One Another

by One Another (retail) (epub)

I wiped my mouth with my napkin. No thank you, I said, or I won’t sleep.

  Still blue. Are you tired?

  Yes, and I have to get up early. Better?

  No.

  I stood up and went to the ladies’ room, rinsed out my mouth, moistened my lips and scraped the crust of red wine from the corners of my mouth. I looked up, saw my face in the mirror and felt ashamed. But I’m not doing anything, I murmured and went back into the dining room.

  Do you need anything else, a hand towel?

  A toothbrush wouldn’t be bad.

  Sorry, I’ve only got mine. I threw him a hand towel and said: I’m going to bed.

  Lie down, he said and grinned.

  I’d been waiting for that phrase all evening. He hadn’t said it and that won me over to such an extent that I was thinking maybe he wasn’t such a bad person after all. And now this. If you need anything, let me know. Otherwise, good night, I said in an unfriendly tone.

  Good night, he said, giving me a look. Now his eyes were green.

  I closed my door, opened the window, and lay down. My bed was big. Sometimes at night Petrus came to my room, but mostly in the morning. Rarely did we go to bed together in the evening. What could he be doing now, in the wilds of Canada? How late was it there? Just before six PM, he had the whole evening ahead of him. Well, Petrus, make good use of it, I said, and for later, when you go to sleep: sweet dreams. Good night.

  I lay there and smiled into the darkness.

  I kissed the scar, I worked over its bulges and hollows with my tongue and lips as if I wanted to suck the last bit of life out of it. Your mouth, you had such a beautiful mouth, I said. Yes, that one was stolen, he said. Kissed away from an angel. No: I wheedled it off him, now he’s got mine. But this mouth here, with this peculiar lip, I’m not giving it up. I’m not trading it for anyone’s.

  In retrospect, I described him as an incubus who descended on me without my wanting him to, but that’s not how it was. I dreamed about him, that’s true, dreamed he was moving on top of and inside me and in my dream I wondered when the neighbors would finally call the police because the cries that escaped me could surely be heard all the way to Canada, and I said, Watch out, the cops are about to show up. Andreas wanted to roll off me and I woke up.

  I stood in Petrus’s door.

  I said: Are you coming?

  And Andreas said: Yes.

  The next morning Andreas was agitated, he seemed both absent and harried. I have to call him, he said when I asked him if he wanted breakfast. He dialed Joseph’s number in Canada and woke them both from a sound sleep. They could barely speak. Joseph handed Petrus the receiver and Petrus kept asking: What’s the matter? Did something happen? It’s the middle of the night! And Andreas exclaimed: Guess where I am! Yes, of course she’s here. You know how she is, not exactly charming, but she didn’t leave her brother-in-law out in the rain. But for real, your bed, it’s terrible, much too soft. I didn’t get a wink of—

  Petrus hung up. Andreas was pale. He looked at me: He knows.

  But Petrus didn’t know anything.

  I found the letter only much later. It was in the Bible. The perfect hiding place, actually. Why I took the Bible off the shelf and opened it, I no longer remember, but the letter fell right into my hands and before I checked the date, I knew from the French address that it was the letter I had looked for in vain in Petrus’s room the night Andreas was bitten. It was from a certain Miriam, but the contents were so harmless that I didn’t understand what it was doing in this remote place. The contrast between the innocuous contents and the ingenious hiding place made the whole thing suspicious. I knew it, I said to myself, but I didn’t know anything.

  I just googled Miriam’s name. She’s alive, a million-fold. And since I don’t know her last name, how alive she is won’t change. My dog presses up against me. She whimpers and fidgets, she wants to go out. She sat under my desk and let me write long enough. Who would have thought, would have thought at the time, that I’d have a dog like this, that is half like this, she’s only a border collie mix. She still loves sheep, though, but she’s not nearly as well-trained as the Lie-downs and doesn’t speak any English as far as I know.

  3

  Twelve autumns

  At first, winter did not want to come, now it won’t go. Mid-February and it’s snowing, snowing, snowing.

  My husband walked the dog and took the children to kindergarten. On a sled, believe it or not. The sidewalks are cross-country skiing trails, he says when he comes home for a nap, before his afternoon shift begins.

  The dog shakes herself.

  My husband gives me a long kiss, it tastes good. Just as I’m noticing this, he flinches, looks at his mobile phone and says: Just a second, I’ll only be a second—and disappears around the corner into his room.

  After about a minute, he comes back.

  What’s going on? I ask.

  Everything’s fine.

  What was so urgent?

  Don’t worry about it, everything’s fine.

  I’m not worried!

  Yes, you are and you don’t need to be. Stop catastrophizing, it doesn’t suit you, he says and kisses me again, and even though I’m not in the mood, this short kiss tastes very good, too. I’m going to lie down, he says. His door closes.

  I sit at my desk, open a new document and stare at the blank screen. And now? In the beginning was Petrus, it all started with him. He led me to Andreas. The story could end here.

  Just as I finish writing this, an enormous shadow comes up behind me, sways closer, grows larger, covers my screen in darkness. Petrus? I turn around. My husband is standing behind me. Who are you talking to? he asks. I thought you were going to take a nap, I reply. What are you doing? he asks. Working, I say and, since he’s looking at me skeptically, I add: writing.

  Who are you writing? he asks.

  Who? What do you mean? I’m writing a book, maybe you remember. Here, chapter three, slow going. At this rate, I’ll still be sitting here in ten years.

  My husband turns to leave. Don’t worry, everything’s fine, I say. He stops. That’s my line, he says. We both smile, briefly, then he shakes his head and leaves.

  No, the story can’t end here. I look out at the driving snow. It’s ten in the morning and still not really light out. You’d think it was late afternoon. Petrus. The last thing he saw was more or less what I see now: twilight, heavy snow. He left, unnoticed and without saying goodbye. Suddenly he’s here again, but at the same time I miss him. He lays his heavy, warm hand on the back of my neck, encircles it, presses gently at first, then harder and harder, pushing me forward. Petrus, then Andreas: the beginning of a series, if you’re going to take the names seriously, a series of twelve, twelve names, twelve men, one after the other.

  How many loves does anyone have? If I kept on with my story, would I end up with twelve? Probably not. And yet: the way I count depends on what I tell. But one thing is certain: however I count, whatever I tell, my husband should come last. No man after my husband. Period. I write on a piece of scrap paper, which I don’t pin up on the wall as usual, but slip under my keyboard.

  Twelve ... I think it over and make a rough guess. If I stay on track and continue chronologically, then my husband will be number five. But maybe I’ll find a solution on the way, as I write? Perhaps enter higher spheres of love, free of corporeality, in Plato’s pure realm? (Personally, I don’t believe it for a minute.) Or in the innocent higher elevations of imagination? I pull the note out from under my keyboard and tear it up.

  The knocking again, the hammering overhead. I don’t know what I’m hatching. I’ve had a cold for weeks now. But not more than that—except for the knocking in my head! In the meantime, I’ve gotten a handle on the Morse code. But the better I know it, the less clear the messages become. All I can recognize is * * * / - - / - - - / - * - / * : SMOKE. Before and after, a wild, nonsensical chaos of dots and dashes. There are moments when TIME or KID are also hammered out, but today, at
best, there’s SMOKE. Why that should remind me of my dog, who will be ten years old in a few days, I don’t know. I make a note that I need to get her a birthday present and go back to chapter three. The knocking has to stop, it must stop! So then. One after the other. Man for man. After Petrus and Andreas would come Jakob. Yes, that fits.

  When the leaves fall, it’s time for his birthday, he said. He knew this even when he was little and it’s still true today, unlike the other childhood pillars of truth that have collapsed. The one about eternity, for example, and the one about our benevolent God the father, the one about justice, and above all, the one about love. But on this one, he can rely: in autumn the leaves always fell and he always turned a year older.

  As soon as the clocks are changed, everything goes very quickly, he said. With the darkness, the leaves fell, as did the rain, sometimes even the first snow, he had his birthday and something happened. Something always happened.

  The autumn we fell in love was a golden one. Even if Jakob later claimed it was as dark and rainy as every other autumn. The days were sunny well into November, the nights were clear and cold. During the day, the foliage glowed an intense yellow and at night, huge spider webs shimmered in the light of the lanterns on the boardwalk. We sat on a bench and listened. After a while we could hear the spiders at work. We could distinguish their fine weaving from the rushing of the river, which was especially loud because of a marked drop in elevation. We looked at each other and said: I can hear it. And said: So can I. And we kissed each other very quietly.

  It ends the way it begins, my grandmother always said. She probably didn’t mean relationships, because for her they weren’t finite. Even though she longed for the end as she had never longed for anyone or anything in her life before. The end meant: his end, Grandfather’s death. When it finally came, she suddenly looked relieved and much younger, almost girlish. She enjoyed the attention she got and smiled coquettishly. She received condolences like compliments and answered them by shyly batting her eyelashes. Not much later, she died, too. It ends the way it begins. This sentence often comes back to me.

  Things began covertly with Jakob and me. As a game with our feet, a lively conversation between his left and my right foot during a theater performance.

  Petrus and I were still a couple even though we hadn’t been living together for about a year; I had left Zurich and the university and applied to the Salzburg Drama School to study acting and directing. Petrus was against it, though he did end up following me halfway. He enrolled for one unhappy semester in Vienna and another in Munich. He spent weekends with me, but mostly without me. On days off, I’d get a key from the doorman and rehearse one of my directing projects with grateful acting students who hated quiet weekends. Minna von Barnhelm’s dialogue with Tellheim, for example.

  Will you answer one question?

  Any, Madam.

  With nothing more than a simple yes or no?

  I will—if I can.

  Do you still love me, Tellheim?

  Madam, this question—

  You must know what is happening in your heart. Do you still love me, Tellheim—Yes or no?

  If my heart—

  Yes or no!

  Then, yes!

  Yes?

  Yes, yes!—and yet—

  What does he mean, and yet? the actor playing Tellheim asked and the actress playing Minna took a step back and rolled her eyes. I’m sorry, but I don’t get it, he insisted, my demeanor in this passage, I mean Tellheim’s demeanor. So, is he saying clearly yes or rather yes and no?

  Yes, Petrus and I were a couple even after my friend Katrin told me a secret one day under the dripping awning of an ice cream store, a secret she absolutely couldn’t keep to herself any longer: Petrus had betrayed me with her. Or she me with Petrus, you could also look at it that way. Doubly betrayed by lover and friend, that’s how to put it. It happened a year before, no, even more, but that’s not important, she said. She believed there was no statute of limitations for something like this. None. I tried to follow her logic, I plunged the long spoon deep into the glass and scooped a chunk of chocolate ice cream up from the bottom, pulled the spoon out slowly, balanced it in my mouth, pushed it in and was surprised that it was empty. I looked at my lap, at the ugly brown spot on my light-colored trousers. That’s disgusting, I said and grabbed a napkin, but all I did was rub the stain deeper into the fabric. Later, I went to rehearsal. While I watched my three actresses improvising, I thought of one applicant who a few weeks before had shown up at auditions with a monologue from Faust and had been accepted with enthusiasm; a huge talent, the leader of the audition committee had said, and once he learns how to work, he’ll be a candidate for the A list. He has star potential, no doubt about it. I thought he was cute. Actually there were two cute ones, but the one with star potential had looked over at me several times, when I was called into the auditions as student representative, and now I remembered him. His name was either Jakob Bäumer or Jonas Liebig. Those were the names of the two cute ones on the list of accepted students.

  Let’s call it a day and go get a drink, I said, and the actresses were surprised that we were stopping when it was still light out.

  We were working on my first production. It was during semester break. In the morning I worked in a bakery, so we could start rehearsals at three in the afternoon. I had chosen, no surprise, Samuel Beckett’s Come and Go. Three women sit on a bench. In turn, one rises and leaves briefly, upon which the other two whisper a secret to each other about the third. The secrets themselves are not revealed. Nor are we told where each went and what she did while she was gone. What bound the three? Why did each return? What’s fascinating is what is not heard and not said—and, of course, what isn’t seen. This play (the word is misleading, it’s a short play, at best a “dramaticule,” as Beckett called it) is less than five minutes long, if you follow his meticulous stage directions. I let the actresses improvise for hours and they developed endless dialogues and back-stories I had them write out at home only to cross out everything shortly before the premiere. Not a single word was spoken that did not come from Beckett, and yet the running time was at least two hours. At least, that is, because the doors were opened after two hours. The play continued until there was no one left in the audience. Over and over again, from the beginning.

  At the premiere, at the start of the new semester in early October, I sat in the middle of the first row, Petrus to my left, Jakob to my right. It was only Jakob’s second day, but he still rushed energetically through the auditorium right up to the stage. He had seen me and sat down next to me without hesitating. Good evening.

  Hello. I looked at him severely.

  Good luck!

  You’re supposed to say break a leg.

  Are you?

  Yes.

  Well then, break a leg! He became engrossed in the program notes.

  When the auditorium lights went down, his foot nudged mine for the first time. When the dramaticule was on its third round, he knocked again. By the fifth round our feet had started up a timid conversation and by the eighth they were engaged in a lively discussion. At the same time I was holding Petrus’s damp hand in my left, squeezing it tenderly. I glanced at him from time to time. Jakob, by contrast, I did not look at once.

  It took forever for everyone in the audience to leave. The actresses were relieved when it was finally over, but they were also disappointed since there was no one left to applaud, except for Petrus, Jakob, and me. One of the three was so exhausted, she wept. You were fantastic, I said, thank you so much. Petrus and Jakob nodded. Petrus did not speak for an hour, then he said: Three is always one too many.

  What do you mean?

  Well, people are always forming pairs. Whenever someone stands up, the other two scoot closer together.

  I nodded. He nodded back and explained why my staging didn’t hold.

  The minimum a theatrical production must do is to tell a story, it can be a very short one, however banal or simple
it may be, right? When, like tonight, there’s no beginning or end, then it’s not a story.

  The story is precisely that it never ends, I reply.

  Petrus considers this briefly. The play isn’t called Go and Come, but Come and Go. At the end, you go. At the end you can just leave.

  You think?

  I do.

  Jakob thought I was great. I was a year older, one year ahead of him, and I was a director. He wanted to be seen by me, and for me to direct him. He wanted me to tell him how talented he was, which, in fact, he was. With you as my director, I could play any role, he said, any at all and in every one, I’d be good, really good. I did perception exercises with him. I blindfolded him and put him in the middle of a rehearsal room. I moved silently across the floor toward him and then away. The task was simple: when he thought I was within reach, he had to stretch his arm out in my direction. At first, every attempt, with an impatient click of his tongue, went astray. No commenting, I admonished him. You determine reality. You feel it out and make it visible. Understood? And at some point, I stood at the other end of the room and he extended his hand toward me and smiled instead of clicking his tongue, and I saw his hand start to stroke the air. Very good, I called out, keep going. Gradually a woman’s entire body began to take shape under his caressing hands. You’re making me jealous, I said, and I came up to him from behind and took off his blindfold. He turned around, and we were all over each other. That’s how almost every perception exercise ended. Afterward we lay exhausted in each other’s arms and discussed the exercise. You get better every day, I said, and he bit my shoulder from joy.

  At first I didn’t notice his sadness. My grandmother always said: There’s no reason to be sad, sweetheart. She would say this in such a sorrowful tone that I would be overcome with sadness. I knew a thing or two about unhappiness, but I didn’t see it in Jakob until autumn came again. Mornings, he overslept. At noon, he just watched others eat. At night, he couldn’t fall asleep. I’m going to go out for a beer, he’d say. Late at night, he would sit at the kitchen table, as if lying in wait for something. We were going to celebrate his birthday. I don’t like birthdays, he said, but I had already organized everything. When he was with the other acting students, he perked up. He made fun of some new couples who couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Everyone was always switching partners, only the two of us stayed together. We were the couple. Jakob announced: People, if you really intend to get it on with everyone once, then hurry up, get down to business and on to the next! When I whistle, rotate, understood? One dream couple is enough, someone shouted back, not everyone can have a steady love life like you, Jakob. When are you two getting married, actually? Jakob and I looked at each other and smiled. And without having agreed on it, we both started to improvise on the theme We’re expecting a child. Our performance was discreet, spreading the news only by the way we touched, the way we smiled at each other and shared our secret. We constructed the game slowly, over half the evening, and when we were finally dancing, holding each other close, and he caressed me very tenderly, everyone suddenly saw. That I drank enormous amounts of alcohol didn’t seem to bother anyone, the news hit like a bombshell. A few asked: Are you happy? Others squealed: Oh, how cute. They all gave me hugs and patted Jakob on the back. What talented actors we were. We were so turned on, we were all over each other all night long and didn’t get any sleep.