Will, стр. 71
For about two years I’ve kept a leather-bound notebook in my inside pocket with the stub of a pencil. In all the times I’ve pulled it out, I’ve never got any further than a line that is doomed to instant oblivion, as if the act of pulling the notebook out of that inside pocket is too premeditated and therefore too innocuous, too focused on poethood itself rather than forging poetry that will put the fear of God into everyone. And now that notebook is lying in front of me, with that pencil stub lined up next to it, without me remembering taking it out of my pocket. I open it and cross out the words ‘incandescent tale’, which I had previously seen as a possible title and now suspect I may have stolen from someone else. Above it I scribble ‘Confessions of a Comedian’. Not once does Lizke look up while I fill page after page with filth, with poems that have not yet been thwarted by anyone or anything. At the start of each first line, I hear Angelo holding his breath.
And then, finally, her letter is lying on the tiled floor of our hall. I recognize her handwriting from the top of the stairs. Like my last four letters, hers doesn’t have a stamp. She must have posted it through the door herself, as if she too doesn’t trust anything or anyone between us. I tear the envelope open. The sheet of writing paper only has a date and a time with a question mark, followed by: ‘You can find me on the bridge in City Park.’
She has been giving it a lot of thought. I see that immediately as I approach her on the bridge at the stipulated time. She is standing bolt upright, her feet a little wider than one expects from a lady, almost like a man bracing himself for a row that might end in a fist fight.
‘Don’t say you’re sorry. You’ve already done that too much.’
Below us ducks are quacking. The winter is almost over.
‘I’m so crazy about you,’ I say.
‘They’re just words,’ she replies.
‘I’ll change.’
‘Really, why? To make me think it’ll get better. I’d rather not. It’s a waste of time and I’ll only be letting you string me along.’
‘Don’t you want me any more? Is it over? Say so and I’ll accept it.’
‘You’re in a hurry all of a sudden.’
I shrug like a vaudeville clown, with sad-face make-up and a painted tear under one eye, as well as flat feet. ‘It hurts too much. It would be better to have it over and done with right away.’
I look away from her, rest my hands on the railing and look down at a couple on one of the paths below, strolling behind a pram, each staring straight ahead and not saying a word.
‘You love playing games so much, Wilfried, you don’t even know any more when you’re spouting hot air and when you’re not.’
‘That’s possible,’ I say. ‘It’s possible. I don’t know.’
‘Come here.’ She takes hold of me and I feel my body tensing up. ‘Just stop it…’
We hug each other and I bite my tongue hard to avoid bursting into tears like a baby.
In that very moment someone wakes up.
In that very moment, Angelo says, ‘Comedian.’
And she says, ‘That German was touching me. And you did nothing. You didn’t protect me.’
She kisses me. I kiss her back.
‘It won’t happen again…’
‘Just forget it,’ she says and kisses me again, warm and wet.
And suddenly I no longer have the faintest clue what love is supposed to be.
I’m pushing my writing paper, notes and diaries to one side, dear great-grandson. I’ve had enough of it for the moment. And there’s also a waiting cigar I’d like to savour without Nicole bursting in screeching. I just heard the front door click shut, so I know she’s gone out to do her shopping. Maybe I should open a window, maybe not. I’ll smoke shamelessly like a factory chimney in a nineteenth-century industrial city on a polluted river. It might make it even more fun later to deny this lung-rotting activity while the smoke is still hanging in the room like a brown mist.
For you I have become the hero of a novel in these pages, one who doesn’t know what will happen the moment he goes out the door, and therefore takes one slap in the face after the other, like a fool on a burning mountain who doesn’t realize the raging fire was caused by the smouldering cigar he carelessly left in the dry grass. After all, so many things can still happen; what it comes down to is the moment you yourself say or do things that will require you to pay a price—regardless of whether it’s exacted a scant few seconds later or after dozens of years. The more I write down for you, the more I let all the things I know be covered over, snowed under, the more I act like this old man is just a ghost, a shadow cast by the young Wilfried, who stares straight into the sun of yet another new day, a youth who understands too little of everything and fools himself that nothing can hurt him. When I thought about the conversation with your great-grandmother that smug dream burst. Just forget it… That’s right, just forget it.
I’m enjoying my cigar less with every puff. I’d prefer to just stay Wilfried Wils for a while, an old fellow who’s contemplating the things around him. Look at that blackbird outside in the tree, how droll. And there, so cute, that tyke with the oversized woolly