Jungk The Inheritance

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-908968-65-4
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

A harrowing chase from Venezuela to Miami, Peter Stephen Jungk's The Inheritance is a vivid, Kafkaesque novel set against the chaos of Hugo Chavez's doomed 1992 military coup. Daniel Loew, a poet based in London, has been told since childhood that one day he would become his wealthy uncle's only heir. When he learns of his uncle's death, in Caracas, a few weeks have since passed. A close friend of his uncle's tells Loew that he alone has been named executor of the will and blocks Loew from receiving his inheritance... Loew the poet must become Loew the man of action as he fights desperately to regain his inheritance. Peter Stephen Jungk's The Inheritance is translated from the German by Michael Hoffman in Pushkin Press. 'Yet another thrilling, vividly narrated novel from the pen of Peter Stephan Jungk - a plot worthy of film...'- Focus 'This eventful, thrilling novel proves to be the parable of a world whose heirs have all the rights, but cannot do anything with them...'- Die Zeit Peter Stephan Jungk (b. 1952) was born in Los Angeles and raised in several European cities. In 1974 he moved to Los Angeles and studied at UCLA and the American Film Institute, before releasing his first collection of short stories in 1978. Since then, he has written a further eight books, including The Snowflake Constant, Crossing the Hudson, and, most recently, The Inheritance. His fictional biography of Walt Disney's last months, The Perfect American, is being developed into an opera for performance in Madrid and London by Philip Glass.

Peter Stephan Jungk was born in 1952 in Los Angeles and raised in several European cities. Since 1988 he has been living in Paris and works as author, film script author, translator, and essayist.A former screenwriting fellow of the American Film Institute, he is the author of eight books, including the acclaimed biography Franz Werfel: A Life from Prague to Hollywood (1990) and the novels The Snowflake Constant shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (Faber and Faber, 2002 - published in the US as Tigor by Handsel Books 2003), and The Perfect American (Handsel Books, 2004), a fictional biography of Walt Disney's last months, which was turned into an opera by Philip Glass. Peter Stephan Jungk has been published extensively, his creative works extending also to the media of radio and television.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jungk, Peter Stephan

Weitere Mitwirkende

Hofmann, Michael

Leseproben

3

ESTHER MORENO

NO-ONE IS ALLOWED TO LEAVE THE HOTEL. There is a long line of people in the lobby of the El Presidente, waiting to be admitted to the restaurant. Daniel joins the hapless ones, as they shuffle forwards. He listens to their conversations—the missed flights, the postponed trips, the delayed business meetings. A captain, whose cruise ship is at anchor in the port of La Guaira, is unable to join his crew. An eye specialist expected back at her clinic in Los Angeles tomorrow has had to cancel all operations for the next several days.

It feels unbearable to Daniel to stay in the queue of people, waiting like cattle to be fed. He goes back up to his room, and drapes himself in a couple of towels. Walks down a long passage in the basement, and finally reaches the swimming pool. The surface of the water is absolutely still. There is no one there. Deckchairs, parasols glimmer dully in the light. A smell of chlorine and heat.

He slips into the water. He has always felt in his element in a swimming pool. He swims on his front, mechanically repeating the simple, unchanging movements of arms and legs that he learnt at eight or nine under the turn-of-the-century cupola of the Diana Baths in Vienna, long since demolished. He swims with stamina from end to end, and back and forth. Overhead, twenty stories soar into the sky. The palms creak in the hotel gardens. Two parrots fly back and forth in a spacious cage, and shriek, as if their lives were in danger.

Daniel keeps seeing the picture of his uncle in front of him, smiling. Always smiling. Not just when he was being photographed did Alexander Stecher Bravo smile, he smiled in every conceivable situation. A slender man, always clean-shaven. Glasses, from early boyhood. Every day he wore a clean white shirt, and always a tie, even when it was very hot. His hair was white and kept short.

“Muy bien! Muy bien!” squawks one of the parrots.

He was just four; his uncle Alexander, fifty-two years older, was sitting at the foot of his bed, on the eighteenth floor of the New York hotel, the St Moritz, on Central Park South. His parents were going out that evening, to the world première of West Side Story on Broadway. They had left the relative whom Daniel had met for the first time a couple of hours before, never having seen him before, with the task of babysitting. For more than half-an-hour you were shaking your head, Stecher was still telling his nephew decades later, just incessantly. I thought you must be some kind of idiot. But then you suddenly stopped, and you blinked, and you saw that it was me who was sitting beside you, as always immersed in the stock market reports in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times. You sat up, looked at me, and said: ‘Oh, you’re here, so there’s no point in my still shaking my head!’ And minutes later you were blissfully asleep.

Calm strokes, from end to end of the pool. The creaking of a rusty deckchair.

In a legal sense, Daniel Loew is not Alexander Stecher Bravo’s nephew, even though he has always felt and described himself as such. Daniel’s father, Jacob, had two cousins on his mother’s side, the sons of his mother’s only sister—Arnold and Alexander. Arnold, a high-school teacher, and a passionate ornithologist in his free time, died without having married or left any heirs. Alexander, another obdurate bachelor, had no children either. Stecher spoilt his second cousin from when he was born. Almost every year he travelled to Europe from Caracas, either flying or taking ship to Le Havre. For Jacob, his first cousin, Alexander had little interest. Whenever they would meet, both were lost for words.

His hair is still wet from the pool when he walks into the windowless dining room. There is barely anything left to eat on the long buffet table. Twenty neon lights give off a chill light. In the middle of the ceiling there’s a mirror ball. On gala evenings it’s set in motion, scatters lightings over the room.

From the almost empty platters he picks up a few withered lettuce leaves, an end of cheese, some greyish slices of sausage and dried-out pieces of white bread. A copper saucepan contains three bony pieces of oxtail in a black gravy. He sits all alone in the hangar-sized room. Gulps down what little is on his plate. Gets up to hunt for a piece of fruit.

A woman enters the room. Her eyes put him in mind of a deer’s caught in heavy nets. Her long white neck thrusts out in every direction. “I’m hungry!” she calls out. And once more: “I’m hungry!”

He gives her two oranges, the last there are.

“Let’s share,” she says.

He returns to his place, the round table is littered with leftover food, crumpled paper napkins, dirty cutlery, empty bottles and glasses. The unknown woman sits down at his table with him. Tears the peel off the oranges. Daniel becomes aware of a mild heat spilt by his solar plexus over his thighs and groin. A black Alice band holds the woman’s reddish, wiry curls back. She has beige fluff on her upper lip. Her suit, which is made of expensive material, is a little crooked on her, it’s too big for her, inherited, as it might be, from a heavier, broader relation. Her high heels are a little tight on her feet. He takes her to be roughly the same age as himself, late thirties. Her skin seems dry, her lips cracked, as though the climate were ice and snow. She has tiny, soft, blonde hairs on her cheeks and her prominent cheekbones. She gobbles up the orange he gives her.

Years ago she experienced a coup in Caracas, the woman says. “The rebels barricaded themselves into the fifth floor of the house I was living in at the time, and fired at the government troops until at the end of two days they were overpowered, and finished off there and then with shots to the head.” Stray bullets and pieces of shrapnel found their way into her apartment on the fourth floor, and damaged the Chagall painting she’d inherited from her grandparents called Leoncin in Winter, shattered her wardrobe, sideboard and a two hundred-year-old clock.

She picks the last few lettuce leaves off the metal dishes on the sideboard, and goes back to the table. She moved to Miami after the last government crisis, it was only a week ago that she returned to Caracas for the first time, to sell her apartment. “Ever since emigrating, I’ve kept trying to sell it, but my attempts have been unsuccessful,” not least because some distant relatives settled in it, and refused to be dislodged. Finally, she decided she had to take her family to court, and had already got in touch with a lawyer. But now the military coup would put an end to all such efforts for an unknown length of time. She stops to draw breath. “What about you? What are you doing here, who are you, what’s your name?” Her nasal voice has something whiny and plaintive about it, the torrent of her long sentences something oddly tired and bored.

The white plates reflect back the light of the neon tubes. There’s commotion in the background—a group of hotel guests are complaining because the telephone is down. They demand to be driven to the airport. The people on reception tell them the airport will be closed until further notice to all national and international flights. It was not possible to call a taxi, because naturally all taxi drivers were themselves subject to the citywide curfew.

“You don’t need to tell me if you don’t want,” says the woman. “I just thought, from the way you were sharing your oranges with me, that I must have known you before, even though I suppose we have never met before and might never see each other again. Time isn’t chronology, as people generally suppose. Time is the great everything-at-once, yesterday-today-tomorrow-always, if you know what I mean.”

In the lobby, the commotion is settling down. People are returning to their rooms.

“This is my first visit here … I arrived the day before yesterday.” He speaks very softly.

“On business?”

“My uncle lived here, for over fifty years …”

“I see! You’re visiting your uncle! …”

“He died a few months ago …”

“And before that … I mean, while he was alive … did you never visit him? Or did you have a quarrel?”

“He came to me. Almost every year.”

“I’m sorry, but … weren’t you at all curious about his life, his place?”

Daniel does not reply.

“And now? Why are you here now,” she continues, “now that he’s dead?”

He remains silent.

“I’ve got time, a lot of time, thanks to the circumstances of this peculiar day. What am I to do? Sit in my room and ponder? Think about my husband? He died of a heart attack when he was just forty-nine. We were happy together, very happy, if I may say so.”

She puts out a leg, her pointed knee touches his knee, as if by accident. Now she looks simultaneously pert, pretty and sad.

“Do I … remind you of anyone?”

He shakes his head.

“What’s your star sign?” she asks.

“Sagittarius.”

“Just like mine—December the eighth.”

“What a coincidence—mine’s the ninth.”

She smiles contentedly. “You said your uncle passed away five months ago?”

“He was over ninety …” Loew is gathering up the breadcrumbs on his plate into a little pile the size of a fingernail. “What do you do … in Miami?”

“When my husband died, he left me enough money that I can live in comfort till I’m a hundred and fifty.” Her half-embarrassed grin gives her a strangely...