Moving Parts by Magdalena Tulli Page A

informs the narrator with a regret tinged with malicioussatisfaction. The one figure that the narrator cannot recall is a grinning hipster in a studded leather jacket. He’s just sitting down on the bench, pushing the other two aside unceremoniously: That’s enough of that, now me. Because here everyone is simply waiting their turn, shuffling their feet; this is more or less how the leather-clad wise guy explains his loutish behavior to the narrator. As he does so he plays with a glass marble. A tiny opalescent light flashes between his fingers. But he doesn’t look at the marble. His gaze taxes the narrator; it has already consigned him to the category of people who prefer to drive brand new cars of different makes moving one after another across the pages of an illustrated weekly left behind under the bench. There at least the spray can-wielding Braun and Schmidt will not intrude, and the gleaming bodywork will not be defiled by a vulgar addition. The wise guy wants to explain to the narrator the hidden mechanism of the event in which they are both taking part, revealing its course, well-established and known by heart, and its obsessive repetitions, and even telling how people keep themselves entertained here and at whose expense. Thus for instance the professor gladly has his palm greased for his worthless credits, while the hobo turns a buck from time to time with his chicanery. Though the narrator asks no questions, he might be interested in knowing what tricks the leather-clad wise guy plays on the other passengers. I slit throats, says the latter; the marble disappears, and there’s a sudden click of a spring and the glint of a blade held to the narrator’s neck. It’dbe a pity if something bad happened; the man in the leather jacket will be content with a hundred. He’s in a bit of a hurry now; his buddies have just arrived and are waiting nearby. The narrator reaches for his wallet; the plastic bag slips off his lap and there comes the sound of breaking glass. The wise guy’s buddies burst out in raucous laughter, the echo of which reverberates beneath the concrete roof. The hobo waves his hand regretfully – after all, didn’t he warn him ahead of time? The grinning leather-clad hipster sticks the bill in an inside pocket and walks away with an ironic bow.
    And so the narrator possesses a wallet. Anticipating inquisitive questions about where he got his money, who gave it to him and what for, he ought to mention that he is incurring considerable personal expenses – the hotel, for example, is not cheap. And the one who is paying him does not expect services for free. The tips that the former hands out left and right for the tiniest thing in any case come back to him eventually. The narrator could now point to the row of ticket vending machines on the platform, from which the cash drawers are certainly removed from time to time. They end up in the same hands as the check for the commission collected by the real estate agency that took on the sale of the house with the garden; the same hands as the income of the shipping company, and the rich flow of profits from the hotel. Is it not the case that the lion’s share of circulating cash ends up in the pockets of the master of all circumstances, who lies around all day in his crumpled bed-ding,his back turned on the world, and would he not prefer that nothing be said here about what he spends it on? And if someone simply had to know what currency these sums are calculated in, the narrator would explain calmly that it’s the same currency in which he paid a hundred to the insolent wise guy. The banknote came from the envelope left for him at the front desk of the hotel. These were old Polish zlotys, withdrawn in the nineties. And let’s agree right away that only old Polish zlotys are in circulation, absolutely everywhere – in the German towns where the Feuchtmeiers live, in the Balkans, even in the ports of the