Alice

by Judith Hermann

  Was it nice?

  Well, of course. Aren’t you going in?

  I’ll see, Alice said.

  Raymond drank some tea, ate an apple, opened the newspaper. Alice watched as a mosquito settled on his left shoulder, pushed its proboscis under his skin, and pumped with the hind part of its body, calmly and for a long time. She watched Raymond reading, his chin resting in his hand. He was elsewhere, in a parallel world; twice he smiled at something. Then he folded the paper, got up, and stretched until his bones cracked. Bent his head to the right and to the left, the neck vertebrae cracking. He said, I’ll take a turn around the lake, disappearing between the black yet simultaneously bright tree trunks. Blotches of light in the grass. Busy ants, wasps around the remains of his apple, the tea in the tin cup, cold. Alice fell asleep, in a second-long dream the male nurse put away all the things on the table in Richard’s room, then pulled off the blue tablecloth, doing it all with a distinctly chilly ‘that’s-how-things-stand’ expression. She was startled awake as her head fell to one side like the Vietnamese flower seller’s had in the hall of the Prenzlauer Allee train station. Raymond was standing with his feet in the water, looking out across the dark lake. He said, We have to leave, Alice. I’m on the night shift today. Clouds covered the sun. It had suddenly turned cool. Even as the nurse in the dream had been picking up Richard’s glasses.

  Alice packed up. They shook out the blanket together, threw the remains of the apples into the reeds. Folded up the crumpled, messy newspaper. The paper seemed to have doubled in size. I’ll be right there, Alice said. That old disquiet on excursions, at the end always sentimental and wistful, as if it had been their last, as if it might have been their last. She hadn’t gone swimming. Should she have? She should have done everything differently, not just today, but always. Done everything differently. She walked behind Raymond on the path, then she walked beside him, took his hand; they held hands the rest of the way. He was carrying the basket; she, the blanket and the newspaper. They met no one.

  What sort of arrangement did you make with Margaret? Raymond asked.

  He had suddenly remembered again.

  She’ll call me, Alice said. She’ll phone when it’s over.

  Half an hour in a traffic jam on the motorway. Alice took off her shoes, put her feet up on the dashboard as she used to do fifteen years ago, fiddled with the radio and rolled down the window. At the side of the road a strip of shoulder, cornfields, windmills. At the far end of the twinkling chain of cars, the silhouette of the TV tower. Both of them looked at it. Raymond turned off the radio, then the engine. He looked at his watch and made an involuntary irritable sound. They had left in good time; he wouldn’t be late, yet in spite of that he was on edge. Alice wondered whether she ought to tell him about her dream. But she was afraid of its interpretation, not what it would say about Raymond, but about herself. She unbuckled her seat belt, took her feet off the dashboard. She said, You got sunburned. Raymond said, I know.

  On the other side of the motorway, an occasional car drove by, heading north. We should have taken the secondary road. Probably wouldn’t have been any better. The windmills turned slowly, casting strange rotating shadows in the dry fields. Raymond started the engine again. They were both tired. Then the traffic jam dissolved.

  The apartment was as quiet as if they’d been away a long time. The kitchen window facing the courtyard was wide open; Alice watered the flowers on the windowsill. Flowers with blue leaves whose name she didn’t know. Raymond didn’t either. Thirteen blue leaves and a little flower head on each one. Alice had counted them. Tiny spiders had woven their webs between the stems. The mercury in the thermometer on the house wall above the flower box stood at 27 °C. A pale half moon was already visible in the sky. Signs of a thunderstorm above the rooftops, absolutely no wind now.

  And what else are you doing today. Tonight.

  Raymond was standing in the doorway to the kitchen; he’d taken a shower and put on another T-shirt; his skin was slightly reddened, and there were faint rings under his eyes. The T-shirt covered the tattoo on his left arm: ‘The last shall be the first.’ Alice was as afraid of the meaning of this tattoo as of the meaning of her dreams. Years ago she had asked Raymond not to tell her why he had had this sentence tattooed in calligraphy on his arm, and Raymond had promised not to. He had kept his promise.

  I’m not doing anything, she said.

  She was standing by the kitchen window holding the bottle of water for the flowers; she looked at Raymond; there would be nothing he could say, but for one moment she did look at him the way she felt – helpless and close to tears.

  What should I do? I’ll wait for Margaret’s phone call. I keep thinking about it. I’m thinking about it now. At the lake I didn’t think so much about it. It’s not bad; don’t worry about me. I’ll just stay home.

  She shook her head. Set the water bottle down on the windowsill. There seemed to be something about her that kept Raymond from touching her, from putting his arms around her – how do you say it – she couldn’t think of the word embrace; she wished he would go now.

  Till tomorrow morning, Raymond said. He gave her a searching look.

  Yes, till tomorrow morning.

  Call me if Margaret phones.

  I will, Alice said.

  Promise.

  Sure. She walked him to the door. Then went across the hall to the bedroom. Pulled up the blinds, opened the window, and leaned out. It took a while. Sometimes it took so long that Alice thought he would never come out. And what then?

  Raymond stepped out of the house. His jacket slung over his shoulder. He disappeared from sight under the awning, emerged again at the corner of the street, crossed at the intersection. He went over to the other side of the street and walked along the edge of the park. Just as Alice had yesterday on her way to Margaret and Richard’s. Had Raymond watched her yesterday?

  She hadn’t turned round. Now, she could see Raymond walking – among all those people on the street, in the park, in the cafés, at the tables in the shade of the trees, he was the one she knew and knew about yet didn’t understand. He turned round, looked up at their apartment, raised his hand, and waved. Alice waved back. Then he was gone. She kept looking out of the window for a while longer. The last of the children left the park; the street lights went on. In the basketball court, hidden by the leaves of the trees, someone was still throwing a ball into the basket, again and again. Open windows, profusely planted balconies, and the water from the flowers dripping down on the pavement. A ring of fiery clouds around the sun hanging low in the sky. Tomorrow was Monday. Alice closed the window. She lowered the blind, searched for the phone, and found it on the floor beside the bed, next to Raymond’s open book. The street lamps buckled weakly, newsstands and advertising columns dissolved into the air, everything everywhere crackled, hissed, and rustled, became porous and transparent, turned into little piles of dust, and disappeared. In the distance the outlines of the Town Hall tower became blurry and blended with the blue sky. For a while the old tower clock, detached from everything else, still hung suspended in the sky until it too vanished. Alice took the book and the phone and went back to the kitchen. Pulling a chair over to the table, she sat down, placed the phone next to the book, and continued reading.

  IV

  Malte

  It was raining the day Alice saw Frederick for the first and only time. A light rain but steady – diagonal lines against the winter sky. Mid-November. Frederick had said he was coming to Berlin anyway; he hadn’t picked this weather for their meeting; neither had Alice, although it was the sort of weather that made her feel good. Reason enough to feel sleepy and lethargic, rain enough for an umbrella. As usual, her car was parked far away, umpteen streets away, at the edge of the district. Alice left the house too early, carrying an umbrella, wearing high heels, a grey coat, her bag slung over one shoulder, and feeling as if she were dressed for a state visit. On a whim, Frederick had taken a hotel room in the centre of the city, ri
ght by the river. Alice thought of it as a whim, but it might simply have been practical, a room downtown. With a view of the water and a steel bridge with pigeons nesting in its struts and trains rolling across from east to west and back. Milky green water with shimmering streaks of oil. The beautiful River Spree, its rusty freight barges, excursion boats, shabby tugboats, everything the same today as it had been forty years ago. Maybe Frederick chose the location because of that.

  Alice was to pick him up at the hotel, around eleven.

  In your room?

  In the lobby. Not in the room. I’ll come down to the lobby.

  She didn’t know exactly how old Frederick was. About seventy, a miracle actually that he was still around; he could have been gone by now; that would have been more likely. She had phoned him. He had answered the phone. This startled her so much she almost hung up. His voice sounded low and soft. Not frail. But soft. She took a deep breath. Hello, my name is Alice, she said. We don’t know each other, but I’m Malte’s niece.

  For a moment Frederick said nothing. Then he asked how she got hold of his phone number, his voice neither friendly nor unfriendly, matter-of-fact.

  From the phone book, Alice had said. It was the truth.

  In that moment, during which he said nothing, in that very short stretch of time, Alice knew that her call had forced Frederick to think back over almost forty years – whether he wanted to or not. Back through all the ups and downs, back to the day his friend Malte had taken his own life. Was that hard for him? With her phone call Alice had turned Frederick’s day upside down, had ripped him out of whatever he was just then doing, out of the equilibrium of his everyday world. Thoughtless and needy. By reminding him of a name – pronounced as softly and gently as possible.

  Oh, Frederick had said. And what’s this all about?

  Still, Frederick had said, Oh, and what’s this all about, and Alice, grateful for the almost casual tone in his voice, had said that she didn’t really know what she was hoping for, but she’d like to see him.

  I’d like to meet you. That’s all. I can’t give you a good reason.

  He seemed to understand that. Or it seemed to be all right with him. He asked, Do you live in Berlin? – He meant: Do you live in Berlin, just as Malte had lived in Berlin, even though, unlike Malte, you’re obviously not dead – and Alice said, yes, she lived in Berlin, and as she was saying it, saw in her mind’s eye the picture of a plant in a clay pot on the windowsill of a ground-floor apartment that looked out on a dark rear courtyard, on dustbins and carpet rods. All around the pot were the crunchy shells of insects. That’s what came to mind. Who knows why.

  Well, I still get to Berlin, Frederick said. Frequently. Let’s meet in Berlin. Give me your phone number. I’ll call you the next time I’m in Berlin.

  He had set the conditions. His voice had suddenly become strong, alert. Alice gave him her phone number; he didn’t repeat it. And it might have gone no further. But two months later he had actually called her.

  Alice stumbled in her high heels, tripped, and was surprised by the brief jolt to her spine, an icy throbbing. She should have worn different shoes, should have left her shoulder bag at home. Her coat was already spotted from the rain and by the time she arrived, the right shoulder would be crumpled by her bag. Who was it she actually wanted to introduce to Frederick? Obviously not herself. Alice tipped back her umbrella and looked up into the black tree branches; her face got wet. The day was so grey that everything glowed: the orange of the refuse truck, the yellow of the mail trucks, the golden halos behind the fogged-up windows of the cafés. Roller shutters rattled. The bin men clanged dustbins into the entryways, as noisily as possible. From behind the scaffolding that covered the house facades came music from transistor radios, drowned out by an avalanche of construction debris. Fire-engine sirens, sounding a four-note interval, a helicopter hurtling across the sky with a deafening roar. Twilight. The temperature barely above freezing on this day in November. What is this all about? What’s it all about? Alice might also have said, Frederick, you know, it’s actually all about me. But she didn’t say it, and she wasn’t going to say it. Frederick would know anyway.

  Alice hadn’t known Malte. Malte would have been her uncle if he hadn’t committed suicide on a day in March – almost forty years ago. Alice was born in April, one month later. But by the time her life began Malte was already lying under the green grass – stones, jasmine and rhododendron around his grave. You are the light in our darkness, Alice’s grandmother, Malte’s mother, had written on her calendar in a clear, deliberate hand.

  Alice shook her head, clicked her tongue. To be the light in someone’s darkness. She could see her car now. It was standing where she had parked it yesterday, next to the planetarium behind a row of shaggy forsythia bushes. She was always surprised to find her car exactly where she’d left it. There was a message clamped under the windscreen wiper. The bearer of the message was already ten cars away, a skinny gypsy in a black leotard. His shoulders were bare; his right leg dragged, and he was preaching at the top of his lungs – incomprehensible, full of rage or ecstasy, it could have been either. The dome of the planetarium was varnished with rain. Fat crows in the winter grass, and along the edge of the meadow, the clatter of the S-Bahn. Alice waited until the gypsy had turned the corner and disappeared into the new housing development. He was slow, limping from windscreen to windscreen, now and then looking up into the sky. Alice followed his gaze. Nothing to be seen. Rain clouds, dark as ink. When she looked back again at the row of cars, he was gone. On the little red plastic card under the wiper was the phone number of some stranger who was interested in buying Alice’s car. Hurriedly and distractedly, she searched for her car key in her bag, opened the car door, put the little card on the passenger seat, her bag next to it, got in and slammed the car door shut, as usual much too hard. It was a Japanese car. Tiny, made of Japanese cardboard. Hanging on the rear-view mirror, a dream-catcher – a web of string with brown and white feathers attached. Chewing-gum wrappers in the tray next to the gearstick. Tickets from parking meters, some coins, the smell of damp plastic – what an absolutely personal space. Something made the tears come to Alice’s eyes, possibly it was only weariness. She inserted the key in the ignition, started the engine, and awkwardly manoeuvred the car out of its parking space. The gypsy had not returned. The windscreen wipers started up and, chirping softly, traced clean half-moons on the wet glass.

  Alice knew that Malte didn’t have a driving licence, in the late sixties in West Berlin. As far as she knew, he didn’t know how to drive, may have wanted to learn, but never got round to it. Too much to do. He liked going to Prinzenbad, the public pool. Would lie around at the pool on Prinzen Strasse day after day in June, July, and August. Smoking, of course. Garbáty Kalif? Wearing check shirts, narrow trousers. Back then a ticket on the U-Bahn cost 50 Pfennig. Lovely 10-Pfennig coins in his trouser pocket, the ticket made of heavy paper. The U-Bahn ran above ground on Prinzen Strasse between the bullet-riddled grey buildings, then hurtled underground before it reached Wittenberg Platz, and only re-emerged into the light just before Krumme Lanke. Zehlendorf. Malte had lived in his mother’s house in Zehlendorf. A three-storey house, lilacs, elderberry bushes, a porch in the back. When he was eighteen years old, Frederick was ten years older, and the war had been over for twenty years. The grass grew high, the dandelions too. The whole garden was overgrown with weeds. The name of the street was Waldhüterpfad. The U-Bahn station was called Onkel Toms Hütte. Reeds grew all around the edges of Krumme Lanke lake. There was a rowboat, called Maori. And a cat named Pumi in the tall grass, among the dandelions and juicy leaves of clover. Lemonade in scratched glasses. And such starry clear nights!

  Malte had loved Frederick, and Frederick had loved Malte. That much Alice knew, a handful of words, and some sensory impressions – the smell of pine trees, lake water, and sun-warmed cat fur. That much she’d pieced together from the little they had told her. And they hadn’t told her much. Worke
d it out from the photos – a cat in the grass, her rear legs stretched out, her little head facing the camera with a haughty cat expression, that certain feline all-knowingness, a snapshot in black and white. Beneath it, on the photographic paper, her grandmother had used a crayon to write: Pumi. A photo of Malte, smoking. Wearing a striped shirt, sitting on the porch, his hair hanging over his forehead, his eyes cast down, twenty years old. Three years later Alice was born. No photo of the lake, no photo of the boat. Alice knew the lakes and boats. The word Maori had a good sound, a nice sound. Kissing in the heat. Skin and hair. To think of only one man, feeling despair and delight.

  Alice didn’t know why Malte had taken his own life. She was surprised that nobody had been able to tell her why; they just looked at her in surprise, wide-eyed, when she asked. With faces like clowns. Well, there’s no way to know. There’s nothing to know. Depression, melancholy, manic-depressive psychosis? Tired of life. He was weary of life. But how could that be?

  Alice drove her Japanese car down the narrow street, past the planetarium towards the main road, and was caught up in the morning traffic, her eyes half closed. The dream-catcher swung from side to side in slow motion, the coins rattled in the tray next to the gearstick. The traffic lights glowed. She had no idea why she’d phoned Frederick at this particular time. This year. In the autumn. Because he was getting older and older, just as she was. Because people were suddenly gone, vanishing from the scene from one day to the next. That’s probably why. She had been thinking about him ever since she had first heard his name mentioned; he was part of Malte’s story, but not part of the family; that was what made him stand out. He had some perspective. No one else did. Tidying up – it had something to do with tidying up, putting things in order, the desire to know which assumptions one could lay aside, and which ones not yet. To drop this particular assumption, and to look for another instead. To see connections, or to see that there weren’t any connections at all. Just presumed relationships. Illusions, like reflections, nothing more than changes in the temperature, the light, the seasons.