frankfurt, beginning of december 2002, hotel hessischer hof

Frankfurt, hotel hessischer hof, beginning of December 2002. 

The whole evening i spent in my room,  waiting for R. to call me. He did not. I went to the reception desk half past ten, to see if maybe he hadn´t checked in. But he had. There was no message for me. He usually left a note when he would be late. I inquired whether they knew if he was in his room. The man at the reception said that R. was indeed in his room, he had ordered something to eat at nine o clock, and said not to be disturbed furthermore.

Well, then, i would not disturb him either.

I went back to my room. There was always the option of calling him on his cellphone. I looked at his number, and did not dare to dial it. 

I waited until midnight, then gave up. He never called for me this late. 

I took a bath, had some tea. Checked my phone. No message.

I sat on the windowsill and looked at the street for some time. There was nothing to be seen. An occasional car would drive by. There was a tiny park in front of the hotel, and behind it loomed the enormous grounds of "die Messe". 

Without R., i had absolutely no reason what so ever to be here. in Frankfurt of all places. i had never been in this city before, only passed it by train back in the eighties a couple of times.  Frankfurt was about money, industry, punctuality, i don´t know why i would describe it like that but i think that comes closest to how i felt about it. This city to me had always been the centre of complete lack of content. A punctual well organised world that did not fit into mine. 

Finally i fell asleep, watching a tv channel which was called: die schönsten bahnstrecken europas, it was brilliant: a camera was put in the locomotive of a train, and it filmed the railtrack ahead of it. That was all. nothing more than that. A train, sometimes halting at a station, sometimes speeding up. An occasional tunnel, a railway crossing. The train rolled on and the sound of the motions lulled me to sleep.

I woke up at about eight o clock. I had slept four hours at most. He had not called. No sms.  I went to reception and asked if there were any messages. None. He had left the hotel at seven thirty. I decided i would have breakfast, it was the first time since we had begun travelling that i had not overslept. I took some bread, an boiled egg. Tea. chewing and swallowing the bread was extremely difficult, my mouth was dry. The tea was way too dark, nearly black, bitter. The egg had been boiled into a green state of solidity. There were only businesspeople in the breakfast room, men, in duos, threesomes. Except for the waitress there was no other woman beside me. The men ate hurriedly, some of them were discussing matters in a low volume, others read their newspapers. at 8.45 sharp the whole crowd dissolved.

I walked the streets, crossed the river. There were new buildings next to old ones, spread out in an erratic pattern. I thought it could have to do with the war. New buildings had been erected on the premises where the old buildings had been bombed. The ruins which must have been on almost every housing block of this city suddenly seemed visible to me: The new buildings became transparent and revealed the burned-out carcasses that had once been homes.  I made it into a little game for myself, to count the buildings i passed: bombed, not bombed, blown up, bombed. Some new office buildings maybe were just put there by real estate developers who had torn the old buildings down.

Every road seemed to lead to a windy square. On each square was a bar or a restaurant, styled to look homely good old fashioned German, in a new building. 

A Christmas fair was being built at the riverbank. Wooden sheds with flickering electric lights. Loud music was played, German folk songs with a house beat pasted underneath them. One barn was already open, it sold sausages. There was this solid black steel wheel with a spiral of sausage on it. It rotated over a fire. The smell of the grease travelled all the way to where i was standing. 

I decided i would go to the museum. Someone had told me it had one of the Vermeer's, so i gathered, this would be time well spent.

The Vermeer was simply beautiful: The geographer. A young man is leaning over his desk, looking out of the window. he is measuring a map. He looked so inquisitive, optimistic, it made me feel slightly better. I dwelled through the rooms. Ruysdael, Rembrandt, the 17th century. 

Manet, Munch, Courbet, the 19th. When i made my way to the 20st century room i passed a mirror. I had not looked into the mirror that morning and thought that i still might have my make-up on of the day before, leaving stains all over my face. It quite often happens that i forget to check how i look in the morning, realising some time late in the afternoon that i still wear yesterdays make up, smeared all over me. There was a smudge of black under my left eye. I wiped it away with my fingers and some spit. My eye got caught by a disturbing painting hanging on the opposite wall:   two women, one dressed in black, the other in white, and a man who was lighting a cigarette, sitting at a table in bright sunlight, surrounded by flowers. The woman´s white dress was covered with bloodstenches. In her hand she held intestines. Both the women and the man were smiling most euphorically. I turned around to look at the picture. It was a Renoir,  but there was no blood, no innards. She held a small vial of sorts. I looked at the mirror again. I could make out the red stains in the reflection. I walked to the painting, and looked at the mirror from that angle. Again, red stains on the dress. I tried to find out if there was some light in the ceiling which could cause this aberration. Nothing. I paced through the room to see if the other paintings had a similar effect in the mirror, but i could not detect anything. A group of students entered the room, and i rushed out, i did not want them to see me behaving oddly.

I took a taxi to the hotel, it was not even three o clock. I started to panic. What if R. would not want to see me tonight either? I had no credit card, i would not be able to book myself an earlier flight back home, i had hardly any cash with me, and the magnetic strip of my bankcard did not work. I wouldn't even be able to take a train. I would be a hostage in this hotelroom for two more nights, i dared not go back on the street. I had no idea how it could have happened that i saw the blood on this woman´s dress. it had looked so real. And it had not disappeared after i saw the real picture. The mirror had kept showing the same image to me. 

I set the alarm at 7 p.m. R. would not call before that time, and went into the bathroom to have another bath. I kept adding hot water and bathfoam, kept refreshing the water, as if i wanted to rinse the echo of that distorted image out of my skin.