Text for You

by Sofie Cramer

  Thinking about it now though, Clara feels she understands what Katja meant when she talked about her new attitude toward life. By this point the change in her friend’s personality is so complete that when they were talking on the phone earlier, she had mentioned something—just in passing, casual as could be—about wanting a child. But because Clara was so focused on telling her about her night with Sven, she’s only now realizing the significance of what her friend said.

  Clara thinks about whether she should open up about her date to Lisbeth. But somehow the timing doesn’t seem right yet. She’ll get to meet Sven properly one day, anyway, Clara is sure of it. And if everything keeps going as wonderfully as it feels like it’s going now, this opportunity is sure to come very soon. Clara is in no hurry. She just wants to sit back and let it all happen. She feels a newfound confidence that most things in life might turn out all right after all, and this feeling alone is enough to fill her with a profound and overwhelming sense of gratitude.

  sven

  How could I ever have forgotten how fun it is to cook? Sven asks himself as he proudly samples his filling for the grilled tomatoes. He plans to serve them with shrimp, a sliced baguette, and champagne when Clara arrives, which should be any minute now. He’s already set out tea candles and transformed his roof terrace into a dazzling sea of light. He hopes to make her feel welcome and truly comfortable.

  He’s going to have to pick up the pace a little though. There are still a few things that need to be put away, like for example the tube socks in the corner or the Playboy on the nightstand, not to mention the bits of toothpaste that need to be scrubbed off the bathroom sink. He is after all assuming that Clara is going to spend the night with him.

  In every one of their phone conversations since last Saturday there had been little suggestive hints, and Sven is truly feverish with expectation for their date tonight.

  If she’s on time and manages to find a parking space right away—which is unlikely—she could be ringing the buzzer just five minutes from now and be at the door a minute after that. Just as Sven is about to look to see if he can spot her trying to park from the terrace and come up with a few macho lines to have at the ready, his doorbell rings.

  Heart pounding, he walks quickly to the entryway of the loft and energetically pulls open the door. There before him stands Clara, enchanting and bursting with life, wearing a knee-length summer skirt and a jean jacket, underneath which Sven can see a skin-tight, light-green T-shirt. Sven catches a brief glimpse of the seductively low-cut neckline, and what he sees is more than promising.

  “Wow!” says Sven, inviting her inside.

  “Wow!” says Clara, stepping into the loft and looking around. “I never would have thought you had such good taste.” She flashes a grin at Sven and kisses him, fleetingly, but tenderly, on the mouth.

  Sven wishes he could stop time to truly appreciate this moment and enjoy it more intensely. But he tries to act as casual as he can and says, “Well, if didn’t have such good taste, I doubt I’d be thinking about you all the time.”

  Clara smiles, blushing, and Sven can’t quite gauge if she’s just being coquettish or if she is in fact this easily unsettled by compliments. He’s so eager to find out more about her. There are so many questions; he wants to learn all the answers, one by one.

  “And it wouldn’t smell so good in here, either!” Clara adds and looks eagerly around.

  First Sven takes her jacket from her and then he leads her by the hand through his domain and out to the terrace, where the table is set.

  “I hope you’re hungry!” he says, trying to mask his nervousness.

  Clara looks at him, again blushing a little, and replies, “Sure, but to be honest I’m almost a bit too excited to eat anything right this second.”

  She takes a step closer to Sven and gazes at him intensely. Once more it’s her eyes that move him so deeply, that make him just want to hold her in his arms. He smiles and lifts his hand as if to say: Don’t move. He quickly hurries off to the kitchen to get the champagne, which he’s been keeping extra cold. On the way back his eye catches the Pink Floyd record sleeve next to his record player. He quickly puts it back on the shelf with the other records and puts on a CD of light, catchy piano pieces. Finally he walks right up to Clara, wraps his arms around her, and whispers: “Come here.”

  He places one hand on the back of Clara’s neck, so that for a time her head is resting against his chest. She looks up again and their lips come together in a long, intense kiss.

  * * *

  • • •

  Two hours and many kisses later, the bottle is empty. All the freshly grilled shrimp have been polished off. Sven spared no effort, serving Clara her meal with affection. Every bite was a kind of reward for her gamely answering one question after the next. Nevertheless she kept stressing again and again that on a night like tonight she’d rather look ahead into the future rather than backward, and that actually it was his turn to give an interview.

  After slipping inside for a moment, Sven returns with a wool blanket and a bottle of white wine. He pulls out the footrest of his beach chair and reclines the backrest as far back as it will go. He gestures invitingly for Clara to sit and drapes the blanket over her with care.

  “Voilà! The planetarium is open,” he says ceremoniously and not without a bit of pride. He sits down next to her, slips under the blanket, and puts his arm around her. As Clara readily snuggles up against him, he adds, “You see all those stars up there? That’s how many questions I still have for you!”

  Sven notices her pulling back a little and giving him a skeptical look.

  “Okay, you can keep asking your questions, Mr. Star Reporter. But I reserve the right to decide whether I’m going to answer them truthfully or not. And also, we’re going to take turns—after every question you ask, I’m going to ask you one!”

  “Sounds good to me. But I get to go first,” Sven declares. “Ms. Sommerfeld, all your adoring fans out there are dying to know: Why is it that you have such a hard time revealing interesting details about your personal life?”

  Clara lets out a mock groan and answers sarcastically: “Well, you know, a successful artist needs her secrets. They’re part of the aura of inspiration that surrounds her.” She grins triumphantly and continues: “And you, Mr. Acts-like-he-wears-his-heart-on-his-sleeve-when-really-he’s-just-a-playboy? Why do you have such a hard time revealing intimate details from your past? Hmm?”

  Sven clears his throat and is tempted to give some witty made-up response. But he finally wants to make good on his promise to himself and not keep anything from Clara any longer. On the contrary, he wants to encourage her to be open about her own story. An experience like losing someone you love has a huge impact on a person’s life; she shouldn’t have to keep that experience to herself.

  And so he urges himself to tell her only the truth from here on out. “First of all, I’m not a playboy, and I only speak about matters of the heart with people I trust. You’re someone I trust, and so I’ll tell you that I had almost lost faith in love, because it once let me down pretty bad . . . that’ll have to do for now. Now it’s my turn again: What do your paintings mean to you? What do they express?”

  Clara sits up a little, and now Sven is angry at himself because he senses that he’s gone too far. He has to proceed a little more gingerly from now on.

  “More than anything, my paintings give me hope. Hope that all this striving to lead a good life has a deeper meaning, a meaning that I lost all sense of not too long ago . . . so, and now it’s my turn again: What gives you hope?”

  Sven can’t help smiling, because really there’s only one answer to that one—Clara! But he makes an effort to give her a more informative reply.

  “Like I said, I’d almost given up hope myself. But ever since you came into my life, I’ve felt this vitality that I never knew existed before.”

 
“Oh sure,” Clara responds, “but you can’t have been that comatose if all it takes to bring you back to life is a little game of question and answer!”

  Sven is quite aware that this is Clara’s clever way of probing for compliments. He’s more than happy to turn on the charm; he knows what she’s all too eager to hear, and it’s not like it would be hard for him to come up with anything. But he really doesn’t want to let this opportunity slip by without taking advantage of it; he doesn’t want to get himself caught up in more lies that could shatter his dream.

  “Well, you know, the thing is, I heard your wake-up call much earlier than you might think,” Sven continues, feeling his way along. He knows that this is his chance to confess everything to Clara. Finally he can tell her how long she’s been in his life, and how much her presence has meant. “So, okay, it’s like this . . . I have to . . . ugh, no, seriously now. I’ve fallen in love with you. It was the melancholy side of you that I fell in love with first. You have this way with words that I find so moving.”

  Clara caresses his face and smiles happily at him.

  And so he continues: “And I love the natural, lighthearted side of you, which is so radiant with life. When you’re painting or when you’re writing as well . . . take the name Lilime, for example. That alone. Where does it come from, anyway? That’s one question that I’m burning to know the answer to,” says Sven, relieved that he’s finally past the first hurdle on the way to the truth.

  Clara sits bolt upright. Her eyes are blazing, but Sven can’t figure out why she’s reacting so strongly. “What is it? Did I say something wrong?”

  Suddenly Clara’s whole body is shaking. She starts looking around for her shoes.

  “Clara, come on, tell me. What’s going on?”

  With a cold stare and trembling lips she snaps at him: “How do you know about that name?”

  It hits Sven like a bolt of lightning. Lilime! How could he be so stupid? He couldn’t have chosen a more tactless way of starting his confession.

  “I . . . okay, listen, I . . .”

  “Nobody in the world knows about that name,” Clara continues. “What is this, investigative journalism?”

  Sven can’t manage to say another word.

  “I hope you at least had fun rummaging through my things behind my back!”

  Clara jumps up, grabs her shoes and her bag in a frenzy, and heads for the door so quickly that Sven has no time to react, all he can do is call after her: “Clara! Clara, please, wait. Clara!”

  But she never looks back. She slams the door behind her and is simply gone.

  clara

  The whole time she’s been driving Clara’s mind has been working in such a frenzy that it’s not really clear to her how she actually got out of Hamburg so quickly. She has no memory of making the turn onto the highway to Lüneburg, and now she’s almost there. Of course, she can barely read the signs because her eyes are so puffy, and the tears just keep on coming.

  She’s in a state of utter despair. What am I supposed to do now? she wonders—both right now, on this night that is beyond ruined, and just in general at this point in her life. A life that Ben ruined, she thinks bitterly, though her guilty conscience immediately makes her regret thinking such a furious, even hateful thought.

  Without weighing the pros and cons of it, she follows the impulse to get off one exit later in the hopes that her mother will be home and will have time for her.

  A few minutes later, Clara is relieved to see that there’s a light on in the living room. She rings her mother’s doorbell.

  “Clara, honey, what’s wrong?” Karin looks at her daughter in dismay and immediately wraps her arms around her.

  “Oh, Mom, it’s all so horrible!” Clara mumbles and buries her face in her mother’s neck. She cries bitter tears.

  “It’s all right, honey; it’s all right,” Karin says quietly and gently runs her hand over Clara’s hair. “Come on inside. I’ll just let Reinhard know that you’re here. And then I’ll make you your favorite tea, and you can take your time and tell me anything you want. Okay?”

  * * *

  • • •

  Though Clara had first fallen asleep on the living room couch earlier, exhausted from the strain of that evening and the intense conversation with her mother, and maybe also from everything else that she’d lived through and suffered through over the last few months, she’s now lying wide awake in the bed in the guest room, where everything smells soothing and fresh.

  Her mother’s words are still sinking in, but the longer Clara thinks about them, the calmer she feels inside.

  It felt so good to finally let loose and complain, unfiltered, about what a raw deal fate had given her. About how she still gets assailed by feelings of guilt with stubborn regularity. About how she put so much hope in a new love and it came to nothing. And about how this hope was clearly just a tiny life preserver in a giant ocean, anyway.

  Her mother didn’t understand at first that the problem wasn’t really Sven’s snooping around, or not the main problem anyway. On the contrary, Karin even defended his behavior, saying it only showed how much this man was interested in her—though of course her mother did have to admit that curiosity had its limits.

  After this initial misunderstanding, Clara almost wanted to clam up again rather than expose herself further and end up feeling even more alone and misunderstood. But in the end no further explanations were necessary, because all at once her mother was able to intuit what she was actually going through on the inside. She thought it was completely understandable that it was hard for Clara to form a sense of trust in another person, even if this person didn’t just take off from one moment to the next because he found out how much she was still caught up in the past. She even understood her worry that Sven wasn’t capable of truly committing to her and that the tingling feeling of infatuation she felt was only the euphoria of a fleeting passion.

  Without being arrogant or presumptuous, her mother got straight to the heart of what was most weighing on Clara deep down: her understandable concern that she might not ever be able to trust someone again, as well as her outsized fear that her feelings would be taken advantage of and she’d once again end up being left stranded—powerless, alone, and abandoned.

  And just as Clara began to wonder how much she even trusted her mother and her advice anyway, Karin introduced a new perspective into the conversation that Clara hasn’t been able to stop thinking about ever since.

  Clara had described how close she’d been to telling Sven the whole story about Ben. He’d just given her such a strong sense that he was truly falling for her. At that point, her mother cut in to ask what she actually knew about Sven’s inner life. And suddenly Clara remembered, crystal clear, what he’d said about his own restored sense of hope. It had been brave of him to be so honest with her.

  “Then you know how he feels now,” her mother said then. “He was about to open up to you and let you get close to him. He revealed something about his past and how he felt inside, and then he had to sit there and watch you leave, just like that, without any explanation.”

  She spoke this plain truth without criticism. Her voice was entirely neutral, like a voice speaking to Clara through the mirror.

  And now Clara has to think of Katja, too, who really always had trouble letting anyone truly get close to her. As if by some miracle, and despite suffering a huge disappointment, her friend found Andy, a man who seems to be making a more relaxed and less cynical person of her. Clara feels the soothing waves of acceptance gently wash over her as she feels herself reconciling with her fate. Suddenly it becomes clear to her that Katja’s good fortune is founded on her own misfortune. If Ben hadn’t left her, Katja wouldn’t have made such a stubborn effort to set her up with another man—and might never have met Andy and fallen in love.

  Clara smiles meekly in the darkness. Again she starts brooding ov
er where Sven could have found out about the nickname Lilime. She goes through her apartment and also the studio in her mind, trying to think if he could have found some stray sheet of paper, a letter, a CD case, or whatever else while she was still asleep or otherwise not paying attention.

  Then again, maybe he’d just looked through her cell phone to find out if she was playing the field. Maybe he wanted to know if he could trust her. If so it’s possible he could have seen a text to Ben in her Sent Messages folder.

  But her intuition tells her that Sven wouldn’t do such a thing. And besides, he would hardly have opened himself up to her if he had. But if he did in fact happen to see one of the texts she’d sent to Ben, then Clara would feel even more of an urge to confide in him completely, to tell him everything as soon as possible.

  Feeling significantly calmer and thoroughly satisfied with the conclusions she’s reached, she decides to call him first thing tomorrow morning. Really she’d like to text him right this second, just like she’s been doing with Ben whenever she absolutely has to get something off her chest. How frustrating that she doesn’t have his cell phone number!

  But suddenly Clara feels utterly euphoric. Maybe he’s already tried to get in touch with her. Should she turn her phone back on? She’d turned it off when she hit the first red light in Altona to make it unmistakably clear that she didn’t want to hear from him.

  Clara tiptoes quietly out into the hallway, trying not to wake her mother and Reinhard. She looks around for her bag in the dark, grabs her phone, and steps out onto the balcony to take a deep breath before checking it.

  With trembling fingers she types in her PIN and waits impatiently for the display to show that she has reception. And look at that! In the time since she turned it off she’s received three missed calls and a text.