Higher Ground, Anke Stelling [historical books to read .TXT] 📗

the director of the literary venue. This general remark takes me out of the spotlight again; they can all relate to it, they are or know somebody in the same boat, if not here, then in Paris or London, or in that film at the Berlin Film Festival. Which nevertheless had a happy ending.

‘When one door closes, another opens,’ I say, and, ‘Setting off for new shores means having the courage to leap into the unknown, out onto the open sea.’

‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,’ cites Olli, and my publisher says: ‘How does it feel?’, and I say to the intern that I think it’s good that she’s concerned about how animals live, because that’s often the first step to being concerned about how people live. ‘Isn’t that right, Miss Carefree?’ I add, then realise I should be careful what I say in my tipsiness and in this circle, and that I’ve just won fifteen thousand euros, so what the hell do I care — and wonder whether I’ll have to declare it on my tax return, and whether the kids will lose their school meals’ and activities’ allowance as a result.

Yes, probably. But luckily, they don’t exist.

I order another beer.

The director of the literary house says goodbye. He pays up at the bar; everybody will have to cover their own bill from now on, and only a few remain at the table — those who know how it really feels.

My publisher always stays until the last round, and now it’s the afternoon, half past two.

He stares at me with bloodshot eyes.

‘Resi,’ he says, ‘you think you’re smart, but sometimes you have to let go.’

‘Okay,’ I say, ‘I’ll try. Let’s go and pee outside.’

He fetches my jacket.

I squat down between two cars. With a skirt on, it’s no problem. Some trickles into my tights, but it doesn’t matter, it will dry straight away. The publisher is waiting.

‘Now you,’ I say.

He turns around and pees up against the wall.

Then we stand there for a bit. It’s a Sunday in November on Friedrichstraße. But this Sunday all the shops are open, and heated air wafts from store doors, and tourists without scarves can go in buy themselves one.

It’s really great not to need the toilet anymore. To never have to go to the toilet again, because you can just pee in the gutter.

‘You would never have to breathe in that fruit-scented cleaning fluid they spray in restaurant toilets,’ says the publisher, nodding.

‘And you’d do a Number Two on the pavement too?’

He nods again. Gestures that he’d like another cigarette.

‘And masturbate? And menstruate?’

I don’t know if I should believe him. He can’t even menstruate, but he nods.

List to self:

Stop waiting for Alexander the Great. You’re not Diogenes in his barrel saying ‘Get out of my sunlight.’ The sun doesn’t even shine on November afternoons here, and although the Berlin Palace has been rebuilt in the meantime, it doesn’t house a king that you could shame, let alone foist your modesty on.

Stop trying to ingratiate yourself with people in the literary business. She has her price now, old Resi, and no one needs to comment anymore on the fact that her name isn’t short for Theresia, but Parrhesia.

Stop making demands on Bea. There are too many gaps in your advice to her; while you’re talking about starving, the number of clinically obese children is rising relentlessly above the clinically underweight.

And, speaking of children, my family doesn’t exist. I’m not the type that manages.

‘Well, I’ll let myself go, then,’ I say.

The publisher nods, gives me a fatherly hug, and goes back into the restaurant; I walk down Friedrichstraße.

Diogenes was single, and singly tied up in his own life. He didn’t write, he did street theatre, the post-dramatic kind, claiming that roles were not to be played, but to be embodied. That packed a punch, even back then.

He had his greatest moments in front of an audience. These are the only moments we know about, because Diogenes didn’t take any notes, and the folklore of his interventions is probably at least half invented. Certainly exaggerated. Unacceptably overstated.

There is some controversy over his death. He knew very well how it felt, but that was his own private business and not part of his work.

He improvised a lot; he was an ad-libbing comedian. Naturally, he thought up and rehearsed scenes and sayings in his barrel, but he couldn’t have planned Alexander the Great’s visit or known that Alexander would give him the opportunity for his most famous line. It was pure luck, and not the essence of his work. It just happens to be a very clear example.

To be, not to have.

Everybody knows that’s the secret!

Having never stops; but it’s part of being. You define what is and what you are. That was Diogenes’ lesson. If you manage that, you’ve won. Then you don’t need the last word. You are the last word.

Victims

Sven is in the kitchen looking for something he can cook.

There is nothing; I didn’t go shopping. But I still could, because the shops are open this Sunday. Instead I sit down at the table, still wearing my rain jacket and brown shoes.

‘Finished?’ asks Sven.

I nod.

‘What’s next?’

‘Christmas.’

‘Oh, God.’

Sven goes to put on a coffee. The espresso has run out too.

‘I didn’t go shopping,’ I say.

Sven shrugs and puts on the kettle for tea instead.

‘I got a letter. From Frank.’

‘What kind of letter?’

I go into my broom cupboard and fetch it. It’s really that easy. I hold it out for Sven.

Sven reads the letter. Twice.

‘What the hell’s this about?’ he says. ‘What’s Frank’s problem?’

‘I’m worried,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to move.’

‘We can’t get far enough away from those windbags.’

I haven’t heard that word in a long time. I think of Silas’s baby trumpet. Of how Frank wanted Willi to play in the brass band, which Willi predictably refused. And how Friederike wanted to take up flute lessons parallel to Silas’s trumpet lessons, and of Ulf’s grandma, propped up on her stick