Since their first meeting in the stairwell, Klaus pestered her at every turn: with invitations to his parties, which were frequent, since he played in a band and had a large circle of friends. He knocked on her door almost every day, to ask her if she needed anything from the supermarket, from the kebab shop, or from the state library, to see if she wanted a free ticket for a jazz concert or if she would be interested in a weekend in the Vosges. Judith wanted neither kebabs nor milk. Occasionally she’d show up at the parties, always quite late, when she was sure there was no longer any hope that Sören would call. She’d stand at the edge of the smoke-filled room, her silver-shadowed eyes half-closed, a glass in her hand, moving her hips to the music and staring into the crowd of people until the host came over and forced her into conversation. He’d bring her a selection of snacks from the kitchen: flatbreads, sheep’s cheese, tsatziki, sometimes a curried pasta salad. He watched her paw at the food with a fork, picking through bits, then finally stubbing out her cigarette in the barely-touched food and setting the plate down on the bookshelf. “Are you still agonizing over old Dix? No wonder you always look so sad. That shit is depressing.” Klaus drank beer and tequila, he bit into a wedge of lemon and then tossed it on the floor. “I know you really like flower paintings better, you just can’t admit it because they’re not cool. That’s why you’re sticking it out. Just like you’re sticking it out with Sören. Screw that asshole! There are plenty of guys who could make you happier.” His otherwise clear enunciation began to muddy and he talked louder. Judith just smiled and shook her head. One time she helped him clean up afterward, since she couldn’t sleep anyway. She made out with him in front of a sink filled with greasy dishwater, only to pull away in dismay when she saw the blissful look on his face. When Klaus started going out with Annett, a plump little music therapist with spiky, bleach-blonde hair, Judith was surprised to find herself struck with jealousy—as sharp and fresh as the pain of an open wound. But when Sören showed up again, she managed to pass Klaus in the stairway without even a greeting, not because she enjoyed torturing him, but out of pure carelessness. He must have seen her coming home near dawn in her thin lurex dresses, leather pants, high boots. When Sören stayed in Tübingen to study for exams with unnamed female students, she’d bring home other men, sleep with them on the cigarette-burned sofa bed, and then kick them out when she wanted to drink her coffee and dip into the blue tin in peace. Klaus moved out and left his new address in her mailbox: Constantinstr. 153, his phone number, and “Call me!” highlighted below in neon yellow. She never called.
“Don’t wanna meddle, hon, but sittin’ on the cold ground—that ain’t good for us gals. Who’re ya lookin’ for?” Frau Posselt’s heart-shaped face, adorned even then with gaudy glasses and colorful makeup, bent down to look into hers. Judith raised her head from Orplid’s sober shore and blinked. A broad smile spread involuntarily across her face. The old woman’s squawking, the mink stole that encircled her shoulders like a shining snake, and the chubby, clownish face cheered her immeasurably, and she felt like bursting out laughing. It was only due to years of practice that she was able to keep her composure even when heavily medicated. During office hours with Baumeister, she always managed to stare stoically ahead, no matter how much of a gnarled, pompous old goat he seemed to her. With some effort she stood up and shook the woman’s hand. Then the words just started to flow out of her. Her explanations were accompanied by economical but nonetheless meaningful gestures. A queen on a box. The autumn light fell on Judith’s faux pearl necklace at a flattering angle. The old lady looked sympathetically at her light blue pullover, her Marlene Dietrich trousers, velvet jacket, and pumps. Judith hadn’t brought much with her from Hackstraße: her old sock monkey, the Chinese tea set, her bathrobe, cosmetics, a few mystery novels, Kafka, Anne Sexton, Hermann Lenz, and Mörike had all been pedantically wrapped in old copies of the Stuttgart News and piled into two boxes, while binders, boxes of index cards, and laptop were left on the desk. Standing in front of the closet in her underwear, she had reached without hesitation for her professional clothes, the ones she’d bought for her internship at the gallery. They made her feel like an imposter, but they also made her feel elegant and protected. She’d eyed Anita Berber with scorn. Her nipples pricked through the thin red fabric. Judith shook her head: “Of course, you would just show up at his door in those rags and stick your tongue in his ear by way of greeting. It would probably work, too.” She packed a cotton nightgown, jeans, and her only pair of sneakers. The shiny miniskirts, studded belts, T-shirts with dragons or Madonna, and the pile of stilettos for every season remained in the closet.
The old lady on the sidewalk smiled and nodded. Her friendliness and the enthusiasm with which she listened—it bordered on rapture—spurred Judith on, as applause does an actor. Her right arm traced an arc that included the moving boxes and the hiking backpack that lay next to it like an armless, legless torso, and came to lie in a gesture of blessing on her own body, somewhere in the region of her belly.
The old lady clapped her hands. “Aw, that makes me happy. Ma name is Posselt, Luise Posselt. Ma husband ‘n me live on the first floor, two floors under the professor. He’s a good un. He’ll make a good daddy.” Judith smiled: “Yes, I’m very proud of Klaus.” It was a pleasant sensation to feel at home in a story that ended happily, to have someone’s sympathy and attention, at least for the duration of the conversation. The approving look of her thoroughly bourgeois interlocutor, who at another time would surely have passed her by, shaking her head and murmuring crossly, egged Judith on.
“I was abroad for a while, in the USA, working as an art historian. But I just missed Klaus so much. It was only over there that I realized we belonged together. I came back for an exhibition at the Staatsgalerie.” The old lady’s eyes grew round. “We saw each other and decided to get married.” Judith spoke slowly and clearly. She held herself erect and looked the woman in the eye. Instead of biting her nails, she used her hands to underscore her tale. She suddenly felt certain that she could play this part even without chemical support, as if Constantinstraße-Judith was her true self, like a piece of clothing she’d been wearing inside out for years and had finally reversed, displaying a shimmering brocade that stunned everyone.
But Frau Posselt suddenly began to pluck at the cuffs of her coat and turned her head this way and that, like a bird. She seemed embarrassed; she didn’t want to say the wrong thing to nice Miss Seysollf, but the little blonde who came over almost every night, stashed her folding bike under the stairs, and never said “Hi” was weighing on her mind. Judith looked serious and nodded knowingly. “Yes, that’s Annett, Klaus’s sister. She’s in a bad way, Frau Posselt—it’s really sad. She’s been studying for ages but can’t manage to pass her exams. And then there’s that cad who won’t marry her and runs around with other women. No wonder she drinks and takes tranquilizers. Klaus worries about her.”
She raised her right hand, as if taking an oath. A speck of dark red polish still clung to her ring finger, but Frau Posselt saw only the heavy gold ring. “Look—this is my engagement ring.” She took the piece of jewelry from her finger and pointed to the inside. “Love, Klaus,” she spelled out solemnly, biting her cheek to keep from giggling aloud. The old lady blinked behind her thick glasses and nodded eagerly. “Oh yeah, that’s purty.” Judith, having gotten herself under control, invented an engagement—a candle-light dinner at a hotel by the Schloßgarten. She sighed and smiled as she talked. In that moment, the image she conjured up felt as true as the reality, in which Sören had given her the ring in the drafty train station. It only looked valuable—there was no stamp to certify the quality—and Judith couldn’t hide her disappointment. But Sören, already aboard the train, had shoved his luggage into the aisle with his foot and called over his shoulder, “I’m saving the family jewels for Mrs. Right.”
Later, Frau Posselt took Judith’s arm and led her resolutely toward the painted green door. “Ya can’t just keep sittin’ h
ere in yer state. Ya got a responsibility. Me, I ain’t got kids. I’ll just letcha in. Sometimes we water the professor’s flowers. I’ll run up and getcha the key. Ya look white as a sheet.”
And so Judith followed Frau Posselt up three flights of stairs to her new home.
A short, stubby sandstone figure grinned above the door—a Hutzelmännle, a Stuttgart folk talisman inspired by one of Mörike’s fairy tales. It clutched a shoe and a loaf of bread, which, according to the story, would magically replenish itself after being eaten. She looked up, delighted. Hutzelmännle, melter-away of bad luck, comforter! she thought, thinking of Mörike’s lines. Wish me luck! She breathed in the scent of the stairwell, which betrayed meticulous weekly cleaning, and looked at the shiny-leafed bush lilies and araukaria on the windowsills. In the dim light of deep afternoon, they looked to her not like emblems of bourgeois conventionality, but venerable and mysterious, like the flora of a past era.
Judith saw only Klaus’s jackets and coats in the hallway, and was relieved not to be greeted by Annett’s bright red duffle coat. The little music therapist had often been at Klaus’s apartment on Hackstraße. She spoke loudly, enunciated her words too clearly, laughed a lot, and treated Judith with a disrespect that made it clear that Annett saw her as genuine competition. The apartment was bright and clean. There were four large rooms, a kitchen with a balcony, and a spacious bathroom with a window. Judith recognized much of the furniture from Hackstraße: a dark desk, large leather chairs, a colorful, clearly authentic tapestry on the wall, and lots of plants. The clothes and piles of newspapers on the floor argued against a woman’s regular presence. The living room looked out on Constantinstraße. The rear side of the apartment opened onto a proper garden with grass, fruit trees, and roses rather than the usual paved courtyard. Judith found only bachelor food in the fridge: bottles of beer, UHT milk, packaged steaks, pickled chilies. She took a glass from the cabinet and drank some tap water. Four equally well-used toothbrushes stood in a glass by the sink in the bathroom. There was no feminine perfume, no bottles of lotion. Klaus used a water pick and dental floss and read Ransmayr’s The Dog King and Engineering Weekly in the evenings. Around five, when it was already dark, the telephone rang. “You’ve reached Klaus Rapp. Please leave a message after the tone.” A masculine voice with a thick accent, unmistakably from the Swabian Alps, was calling about some exam. Judith stopped listening. Klaus had sounded as he always did—calm and a bit amused, as if he were secretly laughing.
A dark green spread lay on the bed. The fabric was cool and smooth; she nestled her cheek against it. She had purposely ignored the desk, full of papers and files, but she now opened the drawer of the bedside table. Alka-Seltzer, a package of condoms, a photo with a group of people. She fished it out. A party on Hackstraße—empty bottles of Rothaus beer lined up on the window ledge, Judith next to them staring morosely past the camera. She smiled and suddenly felt an overwhelming weariness, like a heavy pillow pressed against her face. She just managed to put the photo back, then fell asleep.
Leonie
Blue smoke rises from the fire pit at Wren House and disperses in the twilight. Charred sticks lie half-buried in sand, like the carcass of an animal in the desert. The civilian service volunteer, a slim young man with a goatee and a cap pulled low over his face, drives the sheep into their stalls. The fur of the animals is thick, a matted brownish-yellow. Clods of dirt and dung dangle from their wide tails like wooden beads on a string. The animals move at a surprisingly fast trot up the muddy path, bleating and jostling into their shelter. The little hooves leave imprints, and a strong, tallowy scent fills Leonie’s nose. She breathes in deep. When the wind blows in the right direction, the scent and sound of the sheep can drift all the way up to her third-floor balcony. The young man fills a rack with hay. Only now does Leonie notice the light green cords that rise out of his hoodie towards his face and disappear into his ears. Leonie knows for certain that if she asked the familiar question—What are you listening to?—she wouldn’t be able to put a face or a melody to what she’d hear in response. And he would smirk pityingly if she were to name the artists that make her sing along wildly in the bath or fumble excitedly to turn up the volume. She can’t get used to the fact that she can only find her favorite songs on stations she used to think were lame—stations for square, conventional older people. Sadly, the songs whose every note and sigh she knows by heart have suddenly become Oldies, and the faces of their singers appear as part of TV revivals or gala shows introduced by graying hosts. Instead of using pushpins, she’d always mounted the posters that used to hang over her teenage bed with frames and glass, like real art.
But now grooves are forming on the bright foreheads of her old idols, and their eyes are wrinkled. Their skinny, wizened arms protrude from leather jackets like sticks from a scarecrow’s burlap sacks. They used to be indestructible, wild, unbounded. The way Leonie felt when she moved to their songs on the dance floor, when she yelled at her mother, or practiced French kissing with her best friend in the dead summer quiet of her room until they lay atop each other, breathing heavily. They had gone to get ice cream afterward. They never talked about it, and as exciting as it had been, it remained incidental—not comparable to a first kiss with a boy. Time had no bounds. There seemed to be no limits, or at least she couldn’t sense any. Now the days race toward their ends, and she changes the channel if the subject of nursing homes or hospitals comes up on TV. She’s depressed when she finds yet another pale blue vein in the hollow of her knee or another notch at the corner of her eyes during her morning self-inspections in front of the mirror. She’s sad that she no longer has anything in common with the pimpled boy who’s locking up the sheep stall. Leonie’s nightmare is to find her eighteen-year-old soul trapped in a wrinkled body—a diaper on her bottom and an IV in her arm; she envisions her girls moving to Australia or China, calling the nursing home from their cell phones, visiting once a year. Old-age Barbie, Daisy and Minnie as wrinkled old prunes.
Felicia yawns and stumbles. Her eyes have gotten small. Leonie knows that it won’t be long before cold, hunger, and weariness trigger the first tantrum. Suddenly her little mouth twists into a smile. “There Matti!” Leonie receives a strong kick to the back of the knee and nearly falls over. “Boo! You’re dead! You’re both dead, I bit you!” A boy of about four, his pale face and spiky blond hair corpse-like above his vampire costume, springs out from behind Leonie, grabs Felicia under the arms, and carries her a few steps before dropping her in front of the chicken coop. Her diaper absorbs the shock. Felicia coos and they both laugh. Slowly, Mattis’s mother walks up the path. She looks at her son and shakes her head. “Felicia is much too heavy for you.” The young woman’s name is Hanna; she lives a few houses down. Lisa and Felicia go to kindergarten with Mattis. Leonie is glad of the chance for adult conversation, particularly with someone from the neighborhood, since she still feels like a stranger here. The daily race from kindergarten to bank provides little opportunity to put down roots—to learn the names of neighbors, to be greeted with familiarity by the baker or the postman. Leonie dreams of such daily rhythms, and when she’s honest with herself, she knows she’s woven together a pastel-hued film trailer about her future life from some combination of TV shows and the unnatural cheerfulness of Lisa’s picture books.
In reality she hasn’t even managed to become a familiar figure in Nâzim’s shop. It was clear to Leonie, even on her first shopping trip, that the little store on the corner was the heart of the neighborhood. She and Simon had made this discovery, like most of their discoveries in their new surroundings, during that first August week when they moved in. The two of them together twenty-four hours a day, Adam and Eve in shorts and T-shirts in a hot, dusty garden made of lamps, haphazardly-angled furniture, and crumpled-up newspapers, encircled by a wall of full cardboard boxes. “The coffee machine has to be in here somewhere. And there was half a bag of Hochland beans, too,” Simon said, wiping sweat from his face. His hand left a black
streak across his forehead. Leonie, exhausted and frustrated by her unsystematic packing, was captivated by the whiteness of his skin, against which smudge, stubble, and blue eyes stood out clearly. She bent over to him to taste the sweaty coolness with her tongue. “Now you have to buy me a coffee. I won’t lift another finger until I’ve gotten it. There’s a little shop downstairs. Maybe they have bottled lattes. Or a Coke.”
They immediately saw that Nâzim was anything but the typical Turkish grocer. A green-and-cream-colored awning shaded the scorching sidewalk. The display window, scrubbed clean, and free of lettering, was empty save a plain round vase with sunflowers and zinnias. It was cool inside the shop. The scent of the flowers mingled with the smells from pots of herbs, strawberries, and fresh espresso. Leonie marveled at the appealing arrangement, and at the prices. “It’s at least as expensive as the train station, maybe even the airport,” she whispered to Simon. And then there was Nâzim himself. He wore light Bermuda shorts with a lily-white polo shirt, plaited leather sandals, and a beret—he seemed to have attired himself like a Frenchman from a song by Trenet or Brel in order to break the grocery-Turk stereotype. In addition to the slew of women who greeted him by name, a pair of kindergarten-age brothers appeared: two blond boys in tunics and sandals who read out their requests from a doodle-filled slip of paper in melodic Swabian: “A bunch of parsley, yellow beets . . .” Leonie and Simon stood and drank espressos at the single high table by the window, and then had some fruit, ciabatta, and salami packed up to take home. Nâzim waved from behind the counter, so Leonie did the same. She longed to exchanged cheek-kisses and neighborhood gossip with him as well. Sadly, Nâzim’s opening hours were not chosen with Leonie’s work schedule in mind. She continued to purchase fruit for the girls’ breakfast at the supermarket. Leonie rushed past the store in the mornings long before the awnings were even cranked out.
Shorter Days Page 4