Nicotine by Gregor Hens

Author:Gregor Hens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2017-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

During the years of the economic miracle, my father, a technical expert, built up a modest but profitable business that exclusively examined fire and explosion damage in industry and middle-sized businesses. The smaller of these incidents, mostly office and workshop fires, were predominantly caused by cigarette butts, but also by advent candles, Christmas trees and fireworks, which gave the business a seasonal character. At least most of the time. The elephant in the room was, of course, arson.

He smoked up to two packs of Ernte 23 a day. In each of these hinged jumbo packs were forty cigarettes lying beneath silver paper evocative of a freshly ironed bedspread. This meant that my father smoked constantly whenever he was in his home office, which was often, or when he drove to inspections. Shortly after I’d taken my first drag that New Year’s Eve when I was five or six, my father went from smoking one day to stopping the next. He didn’t, as far as I know, announce this resolution, though he later enjoyed narrating what had happened immediately prior to the decision: he was standing at his desk and had lit up a cigarette while on the phone even though the previous one was still burning in the ashtray, a tin dish with three soldered rivets that looked like finger nails. He apologized and hung up. He understood that he no longer had his cigarette consumption in hand, control had slipped away from him. That was it. That was the whole story. And every time he told the story, he pointed out with undisguised pride how without preparation, without a word of advice, without aids and strategies, he had quit smoking. He had followed none of the typical methods recommended in self-help books. The short story, which soon became formulaic from all the retellings, was laid out solely as proof of the enormous willpower of its heroic storyteller. It’s true, he seemed to say, that most people don’t manage it because it’s actually a perilous addiction. But I did it. It’s damn hard, but if you have a strong will like mine, it’s in fact no problem at all. If you can’t do it with the power of your own will, you are simply a weak person.

One day while we were on a skiing holiday, my father’s office caught fire. This lead to countless jokes and ironically twisted remarks within his business circles, which my father would recount over dinner. The following year he sent 120 Gloria brand fire extinguishers as Christmas gifts. The boxes were already piled up in the corridor in November and in the staff engineer’s office next to my father’s. All I knew about the engineer was that he’d fled the GDR and that he also used to smoke. His flight over the inner-German border and his abandonment of cigarettes years ago were always connected in my mind; for a while I even held them to be two parts of one, courageous act of will. Every

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