Alice

by Judith Hermann

  At midday Alice packed up her things, put her dress on over her bathing suit, and said goodbye to the mothers. They didn’t reply, probably just out of laziness. Then she left. Passing the pool with the fountains where boys were dunking girls in the water, again and again pushing them down, then at the very last moment pulling them up by their hair, and the girls flew out of the water and screamed, triumphant and shrill. What kind of ritual was that? Alice was sure she and Raymond had also performed this ritual, long ago, both alone and with others, but she couldn’t remember exactly. By the time she met Raymond, almost all the rituals had already been performed, almost all, except for just a few. Who would have thought? She dipped her feet into the lukewarm water of the shallow pool just before she came to the dried-up lawn, then put on her sandals.

  Men with gold teeth were playing cards, under sun-bleached umbrellas in front of the kiosk where Raymond as a child had bought ice cream in a soft waffle, chocolate-coated vanilla wrapped in silvery foil. Tattoos, anchors on chains and hearts pierced by daggers, faded blue: For ever and ever. Naked people were sunning themselves on the lawn. Lying around singly under the white sky like people who’d been shot dead. Nothing was moving, except a threatening cloud of mosquitoes above a puddle at the end of the path, and the red and white barrier tape rattling between the trees in an imperceptible breeze.

  Alice pushed her bike home through the afternoon streets. Some days she would push it all the way; she had the feeling that she was in danger and had to watch out and take care of herself, too tired from the heat and too deeply preoccupied to ride a bike – she thought, if I ride I’ll have an accident, fly over the handlebars, and be run over, break my neck, break all my bones.

  Take care of yourself.

  You too.

  And so she didn’t ride. Bought strawberries at the corner from a stand shaped like a giant fruit. It had a green plastic stem on the roof, and in the shade inside were mountains of glowing strawberries in cardboard boxes stacked into pyramids. No, not a whole kilogram, thanks. Only half a kilo strawberries for Alice alone. She carried the berries home in a transparent bag. Locked the bike to the rack in front of the house. Since Raymond’s death she no longer kept it in the courtyard. It was too much trouble, and she’d done it only for his sake; he thought the bicycle was safer in the courtyard.

  The hallway was stifling. The apartment, quiet. Alice washed the strawberries long and thoroughly, letting the cold water run over her wrists, her rapid pulse. She cut the berries in half, then into quarters, sugared them, added a shot of vinegar, and put the bowl into the refrigerator. The blue flowers on the windowsill extended their austere, sturdy little petals – thirteen on each stem – towards the sun, impassive but purposeful.

  Alice changed the beds. One sheet, two pillowcases, two blankets. She put on a fresh duvet cover. Crisp and cool the first night. She didn’t dream that her teeth were falling out. Or that new ones would grow in their place.

  She went to visit Margaret. Driving her car out of the city to the house-with-garden where Margaret now lived. A house in the suburbs, decentralised in many respects. They sat next to each other on the porch made of tropical wood and gazed at Margaret’s flowers, the luxurious splendour of her flower beds: snapdragons, hydrangeas, and columbine, Japanese lilies.

  Acqua Alba. The sky was blue, the planes were flying elsewhere. In the distance, the summer sounds of lawnmowers, water sprinklers, the clatter of hedge shears. A cat came noiselessly onto the porch, sneezed dryly, settled down in front of them, straightening her front legs, and turning sideways, showing them her cat profile.

  Cats do that, Margaret said. With two people they always position themselves so as to form an equilateral triangle. They always do that.

  Alice looked at the cat, its reddish brown fur; the white spot at the end of the tail twitched slightly. Malte, Frederick, Pumi. It was reassuring to put everything she had together in her mind, put it together and see what the result would be.

  And how to go on from there? Even with all the exhaustion – it was after all still early. The first days and weeks and months without Raymond – the days would never again be this clear and luminous; maybe she would have to learn how to find pleasure in it; any other way was impossible.

  Richard said I would need three years, Margaret said. Just like that, he said it, imagine that. You’ll need three years, then things will be easier for you.

  And is it true? Alice asked.

  No idea, Margaret said. A year has passed now, only one year, I’m far from understanding how he meant it. Three years. Would you like to take a few flowers home with you?

  Yes, I’d love to, Alice said.

  The lawn had been mown. Alice stood in the grass, barefoot. Margaret walked along the flower beds with a pair of scissors. Dahlias, sunflowers, and one thistle stem. The lawnmowers were silent now, wasps hummed around their nest in a pine tree. Cold orange juice. A wind sprang up, the porch door slammed shut, flat clouds in the sky.

  Later on Alice went inside. Walking on the light-coloured tiles. Past the bookshelf on which stood a black and white photo of Richard. Taken in front of the bookshelf on Rheinsberger Strasse.

  After that she gave away her car. It was quite clear that she had to give it away. It was too expensive, she couldn’t afford it now that she was by herself; she used it far too rarely. Without Raymond, in fact, she didn’t drive anywhere, and she didn’t have to pick him up any more or take him somewhere; she’d stay put now. For that the bicycle and tram were adequate. She placed an ad in a car magazine, filling out the form in capital letters. Year: ’87. Colour: red. Small dent on offside bumper. Windscreen slightly scratched. She worded it as best she could, and at the end thought up a price, not knowing whether it was appropriate or not. It seemed fair to her. Any price. What should it cost? It didn’t matter.

  The telephone began to ring in the middle of the night, at four a.m. Alice was lying on her back in bed, listening to the voices on the telephone answering machine, their graphic statements, foreign accents, thrice-repeated phone numbers, feverish promises. Requests to call back. Somewhere in the city all these people were wide awake. Busy. They had plans and were carrying out intentions. They had goals. She couldn’t get herself to pull the plug out of the wall. Towards morning the phone stopped ringing. Quiet. Alice fell asleep. The first ball bounced against the fence of the basketball court. In the courtyard the wind rustled heavily in the trees.

  At noon she walked to the car, carrying a blue bin bag and wearing sunglasses. Tropical temperatures. People were sitting in a row in front of the cafés in the semi-shade of the awnings; butter melting on their plates. Market stalls stood huddled at the edge of the park; the sun beat down on the cobblestone pavement. Cherry time. The last of the strawberries. Someone full of confidence had planted beans in the dust-dry soil surrounding the locust trees. Her car was parked at the planetarium. Alice unlocked the car door. Half-kneeling on the passenger seat, she opened the glove compartment and pulled out everything in it. Everything. Raymond’s matchbooks, a chemist’s calendar, petrol receipts, advertising leaflets. His supermarket discount coupons, other coupons. A creased photo of a chair standing next to a birch tree in front of a collapsed factory building. Ruins. Some sort of object on the ground next to the chair; Alice squinted, staring at the photo, but couldn’t make out anything. She wouldn’t be able to make out anything tomorrow either, or the day after tomorrow, not ever. Into the blue bag went the photo. Everything else too. And then among all the scraps of paper, suddenly – it could happen that quickly – she saw the plastic card, a green laminated card. Not the one from the gypsy back then, ages ago, but another one; still, they were probably all the same anyhow. I am interested in your car. Now or later. Anytime. Give me a call. I’ll be right over. Alice crawled out of the car, whipped open the boot lid, stuffed everything that was in the boot into the blue bag. The picnic blanket – a colourful tartan, frayed at the edges, some of last autumn’s leaves still in its folds. Hells
ee. Or Lanke. Müritz. Water bottles, into the bag. An umbrella, the Thermos flask actually had something in it, some ancient liquid, probably tea made of leaves that Raymond had held between his fingertips. Holy, holy. Should she drink it? She dropped the flask into the blue bag and could hear the glass inside it breaking, a delicate splintering.

  Was that all?

  That was all.

  The dream-catcher hung on the rear-view mirror, lashed to it.

  Alice took her cellphone out of her bag, punched in the number on the card. Her hands were shaking, she didn’t really know why. She said, I’d like to give away my car, please come and get it, yes, exactly, thanks, that would be very kind. She sat down on the kerb and waited. The car key in her hand, attached to it a metal token with a series of numbers stamped into it that must have had something to do with Raymond’s life, but she had forgotten exactly what. Blocked synapses. She thought hard. Sitting motionless so that the jackdaws came quite close, their gleaming black wings, eyes, blunt beaks – little dinosaurs, absolutely indestructible.

  She saw Raymond daily. Every day. She saw him everywhere; it was amazing how many manifestations, physical shapes he must have had – he could be everyman. He was standing on one of the escalators at the main railway station, moving through the high-ceilinged hall, a lightweight suitcase in his hand, his face in half profile, a traveller who was not in a hurry. Alice pushed someone aside and hurried through the hall, saw him step off the escalator, stroll over to the exit; it wasn’t him, it was someone else. Her heart jumped with indignation because she saw him in the last carriage of a departing tram, at the traffic light on the other side of the street, in the queue at the supermarket; he got out of a taxi, lay sleeping on a park bench, rode a bicycle round the corner. He was sitting in an Italian ice-cream parlour, a dish of gorgeous fruit before him; an old man with dim eyes who saw Alice looking through the window, and shooed her away with his hand as if she were an animal. They were all Raymond. The way he walked, stood still, touched the back of his neck with his hand, rubbed his head, threw his shoulders back, yawned, put on his jacket, walked away. He isn’t here any more, Alice, Alice told herself, addressing herself by her name as though she were her own child. Alice, Raymond isn’t here any more.

  What mattered was to preserve his memory, without going crazy in the process. To think of him without going crazy or becoming angry. Carefully. Over and over again. Starting from the beginning.

  Where’s your husband? the Indian cook asked.

  Travelling, Alice said.

  Oh really, for a long time? the Indian cook asked. He was sweeping the kitchen floor; the second Indian cook was sitting on an overturned bucket by the damp wall next to the dishwasher; his glasses were fogged up, he was smoking. Arabic music was coming out of a transistor radio, and he was beating time to it with his key chain, in restless, exact syncopation. Alice was leaning against the door to the hallway. The threshold was slippery. The Indian cook swept parsley stems, tomato halves, onion peels, rubber bands into a heap. Quitting time. He was humming to himself, then he put the broom down and drank apple juice from a bottle, taking large gurgling swallows. The day before, the second Indian cook had poured a bottleful of mineral water over his head in the middle of the kitchen, just like that. He didn’t do it for Alice, but in spite of that Alice had enjoyed it.

  Oh yes, for a long time, Alice said. It was impossible to say anything else. It was impossible to say, Raymond is dead. She had said that to the waitress, the tattooed one, in front of the house, on the street.

  Where’s your husband?

  My husband is dead.

  The tattooed waitress had said, My heartfelt condolences, yes, my heartfelt condolences; then she gave notice, moved somewhere else; nobody had ever written Happy Hour on the board as beautifully and clumsily as she.

  Raymond is dead.

  Alice couldn’t say it again. Couldn’t call it out into the kitchen. A draught of air, the aroma of parsley, a plastic tub with shimmering slices of lemon on a bed of ice, heads of lettuce on a wet wooden board, grapes, bananas, honeydew melons, dishrags, canisters of oil, huge glass jars of honey, tubs, and pots. Shortly before midnight. The second Indian cook crushed his cigarette out on the tiles. Took off his steamed-up glasses, cleaned them thoroughly, and put them back on. Still listening, his eyes rolled up, his twitching fingers shaking the bunch of keys, striking the bucket with the key ring, he mumbled something, thought for a while, then he yawned, got up, and with his foot pushed the bucket into a corner. He threw the keys up into the air, caught them, whistling softly; he turned round, extended his hands to Alice. The keys were gone.

  Where to, said the first Indian cook.

  On a trip.

  He puffed out his cheeks, looked at Alice, leaning on the broom handle as if it were a sceptre. Alice looked past him; she didn’t know what to say in reply.

  But the Indian cook said, I understand, I understand. Ah yes. I understand. He nodded steadily. Then he pointed at the second Indian cook and said: Four Eyes. Sees more than anyone else. Also going on a trip soon.

  Where to, Alice said.

  Oh, we’ll see, the Indian cook said. Home? Back home maybe. Mumbai. Or to the moon.

  Evenings at the table in their kitchen where Raymond used to sit, his elbows propped up in the invisible indentations that they must have left in the soft wood of the tabletop. Sitting there and watching as the blue flowers on the windowsill rolled up all their thirteen petals when the time came and their day’s work was done. Day in, day out. The spiders that had hatched in the webs between the flower stems had grown, got big, some disappeared, others came into the apartment. Inside. Alice sat on a chair between the table and the cupboard and watched the spider that had set itself up in the corner above the kitchen door, probably for quite some time to come. Raymond would have removed the spider from the kitchen; she would have asked him to. But this spider would stay. Alice’s grandmother would have approved. Alice whispered. Watching the spider spin its web and listening to the sounds in the courtyard. Water splashing, lengthy teeth-brushing. A telephone rang. Doors slammed shut. Footsteps on the stairs. The Indian cooks stamped on cardboard boxes, ripped paper into strips, stuffed the strips into the dustbins; then they smoked a cigarette together, and the smoke rose in the courtyard, all the way up to Alice who quietly went to sit on the windowsill. Late at night bats swooped down. And, of course, there were the last planes.

  What was left was lying on the table. The replacement part for the car, the bag with the remainder of the almond horn. Nothing was left. The half-full box that had the jacket in it, the T-shirt, and the odds and ends stood next to Misha’s suitcase which Maja had not yet picked up and which, whenever Alice lifted it, seemed to have got heavier as though there was something in it that kept growing. Since that time she had not looked inside. Alice knew that Lotte had tacked a little piece of paper next to her front door on which Conrad, when he was still alive, had written in a hurried and confident hand:

  Be back soon.

  Alice searched for something similar for herself and Raymond. Couldn’t find it, but was certain that it existed. One day she would surely find it, probably by accident.

  Sometimes Alice went to see the Romanian. She hadn’t seen him for a long time, which was no problem, didn’t seem to be a problem. Yet who knows, Alice thought, you find out about that sort of thing only later. The Romanian had grown older too, grey hair at the temples and thinner in a worrisome way, but his jug-handle ears still glowed unscathed. And he drank beer just as he always used to do and hadn’t taken up smoking again, saying, I’ll do that later on, when my last days come.

  You can’t choose the time, Alice said, amazed at so much ignorance. You can’t know when your last days will be.

  She tapped him lightly on the arm with her fist, and he smiled and moved aside. They were sitting on the balcony. You can sit here from nine o’clock in the evening until four in the morning, the Romanian said, then it gets too hot. Thirty degre
es in the shade. Look at my plants – a regular biotope, wild clover and primeval mallows. He plucked at things in the flower boxes, pulled at some stalks, pointed at flower petals the size of a match head. Look at that. The prototype of a pansy.

  Alice looked. A little cat face. She drank some water, the Romanian was drinking wine. The sun sank lazily. Then the half-moon rose. The sky, far away at the TV tower, above the Marienkirche and the neon sign of the Forum Hotel, was black. There won’t be any thunderstorms, the Romanian said, clicking his tongue and nodding knowingly. Not until the full moon. It’s the same as back home in Romania – a great open plain with lots of sun, no water, but apple trees in spite of that; shade under the apple trees, chickens running around, scratching in the soil, raising a little dust and so forth; and everything’s still, holding its breath, waiting, and then suddenly there’s a thunderstorm and the rain roars down on the plain and washes everything away. That’s how it goes, but we’re not there yet.

  I’m hungry, Alice said, would you make me a sandwich?

  Of course, the Romanian said, left and came back with a wooden board on which there were two open-face red-cherry jam sandwiches. My mother’s jam. Watch out, you’re dripping.

  Alice ate the sandwiches, carefully and thoughtfully; it seemed as if she were eating a piece of bread with cherry jam for the first time in her life; the jam was so sweet, it made her mouth pucker – fruit and sugar. Tears came to her eyes. They looked down on the city, bare land, that was where the Wall had been, now sheep were grazing there, a warehouse, then the new buildings of the West; the first lights came on in the windows. All of it looked like a stage setting. Placed there. An installation. An aeroplane scraped diagonally past the moon. The S-Bahn came rolling in from the right, leaning heavily into the curve, a wonderful cadence on the rails. Wave to me if you should ever go by, because I’ll be able to see it from here, the Romanian said.