E-Book, Englisch, 203 Seiten
Fricke Daughters
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-3-86391-287-1
Verlag: Verlag Voland & Quist
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 203 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-86391-287-1
Verlag: Verlag Voland & Quist
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Lucy Fricke wurd 1974 in Hamburg geboren, hat am Deutschen Literaturinstitut Leipzig studiert, lange Jahre beim Film gearbeitet und in den letzten zehn Jahren vier Romane veröffentlicht. Für ihre Arbeiten wurde sie mehrfach ausgezeichnet. Ihr Buch 'Töchter' erhielt den Bayerischen Buchpreis 2018. Seit 2010 veranstaltet Lucy Fricke HAM.LIT, das erste Hamburger Festival für junge Literatur und Musik. Sie lebt in Berlin.
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I’d taken the first flight out, the night so short as to be practically non-existent, and now, at around half past nine on a Monday morning, I was dragging my suitcase across Warschauer Bridge, where the party had just broken up, the revellers either in bed, passed out in a pool of vomit or still dancing in some club. I trudged past empty bottles of cheap sparkling wine, shattered beer bottles and an abandoned amp. Shards crunched beneath the wheels of my case. Around the next corner, right beside a massive building site, was my flat. The stairwell smelled like an exploded beer cellar, and a numb silence had taken hold. The building had adapted to its bacchanalian surroundings. To survive the noise here, you needed a country retreat or a job abroad. To afford the rent, you had to sublet your rooms to people from duller countries, people who came here to behave in ways they would never dream of at home. We lived in a muddle, sleeping on sofas with the downstairs and upstairs neighbours, while in our own flats, party tourists pissed on the parquet floors.
I financed myself by fleeing the city. Whenever I was strapped for cash, I would head to parts of the world that were cheaper than this one, of which there were many. ‘Kill the investor in you,’ I’d read on the side of a building in Kreuzberg recently and cheerfully disregarded. I felt that I’d been living in this neighbourhood long enough now to deserve a piece of the pie, that in fact I myself was the pie. So, like nearly everyone else, I flogged my own home for 80 euros a night.
And then on Thursdays we’d clutch our cardboard coffee cups at demos to save the Turkish greengrocer’s, if not the entire neighbourhood, from being driven out, standing alongside artists from Charlottenburg and Prenzlauer Berg who’d shown up to express their solidarity and day-trippers carrying canvas bags emblazoned with protest slogans. A few speeches, a few songs about the rising rents and the selling-out, and demand on Airbnb would shoot up another twenty per cent. The tourists bought the bags and later toted them around New York, Barcelona and Lower Bavaria. No one ever bought vegetables.
The face in my mirror looked exactly as old as it was: just over forty. The lines stayed white in the sun now, as if I’d shattered on the inside. I could only call myself beautiful in the past tense. Age had arrived by night, and it kept on coming. I used to grow while I dreamt, but soon I would start shrinking in my sleep, waking up smaller each morning until I vanished entirely. Sometimes I wondered how I was going to get through all the time until then. And to top it all off, there was more hair sprouting on my face each day.
The Spanish kid had thrown up next to my toilet, the stereo had been set to the highest volume. A jar of peanut butter, a chunk of Emmental and a bottle of beer in the fridge, three cigarette butts stamped out on the floor. . The picture in my bedroom was now hanging upside down. Apparently José was a practical joker. I was glad I’d never met him.
It took me two hours to clean the flat, to purge it, to scrape Spanish youth out of the cracks. When I was done, I opened José’s beer, sat down by the window and looked out at the Spree. It was mid-April and the river was still a river rather than a party strip. In less than six weeks, the techno cruisers would be blaring past, their lasers groping the walls of my study. I’d be looking out at frenzied stag and hen parties, at semi-clad men and even less-clad women, all of whom would be thinking they were having the time of their lives and would probably be right, a state of affairs I found increasingly pitiful.
There was no sign of Martha when I arrived at the bar. There was no sign of anyone, apart from a barman I’d never seen before, who was polishing glasses. Martha had suggested the location, a former haunt of hers, though whether this was for sentimental reasons or for lack of a better idea, I didn’t know. It felt like a lifetime since we’d spent our nights here with Henning, a boyfriend she would regularly resolve to leave, only to eventually marry him last year. And with Jon, Henning’s oldest friend, whom we hadn’t been able to save, who’d made this bar his favourite and only companion, leaving his money and his will to live at the counter until both were gone. I didn’t think about Jon very much any more. We rarely talked about him, but then all three of us had got quieter in general since he died. Whether this reticence was down to our age or our pain, whether there was any difference between the two, I wasn’t sure. We just kept going, and it wasn’t as hard to keep going as we’d expected.
I glanced over at the door just as Martha slipped in, like a shadow. She gave my shoulder a listless stroke and sat down with a groan. She barely looked at me, just at the bottles on the shelves.
Martha only went out these days when it was absolutely necessary, and this necessity always came from within, never from the outside world. It had been a long time since she’d shown any interest in the outside world. She’d been pregnant again and again over the past year: four weeks, six, eight, and afterwards, after the miscarriages, we’d go drinking before it all started up again. I was a little unnerved by the way she emerged from these hormonal torture sessions virtually unchanged. Martha was the toughest old bird I knew. During her unfertilised weeks, she’d always order the most expensive booze, usually neat.
In for a penny, in for a pound, she’d say, and be pissed by her third glass. This was one change that did bother me. At first, I’d felt betrayed. At this age, this stage of life, a stage I couldn’t relate to, I had fewer and fewer friends who could stay upright on a barstool beside me. My nights were as long as other people’s days. Our lives were out of sync. Hardly anyone ever crossed my path, and the few who did scared me: they were lost souls who latched on to me, sinking their teeth into the backs of my legs.
Martha ordered an eighteen-year-old double whisky before turning to me, exhausted. We hadn’t seen each other in over a month, hadn’t spoken. This wasn’t unusual. I was always out, she was always at home, and we no longer needed reassurance that we were thinking of each other. We were there for each other and we’d stay there. We sat together in silence, like old men in a pub by the factory gate. I ordered myself a beer, a large one. It looked like it was going to be a long, quiet night.
‘Why Rome?’ she asked eventually.
‘No reason really,’ I lied. ‘Just, every couple of years I think it might help if I found religion. So I spend a day going from church to church, imagining how much better it would all be if I believed in God. I sit there, surrounded by the quiet, the darkness, the damp coldness, the crosses and frescoes on the walls, all that devout suffering, and it feels like maybe everything does have meaning after all. I sit and sit, for hours sometimes, because I know that as soon as I leave, everything will fall apart again.’
‘So you went to Rome to sit in a church?’
‘Well, where else do you get so many churches, each one better than the one before, a Caravaggio in every corner? If you chuck a euro in the machines, the light goes on and you can actually see the Caravaggio. Plus, I finally understand nuns now. Jesus looks completely different in Italy. Not the emaciated, anguished bloke we have here. No, the man on the cross over there has a six-pack. It’s plain lascivious. Anyone would join a convent for a man like that.’
I kept blathering on to give her time. Anyway, I didn’t want to talk about the real reason for my trip. Something about it embarrassed me, especially tonight. Tonight wasn’t supposed to be about me.
She ordered another whisky, still saying nothing.
‘What’s up, Martha?’
‘First tell me what you were really up to in Rome, apart from drooling over Jesus.’
‘I wasn’t up to anything in Rome. I’d planned to go to Bellegra, an hour south of the city,’ I admitted.
She looked at me in puzzlement.
‘I wanted to visit my father’s grave.’
‘Your father died?’
‘Not him. The other one.’
‘You’ve got so many fathers I never know which one you’re talking about.’
Martha was exaggerating. There were basically only three. The good one, also known as ‘The Trombonist’; the bad one, AKA ‘The Prick’; and the biological one, ‘Jochen’. My mother and I had vanished from the last one’s life so early that he was more like a nice-enough uncle I was always on my best behaviour with. Every now and then, I’d meet up with him for dinner. I’d never been able to feel anything other than pity for him. Not even after my mother wedded The Prick, who in the space of two years wreaked enough havoc on my prepubescent psyche to lumber me with an impressive range of lifelong psychological and sexual defects. The only beacon of hope in this male netherworld was The Trombonist. A...
