Funeral for a Dog: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

her head, clasps her ankles with her hands (you). Several times she screams his first name into the air between them, and when he later asks the reason why (why Daniel Daniel), she answers that she always thinks that when he doesn’t talk back to her. Elisabeth laughs, Mandelkern doesn’t.
    Lost & Found
    My baggage has not arrived in Milan, I’m informed by the woman working at the Lost & Found, at least that’s what the system says. The suitcase is probably in Frankfurt, most likely due to the last minute rebooking, I arrived earlier than my baggage. There is no sense in cursing now. I leave the address of the hotel: Hotel Lido Seegarten, Viale Castagnola 24, CH-6906 Lugano (I’ll have to record the interview with pen and paper).
    Aeroporti Milano Malpensa
    With my plastic bag on a bench next to the bus stop (the airport building dull green, fields of light and glass facades). “The best Malpensa-Lugano connection is the Airport Express!” reads the itinerary that Elisabeth’s intern wrote (a greasy person with a telephone voice and an absurd talent for data banks and timetables). Not far away the small woman in the tank top again, now holding the sleepy boy’s hand. She brushes a damp strand of hair from his forehead with her index finger and looks into the emptiness beyond the buses; she is his mother (but above all she has an inscrutable beauty, a slender beauty). Her legs are short, but much too delicate to seem ungraceful. She looks over at me briefly, then she disappears behind a bus (www.airportbus.ch). I could carry her suitcase (I could offer her my life), but she’s apparently traveling without baggage.
    Biglietto di andata no 133567
    Il biglietto di corsa semplice è valido per il giorno cui è stato rilasciato. La mancata effettuazione del viaggio per causa di forza maggiore o per fatto proprio del passagero non dà diritto ad alcun rimborso, né alla proroga di validità .
    Malpensa—Chiasso—Lugano
    Sometimes people find themselves on a journey together. To my surprise, the small, pretty woman with the boy gets on the bus to Lugano too, this time she’s sitting a few rows behind me. The bus follows entrance ramps onto the highway, traveling at first over flat land (prefab warehouses, Parmalat and Danone factories, palm trees), at one point through a residential area (the backs of five-story houses, laundry between the windows, lots of pink). I read on in the Svensson file: Dirk Svensson, born in 1973 in the Ruhr area and grew up there, the photo in the publisher’s catalogue shows him smiling in front of a stone house, he’s wearing a shirt with rolled-up sleeves and suit pants. He’s kneeling next to a black dog (you can’t tell if it has only three legs: Svensson is blocking the view). His biography sounds like mine (his shirt rolled up like mine). At Chiasso on the Swiss border, the boy stands on the seat and takes the passports out of his backpack, his mother is asleep now (years ago I learned a smattering of Finnish). I hold up Svensson’s book and wink at him, the boy raises his hand (then the bus station on the mountain over the city, the water is shining in the sun like metal, the boats on it like scratches). When we get off the bus and the boy actually waves good-bye to me, I could go over and speak to the two of them, I could offer the small, pretty mother a cigarette, but she pulls the boy across the plaza toward the city and disappears into a gray concrete entrance (Funicolare, pigeons). I take a taxi to Piazza Manzoni and sit down in a café (three mineral waters, the possibility of another life).
    Piazza Manzoni, Lugano, 2:30 PM
    I’m waiting for Svensson. I’ll have two hours to ask my questions. Actually, I should skim through the file one more time, but in my fatigue the letters blur (headache). I wait with a view of the fountain. Lugano is a city that is aware of its beauty: through a gap between the houses shimmers the lake, at times a blindingly white sail, chestnuts,