Matthias Politycki - Next World Novella

He found the flask intact, removed the stopper, closed his eyes, and for a few seconds he could imagine that everything was all right, was as it had been thirty years before. He dabbed some of the perfume behind Doro’s ears and at the base of her throat. There, that was better. He checked that her hands remained as he had folded them. By now they were considerably more rigid. Linked inseparably, they somewhat resembled claws. As he smoothed the sleeve of the kimono he saw more discoloured patches on her body and carefully covered them up again. Yes, that was better.

Now he’d get it over and done with. Quietly, Schepp went around the room, carefully avoiding anything in his path, retrieving the sheets of his manuscript that he still had to read. There were not many, barely three pages. Doro’s final set of comments began on the third page. He could cope with her comments now too. He put all the pages in the correct order. And then? He would be done. And afterwards for all he cared the doctor could come, the undertaker, the lawyer to read the will, the executor. He sat down beside Doro on the chaise-longue . When he located the passage in which Marek was asked for his name and date of birth at the customs office, and was taken into custody, his own name was still there in the margin. ‘Why not just call him Hinrich and be done with it?’ At that point Schepp would have liked to stop reading again. But it was no good. He had promised.

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 going on? 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 found only the note with Hanni’s phone number. That wasn’t going to be any help. Hanni! Come to think of it, hadn’t she got him into this shitty situation in the first place? If she hadn’t said that one thing to him, he’d never have driven off. In winter! With summer tyres on the van. All because of a woman who probably didn’t think much of men anyway, and he, Marek, had been made a laughing stock by such a person. He was bloody furious!

Big Marek. They gave him some time to calm down. Twice he rang for the customs man who had arrested him and who assured him that everything would be all right, the investigating judge had been informed. Finally, after four hours, things started moving, as we found out later, much later, when we heard the entire story, all the details: he was carted all over the place, ended up in the office of the investigating judge, who had apparently just been on the phone to the judge responsible for such matters in Marek’s hometown. And she, the judge in his hometown, had told this judge that the reason for his arrest was an unpaid parking fine, because he had once left the Dolly in a no-parking zone. The reminder had been sent to his parents’ address, which was still Marek’s official place of residence. The letter had probably simply disappeared in a pile of their other post, ditto the summons to turn up in court.

Marek was no longer a potential enemy of the state or serious offender, he was just a little fish again. After surrendering his savings passbook as bail, he was allowed to leave on the condition that he report to the judge in his hometown within twenty-four hours. That meant … but when he was taken back to the customs office, the officers there had been spending their time checking his Dolly van, and had found a whole list of things that, in their view, made it un-roadworthy. The most serious was the little skylight, not mentioned in the vehicle documents and therefore not passed by the MOT office. They were sorry but the registration of his Dolly van was invalid, he couldn’t continue his journey, and he had to pay a fine of sixty marks. Marek burst into tears. They’d finally got their claws into him.

But hadn’t he been told, by a higher authority, that he had to turn up back home within twenty-four hours, so surely he must be allowed to leave? The very same customs man who arrested him in the first place now persuades his superior to reinstate Marek’s right to drive the van home. So they tell him to take his old heap of scrap metal to the local MOT office within the next twenty-four hours, and when they hear about his savings passbook they even tear up the sixty-mark fine.

Marek races on like a world champion. First in driving snow, taking as a guide the space where the central reservation might be; then in heavy rain, water coming in not only through the holes in the van’s floor but also from above; they probably bent the fitting of the skylight out of true during their inspection. When he finally crosses the finishing line here, well after midnight, he goes straight to the Blaue Maus. A notice on the door instantly makes him suspicious. He goes closer, flicking his lighter to read it. ‘Mutt has passed away. Closed for the funeral.’

Marek half-heartedly rattles the door, he isn’t to know, and in this situation he certainly wouldn’t want to know, that by this time Wolfi has closed down entirely and gone to manage some bar or other in Bavaria, while the notice has been scribbled over quite a lot, so he could have worked out for himself that Mutt must have been dead for some time. Never mind! Marek needs someone he can talk to about his journey, someone who might even console him, and he also needs a place to spend the night that won’t seem as miserable and lonely as his Dolly. He puts his hand in his jacket pocket and finds the piece of paper with Hanni’s phone number, which indeed could come in really handy right about now; after all, she still owes him a night. In fact as soon as he finds a phone kiosk and lets the phone ring on at her place until she answers, she says, ‘Sure,’ or ‘Okay,’ or ‘Are you crazy?’ — we don’t know for certain, but anyway he drives over there.

When she opens the door to him there are no little gold flecks sparkling in her brown eyes. Far from it, she stares at him like he was some kind of apparition. Marek, however, stammers it all out, confused as he is, what with the rushing in his ears he can hardly hear himself speak. In retrospect all he can remember is that maybe he asked her if she really didn’t fancy men? Only dykes? Imagine that! Anyway, Hanni looks at him so incredulously, and a second later starts laughing so indignantly, that the rushing in his ears stops for a moment, and

And then what? Then nothing. The text broke off; that was where he had stopped writing. He sat there dumbstruck. In the margin Doro had written, ‘As if he’d have said anything like that in such a situation. Don’t kid yourself, that’s not the end of the story.’ She had continued writing where he had stopped, or, to be more accurate, she had begun rewriting the scene between the lines a few paragraphs earlier. Rewritten it in such a way that it was soon very like the one in which Dana, after her misappropriation of the cash or whatever you want to call it, came back to wait tables at La Pfiff and was as indifferent, yes, indifferent to Schepp as if she had never been sacked without notice and then got her job back only because he lied gallantly on her behalf. Not a single detail remained of the midnight encounter between Marek and Hanni. The end of the story now read:

Only when Schepp had stood up and gone to the bar to pay did she ask him how she could ever repay him for ‘all that’. There was none of the usual sparkle in her look, though, even on a day like that one where there should have been. In his confusion Schepp droned on, barely able to hear himself speak for the rushing in his ears. In retrospect all he thought he could remember was that he had condescendingly given her to understand that ‘a woman like her’ could presumably only ‘pay in kind, and in instalments’ for what he had spent to get her out of trouble. Dana looked at him so incredulously, and a second later laughed so indignantly, that the rushing in his ears stopped for a moment and everyone looked up.