Fame

  That’s completely different.

  And you won’t understand why an exception can’t be made for you.

  The two things aren’t comparable. You’re my invention and I’m …

  Yes?

  I’m real!

  Are you?

  Trust me. It’s not going to hurt. That much I can take care of, I promise. My story—

  Excuse me, but I couldn’t care less about your story. It’s probably not even any good!

  I’m furious and I say nothing, and to make sure Rosalie doesn’t start up again, I have her arrive at the airport a few minutes later—the taxi has made unbelievable time, the streets have become a blur of color, and she’s already getting out, no line at the check-in counter, no waiting to clear security, and she’s sitting at the gate, surrounded by noisy children and people on business trips, and has no idea how all this happened. Our conversation has slipped into the back of her brain, she’s no longer sure whether I actually said something or whether she invented my words herself.

  The plane is late. All planes are always late, that’s something not even I can do anything about. So Rosalie sits in the departure lounge. Sunlight filters softly through the windows. Until now she hasn’t felt afraid, but suddenly she is rigid with terror.

  At exactly this moment, things begin to move. The flight to Zurich is called, and as Rosalie stands up, a fellow passenger asks if she needs help. She doesn’t, but why turn down the offer of a little support and friendliness? So she allows herself to be assisted on board.

  Luckily, she has a window seat. She decides not to waste a moment, she’s going to look out as if she could take it all with her. It’s a fine thing to fly over the Alps one more time just before the end. The plane starts down the runway, engines screaming.

  Rosalie wakes as the plane touches down and the force of the brakes presses her against her seatbelt. Her eardrums hurt. She rubs her forehead. Did she really … the whole way? She can’t believe it. But out there the landing runway stretches away under a uniform gray sky. It’s true, she’s slept through it all.

  “Are we really already there?” she asks her neighbor.

  He shakes his head. “Basel.”

  “What?”

  “Fog in Zurich.” He looks at her as if it’s her fault. “We had to land in Basel.”

  Rosalie stares at the back of the seat in front of her and tries to think. What is this? The unexpected twist that’s meant to save her life? Have I intervened to interrupt her journey?

  But Rosalie, I reply. You have cancer. You’re going to die anyway. A break in your journey isn’t going to save you.

  It could turn into another kind of story, she says. I could discover life in the next two weeks. Do things I’ve never done before. It could be one of those stories about how nobody ever values the present enough and how you should always live as if it would be all over in the next few days. It could be a positive … what do they call them?

  Life-affirming. It’s called a life-affirming story.

  So it could be one of those!

  Rosalie, the airline will offer you two things. A connecting flight, but nobody will know when you’ll be able to board, because the fog in Zurich is extremely thick, or a train ticket. The train would get you there on time. You’ll take the train ticket. This isn’t a life-affirming story. If anything, it’s a theological one.

  How so?

  I say nothing.

  But how so, she says again. What do you mean?

  I say nothing.

  “I beg you,” says Rosalie’s neighbor. “It’s not so bad. You’ll get to Zurich—it’s not that far. There’s no reason to cry.”

  At the door to the plane she’s pulled herself together again. A man from the airline is handing out vouchers to the grumbling passengers. Rosalie does opt for the train, and because she looks frail and not very well, an employee is found to drive her to the station. Her train is already at the platform. “Mind the step,” says the young man. “Mind, there’s a gap. Mind the next step. Would you like to sit here? Mind the seat.”

  Very shortly the train is racing through a green landscape of hills and valleys. This time Rosalie is determined not to doze off.

  She wakes as the train is stopping at some little provincial station. Fog hangs over the roofs of hideous houses. Out on the platform a child is whimpering while his mother next to him stares wildly as if she’d just trodden in a mound of turds. Rosalie rubs her face. Then the conductor comes onto the loudspeaker: there’s been an accident, bodily injuries, please disembark!

  “Someone’s committed suicide,” a man says cheerfully.

  “Jumped in front of the train,” says a woman. “That makes a mess of you. Nothing left!”

  “Maybe a shoe,” says the man. “It’ll turn up miles away.”

  They all nod in concert, then they get out. A man helps Rosalie down onto the platform, and she stands out there in the drizzle. Not knowing what to do, she goes into the station buffet. A Madonna smiles down from the wall next to a general in black and white next to a mountain guide with a pickax. There are four Swiss flags in the room. The coffee is disgusting.

  “Dear lady, do you wish to get to Zurich?”

  She looks up. There’s a thin man with horn-rim glasses and greasy hair at the next table. Rosalie has already noticed him on the train.

  “If so, I could give you a lift.”

  “You have a car here?”

  “Dear lady, there are many cars.”

  She’s silent, nonplussed. But what does she have to lose? She nods.

  “If you would be so kind as to come with me. I take it time is tight.” In a grand gesture he pulls out his wallet and pays for her coffee. Then he goes over to the coat stand, takes a bright red cap that’s hanging there, puts it on his head, and slowly adjusts it. “Forgive me if I don’t assist you, but alas my back hurts. What is your name?”

  She introduces herself.

  He takes her hand and—she pulls back involuntarily—presses his lips to it. “Charmed!” He doesn’t tell her his own name. He holds himself very straight, his movements are supple, and there’s no sign that he has a bad back.

  She follows him into the parking lot. He walks quickly without looking back and she can hardly keep up with him. He stops first in front of one car, then another, his head to one side and his lips pursed.

  “What do you think about this one?” he asks in front of a silver Citroën. “I think it will do the job.” He looks questioningly at Rosalie. As she nods, disconcerted, he bends over and does something to the door, which springs open after a moment. He gets in and does something to the ignition.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Dear lady, won’t you get in?”

  Rosalie hesitantly sits down in the passenger seat. The engine starts. “Is this your car, or did you just …”

  “Of course it’s my car, dear lady! You wouldn’t wish to insult me?”

  “But the ignition! You …”

  “A new patent, very complicated, why don’t you tilt your seat back, it’s not going to take long, even if I can’t drive at top speed, too much fog and I don’t want to expose you to the slightest danger.” His laugh sounds like a bleat and Rosalie feels a shiver down her spine.

  “Who are you?” she asks, her voice hoarse.

  “A friendly fellow human being, dear lady. A seeker, a helper, a voyager. A shadow and a brother. As each of us should be to others.”

  They’re already on the Autobahn. The guardrails glisten at the side of the car and the speed pushes Rosalie into her soft leather seat.

  “The old riddle,” he says with a sidelong glance at her face. “Oedipus and the Sphinx. In the morning, four; at midday, two; in the evening, three. So profound, dear lady.” He turns on the radio, alpenhorns groan, in the background someone yodels. He whistles along and bangs out the rhythm on the steering wheel, completely off the beat. “A thinking reed, most venerable lady, un roseau pensant, what else is man? I will ta
ke you to your destination, and all I ask in return, fear not, is absolutely nothing.”

  Get on and do something, she says to me. Spoil your story. Who’s going to care, there are so many stories, it’s not all about just one. You could make me better again, you could even make me young. It wouldn’t cost you a thing.

  She almost managed to coax me out of my reserve, but right now I’m preoccupied with other things: I’m really bothered that I have no idea who the guy behind the wheel is, who invented him, and how he got into my story. My plan involved a little boy and a bike, a motorcycle gang and a retired Colombian coffin maker. A little dog was also to be given a major role, largely symbolic. Twenty pages of drafts, a lot of them really good, that I can just as well throw away now.

  They’re already leaving the Autobahn, the first houses on the outskirts of Zurich appear: little gardens, advertisements for milk, more little gardens, schoolchildren with oversized knapsacks. Suddenly he hits the brakes, jumps out into the street, runs around the car, and opens Rosalie’s door. “Dear lady!”

  She climbs out. “We’re here?”

  “Yes indeed!” He makes an absurdly low bow, his arms hanging slack so that the backs of his hands brush the wet asphalt. He holds this pose for several seconds, then straightens up again. “Determination. Whatever projects you have planned, perform them with determination. Think about that.” He turns and walks away with long strides.

  “But your car!” Rosalie calls after him.

  He’s already disappeared around the corner, and the Citroën sits there abandoned, its blinkers going, and the door wide open. Rosalie squeezes her eyes, then focuses on the street sign, and realizes with a mixture of relief, incredulity, and anger that he’s dropped her off in the wrong place.

  She lifts her hand and stands there for a long time in the rain, getting wetter and wetter and feeling wretched beyond words. Finally a taxi pulls up. She gets in, gives the driver the correct address, and closes her eyes.

  Let me live, she tries one last time. Your story. Forget it. Just let me live.

  You’re clutching at the illusion that you really exist, I reply. But you’re made of words, vague images, and a few simple thoughts, and they all belong to other people. You think you’re suffering. But nobody’s suffering here, because nobody’s here!

  You and your clever words! You can stick them up your ass!

  For a moment I’m speechless. I’ve no idea who taught her to talk like that. It’s not who she is, it’s a stylistic break, it spoils my prose. Please pull yourself together!

  No, I won’t. I hurt. One day it’ll happen to you too, and someone will tell you that you don’t exist.

  Rosalie, that’s precisely the difference. I do exist.

  Oh yes?

  I have a personality and feelings and a soul, which may not be immortal but it’s real. Why are you laughing?

  The driver looks round, then shrugs his shoulders, old people are strange and that’s that. The windshield wipers are on high, rain is bouncing back up out of the puddles, people are staring out from under their umbrellas. The last journey, says Rosalie softly, and precisely because it’s true, the thought rings both false and pathetic. It doesn’t matter what kind of life you’ve had, she tells herself, it always ends in horror. And now all that remains is to let the minutes go by. There are approximately twenty left to her, each one filled with seconds; it’s a long time. The clock will tick thousands of times more, the end is still unreal for now.

  “We’re here!” says the driver.

  “Already?”

  He nods. She realizes she hasn’t changed any money, and has no Swiss francs. “Please wait. I’ll be right back.”

  As she’s getting out, she simply can’t believe her last act is going to be cheating on a taxi fare. But life is such a mixed-up, impure business, and now she’s no longer responsible. Here is the name board with all the buzzers, and on it, as if it meant something other than death itself, is the name of the association. She rings, the door immediately unlocks itself with a dull hum.

  The elevator is ancient, the suspension cables above the car groan, and as she goes up, she understands that until this moment she’d never believed she would set foot in this house. The car stops, the door glides open, and there appears out of nowhere, as if to prevent her from pushing the button that will take her back down again, a thin man with a center part in his hair. “Good day, my name is Freytag.”

  And now?

  I know I should tell it all. Rosalie walking through the anteroom to the inner room in which the dying is done. The table; the chair; the bed, I should describe them, I should paint a picture of the battered furniture, the strange layer of dust on the little wall cupboard, the general air of a place that’s both used and uninhabited, as if it were the home of shadows, not people. And of course the camera; I should mention the camera, installed to document that the terminally ill patients drink the poison themselves, that nobody forces them, the association has to cover itself legally. I should recount how Rosalie sits down and props her head on her hands, how she looks out of the window for one last sight of the endless foggy expanse of sky, how fear gives way to exhaustion, how she—here, please, and here, and again here—signs forms, and how the glass of poison is finally set down in front of her. I should describe how she lifts it to her mouth, I should conjure up the mixture of aversion and longing as she looks at the watery liquid, her brief hesitation, because she could still turn back and, even if for a matter of days, choose life with all its pain and all its adversities, but then she decides against this—she’s come too far, she’s too close to the threshold to turn back. I should also describe the last wave of her memories: games at the edge of a peaceful lake, the moist kiss of a motherly woman, her father behind the Sunday paper, the little girl who sat next to her at school, and a boy she hasn’t thought about since back then, and the bird in a cage at her grandmother’s that could enunciate several words quite clearly. Nothing, if truth be told, in the intervening seventy-two years, has ever fascinated her as much as that talking creature.

  Yes, it could have made a really good story, a little sentimental, granted, but with humor to counterbalance the melancholy, the brutality offset by a touch of philosophy. I had worked the whole thing out. And now?

  Now I ruin it. I tear the curtain aside, I become visible, I appear by Freytag’s side at the door to the elevator. For a second he looks at me uncomprehendingly, then he turns pale and vanishes like dust. Rosalie, you’re cured. And while we’re at it, be young again. Start from the beginning again!

  Before she can even respond, I’ve disappeared again and she’s standing in the elevator that’s grinding its way back downstairs and cannot grapple with the fact that a twenty-year-old woman is looking back at her out of the mirror. Slightly irregular teeth, hair a little sparse, neck too thin, she never was a beauty, but I can’t give her that as well. Although, on the other hand—why not! It’s not important anymore.

  Thank you.

  Ah, I say, exhausted, don’t celebrate too fast.

  She pulls open the front door and bounds out into the street on legs that no longer hurt. Her clothes look peculiar on her: a young girl dressed like an old woman. Because the taxi driver doesn’t recognize her, he doesn’t stop her, he’s lost his fare and will still be standing here half an hour later, watching the meter keep ticking with rising concern, and finally banging on every door in the building. At the association they tell him that they were indeed expecting an old lady but that she hadn’t bothered to keep her appointment. He will go off cursing and this evening will shovel down his wife’s wretched cooking, even more taciturn than usual. It’s long been in his mind to kill her, with a knife or his bare hands, but today’s the day he decides to go through with it. But that’s another story.

  And Rosalie? She goes down the street, taking great strides, half unconscious with euphoria, and for a moment I feel I’ve done the right thing, as if mercy were all-important and one story less didn’t matt
er. And at the same time, I have to confess, I have an absurd hope that someone someday will do the same for me. For like Rosalie I cannot imagine that I’m a nothing if I’m not being observed by somebody else, and that my only half-real existence ends the moment that that somebody takes his eyes off me—just as, now that I’m finally ending this story, Rosalie ceases to exist. From one moment to the next. Without any death throes, pain, or transition. At one instant an oddly dressed girl in a state of happy confusion, now a mere undulation in the air, a sound that echoes for a few seconds, a memory that bleaches itself from my mind and from yours as you read this paragraph.

  What remains, if anything, is a street in the rain. Water pouring off two children’s ponchos, a dog over there lifting its leg, a yawning street sweeper, and three cars with unknown number plates rounding the corner as if they were coming from a long way away: out of another unknown reality or at least out of another story altogether.

  The Way Out

  In the early summer of his thirty-ninth year, Ralf Tanner the actor began to feel he didn’t exist.

  From one day to the next, phone calls stopped. Friends of long standing vanished from his life, business plans collapsed for no good reason, a woman he’d loved insofar as he was capable maintained that he’d mocked her cruelly on the telephone, and another, Carla, suddenly surfaced in a hotel lobby to make the worst scene he’d ever undergone in his life: three times, she screamed, he’d stood her up three times in a row! People had stopped, grinning, to watch, a few of them had filmed it all on their cell phones, and already in the very moment Carla had hit him with all her strength, he knew that these few seconds would make it onto the Internet and eclipse the fame of his best films. Shortly after that, he was forced to part with his German shepherd because of allergies and in his distress he shut himself up to paint pictures that he didn’t dare let anyone see. He bought albums of photographs of the designs on the wings of Central Asian butterflies, and read books on how to dismantle and reassemble watches without ever daring to try it himself.

  He began to google his own name several times a day, corrected the Wikipedia entry on himself that was riddled with errors, checked the casting in his films in various databanks, and laboriously translated the opinions of participants in forums about them from Spanish, Italian, and Dutch. Absolute strangers got into fights in these forums about whether he really had split definitively with his brother years before, and he, who had never been able to stand his brother, read their views as if there might be a chance he’d find in them the answer to his existential crisis.