Leipzig Book Fair – the right direction

Being in Görlitz was of course a failure that I owed to André Gide. In “Les Caves du Vatican” he lets Lafcadio throw the fleurissoire completely unknown to him out of the moving train, just like that, out of your mood. This motivated by nothing, basically absurd deed is what literary studies calls an “file Gratuit”. And the act of arbitrariness should, the André Gide thought, was an expression of an individual resistance to the causality of storytelling, a sign of the possibility of the individual against his determination. A very nice rubbish, but expected by André Gide, who has always been everything: Christian and gay and left, who was against real communism against real, and never actually could do it right.

I wanted to know more about whether that was going to just get someone out of the train – not that I would have planned it myself, in today’s trains the doors can no longer be opened by hand, but I wanted to imagine it; And for such a undertaking, Görlitz seemed to me to be the right direction. It was of course a fiasco, I didn’t seriously think about how it could be to get someone out of the train, but only what I could eat for lunch in Görlitz.

Actually, I wanted to drive back directly, but behind us a storm was raised and had thrown a tree, directly on the rails of the only railway line that connects the Görlitz with the rest of the world, and so I was now sitting in the »Café Torberg«, three paving stones from the train station, and drank Belgian cherry beer.

The “Café Torberg” is a huge hall in which five chandeliers have space, and which looked even larger because you had fully mirrored a wall; You could easily stop balls here if there were enough Görlitzer, but we were only there in pairs, I at the bar and diagonally behind me someone I thought I had already seen him on TV. “The glasses,” I said to myself, “you know,” I remembered: this was the case: Tex Rubinowitz had to be, which was struggling through the menu, which basically only consisted of beer, Soljanka and Escargots de Bourgogne.

It would never have occurred to me in Vienna or Berlin, but I was in Görlitz, so I took my glass and suddenly sat down at his table. Tex Rubinowitz lifted his head surprised and dropped out sharply past me. I should have said something now, but at that moment I worked out that I didn’t know if I was supposed to do it or duk. I had just read his book “Turn the Moon for” and also had a few questions – which was actually his opinion on Abba and Elfriede Jelinek – but I was completely aware that these varieties from Lamäng appears to be clumsy at best, what should you say about Elfriede Jelinek at midday half one in Görlitz while the rain begins to fiss.

I am not good in improvising, another reason why this whole train journey had been a completely meaningless idea, so I just asked: “What drink?” Tex Rubinowitz nodded, I went to the bar and ordered two Kirsch beer. When I came back, he looked a bit brighter, although he continued to look stubbornly, no longer on the menu, but on the foiled wooden table. I leafed through my skills; It was clear to me that he was so far ahead in terms of painting, music and pop culture, but also in Nordic literature and gossip from the artist scene that a conversation would be bored faster than this table top in front of him, and I didn’t want that now.

But something I had to say, so I was clearing myself and asked completely suddenly: “Do you love Boris Vian?” I seemed to be a obvious question, Tex Rubninowitz with his diverse talents and his playful, fantastic, always true texts, so to speak, was a kind of intellectual descendant, but he seemed less convincing. He plucked himself at the earlobe and said: “Yes, why not.” Maybe I turned into a word, but then Tex Rubinowitz only shook your head: “You can love everything that is not worthy of hate,” he said, and there she was again, this Rubinowitz’s tender of the abrasion, which is careful for his own longing.

If that were an interview, I thought, I would now have what I wanted and could go, but this tree was still on the only railway line out of Görlitz. So I asked him what he was looking for in Görlitz, and then he answered me without even looking: “A little rest.” And then we sat together for two hours with the cherry beer without saying another word; And I thought of one of those beautiful sentences that he had given me in “Turn the moon”: “I am a positive disappointed”, and myself, a nice feeling that I half as much as attributed to the cherry beer.

Tex Rubinowitz: Turn the moon over. Valve, 272 p., Br., 20 €.