Retrograde

  “I wouldn’t want this to be any different,” she says with a mischievous dimple in one cheek, but he can tell that, in a way, she means it. It’s not too late, not yet. After all, the great opportunity of all this was even seeing Helena, speaking to her, knowing where she was again. It’s not over as long as she’s here with him.

  • • •

  The only person at the reception desk is a balding man with a forehead like a boulder about to start an avalanche and a dingy mustache that’s neither brown nor gray, but rather like something whose real color is hidden under an impenetrable layer of dirt. He tries to sound surprised that they don’t have a reservation.

  “Just walking in on a Friday night!”

  “But surely you have a room available,” Joachim says. “It’s off-season and your parking lot is empty.”

  “Be that as it may…” the man says balefully, but doesn’t continue.

  Joachim feels an irrational fury he can barely contain, and he’s relieved when Helena goes to sit on one of the dusty plush seats lining the otherwise bare walls of the entryway.

  “Look,” says Joachim, grinning in a way he fears might be more frightening than friendly, “We were hoping to stay here for the weekend. Your hotel was recommended to me by a friend, but if you don’t have any rooms…”

  With a visible effort, the old man returns Joachim’s grimace of a smile. “We do have a room or two,” he admits. “It’s just that we don’t generally allow check-ins after six.”

  Joachim looks over his shoulder. Helena is resting her head against the wall. He can’t tell whether she’s angry or just tired.

  “I understand,” he tells the man. “And I’d certainly be ready to pay extra for the inconvenience.”

  Although this is the moment the old man must’ve been waiting for, greasing the wheels of the transaction costs just twenty euros. Perhaps he’s afraid Joachim will leave if he asks for more.

  “What type of room would you like, Sir?”

  “The nicest you’ve got.”

  That turns out to be a chilly but rather large room with a queen bed, a bathroom—which the mustached man emphasizes several times—an ancient TV set and a poorly done painting of the night sky on the ceiling, which has a small additional light in case guests want to leave the stars on overnight. The price, which was probably jacked up especially for Joachim, is less than that of a decent single room in Berlin, and far less than he would’ve been willing to pay to get Helena alone here, outside of everything they’ve already lived, and try to make something new.

  “The front desk is now closed until morning,” the man tells them, closing the door behind him. He can’t hope for another such windfall tonight.

  Helena takes off her shoes, switches off the main light and flops down on the bed, looking up at the ceiling. “It’s actually quite charming.”

  Joachim feels the praise fill and warm him, as if he’d decorated the room himself.

  “Did you bribe him?” she adds.

  “A little.”

  And then they’re laughing, and then they’re flipping through the regional stations on the TV, laughing again and making love in a drowsy, end-of-a-long-day way, nothing like the romantic union he imagined for this improvised second honeymoon. Still, he thinks afterward, somewhere between consciousness and sleep, at least we were together, at least we are…

  He wakes in the middle of the night and gets up to switch off the night sky, which he blames for disturbing his sleep. But afterward in the dark, he’s filled with a deep and terrible loneliness, an indefinable anxiety that makes his heart race painfully. He wants more than anything to wake Helena, make her save him from this, keep him from being alone just for a few minutes.

  But she’d only be angry, and he doesn’t want to start a fight that would keep him up even longer, so he forces himself to lie still, pulsing between smothering heat and bone-chilling cold, watching like a continuous film reel in his mind all the things that could go wrong, and all those that already have.

  HELENA

  They wake late the next morning, and Helena has the vague, dissatisfied feeling of almost, but not quite remembering her dream. The drive, the arrival at the desolate hotel, and especially her meeting with Ester seem more like a dream than whatever flitted through her subconscious. When she turns to Joachim, she sees that his eyes are already open.

  “Hey, you.” She leans over to kiss him on the cheek, and the gesture has an echoing hollowness even as she feels the old ache of affection rise up in her. If only there were a way to start over. If only there were a way to be together now that had nothing to do with having been together before.

  “Morning, darling.”

  But that was never what she wanted. Didn’t she move and change her number to keep just that from happening? If he knew what was going through her head, he’d say what he always did, that she was overthinking things. That she could never just enjoy the moment without agonizing about the future.

  She gets up to open the window. Only when a cool, fresh breeze comes in does she realize how oppressive the air in the room was, the stale smell of the room itself and the humid warmth of their bodies. Outside, everything is fresh and new. It must’ve rained overnight. Even the cracked pavement of the parking lot is glittering in the light of day.

  That’s what they need, too: something to wash away the past and let the light of a new day shine on them. Maybe she’ll say something like that when he finally starts to talk to her. Or she could just say, “Shhh, I know all that. We can forget about it now.” And he’ll explain why he decided to play this strange little game, and she’ll tell him how long she’s known. Or they won’t mention it; one lie will cancel the other out.

  He joins her in the shower, and until they leave their hotel room, they’re strangely quiet, like young lovers trying out new things. She switches the ceiling light on and off as they step out, but it hardly shows up against the brilliant light of noon.

  JOACHIM

  The hotel restaurant isn’t serving breakfast so they stop in the bakery for lattes, croissants, and bottles of water to take with them. The pervasive smell of meat from the other side of the shop overwhelms any scent of baked goods or coffee until they get outside. Joachim shows Helena the two dots on the screen of his phone indicating how close they are to the nearest lake, but he can tell she’s not really paying attention.

  “Do you feel up for the walk?” he asks.

  “If we go slowly.”

  By the time they finish their breakfast, they’re on the dirt end of the road, passing farmhouses that look far more ramshackle by daylight, large but largely patched together from scrap metal and wooden boards. A couple of them look abandoned. They turn off to the left down an even narrower dirt path interspersed with clumps of horse shit. He keeps finding himself a few steps ahead of her and having to stop. She moves with steady caution, like someone looking for footholds in the face of a cliff.

  He feels that it would be wrong to speak to her now, to break that concentration. But the pressure of silence begins to suffocate him. He doesn’t know what to say, only that he needs to say something. There aren’t even many birds out, and the only consistent noise is the distant drone of the highway, something like the sea before you’re close enough to make out the crash of each individual wave. The forest looms ahead of them a long time without seeming to get closer, and then, abruptly, they’re in it, with half the light and double the silence. The threadbare canopy over their heads is a patchwork of dry conifers and half-changed leaves, sometimes red, yellow and green on the same tree.

  Either the lake is farther away than it looked on the map, or he underestimated how slowly they would move. Their gradual progress down the dirt path seems eternal, the way they came now covered over by trees, identical to the way they’re headed. At the same time, this could be the very safety he’s needed, an eternal moment, a path that never ends in either direction, the beginning and end the same. His heart aches with the knowledge of it.
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br />   “Helena,” he says.

  She looks at him with a startled, wild-animal look, then covers it over with a smile.

  “I love you,” he says. “I love you so much.”

  And she watches with large, blank eyes and says nothing, maybe because she wants to know why he’s telling her this now, or maybe because she doesn’t love him anymore, doesn’t have anything to say in return.

  “When we were together before, we decided to take some time off,” he says. His own voice sounds strange, as if he were speaking through some thick physical barrier. “I was involved with another woman during that time. We hadn’t talked about whether that was okay, but I guess I thought it was. I wasn’t sure you and I were ever going to be together again. I was…”

  “I understand,” she says.

  “You do?” He’s so sure this mercy must be some kind of trap that he’s afraid to feel relieved. In all their years together, in all his apologies, excuses and explanations, there was never a moment like this, when she understood.

  She nods and he hurries to continue, before she runs out of understanding or before he’s tempted to leave something unsaid.

  “She got pregnant and I wasn’t really there for her. You and I were back together, so of course I’d stopped seeing her. Then she came and told me and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how I could help her without somehow betraying you and there was so much pressure. It was all so immediate, I felt like I had no time to decide.” Even now he feels his breath quickening, as if the decision had to be made all over again. “It seemed like she wanted to keep the baby so I told her I’d help support it but I was going to stay with you. I didn’t tell you. I know I should’ve but I was too scared and it didn’t seem fair. I knew you’d take off if you heard, and that wouldn’t have been fair because I’d ended it with her, and I was never with her again once you said you wanted to come back. And then she went and had an abortion and wrote you a letter about all of it, and half of it wasn’t true but you never believed me. You believed everything she said and then it was all downhill. There was no fixing things after that. You took another couple months to really leave, but it was over when you read that letter.”

  “Look,” she says, and for a moment he continues to look at her, the expression of childish wonder on her face, but then she points ahead and he sees the lake opening up as the path winds downhill, the reflection of autumn sunlight almost blinding when he looks straight at it. “The lake,” she adds extraneously.

  They’re at the bottom of the hill on the sandy shore before he can summon the courage to speak again, but Helena, peering through the rushes, interrupts him to point out a brave group of swimmers paddling at the opposite end.

  “How can they!” she says. “I wouldn’t even want to take off my clothes at this temperature, let alone get in that water!”

  He feels a creeping sense of alarm, the way he did in the hospital when she greeted him so familiarly, like they’d seen each other just hours before. Is it possible that she didn’t hear, didn’t understand, has somehow forgotten what he said? Why doesn’t she respond? He looks away from the group of swimmers and back at her, squinting and raising one hand to her eyebrows to block out the sunlight, grinning in a slightly breathless way, like someone rushing into a stiff wind.

  “I should’ve brought sunglasses,” she says. “I don’t suppose I have any anymore.”

  “Helena,” he says, and grabs one of her shoulders, holding in the urge to shake her until she’s really listening.

  “Yes, Joachim,” she says, “I know.”

  “You know?”

  “Yes, I know all about that girl sending me that ugly letter.” And then, dismissing his amazement with a flippant wave of one hand, she says, “Can’t we sit down soon? I’m not supposed to be on my feet for this long.”

  He nods, and even this slight movement wracks him with dizziness. Now he feels that he can barely keep up as she starts to shuffle around the lake, looking for somewhere to sit. “But how?” he finally manages to say.

  “Who knows how these things work?” she says. “Maybe I dreamt it. Look, just there, there’s a patch of grass that will still have sun on it for a couple hours.”

  The strange thing is that she doesn’t seem to be covering for anything or trying to change the subject. It genuinely must not bother her. Does this mean she knows everything else, or just about the affair? How long has she known and not said anything? It can’t have been long; she’d never have been able to hold something like that in without at least checking whether it was true. Unless it was so obviously true, such a clear, plausible memory, that there was no need for her to check. Unless she knew it for certain from the moment it crossed her mind. But if she knows, if she’s still here with him, knowing and having known, doesn’t that mean that she’s accepted it?

  He spreads out his jacket for her to sit on, but she perches on the very edge to make room for him. Still, she didn’t say she loved him. She didn’t say and he can never ask, could never ask something like that. Better never to know than to make a fool of himself. Besides, he’ll find out soon enough. Her very gentleness alienates him. Is this woman really his wife, or simply a stranger? His Helena never had any sense of proportion, would never have been capable of weighing his mistake in light of their whole relationship, and deciding it wasn’t worth ending things over. For his Helena, every discussion was the be-all and end-all, every fight an Armageddon they had only the slimmest chances of surviving. And his Helena always wanted to talk about everything, except the one time they most needed to talk. Who is this woman next to him, resting her hand on his knee and smiling at the glittering surface of this all but abandoned lake?

  When he stares out at the water, everything around it seems to move and flicker, as if the water itself were still, and the sky, the mottled color of the trees, its rippled reflection. He wants to relax, close his eyes and enjoy this moment with Helena, her presence beside him warm as the autumn sun on his face, but he can’t. Some creature inside of him is crouched with its hackles up, waiting for a sign of danger. He can’t soothe it or coax it to sleep. If only she’d say something.

  They should be able to be silent together. They’ve known each other long enough, intimately enough, for that. But instead of feeling that he doesn’t need to say anything aloud, he feels that he can’t. Does she feel the same way? Is she also desperate for him to break this silence, smash through it like the hard surface of the water cut by a swimmer’s strokes? She isn’t saying anything either, but he feels like it’s his fault, either because he started a discussion he doesn’t know how to finish, or because the discussion’s already over and he has nothing more to say.

  If this were a first date, it would be going badly. She’d think later, and maybe he would, that they had nothing in common, nothing to say to each other. And yet there’s so much going on inside him now; he’s brimming over with things he wants to communicate to her. It’s only the words that are missing. How clumsy human interaction is, how we get in the way of ourselves, trying to speak with our mouths underwater, or make eye contact through a blindfold. Putting our hands to opposite sides of a wall, guessing where the other person stands, not even knowing if our fingers are aligned, if, the barrier having fallen, we would even be touching.

  “Do you remember our first date?” he asks, just to say something. Once they start talking, no matter what about, they’ll be light years closer to an honest discussion.

  “Of course,” she says too quickly, and he remembers what a sensitive subject remembering has become.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I remember it perfectly. We got drenched.”

  He laughs. He’d just graduated and had only been in Berlin a few months when he asked the pretty intern at the office where he was freelancing for a date. He didn’t know anywhere to take her. It was June and he figured something outdoors was a safe bet so he packed a picnic and asked Helena to meet him near Tiergarten, the only park he knew at that
point.

  It was cool and overcast when he left his house, drizzling by the time he met up with her; he was late and she was early.

  He stopped and bought an overpriced umbrella in one of the tourist shops lining Unter den Linden and opened it over both of them. It had a picture of the red East German Ampel-mann on one side, spreading out his arms to stop pedestrians from crossing, and on the other side the green Ampelmann, strolling confidently ahead in his fedora.

  “You can’t be serious,” Helena said when he told her his plan. But she came along anyway, and by the time it started pouring, they were too deep in the park to seek shelter, and soaked to the skin so quickly it wouldn’t have been worth it.

  “Wow,” she said. “This’ll be a date to remember.”

  He would’ve been mortally embarrassed, but there was too much water pouring down his face to do anything but laugh and try not to swallow too much of it. When they finally found their way out of the park, they were at Potsdamer Platz, where they stopped in the Arkaden to buy two beach towels, and then stumbled into the Cinemaxx to see the next showing of a forgettable romantic comedy and discreetly eat the damp picnic lunch he’d packed. When they came out of the theater, the sky was a brilliant blue without a trace of white, and the sun was strong enough to start drying up the puddles on the sidewalk, though not their clothes.

  After an experience like that, the only possibilities were for her never to speak to him again, or for them to become very close, very quickly. He worked from home for a few days in case she didn’t want to see him, but when he got up the courage to call the following Thursday, she demanded, “Where have you been?” and immediately accepted his offer of a second date, “indoors this time.”