Зимон Штраус - Seven Nights

The tree here in the hall is its little sister. Standing shyly in the corner, allowing itself to be touched by the guests. But not moving its branches, indifferent to their embraces.

On the stage, the revue starts. A Burlesque dancer steps in front of a semicircle of costumed illuminati. In real life she’s a clerk at a suburban bank, but tonight she’s pulling the frills off her body. It’s all well rehearsed. On the last note she drops her last piece of clothing. But contempt is written in her face, her tantalizing gaze is directed at the ceiling. A Salomé would look different. Where is the cut-off head, where the bloodthirst, the terrors of lust? Her skin, which I touch in passing with the tip of my finger, is cold. The revenge of the touched: to suffocate the embers with a shiver. Communicate to each admirer that someone else would do just as well.

Above the entrance to the basement, where the beer crates would normally be stacked high, a bare-chested young girl is now sitting on the windowsill, taking photographs. She does not respond to calls, doesn’t let anyone get close. A malicious oracle, a false Loreley? In any case she remains there the entire night, even later when the bass has stopped and the police have confiscated all of the magic powder.

A broad-shouldered boy in suspenders makes an announcement, speaks with an Italian, Russian and Greek accent. Invites the crowd to a celebration with the ghosts of yesteryear and the demons of today. His girlfriend is from Madrid. She has tragic dark eyes and an Eton crop. When she speaks, she speaks in long sentences. Together we descend into the basement, while her boyfriend is busy with drinks and coke upstairs. Later I see him come down the stairs to watch me desire her. Where does it come from, this clandestine, malevolent and yet infinitely arousing male fantasy to see one’s own lover in the arms of a stranger? To closely watch her surrender, how she puts her arms around his neck, her legs around his hips, her breath on his ear.

Upstairs the Russian DJ plays EDM sets that lack a sense of time and place. His music is too challenging. The people want Abba, not James Blake. A young woman of nobility, beautiful eyes, challenges a man in a fox mask to a round of arm wrestling. Last year, he slept with her, then shut the door on her. She would rather punch him in the face, no warning, break his nose. But it is too early for that. In a few hours she will get her revenge: She will make sure that he hears her moan as she makes love to a bearded musician on the bar. She will—just as his pants open in lust—notice with a satisfied glance that the man in the fox mask has been defeated, that the toxin of jealousy has done its work. Humiliated he will tumble out onto the street, to look up into the sky for a moment.

Outside, a grieving widow has placed a sign in front of the closed metal shutters. The name of her deceased husband is written on it in shy letters. She knows that he would have liked to stand at the bar, in the midst of the bustling crowd, in the twitching light. He would have been perfectly quiet, simply observing. His eyebrows slightly raised, lips pursed. He would have thought of Buñuel and Visconti and how much time he still had. He was the film critic for a major newspaper. Often he’d walk back and forth in the middle aisle of a cinema, unable to decide on a row. I once worked as a waiter at a birthday party in his house. I was fourteen and his daughter twelve. We bit each other’s lips on the balcony and later I read in the newspaper of his death. There aren’t a lot of people whose view on the world you miss. He was one of them.

Back in the basement, where an old sign says “suffocation hazard,” red velvet is draped over waiters’ lockers. The hum of the refrigerators fills the room. In front of them people play roulette at a long table. Nobody verifies date of birth; no account balance is checked. In the back corner, a young Austrian writer reads the intercessions that he has written for his godson. He is invited to his baptism tomorrow. He looks around in disgust, the players frozen with covetous desire as they lean across the table. The ball is rolling— rien ne va plus . The croupier, an Orientalist from Wales, is completely pale, but he’s used to crazy nights. His favorite movie is Just a Gigolo with Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie. A princess and prince who never came together—the divide was too vast. They talked on the phone a few times, but Marlene didn’t want to see David. He who wore the scent, the strong perfume of a new era. He wanted to come to her with a helicopter. A helicopter! She hadn’t spent her life on the back of a piano to be picked up by half a man in a helicopter.

The girlfriend of the boy in suspenders wishes she had her very own Fallada, the little man and his burning question: “What now?” Wishes for a ballroom with ten thousand Chinese lanterns. Suspenders alone no longer do the trick. There would have to be neon advertisements and silk tablecloths. Signal lamps that can be activated with the push of a button that say either “Do Not Disturb” or “Dance Requests Welcome.” What is missing here is not just the Champagne fountains and pickled herring pyramids. Most of all she is thinking of the table telephones that Fallada mentions. You could call anyone in the room with them. Could threaten, seduce, goad. And when you’re not in the mood to talk, you can write a letter and send it through a pneumatic tube. In 1979 the Resi was demolished. Today you can go shopping at a Lidl there instead.

The pretty one with the Eton crop is rhapsodizing about pneumatic tubes. Last month, she deleted her Tinder account. She wanted to win back serendipity. She wanted to want to be surprised again. She would show Suspenders what he was missing. “To make him jealous once, just once. To feel his fearful look from the other side of the room. To see doubt in his face. Just once.”

His mouth is greedily glued to foreign lips. He’s a man without a sense for the question: “What now?” To feel grand in front of her, irresistible and wild, he has to go groping other women. Had to lick others’ necks and push his hands into random strangers’ sweaty underwear. “ I am a Man! Who more than I? / If any, let him spring. ” These first lines of Schiller’s poem are always at the ready when he has to justify his desire.

In the early days, there’d been the great promise of departure. The dream of endless evenings in the south. Someone who would count her freckles and protect her from mosquitoes, who would sail with her into the sunrise and never talk of skinnier girls. They had jointly picked out the suspenders, in a workwear shop in the harbor district of Athens. Later, on the ferry to Icaria, their lovemaking had been so intense, they nearly fell overboard. Not much remains. A few fierce exchanges and a first gray hair in the ear. She had dreamed of black and white family photos and of a wedding night in a tree house. But now he’s been making out for hours with a busty noblewoman. The morning yoga on the carpet in their prewar apartment (not his, his mother’s), the joint sweating and wheezing, hadn’t been great for their love life. Neither had the shared toothpaste.

The roulette table is the meeting point for those out of luck. What they are missing in love must be attainable in a game. They put everything on black, their color of hope. My arm reaches for a female hip. Evolutionary biology designed it well: a chimpanzee baby can easily rest on the hip bone of his mother, to free her hands to search for food.

And not even jealousy is reserved for humans: the rhinoceros hornbill, one of the biggest hornbilled birds of the southeast Asian rainforests, who lives off fruit and large insects, uses his large beak primarily to wall in his pregnant mate, preventing her from leaving the nest. The only remaining opening is a small crack for feeding, which separates the female completely from the outside world. Locked into her treehouse prison she leads a sad existence. It is only when the young birds are fully fledged and the female has regenerated her plumage that the nesting hole is opened again. If the male dies in the meantime, the female and the young birds starve to death…