The Summer House, Later

by Judith Hermann

  In the hallway of the director’s apartment we twice stepped on hamsters. The hamsters made ghastly noises, and the Bali woman laughed, picked them up, and threw them into one of the many rooms in the apartment. The children took a final peek through the crack in the door and then disappeared. The director was nowhere to be seen, and the apartment was dark. The Bali woman led us into the kitchen, lit candles, put water on to boil. Embarrassed, we sat down at the kitchen table; I wanted to sit next to Markus Werner, and Christiane wanted to sit next to me, and we kept moving around for a long time, our sense of shame obvious. Finally we were all seated. The kitchen was large and warm, and outside the windows it was night; unusual garlands were strung across the ceiling; there was a strange smell. We were silent. Christiane avoided my eyes. Like a child, Markus Werner whispered, ‘What is it we’re doing here?’ and nobody answered him. The Bali woman made tea from green leaves, placing small cups, honey and sugar on the table. She poured with slow, confident movements, smiling all the time, finally sitting down next to Christiane. Markus Werner was looking at a photo hanging on the wall above the table. In it the director stood next to the Bali woman, and in the background were palm trees and a too-blue ocean; the director was naked except for a tiny loincloth and an ornament of bananas and flowers on his head. He was looking into the camera sidelong and obviously embarrassed, the Bali woman was holding his hand, wasn’t smiling; the sky above them looked like rain. Markus Werner said, still with excessive precision, ‘Your wedding?’ and the Bali woman, who had just put her face very close to Christiane’s, drew back and nodded. Christiane cleared her throat and put her hands on the table as though she were about to start a meeting. She said, in a determined and firm tone of voice, ‘So where is he?’ Markus Werner answered on behalf of the Bali woman, ‘He’s asleep already.’

  I think we had some good winters together. Was it one or were there several? I don’t remember anymore, and you’d say it wasn’t important anyway. We had snow and crisp cold weather, and every time I said I really liked being cold you’d look at me as though you understood. We went for walks when the sun was shining. Those long shadows, and you would break icicles off the tree branches and suck on them. When you fell on the ice I laughed till the tears came to my eyes. We made no promises, and I too wanted it that way; still – forgive me – I am jealous of all the winters you’re going to spend without me. I believe that from now on things will always be the way they were in that kitchen at that table sitting next to Markus Werner, with Christiane and the Bali woman. Morning came. I was so tired. I know that things were never any different, I just happened to have been wrong once.

  The sky was turning pale outside the windows. It was snowing again, and the snow began to glow. Christiane stood up once, then sat down again. Markus Werner took off his rubber gloves and leaned against me. He kissed me quickly and softly on the neck. The Bali woman saw us and smiled. She said, ‘There are many jokes in Deutschland.’ Her voice sounded very bright and childlike, and she stretched out the words and couldn’t pronounce the ‘sch’ properly. Markus Werner didn’t move. Christiane emitted a short dry laugh and said irritably, ‘What?’ The Bali woman moved closer to the table, no longer smiling. Very seriously she said, ‘Jokes. I have learned them all.’ Markus Werner closed his eyes and said gently, ‘Why don’t you tell us one?’ The Bali woman looked up at the garland-decorated ceiling and said, ‘What is the difference between a blonde and the Titanic?’ We didn’t say anything. She waited four, five seconds, then said, ‘With the Titanic you know how many were on her.’ We still didn’t say anything. She looked at us as though she expected an explanation, a clarification of the joke; she looked terribly serious, and her eyes were opened wide. Markus Werner still had his eyes closed, but Christiane’s face wore an expression of panic that made me laugh. The Bali woman leaned farther forward and said, ‘What do you say to a blonde who falls down the cellar stairs?’ Again she waited two, three seconds – she actually seemed to be counting – then she answered herself, ‘Bring back some beer.’ She said, ‘Bring back some beer,’ and all the while she looked with the utmost concentration at the table as though she were reading the words off it. Then she straightened up. She was now sitting ramrod straight and speaking as though the words had been drilled into her head, ‘How do you bury a blonde?’ and she didn’t stop after that. She told one blonde joke after the other, ten, twenty, fifty dumb blonde jokes, and I stared at her, stared at her strange, concentrated, crazy face; at some point I no longer understood her at all. She kept speaking faster and faster, and would ask the question and give the answer, ask the question and give the answer without a pause. And then I noticed that Christiane – for how long? – was crying. Markus Werner’s head slid off my shoulder into my lap. He was asleep, and his grandmother’s mangy fur enfolded his surprisingly small face. I put my hand under his cheek and supported his head. I felt my heart beating. I felt good.

  Then all was quiet. In one of the back rooms an alarm clock rang and a director woke up; outside it had grown light. The Bali woman was silent. She didn’t look at all exhausted. She got up and pulled Markus Werner off me and he fell against her, then she gently brushed the coat off his shoulders and moved him over to the kitchen bench. She pushed him down on it, covered him with his coat, stroked his forehead with her small brown hand, then kissed him on the mouth. Christiane and I got up and put on our coats. At the kitchen door we turned around once more, and there she was, standing next to the bench in her red dress, looking at us, gravely and directly. She did not say another word, and at that point we left.

  Outside it was still cold. An early-morning streetcar drove past us, blue sparks flying off the overhead lines. The city was still quiet and the light was so bright it made me squint. Christiane stopped and tied her hair together at the back of her neck, and I wondered whether I ought to touch her, but I didn’t. Her face was all white, and her lips were blue. Then we started to walk, the snow crunching under our feet. I thought that if you had been sleeping you would just be waking up. You would wake up and see the frost flowers on your windows.

  It is cold. The air smells of snow. Of smoke. Are you listening for something you can’t hear, do you have a word on the tip of your tongue that you can’t say? Are you restless? Did we meet – just once – and isn’t that enough? I’m going to sleep now. Does winter sometimes remind you of something, you don’t know – of what?

  Hunter Tompson Music

  The day something does finally happen after all is the Friday before Easter. Hunter comes back towards evening; he has bought canned soup, cigarettes and white bread at the deli, and picked up the cheapest whiskey at the liquor store; he’s tired, a little shaky in the knees. He walks along 85th Street, the green plastic deli bag swinging against his knee; on the asphalt the last remnants of March snow are melting into grey, dirty streaks. It is cold and the neon sign on the Washington-Madison flickers an irresolute ‘Hotel-Hotel’ into the darkness.

  Hunter pushes the big swinging door open with the palm of his hand, the warmth drawing him in and taking his breath away. There are black footprints on the green hotel carpet runner. He enters the dim foyer, where dark red silk-covered walls, soft leather-upholstered corner settees and large crystal chandeliers tell a tale of time irretrievably past; the silk is rippled, the leather corner settees are worn and sagging, the candelabra have lost their sparkling cut-glass pendants, and instead of twelve light bulbs in each there are only two. The Washington-Madison is no longer a hotel. It is a refuge, a poorhouse for old people, a last dilapidated stop before the end, a place of ghosts. It happens only rarely that an ordinary hotel guest mistakenly finds his way here. As long as no one dies the rooms are booked for months ahead; when someone dies the room stays empty for a while, only to receive the next old man or woman, for a year or two, or for four days or five.

  Hunter shuffles over to the reception desk, where Leach, the hotel owner, is busy picking his nose and going through the personals in the Daily News.
Hunter hates Leach. Everybody in the Washington-Madison hates Leach, except for old Miss Gil, who has chosen to offer him her feeble and scarred heart. Leach isn’t interested in Miss Gil. Leach is interested in himself, in the Daily News personals – only the perverse ones, Hunter suspects – and in money. Hunter puts the green deli bag down on the worn reception desk, takes a deep breath, and says, ‘Mail.’

  Leach doesn’t even look up. He says, ‘No mail, Mr Tompson. Naturally, no mail.’ Hunter feels his heart trip. It doesn’t really trip, it just skips, it skips a beat and hesitates and then goes on beating after all, almost mercifully, as though it wanted to say – just a little joke. Hunter holds on to the counter with his left hand and says, ‘Please, would you mind checking to see whether I have any mail.’

  Leach looks up with the expression of someone who’s been repeatedly interrupted during a tremendously important task by something tremendously unimportant, and he points with a weary, ritual gesture at the empty compartments behind him. ‘Your box is Box Number 93, Mr Tompson. As you can see, it’s empty. As empty as every other day.’

  Hunter stares at the empty box, at all the other empty boxes above and below it; in Box 45 there’s Mr Friedman’s chess magazine, and in Box 107 the knitting instructions for Miss Wenders. An unusually large number of knitting instructions. ‘It looks as though Miss Wenders hasn’t picked up her mail for several days, Mr Leach,’ Hunter says. ‘Maybe you should check to see if she’s all right.’

  Leach doesn’t answer. Hunter, with a dull feeling of triumph, picks up his plastic bag from the desk and takes the elevator to the fourth floor. The elevator rumbles alarmingly, its routine maintenance is long overdue; at his floor the doors slide open, shaking and creaking. The hall light isn’t working. Hunter gropes his way along the wall; ever since Mr Wright died three weeks ago in Room 95, the room across the hall, he has been alone in this corner of the fourth floor, and he is afraid. The red EXIT sign over the door to the stairway glows weakly. From the bathroom at the end of the hall come sounds of running water, violent nose-blowing and coughing. Hunter shudders. He washes himself as best he can at the sink in his room, and uses the communal bath with the big old tub as rarely as possible; sad to say, he finds old people for the most part disgusting.

  Hunter turns the key in the lock, switches the light on, locks the door behind him. He unpacks the groceries, lies down on the bed, closes his eyes. Tiny green dots dance up and down in the blackness behind his closed eyelids. The building moves. It is always moving. The floors above him creak, somewhere a door slams, the elevator rumbles in the distance. Hunter can hear soft radio music, a telephone rings, something falls down with a dull thud, the sound of taxi horns rises from the street below. Hunter likes these noises. He likes the Washington-Madison in a certain sad, resigned way. He likes his room, for which he pays four hundred dollars a month; he replaced the twenty-watt bulb in the ceiling fixture with a sixty-watt bulb and put up blue curtains at the windows. He has arranged his books on the bookshelf, the tape recorder and tapes on the bureau, and hung two photographs above the bed. There’s a chair for visitors who never come, and a telephone that never rings. Next to the sink a refrigerator, and on the refrigerator a hotplate. All the rooms are furnished like this. Once a week the bed linen is changed; when he moved in Hunter had insisted on doing it himself. He doesn’t like the idea of the chambermaid rummaging around among his books, papers and tapes.

  Hunter turns over on his back, pushes aside the curtain at the window next to the bed, and stares out; the grating of the fire escape stairway slices the dark sky into small squares. He falls asleep, then wakes up again and sits on the edge of the bed, glancing briefly at the brown, patterned rug between his feet. Then he gets up. It’s going to snow one more time this March, he can feel it in his bones, a chilly, unpleasant prickling. But his tiredness is gone: the room is warm, there’s banging in the heating pipes, and far away at the end of the hall Miss Gil is singing to herself in a thin, high voice. Hunter smiles briefly. He heats a can of soup on the hotplate, pours himself a glass of whiskey, and eats in front of the television. The newscaster on CNN reports in an apathetic voice that in East New York, Brooklyn, a boy shot three employees in a McDonald’s. The boy appears on the television screen. He is black, and maybe seventeen years old; three police officers parade him before the cameras. A voice from nowhere asks about his motive. The boy looks directly into the cameras, he seems completely normal. He explains that he had ordered a Big Mac without pickles. Specifically without pickles. But he’d gotten a Big Mac with pickles.

  Hunter turns off the television. In the hall the door to Room 95 slams shut. Hunter turns his head and listens, irritated; there is silence. He washes his plates and pot, pours himself another glass of whiskey, and stands in front of his tapes, undecided. Time for music. Time for music just like every other evening, time for a cigarette, time for time. What else should he do if not listen to music. Hunter rubs a hand over his eyes and briefly feels for his heartbeat. His heart is beating quietly and sluggishly. Maybe Mozart. Or better still, Beethoven. Schubert as always is too sad. Bach. Johann Sebastian Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1. Hunter slides the cassette into the player and pushes the start button. There is a soft hissing sound. He sits down on the chair by the window and lights a cigarette.

  Glenn Gould’s playing is slow, concentrated and sustained. Now and then Hunter can hear him singing along softly, sometimes breathing heavily: Hunter likes that, he sees it as a personal touch. He sits on the chair, listening. He can either think well or not think at all while listening to music; either way it’s nice. Taxi horns honk in the distance. Miss Gil has stopped singing, or perhaps Glenn Gould is louder than Miss Gil. Outside Hunter’s door a floorboard creaks. The board creaks noisily. The board had always creaked noisily whenever Mr Wright would stand outside his door, wanting cigarettes or whiskey or company. Mr Wright is dead. He died three weeks ago, the only person ever to stand in front of Hunter’s door.

  Hunter stares at the door with wide-open eyes. The doorknob, unlike in the movies, does not turn, but there comes another creak. Hunter’s heart suddenly starts beating surprisingly fast. New York is a crime-ridden city. Nobody would take him seriously if he were to shout for help. Leach would pretend he’d forgotten the police emergency number. Hunter gets up. He tiptoes to the door, his heart now skipping beats. He puts his hand on the doorknob, takes a deep breath, and flings open the door.

  The girl stands in the red light of the EXIT sign. Hunter sees very small feet with curled toes, a mosquito bite scratched open on the left ankle, a tiny bit of dirt under the big toenail. Her bathrobe is frayed at the hem, blue with white appliquéd rabbits on the pockets. She has tied the robe very tightly around her waist, and under her arm she has a towel and a bottle of shampoo. With her right hand she holds the bathrobe closed at her throat: her lips are thin and she seems agitated. Water drips steadily from her wet hair onto the brown hall carpet. She squints and peers past Hunter into his room. Below her left eye there’s a small birthmark. Involuntarily Hunter looks down at himself and notices that he can’t see his belt buckle because his belly protrudes above it. The girl says something like, ‘The music’

  Hunter pulls the door toward him and tries to block her view of the room. He can hear Miss Gil singing again, she’s singing, Honey pie, you are making me crazy, and for some reason he finds this embarrassing. The girl says something like, ‘Excuse me, the music,’ pronouncing the words awkwardly and like a child, at the same time rubbing the toes of her right foot against her left calf.

  Hunter gets goosepimples. He steps out into the hall and pulls the door shut behind him, saying, ‘What do you mean?’ The girl draws back and screws up her thin lips. Hunter feels his hand trembling on the doorknob. The girl, transferring the towel and shampoo bottle from her right arm to the left, says, ‘Are you watching television or are you listening to music?’ Hunter stares at her. He has a vague memory of some television show he has seen, but he
doesn’t understand her; she’s speaking in a code but he can’t crack the code: does he watch television or does he listen to music. What does that mean?

  She says, ‘Television or music? Commercial – advertisement – or really music?

  Hunter repeats hesitantly, ‘Really music,’ and the girl, impatient now, bounces up and down on her toes and says, ‘Bach.’

  Hunter says, ‘Yes, Bach. The Well-Tempered Clavier, Glenn Gould.’

  She says, ‘Well then. So you are listening to music’

  Hunter takes a deep breath, feeling his belly distending even more, but he immediately feels better. Of course he’s listening to music. He wants to go back to the beginning, to the first question, and has difficulty hiding his confusion from her: he suspects she sees him as an old fool. He repeats, this time with more self-assurance, ‘What do you mean?’ The girl answers slowly, in the voice of a teacher whose pupil has finally understood, ‘I stopped in front of the door to your room to listen to the music’