Matthias Politycki - Next World Novella

Most of all Mutt had to be protected from Big Jörn. Jörn liked firewater, gave you ‘smooth body juices and a pure complexion’, he said. When he’d tipped enough of it down his throat to set light to his nerve endings he’d go up in flames, all for Hanni, of course. Then Marek just shrugged and took himself off to a quieter corner. There he sat, didn’t get much joy in the corner either, couldn’t join in the conversation like ours at the bar, just automatically raised his glass when the time seemed right. Couldn’t really get real friends that way. Meanwhile Big Jörn was full of drunk boasting: Hanni, let me tell you, what a live wire, you never know if she’s going to laugh or bite. So when he said that and more of the same, the only thing Hanni would do is pause in front of him flashing her eyes to shut him up. Those nights Mutt usually suffered a lot.

It could have gone on like this for years. But it all changed one hot, humid July night. ‘Love Like a Man’ had been playing for some time, it was Wolfi’s habitual chucking-out number. But as usual it was only him who set off home, leaving the field to Hanni. And us. Big Jörn really got into his stride on such nights. Entertained the whole Maus with his boastful stories, spiked with racy little details. Stood a round. Firewater for everyone. Every time Marek had to raise his glass to him you can bet he was thinking, the hell with you. ‘Another little one won’t hurt,’ Big Jörn announced, launching into praise for Hanni’s charms — if looks could kill he’d have died several times over. But she said nothing, at most just flashed her eyes, and still no one knew whether Big Jörn was her boyfriend, her ex-boyfriend or just showing off. We wanted him to verify his claims. Now Big Jörn had a reputation to lose. So he reached for Hanni just as she was trying to steer past him with a tray of empty glasses, and, while we were still scattering from their clinking and clattering, he laid her down on the bar and gave her a kiss in front of us all.

But not a nice sort of kiss.

The other sort.

He finally lets her go with a triumphant grin. Hanni is breathing heavily, then she starts screaming. Now we all know what to think, and the next moment there’s a right old punch-up going on, a real clattering and clanking, and all together we throw Big Jörn out into the street. There Hanni gives him a ringing slap. And just as he’s about to get up and scram, Mutt shoots out of the bar barking and snaps at his trouser legs. For a moment Big Jörn glares at the dog, then sends him flying against the wall with a hearty kick. Now everyone would like to kick the shit out of Big Jörn, every last one of us. But while we still stand, gaping, only Marek — Marek of all people, who’d been hanging back until now — first he goes over to Mutt, who’s writhing about whining, then without a word he goes up to Big Jörn and smashes his nose in. You should’ve seen it! Big Jörn howls, there’s blood running through his fingers and down his neck, and off he runs.

Next day no one’s waiting tables in the Blaue Maus. After much questioning we find out from Wolfi that he’s seen this coming right 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, suddenly raising his voice and

Schepp had managed to read up to this point in spite of Doro’s corrections, at first with sceptical curiosity, then with horror, finally with mounting anger. At the beginning she had just scored one or two sets of double lines in the margin to draw attention to something, followed by an exclamation or a question mark — he knew her annotation style well enough to understand what she meant. But soon the marginal notes became more extensive, forthright, cutting. Doro had always been a model of discretion, but now that the sharp tone of her comments was unmitigated by lenience, she sparkled with icy elegance. Did she want to make him feel inferior? How was he to take it when she, of all people, told him in the margin what she thought Marek was really doing when the text said expressly that he was just lying there thinking of Hanni? Schepp was embarrassed. In the next section wasn’t she openly criticizing not only his protagonist but him, the author, for being inhibited — why did he keep beating about the bush, circling around the subject? Had he never had a little nibble of someone himself? And when Big Jörn got into his stride, once again there was the remark, ‘Oh, why not call him Hinrich and be done with it?’ On the back of the sheet, however, she had written, ‘Your admiration for him is ridiculous.’

Schepp was extremely annoyed. The solemn mood in which he had wanted to say his last goodbye to Doro was gone. Being dead means no one can answer you back, he snorted at her. But it was her next correction that cut him to the quick. The manuscript slipped from his hands, he got up and looked around him, at a loss. Then he started pacing back and forth, beating time in the air with his index and little fingers to the rhythm of the retorts bursting out of him.

What had put him in such a rage, what had him pacing back and forth in full lecturing mode, was a single tiny pen stroke. At the place where Marek spoke up for the first time, Doro had crossed out the name Hanni and written ‘Dana’ over it. The louder Schepp’s heels tapped the wooden floor, the more baffled he felt. As soon as he had convinced himself that Doro had chosen that name at random, it struck him, however, that this could be no coincidence. She had come looking for him, hadn’t she, one evening maybe four years ago, in La Pfiff; she’d seen Dana, even spoken briefly to her. Or had it been five years ago? But what would a girl called Dana, might he ask, have to do with Marek the Drunkard ? The only parallel with Hanni being that Dana had been a waitress too — although decades later!

Schepp stopped in the doorway through which he had come to begin the day what now seemed an eternity ago. He breathed deeply, in and out, until he thought, again, that Doro must have forgotten to change the water in the vase. With every breath the silence came closer, creeping towards him from the far end of the room. Eventually it once again embraced him entirely.

But this was a different kind of silence. Schepp stood there listening to what was in his mind. Or outside of his mind? For a while he heard a buzzing, sometimes closer, sometimes further away, as if it were a part of the silence. Only when the sound stopped did he remember what was causing it. He stepped across the wooden floor as warily as a man about to commit murder, reached the chaise-longue , saw the fly sitting on Doro’s eye just where the lids met at a sharp angle. He could hardly swat it while it was there. Where did a fly come from anyway at this time of year; shouldn’t it be dead by now? Only when he was almost touching it could he shoo it away.

Schepp’s glance lingered on the little slits of Doro’s eyes, moved to the bridge of her nose, which was sticking up in the air, to her lower jaw hanging so inelegantly open. How could he close it without hurting her? All at once he was back to loving her as much as ever; there would be time to quarrel later. Schepp knelt down in front of Doro and looked closely into her open mouth. He could see nothing in that dark space.

He inhaled the smell of death and shuddered at the thought that she would leave her jaws open like that for ever and ever.

How exactly did rigor mortis work?

The fermentation of bodily fluids, decomposition, decay?