Matthias Politycki - Next World Novella

I’ll cheerfully admit to doing violence to that old text of yours; it’s been a while since you used a typewriter. I’ll also confess that at no time was I concerned with correcting your story in any detail — whether misappropriation of cash or destruction of bar fittings was the point at issue, whether it was Jörn or Kiddo or Wolfi or Paul, what difference does it make? I have been speechless in our marriage, and here I finally saw my chance to tell you how hard the last five years have been for me, maybe even the last twenty-five years. Forgive me, I lacked the courage to try to discuss it with you. It seems to me that we were never able to find a means of communication that would have brought us together in anything other than a mundane way. There were the texts you had written and that I edited. Presumably you wouldn’t have paid attention to anything but a written text. If I know you, you wouldn’t understand anything but editorial corrections.

Understand what?

Oh, a great deal, Hinrich.

Firstly: It was a mere single sentence in this little text of yours that caught my eye, a naïve audacious remark you repeated thirty years later in the face of another woman. A shockingly wrong thing said at the wrong time, the kind of thing only men can utter. The first time you probably only thought it or heard it somewhere, but then you actually said it — you dared to say it to a woman like Dana, say it to her face. How angry she was with you! So was I. How could I have been married for twenty-nine years to someone who would so much as venture to think up that remark? What had happened to the shy dreamer of the old days, who had held a woman’s hand for the first time at the age of thirty-five? But then you held it so tightly that I might well have thought it meant a good deal. You became a would-be Marek, or a would-be man instead of a would-be Marek.

Please forgive me, it is not, of course, just that remark that has made me so angry. It’s the pathetic lover-boy who expresses all his small-minded pathos in it. You’re a jumped-up nobody, you have no discretion, no decency, no tact, you have no sensitivity at all even in adultery. And you’re also a failure, Hinrich; oddly enough that hurts me too. Didn’t you buy Dana, at least according to your shabby logic? Wouldn’t you have thrown her down that very same night — you, with her! — on the bar or somewhere else, telling her she had taken money from the till, so that as you saw it she owed you? Shouldn’t it therefore have been repaid, every penny of it, ‘in kind’ — my God, have you any idea how that sounds to a woman? and how has it in fact been repaid? I’m sorry, Hinrich, I am not thinking about morality, I am thinking about style. You’re all the same, men and would-be men, and, to be absolutely clear, I despise you more than ever.

No, what I wrote yesterday isn’t true; I don’t despise you, you have been punished enough. I am ashamed of you, Hinrich, and I share a little of that shame myself. At the time, anyway, when Dana told me how she had to bring you to your senses, I could have cursed you. If I hadn’t already been cursing you for your nocturnal escapades, your ever-changing affairs, maybe I would have wanted the ground to swallow me up there in front of her. Imagine having a strange woman tell you all that about your own husband.

Yet I wasn’t as surprised as you might think. Did you suppose I wouldn’t notice anything? Yes, while you were still groping your way through life half blind, I was good enough for you. While I was editing what you wrote, you were happy to assure me that you would even hold my hand in the next world. But as soon as you could see properly, whose hand did you hold? You owe me an explanation, Hinrich. Do you seriously think I never noticed how much you had changed? How you turned away from what had meant everything to you before? And, let me say in passing, what it meant to me. Did you think I would just sit back and let it happen, when I had wanted to be happy with you for ever? I gave you my word in front of witnesses, could you forget that?

Yes, you could. You left me. Not physically, I know, but in every other way. Because I am now, at last, also leaving you, I will call you Schepp again, so that you understand I take this seriously, I really have drawn a line underneath it. The Hinrich I knew and loved, and with whom I hoped to grow old, disappeared from my life after his eye operation. Only the pathetic remains are left. Yes, Schepp, you read that correctly, and because I am leaving you I want to have it out in the clear light of day and

At this point Schepp was overwhelmed by helpless, hysterical laughter, which gave him a fright. He then stared into space for a while, finally blew his nose and said, a distinct note of doubt in his voice, ‘Then this really is a farewell letter? She surely won’t have done herself, well, an injury — done anything silly?’

No, Schepp had no tears left; all he could do was read on, and there were only about a dozen pages left. He had good reason to wonder what that woman Dana had said about him; he knew she could be economical with the truth. Oh, how could Doro be so credulous, how could she believe what a woman like Dana said? Now that she didn’t even want to call him by his first name, did he have to call her Fräulein Dorothee again, maybe even Fräulein von Hagelstein? He glanced at the parquet beneath the slanting rays of the afternoon sun, where remnants of his life lay scattered. Now, in the softer light, he could make out details of the photographs without squinting. There could easily have been some memory or other among them, he could have dived down, submerged himself instead of giving himself over to what he still had to read. But he did not. He plucked up his courage and did not stop again.

Yes, Schepp, what you have read is correct; because I am leaving you, I want to have it out in the clear light of day and confess something to you. I too have been unfaithful, for at least as long as you and with far greater consistency. Not the way you are imagining. Although of course I was crazy about her, used every opportunity to meet up with her — at least I can understand you there. How strong she was, bubbling over with joie de vivre , the life force. When I saw her the first time, leaning against the bar, I knew instantly what drove you there evening after evening. After all, I’d felt for weeks that you had changed completely, I sensed it after that night you came home so late, not really of this world, or at least not entirely responsible for your actions.

You could be forgiven for that, I know that now. But asking to borrow my commentaries on the I Ching the very next day, keeping the book for weeks on end — the I Ching, of all things, the text you usually refer to with mild derision, don’t you think that was a bit tasteless? Or did you really think me so simple-minded? Did you actually not care? Unloved wives are jealous. You underestimate a placid surface; it masks hidden depths. The quieter I became, the more violent I felt inside. And I’m not supposed to get upset. But high blood pressure doesn’t count for much when you’re coming to terms with your husband’s baser instincts.

Once you start seeking, you find. Even if at first all you find is a short yellowed typescript — why did you never tell me that you’d tried your hand at a novel? Or was it just going to be a short story? At any rate, you went at it, shall we say, full tilt in a way I’d never have expected you to. Forgive me, but did you really write it yourself? You weren’t the kind of man who stood at the bar, you were much more of an outsider, like Marek — were you trying to write about yourself? Well, you weren’t nearly as unworldly as I thought you were before your operation. If I’d guessed … would I have fallen in love with such a Schepp?