Wolf Haas – Short circuit
“ ‘What’s your name?’ ‘I already told you: Gabriele.’ Marco Steiner laughed. ‘What’s so funny?’ ‘That sounds silly too.’ He was satisfied with this response. Marco knew he must not repeat her name. Words shared in common with his old language were always a problem. Although he had finally accepted that there were women here with a man’s name. Gabriele.”
“One might have gotten the impression that Marco and Gabriele had been invited as witnesses to the two men’s great reconciliation. The next day however Jens could not remember that he had made up with Georgi, but when he saw the drunken pictures from the wedding, there was no going back. Gabi and Marco had a wild time too without having to struggle with any memory lapses, and certainly no lapses when it came to their secrets.
“It was all about towing the line with your words: the invisible line between the world of what had actually happened and what could have been possible. Like a climber you must not slip from this ridge, either to the heaven of sheer empty rhetoric or to the hell of facts of the life lived. The climber remained where they were by falling on both sides simultaneously. Escher suspected that it was at this ridge that all ideas and knowledge were at home. You must not distance yourself from the facts, but nor should you stick to them.
