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Fiction from Web del SolThe Munich Window
Brian Evenson
The face of my daughter, my eldest--the daughter who
later that day threw herself a second time from the open window
of her Munich apartment, this time to her death--was not unknown
to me, though I had not seen her face for eighteen years. After
the untimely death of her mother--who had also died by throwing
herself from a window (this being a window in Dresden) in what
police and reporters had maliciously referred to as suspicious
circumstances--I had found it expedient to leave Germany for
warmer, more hospitable climes. I had left my eldest and only
living daughter with our neighbors, for what I promised would be
no more than thirty minutes, but which had in truth been eighteen
years. And which, had she not killed herself, would have been
eighteen more. Leaving her eighteen years ago, I assured myself
that I had not so much abandoned a daughter (although certainly I
had done that as well) as done that which I had logically and
methodically determined to be the absolutely ideal solution for
her--and of course for myself, in consideration my own
circumstances. Circumstances which, to say the least, were
troubled, absolutely unsuitable for children. I left my daughter
with a family bearing the name of Grunders, who quickly proved
themselves not unworthy of the task I had assigned them in the
care of my daughter, all the more impressive in that these
Grunders had accomplished this task without any monetary
compensation for their pains during the full eighteen years.
Despite, however, what must initially appear a neglect of my
daughter, I can assure you that, during my self-imposed exile
from Germany, not a day passed in which I did not glance at my
daughter's picture. It is the only photograph of any type which
I possess, a photograph which, for the greater part of the last
eighteen years, has been pinned to the wall above my desk. I had
succeeded, through daily study, in engraving the image
mercilessly upon the walls of my skull. Or so I believed. For,
despite my careful study, I failed to recognized my daughter's
face at the Munich station. Perhaps the photograph I possessed
was atypical. Possibly my daughter's physiognomy had undergone a
revolution over the last eighteen years. Perhaps the photograph
above my desk was not a photograph of my daughter at all, but a
childhood picture of my wife--for my daughter had resembled my
wife, my wife as a child, to a troubling degree. When my
daughter made herself known to me at the Munich station, however,
she resembled my wife not in the slightest, nor did she bear any
resemblance to me. Rather, she was the spitting image of the
Grunders woman who, along with the Grunders man, had taken her
in. I noticed that my daughter possessed the most
irritating habits of the Grunders family--mannerisms which, due
to my eighteen years of non-contact with Grunders, I believed to
have completely expunged from memory, but which immediately
leaped to the fore of my consciousness upon seeing my daughter.
I realized, the instant I saw my daughter, that my daughter had
adopted not only the name Grunders (a repulsive name at best),
but also these people's most despicable etiquette. The rubbing-the-nose habit, the clearing-the-throat habit, the coughing-up-the-phlegm habit, the curling-the-middle-finger habit, the
slouching-shuffling-gait habit, even the cracking-the-neck habit:
she had marked all these tics for her own. When my daughter
introduced herself to me, I thought at first, bombarded suddenly
with all her nervous Grunderisms--bombarded above all by the
slouching-shuffling-gait habit as, slouching, she shuffled toward
me--I thought at first that the creature awkwardly introducing
itself to me could not possibly be my daughter. Rather, I
expected it was a Grunders sent to the Munich station to
chauffeur me to the place where my real daughter was recovering
from her leap from the window, her first leap, the non-fatal one.
My daughter had to grip my arm, had to repeat her name several
times before I paid her the slightest heed. While she addressed
me I wondered if this Grunders person thought herself jocular for
passing herself off as my daughter, when, as any fool could see,
she was anything but my daughter. However, against all logic, it
turned out that she was my daughter and, being my daughter, was
only in exteriority of the Grunders breed. For although my
daughter, judged by her apperance ex ungue leonis as it were,
resembled the Grunders to an uncanny degree--had even made the
mistake of exchanging her mother's face and figure for that of a
Grunders (and had thereby sustained a substantial loss)--she had,
even before I arrived, revealed that interiorly she was her
mother's child. My daughter had proved herself to be the
suicidal type, as was my dead wife, by making her (first) attempt
to kill herself. Through this act, too, she had proved herself
not only the suicidal type, but also, as was my dead wife, the
vicious type. Both of the window leaps, the mother's and the
daughter's, had been intended to soil my character. Both the
suicide of the mother and the suicide attempt of the daughter had
been performed without the slightest degree of disinterestedness
--the most necessary component of the aesthetically successful
suicide. My daughter had hurled herself from the window (the
first time, not the second) out of pure viciousness, in an
attempt to force me to submit to her will, to force me to visit
her in Munich. She assumed, after that excessive display, I
would have no choice. Of course, entre nous, a mere suicide
attempt is not nearly enough to provoke a man of my caliber. A
mere suicide attempt is a quotidian occurrence, worthy of no
notice whatsoever--particularly when it is obviously strictly
manipulative, as hers undoubtedly was. I was not to be provoked
by such sophomoric tricks, I wrote to her. I wrote to her that
she did great dishonor to her mother by merely pretending to kill
herself, instead of actually killing herself. I encouraged her
to take the task of killing herself as seriously as her mother
had. Indeed, a mere suicide attempt was not enough to entice me
to Munich. I only began to consider that a journey to Munich
might be justified when she wrote to inform me (definitely
proving herself the vicious type) that there were certain matters
having to bear on my personal character, matters which must be
discussed with me immediately, in person, in Munich. Otherwise,
she would, she indicated, be compelled to take legal action and
make arrangements for my extradition from my adopted country.
These were matters of the greatest import, she claimed, although
she remained elusive about the content of these so-called
important matters. No doubt these matters were the spawn of
lies, lies which the Grunders and the press, with only an
imperfect knowledge of my true family circumstances, had
instilled within her. However, I purchased a ticket and came to
Munich and, once I found myself standing in the Munich station
confronted by my daughter, I could not help but sense the
Grunders in her. I could not help but notice that she chose to
utilize the slouching-shuffling-gait habit as she approached me,
nor could I ignore her use of the clearing-the-throat habit as
she prepared to speak. Although both her middle fingers were
invisible once she had embraced me, I had no doubt that she
practiced, even while we embraced, the petit-bourgeois curling-the-middle-finger habit. The assault on my senses of all these
habits, made me want to push my daughter, now renamed Grunders
(another indication of her viciousness), under the train, a
desire which grew as my eldest daughter now did her best to
exchange the light embrace I had initiated for a full, tight
embrace of the kind unsuitable for public display, inappropriate
for all but a married couple. It was instantly clear that my
wife, by taking my other daughter, the younger daughter, the dead
one, with her when she killed herself, had saved my younger
daughter from the terrible prospect of becoming Grunders. This
humane sentiment certainly had not been my wife's primary
motivation for her jump, nor even an afterthought, though it had
been one of the few happy results. In our nine years of
marriage, I had never known my wife to be motivated by anything
except a general viciousness toward everything around her coupled
with a specific persecutory viciousness toward myself, who, of
all people, was the least deserving of such treatment. I divined
that my daughter to be a woman of the same stripe. I had long
ago let my arms fall in embarrassment, but my daughter continued
to embrace me, kept her arms locked around my ribs, refused to
let go despite the fact that the patience of etiquette had long
since been exhausted. I stood helpless in her embrace, observing
crowds shuffle past, attempting in this painful interim, I
attempted to determine why, despite perpetual dedication to the
photograph of my daughter, I had failed to recognize her.
Equally important, how had the girl, who must have been young
when she last saw me, seven or eight or six, (I have her age
written down somewhere, surely), and who had no photograph to aid
her in recalling me to memory, how had my daughter, managed to
identify me? Perhaps I was wrong to believe she had no
photographs of me, there being some likelihood that, in my hasty
departure eighteen years ago, when I had incinerated all
important documents and possessions, including my photographs--first and foremost my photographs--I had passed over one or two
critical photographs. The family Grunders might have found these
photographs, I imagine, and had passed on to my daughter, and she
had pinned them to her wall, subjecting them to serious daily
study. Or perhaps the Grunders themselves had, without my
knowledge, taken pictures of me themselves, pictures which had
fallen by default into my daughter's hands upon her coming of
age. It was perhaps even more likely that my daughter had
practiced her indefatigable viciousness in order to extort a
picture from my business associates--I should say ex-business
associates--my ex-associates from the period before my wife threw
herself from the window, an act certainly calculated well in
advance, but which, out of her own viciousness, she arranged to
take place under circumstances which seemed sudden and, as police
and reporters had indicated, suspicious. After fleeing Dresden,
I had made the mistake of writing to my business associates
(leaving no forwarding address, of course, crossing national
borders to mail the letters, so that the postmarks might be a
misdirection) to request that they shred all my correspondence
and, I wrote, all photographs as well. This request must have
had the opposite effect of what was intended, insuring not only
that they refused to shred my correspondence but that they went
to the extreme of examining my correspondence in its minutest
particulars. It was equally possible, considering how
idefatigable my daughter had been in her pursuit of me, tht she
had obtained more recent photographs, photographs which had been
taken without my permission, through the exceptionally
infuriating investigator who had located me or through one of his
equally repulsive minions. I could not help but feel exceedingly
embarrassed in the station by my daughter's public embrace,
particularly since I noticed now that a young woman leaning
against the wall was staring at us, and that, no matter how
sharply I returned her gaze, the woman refused to avert her eyes.
Quite the reverse: this woman had the audacity to smile at us,
to actually smile, so that, confronted by her gaze and smile, I
was forced not only to refuse to return my daughter's embrace,
but finally to take hold of my daughter's arms and pry them off
of me. I took my daughter by the hand and shook her hand warmly,
introducing myself properly and without affectation. Was it
true, I asked her, that she had exchanged the surname I had
proudly given her for the quite frankly repulsive name of
Grunders? She said she had, whereupon I congratulated her on her
lack of taste. I indicated that there was some confusion in my
mind about whether she considered myself or Grunders her father.
I could not help noticing that the other woman was still staring
at us, the woman who, I now noticed, was sporting brightly
colored petit bourgeois clothing--moreover, this woman was
practicing a variation of the curling-the-middle-finger habit, a
variation even more irritating than its original Grunders
manifestation. I took my daughter by the arm, propelling her
down the quay, demanding she explain immediately how she had
recognized me. Perhaps from some weakness in her rational
faculties--weakness which had no doubt been cultivated into full
bloom by her transplantation into Grunders manure--she was
absolutely unable to explain. "Instinct," she told me, whereupon
I uttered the word "bosh." Instinct, I informed her, had been
the type of nonsequitor which had composed her (late) mother's
equivalent of a rosary. So-called instinct had proved her
mother's downfall, and it was, by all appearances, proving my
daughter's downfall as well. I told my daughter that her mother
had thrown herself out the window as a result of instinct,
although the actual fall from the window--which had been suicide,
not murder, I said, make no mistake, the only murder being that
of my youngest daughter, killed when her mother chose to take
that daughter out the window with her--the fall from the window
had, though triggered by "instinct", been coldly reasoned out
aequo animo beforehand. I told my daughter that I had no doubt
that her own leap out of the window had been a result of instinct
conjoined with the same cold viciousness, corollary to which
viciousness had been her demand that I make this futile and
perilous journey to Munich, in order to satisfy her whims. I was
close enough to her face now to see, beneath her heavy
maquillage, the webwork of scars that the window glass had left
on her face and neck. Glancing behind us, I saw, pursuing us
down the quay, the woman who had so brazenly observed us earlier.
Already? I wondered, though I saw neither badge nor camera.
Redoubling my steps, dragging my daughter forward, I shouted at
my daughter the words "legal action?," and demanded an immediate
explanation. I could hear the woman's footsteps close behind.
"Matters of the greatest importance?" I shouted at my daugther,
"Child Abuse? My Mother's Murder?", and demanded she explain
without further delay, and without slowing her pace. I sped up,
threw a glance backward, saw the woman quicken her pace as well.
"Ludicrous! Ludicrous!" I couldn't help expostulating. It was
obvious, I told my daughter, that my daughter's leap--a leap
which, had she been a woman of respectable character, in all
rights should have killed her--had merely succeeded in leading
her into the wildest and most unfounded imaginings. I swerved,
heard the woman's footsteps behind us stutter, mimic my course.
I would, I told my daughter, deign to spend thirty minutes
convincing her that her accusations were faulty, at the
expiration of which time I would board the express train again
and return home, where, I told her, I proposed that she should
not disturb me further. We were running down the quay, the woman
matching our pace. I let the woman close on us, then stopped
abruptly and flung myself backward, jerking my daughter back with
me, sending the other woman off her feet to leave her sprawled on
the floor, her hand cupping her mouth. I straightened my
clothing, stepped over her body. I attempted the walk back up
the quay, but found that my daughter had dug in her heels. I
released my daughter and watched her actually fall to her knees
before the other woman, actually reach her hands out to the other
woman, through whose fingers blood had begun to drip. I demanded
my daughter stand and deliver an immediate explanation.
I informed my daughter, as she helped her psychiatrist
friend to her feet, that I had brought only one small valise to
Munich, that I had every intention of departing on the next
train. In the meantime, I would allow her a few minutes which
she could use, if she used them wisely, to explain succinctly and
to my satisfaction the threatening letter she had mailed.
Immediate legal action, matters of the greatest import, child
abuse, my mother's murder: Were these phrases proper to use with
one's father? She had, I told her, a few minutes to present her
case in the station café, where she would purchase for herself a
Coca Blanc and for myself a glass of Perrier--since I had never
fallen into the vice of drinking alcoholic beverages, though she,
having been raised by Grunders, surely drank gallons of the
cheapest lager. My daughter's psychiatrist friend had removed
from her pocket a wad of crumpled, undoubtedly soiled,
papertissues which she pressed against her lips and gums in a
futile attempt to halt the bleeding. Watching her, I felt
obliged to inform my daughter that I was not, in all honesty,
interested in being shadowed by such a person. Her psychiatrist
friend was, I told my daughter, as the psychiatrist woman pressed
bloody tissues against broken teeth, obviously a tapeworm, or
perhaps a ringworm. A dabbler in sir-reverence, no doubt. I
advised my daughter to sever the connection between herself and
the psychiatrist woman without further delay, by all means within
her power, and to do so while her psychiatrist friend's mouth
remained hors de service and incapable of spewing its venom.
Imagine my surprise when, purely for viciousness' sake, my
daughter refused to dismiss her psychiatrist friend, having the
gall to insist that her psychiatrist friend was what she called a
"nice person," making perfectly clear to me how far she was under
the psychiatrist woman's spell. She even attempted to introduce
me formally to this psychiatrist woman who, I had no doubt, was
not in the least a "nice person" but was a disgustingly and
vulgarly unbearable person, was even more of the Grunders type
than my daughter was--a person who participated for money in the
most ugly sort of mountebankery--viz. that of, upon promise of a
cure, stripping people of their personalities, as she was
doubtless doing even now to my daughter. I would not under any
circumstances, I said, sit at the same table with this
psychologist woman. In all this, motivated as I was by
principles of reason, I was blameless. What I finally did allow,
against my better judgment, was for the psychiatrist woman to sit
at a table near us, where, forbidden to take notes on the matter
my daughter and I discussed, she could remain, as long as she
promised not to penetrate our conversation with "insights,"
particularly insights of the psychological variety.
Psychological insight, I confided to my daughter, was synonymous
with psychological nonsense. I pushed the psychiatrist woman,
who had not succeeded in arresting the bleeding of her mouth,
toward a table two tables distant from the table I had chosen for
my daughter and myself, a table at which I sat in such a manner
that I could see at all times this psychiatrist woman and, above
her and beyond her, the station clock. Once seated, I told her,
told my oldest daughter, to begin speaking without further delay,
removing at that same moment from my breast pocket the train
schedule, examining it with the greatest avidity. The next
train, I saw, the train which would take me from Munich, was
departing in slightly less than twelve minutes. I folded the
schedule neatly again, telling my daughter to have done with
niceties and gibberish, and to come directly to the point in the
next ten minutes, for in eleven minutes she would see the last of
me, and in twelve she would see me not at all. Waiting for my
daughter to speak, I made the mistake of glancing at the
psychiatrist woman. Holding up one hand to my daughter to keep
her from speak, I was compelled to command the psychiatrist woman
to stop staring at us unless she desired to be personally
escorted from the Munich station. I leaned closer to my daughter
and asked her, confidentially, if she actually employed this
woman, a woman who was now in the process of stuffing an entire
tissue up her left nostril in an attempt to stop the bleeding of
her nose which, perhaps from sympathy, had joined the bleeding of
her mouth, creating a veritable symphony of bleeding. I informed
the psychiatrist woman that the most effective method of stopping
this type of bleeding was first to heat the end of a spoon,
second to thrust the spoon handle up the nostril. I graciously
offered her my utensils and the use of the candle on our table to
perform this delicate operation, all of which instruments she
declined. I whispered to my daughter that surely it was
impossible for her to have hired a woman of this sort. I told
the woman psychiatrist that, as regarded her mouth, the proper
thing to do was to see a dentist, which I encouraged her to do
without further delay, without minding us, as we would proceed
without her aid. I informed my daughter that she had
approximately seven minutes to enlighten me as to what events the
accusations mentioned in her letter alluded. At the least, I
could not help but say, holding up a finger to stop my daughter
for just a moment more, the psychiatrist woman should volunteer
the gratuity for having imposed herself upon us--although her
volunteering the gratuity would have done absolutely nothing to
repair the miserable impression she made by cramming whole boxes
of paper tissue into a single nostril. Waiting for my daughter
to speak, waiting while my daughter did not speak, I sipped at my
drink. How refreshing! I told my daughter, holding up a finger,
to be in a country in which drinks make their appearance
unencumbered by ice cubes, a country where one did not even have
to ask for one's drink to be served without ice--where one's
drink was each and every time served without ice. The drink
itself, of course, was no good, I said, no good at all, but the
fact that the drink had no ice, automatically had no ice, eo ipso
made the drink verge on the bearable. Germany taken as a whole
is absolutely unbearable, I said; however, Germany's relationship
to its ice is one of sublime beauty--Frankfurt, I informed my
daughter (who certainly could not help being interested in such
matters) is the unfortunate exception, as is West Berlin. I
settled back to allow my daughter to absorb these simple facts,
and then elucidated. When one goes to Frankfurt or to West
Berlin one never knows, because of the American soldiers in the
first case, and American soldiers and American tourists in the
second case, one never knows whether one will or will not be
served ice. In the same Frankfurt restaurant, in the same West
Berlin restaurant, on the same day of the week, served by the
same waiter, I informed my daughter, one might in the morning be
served a beverage with ice, in the evening be served a beverage
without ice. Appalling! I yelled. Appalling! One must spend
one's time in Frankfurt, in West Berlin, in mortal dread of
whether one's drink will be served with ice or without ice. East
Berlin, however, I said, finishing my drink, is an altogether
different story. One is never served ice in East Germany--but
how long will it last, how long? "One must rebuild the Berlin
Wall for the sake of ice," I declared, pounding my fist on the
table to punctuate my statement. I put my empty glass on the
table, asking my daughter why she had dragged me to Munich and
now refused to discuss those matters which, she had insisted,
were crucial. "Matters of greatest import," I reminded her.
"Child abuse!" I shouted, "My mother's murder! Immediate legal
action! My mother's murder! Child abuse! Matters of the
greatest import! Child abuse! Immediate legal action!" I said.
I was all ears, arrectis auribus, I told her, checking once again
the station clock. Why didn't she speak? I wanted to know. She
had exactly two minutes, I told her; she would have to be
succinct and extremely precise, but it could be done, she was my
daughter. My daughter looked away from me, looked over her
shoulder at her psychologist friend. The latter clutched her
hand into a fist and pressed it against her breast, contorting
her face into what was supposed to be an expression of
solidarity, I assume, but which, with one wad of tissue crammed
up her nose and another wad hanging out from under her top lip,
made her look as if she was a hospital case. My daughter, who
had far too much Grunders in her, apparently found this
nauseating gesture reassuring, for immediately thereafter she
turned toward me, though refusing to meet my gaze, and informed
me that I had slaughtered her mother. My daughter said she knew
that I had pushed her mother out the window of our Dresden
apartment; that, with the help of her psychiatrist friend, she
had been able to "reconstruct the original scene" as it had
"actually happened" eighteen years ago, along, she said, with
some other scenes which illustrated how I had treated her as a
child, what (she said) I had done to "abuse her trust" when she
was a child. After many months of therapy, she claimed to have
succeeded in reconstructing the murder of her mother, and was
prepared to repeat this elaborate joint fabrication of a non-existent original scene to me had I not stood and told her that
her time had expired. I informed her that she could not have
possibly seen me murder her mother, since she had been in the
closet at the time. She had been unable to see anything, let
alone her mother's murder. Her mother had not been murdered by
me, I told her, although circumstances had been contrived by her
to throw suspicion on me. Her mother was a victim of self-
murder, having thrown herself out the window of her own free will
and choice--my daughter herself had been the victim of attempted
(failed) self-murder. Her so-called psychiatrist friend had
created false memories in order to keep extracting a fee from my
daughter, I said. I was not impressed, I said, by the
viciousness of her psychiatrist friend, nor was I impressed by
the viciousness of my own daughter, had I anything else to say to
either of them. Having proved her "Matters of utmost importance"
to be no more than mere trivialities and imaginings, I would
waste no more time at the cafe, nor at the Munich train station,
nor, for that matter, anywhere in Munich. Shaking my daughter's
hand vigorously and thanking her for a delightful visit, I picked
up my valise, and walked hurriedly back to the quay to catch my
train.
I soon found a compartment which, although filthy, was less
filthy than the other compartments, and had the additional
qualification of being empty of other passengers. I took out my
handkerchief and unfolded it, using one side of it to brush clean
the seat upon which I placed my bag. I took off my coat, folding
it neatly, placing it on a seat two seats from the bag. On the
seat between bag and coat, I carefully spread the handkerchief,
soiled side down, and sat down myself. No sooner had I insured
my comfort when I heard an odd repeated tapping on the window,
devoid of any percussionary sense. Glancing over, I was not
surprised to see the ruined mouth of the psychiatrist woman, her
index finger engaged in erratically striking the glass. She
began to wave madly. I refused to acknowledge her existence,
whereupon she actually began beating on the window glass with
both palms, as if to break the glass. I stood up, pulled the shade down between us,
Part I: Station
"Psychiatrist!" she choked out.
"You poor silly thing," I said, "not in the least!" I
pointed to the woman's mouth. "A dentist! A dentist!"
Part II: Cafe
Part III: The Hamburg Train