Ulrike closes her eyes.
She shifts her weight onto the floor and collapses on her side. Polina tries to help. She pushes her fingers into Ulrike’s hair and touches her scalp: if only her thoughts would start moving.
If only she could remember her last moments!
Ulrike begins to relax. She feels drowsy, woken up too early, yet again. With her eyes closed she turns on her iPod, and the first song on the album, her favorite song, starts to play: Scott Walker’s ‘Farmer in the City’. Today is the Assumption of Mary, Thursday the fifteenth of August, 2013, the day when Ulrike dies, which of course Ulrike doesn’t know yet. Mariä Aufnahme in den Himmel. People cram into their cars and buses and trains, each wanting a moment away from the noise of the city. They reserve a hotel room or a whole house in the countryside. For example, in Berchtesgaden. They want to roam the mountains, swim in the lakes, and enjoy the susurrations of history. That means more work for Ulrike, as she is forced to jog around the dining room at the Kehlsteinhaus restaurant from ten in the morning until six in the evening. But so what? It just means more money.
Ulrike slips into a torpor at about Sankt Leonhard. The articulated bus trundles along with hisses and squeals, a mechanical female voice announcing the stops, but Ulrike doesn’t hear. She hears other words, a story she doesn’t understand but loves nonetheless, which she wants to hear over and over again. She is enchanted in turn by each individual word Scott Walker’s fateful voice gives form to. Every word is overwhelming, full in itself; each syllable passing Scott’s vocal chords is worthy of singing, overflowing with emotion that grabs you and pushes you into a sweet darkness you have no desire to leave. Ulrich B. Zinnemann introduced her to this album. The song is based on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poem “Uno dei Tanti Epiloghi”—“One of Many Epilogues”; U.B.Z. told her this during a smoke break in July when they were finally starting to get to know each other. The music led them from one sentence to another, from question to answer, from cigarette to cigarette. Ulrike learned new things, information that fitted into a framework that was light years away from Hanno’s infantile thoughts. Such as this: Pasolini dedicated his poem to the amateur actor Ninetto Davoli, his protégé, with whom the director began a love affair when Ninetto was fifteen years old. Pier Paolo wrote the poem around the time Ninetto entered the army at age twenty-one, after which he was quickly returned to civilian life for being too nonconformist.
Glass-eye U.B.Z. stubbed out his cigarette and looked Ulrike sternly in the eyes. “Pasolini was one of the great film directors, but only one. In contrast, there has never been a more ingenious musician than Scott Walker. Period.”
Ulrike nods, half asleep, in the sweet darkness behind her Eye Mask DeLuxe. She amuses herself, imagining a roguish Ninetto and a handsome Pier Paolo making love. Slow, moose-like movements. Open mouths, gruff bellowing. How does a middle-aged man make love to an underage boy? Does he make love to the boy, or does the boy make love to him? Or does it really happen together, at one time, the man with the boy and the boy with the man? However it works, Ulrike enjoys their love. This time she decides to let Paulo lead. She is Ninetto, young fifteen-year-old wicked Ninetto, who submits, who allows the older man to mount his back once again . . .
Glass-eye U.B.Z. knows a lot of things. He tells stories, but he still doesn’t reveal anything. Ulrike’s new friend at the Eagle’s Nest, Anke-Marie, is sure that U.B.Z makes up all of it. “It can’t be true,” Anke-Marie says. “Like the story about the eye. Come on!” Anke-Marie is skeptical. She frowns as if in disapproval of U.B.Z.’s stories, but she still enjoys them. Maybe Anke-Marie is a little infatuated with Ulrich? She smiles (her gums show) when Ulrich walks up to the kiosk in the courtyard of the Kehlsteinhaus during the shift change and buys a package of throat lozenges and cigarettes from her. The kiosk belongs to Anke-Marie’s mother, but because her mother has to care for her own ailing mother in a gingerbread house in the valley of Berchtesgaden, Anke-Marie is spending this summer sitting on a tall barstool behind the kiosk window. Ulrike thinks Anke-Marie is the best thing at the Eagle’s Nest, besides the salary. And besides Ulrich. When Anke-Marie explodes with laughter, the vultures in the mountain tops hear it too.
Ulrich B. Zinnemann is a unique case. None of the characters from any normal gallery of stereotypes fits his description. A forty-year-old man who lost his left eye in a duel! Ulrike and Anke-Marie have spent many a day considering the mystery of the unmoving, lifeless glass eye. Until one fine day, Anke-Marie goes and simply asks, “One of your eyes doesn’t move, Ulrich. What happened to it?” The three of them were hanging around the kiosk. The Eagle’s Nest was already closed, and Anke-Marie was locking up. “Is your left eye made of glass?”
Ulrike wanted to kick Anke-Marie in the shins, but U.B.Z. didn’t seem to mind. He leaned on the counter, loudly sucking on a mint, and began to tell the story of his left eye: “There was a woman, a very beautiful woman, who had another man. I got in the way of a budding
