I THINK IT’S FUNNY the way I can pick out a sound, even when there’s a lot of noise and it’s not a big sound, just because I’m waiting to hear it. I bet the others haven’t heard it. They don’t recognize the sound, the quiet creak of a floorboard in the apartment upstairs. They carry on talking, as though nothing had happened. They chat and laugh and drink my wine and eat the food I cooked for them, without anyone saying thank you or this is delicious. Presumably they think they’re doing me a favor by visiting. Statistically, most women meet their eventual partners at work. But our work revolves around five- and six-year-old children. And their parents—either couples or single mothers. Karin and Pim hooked up when they were Scouts, Janneke and Stefan met on holiday in Australia. They must have told the story a hundred times. Two Dutch people meeting in Australia—it had to happen. They can’t get over it. And now they’re talking about their New Year’s resolutions. Lift the seat, says Karin to Pim. Do you not do that? asks Janneke, making a face. She says she trained Stefan to pee sitting down. Karin says men have different notions of hygiene. What about women who chuck their used tampons in the wastepaper basket? asks Pim. That’s the way they always talk. Not a pleasant or sensible word all evening.
Is there coffee? Stefan asks, as if I was the waitress. No, I say. At first they didn’t even hear. I have to say it again, loud and clear. I’m tired. I’d like you to go now, please. They just laugh and say, Well, we’ll just have to have our coffee somewhere else. As they file out, Janneke asks me if I’m all right. She makes a sympathetic face, as if I was one of the kids that had fallen down and scraped a knee. You would think she was on the verge of tears herself, but she’s not even listening when I reply, Yes I’m fine, I just want to be alone. I don’t think they will stop off anywhere on the way home. I don’t think they’ll talk about me. There’s nothing to say, and that suits me.
I go back quietly into the living room and listen. There’s a long silence, and then I hear the creak again. It sounds like someone creeping around on tiptoe, trying not to make a noise. I follow the footsteps from the door to the window and then back to the middle of the room. A chair or some piece of furniture is pushed, and then there’s another sound I can’t identify. It sounds as though something had fallen down, something heavy but soft.
I’ve never met Mrs. de Groot, I only know her name from the doorbell. Even so, I have a feeling I know her better than anyone else in the world. I’ve heard her radio and her vacuum and the dinnerware, so loud it’s as though someone was washing up in my kitchen. I’ve heard her get up at night and shuffle around, heard her run a bath, flush the toilet, open a window. Sometimes water dripped onto my balcony when she watered her flowers, but when I leaned out and looked up, I couldn’t see anyone there. I don’t think she’s ever left her apartment. I liked the sounds. They gave me the sense of living with a sort of ghost, a benign presence watching over me. Then a couple of weeks ago, everything went quiet. I heard nothing since. And now the creaking again.
My first thought was: it’s a break-in. While I’m undressing and going to the bathroom, I wonder whether I should call the police or the super. I’m in my nightgown when I decide to go up there myself. I’m surprisingly fearless. But then I’m not really afraid of anything ever. You’ve got to learn that, as a single woman. I pull on my robe and slip into some shoes. It’s eleven o’clock.
I have to ring twice, and then I can see the light come on through the peephole, and a young man, much younger than me, opens the door and says in a very friendly voice, Good evening. I’m thinking it was a mistake to go upstairs, and why do I always have to get involved in other people’s affairs, instead of looking after my own. But then you keep reading about people dying, and their bodies left to rot in their apartments for weeks without anyone noticing. The boy is wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt with IRON MAIDEN on it, which I think is the name of a rock band. He isn’t wearing any shoes, and his socks are holey.
I tell him I live downstairs, and that I heard footsteps. And because Mrs. de Groot has clearly moved out, I thought it might be a break-in. The boy laughs and says it’s brave of me to come up and look all by myself. If it was him, he’d have called the police. What made me think a woman lived there? He has a point. All it says on the bell is P. de Groot. For some reason I was convinced that that had to be a woman, an elderly woman living by herself. I tell him I’ve never seen anyone, just heard the noises. He asks if women sound any different than men. First I think he’s making fun of me, but then he seems to mean it as a serious question. I don’t know, I say. He looks at me with this rather boyish look, a mixture of timid and curious. I apologize, and say I’ve just got out of bed. I have no idea why I’m lying. He has this way of making me say things I didn’t want to say, and that from the very first moment. We look at each other in silence, and I think I ought to be going. Then he asks if I’d like a coffee with him. I say yes right away, even though I never drink coffee at night, and I’m in my robe. I follow him inside. When he locks the door, it occurs to me in a flash that he might be a burglar after all, and has asked me in to silence me. He is quite pale and slimly built, but he’s about a head taller than me, and has muscly arms. I imagine him grabbing me and throwing me down on the floor, then he sits on my belly and holds my arms in a painful grip, while he jams something in my mouth to keep me from screaming. But instead he goes to the kitchen, fills a pan with water, turns on the stove. Then he flings open, it seems, every one of the kitchen cupboards. Coffee pot, coffee, filters, he mutters to himself as if it was a spell he’d learned by heart—sugar, sweetener, milk. When he can’t find the coffee, I suggest getting some from my place. No, he says, so firmly that it makes me jump. He thinks for a moment. We could always have tea instead, he says.
The apartment looks exactly the way I imagined it would as an old woman’s apartment. A TV magazine on the coffee table, knitting on the sofa, crocheted rugs and coasters, various knickknacks and passe-partouts with pictures of ugly-looking people in old-fashioned clothes. We sit down, me on the sofa, him on a great big armchair. On the armrest is a little box with a couple of buttons. He presses one of them, and a footrest slowly comes up from the bottom of the chair. With a switch he tilts back and then forward again. For a while he’s busy pressing the buttons, like a kid showing off a new toy. We haven’t introduced ourselves, he suddenly says, and he jumps up and thrusts out his hand. I’m Daphne, I say, and he laughs again, and says, I see. Oh. Patrick. Funny we’ve never met before. The whole time he’s holding my hand in his. He asks me if I live alone. He asks about my life, my job, my family. He asks me so many questions, I don’t get a chance to ask him anything back. I’m not used to people taking an interest in me. I expect I tell him way too much. I talk about my childhood and my little brother who died four years ago in a motorcycle accident, and my parents and my job in the kindergarten. It’s not exactly thrilling, but he listens carefully. He has shining eyes, like the children when I tell them a story.
We finish the tea, and Patrick gets up and opens a sideboard. He finds a dusty bottle of Grand Marnier that’s almost full. He sets a couple of small glasses on the table, fills them, and raises one.
Here’s to unexpected visitors.
I empty my glass, even though I don’t really like liqueur. He makes a face when he drinks as well, as though he’s not used to it. I had company earlier, I say, a couple of colleagues from work and their husbands. We always get together on the first Friday of the month. I don’t know why I’m telling him this. There’s nothing more to say about it. He says January is his favorite month. His birthday’s in January, in a couple of weeks’ time. He likes the cold.
Which is your favorite month?
I’ve never thought about it. I know I hate November.
He has a favorite month, a favorite season, a favorite flower, a favorite animal, a favorite novel, and so on. That’s all he has to say for himself. I think he has nothing else. He’s just like my kids at kindergarten. When I ask them what they did on their vacation, they say, Played. He really is like a child, cheerful and helpless and sometimes a bit shy. He seems to be perpetually surprised. And he laughs a lot. He asks me if I like children. Sure, I reply, it’s my job.
That doesn’t have to mean anything. You can be a butcher and still love animals.
But I do like them. That’s why I work in a kindergarten.
He looks alarmed and apologizes, as though he’d said something terrible. He pours us another. None for me, I say, but then I drink it anyway.
I guess I shouldn’t be so nosy.
No, I guess you shouldn’t.
I must sound just like an old kindergarten biddy, but the fact is I’m already hooked on his curiosity, his questioning look that gives significance to the most banal things. Sometimes he doesn’t say anything for a long time, and just looks at me and smiles. When he asks me if I have a boyfriend, I get cross. I’ve heard the question too many times. Anyway, it’s none of his business. Just because I don’t live with a man doesn’t mean … He looks at me with big, staring eyes. I don’t know what to say, and my uncertainty makes me even angrier.
Now you’re angry with me.
No I’m not.
And so it goes on. We drink and talk about everything under the sun and about me, only not about him. I find him provocative, but I don’t think he means to be. He’s staring at my legs until I see that my robe has fallen open, and he can see my thighs. I must get my legs waxed again. But who really cares. I pull the robe together, and Patrick stares at me as if I’d caught him doing something forbidden. I’m quite drunk at this point. I’m thinking he could do anything to me, and then straightaway I’m ashamed of the thought. He’s so young I could be his mother. I’d like to run my hand through his hair, press myself against him, protect him in some way. I want him to hug me the way the kids do, I want him to lay his head in my lap and go to sleep in my arms. He yawns, and I look at my watch. It’s three a.m.
I really better go.
It’s Saturday tomorrow.
Even so.
Then he sits beside me on the sofa. He asks if he can give me a good night kiss, and before I can say anything, he’s taken my hand and kissed it. I’m so astonished, I pull it away. He jumps up and crosses to the window, as if he was afraid I’m going to punish him.
I’m sorry.
You don’t have to be.
Then he says something peculiar. I respect you, he says. After that neither of us says anything for a long time. Finally he says, Look, it’s raining. Now the snow’s going to melt. I say I don’t like snow, and all at once I’m not sure if I mean that or not. I don’t like snow, because the kids come bundled up in lots of clothes, so it takes you half an hour to get them changed, and they dirty the place with their shoes. But when I was a kid, I used to love snow. There were lots of things I used to love then. It feels to me like I’ve spent the whole evening moaning and griping. He talked about things he liked; I talked about things I didn’t like. He must think I’m a negative person, an embittered old maid. Maybe that is what I am. At least in the city, I say. I don’t like it because they go and grit the streets, and then everything … I picture us going for a sleigh ride. Patrick’s sitting behind me, and his inner thighs are pressing against me, making me warm. He’s snuggled his face into my hair, and I can feel his breath on my neck. He whispers in my ear. Completely out of the blue, he says what a wonderful woman I am, and he was so happy he’d met me. Well, I certainly didn’t see that coming.
Can I see you tomorrow?
I always visit my parents on Saturday.
I say he can come to supper on Sunday if he’d like that. It doesn’t matter to me whether I cook for one or two. I like cooking, I manage to add. There’s something at least that I like to do. When we say good night, he kisses my hand again.
I can’t sleep. I listen to him walking around upstairs and washing up and going to the bathroom. He is kind and attentive and terribly polite, but he’s a little bit scary too when he smiles. It’s too bad we always distrust people when they’re nice.
In the morning I wake up with a splitting headache and a bitter taste in my mouth. Over breakfast already I’ve started looking through my cookbooks for ideas. I said I would make something really simple, but now I feel like impressing him. There’s not much in the way of interesting vegetables in the stores this time of year. Most of it has come a long way and doesn’t taste of much. Green beans from Kenya, I mean, come on. I’d rather buy frozen. That night I get in a stupid argument with my father.
On Sunday I spend the whole afternoon in the kitchen, preparing dinner. I can’t hear anything upstairs. Maybe Patrick’s gone out. But punctually at six o’clock the bell rings. He’s bought me an enormous bunch of flowers, and he kisses my hand again. I hope that’s not his thing he does with everyone. I don’t own a big enough vase, and I have to put the flowers in a plastic bucket in the bathtub to start off with. I don’t get flowers often—never, really—and I don’t buy them myself either. Lots of them are supplied from the third world, and the men who pick them get sterile because of the spray they treat them with. Now I’m being all negative again, instead of thanking him for the lovely flowers.
Over dinner, he keeps on telling me how delicious everything is, until I can’t stand to hear him say it anymore. Although, it has to be said, dinner is good. Cooking is one thing I can do. You can cook too, he says. I must be perfect. I almost laughed in his face. I can’t bring myself to take his compliments seriously. It always sounds as though he’s parroting something he heard some grownups say. I really do seem to impress him, I can’t imagine why. Each time I open my mouth to speak, he stops eating and stares at me with big round eyes. And it seems he remembers everything I say to him. Already he knows so much about me, and I don’t know the first thing about him.
When we’re sitting on the sofa later, he clumsily knocks over his glass. I almost gave him a smack, the way I do with the little ones, when they do something naughty. Luckily I manage to restrain myself at the last moment. I go to the kitchen for salt and mineral water. I picture laying Patrick over my knee, pulling his pants down, and smacking his naughty bottom.
Of course I can’t remove the stain. I’ll never get rid of it. What a stupid idea anyway, buying a white sofa. But I liked it, I like my white sofa. I bought it after my brother died, and somehow it’s something to do with him. Patrick is standing next to me vaguely, watching me scrub away at the stain. He apologizes profusely and says he’ll buy me a new sofa cover. But I’m still annoyed and shortly after I say I need to go to bed, tomorrow is Monday. He gets up. In the doorway he shoots me a tragic glance, and apologizes one more time. Never mind, I say, what’s done is done. We don’t arrange to meet. He doesn’t say anything, and I’m still a bit pissed at him.
I wonder if he can hear me as clearly as I can hear him. When I’m taking a shower, I suddenly feel naked. When I go to the toilet, I lock the door and sometimes don’t flush, so that he doesn’t hear. I need to drink plenty of water for my kidneys: I seem to spend half my life peeing. In fact I’m only just starting to realize how much noise I make. That I keep my street shoes on in the apartment, turn up the radio when vacuuming, sometimes scold or sing to myself. I’d better stop all that right away. I buy a pair of soft-soled slippers. When I drop a glass and it shatters, I listen for minutes for some sound from upstairs. But nothing—silence.
I can’t stand it that he’s so near, doing God knows what, and listening to me. I start to go out a lot. Then I sit in a cafe, or go for a walk, even though it’s gotten cold again, and I need to be careful not to catch anything. Last year I had a bladder infection that simply refused to go away. I had to take antibiotics and was off work for days. Afterward, Janneke and Karin made snide remarks. A bladder infection. To them, that could mean only one thing.
Three days later, Patrick rings the bell, right after I’ve got home from work. He must have been waiting for me. He’s got a new sofa cover, and a gift-wrapped box. He helps me cover the sofa. Our hands touch. Inside the box is a fish kettle. Just because that time I made dinner, I said I wished I owned a fish kettle. Now he goes and buys me one. They’re not cheap.
You’re crazy. You didn’t have to do that.
Because of the trouble I put you to.
He smiles. We kiss for the first time. It just happens, I couldn’t say who started it. There’s something greedy about his kisses, he drapes his lips over mine, and shuts them and opens them and shuts them as though to gobble me up. The whole time he holds me firmly in his arms, and I feel how strong he is. I can hardly move. When I tell him he’s crushing me, he lets go right away and apologizes. He does like an apology. He seems embarrassed about having kissed me. I imagine him undressing me and sleeping with me on the newly slip-covered sofa. Sperm stains are tricky, by the way. Why do I keep thinking of all this nonsense. He’s just looking at me.
Now he’s upstairs again. I keep having to think of him though. I don’t know anything about him, not if the things in the apartment are his, not if he lives there, or is only staying for a while. I don’t know his middle initial, or his age, or what his job is. He seems not to be short of money for generous presents. I imagine what Janneke and Karin would say if they saw us together: Oh, she’s lost it now. Or: She’s beyond good and evil anyway. Or: She must be paying him, he’s exploiting her. And all the time I feel I’m exploiting him.
From now on we see each other every two or three days. Sometimes he comes down, sometimes I go up to him. We always know when the other is home. Sometimes we talk on the phone for hours. Then after a while I’m not sure if I’m hearing his voice through the phone or through the ceiling.
When we eat dinner together, we drink a lot, but he doesn’t seem to get drunk. We chat like old friends. We only kiss good-bye. It’s almost become a habit. I started the French kissing. I started stroking him. Then he does it too, but only with his fingertips, my hips and the small of my back where I feel pain sometimes. When I put his hand on my breast, he leaves it there for a moment inertly and then takes it away again. He needs time, I think. But I don’t have the time. Of course I don’t say so. I’ve gotten to be careful about what I say and don’t say. I keep an eye on him. I listen.
Some nights he doesn’t come home. I don’t sleep on those nights, and stay up and listen and in the morning I’m dog-tired. I hate myself for it, but I can’t help it. The next time we see each other, he tells me straight out where he was, with his parents or some friends or other that he hasn’t mentioned to me before. He must have sensed my distrust.
At work, Janneke asks me how I’m doing, and whether I’m sick again. She says I’m looking tired. I’m not sleeping properly, that’s all I say. I’ve lost weight. What can I do if I don’t have any appetite? Janneke says she wants to leave Stefan, that was one of her New Year’s resolutions she hadn’t yet told him about. We talk about her problems. Everyone comes to cry on my shoulder, but when I give them good advice, they don’t take it, they just say things aren’t that simple. Karin is in a bad mood, she doesn’t know why. She’s unbearable sometimes, even with the kids. Until one of them starts to cry. Then she cries too.
Patrick says he really likes me, and I’m much too good for him. Then he kisses me again, but he keeps me at a distance. I’ve already asked myself whether perhaps physically there isn’t something wrong with him. He looks fit enough, but that can be deceptive. There are more men all the time who can’t get it up, or who can’t be bothered with sex. The quality of sperm is falling off a cliff. It has to do with female hormones that leach into the groundwater.
I’ve set myself a deadline. If he hasn’t decided by the end of the month, then I’m putting an end to it. But now what do I mean by decided? I’m not exactly sure what I’m expecting from him. That he rips my clothes off and jumps me on the sofa? Certainly not. But that he opens himself to me. Entrusts himself. It’s a matter of a few words.
When I get home the next day, I can hear Hello by Lionel Ritchie booming down from the top floor, much louder than the music he usually plays. It was a CD I played to Patrick once. He must have bought himself a copy. He’s been waiting for me to come home, and this is his way of welcoming me. I’m expecting him to call, or come downstairs. I hear him leave his apartment. But he keeps going, and shortly after, the street door falls shut. It’s after midnight when he gets back. I hear his footfall, the slow steps, the creaking of the floorboards. For a second, I think he’s not alone, but that can’t be. Then silence. Silence is the worst. I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept for days. I have the most ridiculous imaginings, horrible things that I feel ashamed to entertain.
On his birthday, he makes me dinner. He’s gone to unbelievable trouble, he’s even decorated the table with chocolate ladybirds. I manage to get a stain on my blouse and take it off to wash it out properly. Patrick has followed me into the kitchen, we’re talking, he’s looking at me. But he acts as though there’s nothing the matter. I could strip naked in front of him, he wouldn’t even notice. That can’t be normal. I wonder what his game is. I go downstairs and put on a clean blouse. While I’m downstairs, I hear him go to the toilet, and flush twice. Ideally, I wouldn’t go back upstairs. We’re in closer touch when we’re apart, when we only hear each other.
We drank a lot of wine with dinner, a whole bottle. When we kissed good-bye, he suddenly started whispering it’s not fair, and he stopped. Now I’m lying in my bed, and I can’t sleep. He’s directly above me, just a few yards away. I spread my legs and imagine him on top of me, doing it to me. He’s pinning my arms, the way he does when he kisses me. He’s grabbing my hair, pulling it, slapping my face. I throw my legs around him. He’s kissing me hungrily. We’re sweating. There’s silence, all I can hear is him breathing, his breath in my loosened hair. I stretch out my arms to him. Come, I whisper to him, come! Come! He’s so close, I can almost feel him.
CHRISTOPH SWITCHED THE light off and the group fell silent. After a few seconds of darkness, there was disquiet, chairs creaked, someone cleared his throat, there were other sounds that were hard to trace. As the first whispers began, Christoph switched on the microphone, and the sudden element of amplification made the space appear still bigger and the darkness still more intense. If he’d been very concentrated and managed to focus his attention on the group, then surely it would be possible to get by without slides, and finally even without words, and just be in the dark and allow time to elapse for an hour or two.
For hundreds of thousands of years no light, no smell, no life, no sounds but for the dripping of water, the plinking and flowing of water penetrating through cracks in the rock, collecting in trickles, widening cracks, forming courses, small streams by now, one or ten or hundred thousands of years later, a cavern or system of caverns. Christoph switched the projector on, and the Water Dome was there, a domed arch lit by several flashbeams, its upper reaches lost in the darkness. The first image was the most important, that had to captivate the audience straightaway. He had chosen it carefully, and let it stand for a long time, without saying a word. He felt it would be a good evening.
After that first shot, there were others, less spectacular, the barred entrance to the cave, the first few hundred yards, paved paths and wire balustrades, the odd stalactite taken from somewhere on the inside and put out near the entrance for the trippers to see. The group relaxed and listened as Christoph talked about the discovery of the cave, the early expeditions into the interior, the technical difficulties of living under the earth’s surface. One of the slides showed a map of the passages that had been explored thus far, a tangled web of lines in different colors.
Just over a hundred miles have been explored and charted, but we have to assume that’s just a fraction of the whole.
The shot of a staircase going steeply down, and coming to a sudden unexpected stop in a pile of scree. The adventure is beginning, said Christoph, and showed pictures that needed no explaining. Difficult terrain, narrow couloirs, crevasses, meanders, faults. In some of the photos you could see cave explorers in dirty orange coveralls with carbide lamps on their foreheads crawling through narrow passageways or rappelling down seemingly bottomless gullies. Amazing the kind of places a man is able to slip through, Christoph commented.
Then there was a shot of the bivouac, and for the first time there was the whole group sitting over fondue and wine at camp tables. You could almost forget you were in a cave, said Christoph, but if you need to answer the call of nature, then you remember. If the torch fails, if the light goes out, then you lose orientation in a matter of seconds. He showed pictures of the group in sleeping bags on thick foam rubber mattresses encased in plastic sheeting. The faces looked dirty and tired, but there was a wild flash in the eyes as in people just awakened. And then a brief pause. You’ll find my book on sale in the lobby, along with information on guided tours for a day or more. Christoph switched on the music and hurried out of the cave, to be the first at the book table.
A man of Christoph’s age flicked desultorily through the desk copy of the book. Beside him was a slim woman who seemed a lot younger and had something elfin about her. Both were wearing fleece jackets. The man casually asked Christoph if he had ever been cave diving. Not bothering to wait for a reply, he volunteered that he’d been in cave complexes all over the world. His voice had an aggressive tone that Christoph had quite often heard among extreme sports aficionados. Sometimes he had the impression they only turned up at his talks to tell him about their experiences, and to measure themselves against him and challenge him. After the break he would show pictures from parts of the caves not open to the general public, Christoph said. He felt a little ashamed of the way he rose to the bait. The man didn’t react, and carried on flicking through the book. He asked if Christoph had ever been to the caves at Gunung Mulu in Malaysia. An elderly gentleman stepped up to the table. He bought the book without looking at it, and asked Christoph to sign it for him with a personal dedication. The couple stepped aside.
Just before the end of the break, Christoph noticed them again. They were still by the table. The man was looking across at him and saying something to his girlfriend. There was a mocking expression on his face.
And now, said Christoph, a little hammily, let’s explore Nirvana! This was a cave system that was hard to get to and that had only ever been seen by maybe a dozen or so people. He brought up the images from the darkness and slow-faded them, just the way they had flashed up in the cave and slowly faded on the retina: a candle stalagmite, a few needle-thin stalactites, gardens of karst that had grown up in the darkness since the last ice age, only to be seen in a single brief shock of light thousands of years later. Shades of brown, white, yellow, a mercury glimmer of damp-looking surfaces.
Each time Christoph saw the photographs, a shiver went through him. He felt the pressure of the masses of rock, the fear of the complete indifference of the mountain, that with a tiny movement could have squashed all life out of him. He had set up the flashes, loaded the camera, the practiced moves had something calming about them that dispelled his feeling of paralysis. But the fear remained. It would always be there.
There must be thousands of caves like these, said Christoph, where no man has ever set foot, where no man ever will set foot. There is a world beneath us in the rock, a world full of marvels and secrets. He stopped, he didn’t know what else to say. Words weren’t enough, pictures weren’t enough either. You had to have been there yourself, and mapped out the senseless beauty. All that could be heard was the sound of the projector, the humming of the ventilator, and the clattering of the carousel that pushed one slide after the other in front of the beam.
When you go back outside, it’s not the sun or the colors that overwhelm you, it’s the smells of the forest, the smells of life, of things growing and rotting. The cave has no smell. The last shot brought the audience back to the surface, it showed a picturesque little forest lake that was fed from the inside of the mountain. Each year thousands of tons of water-soluble limestone are carried out, said Christoph, the water works day and night, hour after hour, enlarging the cave all the time. He switched off the projector and microphone and turned on the light. People applauded.
After the talk, a couple of the listeners went up to him and asked questions and inquired about the tours with shining eyes. When the last of them had gone, Christoph packed away the projector and the box of slides and put them on a cart, along with the unsold books. In the lobby he lit a cigarette. It had gotten cold.
Will you come for a drink with us?
Christoph gave a start when he saw the man standing a few yards away. He was standing in front of him, feet apart, it looked as though he was challenging him to a fight.
All right, he said out of politeness. But just one beer, I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.
The man went up to him and they shook hands. Clemens, he said, and that’s Sabine. He pointed into the darkness, where Christoph could see the faint outline of the woman.
THEY’D BEEN SITTING in the bar for quite a while. The conversation was faltering. Clemens talked about expeditions he’d been on, an endless list of caves, all described with the same adjectives. He had taken thousands of pictures, he said. He’d be glad to show them to Christoph sometime. Maybe he could use them in his talks. Since being introduced, Sabine hadn’t said a word. Christoph didn’t say much either, just nodded from time to time and smiled, and pretended Clemens’s stories were interesting. When, after a long description of a diving trip, there was a silence, Christoph asked Sabine if she’d ever been in a cave herself.
That’s how we met, she said. And then—as though someone had pushed a button—she embarked on a list of caves she’d seen. She only listed their names and the years of the expeditions. Then she stopped, and Christoph wasn’t sure whether she had spoken or not.
Why don’t we go on a tour together, the three of us, suggested Clemens.
Christoph smiled vaguely, said, Well, one day, and OK, I’d better go, and waved the waiter over. For a moment there was silence, and then Clemens said, To Nirvana. He said it more quietly than he’d been speaking before, and at first Christoph wasn’t sure he could trust his hearing, and then Clemens said it again: To Nirvana.
How do we get in there? he asked. There was something hungry in his look.
The waiter came with the check. Clemens said he’d have another beer. Will you have something else as well? His voice sounded beseeching, almost fearful. Christoph ordered an apple juice. He waited till the drinks came, then he began to speak. As he spoke, he had the sensation he was making the descent all over again.
He waded through a gallery deep in the interior of the mountain. The water was ice-cold and getting deeper, he was in it up to his belly, his chest, his chin. From the end of the grotto, where there were only a few inches between the ceiling and the water’s surface, a passage led steeply up. It was so narrow that once Christoph had crept into it, he was unable to put his hands back. He pushed himself up with the tips of his toes, inch by inch, just behind the guide. They didn’t speak, all that could be heard was the scraping of their boots and the occasional grunt or cough. He had long since lost all sense of time when the man in front of him stopped and said, We’ve reached the fault, it might take a while. Christoph was surprised by how close his voice sounded. Swearing, the guide pushed himself through the narrowest point. Christoph waited. The cold penetrated his neoprene suit and spread slowly through his body. He shut his eyes and pictured himself lying coffined in rock, a foreign body. We’re buried alive, he thought, we’ll never get out of here. Suddenly he became conscious that he was breathing fast. He forced himself not to think about where he was, tried to remember the words of children’s songs, added up the royalties he would get for his pictures, pictured landscapes, a wide expanse of sky, passing clouds. Then the man in front of him was gone, and Christoph looked through the fault and laughed nervously. You want me to get through there? You can do it, he heard the voice of his companion, which seemed to come from nowhere but was still very close. We’re halfway there. Christoph’s body pushed itself forward, mindlessly as a machine.
Clemens had been listening with shining eyes. I’ve gotta get in there, he said, when Christoph stopped. Will you take me? Christoph said there were no tours to that part of the cave. You could put in a word for us, said Clemens. He said he was prepared to pay. Sabine looked into Christoph’s eyes with a mixture of skepticism and adventure lust. It would be simplest for you, he said, you’re slimly built. It’s not dangerous, he said, the only danger is being afraid. Fear, he repeated, is the only danger.
Clemens went to the washroom. Christoph saw him exchange words with the waiter before disappearing downstairs. Even before he had returned, the waiter had brought a bottle of wine and three glasses.
How long have you two been together? Christoph asked.
Two years, said Sabine. He’s crazy, she said. He does all kinds of things, freeclimbing, canyoning, off-track skiing. Once he smashed into a snow slab because he was in slack country. He’s completely crazy.
YOU CAN STAY WITH US, Clemens had said, and ordered another bottle of wine, which he’d gone on to drink almost alone. They talked about the equipment, dry runs, and the best time for the expedition. Sabine hardly drank anything, and was as quiet as before. Christoph still disliked Clemens, but he allowed himself to be caught up in the excitement. It was like a game, a contest. It was all about—suddenly it dawned on him—who was going to get Sabine. They were fighting over this cool, childlike woman, who wasn’t even paying attention. He felt he had blundered into a trap. When Clemens asked him to stay the night, he had no choice. The game had to be played to a finish.
Christoph felt the alcohol, but he wasn’t drunk. Clemens staggered up the steps of the apartment complex. It took him forever to get the key in the lock. From the very first moment, Christoph felt ill at ease in the apartment, he didn’t know why. His hosts seemed to have no sense of beautiful things. They had the bare necessities, and even so the apartment looked untidy. The furniture didn’t match and was in the wrong places, jumbled together by chance, it seemed, as though it had been unloaded and left standing there.
Clemens had disappeared without a word. Sabine showed Christoph the guest room. He watched as she made the bed. She went out and came back with a towel. Clemens is asleep already, she said. He didn’t even get undressed.
Christoph went to the bathroom. When he was finished, he found Sabine in the living room, leafing through a photo album. He sat down beside her, and she handed the album over to him and went to the bathroom herself. Gunung Mulu, Malaysia, he read at the top of the page. The pictures were not very good. You couldn’t light a big cave with a single flash. On some of them you could see Clemens, on others there was a pretty blond woman, with a gamine expression. The last picture showed them standing together in dirty overalls, with tired smiles on their faces. Between them stood a native, about a head smaller, and with an alert expression. At the back of the album was a sheaf of photos that hadn’t yet been stuck down. Christoph began going through the album from the front. Pictures from a different expedition. There was the blond woman again, this time in a diving costume.
That’s his ex, said Sabine. She stood in front of him in leggings and an orange sleeveless T-shirt. She had narrow hips and a flat boyish chest. She asked him if he wanted a drink. What about a beer? A glass of water, said Christoph.
She brought it to him and sat back down. He went on leafing through the album, and they saw photos of beaches and old temples, and over and over again the blond gamine. They broke up over that business of the snow slab, Sabine said. It took Clemens a long time to get over her. Do you like her?
Her hands were folded in her lap. Christoph looked at her arms, which were anorexically thin, and covered with little black hairs. She gave off a smell—it took him a while to trace it—of camphor. It wasn’t till she pointed out something in one of the pictures that he noticed her knotty hands. Sabine must be much older than he first thought, perhaps older than himself.
She laughed softly. He’s crazy, she said, but I’m crazy too. And you must be as well? We’re all crazy. Why do you think we want to go in that cave? Why do you want to go there? Nirvana. Because no one else has been there?
Christoph shrugged his shoulders and shut the album.
We want to fuck the planet, said Sabine. She stood up and held out her hand. We’re going to fuck the planet.
SHE DIDN’T STOP WHISPERING. Never mind, she said. Her mouth was right up against Christoph’s ear, he could feel her lips brushing against it. They had tried hard, but that hadn’t helped. Christoph hadn’t been able to shake from his mind the caves she’d listed in the bar, and he’d thought she was just out for one more conquest, another name on another list.
Never mind, Sabine said again, as if she wasn’t quite convinced the first time. Her breath was coming and going in pants. Then she started fiddling with him again, with a silly giggle that got worse the longer it went on. Stop that, he finally said. I don’t feel like it. Right away she stopped, and was quiet. He moved away from her a little, he couldn’t stand her nearness. But she came after him, pressed herself against him. In the end, he sat up on the side of the bed. It was dark in the room, and he sat there and stared into the dark. What’s the matter? Sabine asked. Christoph still didn’t speak. Endure the dark, he thought, tolerate the silence. He heard the rustle of the sheets. Sabine must have sat up as well. She didn’t touch him, but he could sense that she was right behind him. It was completely dark. He heard her voice coming out of the void, sounding very calm and objective. You’re not going to take us with you, are you? You won’t dream of it. The thought seemed to amuse her, and she started her giggling again. Christoph turned his head half toward her, and said he didn’t think he would ever set foot in a cave again. Sabine laid her hand on his bare back, as if to push him away. I can’t do it anymore, he said. And then, slowly and haltingly, on the way down to Nirvana he had been more afraid than he had ever been in his life. Previously, fear had lent him wings, it was a source of tension that helped him to concentrate. But there in that narrow crevasse, he had felt lamed. It was as though all his strength had deserted him. He had felt utterly helpless, his thoughts spinning in his head. I don’t remember how I got out. I can’t remember the way back.
Sabine took her hand off his back and got up. He heard steps, a dull thump, and a stifled curse. Then the overhead light came on.
I’ve never been inside a cave since, he said and pulled himself upright. Christ, I don’t even ride in elevators anymore. He laughed hoarsely. Sabine said she was going to bed. Her voice sounded dismissive. He said he would drive home, he felt perfectly sober. Sabine didn’t reply. She watched him dress and followed him to the door. She held up her face to him, and he kissed her quickly on the mouth. She seemed offended. Clemens will be disappointed, she said. What about? Christoph asked. She looked at him with an absurdly serious, censorious expression.
The sky was clear, and the stars seemed to be burning in the cold air. Christoph felt the gratitude he felt after every expedition under the surface, the joy of having got back in one piece, and being able to breathe freely after days of being shut in. He walked through the silent village, got lost, and finally found himself in front of the village hall. He felt relieved, even strangely cheerful. Whatever sort of game it was, he had the feeling he’d won.
HEIDI SKETCHED THE girl from memory. She drew the outline with swift strokes, the low, slightly heavy hips, narrow waist, and large breasts. She started to put detail on the sketch, worked on hands and hair, armpits and collarbone. Why isn’t she wearing anything? asked Cyril. Heidi was working on the face, which was hard to do in its girlish simplicity. My turn now, said Cyril, who was standing next to her, watching. Heidi went on drawing. The shoulders were tricky, the transition to the arms, which the girl had extended behind her, like a swimmer on the starting blocks. Carefully Heidi selected colors, brown and red for the hair, pink and white and a pale yellow for the skin tone. Those are mine, cried Cyril, and he snatched away the box of colored pencils and tried to snatch away the paper as well. She kept him off, and went back to the face. She had to catch the expression, the pert look of a seventeen-year-old girl with oodles of knowledge and no understanding. Mama, wailed Cyril, and when she didn’t react, he grabbed a red pencil and scribbled furiously across the drawing, until the point of the pencil broke off with a nasty click. Heidi tried to hold onto the drawing, the paper tore, and in a sudden surge of fury she pushed Cyril away from her so hard that he fell off his stool. He lay on the ground wailing, though not from pain, she knew his calculating cry, which was capable of driving her to white rage.
Heidi went and shut herself in her bedroom. She lay frozen on the bed, while Cyril pounded on the door with his fists. After a while he gave up, and she could only hear him whimpering. Slowly she recovered herself. She took a few deep breaths. She was sorry she had given the boy a shove. In the evening he would tell his father, and he would give her a concerned look but say nothing. He had been afraid from the very beginning that the boy would be too much for her. After all, he treated her like a child. The pregnancy had been uncomplicated and it had been an easy birth. Anyway she wasn’t overburdened, she just had different views. He spoiled the child, and put up with all his nonsense, the way he tried to spoil her as well. Rainer is a pussy, Heidi’s father had said once, and laughed. He got on better with him than she did.
Cyril whimpered quietly. Heidi opened the door, knelt down, and put her arms around him. No one likes me, he said. Of course I like you, she said, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you. Here, said Cyril, and she kissed the place. And here. You mustn’t scribble on Mama’s drawings.
CYRIL HAD GONE next door to play with Leah, who went to the same kindergarten. Heidi had carefully smoothed out her drawing and stuck it together with Scotch tape, and hidden it in the box at the top of the closet. Rainer mustn’t see it, he wouldn’t understand. Heidi went into town to buy something she had forgotten this morning. She stopped at the station and ran her eye down the train timetable. The train now ran a minute later than it had six years ago, now it was two minutes past midnight. She went through the underpass and sat down on one of the benches on the platform. The station was deserted, only from time to time a freight train clattered through at high speed, disappearing as quickly as it had come.
She had been all alone on the platform then as well. Her parents hadn’t seen her onto the train, they had been dead set against the idea of her going to Vienna, now that she had learned a trade and had such good final grades. But then she and her father had stopped speaking months ago. If he hadn’t been so concerned with what people might say, he would have thrown her out of the house.
Heidi packed her things at the last minute, she didn’t need much, she would only be gone for three or four days. As she slipped into her shoes in the hall, her mother came out and watched her in perplexity. Then—Heidi was already in the doorway—she said wait, and went into the kitchen and came back with a bar of chocolate. Eat this before your exam, she said, it’ll settle your nerves.
Heidi had got to the station much too early. She took a seat in the cafe garden opposite. The chestnuts formed a dense canopy, only a few dim strings of lights lit up the garden and made the night appear still darker. Only one table was in use—there was a group of men of whom she recognized none. Even so, the men greeted her exuberantly, perhaps to make fun of her. One of them was telling dirty jokes, one after the other. He kept his voice down, but in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, Heidi could hear every word. The men kept squinting across at her. She knew she looked younger than she was. When she went to the cinema, she had to show her ID, even now. The waitress came to her table, a girl not much older than herself, and said the cafe was closed. Last orders, she said, as she went by the men’s table. She disappeared into the restaurant and came back a few moments later with a couple of bottles of beer. We’re closed, she called to Heidi, who had remained sitting, and sat down with the men herself.
Heidi stood up to go. As she turned around once more, she saw that one of the men was gazing at her drunkenly. He got clumsily to his feet, and she was a little afraid he would come after her, but he went instead to the little outhouse where the lavatories were.
It was still warm. The foehn wind had been blowing for days, and even now at night the mountains seemed to loom unusually close. Heidi went over their names to calm herself, there was Helwang, Gaflei, the Three Sisters, the same peaks she could see out of her bedroom window. She remembered the story her teacher had told her at school. How instead of going to church on Assumption Day, the three sisters had gone up into the mountains to pick berries, and how the Virgin had appeared to them, and asked them for their berries. But the sisters hadn’t wanted to give them up, and ever since they stood there, turned to stone. Heidi had always been on the side of the sisters, she didn’t know why. She had sketched the forms many times and in all weathers, but she had never been up there herself. It was an exposed path, and she suffered from vertigo.
Two border guards with a German shepherd emerged from the underpass, and at the very back of the platform a railway worker in a luminous orange vest suddenly appeared. Then in the distance, Heidi saw the lights of her train.
She walked up and down, looking for her car. She was starting to worry the train would leave without her, so she finally asked a conductor who was standing in the open doorway of the sleeping car, smoking a cigarette. He pointed her the way and said she had better hurry, the train was leaving in three minutes. The border guards had already boarded, they were just changing the locomotive at the front. Heidi ran along the platform, watching the time on the big station clock. When the hands reached the vertical, she jumped in and went on down the narrow corridors until she got to her car. While she was looking for her compartment, the sleeping car attendant came by and asked her for her ticket and passport. A little reluctantly, she handed them over. He sensed her unease, and told her everything would be returned to her in the morning, when he woke her. Then, with a jolt, the train departed. Heidi almost fell over, but the conductor caught her by the shoulder, and then let her go again immediately, as if he’d done something wrong. He said good night and disappeared into his own compartment.
The train crossed the Rhine bridge. Now they were in Liechtenstein, and in a few minutes they would be in Austria. Heidi remained in the dimly lit corridor, gazing out into the darkness. Gradually her fear and tension began to melt away, and she began to look forward to the journey, and to Vienna, where she’d never been. The Academy of Fine Arts, she said the name over and over to herself, she was applying to the Academy of Fine Arts, she of all people, whom everyone treated like a little girl, and whose father even saw her going to Gymnasium as a waste of time, on her way to the Academy of Fine Arts. What makes you think you’re any better than us, he had said, and got her the internship with the council. If she hadn’t run into her old art teacher, it wouldn’t have occurred to her that she might become a painter.
A couple of months before, Frau Brander had gone to the registry office, she had lost her purse or someone had stolen it, and she needed to get a new identity card. Are you still drawing? she asked, as Heidi filled in the form. Heidi nodded, and Frau Brander suggested she show her what she was working on.
So a couple of days later they met for lunch in a cafe, and Heidi showed Frau Brander some of her drawings. The teacher looked at each one of them carefully, and then went on to the next. They’re just things I tossed off, said Heidi. They’re good, Frau Brander said, you have a nice clear line. Did you ever think of applying to art school? Heidi laughed and shook her head. You should think about it, said Frau Brander. Go to Vienna or Berlin. Don’t go to Zurich.
Heidi had made inquiries without telling anyone. Might as well, she thought, it doesn’t cost anything. The entrance exams were in September for Vienna and in October for Berlin, and it was only May. In the next few months, Heidi sketched more purposefully than before, and she went to the library and looked at art books and read the lives of artists she admired. And after some time it became clear that this was what she wanted to do, what she had secretly always wanted to do, to be an artist, as independent and confident as her teacher. When the boss called her into the office once to talk about her future, she said when she’d finished the internship she’d like to go to art school. He looked doubtful. What if they don’t take you? he asked. He said he couldn’t keep a job open for her. Heidi hadn’t discussed her plans with her parents yet. The boss called her father, they were acquainted from way back, through the gymnastic club. Her father was devastated, what seemed to upset him most was the fact that Heidi hadn’t taken him into her confidence. There was a short, vicious scene, Heidi called her father crude, and he called her crazy. And they’d stopped speaking to each other.
In August Heidi called Frau Brander, and said she was going to apply to Vienna. Frau Brander offered to help her put together a portfolio. Come by my apartment tomorrow night, she said, and bring everything you’ve ever done.
The following evening, Heidi packed all her drawings into a big cardboard box and cycled out to where Frau Brander lived, in an apartment complex at the edge of town. Heidi had never been to the area before. The building was old and run-down, but the apartment was nicely furnished. There were pictures on all the walls, little oil landscapes that showed the ugly warehouses of the transport companies, the freight station, and the silos. Go out on the balcony, said Frau Brander. Will you have a glass of wine? Heidi hesitated, then she said, Yes, please.
She stood by the railing and looked down at the enormous cornfield that began at the foot of the house and extended as far as the Three Sisters. In the distance you could hear the highway, a thrumming that alternately got louder and quieter. Frau Brander had stepped outside and was standing next to Heidi. She put her arm around her shoulder and squeezed her closer. I’m all excited, she said, it feels like it’s me applying all over again. Heidi thought of the stories about Frau Brander, but they were such nonsense, it was just a friendly hug that didn’t mean anything. That was the way artists were, easygoing and free from fear and prejudice.
Frau Brander had opened a bottle, and poured a couple of glasses. Call me Renate, she said, and they bumped glasses. Now let’s see what you’ve brought.
They took hours making their selection. When it got too dark outside, they went into the living room and carried on there. They laid the remaining drawings on the wood floor. Renate was barefoot, and Heidi had taken her shoes off; suddenly she felt naked in this strange place. They walked up and down among the drawings, putting them in different piles, taking some out and putting in others. It was very warm in the apartment, and when Renate raised her hand to scratch her head in thought, Heidi noticed dark sweat stains rimming her sleeveless dress. They stood at opposite ends of the room, approached one another, stood silently side by side, squatted down in front of one sketch the better to take it in. Renate overbalanced, and caught herself laughing on Heidi’s shoulder, and left her hand there after they had stood up again. Heidi could smell Renate’s perfume, which didn’t drown out the smell of her body, but blended with it to make a warm, summery scent of milk and grass.
In the end, there were only twenty pictures left, a few small portrait sketches, half a dozen landscapes, and a few recent things, colored-pencil drawings of strange organic shapes. Heidi felt confused when Renate had pulled the stack of them out of the box and asked what they were. She had shrugged her shoulders. This one looks like a vulva, Renate said, and this one too. She laughed, and looked Heidi straight in the eye. Heidi lowered her gaze, but not from shame. Do you have a boyfriend? Renate asked.
HEIDI HAD FOUND her compartment. There was just a dim emergency light on. She could hear someone breathing. She sat down on the lower bunk, opened her folder, and looked through the drawings once more. Hello, said a voice. Quickly Heidi shut the folder and looked up. A young woman was looking down at her. Where are we? she asked. We’ve just crossed the border, said Heidi. Oh, God, said the woman and she sat up and dangled her bare legs over the edge of her bunk. I can never sleep in these so-called sleeping cars. She climbed down the ladder and went off down the corridor. In a while she returned and stopped in front of the door to the compartment. She pulled down the window and lit a cigarette. Do you want one? she asked. She said that before boarding a night train, she always drank a beer to help her sleep. But in Zurich she had met some guys in a bar and had a few beers too many, and now she had to keep going to the bathroom. My name’s Susa. What’s yours? Heidi. Susa laughed. Is that your real name?
The conductor stepped into the corridor and said there was no smoking allowed. Asshole, muttered Susa, flicked the cigarette out the window, and went back inside the compartment. She said she was from Kiel. She had been bumming around Europe for the past couple of weeks. She had been to France, and Barcelona, and Italy, and Zurich. Now she was on her way to Austria and Hungary, and if there was time, the Czech Republic. What about yourself? Heidi said she was on her way to Vienna to apply to the Academy of Fine Arts. Are you an artist then? asked Susa. Heidi shook her head. I’m just applying, she said. I think your accent’s cute, said Susa. Are those your pictures in there? Will you show me?
Heidi hesitated, but she did feel a bit proud as well, to have been taken for an artist. She opened the folder. Susa settled down next to her. Those are the Three Sisters, said Heidi, that’s their name, they’re mountains. That’s the Gonzen. That’s the castle at Sargans, there’s my mum, and she’s someone at work. And there’s you, said Susa. They’re good. Yes, said Heidi. And that’s a girlfriend of mine. And what’s that? That’s just imaginary shapes, said Heidi. Susa laughed and said it looked like a cunt. Heidi stopped turning over pages. She could feel herself blushing. Come on, said Susa, this is exciting. She pulled the rest of the drawings out of the folder herself. Don’t, said Heidi, but Susa had already flicked on ahead. Just a load of cunts, she said in disappointment. She said she would try and sleep a bit now, so that she didn’t look like shit in the morning. She climbed back up the ladder.
Heidi gathered up her papers, returned them carefully to the folder, and put the folder next to the small backpack with her things. Then she lay down, without undressing. She still felt ashamed. At the time she had done the sketches, she had done them somehow automatically, not even thinking about what she was doing. For the first time, she had had the sense that she wasn’t just copying something, imitating, but making something original. It had been effortless, a wonderful feeling, one line after the next, as if the drawings were simply growing. Organic shapes, was the most she had thought, the organs of some creature or other. Even now she couldn’t see what everybody else seemed to see. Maybe she was just naive. She pictured herself standing in front of the selection committee, the experts looking on, and what they would make of it. She pictured herself standing naked in front of a group of old men, and one of them pointing at her pudenda, and saying that looks like a cunt, and the others cackling.
The train slowed down, and then picked up speed. It was warm in the compartment. Heidi got a water bottle out of her backpack and took a small swallow. She thought about Renate and the life she was leading. An art teacher in a small town, painting in her free time, and every couple of years or so getting a show of her work put on in some cafe room, or the staircase in an office building. Heidi had attended one of the openings, and even she had seen the full absurdity of the event. A local newspaperman had said a few garbled words about Renate’s art, and a flushed-looking Renate had gone around pulling corks and filling glasses for the few people present, all of them outsiders like herself, and listened to them say how great they thought the pictures were. It was strange that Heidi had never had any doubts about Renate before, that she had never stopped to think whether her teacher’s pictures were any good or not. Nor had she questioned Renate’s judgment either. She thought about the works of the great masters she had looked at in the library. What, compared to them, were her pencil drawings, her childish sketches?
The train had entered a station, and a cold neon light came in through the cracks in the blinds of the compartment window. Heidi looked at her watch, it was twenty past two. Without stopping to think, she jumped up, grabbed her backpack and folder, and ran down the corridor. The sleeping car attendant was standing in the open doorway, talking to a railwayman. I want to get off, said Heidi. We’re only in Innsbruck, said the conductor. I want to get off, Heidi repeated. The conductor muttered something that didn’t sound pleased, and strolled back to his compartment. He seemed to be doing everything deliberately slowly, thumbing through the envelopes that contained the passports of the travelers. At last he produced Heidi’s passport and ticket, and handed them to her. Outside, the whistle blew. Heidi jumped out of the car and the train pulled away. The railway employee was gone, there was no one in sight.
Heidi stood on the empty platform for ages. She was tired and confused and didn’t know where to go. On the schedule she saw that a train back to Switzerland was due any minute, but she couldn’t go home just yet. She picked up her things and left the station. She walked through the almost deserted city, which seemed very dark to her and rather frightening, with massive buildings and narrow lanes. There was the occasional light still on in a bar, and voices and laughter were audible, and sometimes music. But Heidi didn’t feel like being with people, she couldn’t have handled the nosy looks, the noise, and the drunken cheer of the night owls. On the banks of the Inn she sat down on a bench. She was cold, and put on her sweater.
That was the night that Heidi met Rainer. He was just going home with a few friends when he saw her sitting down by the river. He was worried she might do something silly, he said later, when she asked him why he had approached her. A woman by the river in the middle of the night, of course you thought of things like that. No, Heidi said, nothing like that had ever crossed her mind. Rainer’s friends stayed behind, shouted to him a couple of times, and then went off without him.
Rainer had sat down on the bench next to Heidi, and she told him her story, but not what Susa and Renate had said about her sketches. He didn’t seem at all interested in pictures. He took her home with him; after all, they couldn’t sit out on the bench all night. He was very sweet, and then suddenly he put his arms around her and started touching her. She didn’t fight him off for long, she had no strength and was tired and empty. Perhaps she even wanted it, the pain and the humiliation were apt punishment for her cowardice, they set the seal on her defeat. Heidi had to think about Renate, how different she was, more confident but still cautious and sensitive.
Rainer stood by the window, and Heidi stared at his hairy back and felt disgusted by him and by what he’d done with her. He turned to her and asked how old she was, and when she replied, Nineteen, he said, You’re not shitting me, are you? He was ten years older.
Heidi stayed at Rainer’s for three days. He worked in a sportswear shop, and left home every morning before nine o’clock, and only returned after business hours. Most of the time she spent in the flat, incapable of formulating a clear thought. Once, she pulled out her drawing things, and she sat for an hour in front of the empty sheet of paper without sketching a line. She sat in the dusk, waiting for Rainer, dreading him but unable to leave. She felt like a prisoner, even though he’d given her a key to the apartment. Sometimes she stood behind the front door without managing to open it. Once Rainer was back, he didn’t feel like going out. He had done the shopping, had bought bread and cheese and ham and wine, and they ate and drank, and then Rainer stripped her naked, and she let him. He was fit and strong and about a head taller than her, and he turned and twisted her and put her in positions that he liked, and demanded that she do things that were difficult for her and shaming, but still she never had the feeling that it was personal, and that he was thinking of her. He seemed very detached and entirely wrapped up in himself and his pleasure, and that was some consolation to her. He used her, but perhaps she used him even more, because she felt nothing, not even pleasure. She viewed herself as from a distance, and was surprised at herself.
HEIDI HAD NO CLEAR RECOLLECTION of time after her return home. She withdrew to her room and didn’t speak to anyone. She heard her father standing at the foot of her bed, and announcing in a loud voice, You can go back to the office now. He went away, he came back, stood there in silence and looked down at her. Her mother brought her meals, sat down on the side of the bed, talked to her or stroked her hair. Sometimes she cried. You can’t lie here always, she said, you have to eat something, say something. At night Heidi stood in front of the window for hours, gazing out at the moonlit mountains, the stony sisters, that simultaneously drew her and frightened her. She got sick. The doctor was clueless, he performed all sorts of tests on her, and Heidi let it happen. She sat on the treatment table in her underwear. The doctor wrote something in her file, and then swiveled around on his much too low chair. Everything’s fine, he said, making a face as though nothing was, except you’re pregnant.
She asked him not to tell her parents, but after a while it was impossible to conceal the fact. Her mother was first to notice, and told her father. Her parents reacted with astonishing calm. They asked Heidi who the father was, and whether he knew. Oddly, it had never occurred to Heidi to let Rainer know. What did the child have to do with him? But on her parents’ insistence, she called him. He came that weekend, and Heidi met him at the station. He was wearing good clothes, and she sensed that he had thought about everything and had a plan. They drank coffee in a place near the station, and Rainer cautiously tried to establish Heidi’s view of everything, and whether she could imagine a life with him. By the time they moved on, to lunch at home with her parents, everything was decided.
Rainer got on well with Heidi’s parents. He had a way of submitting to others immediately, and Heidi’s father liked that. He helped Rainer get a job, and found them a little three-room apartment. From the balcony, Heidi could see the Three Sisters, and when the wind was in the right angle she could hear the trains, and even the platform announcements. On Sundays, Rainer and Heidi went to her parents’, and they all acted as though the baby was already born and belonged to them. Heidi didn’t say much, she sensed that it would pass, and that something different was in store for her, something she couldn’t begin to predict. At the wedding, Heidi’s father made a speech, poking fun at his daughter who had left home to become an artist, and had come back with a bun in the oven. Rainer looked sheepish, but Heidi smiled and raised the baby aloft, like a prize.
HEIDI WENT TO INNSBRUCK many times in the intervening years, but never once to Vienna. Rainer didn’t care for Vienna, much less the Viennese. Anyway, he didn’t want Heidi to get any stupid ideas, he said, otherwise she might start applying to the Academy again.
A train came in, and Heidi quickly stood up. She didn’t want people to see her sitting there as though she had nothing better to do. She went to the supermarket, and then home. She stopped by the neighbor’s. Cyril wasn’t ready to go home yet, he wanted to go on playing with Leah. He can have supper with us, that’s fine, said the neighbor. Not today, said Heidi. Cyril, she called out shrilly, and she stuck her head in at the door, past the neighbor. Cyril!
While she was making supper, she saw the teenagers hanging around the recycling containers. She knew one of the girls, who was a trainee at the bakery. At work she wore a shapeless apron, but on the street you only ever saw her in a miniskirt, with exposed navel and a pushup bra that made her breasts look even bigger than they were. She’s just a kid, Rainer had said once, in a tone that made Heidi suspicious. He often made remarks like that about other women, he seemed to think of little else. In their years together Heidi had lost all respect for him. She refused to participate in his games, and kept to herself whenever she could. He suggested a course of therapy for her, came home with pamphlets for couples workshops. Never, said Heidi, I’ll never do that, and I’ll never talk about those things in front of other people either. She wouldn’t even touch the pamphlets, that was how disgusted she was.
After some time Heidi had begun to draw again, in the mornings, when Rainer was out of the house and Cyril was in his kindergarten. Every evening she watched the trainee baker from her kitchen window, saw her parading back and forth in front of the boys, with her chest out and her bottom wiggling. Heidi wanted to ask her to model for her, but she didn’t dare go down and talk to the girl. Instead, she drew her from memory, she imagined her in all sorts of poses, naked and clothed, from the back, from the front, squatting or kneeling, standing, face averted, with a hand in her hair.
Heidi stood naked in front of the mirror, and then drew the girl, based on her own body, a childlike figure resembling both parents without it being clear which features came from which parent. She hid the drawings in a cardboard box at the top of the closet in the bedroom. There must be hundreds of them by now.
Sometimes she wondered what would have happened if she’d stayed on the train and gone to Vienna, and submitted her portfolio. Most likely she wouldn’t have been asked to take the exam. Or she would have failed the exam. Or she would have passed the exam and taken the course, and she would be an art teacher now in some little town or other. The only thing you could say for certain was that there would have been no Cyril, and she couldn’t imagine a life without him, even if she did sometimes wish he had never been born, and she had remained free and independent and able to do whatever she wanted.
She would have liked to talk about all that with Renate, would have liked to show her the new drawings, but since her return she had avoided her former teacher. She thought of that night, the smell of Renate, and her bare feet and her hands, her tanned skin, her pale skin. She felt ashamed in front of her, and secretly she probably gave her some of the blame for what had happened. She never thanked Renate for the card and the soft toy that Renate had sent when Cyril was born. She had the feeling she was making fun of her in some way.
HEIDI WAS MAKING SUPPER. The news was on the radio. Cyril was in the living room, listening to a kids’ tape. He had the volume on much too high, and his story was mixed in with items on the news, making an absurd collage. Outside, Carmen was showing off in front of her pals. In her mind, Heidi changed to the girl, parading up and down, confidently showing off her body, dolled up for no one except herself. Heidi knew by now that Carmen wasn’t interested in the boys, she was just playing with them. She had talked to her, they had had coffee together, she had gone to buy clothes with her and underwear, which she only wore when Rainer wasn’t at home. She had let Carmen put makeup on her and do her hair. And then they had taken pictures of themselves and each other, made little videos using Carmen’s mobile phone camera, masquerades, games, whatever they felt like. Heidi had shown herself to the girl, she imagined her showing the little films to her friends with her cheeky laugh. Heidi was waiting for Carmen to look up at her, but she never did, probably she was just toying with her too.
Heidi imagined what would happen if Rainer found the drawings when she was no longer there. Sometime, looking for a reason, he would go through all her things, and open the box and find the sketches and the photographs. She’s just a kid, he would say, and shake his head, and not get it.
AT THE AGE of forty, Lucia’s mother had gone mad. I think that was the thing Lucia was most afraid of for herself. I asked her what had precipitated it. Just life, Lucia said, shrugging her shoulders. She married this man who loved her more than she loved him. I came along, she raised me, and eventually she couldn’t take it anymore and she cut her wrists. When I found her she was unconscious. I was thirteen.
Lucia was two years younger than me. I met her one summer, when I was staying with my grandparents in the mountains. I’d finished school in the spring, and I was going to start college in the fall. I had been hoping to go walking with my grandfather, but he had fallen ill and was slow to recover, so I had a lot of time to myself. When it rained, I read to try and prepare for college, but when the sun shone I was outside all day, wandering around, swimming in the icy lake, and coming home late.
It was at the lake that I first met Lucia. We hit it off right away, and spent all our time together. We went walking in the mountains, lay in the grass for hours, and when the weather was bad we put on slickers and went out anyway. The meadows were springy underfoot, and when the sun came out the sky was blue like you wouldn’t believe.
Often Lucia asked me to tell her stories. I’d hardly experienced anything in real life, but I always came up with something to tell her about. I can’t remember what, I just remember we used to laugh a lot. Lucia told me about her dreams, places she wanted to visit, things she wanted to buy. A car and clothes and a house. She had it all planned. She wanted to work in one of the hotel bars and make a lot of money in no time at all, and then she wanted a husband and two kids and a house on the edge of the village, near the lake. Then I can sit at home, she said, and look out the window and wait for the kids to come home from school.
Once Lucia got sick. She was alone at home, her mother was away in the clinic, and her father was in the shop downstairs. He sold radios and TVs, and he was a nice, rather shy man. She’s just got a bit of a cold, he said, and he sent me upstairs to her.
Lucia answered the door in pajamas, and I followed her up to her room. It was my first time in the house, and I had a mildly alarming sense I was doing something forbidden. It was that afternoon Lucia told me about her mother. It’s only in summer, she said, she sits upstairs in her room all day long, doesn’t speak, doesn’t do anything, and my father keeps having to go up and check how she is. He’s worried she might try to do it again, said Lucia. Will you make me some tea?
She wasn’t really sick, but I made her some tea anyway, it was like a game of house. Lucia told me where to find everything. When I opened the cabinets, I had a feeling I was under observation. Then Lucia walked into the kitchen and watched me and smiled when I looked at her. When she coughed, it sounded like she was pretending.
Lucia showed me photographs. We lay on the bed together, she was under the covers, I was on top. Eventually she asked me to kiss her, and I kissed her. About a week later, we slept together, it was the first time for both of us.
We thought we would go on a circular walk over two mountain passes. We would spend the night in a youth hostel in the next valley. We had been walking all day, had climbed up a long way, crossed stony landscapes, and only late in the afternoon reached our destination, which was a tiny village way up a barren valley. The youth hostel was a small stone house at the edge of the village. On the door was a sign telling you where to pick up the key.
The house was cold and empty. On the ground floor was a kitchen and a little dining room. There was a guest book on the table. The last entry was a couple of days ago. Two Australians had written something about the end of the world. The dormitory was up in the attic. It was dark, because there were only two dormer windows and a single weak lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. I dropped my backpack on one of the narrow mattresses along the wall on the floor, and Lucia took the one beside it. At the foot end of the mattresses were piles of brown woolen blankets. We went down to the kitchen, made coffee, and ate provisions we’d brought with us, bread and cheese and fruit and chocolate.
The sun dipped over the mountain early and it quickly got cold, but the sky was still blue. In a little general store we bought a liter of red wine. Then we strolled up the valley out of the village. We could hear marmots whistle, but we couldn’t see them. After a bit, Lucia said she was getting cold. I offered her my jacket, but she declined and we turned back.
The youth hostel was situated next to a stream we could hear even with the windows closed. It was barely warmer inside than out. I opened the wine and we got into our sleeping bags, not undressing, and drank wine out of the bottle and talked. Tell me a story, Lucia said, and I told her about things I wanted to do and films I’d seen and books I’d read.
Lucia slipped out of her sleeping bag to go to the bathroom. When she came back, she sat on my sleeping bag for a minute, then she stripped to her underwear and scooted in beside me.
Autumn came, and Lucia got a job at a hotel bar. I went home and enrolled at university. I had a good record at high school, but I had trouble making the adjustment to college. I found it hard to meet people, and spent most of my evenings alone in the little attic room my parents had found me.
I wrote regularly to Lucia, who rarely wrote back. If she did, it was a postcard that barely said anything, just that she was doing fine, that there was nothing happening in the village, the weather was good or bad or whatever. Sometimes she filled in the space with little drawings, a flower or an Alpine hut, and one time a heart with a drop of blood squeezed from it. The drawings looked like tattoos to me.
The summer after, my grandfather died. I drove out to the funeral in the village with my father. I hoped to see Lucia. She wasn’t there. I left messages for her but she didn’t get in touch. When we returned to the flatland, we took Grandmother with us.
A couple of times I tried to phone Lucia. Usually her father picked up and said she had just gone out. Once it was her. I said I wanted to visit her, but she didn’t seem interested. When I insisted, she said I was free to do what I liked, she couldn’t tell me never to come to the village. After that I wrote to her less often, but I didn’t forget her either. I had promised her that summer that I would be back, and when I’d finished at college, I applied for the job of teacher at the village school. The headmaster told me it was only on account of my grandparents that I got the job.
YOU WON’T COME BACK, Lucia had said four years ago. Now she said, I never thought you’d be back. I had come up by train at the beginning of the week. My father promised to bring my stuff up to the valley by car that weekend, my books and the stereo and the little TV. But on Friday it snowed and the pass was shut. My father called and said did it matter if he came the following week? I was sitting in my grandparents’ little house. I was sleeping in the bed my grandfather had died in, and presumably my great-grandfather before him. I lay under the heavy comforter, my arms pinned to my sides like a dead person’s, and I tried to imagine what it would be like if I really couldn’t move them, just to lie there and wait for death.
When the rest of my stuff comes, I’ll have you around to dinner, I said to Lucia. I’d gone to the bar where she worked. She said she was still living with her parents. She was working a lot, she said, in summer she’d totaled the car, and she wanted to buy another one in the spring. I said my grandparents’ garage still had the old Volvo standing in it, she could always borrow that. That piece of junk? she said, and she smirked.
Work at the school was difficult. I had taken courses in education at college, but the kids here were rowdy and badly behaved and didn’t make it at all easy for me. My colleagues were no help either. Most of them were local, and the talk at break was about going hunting and village gossip and the weather. Once I rang the father of one especially difficult girl. He was a hotelier, and he treated me like a schoolboy on the phone. A few days later the headmaster came into my classroom after lessons and said if I had trouble, I should talk to him, and not blame the parents for my failures. Astrid stays up half the night watching TV, I said. And then she can’t stay awake during class.
The head looked at the cut-paper shapes I’d done with the kids and that we’d hung in the windows. Snowflakes, he said. As if we didn’t have enough snow here. He took them down one after the other, slowly and without saying a word. When he was finished, he put them down in front of me and said, You ought to work on the syllabus instead of cutting fancy paper shapes.
He left. I could hear the kids yelling outside. I went to the window. They were fighting, and then, just like that, they all ran out of the yard and disappeared down the street. They all ran off together, and I was put in mind of a swarm of scruffy birds I’d seen scavenging on the rubbish dump outside the village.
The days were short and getting shorter. For a long time that year the snow held off, instead it was cold and rainy, and often I couldn’t see the tops of the mountains because the clouds were so low. It’s worse than in other years, said Lucia, at least when the snow comes everything gets brighter. She said she sometimes feared she might lose her mind like her mother. We had gone for a walk one afternoon when there was no school, out of the village and up the slope. It was one of the few fine days that autumn. But soon enough the sun disappeared behind the mountains, and only the upper slopes still had light on them.
If only it would snow, Lucia said, then we could at least go skiing. I asked her back for supper, but she said she had no time. On Saturday then, I said, and she said, Oh, all right. She said she could smell snow in the air, and that the old people said it was going to be a cold winter. But that was what they said every year. I tried to kiss her on the mouth, but she turned away and offered her cheek. Tell me a story, she said. You must have stories you can tell. All that time you’ve been away. I haven’t been away, I said, I’ve been at home.
THE NEXT DAY we went walking again. We went the same way and sat down on the same bench as on the day before. From there we could see the whole village, and the ugly modern hotels on the lake. The sky was cloudy, and soon after we had sat down it started snowing, small flakes the wind blew in our faces and that settled in the folds of our clothes. The snow melted away as soon as it touched the ground. Lucia had got up. I asked her to wait, but she shook her head and ran down the steep slope, leaping from boulder to boulder like a little girl. I watched her until she was back in the village. I stayed a while longer, then I walked down the road. I got to the school just on time. The headmaster was standing in the doorway, and watched silently as I walked past him and into my classroom.
On Saturday Lucia came around. I had gone shopping that morning and cooked all afternoon. Lucia ate in silence. I asked her how she liked the food. She said, Yeah, and went on chewing. When we were finished, and sitting on the sofa drinking coffee, she got up and switched on the TV. I said did she have to do that. Not really, she said. You can tell me a story, if you like. She left the TV on, but turned the sound down a bit. I’ve been waiting for you, I said. I haven’t kept you waiting. I mean since that time … since we … you know, since we slept together. Lucia furrowed her brow. You mean you haven’t slept with any other woman? No, I said, and suddenly I felt stupid. Lucia laughed out loud. She said I was crazy. That’s just weird. I said I’d often thought about her. Lucia got up and said it was time she went. I switched off the TV and put on a CD. I asked if she’d slept with a lot of guys. She said that was none of my business, and after hesitating briefly, Of course, what else was there to do up here? Then she said she had brought some condoms, but she didn’t feel like it anymore. She took the little pack out of her pocket and tossed it to me. Here, they’re all for you, she said, and she put on her shoes and jacket.
A WEEK LATER we went to the movies together. From the beginning of winter, the community center had one screening per week, and we often went to see them together. But Lucia wouldn’t come back to my house again. I was allowed to walk her home, and sometimes we would stand around chatting on the doorstep for a while. When she got cold, she gave me her hand and went inside.
Finally, early in December, it started to snow in the village, and this time the snow stayed with us. For one week it snowed almost solidly, then it stopped. It was very cold now, and the sky was clear. At night I saw loads of stars, they seemed to be much nearer than they were down in the flatland. Once, just before Christmas—we’d watched an American comedy together—Lucia said I could come in if I liked. On the landing she kissed me.
Have you had any more practice since? she asked me, laughing. And when I shook my head: Do you even remember how it’s done?
She left me standing in the hallway and went into the living room. I could hear her talking to someone, then she came out again. She opened the door to her room, and I just caught her father sticking his head around the corner of the living room door to see who it might be.
When Lucia was sitting on top of me, she got a nosebleed. She leaned forward and cupped her hand under her nose, but even so some of the blood splashed on my face. She laughed. The blood felt surprisingly cool. Later I heard her father in the passage outside. I wanted to stay over, but Lucia sent me away. She said she didn’t want anyone to see me. I got home very late.
The following afternoon I went by without phoning beforehand. Her father was friendly as always and told me just to go up. I’d spent the whole afternoon grading papers, and I was feeling drained. Lucia said she had to go right away, she was on shift at six. If I wanted to, I could go along with her. She would buy me a drink.
In the bar there were a couple of guys from the village, and Lucia wanted us to sit with them until it was time for her to start. I didn’t feel like it myself, but she had pulled up a couple of chairs. She was on first-name terms with all of them, and sat next to one she called Elio whom I’d never seen before. Elio worked as a mountain guide in summer and a skiing instructor in winter. He talked about his climbing trips and some ski race that was taking place in January, and the foreign girls who all wanted to hop into bed with him. One came back every year, a German woman from Munich. She books private lessons, but let me tell you, we don’t do a lot of skiing. Her husband was some bigwig in a bank, and he might show up in the valley for a weekend. She parked the kids on a baby slope. Then he worked out how much he made from private lessons. He said he was in it purely for the money.
I wanted to go, but Lucia told me to stay. She put her arm through Elio’s and told him to go on. By now he was on to mountaineering, relating heroic exploits about difficult ascents and dangerous rescue missions. Lucia wasn’t looking at me. She beamed at Elio. In the middle of one story I got up and left. At home I didn’t know what to do with myself. I turned on the TV. There was a talk show, in which, to the consternation of the audience, a man was talking about living with two women. The women were present in the studio, and they kept saying what a good relationship they had. I felt disgusted and turned the TV off.
I vacuumed the whole house, washed the dishes, and took the empty bottles to the recycling center. I felt a bit better after that. On my way home I looked in on the bar again. Lucia was working now, and the whole place was full of noisy tourists. Elio was sitting at the end of the bar. When Lucia spotted me, she went over to him and took a puff from his cigarette. Then she leaned across the bar and kissed him on the mouth. She looked at me with an evil smile.
THE NEXT DAY I ran into Lucia on the street. I had bought her something for Christmas. She took the parcel from me without looking at it, shrugged her shoulders, and walked off.
There was no school until the new year. My parents, along with my grandmother, came up to the valley and stayed in the house. They went skiing every day, my grandmother sat downstairs knitting or dozing. She had complained because I had taken down some of her pictures, and there was a scratch in the slate surface of the dining table. I was relieved when Christmas was over and they all went away.
During the rest of my time off, I stayed in bed as long as I could, and once I got up I hardly ever left the house. In the late afternoon I turned on the TV. There was the same talk show I’d seen before, only the subject was different. After I’d watched for a while, I turned off the TV and carted it into the garage. I stood there and stared at the thing. Then I took it around to the front of the house, left it on the street, and taped a piece of paper on the screen: TAKE ME. I waited by the window and looked out. From time to time someone would stop and read the sign and look up at the house. But no one took my TV.
On New Year’s Eve I called Lucia. We didn’t speak for long, she said she was busy. When I tried later, there was just the answering machine. I left a message on the tape. I said, Lucia, and I loved her and I was lonely and I wanted to spend the evening with her. I waited. At nine o’clock I gave up and went out.
The bar was packed, I could hear the music and the din of voices from out on the street. Lucia and a coworker stood behind the bar, Elio was sitting at one end of it again. I sat down next to him and ordered a beer. Lucia didn’t look at me. Sometimes she came down in our direction, leaned across the bar and shouted something in Elio’s ear, or kissed him, or had a puff from his cigarette. She smoked hurriedly, scanning the room as she did so. The smoke slid around her hand as though caressing it. I felt drunk, even though it was my first beer.
I watched Lucia at work. She laughed with the customers and moved quickly back and forth. She was wearing a skimpy top, and I saw she had a pierced navel, and wasn’t as slim as I seemed to remember her. But that only made her more alluring. I so wanted to touch her and kiss her, my whole body ached. And at the same time I saw myself hunkered in my corner, a pathetic lovelorn figure.
Eventually Lucia had some time off. She came out from behind the bar and got between Elio and me. Elio stood up and threw his arm around her shoulder, then he half bent his knees and gyrated with his hips. Then he let go of Lucia to go to the toilet, stumbled, almost fell. Lucia screamed with laughter. She moved slowly to the music, ran her hands down my hips and smiled at me. She said something. I shook my head, and she put her mouth right up against my ear. Great vibe, isn’t it? she yelled. Then she disappeared back behind the bar. I got up and left.
I WENT HOME. The TV was still out on the street, covered with snow. It was cold inside, I’d forgotten to fill the stove before going out. As I was on my way to the garage to pick up a few logs, my eye fell on the stack of blue exam books on the kitchen table. What I Really Want for Christmas. I flicked through them. What was it my students wanted, snowboards, game boys, a motor sled? And what had I expected? Justice? Love? Peace on earth?
I heard the bells chiming for midnight, and then cars honking and fireworks going off. I stuffed the essays in the stove and lit them. I watched through the glass panel as they curled in the heat and burned, first slowly, then faster and faster. Before the flames died down, I ripped a few pages out of an education textbook on the floor, and shoved them in too. I ripped more and more pages out of it, and when there was nothing left of it but the cover, I got another one. My eyes were tearing from staring so hard into the flames, and my face felt scorched.
I burned one book after another. I ripped bundles of pages out of the bindings and threw them in the flames. I was surprised how much strength it took to rip up a book. My hands hurt. In the end I went to bed.
The next day I carried on. I was more methodical now, I stacked my books next to the stove and burned them one by one. It took all morning. Then I pulled my notes out of my desk drawers, my diaries, newspaper clippings I’d never gotten around to reading. I burned the lot. The room was full of smoke that billowed out of the open door of the stove.
That evening I went to the bar. There weren’t so many people as the day before. Elio was in his corner again. When I sat down next to him, he looked at me doubtfully. Lucia came and took my order. She asked me if I’d made any good resolutions for the new year. I said I’d burned all my books. You’re crazy, she said. I’ll tell you a story, I said, but it was probably more for my benefit than hers. I told her about how I’d first come to the village, and how I’d met Lucia. I told her about our long hike into the next valley, and our first night.
Slowly Elio drank his beer. He was looking at the bar, it seemed he wasn’t listening. Lucia was, though. She was in the grip of a strange unrest, and wouldn’t look me in the eye. When I was finished, she leaned across the bar and whispered something into Elio’s ear. Then she kissed him on the mouth long and lingeringly. At the same time she looked at me with an expression that was at once frightened and furious. At least she wasn’t indifferent to me anymore. I got up and left. At home I wrote her a long letter. When I’d finished, I put it in the stove and burned it.
I didn’t leave the house at all the next day. I burned everything I could find: cardboard boxes, my grandparents’ photo albums, old wooden skis that were in the broom closet, a broken stool. Whatever was too big I sawed or chopped into pieces with the ax. The tools were old and hadn’t been used in a long time, the saw blade was spotted with rust, and the ax was blunt.
The following day I started on the furniture. My grandparents’ things were solidly built, and I had no idea how much work it was to destroy something. It was probably easier to kill someone, I thought. The application of pressure to the correct spot, a twist of the neck, a blade slipped between the ribs, the way I had seen it done in films. I thought more in terms of killing Elio than Lucia, but it wouldn’t have changed anything. When the shops opened after the holidays, I bought a new ax.
Destruction had a smell. Torn paper, cardboard, ripped cloth soaked in gasoline to make it burn. Wood smelled when it splintered as if it was freshly felled, as though the smell had been secreted inside it the whole time. And then the smells of burning: the sour smoke from paper that I pushed into the stove in great wads, and that slowly turned to ash. The thick smell of burning gas, the acrid smell of varnish that bubbled and blackened before the wood underneath caught fire.
Whatever I couldn’t burn I stuffed in garbage sacks that I stowed in the Volvo, first in the trunk, then when that was full on the back seat, and finally on the front passenger seat.
School had begun again. I had gotten much calmer. During class, my thoughts were already on the work of destruction I would continue that evening. Thinking of it seemed to calm me. When I met the headmaster in the hallway, he gave me a friendly nod, and offered me best wishes for the new year.
One weekend I drove out of the village and took a narrow road up the mountain. At the beginning of the road was a sign saying no passenger cars, only farm and forestry traffic. There were very few marks in the snow. I followed the zigzagging road up the mountain. After a couple of miles it came to a sudden stop. I left the car and walked back. When I got home I was frozen to the marrow.
After a week the village policeman phoned and said my car had been found. He was suspicious and asked various questions. He didn’t seem to believe whatever cock-and-bull story I told him.
On Sunday I went to church for the first time since I was living in the valley. I sat in the back pew. When the minister asked the congregation to come forward for the blessing, I stayed put. I saw Lucia, kneeling down with maybe a dozen other believers. The minister laid his hand on their heads, one after the other, and spoke the blessing. After the service I tried to speak to Lucia. It was the first time in ages that I’d seen her without Elio. I love you, I said. You’re crazy, she said, you’re imagining things. She walked off. I followed her and said it again: I love you. But she didn’t react, wouldn’t even look at me. I followed her back to her house, climbed the stairs after her to the back entrance. She opened the door, went in, and slammed the door in my face.
At the end of January I took the bed apart and sawed and chopped it up in the garage into little pieces that I burned in the stove. That was the last of the furniture. There was only the mattress to come.
On one of the following days I walked up to the place above the village where I’d sat with Lucia. I wiped the snow off the bench and sat down. The sun was already gone over the mountains. After a while I saw Lucia coming up the road. She was walking fast and had her eyes on the ground. Once she looked up at the bench. I waved, but I wasn’t sure whether she saw me or not. She walked on a bit, then she turned back and returned to the village.
The next day I was just about to give my students a dictation when I saw Lucia through the window. I told them I’d be back in a minute, and ran out of the classroom. By the time I was on the street, though, she had disappeared. I hesitated for a minute, then I went home, packed a few things, and called a taxi. I knew the driver, one of his kids was in my class. He didn’t ask me any questions, and didn’t seem to be surprised when I told him to take me to the station.
There was half an hour until the next train, and I was suddenly worried someone might come and prevent me from leaving. The driver had parked his taxi outside the station. He had got out and was smoking and talking on the phone to someone. He laughed, I could hear him from the platform where I was standing. Sometimes he looked across at me, and in spite of the distance, I thought I could make out a triumphant expression on his face.
The train arrived. A couple of skiers boarded with me, but they got off at the next station and I was alone in the car. I opened a window and leaned out. Cold air flowed in. The sky was overcast, and the mountains looked threatening as they passed. Not until the train turned a corner and entered a tunnel did I calm down.
THE BANDAGE ON Bruno’s back felt tight. The wound hardly hurt, but thinking about it got to him and made him sweat more than he usually did. It had been hot for weeks. It was late August, and some people said it would stay hot well into September.
Bruno had worked at reception for thirty years. The past week he had been on the early shift. He was home at three, and Olivia got him to go shopping with her. In the shops she asked him questions he couldn’t answer.
Bruno showered before supper. When he came out of the bathroom in clean clothes, Olivia wanted to change his bandage. The thought that she had left the kitchen and waited for him outside the bathroom door bothered him. I’m sure the bandage has gotten wet, she said, and she followed him into the bedroom. It hasn’t, he said, it doesn’t matter.
Olivia unbuttoned his shirt. He was too feeble to resist, and sank down onto the bed. She sat down beside him, pulled the shirt over his shoulder, and told him to turn around.
Watch out, she said, and already the bandage was off. It doesn’t hurt, said Bruno. It looks fine, she said. It was just a couple of punctures, he said. She said he had always had good powers of healing. He said it felt a bit tight. Olivia was immersed in her work. There, she said, and she stroked his hair, now you’ve earned your supper.
It was seven o’clock. They always ate at seven. It’s supposed to get cooler tomorrow, said Olivia, as she heaped Bruno’s plate. He wasn’t hungry, but he had long since stopped trying to tell her that.
After supper he went out in the garden and stayed out a long time, longer than usual. It was already getting dark when he came in. Clouds had appeared from somewhere. Olivia was in the living room, watching the late news. Bruno went into the bedroom. He got undressed and lay down. Is it raining yet? Olivia asked as she came to bed. Bruno didn’t reply.
He was glad he was on the late shift again tomorrow. He didn’t have to be at the hotel until three, and could sleep in as long as he liked. Olivia woke him with lunch, and after coffee he was out of the house. They didn’t live far from the hotel, and Bruno loved biking home from work. At night the town center was full of young people talking animatedly in the cafes. When he got home, Olivia was usually in bed already, and he went into the bedroom to wish her good night. He kissed her quickly, and she said, Mind you don’t stay up too long.
The cold front had reached the town overnight. Suddenly the air was almost twenty degrees colder, and it had gotten darker, almost autumnal outside. When was he expecting the result? Olivia asked him over lunch. She asked him every day, since he’d gone to the doctor a week ago, to get the mole removed. Tomorrow, he said. It’s bound not to be anything, said Olivia. Of course it’s nothing, said Bruno, just a routine check. Well, better safe than sorry, said Olivia, it’s one less thing to worry about. The uncertainty. That’s why I had it done, said Bruno. Quite, said Olivia. Will they call you, or do you have to call them?
Bruno had left the number of the hotel with the doctor’s assistant. She had promised to call on Wednesday, sometime during the afternoon. The doctor hadn’t even thought it necessary to offer any words of optimism. The chances of it being a melanoma were really very small. Bruno wasn’t worried. On the contrary, he was in a sparkling mood that day, perhaps because it had cooled down at last. He made a joke when he took over from his colleague, and personally arranged the flowers in the room where the Christian businesspeople were meeting in the evening. Then he stepped out onto the terrace and contentedly surveyed the landscape, the little section of the lake you could see from there, and the forested mountains, which seemed to be much nearer now than when it was hot. It didn’t even bother him when Sergio called in to say he was sick. The student who generally filled in on such occasions wasn’t home, but his mother said he would be back soon. Bruno called Olivia. He said he would be back late, he couldn’t say how late. Why today of all days? said Olivia. Bruno didn’t reply.
The Christian businesspeople had all gone home. Marcella emerged from the room with the last of them, and stopped at the reception desk for a chat with Bruno.
Those Christians are lousy tippers, she said, I hope they’ll at least remember us in their prayers. She asked what Bruno was doing there still.
Sergio is sick, he said.
What about the student? asked Marcella. What’s the matter with Sergio?
Bruno shook his head. We’ve known each other for thirty years, he said. He began here shortly after me. You weren’t even born then.
Marcella laughed. She said she was thirty-five.
You don’t look it, said Bruno. Who looks after your kids when you’re at work?
They can look after themselves. My younger girl is ten. My older girl is thirteen. The boy is fifteen.
He had three children too, Bruno said, but they all moved out a long time ago. Marcella said she was just going to straighten out the hall. See you in a minute, she said.
Two middle-aged women left the hotel. Bruno had often been puzzled by the attractive women who stayed as guests of the hotel. They arrived in twos and threes, without their husbands. They shared a room, were out all day, and returned to the hotel in the evening with half a dozen large bags from expensive stores. Sometimes he saw them on his tours of duty by the pool, lying there half naked on their deck chairs. Bruno would stop for an instant and look at them skeptically from a distance. After dinner, the women might leave the hotel once more, and he wouldn’t be around to see them return. Sergio had told him that they sometimes had men with them whom they tried to smuggle in past him. As if he cared who they spent their nights with. He was quite capable of imagining the rest, when the men slunk past the porter’s desk an hour later, with cigarettes between their lips and frosty expressions.
Bruno thought of Marcella in her black skirt. He imagined her coming home. The children were already in bed, the husband was watching TV in the living room. She went into the bathroom and took off her skirt and underskirt. She washed and went to the bedroom in her underwear and pulled on her nightie.
Bruno thought of the time when his kids had still been at home, all those long, monotonous years, all the mornings and evenings. Sometimes he longed for those meals, where no one had said much, nothing of importance. It was the repetition that made them so lovely, the knowledge that tomorrow and the day after and next week and next year they would be sitting together in exactly the same way. There seemed to be so much time then. Not until the children had moved out did he notice how distant they had remained in all those years. When Bruno saw a disaster movie in which an earthquake or flood or volcanic eruption threatened a town, it wasn’t the destruction that moved him or the deaths, only the fate of the man who had become separated from his family and was desperately looking for them in all the confusion. He would have tears in his eyes, and Olivia said what a load of nonsense.
At ten o’clock Bruno called home and said he still didn’t know when he’d be back. Olivia sounded worried, but she didn’t say anything. He promised her he would call later on.
He thought of the result he would get tomorrow. He thought about the way they would break the news. The doctor would be straight with him. Seventy percent of patients died within five years. Then he would embark on that rigmarole he had seen one of the waiters, a man from Portugal, go through, that endless sequence of tests and therapies. Times when things looked to be improving, and other times when he could barely recognize the man. Sleepless nights, unbearable pain, days of vomiting, and in the end a mean and nasty death.
He stood in front of the hotel. Not many of its rooms were occupied. Only a few of the windows had lights on; in one of them a young man was sitting and smoking a cigarette. He tossed the butt out the window and disappeared. Bruno was terrified, absolutely terrified of the disease that might already have spread throughout his body. He was afraid of losing his life a piece at a time. He had never wished for very much, only hoped things might stay more or less as they were. But maybe that had been enough to provoke fate.
Marcella emerged from the hotel, said good night, and unlocked her bike. Good night, he said, and Marcella waved and rode off.
Bruno looked at the old oil painting that hung next to the front desk. He had almost forgotten it existed, even though he went past it at least twice a day. It was a farewell scene in the golden light of a breaking storm. The man was wearing chain mail and some sort of surcoat. His hair was braided and he had a drooping mustache that gave his appearance something Oriental, a Fu Manchu mustache. He would be gone a long time, perhaps he was going on a Crusade, perhaps he would never return to the castle on the lake, and to the woman in the long flowing robes. When he started at the hotel, Bruno had often stood in front of the painting. He had kissed the woman and set out into the storm full of joyful expectation. Now all he could see was pain and the inevitability of parting.
The student called a little after eleven. Bruno told him not to bother anymore. He was annoyed, even though there was nothing he could blame the student for. Bruno waited, looked at the wall clock, sat down at his desk, got up again. He fetched the bottle of grappa from the cabinet that he had been given for Christmas by a regular at the hotel, and hadn’t opened. It was a good make, the guest had said, but Bruno didn’t care for grappa. He poured himself a water glass full and drank it down. He shuddered. He filled the glass a second time. He picked up the phone, put it down again. What was he going to tell Olivia? The truth? And what was the truth? That he didn’t want to come home. That he didn’t want to spend this last evening with her and her false concern and her useless chatter. He wouldn’t be able to stand it if she changed his bandage again, ruffled his hair like a little boy’s. He wasn’t a little boy, he was an old man, maybe a man with a deadly disease. And he wanted to spend the evening by himself, without lies and without comfort.
He called Olivia and said he wasn’t coming home. The student couldn’t make it, and there had to be somebody at reception.
Can’t be helped, he said. Olivia asked if he’d eaten anything, and said he ought to lie down. Good night, said Bruno, and hung up.
The two women came back just before midnight. They were unaccompanied, but clearly exuberant. They laughed loudly as they walked up the stairs. A little later, Bruno locked the front entrance. If anyone came along, they would have to ring the bell. Bruno could have lain down now, but he walked through the deserted hallways, and went out through a side exit into the grounds. The swimming pool glistened blackly in the darkness. Bruno switched on the underwater lighting, and the pool shone azure. He loved that color, and the coolness and cleanness and the faint smell of chlorine. The pool was the real glory of the hotel, not the decorated rooms or the gourmet menus or the lounge musicians who sometimes played here on weekends. The pool was different from the lake where he usually swam, it was detached from the natural scene and from daily life. It represented a life he would never live, but that didn’t bother him. It was enough that there were some people who did live like that, and that he was near them, and provided service for them. It had never occurred to him to spend his holidays in the hotel, though probably he could have afforded it.
Bruno stood by the side of the pool. Then, not really knowing what he was doing, he began to undress. Slowly and gingerly he went down the shallow tiled steps, leaning forward as though about to plunge into the water. It was cool, but not cold. He stood there and looked at his naked body, which was yellow and pale in the bluish light. Then he lowered himself into the water and swam to the far end of the pool. He swam back and forth, feeling first a little warmer, then cold again. He got out of the pool and brushed the water from his body with his hands, and got dressed. He was aroused, almost euphoric, and felt like laughing or crying.
Bruno slept on the couch in a nook on the second-floor landing. He had wild dreams he was unable to remember later. When it grew light outside, he didn’t feel he’d slept at all. His head ached and he was still a little dizzy from the grappa. He put the half-empty bottle back in the cabinet. Then he went to the bathroom, washed his face, and rinsed his mouth out. The cold water refreshed him a little. He went down to the restaurant, which was still closed at this hour. It took a long time for the water in the coffee machine to heat up. Only then did it occur to him that he’d had nothing to eat since yesterday lunchtime. In a drawer he found some cut bread, and there were little individually wrapped pats of butter and cheese in the fridge.
His colleague got in at half past six. He explained to her that Sergio was sick, and she said Bruno should have called her. He merely shook his head. Then he called Olivia. It took a few rings before she picked up. He could hear the radio in the background. He thought of her eating her breakfast by herself, the way she always did when he was on night duty and she let him sleep in. She will eat breakfast by herself all the time now, he thought, she will have to get used to it. And suddenly he felt sorry for her, and he was ashamed of himself.
Did you sleep well? he asked.
Not really, replied Olivia. She said the house felt cold.
Then why didn’t you turn the heat on? he said. I’m on my way.
Did you get your result? she asked.
This afternoon, said Bruno. But it’s nothing. It won’t be anything.
SIX O’CLOCK CAME and went, but Angelika wasn’t really worried. She brought out the garage, but Dominic didn’t want to play anymore. He sat quietly on her lap and leaned his head against her breast. The last couple of times the bell rang, he had gone running to the door, only to come back with shoulders drooping, because it was some other child’s mother or father. All the parents knew Dominic, because he was usually already there in the morning when they dropped off their own children and still there when they picked them up at night. They said hello to him, and thanked him for opening the door. They asked him vaguely if he’d played nicely that day. Then as soon as they saw their own children, they beamed and forgot all about Dominic.
Shall we look at a picture book together? Dominic merely shook his head. When Angelika stood up and set him down on the ground, he held on to her leg. She said she was going to call his home. Let me go, she said. He wouldn’t let go. She was annoyed, not with him, but with his parents, and she felt bad about taking out her irritation on him. She was tired and wanted to go home. Benno was coming at half past seven, and she wanted to shower first and relax a bit. She looked at the clock. It was twenty past six.
She broke Dominic’s grip and stepped away from him. He was lying in the corner, screaming now, and she tried to call his parents. She dialed all the numbers she found in the book: home numbers, office numbers, and both mobile phones, but no one picked up. She left messages. She made no effort to conceal her irritation. After that was done she felt a little calmer. She went across to Dominic, leaned down over him, and patted him on the shoulder. Someone would be along soon.
Dominic asked if it would be his mama or his papa who was coming. Angelika said she wasn’t sure, but one or the other would be there any minute. Dominic asked if any minute was now. No, said Angelika. When was any minute? Now? No, any minute was soon. Now? Not yet. She would tell him. She lifted him off the ground and carried him to the sofa. He took hold of her again. Is now soon? She didn’t reply. She was busy doing things, tidying away the last of the toys, opening the windows to let in some fresh air. At seven she called Benno and said she was running late. They agreed to make it half past eight. Dominic sat rigidly on the red sofa and didn’t take his eyes off her.
Usually it was his mother who brought him to nursery school and his father who picked him up. He always came at the last moment, sometimes he was late, but this time he was more than an hour late. Angelika’s annoyance had lessened. Now she was beginning to worry. She felt uneasy, she felt threatened, she didn’t know how or why. I’m going to leave in five minutes, she thought to herself, and in five minutes she thought the same thing. She called her boss but got no reply. She wondered about calling the police to ask if there’d been an accident somewhere, but then she decided not to. She wrote a note to Dominic’s parents to say she had taken the boy home with her. She left her cell phone number at the bottom. She shut the windows and bundled Dominic up in his jacket and hat and shoes, and took him by the hand. When she’d locked up, she realized she’d forgotten the note, and she had to go back in again to get it and attach it to the door.
She was often out and about in the city with the children, going to the zoo or the lake or a playground near the day care. But this was different. She felt she was with her own child, and she felt oddly proud—as though taking a child by the hand were somehow difficult. Dominic was quiet, who knew what was going on in his head. He sat down next to her in the streetcar and looked out the window. After a couple of stops, he began asking questions. He pointed to a woman and asked, Why is that woman wearing a hat? Because it’s cold. Why is it cold? It’s winter. Why? Look at the little dog, said Angelika. Why is the dog little? Just because, she said, there are big dogs and little dogs. Are we going home? asked Dominic. Yes, said Angelika, we’re going home. Home to my home.
At the station they had to wait. The bus was late, so they stood in the dark and waited. It had been raining in the afternoon, and the car headlights glistened on the wet asphalt. At least Angelika had tomorrow off. She wanted to go to IKEA with Benno and buy a cabinet for her shoes. She had looked at the catalog and knew exactly which model.
For a while Dominic didn’t say anything. When she bent down to look at him, he suddenly stood up on one foot and swiveled on his own axis like a ballet dancer. He spread his arms, and turned around and around until he was wobbling. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground, completely lost in his funny dance. His face was earnest and concentrated. Watch out, said Angelika, here comes the bus. I’m flying, said Dominic.
Angelika lived in a suburb on the edge of town, in a five-story tenement from the 1980s. At the time she moved to the city, she hadn’t been able in her hurry to find anything better, and after a while she had gotten used to it, she no longer heard the noise from the airport, and it was close to the forest where she liked to go jogging in summer. Lots of families with children lived here. Eventually Angelika would have children too. She had never discussed it with Benno, and didn’t even know how he felt about it. But one thing was for sure: he wouldn’t want to live out here. He let her know that each time he came to visit her. Most of the time they met at his place. Only when Angelika was at work late did he sometimes agree to sleep over at hers.
She was amazed by how naturally Dominic followed her up the stairs. On the second floor he even overtook her and charged on ahead. When she stopped in front of her door, he was half a flight up, and she had to call him back. Then suddenly he didn’t want to go down the stairs alone, and she had to lead him down.
He stopped in the hall and waited patiently while she took off his wet shoes and his jacket. She asked him if he was hungry. He nodded, and she went in the kitchen to see what she had in the fridge. She cooked some pasta, with sauce out of a jar. While he ate, she flicked through the free newspaper she’d picked up on the streetcar. Dominic was ravenous, cramming the noodles into his mouth with both hands. When she asked him to use a fork, he said he didn’t know how. But you manage it at nursery, she said. He pretended to try. Then, when she told him off again, he started to wail. Don’t be so silly, said Angelika. Dominic pushed his plate away with a jerk and upset his glass. The water spilled over the table and the newspaper. Can’t you watch what you’re doing? snapped Angelika, and got up to get a paper towel.
Suddenly her apartment looked ugly and inhospitable to her. No wonder Benno didn’t like coming here. She remembered her childhood and the home of her parents, that cozy old house. At the time she had the feeling nothing bad could happen to her in that house, as though it had always been there and would always be there, a refuge and a protection for her. When her parents said a few years ago that they wanted to sell it and move into an apartment, she couldn’t believe it. Her father had trouble walking, and her mother said neither of them was getting any younger, and the garden was a lot of work, and what were they both doing, rattling around all alone in that big old house. Angelika said nothing. Her parents hired movers to handle the move. She asked herself if she would ever manage to offer a child such a home. It seemed to her she didn’t have the confidence, the security, or the love.
They were still at table when Angelika heard the key in the door. Hello, Benno called from the hall. He appeared in the doorway of the living room, stopped, and said, Well, who do we have here? Angelika explained. Is he going to sleep in our bed? Benno asked with a grin. Because if he is, I can pack up and go home. Angelika said she was sure it was just a misunderstanding. Misunderstanding? said Benno. People leave their kid somewhere, and it’s a misunderstanding? He sat down with them at table. Dominic stared at him, and Benno stared back, with the same look of astonishment. Perhaps they flew away, he said. Do you think your parents could have flown away? He flapped his arms like a bird. Dominic said nothing, and Benno asked if there was anything left to eat. I thought you would have eaten already. Not really, said Benno. Angelika said she could make him some spaghetti. Do you want some more? she asked Dominic. He nodded.
When she brought the spaghetti into the living room ten minutes later, Benno and Dominic were sitting on two sofa cushions on the floor. Dominic was sitting behind Benno and had his arms around his waist. Benno leaned his upper body forward and to the side and back, and was making droning sounds. Dominic was laughing wildly and copying his movements. We’re flying, said Benno.
Angelika put the spaghetti on the table and fetched cutlery and a clean plate. Come on, she said, supper’ll get cold. Again she thought of her childhood, where such a sentence must have fallen a thousand times, though she seemed only now to understand it. Benno got up. He had his arms out and was still flying. He made for the table. Dominic was holding onto his belt and allowed himself to be towed. He was skipping up and down with delight. Suddenly Benno spun around and grabbed the boy and plopped him on a chair. There, he said, we have to eat something, the plane’s run out of fuel.
Angelika watched the two of them eating. Now it was Dominic’s turn to copy Benno. He had his head low over his plate and shoveled forkfuls of spaghetti into his mouth, all the while squinting at Benno. Angelika looked at her boyfriend, who seemed unaware of it. He’s like a kid himself, she thought. Maybe that was why he was so good with them. She had had a couple of occasions to witness it, when he had picked her up from nursery school. In some ways he struck her as almost being younger than Dominic, who seemed to be aware of everything that was going on, and thought it through and asked questions. Benno didn’t ask any questions. He came here, ate, slept with her, and went away the next day. She couldn’t imagine him as a father. But then most of the men who came to pick up their kids at day care weren’t fathers either. They talked to the kids as if they were kids themselves, and fooled around, and when you asked them something they shrugged their shoulders.
Do I get a beer? Benno asked, and then he asked Dominic, Hey man, do you want a beer? No-o-o, said Dominic emphatically, beer is for grownups.
After supper, Dominic wanted to fly some more, but Benno said the plane had mechanical trouble. He sat on the sofa and switched on the TV. Angelika cleared the table. She brought Dominic a few toys she kept in the apartment for her nephews and nieces. Then she sat down next to Benno, who was watching a cop show. Suddenly she felt very much alone.
Dominic played uncertainly with Legos, and kept looking up at them on the sofa. Benno had put his feet up on the coffee table, and had his arm around Angelika. He undid the top button of her blouse. Stop that, she said, but he carried on, and shoved his hand down her front. When she tried to get up, he held her down. I’m not going to let that runt spoil my fun, he said, and he took off her blouse. If he says anything, I’m out of a job, said Angelika. Benno kissed her on the mouth and talked at the same time, she didn’t know what he was saying. He must have seen things at his parents’, he said, and anyhow he had to learn sometime. Angelika tried to forget about Dominic, but she couldn’t. She remembered how he had cried on the stairs. He had looked at her as though it was her fault his parents weren’t coming. I don’t like him, she thought, actually I don’t like any of them. She lay on the sofa and embraced Benno. He laughed and thrust his hand between her legs. When he tried to undo her belt, she pushed him away. He allowed himself to fall to the floor, and lay there on his back, next to Dominic.
Do you want to fly? he asked the boy, who was staring at him in utter bewilderment. He grabbed him and lifted him onto his belly, where he began tickling him. Dominic squirmed, but he didn’t laugh. He assumed the serious expression he had had during his dance at the bus stop. Angelika sat up, straightened her bra, and pulled on her blouse. She felt ashamed of herself.
Do you know where babies come from? Benno asked. Dominic said he had come out of his mama’s belly. But do you know how you got in there? asked Benno. I was so small, said Dominic, I was as small as this, and he pinched his finger and thumb together.
Just before nine, Dominic’s mother called. Angelika jumped, as she always did when her cell phone rang. The woman’s voice sounded half annoyed, half embarrassed. She apologized. Her husband had a late meeting that he hadn’t told her about. Angelika could hear his voice in the background, protesting. At any rate, we each thought the other was doing it. They were at the day care, and were on their way here. Angelika gave them directions, with a lot of difficulty. Well, we’ll be there soon, said the mother. Dominic’s fine, said Angelika. Yes, of course, said the mother with a little laugh, I didn’t doubt it. I’ll see you in twenty minutes, half an hour, maybe.
She’s a lawyer, said Angelika.
Is she good-looking? asked Benno. Rich?
Angelika said she was sure Dominic’s parents weren’t short of money. His father was a relationship counselor.
What’s she look like? asked Benno.
Average, said Angelika.
Half an hour later the bell rang. Dominic had been sitting on the sofa in shoes and coat for the past ten minutes. Good-bye, little fellow, said Benno. Come and see us again, will you?
Dominic didn’t answer. Angelika took him by the hand.
When Dominic saw his mother through the glass door, he broke away and ran down the last couple of steps. The two of them faced each other, separated only by the glass. The mother had crouched down and was signaling to the boy. He pressed his hands and face against the cold glass, which misted over with his breath. Angelika unlocked the door. The mother stood up. Angelika saw she had a package in her hand. Is that for me? asked Dominic. That’s for dear Angelika, said the mother. As thanks for letting you come and visit her. She handed the present to Angelika, and repeated that she was terribly sorry it had happened, and she was thoroughly embarrassed. A misunderstanding. Angelika had thought of some reply, but then all she said was these things happened, and thank you for the present. I hope you’ll enjoy this, she said, and then to Dominic, Right, let’s hurry home and get to bed. Say bye-bye. Angelika watched them leave and walk over to a jeep that was parked diagonally to the other cars. She could just make out the silhouette of the father at the wheel. The mother bent down to Dominic and seemed to tell him something. Angelika waved, but they didn’t seem to notice. When the door closed behind her, she turned around once more. The car was gone. On the glass she saw the traces left by Dominic’s hands. She wiped them away with her sleeve.
Benno was in the shower, Angelika could hear the water. She sat down in the living room and opened the package. It was a bottle of perfume. She sniffed it and dabbed some behind her ears and between her breasts. Benno emerged from the shower. He was naked, with a towel slung around his hips. She saw the bulge of his erection. He sat down beside her and embraced her. She freed herself and said she would have a quick shower too. She locked the bathroom but didn’t undress. When Benno knocked on the door, she was still sitting on the toilet, with her face in her hands.
“You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me?
Then who the hell else are you talkin’ to? You talkin’ to me?
Well I’m the only one here.”
IT ALL BEGAN with the death of his mother. With their claim that his mother had died. He can hardly remember what came before. Just occasional images: exterior, day. A large garden, colors, fruit trees, a house with a steeply pitched roof. The image is distorted at the edges, as though seen through a wide-angle lens. In close-up the face of his mother. She is laughing and swinging him up in the air. She is holding him by the hands and swinging him around in a circle. His eye is the camera. The garden smudges in the accelerating movement, a green blur. Cut.
A long hallway, gray linoleum, white walls. Rainy light leaks in from outside, dim. He is sitting on a bench next to a woman he doesn’t know. They wait for a long time until a doctor emerges from one of the rooms, shakes his head, says something he doesn’t understand. The face of the doctor is gray. The woman stands up, takes the boy by the hand, and they leave down the hallway and down a wide flight of stone steps. They walk out of shot, which is held a moment longer. Cut.
A montage: dining rooms, dormitories, gym halls. He is standing there, in too short pants, in a gym outfit, clothes that others have worn before him. Always with other boys. The soundtrack is a babel of noise, an echoey confusion of scraps of words, yells, whistles, the singing of children. The loneliness of never-being-alone. The light goes out and goes on again immediately. The taste of toothpaste, porridge, white bread. Someone is banging around on an upright piano, the clatter of dishes and sounds of liquids being slopped out and scraping noises. He shuts his eyes, opens them again.
Twenty years later. The radio alarm plays “I Got You, Babe.” A hand slams on the button and the music stops. A man gets up, sits for a moment on the edge of the bed, his face buried in his hands. He stands up and leaves the room. We track him to the bathroom, then to the landing. The camera pans away from him, moves toward the window, then through it. Outside a street in a poor neighborhood. The asphalt is wet, but judging by the clothes of the passersby it is not cold. As if on command, the extras start to move. A man carrying a bouquet of flowers walks past, the same as every morning, then two women of thirty or so, presumably foreigners, with long black hair. Both are wearing jeans and white T-shirts, one of them is carrying a light blue shoulder bag. They are yards apart, but even so they seem to belong together, like clones, or sisters unaware of each other’s existence. The front door of a house opens. The man we saw a moment earlier steps out onto the pavement. His hair is wild, he looks like an unmade bed. At a corner bodega he buys a cup of coffee. Then he walks on in the same direction as the two women.
From street level, a couple of steps lead down to a low basement premises. VIDEOCITY it says on the glass door. On the inside of the glass is a red sign: CLOSED. The man unlocks the door, walks in, and turns the sign around. A smell of cold cigarette smoke. The room is dark, even after the man has switched on a light. On the walls are shelves stacked with hundreds of videocassettes, at the far end of the room is a counter with a cash register and a small TV set. Behind it a door leads into a tiny room with a toilet, an old fridge with a stained coffee machine on it, and a rickety cabinet that looks as if it’s been salvaged from a dumpster. The man plugs in the TV and the register and starts the coffee machine. Only then does he take off his coat.
All morning no one comes. A little before noon, a short woman of about fifty walks into the shop and looks around. She is wearing blue shoes and a 1950s hounds-tooth jacket. She has a vaguely stunned facial expression. She seems to have walked in by mistake. She turns and walks out again without saying a thing. It often happens, people walk in here and leave, for no apparent reason. Sometimes they just look in the window, sometimes they walk in under some pretext. They’re looking for some film he’s never heard of, or they want to buy the life-sized cardboard figure in the window. Sometimes they want change for the meter. He can’t do anything, he can’t prove anything. They’re too cunning for him. Once he saw that someone must have broken in during the night. Since then he’s careful to remember all the details of where he leaves everything when he goes. They must have noticed it, because they’ve stopped coming in at night. They are very cagey.
It’s not just the young men in dark suits with name tags. Sometimes there are children or old women, foreigners with some illegible piece of paper they hold in his face, some address they claim they’re trying to find. He’s remembered the addresses, marked them down on a map, and connected them up. It’s not yet clear to him what their significance is. He is unable to trust even his oldest customers. They’re sounding him out. They start a casual conversation, ask him if he’s seen some film or other, and what he thinks of it. He’s very careful with what he says. He doesn’t know how many of them are involved. It’s not impossible that they’re all in league with each other.
The sets are made of wood and stone. They are to very high specifications, you barely notice the difference, but you sense there’s something missing. Distant buildings seen against the light look transparent. The horizon retreats as you walk toward it, it seems two-dimensional, a painting. Sometimes he spots mistakes, trivial things, but they can’t be accidental. When he taps the wall, it makes a hollow sound. Some things are smaller than they should be in reality. He feels tempted to lift the manhole cover in the street to see what’s concealed underneath. But that would be too obvious. When he goes home at night, he thinks he could just keep on going, straight on, but he’s convinced they wouldn’t allow it. He would lose his way in the streets, he would wind up at a dead end. An accident could be organized.
Every step he takes is watched. At night he can hear people walking about in the apartment above. He’s tried to spot the cameras and microphones, but they’re so small and so well concealed that he can’t find them. He can’t exclude the possibility that a computer chip has been implanted in him that records his whereabouts, controls his physical processes, pulse rate, blood pressure, metabolism. He pats himself down sometimes, but he can’t feel anything. The chip must be buried deep in his flesh. He doesn’t believe they can read his mind. The technology for that hasn’t been invented. But they’re working on it.
When he showers, he hangs a towel over the mirror. When he goes shopping, he often puts back the package he picks up first and chooses a different one from the back of the shelf. He’s noticed the salespeople looking at him. He is almost certain they are mixing things into his food, drugs that alter his consciousness. Hence his forgetfulness, his visual distortions, his racing pulse, his tendency to sweat. Hence the occasional panic attacks. Who knows whether the medications the doctor prescribes aren’t the real cause for his condition.
He’s stopped going to restaurants long ago. He’s not even sure of the coffee at the corner bodega. Sometimes he changes his order to tea at the last moment. Then he monitors his body’s reaction very carefully.
For security reasons, he’s detached the little TV from the antenna. There’s nothing easier than picking up data that travel through a wire. Now he only watches videos. They are his last connection to the world outside, to the real world. He sees the same films again and again, runs them in slow motion and attends to their tiniest details, to minute slips. A wristwatch in a film set in ancient Rome. The shadow of a boom falling across a scene.
He’s tried to get in touch with film people, written letters to Jodie Foster and Martin Scorsese. No reply of course. It was naive of him to suppose his letters would get through, but back then he saw no other way. Since then he’s learned to use dead letterboxes. He leaves his plans and protocols and samples behind mirrors in public toilets or in garbage cans at certain crossings. He gets the position of the garbage cans from films, and also whether the messages have been received. His progress can be charted from film to film. Each film answers the question put in the one before. The communications are encoded, but he’s learned to decipher them. Sometimes he laughs aloud when he gets their meaning. He often feels a great hilarity, the cool bliss of being undeceived. He won’t be misled by the voices in his head anymore: You can’t leave. This is where you belong. You belong to me.
The sudden clarity, after years of uncertainty. He walks through the city and laughs. He sees through things. He could knock over the buildings with one hand, uproot the trees that have been fixed in the ground like parasols. He has achieved mastery over his body. By pure mind he can control his physical functions.
He knows his contribution is vital. Otherwise they would have pulled him out long ago. A sacrifice will be required of him, but he is willing. The sacrifice will give shape and meaning to his life.
He has forgotten his sandwiches. He wonders whether he dares to buy a hamburger at the bodega. They can’t know that today of all days he will go there. If he’s quick enough, he can take them by surprise, not give them time to doctor his food. Some risks are unavoidable.
While he’s waiting for his hamburger, he sees a woman with a small child walking straight up to him. She is wearing a fawn leather jacket and carrying a black leather bag. They always carry bags, presumably for the technical equipment, the batteries. They may be armed. The child is beyond suspicion. Presumably it knows nothing, it’s just there as a decoy. He looks the woman straight in the eye. She should know that it’s impossible to trick him. And it works: she turns aside and walks past him. Suddenly she speeds up. When she is a few steps past him, she looks back. Her expression is full of fear. He smiles triumphantly.
He waits until the last possible moment before turning on the light in his store. The light makes it easier to see him from the street. That’s the most dangerous moment of the whole day. Sometimes he walks out of the store and watches it from the other side of the road. If a customer walks in, he hurries across the street to be there.
Between six and eight o’clock is the busiest time. After that the customers dwindle away. It used to be he stayed open until midnight, now he closes at ten or eleven. Ever since the big video chain opened two blocks away he’s been getting fewer customers. They are trying to drive him out of business, but he’s not about to give up. He mustn’t give up. He counts the earnings for the day and puts the money in his pocket. Ever since he’s suffered a break-in, he leaves the register open.
He has gotten used to the situation, he is calmer now. On his way to work in the morning, he says hello to the agents. That terrifies them. They never expected him to identify them, and they run away. Good morning, he calls out after them. And in case we don’t see each other again, good afternoon, and good evening as well. He wants to burst out laughing, but controls himself. When he goes home at night, there they are again. He hurries down the street and runs up the stairs to his apartment, taking the stairs two and three at a time. He is so boisterous he feels like ringing all the bells and yelling in his neighbors’ faces that he knows perfectly well what they’re up to. Once he’s locked the door after him, he stops for a moment, then opens it again, peeps out into the stairwell, and locks it again. He goes straight to his living room and switches on the radio, so that no one can hear what he’s doing. His neighbors have complained about the noise. No surprise there.
Only after he’s eaten and showered and has been to the bathroom does he turn off the radio and switch off the light. With heavy strides he goes to the bedroom. That’ll fool them into thinking he’s gone to bed. Their guard will drop. He waits perfectly still for minutes. He is so tired he thinks sometimes that he’ll fall asleep on his feet. His thoughts wander, he loses track of time.
When everything’s quiet, when he’s calmed down, he creeps back into the living room, switches on the video recorder and the TV. He’s rewound the tape to the correct place.
He’s playing in the garden. His mother comes, picks him up, spins him around. The garden blurs with the movement, becomes indistinct. The music reaches its climax. He can no longer keep back his tears. He stretches his arms out to his mother, his hands brush the screen. She looks at him and smiles sweetly.
THE RIVER BATHS were closed, the entrance padlocked. There was a chill rain falling. The lifeguard was nowhere to be seen, perhaps he had gone home or was in the village somewhere. When Lucas clambered over the wire fence, he thought of the drunk who had got in here at night a few years ago and fallen into the pool. They had found him dead the following morning.
He went to the changing rooms, which were in a low whitewashed brick building. Next to the entrance was a sign, MEN AND BOYS. There was no light except what came through the gap between the walls and ceiling, and it was always a bit damp in the cabins, even when it was really hot outside. Lucas browsed along the row of lockers, to see if someone had forgotten a coin, but there wasn’t one. About halfway he stopped looking. He went down to the river. The water was high and pale brown. It flowed so fast that there were little eddies marking its surface. Twigs drifted past, they seemed to be going faster than the current. They must have opened the weir downstream, following the storm, Lucas could hear a distant roar of falling water. The rain eased, then stopped altogether. He went back to the cabins and changed.
He remembered summer afternoons when it was hot and all the kids seemed to go swimming. There were various groups dotted about the lawn. Lucas’s fellows ran around on the edge of the pool jumping or pushing each other into the water until the lifeguard intervened. Lucas swam back and forth, counting laps. After he’d done a mile, he climbed out, feeling cold and staggering slightly as if he’d forgotten how to walk. His friends lay on big bath towels on the grass. They talked about the summer holidays and where they would go. He lay down next to them on the grass.
Whenever he was with the others, Lucas felt as though his pores were closing, he felt small and painfully self-conscious of his body. He was shut up inside it, he couldn’t be human without it. On his own, he could forget about it, then his edges were those of his consciousness, the damp meadow he was walking over, the passing clouds, the blue strip on the horizon, the seam of forest on the river’s far bank. Then Lucas could have been just anyone, or even no one.
He lay down on the rough concrete slabs beside the pool. There were leaves floating on the water that the storm had blown off the trees, and a wasp was wriggling about. Lucas put out his hand to rescue the creature, but he was afraid he might get stung. His hand hovered protectively over it. Slowly it drifted farther and farther from the edge of the pool.
Lucas remembered Franziska, who was in the same class as him. They sometimes walked home together from school as far as the railroad crossing, where their paths divided. Often they would stand in front of the crossing sign for a long time, talking. Franziska had so much to say, she never seemed to get to the end of it. But at the class party she didn’t want to dance with him, she made some snotty remark and got herself something to drink. And later she was seen dancing with Leo.
Lucas picked three stones from the rosebed that surrounded the pool, washed the clay off them, and dropped them into the water one after the other. Once the ripples had stopped, he could see them lying on the bottom. He lowered himself slowly into the water. It was so cold it took his breath away. For a long time he stood on the lowest step of the ladder, up to his belly, and then he slipped in. As soon as he started to move, the cold abated. He dived for the stones. The first time he only managed two, he didn’t see the last one until he was on the surface again. He released them from his hand. When they dropped, they made a little clucking sound in the water, and then they sank waveringly to the floor. The second time, Lucas found all three. He wasn’t an especially good swimmer, but he was a good diver. He took a few deep breaths, pushed off the side, and dived down on a diagonal slant. He saw the blurry white tramlines and the bottom of the pool quickly move beneath him. Now he was swimming just over the floor. After the third line, he felt an ache in his throat and chest. He had to rise to the surface, he couldn’t make it all the way across. But he carried on, and the aching diminished. He now had the feeling he could dive forever. Over the last few yards he expelled the air he still had in his lungs, and then his head broke the surface just in front of the edge. He took deep breaths and turned and swam slowly. He wished Franziska could have been there and seen him. One time, as she was getting out of the water, her bikini top slipped and for a second Lucas caught a glimpse of her small bare breast, and the nipple dark and erect.
When he left the water he was cold, and he ran to the diving board and back. The surface of the water was smooth once more. Lucas dived the length of the pool, fifty meters, and surged out of the water at the far end with a shout of triumph. Franziska was standing there smiling at him. She bent down, put out her hand, and helped him out. He wanted to hug her, but he wasn’t sure how to do it. They just looked at each other and walked to the lawn side by side. In her bathing suit, Franziska walked somehow differently, more confidently, her whole body moving, the hips, the shoulders, the slender arms. She sat down—it looked as though she just let herself drop. Then she sat there on the grass, cross-legged, leaning forward. She talked and talked.
Lucas wandered about, crossed the large lawn, and walked along the fence under the trees, where in some places the bare earth had a shiny gleam, as if someone had polished it. There was a smell of grass and earth, and something sweet like flowers or something rotting. The sun had come out from under the clouds, and its level rays were falling on the ground. Little droplets of water glistened on the leaves and in the grass, and suddenly everything looked very bright.
Lucas wandered across the lawn, hoping to find something, a purse or a watch or a penknife, something. Down by the river he lay down in the short-cut grass and watched the dirty brown water flowing past. The grass was wet and cold. Everything was clear and shallow. It was a mixture of happiness and unhappiness. It was happiness that felt like unhappiness.
Franziska and her girlfriends were going to the baths. They sat in a circle, they had bought sweets and were talking and laughing. Lucas couldn’t imagine what they were talking about, he couldn’t remember what Franziska used to talk about with him. Sometimes she wouldn’t know what to say anymore. Perhaps that was the moment when people kissed. You had to be quiet before you kissed.
Lucas lay in the grass. He cupped his hands on his chest and made two shallow breasts. A couple of drops of water from somewhere landed on his stomach. A light wind had started up. Lucas shivered with cold.
He stood in front of the changing rooms: WOMEN AND GIRLS. He went inside. Here there were single stalls, there was no general changing room, like for men, who didn’t mind changing together. Lucas wondered if women felt more shame, and if they had secrets from one another, and what they were.
Franziska walked in, with a plastic bag with her things under her arm. She locked herself in one of the stalls and pulled off her jeans and T-shirt. Before undressing further, she pulled her bathing suit out of the bag and shook it out and hung it on a hook. She hurried. She was thinking of the others who were already there, lying in a ring on the grass and waiting for her to arrive.
Lucas had taken off his trunks and hung them. He wedged his cock between his legs, and looked down his body, stroked his hands over his hips. He could be someone or no one. He had a sensation of warmth, his skin seemed to glow, but inside his body was still cold.
He opened the stall door, and immediately felt much more exposed. When he stepped out into the open, someone could see him naked. He didn’t dare go on, and stopped at the entrance. The women walked past him, the girls in light summer dresses and young mothers and older women. They vanished into the changing rooms, and immediately re-emerged in various brightly colored bathing suits.
Lucas ran over to the men’s changing rooms. He hadn’t put his clothes away in a locker, there was a little heap of them lying on the long wooden bench. He pulled on the chilly garments. Then he checked the lockers again, to see if someone had forgotten their deposit, starting with the first lockers and going on until halfway, when he gave up and left the building.
The toilets were locked. Lucas tried both doors, the men’s and women’s. At the back of the little hut was a door that was open a crack. A low monotonous drone was audible. Lucas peered into the unlit room. The noise came from a big pump. On the floor were blue-and-white plastic chemical containers. It smelled of chlorine.
He went inside—it was far warmer there than it was outside—and pulled the door shut behind him. For a while he stood in the darkness. Suddenly he panicked: the lifeguard might return and catch him.
When he climbed back out over the fence, he remembered he had left his trunks in the ladies’ cabins. He imagined Franziska picking them up and taking them between the tips of her fingers to the lifeguard, who tossed them in a box where all sorts of lost and forgotten things were kept until someone came for them.
IN THE DAYS between Manfred’s death and his burial, Johanna threw away all his clothes and shoes. Later on, she suspected, she would no longer be capable of it. She threw away his toiletries and medications, unfinished containers of food, little supplies. When it was dark, Johanna carried the big garbage bags out to the car. The next day she drove to the incinerator and dropped the bags herself in the big ditch. It was midsummer, and the smell of garbage was unbearable, even early in the morning. The car was weighed once as she drove in and then again as she left, and the fee was calculated on the basis of the difference in weight. One hundred and ninety-eight pounds, said the man at the register, and he charged the basic fee. You know you could have brought in three times as much stuff for that money. Never mind, said Johanna, and she tipped him. The period of mourning began only after the burial.
It took years before Johanna managed to look through those things she hadn’t immediately thrown away. She sorted through Manfred’s books, almost all of them manuals on tax and company law from the time he was qualifying. He had been a tax accountant, whose clients were mostly small firms for whom he did the bookkeeping, and individuals whose tax declarations he prepared, often without asking for payment. You’re much too good-natured, Johanna would sometimes say, but Manfred merely shrugged his shoulders and said, I see how little people make, we’re well off by comparison. Following Manfred’s death, Hedwig, his long-serving secretary, had settled affairs at the office, got in touch with clients, returned files and recommended other tax accountants, and finally had the furniture collected by the firm from whom Manfred had bought it not too many years previously. Early on, Hedwig had called now and again, but Johanna had always said, I have no idea about these things, you must do what you think is right. I miss him, Hedwig had said, and Johanna, with a rough laugh: Do you think you’re the only one?
Johanna felt guilty when she cleared Manfred’s desk, even though he had been dead for seven years now. But she would have to do it sooner or later. She needed the room for Felicitas, who sometimes came to stay for a day or two. Thus far, the little girl had slept in her bed with her, but now she was six, and it seemed to Johanna that she needed her own bed and somewhere to keep her things.
The top drawer was full of the stuff that had been so endlessly fascinating to Adrian when he was a boy. Sometimes Manfred had set him on his lap and pulled one thing after another out of the drawer and told him its story: the Red Sox baseball he had bought during his first trip to America, the Lapland knife, the papier-mâché elephant, a slide rule, a broken pocket watch. Some of these items dated back to Manfred’s childhood, others Johanna knew where they came from and what they had signified to Manfred. She held each item in her hand a long time, unable to decide what to keep and what to throw away. Finally she put everything back in the drawer and shut it again. She would ask Adrian if he wanted any of it. She didn’t need any of it herself, those things only made her sad.
In the second drawer were files of all sorts of documents, office furniture catalogs and instructions, old papers of no sentimental value that Johanna unhesitatingly threw in the recycling. In one of the folders there were a few issues of a 1970s magazine. On one cover was a black woman with an Afro hairstyle and pointy breasts. Johanna flicked through them. She was surprised by the innocence of the pictures, even though she was bothered by the fact that Manfred had hidden their existence from her. When she hoisted the empty files from the drawer and dumped them in a garbage bag, a bundle of letters slipped out and fell to the floor. Johanna picked it up and pulled off the rubber band that held it together. There were perhaps twenty small envelopes, addressed to Manfred’s office in an attractive hand. The letters had been sent within the space of a single year, the date on the cancellation stamp was perhaps thirty years old. Johanna hesitated, then she took one of the letters out of its envelope and began to read.
ADRIAN DIDN’T HAVE much time. When Johanna opened the door, he was in the process of saying good-bye to Felicitas. He greeted his mother perfunctorily and said Iris was waiting in the car. We won’t be that late, he said. She can stay the night if you like, said Johanna, I’ve cleared out the office. You’ve got your own room now, she said to Felicitas, who had taken her hand and was beaming at her. Is that really OK? asked Adrian. Come to breakfast tomorrow, said Johanna, there’s something I want to talk to you about. Thanks, said Adrian, and kissed his mother on the cheek. He stroked Felicitas’s head and said, See you tomorrow, sweetie. You can stay here yourselves if you like, Johanna added, but Adrian said over his shoulder, going down the stairs, he would rather go home, thanks all the same.
When Felicitas was in bed, she started to ask her grandmother about her grandfather. She always tried anything not to have to go to sleep. Johanna had often told her what a good man Grandfather was, and how he had helped lots of people, but on this occasion she was curt, she didn’t feel like thinking about Manfred now. Why did he die? Felicitas asked. We all have to die, said Johanna, he smoked too much. My papa smokes too much as well, Felicitas said. Does everyone die if they smoke too much? If you’re unlucky, said Johanna. Your grandfather’s in heaven. I don’t think he can see us. A little while ago, Felicitas’s guinea pig had died, and now she was picturing it up in heaven along with her grandfather, a vision that was clearly too much for her. Go to sleep now, said Johanna, and sweet dreams.
In the morning they were speaking about something else, but when Felicitas caught sight of a photo of her grandfather on the sideboard, she asked if that was taken in heaven. No, said Johanna, that was in Italy, in Tuscany, where we were on vacation. You’ve been there too, remember, with your mama and papa last year. I don’t remember, said Felicitas. It seemed to make her sad. And there followed another round of questions about heaven that Johanna couldn’t answer. No one knows what it looks like. No one has ever come back from there. It’s farther away than the stars. Yes, she said, I’m going to go to heaven as well, and so will your papa and mama, and you too.
At breakfast Felicitas started again. Grandfather’s in heaven, she said, and I’m going to go to heaven too. Iris looked at her mother-in-law critically. Adrian didn’t say anything, it still wasn’t possible to talk to him about his father’s death, even though the two of them hadn’t been close. I’m going to go to heaven too, Felicitas said again. Sure you will, said Iris, but there’s plenty of time until then. Then she wanted to leave, and Johanna only had a moment in which to show Adrian Manfred’s things. She watched his face, and for a moment saw a boyish joy that suddenly was extinguished. He took out the slide rule and slid the scales along each other. I’ve never understood the principle of these, he said. Look, Felicitas, this is how people used to do calculations before there were computers. Do you want any of it? asked Johanna. Adrian hesitated. We’ve got so much stuff already, Iris said. What about the watch? asked Johanna. It doesn’t work, said Adrian. Johanna felt disappointed, even though she herself didn’t want to keep any of it either. She accompanied them out to the car. Iris put Felicitas in her car seat. Adrian hadn’t got in yet. Are you all right? he asked. I’ve been a bit tired recently, said Johanna, I’m not sleeping well. Wasn’t there something you wanted to talk to me about? he asked. She said it wasn’t urgent, later when he had time. Call me, he said.
Johanna called Hedwig, the secretary, and they met at a cafe. Johanna got a shock when she saw Hedwig. She had stopped dyeing her hair, and she was in flat shoes and glasses. She couldn’t deal with the contact lenses anymore, she said. The two women had nothing to say to each other—they never had. Manfred’s office had been a world of its own, Johanna had never had anything to do with it. Manfred hardly ever brought his work home with him. When Johanna asked him about it, he would gesture dismissively and say, Oh, the usual. Sometimes she would pick him up from the office and caught him seeing out a client or bantering with Hedwig, and each time she thought he was an utter stranger. He seemed different there from the way he was at home, more decisive, more humorous, more alive. It was this man who had got those letters, and written others whose content Johanna could only guess at, from the replies of his mistress. Your last letter made me blush. Your erotic fantasies turned me on. I think about you all the time. Johanna had meant to ask Hedwig about the woman, but she couldn’t now, she would have felt too ashamed. And would his secretary know anyway? Johanna couldn’t imagine that Manfred would have let her into the secret of his double life. In fact she couldn’t imagine the double life itself.
She only went to the cemetery out of a sense of duty. When she tended his grave before, she had felt very close to Manfred. Now it was as though he really was dead, as though the bond between them had torn, the connection that had lasted beyond his death. It occurred to her to track down Manfred’s mistress and demand the return of his letters, so as to undo the deception. But it was all such a long time ago, and the woman had signed using her first name only. And what difference would it have made to destroy those relics? In the end it hardly mattered who Monica was. Perhaps she was one of many. Johanna thought of one of Manfred’s clients, the manager of a restaurant where they sometimes ate. She had cried at the funeral, at the time Johanna hadn’t thought anything of it, but now she was suspicious. Many of Manfred’s woman clients had gone to the funeral.
She had meant to talk about all this with Adrian, but when he next called, she didn’t say anything about it. She tried to persuade herself it was that she didn’t want to damage his image of his father. Privately, though, she knew that it wasn’t his father he might lose respect for, but herself, the injured party. She tried to think of someone else she could take into her confidence, but there was no one. The neighbors were out of the question, and most of the other people she knew in the village she had met through Manfred. He had grown up here, and knew everyone, man and woman. Because she had been his wife, she was still greeted by many people today in the street, but she wasn’t on friendly terms with any of them. Once, a couple of years ago now, she had taken an Italian course, but the others there were all much younger than she was, and when it was over, the group split up. She thought of the man who had taught the course, who wasn’t a local. They had got along well together, but what was she going to say to him? He probably wouldn’t even remember who she was.
ON HIS FORTIETH BIRTHDAY Adrian threw a big party. For all my friends, he said, and he asked his mother if she would look after Felicitas. Johanna was there from the afternoon on, and played with her granddaughter while Iris and Adrian made salads. The party was to be held in the garden. The weather was being a bit unpredictable, and at the last moment Adrian had a big tent set up in the garden, in case it rained. The guests started arriving at six, work colleagues of Adrian’s and old school friends whom Johanna hadn’t seen in twenty years, but whom she immediately identified. Back then, she had been on easy terms with all of them, and it felt a little weird to her to be formal. Felicitas had gone off somewhere with some other kids. Johanna had followed them, but had quickly seen she wasn’t welcome. She went back out to the garden. Adrian was busy over the grill, Iris was welcoming the new arrivals and introducing them, if they didn’t know each other. Johanna stood on the fringes with a fixed smile on her face. She didn’t want to bother anyone, didn’t want anyone to see how unhappy she felt.
Clouds had filled the sky, it looked as though it could start raining any minute. The meat’s ready, called Adrian, and a line of people formed in front of the grill. Johanna went inside to get the children, then sat down with them at their junior table and tried to keep them vaguely under control. From time to time one or another of the parents would go up to the table and ask if everything was all right. One young woman remained standing behind a rather quiet toddler, laid her hand on his head, and asked him if he wasn’t tired yet. Only then did she seem to notice Johanna. She extended her hand and said, Why, how are you, we haven’t seen each other in ages. Johanna hesitated. Eva, said the young woman, I used to wear my hair longer. Now Johanna remembered. Eva had done an internship at the same time as Adrian, and for a while the two of them had been an item. She and Manfred had been fond of the girl, and both were disappointed when one day Adrian announced that they had broken up. He hadn’t given a reason, and Johanna hadn’t asked him for one either. Of course, now I remember, she said. And this is your little boy? Yes, this is Jan. Johanna took the little boy’s hand in hers. He looked at her rather rigidly. And who’s your daddy? she asked. Eva said she and Jan’s father weren’t together anymore. I’m sorry, said Johanna. Eva laughed and said, I’m not!
The older children had jumped up and run over to the sideboard, where Iris was serving dessert. The little ones followed them. Eva picked up Jan, but he wriggled so hard that she had to put him down and let him run after the others. I think they can look after themselves, said Eva. Wouldn’t you like to come and sit with us?
After dessert, Johanna put Felicitas to bed. As she came back down the stairs, she saw Eva standing in the hallway, jiggling a stroller. It’s started raining, said Eva in a hushed voice. I think he’s gone to sleep.
Shall I turn the light off? Johanna whispered.
There’s no need, said Eva, once he’s asleep, it’s not easy to wake him. She turned on the baby monitor and put the microphone next to the stroller.
But then, instead of going back out to the garden, she went into the kitchen, and, not bothering to switch on a light, took one of the empty champagne glasses that were standing around and filled it at the faucet. Johanna had followed her and said, Hang on, I’ll get you a clean glass, but Eva had already drunk from hers. Even so, Johanna took a glass from the cabinet and filled it, and stood there rather cluelessly until Eva took it from her and set it down on the side.
God, I’m so tired, Eva said, running her fingers through her hair. Man problems.
Johanna was silent. She wasn’t sure what the young woman expected from her. Well, time will tell, she said, and she sat down at the kitchen table.
Eva laughed. You never know, she said. He’s married, I’ll spare you the rest … I’ve heard it so many times, and now it’s happened to me. At least he was open with me from the start.
Her lover was a German teacher, like herself. They had met at a teachers’ refresher course and fallen in love immediately. But he had two children, and wasn’t prepared to leave his wife. He’s afraid he’ll lose the children, said Eva, and anyway his marriage seems to be OK. It’s such a wonderfully banal story. Johanna didn’t say anything, and Eva carried on. Her lover lived in Lucerne, maybe that was an advantage, the fact that they didn’t see each other that often. They met every couple of weeks. He visited her, she didn’t know what he told his wife, and she didn’t want to know, either. For a weekend at a time they lived together like man and wife, and then he went back to his family. Eva laughed. It’s peculiar, I’m not even jealous of his wife.
If his marriage is OK, said Johanna, then what makes him into an adulterer?
Eva shrugged her shoulders. Do you think it’s immoral? I tell myself it’s his responsibility, she said, after all he’s the one who’s cheating on his wife. Do you think I should get rid of him?
But that wasn’t the question that interested Johanna. What sort of person is he? she asked. Does he talk about his family with you? What do you talk about?
He’s a perfectly normal guy, said Eva, he doesn’t talk about his family much. That’s fine by me, it’s none of my business.
But is that normal? asked Johanna, more vehemently than she meant to. Is it normal for a man to have a mistress? Surely it can’t be?
In the bit of light that came in from the hall, she could see that Eva was smiling. Adrian never told you why we broke up, isn’t that right? she asked.
What would you say to his wife? asked Johanna. What do you tell her if she calls you up and asks you what you’re doing?
I don’t know, said Eva. They were silent. Then Eva said, I would tell her that it’s of no importance, and she doesn’t have anything to worry about.
There were sounds in the hallway, someone had come in from outside and was going to the toilet. Johanna heard a man’s voice. Are you ready? And then the flush, and the door, and a woman saying, I think he’s nice. Just coming, said the man. Again, the door, and then the woman’s voice. I’ll wait outside. Eva shrugged her shoulders, and said she’d better get going too.
JOHANNA MUST HAVE BEGUN her letter five times. Dear Eva, I’ve been thinking about what we were talking about. I’m familiar with the other side of the problem, I was the victim of a man’s cheating. No, she thought, I wasn’t a victim, I didn’t know anything. My husband committed adultery, she wrote, but she didn’t like the phrase either. My husband cheated on me. And why should Eva care? She had wanted to tell her to leave her lover, she was damaging herself and him and his family. But was that really what she believed? What if she hadn’t found the letters, but had thrown them away unread? It wasn’t Manfred, it was she who had hurt herself because she hadn’t been content to leave things alone. And wasn’t it actually her fault if Manfred had cheated? He must have missed something in their relationship. Maybe—and this was the most comfortable version—it was something physical. Reading your letter made me blush. Your erotic fantasies turned me on. Johanna had never written sentences like that to her husband. Sex in their marriage had been a wordless affair for something that was transacted in darkness, and wasn’t discussed. Perhaps you had to be apart from a man to desire him in that way, to be able to write him sentences like that. She had never been away for more than a day or two at a time. Then she had written Manfred postcards that didn’t have anything on them that the postman couldn’t read.
She got out the mistress’s letters and read them again, trying to read the words without thinking of Manfred, as the product of a passion that could surmount any obstacle and any distance. She read them all from beginning to end, then she crumpled them up and threw them away. For the first time in a long time, she thought about Manfred without thinking of his infidelity. She thought of his joie de vivre, his patient, helpful manner, and his self-irony. She thought of the intimacy between them, his tenderness to her, and how much she missed him. And suddenly she felt perfectly sure that he hadn’t lacked anything in their relationship, and that he hadn’t committed adultery for want of anything, but from that excess of love and curiosity and wonder with which he encountered everything in life, children, animals, nature, his work, the whole world. She ripped the letter she had begun off the legal pad, and started writing to Manfred, quickly and without thinking, sentences the likes of which she had never written before.
WECHSLER HAD DRIVEN for two hours when he saw the looming shape of the mountain on whose slopes the village nestled and from which it took its name. From the distance its mass had always suggested to him the body of an enormous animal that had come down ages before to lie down in the plain, and had gradually been overgrown with grass and forest.
It was more than twenty years since he had left the place where he had grown up, the village where he had married and worked on his first jobs as an architect. After his marriage with Margrit broke up, Wechsler had moved into the city and begun a new life. He had met with success and his memories of living in the village faded.
February had been unseasonably mild, but a few days ago there was another snowfall. There was still a little snow in the vineyards that covered a large part of the slope. The regular rows of vines might have been cross-hatching from one of Wechsler’s sketches. The landscape instantly looked familiar to him. Only as he drew closer to the village did he see how much had changed in the time he was away. There where corn and sugar beets had been planted now stood monstrous industrial buildings, painted in all kinds of colors and sprawled self-importantly over the plain. Wechsler remembered his first little restoration jobs in the village. At that time he had argued for months with the authorities about the color of some shutters. Now it seemed people were free to build just exactly as they pleased out here.
Wechsler parked his car in the marketplace he had once crossed to go to school. Sometimes he had sneaked off to the butcher’s after class and watched him at his work. He could still remember the apprehensive eyes of the calves, tethered in the open, waiting for it to be their turn. The butcher’s shop no longer existed, now it was lingerie. Round the square, ugly new buildings had been put up, office blocks, a shopping center, even a hotel.
It was almost noon. Wechsler went into a restaurant he remembered from long ago. The inside hadn’t changed. It was paneled in dark wood, and the tables were set, but Wechsler was the only person there. The waitress asked him if he wanted lunch and sullenly took his order for coffee. She was just bringing it to him when the cook came out. He was wearing a stained apron, and for a moment Wechsler thought it was the landlord of the old Linde, who had let them drink beer in his pub even though they weren’t yet sixteen. It must be his son, who wasn’t much older than Wechsler. Twenty years ago he had been a good-looking ladies’ man. Now he was pale and fat, and had the puffy face of a drinker.
The cook stepped up to Wechsler’s table and shook hands with him, as seemed still to be the custom in these parts. Wechsler asked after his father. The cook looked at him suspiciously and said his father had been dead for many years. Wechsler explained he used to live here once, and he asked after some of his old friends. The cook gave him what information he could. Some of Wechsler’s friends had moved away, others were dead. A few of the names the cook had never heard before.
But you do remember Wechsler, the architect? And his wife, Margrit?
The cook nodded and made a vague gesture, as if to say it was all a long time ago. His face looked suddenly tired.
The divorce was a bit of a scandal, said Wechsler. To begin with, the wife contested it. Hodel was the lawyer in the case. I’m sure you remember.
Hodel had since become a notary, said the cook, he ate lunch here every day. Then he excused himself. He was needed in the kitchen. Wechsler called the waitress and said he had had a change of heart, he would have lunch here after all.
At twelve o’clock the bells in the nearby church began to toll, and the restaurant started filling up. Most of the customers came in small groups, and greeted the waitress by name. Wechsler had the feeling that these people, whom he didn’t know, had taken possession of his past. He had moved away and others had replaced him. The old village existed only in his memory.
Hodel entered the restaurant. He stopped in the doorway and looked around, as though the place belonged to him. Wechsler recognized the lawyer right away, even though he had grown old and bald and seemed shrunken. Their eyes met, and when Wechsler half got to his feet and smiled and nodded to Hodel, the latter came over to his table.
I’m so sorry, he said, with a questioning look in his eyes. I meet so many people …
Wechsler identified himself. Hodel’s face brightened, and he said, Well, well. A revenant. How are you?
The men shook hands and sat down. After a glance at the menu, Hodel ordered casually, as befits a regular. The waitress smiled when he asked her to bring a bottle of wine, the barrique, not the house wine.
Even the wine’s improved, Hodel observed.
He had kept seeing Wechsler’s name in the paper, he said, people in the village were proud of him. The indoor pool he had built … The outdoor pool, you mean, Wechsler corrected him. What was it that brought him back to the village, Hodel asked, and nodded when Wechsler said the cemetery chapel was being renovated. He had come to have a look at it. He wasn’t yet sure whether to bid for the contract or not. Hodel grinned and said the business with his wife had long since been forgotten and forgiven. Today, divorces were almost part of the bon ton. Suddenly Wechsler wished he had gone to a different restaurant. He didn’t want to be reminded of his early years. Time had passed, he had remarried, had become a father, and was expecting the birth of his first grandchild. He was happy with his life.
I’ll walk you to the cemetery, if you’ve no objection, Hodel said over coffee. The exercise will do me good.
All through lunch, Hodel had talked only about himself, his work, and his wife and two sons, who were living in the city. Wechsler would have liked to be rid of his old friend, but he didn’t want to be impolite. He was tired after the food and the wine, and everything disgusted him. Hodel insisted on paying for lunch. That was the least he could do, he said, after all, he had made quite a bit of money off him. Besides, without knowing it, Wechsler had helped him get some nooky on the side.
Did he have much recollection of his first wife? Hodel asked, as they strolled along the busy street going to the cemetery. Of course, said Wechsler. He was going to say something else, but refrained. A young woman with a stroller was coming the other way, and Hodel stepped aside, walking so close behind Wechsler that he seemed about to jump on him.
She had her reasons for not wanting to grant a divorce, he said. Tongues were wagging. She was told she was no longer wanted in the church choir. Who could have guessed …
Margrit came from a religious family. Her father had been opposed to her marrying a man of a different faith, and the divorce was a calamity as far as he was concerned. He threatened his daughter, even though she was innocent, and at that point Wechsler was already living in the city with another woman. Margrit had been a highly emotional woman, sometimes almost wildly so, but she couldn’t shift her father over. Wechsler left the conduct of the case to Hodel, giving him free rein. He had never heard what it was that had changed Margrit’s mind. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know now.
Rumors travel quickly here, said Hodel with a brash laugh. If she’d been found the guilty party in the divorce, that would have brought disagreeable financial consequences.
At that time, he hadn’t been too particular about the way things got done, Hodel said, but that was long ago, and he had no cause to feel shame anymore. By now he had become a respected citizen, and was on good terms with all the people that mattered.
It might be that one or another person doesn’t greet me on the street, but anyone who doesn’t make enemies in this business must be a complete incompetent.
Reaching the cemetery now, they came to a stop in front of the chapel. When it was first built in the 1960s, its progressive style had divided opinion, now it just looked seedy, and the facade was grimy with dirt.
It was colder inside than out. There was a smell of chemical cleaner and candle wax. Wechsler looked around and took pictures of the interior with his digital camera, even though he was already sure that he wasn’t going to bid for the contract. Hodel didn’t budge from his side. He was silent now, except once to clear his throat.
Just one after another, he said when they were outside again. Do you want to look at the grave?
Without waiting for a reply, he led the way down the row of graves. He stopped in front of an unobtrusive white marble. Wechsler joined him, and for a while the two men stood silently side by side, hands in their coat pockets, staring at the stone, on which only Margrit’s name and dates had been carved. Hodel sighed deeply.
This is the worst, he said. His voice sounded altered, quieter, cracking. I’m not saying I was a better person when I was younger. But getting old is no fun at all.
He turned around and gestured at a workman who was just in the process of digging a new grave with a little bulldozer.
You never know whether it’s your turn next, he said. If only they could at least dig the graves by hand …
Wechsler suddenly felt an urge to cry. But in Hodel’s presence he restrained himself. He shook his head and walked on. He sat down on a bench under a group of fir trees at the edge of the cemetery. Hodel had followed him. He stood in front of the bench, and looked over at the cemetery wall, behind which the railway line ran.
If you fall, she said to me one time, then at least make sure you fall hard, he said quietly. There was something going on between her and the landlord of the Linde. When he got rid of her, she started drinking. Maybe she was drinking already. After that, she had, let’s say, various relationships. I think she loved you more than you thought.
He had helped Margrit out a couple of times, said Hodel, not out of pity, he freely admitted. Desperate women were the best lovers. You could do anything you liked with them, they had nothing left to lose. Even when she was already on the bottle, Margrit was still a good-looking woman. It was only at the very end that you could see the disintegration.
Why didn’t you call me? Wechsler called out in a sudden fury. I could have helped her.
She said she’d written you a letter, said Hodel, smiling cautiously.
Wechsler raised his hands and let them fall against his thighs. He had always just worked, he said, he hardly had any time for his children and his second wife.
The old stories, said Hodel. A train passed on the other side of the wall, and he stopped until the noise went away. Then he said he had paid for the stone. In the village people were still scratching their heads about where the money had come from, but the mason was discreet. He was another of Margrit’s admirers, incidentally.
We’ve gotten so ugly, said Hodel, shaking his head. He said he had to go now. Wechsler should let him know ahead of time when he would be back. He held out his hand to Wechsler without looking at him, and left.
The snow wouldn’t lie for long, thought Wechsler. The air was cold, but the sun had some force. He sat on the bench a while longer, then he got up. He stopped in front of Margrit’s grave. He thought of the girl she had been when he first met her, her happiness, her lightness, and how he and Hodel and others had wrecked her life. He wanted to cry, but couldn’t. He squatted down and plucked a few dry leaves off the plants that were growing on the grave. Then he stood up and walked out of the cemetery without looking back.
IT WAS THE first Michael had heard of the girl. His housekeeper was telling him about her: she claimed—Mandy did—that there was no father. She lived in the neighboring village of W. The housekeeper laughed, Michael sighed. As if it wasn’t enough that church attendance was way down, that the old people sent him away when he tried to visit them in their home, and the children cheeked him in Sunday school. It was all Communism, he said, or the aftereffects of it. Ach, nonsense, said the housekeeper, it was never any different. Did he know the large sugar-beet field on the road to W.? There was a sort of island in the middle of it. A clump of trees had been left standing by the farmer. Since forever, she said. And that’s where he has assignations with a woman. What woman? asked Michael. What farmer? The one who’s there, and his father before him, and his grandfather before that. All of them. Since forever. We’re only human, after all, them and me. Each of us has his needs.
Michael sighed. He had been the minister here since spring, but he hadn’t got any closer to his flock. He came from the mountains, where everything was different: the people, the landscape, and the sky, which here was so infinitely wide and remote.
She claims she’s never been with a man, said the housekeeper, the baby must be a gift from God. That Mandy girl, she said, was the daughter of Gregor who works for the bus company. The little fat driver. He gave her a good spanking, she was black and blue all over. And now the whole village is scratching its head over who the father might be. There aren’t a lot of men living there who are candidates. Maybe it was Marco the landlord. Or a passing tramp. She’s no oil painting, you know. But you take what you can get. That Mandy, she’s not the brightest either, said the housekeeper: maybe she didn’t realize. Up on the ladder picking cherries. All right, all right, said Michael.
MANDY CAME TO THE VICARAGE while Michael was eating lunch. The housekeeper brought her in, and he asked her to sit down and talk to him. She just sat there with downcast eyes and didn’t speak. She smelled of soap. Michael ate, and kept sneaking looks at the young woman. She wasn’t pretty, but she wasn’t ugly either. Perhaps she would turn to fat later. Now she was plump. She’s blooming, thought Michael. And he sneaked a look at her belly and her big breasts, very prominent under the rather garish sweater. He didn’t know if it was pregnancy or food. Then the young woman looked at him and immediately lowered her eyes, and he pushed away his half-eaten lunch and stood up. Let’s go out in the garden.
The year was far along. The leaves were turning on the trees. The morning had been misty, now the sun was trying to break through. Michael and Mandy walked together in the garden. Your Reverence, she said, and he, No, please just call me Michael, and I’ll call you Mandy. So she didn’t know who the father was? There was no father, said Mandy, I never … She stopped. Michael sighed. Sixteen, eighteen, he thought, no older than that. My dear child, he said, it’s a sin, but God will forgive you. Thus saith the Lord God of Israel: Every bottle shall be filled with wine!
Mandy tore a leaf off the old linden tree where they had come to a stop, and Michael said, Do you know how it is when a man lies with a woman? You mean, with the peter, said Mandy, and she blushed and looked down. Perhaps it was in her sleep, thought Michael, apparently such things happen. They had studied it in school, Mandy added, and quickly: Erection, coitus, and rhythm method. All right, all right, said Michael, school. That was the upshot of having so many Communists still sitting on school boards.
Holy mother of God, said Mandy, I’ve never … All right, all right, said Michael, and then, with sudden vehemence, Well, where do you think the baby’s come from then? Do you think it’s a gift from God? Yes, said Mandy. He sent her home.
ON SUNDAY, Michael saw Mandy among the few who were at the service. If he remembered correctly, she had never been before. She was wearing a simple dress in dark green, and now he could see her condition plainly. She should be ashamed of herself, said the housekeeper.
Mandy was all at sea. Michael could see her craning around. When the others sang, she didn’t. And when she came forward at the end to receive Communion, he had to tell her, Open your mouth.
Michael spoke about steadiness in adversity. Frau Schmidt, who was always there, read the lesson with a quiet but firm voice. See that ye refuse not him that speaketh. For if they escaped not who refused him that spake on earth: be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
Michael had kept his eyes closed during the reading, and he felt he could almost see the angel who came to visit men, an angel that had Mandy’s face, and whose belly in its white robes bulged like Mandy’s in her dress. Suddenly it got very quiet in the church. Michael opened his eyes and saw that everyone was looking at him expectantly. Then he said: We can speak with confidence. The Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do unto me.
After the service was over, Michael hurried over to the door to see out his old biddies. He had shut the door behind the last of them when he saw that Mandy was kneeling at the altar. He went up to her and laid his hand on her head. She looked at him, and he saw she had tears running down her cheeks. Come, he said, and he led her out of the church and across the road to the cemetery. Look at all these people, he said, they were all sinners: but God took them to Himself, and He will forgive you your sins as well. I am full of sin, said Mandy, but I have never been with a man. All right, all right, said Michael, and he touched Mandy’s shoulder with his hand.
But when he touched Mandy, it was as though his heart and his whole body were filling with a joy he had never felt in his life, and he shrank back, as though he had burned himself. And if it’s true? he thought.
AND IF IT’S TRUE? he thought that afternoon, as he walked down the road to the next village. The sun was shining and the sky was wide and cloudless. Michael felt tired after lunch, but his heart was still filled with the joy that had flowed from Mandy’s body into his own: and if it’s true?
He often walked to one of the other villages on a Sunday afternoon, striding quickly down the tree-lined roads in rain or shine. But on that day he had an objective. He had called the doctor who lived there, a man by the name of Klaus, and asked if he might talk to him: no, he couldn’t tell him what about.
Dr. Klaus was a local man, the son and grandson of farmers. He knew everyone and everything, and the word was that in an emergency, he would treat sick animals as well. He lived alone in a big house in W., following the death of his wife. He said if Michael promised to keep God out of it, he was welcome and might come. He was an atheist, said the doctor, no, not even an atheist, he believed in nothing, not even that there was no God. He was a man of science, not faith. A Communist, thought Michael, and he said, All right, all right, and suppressed a yawn.
The doctor served schnapps, and because Michael had a question, he drank the schnapps, drank it in one swallow, and then another glass that Dr. Klaus poured him. Mandy, said Michael, whether … and … He was sweating. She claimed her baby wasn’t the outcome of union with a man, that she had never, no, that no man had known … My God: you know what I’m trying to say. The doctor emptied his glass and asked whether Michael meant the Lord had a hand in the business, or maybe a peter. Michael stared at him with an empty, despairing expression. He drank the schnapps the doctor had poured him, and stood up. The hymen, he said quietly, almost inaudibly, the hymen. That would be a miracle, said the doctor, and here in our midst. He laughed. Michael excused himself. I am a man of science, said the doctor, you are a man of faith. Let’s not mix things up. I know what I know; you believe whatever you like.
On his way back, Michael was sweating still more profusely. He grew dizzy. Blood pressure, he thought. He sat down on the grassy edge of a large beet field. The beets had already been harvested and were lying in long heaps along the road. In the distance he could see a strip of woodland, and in the middle of the enormous field was the little island that his housekeeper had spoken of, a few trees sprouting from the dark earth.
Michael stood up and took a step into the field, and then another one. He walked toward the island. The damp soil clung to his boots in great clumps, and he stumbled, reeled, walking was difficult. Be of good heart, he thought, howbeit we must be cast upon a certain island. He walked on.
Once he heard a car drive past on the road. He didn’t look around. He crossed the field, step by step, and finally the trees came nearer and he was there, and it really was like an island: the furrows of plowed land had divided and opened, as if an island had erupted from the land, and torn the soil aside like a curtain. This island was maybe half a yard in elevation. At its edge grew some grass, beyond was shrubbery. Michael broke a twig off one of the bushes and scraped some of the earth off his soles. Then he walked around the island on the narrow strip of grass. In one place there was a gap in the vegetation, and he climbed through it and got to a small clearing under the trees. The tall grass was trampled down, and there were a couple of empty bottles.
Michael looked up: between the tops of the trees he could see the sky, it seemed not so high as over the field. It was very quiet. The air was warm, even though the sun was far gone to the west. Michael took off his jacket and dropped it on the grass. Then, without really knowing what he was doing, he unbuttoned his shirt and took it off, and then his undershirt, his shoes, his pants, his shorts, and last of all his socks. He took off his wristwatch and dropped it on the pile of clothes, and then his glasses and the ring his mother had given him for protection. And stood there the way God had made him: as naked as a sign.
Michael looked up at the sky. He had never felt more connected to it. He lifted his arms aloft, then he felt the dizziness of a moment before, and he toppled forward onto his knees, and knelt there, naked with upraised arms. He began singing, softly and with a cracked voice, but it wasn’t enough. And so he screamed, screamed as loudly as he could, because he knew that out here only God could hear him, and that God heard him and was looking down at him.
AS HE WALKED back home across the field, he thought about Mandy, and she was very near to him, as though she was in him. So he thought, without knowing it, I have given shelter to an angel.
Back in the vicarage, Michael went straight to the old sideboard, and got out a bottle of schnapps that a farmer had given him after the burial of his wife, and poured himself a little glassful and then a second. Then he lay down, and only woke when the housekeeper called him down to supper. He had a headache.
And what if it’s true? he said as the housekeeper brought in supper. What if what’s true? Mandy. If she’s conceived. By whom? Is not this land also a desert? said Michael. How do we know that He doesn’t direct His gaze here, and that this child has found favor in His eyes, this Mandy? The housekeeper shook her head angrily: Her father’s a bus driver. Well wasn’t Joseph a carpenter? But that was a long time ago. Didn’t she believe that God was still alive and in our midst? And that Jesus will return? Sure. But not here. What’s special about Mandy? She’s nothing. She works in the restaurant in W., she helps out.
With God nothing shall be impossible, said Michael, and verily, I say unto you, that the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you. The housekeeper made a face and disappeared into the kitchen. Michael had never managed to persuade her to eat with him: she had always said she didn’t want there to be talk in the village. Talk about what? We’re only human, she said then, we all have our needs.
AFTER SUPPER Michael went out again. He walked down the street, and the dogs in the yards barked like crazy, and Michael thought, You would do better to trust in God than in your dogs. That was the Communists’ doing: he should have talked them around, but he hadn’t done it. There were no more people in the church now than in the spring, and you could hear of immorality and drunkenness every day.
Michael went into the retirement home and asked for Frau Schmidt, who read the lesson every week. If she’s still awake, said Ulla, the nurse, unwillingly, and disappeared. A Communist, thought Michael, bound to be. He could tell, he knew what they thought when they saw him. And then, when someone passed away, they called him anyway. So that he gets a decent funeral, Ulla had said once, when he was required to bury a man who hadn’t been inside a church in his life.
Frau Schmidt was still awake. She was sitting in her comfy chair watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Michael shook her hand, Good evening, Frau Schmidt. He pulled up a chair and sat down beside her. She had read nicely, he said, and he wanted to thank her for it again. Frau Schmidt nodded from the waist. Michael took a small leather-bound Bible from his pocket. Today I’d like to read you something, he said. And while the TV quiz host asked which city was destroyed by a volcanic eruption in 79 A.D., Troy, Sodom, Pompeii, or Babylon, Michael read aloud, and steadily more loudly. There shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as from the beginning of the creation. But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
And he read, the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, and the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
All the while Michael read, the old woman nodded: she rocked back and forth, as if her whole body were one great yes. Then finally she spoke, and said, It’s not Sodom, and it’s not Babylon. Is it Troy?
The day is perhaps closer than we imagine, said Michael. But no one will know. I don’t know, said Frau Schmidt. He will come like a thief in the night, said Michael, standing up. Troy, said Frau Schmidt. He shook her hand. She didn’t say anything, and didn’t look when he left the room. Pompeii, said the quiz host. Pompeii, said Frau Schmidt.
No one will know it, thought Michael as he went home. The dogs of the Communists were barking, and once he bent down to pick up a stone and hurled it against a wooden gate. That made the dog behind bark still more loudly, and Michael hurried on, so that no one would spot him. He didn’t go back to the rectory, though, he walked out of the village.
It was half an hour to W. A single car passed him. He saw the beam of the headlights a long way ahead, and hid behind one of the trees lining the road until it was safely past. The island was nothing but a dark stain in the gray field, and it seemed to be closer than during the day. The stars were glittering: it had turned cold.
There was no one on the streets in W. The lights were on in the houses, and there was a single streetlamp at a crossroads. Michael knew where Mandy lived. He stopped at the garden gate and looked at the small singlestory house. He saw shadows moving in the kitchen. It looked like someone was doing the dishes. Michael felt his heart grow warmer. He leaned against the gate. Then he heard breathing very close by, and suddenly a loud, yelping bark. He jumped back and ran off. He wasn’t a hundred yards away when the door of the house opened, and the beam of a flashlight showed in the darkness, and a man’s voice shouted, Shut yer noise!
ON ONE OF THE following days, Michael went to the restaurant in W., where his housekeeper had said Mandy was helping out. And so it proved.
The dining room was high-ceilinged. The walls were yellowed with cigarette smoke, the windows were blind, the furniture aged, and nothing went with anything else. There was no one there but Mandy, standing behind the bar as if she belonged there, with her hands on the counter. She smiled and lowered her gaze, and Michael had the sense of her face glowing in the gloomy room. He sat down at a table near the entrance. Mandy went over to him, he ordered tea, she disappeared. Please no one come, he thought to himself. Then Mandy came back with his tea. Michael added sugar and stirred. Mandy was still standing beside the table. An angel at my side, thought Michael. He took a hurried sip and burned his mouth. And then, not looking at Mandy, nor she looking at him, he spoke.
But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
Only now did Michael look at Mandy, and he saw that she was crying. Fear not, he said. Then he stood up and laid his hand on Mandy’s head, and then he hesitated, and placed his other hand on her belly. Will it be called Jesus? Mandy asked softly. Michael was taken aback. He hadn’t considered that. The wind bloweth where it listeth, he said, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.
Then he gave Mandy the little manual for young women and expectant mothers that the church provides, and from which he drew all his understanding, and he said Mandy should come to instruction, and to service, that was the most important thing, she had plenty to catch up on.
MONTHS PASSED. Autumn gave way to winter, the first snows fell and covered everything, the villages, the forest, and the fields. Winter stretched out over the land, and the acrid smell of woodsmoke hung heavy over the streets.
Michael went on long walks over the countryside, he went from village to village, and he went again across the large sugar-beet field, that was now frozen, to the island. Once again he stood there and raised his arms aloft. But the trees had lost their leaves, and the sky was distant. Michael waited for a sign. None came: there was no new star in the sky, no angel on the field to talk to him, no king and no shepherd and no sheep. Then he felt ashamed and thought, I am not chosen. She, Mandy, will receive the signal, it is to her the angel will appear.
Mandy was now coming in from W. on her moped every Wednesday to class, and every Sunday to church. Her belly was growing, but her face was growing thinner and pale. After service she stayed behind in church until everyone was gone, and then she sat with Michael in one of the pews, speaking quietly. Her baby was due in February, she said. If only it had been Christmas, thought Michael, if only it had been Easter. But Christmas was soon, while Easter was the end of March: they would see.
Then the housekeeper put her head through the door, and asked if the minister proposed to eat his lunch today. All the trouble she went to, she said, and not a word of praise, nothing, and then he left half of it. Michael said Mandy should stay for lunch, there was enough for two. For three, he added, and both smiled shyly. Why don’t we just open a restaurant, said the housekeeper, laying a second setting. She banged the plates down on the table and stalked off without a word, and certainly without wishing them Bon appétit.
Mandy said her father was tormenting her, he insisted on knowing who the father was, and he went into a rage when she said it was Almighty God. No, he didn’t beat her. Only slaps, she said, her mother as well. She wanted to leave home. They both ate in silence. Michael very little, Mandy twice helping herself to more. Do you like it? he asked. She nodded and blushed. Then he said, why didn’t she live here in the rectory, there was room enough. Mandy looked at him timidly.
You can’t do that, said the housekeeper. Michael said nothing. If you do that, I’m out of here, said the housekeeper. Still Michael said nothing. He crossed his arms. He thought of Bethlehem. Not this time, he thought. And the thought gave him strength. I’m moving out, said the housekeeper, and Michael nodded slowly. So much the better, he thought: he had already concluded that this housekeeper had been a Communist, and who knows what besides. Because she always said she was only human, and because her name was Carola, which was a heathen name. He had heard the stories about her and his predecessor, a married man. In the sacristy, they said, among other things. That woman had nothing to say to him. She least of all. And she wasn’t even a good cook.
The housekeeper disappeared into the kitchen, and then she left the house, because it wasn’t right and it wasn’t proper. And Mandy moved in: she was the new housekeeper, that was the agreement worked out with her parents. She was even paid. But Mandy was already in her fifth month, and her belly was so big that she snorted like a cow when she went up the stairs, and Michael was afraid something might happen to the baby one day when she lugged the heavy carpets out to beat them.
Michael was just returning from one of his walks when he saw Mandy beating the carpets in front of the vicarage. He said she ought to take it easy, and carried the carpets back into the house himself, even if it was almost more than he could do: his body wasn’t very strong. Everything has to be clean by Christmas, said Mandy. That pleased Michael, and seemed to him to be a good sign. Other than that he hadn’t found much evidence of faith, even if she liked to swear Holy Mother of God, and was firmly convinced that her baby was a baby Jesus, as she put it. She did say she was Protestant. But not so very much. Michael was in doubt. He felt ashamed of his doubts, but there they were, poisoning his love and his belief.
From now on, Michael did all the housework himself. Mandy cooked for him, and they ate together in the dark dining room, without speaking much. Michael worked far into the evenings. He read his Bible, and when he heard Mandy come out of the bathroom, he waited for five minutes, he was no longer able to work, that’s how excited he was. Then he knocked on the door of Mandy’s room, and she called, Come in, come in. There she was, already in bed, with her hand on her brow, or else on the blanket, over her belly.
On one occasion he asked her about her dreams: after all, he was waiting for a sign. But Mandy didn’t dream. She slept deeply and solidly, she said. So he asked her if she really hadn’t ever had a boyfriend or anything, and if she’d ever found blood on her sheets. Not during your period, he said, and he felt very peculiar, talking to her like that. If she is the new mother of God, then what sort of figure will I cut, he thought. Mandy didn’t reply. She cried, and said, didn’t he believe her? He laid his hand on the blanket and his eyes got moist. We should be called the children of God, he said, therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew Him not. What Him? asked Mandy.
Once she pushed the blankets back and lay before him in her thin nightie. Michael had had his hand on the blanket, and then he raised it up, and now it was hovering in the air over Mandy’s belly. It’s moving, said Mandy, and she took his hand with both of hers and pulled it down so that it pressed against her belly, and Michael couldn’t raise his hand, it lay there for a long time, heavy and sinful.
• • •
CHRISTMAS CAME AND WENT. On Christmas Eve, Mandy went to her parents, but the next day she was back again. There were not many people in church. In the village there was talk about Michael and Mandy, letters had been written to the bishop, and letters were written back from the bishop. A call had gone out, and a representative of the bishop had traveled to the village on a Sunday, and had sat with Michael and spoken with him. On that day, Mandy had eaten in the kitchen. She was very excited, but when the visitor left, Michael said everything was fine: the bishop knew there was a lot of bad blood in the district, and that some old Communists were still fighting against the church, and sowing division.
With the passing of time, the baby grew, and Mandy’s belly got ever bigger, long after Michael thought it couldn’t possibly. As if it wasn’t part of her body. And so Michael laid his hand on the growing baby, and felt happiness.
The terrible thing happened when Michael went off on one of his afternoon walks. He realized he had left his book at home. He turned back, and half an hour later had returned. He quietly let himself into the house and tiptoed up the stairs. Mandy often slept in the daytime now, and if that was the case now, he didn’t want to wake her. But when he stepped into his room, Mandy was standing there naked: she was standing in front of the large mirror in the door of the wardrobe. And she was looking at herself from the side, and so confronted Michael, who could see everything. Mandy had heard him coming and had turned to face him, and they looked at each other, just exactly as they were.
What are you doing in my room? asked Michael. And he hoped Mandy would cover her nakedness with her hands, but she did not. Her hands hung at her sides like the leaves of a tree, barely stirring. She said she had no mirror in her room, and she had wanted to see this belly she had grown. Michael approached Mandy, so as not to have to look at her anymore. Then his hands touched her hands, and then he thought about nothing at all, because he was with Mandy, and she was with him. And so it was that Michael’s hand lay there, as if it had been newly brought forth: an animal from out of that wound.
Then Michael did sleep, and when he awakened, he thought, my God, what have I done. He lay there curled in bed, and with his hand covered his sin, which was great. Mandy’s blood was her witness and his proof, and he was surprised that the elements did not melt with fervent heat, or the heavens pass away with a great noise: to slay him and punish him with lightning or some other event. But this did not transpire.
• • •
NOR DID THE HEAVENS open when Michael hurried along the street on the way to W. He was on his way to the island in the field, and he walked rapidly and with stumbling steps across the frozen furrows. Mandy had been asleep when he left the house, Mandy, whom he had taken in and to whom he had offered the hospitality of his house.
He reached the island and sat down in the snow. He could not stand any longer, so tired was he and so sad and lost. He would stay there and never leave. Let them find him, the farmer and the woman when they came here in spring to commit adultery.
It was cold and getting dark. Then it was night. Michael was still sitting on his island in the snow. The damp soaked through his coat, and he shivered and felt chilled to the bone. Let us not love one another with words, he thought, nor with speech. But with deeds. So God had led him to Mandy, and Mandy to him: that they might love one another. For she was not a child, she was eighteen or nineteen. And was it not written that no one should know? Was it not written that the day would come like a thief? So Michael thought: I cannot know. And if it was God’s will that she conceive His child, then it was also His will that she had received him: for was he not God’s work and creature?
Through the trees Michael could see only a few scattered stars. But when he left their cover and stepped out onto the field, he saw all the stars that can be seen on a cold night, and for the first time since he had come here, he was not afraid of this sky. And he was glad that the sky was so distant, and that he himself was so small on this endless field. So distant that even God had to take a second look to see him.
Soon he was back in the village. The dogs barked, and Michael threw stones at the gates and barked himself, and aped the dogs, their stupid yapping and howling, and he laughed when the dogs were beside themselves with rage and fury: and he was beside himself just as much.
In the vicarage the lights were on, and as soon as Michael stepped inside, he could smell the dinner that Mandy had cooked. And as he took off his sodden boots and his heavy coat, she stepped out into the kitchen doorway and looked anxiously at him. It had gotten cold, he said, and she said dinner was ready. Then Michael stepped up to Mandy, and he kissed her on the mouth, as she smiled up at him. Over supper they discussed one possible name for the baby, and then another one. And when it was bedtime they squeezed each other’s hands, and each went to their own room.
As it got colder and colder in January, and it was almost impossible to heat the old vicarage, Mandy moved one evening from the guest bedroom into the warmer room of the master of the house. She carried her blanket in front of her, and lay down beside Michael as he moved aside, without a word. And that night, and in all the nights to come, they lay in one bed, and so learned to know and to love one another better. And Michael saw everything, and Mandy was not ashamed.
But was it a sin? Who could know. And hadn’t Mandy’s own blood affirmed that it was a child of God that was growing, a child of purity? Could there be anything impure about purity?
Even if Michael hadn’t thought it possible, his word reached the people and the Communists of the village. They were touched by the wonder that had occurred, and one couldn’t say how: for such people came to the door and knocked. They came without many words, and brought what they had. A neighbor brought a cake. She had been baking, she said, and it was no more trouble to bake two than one. And was Mandy doing all right?
On another day, Marco the publican came around and asked how far along they were. Michael invited him in, and called Mandy, and made tea in the kitchen. Then the three of them sat at the table and were silent, because they didn’t know what to say. Marco had brought along a bottle of cognac, and set it down in front of them. He knew full well, he said, that it wasn’t the right thing for a small baby, but maybe if it had a colic. Then he asked to have it explained to him, and when Michael did so, Marco looked at Mandy and her belly with disbelief. Was that certain? he asked, and Michael said no one knew, and no one could know. Because it was pretty unlikely, Marco said. He had picked up the cognac again, and was looking at the bottle. He seemed to hesitate, but then he put it back on the table, and said, three stars, that’s the best you can get hereabouts. Not the one I serve my customers. And he was a little confused, and he stood up and scratched his head. Back in the summer you rode pillion on my bike, he said, and he laughed, think of it. They’d gone bathing, the whole lot of them, in the lake outside F. Who’d have thought it.
When Marco left, Frau Schmidt was standing in the garden, with something she had knitted for the baby. With her was Nurse Ulla from the retirement home, whom Michael had suspected of being a Communist. But she was bringing something herself, a soft toy, and she wanted Mandy to touch her as well.
It was one after another. The table in the front room was covered with presents, and the cupboard housed a dozen or more bottles of schnapps. The children brought drawings of Mandy and the baby, and sometimes Michael was in the pictures too, and perhaps an ass or an ox as well.
Before long the people were coming from W. and the other villages, wanting to see the expectant mother, to ask her advice on this or that matter. And Mandy gave them advice and comfort, and sometimes she would lay her hand on the arm or the head of the people, without saying anything. She had become so earnest and still that even Michael seemed to see her anew. And did all that needed to be done. In the village, various quarrels were settled during these days, and even the dogs seemed to be less ferocious when Michael walked down the street, and on some houses the straw stars and Christmas wreaths were back up on the doors again, and in the windows, because the whole village was rejoicing, as though Christmas was yet to come. Everyone knew it, but no one said it.
One time, Dr. Klaus came to see that all was well. But when he knocked on the door, Michael did not welcome him in. He sat upstairs with Mandy, and they were quiet as two children, and peeked out of the window until they saw the doctor leaving.
The next day, Michael went to W. to see the doctor. He poured schnapps, and asked how things stood with Mandy. Michael didn’t touch the schnapps. He merely said everything was fine, and they didn’t need a doctor. And these stories that were making the rounds? He that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth, said Michael. Be that as it may, said the doctor, the baby will be born on earth, and not in heaven. And if you need help, then call me, and I’ll come. Then they shook hands, and nothing more was said. Michael, though, went back to the retirement home in the village and spoke to Nurse Ulla. She had four children herself, and knew the ropes. And she promised him she would assist when the time came.
Then in February, the time came: the baby was born. Mandy was assisted by Michael, and by Nurse Ulla, whom he had called in. As word spread of the impending event, people gathered on the village streets to wait in silence. It was already dark when the baby was born, and Ulla stepped up to the window and held it aloft, that all might see it. And it was a girl.
Michael sat at Mandy’s bedside, holding her hand and looking at the baby. She’s no beauty, said Mandy, but that was more of a question. And Nurse Ulla asked the new mother where she meant to go with her baby, as she would no longer be able to run the minister’s household anymore. Then Michael said: He that hath the bride is the bridegroom. And he kissed Mandy in full view of the nurse. And she later told everyone of it: that he had given his word.
Because the child could not be called Jesus, they called it Sandra. And as the people in the village believed it had been born for them, they didn’t mind that it was a girl. And all were contented and rejoiced.
The following Sunday attendance at church was greater than it had been for a long time. Mandy and the babe sat in the front pew. The organ was playing, and after it had played, Michael climbed up to the pulpit and spoke as follows: Whether this is a child that has long been awaited in the world, we do not know, and may not know. For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness. For they that sleep sleep in the night; and they that be drunken are drunken in the night. But let us, who are of the day, be sober.
That which is born of the flesh is flesh, said Michael, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. But we, beloved, should be called the children of God.
BACK THEN, THE time you left Trouville and climbed the narrow path up the hill, and then crossed the harvested field to get a good view. The earth clung to your soles in thick clumps, the leather was sodden. There was this kid, a boy, ten years old or even younger. He watched as you crossed the field, set up your folding chair, and started sketching the landscape. First he watched you from a distance, then he slowly came closer, step by step, wary as a cat. His clothes were old and dirty, their color like the earth from which he emerged. His hair was slightly reddish, almost transparent when the sun struck it in the odd moments when it broke through the clouds. His nose was blocked and he sniffled persistently. He kept his mouth slightly open to breathe, which distorted his otherwise pretty face, and gave it an expression of stupidity.
YOU GIVE HIM a cloth from your paint box, a little scrap of linen you normally use to clean brushes.
Here, wipe your nose.
The way he stares at you. He wipes his nose and then wipes his neck too, as though he was sweating. But the weather is cool and he’s jacketless. It’s a gesture he must have copied from his father.
Do you live near here?
He nods and takes his cap off.
Is that your field?
He nods again, takes a step closer, and tries to take a peek into your sketchbook. His shoulders are hunched, as if in the expectation of blows. You can see in his face how the question has come about, via many detours. And then his fear of asking it. But his curiosity is too strong.
Why are you doing that, monsieur?
Why are you doing that? The most terrible of questions. The question you don’t even dare ask yourself. He doesn’t ask what you’re doing. He doesn’t seem to be stupid. He must have watched other painters.
Has he ever seen a painting? Maybe a saint in church. But a landscape? How futile it must seem to him, you standing there in his father’s field in your muddy boots, trying to capture the mouth of the river and the sea and the few houses in his village, the only one he knows.
You buy yourself off with a coin. He thanks you with a bow, and he’s gone, and you work on, quickly, so as not to miss the moment. You’ve almost missed the fishing boats in the river mouth. They’re on their way back to port.
It will rain later, and you will ask yourself where the boy is now, and whether he has a roof over his head. His question worries you. You ask yourself what quarter the clouds are coming from. Who cares? Weather is for farmers.
You are just hand and eye now. You hum a tune from Mozart, your Mozart. To paint the way he composed, with such facility and lightness. To paint in such a way that no one will ask any questions.
Why are you doing that? Because you’re a painter. Nothing else, just a painter.
WHEN YOU TRANSFERRED the sketch in your studio, when you tried to remember the light and shade, and the reflexes on the sea—were there reflexes on the sea?—and the colors and the hues, all you could think about was the boy and his question. The question you never asked yourself. Why are you doing that?
You could just carry on like that. You will carry on like that. Already you have material for a whole lifetime. Sketches. Folders full of sketches, a head full of landscapes ready to be painted. And every day there are more. Every landscape you see is a job for you. The sun rises and sets for you, the wind blows the clouds across the sky for you, the grass and the trees grow for you.
Why are you doing that? Why not? The pictures are good. You know how good they are. You love your pictures more than anything. Your little sketches. The walls of your studio are covered with them. And you love working in the open, being outdoors, contemplating landscapes, painting. Nothing but the changes in the light, the slow, almost imperceptible movement of the shadows. How irritating it always was, when you drew the street urchins in Rome and they ran off before you were finished. They left you with a load of unfinished sketches. Landscapes don’t run away.
You don’t paint them to show them off. You don’t exhibit your sketches. When your friends call on you in your studio, they want to see the big pieces you will exhibit, the landscapes with mythological or biblical scenes. They pass judgments that are baffling to you. You ignore them. You’d rather do it wrong in your way than do it right according to the prescription of those twenty people. They all know better, give you advice, as if you didn’t know that you can’t pull off the big things, and why you can’t. The biblical figures, the mythological figures, basically they don’t interest you. Your true love is for the sketches, the little mood pieces.
If you could manage to depict the moment in just the way you sensed it, so that the boy in Trouville would recognize his village. That he might see the beauty of the village, the beauty of the moment. But who cares about such things?
Old Sennegon loved sunsets. In Rouen he went walking with you every evening. He told you Bible stories, always the same ones. It was as if he needed some pretext to be with you. The stories didn’t interest you. Stories and the past—they never interested you. What interests you is the present, the moment. Father Sennegon walked two paces ahead of you, his hands crossed behind his back. He spoke slowly and thoughtfully, and suddenly he stopped and said, Look, look at the colors of the clouds. As if you had been looking at anything else anyway.
You sat down on a bench and silently watched as the sun went down. Very slowly it grew dark. The changes were barely perceptible. Then, the second the sun dipped below the horizon, everything was different. That terrible moment in which the light seems to die. You kept painting dusks, as if you wanted to stop time, to escape the certainty of death.
YOU ARE TWENTY-NINE YEARS OLD. Soon you will leave your parents and travel to Italy. You must travel to Italy, if you are serious about becoming a painter. You are looking forward to the journey, but you’re a little afraid of it too. Everything will be different. You will meet new people, sleep in strange beds, learn another language. You are thinking about the women in Rome. You have visited the rue du Pelican once or twice, but the women in Rome are different. Michallon told you stories about them. And on that occasion you were interested in stories.
You’ve bought a suitcase and clothes for the journey, a broad-brimmed hat, paints and brushes. You are prepared. In a couple of days you will leave. When you walk through Paris now, everything looks completely different. It’s as though you were seeing it for the first time, it looks fresh and exciting. The beauty of the city is frightening to you. The last look is like the first.
You paint a self-portrait. Your father requested it. He wanted you to leave a picture of yourself. He will get on better with your picture than with you. He won’t lose his temper with you for not getting up in the morning, for being absentminded, for wandering around aimlessly.
For the first time you look at yourself in the mirror with a painter’s eye. You’re not good-looking, but you like yourself. You smile. You will paint yourself smiling, with that smile with which you seduce women and drive your father white with rage. When he shouts at you and tells you to get on with it. You smile, and no one can do anything to you. You don’t shout, you just smile.
You sketch your face. You capture your likeness. You have always clung to pictures. When you were sent out on errands during your apprenticeship, you stopped in front of galleries and looked at the pictures, always the same pictures. Once, when one of them was suddenly not there—it was a study of Valenciennes—in your excitement you walked into the gallery to ask after the painting, to see it one last time. It was as though you’d lost a loved one. But then you didn’t dare. You said you’d gone in the wrong door, and you blushed and ran off.
You cling to pictures, your pictures. You don’t really want to sell them. You’ve been known to buy pictures back. They are part of you, part of your life. You look at them. They don’t change. When you put out the lights at night, you know they’re there in the dark.
If only you’d drawn Victoire, while she was alive. You’d never have been a painter without her. It broke your father when she died. After that he didn’t care what happened. He gave you the money he’d set aside for her. If you’d drawn her, she would still have been there. But drawing people, that was something you only learned to do afterward. Once you’d learned to see.
You learned: the world is flat, space is composed of blurs, shadows. Gradations. There is no time.
Long after you’ve died, long after the boy you saw on the field above Trouville will have died, your pictures will still be around. They will have barely changed. If only you’d said that to him: Once we’re both dead, this picture will still be there and show your village the way it has long since ceased to be. But who will look at it, once we’re both dead? Children always put you in mind of death, of your death, of the passage of time. Perhaps that’s why you never wanted a family.
All I really want to do in my life is draw landscapes. That’s what you wrote to Abel Osmond from Italy, shortly after you’d turned thirty. Draw landscapes. I won’t change from that. That resolution will keep me from entering into any firm bonds, such as marriage.
As if the one excluded the other. Were you kidding him, or only yourself? You’re a sketch artist, that’s the reason. Whether it’s a landscape or a woman, you’re incapable of deciding. A fleeting touch, a brief glance, that’s enough for you. So brief that nothing changes. The eyes, the shoulders, the hands, the bottom. Pictures of women. But such brief moments come with a price. Even in Rome.
Your passion is seeing. The act of love for you is painting. The other, the physical thing, is tedious for you, it just distracts you from work. You make love the way you eat, when you’re hungry, quickly, without concentrating. You were never especially picky. For your bed the lovely Italians, for emotion the lovable French. And as a painter, as you wrote Abel, I prefer the former. Roman prostitutes. They do their work for a fixed price, and when it’s done they leave with a smile.
You never really loved people, you were afraid of loving them, of losing them, of dependence on them. Love makes you vulnerable. Perhaps that’s what makes you so popular: because you don’t expect anything from people, you’re indifferent to them. You were always generous. You helped lots of them without making a fuss. You buy your freedom. You want to be left in peace.
You don’t like people for the same reason you don’t like the sea. Back then, on the field in Trouville, you looked out at the sea, and it became clear to you that you don’t like it. Because it keeps changing. It’s dangerous. You can drown in it. You need terra firma underfoot. You wish the world would freeze over. Strange that you never painted snow.
YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE ABLE to take the moment of love into yourself, and live from the memory. But memory is deceptive. You remember the feelings, not the appearance of things. Once you tried to draw Anna from memory, your dear, sweet Anna. But as soon as you had the pencil in your hand, her face blurred. Your recollection was just a feeling. A feeling has no nose, no cheeks, no mouth. You can’t trust your feelings, they’re too inexact. Whereas exactitude was always your commandment. When you paint, you can’t leave anything unresolved.
Memory cheats you, and you cheat memory. You paint it over, you destroy it. The world has no colors. Colors are interrelated, one entails the other. You obey colors. This green, this brown, this blue, you saw them for the first time when you mixed them on your palette. Your world is made up of lines and surfaces and colors. Your light is white lead.
How frightened you were the first time you painted your own likeness. How your face changed under the brush. It became a landscape, an approximate landscape, a surface. For a moment you were afraid you would lose your face.
I paint a woman’s breasts no differently than I paint cans of milk. The forms and the contrasting tonalities: that’s what matters. When you said that, did you think of Anna’s breasts?
Her love only makes you impatient. You would have to sleep with her to free yourself of her, you would have to paint her. Why won’t you paint me, she once asked in jest. Why does she want you to paint her? She thinks it would be proof of love. She doesn’t know that it would destroy your love, that it could do nothing else. What you contemplate changes, becomes a picture. When you contemplate her, her face freezes. However much you fight it, you see lines, planes, colors. If you were to paint her, you would discover her beauty anew, the beauty of her picture. You would love the picture. Anna would be nothing in comparison.
YOU COULD HANG IT UP in your studio. Then you’ll always have me with you.
You know that modeling is hard work. You have to keep still for a very long time.
I don’t mind that. It’s what I’ve done all my life.
I can’t paint you, because I can’t see you. My feelings for you cloud my eye. I can’t paint what I love.
She laughs. She’s flattered, but then she looks at you with an expression of reproach.
If you loved me …
She doesn’t get to the end of the sentence. It’s up to you. But you just kiss her hand. No one can keep silent like you. She reflects.
Don’t you love the landscapes you paint?
I love my pictures. The landscapes don’t mean anything to me.
VIEW OF VILLENEUVE-LES-AVIGNON, View of the Church of Saint-Paterne in Orleans, The Woods at Fontainebleau, Trouville, The Mouth of the Touques. You give your pictures titles, as if that’s what they were for: one particular church, a bridge, one village rather than another. You love these villages, these landscapes, but when you paint them, you have to be indifferent to them. You said it in jest, but it’s true: you work out of a passionate indifference.
It’s hard to explain and hard to understand. You paint what you see with the maximum of precision, but you don’t care about the precision of the depiction. You try to capture the feeling, the inexact feeling, as exactly as you can. What counts is decisiveness.
Your regard is cold, but not unfeeling. The coldness of the regard is an absolute precondition. You mustn’t be moved when you want to see clearly. To see something with cold regard means being nothing but eye. Otherwise it’s not possible to feel your way into a landscape or a person. To feel your way means above all to forget yourself, to be beside yourself. It’s not proximity that’s your objective. The foreground is always messed up, if you don’t wholly disregard it. You have decided against nearness. Nearness is warmth, nearness is when you’re in love.
WHEN YOU WERE IN TROUVILLE the next time, you climbed up on the hill again, to check over a few details. You have to go out into the fields, not to the paintings, how often you used to say that to your colleagues, the ruminants, who copied the great pictures in the Louvre and reckoned that doing it made them great too. Bertin had sent you there, with a commission to copy some of the canvases, but you only ever drew the painters, those pathetic creatures, contorting their features, doing their best. Go out into the fields …
You climbed up the steep hill. It was chilly, but you were sweating. You were still tired after your lunch. In the distance you heard the breaking waves and a dog barking. This time you walked along the edge of the field, so as not to muddy your shoes. Then you had that view again of the village and the river mouth and the sea.
And suddenly you had the extraordinary feeling that the landscape was wrong, that it didn’t accord with the reality you had created. Later on, you will paint this feeling over and over again. The young reader. She interrupts her reading, looks up from her book, and no longer knows the world. You will paint the wonderment in her eyes. Her smile is your smile. She knows that she is invulnerable. She lives in her own world, a world in which no time passes, in which there is no death.
YOU ARE STANDING at the edge of a field above Trouville. It is your field, and you look down at your village and your sea and your sky, at the lead white light.
When you go back to the village in the evening, you see the boy you saw before. He is squatting on the ground beside the path, playing with a piece of wood. He pushes it around on the ground, a cow, a pig, who knows what he sees in it. You ask him. He looks up at you in apprehension, as though you’d caught him doing something forbidden. Perhaps he doesn’t recognize you.
A coach, monsieur.
As if you were able to see it.
Where is it going?
To Paris.
That’s where I’m going soon. Do you have room in your coach?
He laughs. He’s laughing at you. You’ve fallen for it.
It’s just a bit of wood.
A bit of wood, a piece of paper, a canvas. Call it a coach, a bridge, a landscape. Call it a person. It’s a game. Any child knows that.
What are you doing it for?
He looks at you with that expression of utter blankness of which only children are capable. Then he stands up and runs away. He has left his toy behind at your feet. You stoop to pick it up. It is just a bit of wood, a wretched piece of wood.