from Graz

I clicked my front door shut and went out into the street. It was a little after 2:00 a.m. I wore my pyjama bottoms under my pants and two sweaters under my jacket. The wallet in my inside pocket was the only justification for what I was doing. It rested over my heart.

Nobody had better hear me.

I went around the corner of my pharmacy and turned onto Leonhardstrasse. I crossed the street diagonally and went around another corner.

On Glacisstrasse I was the first person to leave footprints in the snow, which calmed my nerves. I’ve been told too many stories about Glacisstrasse, mostly stories that people only know from hearsay, but where there’s smoke, there’s fire. I kept close to the kerb. When a car drove by, I slowed down.

Near to Attemsgasse I made the mistake of looking back towards the Stadtpark. Plenty of light shone from beyond the black thicket of bushes. It was less dark than it used to be. A while ago there were complaints to the city council about the corner where the Waldlilie sculpture stands. People kept seeing faeces on and behind the benches–and they weren’t from dogs. The park keepers raked used needles and condoms from under the bushes around the fountain every week, and at the spot where children rode their bikes around the fountain during the day, dealers gathered at night to pick up or drop off their product. They were men from Graz, but also Slovenians, Hungarians, even Croatians. They didn’t cross the border on a tricycle. The screeching tyres as they drove off alerted the neighbourhood’s residents to murky goings-on in the park at night. Were the city authorities aware of the situation?

It took a half-dead man for the city council to put up a few more street lamps near the Forum Stadtpark. One morning, a young Slovakian was found on the steps behind the Forum building, stoned out of his head and bleeding to death from being stabbed in the back six times with a kitchen knife. Ping, the new lights went on.

“And we’re only talking about this side of the park,” the people in the pharmacy said to me.

I had a ready answer for them. “Maybe we have to assume that the park has a bad and a good side. The bad side is doing better now.”

I crossed Attemsgasse. To clear my head, I gazed at the street and noticed Café Fotter a few doors down. Whenever I went there, the old ladies who waited the tables would always give me something I hadn’t ordered. If I asked for coffee they served me tea, and when I returned the tea they would bring me Makava ice tea, which I tried to find funny, because Makava is something you drink if you’re trendy and a student and want to live forever.

The part of the park mostly shrouded in darkness, which people called the other side, stretched out diagonally in front of me. A bluish halo flickered from the odd lantern dotted around, and sometimes I thought I saw a silhouette walking underneath the patches of light. Then I tried to catch up and get a closer look, but each time it seemed like my mind was playing tricks on me.

It was hard to take my eyes off the other side. I like to be sure of things.

At the corner of Glacisstrasse and Heinrichstrasse I ran into a man. He startled me, but not because he was the first person to cross my path over the last kilometre, or because he had been drinking and was shaky on his legs. He startled me because it was another person. Would you look at that. I really was on the streets again at this late hour.

I thought of the dog I had seen taking the tram after the accident. I figured the dog was probably the only living thing that had no purpose tonight. The man who just ran into me was trying with each step to remember how his body worked, but all the while he seemed to be on his way to somewhere.

Me too. I was Hermann Eichler. A pharmacist. A serious man with calluses on his soul. I was wearing my pyjama bottoms under my pants and heading to an address in the middle of the night, where I hoped the door would have a letterbox, because I wanted to drop the wallet onto the mat of its rightful owner without having to ring the doorbell. And I already knew what I would do afterwards.

I took a deep breath and crossed Heinrichstrasse a thousand metres from home. You saw a different side of the city here. The crossroads glistened with wet snow (or was it already ice?), the streets were wide, the stillness was louder than in Maifreddygasse, and five streets converged here.

On Geidorfplatz itself, life had come to a standstill. The windows of the cars parked there were frozen over and their bodywork too, so it looked like they were hibernating. It was nigh impossible to believe that this square was a sun-drenched spot in summer. Sausages and sandwich rolls and flowers were sold from kiosks under the trees. The light streaming through the leaves sometimes looked green. If you didn’t look closely, you could mistake the square for a park by the sea.

Now it was a dark place that you crossed with your head bowed.

I hugged my jacket tight and watched where I was walking, because the tarmac was dotted with cracks where aggressive tree roots were pushing through, and wound up opposite from the Kunstkino. Its entrance gate was closed and lights turned off.

My heart sank a few centimetres.

The house at number 3 announced itself.

Three lit windows stood out from the dark facade, with plain white blinds hanging in front of them. I needed to go to the door under these windows.

In my mind I imagined the two friends sitting next to each other on a low brown couch. They exchanged glances. The boy was missing something on his left arm and the girl was missing something on her right arm. The empty place on the couch took up so much space that they were unable to move closer to each other. Every now and then their hands reached out, meeting somewhere in the middle. Then they sat joined together for a while, waiting for the bell. For the key in the lock. For the moment when Jochen would sit down between them. Eventually they wouldn’t hear the clock ticking in the next room.

Maybe I should just ring the bell after all, I wondered. It wouldn’t be a very complicated conversation. I could apologize, and point to the lights still on behind the three windows. I’d say I was confused after the accident I’d nearly witnessed this evening, and hoped everything would be fine. I’d hold up the wallet and say, “Hey, I’m returning the wallet I found on my doorstep. Here you go. Good night.”

But I was wide awake.

I’ve been conditioned by advice my whole life. I was told to move slowly when people were watching, to be calm when others were excited. To be quiet when someone was talking. The advice I received from my father and grandfather was always focused on maintaining balance. The goal was for the scale to reach equilibrium. To be in harmony.

I crossed the road, slipped sideways between two parked cars, and took the wallet out of my inside pocket. I didn’t rip my heart out of my chest. I did tear off a plaster, an old one.

I lifted the flap of the letterbox, wished the house good luck, and stuffed the wallet inside. It hit the floor like a slap on wet skin. I imitated the fall with my head. “Just like that,” I said.

Job done.

I then headed quickly down the street, towards the darkness between two market stalls.

A light went on above the house number and an elderly woman appeared in the doorway. Holding on to the door frame, she leaned out and peered at the street, left and right.

I couldn’t tell if age-wise she was more likely to be a mother or grandmother.

She held the wallet in her hand. In her other hand she had a handkerchief. She raised the wallet to her face. The handkerchief too.

“Come here,” she called into the house. She pushed the door shut with her foot.

It didn’t click, it fell.

 



I didn’t wait for the green light. I cut diagonally across the junction where Bergmanngasse meets Parkstrasse and Glacisstrasse. I hurried, so that I wouldn’t get a chance to change my mind.

On the other side, I turned around for a moment. The lights were still on in the three windows. It struck me that they were keeping vigil for the whole of Geidorfplatz, which I hadn’t noticed before. Behind the blinds, the lights would probably stay on all night. The people inside were waiting for someone.

A man came towards me. He crossed the street, taking care to use the zebra crossing, and looked at me. He trained his gaze on me as much as a person can from such a distance. His eyes were bright and the whites were pure white. His eyebrows were dark and thick.

He didn’t take his gaze off me. He walked right past, filling my nose with his scent, and threw me a shameless look over his shoulder. As he walked on, he turned and took a few steps back, raising his hands in my direction and smiling broadly. His teeth were pearly white, of course. He clearly wasn’t in the habit of blushing. He seemed pleased that I was looking at him, too.

He wasn’t quite the master of all he surveyed. On Maria-Theresia-Allee, he fumbled at the door of the Jugendstil pavilion. The toilets were locked at this hour. He glanced back in my direction with an inquisitive look, and struck a pose that I read as: what are you waiting for?

Without blinking, he then veered off the footpath. He headed straight for the snowy grass, towards the bushes and the darkness beyond.

I don’t know how long I went without breathing.

I once went for a walk on a Sunday that ended with a coffee on the terrace of Aïola, the café under the shadow of the Uhrturm. I was wrapped up warm and felt tired from walking. I wore boots, because it was a sunny but cold day and had rained all week before, so people had dragged mud all over the city. I had enjoyed a pleasant walk with barely a thought passing through my head.

As I took a seat on the sunny terrace and ordered a coffee, I noticed a man at a table chewing on his tongue. His chin was moving, his lips were pressing together, and I kept watching the movement of his jaws, convinced that he was only pretending to chew. Any second he would show his girlfriend the inside of his mouth. Haha, empty.

But it wasn’t a joke. He leaned on one elbow and sat crookedly in his chair with his legs wide apart, as if to assert that chewing suited a man like the big handbag suited his bleached blonde girlfriend.

I often find a person’s facial characteristics very fascinating. When I watch the movements of their jaw, I imagine the jawbone and cartilage and tissue and muscles.

I thought: carnivore.

I remember that my coffee had been brought to me. I know I had paid for it. I know I didn’t realize how long I had been watching him. I know I heard him tell his girlfriend he was about to punch someone in the face, and I remember the moment it dawned on me that he was talking about my face.

He called me a faggot. The whole terrace heard what he said, but nobody reacted. The whole trendy terrace sat there in the sun and drank coffee while I was dying. I thought about going inside to warn the waiters, because in a moment I’d call him out. I’d defy him to punch me in the face.

But unfortunately, I’m my father’s son. I was taught to maintain balance at all times, to preserve equilibrium, even to retreat if necessary.

I burned my throat with the coffee, put my jacket and gloves back on and left the terrace, heading in a straight line towards the Kriegssteig, which I hadn’t intended to take, and for several minutes I was afraid that the man chewing on his tongue would still come after me. On the way I saw bad accidents happening. I fell deep. I kept falling.

For several minutes, the dark bushes next to the Jugendstil pavilion seemed like a void. When I closed my eyes, I saw the man who had just given me a look smiling again. I saw his good teeth, his bright eyes, his dark and bushy eyebrows.

For a while I stood counting the minutes. My legs were shaking.

In a moment I didn’t see coming and was no longer expecting, he stepped into the light again, in the middle of the bushes. He turned to look at me. He didn’t ask what I was waiting for, he shouted it with his whole body.

Ertl’s artwork was behind the bushes. It’s a few concrete slabs and the torso of a woman, I have to tell it like it is. There’s art I’ll never understand. But maybe it’s beautiful in the snow, I thought.

I can talk about a lot of things and I would never lie, but when it comes to myself, I find it hard to put labels on things.

I took my first step forwards even before stopping to think that there was no harm in looking.

I walked across the grass, next to the footsteps already left there, and was surprised at how light it remained around me. Swiping away the last branches that hung in my way, I came to a place with many shades of black and grey and white.

The man walked slowly towards me. His shoulders were hunched, his hands were in his pockets. He stopped a few metres short of me. He said that what he was about to tell me might sound weird, but it was a fact that we weren’t brought into the world to be alone. People needed to seek out contact with one another. Human contact, so it seemed to him, was important.

When you use a word twice, you want to emphasize something, I thought. I nodded in agreement.

I did everything I could to avoid his gaze. I pushed the snow away from around my feet, kept imagining I’d seen something in the distance, dug a hole to disappear into.

He asked what my name was.

I said it didn’t matter what my name was.

“No,” he said. “No. But I think you have a nice name.”

That was a good one. Touché.

I said, “What’s your name?”

He straightened his back and smiled. He walked past me, just like he did before at the crossroads, and touched the back of my hand as if by accident. He made no secret of the fact that he’d be happy if I walked with him for a bit. We’d walk into the darkness, but there was no need to worry: I was safe with him.

I like to think I have experience with people. That I know their language, and can see in their eyes if they’re bottling everything up.

We walked past the Nepomuk Chapel.

Everyone remembers a place where nothing special happened when you were four, and yet you can still picture the hollow tree, the coffin on the carriage, the tunnel under the train tracks where you screamed as the train rattled by overhead.

I used to play down by the Nepomuk Chapel. The bench where my mother would sit and wait for me is no longer there, moved to make way for a monument in honour of Jahn. Monument is a flattering name; stone pillar would be more accurate.

The man leaned his shoulder against it. He looked at the sports grounds behind the fences, lit up by bright lights. During the day it was where people worked on their inner happiness.

He knew very well that the light was falling on his face. He closed his eyes, giving me the chance to look at him. Then I let him catch a glimpse of me. After just a few seconds he looked out of the corner of his eye to see where I was and smiled, moved his leg, tilted his pelvis, curved his upper body. He started stroking his chest and stomach with his hands.

I stayed rooted to the spot. If only I could lift my arm, I thought.

“Come over here,” he said in a friendly voice.

I said, “Yes,” and pointed my chin at the pillar he was leaning against. I asked if he knew Jahn, the father of gymnastics.

“Come over,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, asking if he knew the ridiculous things that man had said. “If you teach your daughter French, you might as well train her to become a whore. Parents who give their offspring a foreign name make the child into a bastard.”

“That sounds smart. Come.”

I said, “Yes. And yet he’s been given a monument.”

“And now it’s given us something to lean against,” he said, and let himself fall backwards, raising his hands for me to fit in between.

I said, “Us?”

“Yes, us.”

Then he satisfied his hunger and mine. His hands fumbled with my buttons and zip. I slowly fell towards him. The fall was gentle, as was the landing. I caught the scent of his skin as I breathed in. He smelled sweet and clean. He breathed in my clothes. I lifted my arms and let him have his way. I had no idea what else to do. I really wanted to hold his head in my hands. I ended up putting them on his shoulders. He looked up with a smile. You’re so young, I thought. So hungry. You want so much. And dare to do it.

I didn’t die. I almost fell backwards, my head was already tipping, but I didn’t die. His hand crawled up over my stomach, grabbed my shirt at the chest, and pulled me down. He wanted to show me his eyes. His pupils swam in the blue pools of his irises. His lips shone. His chin glowed. He whispered something I didn’t understand. I thought I didn’t hear it right.

He swore at me. Then he pushed me away from him and spat near his feet. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve, took a handful of snow and cleaned off his hands, his tongue, his face. He stood up and staggered slightly, as if I’d made him drunk. He called me a few more names that I don’t care to remember. He gargled up more spit, looked back at me one more time, and left me alone with Jahn. I couldn’t help but think that he was apologizing to me with that last look.

Holding my breath, I walked home via Glacisstrasse. The pavement was slippery and the porches dark.

I took to my bed and stretched out my limbs.

I stared at the ceiling and wondered if I could still make it through the day ahead. Soon the alarm would go off. I set myself the challenge of sticking it out. If I manage it, I’ll be my own hero.

I fell asleep without any help. It was the sleep of a martyr. Somebody had grabbed hold of my body at the waist, and I was slumped forward like a doll. I slept, I saw the most beautiful people dancing, I was woken up by the first tram to Mariatrost, but quickly fell asleep again, because I wanted to disappear, and sleeping is a form of disappearing.