And here she was still, standing in the big kitchen-diner. It smelled of sauerkraut. She glanced over her shoulder and smiled. If he looked closely, he could see the cheeks of the girl she used to be, the girl he used to know. Coming up behind her, Paul looked at the pots and pans on the stove. In the old days he used to kiss her when he came home. But he’d only been away a moment. To be fair, these days he never really left home at all.
They’d met in their early twenties. He was temporarily living with a countess married to a Dutchman while working on his first book. She lived in Bozen and was training to be a nurse for premature infants. She’d laughed at his German when she heard him stutter at the baker’s. He hadn’t noticed. But fate gave him a second chance and brought them together at a party. He was alone, she noticed, perhaps lonely, too. He couldn’t remember what he’d seen. In all likelihood, just a young woman with bare arms and legs.
The next day, they went to a café with high brick arches, where she taught him German. Her fingertips touched his face. He didn’t understand what she saw in him. Later, he thought he realised what women saw in him: an illustrious life. That’s to say, a life that was different from their own. By then, he was already living in Italy (Italy — he never said South Tyrol) and had made a name for himself in the Netherlands. He owned a spacious apartment and they had two small children: a boy they’d named after an American writer he admired, and a girl with the rusk-coloured shoulders of Lolita. He’d graced the covers of glossy magazines with ads for anti-wrinkle creams. The accompanying story was always the same: the man who lived a quiet life with his family in the mountains, an anonymous life among farmers and loggers; the father who threw his children up in the air in idyllic fields. Some men, it seems, can be in different worlds at once. He was one of them. In the Netherlands he was a rising star. He did readings and appeared on talk shows. They turned up wherever he went: young women in high heels; women who were freshly showered; women whose youth was a breath of fresh air in the small, grey rooms where he appeared; women in frayed jeans with a simple top. But there were also women wearing too much blush; women who were ten years his senior; women who found it hard to part with their beauty.
He hadn’t forgotten the nights, but what he couldn’t remember was how easy it had been, how little he’d had to do. He recalled a woman with long red hair. She lived with her young son. For six months, he kept his toothbrush in a beaker in their bathroom. He walked in and out of lives, the way some people get in and out of elevators. What had he been looking for? What had he found? Little, if anything. But the curiosity was insatiable. It was the longing for the unfamiliar, for the unknown and the transient. He was incapable of saying no — too weak, too cowardly. It was the absence of commitments, too: beauty, temptation, and nothing else. He was a dog and he knew it.
She was still here. It hadn’t been easy. Irwin Shaw’s wife could list her husband’s mistresses in alphabetical order. His own wife didn’t know any names or faces, but she was aware of their existence. A battalion of ghosts gathered around their bed when he came home after a trip.
Once, after overhearing snippets of a phone conversation with an actress, his wife had thrown him out. The words ‘I want to see you, too’ had made her physically sick. ‘Out!’ she’d shouted. ‘Go to Holland and don’t come back!’
He’d gone down on his knees to beg for forgiveness. In his diary, he jotted down the nights he spent in their son’s bunkbed. In the mornings, the little head appeared above him: ‘Why aren’t you sleeping in Mama’s bed?’ The boy often snuggled up beside him for a while, and so he and his son would lie in one bedroom and his wife and daughter in the other. There was love, but it wasn’t evenly distributed — or, at least, not the way it’s meant to be.
Two years later, they split. He returned to the Netherlands. It was a dramatic farewell, rife with recriminations and yelling, with his daughter howling and his son pleading: ‘Daddy, daddy … Dad!’ Finally, the door was slammed shut.
Paul Barendse drank from the cup that wasn’t his, the cup from which lesser men drank, those who were insatiable. He became arrogant and quarrelled with colleagues. For a while he lived with a philosophy student. She had long, blonde hair like a waterfall.
It had been a mistake — the biggest one of his life. It was a difficult thing to admit to himself. At first he thought the damage amounted to nothing but a book, a novel that wasn’t being written. But that was a delusion. If he’d had friends, they’d have seen him sink. But he had no friends, no house, no wife. There were hotel rooms and addresses around town where he was welcome. There were restaurants with wooden flooring and tables by the window; parties to which he wore smart suits. And as always, there were the endless nights. He had everything, and he had nothing.
In literature, there’s seldom a way back. He didn’t believe in it himself, in the happy ending, the final major chord. But perhaps, for him, it was the only way. Paul Barendse had enjoyed a respectable upbringing. He simply lacked the talent for the big crash and burn.
In his absence, his daughter had shot up fourteen centimetres. They all regarded him as a stranger, but he was welcome nonetheless. Picking things up again, winning back trust, was going to be a struggle, but he was prepared to fight. What had kept him and his wife together was still there. It was invisible, yet he could see it, feel it. She caressed his face with her fingertips. He lay next to her in bed, motionless, listening to her breathing. The first time he touched her, she cried. It was too early; it would take time.
And then the farm became available. The children of the family that lived there had left home, and now their parents wanted to go back to the city. It felt like yet another chance. Paul was won over at once.
His wife had reservations. ‘Can you live here?’ she asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Isn’t it too quiet?’
He knew what she meant. Nothing ever happened here, except the changing of the seasons. He used to look down on the people in San Genesio for their mentality, and for their culture, too: the folksy music and the Speckknödel. Bacon dumplings, but no books, no violins. The local paper featured car crashes on its front page, with victims’ names under a photo of the wreck. And wherever you went, people were yakking and gossiping in that appalling dialect his children spoke, too, and which had even crept into his own German.
Mazzon, the village the farm was in, was smaller than San Genesio. He wasn’t sure if he could live here the way his wife meant — forever.
Still, he nodded. He was willing to give it a try.
‘I’m always scared …’ his wife whispered, but didn’t finish her sentence. She wrapped her arms around Paul and held him tight. In the hospital where she worked, babies were looked after in incubators. Some had knees the size of her little fingernail. There were parents who kept hearing the beeps of the monitors at home. She’d heard stories of mothers waking up in the middle of the night, at the exact moment their child passed away in the hospital.
Like so many men, Paul never knew what to say at moments like this. So he was silent, waiting for it to be over, really; for it to go away.
Their children, six and eight now, settled in quickly. They were familiar with the farm from their many weekend visits and summer holidays. Now it was their own patch: the fruit trees, the red poppy fields, the buzzing insects. They walked barefoot under the vines and climbed on each other’s shoulders to reach the dark purple bunches. His wife and daughter made jam from the apricots, while he taught his son to chop wood. There was no warm water; in winter, the house was heated with large stone furnaces. A renovation would require a bestseller. He wrote the book at the small table in front of the window overlooking the valley. Sometimes he suddenly rose to his feet, as an almost feverish energy surged through his body. Then he’d stand in front of the window, the way Hemingway used to stand in front of the typewriter in his bedroom, not far from the Mexican Gulf. The words would pour
onto the paper, five thousand in a single week.
There were times he was amazed at the enduring success, at the many opportunities that came his way. He feared something bad might happen to his children — the price for their carefree days. Or that he himself might fall ill with, say, cancer of the bone, and be given less than a month to live.
But fate had no interest in them. They appeared to be living in a bubble. In the evenings, they usually sat on the sofa with mugs of tea and watched television. One after the other, the children would fall asleep. He’d breathe in their scent and kiss their hair. Life didn’t come to a standstill; they just moved in ever smaller circles. Life became a living room surrounded by a house with thick walls, and around it the land that ended at the winegrower’s wooden fence. There didn’t seem to be anything beyond that.
Summer was the most delightful season. The children looked after a donkey Paul had adopted from a nearby farm. There were vegetables from the garden, scarlet strawberries, and aromatic herbs. Huge sunflowers towered over everything. Lazy afternoons were spent in hammocks. Life was lived outdoors. They walked up and down the fields and washed their feet with the garden hose. They tackled the grass with scythes and rakes. The nights were splendid, punctuated in August by grotesque thunderstorms. Later came the harvest and the colours of autumn: the violet of figs and the rust of apples rotting away because nobody had picked them.
He still travelled back to the Netherlands, albeit less and less often. Paul Barendse was over forty now, and his blond hair was thinning. His books had a guaranteed first print run of tens of thousands of copies. Doors continued to open left, right, and centre, but he no longer had any business behind some. It was all too noisy, the people too young.
His mistress was a film producer. In Cannes, she’d slept with the great and the good. She told him long stories about them over breakfast. Among them were a famous British actor who’d wanted to take her in the press area bathroom, and a Russian director who offered her a role on the condition that she married him. She didn’t always have time for Paul. The day would come, she said, when she’d stop answering his phone calls. This was a woman who’d left men because they’d bought her gifts.
In your mind you can be anywhere you want to be, but Paul was often in the big hotel by the pier. This is where, in the olden days, steamers set off for America. The suites were former management offices, and still had the original carpets on the floors. The hearth contained a briquette of compressed wood that caught fire the second you held a match to it. In his memory, he stood in front of the tall windows overlooking the New Meuse, the river that had carried countless fortune seekers to the open sea. Her voice echoed through the bathroom, which was as long as a Cessna. ‘Can you top up my glass?’
He thought of her body in the bath, the foam up to her breasts, the other men who didn’t have her.
At home, the seasons came and went. His children began to read his books and recognise themselves in some of the stories, prompting his daughter to observe: ‘But Mama never cried.’
He didn’t know what to say to that, how much he could tell his children. In the small rooms where he read from his work and took questions from the audience afterwards, he tended to stumble over his answers, too. He denied any parallels between his life and work. He cited the American writer James Salter, who’d written a book about a couple with children growing apart. The author divorced his wife when the novel hit the shops. Salter, too, had asserted there were no parallels. No doubt his children knew better.
Paul’s son reached the age at which he wanted to come along on trips to the Netherlands. They wouldn’t see much of each other, meeting either in the dimly lit hotel room in the dead of night or at breakfast. Paul would be out a lot, so his son was given a key card and pocket money. He smelled the stink of cigarettes on the boy’s clothes, but asked no questions. In turn, his son said nothing about the perfume that clung to his father when he lay down beside him.
Then came the reunion: the mornings they’d sit at the breakfast table in the kitchen together, his wife, his son and daughter, and Paul reading the paper. The tabletop would be covered in crumbs, while the coffee cooled down in small cups. A string quartet played on the radio. Life within the ancient walls of marriage. It wasn’t a game, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t gamble it all away.
A sense of farewell suffused the air. They were moving towards it — and had done so for years, perhaps. There were little things, portents: the locked bathroom door in the morning, his daughter whispering on the phone. They were survivors, Paul realised, but they were no longer the same family. After the summer, his son would be going off to study in Bologna, at the oldest university in the world. His daughter, meanwhile, spent days on end in a bikini in the hammock. Paul had a feeling she was ripe for the picking.
His wife was afraid that he, too, would leave. It was only a matter of time, she figured. In the evening, as they held each other, he looked at the lines around her eyes.
One night — they’d only just gone to bed — he came out with it. He wanted to live in a city again, for a while anyway, maybe no more than a year.
‘What?’ she asked.
He explained that he didn’t want to go on his own, but with her.
‘What city? Not Amsterdam, I hope?’ She had a horror of the Netherlands.
‘Berlin,’ he replied. ‘Or else a city in Italy: Verona, Padua, Perugia.’
‘We’ve never been to Perugia.’
‘I want hustle and bustle, streets with people and cars in them, and bars where you can drink until the early hours.’
Quite unexpectedly, she moved closer and snuggled up against him. She listened to his heartbeat for a while.
‘What about the farm?’ she asked. ‘What do you want to do about the farm?’
He ran his fingers through her grey hair. It had happened really fast. She’d decided not to dye it, and he’d never said anything about it. As for himself, he was scared stiff of going bald, like his father had been around sixty. His dad’s hair had thinned until there was precious little left.
‘Maybe we can find a tenant,’ he said. ‘Young people who love the countryside.’
That made her smile. Their daughter had now flown the nest, too. She’d recently moved in with an architect and lived on the seventh floor of an apartment building in Bozen. By two in the afternoon, the sun had all but disappeared from view.
Still, against the odds, they’d managed to find a young couple who wanted to rent their farm. The woman had sighed with pleasure on the first viewing. With her nose stuck in a rose, she’d exclaimed, ‘Honey, smell this!’ Paul felt a bit sorry for the husband.
‘Isn’t it too quiet?’ the man asked, his question aimed at no one in particular.
There isn’t much here, Paul was tempted to say — trees, vines, grass that reaches up to your knees in summer — but he kept his mouth shut. He let the young couple survey the small radius of action for themselves. This was all there was, but it would have to suffice. The author Paustovsky once wrote that you could spend your whole life on one and the same piece of land, and yet see an extraordinary amount.
They moved to Berlin and lived in Charlottenburg for fourteen months. He spent the mornings writing in the attic of their apartment, while his wife found a job at the Old National Gallery. In the afternoon, they roamed the streets and drank aperitifs in cafés with ramshackle tables and chairs. Berlin wasn’t a rough diamond, but a piece of jewellery devoid of any gems. A ransacked city. They talked about books they’d both read. When she disagreed with him, he raised his voice, sticking up for writers as if they were family. ‘Joseph Roth isn’t a misogynist! He’s afraid of women!’ In the U-Bahn they held hands. They slept peacefully in the city that never sleeps.
Autumn: the scent of roast chestnuts, the wide avenues of Prenzlauer Berg. Life was never perfect, but at times it was pretty good. They fed the pigeons nea
r the water tower and walked in the pale, autumnal light, had dinners in crowded restaurants, and spent Sundays reading the paper. They thought of their children, who were both in other cities. Their son would be coming to visit at Christmas, while their daughter, who’d been invited by the architect’s parents, would join them later. Together, they’d see in the new year.
His wife had forgotten the lights. The evenings in the country were dark, with not a single illuminated window to be seen. But here there were twinkling lights everywhere: in trees, on façades, draped over monuments. The streets were covered in a fine dusting of snow. The four of them walked across it, the women’s hands in thick mittens. That evening, Paul said things that can only be said after alcohol. He was happy they were all together — him and his wife, the two of them with their children. He couldn’t believe they were all grown up now.
‘Dad,’ his daughter said.
But he carried on. He loved them so much. They meant the world to him. He couldn’t imagine life without them. Of course, he couldn’t take any credit for it, he said. His children knew what he was going to say; they knew everything. The months, spread over many years, when the house was filled with sadness, the leaden silence alternating with slamming doors, and the mornings he’d woken up in his son’s bunkbed — nothing had been forgotten, everything had slipped into the collective bloodstream. As teenagers they’d sworn they’d never get married.
What other men might say as a joke, at an anniversary or a leaving do, he said in all earnestness to his wife, straight from the heart. He thanked her for not walking out on him.
He raised his glass. It was an awkward moment, and too early to boot. It wasn’t yet midnight. But that didn’t stop them from raising a toast to the year ahead, blank as a sheet of paper, and full of promises for those who were young.
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