reality check

a quick injection of non-fiction into this series of half-baked, semi-fictional, middling attempts at writing short stories:

the other day i (finally) managed to send out the first draft of my phd-thesis to my profs. when i clicked the "send" button, i was overcome with a sense of euphoria, of lust for life, which completely overtook the fatigue i had been feeling all week. but after about three minutes the euphoria subsided, leaving me with an empty feeling inside. having finished the draft, what should i now do with my life? (answer being: enjoy it. soon enough the profs will be back with their comments and you can lock yourself up in your academic chamber again and write the second draft)

due to circumstances, i've also been having a "home improvement"-month over the past few weeks and i can honestly say that no, i'm just not the type for that kind of lifestyle. and i've got the cuts and bruises to prove it, not to mention the new curses i came up with when i managed to both hit my thumb with the hammer and cause the bookshelf to collapse on me simultaneously.

l’humanité

as i was listlessly poking at the tasteless nasi goreng which was technically my breakfast in the afternoon heat of jakarta, a man sat down at my table. all the other tables were free, so in spite of my slow hangover mood i was able to draw the conclusion that he probably wanted to talk to me. he was a whitey, in his late 50s judging by his looks, but he might well have been younger. he had a gaunt, drawn face, and the etched lines of his face and burst capillaries led me to jump to the perhaps unfair conclusion that the large bintang beer in his hand was not the first one in his life. he was the kind of person that this street, jalan jaksa, seemed to attract like a magnet. the human flotsam and jetsam of the industrialised countries that falls overboard at home and finds itself, 20, 30, 40 years down the line, washed up in sleazy, second-rate bars such as this one. lost, lonely, hanging on to the last scraps of their dignity.

without any further ado, apart from a swig of his bintang, he told me that he had thyroid cancer. he had been diagnosed just the other day, he couldn't quite say when, though, as he had been on a drinking binge ever since. and in the end, did it really matter now what day he found out? he didn't have any money for therapy, no health plan, he had burned his bridges in britain decades ago but had not been able to build any new ones on indonesia either. nor did he see his chances of finding a loving partner for the last few years of his remaining life as being too great: a dying, old, impoverished, alcoholic man does not really score very high in the highly competitive jakarta social scene.

i had in the meantime stopped eating my fried rice and wondered if i should say something, but there was no need for that, he was the one doing the talking.

and then he stopped. his eyes were fixed on something far away, metaphorically speaking, for in the grubby street that is jalan jaksa there isn't anything one could look at thats more then 25 metres away. after a moment's silence, he turned to me: "where are you from, anyway?"

"finland," i said, adding my first and last word to what had now become a conversation. "oh, finland...," he started, with a new-found dreaminess in his voice... "i remember finland well," he continued, almost as if transfixed, "the olympics in helsinki in 1952." he paused to sip his beer and his gaze was now fixated not only on a place far away, but also on a different era. "i remember it well," he said, looking through and past me with his glazed eyes, his back suddenly ramrod straight, as if in a past memory of better times, of more self-dignity, perhaps even of pride in himself.

lost in his own world, he continued slowly. "it was the marathon. i remember it well. it was the helsinki stadium, and emil zatopek came running in. it was the cold war, you know, and he was czech, but the crowd stood up and chanted his name... ZA-TO-PEK, ZA-TO-PEK, ZA-TO-PEK! cheering on the one who was supposed to be the enemy... oh, the humanity of it! the humanity!!!" tears started rolling down his worn face as he mumbled "the humanity, the humanity..." to himself a few more times, bleary eyes focusing on a better, other life. he then quickly finished his beer, stood up and continued walking down jalan jaksa as if in a trance, leaving me speechless and dumbfounded with my now-cold nasi goreng.

don't think twice, its all right

the incongruous smell struck him as soon as he stepped off the train. that smell shouldn't have been there, not in that place, not then. it was the smell of coal being burned in stoves and it took his mind back to long train rides on cold winter nights, inching across the frozen ukrainian landscape. but this was germany, and it was now the middle of summer... looking across the tracks he saw the source of the smell - it was indeed a ukrainian train, the carriages were being heated up for the nocturnal journey to kyiv. the name of the city and the smell of the coal also brought back memories of the girl he had chosen to leave a year ago. he had wanted to let her go, to not waste her time, to not drag her down.

when they had parted at kyiv airport a year ago, a bob dylan song had been playing in his head. as if in a cheesy movie, a busker was now playing exactly the same song now as he stepped on to the metro, leaving the smell of the past behind him.

changi airport, poolside, 2004

the gambler wiped the sweat off his brow and looked at the fake filipino passport lying on the table in front of him. idly he pondered whether or not he should use it when entering cambodia in the afternoon. in younger years, the thought of traveling with fake documents, the potential danger of it, would have made him giddy with anticipation. but now, he noted with a tired smile, even the question of whether to order a pint of tiger or heineken involved him more emotionally than the passport issue. too many years on the run already...

he took a gulp of the cold beer in front of him (he had settled for tiger) and lit up a cigarette. he thought about the girl. she had driven him to the airport and asked him to call once he got back. he wouldn't. not that there was anything wrong with the girl, at some other point in his life he might even have started some kind of serious relationship with her. but not now. he did not have the emotional energy left for a relationship. he was drained. he had nothing left to give. he exhaled the sweet smoke of the kretek, scrolled through the phone numbers in his mobile and erased her number.

a tribal gathering

they had come from across the northern european plains, some even from beyond the alps, from beyond the pyrenees, from the plains of pannonia. most wore their hair long, beards left unshaven, tattoos and piercings all around. they wore the same tribal costume - t-shirt (preferably black), combat trouser-style shorts, old trainers. they had come together to the old citadel to pay homage to their idols, buy a ticket and a few beers and to communally vent their futile frustration against The System, a system which is able to co-opt even those who oppose it most, turning their teenage rebellion into a commodity like any other to be bought, sold, marketed and consumed. "the revolution is just a t-shirt away..."


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post-scriptum: sitting around on the grass before the rage against machine concert i was once again struck by the "binary" attitude of the berlin police to their job. it seems to be either "full on," for example when their cracking skulls on may 1, or they go into their "off" mode, adopting a very lackadaisical attitude to keeping up law and order. the latter was the case in the car park and lawn in front of the concert, with hundreds of people drinking and urinating in public, illegally hawking tickets and openly taking various kinds of recreational drugs. just as the young czech fans next to me had lit up their joint, two cops showed up. the czechs froze, joint in hand. the cops gave them a quick look, then looked at the car that was parked next to them, picked up their radio and called hq: "this is foot patrol 5, we checked the situation out. its ok, the car does indeed have a handicapped sign. over." and left, leaving the smoking czechs completely dumbfounded.

bridge

as it seemed a bit out of place to return to the "normality" of blogging and my original plan of writing more fictional stories after the previous two entries, which were about as rooted in reality as it gets, i felt that some kind of bridge was necessary before moving on.

as sad and painful as dealing with the recent deaths have been, they also have shown the beauty of life, as trite as that may sound. though i will be thanking you all in person in real life as well, i'd like to collectively thank you all already here for the support i have received from you.

sharon

my last words i wrote to her were to take care. she said that she would try. twenty-four hours later she was dead. car crash. (again).

through my numbness memories come back - the sound of her bracelets jingling, her cooking, her sms'es from her night shift in some rural hospital, her striving to do good, her calling me the ice queen.

it seems somehow odd that her name and picture are still there on my skype-console. offline. forever. my last words to her were not delivered. and never will be.