Matthias Politycki - Next World Novella

Then it was his German colleague’s turn; the German customs man, however, showed little interest in art but a great deal in Marek’s passport, he took it into his cubby-hole, stayed there for a long time, finally came out saying, ‘Sorry, you’re under arrest.’

This had to be a joke, said Marek, sounding remarkably lively; the customs man asked for his date of birth just to be on the safe side, nodded yes, there was a search warrant out for this very same Marek Seliger. After they’d taken away his belt and his boots they gave him a cell that was, roughly speaking, three times the size of the mattress in his Dolly, the barred window hardly as big as the new skylight. But why, what was it all about? Although they didn’t know, they did tell him, shrugging, that matters would take their course, was there anyone he wanted to phone? Then Marek, without stopping to think, put his hand in the breast pocket of his jacket and

For the second time, Schepp had reached a point in his reading where he had to stand up and get some air. He was in such a state that he accused Doro to her face of deliberately distorting the facts, of malicious insinuation. Angrily he asked her why she always had to destroy everything, even in death! Now she had gone and spoilt even this sad day for him, maliciously planning it in advance. He had always, he said, suspected her of, in her quiet way, hatching ideas he’d rather not have known about, of laying plans that then, thank God, she didn’t have the courage to put into practice.

Of course he still didn’t know what had been on his wife’s mind year in, year out, but he guessed. He had bravely read through what started as a series of corrections, but became a second text superimposed on his own. Doro must have had some entirely different intention in mind in retelling the story. Not only had she consistently changed Hanni’s name to Dana, she was soon renaming the Blaue Maus La Pfiff, and Wolfi became Paulus at the first opportunity, although in fact she had put Paul, which was officially correct but no one called him that — for two pins Schepp would have got his fountain pen and corrected the correction. In the final passage, on the other hand, where Marek was on the road, in Greece, on the Yugoslavian autoput and in jail, Doro started replacing Marek’s name as well. There was no bearing it: ‘Why not at least call him Hinrich?’ she wrote in the margin near where the customs man asked Marek’s date of birth, and on the back of the sheet she added, ‘You’d always have liked to be a Marek, admit it. Someone who for once in his life plays the man and promptly gets his reward. Whereas all your life you’ve only been a genius, one who would rather —’

It was at this point that Schepp had got up. What had been gnawing at Doro, that she assumed such things about him? What had made her play him off against Marek, call him a ‘hopeless case who had never done anything much in life, and so couldn’t have had the faintest hope of finding a Hanni or a Nanni or a Dana or whatever they might be called. Your little daydreams and nocturnal dreams too?’ Here Schepp had finally left off reading, had had to get some air. Probably he ought to have given Doro a slap in the face there and then, and that would have been that.

Shaking his head, he looked at her. Had he been wrong about her his entire life? Had she just been pretending all those years?

‘That can’t be right,’ he protested, startled by the certainty of his tone, and he added quietly, ‘But I always loved you, didn’t I? And don’t I love you still? Won’t I love you for the rest of my life?’

Then he fell silent again, and it was so quiet that he heard a humming, a familiar and homely sound, he thought. A sudden premonition, a suspicion quickly becoming certainty that perhaps Doro didn’t want to be loved by him any longer, grabbed him by the throat. Hell, why had he ever written Marek the Drunkard ? Why had Doro found the manuscript, why couldn’t she think of anything better to do than read it as a disguised version of the affair that, she was insinuating, he’d had with Dana? A character like Marek had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the married life of Dr Hinrich Schepp, acknowledged as a leading international expert on ancient Chinese script.

As far as he could remember, he had written Marek the Drunkard at the beginning of the seventies, basing it vaguely on the story of a college classmate. He had thought it up and put it together in the light of what little he had heard about the man. Schepp had been in his late twenties, an assistant in the department and studying for his doctorate, no Doro or any other woman in the picture. Well, it was probably also the story of the quiet desperation that had crept up on him during those winter evenings of ’72, or was it ’73? Evenings when he hung around the library until the cleaner threw him out, because the room he rented had no heating. Possibly Marek the Drunkard did have a little, a very little, to do with himself, although he had been to the Blaue Maus only once, and until his marriage had been a teetotaller. For Doro simply to equate him with Marek when he neither held a driving licence nor had the money to spend all evening in bars or anywhere else — he couldn’t, wouldn’t accept that.

On the other hand, and again he felt weak, fragile, on the other hand she could have assumed that the text was new, or written recently, and in that event she was positively bound to think that he was writing to get something off his chest, something he had carefully concealed and hushed up in real life. Schepp immediately calmed down again — how could anyone die with such a dreadful mistaken belief? To be dead, he thought, means above all that you can’t answer questions, you can’t clear things up, you can’t get things straight and see that you may have misunderstood them, so they will also be hopelessly false for other people, if they will stay that way. Schepp stood there savouring this idea, which made him feel both mild and melancholy, and if he wasn’t to weep aloud and hide, that was how he wanted to feel today. He listened for the humming that had just broken off, even the ensuing silence seemed curiously familiar and yet unimaginably vast. To make room for this vastness everything had moved as far back towards the walls as possible, a gigantic silence in a gigantic room, above a gigantic abyss.

At this point Schepp was almost overcome by desperation concerning his own life, but even before it could unfold completely it had turned into remorse, into the urgent feeling that he should apologize; after all, Doro was not to blame for the confusion she had left behind! It was true that he feared the worst so far as the rest of her corrections were concerned, but it was his own fault, he ought to have told her about Marek the Drunkard years, decades, ago, ought to have shown her the manuscript. Maybe they would have read it together and then destroyed it, yes, that would probably have been the best thing to do. Now it was too late. She lay there like someone who finally had discovered something deliberately kept from her, like a woman who would be bound to feel bitter about this last secret she had torn from her married life to take to the grave, at least that was how she must have seen it. Oh Doro. How stupid, how stupid.

Although he was horrified by the power of the rigor mortis that had overtaken her — only her torso remained flexible — he nudged her as if to wake her from a bad dream, and although he was also horrified by how cold her body was he kissed her on both cheeks. For a few moments he was not afraid of her any more, he just wanted to warm her and scold her gently, but most of all to be with her. How long had she been lying here, consumed by jealousy and now dead? As if in reply the clock of the Church of the Good Shepherd struck twice. Did that mean it was one-thirty, two-thirty or three-thirty already?