Fiasco

Ilka loves Hendrik, but Hendrik hides his feelings from Ilka. Their love is about to be put to the test. None of this happens in Stanisław Lem's novel “Fiasco” – except in my personal copy.

I am one of those sensitive people who find it embarrasing and inappropriate to be drawn – suddenly and for no good reason – into the battlefields of someone else's love affair. Such matters don’t affect me and are therefore absolutely none of my business.

On the other hand, I am curious.

That's why I read books. Even old-fashioned ones, made of paper. With book covers and loose dust jackets, the perfect hiding place for surprises. Like hidden messages, for example.

I ordered Stanisław Lem's science fiction novel “Fiasco”, published in 1986, from an antiquarian bookshop on the Internet because there are few things I am more enthusiastic about than astronomy, astrophysics and space travel. And the novel is set on Saturn's moon Titan, which at the time of writing had long since been discovered but was still completely unexplored.

However, in 2005 Nasa’s “Cassini” probe set down a research module on Titan. That’s why today’s cosmologists have fascinating facts to tell about this moon, the only one in the solar system with a dense atmosphere: It has rivers, lakes and seas - albeit not made of water, but of methane, which occurs there in liquid form at a surface temperature of minus 180 degrees Celsius. It rains methane on Titan.

So nowadays I know more about the subject than the famous science fiction writer possibly could have in 1986. An intriguing setup for revisiting a book that envisioned a future now long outdated.

But alas, despite all the quantum leaps in research, mankind has still not outgrown planet Earth. All of us eight billion bipeds, like each and every one of our ancestors since Adam and Eve, still have to make do on this one little ball of rock. Our planet rotates through our Milky Way with billions of other suns and planets like the debutantes dance through the Vienna State Opera. Four billion men, four billion women. Four billion potential couples spinning in ever-shifting circles.

Take Ilka and Hendrik (names discreetly changed), for instance. Their relationship is not at its best. So on October 30, 1990, Ilka writes a letter to Hendrik. An actual, passionate, handwritten love letter. Younger readers must understand: It was towards the end of the age before emails and smartphones. On nothing more than some unlined sheets of paper she penned her thoughts and emotions, in thin ink and tightly spaced words. Every sentence tells of her struggle for this love.

As I pull the novel from the brown postal envelope and open it for the first time, Ilka’s letter slips out of the flap between the book cover and the blurb, shoving itself almost purposefully into my palm. Hendrik, obviously a science fiction fan, must have deposited it in the book. In a novel called “Fiasco”. Whatever the contents of this letter may be, the man has a black sense of humor.

I don't know either of Ilka and Hendrik. But I get to know them almost instantly. That’s because it doesn’t take me long to answer the obvious question of conscience: Are you allowed to read something as intimate as that? I mean, there’s this legal concept called secrecy of correspondence, and as far as I know there's nothing in the law about it being time-barred after decades.

Yes, you may read it, I decide after two milliseconds of pondering. You may read an artifact of contemporary history. Because not to do so would require superhuman strength. Nobody can demand that. And anyway, no one is harmed, no one is exposed, no one is judged. So that's settled. Phew. Let’s get down to business.

Ilka's handwriting is delicate but precise. A practiced hand-writer. Her diction is flawless, her spelling secure. As I said, the year is 1990 and school education is still widespread, at least among the well-read. And Ilka undoubtedly is; her boyfriend Hendrik, the space adventure enthusiast, probably is too.

“Dear Hendrik,

Unfortunately, our communication these days consists largely of silence...”

Oh, how I recognize letters that start like that. I intuitively know how they continue, what tone they strike, what solutions they hint at, what hopes and threats they conjure up at the same time.

I have been there, in that place of brooding silence. We bipeds on planet Earth are not so different from each other. At least the male half of humanity is rather identical in construction.

“But for me, partnership means going through thick and thin together, sharing ups and downs, standing by each other even in difficult times...”

It is abundantly clear that these are the lines of a woman in search of resonance, while he, the man, isolates himself, seeks distance, remains sullenly speechless, finds no words. The roles are so clearly distributed, and the die seems to have been cast. There's not much left here. We all suspect it.

“Are the days gone when we phoned each other every day, when we snuggled up together in bed in the evening without making love every time, or when we wrote each other little notes with a few nice words and 'I love you'?”

Yep. That's exactly what it looks like. Already over. Gone with the wind. For what was supposed to convert him, make him rediscover the gift of speech? How could he suddenly enter unexplored dimensions of closeness, or gain access to his true feelings? There was never much there, there can't be more now by miracle, just because he reads a letter, written by hand on white paper. And yet …

Come on, Hendrik, I want to shout. Now it's your turn! Save your love! Write back, write better, write more eloquently, with more commitment, more charm than you ever thought possible! Win her back with a sudden, spellbinding openness. Show her the new and improved Hendrik, the one without the mask. Or at least the Hendrik of yore. And don't just put her letter in a file marked “Fiasco”.

A fiasco, that's a miserable end.

“I hereby send you a very big kiss.

Yours, Ilka”

By chance, my personal copy of “Fiasco” has turned into something else: a declaration of someone’s love, a plea for writing out of baseless hope, a manifest of broken dreams. But far out there, on Titan, dreariness and utopia mingle, streams of frozen tears of methane flow into frosty seas of indifference.

Why do I become so melancholy and so disillusioned at the same time when such a letter appears out of the blue, without prior notice? Is it because I could not timely arm myself with phrases of goodwill, rehearsed slogans and rationalizations? Yes, this document of real tristesse smuggled into a work of fiction has caught me off guard. The rug has been pulled from under my feet.

Now I'm just wondering if some of my own letters also rest between the pages of novels in second hand bookshops, waiting for the unlikely event that this very pile of paper changes hands again. Whereupon someone pulls such a book and its hidden by-catch out of the letter box, opens the envelope, opens the book, opens the folded letter, answers the question of conscience with a quickfire “yes” ...

I can't rule it out. But I wish the handwritten artefacts of my former self at least a respectable novel as their temporary refuge.

And that it hopefully won't be “Fiasco”.

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