Free Funeral for a Dog: A Novel by Thomas Pletzinger

answered). Lua trudges ahead, coughing, we walk between the sycamore and the garbage heap around the house. A heavy door, then a dark hallway with a terra-cotta floor, pictures all over the walls and framed photographs with black centers (dogs maybe, Lua maybe). We climb a dark staircase, closed doors on the right and left. The dog breathes heavily in the dark, now the smell of smoke is stronger. Svensson opens a door, then a window, and stands in the backlight (Svensson is an opaque man).
    crematorium
    Over Svensson’s property and over the lake in front of Svensson’s property lies an acrid stench. That’s Claasen, says Svensson, in answer to my question as to whether there isn’t a smell of something burning (state the obvious and casually open the conversation). Clouds of smoke, stretching long and wide, hang over the lake: burning leaves and underbrush, smoldering green wood, burning paper. Svensson is standing with my bag in a room that looks like a study (empty shelves, only a few books). This was my study, he says. Lua flops down on a carpet in a corner of the room. In the other corner lies a mattress with clean sheets. Claasen? I ask, and Svensson nods as if I should be able to understand everything here, as if I had already been here for a long time. Every day at four, says Svensson, Claasen burns another piece of his life. Claasen is his own crematorium.
     
    Can you elaborate on that?
     
    Svensson’s reply: Claasen is his neighbor, a former journalist from Germany, his wife left him, the children are already grown up. Now this pyromaniac in early retirement burns his possessions every day at four, log after log, dry and damp wood, leaves, grass. Svensson opens another window shutter. Furniture, pictures, books. Clothing is the worst. Do you smell that? Melting seventies synthetics: jackets, suits, shirts, dresses. Sometimes Claasen gazes into a book for hours before he throws it into the fire. Depending on the wind direction, a veil of the desire to forget hangs over the shore, when no wind is blowing you sometimes can’t see the other side of the lake (Caravina). Svensson gives me back the bag and turns to the door. Make yourself at home, Mandelkern, get some rest, if you’d like. We’ll call you down for dinner later, and I again say “okay” (you look tired, Mandelkern, Elisabeth would say, lie down).
    my assignment, my profession
    My assignment: get on the trail of Svensson the man. The true personality of the artist, said Elisabeth after the editorial meeting on Friday, always remains hidden behind success stories (this is what interests Elisabeth). My assignment doesn’t have much to do with my vocation. My profession: I’m an ethnologist, even if my dissertation has been shelved for two years (“Thick Participation and Mediated Identity: A Method in Flux”). It deals with distance and proximity (the ethnological dilemma). Sooner or later, everything I write has to do with me, I think, and of all thoughts it is this one with which Svensson leaves me alone in his room (I find myself in the middle of the group under investigation).
    Optolyth
    The room has very high ceilings. The shelves on the walls are nearly empty: a little bit of dust on them as if the books were only just removed, a few novels left behind. On the wall hang three large paintings (about 1 x 2 meters), opposite them under the three windows looking out on the lake stands a small, tidy desk, arranged on it along an invisible grid: two small yogurt jars (La Laitière), in the first a yellow pencil, some paper clips, loose change (Swiss francs, dollars, euros, reais ), in the second a few crayons. Then a letter holder (without letters), an inkwell (without ink), in the middle a pair of binoculars (Optolyth). A hotel bill for 84.50 euros (Hotel Stella d’Italia, dated August 4, 2004). On the back of the desk a row of reference books (show me what you read, and I’ll tell you who you are, Elisabeth once said to me, referring to my