At midnight, they watched the fireworks over the city. Soon afterwards, his children went out into the street, leaving the two of them behind, surrounded by uncorked bottles and glasses with a few last drops. He was afraid to speak; he’d already said too much this evening.
In bed, they listened to the last rockets exploding in the sky over Berlin. The lights had gone out.
‘Are you asleep?’ she asked eventually.
‘No.’
‘What are you thinking of?’
He was thinking of the fourteen centimetres his daughter had grown in his absence. At times, sitting at his desk, he’d indicated the length to himself with his index fingers.
‘Why?’ he asked after a while. ‘Why did you never leave me?’
She was strong, she was brave, she’d have managed on her own — on her own with two children, that is.
He felt her body coming closer. She whispered something in his ear, words he’d never written down; words that didn’t work on paper. But in the early hours of New Year’s Day they would do; they were fine.
They were still going. He sat opposite her at the large kitchen table. His wife took small bites, he drank a glass of Blauburgunder with his meal. The silence: there was the cutting of the tender sausage, the waiting for the other to finish eating. He always cleared his plate first.
Outside, the sky wasn’t completely dark yet. Over the years they’d started eating earlier, sleeping earlier, the elderly couple stuck with each other. There were grandchildren: two boys, brothers, and a girl who was their son’s daughter. Their portraits hung in the hallway. One of the grandsons resembled him. Looking at the boy, he saw himself: the same cold blue eyes, rolled-up sleeves in summer, and self-assurance.
They’d lived on the coast for a few years. A decade after Berlin, it was to be their final adventure. It had been his idea to go to Sicily and rent a house by the beach, just south of Noto, where the sea is green and blue; where there is space, a horizon of sky and water, and seasons that differ from those in the north. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa once wrote that summer in Sicily lasted six months. But the sea was refreshing. Wearing little more than boxer shorts on the hottest days, Paul wrote on a laptop with sand between the keys, with the sound of the waves in the background, and his wife a tiny dot somewhere on the beach. There were still readers who were waiting for a new book filled by his breath.
Then the circle closed again, and they had to make do with the small piece of land that belonged to them. When Paul’s wife saw him decline, faster than herself, she forced him to come for a walk with her every morning. On their return home, they had breakfast together and then he sat down at his writing table. Later, the dog arrived, and the three of them would go out walking together.
He wrote one more book. Then he called it a day. What was the point in sitting in the same chair for hours on end? Other writers had arrived on the scene, others had taken his place in the pantheon. Still, his books were on the school curriculum, and his collected works had been published. Their children visited regularly. He saw them watching him, checking to see if he remembered to do up his fly.
The dog died at the end of autumn. The ground was already hard. Paul needed an entire morning to dig a grave under the fig tree, the shaded spot where Stella had whiled away many hours of her life. The first few days after her death, he was sad, but then the heaviness lifted, as if his heart simply lacked the strength to carry on mourning.
Now it was just the two of them going on their walks. The villagers saw them without a dog, as did the hares. Perhaps some of them were puzzled, looking around nervously to see where Stella had gone. But everything was peaceful — no taut lead, no barking, only an elderly couple strolling through the vineyard, inching towards the red dawn that heralded winter. He knew she was no longer afraid. One day he’d be gone, but they’d meet again, buried side by side. The glare of the sun absorbed all the colours around them, and their shadows were dozens of metres long. He paused and looked at the trees, the vines, and the short grass. His wife had walked on, but now retraced her steps.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
He was unable to formulate an answer, to explain what he saw. It had to do with the light and with the familiarity of everything around him. Somehow he still felt that every day offered him a new chance. His wife took his hand, and together they looked at what had been around them all this time. Standing there, on the sandy path among the vines, old together, it was almost too good to be true. But it was true.
All but one of Gustav Mahler’s symphonies end on a major chord. They walked on, illuminated by the strengthening sunlight coming from above the mountain tops. He’d never really known whether he could live here. But now he knew he could die here.
Acknowledgements
I owe a debt of gratitude to Karl and Nikolaus Schmid. Not only did they answer all of my questions, but they also took the time to tell me about the history of the apple harvest. In addition, I have drawn on the following sources: Südtirol. Vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis zur Gegenwart [South Tyrol: from World War I to the present], Rolf Steininger, StudienVerlag, Innsbruck, and Farbe & Qualität der Südtiroler Apfelsorten [Colour and Quality of the South Tyrolean Apple Varieties], Kurt Werth, Verband der Südtiroler Obstgenossenschaften GmbH.
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