The Summer House, Later

by Judith Hermann

  ‘Will you come again?’ Cat asked. Christine instantly said, ‘Yes,’ lied effortlessly, tried, leaning against him, to figure out what he smelled like – petroleum, earth, rum, hashish? All strange. The old men slapped their dominoes down on the table, and a child secured herself a place on Nora’s lap. The world was divided in two. Christine dangled her legs, then Cat took hold of her head and kissed her. She realized with amazement that his jaw cracked as he did, and the ‘Imagining a Life Like That’ game passed through her thoughts like a bright red strip of paper. She kissed Cat and thought her mouth was much too small for his; Cat’s jaw cracked and, as he was kissing her, he looked over towards the store with wide open eyes. When Brenton looked up he let go of her. Kaspar turned around and spoke with Brenton. Nora stealthily craned her neck, and Christine knew that she was trying to see what was going on on the bamboo bench.

  ‘When you come back, will that be our time?’ Cat asked. Christine answered, ‘Of course, that will be our time,’ lying again. She thought of the Island, as if for the first time. Would she live in Cat’s house, or where? And Lovey? And Cat’s child? For four weeks or five? She kissed Cat and carefully touched the inside of his hand with a finger. The rum that was left in the glass tasted sweet and burned her throat. Confused, Christine thought that drinking rum on the Island was completely different from drinking rum back home, and she heard Kaspar calling her name. Cat held on to her, didn’t close his eyes this time either, then Christine freed herself, and called back, ‘Yes?’ in a voice that sounded strange even to her. Cat didn’t say goodbye either; she jumped off the bench and took a seat in the jeep. Kaspar stared at her reproachfully, and she turned away.

  The taxi that will take her to the airport arrives at four o’clock in the morning, and up until three Christine keeps thinking that Nora will come into the room, stand there sleepy-faced – ‘Christine, I’ll come with you after all.’

  But Nora doesn’t come. Christine sits on the sofa, falls asleep, wakes up again, and the wind blows around the house; now opening the door again and sitting on the porch one more time – in Cat’s blue chair? – is not possible anymore. Christine writes a note to Nora and stuffs it into the didgeridoo. At four o’clock the beams of the taxi’s headlights finger their way up the hill; the sun will be rising above the ocean soon. Christine puts her backpack into the trunk, sits down next to the driver and buckles her seatbelt. The driver, too tired to talk, asks only, ‘Airport?’ Christine nods and closes her eyes.

  Later Nora writes to Christine: The hurricane passed us by, now the sun shines all day long, and we’ve eaten up Kaspar’s emergency rice. Cat misses you and says you’ll be coming back soon; I say – yes.

  Sonja

  Sonja was pliable. I don’t mean pliable like a willow twig; it was not a physical thing. Sonya was pliable – mentally. It’s hard to explain. Maybe it was because – she fitted into all the projections I imposed on her: she fitted in with all my wishful thinking about her, she could be a stranger, a little muse, the woman you meet once on the street and then remember years later with a sense of tremendous loss. She could be stupid and conventional, cynical and clever. She could be splendid and beautiful, and there were moments when she was a little girl, pale in a brown coat and truly insignificant; I think she was so pliable because she was in fact nothing.

  I met Sonja on the train from Hamburg to Berlin. I had been visiting Verena and was on my way home; I had spent eight days with Verena, and I was very much in love with her. Verena had cherry-red lips and raven-black hair that I would plait into two thick braids every morning. We went for walks along the harbour, I hopped and skipped around her, shouted her name, shooed away the seagulls, thought she was wonderful. She took pictures of the dockyards, barges and hotdog stands, talked a lot, was constantly laughing at me, and I would sing, ‘Verena, Verena,’ kiss her cherry-red lips, and want very much to go home and back to work, the smell of her hair on my hands.

  It was May. The train was passing through Mark Brandenburg, and the meadows were very green in the long, early-evening shadows. I left my compartment to smoke a cigarette, and there, in the corridor, stood Sonja. She was smoking, her right leg pressed up against the ashtray; as I walked up to her she pulled her shoulders forward involuntarily, and something wasn’t quite right about her. The circumstance wasn’t unusual – a narrow corridor on an intercity express train somewhere between Hamburg and Berlin, two people accidentally standing next to each other because both wanted to smoke a cigarette. But Sonja was staring doggedly out the window, tense, as though there’d been a bomb alert. She was not at all beautiful. In fact that very first moment she was anything but beautiful, the way she stood there in jeans and a skimpy white shirt; she had shoulder-length, straight, blonde hair, and her face was as unusual and as old-fashioned as one of those Madonna paintings from the fifteenth century – a narrow, almost pointed face. I looked at her out of the corner of my eyes, feeling uncomfortable and annoyed because my memory of Verena’s sensuousness was fading. I lit a cigarette and walked down the passageway, smoking; I wanted to whisper an obscene remark in her ear. When I turned to go back to my compartment, she looked at me.

  Something ironic came to mind, something like, Well, she dared to look at me after all. The train clattered, and a child screamed in one of the compartments at the back of the car. Her eyes were nothing special, maybe green, not very large, and set pretty close together. I stopped thinking about anything and just looked at her. She looked back at me, a look without a hint of eroticism or flirtation, without sweetness, but with such serious directness that I could have slapped her face. I took two steps towards her, and she smiled just barely. Then I was back in my compartment, pulling the door shut behind me, almost out of breath.

  The train stopped at the Zoo station after it was already dark. I got off, felt strangely relieved, and imagined that I could smell the city. It was warm, the platform full of people, and I took the escalator down to the U-Bahn. Although I hadn’t been looking for her, I caught sight of her right away. She was three, four yards ahead of me, carrying a small red hatbox in her right hand, her back just one big challenge. I clenched my teeth and ignored her. I stopped at the Press Cafe to buy tobacco and an evening paper, and then she was standing beside me. She said, ‘Shall I wait.’

  She didn’t ask, she simply said it, looking at the ground, her voice not sounding the least bit embarrassed but firm, and a bit husky. She was very young, maybe nineteen or twenty. My uneasiness dissolved and gave way to a sense of superiority. I said, ‘Yes,’ without really knowing why, paid for the tobacco and the newspaper, and then we walked side by side to the U-Bahn. The train came, we got on; she was silent, put down her silly hatbox. Just before things became uncomfortable she asked, ‘Where are you coming from?’ This time it was a real question.

  I could have told her that I had been visiting my girlfriend in Hamburg, but for some reason I said, ‘I went fishing with my father.’

  She stared at my mouth. I wasn’t sure whether she’d even been listening to me, but suddenly I knew that she had decided she wanted me. She must have seen me earlier, perhaps in Hamburg, perhaps in Berlin. She knew me even before I had become aware of her, and when I had stood next to her to smoke a cigarette she hunched her shoulders forward because she had decided on her next move. She had planned this, and knew that it would turn out like this, and now she gave me the creeps. I shouldered my backpack and said, ‘I have to get off here.’ With incredible speed she took a pencil out of her hatbox, wrote something on a piece of paper, and pressed it into my hand – ‘You can call me.’

  I didn’t reply, and got off without saying goodbye. I stuffed the paper into my jacket pocket instead of throwing it away.

  May was warm and sunny. I rose early, got a lot of work done in my studio, wrote innumerable letters to Verena. She seldom wrote back, but occasionally she phoned to tell me some story or other, and each time I took pleasure in her voice and her easy-going nature. The linden trees were
in bloom in the rear courtyard of my house, and I played soccer with the Turkish boys and longed for Verena, without torturing myself. When it got dark I would take off; it was as if the whole city were slightly intoxicated. I went out drinking and dancing, and there were women I liked, but then I thought of Verena and went home by myself.

  Two weeks later I found Sonja’s piece of paper in my jacket. She had written her telephone number in large round numerals, and under it just her first name. I said it softly to myself – ‘Sonja.’ Then I called her. She answered the phone as though she had been sitting next to it for the last two weeks doing nothing but waiting for my call. I didn’t have to identify myself; she knew immediately who I was, and we made a date to meet that evening at a café down by the water.

  I hung up, with no regrets, then called Verena and shouted cheerfully into the phone that I loved her madly. She giggled and said that she was coming to Berlin in three weeks, then I began to work, whistling the refrain from ‘Wild Thing’. Towards evening I left, hands in my pockets, and not the slightest bit nervous.

  Sonja arrived half an hour late. I was sitting at the bar and had ordered my second glass of wine when she entered the café. She was wearing an unbelievably old-fashioned red velvet dress, and I noticed with irritation that she was causing a stir. She came traipsing toward me in heels that were much too high, said, ‘Hello,’ and ‘I’m sorry,’ and for an instant I was tempted to tell her that I thought she was ridiculous, her get-up, her lack of punctuality, everything about her. But then she grinned, climbed up on a stool, dug her cigarettes out of a tiny backpack, and my anger turned into amusement. I drank my wine, rolled myself a cigarette, grinned back at her, and began to talk.

  I talked about my work, my parents, my love of fishing, about my friend Mick, and about America. I talked about people who rustle candy wrappers in the movies, about Francis Bacon and Jackson Pollock and Anselm Kiefer. I told her about Denmark, about the Turkish boys in the rear courtyard, and about the lover my mother had ten years ago, about cooking lamb and rabbit, about soccer, and about Greece. I described Chios and Athens, the breakers in Husum, and the spawning of salmon in the summer in Norway. I could have talked Sonja to death, and she wouldn’t have stopped me. She simply sat there, looking at me, her head cradled in her hands, smoking a huge number of cigarettes and drinking a single glass of wine. She listened to me for four hours. Actually I believe she never spoke a single word during all that time. When I was finished, I paid for both of us, said goodnight to her, took a taxi home, and slept deeply and without dreaming for eight hours.

  I forgot Sonja immediately. I prepared my show, June came, and Verena arrived in Berlin. She returned my empty bottles for their deposits, bought large quantities of groceries, filled the kitchen with bunches of lilac, and was always ready to go to bed with me. She sang in the apartment while I worked, cleaned my windows, spent hours on the phone with her friends in Hamburg, and kept running into my studio to tell me things. I combed her hair, photographed her from all angles, and began to talk about children and getting married. She was pretty tall, and on the street men would turn to look at her. She smelled wonderful, and I was serious about her.

  At the end of the month my show opened. While Verena went to the train station to pick up her friends, I paced restlessly back and forth in the gallery, and rehung one last picture. I was nervous. Towards seven o’clock Verena came back and hustled her friends past my pictures; I left the gallery to be by myself for five minutes. I crossed to the other side of the street, and there, in a doorway, stood Sonja. To this day I don’t know whether she had come by chance or whether she had somehow found out about the show. She knew only my first name, and I hadn’t told her anything about the gallery. She stood there looking absolutely furious, arrogantly furious in fact, and then she said, ‘You were going to call me. You didn’t call. I’d like to know why, because I don’t think that’s right.’

  I was really taken aback at this impertinence. I became annoyed and unsure of myself and said, ‘My girlfriend is here. I can’t split myself in two. I don’t want to.’

  We stood face to face, staring at each other. I thought she was tactless. The corners of her mouth began to tremble, and I had the feeling that something was going completely wrong. She said, ‘Can I come in anyway?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ turned around and went back to the gallery.

  Twenty minutes later she came in. By then the place had filled up; she didn’t attract any attention, but I still saw her immediately. She came in with a tense expression and a strained haughty look. She seemed very small and vulnerable. She was looking for me; I looked at her and then at Verena, who was standing at die bar. Sonja followed my glance and understood immediately. I wasn’t afraid of a scene, as there would have been no grounds for a row. Still, I knew anything was possible but I also knew that nothing would happen. I kept an eye on Sonja as she walked back and forth in front of my pictures; the only thing that gave her away was the fact that she spent half an hour in front of each picture. I sat on a chair watching her, and drank a lot of wine. Now and then Verena came over and said something about being ‘proud’ of me. I felt pretty good, but beneath it all I sensed a strange uneasiness that I had not known before. Sonja did not look at me again. After she had stood in front of the last picture for a quarter of an hour she marched resolutely toward the door and left.

  In July Verena went back to Hamburg. I never tired of her – I was sure I would be able to spend my whole life with her – but when she was gone the bunches of lilac wilted in the kitchen, the empty bottles started piling up again, dust whirled through the studio, and I no longer missed her. For weeks the city was submerged in a yellow light. It was very hot, and I spent hours at a time lying naked on the wooden floor of my room staring at the ceiling. I wasn’t uneasy, or on edge, but I was tired and in a strangely emotionless state. Perhaps that was why I phoned Sonja again, even though I thought the whole thing was in fact quite hopeless, but good God, it was the middle of summer. The Turkish women were sitting in the rear courtyard plucking geese, white feathers fluttering up to my window. I dialled Sonja’s number and let it ring ten or twenty times. She wasn’t home. In any case she didn’t answer the phone. I tried again and again, feeling an almost obsessive desire to torment her, to make her suffer. But Sonja evaded me.

  She evaded me for almost four months. Not until November did I receive a card from her, forwarded to me by the gallery. It was a black and white photograph of some Chekhovian group, and on the back was an invitation to a party.

  I polished my shoes, took a long time deciding whether to wear my leather jacket or my coat, chose the leather jacket, and towards midnight I set out; I was nervous because I was sure I wouldn’t know anyone at the party. For a long while I wandered through the factory quarter where Sonja lived at that time. Her house was located between a car crusher and a factory, right on the Spree: it was an old grey apartment house, and except for the brightly lit windows on the fourth floor, it was dark. I staggered up the stairs: the hall light wasn’t working. I didn’t know whether to laugh or be annoyed; suddenly I felt that it was all an unreasonable imposition. But then I reached the fourth floor. The door to the apartment stood open, someone pulled me into the entrance hall, and there was Sonja, leaning against the wall and looking slightly tipsy. She smiled at me with an absolutely triumphant expression, and for the first time I thought her beautiful. Next to her stood a small woman in a long seaweed-green dress with an incredible abundance of red hair, and Sonja pointed at me and said, ‘That’s him.’

  She had invited about fifty people, though I was sure that only a few of them were really her friends. But the combination of people, faces and characters made me feel that the old apartment house on the Spree was gradually losing its hold on reality. I don’t usually have impressions like that, but sometimes – very rarely – there are parties one never forgets, and Sonja’s party was one of those. Candlelight came from three or four almost bare rooms, somewhere Tom Waits was singing. I w
asn’t the least bit drunk, and yet I felt giddy. I went to the kitchen and found myself a glass of wine, and then I wandered through Sonja’s rooms and had innumerable peculiar conversations with innumerable peculiar people. Sonja seemed to be everywhere. Wherever I was, she always happened to be standing on the other side of the room, or perhaps I was always wherever she happened to be. She had invited many of her admirers: in any case she was constantly surrounded by changing groups of young men, and usually the red-haired woman was at her side. Sonja drank vodka by the glassful and always had a cigarette in her hand; each of us would be talking with someone or other, and all the while we were looking across at each other over their heads. I think we hardly spoke a single word to each other. It wasn’t necessary; she seemed to think it was nice that I was there, and I enjoyed moving around in her apartment and having her watch me.

  At some point I saw her standing near the front door of the apartment with a very tall and remarkably ungainly man, leaning against him. I felt a soft twinge in my stomach, and about half an hour later she was gone. She had simply vanished.

  The light was turning grey outside the windows. I walked through the apartment, trying to find her, but she was no longer there. The short red-haired woman came up to me, her smile just as triumphant as Sonja’s had been hours ago. She said, ‘She’s gone. She always leaves at the end.’ So I finished my wine, put on my jacket and left too. I think I was hoping she would be waiting for me downstairs, a little cold, her hands in the pockets of her winter coat, but of course she wasn’t waiting. The Spree looked steely in the morning light, and I stumbled along the street. It was very cold, and I remember that I was very angry.

  After that I saw Sonja almost every night. I got up early again, drank two pots of tea, took ice-cold showers, started working. Towards noon I slept for an hour, then I drank some coffee, read the newspaper, went on working. I was caught up in a high – both wild and cold simultaneously – of pictures and colours; I felt I had never been so clear-headed before. Sonja came very late in the evening; sometimes she was so tired she fell asleep at the kitchen table, but she always came, and she always looked plucky. I cooked for us, we would drink a bottle of wine together, and I would put the studio in order while she softly padded behind me in her stocking feet.