Their restraint was not lessened by knowing so much about each other. So far they had barely commented on their own story or the other’s, nor had they talked of how unusual it was, revealing so much to a stranger. They were content to listen and ask about specific matters. It was almost as if they had made a rule for it, albeit unspoken. He felt sure she thought about this too, sitting beside him, leaning back against the head-rest. That she had just broken the rule which in the past months had made it possible to speak without fear of being exposed to judgement or pity.
Their evenings had passed with one or the other telling more of their story. She lay on the sofa, he sat in an easy-chair. Sometimes he had not even looked at her. He had gazed out into the summer evening or the first evenings of autumn, listening to her voice or hearing himself speaking. They had been like two strangers who meet in the dimness of a quiet hotel vestibule and fall into conversation. Two strangers who take into account that they have no previous knowledge and therefore need an explanation for everything. Two homesick tourists who have stayed in the hotel instead of going on the excursion to Luxor or the Cheops pyramid, because they prefer to sit listening and noting the congruencies and divergences between their otherwise quite ordinary stories.
Her story had emerged in a gliding progression of events and ideas, people she had known and places where she had been. To begin with he could feel she was embarrassed when she touched on things she had never confided to anyone, and feelings she had never before expressed in words. She could blush in mid-sentence or hesitate before continuing, but at the same time he sensed the pressure of the untold things waking at the sound of her voice and impatiently insisting to be expressed and given a place in her narrative. As it gradually unfolded she quite forgot to distinguish between what was acceptable and what was revealing or directly unattractive. One event or emotion drew another with it, her tone gradually grew calmer and more confidential, and he discovered that he too was no longer too startled or embarrassed to listen to her intimate revelations. Only in the pauses when silence fell between them could he see how she suddenly directed her mind’s eye towards her story, amazed, sad or ironic, as if she were a stranger meditating for a while on its tortuous course, its blind alleys and delusions, the agitation and restless craving of emotions.
Something similar took place in him when he heard his own voice narrating. He did not see himself in his story but another, and he saw that other from behind, unable to fathom his deeper impulses. His secret, intimate feelings became secretive even to himself. And it was as if she read his thoughts. You don’t know why things happen, why they come to be as they are, she said one evening, after he had made a long pause. No, he replied. You can never really know.
An escape . . . could her story be concentrated into that one word? Was it an attempted flight that had been halted by the Dutch truck that evening in April? As he followed the peaceful rhythm of the traffic he felt it sounded like an answer to something he had said the previous day when they walked out to the headland. They had gone as far as they could get, right out to the end of the reed beds. She asked him to tell her what it looked like, and he described the tall reeds and the tussocks of grass and the rowing boat moored to a post in the inlet, reflected in the quiet water. They had passed the rotten post where he used to sit. She balanced on it, supporting herself with a hand on his shoulder. The faded pack of Gitanes had vanished. He told her about it and said Andreas must have been out there one day.
Apart from the humble and practical messages he passed on he seldom mentioned Andreas, but now and then he asked if it wasn’t time for them to talk. Each time she gave him the same answer. Not yet . . . he asked again out on the headland. She stopped. Was he tired of having her as a guest? No, he said, but I feel you are running away . . . It had started to rain in earnest and he suggested turning back. They took shelter from the rain in the shed made of tall, tarred planks, the only break in the flat landscape. The grey light penetrated the gloom through the spaces between the planks, where the inlet and the sand bank stretched horizontally, broken by the dark into vertical bands. He saw a big seagull flying across the strip of sand, disappearing and appearing again in the cracks. Not any more, she said. I am not running away any more. But to go home . . . that would be a flight.
He glanced at her briefly. What about their trip then? She turned her dark glasses towards him. He switched on the windscreen wipers and concentrated on the road again. The rain was like fog around the wheels of the lorry ahead of him. Wasn’t that an escape too? Her being here with him in the car driving south? She waited a few moments before replying. No, she said. What should they call it then? Going back, she said. All the way back. To the beginning . . . He overtook the lorry and pulled in again. Yes, he replied. That’s probably the only way to go.
It rained through most of Germany. The countryside was unvarying, woods, fields, factories and woods again, blurred and blue-grey in the misty rain. The names of towns told them how far they had come. He read them aloud to her when they passed yet another signboard. She took a cigarette from the pack under the window and put it between her lips. They had just passed Hanover. On the satellite picture of the weather forecast the night before, a gigantic spiral of cloud was moving in over northern Europe in a slowly ticking movement. So tonight the astronauts couldn’t see the lights of the cities. She smiled with her lips clamped round the cigarette and ignited her lighter. She was always nervous when she lit a cigarette. During the first weeks she had scorched the tips of her hair several times or set light to the filter, but he had accustomed himself not to interfere.
She lit the cigarette, inhaled and slowly blew out smoke. The astronauts? Yes, he said, describing a picture he had once seen in the newspaper. It had been taken on a clear night, from space, and you could clearly distinguish the contours of Europe surrounded by dark blue, with shining spots for each big city on the continent. The picture had illustrated an article on light pollution. He hadn’t understood that word. How could light pollute? She agreed. She had seen that picture too. It was one of the most beautiful pictures she had ever seen. Like a reflection of the firmament, she said. As if each city was a star. Yes, he replied, taking his hand off the gear lever and pulling out the ashtray. And imagine, if one day the lights of cities should reach some distant, inhabited planet, long after the cities and their inhabitants had disappeared. She nodded. Poor things, she said, if they found out the lights were not stars, but cities. Then they would believe they were not alone in the universe.
Robert disagreed. Would we feel sad if we thought the stars were cities? On the contrary, life would feel better for them, he said, with the thought that light years away, fools like themselves had existed who would surely have been just as confused. She smiled. How could he be sure they would be just as confused? He shrugged. He couldn’t imagine life without confusion. Unless you spend your life without knowing it, she replied. But then nothing would matter much, of course. Yes, he said. But it’s worse if you believe you are alive, even though your thoughts are merely the delayed light of a dead star. But, my dear doctor! she exclaimed and tapped out her ash outside the ashtray so the flakes drifted down over her left knee. She didn’t know he could be so philosophical. He didn’t know that either.
He put on a tape of Beethoven’s late string quartets and sank into the music as they passed industrial complexes and the looping junctions to big cities. All those emotions, he thought. The music vibrated with them, rough, smooth, hoarse or trembling, singing in the warm soundboard of the instruments, like slim crystal glasses vibrating from the circling of a damp finger. So many emotions were involved there, but they had lost their faces, they were no longer elicited by something or directed towards anyone, swallowed up by the transforming power of music. Their anonymity was the price of his own feeling, sitting in his car surrounded by strange cars and road signs, factories and cities, and yet being recognised and exposed. They sat silently listening to the music linking the cities as did the endless as
phalt. It had different meanings to them, the same music, as it vibrated through their heads, and that could only be because in itself it meant nothing at all.
The ease he had felt in the morning at the prospect of going away had been superseded by a drowsy flatness, but he did not feel heavy as he usually did when he was tired. Nor was it the monotonous driving that exhausted him. His ease had changed into a strange, weightless feeling, and it seemed as if the restless or lingering string instruments echoed inside him as in a cavity surrounded by porous walls. Suddenly it seemed unrealistic to be sitting in his car beside his one-time patient on the way to the town whose name she had been given. In the past few months he had not had time to fall back into vegetating as usual. When he got home from work she was there, whether they talked or she sat by herself on the terrace, and at weekends Lauritz came and filled the house with his toys and his high-pitched babbling. He saw more of her son than of his own daughter, and the boy was becoming dangerously attached to him.
When they returned to the car after tanking up and having coffee at a service station outside Wurzburg, she put on the radio before he could go back to Beethoven. She zapped between programmes until deciding on a station playing pop. He never listened to that, but he thought it was her turn to choose and when they had driven another hundred kilometres the mindless pop music had merged with his strange, at once relaxed and melancholy mood. Now and then they chatted a little. She asked about details of what he had told her, or answered herself when he asked her to say more about some of the men she had known.
As he heard his own voice and listened to hers above the soft, stupefying pop, he recognised the feeling that had struck him when he was on the beach watching Lea swimming alongside the reef, the last Sunday before the summer holidays. It was the same feeling that overwhelmed him a few weeks later when Lauritz had stayed the night with him for the first time. He hadn’t gone into the house when he came back after driving the boy home. He sat in the car thinking of what Andreas had told him about his trip to Stockholm. His abortive attempt at flight from the life he now spoke of so devoutly was almost unbearable. As Robert alternately slipped into the overtaking lane and back into the line of cars driving south through Germany, he again recalled Lucca’s eyes in the photograph from Paris and the vague, intangible recollection her expression had woken. Like a mute reminder of something left undone, but what? Some act of negligence, he had thought, an unredeemed pledge, but of what and to whom?
It wasn’t so much the thought of how Andreas had smoked his cigarettes and gobbled up plums as he untangled himself from one illusion only to get wound up into another. It was not that which had paralysed him so he stayed on in his car listening to the sprinklers in the quiet gardens, staring at his own idiotic plastic chairs reflected in the window by the terrace. Nor was he suddenly struck by paralysis at the melancholy realisation that Lea would soon be a young woman who had no further need of him. That was not why he felt dumped on a siding when he waved to her out there between the poles and later, as the train moved off and he walked along the platform beside it to keep in sight of her face for a second or two longer.
Behind Lea’s face in the train window and Lucca’s at the pavement café, others appeared. He saw Monica’s face again, looking over the water and smoking a cigarette, one late afternoon on the beach a year or two before they were divorced. He saw his mother sitting on her balcony looking out over the railway towards the heating system’s blank red-brick wall concentrating the last sunlight. He saw another Monica blushing as she bent over him beneath a woollen blanket in the Alps, and he caught sight of Sonia’s inflamed young face behind Monica’s, bent over in the same way while she rode him like a mechanical toy horse. And behind them he was looking Ana in the eyes again, her dark gaze watched him through all the others’ as she lay down with loosened hair on the dim patterns of a dark red carpet, that winter evening when they were young and she finally gave him what he had wanted for so long he had forgotten why, and wanted it so frenziedly that she had not been able to quell his insatiable hunger.
He had been too young when he lost Ana, too young to lose something he had wanted so terribly much. He had withdrawn into a cave deep inside himself. It had terrified him to witness his own body amusing itself with anyone who came along. He had not dared come out until Monica pulled a woollen blanket over her head to protect their first kiss from the cruel light of the snow-clad mountains. By then he had learned to be more patient, less basic in his desires, but perhaps his body had grown used to being on its own. At any rate, it had gone off again when Sonia appeared in the barrister’s garden showing off her strong legs and slight breasts and doing her tai chi until he was totally mesmerised.
An incident of no importance had chanced to devour what meant everything, not with the insatiability of desire, but with that of silence. In fact he had not been as greedy as a lot of people, but what had been his had ended by slipping out of his hands again, because he let go, or because he was no longer capable of holding on with his previous conviction. As he watched them, the faces from the story of his life appeared before him and grew thin and transparent, Ana, Monica and Sonia, even his mother and Lea paled in his mind. Finally they fused and disappeared like reflections when a gust of wind whips up the surface of the water into sudden ripples. Again he visualised the flat landscape he had so often walked, the sand banks and reeds, the lonely shed of tarred planks, the birds’ signs on the sky and the tufts of grass on the inlet, their inundated stalks.
After midnight he drove into the car park of a motel between Stuttgart and Tübingen. Lucca had been asleep for the past hour. It was stupid to have driven so far when they were both tired, but he had been caught up into the trance-like monotony of driving and kept succumbing to the temptation to drive another hundred kilometres. As he switched off the engine and stretched out in his seat, fatigue came over him. He sat for a while looking listlessly through the drops on the windscreen, sparkling in the light from the motel’s yellow sign. The restaurant behind the white net curtains was in darkness, with only bluish neon strip lights to relieve it. He spoke her name several times, at first quietly, then with more insistence. Finally he laid a hand on her shoulder and shook it gently. She woke with a start, frightened and confused. He told her where they were. That far . . . Her voice was thick with sleep. She apologised for having slept instead of entertaining him. He carried their bags in one hand and took her arm as they hurried through the rain.
The motel was furnished in sham romantic style, as if guests were supposed to imagine themselves in a hunting lodge, a casino and a solid Christian home blended into one. While they were signing the register he said she should be glad she couldn’t see how ghastly it was. She did not react, it was not very funny, but it had become a habit with them, these slightly cynical references to her handicap. She stood swaying slightly, on the verge of falling asleep. They had rooms side by side. He showed her the bed and the door into the bathroom before going to his own room and collapsing in his clothes.
He hadn’t even taken off his shoes, he must have fallen asleep at once. At first he had no idea where he was, he lay on his side with his shoes tangled up in the blanket, watching the distant lights of passing trucks. It was a long time since he had remembered a dream. As a rule his dreams faded as soon as he woke up and he only saw a few dissolving, disconnected details. But this dream he remembered absolutely clearly. He pulled the pillow under his ear and sniffed in the scent of washing powder in the cool, smooth pillow-case.
It had been a colourless dream in shades of grey, white and black. He had never been in Africa, but that was where he was, he didn’t know why nor what kind of room he was standing in. He kneeled down in front of a boy with curly, close-cropped hair. A boy of four, perhaps five, not dark brown but grey like everything else in the dream. The boy had no eyes. There was nothing in their place but thin grey skin. Someone spoke to him behind his back, he did not know who. He could not see the person who spoke, nor hear if it was
a man or a woman. The voice told him what he was to do. It said he should reach out and rub the skin where the boy’s eyes should have been. He rubbed cautiously with his knuckles and felt the tense membranes breaking at the light touch. As the flaps of skin curled up, two dark boy’s eyes appeared. Then he woke up.
At first he did not know what it was, the clenching feeling in his diaphragm, which made him double up with his forehead against his knees. He could not breathe, and for a few seconds everything in his body locked in a vice-like grip, until the cramp gave way to an overpowering force that chopped through him in hard, rhythmic stabs. Then he felt sobs breaking from his lungs and throat, hollow, deep and impossible to check.
A little later his muscles slackened, the weeping stopped and he was able to sit up. He dried his eyes and looked out at the silhouettes of parked cars. His watch showed the time to be half past two. He found a cigarette and lit it. The door beside the window led out to the car park. He went outside, it had stopped raining. The cold wind went straight through his shirt, but he kept on walking up and down beside the line of trucks and trailers. There was a wood beside the motel. He had not noticed that when they arrived. The tops of the tall pine trees were faintly outlined against the night sky above the dark windows of the building.
He did not wake up until half past nine. Lucca answered at once when he knocked on her door. She sat with her coat on beside the open window. Her bag was on the bed, packed. They were silent in the restaurant. The end wall was decorated with antlers, and a subdued Viennese waltz sounded from the invisible loudspeakers. He fetched their breakfast from the sideboard. There were no other people and the car park was almost empty. He asked if she had slept well. As she turned her face towards him he could see himself and a section of the wood in her dark glasses. I heard you, she said quietly. He directed his gaze through the corridor of pine trees, their dark trunks vanishing into the dimness. Her cup clattered on the saucer, and he felt the warmth of her hand on his. I am your friend, she said. He looked at her. My friend? She nodded. Yes, she said with a wry smile. Your friend in the dark . . .
Lucca Page 39