ANNA NEVER TOLD STEPHEN about Polly Jean. In fact, she’d never contacted him at all.
BY A QUARTER AFTER seven the Benzes were homeward bound. The boys, Polly, and Ursula fell asleep after the transfer in Frick. It would be past nine by the time the Benzes got home. On the train Anna watched a Swiss Army cadet talk on his cell phone. She passed her time imagining the party on the other end. Is it his mother? His father? His girlfriend? Is today his sister’s birthday, too? Anna held her sleeping daughter. Victor rested his head on Anna’s shoulder. An affection surged in Anna for her eldest child when, lowering her nose to his head, she noted that he smelled like David’s dog. Charles was asleep as well. He’d had a difficult afternoon. While Anna was on her walk he’d fallen off the branch of the tree he’d been climbing. He’d cut his palm. He was howling in the bathroom fighting Bruno as he tried to wash the wound when Anna returned. Anna took over. “You have to let me clean this, Schatz,” she cooed. He shook his head. “I know it hurts. So close your eyes. We’ll do this quickly, okay?” Charles sniffed and held out his hand and closed his eyes. Anna rinsed and dried the cut, then put a little ointment on it and dressed it with gauze and tape, all in less than a minute. When Anna asked Charles how it happened that he fell he said he couldn’t remember. Anna mustered her sternest face and reprimanded him for not paying better attention. Then, she gave him a giant hug.
Anna looked across the row to Bruno, who wore a blank, drunken expression. Despite the day’s cloud cover, he was sunburned.
“How,” Bruno asked sleepily when they were almost halfway home and for the first time since Anna had begun them, “are your appointments with the psychiatrist? What do you talk about?”
He wants to know whether we talk about him, Anna thought. “We talk about ways I can steer myself into a trajectory that forces me to participate more fully with the world,” Anna said, quoting Doktor Messerli.
This seemed to satisfy him. He yawned and pointed to her leg. “Your tights are ripped.” Anna looked down. There was a hole the size of a ten-rappen coin on her right shin and a run laddering after it. She must have snagged it on her toenail, dressing.
“I didn’t notice,” Anna said. This was not a lie.
ANNA SPENT THE PREGNANCY reconciling herself to herself. This would be his parting song, she thought. The adieu he didn’t bid. It would be, she argued, the only part of him worth keeping. Despondency nauseated her. Morning sickness made her cry. She’d been weepy with the other pregnancies and her daily tears were no surprise to anyone.
ANNA TOLD DOKTOR MESSERLI a dream of a fire-ravaged cabin in an unknown wood and asked her what she thought it meant.
Vhat dooo yooooo sink, Anna?
ANNA WAS IN BED less than half an hour after walking through the door. She hurried the boys through their baths and put Polly in her crib. Bruno was asleep when Anna came into the bedroom. She undressed as quietly as she could, changed into a thin cotton nightgown, and slid into bed. Bruno rolled over and draped his arm around her. It was an action born of habit. Anna curled into herself and faced the wall.
How did I become so unprincipled?
Tomorrow Anna would begin her second month of German classes: Advanced Beginner, II.
Oh Bruno, Bruno, she mouthed silently as she waited for sleep to steal her. This is your mess too.
A MONTH BEFORE POLLY Jean’s birth Anna left the house in the middle of the night and walked up the hill to the bench where she always went to cry.
To the night, to the cold autumn air, to the stars, to the trains in the distance, to the forest behind her, and to the sleeping inhabitants of the town below, Anna confessed:
I love him. I love him. I love him.
Like people in pain love opiates.
october
9
“A MISTAKE MADE ONCE IS AN OVERSIGHT. THE SAME MISTAKE made twice? An aberration. A blunder. But a third time?” Doktor Messerli shook her head. “Whatever’s been done has been done to an end. Your will is at work. You beg a result. A repercussion.” Anna held her left hand with her right and rested both on her lap. “A precedent has been established. You will get what you want. And there’s no need to seek out these mistakes. For now it is they who seek you.”
THE BEGINNING OF OCTOBER was as easy as the end of September had been uncertain. It is often like that. Every month begins at its own beginning. Chalkboards are washed clean. Work kept Bruno occupied and distracted. Victor and Charles were busy with school. Every morning Ursula came to the house on Rosenweg to mind Polly Jean. And Anna had begun the second term of her German class.
Most of the graduates of the September session enrolled in October’s. The remainder of the class was made up of graduates from other sections. Everyone’s German had improved. Anna’s as well. Anna’s especially. It became less difficult to sit through Roland’s lectures. They began to make more sense. The mood in the Oerlikon classroom was sociable and friendly, even as the autumn days grew bleak.
The consequence of Anna’s lessons was, as Doktor Messerli rightly predicted, that Anna was becoming accustomed to speaking German aloud. And the consequence of that consequence was that Anna began to feel a little less out of place, perhaps even somewhat comfortable in her daily life in a way she hadn’t before. On one day she spoke to the mothers in the square. On another she made chitchat with the cashier at the Coop. That was an absolute first. The checker offered a forced, availing smile in return.
But Anna wasn’t entirely at ease. In the same market on another day, she’d mistakenly weighed her pears under the code for bananas and a different checker—a fat, belligerent woman with close-cropped hair—huffed and rose from her stool to make a big, bullying point of walking to the scales and weighing them herself. Anna felt scolded and two feet tall. She carried the agitation all the way home and didn’t speak another word of German for the rest of the day.
Bruno noticed the upward, progressive arc of her speech, her level of comfort, her general mien. “I am impressed,” he said. “But it’s not Schwiizerdütsch.” It was a cynical, ungracious comment, but it was true. She didn’t know any more Swiss German than she did when she began the class. “Still, it is a start.” Then he added he’d be glad to pay for more lessons. As many as would keep Anna happy. And Anna was, perhaps, happier than she’d been in a long while (if indeed “happy” was the word for what she was, and Anna was almost sure it wasn’t). The classes were the axis around which her present life—public, private, and secret—spun.
“YOU SEE?” DOKTOR MESSERLI cheerfully pointed out. “What you’ve needed all along was simply a way of facilitating an ease of speech, of feeling more comfortable with your own vice.”
It was a slip of Freudian magnitude.
AND IT WAS SOMETIME around the start of October that Anna’s relationship with Mary began to deepen into a genuine, unmistakable friendship. It had happened with no fanfare, over cups of coffee in the Migros Klubschule Kantine. Anna had never had many close friends, even before the expatriation. But now in Mary, Anna had someone with whom she could enjoy a late lunch or see a film or sit in a park and talk about things that casual girlfriends might share with each other (they’d done none of these things, but that wasn’t the comfort; the peace came from knowing that they could). Anna was charmed by Mary’s sympathetic bent. She’d forgotten that people could be so genuinely kind.
But there are things that Mary will never know of me, Anna thought. We’ll never truly be close. Anna’s psychology demanded reserve. She held Mary at a short but distinct distance. But Mary didn’t seem to notice and remained her supportive, cheerful self even as Anna kept her own self separate. But Mary wasn’t mannerly all the time. One day after class, she dropped her purse outside Bahnhof Oerlikon and her wallet, her makeup, and every little thing she had stashed inside the bag spilled out onto the street. The powder in her compact broke and a snap-shut photo album she was never caught without landed in an oily puddle. Shit! Temperate Mary with her milquetoast demeanor cursed so loudly th
at a doorman at the Swissôtel across the street looked over to see what had happened. No one is even-keeled at all times, Anna knew. Nevertheless, Anna couldn’t dare open up. There are burdens that even the best of friends shouldn’t share. In that way, Anna was lonelier than ever.
ANNA BROUGHT A DREAM to Doktor Messerli:
I descend a staircase into a maze of dark passages. It’s dank and foreboding. Each step forward sinks me deeper below the earth. I’m apprehensive. The farther I go, the more terrible I feel. I never reach the end of the labyrinth and I never find my way back out.
“Which is it,” Doktor Messerli asked.
“Which is what?”
“Is it a maze or a labyrinth? They aren’t the same thing. A maze has an entrance and an exit. It’s a puzzle to solve. In a labyrinth the way in is also the way out. A labyrinth leads you through itself.”
IT WAS A WEEK into October before Anna followed Archie home again. She hadn’t intended this. A tumbling series of obligations and impediments had wedged themselves between the pair. First it was Mary, who begged Anna to ride the train with her to Üetliberg. Anna explained that in the foggy weather they wouldn’t be able to see much of anything and that standing in miserable drizzle 1,500 feet above the Limmat Valley is a good way to catch a bad cold. But Mary had her heart set so Anna gave in and went with her. The day after that Anna stayed with Charles, who was home with a fever. “I want you. Not Grosi,” he said. Anna would never have refused him. On Wednesday Charles felt well enough for school but in the middle of German class Anna started to feel woozy herself so she left after the first break (“Do you think it was because I made you go with me to Üetliberg?” Mary fretted). Yet another day found Anna rushing home so Ursula could get to Schaffhausen in time to meet a friend who was visiting from America. And one day, it was Archie who couldn’t make their rendezvous; Glenn had a doctor’s appointment and needed Archie to mind the shop. They hadn’t cooled. They’d simply back-burnered each other.
But after German class on the second Tuesday of October Anna followed Archie to his flat and on the spring heels of a kiss in the doorframe that might have shattered glass, Archie carried Anna to his bed and the two of them made love like ravenous teenagers, the air on fire with a thick, erotic charge. She sucked him off. He licked her until she came. He pressed her to the bed and laid his body atop her like a blanket. Anna could barely breathe. That was okay. It was the price she paid for feeling safe, subsumed. A muscle in her soul was massaged, a particular crack in her wailing wall patched.
But the thing about cracks in walls is that they happen when foundations shift. The concrete slabs become abstract. From the first crack, others spider out. This? This is my fault, Anna thought when she felt the ground wobble beneath her. And she meant “fault” in every sense.
So two hours later, and against her best judgment, Anna stepped off a train onto platform 3 in Kloten, a town just on the other side of the woods north of Dietlikon, and crossed underneath the station to the Hotel Allegra, where Karl Trötzmüller waited for her. She’d received the SMS while Archie was in the bathroom. Come, Anna, it read and gave the address.
I’m cheating on the man I’m cheating on my husband with, Anna thought. I grow less decent every passing day.
ANNA WAS FREQUENTLY SADDENED by flux. How autumn’s spinning leaves ripened first to red then dried to a crackling brown. How spring flowers hidden all winter would bust through the ground unannounced. Bruno told her she was insane. Everyone loves spring, Anna. Stop being foolish. But it wasn’t spring (or fall or winter) that perturbed her. It was their mutability. How one became the next, became the next, the next. It was a shifty enterprise; she didn’t trust it. And change is always an occasion for panic, she tried to explain. Even the changes that one should surely be accustomed to, like the daily rising and setting of the sun. Especially the setting. Tell me, Bruno, in what culture isn’t the sunset a harbinger of doom? Bruno would roll his eyes and drop the argument. So even as October so easily began, the shortening of days steadily jostled the cogs of an apprehension in Anna that couldn’t be denied.
Anna didn’t get home from Kloten until after four thirty. She’d stayed to take a shower. Ursula was irritated. “I wish you’d be more considerate. Stop dawdling in the city. I’m not their mother, you know.” Ursula left so quickly she forgot her jacket. The boys were in the yard and Polly Jean in the den inside her playpen content and chewing on the foot of a stuffed tiger. The house was so quiet that Anna could hear the clocks tick.
That morning’s German lesson left Anna pensive. The German language, like a woman, has moods. On occasion they are conditional, imperative, indicative, subjunctive. Hypothetical, demanding, factual, wishful. Wistful, bossy, of blunted affect, solicitous. Longing, officious, anhedonic, pleading. Anna tried to make a list of every mood she’d ever been in but ran out of words before even half of her feelings were named.
Anna made a mental note to return home directly after class the next few days as she reached into the playpen and lifted her daughter out. Polly Jean began to cry. “Hush,” Anna said. “I need someone to hold.” She sat in a rocking chair, pinned Polly to her chest with a small blanket, and out of exhaustion, compassion, and perhaps even boredom, all three, cried too.
“WHAT DO YOU THINK you will find at the center of the labyrinth, Anna?”
Catastrophe pushed her down the wending path. She knew that whatever she found, it wouldn’t be pleasant. Anna said as much.
“Psychoanalysis isn’t therapy,” Doktor Messerli replied. “The intent of most therapy is to make you feel better. Psychoanalysis intends to make you into a better person. It’s not the same thing. Analysis rarely feels good. Consider a broken bone improperly healed. You must break the bone again and set it correctly. The second pain is usually greater than the initial trauma. It’s true the journey isn’t pleasant. Anna: it is not meant to be.”
USING CONVOLUTED LOGIC, ANNA could justify a single affair: It feels good in the moment. It distracts me from the things that weigh me down. Bruno has ignored me for years. Can I not have something that belongs entirely to me? It doesn’t count if Bruno doesn’t know. It won’t go on forever, just a while. A while. Just a little while. Anna was clever and could dance around a dozen arguments.
But even clever Anna knew there wasn’t any way to justify two affairs at once. Allow them? Succumb to them? Capitulate? Concede? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. But she couldn’t absolve or exonerate herself. So she didn’t. Instead, she pushed every scruple aside and did her best not to worry about it. A task made easier somehow by the affair itself.
When Anna surrendered in the Mumpf woods, a strange, implausible mercy grabbed her by the throat. How futile to flee from my impulses. The epiphany was sharp. A knife. It cut through the ropes at her wrists. My guilts are undeniable. They are unassuageable. They are mine to feel. Mine to own. And that’s what she decided to do. Possess them. Experience them. The sex begat the clarity. I may not be as passive as I think I am. The bus is mine. Goddammit, I’ll drive it. And so the worse she became, the better she became. She was still sad. She was still skittish. She was still herself, and in full danger of being trapped beneath the rubble of her poor choices when her makeshift shelter caved in. But from this terrible awareness Anna drew strength. It was this that set October’s mood. This that jury-rigged her machine. And for as long as it worked—perilous as it was—she’d employ it.
THE NEXT DAY ANNA came home directly after class. She was tired and sore and wilted and she had promised Ursula that she would. Archie didn’t hide his disappointment. “Oh come on, we’ll get together later in the week,” Anna hissed at him by the coffee machine in the Kantine. He frowned and whimpered the way her sons did when they weren’t getting something they wanted. The waggishness grated Anna’s patience. “Jesus, Archie, get past it.” She rubbed her temples as she spoke. Archie turned away without responding, paid for his coffee, grabbed a newspaper someone had left on a counter, and took it to a table in the corne
r and sat down, his back to the room. Anna felt bad. She hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings. Mary sidled up to her. “What’s wrong, hon? Got a headache? I think I have some aspirin.” She began to rifle through her purse.
Anna stopped her. “I just need some coffee.”
“Well, then let’s get you some!”
On the way home Anna stopped at the Coop on Dietlikon’s Bahnhofstrasse. She’d written a list on the train. Eier. Milch. Brot. Pfirsiche. Müsli. Die Fernsehzeitschrift. Eggs. Milk. Bread. Peaches. Cereal. A TV guide. Anna swallowed a self-deprecating snort. This is an old lady’s shopping list. There was truth in that. Anna felt her age that day, plus fifteen, twenty years more. She shopped as quickly as she could.
Five minutes later and from behind her in the checkout line, Anna heard her name.
“Grüezi Frau Benz.” It was Anna’s neighbor Margrith.
“Grüezi Frau Tschäppät.”
Margrith volunteered an odd but not unfriendly smile. She inquired after Bruno, the children, Ursula. Anna told her everyone was fine and then asked Margrith what sort of things she and Hans had planned for the rest of the season. It was a go-to topic of conversation. Anna never knew what to talk to strangers about. And the Swiss were always strangers. The conversation was polite and cursory, the way conversations in shopping lanes are intended to be.
Margrith continued talking even as Anna turned to pay. “Oh,” Margrith by-the-wayed as Anna inserted her bank card into the reader, “I saw you, I think, was it yesterday?” Margrith paused. “Yes. In Kloten. You were walking toward the trains.” Anna entered her PIN and didn’t look up. “I have a sister in Kloten, you know.”
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