What keeps her from opening the door, walking through the garden towards him and opening the gate, just as she would normally do.
I don’t know, Stella will later say to Clara. Can’t answer that question. I didn’t open the door; I stopped short, recoiled. From what?
The man out on the street waits. Then he takes his right hand out of his pocket and rings again, and suddenly Stella feels – it almost makes her angry – that her heart is speeding up, slowly, steadily, as if her heart understands something that Stella has not yet understood. Without taking her eyes off the stranger, she lifts the receiver of the intercom off the hook on the wall, holds it to her left ear, and says, Yes.
The man outside on the street bends down. Stella has no idea how loud or soft her voice sounds out on the street; she can’t recall ever having used the intercom before. He says something into the contraption; she thinks she hears his voice at her ear at the same instant as she hears his voice from the street. The voice at her ear sounds distinctly hoarse. Like the voice of a person who takes pills, who is on medication; no doubt about that. Stella can hear it. She knows all about that.
He says, Hello. We don’t know each other. You don’t know me. But I know you from having seen you, and I’d like to talk to you. Do you have time.
It isn’t a question. Not a real question, and it also sounds rehearsed, something memorised.
Do you have time.
Stella holds the receiver away from her ear. Is this supposed to be a joke? She almost isn’t sure that she heard him right. The man outside stands bent over slightly in front of her intercom waiting for an answer. He won’t say it again. He won’t repeat it; she understood it correctly.
So she holds on tight to the receiver and says loud and clear, I don’t have any time. Impossible. Do you understand what I mean? We cannot talk together because I don’t have any time at all, none.
Too bad, says the man in front of her house. Oh well then. Maybe another time.
*
He straightens up and looks once more at the front door. Definitely looking at the window behind which, Stella thinks, he can’t actually see her but obviously assumes she is standing. For a moment he stands there expressionless, raising a hand as if in greeting, but maybe it’s supposed to be something else. Then he turns and walks away from the fence and towards the street corner.
Stella can no longer see him.
She hangs the receiver back up on the wall and stumbles from the hall into Jason’s room. Jason’s room is cool and feels a bit abandoned, so very familiar; no connection at all with what caused her to stumble in here. She pushes Jason’s chair aside and steps over to the window, unintentionally, carelessly brushing three pens and a piece of paper off the desk, which startles her; she leans forward, looking out into the street; the man has stopped at the street corner, at the edge of their lot, with his back to the house, he stands there. Looks up the street. And down. On the left are houses like this one, on the right, the forest; their street leads to Main Street, the traffic starts at the end of their street. Cars coming from right and left. Other people.
The man on the corner is now rolling himself a cigarette. How about that, it’s something he has with him – tobacco. He has tobacco and cigarette papers; he takes these out of his jacket pocket. He’s rolling it slowly, carefully, but maybe awkwardly too; maybe he’s trembling; hard to tell; Stella in any case is trembling slightly. He lights the cigarette with a lighter and smokes. That goes on for a while. Stella watches him smoking. Time stretches out between them. She thinks she ought to look away, but she can’t look away. She sees him, watches him breathe, watches him as he flicks the cigarette to the pavement, puts his hands in his trouser pockets, walks on, down Forest Lane towards Main Street. Until she can’t see him any more. Later she’ll think, even that was too much.
She steps away from the window and exhales. She picks up the pens and the sheet of paper and puts them back on the desk, pushes the chair back to the desk; Jason’s shirt is draped over the back of the chair, and Stella straightens it as if Jason had surprised her at something. Jason’s room is so messy. It smells of turpentine, wood and metal, of machine oil, of grass. The computer on the desk is black. The numbers on the weather station on the windowsill flip from 12.19 to 12.20, digital rain clouds approach from the west. The man on the street had looked unemployed, idle, as if he had all the time in the world. He also looked neglected, just a hint of dissipation, just a trace. He had looked like an absolutely free man. So what is so disquieting about that, Stella says out loud; she leaves the room, opens the front door and steps out into the front yard as if she were reclaiming her right to it. How cool it is, delightful and quiet. What is it exactly that is disquieting about a free human being.
*
Stella leaves the house at a quarter past one. She pushes her bicycle out into the street, pulls the gate shut behind her, stands for a while looking at her house from the outside. She’s standing where the stranger stood. She looks at her front door, at the narrow window next to the front door. She was standing behind that window, and he knew it.
What is there to see?
A brick house with a mossy tile roof. A front door with leaded glass panes set into it, to the left a wooden bench, next to the bench a little olive tree in a clay pot, and under the bench, Ava’s rubber boots. Stella has no idea how they got there, how long they’ve been there. To the right of the front door, the picture window; clearly visible through it, the armchair with a crumpled blanket draped over the armrest, piles of books, and on the wide windowsill, pillows, a stuffed zebra, a tea glass, a bottle of water, and something small that Stella thinks might be Jason’s glasses case. You can see all of it; for a moment she is stunned at this exhibition of private things, at her carelessness. The stranger on the street was able to see all that, and she’d allowed it; she’s the one who made it possible, after all. What is it really – recklessness?
She gets on her bike and turns left into Forest Lane. Crossing Main Street at the big intersection, she loses the stranger’s trail, if there even was one. She rides past the shopping centre, across the car park with the shopping centre’s flapping banners and clanking flag chains, a wild noise that Ava loves. She turns into the new development. Large, free-standing one-family houses, with families sitting on the terraces as if posed there, defying the chilly May wind. Dogs throw themselves against garden gates and are generously whistled back. Stella rides down Pine Lane, Stone Pine Lane and Fir Tree Lane to the middle of the development. She takes this route every day. Ava’s kindergarten, a park and the office of the nursing station in the Community Centre are all located in the middle of the development. She isn’t paying attention. Not concentrating, isn’t being careful. She’s glad when she can park the bike in front of the Community Centre. The door is wide open; a breeze is blowing through the foyer where small reading lamps are lit on little tables at which no one ever sits. Stella often arrives at the office half an hour before her shift starts; she almost always has a cup of coffee with Paloma. Paloma is fifty, tall and gaunt; her expression is disdainful and at the same time melancholy. Occasionally she baby-sits for Ava; she’s curious but not too curious; there are days when Stella discusses Ava with Paloma; sometimes they talk about Jason too, and if not about Jason, then occasionally about Stella’s dreams, about her uneasiness that could be caused by the weather or something else. Paloma has a penchant for Swedish crime novels. She almost always wears black dresses and ethnic necklaces. She looks like an actress in a silent film, but maybe, Stella thinks, that’s because Paloma is often on the phone while handing out keys, pushing weekly schedules across her desk, and making signals with her hands and eyes, signals that Stella could interpret one way or another or yet in some completely different way. This afternoon Paloma is on the phone to her mother, maybe to her mother. She is often interrupted by the other person; this is unusual, and her voice alternates between annoyance and forbearance.
Yes. No. I can’t keep telling you t
he same thing all the time. You don’t challenge yourself enough. You have to move around more, you have to change your habits. Put on a hat and go outside.
Stella steps behind the desk, takes Esther’s key off the hook, signs the week’s schedule, which is already full of scrawled notes of changes and substitutions. She would like to wait till Paloma finishes her conversation. She would like to say to Paloma, Just imagine, a stranger rang our doorbell today. He said he’d like to speak to me, but I don’t know him at all. I’ve never seen him before.
How would that sound?
It wouldn’t sound normal.
But still, she could say it that way, blush and then laugh about it, and maybe with the laugh this unpleasant feeling would go away – uneasiness, anxiety, as if she had overlooked something. She steps to the front of the desk.
Just for once, stick to the arrangement, Paloma is saying. She holds the receiver away from her ear, and putting her hand over the mouthpiece and rolling her eyes up towards the ceiling, she whispers, Good Lord.
Till later, Stella mouths soundlessly. She points at the clock, holds out four fingers. She leaves the office, passing the empty tables, the display cases in which there are pictures by the schoolchildren held in place by colourful magnets: giant suns, smiling flowers, children from all the continents holding hands. She says hello to the janitor. She buttons up her rain jacket, walks out of the foyer.
*
Esther is eighty-two years old. She isn’t Stella’s favourite patient, but not unbearable either. It’s best not to have favourites among the patients. Even so, Stella likes Dermot best, Julia’s husband. Esther is lying in bed. Actually, she still gets up every afternoon and walks from her bedroom into the living room or the kitchen. But for the last few weeks she’s just wanted to lie in bed, dozing, maybe eat a piece of buttered toast with a little orange marmalade, drink some tea with it, and have Stella open the window every two minutes and then close it again. Not in a good mood today, the carer doing the night shift had written into the record book. Esther’s bedroom is small. Her bed stands in front of a wall of bookshelves; when Esther lies on her side she’ll grab a book from the shelf at random, open it, read a sentence aloud, shake her head at what she’s read and drop the book behind the bed. The little night table is full of medications, pill dispensers, water glasses, various watches, glasses, thermometers and first-aid kits. Esther’s skin is parchment-thin and wrinkled; it tears like paper. The room smells of old age and illness, but of something else too. Of incense and myrrh, Esther’s cigars, dusty books, and the flowers on which Esther insists and which stand around in large glass vases. The window is open, the radio is on, with a lackadaisical, sleepy lecture that sounds like a lot of drivel to Stella, about something imaginary, a lot of drivel from the world of shadows. Now finally, in taking care of Esther, she emerges from those other thoughts into the familiar rhythm of touching, sick-room procedures, responsibilities, the counting of drops, emptying of tubes, pots, pails, Esther’s spit cup, the glass for her teeth, the bowl for the warm soapy water. Don’t be so lazy, Esther, try to help a little. And Esther pulls herself up by means of the handle that’s part of the apparatus rigged up over her bed, sitting up and dangling her legs over the edge of the bed with the same expression Ava sometimes has, sullen, restrained, pretending to be far away.
Esther says, My feet are cold, please close the window; turn off the radio now; put on my socks; I want those soft socks Ricarda knits for me. Ricarda is Esther’s daughter, and Stella can’t remember any more when she last saw her here. Esther’s eyeballs are red-veined; the irises are a bright, profound blue. Seven drops into the left eye, seven drops into the right. Her blood pressure has dropped through the floor. Last night, though, it was one hundred and eighty. What caused that, Esther? Sometimes they can joke with each other, find a common language, common ground, two people forced to touch each other, to handle each other, to share information. It could just as well be the other way around. It could be Esther who swaddles Stella. The present arrangement is a coincidence, nothing more. Do you have a fever? Come, Esther, lift up your arm and hold the thermometer. You feel quite hot.
Esther says, Nonsense.
Stella squeezes a drop of blood from her earlobe, measures the blood sugar level, enters Esther’s catastrophic numbers on the chart in the record book, as if they weren’t catastrophic. She calculates and counts out drops and pills, and all that time Esther keeps talking to herself, jumping from one subject to another, from a long-ago year into the here and now, from a suspicion to a fragile memory, from the memory to the stubborn pain flaring up in her back or in her eyes or in her chest, her knee, the joints of her fingers, her head, her behind, her back.
Don’t be so rough, Stella. What are you thinking of? Don’t keep frowning all the time. You’ll look like an angry parrot when you get old.
Esther giggles.
Stella washes Esther’s face. She washes Esther’s hands, her back, her armpits, her private parts. Esther’s feet; Esther is very proud of her feet; they’re the only part of her body that seem unscathed, the slender feet of a dancer.
Are you hungry?
No.
Esther doesn’t want to eat anything, but she claims that the bread for toast is all gone; Stella should go shopping; Stella finds enough toasting bread in Esther’s kitchen to last for months, goes shopping anyway. In the supermarket she stands leaning against the newspaper rack, reading the week’s horoscope; she’s tired; the in-store music has something sad about it. To Stella it seems as if the lights were being turned out in slow motion.
Esther is asleep when she gets back. Or pretends to be asleep, and Stella quietly closes the curtain, does the rest of her work. She cleans the bathroom and the kitchen, straightens the living room table, stacks the entire spring’s newspapers, one on top of the other; she looks to see what Esther has marked in the television listings, the programmes she wants to watch or might watch: a travelogue about Mongolia, a political round table, a concert in Venice, an evening’s discussion of mortality. Stella puts some orange marmalade on a piece of buttered toast and cuts it into tiny squares; she makes coffee, puts the bread and coffee by Esther’s bed and sits down for a while on the chair next to it. She sits next to Esther’s bed the way she sometimes sits next to Ava’s bed. The hands of the large clock on the wall above the bookshelf drop, stand still and drop again.
I’m leaving, Esther, Stella says. The night shift will be here at eight. Take care of yourself; be sensible.
Esther doesn’t reply.
In the record book Stella writes: Sleeping; pretends to be sleeping. In the hall she puts on her rain jacket and closes the front door behind her. Bicycling back to the Community Centre, she signs out on the weekly schedule, and hangs Esther’s key back up on the board behind Paloma’s desk. Paloma has already left; she leaves her office so tidy every day that it looks as if she weren’t ever coming back. The lobby is deserted; the ferns in the big buckets stand motionless as if before an explosion. The idyll of the children’s pictures in the glass case looks suddenly ugly and slightly suspect. At the far end of the hall the janitor is on his knees in the twilight, fiddling with an electric outlet.
Good evening.
Same to you.
The entrance door stands wide open; outside, the real world.
*
Stella picks up Ava from kindergarten.
She can finally pick Ava up from kindergarten. In the cloakroom Stella takes off Ava’s slippers and puts on her street shoes. Ava can do all this by herself already; she’s four, going on five. But at the end of a long day in kindergarten she’s so tired that she forgets her independence and holds out her legs to Stella, little fat legs in tights put on backwards. Stella is grateful. Ava isn’t the last child to be picked up. There are six or seven other kids there; their jackets still hanging on the clothes’ hooks; little pictures of tractors, flowers and butterflies are pasted next to the hooks. A snail is pasted next to Ava’s hook, which she has bee
n and continues to be distressed about since her first day in kindergarten. Ava has the same black hair and eyes as Jason. She’s a loner and just as stubborn as Jason. She’s affectionate and impatient. Maybe as impatient as Stella. The teachers had asked Stella whether she reaffirms Ava sufficiently. Stella had a hard time understanding the question. Whether she reaffirms Ava sufficiently? She reaffirms Ava from morning to night. Sometimes she’s afraid she reaffirms her too much. Why the question? Because Ava lacks confidence. Because she holds back, because she doesn’t dash off right away, doesn’t want to recite any poems and doesn’t want to stand in the middle during their morning circle. Because she doesn’t want to dress up for the carnival, because she only wants to dress up at home. All these things are part of a pattern; the teachers observe Ava carefully. I reaffirm Ava, Stella said; of course I do. She takes Ava’s round face in her hands and kisses her on both cheeks. Ava. Avenka. How was your day.
Rabbits can have shaggy fur, Ava says. Like dogs. They can be as shaggy as a dog, did you know that, and she slides off the bench dragging her jacket behind her; she says, Put out the light, Mama, you shouldn’t forget to put out the light. Why do I have to tell you that over and over again.
Stella switches the light off in the cloakroom. She says to Ava, And you should wave to them, and together they wave to the teachers sitting with the last of the children at the round table outside on the lawn. The children have put their heads down on the tabletop. The inevitable pot of peppermint tea stands on the table, coloured plastic cups next to it. Stella thinks she knows what the tea smells like and how it tastes. She buckles Ava into the child’s seat on the bicycle and pedals out of the courtyard. The paths through the park are so green that they seem almost dark, and out of the thicket at the edge of the path come peacocks heavily dragging their long feather trains through the sand.
Where Love Begins Page 2