Schulze Ingo - 33 moments of happiness: St. Petersburg stories

Table of Contents

For H.P.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

John E. Woods is the distinguished translator of many booksmost notably Arno Schmidts Evening Edged inGold, for which he won the American Book Award for translation and the PEN Translation Prize in 1981; Patrick Sskinds Perfume, for which he again won the PEN Translation Prize in 1987; and Thomas Manns Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus. For his translations of The Magic Mountain and Arno Schmidts Nobodaddys Children, he was presented with the first Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for Translation from the German in 1996.

Let me explain it to you: A year ago I made good on a long-cherished wish and took a train to Petersburg. I shared the compartment with a Russian fresh from the hairdresser, her husband and a German named Hofmann. The Russians took us for a couple, and as the translator of their questions and my answers, Hofmann presumably let them believe that was the case. I dont know what all he told them. They never stopped laughing, and the woman kept patting my cheek.

It stayed sultry all that night, too; the conductors shirts were splotched with sweat, the compartment windows were dirty, steamed over and unopenableostensibly there was air-conditioningand when the stench wasnt of disinfectants, it was of the toilet and cigarettes. Lowered like drawbridges between the cars were steel plates that banged together tarrara-tarrara-ping, tarrara-tarrara-ping, modulating to tarrara-ping-bong, tarrara-ping-bong when the train braked, until the bumpers finally started banging in unpredictable, unrelenting collisions, so that I could not sleep and was still lying awake the next day, even after the heat let up. When Hofmann wasnt talking with the Russians, he would lean his head back into his pillow and gaze out the window, where amid swampy fallow fields and bleak forests, little houses emerged here and there, blue and green and pressed askew into the earth, with stacks of firewood shining pale behind burned-off meadows and whitewashed fences. Often all that was left of a gatekeepers little yellow flag was the wooden pole held out in salute.

The second evening, in Lithuania already, Hofmann suddenly invited me to the dining car. Sitting across from mewith his dark blond hair, nearly gray eyes and a scar under his chinhe seemed quite sure of himself. He ordered without a menu and wiped his silverware on the red curtains. But when asked how a German businessman, which he claimed he was, came to be traveling by train, he lost all his jauntiness for a moment. He gave a strained smile and fixed his eyes on me. Instead of answering, he began to ramble on about his work at a newspaper. But above all, he said, along with having a passion for karaoke, he was a lover of literature.

The further we moved away from my question, the more freely and easily he spokeand, it seemed to me, the more fantastic and incredible his stories. He showered me with wide-ranging and elucidative suggestions of things I simply had to read, all the while heaving great sighs and congratulating me on my ignorance. What all you still have before you! he kept saying. We ate and drank a lot, it was dirt-cheap, and whatever was meant to happen happenedtarrara-tarrara-ping....

I awoke with a hellacious headache. The sun was glaring; the train had stopped, a station named Pskov. Hofmanns bed had been stripped, the mattress rolled up. No one would or could say where he had got to. Easy come, easy go. I felt awful. And was still feeling awful even after I discovered, tucked behind my handbag, the folder lying before you now. I knew neither how it got there nor what I should do with it. At first I was going to give it to the conductor, because who knows what trouble not-knowing can get you into. But then I began to read.

Among the things we had talked about, Hofmann also spoke of some sketches he wrote every day and sent back to Germany from Petersburg. In writing themhe did not say for whomhe had yielded more and more to his inclination to invent rather than to research. Because for him, Hofmann said, something fabricated was no less real than an accident out on the street. He likewise must have encouraged business acquaintances and friends to describe for him certain episodes which is not hard to get a Westerner to do in Russia.

Perhaps Hofmann succumbed to his weakness with me as well, and preferred invention to giving truth its due. I dont know and can say little more than that for the past year I have tried in vain to forget him. And what, you will ask, does this have to do with me? When you spoke so candidly of your own plans, the idea came to me that someone like you should see to it that this folder gets published. Edited, it would surely provide diverting entertainment. And if Hofmann is still alive, he will come forward. I see no other possibility of my ever finding him again.

I beg you, please lend these fantasies your name! Because publishers will not accept a book without an author. They need photographs, interviews, theyre hungry for faces and real stories. What would be a welcome outcome for you would be burdensome to me. For one thing, I dont feel Im up to it all, for another, I would not like to put my own job in jeopardy. Whereas you are a person of literary ambition, are skilled at dealing with texts and have friends who would be happy to be of help to you. Perhaps you may even earn some money from it.

Freiburg im Breisgau, 25 June 94

I have provided this letter, in slightly abbreviated form, as a preface, because it relieves me of all explanations. I would nevertheless like to note that material considerations were secondary in my having assumed an editorial role. I would gladly have refrained from this task had I not been convinced that the sketches collected here go beyond their mere entertainment value and bear within them the possibility of inspiring an ongoing discussion concerning the value of happiness.

I.S.
Berlin, 10 June 95

You run across women like Maria only in magazines and commercials. Each evening in the lobby of the Hotel St. Petersburg, where I stayed early on, she would shift from one arrangement of white armchairs to another as if she were moving about in a furniture store. Sometimes she would disappear for five minutes, but she always came back, and she was always alone.

On my way to the hotel bar I spoke to her, and so we entered as a couple. Maria grew livelier and even more beautiful. She had in fact been waiting for me. The bartender ignored other guests to serve me, and within Marias line of sight, I returned to our table full of success and without sloshing a drop from the glasses. Her fingers got absentmindedly tangled in the silver chain above her dcolletage, and her long nails drew streaks across that incredible skin, which re-emerged no less pure from under her red dress just above the knee. I lit her cigarette for her with her lighter so that she would not be distracted from what she was saying about Margarita and Lolita, about the difference between Zoshchenkos and Platonovs use of language, and my palms lay flat on the table while she recited Pushkin and Brodsky as if she were planning a menu according to the vintage of the wines. She had time for me, as if there were no soccer heroes or singers, no members of parliament or captains waiting for her, and I knew: Petersburg, that is her dark eyes. They would stand like stars for me above the city, no matter what else might yet await me.