Overstaying E-Book

Ariane Koch

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 169

Beschreibung

An isolated woman clashes with an enigmatic visitor in this funny, jagged parable about integration, difference and hospitality __________ 'Comparing this magnificent first novel to the great Kafka does it no disservice - on the contrary' Neue Zürcher Zeitung 'Full of dreamlike symbols of loneliness and alienation. Overstaying has the makings of a classic' Die Zeit 'An intense, enigmatic - in the best sense of the word - debut of philosophical force' Süddeutsche Zeitung __________ An isolated young woman living in a small Swiss town decides to take in a mysterious stranger, known only as 'the visitor'. His arrival introduces disturbance into her carefully sealed life, and the longer he stays, the more confounding he becomes. His joy causes her sadness, his sleep brings her insomnia, and she becomes convinced he is sneaking into her room, even eating her socks. As she tries to impose orders and regulations on her opaque visitor, the woman's fantasies of power and control grow ever wilder. Sly, wilful and full of slanted humour, Overstaying is a profound and uncanny exploration of hospitality, integration and the stranger within all of us.

Leseprobe

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Contents

Title PageOverstayingAcknowledgementsAvailable and Coming Soon From Pushkin Press ClassicsCopyright

7

Overstaying

The visitor sat at the table eating his little tangerine segments. Whenever things are excessively small, I can’t help but raise my eyebrows and put my hand on my heart, or at least where I presume my heart is. No one has ever had trouble making me stop misbehaving, all they had to do was offer me something miniature.

The visitor is delicate, so very delicate that he practically wafts apart. At first I didn’t notice, because he’s very good at hiding it. Anyone as delicate as the visitor is in grave danger. How easily he might end up in the clutches of some crazy person. My great-grandfather, for instance, was a well-known cult leader. Alas I was not so fortunate as to ever have met him personally. All I have of him is a single photograph showing him at a writing desk, his hair in a severe part, gaze aimed into a visionary future. I also find it fascinating that the sermons he gave were apparently improvised: he would let the Holy Scripture drop onto the 8pulpit, the beneficent hand of the Lord would make the book fall open at a choice passage, and he would thereby be presented with the subject of his sermon.

My great-grandfather might have put it thus: You have to trust the page that the Holy Book opens to when it falls, and anyway one is merely the servant of the Lord, there is nothing to do but carry out His will.

9Next to the small town where I have come to rest, as if in a sarcophagus, there is a large mountain, rather like a pyramid, but not, like the actual wonder of the world, able to be sightseen from within, and furthermore capped with snow. One can, if one truly wants to, climb it. I personally refrain—by now the view’s been ruined for me and it’s no longer possible to see as far as I would like. I prefer to remain at the mountain’s feet. Sometimes the mountain’s shadow scares me.

I know everyone in this town but mostly act like I don’t know anyone. Something or other has happened to me on practically every streetcorner by now; various temporal strata are superimposed. There’s always quite a bustling crowd in the Roundel Bar, which is located right near my house; it was originally supposed to be open for only a hundred days, but that hundred has turned into thousands. The waiter changes every week, and each one is more appalling 10than the last, but they all keep their hair tied up tight on their heads, and even aside from that it’s safe to say there has never been anything interesting to see there. I always knew that I was ungrateful. My parents prophesied it early on, and I never denied it.

The visitor was uncharted territory. He materialized from the void. He got off the train, walked down the platform swinging his suitcases, and our gazes met. It’s not entirely clear to me whether the insane idea to come here was his own. I was standing on the other side of the platform, contemplating departure, or at least wandering around the train station trying to get an overview of all the destinations I might possibly travel to. But I’ve never set foot on a train.

I can’t deny it: the visitor seemed familiar the first time I stared at him through the gold-rimmed lenses of my glasses—or was it he, standing on the other side of the platform, who fixed his eyes warmly on me through the lenses of his, while we both knew we’d come from opposite directions and so would travel onward in opposite directions too, the next day or at the very latest the day after? It was this look from the visitor that burned into my mind and that I’ve been seeking in the looks of other people ever since that moment, and sometimes I find it, today it came from the moderator of a philosophical panel discussion on TV and was aimed at a young French writer.

11They said on the radio that the animals in the zoo aren’t used to human beings anymore and take flight at the slightest human movement. Especially the flamingoes. The image of people drifting through the zoo while the animals take off for the great wide open is one I find pleasing.

Then came an interview with the head of tourism for the small town (into which I was involuntarily born and where I do not plan to die); he wanted to boost tourism by presenting the little town as a major metropolis. This statement struck me as so nonsensical that I didn’t know what to do with myself. At the Roundel, large flakes from a croissant had been scattered across the bar with its thin plastic coating of fake marble. They glittered gold in the sun. The mountain, the head of tourism went on, was a great attraction already, of course, but the aerial tramway was tottering, the cable cars swinging ominously—renovations were urgently needed.

12I didn’t make a habit of going to the bar in the middle of the day but the recent appearance of the visitor had driven me out of the house that morning to take up the search for him.

Outside, people I was only able to perceive as silhouettes walked up and down the streets. I observed a mother resignedly pulling her berserk child by the hand. Sitting at the marble bar, one leg crossed over the other, I imagined that only teeny-tiny people lived in this small town, riding around on teeny-tiny bicycles and tossing down ristrettos from teeny-tiny coffee cups. I had no problem picking up the entire Roundel Bar in my hand, turning it around, and examining it from all sides, while the people sitting on the barstools shrieked and tried to hold on; their teeny-tiny drinks had already fallen, plummeted, and landed on my jeans as little drops. The people, now hanging on for dear life, stared at me with wide minuscule eyes as I tore the Roundel in half down the middle, like a donut. I imagined the small town getting smaller and smaller, shrinking down to a tiny point—I alone remained large, so I no longer fit in it. Then it occurred to me that this was already the situation.

The radio was broadcasting a report about the increasing wave of violence against caregivers. The bartender turned the radio down, and the voices drifted away.

13People are lying under awnings, sometimes in sleeping bags, sometimes in tents, sometimes in sleeping bags in tents. They mostly keep their luggage stored in holes in the street covered with trap doors. How many times have I seen them crawling out from these holes tugging shapeless pieces of luggage behind them. The people have taken on the color of the buildings they sleep in front of—gray, like the sidewalks—while their tents and sleeping bags light up the whole town with their neon colors. In winter there is a team of workers in orange protective vests who go looking for people without fixed domiciles and bring them groceries and occasionally wet wipes.

There is one woman I’ve noticed several times. During the day her clothes are irreproachable—she wears a light-gray coat and hurries down the street as though going to work. When night falls she lies down in her sleeping bag wearing tattered sweatpants and stares out dully, right into 14my face, and I in return look into her face whenever I’m crossing the street back from the Roundel Bar to my house or vice versa. We don’t say anything, we just share this look.

At the end of the street, where the woman sometimes sets up her temporary sleeping quarters, there’s a furniture store that specializes in sofas. The furniture store really might as well call itself a sofa store, there are so many sofas crammed next to one another in the shop windows. It has extended business hours until late in the evening so that people with jobs can look for their sofas too. Most often it’s couples who go in, try out sitting on sofa after sofa, and leave again with faces stunned by their purchase. Soon, very soon, the mountain of cotton will be delivered to them at home. Soon a moving truck will stop in front of their house. Soon two guys will heave a mountain of cotton out of the truck and carry it up the stairs, bumping it into everything along the way. Soon the mountain of cotton will be in the couple’s apartment, and the couple will sit down upon it in disbelief and sink into it.

I sometimes wish I had slightly less good eyesight. But then I might not have seen the visitor holding up coins foreign to him under the lights shining down onto the circular bar at the Roundel. We sat across from each other at a safe distance, sipping our respective beers and then our respective next beers for hours on end. One on one side of the roundel, the other on the other side. The sight line ran straight through the circle, connecting our two points and transfixing the center point, the waiter, who was shifting from one foot to the other. Perhaps it was 15not the first time, and also not the last time, that I drew such a line in the Roundel Bar. No one ever sleeps in this town anymore, most people sit at the bar, sip drinks from tin cups, and contemplate whom on which diagonal they might start up an affair with. I can often predict the future connecting lines of the people sitting there, the secants’ points of intersection. When someone tries to approach me I generally move around the circle in the opposite direction so that we never converge, remaining a fixed distance away from each other. That is to say, I too receive mail from men every now and then in which I can read that they’ve seen me and, even though they don’t know me, my smile, which they say they’re certain was directed at them, has said yes. I can’t with the best will in the world remember ever once having smiled.

16The visitor walked around like a sticky strip of flypaper with insects stuck to it. He was clearly looking for a place to stay, although he seemed not to know it yet. He traipsed around outside the Roundel Bar, down the lanes, up the mountain.

Anyway, I felt a little uneasy.

I was suddenly seeing him everywhere, as though there was no one besides him, as though he would be wandering through the town swinging his luggage forever, examining forever the gap in the clouds that was growing ever larger, the moonlight breaking through it. Meanwhile his silhouette shimmered, silvery.

I put down my binoculars for a moment so that the image could burn itself onto my retina like lightning flashing in the night sky.

17I have a big house even though it doesn’t look that way from the outside. It’s gigantic, though not as big as the mountain outlined so sharply against the light. I don’t own my house, I only superintend it to make sure it doesn’t fall apart. At some point my brothers and sisters will take over the house. At some point I will have to move out of my house, I will be driven out, namely when my brothers and sisters announce their desire to possess the house once more. They have the money to say that my house should belong to them. They might well become land barons and baronesses while I am the warden of a ruin. They will move into my house and renovate, convert, add onto, and turn it into a house different from the one it is now. Maybe it will be bigger and taller; it will definitely be more luxurious. It will definitely be painted a different color.

In general I feel that over the years this house has kept changing into a different house.

18When my parents moved in here with me and my brothers and sisters, many years ago, I installed a little cable car line to the neighbors’ house and exchanged letters with the neighbor child. Sometimes we also showed each other objects by holding them up to our window—a silent dialogue of things dancing back and forth behind the windowpane. For example, I saw a stuffed polar bear, then a pair of scissors. I answered with a stuffed donkey and some indefinable bramble I had manufactured in kindergarten. When I got older I cut the cord, which fell down on the hedge and turned into a trembling line running through the yards. I had a bad feeling that there was no real reason for me to have done that, yet contact with the neighbor child remained broken off for good.

The cats, too, came and went, were run over, got fat, got castrated. I remember Rambo, Caesar, and Napoleon. Now one, now the other ruled the yards, swaggering through the greenery with tail held high. There was constant warfare over territorial boundaries and the smell of cat piss filled the air; even my parents’ efforts to make the cats go to the bathroom elsewhere—efforts consisting of scattering pepper—failed.

Now they’re all dead. Their lives were spent in yards.

And I’m still here. Living like a tomb-keeper among things I don’t own that are increasingly falling to pieces. Leaning too hard against the walls is not advisable. Stones fall out of the façade. The front yard is covered with leaves, and dirt, and snow.

19If it were up to me I wouldn’t need a house at all, no architecture of any sort, because I really don’t know how to appreciate it. You could just stick something up and tell me it’s a house and I’d believe it. I’ve never had an eye for architecture, despite living in the most outlandish house in the whole town. It’s a real blind spot I have for masonry. The plaster has to fall off my façade at my feet before I even notice that there’s plaster on my house. I see qua blindness straight through the masonry of the building to the people who live there. Picture something like a dollhouse with one of the walls missing.

I have an excellent memory for the people who live in a house, unlike for the house itself. Their coloration, their clothes, their way of walking down stairs or standing up from the table and turning on the stove. I must confess that I only rarely let other people into my house, and yet it is memories of them and their lives that blow as traces 20through the house’s rooms and corridors. My parents may have left but their way of occupying architectural space remains.

21My grandfather once built a dollhouse complete with electric lights, even light switches. When I used to go visit my grandparents it was one of my favorite pastimes to flick the teeny-tiny light switches on and off, illuminating the dollroom with teeny-tiny floorlamps and overhead lights complete with patterned lampshades, then darkening it again. I never touched the dolls. I remember that I left them lying in their wooden beds under the blankets—they needed their sleep. At some point the light switches broke; the fact is, my grandfather had nine other grandchildren besides me, who flicked the little switches in the dollhouse at least as obsessed with them as I was.

I wonder what makes people love little things so much. I fear it might have something to do with the fact that their offspring (children) are also little, and bigger people have to look after them or else they’ll starve.

22There are the people who want a house but don’t have one and the people who have a house but don’t want one. There are people with ugly houses and people with other overnighting options, for example a mobile home, tent, or sleeping bag. The boundaries between the various categories of domicile are fluid, like boundaries in general. But we might say that someone who temporarily lays claim to domestic lodgings that don’t belong to them on the one hand steps across this fluid boundary and thus on the other hand may be termed a visitor.

I once had a friend who liked how I constantly started sentences with on the one hand and on the other hand, despite not using the terms correctly. Rather than communicating opposite views, I used them simply to tack on the same viewpoint again.

On the one hand a roundel is a military fortification, on the other hand a defensive structure from which one 23could observe the enemy from a safe distance, for instance through binoculars. If one were on the one hand not in the mood for the enemy or his approach, one could on the other hand shoot at him from the roundel with arrows. Anyone standing on the roundel would have a view over all his enemies or subjects, should he have any. On the roundel he could act like he did have such even if he didn’t. It is also possible to add optional moats around the roundel. I would recommend a roundel to anyone who needs to want to feel bigger.

The waiter in the Roundel is acting exactly like he doesn’t hear my beer order.

24In the place where the visitor came from, he no longer is. In the place where he was, there is now only a non-him. In the place where the visitor no longer is, someone is dealing with a gap, an empty space, possibly a pulsating empty space. Someone finds him- or herself confronted with the visitor’s absence. Someone is possibly baffled, possibly sad, possibly happy about it.

Everything the visitor might be too much of here, he is perhaps too little of somewhere else. Here there was nothing missing. Here no one was waiting for a visitor. Here there is everything to excess already.

Only the Roundel Bar is gradually falling apart. The golden kerchiefs tacked to the walls are increasingly coming loose; the people drinking along the ring of the bar, too, are getting wrinkles, first in the corners of their eyes, then in the corners of their mouths. Sooner or later their jowls will be hanging down into their beer foam. The Roundel Bar 25is turning more and more into a museum housing fossils. Sometimes I imagine wall text, glass cases, basins to put the fossils into: the artist with the walrus mustache; a woman with very long hair and a busy-looking face who likes to wear a dress that looks like fish scales; another woman with shorter hair whose drinks sometimes slip spectacularly out of her hands. Yes, even these fossils need a home.

The fact is, all my life I’ve longed to go away but then I’ve never left. The fact is, I’ve been thinking about leaving and talking about leaving my whole life long but I’m still here. I am the oldest fossil of all, and I hate this small town so much that I’ll have my revenge on it by never actually leaving, even if I constantly act like I’m about to. I am the oldest fossil of all, and even if someone asked me on bended knee to leave here I would stay anyway.

Maybe the only one who has understood the difference between possibilities and actualities is the visitor. Maybe he never actually wanted to go anywhere at all, maybe he just wanted to stay where he was, all his life, but he has nevertheless managed to privilege the unavoidable over the unwanted.