Thomas Pletzinger - Funeral for a Dog

Hotel Norge

In a dark, cheap double room in the Hotel Norge near the Christuskirche, I lay on my back and listened to the surge of the early traffic. My 30th birthday, Elisabeth was already 36, a few weeks earlier we’d met again. This evening we’d first eaten solemnly (loup de mer) and then kept drinking so as to stop time, we drifted through the night. When it began to rain toward morning, we were standing outside the hotel’s glass revolving door (time refused and passed more swiftly). We could go to my place, said Elisabeth. We could also stay here, I said (I don’t know what held me back). The hotel room was five hundred meters from her apartment. At the reception desk I showed the night porter my identification, and Elisabeth searched in her purse for her credit card (our names on a bill together for the first time). The porter is even younger than you, Daniel, she whispered, at least two years. We were drunker than we thought. In the elevator she kissed me as if I belonged to her. She wanted to fuck me right now, she said. (Elisabeth has long talked straight. She has her reasons.) But then she disappeared into the bathroom and stayed there for an unusually long time. I was torn about whether I should open the door, whether we knew each other well enough. I turned the hotel television on and off and wondered whether we could love each other. Later Elisabeth’s retching woke me. She was kneeling over the toilet and vomiting. Would I stay with her anyway, she asked between two regurgitations of fish and wine and bile (please, Daniel?).

my Renault 4

I want to retain the important things (our first hotel bill). Such as my first car, my first kiss, my first girlfriend, my first love, my first betrayal, my first abortion. My preferences and selection criteria, for example. Names with the vowel a in them, maybe, tallness under certain circumstances, maybe an unkitschy femininity, blonde hair possibly, more likely red. It’s now Sunday morning, Elisabeth will have gone home late last night on my bike (the R4 parked on Bismarckstrasse, the windshields murky from the lindens). Now she’s waking up in the bed. Before our wedding I slept with eleven women (I don’t care about numbers, Daniel, said Elisabeth, you can almost count to eleven on two hands). I haven’t yet told her everything about myself that seems important to me:

(1) Carolina. She came to Germany from Warsaw in 1989, at first she didn’t speak much German and later she spoke it very well. Someone or other called her shoes cheap hooker boots, she was the prettiest girl I knew, she had seventy-centimeter-long blonde hair (I measured). We had no idea about sex, we were Catholic, I secretly accompanied her to her babysitting jobs. For a few months I forgot my age (we considered most things possible). We talked a lot, we wanted to take our time and be able to laugh even when having sex. But then it was a deeply serious matter with technical deficiencies (after a year she exchanged me for a boy with a red Toyota). I ran into her again in 2001 at Frankfurt Airport, she had a practical short haircut, she’d married someone from the old days and since then had been living in Menden in the Sauer-land. After Carolina I spent a while just listening when the other boys talked about girls. We called one another by our last names. Pfeifer recorded music tapes (U2), Debus always kissed right away, the rest comes naturally, he said, Hornberg had a girlfriend and joined her family on trips to the mini-golf course, Petrovic had a southeastern roll in his r , Issel a soulful gaze, Wilson was the shortest and relied on the cute little kid angle. Mandelkern just says too much weird stuff, they said, Mandelkern has Carolina in his bones. In the spring of 1991 I inherited the Renault in excellent condition from my mother (I rarely talk about her death). I picked up a smattering of French, left the Süddeutsche and an issue of Spex on the passenger seat (unread), and learned to search at the right moments for a slip of paper to make a note of a compelling sentence from one of my female passengers. We drove to local art-house cinemas. Within a few months, those who leaned over the dashboard gearshift were:

(2) Nadine,

(3) Tanja,

(4) Eva,

(5) Katrin. I stayed the night in their converted attics amid their application portfolios for art academies, their Janosch novels ( Polski Blues ), Tori Amos posters, and hammocks (in the end they studied art education). It was probably about proving our adulthood, we blurred our boundaries before we knew them (Tanja and Katrin kissed each other when I wasn’t there).

(6) Hanna. With Hanna I developed the shrinking and dwindling and my it-can’t-go-on-like-this (the discovery of fear). She lived with a biology student in a separate apartment in her parents’ house, he bred geckos. Her mother was from Flensburg and was the examining physician at the district recruiting office (my mother holds the balls of all the eighteen-year-old men in this town and makes them cough, she said). Hanna decided that I should stop with the newspaper thing (she meant the Süddeutsche on the passenger seat of the Renault). Hanna’s father was an Indian engineer with an irritatingly single-minded fixation on the family honor. When Hanna was kneeling in front of me in the bushes behind the stadium one night, I could see her father and the biology student in the parking lot shining flashlights into the parked Renault (my cock in her mouth). I was declared unfit. They always did that when she came home later than arranged, said Hanna, and now cough (Hanna could do whatever she wanted, I wasn’t functioning)!

(7) Britta. With Britta my first wrong turn. In 1994 Hornberg, Pfeifer, and I had left our town and driven the Renault to the university in Hamburg (all of us studying ethnology). For the first time it was about our whole life. Britta was older and beautiful, we talked on the phone for nights on end, I in my early twenties, she three years older. I was astonished by her complete and continuous interest in me. Then one of my friends (Wilson) called her a “stupid horse” in front of me, that made me absurdly insecure, we talked on the phone more rarely and slept together only one more time. And that wasn’t until five years later, drunk and unnoticed, at that same undersized friend’s wedding. I wanted to save us for later, I said, and she laughed at me. In the summer of 2004 she called me again: she was now living in Berlin, she was getting married next week, she was five months pregnant, she just wanted me to know that (I couldn’t have been the father). I was, of all things, driving the R4 on the A24 from Berlin to Hamburg. I said I was sorry, I’d imagined things differently: the two of us and later. Britta’s reply on the phone: but you’re married too, Daniel! I said unnecessarily “yes, but” and the connection broke immediately. Autobahn and life struck me as excessively straight (turning impossible and prohibited).

(8) Carolina. The second Carolina wore red shoes with her blonde hair and was the most honest person I knew. She stood in front of Hornberg, Pfeifer, and me in the lecture hall of the Museum of Ethnology and would mark our first academic papers (“Intensive Agriculture among the Kapauku in New Guinea”). Carolina was Professor Jansen’s assistant and half Finnish, half Swedish. I’d never met a woman who could judge so clearly and run so fast (from her I learned to run, to write, to think). On her lower right leg a tattooed pack of foxes craved the grapes and rowanberries that climbed around her hip bones (the Fable of the Fox and the Grapes/ Fabeln om räven och rönnbären ). Carolina was twenty-five, she ran marathons and kickboxed (in a sparring session she once broke her opponent’s nose with her fist). After three years I’d completed my studies and she her dissertation. Did I want to go for a doctorate, Professor Jansen asked me, and I said “yes.” When the second Carolina then went back to the University of Helsinki, I brought her to the Hamburg Airport. The unattainable, she said at the security checkpoint, is something different for everyone (I got her assistantship in the witch archive).