Thomas Pletzinger - Funeral for a Dog

The boy is hungry when Tuuli parks the Fiat in a Burger King lot on the A5 beyond Heidelberg. Samuli has to eat, Tuuli says, I don’t have enough milk. In the parking lot a giant foam rubber mouse in overalls is walking around between the parked cars and sticking advertising leaflets under the windshield wipers: I’m the Euromaus, she sings, from the Europa-Park in Rust! Thrills galore, she shouts, and gives Tuuli a flyer, the sensational Silver Star roller coaster! Tuuli reads and hands me the boy, I touch him for the first time, his hair color is hidden under the blue cap. We have a bottle of milk warmed up in the microwave, Lua gets a Whopper. We sit outside the Burger King in the sun with our milkshakes, and I give the boy the bottle. Tuuli talks about the past year without me and how it has come to this, she tells me about life in Hamburg and this and that. I nod, Samuli drinks. Tuuli has stamped out her cigarette and is petting Lua, then she leans her head on my shoulder, for the first time in months I can smell her hair and her smoke. What’s this secret Felix mentioned? I ask, even though I know what it is. No idea, she answers, it’s not that important. For a few seconds in the parking lot of the Burger King at exit 57 on the autobahn, Tuuli, the boy, and I are a family, then the foam rubber mouse in overalls interrupts us: the Silver Star — breathtaking fun! No thanks, I say, but Tuuli takes another leaflet and says that we are now going to ride the roller coaster, there really is something to celebrate.

(The pretty mothers)

Down by the water: Lua motionless, then Svensson steps onto the dock from the right. A few minutes ago I woke up with a stubborn erection and between manuscript pages (the empty soup bowl on the floor). For the first time in days I’m not tired or drunk. The door is ajar, the window open. It comes back to me: last night Tuuli was lying next to me on the mattress and reading. I fell asleep, even though she now and then touched my shoulder (her occasional laughter in my half-sleep). I gather up the manuscript pages and put them in the suitcase with the stones. I sit down at the desk as if nothing happened, I open my blue notebook (my rapid recovery). Down below on the dock Svensson scoops lake water into a light blue cleaning bucket and pours it on the dried chicken blood. As they do every morning, the two fishermen glide along the shore, the blood-scrubbing Svensson on the dock raises his brush and shouts something Italian. The fishermen laugh. Svensson scrubs and scours and rinses the blood into the light green lake. Then he bends down to Lua and watches the boat (Pike Machine). Svensson is kneeling there and looking across the lake to the opposite shore, to the glowing yellow of the church. I gaze at the villa below it in the morning sun. That villa belongs to Blaumeiser’s family, Tuuli said. Blaumeiser drowned. Svensson’s hints come back to me (Tuuli’s reproaches). He’s standing on the shore like the sad Jay Gatsby, I’m observing as unreliably as Nick Carraway. Svensson has come up against a limit, he hasn’t finished writing his autobiography (his stories don’t extend into the present). I’m waiting for my cock to give way, but the thought of Tuuli remains. This morning the swallows are sailing their sharp turns just over the water’s surface on a wind I can’t feel yet, they’re avoiding the storm that’s supposed to come soon (Svensson’s been talking for days about a storm caught in the St. Gotthard Pass). The sycamore is shedding its leaves due to dryness, the oleander is spitting its flowers at our feet (the question of whether this storm will come).

The Story of Leo and the Notmuch

In the next room Tuuli is reading softly to the boy from the children’s book, Samy is reciting along. The two research folders still on the desk. “ The Story of Leo and the Notmuch doesn’t downplay anything,” writes the Frankfurter Allgemeine , “it’s more than another illustrated trivialization. It explains death to children as what it is: loss.” And “against loss it is above all memory that helps” (literary supplement of the 2005 Leipzig Book Fair). The Neue Zürcher Zeitung speaks of “potent images that create a palpable grief and then dissolve this in imagination and memory.” The Story of Leo and the Notmuch tells a story of loss because Felix Blaumeiser is dead (naïve biographism, Elisabeth would call that; but she sent me here). Svensson is a collector, he wants to retain memories in stones, chairs, pictures. He wrote the Astroland manuscript. Lua has almost always been there, the dog has seen and heard most of it. I’m sitting by the window and surmising: The Blaumeiser family’s house is in Cima di Porlezza on the other side of the lake, so Svensson lives directly opposite. The blue Fiat once belonged to Felix, that’s why Svensson has parked the car probably forever in his yard. At the cockfight in Olinda they bet on Wordsworth and Naish, so Svensson gave two roosters those names (I can’t tell the ages of animals). Tuuli and Svensson were in the Fiat on the way to Felix on Lake Lugano. There was something to celebrate, Blaumeiser apparently said. His death remains a mystery. Tuuli and the boy can no longer be heard (my main informant must know the solution).

chicken blood

I’m lying on the mattress again, my erection won’t go away on its own. Under the white sheets my fingers summon the memory of Elisabeth’s dried blood (my wife’s blood), my nose smells Tuuli’s tobacco and milk, I think about last night (the missed opportunity). I could consider myself lucky that Tuuli didn’t come closer to me last night. I’ve fallen out of time, I haven’t been able to wash myself, I haven’t brushed my teeth for days. The bed bears her smell, her golden hairpin is no longer lying where it was still lying last night. A line of thought: if Tuuli doesn’t open the suitcase for me now, it will remain locked, and I won’t be able to save Svensson’s story. Without the story I need not even go back to Hamburg at all. I could jump in the lake to get rid of Elisabeth’s blood, I could jump in the lake to wash off my wife. Down below on the dock Svensson is scrubbing the animals’ blood from the planks, in his study I want to expel my strategies, my fingers work on the usual mechanics, in my pants pocket I search for and find the necessary handkerchief. Tuuli’s singing and Svensson’s footsteps are nowhere to be heard, only a single pigeon is sitting silently on the windowsill, and I help myself to the images in my head, Elisabeth and Mandelkern, suddenly

I and you

in the white of our bed like a single body, we’d been reading to each other ( Das Dekameron ). When I eventually fell asleep in the sun and woke up again, Boccaccio was lying open between us. You were sitting next to me with open mouth and open legs (your eyes fixed on my face, your right hand between your legs). It won’t take much longer, you said, you were almost there (you had to concentrate on those words). My cock had already anticipated you in sleep. Then you actually came, before I could help your fingers, there was enough time only for our open mouths. It was of no consequence who came how and when (we talked about our orgasms).

I just wanna fuck you right here

And now this mattress (another awakening). With my cock in my left hand the realization that I’m not going to write a 3,000-word profile of Svensson in this room. I would tell about Tuuli, her somewhat too-tired eyes and her blonde hair, how she was suddenly standing in the room yesterday, in a purple T-shirt, a bowl of chicken soup in her hand, her note from the day before still on the floor: Tuuli wants to show me things that are worth it. I jerk off the way I write (I mingle past and present, Tuuli Elisabeth, Elisabeth Tuuli, etc.). I mix Elisabeth’s image with Tuuli’s smell on the sheets around me, I help my thoughts to Elisabeth’s heavy breasts and Tuuli’s small ones, also briefly to the first and the second Carolina, to their open mouths, to Svensson’s stories (“I just wanna fuck you right here”). Suddenly the shouting of the boy penetrates through the window to me from the water (under the chestnuts in Hamburg: bicycle bells and children’s noise). And then the suitcase comes into my view, and the situation. I’m still on the mattress, unwashed and alone, the research folders on the desk (the blood still on me).