Yok (25 page)

“I didn't hear a thing,” he whispered.

“Good.”

And with perfect timing, a red Volga Mini pulled up by the sidewalk, and Cocker Spaniel's colleague Karin Lion rolled down the window.

“Turtledoves!” she called. “You'll have to wait with that for a few weeks. So there's something left for later.”

Laughing, Cocker Spaniel got into the car, and as they drove away she stuck her head out and threw air kisses after her. Her long ears fluttered in the wind, and he waved back.

Mike had fallen in love with the idea of falling in love with Cocker Spaniel Rozenblatt even before his first record hit the shelves and he was blessed with stardom and a year in the fast lane. When he saw her for the first time, she was doing volunteer work at his school, helping out the overworked staff during breaks and lunches. He had never seen anyone like her before, with her pearl necklace and ironed skirts down to her knees. Not to mention that she was a few years older than he was. She was acting like the cubs in the Corbod school were not of lesser means but of lesser minds, and she talked very slowly so everyone could understand what an animal from the better part of town was saying. Mike was as provoked as he was fascinated. She didn't seem like a stupid animal, so why did she act that way?

When they started dating—in the beginning she refused to call their meetings “dates”—Mike understood that to Cocker Spaniel, poverty was completely unknown. She acted with caution like any true explorer would in a hostile environment. And that perspective, along with the way she pronounced “Tourquai” and how her world consisted of “who-said-what-to-whom,” while the most common existential and political dilemmas seemed to make no sense to her: Mike envied it all. He pursued their relationship, he himself became an explorer, and he accepted that she went along with it for the same reasons. He was everything her father was afraid of. And the years passed and now he was standing on this sidewalk, waving to her with a wedding chain in his paw. In many ways, it was incomprehensible.

M
ike Chimpanzee took the wedding chains home with him because he was the one who would present them at the wedding ceremony, and during the day's obligatory phone call with Mom—she called around lunchtime every day to make sure he was alive and dry—Mike happened to mention the visit to Vulgaeri. Ilja threw herself into her old, automatic transmission Volga and stormed into the antique shop ten minutes later.

“Where are they, let me see them!” she called out halfway across the threshold.

He showed her the chains, which for her taste were much too minimalistic, but she sighed heavily anyway and shed a large crocodile tear that thankfully fell to the side of the expensive velvet case.

“Now I believe it, my monkeychin, my own little candy troll. Now I believe it. My own little chimpy-wimpykins has become a big ape and is really going to get married. Mrs. Rosenthal can choke on that for real.”

“Mom, can't you just call me ‘Mike'?”

W
hen his mom left, the genie would not leave Mike alone. The frustrated Fredrik had decided to dial up the intensity a few notches, and out of his diffuse mouth bubbled a cavalcade of possibilities that would have aroused unbridled avarice in any stuffed animal: gold, securities, and lotteries with guaranteed winnings. Exclusive wardrobes, classic guitars from Mollisan Town history, handwritten manuscripts by the great masters, horns of plenty, and luxury villas in the resort town of Hillevie. If nothing else, Fredrik demonstrated an imagination born out of his own desperation, and which for that reason lacked limits.

Mike demonstratively remained lying in bed. When the genie addressed him, he stared down at the pages of a random paperback without turning any. The genie was not so dumb that he didn't notice this.

“Mr. Ape,” Fredrik said at last, “it seems as if we're both stuck. Or, which perhaps is closer to the truth, it seems as if you're stuck, both as far as your reading and making a decision is concerned. A little air will do us good so I can take the opportunity to show you instead of telling.”

And so involuntarily, Mike accompanied the genie to the sidewalk outside the store. The afternoon sun was broiling hot from a blue sky, and the chimpanzee did not need to be in the studio until evening, so he actually had all the time in the world. As usual, he assured himself that the street was empty before he went out. If an admirer saw him coming out of the store, his secret residence would be discovered, forcing him to flee.

Otherwise the Corbod neighborhood in Yok was a good place to live for someone as well-known as Mike Chimpanzee. In Corbod, as in Yok in general, you minded your own business, and knew to look away when things happened that didn't concern you. For that reason no one in the neighborhood would claim that a beautiful fifty-foot sailboat was suddenly on a trailer outside the antique store, even though the boat's newly varnished wooden hull glistened in the sun. The boat then disappeared a few minutes later, as if in a fog.

The silver-gleaming truck pulling a trailer with the city's most modern recording studio—complete with instruments and cover press—did not attract any attention either, even though it drove up hissing and groaning. The genie forced Mike to enter this technical sound paradise, but from the ape nothing was heard other than a heavy sigh. Fifteen minutes later, the truck and trailer drove around the corner, and seemed to disappear down into a tunnel that faded away the moment after.

It was one thing that the rootless stuffed animals in the neighborhood knew to show disinterest, but it was even stranger that Mike Chimpanzee remained so indifferent to what Fredrik presented, and this included a diamond whose like had never been seen before, or since, in Mollisan Town. Back on the sofa bed Mike cast a distracted look at the stone and shook his head.

“But, sir, I don't know if you understand,” Fredrik said. “If you only say the word, it can be yours.”

“A diamond? Sorry, Cloud, you'll have to forgive me, but I have other things to think about.”

“Maybe that's the problem?” the genie said. “You still address me as ‘Cloud.' Are you really sure you've understood? I'm a genie. I can fulfill three wishes. Any whatsoever. Shall we start again? This diamond is the most significant precious stone Mollisan Town has ever seen.”

“Shut up now, Cloud,” said Mike. “I have to finish so I have something to show Lancelot tonight.”

And with those words, the chimpanzee picked up his notebook, unmoved by boats and diamonds, and stared down at the pages without reading a line.

 

8.

F
redrik the genie sat on a rocking horse from medieval Lanceheim, watching a mop scrub the wood floors in the antique store. It wouldn't help, he sighed to himself; the filth was ingrained in the floor. But he was forced to do something. He did not consider himself a perfectionist, but it was impossible to stay still, even for a genie.

Mike Chimpanzee was still asleep, even though the Morning Weather had advanced far toward lunch. Using telepathy, the genie dipped the mop in the scrub water, letting it make majestic sweeps under the sofa bed on which the ape was lying.

The genie's master slept often and a lot, which went along with the fact that he smoked or drank all the time. When he came home from the studio in the dawn hours he was thoroughly tipsy. Fredrik shook his head. He shouldn't have done that. His already diffuse, cloudlike facial features came undone, one eye ended up on his cheek and his nose exchanged places with an ear. It took a few seconds to straighten out the puffs of cloud, and instead of repeating the maneuver he sighed heavily.

Any stuffed animal in Mollisan Town would have rejoiced at the opportunity to make three wishes. With very few exceptions the same stuffed animal would have leapt at the villa in Le Vezinot, a golden drying cabinet, or King Carl's spurs. But the genie understood that Mike Chimpanzee would never wish for material things. Perhaps it was after the breakthrough as a star that he realized how fleeting success could be. That for a brief period he had money to buy anything at all, which he did, but realized that, basically, this really didn't change anything. The genie didn't know, nor did he search for explanations. Instead he tried to understand what Mike wanted most of all, and it quickly became obvious: More than anything else, Mike Chimpanzee wanted his song to be on the impending album.

So why didn't he wish for that?

On two occasions the genie had suggested that Mike ought to wish for a song on the album, which made the chimpanzee positively aggressive. The first time it was mostly shouting and unbelievable quantities of vodka. The second time the ape picked up a blow-dryer and went on open attack. It took the genie several minutes to put himself back together. He could not say that he understood Mike's reaction, but he understood that the suggestion must be handled carefully. And if it was brought up again, it had to happen on Mike's terms.

Mike Chimpanzee was a mystery.

The ape had everything. Everyone loved him, and he was recording an album that would most likely consolidate his position as one of Mollisan Town's foremost performers . . . and yet, he seemed mostly depressed. Restless, ungrateful, and gloomy. Searching, confused, and afraid. He seemed to identify himself completely with the role of failed songwriter.

Even more problematic, and threatening for the genie, was that the chimpanzee was uninterested in his remaining wishes.

The genie was convinced of his own inexhaustible imagination and his verbal abilities; his description of the opportunities would have enticed the most recalcitrant. He was a genie, after all. Everything was in his power and he could satisfy them all: the materialist, the humanist, and the idealist. Services, experiences, or things; egotism, altruism, or dualism, Fredrik felt no limitations. Yet he failed where Mike Chimpanzee was concerned. Because the cursed ape simply seemed so absorbed by his own miserable spiritual life, he didn't even have the sense to listen to the genie's enticements.

The previous evening the genie thought he had come very close to granting a second wish, but for some unfathomable reason he had not succeeded in getting all the way to a decision. Mike came home at dawn, intoxicated, and as usual sat down at the desk with the guitar on his lap. The genie spent the night brooding, ready to attack the ape from a new angle. He was exhausted in a way that he assumed was typical for genies; more frustrated than tired. Outside the night sky watched over Corbod and a massive convoy of heavy trucks rolled past on Calle Gran Via in the protection of darkness and the clouds of dust they stirred up.

“If I say Rozenblatt,” the genie said, “what do you say?”

The dear and feared name Rozenblatt appeared so suddenly that Mike stopped playing. He set aside the guitar, looked inquisitively at the genie, and went into the office to get a beer.

“What do you mean, Cloud?”

“Dear Mr. Rock Star Ape,” the genie said formally, “many are the stuffed animals you have managed to dupe, but not your future father-in-law, isn't that right? Because he has seen through you. Your stock is not particularly high there, is it? He knows you can't do dishes.”

Mike opened the refrigerator door and noted there were only about ten bottles left. He would have to ration in the dawn hours.

“I'm not getting married to Mr. Rozenblatt, Cloud,” he answered. “And even if I couldn't do dishes—which of course I can—that's hardly why Cocker Spaniel wants me. She wants me because—”

“Sir, let's not go into that, if you please?” the genie interrupted in horror, adding: “But permit me a certain forwardness, anyway. Being an accepted stuffed animal like the Rozenblatts, that does seem to have a certain significance for you?”

“Bullshit.”

Mike twisted the cap off the bottle and put it to his mouth.

“Really?”

“Bullshit.”

Inside, Chimpanzee was shaken. Up to this moment he had not even admitted to himself what the genie was hinting at: that he actually longed for the acceptance of the Rozenblatt family in a way that went beyond the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Rozenblatt were his future parents-in-law. He drank from the beer bottle. It was not only inconceivable, it was degrading.

“Being accepted by Mr. Rozenblatt,” said the genie, interrupting Mike's train of thought. “Being respected by Mr. Rozenblatt . . . that would feel good, wouldn't it?”

Mike shrugged his shoulders, but he was no actor.

The genie chuckled to himself. It was obvious that he had guessed correctly; this meant a lot to Mike.

The ape took a few more gulps of beer and returned to the desk, where the glow of the lamp fell down over the black notebook open on the underlay. He picked up the guitar. By his body language it was visible that he had yet another worry to bear.

“You only need to ask me nicely,” clarified the genie, who amused himself by hovering out from the office instead of pretending to walk. “And don't think about the wording itself. I'll gladly assist. Shall we call it respect, love, or maybe unconditional admiration? Does it concern both Mr. and Mrs. Rozenblatt, or just one of them? You wish—when I think about it, you don't even need to ask particularly nicely—and then the matter is done. Mr. Rozenblatt will be your latest admirer.”

Mike stared at him for a long time, but then leaned over the guitar and started again plinking the same chord progression that the genie had been forced to listen to many nights in a row. And the moment had passed.

The rest of the morning was as usual; Mike played and the genie nagged. Much could be said about the self-occupied rock performer, but he had an impressive capacity to ignore something if he wanted to.

F
redrik got off the rocking horse, considered pouring the murky water in the bucket over the sleeping chimpanzee, but thought better of it. Acting out his frustration would not help him, and besides, he couldn't raise his hand against his master.