From a new beginning....

There is very little that dampens my joy at being back in Germany. Being back and understanding what I had missed, it is all there again, the good as well as the bad. It is the familiar, the norm, no longer having to guess because you do not speak this social silent code, but instead once again knowing what the other person expects and what they take for granted, without drawing the wrong conclusions. Life is so much easier. And easy has always been my preferred way, or something like that.

After finding a new profession surprisingly quickly, and in these difficult times at that, I seem to have acquired the right specialization, in a very rapidly growing field where expertise is in short supply worldwide. And since working is not enough, and a three-star superior hotel for 38 euros a night may be acceptable accommodation but is nothing permanent, I once again found myself looking for an apartment. And as it goes, as a middle-aged man, no children, non-smoker, no pets, let’s say a steady income, apartments were practically thrown at me. And since, as always, I have a matrix made up of cinema, weekly market and gym, as well as distance to work, reachable by bike, public transport connections, and only in second place price, I found what I was looking for. And once again, I was in the position of being able to choose. So I could turn down the completely absurd and obviously overpriced offers. I could also comfortably walk away from two-year minimum lease terms, demands to disclose savings or, because I am still on probation, guarantors being required in the rental contract, and merely smile wearily at the whole thing. I found what I wanted, inside the city’s inner ring, three rooms and a rent that fits my budget very well. Two kilometres to the cinema, everything else is closer, and ten dead-flat kilometres to work. Perfect. The city itself is medium-sized, significantly larger than GD, but also smaller than S, and I like it here. It reminds me of home, and I’ll leave open which one I mean. There is also a low mountain range nearby, which I have not yet explored, though on one ride through it actually left quite a decent impression. There are rivers here too, for getting some distance in. I am looking forward to the weekly market, which I will finally check out next Saturday. (Addendum: passable.) I think I will soon have that one routine again that I have missed so much. The last time I had it was a few years ago in Mannheim, now that I think about it, that was the last place where I had everything together so perfectly. We’ll see whether it develops in a similar way. I wouldn’t mind.

Then Wiesbaden, really beautiful city, one of the nicest apartments I have ever lived in, distances a bit too long, but then there was the workplace. I have found myself thinking about it again and again lately, about the people there and their behaviour, shaking my head. Just shaking my head. How can people make working so difficult for themselves and everyone else? Then Essen. The Ruhr. Dort. Mund. Hurz. I don’t even feel like thinking about it anymore. Done. Then Brisbane and Australia. One image is taking shape more and more clearly, the rainbow-coloured swastika tattoo. It is becoming more and more the symbol of Australia for me. Not my cup of tea. And when I compare it with the German working environment, God, the Aussies would have an existential crisis every morning here in Germany and first of all collapse in tears. After the first good morning. The little sensitive souls, heaven forbid anyone actually address a conflict, oi oi oi. God, I’m glad to be back. Floating to the top.

And I am looking forward again to my boring little routine, short distances, work, finishing work, hitting the gym, cycling, a bit of art, a bit of book writing, a bit of travelling, a small boring future lying ahead of me. If it weren’t for that one little spot inside me, that little itching patch that keeps making itself known and says: “Come on, you know how it goes, come away with me, left, right, straight ahead, here today, there tomorrow.” It itches, again and again, not strongly yet, but it is there and keeps making itself known. Let’s see how long I can resist.

So, that was the entry I wanted to write, and I wanted to leave it there, that I’m doing well, at the moment, that I’m looking forward to discovering my new surroundings, that was it. Perhaps also that you should not necessarily choose the cheapest company to transport your stuff from Haus am Hain to your new home. Actually, I could have asked Willi whether he felt like playing hooky again and driving a Sprinter for me. I would have enjoyed the time with the Greek, and he, although he would never have admitted it, would have enjoyed it too, and we would have sung songs about the sufferings of middle-aged David, black-and-white songs full of mediocrity. But I actually wanted to go down new paths, I wanted to do something new, and I went with a solution that cost me exactly as much as renting a Sprinter, paying for the fuel and enslaving Willi. The end result was a twenty-minute unloading operation on Sunday evening at 10:30 p.m. (we won’t talk about the loading and the renegotiations). Still cheaper than the DIY operation, although perhaps I should not always choose the cheapest provider. A story to remember, at any rate, though it would have been good with Willi too. Next time, Greek, next time again, and who knows when that will be, it is already itching again. Every ending is a new beginning. In that spirit.

That would have been the closing sentence, actually, were it not for, yes, were it not for one of the reasons for my return being a somewhat health-stricken older gentleman.

After seeing him more often again lately, I noticed that the deterioration is accelerating now, and after a month away I visited him again this weekend, and if I had not been able to see for myself that he is no longer doing well and is probably in the final weeks of his life, then the things he still owns, collected in a large blue plastic sack at the foot of his bed, the new razor that can no longer be found, and that unsettling smile of one of the carers when she saw me would have made me suspicious. It was not a smile of joy. That cruel, distorted face that is supposed to pass for a smile tells me one thing: the man does not have long left, and to my own surprise, it really gets to me that he is coming to the end. I never had the best relationship with this man, who liked to have me refer to him as my father. An honour I deny both of my parents.

And now he is lying there in front of me, I hear how laboured his breathing is, I see the blood in his urinary catheter, I see the bloated body, the yellow-tinged face that is no longer his, and the deterioration over the course of the last month, and I hope that at least he is not in pain and, as terrible as it sounds, that he gets it over with. The reserves are exhausted. And I try to find something positive in our relationship. The first years, certainly, the first carefree six years, the only time in my life when I lived in an intact world. Sitting together on Sundays, toast with butter and honey or jam, chess. Or Sportschau on Saturday evenings with filled rolls, or the big Saturday-night entertainment shows. And the chess playing, which continued deep into our relationship. Whenever I could no longer follow him, whenever things became too confused, we played chess, and then there was silence, no more talking, no more lectures, no more rambling. My escape from having to deal with him.

I visited him for years, drove to see him in his apartment, tidied up, cleaned, had to read his pages covered in writing, written in a handwriting I could never decipher. His book, as he called it, his memoirs, his insights into life. I never understood it, I could never make sense of it, and to be honest, I never wanted to. He could never tell it either. He never told me stories, he merely kept shoving those pages covered in his handwriting under my nose and acting as though they were the final word in wisdom. Or sent me twenty-six-page letters that I never read. I have to think about why. What did he want with it? Did he want to explain himself? I do the fuck not know.

I know little about him. He grew up without a father, who was lost in the war, somewhere between Russia and Brittany. Apparently not a radio operator. With his mother and two aunts, in a farmhouse. Both aunts, I still remember, later ended up in nursing homes as well. His mother spent her final years with her daughter. Raised as a war orphan, in a small village, hardly went anywhere, travelled even less, few friends. At some point I had my father’s childhood toys in my hands, soldiers in Wehrmacht uniforms, roughly hand-sized figures on wire, made of wood, hand-painted. They suddenly stood in my childhood bedroom as though that were the most normal thing in the world. Funny as it is? I preferred Lego to those strange inclinations.

He was a toolmaker, had a career in the German Mittelstand, a clever little bugger, apparently, but he never managed to make the leap into the digital age. From the drawing board to the monitor. I still remember how he wanted to buy me a C64 and tried to get his head around it. Awkward, simply never managed that transition. And then family problems, retreat into his illness, occupational disability or early retirement, and withdrawal. On an interpersonal level there were probably no friends left, no relationships, incapable of participating in social life. Isolation, a broken man after the failure of his marriage. His conversion to the Catholic Church, which he sold to me like some kind of coup, as though the Pope himself had personally called him, and nobody cared. Literally nobody was bothered by his change of denomination.

And me? At some point I simply couldn’t anymore, I couldn’t take it anymore, it became too absurd, too manic, I never knew who I was dealing with at any given moment, I closed the door, somewhere between university and my PhD, had enough to deal with myself. Every now and then I called 183868 and hung up, just wanted to know whether he was still alive. There were people who had seen him and told me about it. Stories about how he had gone to the police and reported a poisoning, someone had supposedly tried to poison him. That is what I was told on the phone.

For ten years I did not contact him, until word came that he was in hospital, fractured neck of femur, was I the son? He was no longer capable of living on his own, something made abundantly clear by the sight of his apartment. An entire wall full of dietary supplements and in front of it stacks of handwritten pages, the strange repetition of events. For every one of his little bottles he could tell you what it was supposed to do or what it was supposed to be for. They did not help with his heart and kidney failure, and I think at some point he could no longer read his own scribblings either.

Then I began visiting him more regularly again in the nursing home. His meal schedule was more important than my visits. When it was coffee time, I was asked to leave. No matter how far I had travelled, and sometimes the journey could hardly have been any longer. He would always tell me how much he had changed the world, that chess was now being taught in schools because of him. It would promote logical thinking. That he still had millions hidden somewhere because he had achieved so much politically. And that his former boss had stolen all his patents and that he had taught the chess computer how to play chess. And I nodded and smiled and, contrary to my nature, I did not contradict him.

Like when he held a bank statement under my nose with millions on it, as he said: it said 3000 H there. And then that was the wrong one, the other one, it had still been here ten minutes ago, someone must have taken it. And I nodded and thanked him for managing his finances so well.

The truth? The truth is very bitter. So what do I actually have from him?

On the way this weekend I went down the old road from Utzstetten, and I remembered how we used to sled down that road in winter. Me at the front and him, and he was going far too fast for me, I was still young, and at the bottom of the run, instead of braking, he tipped the sled over into the snow, and I can still remember it as though it were yesterday, how I could not breathe and lay there, smeared with snow and tears, utterly terrified. I rode my bicycle past that spot and saw the little boy sitting in the snow, gasping for breath. To this day I do not like speed and I like being in control. It wasn’t because of that. No.

Oedipus was the Greek myth he knew and liked to tell. He liked to talk about the Oedipus complex and thought he was saying something intelligent.

And then this weekend I stood in front of him and saw it. He is dying. Soon. This is not going to go on for months. Since I came back from Australia, he has been wasting away at a rapid pace. I stood there, and for me there was nothing left to settle. I do not need another conversation with him. Everything has been said. No reproaches from me. He owes me nothing and I owe him nothing.

There is only one thing I would have liked to do one more time. I would have liked to play chess against him one more time. Like we always did, really. Whenever I could no longer stand his talking, and I have always been very sensitive about that, I brought out the chessboard, and then there was silence. Lost in the game. I would have liked to do that one more time, just once more.

I always played Black, and no matter how he opened, I played g6; Bg7; e6; Ne7; 0–0.

For years he refused to play against me. He could no longer concentrate, he said. Probably he simply did not want to lose. In truth, I had been letting him win for years. For a very long time now.