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The waiter comes and asks me what I’d like to drink. There are all kinds of drinks on the table, everyone’s ordered something different, whoa, yet another keg of confusion, just stop that for a second please.
‘Is that a negroni?’ I ask Carla, who’s playing with the glass in her hand. ‘What else?’ she says, and her voice sounds as though she’s just found the formula for liquid happiness. I’d like a bit of that. ‘I’ll have one of those too, please,’ I say. Klatsche grins at me, and what a grin he’s got. Shameless and sexy that grin is, almost unbearable, my God, how I’ve missed that grin.
‘I thought alcohol had to be see-through,’ he says, taking a swig from his beer. ‘Things change,’ I say and look him in the eye for the first time since he popped back into my flat for a bit, a good couple of years ago now, and then left forever. His expression drops into the middle of my heart and explodes. Oh wow, what a mess, now I’ll have to clean everything up again. Six months ago, he once tried to call me. I didn’t answer. Brückner leans over to me and asks quietly if he should swap places with his colleague Inceman. So that we can sit next to each other. ‘Oh,’ I say, and reckon that’ll have to do as an answer.
Inceman and I sit next to each other all the time, at least three times a week we sit next to each other at great length, as a matter of fact. First we walk next to each other through the streets for an eternity, by night, I always walk on his right, maybe because I think I might be able to stand in for his right arm that way, and whenever we reach a place where we can sit next to each other, at a serious bar that is, at a sturdy lump of wood that carries us like a ship, we drink just that precise drop too much that lets us forget histories, sentences, moments and in the end, when we’ve done that long enough for the last scrap of sense to have fallen in the water, we lie on top of one another in bed, mostly in mine. He’s never bothered with a flat, he says the whole city’s his flat, and that it’s better that way, feels better.
So anyway, then we lie around on top of each other and, as if by the by, a couple of earthquakes happen. My drink arrives. Klatsche shakes his head, pushes his beer aside and orders a pina colada. I see: anything you can do, I can do better, bitch. Although I think a pina colada’s a bit over the top for tit-fortat. A mai tai would really have done.I raise my glass and toast Faller; the others follow suit. ‘To you, Faller,’ I say. ‘Well, then,’ he says, ‘to you all.’ And then he stands up. Carla claps her hands. ‘Speech!’ She loves speeches. ‘Just a little toast,’ says Faller, rubbing his white stubble. He stands straight and looks at us. He could say that it’s a miracle that we’re here, together at this table. And that each of us deserves great respect for having survived the journey to this day. He could say that Carla gets more beautiful with every passing year, that her dark brilliance grows more intense, her face clearer and her curls wilder, the whole world is reflected in her eyes, and if you don’t walk past those eyes quickly enough, you’ll topple in.
He could say that Rocco’s lost his boyish air, that he’s suddenly, unmistakably, heading for forty, that the secondhand suits he loves wearing so much don’t even look second-hand anymore, they just look as though he’s been wearing them for over twenty years. And that there’s more than simply the lust for adventure rioting in his eyes these days and that now it’s almost soothing to look at him sometimes, whereas, until a couple of years ago, he was always so unsettling for everyone around him, but in a good way. He could say that, unlike Rocco, Klatsche never was a boy, but always a grown-up man, except that the genetic lottery handed him that boyish face that he’ll still have in ten years, no matter how hard he plays at being a father. But oh, he’s not even playing at being a father, he is a father now, you can see it in his shoulders, in the way he holds himself, in the slight tiredness, sustained by tenderness, in his eyes, in the slightly broader waist. He’s more stable than ever, and that suits him so well that I ought to break into pieces here and now, like a church window exploding in slow motion, but I pull myself together and just carry on looking unobtrusively at him,and keep on looking at Faller too. He could say now that Anne Stanislawski is the future, that she looks like a vixen, cunning and quick and wild and royal at the same time, fervent yet composed. Today, she’s wearing her reddish-blonde hair down, which she rarely does – why is she, oh my God, she’s a strawberry queen, and did she count her freckles when she was a child?
Faller could say that the silver stripes in Calabretta’s hair suit him very well, the way they’re multiplying and getting more and more out of hand, the way they’re seizing possession of his head, and that he really ought to stop giving a damn about his receding hairline because the liberated brow draws all the attention to his finely carved face, to his unassuming wisdom, to the fact that he’s a man who never, really absolutely never, boasts about anything, who always is the way he is, which is mad really, they don’t make them like that anymore.
