Malcolm James Thomson - TheodoraLand

A very pompous francophile (who didn’t last a full weekend) had once claimed that I could best be described as jolie laide . Quirky, then, no beauty but also not horrible looking. He had asserted that my comportment was tolerant of gymnophoria (the sensation that someone is mentally undressing you) if not conducive to apodyopsis (admiration by one inclined or provoked to imagine me naked). I tended to prefer shorter words.

“Good legs! Great arse!”

That was a verdict I was okay with. Skateboard riding is good exercise. So is roller skating. Or racing on inline blades. I have even been known to resort to a Razor kick scooter. Mercury had wings on his heels. I simply like having wheels underfoot, self-propelled rather than motorized.

So, yes, Dirk got his information from me. Why did I call him? One reason is that I feel comfortable with the notion that those with whom I have shared intimacies, even if the episode was short, should remain somehow part of my life. I still enjoy infrequent, only half-serious but nevertheless lurid and stimulating online chat sessions with Dorthe Larsen. Some might find it odd that Dirk Seehof and Bea Schell and I remained good friends after I had borrowed Bea’s fiancé last summer. Part of the reason is that I am a very good cook.

Dirk’s article would appear buried deep on the website of the least read Munich daily newspaper and would not, to my regret, include my characterization of Elsa, the woman who was the day’s sole fatality.

“Frau Elsa Brundt was the assistant manager of Manduvel Bookshop, with the charm of a traffic warden, the sincerity of an estate agent, the human kindness of a robot and the personal odour of a basket of laundry long overdue for washing.”

My descriptions of the other colleagues were kinder. Jane Gallagher and Jock Bain were Brits, although to be precise Jane hailed from Ireland where her name could be given as ó Gallchobhair which meant ‘lover of foreigners’. Which might explain Jock, who tended towards outspoken Scottish nationalist politics. They were low-budget preppy types, recently graduated students in Germanistik. They chose for some reason to deny that they were co-habiting. Neither were injured. Jane reacted to the emergency by making lots of tea, the British response to anything short of the Apocalypse. Jock got in everybody’s way as he recorded video on his iPhone.

Frau Peine, a quiet, sad woman in her mid-fifties, suffered what might be a broken hip when the blast of the explosion toppled her off the step-ladder she had been using. On the stretcher she was cursing her misfortune in perfect English (all Bookshop staff were bi-lingual) but Frau Peine was using turns of phrase which might have been expected of a foul-mouthed sailor. That was a surprise. Jock got the audio.

Herr Stemm, our notorious hypochondriac, at long last had ailments which were not imaginary, a fractured wrist and nasty burns on his scalp. Middle-aged and a proponent of Prussian virtues, he was also a vain man. His bouffant toupée had gone up in flames. Jock got a close-up of the charred remnant.

Frau Hopkins, whose English was far from perfect in spite of being married to a Welshman, was carried off unconscious to an ambulance. She was the sympathetic, motherly type although without any children of her own.

Dear Sammy Cohen seemed more concerned at the loss of an earring rather than the earlobe to which it had been attached. Jock almost fainted when he identified the small lump of detached flesh.

One of the passers-by injured by flying glass was, it transpired, a bishop. Clerics have a minatory ubiquity in Munich. As do visitors from the rich states of the Arabian Gulf. Three dark ladies laden with shopping bags from expensive boutiques needed attention to their wounds, insisting on waiting in some discomfort for the arrival of female paramedics. That Dirk also mentioned in his piece.

What I didn’t like was his pathetic attempt to add further human interest to his report. He implied that Herr Lessinger had died of a broken heart, felled by the enormity of the Bookshop’s impending closure. The old man had in truth passed away three days before in a clinic on the other side of town. His demise followed months of illness and he was sad only that he would not be able to visit his grand-children in Florida. Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger was otherwise sanguine with regard to the inevitable outcome of the affliction he preferred to call consumption.

I quite enjoyed the fact that Dirk had used my snarky reference to the fact that the shelves at the far end of the Bookshop housing all the bodice ripper, vampire and zombie titles (genres I had scrupulously avoided even when I had belonged to the target age group) had survived the explosion and the conflagration that ensued unscathed.

TUESDAY 29 MAY 2012

The funeral was more interesting than I had anticipated. This was partly due to the fact that I used public transport instead of my skateboard. I had misread the tram timetable and arrived at the Nordfriedhof cemetery more than a half hour too early. Seated on the low wall surrounding a nineteenth century grave, in the shade of Gabriel’s huge outstretched wings, I smoked a spliff in funereal tranquillity. And so it was that later…

A Whiter Shade Of Pale.

(Procol Harum, it had been my Dad’s all-time favourite song!) And so it was that later I was super-alert to the sudden atmosphere of contempt, hurt and undisguised hostility when Vera and Agnes at last met.

Neither, Herr Lessinger had admitted to me, should know of the other’s existence. Philanderer he might have been, but the old man had never revealed the surnames of his lady-friends. Both were somewhere in their mid to late sixties, well-situated widows, their sexual appetites almost undiminished, each convinced that the aged bookseller was hers alone. I recall Vera described as insatiable although Agnes was praised as the more inventive.

Such frank, revelatory and intimate conversations with Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger had been few and far between. They often coincided with the days when I wore a dress or a skirt instead of my customary ultra-skinny jeans to work. The late unlamented and officious Elsa Brundt (as the Bookshop’s moral guardian) spoke to Herr Lessinger quite often of a suspicion she harboured. According to her, from time to time I wore a dress or skirt without the requisite underwear. The old man protested earnestly that such unseemly temerity from young Frau Lange was quite unthinkable.

Sure.

When the mourners assembled for the non-denominational service I confirmed that I was both the youngest person present and the best dressed. Vera, Agnes and others of advanced years had in their wardrobes ensembles which they wore with increasing frequency for funerals. My black knitted cotton dress from Comme des Garçons was more often worn for clubbing nights, bloused over a belt to be very short indeed. But unbelted it fell almost to my knees. My hat was a black straw trilby. I had bought three, the other two chrome yellow and cherry red respectively, for twenty euro at a market in Ibiza. My black flat-heeled ankle boots (I also owned them in neon green and silver) were more or less okay, I thought. Yes, I have the habit of buying in threes and I alternate between gleeful bargain hunting and self-indulgent extravagance. Anyway, in the chapel at least I was not on the receiving end of the kind of tight-lipped frowns which had been Elsa Brundt’s specialty.

It took me a moment to identify the man whose glance (no, repeated furtive glances during the pastor’s anodyne eulogy) could be deemed interested. Or at least curious.

Rudiger Reiß is in his late thirties, looks fit and has an upright posture. He’s taller than me and I am quite tall. I had seen the man in charge of all the Munich branches of Manduvel just once, at the beginning of the year. He had announced then in glib management-speak to the assembled staff that the branch on Trinity Place was to be abandoned by the concern. His timing, we had all agreed, sucked. It had been the Monday following the weekend which had been lengthened by the Epiphany holiday on the Friday. On the twelfth day of Christmas he had probably rehearsed.