Matthias Politycki - Next World Novella

Never mind. He would stay beside her until he began to turn cold and rigid himself. Not thinking anything, not feeling anything — except for her closeness, which of course would continue undiminished even after her death. Schepp imagined Doro standing by that cold, dark lake, waiting for him. For her it would probably be the merest blink of an eye, then eternity would dawn for him as well. They would be reunited, although in death, who knew, perhaps joined more closely than in life. Always supposing she had been right, always supposing there really was a next world. And supposing an atheist could reach it if someone was waiting for him there. And then could do away, as a matter of priority, with every misunderstanding that hadn’t been discovered in time here below. Schepp felt positively solemn.

Unfortunately at that very moment he recalled the cardinal error that would have to be cleared up in the next world, the whole story beginning with Marek and perhaps not even ending with Dana, and at the same moment he thought of Doro coming to look for him in La Pfiff years ago and meeting Dana. On an evening that was, at first, like any other, he had been at his usual table beneath the groin-vaulted ceiling and Doro had come through the door like an apparition. You could see at once, from the way she looked, that something had happened; it was surprising enough to see her there all of a sudden — once or twice he had mentioned La Pfiff to her, but never where it was and how you got there.

It had been Pia who had brought her there, Pia’s surprising phone call, the news that she was getting a divorce. Doro thought that at least Pia’s father could prevent his ‘wild, uncontrollable daughter’ taking this sudden, rash step; he was to call her straight away, she said, and have ‘a firm word’; she herself was at her wits’ end. Oh yes, it was the middle of the day in the US, this couldn’t be put off, after all a divorce wasn’t something you embarked on ‘just because you fancied doing it’, she hoped there was a telephone in the place?

With these words she had turned to Paulus for help, but before he could find his mobile Dana had brought hers out from beneath her apron. During the entire call with Pia, Schepp had had to watch the two women fall quickly into animated conversation. In the course of which Doro tapped Dana’s tattoo several times; finally she gave her some money and they shook hands. Of course the phone call had done nothing to prevent Pia’s divorce, he could have told Doro right away that it wouldn’t. Pia was as incorrigible as her mother; once she had got something into her head she would go through with it. What came back to him most clearly now, many years later, and seemed a bit strange was the last look that Dana had given Doro, as she had walked away with him — the entire scene had seemed dreadfully embarrassing, everyone in La Pfiff had seen it, and to top it all, that smile Dana gave his wife as she left, one could almost feel jealous! And the way Doro had smiled back! Rather foolishly, he thought now, her entire face shining; normally she hardly perspired at all, but at that moment a light sheen of sweat had appeared on her forehead, her cheeks, even a slight gleam on her upper lip.

Was it possible that Dana had worked the same magic on Doro as on — well, not just on him, the Professor in the corner, oh no! On every man in La Pfiff who had eyes to see. And ears to hear the charming double entendres of her jokes. And a nose to pick up the sweet smell that followed her. Once again Schepp’s thoughts circled around Dana when he wanted to focus them exclusively on Doro. Dana who had so curtly rejected him — long before Doro’s appearance in La Pfiff — when he had spoken to her about the sign at her throat. Even then he had noticed the bold, tarty look of her, and it had only been his injured pride, his pride as a Sinologist, that had made him ask her about it again the following evening …

Did she really know what she was carrying around with her, he inquired zealously. Something rather gloomy, an oracular pronouncement upon which old Kung Tze had commented as follows ….

It was still too subtle for her, Dana had replied, turning away.

This time Schepp didn’t sit there red-faced for the rest of the evening, this time he was prepared, and when she went outside to smoke he bought a packet of cigarettes from Paulus and went outside too, hypocritically pretending to need a light.

Was that finally obvious enough?

It soon became clear that Dana had no idea about her Chinese character. It had simply been ‘the sexiest’ thing she had seen while leafing through the tattoo parlour’s catalogue. Schepp told her at length about the I Ching, although he would have preferred to bite her throat quickly, firmly, where she bore the mark of its twenty-ninth character — that is, if he hadn’t been a respectable elderly gentleman and, well, happily married. By way of a substitute he did his best to confuse Dana with mysterious allusions to the sign; in his gentle didactic manner he was soon on top form, nodded understandingly even when she asked silly questions, praised her intuitive grasp of the oracle, imagined allegorical elements all over the place, new puzzles that only he (in many future sessions with her) would be able to solve, yes, he was determined to trace all the transformations of the macrocosm on the tendon at her throat, yin and yang, heaven and earth, dark and light, soft and firm, and of course south and north, those were the eternal opposites he revealed to her.

In fact he didn’t have much to say. The little he knew from reading Doro’s books of commentaries could have been summed up in a couple of sentences. Kan , the deep, the abysmal, stood both for a ravine and for the water at the bottom of the ravine; stood for heart, soul, mind; was linked in some way to danger or pointed to danger; and also meant a ‘middle son’, whoever or whatever that might be — how could a woman like Dana understand that when Schepp didn’t understand it himself? A lady-killer of the old school, he gently touched this or that stroke in the complex character of the tattoo with the tip of his forefinger, following the curve as if helping Dana to understand it. Dana’s own responses were confined to, ‘What a one you are!’, ‘Fancy you knowing all this, Professor’, or the merest mocking look. Yet it was an acknowledged fact that on that evening Schepp became a smoker and her constant companion during her breaks outside.

That didn’t mean that she treated him with more familiarity than the other customers; on the contrary, she even seemed to be protecting the sign on the tendon at her throat from him. Although word got around as to who was serving the drinks at La Pfiff these days, and soon the bar was unusually crowded and noisy, Dana walked the aisles past the tables evening after evening unmolested, untouchable. The bar seemed made for her, large enough to display her various talents, small enough for everyone to see what he had been missing — a stage that meant the world to many of the spectators.

Those spectators obeyed her every word; they ate out of her hand, drank whatever she served them, and although something quite different might have been ordered, no one dared respond to her pert remarks. For although Dana cast her spell over everyone with her charm and her slight eastern accent, and even the women turned to look at her, at heart she was the opposite of flirtatious. When one of the customers, a hopeful young man whom they all called Kiddo, began describing her with enthusiasm as the best bad waitress he’d ever come across, she could probably do almost anything, shouldn’t they think of her as a kind of minder or nurse instead — well, she whirled round at once and silenced not only him but all the others drinking in the bar. ‘Anyone here want to be minded?’ she inquired in an undertone, looking so slowly from table to table that everyone felt they’d been caught in some guilty act and devoted themselves to their glasses. But Kiddo, a dubious character of unattractively unwashed appearance with a face inviting a slap and bushy side-whiskers that almost came down to his chin, as if that made him a real man — Kiddo ducked into the crowd standing at the bar and was seen no more that evening.