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From someone who believes that the best is yet to come
WHAT THE PAPERS SAY
"One finds oneself racing to employ adjectives like eloquent, nimble, original, left-field, sophisticated, recommended and rewarding."
Sabine Oppolzer, ORF
"Bursting with ingenuity and an emotional power that puts a spotlight on rather than overshadowing the humour."
Burkhard Müller, Süddeutsche Zeitung
⁕⁕⁕
For the longest time, Kuhn had believed he could keep both of them, Vera and Myriam. After all, he had no issue keeping a good red and an excellent white in the same cellar. The one did not preclude the other. On the contrary, they complemented each other. When Myriam's woo woo approach to daily life – she was convinced that plants have a soul and claimed that she could in fact sing the way plants do – started to raise his blood pressure, then Vera's pragmatism would calm him down again. If Vera, the managing director of SECURELLA, a business specialised in the production of security doors, started explaining their new marketing strategy to him, then the prospect of a conversation with Myriam free from technical ins and outs was sweet balm. He counted on Vera and dreamed with Myriam and he needed the one to enjoy the other.
⁕⁕⁕
WHO SLEPT HERE
pp.9-16
ISABELLA STRAUB
WHO
SLEPT
HERE
1
Please Keep Breathing
1
Philip Kuhn put one foot in front of the other. Walking was so easy, what had there been to worry about? Down Gropiusgasse to Kübler Ross Straße, then into Naumannpark through the Machiavelli Gate.
The air was too warm for the end of September. A young couple was lying on the grass; the girl had placed her head on her boyfriend’s stomach. Their bodies formed a perfect T.
Benches were arranged in a semi-circle around a pond. A woman was crumbling cake to feed the birds. She threw the crumbs in the air and cooed like a dove. As Kuhn walked past she raised her head, but she didn’t see him, just the picture he was carrying. It was a framed print of a man’s head in a dazzling white turban, flawless, as if it were made of porcelain.
There was a refreshments stall by the pond. Kuhn bought a lemonade. He drank it standing; he put the picture on a chair. The assistant was stacking magazines on the counter. The radio was on. And when I die, I die for you. And when I cry, I cry for you. The man whistled along to the melody.
Kuhn was the only customer. The lemonade was ice-cold; his stomach cramped. He dug in his trouser pockets until he found the blister pack, squeezed out the last Digestopax, and washed it down with lemonade. He’d been careless the past few days. He’d been eating at odd times, and only taken the tablets when it crossed his mind. It hadn’t crossed his mind very often.
“Stern looking bloke,” the assistant said, pointing at the picture. “That you, is it?”
Kuhn shook his head. The man in the picture was much older than him. Ten, fifteen years at least.
“That’s Adam,” he said.
The artist had painted himself over decades, and his Adam had aged with him. The face in the picture was furrowed, the skin sallow, the cheeks sunken, bulbous lips bulged over a protruding chin. He looked haggard; yet the look in his eye was self-assured, almost arrogant.
“The one with Eve, and the apple?” the man asked.
“A different one,” said Kuhn.
“I don’t know him, then.”
“Me neither,” he said. Who could ever claim to truly know another, even if you saw them every day? The Dove Lady cooed as Kuhn reached for the picture and left.
Vera had never been able to stand Adam. She had banished him to the children’s room where a child would never sleep. A room they hardly ever set foot in. When he asked her if she didn’t like the painting, she said that Adam’s eyes gave her the chills. She was a terrible liar.
The picture was the first thing that Kuhn had taken with him to Vera’s villa, and now it was the last thing he was taking away. Not that there had been much to take. His ambition as a man and a lover was to avoid piling up burdens. No kids, no property in common, no obligations.
That said, the picture was the only thing he still owned, leaving aside the two boxes he had already smuggled out of the villa the week before and deposited at Myriam’s. They were filled with clothes and documents, and right at the bottom the acid reflux tablets and the savings books with the rainy day money.
The villa district gradually gave way to blocks of flats. The greenery in front of the buildings was stragglier, the cars tackier, the tram bells sounded angrier. Satellite dishes jostled each other on the roofs. Ermine moth caterpillars spun webs in the conifer hedges.
A beggar was sitting on a blanket in front of the Church of the Dominican Sisters. He had a cardboard sign: LOTTO. People laughed as they went by and some tossed coins into his paper cup. A tourist girl had her photo taken with the beggar. He wrapped his arm around her and beamed as if he had already won.
Kuhn too was feeling like a winner. If someone had asked him if he was happy, he would have said: I’ve never felt so relieved. There had been no scene. He had expected Vera to cry. Stifle a sob, at least, a trembling hand pressed to her mouth, makeup running, that kind of thing. He had been worried that she might try to hit him, he had been ready for anything, he would have grabbed her wrist, his fingers on her racing pulse. Vera. Please.
But all she did was purse her lips, and a blue vein sprang up on her throat that he had never noticed before. He hadn’t lied to her, but he had carefully measured out the truth. And not mentioned Myriam, not a word about Myriam. Not a syllable.
A bell rang as Kuhn walked through the door of ZUM HEILIGEN NEPOMUK. It was an old-fashioned chemist’s with mahogany cabinets that housed countless tiny drawers. A bulk box of Digestopax would last him a good long while.
“Your prescription, please,” the chemist said.
“Just a sec.” He reached into his trouser pockets and emptied everything onto the counter, tissues, tram ticket, FLOW membership card.
She waited patiently. He took out his wallet and unfolded one receipt after another. All from shops and restaurants.
“I could have sworn…”
“We need a valid prescription. We can’t make exceptions.”
“Look, I have to – I mean, you don’t know how bad it gets when I… I’m sorry, you just have to believe me.”
How could he make her understand that without the tablets he wouldn’t get through the day?
“Go to the doctor and come back with the prescription,” she suggested.
As if it were that simple. He wasn’t even sure if he still had health insurance.
The chemist reached into the display and spread out a selection of teas in front of him. They were called Belly Good, Inner Peace, Gut Feeling. She caressed the packages. “Carefully selected herbs, slow-dried and hand sorted, pharmacy quality,” she said. It sounded like she was reading from a script. “This one,” she said, holding up Belly Good, “I drink this one myself, and just look at me!”
He looked at her, but if there was anything worth looking at it escaped him. When he opened the door back to the street, the bell stayed silent.
The contents of an entire flat were being sold on Perec Platz. There was a worn-out couch on the pavement, a standard lamp, a bed frame whose corners projected perilously far into the road, and a grey armchair. Boxes of dusty books littered the ground. Without walls around it, thought Kuhn, furniture looked alien.
He sat down in the armchair, leaned Adam against the bed frame, took out his mobile. He would take care of the pills later. He called Myriam.
Engaged.
She was probably trying to call him at that very moment. It wouldn’t have been the first time it had happened.
He wrote a text: All sorted. No problems. Aways thinking of you.
He only noticed that the “l” was missing after it was too late. When she still hadn’t answered a minute later, he started to worry that the slip had annoyed her, but he didn’t send a second message for fear of confusing matters further.
A woman approached him. He suppressed the impulse to jump to his feet.
“A real bargain,” she said, looking down at him. She was wearing a summer dress that flapped around her body. She was very thin, her collarbone was like the hoop of a drum.
“It’s yours for a tenner.”
Kuhn ran his hand along the armrest.
“Corduroy,” she said. “Very popular right now.”
“You’re moving,” he said, more a statement of fact than a question.
She shook her head. Her aunt had passed on, she’d had to clear out the flat. They’d ordered the cleaners in before Aunty was even in the coffin. The building management were notorious for their lack of tact.
The woman’s eyes were in shadow. Kuhn quickly lifted himself up, all of a sudden the chair felt menacing. Everything around him seemed to be infected with death.
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
“Better sooner than later. People can’t take their eyes off it,” said the woman, as if the exposed furnishings were somehow hiding a plethora of eager customers.
Always, thought Kuhn, meant for eternity, with no end, and that meant with no beginning, and that meant it had always been, and as he walked down Nussbaumstraße he asked himself if he hadn’t been longing for Myriam from the day he was born. If what he had typed into his phone without even thinking was the one thing in his life that would ever really matter. Maybe, just maybe, his entire life had been leading up to this moment. Maybe he’d been blind this whole time. Maybe she’d understood what he’d written and any other words would be superfluous. Maybe that was why she wasn’t answering.
He saw the tram stop in the distance. He’d meet Myriam at Pirandellosteg. Five stations and he’d be with her. She would emerge into the daylight from the tube station lost in thought, her right hand clutching the strap of her handbag like always. He would have the advantage, he would see her first. He would approach her. Embrace her, without saying a word. Then give her the picture. If it was true that he looked like Adam, he would literally be giving her himself.
At the tram stop two pigeons were fighting over half a croissant. It was only now, watching the birds quarrel, that he realised his hands were empty. The picture. He had forgotten it in the open-air apartment.
Kuhn wasn’t much of a runner, but he ran now. Uphill all the way. Finally, he reached the square again, gasping, his heart leaping out of his chest. Kuhn looked around. But it must have been here! The blue-grey facade, the green shutters. The Riffl Dance School sign. There wasn’t a single item of furniture left on the street.
The street door to the apartment building was open. He went inside. The hall was cool and smelt of damp walls.
“Hallo?”
The door to the ground floor flat was half-open. He opened it all the way.
“Hallo,” he said again.
The thin woman came out of a room and dried her hands on her dress when she saw him. Somewhere, water was running into a sink. The walls were hung with rose pattern wallpaper.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Would you like the armchair?”
“I forgot Adam,” he said, and waited for her to shake her head in bewilderment. But she gestured that he follow her. They entered a room that had been repurposed as a furniture warehouse.
“He was in excellent company,” said the woman.
Adam was leaning against the wall. Next to him was a framed black-and-white photograph of a wax-skinned young woman in matching hat and dress, with a cigarette holder between her fingers.
“Aunt Agnes,” said the woman. “She looked after your Adam. She would have liked his turban.” She laughed, and her face lit up. “She had a thing for exotic men.”
“Adam would have liked your aunt, too. An elegant woman,” Kuhn said, feeling somewhat ludicrous, as if he were trying to flatter the niece by complementing the dead aunt. 4
Then the woman explained that her aunt had emigrated to Madagascar and worked as a translator there; she had a real gift for languages. It was only much later that she learned of her aunt’s affairs with various ministers – one even took his own life because of her.
When she was little, the woman said, she’d always worried about her aunt. Madagascar can’t have been the safest place in the world, after all. “When she finally came back home, I was so relieved. And then she died.”
The two of them stood in silence for a moment in front of the pictures. It was a peculiar feeling. Kuhn wasn’t sure if he was looking at them, or they were looking at him.
When he got back to the tram stop a few minutes later, this time with Adam tucked under his arm, the pigeons and crumbs were gone and the asphalt was immaculately clean. It was as if no one had ever let a croissant fall.
© Isabella Straub 2017, translation Bryn Roberts 2017
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