Fako

Fako, the book’s name for Fanta mixed with Korn, is more than a drink of choice: it marks the passage from barroom sociability to private coercion. In Fiete Honka’s hands, a glass can serve as an invitation, a reward, a ration, or a test. Its recurrence links everyday drinking at the Zum Goldenen Handschuh to the dependence and domination that take shape in his home.

Composition and Intoxication

The mixture is also called Fanta-Korn and is prepared in equal parts, a 1:1 blend. At the Zum Goldenen Handschuh, Fiete has consumed about a litre. By then, after roughly sixty Sheffield cigarettes, he is exhausted and overtaken by Schmiersuff: the alcohol-fogged state in which his head and thoughts seem clogged. He goes to the back of the bar to sleep, holding his head in his hands before lowering it onto his elbow. Sleep takes him suddenly; it is brief, never lasting more than an hour. Fako thus belongs to a routine that makes intoxication tangible in Fiete’s body, followed not by recovery but by a short, abrupt collapse.

The scene gives the drink a social setting without presenting it as harmless conviviality. The Zum Goldenen Handschuh is open around the clock, and Fiete’s drinking unfolds among people who sleep, stagger, and endure the night there. But the book also shows how quickly a glass can become part of a more consequential exchange. When Fiete notices Gerda, he has Anus bring her a drink. She has no money, and Fiete’s offer is deliberate: Anus tells women who has paid, prompting them to come over and thank him. Fako, offered in a public bar, becomes a way to initiate contact with someone in a precarious position.

From Invitation to Confinement

Fiete takes Gerda back to his flat, where he pours Fako into two glasses. The contrast between the drink and its surroundings is stark: the 18-square-metre, two-room apartment is foul-smelling and crowded with damaged furniture, bottles, dirty clothes, and other accumulated debris. Drinking together does not make this a hospitable refuge. Back from a walk, they drink repeatedly, in what the narration presents as destructive drinking. Fiete plays the same two records in alternation, “Es hängt ein Pferdehalfter an der Wand” and “Es geht eine Träne auf Reisen.” That evening, Gerda has to hand over her identity card; the next morning, Fiete locks her inside and takes the card with him. The drink accompanies the last hours in which she remains free to leave.

Fako also exposes the unequal terms on which Fiete casts himself as provider. When he returns home drunk, Gerda is sober because he has locked the Korn away in the apartment’s only intact compartment. He presents this arrangement as protection against temptation, but his control of the alcohol lets him decide when she may drink. He counts what she has cost him, treats her work cleaning the flat as rent rather than payment for food, and reminds himself that he can put her out whenever he wants. In this setting, control of the bottle is one part of a wider power to set the terms of Gerda’s daily life.

Reward, Test, and Violence

Fiete later gives Gerda a large glass of Fako as a reward, while privately imagining a programme of physical improvement: he wants her thinner and proposes to clean her up and make her presentable. Her rapid drinking frustrates him. He rebukes her for gulping, pours another glass to see whether she can drink in a more controlled way, and approves when she takes tiny sips. The drink has become an instrument of assessment: Fiete sets the rules, watches her response, and treats obedience as evidence that his management is working.

The control is unstable and violent. When Gerda pours herself another glass without asking, Fiete tries to wipe it from her mouth; her turn of the head makes his blow harder than he intended, and her dentures break into pieces across the floor. He feels some regret, yet also reasons that the broken teeth will keep her from eating and make her thinner. Fako is not the cause of that blow in any simple sense, but the scene places drinking inside a relationship where permission, hunger, bodily appearance, and punishment have become entangled. What began as a drink offered to secure a stranger’s thanks has become a ration around which Fiete stages authority.

Narrative Significance

Fako’s repeated appearances give the narrative a concrete measure of Fiete’s shifting relation to other people. In the bar, he uses a paid drink to attract Gerda’s attention; at home, he pours for her, withholds the spirit, rewards her, and monitors how she drinks. The same mixture moves from public gesture to domestic rule. Its ordinary familiarity sharpens that change: there is no grand instrument of control, only a glass and a bottle whose availability Fiete claims the right to govern.

The drink also connects Fiete’s own intoxication with his efforts to discipline Gerda. He has consumed enough to sink into Schmiersuff and fall asleep, yet he sets standards for her pace and appetite. That contrast does not make him sober or self-controlled; it shows how his authority over her is asserted even amid his own dependence on alcohol. Fako therefore serves as both a recurring physical detail and a narrative hinge, linking the bar’s drinking culture to Gerda’s confinement and to the violence that takes place under the language of care and improvement.