Where Love Begins

by Judith Hermann

  I’ll just walk over there, Jason says.

  He sits up, rubs his eyes.

  He looks at Stella, he looks past her; he says, Is that all right with you? I’d just walk over there again.

  Yes, Stella says. She smiles in a way that feels strange even to herself. She’d like to say, I’m sorry, but she feels that this sentence can’t encompass the extent of what it is that she’s sorry about; actually she doesn’t even know what exactly she’s sorry about. Is it an imposition for Jason to go over there? To deal with Mister Pfister because she has to deal with him?

  It would be better if he stayed here. Stayed with her.

  Well, see you then, Jason says.

  See you soon, Stella says.

  *

  She waits in the garden. On the chair where Jason had been sitting. Noontime is very quiet. It’s getting hot. In one of the other gardens a lawn mower starts up, and far away a child calls. Butterflies startle up from the lawn, the sky is grey. Someone rides past the house on a bike. Stella yawns.

  After a while Jason comes back. He says, He wasn’t there. Or he didn’t open the door; that could be it too, but I think he wasn’t there. What a neglected hovel.

  Jason looks around, looks at his own house as if he were comparing it. From the outside, the effect of a window with broken shells lying on its sill. Empty bottles by the terrace door, Ava’s jacket hanging over a spade handle.

  Stella says nothing.

  Nor does she say, I knew he wouldn’t be there. It was obvious that he wouldn’t be there.

  Mister Pfister will never be there when Jason goes over there. He isn’t answerable to Jason; he’ll never be at home, never open his door to Jason.

  *

  But she runs into him when she goes shopping the following day. Early in the evening, at the shopping centre, at the checkout in the supermarket. She went there by bicycle, intending to buy milk, eggs, alphabet noodles, butter, nothing else; she decides to take a shopping basket instead of a cart, is walking to the turnstile through which you go to get inside the shop, when she sees Mister Pfister standing at the last cash register.

  Hard to believe that he goes shopping. Gets hungry, wants to buy himself something to eat. Says please and thank you, good day, goodbye.

  It’s the first time Stella has seen him outside. In everyday life, there he stands, waiting in the queue at the checkout counter next to a cigarette machine under a monitor on which a weather forecast alternates with advertisements for car-body paint shops; in the background, the labyrinth of grocery shelves, pyramids of water melons, references to products, and over it all, hellish music. He’s got the things he wants to buy assembled in a cardboard box; he holds the box to his chest, moves one mechanical step forward in the queue, a man like all the others, Mister Pfister exists.

  Stella stops, stands there almost devoutly. She thinks, astonished, I didn’t consider it possible that he existed. But he exists. He does exist after all. Here he is, he is here.

  She recognises him from his posture, his expression; she is certain, yet she is surprised at how young he is, how good-looking and how tired. He’s wearing a black hoodie sweater. No jacket any more, in spite of the early evening, early summer cold. She can’t see what’s inside his cardboard box, what he’s buying. He takes another step forward and puts the box on the conveyor belt; then he looks up, maybe because he senses that someone is looking at him. His eyes move searchingly over the people. Meet Stella’s gaze.

  Mister Pfister looks at her.

  Stella looks at Mister Pfister; she thinks, Can you feel that the entire way one person can take to approach another is encompassed in this look. The way there, and the way back too.

  Anger, courtesy, plus something else.

  Stella almost wants to smile. With a great effort she manages to control the childish impulse to smile that threatens to burst through. She almost wants to say hello; the moment of recognition is so powerful that it seems the gracious thing to do, Oh, we know each other, hello. But there’s no need to greet Mister Pfister; he knows that she has recognised him, that she knows him. And he doesn’t smile, not even a little bit. To be precise, he doesn’t smile at all. Instead, he will wait. He will wait for her outside by the door, to begin what’s been demanded all along here: a conversation.

  Perhaps it will be easy; in spite of everything it might be easy in a way. Stella might say, Don’t do it any more, you hear me. Do you understand, stop ringing the doorbell, all that mail; just stop coming by our house; give it up. Give up; that’s how she could say it.

  Stella breaks eye contact with Mister Pfister. It’s possible he already broke eye contact with her earlier. How long were they looking at each other? No window, no garden gate, no fence separating them from each other.

  Stella enters the supermarket through the turnstile; she doesn’t turn around again. She buys milk, eggs, alphabet noodles, butter, the things she wanted to buy, nothing more, nothing less, but she is in more of a hurry than usual; she is rushing. She dashes through the aisles, feeling utterly tense, and by the time she turns around the last rack of shelves before the checkout counter, those for lemonade powder, chocolate and candy, in front of which Ava always wants to stand forever, Mister Pfister is already gone. He has paid for his stuff – which Stella would have liked to see, knowing that Jason would find this curiosity of hers distasteful – and is already outside, he has already gone off. What is it that Stella actually wants to know, and how far can she stretch this question.

  She puts her things down on the conveyor belt at the checkout. Her heart is beating more calmly now; even as she’s counting her change she has an inkling of an impending disappointment.

  Have a good evening.

  You too.

  The car park outside the supermarket is deserted. Stella’s face is hot. Mister Pfister is nowhere in sight. Mister Pfister has lost his need, his fervent desire to speak to Stella. That’s both hurtful and a relief. But why? Why doesn’t he want to speak to Stella any more; what has changed, been lost. The long look between her and him becomes at first questionable and then humiliating. Stella puts her purchases into the basket on her bicycle. She thinks, Maybe I got even older these past weeks, and she has to laugh a little at that. She pushes her bike across the car park and Main Street, along Forest Lane, past the first houses of the development; she walks on the left side of the street and, as her house comes into view, the jasmine hedge, the fence, Jason’s car in the driveway, the open dormer window, she sees Mister Pfister standing at her garden gate. She’s still quite a distance away from the house, but she sees him clearly; he rings the bell, doesn’t wait, turns away and calmly walks off at a measured pace, down the street towards his house.

  Stella stands still, hands tightly gripping the handlebars of her bike. She can’t believe it. Mister Pfister has rung the bell at her gate even though he knows that she isn’t home. Apparently he also knows that Jason and Ava aren’t home. Jason and Ava are at the children’s party in the Community Centre. Stella baked a lemon cake for it and standing outside her house had waved after them until they were out of sight. Mister Pfister couldn’t wait outside the shopping centre for Stella, but he has to stop outside her house; she can understand that as a tic, a compulsion; it’s simply impossible for Mister Pfister to walk by her house without ringing the bell. No matter whether Stella is there or not. Doesn’t give a damn. But she can also interpret it this way – There is no Stella. The Stella Mister Pfister has in mind doesn’t exist; in any case, she has nothing to do with that Stella. Mister Pfister recognised her, but that’s not who he’s interested in – this Stella who goes shopping after work in flat-heeled sandals and with a tired face without make-up, tense, harried, and obviously needy, this Stella doesn’t interest him. Mister Pfister is interested in Stella in her locked house. In her face behind the small windowpane next to the door, her distant figure in the chair at the edge of the lawn far back in the garden, in the Stella waiting at her desk upstairs in her room. That Stell
a is the one Mister Pfister is interested in. An imagined Stella. His Stella.

  *

  Stella realises that there’s nothing she can do against this. She can’t take this other Stella away from Mister Pfister.

  She watches him walking away, his boyish figure; he’s pulled the black hood over his head, it looks like a suit of armour. She rolls her bike slowly forward until he arrives at his own house, having passed all the houses she’s now familiar with. She waits until he’s disappeared into his garden, and she knows that he knows that she is watching him.

  Fourteen

  I’d like to show you something, Jason says.

  He takes Stella by the hand and goes outside with her; hand in hand they walk to the garden gate; later Stella will think of this hand-in-hand as a betrayal. Jason opens the gate and steps with Stella out into the street. At the far end of the street a large flock of birds alights on the pavement. The wind is high up in the treetops, the pine trees at the edge of the forest creak. Stella feels an inordinately burdensome grief, a longing for another life or a life she once had; exactly which life she can’t recall.

  Jason’s hand is dry and warm. It is the most familiar thing about Jason.

  He stops in front of the garden gate, lets go of Stella and looks at her. She is supposed to see something that he saw long ago, something about this situation is like a déjà-vu. But Stella doesn’t see it. Jason touches her shoulder, he turns her back around to face the house and waits; then he points at the mailbox; he points at it. On the mailbox, under Stella’s and Jason’s names, there is a third name written neatly and like theirs with a white grease pencil directly on the metal of the box, except in a different, a distinctive, feminine handwriting.

  Mister Pfister.

  Don’t touch it, Jason says, quite superfluously.

  He says, Do you have any idea how long that’s been there? Can you somehow make sense of this?

  Fifteen

  Ava is sitting in the sandpit, talking to herself. She whispers, sternly shakes her head, with her tongue makes soft, clicking sounds that she must have heard from the aunties in the kindergarten. She has spread some objects out on the wooden board of the sandpit; she is offering them.

  An apricot.

  A little car.

  A pen, a seashell, a shekel, a coin.

  Ava pushes the objects on the board back and forth, she rearranges them; then she returns them to their original positions.

  She says, You can buy the apricot, or you can take the shell. You can make a necklace for yourself with the shell. This here is a car. Papa’s car from his childhood. A very old car. Old.

  She puts the pail upside down on the board and the car on top of the pail. She gets out of the sandpit and walks over to the edge of the field, she looks at it and thinks it over thoroughly; then she snaps off a yarrow, a poppy and a chamomile flower, ties them together into a bristly bouquet, and puts the bouquet on the board next to the apricot.

  She says pensively, I’m thirsty.

  She says, Today at kindergarten there was a man nobody knew. Nobody knew him. He had on a black sweater with a hood, and he told me to say hello to you, Mama. I didn’t say anything. Do we know him? Have you ever seen him?

  Sixteen

  When Stella picks up Esther and Walter’s key from the office, Paloma, telephone receiver at her ear, signals to her to wait. She beckons with her index finger, indicating the chair in front of her desk.

  Stella makes coffee while Paloma is telephoning. She listens to Paloma’s unemotional, cool voice. If the family doesn’t want to rely on the nursing staff, we have to end the relationship. You’re underestimating your mother. You underestimate your mother’s abilities, the mental faculties of elderly people in general.

  Paloma listens to the voice on the receiver with a nasty smile. The kettle rumbles and switches off. The smell of the instant coffee is delicious and artificial, reminding Stella unfailingly of campsites, nights in tents, waking up by the ocean; it never and will not later ever remind her of Paloma’s office, of the postcards above Paloma’s desk, or of the static stillness of those years.

  She takes a mug with a tiger on it for herself and one with the words destroy something on it for Paloma. She waits, then pours water over the two teaspoons of coffee, stirs some coffee whitener into each, then places Paloma’s mug next to the phone.

  Paloma says, Think it over. Best wishes for the time being; please get in touch once you’ve made your decision; she makes a horrible grimace, puts the receiver back and turns to Stella. She says abruptly, This morning there was a man here. Standing outside the office when I arrived; could be he’d already been waiting for a while. He asked about personnel. About a nurse for his mother. He asked about you.

  What did you say, Stella says. She feels as if she’s falling, falling forward, towards Paloma.

  Well, he asked for your phone number, Paloma says slowly. To contact you; he wanted your number.

  Paloma looks at Stella for a long time. Then she says, Of course I didn’t give it to him. I said I was in charge of making arrangements. He can’t choose his own personnel here anyway.

  Yes, Stella says.

  Paloma says, Stella, I’m not sure. That was a pretty weird sort of guy, and he didn’t look like someone who’d be worried about his sick mother. To be frank, he looked deranged. I told him we were fully booked. We had no available staff. A young man in a black hooded sweater, good-looking actually. But all done in. Do you know who that could have been?

  No, Stella says. Don’t know, no idea.

  She has to get out of there before she starts to cry; she really has to see to it that she can get out of there, disappear.

  She says, OK, Paloma. I’ve got to go now. Esther is waiting. I’ve got to go. I’ll come back later. Maybe you’ll still be here then.

  I’ll still be here, Paloma says. Of course I’ll still be here then. Why did you make coffee for yourself if you have to leave right away. You’re as white as a sheet, Stella. What’s the matter with you?

  Seventeen

  Stella tries not to think about Mister Pfister. She tries to do away with him by not thinking of him, to get him out of her house by not thinking about him. It’s impossible.

  She wakes at daybreak; the coordinates of the days intrude into her half-sleep.

  Ava.

  The house in the development on the outskirts of the city, the room under the roof, the bed with the window on the right, the not-quite closed door on the left, and on the other side of the door, the hall, Ava’s room, Ava.

  Jason. Present, his slender form next to her in bed so surprisingly slight in sleep; Jason’s absence, Jason rather far away, and the bed next to Stella is empty.

  Time of day, morning around six, and the season, summer.

  The window is open; many diverse and wary bird voices.

  And Mister Pfister. Still there.

  Stella turns on her side and imagines Mister Pfister waking up. He wakes up in his room next to the kitchen. She is sure he doesn’t use all the rooms in his house, that the many rooms in his house are too much of a challenge for him. He’ll keep the doors to them closed, possibly locked; he’ll only rarely go upstairs to the first floor. He has retreated to the room next to the kitchen, the room that corresponds to Stella and Jason’s living room. The room is dark because the picture window is draped with black felt. Mister Pfister isn’t awakened by daylight and wakes up at all sorts of times, sometimes at dawn, sometimes during the night, also in the afternoon or early evening. Time, Stella thinks, is relative for Mister Pfister. It is dark when he wakes up, or it is bright, it is dawn turning into day or already dusk turning back to night; it rains, snows, then the sun rises.

  For Mister Pfister time is different, it ticks differently; Stella’s time is what determines Mister Pfister’s time. If Stella’s time didn’t exist, and Ava’s and Jason’s – then there would be a different one for him. Mister Pfister wakes up and lies there, simply lies there with closed eyes, and
at six o’clock in the morning he hears exactly the same things as Stella – birds, the distant noise of traffic, the slamming of car doors – yet under or maybe over it, he hears something completely different, a mesh, a web of voices that Stella can’t hear, a disembodied whispering.

  Then he gets up.

  Stella sees Mister Pfister getting up and going into the kitchen and turning on the kettle. He rolls himself a cigarette while he waits for the water to boil. The kitchen is only dimly lit. There’s quite a lot of paper on the floor; in a bowl in the corner by the window onions are sending glowing green shoots up into the air like flames; there are far too many bottles in this kitchen, beer bottles, wine bottles, pickle jars, and piles of paper under which the essential things – pens, packets of tobacco, lighters, notes, viewpoints and thoughts – get lost; but they’ll all turn up again, no need to worry about that. Nothing gets lost; it all goes around in a circle.

  The water is boiling. Mister Pfister pours hot water on top of a large spoonful of coffee in a dirty mug; the image of the dirty mug fills Stella with satisfaction. He drinks his coffee black, without milk and without sugar. What does the aroma of coffee in the morning remind Mister Pfister of; I don’t even want to know, Stella thinks; I really don’t want to know.

  Mister Pfister opens a beer to go with his coffee. He finds one among all the empty bottles; there’s always one last beer still there. The cigarette crackles extravagantly. Everything is hot and cold at the same time, light and dark, soft and loud. And paper is scattered everywhere. Paper spreads from the kitchen into the living room, crunched-up paper, paper densely covered with writing, graph paper from school notebooks in the midst of stacks of newspapers, notebooks, boxes, piles of wrapping paper, advertisements and cardboard; but Mister Pfister strides through it all as if over water, he strides back to the living room and only now turns on the music, frees up the room – it’s Bach.

  It’s all you can hear.

  Stella has never before heard Bach. Not knowingly heard Bach, not this way. She decides never to listen to Bach. Never.