Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch, read by Gloria Sanders
Luise Tietjen compared the house number to the address that she carried with her in her father’s restless handwriting. She found his name on the buzzer, the door sprang open with a hum, it all fit together, but Luise still didn’t know how she fit in there. A uniformed police officer opened the door of the fourth-floor apartment for her, a scuffed metal door.
“You are…? May I see your I.D., miss?”
Around noon, the officer told her, Kurt Tietjen had left behind the musty smell of these dingy rooms, he’d left behind the bustle of this run-down city. So the half hour that Luise had lost in Manhattan’s afternoon rush hour hadn’t made any difference in the end. The woman who was lying on the sofa drinking a Diet Coke was the only person who had been there when Kurt Tietjen died.
Luise could see Fanny through the open door of the living room. So she had pushed her way back into Kurt’s life, despite all her protestations. Of course she had, Luise thought, people like that could never stand to be alone for long. Fanny was wrapped in a bathrobe — it was the Sunshine Sally model, Kurt must have given it to her, since nobody but Kurt could have gotten a Sunshine Sally bathrobe in America, even though it had been designed especially for the American market. It had been a failure for the company, one of many. Fanny lowered her chin to her chest and dabbed at her cheeks with the terrycloth sleeve.
Six months ago, on Luise’s last visit, they’d briefly met in the lobby of the hotel where Luise had stayed. She’d noticed Fanny because the woman didn’t seem to fit with the interior of the hotel, everything about her looked cheap – not just cheap, but second-hand. Luise had looked at her in surprise, the way someone looks at a curiosity for a moment with undivided attention, only to forget it in the course of the day. But Fanny hadn’t stayed on the other side of the hall, as Luise had expected. Instead, she’d tottered straight towards Luise in her high heels.
“Luise Tietjen?” she asked, and Luise gave a start, as if she’d said something indecent. Luise looked around the lobby to see if any of the guests had heard what Fanny said, and of course all eyes were resting on this woman, who stood out like a piece of tin stuck between silver coins. Luise could have said no, she could have made her escape, but she had the feeling that Fanny knew exactly who she was, and that she wouldn’t take no for an answer.
She introduced herself as Fanny, just Fanny, as if her family had never gotten around to finding a last name. She called herself “Kurt Tietjen’s girlfriend,” which sounded odd, considering that Luise’s father was almost sixty. Luise had heard her father talk about this woman, once he’d mentioned her in a subordinate clause as “this Fanny,” which Luise had misunderstood as “this funny,” leaving her waiting for a noun that never came. Certainly a woman like that could never really belong with her father. She was one of those pitiful creatures who think they’ve hooked a millionaire, when actually they’re the ones hanging on the hook, floundering around until they suffocate in the air. A man like her father, Luise thought, had too much class to live with a woman like that. But the man Luise was thinking of no longer existed. Ever since her father had retreated to New York, he’d looked poor, like those workers who sit at the formica tables by the supermarket check-out every afternoon, eating cooked vegetables out of aluminum containers. His clothing lacked both color and style. He had a five-o’clock shadow, which only made him look unkempt. He looked like an unemployed person who skulked around all afternoon. Some days he looked even more lost. Like a homeless person, Luise thought. And wasn’t that exactly what he was? Someone who’d come to New York to be without a residence, without a stable life?
The two women sat down in the lobby. Luise ordered two glasses of water, and looked at Fanny’s dry girlish fingers, which were tightly grasping her too-wide trousers.
“Your father’s getting obsessed,” Fanny said. “At first I thought he was just eccentric, but now he’s really out of control. I don’t know why he hates your company so much. He tells me about deals that I don’t want to know about. I can’t even say how much of it is true. And I don’t want to, either. I’ve got nothing to do with the company. That’s your business.”
Luise shrugged her shoulders. “You can listen to him or let it drop,” she said. “I’m certainly not asking you take care of my father.”
“But he’s asking me,” Fanny answered.
“What’re you trying to say? Does he give you money?”
“He takes care of me, that’s all, he doesn’t pay me.”
Luise looked Fanny up and down, her mangy hair, her dry lips glistening with lip gloss. For Luise, the problem wasn’t what story Kurt told, it was the fact that he kept this woman around him at all.
“Luise, I don’t understand this business at all,” Fanny repeated, as if Luise could have been in any doubt — this much, at least, she could be sure of. “And I don’t want to understand it,” Fanny added. “I wanted to tell you that I’m not sure if I can stay with your father any more.”
“Is that your only problem?” Luise asked.
“Don’t you see what this is all about for your father?” Fanny asked.
“And just what do you know about my father?” Luise replied. “Don’t start thinking that you can understand who we are.”
Luise stood up and gestured for the check. This woman sitting there in front of her with her badly bleached hair in a faded sweatshirt (Fruit of the Loom, fifteen years old) — a woman like that was in no position to pass judgment on her father, or on Luise, and certainly not on the relationship between the two of them. Luise hadn’t sought her out. For her, Fanny was just a nuisance, and she didn’t waste time with the likes of her.
“Luise? You’re here already?” Fanny got up from the sofa, her bathrobe fell open a bit, exposing her cleavage. She was thin, almost transparent, and her movements were shaky from too much Diet Coke. “I didn’t expect you today.”
“And I didn’t expect you,” Luise answered.
She looked at the soft fabric, the baggy pockets, the worn seams on the arms that showed how often the bathrobe had been worn.
“You ought to go to your father,” Fanny said. “That would be good. Though I’m not sure” — she paused, tapping her nails on her soda can — “I don’t think it’s good for you to be here.”
Fanny glanced briefly at the floor, and then, without looking up at Luise again, she turned back to the TV, which was showing a story about a married couple on the West Coast, Bob and Erin, who had to leave their run-down house because they hadn’t been able to pay their mortgage in months.
Kiesbert von Weiden didn’t look up from his papers when Luise entered the study; maybe he thought that she was one of the two policemen, or maybe he didn’t take her seriously, since she’d come in so quietly. He looked a little sallow, like a character on a screen when the color is out of balance. Luise sat down across the table from him. Kiesbert looked up with a start.
“You’re…? Excuse me, but I didn’t expect you to be here already. It’s only been a few hours since Mr. Tietjen….” He seemed helpless to defend himself in light of her sudden appearance. Kiesbert had been so immersed in documents for the past few months that he’d apparently stopped believing in any reality outside of them. As Luise knew, Kurt had made Kiesbert the executor of his estate, as if she couldn’t decide for herself who should take care of her inheritance. But Luise had long since decided to find her own wealth management expert — if she chose to squander her inheritance, at least it would be her own doing. So von Weiden’s presence in that narrow, dusty room, where he bent over the files, was all for naught. Luise would relieve him of his duties by the end of the day.
“Luise, I’m sorry,” Kiesbert said, but it didn’t sound like he was talking about her father. He looked past her, his face was flushed.
“You don’t have to be sorry.”
“Luise, you know — no, strictly speaking you don’t know…”
One of the two police officers passed by, and Kiesbert broke off. Luise would have liked to tell Kiesbert to leave, but then she would have been alone with Fanny and the officers. She stood and went out into the hall, where she saw one of the officers turning his octagonal hat in his hands. Her eyes wandered up to his fat neck. His partner stood next to him, looking skinny, like an overgrown Catholic schoolboy.
“The undertakers should’ve been here by now,” the fat man remarked.
“In this snow?” the schoolboy answered.
Luise stood at the door of the bedroom. Kiesbert went past her with a pile of papers. When his phone vibrated in his coat, he stopped and fumbled around for it in the pockets. “I got here too late,” he said, “there was nobody here but that woman.” He gestured towards the living room, where Fanny sat on the sofa, watching a fate unfold before her on TV. “She let me in,” Kiesbert said. “She led me into the study and showed me the papers. I was the only one she told.”
“Why didn’t she call the doctor?” Luise asked.
“Shock, I don’t know. Mr. Tietjen had told her to call my number in case of emergency. The whole time I was talking to her she was staring at the TV. I think it seemed more real to her than the dead man here in the apartment. She looked so shocked when she opened the door for the police later, it was like she was waiting for them to take her away.”
He cast a glance into the bedroom, raised his eyebrows, and looked down at the screen of his phone. “Maybe she hadn’t even noticed that he was dying,” Kiesbert said, and slid his fingers across the screen. “Excuse me.”
With the telephone held to his ear, he retreated to the study. Luise heard him pacing back and forth. Light fell across the bed and the sheets, the sky outside the window was cloudless and bright. It wasn’t true that only Fanny had watched as Kurt neared his end. Luise saw him move, first his head, then his whole body, which was wrapped in the cotton bedsheets, as if it had to be protected from the cold (the sun shone in gently, almost warmly, and besides, the room was heated). He turned his face towards her, it was pale and sunken, but not unfamiliar, as she’d expected. The blood circulated slowly through his body, the patches of color on his skin grew smaller, until they only looked like age spots. He closed his eyes and opened them again. His lips twitched, but he didn’t say anything. Luise caught snatches of the conversation in the next room, a short O, a long E, as in feed or need or deed. She saw Kurt’s open eyes, his lips, his face, still warm, still living. It lay there. And then it disintegrated into what was really there, just a mask of cold skin. She ran to the bathroom to throw up.
Could that have been her father?
Luise hunched over the toilet, a chemical odor masked the biting scent of her vomit, she held tight to the plastic edge of the toilet seat and thought that it just wasn’t possible. People didn’t die in their early sixties. They took their time, until they were seventy, eighty. And anyway, people in her family didn’t die, the Tietjen family just resigned. But her father had already provided for what would happen after his final retirement: He had put Kiesbert in place, he had told Fanny who would have to be informed. Kurt Tietjen didn’t want to release his hold on the company, even after his death, just as the company hadn’t wanted to release its hold on him, even in his self-imposed New York exile.
The two police officers were loitering in the kitchen, talking about the apartment, the furniture, books, and lamps, and all that remained of his life. “Poor guy, not one nice piece, and this area, gosh, I’d never live here.” Meanwhile, Fanny opened another Coke and turned up the TV. The doctor still hadn’t arrived, maybe he wouldn’t get there for another hour or two. New York had too many dead bodies, or too few doctors. But still, he had to come, if only to put in writing why Kurt wasn’t getting up. Only then would it be official that there was nothing left but this lifeless thing.
Fanny’s eyes followed the bluish images that radiated from the TV. In her hand she held a scrap of terrycloth, which she rubbed against her cheek. Luise thought about that pale nothingness in the next room. And Fanny was presumably thinking about it too, even if it must have felt different for her. Fanny was crying; it seemed to Luise that she was really crying, and she imagined Fanny beside the bed where Kurt Tietjen had died a few hours before. Like all of his decisions, he had made this one without soliciting anyone’s advice.
For years, Luise had simply assumed that Kurt wasn’t there any more, as physically impossible as that might sound, and that he only appeared every two or three months, when she came to New York herself to check on him. She had assumed that Kurt’s world in New York just couldn’t exist without her. Luise wasn’t just afraid of losing Kurt, she was more afraid of losing him to someone else. She wanted to believe that she had been Kurt’s only confidante in those years, or if not his confidante then his messenger, or if not his messenger then his victim. She’d met Fanny that one time in the hotel lobby, but as soon as she’d arrived back home in Germany she’d forgotten about Fanny entirely. Now she saw this plastic-colored woman playing with her soda can and suddenly understood that here, where she’d always imagined he was only putting in time, Kurt had actually had a life.
(c) Nora Bossong / Jamie Bulloch (2015)
Nora Bossong was born in Bremen in 1982, and studied Literature in Leipzig at the Deutsches Literaturinstitut and Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Humboldt University in Berlin. Novels include Gegend (2007) and Webers Protokoll (2009). More recently a volume of poems published by Hanser, Sommer vor den Mauern, won the 2012 Peter Huchel Prize.
Gloria Sanders's work includes audio-book narration for the RNIB and frequent collaborations with Cabinets of Curiosity. She has performed her devised one-woman show with Hide and Seek Theatre, The Clock, at the Brighton Fringe, the Pleasance, Islington, and the Artscene Festival in Ghent. She is fluent in Spanish.
This event was part of the European Literature Night VII, 13 May – 9 June 2015, www.europeanliteraturenight.co.uk, organised in partnership with EUNIC, Czech Centre, Goethe Institut, Lithuanian Culture Institute, Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania, Polish Cultural Institute and Republic of Slovenia Embassy in London.
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