by Kat Hausler
“Well, it’s your own fault for not talking me out of it,” he says now, watching the last of the swimmers exit the lake and disappear behind a large towel.
“I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Helena,” he says again, and she looks at him without saying anything, her mouth a thin flat line, a blank she won’t fill in. He wants to ask: How can it all have been for nothing, laughing with the water running down our faces and mud up to our knees, and all that came after? How could that ever just end? But instead he says, “I guess it’s a good thing you’re starting to remember more.”
“Yes,” she says, “I guess it is.”
There’s something wrong here. Of course it’s a good thing. Even if he has his reasons for not being unreservedly thrilled that she’s getting better, at least she should be happier about it. But maybe it’s because the things she’s starting to remember are ones she’d rather not know. Or not that she doesn’t want to know about them, just that she’d rather they hadn’t happened.
Telling her about Ester wasn’t the big epiphany he was hoping for. For one thing, of course, she already knew. For another, she didn’t seem to care. And it’s a lot harder to give excuses and explanations if nobody’s accusing you of anything. What good are all the things he’s been meaning to say now?
At the very least, he thought it would be more difficult, that she’d cry and maybe he would, too. At least then she would’ve seen how hard it was for him to open up about it. She might’ve thanked him for his honesty. But what good was honesty when she already knew? He didn’t know that she knew. That has to count for something, that he was the one to bring it up. More than anything, what’s missing is the relief he expected. He was going to feel better about everything; there was going to be a weight off his shoulders. But there’s still a burden weighing him down.
“There’s something else I’ve been meaning to say.”
She doesn’t look up. Only by following her gaze does he notice that the light’s gone off the water, that the surface is darker now, gentler on the eyes.
“We separated again after you found out about that other woman. For…” Somehow, it would be indecent to name a number. He’ll admit it if she asks, but he needs to cling to this last shred of mystery now. “For quite a long time,” he says.
“Okay,” she says. Instead of asking the obvious questions, she lies back and rests her head on the ground, closes her eyes.
He waits a moment. “Do you want to talk about it?”
She takes so long to answer that he begins to wonder whether she’s fallen asleep. Just as he’s about to ask again, she says, “Joachim, I’m tired, I’m hungry, and it’s getting cold. What I most want now is to go in somewhere and get something to eat.”
“Are you too tired to walk back? I can run and get the car. We’ll go get something to eat outside of Rosenteich. You know it’s not far to the Spreewald from here. We could take one of those gondola rides like you always wanted.” To his horror, he realizes even as he’s speaking that it was not Helena, but Leila who always wanted to go to the Spreewald and take a boat ride down the meandering river.
If Helena notices, she doesn’t say. Maybe she did always want to go there. There were so many places they never made it to. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she says without opening her eyes. “You’ll take ages. I might as well come.”
“No, no, I’ll be faster on my own and I’ll park at the edge of the woods. You can start back the way we came and I’ll meet you halfway. You have your phone, right?” The last thing he needs is Helena lost in the woods, him having to call some kind of park rangers to search for her.
“Yeah,” she says. “Of course.”
“I’ll be quick.” Her forehead feels cool against his lips, and she doesn’t move.
• • •
Just a few steps up the dirt path, Joachim feels miles away from Helena. He looks back after a minute or two, but because the path goes uphill, all he can see is a small patch of the lake through the trees, nothing of where he and Helena were sitting. A few more steps and even the dull glow of water has disappeared.
A cool, insidious breeze is blowing, one that sneaks into all the openings in his clothing, up his sleeves and down the collar of his jacket, spreading over his skin in a chilling embrace. She isn’t dressed warm enough for the weather, and he hurries ahead, eager to finish this task, be on his way back to her instead of away from her.
He passes no one on the path, and his steps are obscenely loud in the eerie stillness interrupted only rarely by the grave, harsh call of a raven or hooded crow. It’s still hours until sundown, but in a way, the sun has already left the sky, the brilliant warmth skimmed out of it, leaving only a wan, milky light, devoid of color.
And she didn’t want to talk about any of the things he told her. He can’t make sense of it, can’t even really think about it. All his questions about her mood, her state of mind, are outweighed by a creeping primordial dread. He has to get out of this forest, has to look up at a sky free from the sharp dark spears of these pines, the mottled clawing branches of these ashes and alders. He was sure it would go quickly without Helena to slow him down, but with no change in the view ahead of him or behind him, he begins to wonder whether he’s moving at all.
He runs up the path to be sure he’s really getting somewhere, then stops to catch his breath. His own breathing sounds guttural, animal. And then he closes his mouth, breathes through his nose, and realizes that the growling sound isn’t coming from him.
The sudden, foreboding noise seems inevitable now, the ultimate conclusion and vindication of his growing sense of dread. The most primitive part of his mind looks around for weapons while the possibilities flash through it—a wild boar? A wolf that wandered over the border? A vicious dog?
Even as the growl becomes a roar, he can’t see any movement to the right or left, behind or ahead of him. When he finally looks up, the fear of an instant before is still too real, too present, for him to laugh it at. But as he watches the slow, graceful ascent of a hot air balloon over the tops of the trees, its billowing sides a rainbow of colors far beyond the canopy of autumn leaves, he finally starts to breathe again.
The progress of the balloon is impossibly slow, or maybe time has slowed down for him to watch it emerge from the trees like a radiant butterfly from its dull chrysalis. The roaring is a steady drone that fills the whole forest as, for him, the balloon fills the whole sky. It must be half a kilometer away to launch without getting caught on the trees, but its presence is so bright, so immediate, that he can see nothing else.
He watches for a long, long time as the balloon rises and shrinks almost imperceptibly from his whole field of vision to what could simply be a helium balloon whose string slipped out of a child’s fingers.
Still, even when nothing remains but a speck in the sky he isn’t quite sure he sees, still he waits. Will the miracle repeat itself? Is there some kind of hot air balloon station over there beyond the trees? It can’t be that someone just keeps one in his backyard.
Some time after the balloon disappears, he walks on, unable to escape a sinking feeling that only at that exact spot could he see a balloon rise, that by taking even one step forward, he’s missing something extraordinary and terribly important, something he’ll never have the chance to see again.
The forest around him no longer feels empty; rather, it seems to continually shiver with anticipation, to be filled with rising and falling murmurs of excitement. But even as the long-awaited exit to the street emerges ahead of him, he’s filled with a terrible loneliness. Helena should’ve been there, should’ve seen that with him. She won’t understand, if he tells her later, how it felt to be torn out of the silence by that growing roar, to feel the depths of animal fear rise and suddenly give way to awe. She won’t know how brilliant the colors were, how they took over the whole sky, drained the life from its pale blue. It will only become an anecdote, a minor incident on a long walk. The ache of it fills him, and h
e feels that his whole body is only a thin strip of fabric over it, stretched taut by the dry, hot blast of isolation burning and expanding within him.
At the edge of the street, he crosses his arms over his stomach and breathes deeply, trying to hold it in.
• • •
By the time he’s pulled over by the edge of the forest and left the car, even the ache of his loneliness is only a memory, as incidental as the experience that caused it. But the sense of separation, of having moved that much further from Helena, remains.
He hasn’t gotten far when he sees her ahead of him on the path. He calls her name and she raises a hand in greeting. She’s still too far away for him to make out the look on her face. He breaks into a run.
“Well, somebody’s got a lot of energy,” she says when he reaches her. “It’s all I can do to drag myself along.”
“Do you need help?”
“What are you gonna do, put me in a wheelbarrow?” Her laugh is harsh, mocking his concern. Or maybe his helplessness, his inability to really do anything for her. He feels anger rise up in him, but her expression is so vague he can’t even focus his resentment on her. She’s not really thinking of him, at least not as a presence at her side, right now, on this path.
“You’ll never guess what I saw,” he says as the car comes into view. Because you can feel anger, you can resent somebody, anytime. He doesn’t have to hold on to the feeling now.
But she does guess. “That hot air balloon? I saw it from the water. Must’ve been pretty close.”
“It felt like it was right next to me. When I first heard the sound, I thought it was some kind of animal.” He tells her and keeps telling her about it, recalling trivial details, expanding on his physical and mental sensations in those few instants, but the more he says, the less he feels he’s really sharing the experience with her. It would’ve been better to say nothing at all, simply to know that they’d seen the same sight from different angles, and let her ability to guess what he was about to say pass for real intimacy.
“Do you want to stop back at the hotel?” he asks.
“I’ve got everything I need. How far is it to the Spreewald?”
The question startles him. In the short space between his misguided suggestion and this moment, he managed to forget that she agreed to it. So there’s that to get them through the rest of the day, or for them to get through.
“What’s the matter?” she asks as he starts the car and pulls back onto the pockmarked dirt lane.
It feels strange to hear her ask that. She was always the one receding into herself, waiting to be pried back out of the shell that clamped down after every slight, even the imagined ones. Or wanting to be left in it. And he was always the one to ask what the matter was, and never really get an answer—at best “nothing.” What answer can he give her now? There are things you can’t put into words, subtle things you never catch sight of, currents moving through the air or slight tremors in the ground beneath your feet. He understands her better than ever, but has never felt less understood by her. It feels like being inside her skin, behind her inscrutable dissatisfaction. But is she inside of him, or is he just lying there somewhere, empty and discarded?
“Nothing,” he says. “I guess I’m just hungry.”
• • •
Not long after getting on the Autobahn, they stop at a gas station for sandwiches and coffee from a dispenser. Helena said she couldn’t wait. They eat in the parked car, silent, not hostile, but not quite together. Joachim finishes first and opens the GPS on his phone.
“Should we aim for Lübben or Lübbenau?”
“To be honest, I have no idea.”
He’s grateful to her for not mentioning that she never wanted to go to the Spreewald, not asking him where he got the idea. If he had to, he could always pretend that she simply forgot about it, but lying to her about such a trivial thing would set back all he struggled to do this morning.
That thought reminds him that they didn’t really talk about any of it, not enough to give her a clear idea of the events, or him a clear idea of how much she really remembers.
It’s never the right moment to bring up a subject neither of you wants to talk about, and he grins at her as she reaches to turn up the radio. They sing along with the trite chorus of a song they heard three times on the way from Berlin, mumbling through the parts they don’t know, catching each other doing it, laughing again. He feels a complicity with her that’s the closest they’ve been in days.
HELENA
Helena wants them to park the car as soon as they get to Lübbenau, but Joachim insists on following the small streets to find a space closer to the water.
“You’ve strained your leg enough as it is,” he says.
Some perverse impulse makes her say, “I’ll be the judge of that,” but she hurries to add, “Thanks for looking out for me, though,” as if she could simply paint over her previous remark.
He parks the car outside of a chain supermarket up the road from the little marina. As they get closer to the water, almost every house they pass has a sign advertising rooms to let. She wants to make a joke about how they could’ve come here in the first place, but she knows he’ll be offended instead of laughing. And maybe it wouldn’t quite be a joke. As far as she knows, she’s never in her life planned on visiting the Spreewald, let alone told him about it, but if he’s so sure this was her dream getaway, he could’ve planned it from the get-go. It’s hard to say things like that aloud, hard to convey the particular mix of fondness and frustration you feel.
Behind the marina, there are a few old railcars from the former Spreewald Express that used to run back when the region was glamorous enough to have its own tourist train. Or before everybody had a car.
“I wish we’d come in this,” he says, knocking on the metal side. A tour guide in a historical conductor uniform glares at him over his cigarette.
“Yeah,” she says. “That would’ve been the way to do it.” It’s as close as she can get to saying what she means. It’s okay to tell him he didn’t do this trip right if doing it right would’ve required time travel. And maybe, after all, it would have. Not back to the glory days of the Spreewald Express, but early enough in their own relationship for it to have made a difference. A romantic getaway rather than an apology for never taking her on one.
The marina is lined with wooden booths selling a variety of products neither of them has any interest in buying: a thousand kinds of pickles, cucumber schnapps and liqueurs, bottles of linseed oil in all shapes and sizes, pickle key chains and stuffed toys. Postcards of sights they haven’t been to see.
Joachim stops for a long time at each booth, maybe trying to drag this out, make it seem like more of an event. There aren’t very many customers and he shouldn’t get the sales-people’s hopes up. But maybe he wants to get her a present. Surprise her with it later. It would play into the whole setup he seems to have in mind. Not that there’s anything here that would be remotely appealing as a gift from your husband, but it’s the thought that counts. She goes back to look at the postcards, and then to use the public toilets at the other end of the paved square behind the marina. On her way back, she passes slowly by the row of larger souvenir stores and the ice cream shop, where a family in brightly colored windbreakers is clutching ice cream cones and squinting optimistically at the patchwork of clouds overhead. If he wanted to surprise her, he’s had the time.
And that’s true in more ways than one. Birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine’s Day… At most, he did the bare minimum: a last-minute bouquet of flowers, a gift grabbed without time for consideration on the way home from work, dinner out somewhere. She knew women whose boyfriends and husbands wouldn’t celebrate those occasions on principle, and she was grateful to him for his sense of duty. But it was never quite what she wanted. Expensive jewelry that wasn’t really her style, when she’d rather have had something cheap but personal. The flowers that would’ve meant more if they’d come when she was having a rough
week at work, or just because, for no reason at all, to surprise her. And all the outings she had to plan herself, leaving no room for surprise.
She sees him at the far end of the little market and waves, but stays where she is, facing the river. Two men deposit the last two elderly tourists on a crowded dark brown gondola, one of them unties the ropes mooring it in place, and the gondolier plunges his long pole into the water.
The people on the gondola wave to the people in the marina as the boat moves away, and the people in the marina wave back. Helena joins them halfheartedly, feeling like the interceptor of a greeting meant for someone else. A few mossy paddleboats splash out after the gondola, and then there’s a lull. Nobody in the marina really seems to be doing anything; they’re not shopping at the stalls or in the stores, not eating or drinking or waiting for the next boat, but simply standing or sitting around on the broad steps going down to the water. It’s not even warm or bright enough for them to be sunning themselves. And yet everyone seems to be having a good time. Maybe it’s just that she’s the only one standing here all by herself.
“Hey!” Joachim claps her on the shoulder. “Why don’t we see about tickets?”
There’s a line at the little ticket booth that doesn’t seem to be moving, and the young couple—are they teenagers or already a little older?—ahead of Helena and Joachim is arguing fiercely, the girl in an over-annunciated don’t-care-who-hears-me tone, and the boy in a pleading, embarrassed whisper. Helena gathers that the girl wants to take the longest, most expensive boat tour since they came all this way, but the boy wants them to just rent paddleboats, since he paid for a room at the pension and doesn’t have much money left.
“Please, darling, you’re embarrassing me,” the boy says, and the authoritative way he says “darling,” makes Helena decide that they’re a little older, maybe twenty or twenty-one, away for their first vacation without parents or friends.