Swallow Summer

Larissa Boehning

Description

Each character in Larissa Boehning's debut collection experiences a moment where they re forced to confront how differently things turned out, how quickly ambitions were shelved, or how easily people change. Former colleagues meet up to reminisce about the failed agency they used to work for; brothers-in-law find themselves co-habiting long after the one person they had in common passed away; fellow performers watch as their careers slowly drift in opposite directions. Boehning's stories offer a rich store of metaphors for this abandonment: the downed tools of a deserted East German factory, lying exactly where they were dropped the day Communism fell; the old, collected cameras of a late father that seem to stare, wide-eyed, at the world he left behind. And yet, underpinning this abandonment, there is also great resilience. Like the cat spotted by a demolition worker in the penultimate story that sits, unflinching, as its home is bulldozed around it, certain spirits abide.

Sujets

• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: Comma Press
• Date de parution: 18 août 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781910974612
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Contents

Melon Belly

Silent Fish, Sweetheart

Full Speed Ahead in Neutral

From Above

North Star

Matchstick Cathedrals

Acting, or Walking Around the Island

Sealed Sea

A Cat in Hell

Something for Nothing

About the Author

About the Translator
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Comma Press.
commapress.co.uk
First published in the German language as Schwalbensommer by Larissa Boehning.
by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG, Cologne/ Germany.
Copyright © remains with the author, Larissa Boehning, 2003, and the translator, Lyn Marven, 2016.
All rights reserved.
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

The characters in these stories are entirely the work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons living or dead, or the opinions of persons living or dead, are entirely coincidental. The right of Larissa Boehning to be identified as the Author of this Work, and Lyn Marven as the Translator of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patent Act 1988.
Passages quoted from ‘Death Fugue’ by Paul Celan, first published in German in 1948, ( Poems of Paul Celan , 2007), translated by Michael Hamburger, are copyrighted and are reprinted here by kind permission of Carcanet Press Limited, Manchester, UK.
Lines taken from ‘An Anna Blume’ by Kurt Schwitters (first published in German in 1919) were translated by Lyn Marven for this publication.
The translation of this book has been made possible by the assistance of Goethe-Institut.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges assistance from Arts Council England, and University of Liverpool for their support in the development of this project.
Melon Belly
Two shots rang out during the night and I couldn’t get back to sleep again. In the morning, Elena phoned and asked me if I wanted to go to the lake – it was just a little outing with a couple of people, and they had room for one more in the car. I went.
It was already warm. The courtyard at the back was bathed in sunlight. When I came out of the house, Elena was standing next to her old Mercedes, her arm resting on the open door on the driver’s side. We kissed on both cheeks briefly. I saw Piet sitting on the passenger side and Baumann on the back seat.
I hadn’t seen the two of them since the company had gone bust. We’d been in the same team and worked together on a few projects: Baumann was the conceptual designer, Piet the graphic designer, and I was the copywriter. Elena was the only one who wasn’t fired at the same time as us. As she was the team administrator, the boss had insisted she type up our redundancy letters first. Piet had been saying for some time previously that he wanted to go, but in the end he was happy that he had stayed, so Elena told me, because obviously now he got money from the state. She also told me that for his birthday she’d given him two picture frames containing his old business cards. One read Piet Schulz, Creative Director , and the other read Piet Schulz, Supervising Artist . All he said was, ‘Thanks for reminding me what a failure I am.’
Once, at one of the parties we used to throw at the agency, one night, or rather morning, full of alcohol, Baumann had kissed me. He’d pulled me into the conference room, pressed my back up against the wall, put his hands on my cheeks and said, ‘Could you imagine us being in love?’
As I slid over towards him on the back seat and we greeted each other, the fact that we had once worked together, that we had seen each other every day in the office, had talked, eaten and partied together, was nothing more than a memory of another life that had come to an end.
A police officer was leaning on the patrol car that was still parked in front of the house, smoking. He seemed to watch Elena as she turned the Mercedes round in the road.
The clapped-out car hurtled down the motorway out of Berlin. We didn’t talk much; the windows were open and the wind whistled past our heads. The city ended as unexpectedly as it always did, giving way to a scarred no-man’s-land, abandoned industrial sites, mouldering summerhouses and shopping malls. We carried on going east. Piet fiddled with the radio, then put on a cassette. Baumann stuck his hand out of the window and drummed along with the music on the roof of the car. We drove through villages built in a straight line, over their cobbled single street with all the houses arranged to the left and right. We turned to look at every empty property that had cast-iron railings, pretty stuccowork over the doors or old shutters.
Elena sang, ‘Welcome, we love you.’ Baumann drummed along. Piet rested both hands on his knees, like an applicant who knows he won’t get the job. ‘It sounds like the tape is bust,’ Baumann said, more to himself than to Elena.
I closed my eyes, pressed my hands against the car roof and my body back into the seat and counted to myself in an endless rhythm that echoed the noise of the engine. I started to feel tired. I heard in my head the sound of the two shots and found myself listening once more to the silence of the night. From my bed I could make out the sky, framed by the walls of the courtyard. Suddenly the courtyard was filled with the pounding of running feet, a rubbish bin was opened, a metallic object bounced against the side of the bin, a woman wailed into a hand being held over her mouth. It was all over just as quickly as it started. The door to the yard shut with a creak and I stood up and cautiously walked to the window. My eyes slowly tried to adjust to the darkness. I waited. The police officers stormed into the courtyard, took up positions at the entrance, others ran up the stairs in the building at the back of the courtyard. As they ran they held submachine guns across their torsos; they were wearing caps and combat boots. I stepped back from the window and heard the crackling of their walkie-talkies, scraps of words, voices. One police officer came back down into the yard and said to another officer standing almost directly under my window that the victims were lying in the apartment, two Turks, probably a family feud, and that the woman whose name was on the door wasn’t there. Then he said, something small calibre and a sawn-off shotgun. In the face. He didn’t fancy being the one to clean up the apartment.
I opened my eyes.
Piet turned round to me, sliding his elbow across the armrest.
‘So, what are you up to?’ His eyes were aquamarine. He screwed them up; the sun was bright. He spoke loudly to drown out the wind.
‘Not much. Nothing new,’ I said. We bounced over the street.
‘Same here,’ Baumann said quickly. ‘Well, not exactly. I’m doing a little job for Alex right now. Freelance.’ He scratched his forearm, embarrassed, and looked at me.
On that last morning, just beforehand, Alex had said, ‘It’ll be fine. The third round of finance has as good as gone through. They won’t make us walk the plank.’ In the evening he called us into the conference room, avoiding everyone’s gaze, and read out the names of the people who didn’t need to come into work the following day. While he read out the list, Alex was wearing his sunglasses on his head, one hand in his trouser pocket. Later he shook his wrist, as he always did, to move the face of his heavy watch into the right position. Somebody quipped later, ‘Alex is too heavy to walk the plank.’
‘So what do you call yourself these days?’ Piet asked in Baumann’s general direction, ‘Freelance Head of Content or Consultant for whatever? Everybody I know is a Consultant now.’
Baumann didn’t reply. Piet clicked his tongue a few times to the beat of the music, then turned to face forwards again and ran the palms of his hands over his upper thighs.
‘What about you?’ I asked.
‘Me?’ he shot back, and turned his head so he could look at me out the corner of his eye. ‘I’m attempting to stay on holiday forever. And I’m having a fantastic time with this fantastic woman here.’ He stroked Elena’s ear, the back of her neck. A faint smile flitted across her face. She seemed to be concentrating completely on driving. I leaned one temple against the headrest, against its torn fur cover, and wrapped my hands around its cold metal legs.
The landscape rushed past us; the wind coming in through the windows sent our hair swirling into our eyes. I sat back in the seat, gathered a few strands together at the back of my head, twisted them and then leaned my head against the back of the seat. And once more I saw the images from the night before: the pools of light from the torches on the walls of the house, over the rubbish bins, in the yard, on my t-shirt as a beam slid briefly across my window. More scraps of conversation: a witness, the woman who lived in the apartment, had been found further along Sonnenallee. She was supposedly pregnant by one of the men who had been killed, and married to the other. I could hear the footsteps of the policemen in the yard and suddenly thought I remembered there being a woman amongst the men. I could see it all against the black of my closed eyelids. Just a bystander, but a witness to everything, I thought.
‘I think we’ve taken a wrong turn,’ Piet said loudly to Elena.
They debated the right way to get to the lake. After a while Elena found the road leading back to the motorway. We jolted rhythmically over the corrugations in the huge concrete slabs. Baumann wound the window up. It shut with a final soft hiss and everything was quiet inside the car.
Just before a service station we saw the sign: KNOLLE & BOLLE, FRUIT AND VEG, next exit . Elena suddenly put her indicator on, drove into the car park, got out and went over to the stall where a skinny man was standing. She bought a large watermelon. Baumann followed her, picked the watermelon up off the scales and carried it back to the car. He got into the back seat of the car, putting his leg in first, then pulled his head in and dropped onto the sea