The Zeppelin

I have seen a Zeppelin twice.

The first time it was August.
At the end of July I had come out of hospital holding in one hand a small bundle, which was my growing daughter, and in the other a flame-red gladiolus, which I had been given by the hospital as a present and which stuck out in my hand like a sword.
The gladiolus did not consent to wither. Even in August, when I was rejected and my three week-old daughter felt I was a strange and alien being, I sat on the sofa with the alien child in my arms and stared at my arrogant, unwithering sword.
And through the window, on the point of the sword, appeared a Zeppelin. On its side were the words Good Year, and it sailed from the right side of my field of vision to the left, with nightmarish slowness. It wished me a happy new year, and I did not believe it.


Now it is the first hot day of summer.
On the deep, black surface of the pond there is a crust of ice. I am breaking it when the silent Zeppelin appears in the sky.
The Zeppelin hovers low, so low that I could touch it with my hand.
But the Zeppelin sinks over my head into the pond, and I open my mouth to shout for help, but my throat remains voiceless.
The Zeppelin lies in the pond, and its grey metal roof sticks out of the water like the back of a burbot.
I wade out to  the Zeppelin.
I climb on to its roof and find the roof hatch.
I open it.


And then the others arrive.



The people are walking above me, noisy and laughing.
The people have picnic baskets with them.
There may be corpses here, I try to say, but I am the only one who has no voice at all.
I go down into the Zeppelin with the picnickers.



Inside the Zeppelin an enormous palace opens.
The vestibule is still lit, but the crash has cut off the electricity to the rooms which are separated by heavy salmon-red curtains.
The picnickers open their baskets and bottles of wine, and holding sandwiches or wine-glasses they begin to empty the Zeppelin of its contents.
You shouldn't rob the dead, I try to say, but now not even my mouth will open any more.


And I am also seized by the termites' feverish frenzy.
I push my way through the crowd to a room in whose darkness the silhouettes of lamps are visible.
There are hundreds of lamp-stands, lampshades and crystal chandeliers; there are thousands of them.
No one else but me is interested in the lamps, I can take them all.
But when I touch a lampshade, it tears, and the brass lamp-stand crumbles to dust.
One of the chandeliers is made of fish-scales.
But fortunately there are other rooms.
There is a drawing-room, which is full of decorative antiques: chubby-cheeked garden gnomes, a shepherd carved in ebony playing a pan-pipes, twenty Rebeccas at the well, strange porcelain twins sitting on a bed, one of whom is black and the other pink.
I light a candle which has appeared in my hand from somewhere.
The gnome is not at all three-dimensional, but flat, wrought in rusty sheet metal.
The Rebeccas are flesh and skin, but already in a state of putrefaction.


But I don't give up.


In the burning white drawing room there is a chest of drawers the length of the wall, full of small drawers.
I open the top drawer, and at the same time from between my legs thrusts a curved-handled walking stick, which opens the bottom drawer.
Both drawers are empty.
All the drawers are empty.

I go up on to the roof of the Zeppelin.
Autumn has come. The trees are aflame with blood red, but the air smells of a frosty and starlit night.



When I wake up, I remember that father is dead.
I decide to write this book.


Translated by David Mcduff