Nicotine Page 3

  She never owned an address book. She had a sister, our grandmother, who she’d been corresponding with only via a lawyer for decades, and three school friends who came by once a week to play canasta and milk her generosity. The ladies came by bus from Bremen city centre, drank my aunt’s good schnapps, ate her homemade cherry cake, played a couple of games and then were gone again. Our aunt went on a round-the-world trip shortly after she retired in 1975 or 1976 with one of them, Elke, who was likewise unmarried. She sent my father the Super 8 films while she was still travelling, and he sent them on to Kodak to be developed. Every one of them came out shaky. My first thought now would be Parkinson’s, but back then we just laughed.

  I’m sure she paid for Elke to take the world trip too, Stefan says. He must have been having the same train of thought as I was at exactly the same moment. We watched the whole Hong Kong film at the time: the six precious Kodak minutes of the shaking behinds of a pack of German pensioners in Kowloon made a deep impression on me. The way the ladies shuffled across the Nathan Road, past the park to the gigantic, filthy Chungking Mansions. I would spend an oppressive summer there a few years later lying on a bunk directly under the sweaty, sloping, yellow-green ceiling of the sleeping hall packed with Indians, filling a pile of notebooks with my pencil in just my underpants; a good four hundred pages, which never wanted to come together and become the great postcolonial novel that I had intended.

  I flinch at the buzz of the doorbell. The door’s been left open. A man holds out a clipboard and a pen. He asks me to sign and gives me two cartons of cigarettes. He bids me a good afternoon and turns back to his white delivery van standing on the street with the motor running. A mink hangs on the coat rack next to the door. Two fur hats on the rack look warm and lively, like they’re only sleeping. Above an old, zinc milk churn offering an abundance of colourful umbrellas hangs a Gloria brand fire extinguisher. I take the cigarettes into the living room.

  She never married. She remained faithful to the Brinkmann Company in Burgdamm, Bremen her whole working life; a cigarette factory that produced, among others, the market-leading light cigarette Lord Extra. As former president of the works council, Aunt Anna had a considerable pension and a monthly cigarette allowance of a carton of Lord Extra and a carton of Peer Export as wages-in-kind delivered by courier. This allowance wouldn’t expire until 2071, a hundred years after the start of her pension, and indeed independent of her own final exhalation, her last expiratory act.

  I took such payments in kind for granted during my childhood. My great-grandfather on my father’s side was a driver at the Deinhard sparkling wine cellars in Coblenz and my grandmother commanded a sizable income of Sekt and wine long after his death, which helped her to rise the ranks and become unchallenged queen of the Coblenz black market during the ruinous war years. She exchanged the Bubbes – that’s what she and the other Coblenz inhabitants called the bottles – for butter, coal, potatoes and, of course, cigarettes. The Deinhard cellar was classified as a ‘critical war supplier’ and spent the war years producing wine for the officers’ mess. When I told my classmates about the allowances they looked at me blankly, almost as if I’d lost my marbles. My primary school teacher also didn’t seem to understand what I meant when I mentioned seeing the allowance of bubbly next to the conserved, unsweetened gooseberries we would eat with cream in an essay about my excursion into the storage cellar in Pfaffendorf.

  Aunt Anna only smoked occasionally and happily gave most of her monthly ration to our mother, and later to us children. I didn’t smoke many filter cigarettes in my youth, only when I didn’t have money for tobacco or filterless cigarettes. Sometimes, with a brief flick of my wrist, I would tear the filter out. Though our aunt smoked infrequently, she did so with a peculiar ravenousness, like my grandfather and many other older people I’ve noticed since. It’s as if they’d waited their whole lives for this first drag. Or as if it were their last. She would stick the cigarette right into the hinge between her index and middle fingers and hold her whole hand in front of her mouth, giving her a shocked expression whenever she smoked. She would inhale deeply and frantically with her eyes wide open, sometimes with a strange, faltering gasp like she was being suffocated.

  It was an open secret in our family that Aunt Anna had always been in love with the chief executive of Brinkmann. That she, in a manner of speaking, had to maintain a conflicting relationship with the chairman while also acting as employee representative of the business cast a tragic, almost mythical shadow across this love. On top of this, the guy was married. I understood early on that they were the Romeo and Juliet of the German cigarette industry. In the late fifties or early sixties this love must have come close to being fulfilled. Every so often, Aunt Anna would tell us in suggestive words and with shining eyes of a spontaneous journey she had taken to Switzerland, to a lake (I seem to remember it being Lake Lugano) where the chief executive – a stately man with horn-rimmed glasses and a deep tan – maintained a property. When my aunt reached this point in her story she would fall silent, pull a Lord Extra out from its packet with her smooth, stubby fingers, light up and look out into the pewter grey north German autumn sky.

  We pick the stronger Peer Export. I fetch a bottle of Güldenhaus Eiswette – a clear, corn schnapps produced in Bremen – from the freezer compartment and pick up two shot glasses and a luminous blue glass ashtray from the sideboard on my way back. It’s so heavy you could kill someone with it. Stefan, who’s pulled up a chair, gets down on his knees like an old farmer, bends forward, pours to the rim and passes me a glass. I’ve sunk so deeply into the Deng Xiaoping chair that I can barely hope to ever get out of it again, especially after the Eiswette. I am exhausted.

  To Aunt Anna, Stefan says, raising his glass.

  To her love, I say.

  Outside is the overly high hedge, and the orange-coloured awning that we’ll have to have replaced before we sell the house. I rip out the filter, flip the cigarette and light up. The hundred-year stipend now belongs to us. Everything that remains from this life now belongs to us.

  I once owned a house in the American countryside that hid a gigantic ant colony beneath its gently sloping, prettily laid out front garden. The entire parcel of land was infiltrated. A passer-by, throwing only a fleeting look over the place, would have been completely unaware of it. Maybe they would have delighted in seeing the freshly painted, light blue wooden façade, the glorious irises. But the moment I stuck a spade into it, the moment I pulled up just a single patch of weeds or disturbed a mossy slab with my foot, whole armies of combat-ready army ants gazed up at me; powerful, shimmering red specimens evidently waiting only for me. They streamed into the daylight in their thousands, the earth would appear to be in motion, and I’d be seized by vertigo.

  I sometimes feel that my addiction lurks under the surface of my life in a similar way. I no longer smoke. You wouldn’t look at me and think I had ever smoked. I exercise every day and I’m a member of the German Alpine Association, the Berlin section. I’ve got my asthma under control and can breathe better than ever before, in fact the volume of my lungs has doubled over the last twenty years. I remember how a biology teacher measured this volume with an apparatus. A tube was placed in a beaker filled with water that the students would take turns blowing into. The displaced water was collected in an overflow beaker and showed us our expiratory vital capacity. When the teacher saw my pitiful results he gave me a peeved look. Then he realized I’d given it my all and the annoyance gave way to dismay. I was privately pleased with my result, I’d known for a long time that I had a weak chest. These breathing difficulties would save my skin one day. I was pulled over on a road leaving Düsseldorf and told to blow into a breathalyzer. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t blow long and consistently enough for it to beep. The officers got annoyed and let me drive on.

  Today I’m a healthy non-smoker in my best years, apparently, but no matter where I begin my story, no matter where I scratch the surface, I always alight upon ci
garettes, on nicotine, on an addiction that had a hold on me most of the time, for most of my life. Whether I actually smoke or not, my personality is a smoker’s personality. My story is transfixed by cigarettes, and my body cannot forget what I put it through during those years. The life I led is smoke-screened to such an extent that I have to get very close to even see it. Sometimes it makes my head spin.

  I no longer smoke, but today I will acquire my final cigarette. A couple are sitting in a Hollywood swing seat with a grey army-style blanket over their knees in front of a café on a dim yellow street corner in Berlin. They have stopped the swing and are only managing to balance precariously thanks to the grip on the soles of their Pumas. The young woman leans far forward and puts her cigarette out in an ashtray made from punched out tin that’s sitting on an overturned fruit crate. Only then do they let the seat swing again, the man putting his arm around his girlfriend’s shoulder. When I see people relaxing like this I always hear my father’s voice in my head: Don’t they have something better to do? When my father wanted to grind out the point that the behaviour – especially the bad behaviour, and especially the laziness – of individual people can affect the whole of society, the expression ‘economic damage’ was deployed every time without fail. There are experts in this. For example, imagine you’re stuck in a traffic jam heading south. A driver gets out of his car to get a bottle of lime iced tea out the back while the car in front of him has already started moving to make up a few metres. A gap appears. Even though the driver is soon back behind the wheel and has quickly caught up, even though it looks like his actions have had no consequences either for him or the wider community, he has in fact set in motion a delay that extends right to the end of the traffic jam and has possibly affected thousands of drivers, tens of thousands of people, who have lost seconds of their more or less worthwhile lives, easily adding up to a few hours, even a whole working day. A German labourer costs us, let’s say, eighty or a hundred Deutschmarks an hour, my father would explain, the economic damage is considerable, we’ve paid dearly for that lime iced tea.

  So much for my father’s etho-economic lecturing, in which words like good and evil, injustice and moral had no place. There are in fact departments at big insurance firms and certain university research facilities that calculate how much it costs society if a young woman sits and smokes in a Hollywood swing seat instead of spending time at the gym, reading Charles Dickens, constructing a suspension bridge or peeling cucumbers. Each of these scenarios has its own economic value. If I had journalist blood flowing through my veins I’d immediately try and get an appointment at one of these departments. But this isn’t that kind of book. I’d interview a crazy, eccentric and naturally somewhat unhappy specialist in applied mathematics who would confirm precisely what my father always said – that everything has its price; even if there is never a transaction that determines the value, it can nevertheless be quantified. One just has to calculate it.

  While they’re at it, maybe they’d also be able to prove if it’s easier for some people to build a suspension bridge or read Charles Dickens while smoking. Peeling cucumbers is a bit different, I think to myself, and approach the couple. I ask the woman for a cigarette. Actually, I think to myself, this economic destruction machine owes me one, after all, she’s cost me a great deal. In spite of this my heart’s thumping, it’s as if I’m doing something forbidden. The languid, mildly dis-tracted gaze of the man meets mine. I can pay you for it, I say, a sentence that’s often served me well. It works every time. When I still smoked I would hold out fifty pfennigs or cents, which corresponded to more than a 100 per cent mark-up; nowadays a cigarette costs between twenty and twenty-five cents. It’s an offer that the receiver acknowledges but must ultimately reject in order not to come across like an extortioner. Smokers know from their own experience that in certain situations their fellow smokers would pay a lot more for a cigarette, they would give anything for one, but a code of honour prevents them from profiting from the addiction of others.

  No worries, she says and knocks a cigarette out of the pack. I get a Benson & Hedges for nothing and reach over with a smile. On the short way back I think two things: firstly, that an expression like ‘no worries’ is far more complex than it first appears. ‘No worries’ means: actually, you’re causing me a great inconvenience, but I’ll let you off of this debt. I’ll decide when it’s up, don’t forget, I am benevolent and charitable. Secondly, I wonder if there are rubber gloves in the bucket under my sink.

  Back upstairs at the flat I take a white, clean piece of paper from my printer, lie it horizontally on the table and position the cigarette on it, centred and exactly parallel to the longer edges. I contemplate the composition, a picture. Ceci n’est pas une cigarette. Two dark spots where my fingertips touched the cigarette paper. What I need is a scalpel, but I don’t even have a sharp knife. Then the scraper for the ceramic-top oven comes to mind, a razor blade clamped into a black plastic handle. I carefully cut the length of the cigarette from left to right, from the filter to the tip. It feels like something dead to the touch, a mummified worm. Blonde tobacco crumbles out. My pores are wide open, I’m sweating a little. I worry that the nicotine can permeate my skin and get into my bloodstream. It’s not for nothing that nicotine patches work so well. Rubber gloves, I think again, but that’s just absurd. Though nothing’s really absurd considering the depressing statistics in cases such as mine. The probability that I’ll stay on course and lead a smoke-free life is around eight per cent, even without experiments like this. According to scientists, the more attempts at abstinence the smoker has behind them, the harder it is for them to stop their consumption of nicotine. See it through, M. says. Get your addiction under control, my therapist says. I don’t know how often I’ve already tried.

  This is the perfect place for a witticism reputedly attributed to Mark Twain that’s been cited in every book and every article on the subject without exception and taken up as a motto by countless self-help authors. Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world, I should know, I’ve done it hundreds of times. It’s curious that so many variations have emerged (A hundred times? A thousand times? Countless times?) and that a reference is nowhere to be found. Not one of these authors wants to divulge which work this all-time favourite Mark Twain quote comes from. I can verify this, I own a whole pile of these self-help books, there was a time when I would receive them very regularly as gifts. Relatives that I’d only seen two or three times in my life would wink encouragingly as they presented them to me, the older ones giving me an additional pat on the back of my hand. At some point it stopped, maybe word got around that I couldn’t be saved.

  As if it would be possible to free oneself from an addiction that has been formed and solidified over years or even decades in ten easy steps, or in fifteen minutes with eight simple rules that anyone can understand. As if it would be enough to stick lists on the refrigerator door or to rub yourself with Ayurvedic oil. An average smoker experiences two hundred to three hundred sharp mini-highs in their brain every day, which results in a measurably higher level of dopamine and the structure of the brain changing permanently and irrevocably. Nicotine is known to be a stronger addictive substance than heroin; children become addicted after only a few cigarettes, some come into the world addicted. Should it somehow suffice to do breathing exercises for ten minutes every morning and change your diet? Should one simply adopt the tapping technique of energy psychology and joyfully keep smoking until the problem dissipates? I threw out all these books because their authors are clueless and plagiarize from one another unscrupulously, and inaccurately at that. See Mark Twain.

  Milan Kundera describes in one of his novels how Goethe and Ernest Hemingway meet in the afterlife and debate the pros and cons of immortality. (Goethe is the enlightened one in this conversation, he’s been immortal for a long time already.) If Mark Twain were to join this illustrious society, he could tell the story of how there was a wondrous posthumous proliferation of his qu
otations. In other words, it appears that sharp wit needs a home, as if these kinds of clever sayings only endure if ascribed to a clever soul. They’re like viruses, they need a host body to survive. Twain, who was clearly a great connoisseur of human nature able to express his beliefs on all aspects of contemporary life with keen wit and ingenuity, as well as a passionate cigar smoker, is an ideal host for this quote.

  Caroline Thomas Harnsberger, a Columbus, Ohio-born violinist and hobby philologist, had already crushed the quote in 1947. More specifically, she rebuked it through disrespect: in her famous volume of quotations Mark Twain at Your Fingertips, it isn’t even mentioned. Harnsberger, who performed at Carnegie Hall at the age of twenty-two, who later directed an orchestra in Illinois, built up a musical instrument manufacturing business, brought up three children and wrote thirteen books including a reference book for pilots, remains the irrefutable authority on all things Mark Twain to this day. If she didn’t find the quote, then Mark Twain didn’t write it. Out of respect for Twain the author and as a bow to the revered philologist I’d rather quote a couple of lines by Van Morrison. He’s not particularly known for his biting wit but is always good for getting a sense of life. Plus, he’s not plagiarising anyone.

  Well, you search in your bag

  Light up a fag

  Think it’s a drag, but you’re so glad

  To be alive, honey

  Alive, honey.

  I don’t know whether writing this book will benefit or damage me, whether dissecting the Benson & Hedges will benefit or damage me. It’s an experiment. I consciously confront myself with my only recently overcome addiction. I do it because I believe I’m ready. Only those who are caught out by the pull of their addiction, those who are seized without warning, really run the danger of relapsing. That’s why M. and I agreed only to talk about smoking if I initiate the conversation. She mustn’t talk about it, nor may she ask about my withdrawal symptoms. I don’t want to be taken by surprise. A comment, a harmless question can strike without warning, like an uppercut. You reel, you topple. For a while I suffered from disturbed sleep, it was truly awful. M. wasn’t allowed to mention it. On top of that I’m dysphoric, as my therapist says. Bad tempered. She serenely and patiently ignored this too. The real withdrawal phase lasted about two months. M. kept up our agreement, she didn’t say anything. Sometimes she gave me a sympathetic look, which was enough for me.