A small collection of words I wrote througout the years.
(Winning text writing competition BMZ 2023)
Good evening, good night, she breathes and steps closer to the crib, her skinny fingers outstretched towards me, covered with roses, covered with nails, slipping under the covers.
She strokes my childish cheeks with trembling hands. Her eyes are piercing and black like round buttons and bore themselves into my retina like an afterimage. I scream.
I am eighteen years old, my chest rises and falls in rapid movements, my eyes search confusedly for a fixed point, my fingers claw into the skin of my thighs. The clock is ticking close behind me and the white color of the room blinds me. The noise in the walls is loud and I am not sure where the noise in my veins ends and the noise in the old pipes begins.
Someone is standing next to me, next to everyone, next to themselves. Somewhere far away, I feel a warmth on my skin, it tickles familiarly. I look up tentatively. A blurred figure with a hunched back, seemingly exhausted from standing, and pale, fine skin is standing there, talking quietly to another person. The latter is shrouded in a white shimmer, the angular features piercing the void.
When the strangers realize that they are being watched, they hurry away. The ghost turns around hastily and fiddles so loudly with a metal tray that the shrillest sounds throb in my ears and I flinch. His arms quickly reach for a bottle, a clucking, a sucking, a hissing sound is heard and a moment later I am seeing black.
I love to see black. Spots of color appear, rippling and contorting, dancing and jumping and exuberantly cheering, and I try to catch them with my gaze, but they dissolve immediately.
Dots, why don't you want to play tag? My voice sounds strangely distorted.
We are re not allowed, I hear a choir singing. We want to confuse you.
I continue the game of tag for a while until I give up in frustration. The dots disappear and the darkness returns. I open my eyes and expect to see a bright light, but there is nothing. Only gradually do I recognize a faint glow outside. It is spherical and interspersed with veils. It sits still in the sky, the moon.
Are you lonely too? I ask him.
A while passes. Yes, he finally answers in a deep voice. An old, wise man with a beard made of clouds. The sky darkens.
Then it gets light under the crack in the door, a light comes on. I hear a soft tapping on the linoleum floor, then a clearing of the throat and a few seconds later a soft knock on my door. Startled, I look at the moon and put my index finger to my lips.
“Yes?” I call out timidly.
Can I come in? The voice is bright and clear and sounds like a hundred golden bells. Mother. I quickly push the moon out of the room and give it a sideways nod to tell it to go back to its place.
“Come in,” I reply and the door opens. At first, I only see her outline and the frizzy hair illuminated by the corridor light. Then she enters carefully and closes the door behind her. Now she is little more than a shadow. She steps closer to my bed and claws her fingers into the white hospital bedspread. Mother looks at me silently.
Tomorrow morning, God willing, you'll be woken up again, she begins to sing, tomorrow morning, God willing, you'll be woken up again. I look at my mother in confusion. She sings all the time. As if she was trapped in an endless loop. I grimace.
“Stop singing,” I whisper.
She keeps moving her lips. Good evening, good night! Guarded by little angels, she continues to warble and tugs at the comforter. She falls to the floor with a jerk. My bare legs expose themselves to her.
“Stop singing,” I say firmly and try to keep her at bay.
They show in the dream, she smiles sweetly, you Christkindle’s tree.
“Stop singing,” I am shouting now and trying to shake off her delicate hands that are on my skin. I lash out at her, but only hit air. I kick wildly and pull my white shirt over my head so that I have something to hold against her. Frightened, I throw it at her, but it lands on the floor.
“Get out,” I hiss, “get out, get out, get out.” My voice is now like a howl.
Suddenly a light comes on outside. I look at my mother, confident of victory. “It's over,” I say, looking into her dark beady eyes. Then she is suddenly gone. Surprised, I look around.
Gasping for air, I stand alone in the room until I notice a figure at the door.
“My goodness,” says the nurse angrily and waddles towards me. “Why are you standing around half-nakedly in your room at this time of night?” She takes one look at my naked body and then closes the window before picking up my robe and putting it over me. “Your mother?” is all she says. Her rosewater burns my nose. I swallow. The fifty-year-old’s short hair sticks out from her head in spiky spikes, her thick arms shaking with every movement.
“Lie down again,” says the nurse and smiles. “It's over.” She fluffs the pillow and adjusts the blanket. “Shall we try lithium salts again?” she asks me and leaves the room before she can even see my exhausted nod. Tired, I crawl under the blanket and wrap myself in it. The dots on the ceiling blend into a pleasant rustling sound. Outside, I can hear the gentle chirping of crickets and the moon complaining of loneliness. I miss him. I calmly breathe in and out deeply.
“Here I am again,” the nurse bursts into the room. She is holding a tray in her hands with a transparent cup containing a clear yellow tablet and a glass of water.
“Take this,” she says, holding the medicine under my nose. I don’t react. “You will soon feel better if you take your tablet,” she encourages me.
“Why?” I want to know, not touching the yellow.
She sighs. “Because lithium helps against manic episodes of bipolar affective disorder,” she replies.
I look at her. Something is strange. Is it the lack of light or have her eyes darkened? I alternate between looking at her and the tablet in her hand. Her hair has become more brittle. And her eyes are black now, I am sure of it.
“Do you know Brahms?” I ask her. She pauses.
“Who?”
“Johannes Brahms,” I say, “a fabulous composer of the nineteenth century, author of the song ‘Guter Abend, gut’ Nacht’.” I notice how her gaze narrows. “Do you know him?”
She says nothing in reply, remains silent. I know that her voice would sound bright now if she only spoke. The dizziness suddenly disappears and I can see clearly. Her knuckles emerge white under the thick layer of skin. Her breathing quickens. I smile sweetly at her. “You know him.” Satisfied, I bend down to her.
“Sleep blissfully and sweetly now,” I breathe and squeeze her throat, “see paradise in your dreams.” Her eyes glaze over and she slumps down. The lithium tablet falls quietly to the floor and rolls under the hospital bed. I bend down to Mother.
“Now sleep blissfully and sweetly,” I whisper Brahms’ Night Song into her ear, “see paradise in your dreams.”
I catch my breath. The blood rushes through my veins. I am forty-eight years old, wearing my faded nightgown with the white polka dots, standing in the Klein-Ulm psychiatric clinic somewhere on the edge of the world, and I have just killed my mother. I burst out laughing. The world is wonderful.
Beginning / End
I look up at my coat. It has been lying untouched in the top drawer of the wardrobe for many days, carefully folded and now covered in dust. I pause, standing there as if struck by lightning. The floor sways up and down like water in a storm. My head is pounding, banging and throbbing in rapid succession. I fall silently into the soft pillows and bury my face in them. My hair slides in front of my eyes and it gets dark. I may remember.
Outside, the sun burns hot on the world. Colorful heads move up and down the hill, black balls of fur between them, joyfully darting back and forth. A sight of the summery order of monotony.
I smile when I think back to when I used to play puppet myself not so long ago. Pull this arm and I move there. Pull on the opposite side and I will follow you. I couldn't move myself; I was dependent on someone to show me where life was taking me, I had waited for the instruction and then nodded. Over and over again. Nothing else had seemed possible to me, although I had often felt the urge to tear myself away from this world of orders.
I only realized that I had a freer view of life when I was already caught up in my new life. I had felt it when I saw the carefully arranged elderberry syrup bottles standing on the cellar shelf, when countless clods of earth lay scattered on the living room floor like fallen warriors and when I shoveled the warm apple compote into his tiny mouth in the evening with heavy arms, exhausted. I knew deep down that it wasn't what I craved, but dismissed it with a nod every time. I lost my smile in the process. I don't know how much time had passed before I made the decision to make a fresh start. To leave everything behind me. I had always assumed that I would be plagued by a guilty conscience towards my boyfriend, but I was wrong. I didn’t even get a chance to think about it, I was so busy all summer and when the sunny days became visibly shorter, I had almost forgotten about the past.
I enrolled my son in a small class for children with developmental delays. He is doing well there. He learns quickly and has made friends with a boy from our neighborhood who occasionally eats lunch with us. Sometimes he brings home a pretty drawing, which I hang on the fridge where I can always see it. Every now and then I feel an unforeseen sense of pride. We both like our new everyday life between the alleyways and the high fields. We can satisfy all our needs here.
I quit my job at the kindergarten. The journey from the city to the village was a bit too long for me to walk every day. I also suspected that not much time would pass before my former boyfriend would get on his bike and meet me at work. I now work at the local district school and earn the money we need to pay the rent on our little house on the outskirts of town. Because my son seemed to miss the outdoors so much, I started looking for a house with a garden. When the weather permits, he plays outside in the high meadows and takes a close look at the grasses. On good days, we can even go for a walk in the hills.
I slowly open my eyes. The dizziness has subsided. Outside, the sparrows are chirping and I can hear the children cheering. My heart skips a beat. I straighten up and look in the corner of the wardrobe. There it lies, the coat, carefully folded and covered in dust. I stand up and stretch my arms out towards the fabric. It feels soft and familiar against my skin. I carefully lay it on the edge of the bed and stare at what has been covered under the fabric for many days, hidden and disregarded. Five hundred and eleven letters are lying there. I hesitate for a moment and then carefully take them out. They feel heavy. I look out of the window and hear my son shout something before I look back down at the burden in my hands. Perhaps this is the beginning of an end, perhaps the end of a beginning.
Weighing eighteen thousand tons I am lying under the pale sky, thinking about fig bread with honey. Beneath me, the sand is creeping into my jeans and crawling into my socks. Unpleasant. Everything is going wrong. Is crooked the opposite of straight or is it round?
Farmer Schmidt
“When the karst hill gets excavated, the world ends, silently and unnoticed by the outside world, but of great importance to the farmer Schmidt”. With this sentence, the story of the farmer called Schmidt begins. He lived in Ballikon, a tiny village with barely thirty inhabitants, far away from the big city of Zurich with its countless towers and rivers and shopping miles. He lived in a shack, which was the only name the shed deserved. There were a few simple wooden boards that the Swiss-born man had put together with nails, a wooden peg that he used as a table – he had even put a red and white checkered tablecloth over it, he really liked it – and a few more pegs and boxes with a few belongings. These included a gold wristwatch (incidentally, it was one of the many reasons why he avoided the city; he kept thinking the precious object would be stolen from him there), a cup made of brittle Japanese ceramic, an old suede rucksack, two forks, three knives and a soup spoon. There was also a thermos flask that he used every day and a worn, flat down pillow.
A storm passes by
Melancholy rises
The gust of wind turns back
Melancholy rises
The gust of wind turns back
Grass green in the wind
The summer moves out
Madness remains
The summer moves out
Madness remains
Where time falls
I turn around quickly
The river flows uphill
I turn around quickly
The river flows uphill
Building site in front of the castle
The king weeps gold
Wet velvet hangs limply
The king weeps gold
Wet velvet hangs limply
The fish swallows itself
Bubbles bubble, plop, plop
The lake dies wordlessly
Bubbles bubble, plop, plop
The lake dies wordlessly
Sometimes the mouse chirps
The fox neighs away
The forest eats everything
The fox neighs away
The forest eats everything
I had seen the woman with the orange hat a thousand and ninety-five times before she disappeared one day without a trace. She had sat on the same bus as me every morning for a year and a half, got off at Riedhofstrasse and walked up the hill crosswise to the direction of travel, her black leather bag swaying over her petite shoulder. She had continued her day in an office with high ceilings and a single, angular table made of black lacquered wood, behind which she sat for eight hours, answering calls – "Schmidt office, Mrs. Knäule speaking, what can I do for you?" – and spent half the day looking out of the window. I imagined her dark eyes darting over the vines, the bustling city of Zurich in the valley beyond and even further back, on the distant horizon, barely audible, the Üetliberg, its peak reaching far into the pale sky. She frowned like rose petals and wondered how people could complain about their lives here, how they could feel the urge to leave their lives behind and build a new life somewhere on the other side of the world. She had never played with the idea of leaving. Her heart was at home here: for seven years she had been working in the same architecture firm for Christopher, a man with a bald head and a scary double chin; her mother, who had been battling cancer for almost a year, was stationed at the Hirslanden clinic; and her best friend Luise lived in the same block, just one floor above her own small apartment.
Her home consisted of a narrow entryway that held two pairs of shoes – her boots and a scuffed pair of sneakers – a wooden coat rack with her coat and a light silk jacket for warmer days, and an umbrella that stood in the corner. If you turned right, you entered the kitchen. Brownish tiles adorned the wall between the hob and the cupboard. She had got hold of the four cups in the cupboard at a flea market for two francs. Guests rarely visited. A single dry bush of basil stood between the sink and the stove, next to it a row of spices in glass containers. When she wasn't spending her precious evenings with her mother at the clinic, she loved to cook pasta in a creamy mushroom sauce with a shot of vodka, just for herself. She liked to drink herbal tea with it. After she had done the washing up, dried and cleared away the pan and cup, she retired to the living room. A sagging sofa from the eighties took up a quarter of the room. There was a circular carpet in front of it with short red stubbles which turned parle towards the top. On it was a glass table with a few fashion magazines. She had never read them. The walls were painted white, but had now taken on a slightly yellowish hue. She was not afraid to smoke in the apartment. Her landlord had nothing against it. When she signed the tenancy agreement, he had only said that she had to paint the walls when she moved out, otherwise she would have to pay the painter and that could be very, very expensive. She had nodded dutifully and secretly thought to herself how stupid the landlord was, wild horses couldn’t get her out of there. There would be no new tenants. This was her apartment until she died. That's how she imagined it.
It was a balmy late summer Friday evening when I broke out of myself and Marlen disappeared without a trace. Thinking about it always makes me feel dizzy. As a child, I had often read in the news about people disappearing. Suddenly they were gone and the families were worried, filed a missing person's report and begged for God's mercy to forgive their sins and bring back their sweet, capable little daughter. That's how it was portrayed. In reality, it's not like that at all, everything is different. Maybe it's because this isn't America, but Buchs, a small community on the outskirts of Zurich with just over five thousand inhabitants.
Marlen's disappearance came as no surprise. Even if I hadn't perceived it as such at the time, she had always given us little hints about it. People had always thought that the two of us were siblings: We shared the same red hair, which became brittle and straw-like towards the bottom, our eyes told a similar story and on the first night of the month we liked to dance under the naked sky, only no one knew that except us.
Three months before her disappearance, Marlen had suddenly dyed her hair red, a red as dark and dense as wine. She painted her nails the same color. She no longer wanted to dance on the first night of the new month, but preferably every day. She had so much to express, she had said in her voice, which used to sound like she had swallowed cotton candy. Now it was more reminiscent of an upset horse.
Over the weeks, she kept mentioning her longing for a foreign city. She wished for high skyscrapers and shiny glass facades without fingerprints, wild adventures in heels that clacked delightfully and seductively over the concrete and a view of the whole wide world from a luxurious penthouse apartment.
Marlen had recently met her second boyfriend, a law student who promised her exactly that world, but the world he meant actually consisted of a ten-square-room apartment a village away, two young cats and obligations and responsibilities that she had to chase after with a wooden broom even before they had slept together for the first time. I didn't judge her for not taking a closer look; I probably would have felt the same way. She had slipped helplessly into the trap that Samuel had set for her. He had wrapped her up with his bright white-toothed smile and her parents' banknotes, with wet kisses (at the beginning she told me all the details, but afterwards too much happened for her to be able to tell me everything) and ill-considered expensive gifts. I suspect that Marlenhas lost her temper that evening, but who knows what was going on inside her.
To outsiders she might seem a little strange, maybe even a little crazy, but that was exactly what I liked about her. I loved that she dressed like a rainbow. She wore patterned blouses, colorful homemade knit sweaters, handmade mushroom-shaped earrings, striped tights and skirts with curly patterns embroidered on them. She told me that she liked to sew surrealist-inspired costumes in her spare time, and as she talked about it, her eyes lit up like two suns. I saw her sitting at her grandmother's sewing machine, her delicate fingers running over soft velvet, bringing it back to life, sewing lace hems, fiddling with gold beads and her reveries turning into a bizarre reality.
Maja didn't like strawberries. I'll never understand how that works, but I've come to terms with it. Apart from that, she liked to eat everything and she knew how to cook it. I don't know how she did it, but she had an eye for detail. Whether it was fabrics or menus, she knew how to blow people away. She was someone who didn't just make herself toast with jam for breakfast, no, she baked fragrant wholemeal bread with nuts, put fresh avocado slices on top, seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic and wafer-thin sliced spring onions. She added scrambled eggs mixed with fried onions and a handful of red grapes. She always tried to get the best out of everything and saw shopping trips as a fun adventure. Everything was fun with Maja.
Of course, we also slept twith eachother. She was the first woman I fell in love with and the first person I slept with. Our first time was exciting and beautiful and my heart was pounding so loudly that I was afraid the neighbors would hear it. It wasn't Maja's first time having sex, but she slowly showed me how it was done. When she moved her head between my legs, asked me if it was okay and then carefully touched me, a bright light came on above me and I felt all the love in the world between us. I thought my heart would burst, I was so full of bliss. I loved the sounds she made as she danced and moved above me as if it were a matter of course, without a trace of fear. Yes, Maja was fearless.