I look at the way Tadeusz looks at this beautiful young student. Music, they’re playing music here, which I didn’t even notice before. The song that’s playing right now, I know it, it’s a lovely song. It came out when I met Philipp. Yours is the first face that I saw, Conor Oberst sings in a wavering voice, I think I was blind before I met you. Tadeusz doesn’t seem to hear it. He’s talking to the beautiful student insistently, looking at her insistently all the while.
His observations fascinated me. When I was this student’s age and he was my professor, when I sat with him for hours after rehearsal for debriefings in which he never spoke about the production, but insisted on telling me about amazing coincidences, situations he had witnessed, amazing things that happened to him. Wonderful, he’d cry, simply wonderful: I was crossing the courtyard to the stage door, lost in thought about the rehearsal, which was about to start—and for which I was drawing a complete blank—and at that very moment an entire set of shelves was being pushed across the courtyard, you know, on one of those wheeled dollies, a so-called dog, with several shelves full of life-sized heads we’d had made for the production but then rejected. All of us, the whole team, had modeled for them. Now they’re clattering and rattling past me: my actors, my assistants, all bodiless, nothing but heads. The shelves were piled one after the other on the back seat and passenger front seat of a parked car. When I pass it, I see myself on the passenger seat, cheek to cheek with the dramaturge. I stare at myself wide-eyed and my head seems to be nodding at me. I nod back and look around quickly to see if anyone is watching, and there’s the make-up artist. She grins at me and says: Tadeusz is greeting his own blockhead. I reply: What are you planning on doing with the heads? We’re sending them to one of the rehearsal stages for another production, she says. No way, I say, the heads belong to us. I reach in and grab mine, then go to the rehearsal. I suddenly knew what to do. My wooden head saved the production!
I’m glad I didn’t die before I met you, Conor Oberst sings but no one is listening to him. I think of Philipp. This song back then. When we didn’t really know each other but were setting out into the future together. When I was still so light he could easily lift me in the air. When he moved as supplely as a cat, surefooted even at dizzying heights. Now I don’t know where I am / I don’t know where I’ve been / But I know where I want to go, Conor Oberst sings.
And now? I ran off twenty-six days ago, when Philipp kissed me. When he gave me the kiss I’d waited more than half of a year for. I’m visiting my brother, I said to him and repeat it daily on the phone to him and my two small sons. Though I’m staying with Simon. I’m banking on the fact that Philipp won’t call my brother and ask. Philipp doesn’t really want to know things. Especially not when they might make him unhappy. I’ve suffered because of it for seven years and now I’m taking advantage of it.
Philipp doesn’t reproach me at all. You need space, he explains so that I don’t have to explain anything to him. You need space for yourself and peace and quiet to write. That’s true. He told his mother I’m doing research for my next book. That’s true, too. His mother lives with us now. She can get radiation therapy just as well in Hamburg, no problem, she says. She cooks for the boys at night, sings songs, plays with them, reads to them, puts them to bed. She probably lets them watch television, doesn’t make them clean their rooms, doesn’t brush their teeth properly and gives them milk with honey afterward, no problem!
She can’t make it through the day without taking at least one nap. If she goes shopping, it takes her at least an hour and she comes home pale and exhausted. When she cooks, she has to sit down every few minutes.
How are you doing?
I’m doing great, I really am!
And the therapy isn’t too tiring?
No, it’s really not, no problem at all!
Philipp ignores her condition. Mama, wouldn’t you like to cook us some delicious potato soup? Philipp can’t bear to see her weak. Here, the socks, could you please darn them? Philipp is afraid. Mama, I put the shopping list for tomorrow on the table. He runs his hand through his thick, dark hair. She’ll get better, don’t you think?
We just have to wait and see, Conor Oberst sings, and I nod. Everything OK? Simon smiles at me. Stubborn case, he says and points at my mobile phone. Seems to have fallen into a coma. Maybe it’s nothing that dramatic, I say, maybe it’s just hibernating. Then I’ll tickle it awake, Simon says and pulls out his pocketknife, snaps it open and starts working on the telephone with the blade.
We just have to wait and see, I say, and I think of a black cat.
Tadeusz laughs. He sounds hoarse. Now you’ve got it, he calls out happily. The student agrees. I think I see a shadow of contempt for this self-satisfied old man flit across her smile. Or did I conjure it there and only I can see it? There are things one doesn’t see immediately, Tadeusz says at the next table, tapping his forehead with a finger—things one only gradually recognizes, that’s what work is!
His wife told me she found out every time when she called me one day. First, she asked if I was the one on the phone, before she gave her name then added: the wife of the man you’re having an affair with. You forgot your mascara in his room. Do us both a favor, please, and don’t bother denying it. Don’t be as small-minded as the phalanx of your predecessors. Above all, don’t be so naïve as to think Tadeusz is able to love anyone. The only problem is that I love him, have for twenty-four years, despite everything, I still do, I’ve never stopped loving him. When he got here, he was nothing. I’m the one who taught him German, who introduced him to the theater circles, found him his first assistant, got him out of bed in the morning and drove him to rehearsals, chose plays for him, suggested concepts and casts, held his hand during the premieres, and brought him home after the parties completely out of his mind. I supported him, nagged him, pushed him, because Tadeusz is not a person who has any idea what the next step is. I always put him on the right path and I’m not going to let him go astray. What can you give him? Nothing. And you can’t expect anything from him either: there is no Tadeusz without me and I will destroy you. Get your hands off my husband. Keep your distance. And finally: I hope that someday, somewhere deep inside, you feel what it’s like to have another woman steal your husband.
I’m not planning on getting married, sorry, but thanks for the good wishes, I said. No, that’s what I would have liked to say. As far as I can remember, I said nothing at all.
She was about to hang up and added: You really roughed him up. All those bruises, you think that’s fun? What kind of a person are you?
I was shocked, speechless, and completely confused. I wanted to call Tadeusz but hesitated, fretted over it for hours and finally let it go. He called me the following day. He sounded light-hearted and wanted to see me.
Tadeusz had occasionally talked about his wife. He never referred to her as my wife but always as Ute even though I’d never met her. Ute was an incredibly talented journalist. Along with her demanding job, Ute took care of her elderly parents, with whom she lived on an enormous farm with countless pets and farmyard animals, but no livestock since Ute was, aside from everything else, an engaged animal rights activist. But: Ute was wrong. I had no relationship with Tadeusz. I don’t know why I didn’t set her straight. Was it because of her opening? Tadeusz knows I’m calling you, she’d told me at the start, he gave me your number himself and agreed that I call.
Or was it just that I didn’t want to interrupt her, in order to find out as much as possible?
Tadeusz was having sex with a violent woman. It wasn’t me. But who could it be? And when did he have time anyway? When we were in rehearsals I wasn’t the only one watching him, the whole team was. He spent his free time with me and, on weekends, he went home! What was with the mascara? Whose was it? And the bruises? I wanted to find out. I watched Tadeusz closely, I leafed through his notebook, pricked up my ears when he was on the phone, suspected every woman in the room with us, but got no results. I tried to imagine: I
bit the nipples of a man my father’s age, who had a body similar to his but with Tadeusz’s head, until they bled. I pinched him with pliers until he writhed. I beat his testicles with a blunt object until he begged for mercy. I pressed a lit cigarette into his navel until he screamed. I didn’t enjoy it and wasn’t really convinced, so I gave up. I kept meeting Tadeusz. We never spoke of his wife’s phone call. But her call changed everything. He started giving me money for taxis. Way too much. What is he paying me for? I asked myself. One evening, Tadeusz started stroking my head. Sometimes I have the feeling we’ve known each other forever, he said. He kissed me on the forehead. You’re beautiful. His lips wandered down to my cheeks, kissed them, moved on to my lips, kissed them, too, gently, very gently.
From that evening on, he tore my clothes off whenever we were alone, demanded that I undress him just as roughly, that I sit on him and—he had very clear ideas—abuse him according to his directions. I left early in the morning when he was asleep. The taxi drivers raced through the night. Tadeusz could only drive at a walking pace at night on the small access road that led to Ute’s enormous old farmhouse. He told me that she made him do this so that he wouldn’t run over any animals.
One night Tadeusz started working away at my rear end with a smooth, cool object. When the pain became unbearable, everything was warm and damp and covered with blood. After that I avoided him. Tadeusz begged me to forgive him, howled night after night into the phone and into my ear, he charged himself with being a goddamn criminal, a lunatic, a repulsive pig. I stayed away.
Simon can’t do it. The cell phone gives no sign of life. He says he’ll have to look around at home to see if he has any manual for this kind of device. It’s time to get back for my sweet anyway. He means my dog, whom we left in his apartment because we couldn’t bring her into the museum with us. The poor thing has been alone long enough. Are you coming or are you going to stay here?
Simon loves my dog. It’s not easy for her at home. Philipp takes his frustration out on her, the boys are rough, they pull her ears when I’m not looking or push her away when she trots up to them to be petted. She’s not allowed on playgrounds, the boys don’t want to go on long walks, and because there are two of them and they scream louder, they usually win.
But Simon speaks to her softly with his dark cellar voice. He praises her. He pets her. He takes her for walks, plays with her. He has bought her food and a brush, dog chews and a blanket because we arrived at his place without any baggage. An old dog is expensive. He was able to order the eye drops she needs twice a day for her autoimmune disease that will eventually make her blind from the specialist in Hamburg, even though his assistants were not thrilled about having to make an extra trip to the post office to send a package, complete with customs declaration, to Switzerland. And the day before yesterday he took her to the vet for her monthly manual cleaning of her anal glands, which are chronically blocked and inflamed, a procedure that stinks horribly. But Simon’s love is great, so great that yesterday he tried to take away from her a chocolate wrapper that she’d found in a bush and greedily licked clean. I would never dare try because I know: Love stops when there’s food. She bared her teeth, growled, snapped at him. A logical sequence. Simon couldn’t believe it. He was shocked. The wound on the ball of his hand is deep. It’s shocking to learn where the limits of love lie, to recognize its borders. A few minutes later, she lay her head in his lap as meek as a lamb.
I’m just going to stay a few minutes, Simon. I want to make a few notes.
About what?
About the exhibition and so on, I say.
I’ll take sweet for a walk, he says, you’ve got a key.
I nod.
Can you manage without—he paused briefly—your phone.
I nod.
And without your sweet?
I nod.
And without—me?
I don’t nod.
He puts a bill on the table.
See you later, Simon, and thanks. I watch him leave, pull my notebook out of my bag, open it on the table and pretend to write.
I concentrate on the conversation at the next table, but Tadeusz is speaking quickly and so softly that I can hardly understand a word. The beautiful student can’t get a word in but seems to be interested in what he’s saying. Again, Tadeusz puts his hand on hers. At what point are they in their relationship? How close have they become? Has Ute called her yet? I assume that over the course of their now more than forty years of marriage Ute has called each of the other women just like she called me. Maybe this is her refined way of leading playmates to her husband, women he can torture and be tortured by, and of very elegantly diverting the violence out of their relationship! Could that be the secret to their strong marriage? What do I know? I don’t even know if they’re still married.
Peering over at him works best with eyes almost shut. Tadeusz. He looks terrible. Wrinkled, gray, puffy, his entire face is slack and drooping. I don’t know, is he sleeping? Does he eat anything besides sausage? Does he even wash himself? His greasy brown coat would suit a bum. Completely ratty, near the end. But honestly: Didn’t Tadeusz look exactly like this twenty years ago, just twenty years younger?
Without being aware of it, my fake writing has turned into actual notes. Tadeusz came into a world at war, my notes say. Born in 1943 in occupied Warsaw. His father was imprisoned for being a Communist, sent to Auschwitz (he was lucky: The gassing of non-Jews—except for gypsies—was suspended) from there to another concentration camp every few months and on May 1, 1945, he was freed from a satellite camp of Dachau. His last station before returning to Poland was a displaced persons camp in Munich.
Tadeusz was three when his father came home, five when his father joined the Communist party, seven and just starting school when his father’s doubts—seeing the Stalinist system—got the upper hand over his belief in Communism’s capacity for reform. One day after the birth of his second child, his daughter Agata, Tadeusz’s father gassed himself in their kitchen. Tadeusz was eight.
I peer at him from under my almost closed eyelids. I know all that about you and you don’t even recognize me. I could even publish this, I could send what you confided in me out into the world, I could sell your story as mine.
My fascination with his life was strange for him, but I was stubborn, and because men like it when others are interested in them, I found out what I wanted to know. In fact, I learned more than I wanted to. At eight, Tadeusz took care of baby Agata and his mother, whose son he no longer was. He was her companion, her protector, her comforter. Early in 1968, he joined the student protest against the cancellation in the national theater of an anti-Soviet play by Adam Mickiewicz. Independence without censorship! the students demanded, and that sparked the March events in Warsaw. Disillusioned by the rigidity of the political system, though far less despairing than his father, Tadeusz applied for an exit visa that October. His goal was West Germany, more exactly, Munich, the site of his father’s captivity and liberation. After a few days—Tadeusz claimed it was exactly seven—he met Ute at the university. She took him under her wing and, because he needed money and prospects, introduced him to some theater people. Tadeusz hadn’t been especially interested in the theater until then. Taking part in the protests against the national theater in Warsaw had been a political, not an artistic or explicitly theatrical statement. So within a week, Tadeusz had found himself a wife, a job, and professional prospects. What a transformation story: a Polish student without goals, support, or means had turned into an aspiring theater director and husband.
As soon as I write about anyone’s financial situation, I have to think of my own. For months I’ve done everything I could, taken every possible job to earn money: tutoring struggling seventeen-year-old students, writing articles for weekly papers and magazines—for Gender Pages, of all things, covering male-female issues, as if I knew something about this area or were an expert. At one point, two of my articles were going to appear on the same page, so the editor
asked me to come up with a pseudonym. She was not kidding—I asked five times. I said: Fine, I’m Phyllis Plank. But first I have to check with my husband, since that’s his name. Well, almost.
Philipp agreed right away. I wrote a piece in which I claimed I constantly had dreams about sex, despite an ancient, unverified and therefore untenable study making the rounds again that categorically denies women have such fantasies. And what happened? Philipp started having sex dreams. One morning, he said: Last night I had an erotic dream for the first time in ages.... We looked at each other, were immediately seven years younger and, if the little little one hadn’t come into the kitchen right then with a full diaper ... who knows!
After churning out only this kind of thing for a while, I need time to write, time for this book.
The student at the next table is on the phone. She chews her lower lip and says mmh, mmh, mmh. Her gaze is turned inward. Tadeusz orders himself a beer. What are the two of them doing here? Did they go to a Sunday matinee at the theater? Or maybe they went to the art museum, like we did? To the Giacometti? They came into the restaurant no more than five minutes after us. We’d have seen each other in the exhibition ... The student says into her phone: OK, K, K, examining the fingernails on her left hand. Tadeusz drinks. Even the foam turns gray as soon as it touches his upper lip. Pale and leaden, it hangs between his nose and mouth, fits his face perfectly. I look around the room, over to the distant window where the beautiful sit and behind which lurks the gray winter day. The beer moustache would suit this colorless day just as well as it does Tadeusz. But perhaps I am the prey, on the subject of grey, in the grey, to delusions.... I read the sentence in a book I found on Simon’s bookshelf yesterday: Dialogue in the Void: Beckett & Giacometti. A sentence from Beckett’s The Unnamable.
Twenty years ago, I was given this book as a Christmas present, in that mild winter that was as gray as the day is today. I was delighted with it. I carried it around with me for a while in the inner pocket of my winter coat, the one that’s meant for your wallet and lies next to your heart. And when I wanted to read it, it was gone. I found the book on Simon’s shelves and asked: Your book?
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