Jakob Arjouni - Kismet

The first thing I noticed when I woke up was the smell. A mixture of skin cream and lubricating oil and something chemical like sprayed grapefruit, but without any grapefruit aroma. Then a hand shook my shoulder, and I opened my eyes. Blinking, I saw a head with a furry animal sitting on it. When the picture cleared the animal turned into a complicated hairstyle piled high and held in place with a dozen clasps. Only then did I recognise Gina. Her lips were bright blood-red, and she was wearing a blue pinstriped suit and a blouse with buttons that looked as each of them would pay a few months’ worth of my rent, cash down. I think this was the first time since her university days I’d seen Gina in her war paint, not dressed in an overall or a man’s shirt in order to scrape away at ancient potsherds.

At the time, over ten years ago when Slibulsky first met Gina, she was working as a teacher in a school of dance and etiquette to finance her archaeological studies. With the knowledge she’d had to acquire in childhood, as the daughter of a tax inspector’s wife who liked to make herself out Madame Monte Carlo rather than plain Frau Scheppes from Bornheim, Gina herself was now teaching the sprogs of Frankfurt proprietors of delicatessen shops and ladies’ fashion boutiques how to waltz and drop a curtsey. She’d had to dress to suit the part. After that job ended, leaving Gina free to be much more casual about her appearance, I sometimes wondered whether the short grey skirts and bright red high-heeled shoes of those days had perhaps not been the least important consideration when Slibulsky plied her with several litres of champagne one evening.

Her Punch-and-Judy face with its pointed chin and long, aquiline nose was beaming at me. She looked outrageously healthy and wide awake. ‘Hi, good morning. Had a heavy night of it?’

I wiped my mouth, cleared my throat, and accustomed myself to the fact that even now Gina could look very unlike a woman who organized pottery courses. ‘Fairly heavy. What’s the time?’

‘Twelve-thirty. Slibulsky’s been gone quite some time. Had a meeting with his salesmen.’

She’d done something or other to her eyes too, or around them. They weren’t really that big and that dark. Or had I just never noticed because her hair was usually hanging over her face?

‘He says to tell you you’d better leave the car in the garage for now, and you should look at the sweets.’

‘What sweets?’

‘You’re asking me that? What car?’

Oh yes, I remembered, the evening’s compensation: tell Kayankaya to leave the car in our garage, and you don’t need to know it belongs to a bunch of brutal gangsters, my love, let’s just pray you don’t take it into your head to drive that upmarket set of wheels round town.

‘Anyway,’ Gina went on, ‘the cleaning lady comes in half an hour’s time and I have a date at the museum. If you don’t mind a hoover zooming round you, stay put, otherwise I can take you into town with me.’

I looked down at myself: jacket, trousers, shoes, disgusting stains everywhere. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll be with you.’

‘I need another ten minutes. There’s coffee in the kitchen if you’d like some.’

While Gina disappeared into the next room I heaved myself up from the sofa, staggered into the kitchen, washed my face over the sink, got myself a cup of coffee and sat down with it by the open window, which was next to a chestnut tree. The window looked out on the yard, and silence reigned apart from the chirping of some sparrows hopping about in the branches and the sound of Gina’s distant footsteps as she walked over the wooden floors. I drank some coffee, put the cup down, and pushed it away from me. I sat there for a while, slumped like a sack of flour, just staring ahead of me. So this was how it felt when you’d shot someone the night before, and a fairly close acquaintance had burned to death: you looked for a comfortable place to sit and wonder why people who can afford a cleaning lady would drink horrible filter coffee kept lukewarm for hours in a coffee machine. I made myself think of the moment when we’d come rushing out of that cupboard and fired. But everything that had happened yesterday seemed to me as improbable as a story babbled by some drunk in a bar the night before, and as if I, also drunk, had been trying very hard to believe his story. Perhaps that would change when I read about Romario’s charred body in the evening papers. Or when the first thugs turned up in my office because the gang had been asking questions, and had found out who had been going in and out of the Saudade unusually often over the last few days. No one’s movements went unobserved in the station district, certainly not if you were known to be something like a cop. Or would they simply blow my office up just like that? I mean, what was there to talk about?

‘Got a hangover?’ asked Gina as she came through the door. And with her came that strange, penetrating aroma.

‘Don’t know yet,’ I replied, watching her go over to the coffee machine and pour herself a cup. She leaned against the fridge, cup in hand, and examined me in a friendly manner.

‘Apart from that, are you doing all right?’ We hadn’t seen each other for over a month.

‘Hm… not as well as you, I guess. You’re looking great.’

She smiled at me. ‘Thanks.’ Then she suddenly looked at her coffee, drank some, and kept her eyes down. A brief answer. So brief that there was a silence after it. Other archaeologists might have said: yes, I’m feeling great because I’ve been appointed curator of the museum, or because I’ve found Genghis Khan’s toothglass. She just said thanks, and it was as if she’d slammed a door in my face.

‘As a matter of fact,’ I went on, when the silence threatened to become awkward, ‘if this date at the museum’s an important one, I’d better tell you your clothes smell, and not just of anti-moth spray. It’s like you’d sprayed them against rats, wolves and burglars too.’

‘Anti-moth spray?’ She looked at me in astonishment. Then she lowered her cup and looked down at herself, as if to make sure she was still wearing what she’d put on earlier. ‘But I bought this only last week.’

‘Ah. Well, they must have treated it with something when they were making it. Sorry, but it smells horrible.’

She lowered her head and hauled part of her collar up to her nose. ‘I can’t smell anything… only my perfume.’

‘Perfume?’

‘Yes, perfume! Issey Miyake, if you really want to know!’

‘I don’t believe it.’ And I really didn’t. Some old archaeological joke, maybe: What’s that stink in your lab? — Oh, it’s what Cleopatra smelled like when she’d been rubbing in fermented goat shit for her spots!

Gina shook her head. ‘Good heavens, Kayankaya! Get yourself a girlfriend! Next you’ll be asking what those two bumps swelling out in front of me are.’

I opened my mouth — and shut it again. Well, well. Slibulsky didn’t think it necessary to tell his partner about the gangsters’ car worth a hundred thousand marks in the garage, but he was obviously happy to discuss my private life with her. I imagined them discussing my solo existence anxiously in the evening over stinking cheese and open sandwiches: poor thing, all alone in his flat — Pass the butter, please, darling — It’s really depressing — Well, he can’t be the easiest person to live with — Leave it, dear, I’ll wash the dishes — Oh, Gina…

As we were driving towards the city centre in Gina’s Fiat a little later, she said, ‘And if we’re talking about smells…’

‘Yes, I know.’ I dismissed this comment. Even as I got into the small, cramped car I’d realised that I was the last person who ought to bring the subject up this afternoon.