Thomas Pletzinger - Funeral for a Dog

Because I forgot Lua, I go back to Grace’s apartment. At the bakery where I was kneeling a short while ago, I buy coffee and croissants, and because in the West Village there are convenience stores everywhere and Grace meant the vodka and not the milk, I buy a bag of ice cubes and walk up to the fourth floor. Breakfast, I say when Grace opens the door, and give her the coffee and croissants. Lua wakes up and barks, I stand soaked with sweat and still covered in blood in front of Grace. I hold the dripping bag of ice cubes behind my back. You’re weird, she says, and climbs back into bed. I hop in the shower, that’s enough, I think under the cold water, things can’t go on like this, and because I’m now faster than I was two hours ago, I mix two martinis in water glasses and, wearing Grace’s purple bathrobe, go back to the bedroom, where she’s still lying on her side. I can pick up where I left off. I let a drop of condensation drip from the glass onto Grace’s hip and kiss her on all seventeen characters one after another. At the thirteenth she wakes up, or at the thirteenth she reveals that she’s already awake, and when she takes the glass and drinks, a shiver runs over her skin, as if we’d stopped and turned back time. Grace puts her glass on the windowsill next to the bed, then mine too, forces me directly onto my back, or I let her force me. And because we’re playing by other rules here and now, she at first keeps her mouth off my cock and takes a big bite into my face again like last night by the elevator. Then takes the cue “breakfast” and has me for breakfast, I think, and the word “cue” is right on cue, because between kisses Grace immediately breathes in my ear again, directly in my ear, and reels off her squealing sounds like the actress she is. She lets down her hair and brushes it across my face, and I reach around her narrow waist with my left hand, grab her ass too far down and too far in, pull it too far apart to be going for her ass and end up with index finger and middle finger directly on her pussy. But she can’t be that fast, and she isn’t, so I bring both hands up to her head, and with my hands on her ears I tell her without many words that this is the time and place for kissing and drinking martinis. I take a glass and a sip and warm the vodka, then I turn her over and plunge between her legs and spit her full to have something to lick, and lick her empty. Does vodka burn? I ask myself and her, but Grace is caught up in the wordless script she’s still rehearsing. I come up and now she drinks from the glass and disinfects our tongues, because pussies are the dirtiest places in the world, she’s read, she doesn’t like her own taste, so it’s a good thing the vodka’s there. Grace’s tongue dipped in vodka, and still, to my amazement, she kisses and breathes in my ear at the same time. She does that for a long time, her hand holding my cock. Eventually she straddles me and leans her head back, she does what she has to, she goes berserk and tosses her head back and forth, her hips roll, her bed on rollers moves through the room, and I think about Vonderlippe, about Lua, and watch my hands, see how they do most things right, how Grace and I go through the motions, how she loudly and ardently comes and scratches and claws and notices that I’m not coming, and then keeps going and going and getting louder. How she fulfills her expectations and I don’t stop her, how I close my eyes and concentrate. And suddenly Tuuli is there, not only the thought of her body, but also how she sounds, and it’s her name that fills my head. As I explode behind my closed eyelids and then open my eyes again, I’m surprised to be in Grace’s apartment, in Grace, at the end of the night on which I wanted to remove the splinter. The porcelain dog and Lua look at me.

Grace’s breast moves in my hand as I dial Tuuli’s number, Svensson Home . Grace is asleep or pretending to be asleep. If Felix answers, I’ll hang up, I decide, and with each ring in the receiver, with each inhalation, with each exhalation, I say to myself what I’ll say to Tuuli: the two of you stop calling me, get your own telephone number, do whatever you want, but give me my books back, give me my plants back, and what about the plates and cups, what am I supposed to eat off and drink from? If the two of you could see me now, you’d be surprised how thin I am, Svensson’s all skin and bones, the old Svensson has almost disappeared. Fuck and live wherever you want, but if you could see me now, Tuuli, if you could see me now, you’d be worried. Grace wakes up, I trace my finger around her nipple, the sunlight is pouring into the room and I’m in the middle of it, on the fire escape sits a crow, the porcelain dog is still staring, Grace’s nipple is so much darker, it contracts so much more than Tuuli’s. Do you know any German? I ask. You’re my first one, says Grace. She turns on her side, she’s not interested in the telephone either. I count the tattoos just to the left of her spine, down her whole back, the characters I can’t read. I lay my other ear on Grace’s hip, look directly into the sun and grab her from behind between the legs, maybe because I have to, when someone picks up the phone. I say, I just want to see your face, Tuuli, that’s all. But then it’s Felix who answers and says the boy was born on Saturday.

(Master of chairs, master of chickens)

In my head this image remains: Elisabeth in late summer under a village linden between Fischland and Darss, leaning on the hood of my R4, her red dress (second wedding not in white!) and the dahlias in her left hand, singing “The Linden Tree,” Am Brunnen vor dem Tore, / Da steht ein Lindenbaum , at her side children wrapped in towels on the way back from the beach. How she then goes down on her knees next to a little girl and points at me, that man over there is named Mandelkern and is now my husband (the red of the dress and the towel’s green fight). Elisabeth laughs, I laugh too.

Lua

Now the small, pretty mother is laughing and the dog is coughing. I’m standing with the rope in my hand under an alley of lindens on the shore of Lake Lugano and observing Svensson (in the sunlight the fine drops of the linden flowers, which will now be sticking to our windshield in Hamburg). Svensson lets go of the small woman’s hand, the boy stands next to his mother and observes the three-legged dog on the boat. The animal is a kind of German shepherd, black and old, he has a light spot on his chest and stands on his foreleg coughing on the boat’s bench, or maybe he’s barking, I can’t tell the difference (fatigue). The dirty swans turn away. I don’t understand what Svensson is saying, he’s gesturing at the boat and the dog, he’s pointing at me, then out at the lake. Finally he holds out his cap to the boy, but the boy doesn’t take the cap. When Svensson then tries to shake his hand, the boy evades him and starts to climb across two or three pedal boats toward the boat (Svensson awkwardly following). The boy looks past Svensson to his mother. The sun has now sunk lower over the smooth water, occasionally a light breeze comes out of nowhere, and the dog stops his coughing (the lake suddenly like plastic wrap). The small, pretty woman (Tuuli) takes another two drags and again stamps out her cigarette with her heel.

Who exactly is Daniel Mandelkern?

I’m a journalist, I say, Daniel Mandelkern. Then I apologize to the small, pretty woman for not having introduced myself sooner, I’m here to conduct an interview with Svensson, I’m actually an ethnologist, but I’m currently working as a freelance cultural journalist. She smiles (she keeps her eye on the boy). So it’s Mandelkern, Manteli in my language, she laughs, Karvasmanteli ( Manteli must mean “almond” too). The success of Svensson’s book is really remarkable, I say (awkwardly), of course I’m not the only one whose interest has been aroused, and: I find it equally remarkable that for the whole journey we had the same destination.