One Another

by One Another (retail) (epub)

  Petrus had nodded, but Lisa objected, it’s already getting dark and high time we started back. Sensation was gradually returning to my feet, first my toes tingled, then little prickles started pelting my feet faster and faster from all sides until finally an excruciating internal pressure set in and my feet felt like they were going to explode. I looked out the window into the twilight. The streetlamps had been lit. Heavy snow flurries. It looked like the snowflakes were swirling upward, from the pavement to the sky. Petrus had gotten to his feet and settled the bill with the waitress behind the massive wood bar. She shook her head several times and laughed, then she said: Yes, sure! Sure!

  When Petrus returned to the table, he put the post card in front of me. There weren’t any of the bone house, unfortunately, he said, but here, St. Christopher. We’d have seen him if the church hadn’t been closed. He lay his hand on my shoulder. It’s unusual to see his portrait inside a church because the sight of him guards against death, that’s why he’s often painted on outside walls. Petrus drew his finger along St. Christopher’s cloak. He’s a good six meters tall.

  I flipped the card over. How do you know that?

  I just do.

  And he carries on his shoulders—

  The weight of the world.

  Isn’t that the young Jesus?

  Yes.

  Marc and Lisa had stood up and were ready to leave. Petrus stayed in his chair. He had ordered a taxi, he told us, and another round of schnapps.

  Urs had finished his book. Elfi had solved all the puzzles in hers. They’d been worried. Elfi even called the police, but they were unfazed and wished her a happy New Year. Elfi and Urs had sat in front of the fireplace and listened for us, for hours, until Urs’s lower eyelid twitched and Elfi’s hands fluttered. Elfi had screamed when we came through the door, and we flinched in fright.

  When the taxi driver had finally arrived at the inn, he explained he’d forgotten us. By the time he remembered, he’d already quit for the day and had to get dressed again. Now I’m here. So much new snow had fallen that he probably should have put his chains on. But, he added, for this last ride of the year, it wasn’t worth it. Please get in.

  I have no memory of the ride. But I do remember Elfi’s scream. And the look on her face. The disappointed look she gave Petrus as she passed us without a word on her way to the kitchen, where, according to her messenger, Urs, she wanted to prepare the fondue without distraction.

  The evening was well advanced by the time we gathered at the table and dunked bits of bread in the cheese. We washed down each bite with a small glass of Kirsch. Elfi did not say a word before midnight. When the church bells rang, she sprang up and said Happy New Year! and gave everyone a hug, even me, despite the lost boot. Then she put on a yellow turban and informed us that she would now look into our futures. She saw us there as couples, saw our happy children, and somewhat more distantly, but still clearly, she assured us, she even saw our grandchildren. Petrus smiled, and Elfi blew him a kiss. And thus the evening and the year ended.

  Later, Marc locked his Lisa out of their house—they were married by then. It was jealousy. He claimed she was having an affair with her dermatologist, whom she saw weekly for her eczema. Not long after, Lisa claimed Marc had raped her. She left him, at which point—and I’m not the only one bothered by this—she first moved in with his parents, Urs and Elfi. There were no children. (But I only learned all this secondhand.)

  I left Petrus a year after the New Year’s in Lenzerheide, in autumn, after my friend Katrin told me one cool July day that he had cheated on me with her more than a year earlier. Granted, I had also cheated on him. But the thing with Katrin, that was betrayal, I decided. Afterward, we still heard from each other for a while, but less and less. He needed distance, he said, and I found that convenient.

  One of the children has started crying. Let’s see if I can hold out until my husband leaves his room, turns on the flashlight, and goes to check. The dog crawls out from under the desk and looks at me reproachfully. I’m not deaf, I say. I try to ignore both the dog and the crying. In the hallway, I bump into my husband. I got it, he says. Good, I answer. He turns left into the children’s room, I turn right and return to my office. I read what I’ve written. I look outside. It’s snowing. I picture Petrus in the open window on the ninth floor.

  On the night we met, at the kitchen table of the mutual friend who’d introduced us—with a hidden agenda, as she later revealed—Petrus had already dropped a hint: As soon as I can go, I will.

  Where?

  Away.

  Where?

  And that’s when he spread his arms and smiled.

  2

  No, not like that. More like this.

  The first thing that occurs to me is to write to Andreas. That’s what I call him since he’s Petrus’s brother and Andreas fits.

  I only just found out. My heartfelt condolences. No.

  My deepest symp No.

  I was trying to get in touch with Petrus and learned that

  No, not like that. More like this:

  I had a sudden longing for old times. When I googled Petrus’s name, I came across the entry: Public figure. Was a German historian, publisher, and professor. Was.

  Died on November 17, 2008. More than four years ago! When I was pregnant. I had just become pregnant, finally, and my previous life—with never enough sleep, rest, or care taken, but no scarcity of alcohol, coffee, and cigarettes—was over. It was very hard for me to go forward: the nicotine withdrawal was hell. I found myself in a never-ending dialogue with cigarettes and the baby, the baby and cigarettes. I didn’t long for anyone—except the baby. I didn’t miss anyone—except the cigarettes. I couldn’t think clearly. I couldn’t write anymore. Intellectual life without cigarettes didn’t seem possible. Did I want that kind of a life?

  That was when Petrus decided to jump out of a ninth-story window. He is gone and I hadn’t noticed. How can the news of someone’s death be so upsetting if you haven’t missed him for years?

  It’s ridiculous to send Andreas condolences four years after his brother’s death, but after a rough night filled with vague attacks of longing, I search for his address.

  I type Andreas’s name into a few search engines and social networks. He seems to be alive, director of some—what exactly?—large Scottish bank. Chief Risk Officer. I picture him, from bottom to top, in handmade semi-brogues, a slim-fitting tailored cashmere suit with a silk tie and matching pocket square, smooth shaven, and bald, of course, as he was even then. Just a second. I blink: now he’s got on knee-high, pitch-black rubber boots with thick soles and a wide shaft; an old, stained pair of brown pants; a large-checked flannel shirt, and carries a gun. A gun? Yes, he aims the barrel in turn at his brothers then at me, and a salvo of hissing, crackling, and snapping sounds flies out of his mouth until he has to laugh—all alone—so insanely that his mouth is no longer any kind of muzzle and he leaves us alone. And his lips? What do they look like after so many years? I search under images, but don’t find anything. And yet, it keeps getting bigger. But what is spreading out before me is no longer an upper lip, not even a badly stitched up, hastily treated, thickly scarred one. What keeps expanding in front of me is something else, an unloved, actually long-destroyed, shredded story whose scraps and tatters are banding together, piling up, towering over me—and forming hideous new aspects and grimaces.

  Suddenly it was summer. We woke up dazed and couldn’t explain where the morning mugginess had come from. The spring had been a very rainy one, the shrubs and trees had leafed out as if for the last time; this was no delicate shade of color, but a deep, untamed green that threw thick shadows. Petrus stroked my back with the duck feather he used as a bookmark. My hand would stick, he said, let’s swim. We rode along the riverbank on our bicycles, no-hands, under the trees through the hard, rapidly alternating bands of light and shade, so close to each other that our handlebars almost snagged, and Petrus said: In two weeks I have to leave. I immediately fel
l and split my knee open. To tend sheep in France, he added as he brushed gravel out of the wound with his hand. I gave him a dark look because I didn’t believe him. The tenant farmer is taking his family vacation on the Atlantic coast and I agreed to fill in for him and take care of the farm like I did last year.

  You never told me about that.

  No? I thought I did.

  I leapt up, grabbed my bicycle, jumped on it, and rode off as fast as I could. Petrus chased me. When he had almost caught me, he yelled: Not a chance! From the corner of my eye, I saw that he was about to pass me and I let go of the handlebars, sat up straight and shot my right arm straight out to the side like a barrier. Petrus yelped and fell, and then I had to clean his knee. And not only that: one of his elbows was scraped, his wrist bruised, his ankle sprained. You’re not all there, he said and gave me a much darker look than I’d given him.

  I’m sorry.

  He didn’t answer.

  After swimming—despite his injuries, he did his three kilometers of crawl and I did my few lengths of breaststroke—he used the shower next to the pool, I used the one in the dressing room, he broke his silence at the exit turnstile, asking: Will you come with me?

  Of course, I answered.

  The farmer’s vacation lasted four weeks. The sheep farm was in the middle of the middle of France, in the region that was home to the Bourbons, whose crest that département still bears, and bordered a forest the size of Paris, almost exclusively of oak—twenty-to-thirty meter tall sessile oak trees.

  Petrus’s mother was given the farm as a wedding present from her grandfather. One day Petrus and his brother would inherit it, along with many other seigneuries, agricultural and forestry holdings, fields, forests, and vineyards in Europe, Canada, and South Africa.

  I spent the first week—hot days in early July—wandering around in borrowed, size forty-five black rubber boots, looking at the sheep in the stall until I had the feeling they were staring back at me. I pretended to be interested in the farm machinery and all the equipment lying around such a breeding station until Petrus made it clear that he could hear my internal yawning. Then I set off exploring the surroundings paths and pastures in my pumps, all the way to the nearby village with its original—but, to me, uninspired and squat—Romanesque church and once went on a daylong walk, barefoot, through the oak forest, where I got so completely lost that I was already preparing myself mentally to the idea that I’d be spending the night in immediate proximity to deer, wild boar, and tawny owls when a hiker terrified me by appearing suddenly and silently in front of me, and he then explained with gentle words and an astonishing repertoire of gestures and hand motions how to get to the village. An acrid smell of sweat streamed toward me as he raised his arms again and again, pointing in every possible direction. Each time I nodded and said, Entendu, merci beaucoup, Monsieur, he added additional, more complicated, arm-waving elucidations until I finally turned and hurried off. That seemed to be exactly what he was waiting for.

  So much for the environs. The truth is that I didn’t have any time for the forest and fields, the locals, or sheep since I had planned on using these four weeks to write my term paper on Beckett’s dramaticule Come and Go, which consists of exactly 120 words on two pages, a manageable project, you’d think, even though the paper naturally had to be the usual required length of thirty pages despite the brevity of the work discussed. And that’s where it got difficult. I intended nothing less than to give Beckett studies a fundamental boost with an astounding, yet compelling new interpretation. Even if I only had two semesters of study behind me. I was going to root out the riddle that Beckett posed for himself and for us, with this play, through sustained meditation. I spent entire mornings, entire afternoons searching for the key to this work by pacing throughout the house in my high heels, pacing from the kitchen to the bathroom to the bed or, barefoot, over the hot gravel in front of the house to the stone bench near the driveway, which very quickly became uncomfortable. Or I pulled on a pair of those enormous black size forty-five rubber boots, of which there were at least a dozen lying around, all of which seemed to belong to William, the tenant farmer, and I paced back and forth over the narrow strip of grass between the wall and the manure pile in big, shuffling steps. As I paced, I immersed myself in the master’s few sentences and stage directions as if in an oracle. I’ll get to the bottom of it, I told myself, nodding with each step and murmuring Beckett’s text, conjuring, hands waving, until Petrus came out of the sheepfold and stopped me. He was accompanied, as always, by three shaggy dogs, border collies that were apparently exceptionally well-trained experts in their field, herding sheep. They came from the oldest and most highly regarded breeding center in Great Britain and therefore understood only English.Lie down was all I could say. Lie down was all I needed to communicate to these dogs, whom I didn’t trust for a minute. As soon as one appeared, I would call out lie down, and he would immediately drop, even on the way to a full dog dish, fixing me with an expectant and—I have to admit—downright friendly look. I had no idea how to say Get up and walk, or Do whatever you want, or Eat, for all I care. So it was always Petrus who released the dogs with complicated commands I couldn’t begin to understand, even though he swore he was speaking English. The dogs would rise, take a few steps, sit on their haunches, lift alternate paws and, after giving three short barks, they would trot over to the feeding dish, sit down politely, and wait. Petrus would praise them, speak to them for a while, and then give them permission to eat. When I asked what he said to them, he’d answer: I give them feedback, I tell them what they did well and how they can improve. And then he added apropos, and with this lovely French word, he turned to face me and looked intently at a spot between my eyebrows—he never looked me in the eye, but always between my eyebrows—and continued: You shuffle around in the shade and, like a potato, try to germinate on your own. That is extremely unscientific. Where are you getting your interpretation from? That is the essential and most fundamental question. What are you basing it on? An artist may find creative sparks within and create something from that, but scholars or scientists? Never. No, they would never get anywhere that way.

  What about Newton, I objected, didn’t he discover gravity by looking at an apple tree? (I’m rarely quick with a comeback, the spark must have ignited my brain.)

  Oh, Petrus retorted, I see, you’re bringing out the big guns. Newton, well then, I am sorry to interrupt. I eagerly await your next explanation of the world, my esteemed Isaac. Then he said something to the dogs that I didn’t understand and walked off toward the stone bench, his steps crunching on the gravel. I watched him go, him and his matted, panting dogs, who circled him tirelessly, I saw him open the blue enamel mailbox and take out the newspaper along with an envelope, saw him slip the envelope into his pants pocket, sit down on the bench, and open the newspaper.

  Night fell and the heat gradually let up. Put on some rubber boots and come to the stall with me, Petrus said, I want to show you something. He shut the dogs up in the house and took a large flashlight from the hook near the key rack next to the door. We walked single-file in silence to the stall. My bare feet slid around inside the enormous boots with every step, chafing first against the hard toe box then against the worn back. Before Petrus opened the door to the stall, he put his finger to his lips. He repeated the gesture emphatically and slid back the wooden latch. It was almost ten and dark inside. In response to our entry, a few lambs bleated. We heard rustling, scraping, and snorting. Then it gradually quieted down again. Petrus and I crouched down next to the door and tried to see each other in the darkness. I had fixed my eyes where I guessed his eyes were and he looked at the spot between my eyebrows, assuming he could locate it. The still of night. And then, out of nowhere, came a thundering roar like an avalanche of gravel pouring onto the metal roof directly over our heads. Over our heads? No, the hail seemed instead to be pattering down the wall next to us, no—was it possible?—to be pattering up the wall! What is that? I asked as so
on as I got enough breath back. Petrus turned on the flashlight and shone it at the wall across from us. Rats! They scurried in chaotic masses over the untreated timber, without any obvious goal or definite direction. Then they seemed to be banding together in the eaves—what were they doing up there, what were they discussing? Then things quieted down. Did they have a plan? A renewed volley: with insane speed they scattered over the walls, tending downward this time, countless paws and claws drummed, beat on the wood. Dozens reached the floor of the stall: they ran, whirled around, crashed into each other, tumbled over one another. A few headed toward us. I leapt up, yanked open the stall door, and fled outside. Petrus followed me unhurriedly. Since the beginning of the warm season, they’ve multiplied exponentially, he said calmly. Their population seems to have reached its peak. I think we have to act.

  We? I don’t know the first thing about rats.

  Petrus came up to me, took me in his arms, and said: No? We kissed and as soon as I closed my eyes it seemed to me that rats were dancing over my retina and making it flicker. My brothers are coming tomorrow, Petrus whispered into my ear, his breath tickling pleasantly, they’re on their way home from Lacanau and will make a short stop.

  I opened my eyes. Is that what the letter said? I asked.

  He loosened his hug. Which letter?

  Petrus had three brothers. From the back, all four of them looked the same. No matter that Petrus was the tallest, they all had the same physique, the same long torso, straight back, and sloping shoulders, the same short, strong legs. From the front, you would never confuse them. One bald, the other bearded, the third, well, pink. Andreas was twenty-seven, just two years older than Petrus and already almost completely bald. He had a narrow face with deep-set eyes that were constantly changing color. Blue. Gray. Green. His mouth seemed out of place, as if stolen from someone else’s face: much too curved, too soft, too beautiful. He was studying business administration at the St. Gallen Hochschule, which was known for producing assertive managers.