2
My mother took care of everything. She took care of Horst and Elke, the phone, the formalities and the rest. She lit a candle next to Elisha’s photo and covered the mirrors. I lay in bed, didn’t change my clothes, and stared at the ceiling. Sometimes Mother came in, sat down next to me, and emptied out the bucket next to the bed. Since I couldn’t eat, I only threw up bile.
The Talmud demands that one remember the dead. If I’d had it on hand I would have thrown it into a fireplace. But it was in some box next to a Schindler’s List videotape. I wanted to remember everything. His face and his body. Under no circumstances did I want to forget how he held me in his arms, how his lips felt on my skin, how he smiled and how we fell asleep next to each other. How we talked on the phone in the evening when we were apart. Forgetting became my biggest fear. I lay in bed, the curtains drawn, and on the nightstand there was the lit candle in front of his photo. If I closed my eyes I saw his face and if I kept them closed for too long I saw the face of a young corpse in a light blue gown. Her cavernous eyes, blood dripping from her abdomen. Before the images could merge, I blinked and took a sip of water. Then I could see Elias again. I remembered the way my body fit perfectly into his. I thought of his voice, his hands, and how I had found him in a small, smoky apartment.
The Croatian hosts had slowly bobbed their heads in sync with the Slavic hip-hop. I had a cigarette and a glass of vodka in hand and combed through the rooms searching for people I knew. A recent high school graduate pulled me into the kitchen, wanted me to touch his biceps. The food spoke of the hosts’ loyalty to the Balkan snack bar owned by their aunt. The living room was bursting with people. Elias sat on the sofa, flirting aggressively with Tuba. He had a girly face with sunken cheeks and high cheekbones. Dimples formed at the edges of his smile. A harmless-little-boy haircut. His clear, even skin and a delicate net of freckles around his finely cut nose completed the picture. I liked tall, slender men and faces dominated by noses, and had spent far too long watching him already.
Tuba brushed her hair out of her face, bracelets rattling, and took another swig from the beer bottle. In the process, she stuck out her tongue a little and briefly licked the bottleneck. Suddenly she waved.
“Masha!”
I slowly wove my way through the dancing crowd. Somebody spilled beer on my shoe and apologized with a nod.
“Sweetheart, how are you? This is Elias.” Tuba looked at me and Elias, alternatingly, and played with her hair—seemingly lost in thought. She twirled a strand of hair around her index finger, tightened it, and let it bounce again. Then she asked me, “Are you here with Cem?”
“Yes, but I haven’t seen him in an hour.”
“I’ll go look for him.” Tuba disappeared. I sat down next to Elias and sat up straight. The situation was a little awkward for both of us. At first we just sat there in silence. Then I asked him where he was from. He spoke of Dresden, Hamburg, and Berlin, of fishing and architecture, of French films, the new exhibition at the modern art museum, of soccer and the mole behind my left ear.
We left the party together. It was drizzling and Elias asked me whether he could give me a ride home on his bike. He studied me so intensely and seriously, as if he wanted to learn me by heart. I took the night bus. As I was regretting my decision in solitude at the bus stop, it began to hail.
Three weeks later I ran into Elias on the tram. Next to us stood a boy with a transparent bag in his hand. In the bag swam a goldfish. Elias and I looked at the boy, puzzled, but he paid no attention to us. I wanted to slip Elias my number, but he got off too soon.
Over the next weeks I constantly thought of him. Then I read in the newspaper about an exhibition in the Staedel school. I even bought a new dress, but it was too cold to take off my coat. Elias stood in the corner, leaning on the bar, cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. Next to him was a girl. Red short skirt, coralline lips. A pretty girl, with immaculate skin and immaculate legs. When I saw her, I knew I had no choice but to accept our German girl and her immaculate legs. I stormed out. He caught me at the entrance, by the sleeve. We went back in. He bought me a beer and I was afraid of saying something stupid. And then he said the only thing that most pictures need to become art is empty walls. I grew increasingly nervous. I liked his nose and wasn’t thinking anymore about Sami, who had returned to California a couple of months ago.
The ash of my cigarette left burn marks on the sheet. I lay in the half-empty bed and saw the corpse of the young woman in the blue gown hit the pavement directly in front of my feet. Eyes rolled up, bleeding abdomen. I freed myself from my father’s grip and ran over to the woman. Her dress was soaked with blood that pooled around her on the asphalt and ran up to my shoes. Dyed them red.
My mother greeted Cem with overwhelming geniality and made him coffee.
Cem sat down at my bedside and said that he and his friend had hired professional mourners in Greece for Elias, who during the next forty-eight hours would wail over Elias’s death. I could watch them over a live stream on the Internet. He had set up a YouTube channel specifically for that purpose. He pulled a laptop from his bag and on the screen I saw two veiled old women who did nothing but sit on two white plastic garden chairs in an almost empty room. Cem stared at the screen disappointedly and cursed in Turkish. Then he called Konstantin, whom I heard cursing on the other end of the line as well. Konstantin in turn must have called somebody in Greece, as a mere fifteen minutes later the professional mourners got to work: they screamed, wailed, and sobbed. We watched them for a while and they kept repeating one sentence over and over. At least it sounded like one sentence to us. I asked Cem what it meant but he didn’t know. We called Konstantin again.
“I can’t hear it,” said Konstantin. “It’s too quiet.”
We held the phone closer to the screen.
“Wisdom cometh by suffering,” translated Konstantin.
“Why are they quoting from the Oresteia?” Cem asked.
“They are Greeks,” said Konstantin.
“Call them again,” said Cem.
I lay alone in the double bed, running my hands over the empty half of the bed and trying to find a different sleeping position from my usual one. My thoughts kept returning to his last night. I examined every second, certain that I could’ve averted his death if only I’d woken up earlier. I should have taken a look at the wound the day before. I felt responsible for Elias’s death. Most nights I fell into a restless sleep in the early morning hours and then delayed getting up. I imagined Elisha lying next to me. I would reach out for him and he would be there, lying on his side of the bed, with bent knees and disheveled hair. I would lean over him and wish him a good morning. His stubble would be scratchy. I would touch him. His body would be warm. I would hold on to him and never want to let go. Then he would push me aside, get up, go to the bathroom, come back, and maybe briefly snuggle up again. He would wear clothes that didn’t match. I would make fun of him for it. The sheets still had a faint smell of him and I wore his clothes to sleep. It was only when the morning came that I would look for him in the bed and remember.