In a panic she took a few running steps and did three squat jumps, so deep that the fabric of her corduroys painfully rubbed her labia. The FACT didn’t give a hoot about that. It was practically overjoyed and began to do its worst. It tried to spread a burning heat through every nook and cranny of Ulrike’s body, because it was a vengeful, exceptionally nasty FACT that had once failed to receive its dues.
It was a simple reality that on August 15, on the day of the Assumption of Mary into Heaven, the doors of the lift had opened at just the moment, around 13:20, when Ulrike had been walking from the kitchen toward the dining room. Ulrich B. Zinnemann stood behind the opening doors, mysterious and large, and their gazes met. After this Ulrike had spent the rest of the day biting her lips for good measure. In the back of the kitchen she had chafed her lips with dry paper towels and then broken the thin protective membrane with her teeth so they would swell, and then moistened them with her tongue. So they would be juicy and red on her pale doll’s face.
The memory of that shame feels so terrible that Ulrike rolls on her back. She feels the need to roll down and down—if only there were a place you could say “down is that way”—that was where Ulrike wanted to roll now, away from the expectant gaze of other women, away from the tormenting thought: “U.B.Z. had begun to regret his suggestion” and the even more abhorrent corollary: “she had rubbed her lips raw”.
Ulrike wants to destroy the whole Eagle’s Nest. She wants to think of home, or at least her home street, Alpenstraße. This stifling feeling that makes her ears burn needs a deep line scratched through it on the page: Ulrich B. Zinnemann.
Ulrike does it many times in her mind. She does it to everything that rises steaming to the surface from it:
Ulrich B. Zinnemann.
Glass-eye-U.B.Z.!
Volkswagen.
ddddddd
Auf der Alm da gibt’s ka Sünd
Let’s keep this as a bit of fun
This friendship of ours
Benito ♥ Claretta
BAM!
Pier Paolo ♥ Ninetto
ddddddddddddddddddddddd
BAM! BAM! BAM!
Aladobi! Goulash! Leberkäse!
BAM!
The elevator! Volkswagen?? The elevator!!!
ddddddddddddddddd
BAM!
Apple strudel! Spätzle! Hüttenwurst!
. . . I like you . . .
. . . I like you . . .
. . . Anke-Marie . . .
BAM!
BAM! BAM!
BAM! ♥ BAM! ♥ BAM!
ddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd
Ulrike feels fingers on her temples. She opens her eyes and sees Maimuna sitting behind her head. Maimuna smiles at her sweetly, encouragingly, as if to say: You’ve arrived home, my dear. As if to ask: What happened to you there?
And so finally Ulrike is safely on her home street. In gratitude she takes hold of Maimuna’s gaze and continues her journey. Had she walked in front of a car after she exited the bus because she was so tired? Or had she gone to see Hanno for some incomprehensible reason after her long workday? To suggest a split?
Yes, that’s it: she had taken her bicycle and careened down the Hellbrunner Allee toward death. “The sensation is less of flying through the air, more of being picked up and hurled, and when she comes to rest on the roadside verge with her face against the wet pavement, her first instinct is to look for her bicycle, which has somehow disappeared from beneath her.” Is that how it happened? That’s the way the heroine of a certain blithe novel dies, right in the middle of the book. At the beginning of the summer, Ulrike had read it on the articulated bus. At the moment of the accident that takes her life, the heroine first “thinks very distinctly of two things” and then, in the final sentence of the chapter, “dies, and everything that she thought or felt vanishes and is gone forever”. And it wasn’t even true! There they were in the book, her important thoughts and unique emotions, running to hundreds of pages.
Ulrike had spent the entire journey wondering about the author’s trick. So it’s that kind of death, is it? A real masterclass about death! Everything is left undone, just as it always is in life. And as a bonus, the dramatic, slow motion at the moment of death: the final thoughts of the dying. Let the reader gasp for oxygen in astonishment: Emma can’t die, dash it all, Emma can’t go and die! But Emma does die, and the book becomes a bestseller.
Is this how it goes?
No chance. Not like that.
No bicycle, no flight through the air, no crash in the bushes at the side of the road, and especially none of this at the edge of the sidewalk. No bruises of any kind are visible on Ulrike. Instinctively Ulrike raises her hand and touches her head to be sure. The women nod, smiling. It’s fine, beautiful. Nina even flashes a thumbs-up and sighs: Ulrike, you are just lovely!
So could she have been inside during her last moments after all? Yes, she had ridden to Rainerstraße 13 and suggested to Hanno that they should call it quits. It was a doomed relationship, a teen romance that should have ended after a few red-wine-fueled fucking sessions. And then . . . Crazy, sick with jealousy, Hanno shoves her down on her parents’ water bed . . . Because sometimes Hanno did shove. Sometimes Hanno became agitated and shoved her when they were walking on the street late at night having a fight. She staggered toward the wall of a building and hurt her hands. She screamed, I’LL REPORT YOU TO THE POLICE, and Hanno yelled, GO AHEAD. WHAT DO I CARE!
So Hanno shoves her down on her back on the water bed and starts to press an enormous pillow against her face . . . so that she can’t breathe any more . . .
And just as Ulrike reaches those words, reaches Hanno, jealousy, and the pillow .
