What shall I do until I sleep?
I fetch one of the diaries and sit on the bed. It’s the middle one. The two of us are here together, my former self and my present self, the boy and the middle-aged man.
What makes a boy write: Thanks for life, Mom. Why not Dad? I thank Mom for giving birth to me and girls for sleeping with me. I’m a man who expresses gratitude.
Mom says she had wished she’d had a daughter.
I too would certainly have liked a sister. Instead I had girlfriends. That I slept with. Four in the same week, if the diary entries are anything to go by.
Apart from that, I have a very foggy image of that boy who describes cloud formations and female bodies. It’s clearly something we have in common, he and I, that he doesn’t know who he is any more than I do.
I don’t exist yet is written in clear letters under the date October 24.
A few pages later there is a sentence I have crossed out with one fine stroke of the pen, but that is still legible: How did I become me?
N regularly appears in entries beside the other letters—K, A, L, S, and G—but I don’t have to read far to realise that it isn’t a girl I’ve slept with, because in one place N is fully named as Friedrich Nietzsche. On the basis of the dates and quotations here and there, I spent a whole year reading Beyond Good and Evil. That was my year at university. My diary seems to have served as a glossary.
Whatever remains in him of “person” seems accidental, often arbitrary, and disruptive. It takes effort to think on “himself,” he’s not infrequently mistaken when he does. He confuses himself with others, he is wrong about his basic needs.
My attention is drawn to the fact that death is omnipresent, appearing at three-page intervals along with that wonderful experience of suffering.
Two days after Dad’s death, I write: People die. Other people. One dies. By “one” I mean myself. I die. Because life is the most delicate thing of all. If I have children they’ll die as well. When it comes to that, I won’t be with my children to hold their hands, to comfort them.
And an entry on the following fourteenth of April reads:
At our latitudes people mostly kill themselves in the spring. People can’t bear the idea of the earth renewing itself. Of everything starting anew except themselves.
This isn’t a bad boy. He’s innocent and well-meaning. I notice how weather and cloud descriptions are gradually supplanted by environmental concerns, with entries about the thinning of the ozone layer, greenhouse gases, and global warming. The glaciers recede and eventually disappear. In just a few decades these vast water reservoirs of the world will have disappeared.
What would I say to that boy today? If he was my son, I mean?
I turn the page.
The following is written at the top of the next:
I don’t believe in God anymore and I fear he no longer believes in me.
I swiftly skim through the diary.
On the second-to-last page it transpires that my former self gave blood.
Went to the blood bank and donated blood. And below—on a new line—three words: I feel dizzy.
As far as I can make out, the visit to the blood bank gave rise to two pretty interesting reports on the final page.
Places where I’ve done it:
Bed (A, K, L, D, G, S), graveyard (E), car (K), staircase (H), bathroom (L), summer house (K), public swimming pool (S), crater (with G).
And straight after that:
List of places I haven’t done it: blood bank, art museum, police station (etc.).
I close the diary and turn off the light. What thought should I choose while I lull myself into the darkness? I’m sitting with Gudrún Waterlily in my arms on a carousel—she chose a unicorn—and her mother, my wife, waves at us—while everything spins and the world expands at the speed of light. We wave back at her. Then the world slows down again and shrinks into a tiny iris, just before it’s switched off, before I’m switched off.
The wonderful experience, the suffering, ignites hope
I have no change of clothes, apart from the single shirt dangling on a wooden hanger in the wardrobe. What am I to do about that? Why didn’t I take any clothes with me? I get my red shirt and put it on.
I rub my jaw. Shouldn’t I shave? I haven’t shaved in four days.
“The hotel shop might have razors,” said May.
I ring the bell and wait for Fifi to appear.
“Did May mention we had razors?” he says when I ask him.
He has stepped behind the reception desk in a hoodie and jeans. He’s not wearing his white shirt, but I notice he has white dust in his hair, as if he’d sprinkled flour over it. He’s taken the headphones off his ears.
“Yes, she mentioned a hotel shop.”
“That was packed away in the war. That was actually before my time,” he adds after some thought.
He opens a drawer, rummages through it, and finally fishes out a bundle of keys.
“I think this is the one for the storage room,” he says, beckoning me to follow him down a corridor behind the reception desk, then down a staircase to a locked door.
It takes him some time to find the right key.
“There should be a storage room here,” he explains as he tries out the keys.
The young man seems to be just as dumbfounded as I am when he opens the door and gropes at length for a light switch.
The room is quite large, windowless and crammed with an assortment of items, souvenirs and all kinds of gifts that have been stacked on rows of shelves, but also in boxes on the floor. In the middle, there is a postcard stand and another one with sunglasses. On the
