The sea rushes in the heating pipes. I can hear it. They growl in all directions, a perpetual somewhere sound. It's that quiet. So still.
Once we rolled down all the car windows, tucked our shirts on the handles. It was between Sevilla and Jaen. Lots of scrub and cactus desert. Where Lydia and Hannes were silent for two weeks between brief eruptions: Bile comes up, if you keep silent too long. They threw up at each other's feet.
The wind fluttered as sweet as wine foam, for sure. The sun was burning, between Seville and Jaen, where nothing grew, except for coarse hair from cracks in the earth. The seaweed tasted bitter, which the tide washed up at Isla Cristina, Salt bleached branches and cobalt blue beer bottle bottoms, Washed round the edge. Hanna made a bet, they were jewels. Gems of silence, she called her, for she had a stone book as well as a magic box, with which she could turn stones into jewels. As blond as the reeds, Hanna walked from the Playa towards the village with her collection. The Lambada chugged past the dusty white facades, he drove without a handlebar. But there was a transmitter on its roof, the invited to the bitter belly dance.
I've never been to Spain again, since, where the guys at Hannes age called after my thirteen-year-old sister from the mile-long traffic jam next to the promenade in Cadiz. Hanna carried the Gemmae Silentium in a fanny pack and fled the horn down to the beach, with the intention of, to pick more jewels: smelly crab legs, tarred pesetas, dried starfish. And lampshade parts, that were thrown in from the Atlantic.
That was, before the big storm came and we returned home, so right, back to Switzerland. Because Lydia couldn't go back to the house. It was of course embarazada in the eyes of the bungalow landlords, who spoke a pretty fast Catalan. But the latter was not the case. Lydia and Hannes had just come to an end together, in the prime of life. And so Dad started the engine in deep silence. Next to him his pregnant wife, without a peep. And in the back seat next to me, Hanna with her expensive fundamentals in her lap.
Sand trickled from the neck of a bottle, from top to bottom. Hanna kept sweeping her hourglass, until we had covered the thousand kilometers from Isla Cristina to the Swiss border, Mom jumped out of the car in Geneva, Not, to have an ice cream in the Mövenpick—–
That was Spain. That honking, flutter, Call, Scream, the Lambada car and the flood. The trickling sand with its nowhere tone.—–
Several years later it became very quiet in the big childhood house. A silence spread over the entire floors. Especially, when sister moved out. I didn't make a lot of noise. Sometime, Years later, Hannes had a geothermal heating installed, the heat from the ground wins. Since then, kites howl through the rooms at night as well, that I have to think about now.
At this time I am usually surprised by the silence. It is, as if she wanted to paralyze the time between me and my thoughts, that get louder and louder. Looking for a companion in clay. And then all of a sudden I hear this strange blowing and flying. And can not assign it. I get up and open the balcony door and look for the sound of a dead silence at home, that is not silence, outside.
The streets are immediately there. Traffic, the left and right, springs up and down over the bridges, non-stop. From a short one, piercing caws, a marten maybe. Or an owl, even.
When I was still living in Brügg, in my last days and weeks, I heard the nightingale, she trilled in the bushes close to the ground. Although I didn't take my ear plugs out of my ears for a fortnight. Once I took out the plugs and forgot about it, stuffing them back in your ears.
I immediately heard noises, that hurt me. Sounds of life, Sounds, how they all do.
Gems of silence. Slips away, where the sea level is lowest. I wish, the alchemist would come and transform everything!
Truck tracks run over my ear and now- can this be, at this time?- walks an airplane in the black. How I shiver rusty.
Now I want the tone, that I was born with, go to sleep.
Please only wake me up in urgent cases, wenn ihr etwas besonders Zähflüssiges sagen müsst. Something, that is intended for the sea or the loo.
Or if it's so funny, that I can laugh at tears.