Matthias Politycki - Next World Novella

He returned to the chaise-longue , picked up the sheets of paper from the floor and put them in order. He looked for that passage with Marek, the scene in which he spoke up to defend — no, not Dana — to defend Hanni. Schepp decided to ignore that comment in the margin, even though Doro had stuck to it consistently, crossing out Hanni’s name every time and changing it to Dana’s. It was no use, he had promised her to read the manuscript.

Next day there’s no one waiting tables in the Blaue Maus. After much questioning we find out from Wolfi that he’s seen this coming from the beginning, it couldn’t end well, a girl who carries on with the customers has no place here. Now what? Now nothing. Still nothing the next evening and the next one. When we threaten to go and drink wherever Hanni turns up if he doesn’t take her back of his own free will, Wolfi assures us that he’d rather go bust. But it’s not her fault, says none other than Marek, raising his voice and pointing at Big Jörn, who has actually dared to turn up again and who’s grinning broadly at all of us with a big plaster on his nose. He’s the one who ought to be banned from this bar, not Hanni.

Almost two weeks went by, and whatever we said Wolfi stuck to his guns, pointing out the damage that had been done. But then one day Marek takes his savings passbook out of his jacket and shoves it over to him, asking him to see if the sum in it comes to enough. Wolfi pulls back his ponytail, looking awkward. We all crowd round, we say what a good lad young Marek is, we urge Wolfi to get a grip, we say we’ll contribute too if necessary. But it’s enough.

Okay, says Wolfi, sweeping the passbook off the bar, he’s no monster. He lifts the telephone receiver and hands it to the surprised Marek. As a reward he can give her the good news himself.

Much laughter. We all raise our glasses to Marek, our saviour, and tell him to have courage.

Then what? In his excitement Marek can hardly find the right holes in the dial for all the numbers Wolfi dictates out of a notebook, Wolfi has to write them down on an order pad. Then the phone is answered. He stammers a bit and says, ‘It’s the Blaue Maus here,’ words which are hailed raucously even at the tables furthest back. Marek now has to shout to make himself heard. Everything’s topsy-turvy here, he says, she can hear that for herself, Wolfi urgently needs reinforcements, this evening would be best or at least starting tomorrow, she’s missed a lot. Later he claims he didn’t say the last bit, but all of us crowding round him, we all of us heard it. To our other questions he replies with a silent nod. We take it as a good sign, we pat him on the back, we buy him a drink. And so it goes for the rest of the evening until Marek’s completely pissed. Only Big Jörn sneers and says he doesn’t know what’s up with us all of a sudden. That girl Hanni is ‘totally crazy, totally frigid’, he claims, she only does it ‘with other dykes’. And on and on until he’s thrown out again, this time by Wolfi.

Next day Hanni’s back, waitressing like she’s never been away. She thanks Marek by ignoring him while letting anyone else raise his glass to her and buy her a tequila. Although Mutt is safe amongst all this turmoil, Marek sees to him regularly, making sure he’s okay. Only when dawn breaks and most people have left does Hanni approach him. Instead of cashing up, she bends right over him, her silver earring dangling in his face, and whispers to him just loud enough for those of us still there to hear, telling him that — and here he goes rigid with shock, maybe hoping he heard wrong or he’s drunk, but no …

‘You’ve earned yourself a night with me,’ says Hanni, her brown eyes sparkling with all the little gold flecks in them, not indifferent or joking, dead serious. Imagine that! Marek looks at her, or really he looks through her, he sees her — or doesn’t see her — turning away and smiling the way she’s only ever smiled at others, never before at him. As if suddenly he wasn’t still wet behind the ears.

That night Marek parked in the middle of the traffic island, where he wasn’t woken up by the noise of the rush-hour traffic but by the cops. It would be the first of many encounters between him and the Federal authorities, although they never found any illegal substances in his Dolly van. And least of all Hanni, because deep down Marek was afraid that he had misunderstood her and if he approached her to claim his night she’d only laugh at him for being still wet behind the ears. It was the first of many nights he spent avoiding making his claim.

Next evening Hanni was acting outrageously normal, nothing to suggest she’d said that totally incredible thing and magically bound one of the customers to her — or however it was that Marek felt while he waited in silence. Whenever he came in to the Maus we could see how awkward he felt and it got worse when Hanni went over to him. Even if she only said one word to him, he was totally speechless. Overnight everything had changed, everything he saw, heard, thought about here. Poor old Marek, we thought, grinning at him from the bar, the brightest of us analyzing him — sharp as a set of knives, we were. His quiet contentment, the sort that accompanies constant hopeless adoration, had been replaced by simple moodiness, we concluded. Or something along those lines.

Anyway, Marek really set about drinking now; he was the first to arrive in the Maus, and when the buzz and bustle of the place went flat around five in the morning he was the last to order a final beer. But he didn’t really enjoy it any more, you could see that, he even developed an overwhelming grudge against Mutt. Some nights he stayed away, and instead — we knew this from Wolfi, as manager he was duty-bound to gossip — he drove around in his Dolly until his eyes closed of their own accord. If he turned up in the Maus again the next evening or the evening after that, he didn’t tell us anything. Rumour had it that he did some long-haul driving for various jobs; seems he was doing the lighting for a one-man show and travelled either ahead of or behind it on tour. Someone or other said he’d seen him scavenging on a scrap heap like before; he was painting his red Dolly van black, he didn’t answer questions, all he might say, reluctantly, was, ‘I’m not doing DIY stuff, I’m working.’ Others said … oh, there were so many rumours about Marek that finally we stopped wondering about him.

And what about Hanni? She had better things to do than bother with lads that didn’t have a regular job, didn’t even have a proper roof over their heads. Autumn came. And winter. When Marek had finished doing up his home by punching a skylight in the roof of the Dolly, he drove off to Greece to see his fiancée, the one he’d been with or rather hadn’t been with for a year and a half, probably so that she could sort him out. On the other hand Wolfi claimed that Marek carried Hanni’s phone number around all the time like a talisman, and when drunk enough he’d shown it at the bar, so he’d obviously kept it. He said it was simply because he didn’t have another jacket, just the one into whose breast pocket he’d put the piece of paper that day.

Perhaps that’s why it all worked out so badly for Marek in the end. Anyway he was back from Greece after only three months. Even if he had to drive most of the way on one cylinder, taking gradients against the wind, hair-raising stuff — as we found out later, much later, when we heard the entire story, all the details — and most likely no one but Marek would have made it. In Salzburg the Austrian customs did him over good and proper; Marek was used to that, he happily explained the oil painting that now covered the bonnet, the customs man was so impressed he forgot to inspect the engine.