"so you will get my wife a nice present then, tomorrow? maybe a necklace, she doesn't like earrings too much, i think she has great ears, maybe thats why, that earrings are only worn by women who want to hide them."
I repeated that i did not think it appropriate to buy gifts for any of his family members, and i added that i did not know his wife´s taste or dislikes. R. got up from his bed and took his wallet out of his coat. I thought that he was going to take a photograph of his wife out, to show me, what she looked like. Or that it would be a picture of him, her and their children. It was his credit card. "Here, you use it, spend as much as you think is right."
"But i dont even know what your wife would find beautiful, i know nothing about her. "
"Dont worry, its not about pretty, it has to spell dollars in at least five figures and she is happy."
I felt utterly uncomfortable. "Can´t you buy her something at the airport?"
"Do you have plans here?"
"No, not really."
"Well, then, go, shop. buy yourself something nice too. i have these mergers to settle all day, we can have dinner after if you like, say 8 o clock?"
Walking around Frankfurt with R.´s credit-card in my bag made me feel awkward. I had never allowed myself the luxury of a credit-card and very much doubted that with my unsteady income the bank would even grant me one. Now here i was, walking with a credit-card that did not belong to me, buying a gift for someone i would never know. I was frightened i might lose it, or that it would get stolen. I tried to act as natural as i could, so that i would not look as if i had something with me that was worth the theft.
Now that i was an active customer, the city changed. It felt like one huge airport terminal, shops everywhere and nothing much else to do but purchasing goods to avoid boredom. I went into a newsagent and got myself a Dutch newspaper, it made me feel more at home to be able to read in Dutch. The news itself did not interest me, i just wanted to have familiar words to surround me, to give me some comfort. Using the card on such a small amount felt silly, so i bought an expensive fountain-pen i thought R. might like for himself. I paid with the card. All went well. The woman behind the cash register wished me a nice day. I blushed. She did not see my discomfort. I felt like a con-artist, as it was not my money i was spending here.
I lingered some more in the shop, looked at the magazines, stationary, the lights in the ceiling. All of a sudden i thought i could go and disappear. Just step out of my life. Walk out of that store, precisely like i would do if i were continuing my regular life, but then, instead of going to the right, suddenly turn in another direction, and never return to myself. I could do that. Keep the card, get cash out of an ATM, and then go somewhere. Take on a new identity, some completely common city in Germany, where i knew no one. Alter my name, and then invent a new personality for myself. Become a secretary, or a salesgirl in a shop, like the one i had just met. She did not seem entirely unhappy. I could lead a conventional nine to five life, in which i would function perfectly, and never make a true connection to anybody. I would be alone with my secret, my past. I figured that maybe i would buy some Ikea furniture to decorate my home. Buy it just the way it was photographed in their catalogues, the couch that would fit to the carpet, the table light on the matching side table. Cut my hair very short. Start wearing glasses, which i needed anyway, but i always lost them or sat on them or broke one of the glasses in my handbag. Yes, i could wear glasses, and unremarkable clothing. Watch television at night when i got home. Maybe even allow myself the extravagance of an orchid on one of the coffee-tables. Transform into a complete stranger even to myself. For this instance, i saw that life passing. I wondered how long it would take for people to really miss me. To realise that i was gone for ever. If they would even think of that. I would no longer pick up the telephone, would not answer any of my e-mails, i would simply cease to exist. I would have died, but could still go on living. The temptation of this thought struggled to emerge in full bloom, but guilt made me drift away from it again. My parents would probably miss me the longest, and their worries could be unbearable. I figured this is what biology does, make your next of kin the ones who are anxious to a degree were all rationality evaporates and can even destroy them. I just did not have the stomach for that.
I went out of the shop, and turned right, back into my own existence.
At the jewellery store a guy helped me pick out something. I made up a story about being R.´s personal assistant. The guy helped me out as much as he could. He asked me how old his wife was. I had to guess. I said she was 41. What her colour was. I did not understand the question. Did he mean her complexion, or the colour of her hair? The salesman explained that some women prefer gold, and others silver. It had to do with whether they wanted to appear cool or hot. Or cool with a hot core. And if they preferred silver, which obviously was for the cool type, we could always go for silver-coloured platinum, to add the hot core element. If she was under fifty, the guy went on, diamonds would not be so much appreciated, unless she did not have a lot of taste. If she was a sporty type, the metal itself should be smooth, and the stones should be encrusted instead of laid in. Pearls were for widows, but rubies could be nice, maybe a necklace with rubies and blood coral. It was his personal favourite of the season. He showed me a golden necklace with the rubies and some polished blood coral. i looked at the price tag. It was nearly 200.000 euros. I was shocked. I had not known that you could buy a necklace which costs this much. Was this what R. had in mind? I didnt know what to decide. In the end i declined, and said that this necklace might be way too much. I explained that it was allowed to be a bit more casual. The salesman became far less enthusiastic, and showed me a platinum necklace with a pendant that had a sapphire surrounded by a couple of pearls and some diamonds. His whole theory of age, teint, taste, or widowhood did not seem to matter to him any more. The necklace still cost nearly ten thousand euros, but for him, i had just demoted myself from an A-list customer to a mere nuisance. I asked him if he would gift wrap the necklace and he sullenly obliged.
I took a taxi back to the hotel, no way i dared walk the streets with such valuables in my handbag. On one street some guy was hanging up posters. He had covered the street nicely; every tree, every lamppost, and even some walls, were covered with his slightly crumpled posters. They were designed like the old rote armee fraktion posters: a red star and gun emblem . the logo was covered in handwriting saying: ALLES MUSS WEG!
everything must go.
it must have been when i was nine that i first encountered the Rote Armee Fraktion, the Baader Meinhof Gruppe. Growing up with Swiss parents who spoke German, i had a hard time in the Netherlands. Speaking German was like being half a nazi back in the seventies. Whenever my mother and i would go to the supermarket or greengrocer i implored her to speak Dutch. Sometimes she would indulge me on my wishes. It did not make a real difference. Her accent betrayed her German roots sufficiently to make people stare at us, not even trying to conceal their repulsion. The fact that my mothers parents had only moved to Switzerland from Germany some years after the second world war did not help a lot either. Being German was being wrong. We were the people who were responsible for Anne Frank and all the other victims of second world war. Having a German identity, which in the eyes of our villagers and my classmates was what we had, was being a collaborator to the nazi regime, unless you could prove your grandparents had died in some kind of underground movement. And our family could do no such thing. Our tv had German channels, and i liked to watch German tv, but i would never tell any of my friends. I liked "Persil man". He was a man in a cleaning detergent commercial. he sat in a very serious looking chair, and said that it was scientifically proven that Persil made your laundry whiter than any other product. Another programme i liked was "aktenzeichen XYungelöst", about real crimes. And one night I was introduced to a group of people, wanted for various terrorist crimes: Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, and the rest of the gang. Until then criminals to me had always been men in striped suits. Or men who wore dark glasses. They were men. The Rote Armee Fraktion was different. Their group had many women who were just as willing to break the law as their terrorist boyfriends. I found that truly exiting, scary too, it fascinated me completely. The police station in our village had this box outside, with posters offering ransoms for wanted criminals. Soon after the XY television show a poster was hung up. They were looking for the group in the Netherlands too! The gang looked incredibly hip. Long hair, beards, and the women had dark eyed make-up. Their public relations tactics were smart. Robbing banks for the funding of their numerous attacks and guerilla training in Palestina and Jordan, the Baader Meinhof Gruppe constantly made referrals to Bonnie and Clyde, the huge box office hit of that time. They were the German equivalent to Faye Dunnaway and Warren Beatty, with a pinch of southern American frivolity, in the form of pictures they had distributed of themselves in front of a Che Guevarra poster. Andreas Baader had a graphic designer come up with the logo of the red star with a machine gun in it. No matter how violent and brutal their actions, many of the German and western European citizens felt sympathy for the group. They were the first to address the fact that most politicians and law enforcers in western Germany were ex national socialists. Especially to the generation who had not grown up in the war, but had learned of the horrors of it, the brute statements of the baader meinhof gruppe were a revelation. Their urban guerilla would finally put an end to this discrepancy, the revolution they had in mind would ultimately terminate the fascist state that Germany still was. Their methodology and vocabulary became more and more a twisted duplicate of the fascists they tirelessly combated. The group was caught, Ulrike Meinhof was found hung in her cell in Stammheim Prison in 1976. It was during the kidnapping of Hanns Martin Schleyer that the group became a daily news item. More so after one member shot a Dutch policeman in Utrecht. Then, when the kidnapping turned out to be a futile tactic to have the other members of the group released, Baader, Enslin, Raspe were found dead in their cells on October 18th, 1977. Schleyer was executed by the Rote Armee Fraktion that night. My parents had intense arguments about the abduction, the shooting, about the trial, and the alleged suicides. I didnt quite understand anything my parents said, they were more interested in the legal side of the trial than in the fact that Schleyer had died, or in what the Rote Armee Fraktion stood for. My father would recite the verdict of one court-case, my mother would name the number of a statutory provision, it had nothing to do with the images i saw on television and in the newspapers: these people were rough, they fought with a vehemence that made their small army powerful enough to even get the German prime minister into a complete state of shock. I did not know whether to admire them or detest them. And my parent´s discussions did not clarify the matter for me either. did i want to join them, were they really fighting for a better world in peace, as one of my teachers in school said, or should i, like the police wanted me to do, go chase them and collect the reward?
But as news goes, the group disappeared from the headlines.
then, in the mid eighties, being a punk made knowledge of the Baader Meinhof Gruppe worthwhile again. It was important to really dig deeper into the matter. i suddenly found myself surrounded by people who, under circumstances, would embrace Germany. this was a new sensation. it had to be the right Germany however, meaning, left wing. Heinrich Böll, Margaretha von Trotta, they were good Germans. I had to educate myself into a completely new person. When my classmates in high-school would learn grammar, geography and maths, i was working hard on the subjects communism and anarchy. i was memorising the lyrics of songs by the Birthday party and Einstürzende Neubauten. My tuition furthermore consisted of watching Eisensteins Potemkin and Fritz Langs Metropolis, although the projectionist at the cinema had accidentally changed the reels in the wrong order, so that nobody had a clue what that movie was about. I got a small part in Berthold Brechts "Threepenny Opera", Brecht was a good German too in 1985. All the punks in our city were the same in a way, we came from rather well to do families, and tried to hide the fact that we had grown up in big houses with huge gardens. we were now part of the proletariat. I dont think we wanted to start a revolution or anything, but we had to have at least some kind of ideal. and hippies were just utterly unfashionable, so we were punk.
That summer I learned more about anarchy. I went on tour with an English band. We travelled in a black van of a friend of ours. We would listen to reggae and neue deutsche welle songs and sing along to them. The van was spray-painted grey and had a graffiti on each of the side doors: it was a red star with the face of Ulrike Meinhof in the centre. The graffiti looked like an Andy Warhol painting. In a way, the terrorist martyr had become a pop icon.
The band performed in a bar underneath a squat in Amsterdam. We were allowed to sleep in the squat. Whilst the singer and i had a nap on a worn down sofa in one of the rooms, the rest of the band went shopping. Then it was time for the soundcheck. I hung around a little, and looked at the posters in the bar. It was a dark place, just two or three lightbulbs hung from the ceiling. the place smelled as yellow grey as the walls were. I sat down on a barstool and listened to the music. One of the squatters started talking to me. Or more, he started to ask me questions that i was in a way not supposed to answer. He was worried, he said, that i had not realised that i was being sexist. I indeed had never been aware of being such thing. so i asked him what he meant. He started to explain. i was a girl. i had to agree to that. then he said that i was a girl who did not only wear make up, which i could not deny, but i also chosen to wear a short colourful skirt. he emphasised the last two words: Colourful. Skirt. he nodded to my legs whilst he said that. then he stared at me. his girlfriend had now joined him. she was wearing a huge grey sweater and military pants. The girlfriend whispered something in his ear, and then stood behind him, holding him at the waist. The guy continued: they had watched me all afternoon and felt intensely agonised by my presence in their home. A woman should not be an object of lust to anybody, and my way of dressing was obviously an attempt to attract sexist attention. now, maybe, he continued, i had not done this on a conscious level. Probably i had issues i could not deal with and my intentions were good, they would anyway have to give me the benefit of doubt as i was travelling with this band, who he and his girlfriend knew and admired for their true and virtuous anarchistic standards; but still, it would be very much appreciated if i could wear less conspicuous clothing as long as i was a guest in their squat. he rolled a cigarette. The singer had finished the soundcheck and joined our little conversation. The singer said: "can i have a cigarette?" the male squatter told the singer that he only could offer him a shag, which is the Dutch name for rolling tobacco, so to him it must have sounded like decent English. the singer said he did not fancy men to have sex with. From then on the situation only went downhill rapidly. The squatters had cooked dinner for us upstairs. The band ate the food, whilst taking out their loot of that afternoons shopping spree. It was porn. The band could not believe their luck, Holland was a truly wonderful anarchist country indeed. the freedom of porn was just brilliant, the could never buy such gross magazines in the United Kingdom. They swapped the magazines amongst each other staring at the pictures, showing the worst to each other and to our hosts, who, by then were staring at me malignantly as if i was the root of all this evil. The concert was a blast though.
in my room, I put the necklace in the safe. until it was time for dinner i leafed through the magazines i had bought for R. and read the Dutch newspaper. i had not thought of having the fountain-pen gift-wrapped for him. I needed wrapping paper. I took the newspaper, teared out one page, and packed the pen into it. at 7.30 R. called and told me we would have dinner straight away, he was already in the restaurant. i changed into a dress, took the parcel with the fountain-pen and went downstairs. the restaurant had dozens and dozens of tables. all were set with baroque tableware. every wall in the room was covered with glass cabinets. The dinner plates were hung in these cabinets. very consistent decoration.
R. was sitting at a table with another man, they were talking. when he saw me he got up from his chair and shouted: "hey puppet, there you are, meet my friend maiko!" the other guests looked up, and then went on with their conversations, or food. "maiko and i still need to go over some stuff, but get yourself something nice to eat." he waved for a waiter who brought me the menu. Maiko looked at me for an instance too long, and gave me a wan smile. "maiko is my main man when it comes to the hard deals, and we really need to close this one before someone else gets a hand on the contract. but now, as long as you are here we will do a little small talk. she can smalltalk so well this girl, and bigtalk too." they both grinned. i desperately tried to think of a polite question to ask this Maiko, but i could not think of anything reasonable to say. i just asked them whether they had been colleagues for a long time. "oh, we go way back." R. said. Maiko nodded affirmatively. They really seemed to get along well. "when business goes smooth, i refine the process a little, polish things up nicely. the tough deals, thats were Maiko comes in. he also polishes up. very nicely." they both laughed. The waiter came to take my order. I asked for a salad and the gnocchi. I still had the gift on my lap, but i did not want to give it to R. as long as he had company. i realised it was not even a gift, he had paid for it himself. i wanted it to vanish. "eats like a bird this one does." Maiko all of a sudden said. „why are you eating so little, is the food not comforting for you?“ R. interrupted Maiko. "come to think of it, i never saw her eat one single bite before. tea, coffee, cigarettes, thats more here diet, isn´t it?" I answered that i did eat. Maiko said that i should only eat what i liked and when i liked it.
