Vladimir Vertlib: Lucia Binar und die russische Seele (Lucia Binar and the Russian Soul).

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I have closed my eyes. There is no name for what keeps us drifting along. We are nothing more than driftwood in the current of time, drifting towards the timeless end. Is that by Celan too? At least I’ve paid everything off. Death is equivalent to an open-ended loan. Let him hit me, let him kill me if he wants, that Branko. He’s the one who’ll have to live with it.
»Hey! Leave her alone!« I recognise the voice and open my eyes. The androgynous creature has pushed his way between me and my attacker. Has he gone crazy? Branko only needs to snap his fingers and the delicate ethereal Moritz will crumble before my very eyes.
»What do you want, you bimbo?«, Branko asks, scornfully sizing up his adversary, who is half a head shorter than him. »Anyway, are you a boy or a girl?«
»That’s got nothing to do with it«, replies Moritz drily. Branko takes a step towards him and suddenly find himself lying on the floor. A brief yelp, a sound like a double handclap and then silence. Everything happens so quickly that it seems to me as if Branko has slipped on a banana skin, as if he has done half a backwards somersault and then landed hard on his back on the blue-and-white tiles of our old hall floor.
Moritz is standing, bent forward slightly, and looking at the supine Branko reflectively, concentrated, like a scientist who has caught and secured an animal, and is now preparing, full of professional curiosity, to conduct an experiment on it. In the meantime, the young woman has reappeared on the scene. She has readjusted her clothing and combed her hair. A scornful smile darts over her face. »Serves you right!«, she says.
Branko opens his eyes. He is bleary-eyed. He shakes his head, clears his throat, raises his torso, looks at Moritz, takes a deep breath and reacts in a way that I was least expecting of him. »That was really awesome!«, he says. »Where did you learn that? What was it anyhow? Karate? Judo? Or some other shit?«
»Ju-jitsu«, explains Moritz. »Police sports club.«
»Great, the way this boy laid you flat«, the young woman says.
»How d’you know it’s a boy and not a girl?«, Branko asks, standing up and brushing the dirt from his shirt and trousers.
»Anyone can see that.«
Ten minutes later I am sitting with Moritz in his flat. I was expecting a student’s pad with posters on the wall, a mattress in the middle of the living room and a full ashtray on the floor, the kind of place I knew from my children when they were young. Instead, I am led into a lovingly furnished living room, in which I immediately notice a grey soft-toy elephant on the window-sill. The windows are sound-proofed, and the door seems to have been changed recently. The noise from the rest of the building hardly penetrates this oasis of youthful cuddliness at all. The fact that Moritz has put on a CD – a Chopin piano concerto – and offered me a kombucha juice and a mango, an organically grown Fair Trade product« confirms my impression that this is quite a special young man that I’m dealing with.
I thank him for his help and drink the juice, but don’t touch the mango (it looks much too healthy to be enjoyable), and begin to question him a bit. I have already decided to sign his petition to rename Großen Mohrengasse, in order to make him happy, but I don’t want to tell him that until the end of our conversation. He answers in a rather embarrassed and taciturn manner, but does not evade any of my questions.

(pp. 132 ff)
© 2015 Deuticke Verlag, Vienna
Translation by Peter Waugh.

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