inspo/characterisation

[...] But on a number of other points too, Ivan thinks, his brother has long been a person of good sense. On the subject of how to deal with their mother’s boyfriend Frank, for instance. Or how to tell a waiter politely that they’ve brought the wrong food. Ivan has even observed Peter doing this. Looking down at the plate, he will say in a friendly offhanded kind of voice: Ah, I think it was the tortellini for me. He doesn’t hesitate before saying it, he just says it right out, completely normal. This is not a skill Ivan urgently needs to cultivate, considering how seldom he frequents restaurants, considering that he has almost literally no money, but he would still like to have this skill in his pocket for the rare occasions on which a waiter brings him the wrong dish, to be able to say nonchalantly: Ah, I think it was the tortellini.

He’s sitting in the bar of the Berolina, getting drunk. Ingrid didn’t want to talk to him tonight, which was maybe for the best, but what was he going to do by himself in his one-room box. He didn’t want to take a single step without Katharina. The kid has optimism for two, she needs to, and she sweeps him along. A creature of the new age. Unbroken, hale, well-raised. Somehow pure. If she were otherwise, he would hardly desire her as he did. And not in that way. She uses B for belt in her diary on those days. Table + B. Her shame shows, even through the abbreviation. She’s ashamed but goes on sticking her bottom out to him. She knows how beautiful she is. A human being, doesn’t that sound splendid. Maxim Gorky wrote. And he, Hans, pulls off his belt, and brings it down with a hiss on her behind. And when she’s not there, he gets tight in the bar of the Hotel Berolina. When the moment comes for you to die, and you wonder: what are you dying for? Then suddenly with shocking clarity, a gaping black void will open before you, Bukharin had said to the court that had just sentenced him. There is nothing here to die for, only death full of regrets. Bukharin, Lenin’s comrade in arms, darling of the Party, shot by a firing squad of his own people in 1938. Gorky’s sentence and Bukharin’s last words as the two poles of the Soviet system. That’s what he would like to write his novel about, only no one would print it in the East. And in the West no one would understand it.

Suck it is Danny’s favorite phrase, which he employs as a general greeting. Sometimes he inflects it as a question: Suck it? Directed at a female, it might often be appended: Suck it, sista. This is only for staff members, of course; our patrons will more likely get an egregiously enthusiastic What’s up, my brother? accompanied by a handshake/backslap combination. (If you’re one of his friends you might receive a more sincere What’s up, my fucking brother?) Egregious enthusiasm is Danny’s trademark—he can transmit his buzz and momentum to anyone at will. This is called charisma. His charisma—any charisma, I suppose—is entirely performance, yet in being never more nor less than a performer he somehow remains endearingly genuine. He might embrace a beautiful woman, kiss her on both cheeks, escort her to the bar—What do you like, sister, what do you want? Cosmo? Martini? Chardonnay? Tequila? Tongue kiss? That’s what I thought—Ethan, get my lover here a glass of Mer Soleil, thank you brother—Good to see you, love—and as soon as he spins around to answer your question mutter Dirty whore, suck it.

Almost every question must be brought to Danny, because it’s his restaurant. These people want a booth instead of a table, ask Danny. You want Friday off this week, ask Danny. The guy said his steak looked more medium than rare and he wants a different one, better check with Danny. Music’s too loud, lights are too low, the room’s too cold, tell Danny. You want to go to Silver City, ask Danny—he’s king there and she’ll fuck you for real in a back room at his word. You want tickets to the game or an eight o’clock reservation at Tei Tei, which doesn’t take eight o’clocks—Danny will work it out for you. You need a bump, ask Danny—but not until after service, he never starts till almost everybody’s out of the building.

Everything about Jim was in huge proportions: over six foot three, he was lean and lanky, with a luxuriant mantle of shining jet hair cast carelessly over his elongated back, and a leopard walk, his limbs curving forward like a giant, caged cat. Jim had the most majestic hands; to say they were the hands of a keyboard player would understate their magnitude and grace. They were hands from the workshop of Henry Moore, with immense, broad, flat fingers, languid under their intelligent weight. At the piano, these organs were possessed, animated by the contortions of Scriabin’s music, in the disciplined expression of an emotional range which no other medium afforded him.

Not philosophy, and this was Jim’s tragedy. He found no way—not even Nietzsche’s example—of bringing his inner emotional turmoil into his philosophy, his discipline, his art. Philosophy remained cleverness, a game, but not a stage on life’s way; it remained aesthetic without an oeuvre, as did everything and everyone else for him.

There was a group of us young people, closer than brothers. Raymond, the short-sighted little tough with a sarcastic bent, went back every evening to his drunken old father, whose neck and face were a mass of fantastically knotted muscles. His sister, young, pretty, and a great reader, passed her timid life in front of a window adorned with geraniums, amid the stench of dirty old shoes, still hoping that, some day, someone would pick her up. Jean, an orphan and a part-time printer, lived at Anderlecht, beyond the stinking waters of the Senne, with a grandmother who had been laundering for half a century without a break. The third of our group of four, Luce, a tall, pale, timorous boy, was blessed with “a good job” in the L’lnnovation department store. He was crushed by it all: discipline, swindling, and futility, futility, futility. Everyone around him in this vast, admirably organized bazaar seemed to be mad, and perhaps, from a certain point of view, he was right to think so. At the end of ten years’ hard work, he could become salesman-in-charge, and die as the head of a department, having catalogued a hundred thousand little indignities like the story of the pretty shop assistant who was sacked for rude behavior because she refused to go to bed with a supervisor.

Random moment earlier tonight: out of the blue Todd asked everyone in the Habitrail 2, “When they make processed cheese slices that are only 80 percent milk, what’s the remaining 20 percent made from?”

Michael replied instantly, “Why, nonmilk additives, of course.”

Yes, she sounds sane, doesn’t she, among all these other people I’m working around? But then she has always had money – she has never not had money. Money is carelessly present in the cut and texture of her clothes, her leathery accoutrements, in rug-brilliance and mouth tone. The long legs have travelled, and not just through time. The clean tongue speaks French, Italian, German. The expectant eyes have seen things, and expect to see more. Even as a girl her lovers were always hand-picked, an elite, far above the usual rabble of irregulars, mercenaries, pressed men. Her smile is knowing, roused and playful, but also innocent, because money makes you innocent when it’s been there all along. How else can you hang out on this planet for thirty years while still remaining free? Martina is not a woman of the world. She is a woman of somewhere else.

This brilliant and versatile young man was studying chemistry and turned a deaf ear to all questions that had no clear-cut answer. He was, indeed, an embittered opponent of all such considerations and was a fanatical disciple of the cool, soberly fantastical, world-encompassing spirit of modern technology. He was in favour of doing away with the emotions. He was the antagonist of poetry, kindness, virtue, simplicity. Song-birds need a branch to perch on, and the branch a tree, and the tree the dumb brown earth to grow in; but he flew, he was between the ages, he was somewhere in mid-air. After this age, one that destroys just as much as it constructs, there will come one that will inherit the new premises we are so ascetically creating, and only then will it be possible to say what we ought to have felt about things. Such was more or less his train of thought. For the time being the thing was to be as tough and austere as on an expedition.