Something has changed, though, something has become raw. The breach between now and then, the time of innocence, has been brought into sharper focus. Or maybe he is imagining things; maybe it was nothing more than it was.
When he arrived in South Africa a month ago, he made a call to London and resigned from his job. It was long overdue. His former assistant packed up his office, shipped the boxes. He asked a friend to empty out his flat and let it out. He did not say goodbye to anyone in London, gave no one his new telephone number or his parents’ address.
The rhythms of his mother’s illness catch his mother and everyone around her unawares. For a few weeks, she looks better than ever, radiating inner light. One could imagine the diagnosis was a mistake. Then the decline follows, much faster than predicted. It progresses with such speed that one cannot keep up. Soon she has intense pain. Accompanying the pain is protest, refusal. She declines pain medication. She wants to maintain control. (‘I want to know what’s going on in my body. Want to be all there when it all happens.’) Her condition changes daily, there are new kinds of pain, pains she cannot describe.
The more she becomes lost in thought, and the worse the pain, the more she does. She gets up and cooks on a large scale. She is waging a war on the scattering growths inside her. She’ll show the pain. For hours on end, she cooks and bakes, as if determined to fill a freezer from which everyone whom she has ever loved can eat for the rest of their lives. She cleans the floors, dusts, polishes windows and prunes potted plants so that no one else will ever have to do it again. She drives off to buy clothing for his father, bringing back pullovers and thick socks for him too, for all his future winters in the north. Everything will be clean, everyone will be warm and fed and cared for. So it will be. For ever and ever. (Amen.)
Later, still without painkillers, she is lying, motionless, amidst the regularity of domestic sounds: the drone of the fridge, the ticking of clocks. When one enquires cautiously, she insists there is no pain. Judging by how serenely she is lying there, one could almost believe it. But now and then something travels dimly through her eyes. She talks about taking a trip to the farm with him. She wants to show him the grafted crabapple tree, wants to see for herself how it is growing. Wants to sit in the sandstone pergola again. She is sure she can do it; they can stack a pile of cushions in the back of the car. His father must come too. He nods, but he knows it is not possible, knows it will never happen.
One evening he brings her back from the hospital after she has undergone a procedure. An attempt at brief relief – in the intestines of this most unembittered woman, the bile had dammed up to bursting point and required surgical drainage. She is sore. They drive through wet streets and he tries to understand the nature of pain. It is a strange evening. It has rained unnaturally heavily. It has stopped now, but the idea of rain hovers in the dark. The pain makes his mother speechless. It is a blade cutting them from each other, a presence in the car that dominates them in different ways, makes them absent from each other. In himself there is an echo of her pain, black and shiny and enormous and soundless. But it is not pain itself. Outside there are so many lights: street lamps, houses, cars, shopping centres. It surprises him how powerless all the bulbs are against the dark, how little they infringe on it. He looks at her: she is blind and frozen. The pain inside her is a strange country, an impenetrable language. Not a Germanic language barked in a menacing voice, but a set of soundless signs. Like aleph, the unvoiced Hebrew consonant. Or what one hears when the birds fall silent.
It is during this time that he gets such an unprotected view of his mother in the bathroom. The retina will not let go of the image, he realises after a while. It stays with him. He wonders what it means, the lingering. Yes, it does carry something in it of then and now, the man before and after the event. How he is to construe the respective selves, however, he will never know. But he knows it is a dividing line, a flash of light in the blindness of which all protection is torn away. And it superimposes her body indelibly over his German trip, a defenceless landscape on the edge of collapse. It is also on one of these mornings that she gets up and walks out into the garden. She takes the spade from the gardener. He stands back slowly, respectfully. His forehead is shiny, he has taken off his woolly hat and is turning it around and around in his hands. She puts a foot on the spade, pushing it into the soil. The man’s eyes are turned downwards. She totters. The gardener steps forward, gently adds his own foot. Together they manage to turn over a sod. On the underside earthworms teem and twist.
‘At least one spadeful,’ she says with rasping breath when she sinks into the sofa. Perhaps she wants to dig her own grave, one sod per day.
‘You can bring it now,’ she says. ‘Administer the oblivion.’
He helps her into bed, lifts her feet gently onto the sheet. He covers her lightly with an angora blanket. She surrenders, accepts the morphine. In the coming days, she insists on increasing doses, much more than prescribed.
The care becomes exhausting. He and his father take turns with the night shift. By his mother’s bedside he searches inside himself for all the tenderness he possesses. Nothing is kept in reserve.
During the first week or three he and Joschka occasionally exchanged emails. But Joschka and the entire northern world – London, Berlin, Nuremberg, the castle above the valley – feel so utterly removed from this strange continent. From this place of his childhood that has nothing to do with him, that never really left traces on his consciousness. Their electronic epistles are devoid of substance, impart no concrete news. They are stiff and unnatural – nothing feels the same from here. The menace of his mother’s illness dominates his thoughts, so that the events around Joschka in the previous months look increasingly distant and implausible, like something remembered from a story. The emails start trailing off. In his state of intensified emotion, while his mother is sunk so deep into her pillow, he does, nevertheless, write to Joschka again one night. Lack of sleep has made him scratchy behind the eyes.
Josch
You have, I realise tonight, taught me a few simple lessons (is there any other sort?) and for that I want to thank you. What are these lessons? In no particular order:
1. That one must learn to live with open endings.
2. That we like grafting our painful little stories onto other, greater narratives, onto stories filled with deeper trials and more intense pathos. Even though we want to weigh them down with meaning, they just remain what they are: our own stories.
3. One may linger in a beautiful room as long as possible. One does not have to open the door.
4. That everything is of short duration; we are permitted but a brief sojourn in a shadowy landscape.
5. I am (still) here. I am alive.
6. Pain is a soundless language, a different language to the birds’. (On reflection, this lesson may have come from my mother.)
7. That I owe the gods gratitude for a mother who loved me (loves me, if love is still possible). A mother who never forsook me, who cherished and protected me.
8. To keep the gleaming distant city fiercely in view, without a hand against the brow to shade the eyes.
What I taught you, if anything, I do not know. Perhaps just how tenderness feels when it bleeds through fingertips.
Tschüss, bis später.
He receives no response to his list of lessons. The correspondence ends.
One day, when he awakes from an afternoon nap after a long, gruelling night, he looks out the window and sees his father in the sunshine. When he goes down to his parents’ room, the bed is empty. He exits through the veranda doors. The light is sharp, the sun white.
‘What’s going on?’
‘She’s gone. They’ve come to take her away.’
‘Why on earth didn’t you wake me? I wanted to be there.’
His father shrugs his shoulders, keeps looking at the stirring leaves. ‘Meaning does not, after all, lie in the end. It’s just a moment like any other.’
He wants to grab his father by the shoulders and throw him onto the lawn.
We move a few months ahead. He still thinks of Joschka sometimes, more so now that his mother has died. Via a distant acquaintance, he hears that Joschka has moved to Bavaria, that he has renounced London and Berlin. He now lives near his sister in the Oberpfalz. There was a forest ranger’s hut close to the castle, he remembers, by the footpath, on the edge of the forest. Perhaps Joschka moved in there. Perhaps he goes wandering in the mornings, climbing one of the fire towers at dawn, looking out over the fog-shrouded valleys. He could not say, they no longer speak. These days, when he tastes something sugary, he imagines feeling the tips of Joschka’s fingers on his head. Just for a moment, but still. Sometimes, when a long shadow falls over him, it feels sweet and cool, like Joschka’s, with the same texture of velvet. And often, when he wakes up, he expects to see planes on his duvet.
He wishes it were true, the idea of Joschka as a Bavarian ranger, in a forest hut close to Burg Heimhof, the child of his aunt. But this account turns out to be apocryphal. By chance he comes across one of Joschka’s Berlin acquaintances one day. The man is on holiday in Cape Town. It is one of those names from his and Joschka’s Berlin nights (Ritter? Wolfrik? Tabor?). The man remembers him even though he would never have recognised the man. The man tells him that Joschka returned to Berlin shortly after he returned to South Africa when his mother had been diagnosed, that he has cut himself off from everyone, that he stopped his medication shortly after his move and is withering.
He retreats while the man is speaking. He holds his hand above his eyes, seeking out the shade.
So, his mother’s pain did not belong to her alone, it also had to stand in for Joschka’s. It had to fill in his imagination, had to give content to lost time.
What about him? Es geht, as Joschka would say. Life goes on. Things could be worse. He never found out the result of his test. Anyhow, we all know how an ending looks, or have some notion of it. His father was right. Endings are all the same, everything ends up in the same place. You would rather linger in a beautiful room, the room of which you now often dream, a cube within a cube. From the corners of the colossal ur-cube, cables are stretched to the corners of the smaller cube. And there it hangs: a box within a box. You keep the door locked. Outside the threshold, you know, the floor falls away. No stairs lead here. Nothing supports the floor. Should you look down into dizzying space, you would see cellar stairs disappearing into the darkness below. Should you look up, you would see pigeons flashing through columns of light. Elsewhere, tumbling beams and floors. Remarkable, the proximity of the two things: the perfect and the abject, the room and the destroyed space. In here, on the heavy oak table, there are wild yellow flowers. In the corner, there is a knight’s armour into which you could climb. Through the walls you can hear the pigeons and, behind that, an undertone that you could cut out if you carefully adjusted your ear: the barks emerging from a dog’s barren intestines.
One morning, upon waking from the same dream once again, he gets up and opens his bedroom door. He sits down at his computer and books a ticket to Berlin.