*
Stella and Ava cycle home. Through the new development, along Fir Tree, Stone Pine and Pine Tree Lanes, past the shopping centre, across Main Street and into the old development where a few cars are now parked in front of the houses and the front doors are open; it smells of lilac, charcoal grills and lighter fluid, of neighbourhood. Stella unlocks the gate, pushes the bike into the garden, lifts Ava out of the child seat, and hears the gate close behind her; she listens for the solid sound of the lock snapping shut.
What are we having to eat today?
Pancakes. With apple sauce and cinnamon and sugar.
I’m going to eat seven, Ava says. Seven pancakes. Definitely.
*
Stella washes her hands at the kitchen sink. She listens to the telephone answering machine – a message for Jason, one from Paloma about the week’s schedule, and Clara’s voice, relaxed and pleasant: Stella, call me back; I’m thinking of you. Is everything all right?
Stella opens the door to the sunroom all the way. She turns on the radio, empties the washing machine, prepares the pancake batter, sings along with the radio, drinks tea in the basket chair in the garden and watches Ava in the sandpit making spirals with shells; she listens to Ava’s conversations with herself. Questions, counting rhymes, whispered riddles. Tomorrow morning I’ll get the queen’s child.
The evening is cool, the humidity moving into the garden from the field, almost palpable. They eat in the kitchen at the table, sitting across from each other, Ava and Stella under the lamp in the company of the radio voices, the alternation of reports on war, climate catastrophes and jazz.
Don’t take so much sugar, Stella says; better if you take more apple sauce.
I’ll never eat in kindergarten again, Ava says; I’m not going to ever eat anything there. If I ever, one single time, eat something at the kindergarten again, I’m going to throw up. She gives Stella a long, searching look. Stella endures it, doesn’t comment. Ava eats five pancakes. She says, There’s a boy in my group, his name is Stevie. Then she gets up, walks around the table, sits down in Stella’s lap, and wraps her arms tightly around Stella’s neck.
*
Outside the sky turns dark blue and black at the edges. Lights go on in the house next door and in the house across the street. Ava’s bath mixture smells of peach and melon; her quilt rustles, her pyjamas are soft as moleskin. Stella puts Ava to bed, she reads to her, sings to her. The pear tree sways, it sways as in a dream. Stella thinks that she ought to see to it that Ava is more self-assured as she’s going to sleep, to see to it that Ava is more self-confident at the end of her day. She ought to be more pragmatic, the way she is with Esther, Julia, Walter; she ought to close the door to Ava’s room behind her with pragmatic authority and call out in a firm voice, Good night! Sleep well now. Go to sleep! But she finds it hard to do. The room is safe still, and the globe glows; the Atlantic glows. But the night is the more defined, it is the greater constant. Ava doesn’t know that, Stella thinks that she knows it. Tomorrow morning, if God will.
When is Papa coming back, Ava says. Maybe she does know after all.
In three days, Stella says. Three more sleeps, then Papa will come back.
Three
Next day the stranger comes again, at the same time. He apparently knows when Stella is at home, and when she’s home alone. Stella is in the kitchen looking in the cabinet under the sink for the brush for Ava’s shoes when the doorbell rings, and even though she hadn’t been thinking of him at all, even though she never assumed that he would come back so soon – even though she had actually forgotten him, he immediately comes to mind again. She knows who’s ringing the bell. She knows that it’s not the postman, not a messenger, not her neighbour, not a child in need of a bicycle pump, unfortunately not the chimney sweep, and not the man from the gas company. She puts the little suitcase in which Jason keeps the shoe polish things down in front of the sink, and straightens up. Her knee joints crack as she stands up, and for a moment she feels dizzy. She goes out of the kitchen down the hall to the front door. Looking out of the window she takes hold of the intercom receiver; she says, Yes.
Yes, as she looks at the stranger standing on the street outside her garden gate in the same clothes he was wearing yesterday, his hands in his jacket pockets, and, as far as she can see at this distance, the same totally expressionless face as yesterday. She can’t really see his face, but his aura is expressionless, and the way he now leans down to the intercom, not taking his hands out of his jacket pockets nor looking in her direction, but rather keeping his face turned towards the pavement – his manner is so flat and toneless that it gives Stella the chills.
Hello. It’s me. I wanted to ask if maybe today you have time for a conversation.
No, Stella says. She feels her knees trembling; she is surprised at how quickly that can happen. Is she really trembling again? It’s true. She is trembling.
She says, No, I don’t. I don’t have time today. And tomorrow I won’t have any time either; on the whole, I don’t have any time. I’m sorry, excuse me.
The man outside on the street says, You really don’t have to excuse yourself. You really don’t need to do that. He stands there still leaning forward as he says it, looking at the grass between the paving stones. He coughs.
Stella hangs up the receiver.
This he seems to understand, he straightens up stretching a little; it almost looks as if he were yawning.
You really don’t need to do that. What is it that makes this remark such an impertinence? Why is this remark an effrontery behind which something else seems to be concealed. The word ‘threat’ comes to Stella’s mind like a warning. Her mouth is dry and her heart barely beating. She sees the stranger walk to the corner of the street. From Jason’s window she watches him smoking; she wishes he would turn around, just once, turn around and look towards Jason’s room, and she hisses it: Turn around. But clearly the stranger is the stronger one. He smokes, as deliberately as yesterday; then he flicks the finished cigarette onto the pavement and walks off.
*
Later, Stella can’t remember any more whether she didn’t say, after all, that she knew what she needed to do and what not. Did she say it? I know what I need to do and what I don’t, and then hung the receiver back up? Or did she only think it. Wasn’t she quick or aggressive enough to say it out loud? She cannot remember. But she remembers clearly the feeling of humiliation and her decision to let this be the last time she ever talks to that man. Not even to go to the door from now on when the bell rings. Going to the door twice was enough; there will be no third time, and it remains to be seen if he’ll even ring a third time.
*
That evening she locks the front door from the inside.
Waiting till Ava is asleep, she takes the telephone to the kitchen, but then changes her mind; she doesn’t call Jason after all. She sits at the table in the kitchen, reading the paper and drinking a beer she’s taken from the refrigerator; she reads a story about Calcutta and another one about Siberia and then something else. She looks up between the lines and sees herself from outside, from a point outside the house, a corner of the garden perhaps, from the fence, the high grass in the uncultivated meadow. She sees a woman sitting alone at a table under a lamp, reading.
*
That’s me, Stella thinks. That’s me. Stella.
Four
Next morning the bell rings shortly before ten, and it rings as if it were a certainty that Stella wouldn’t come to the door. Casually, in passing. Much more briefly than yesterday or the day before yesterday. The ringing of someone who just wants to say, Here I am, I’m here, standing outside your door.
Stella sees him. She’s sitting upstairs in her room at her desk, and she sees him. She’s been sitting in her room at her desk by the window and waiting since returning home after taking Ava to kindergarten – the shift at Esther’s begins in an hour and a half. She saw him coming. He was coming from the left. Not from the direction of M
ain Street, from the shopping centre, from the bus route from the new development; he’s coming from the left, from her own neighbourhood. Appearing at the edge of her property, he walks at once both listlessly and purposefully along the fence, stops in front of the garden gate, turns and rings the bell, and almost simultaneously puts a hand into the inside pocket of the same old jacket and takes out something white, an envelope.
He lets the envelope drop into the mailbox attached to the fence and looks up towards Stella’s room. Then he crosses the street, turns into Forest Lane, heads down towards Main Street and disappears.
*
For a while Stella sits at her desk, leaning back, hands folded in her lap. A flock of sparrows flies up out of the trees in the garden across the way, as if hurled into the air by a large hand. Downstairs in the kitchen the gas hot water heater switches on and off again. Four minutes, five. Then she stands up.
The air in the garden outside is wonderful. It smells of late spring, sweet woodruff and boxwood. Postponing it is out of the question. Stella opens the mailbox and the white envelope drops into her hand like something that can’t be changed any more.
The envelope is of ordinary paper, precisely addressed. Stella’s first and last name, house number, street and postal code properly provided in a curving, feminine handwriting, a postage stamp, as if the sender had intended to have the post office deliver the letter, only to change his mind at the last moment. The stamp is neutral, inconspicuous, the head of a queen on a green background. Stella turns the letter over. It seems there’s nothing to hide; on the back are the sender’s name, house number, street and postal code written in the same matter-of-fact hand:
Mister Pfister.
Mister Pfister is the sender of the letter, and he lives, as Stella now reads, on the same street as she does. Seven or eight houses farther on; they are neighbours. It makes no sense to take a letter to the post office if you can deliver it yourself. Mr Pfister simply drops a letter like this into the mailbox personally; that’s no problem for him.
Stella doesn’t know her neighbours. People around here are extremely reserved; they make no effort to get to know each other. A female university student lives in the house next door with changing subtenants. In the house next to her, an Asian family with half-grown children; in the house across the way, a retired teacher; that’s as far as Stella has got. Mister Pfister’s being a neighbour narrows the radius from one moment to the next. She thought he would simply vanish again. She didn’t think that he was this close, had been all along, only a few houses farther on; that he lived here – just like her.
Stella sits down with the letter on the bench next to the front door. The outside thermometer says fourteen degrees centigrade, and the little olive tree ought to be watered; it stands just under the gutter and seldom gets any rain. A shiny blackbird comes hopping across the grass along the hedge. Stella crosses her legs, puts the letter down next to her on the bench.
Then she opens it. She tears it open. She picks it up and rips it open. The feeling she had only the day before yesterday – the quiet amazement, the memory of what it was like once to be tempted – is totally gone.
*
By evening the next day Jason is back. He puts Ava to bed while Stella cleans up in the kitchen; she can hear Ava jumping upstairs. Jason was away for a week. Ava is exuberant.
It’s nice when Jason comes back. And in a certain way also nice when he goes away again.
Jason builds houses. Restaurants, hotels, workshops, apartment houses, pavilions, factories, bungalows. Sometimes Stella thinks that maybe he really wanted to do something else. She couldn’t say why she thinks that; she can sense a certain disillusionment in the way Jason deals with his work, his reluctance to talk about it; she is glad that she doesn’t have to sense this disillusionment every day. She herself is not disillusioned about his work. He was already doing this work when she put her hand in his on the airplane as it took off; the dirt on his hand wasn’t from working as a sculptor but from laying tiles; and Stella claims that she knew that. Sometimes Jason draws a cat for Ava, a cottage with a smoking chimney, and also a big bee; sometimes he draws Ava with braids sitting at the kitchen table early in the morning in front of a bowl of porridge. Drawings that frighten and delight Ava; but Jason is hiding something, it’s in the way he then takes the drawings away from Ava. Probably, Stella thinks, Jason feels that he missed out on something. He hides the drawings in the waste-paper bin, and she retrieves them from the waste-paper bin and saves them for Ava. Jason earns enough money with his work, money for this house, for Stella and Ava, and the work distracts him and tires him. Without his work he would feel worse. Jason is calm only when he is tired. Back then, on the airplane, he was. So tired that he fell asleep before the plane had flown through the clouds. Otherwise he might not even have got involved with Stella. None of all they had here would have come to be. None of it, not even the glass of water on the table, and certainly not Ava’s little voice upstairs in the house.
*
Did I let go of your hand on the plane when I was sleeping?
No, you didn’t let go of my hand. I could feel that you were asleep; you twitched in your sleep; you were dreaming. I could tell you were dreaming.
They keep asking each other. The same question, the same answer. As if to hold on to the beginning, to keep reaffirming it.
*
Stella puts Jason’s clothes into the washing machine, his black work trousers, the blue overalls, the green shirts. Coins in the trouser pockets, a pencil, a pebble. Jason brought back a piece of wood for Ava with an ingrown pine cone; he brought her a booklet full of glittering decals. The piece of wood and the book are lying on the kitchen table, like proof of his return. Stella puts on her jacket, unfolds the second chair on the terrace, and turns off the light in the sunroom. This year the hornets simply moved from one corner of the shed to the other; when the light in the sunroom is turned on, they leave their nest, flying in the darkness across the lawn, bumping against the glass panes, and falling stunned onto the windowsill. Jason comes out on the terrace with two bottles of beer; he stops briefly and looks around as if to make sure where he actually is. Then he sits down next to Stella.
You look tired, he says. Ava says you should come upstairs again. To say goodnight and bring her something to drink.
In a little while, Stella says.
They sit next to each other looking out across the garden, to the wild meadow; skylarks swoop diagonally down into the grass, the nocturnal sky is lilac-coloured. Jason stretches and exhales. He opens the two beers with his lighter and says, Jesus. I have four days, maybe five; then I have to leave again. There’s something I’m doing wrong, and someday we’ll do something else, Stella; we can’t stay here like this forever.
When Ava has to start school, Stella says. She says, By then at the latest, a year and a half to go still.
Jason says, A year and a half. Do you know how long that is? You’ve got to come and see me at the construction site next weekend; you have to plan to do that, and you should make a note of it on the weekly schedule before someone else wants to take that time off. The first storey is done. The roof isn’t on yet; the stairway just reaches up into the sky. They’ve now decided on the materials to be used; they want the doors made of rusty metal. What do you think of that. Metal from barn doors; they want to see the traces of other people’s work when they sit down evenings by the fireplace.
Stella would like to stay with the image of the metal from barn doors; it’s a picture she could spend some time on, but she can’t stand it any longer. She takes Mister Pfister’s letter out of her jacket pocket; she wants to get it over with. She’s got to get it over with. She thought about not telling Jason about Mister Pfister’s letter. She thought about it pretty intensely. But she knows it’s better to tell Jason how matters stand than to let him find out on his own. If Jason were to find out on his own it might lead to misunderstandings. To a fight.
And Mister Pfister is
an unpredictable factor. Hard to say what might happen next.
Jason takes the letter, even that is a relief. He looks at Stella, takes the envelope from her hand, takes out the letter, awkwardly unfolds it and reads.
I wish you would look at me.
That you would look at me and listen to me. I also wish that we had always known each other; you’re getting older, and we don’t have much time left. You’ll smile when you look at me; it can’t be any other way. I’ll show you what I see: the thrush, her spotted feathers, the park, pages of the book I’m reading.
Good lord, Jason says. What is this? He reads the letter all the way to the end, folds it up again, and puts it back into the envelope. He looks at the envelope, both sides; puts it on the table in front of him, then he leans back. The expression on his face is really quite inscrutable. He says, OK. And what’s that supposed to mean?
Stella says, I have no idea. She thinks her voice sounds false, even though she’s trying to tell the truth. She says, I have no idea; I don’t know him. I’ve never seen him before. On Wednesday he stood outside the door for the first time and wanted – to talk to me.
He wanted what? Jason says; now he’s looking at Stella.
To talk to me, Stella says irritably. I can only repeat what he said. He said he would like to talk to me, and I said I had no time to have a conversation.
He was standing outside our front door, Jason says. He says, Is that right?
Where Love Begins Page 3