I had always lived in dreams, among the ghosts of language. Never have I understood why, after leaving Switzerland at eleven to attend Canadian boarding school, I always needed to shift around the globe afterward, my belongings carried with me in plastic bags and hard-shell suitcases or else stashed away somewhere in various storage units. CDs that could no longer be listened to because there were no more CD players. Records that could no longer be played because there were no more turntables. Books consumed by termites and dampness, and clothing that had become unfashionable and moldy.
Why out of some disturbed need peculiar to me I had to live in Bangkok and Florence and Buenos Aires, in California and Sri Lanka and Kenya and India and Kyoto for years at a time, why I had to rent and buy homes and apartments abroad, why I was raising a child who remembered being able to understand Swahili, being able to understand Italian, being able to understand Hindi, being able to understand French, being able to understand Swiss German, being able to understand Spanish, and being able to understand Argentine Castilian, that soft, limp Spanish with the shsh sounds. Why, I did not know.
A child who took enjoyment not only in speaking Italian with a Russian accent, speaking Saxon with an Indian accent, speaking French with a Scottish accent, but also in the scarcely perceptible tonal nuances of language, of High German with a Basel accent, of Glaswegian with a Punjabi accent, of Texan with a Tuscan accent, as though in such acoustic outgrowths, in such minimal shifts among linguistic molecules, something might be detected, gleaned by listening, which would then divide sounds according to truth and fabrication, which would classify them as original and copy.
It was always language itself, the liberation and simultaneous domination of the spastic glottis, that singular enigma which lay in the proper sequence of syllables. And it was always, then, the German. It had always been the German language. It had always been the scorched earth, the sufferings of ill-treated earth itself, war and the burning old city and the vegetable fields made infertile outside it. It had always been the ghetto purged with the flamethrower. It had always been the tailored, pale gray uniforms, the attractive blond officers with their ice-cube-filled gullets, whispering, smiling. It had always been the girl’s dark brown hair pinned on the left by that barrette, a curtain before her face brushed aside gently by her hand; it had always been the candle extinguished in Amsterdam.
*
I lived in the past, the last twenty-five, thirty-five years, which likewise felt as though they hadn’t just transpired but were eternally present. The past was always much more real and elastic and present than the now. I lived in films. And I lived in cinemas, I slept in cinemas. And the cinemas were shut down or relocated to shopping malls in municipal hinterlands, which people had begun to call Agglos. Where cinemas had once been, boutiques now moved in, selling coats and purses and shoes no one needed or deemed beautiful except for my mother, pieces from Loro Piana, for instance, or checkered, quilted blazers from Ferragamo or low-heeled shoes from Tod’s.
This unopened stuff, the sweaters and cardigans and blankets and pleated slacks my mother bought in these boutiques, had wandered into the armoires of her apartment, stacked and stowed away and archived, where they sat, never looked at again, next to dozens of Hermès handbags and the hundreds of Ferragamo shoes that were never worn. The furs, sable and silver fox and the like, that had not been stolen by the housekeeper were divided among five storage units my mother maintained in Zurich because it was no longer appropriate to wear furs, but neither could they be thrown out, just as nothing at all could ever really be thrown out, because everything does have a history, you know.
So even those never unwrapped, compulsively bought articles of clothing were a part of history, a part of her obsession following her experiences of the war and the postwar years. It was as if history had manifested its own fetishes, which then vanished within the dimness of my mother’s armoire. They had become enchanted objects whose meaning had been lost forever.
What might my mother have seen, as a small child, in those final war years? Had she seen deserters being strung up from lampposts with cardboard signs around their necks? Had she seen body parts hanging from the bombed-out buildings, their façades open like dollhouses? Had she seen missing walls, had she peeked into these oversized dollhouse parlors, had she seen those crushed limbs, beset by flies and maggots, severed by the force of the exploding bombs, had she seen liquefied bodies and human organs spattered about, torrents of refugees moving westward, mown down by machine gun fire from low-flying fighter planes, barns burning, wheat fields burning, churches burning—what had she been forced to see with her own eyes in the mangled wasteland of her childhood?
And why did my father always have to buy houses in places where he hoped for a connection to a society that would never otherwise have welcomed him? He had now been dead a decade, my father. The flat on Upper Brook Street in London’s Mayfair district. The chalet of Aga Khan in Gstaad. The villa in Cap Ferrat, situated on the bluff between Somerset Maugham’s home and the king of Belgium’s estate. The house in Kampen on Sylt. The house in Sea Island, Georgia. And finally the château in Morges on Lake Geneva, where he had died.
I was fond of recalling this house, this somewhat meek version of the Rothschilds’ Château de Pregny. I still see the faded baroque of the van Dyck in the entrance hall, which in the time between two of my visits had been removed from the paneling, likely cut out, rolled up, and sent off to Sotheby’s. There was always a very direct link between art and money—never the slightest doubt that they belonged together and were as one.
In my mind’s eye I saw the sofas upholstered with golden silk in the grand salon and, perched on the edge of one of them, my father in his pale gray English flannel suit, narrow shoes on his slender feet. I saw his cunning, icy bright eyes. His gaze traveled out far over the park, past Lake Geneva to Evian and on to the French Alps, orange-red and yielding in the dusk. I saw the furnishings of his dressing room, lined up to the ceiling in fawn and orange leathers by Hermès, with hundreds of shallow teak drawers, one for each bespoke dress shirt from Harvie and Hudson. Then the pair of early expressionist paintings by Lyonel Feininger, the one titled Jesuits, the other The Newspaper Readers, hanging above the desk in the study paneled in mahogany and teak. The collection of hundreds of diaphanous Chinese teacups he’d amassed over decades, like Chatwin’s Kaspar Utz, who suffered from that incurable porcelain sickness. But why all this?
I knew from the moment I guessed what it was all worth that not only would I never be able to live like that, but that my childhood and youth were permeated by arrogance and hyperbole and fraud and degradation, by dead money.
It was my father’s fear of provinciality, of his own humble origins, that emanated from him even after his death. His father had been a taxi driver, in Hamburg, with everything that entails. The nightly bar crawl the little boy had to go along for, his father’s dull, inebriated, violent blows, the post-Wilhelmine mercilessness of the lower classes. That was a place he never wanted to go back to, whatever the cost.
And so after the war he minced into the milieu of Axel Springer. He met the right people while wearing the right suits, though at first they were still sewn from the rough, scratchy fabric of the blackout blankets. He made quite an impression with his elegant demeanor and his nefariousness. For Springer, who’d received a license to print newspapers from the British, he procured whole truck convoys full of paper rolls on the black market. He was on the rise, ever upward, until he became the powerful publisher’s right hand.
He had tried living in England, tried working himself in at the very top in bespoke suits from Davies and Son, the same company on Savile Row that tailored Axel Springer’s clothing. He wore custom-made shoes from John Lobb with gently elevated heels because his slightness embarrassed him; he was a short, slender man. He socialized in the right London clubs, he lived exclusively in the districts of Mayfair and Belgravia, he loved England, but they had not let him in. Although he learned that during luncheon at Simpson’s in the Strand one must slip a few coins into the white-aproned breast pocket of the carver who rolled the silver roast beef cart over to the table, the stink of the German working class still clung to my father’s bespoke English suits, as did the affectations of a parvenu.
There was so much he didn’t understand, my father. The issue of reverse snobbery, for example, and of Belgravia Cockney, the final vulgarity of the English upper class. And then the tailored shirts whose collars had to be tattered and full of holes. They had to be foxed, just about to fall apart in fact. Nor did he understand how to wear suede ankle boots, known as chukkas, which had to be perfectly unsightly: scuffed and stained as though the wearer had tramped through multiple puddles the day before and then forgotten to clean them. My father lacked self-irony, he wasn’t pukka, he had simply not been the right man, like Barry Lyndon. It wasn’t about money or influence or anything; no, it just wasn’t enough to come from Hamburg and to want to be an Englishman.
He had secretly fathered a son with an Englishwoman in the English countryside, in Suffolk or Somerset or somewhere else. Sometimes he would return home to Gstaad after one or two months away and tell stories about the modest English farm where he’d been: the sheep in the enclosure, the apple trees and the dovecote, the plain food and plain goodness of the country people. I recall thinking as a child that we lived in the countryside here in Gstaad though, too. Our neighbors were all farmers as well. Their cows laid their heads on the fence outside my bedroom window and woke me every morning with their bells. I even had to drink their gross fresh milk for breakfast, still warm. It was every bit as much a country life as in England, I thought at the time, but of course I never said a word—I never said anything against my father. Our relationship consisted of a total affirmation of his feudalistic being. It was never possible to be of a different mind. At no time had this been possible. You fell in line, agreed with him, and received money for it.
And when he died, my stepmother, his last wife, took the Learjet from Geneva to the memorial service in Hamburg, on her lap the long coveted thirty-five-thousand-euro Birkin handbag that my father had always forbidden her to own. Inside, inside this Hermès purse, lay his ashes, in a plastic bag, ashes she later hurled from a tugboat off Hamburg-Finkenwerder into the river Elbe: both the plastic bag and the ashes into the filthy Elbe.
I can see it now, the swaying barge, the jaundiced two-hundred-euro bill hastily and bashfully presented so that the drunk captain would turn a blind eye, the mute, absolutely petrified family on the quarterdeck, the milky Hamburg sky, the plastic bag sinking slowly in the boat’s wake, the squawking, diving, horrid seagulls.
My mother of course had not been invited to the memorial service, which concluded with a family dinner at Hamburg’s Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten. We had been seated in a private back room, in neckties and in silence, an awkward silence expressly desired by my stepmother, and disturbed only by the bevy of liveried waiters who announced and described the gimmicky roundelay of courses in advance. It was abysmally, depressingly bourgeois, these loudly and proudly proclaimed lobster tails on pea essence, these Chateaubriands, these basil sorbets.
After the meal I’d stepped out in front of the nocturnally illuminated hotel to smoke a cigarette. No guests had been invited; Ralph Giordano learned of my father’s death from the newspapers. And when I had crumpled up the slips of paper with the Yeats poem and the eulogy I hadn’t read aloud and tossed them into a trash can, my father’s Hamburg attorney had suddenly appeared behind me and put an amicable arm around my shoulder, assuring me that he was always there for me if I needed him. Really, always. And then he had pinched me on the upper flesh of my shoulder, in the Hanseatic manner. I should have yelled at him had I not been so cowardly.
What had my father even done during the war? He’d been born back in 1921, making him prime soldier stock. On the internet it says he was with an infantry regiment and was wounded. That information about him can’t have been right, though. He’d never mentioned anything of the sort. Wounded by whom? And more to the point, where? He’d always said he was supposed to be sent to the Eastern Front, which prompted his best friend, staff surgeon Günter Kelch, to plunge him into the ice-cold Elbe to help him contract pneumonia, and then inject his arm with typhoid pathogens, so that, deathly ill and highly infectious, he would not be shipped east. He was a Social Democrat his whole life long, he’d always claimed, he hated the Nazis, and after the war he had in fact been in the United States, with the American Field Service. Well, whatever the case, my father’s smallish lies were nothing next to the established truths of my mother’s family.
Anyway, his friend, staff surgeon Günter Kelch, had been homosexual, had loved Zarah Leander more than anything, and was present throughout my entire childhood. My father had always said Günter—whom we were supposed to call Güntimäusi, Günter Mouse—had saved his life in the war by injecting him with typhoid, and that he must now take care of him; that was his sacred duty. My father paid Günter Kelch an allowance, as he was unable to hold a job of any kind due to his advanced alcoholism. He was always being kicked out of everywhere, and my father clothed him, mostly in Axel Springer’s bespoke suits, purloined for him in Kampen on Sylt, since both men, Axel and Güntimäusi, had the same elegant build: tall and slender and chiseled.
So Güntimäusi, for whom my father bankrolled a little flat not far from Rothenbaumchaussee in Hamburg, loved dancing for me and my mother in women’s clothing. We knew all the songs of Marlene Dietrich, of Zarah Leander, by heart, but the song about the Fiji Islands Ich lass’ mir meinen Körper schwarz bepinseln was Güntimäusi’s favorite, as were Yes, Sir and Lili Marleen and Ich weiß, es wird einmal ein Wunder geschehen and of course Waldemar.
My father had had an affair with Inge Feltrinelli, whose husband Giangiacomo, an Italian publisher with ever-deepening connections to militant leftist extremism, was killed at the beginning of the seventies in a dynamite attack.
Axel Springer’s chalet near Gstaad was set on fire, as was his second estate, on the island of Sylt, the Klenderhof. Incidentally, our chalet in Gstaad also burned down, after my father had sold it to Mick and Muck Flick. Our houses had always burned down, and I always wondered what that was supposed to mean. Perhaps my mother knew.
As a small child I would often stand in fear before a painting that hung in our chalet above the wooden staircase to the second floor. It was by some Dutchman, with a very small burning farm in Flanders visible in the background. I was unable to remember anything more, maybe snow, probably crows circling in a pallid overcast winter sky as well, people dressed in black coming from the left and walking into the image. Today I have the sense that it must have been Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow hanging on our wall, which I saw once more decades later in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
In any event, fire had always been inside me: the house fire, the glowing remains of the chalets, and the Marie-José primary school in Gstaad I had set ablaze, the Polaroids presented to me as a seven-year-old in juvenile court in Thun to prove what I had done. The photos had shown a scorched chalkboard eraser, roof timbering gutted by fire, scattered matches charred black along half their length, their tips curled onto themselves like tiny, shrunken heads. There had been a half-empty green bottle of lighter fluid, the beige paper of its label frayed, then insulating material torn from the rafters, shredded in a corner of the attic, stacked, and ignited. Photos I still see in my dreams to this day, like discarded, inadequate rejects from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Polaroid collection. Almost half a century ago, radiating European world.
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From Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translation by Daniel Bowles. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright © 2024 Christian Kracht, translation copyright © 2024 by Daniel Bowles. All rights reserved.
