Nicotine Page 5

  The visual warning of the cork-brown paper that covers the last millimetres of the strands of tobacco prevents the smoker from burning the paper down to the filter. It’s incredible how well it works. I have smoked a cigarette down to the filter two or three times in my life, but only because I was sitting at my desk working. (Why didn’t I write: I smoked two or three times in my life? I stopped keeping track of this rare occurrence a long time ago).

  I scrunch up the paper and throw away the Benson & Hedges Gold dismantled into its component parts, and I give silent thanks to the economic destruction machine who gave it to me. Would she have given it to me if I had told her what I had planned to do with it? I take another look at the consumer ministry’s list. I didn’t realize how many cigarette brands were available in Germany. I should have studied this a long time ago, if only to equip the heroes in my novels with distinctive tobacco wares, the Black Devil Menthol manufactured using potato starch and galactomannan for instance, or a Springwater, pepped up remarkably enough with plum juice concentrate. Other authors, especially those servicing the more popular genres, could profit from this highly evocative list.

  He let his Black Devil Menthol glide between his fingers before he lit it and looked over to her. She carefully tucked her bright blonde hair under her headscarf. Half an hour later, she was lying in an overturned Volkswagen Karmann Ghia at the foot of a gigantic pile of coal, desperately trying to free herself.

  Alright then, a mother concedes, and grants her third and youngest son – he is five or six years old – permission to stay up to see the New Year in and to go out into the street with the grown-ups shortly after midnight to set off the New Year’s fireworks. These are the words that the child’s been working towards for months.

  This child is me.

  Apart from a few evenings with my grandfather – a very quiet man with huge hands that always smelled a little of bread and cigarettes – and my first day of school, which have stayed with similar clarity in my memory, I remember very little else from this time. It must have been New Year’s Eve 1970. My brothers had already been allowed to take part in the New Year’s festivities in years gone by and their stories had awoken great expectations in me which would obviously be surpassed. I was told to take a nap. From nine to half past eleven I lay wide awake in my bed and heard the loud goings-on in the living room. My parents had invited some friends and relatives over to the new red brick, three-storey house situated at the end of a row of houses. Twenty or thirty metres behind the turning bay at the end of the cul-de-sac, behind what appeared to be abandoned garden plots edged by an unkempt hedge, the Bergisch-Gladbach connection to inner city Cologne swept by every twenty minutes.

  When my mother came to wake me I was already standing in the middle of the room putting my trousers on in the dark. She turned on the light, got me the checked shirt I’d been wearing during the day, went to the wardrobe smiling silently to herself and pulled out the thickest jumper she could find. I stretched my arms up into the air, she pulled the jumper over my head then stroked the hair from my forehead.

  I ran downstairs to the living room. My brothers were already collecting the empty wine bottles set down all around the room, carrying them outside and positioning them in a row at the edge of the pavement. I followed after them. Stefan ran back into the house and soon reappeared with a bag of New Year’s rockets that my father had bought a few days before the party, maybe even before Christmas, at a shop called Kaiser Kaffee. My brother let me take a look in the red and white bag, pointed to each individual rocket and told me their special properties.

  It’s remarkable how clearly I can remember this night; it’s my first childhood memory that fuses into a story, into a whole. All earlier memories survive only as individual images, individual words or smells, perhaps a look or a touch.

  The images suddenly begin to move.

  I remember nothing of the actual, exact coming in of the New Year, of the good wishes and embraces of the adults, of the clink of champagne glasses. The moment is overlaid with the later repetitions of this sequence that took place over many years following the same pattern, with the same participants. My brothers and I must have run back out into the street immediately afterwards. I see how my father stepped out of the house with some of the male guests – they all wore hats, some of them had put up their collars – how he took the rockets from my brother and stuck them in the bottles standing ready. There would be, as I found out later on, enough rockets to fill the row of bottles five, maybe six times over. A short time later, when everything stood ready, my mother came outside with the other women. The first rockets were lit on the adjoining plot of land. The sound of laughter and the judder of the last train reached over to us. My mother wore a short, light-coloured musk beaver coat and her mid-length blonde hair peeked out from under an electric blue hat she’d knitted herself. My brothers were fighting over the lighter that my father had given them. Both of them wanted to be the first to light a rocket. My mother saw that they wouldn’t reach a compromise, also saw that I stood by more or less helplessly. She pulled out her own lighter and a pack of Kim cigarettes from her coat pocket, a white pack with a red, orange and yellow wavy strip under the logo that was supposed to represent a trail of smoke. I knew the brand of course, my mother smoked ten or fifteen of these cigarettes a day at the time. Later, with mounting depression, her cigarette consumption also rose and she changed brands.

  She pulled out a cigarette, lit up and held it out to me like a treat being offered through the cage bars of a snappy animal. With a slight raise of her chin and without saying a word she invited me to take the burning cigarette and light a rocket with it.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d held a cigarette in my hand. The chocolate cigarettes especially prized by children of my generation because they were vital (and certainly more important than pistols or hats) for acting out scenes from Westerns excluded, I’d frequently pull out a cigarette from the cup decorated with an iridescent green velour brocade that was always well stocked on the living room table. I’d stick the cigarette between my lips and suck, sort of aping Aunt Anna, who would pay me to play cards with her whenever she was visiting us in Cologne. Although I’ve never smoked ‘cold’ in adulthood, not even put a cigarette in my mouth on a moving train or exiting a university building in anticipation, I can still remember the herbal-ethereal flavour of the cold tobacco reaching my mouth through the filter to this day. But it was the first time I’d ever held a lit cigarette in my hand. I accepted it with a reverence that was felt perhaps more truly and deeply than the humble spirit required of me a few years later at my First Communion. I held on to the cigarette at the outermost tip of the (white) filter, turned around and walked the few steps to the bottles keeping my eyes fixed on the tiny ember already hooded by white ash. When my father gave a military gesture to signal the launch, I squatted sideways in front of a bottle half averting my face and guided the spark with an outstretched arm and squinting eyes towards a fuse. I was so fascinated by the cigarette and its possibilities, I was so amazed by the fact that something could be set alight by such a weak glow that I didn’t even pick the biggest, most beautiful, most colourful rocket. I was shaking. I poked the spark at the strangely stiff fuse only a few centimetres from the neck of the bottle, I saw how the ash flaked from the cigarette, tried again and again, after my mother encouraged me with a nod, until finally, finally the fuse flashed with a crackle and my father pulled me away from the bottle by holding me tightly under my arms and lifting me a little into the air.

  I forgot to watch after the rocket and looked at the cigarette that I still held between my fingers like something dangerous and magical. The spark had all but gone out from poking it at the fuse. You have to take a drag on it, my mother said out of the half-darkness, otherwise it’ll go out. Of course, I have to take a drag on it. I’d seen the adults – who practically all smoked – do it often enough. My father still smoked at this point too. He worked in his study cut off on the ground
floor of the house and whenever he worked thick smoke would roll out from under his door and rise into the other levels of the house. When I was three or four, I seem to remember thinking for a while that smoking was his actual job.

  My beautiful, taciturn mother stood on the pavement in the cold night with her hands in the sleeves of her fur coat and gave me a half sad, half amused look. You have to pull on it, she said again. I pulled. What else could I have done? I took a drag on the cigarette and felt how the smoke, which I had imagined to be warmer, filled my mouth, how it rose into my nose and lay burning on my eyes, which I had to close, while I snorted out the smoke in shock. But before I’d completely released it I had to breathe in, and so I started coughing on the pavement with burning, running eyes until my mother banged me on the back. My reaction unleashed a wave of merriment among the drunk adults. But on hearing the expelled laughter I became, in the strictest sense of the word, myself again. Maybe, as I believe today, I became myself for the very first time. My first thought was that the cigarette could have fallen out my hand during the coughing fit and I registered with conscious pride that this hadn’t happened. Then I noticed a tingly, acidic, unfamiliar feeling in my stomach. I felt dizzy, but it was as if the mild nausea that I’d detected with an almost scientific interest hadn’t seized me, but rather a living entity within me; something – and I have to take great care not to speak of it too favourably – that I could claim as part of myself. I believe that in this moment I perceived myself for the first time and that the inversion of perspective, this first stepping out from myself, shook me up and fascinated me at the same time. And I believe that this first feeling of well-being triggered by nicotine – my first head rush – was forevermore entwined with this fascination.

  I was confused, stunned, happy, thrilled. Blood pulsed at my temples. There wasn’t any time to take in any impressions or glory in the new – perhaps not even yet understood as new – feelings I’d just experienced due to the pressures of brotherly rivalry and my own childish greed for experiences. I quickly pulled myself together. I surveyed the situation, saw that my brothers for their part were loudly and agitatedly begging for cigarettes. So we can light the rockets. My mother once again pulled out her Kims from her pocket, lit two cigarettes at the same time and handed them out to them without a word. I don’t know how my brothers fared, I didn’t ask them afterwards and still haven’t to this day. I didn’t know for a long time whether my brother Stefan, who was ten years old at the time and who was considered a difficult child, had already smoked or whether this cigarette constituted just as an intense, wholly new experience for him as it was for me. When I sent him a short email asking him to confirm some dates for the book concerning our great aunt, when she got her pension and when she took her world trip, he wrote without being prompted that his first cigarette was a Lux that our grandfather had given him on a camping trip in the Bienhorn Valley near Coblenz. I had always dreamt – as I already mentioned – of smoking a cigarette with my grandfather, and my brother, I now read, apparently did precisely that. And not just any cigarette: he smoked his first with him, the first, the most important cigarette of his life! Our grandfather Karl, who we called Karl the Mouth due to his muteness, gave him this Lux. Presented to him, I think, as if it was the greatest gift that a person can give someone. Presented wordlessly. And it was long before my mother drew her pack of ladies’ cigarettes from her musk coat. The most casually made gestures are also always the most beguiling.

  I took another drag on my Kim. Now that the initial dizziness had subsided my awareness took on a new, never before recognized clarity; it was as if a curtain had been pulled back to let in a breeze, a fog bank had been blown away. Before me lay a wide, sharp landscape all the way to the horizon. It was my inner world – my feelings and thoughts – that had taken on distinctive contours in a constellation that I found beautiful. I felt a mental tingling, a delirium, and I remember that my brothers and the adults present, even my parents, appeared strange to me. Triggered by the nicotine penetrating the mucous membrane in my mouth and nose, entering my bloodstream and within a few seconds shooting into my young, malleable brain, I felt and saw, perhaps for the first time, a great experiential context. Life was no longer comprised of individual moments, of wishes and disappointments, that pass by indiscriminately and in quick succession; I not only saw images, not only heard single words or sentences, but experienced an inner world. In this manner, I was offered an experience that was narratable for the very first time. This is precisely why I can remember this night with such completeness, precisely why I can write it in this form.

  A rhythm, a cyclical time pattern that accompanies me to this day must have also begun to overlay all my experiences after those first drags. The chemical impulse initiates a phase of raised consciousness that makes way for a period of exhausted contentment. Immediately after the first drags an almost unshakable focus on what’s essential, on what’s cohesive and relatable sets in. I often have the impression that I can easily link together mental reactions to my environment that serendipitously arise from one and the same place in the cortical tissue during this phase. This results in associative and synesthetic effects that help me to remember, along with the dreamlike logic that is the basis of my creativity.

  Even though I’ve not smoked for a long time, I still think and work in a constantly repeated rhythm of around half an hour. This consists of an inner impulse, a still physical but now endogenous stimulus, and a phase of many-stranded consciousness that levels out in a motion that seems elemental and natural and always at precisely the right time when my body and my spirit can’t go on; like a wave smoothly rolling onto a beach. To be more precise, I should really let go of the conjunction, dispel with the old dichotomy and write my body, my spirit, as if they were two words for one and the same thing, as they are inseparable in moments such as these. I experience the mental processes under the influence of nicotine as something decidedly corporeal – they are powerful or weak, sleek or angular, cold or warm, light or heavy – whereas I experience the body as a mental phenomenon, as something to be understood, learned and remembered.

  At the end of this awareness phase, a quick half hour, I feel the incoming (initially only impending) withdrawal phase that I’m not prepared to enter. I defeat the renewed impulse, as I no longer smoke, from my own willpower, from an inner, undoubtedly exhaustible reserve. A smoker would now reach for the next cigarette. Sometimes I just lean back in my chair and turn my attention to the inner processes as set out above. I consider them and wait until what my therapist describes as cravings and what in my Lower Rhenish youth was called Schmacht – hunger – have passed. It lasts no longer than two minutes.

  I took a few more drags on my light cigarette that New Year’s Eve and lit rockets with ever increasing assurance. I’d soon learnt to close up the epiglottis in my mouth when pulling in the smoke, protecting me from more coughing fits and the derision of the adults. In the years that followed, we children were given one or two cigarettes every New Year's Eve (depending on how much money my father had spent on fireworks) and it wasn’t long before my thrill of anticipation for the cigarettes far outstripped my anticipation for the fireworks. When I see a firework, I still get the taste of this long, thin Kim on my tongue and remember with great warmth the sad-beautiful eyes of my mother, who handed me cigarettes as if they were something sacrosanct.

  I must have already developed an addiction to nicotine, or at least a disposition in that direction, even before this first New Year’s Eve. I remember the long car rides on winter holidays when my parents – my father in particular – would chain smoke. Even thinking about it makes me lightheaded: two smoking parents and three small children driving in a light blue Mercedes 250 S from the eastern suburbs of Cologne to Balderschwang, a journey that in those days required a whole day. The windows were, of course, closed.

  Since my father didn’t allow eating in his car because of the expensive velour seats, not even a single dry shortbread
biscuit or a drink of water, we would regularly stop. I know that already within the first half hour, in the Siebengebirge hills even, I would routinely feel ill. A couple of times, I can say with some assurance, I had to throw up in some carpark or other. I’d be in a kind of trance by the time we reached Franconia, an intoxicated stupor I wouldn’t wake from until we reached Balderschwang – after thirty or more passively smoked cigarettes. Once the child safety lock was released I’d push open the door, shuffle out breathing stertorously with an overly acidic stomach, and stagger sleepy and thirsty and strangely excited towards the rented chalet.

  It wasn’t that long ago that I once again found myself in a glass smoking area in an airport, a kind of suffocation chamber. Repulsed and overjoyed, I came across it while still on the moving walkway having already pulled out my pack. I stepped off the conveyor and eyed up the box. Eight or ten smokers, each busy with their own rambling thoughts, as if floating inside a cloud, almost as if they were standing on top of a misty mountain peak. The whole box, I feared, could detach itself from the floor and gain height like a hot air balloon to take us on a long journey into the beyond, perhaps to the gates of hell, perhaps to set us down to an entrance reserved only for smokers. Perhaps it would be the smoke from my cigarette that would create the crucial buoyancy. I lit up even though it was so airless in the cubicle that I would have felt the benefit without actually smoking myself. But with the first puff I sank into my own thoughts and forgot about the balloon flight, and right away this Balderschwang journey came into my mind, my father’s executive saloon, the eternal voice of the newsreader and that idiosyncratic tingling in my hands, wet with sweat, caused by the expensive velour.