Kokosnuss

I was sitting on a bench eating my kokosnuss icecream when a black hatchback swung in fast. A woman in a black dress with the most astonishing tower of hair ducked out. She looked about quickly, and, as I was closest, fixed on me. *Something in Deutsch*, she said.

--Ja, sure, I said, but I only speak English.

--Oh, okay. Can you watch my car? I really need this icecream.

--Okay.

I nodded and she smiled and… she ran. All five metres. To the icecream shop.

I was puzzled. Watch it? She’d parked it in a no-standing-zone perpendicular to all of the other cars. If the police saw it about the only thing I could do for her would be to create a diversion by chucking my dessert at them and hoofing it. Maybe then they’d chase me instead—no thankyou. But I scanned the street dutifully until she came back, walking slowly this time, the paddle in her mouth. She was entranced.

 

She sat down next to me on the wooden slat and we sat for a moment, appreciating.

 

Her hair was died black and collected at the back of her head in a thin yet perfect beehive, the strands plastered together with spray into a topiary cone that overlooked a series of smaller mounds built toward her forehead. She must have been in her early fifties. She had traced green eyebrows and firm eyes.

--Thankyou, she said. The police, you know.

--That’s fine.

--It is the best icecream here, in Berlin. The best.

She looked over at my icecream and then gestured excitedly at her own.

--Kokosnuss!

 

***

 

Today I wandered through the markets along Maybachufer just south of the canal, then up along Oranienstrasse where I sought out a copy of Canetti’s Die Blendung to give to R—. We had spoken about it in a café on the first night we met. She had read Crowds and Power but hadn’t noted his other writing. Embarrassingly enough we got onto the subject whilst talking about places we’d like to visit; I said Budapest was on my list and she asked why. I described Canetti’s memoirs, in particular his descriptions of life in the Sephardic community in Budapest when he was a child. Then we moved onto his Berlin and Vienna years and the people he associated with: Grosz, Brecht (whom he detested), Musil, Karl Krauss—most of whom I’m only very faintly familiar with, really. The discerning reader will have noticed the mistake—and a bad one it is too—Canetti was a child in Bulgaria. Those eastern European places. They’re all the same.

 

The funny thing is I’ve been telling people I’d like to go to Budapest for so long that now I feel like I should go anyway, even if I’m no longer following a literary star. It’s not authentic, but the name of the place will have to do; I’m not really burning to head off to Rustchuck. There’s displacement. But geez—mortification.

 

Anyway, R— expressed an interest and I described Die Blendung with its grotesques and its delectable parody of Kant. I remember that Canetti wrote in his memoirs that he was haunted by guilt afterwards for what he had done to Kant. I recall, reading this, envying him such belief in the life of his creations. To think that they should be so important, to have such a sense of an ethical responsibility toward their suffering, seemed so at odds with the unyielding savagery of that novel and yet somehow so pure. I found a copy in the second bookshop and took it to front of the shop, where the thin, gentle man behind the counter smiled indulgently as I asked in English what he had said, and he replied in English that he was offering me a bag for my book which was written in German; he knew I couldn’t read a single page of it, and I handed over the money and felt like a dill.

Afterwards I walked west and then south until I hit the jagged edge of Libeskind’s unravelled Star of David, where I spent a few hours. Inside, Menashe Kadishman's steel faces clanked underfoot and didn’t rest. Strange, and awful, that the aesthetic should gather this memorialising function to itself.