“I’m really going to miss those two,” she said. “Especially Erwin.”
She got off her bike and walked with me to the entrance of the old development building. She said she’d been one of the first ones in the complex. Back then nothing worked. The heat would shut off for a while and sometimes the power too. She’d had a lot to do with the two gatemen at the time. Erwin had helped her a lot. He was an unbelievably nice guy.
The empty gatehouse was depressing. I didn’t miss Biefer or Sandoz, but I had always been happy that there was somebody there when I came to work in the morning, someone who unlocked the door and turned on the lights, someone who began the day. Now the place seemed dead. The façades of the old buildings seemed even more uninviting than usual and there were no lights in any of the windows. Sooner or later it would all be cleared away. We were only guests there: our days were numbered, even if we acted as if we owned the place.
The violin maker parked his car. I waited for him at the entrance and we chatted a bit. He asked whether I liked it here, and I said it was just a temporary setup for me. At some point I was sure to leave this city. He said he’d stay as long as he could. He’d never find such a suitable studio again. While we were talking, Jana arrived, as did a journalist who had moved into the floor below us a few weeks before. We got to talking about Biefer and Sandoz. The journalist said he’d never been able to tell them apart. I asked what we’d ended up buying them as a going-away present. No one knew.
I had made a lunch appointment with a client. It was with regard to the construction of a double garage, my first job in months. We ate in a restaurant in the city. When I came back to the complex at two, the fog had finally begun to lift. I went down to the shore of the lake and looked out over the smooth, clear water. I was suddenly quite sure that I would never get away from here, that I would have to remain here until the end of my days, building garages and little one-family houses, or, if I had some luck, a kindergarten or a multiple-family house. We would all stay here, the violin maker, the journalist, Jana, and the others. Biefer was the only one who would manage to get away. Jana sat alone in the old weighing office bar and read the newspaper. I grabbed a coffee and sat with her. She thumbed back a few pages, folded the newspaper in the middle, and handed it to me over the table.
“Have you read this?” she asked and pointed to an obituary.
“Gertrud Biefer,” I real aloud: “After a serious illness, which she bore with great patience, our beloved wife, mother, and grandmother passed away on December 27th. A memorial was held for the family and close friends.”
“That must be Erwin’s wife,” said Jana. “His name’s written there. And those two below it, they must be his sons.”
She said it was crazy. Now that he finally had time to enjoy life. He’d often talked about trips he wanted to take after his retirement.
“He’s made plans to emigrate to Canada,” I said. Jana said she couldn’t imagine that, since his wife was so sick.
“I’m sure of it,” I said. “I helped him with the papers. He showed me the letter from the embassy and pictures of his property in Nova Scotia.”
Jana said again that she couldn’t believe it. I said she should call him up if she didn’t believe me, but she said it wasn’t really any of our business.
“Do you know where he lives?”
Jana shook her head. She said she’d look it up in the telephone book and send him a sympathy card.
The next morning the weather was so unfriendly that I went to work on foot. The fog was as thick as nearly every morning this time of year, but even from a distance I could see that there was light in the gatehouse. The blinds were up, and at the console sat Erwin Biefer in his blue uniform. He looked the same as ever, only he wasn’t smoking, and he wasn’t reading the paper. I moved closer and waved at him. He looked straight ahead as if he hadn’t noticed me. I knocked on the glass, but he still didn’t react. His eyes were half closed and the corners of his mouth were raised. He looked as if he were smirking, or beginning to cry. I waved again. When he still didn’t react, I moved on. Maybe an hour later someone knocked at the door to my office. It was Jana. She asked if I’d seen Erwin.
“I knocked on the glass,” I said. “It was like he didn’t see me.”
Jana thought we should notify someone, a doctor or the police or at least the administration. I said that I thought it’d be better to wait it out. “He lost his wife. I can understand why he doesn’t want to sit around the house.”
In the old weighing office that afternoon, Biefer was the only topic of conversation. Everyone had seen him and were now discussing what was to be done. The room was filled with smoke. When somebody came or went a gush of cold winter air rushed in. The man who ran the bar turned the music down and joined the discussion. He’d known Biefer the longest. He said he’d tried to open the door to the gatehouse, but it was locked. It would have to be broken down, if it came to that. I didn’t say anything about Biefer’s plans to emigrate, and when Jana wanted to mention it, I made a gesture and shook my head. Suddenly someone called, “There he is!” and pointed out the window. Outside, Biefer shuffled past, looking straight ahead. He was only wearing his blue uniform, and his face was white from the cold. We were silent for a moment. Then the journalist suggested someone go out and try to speak with him. Who knew him best? We all looked at each other. Finally Jana said she’d try it.
We stood at the window and watched how she walked alongside Biefer and talked to him. He didn’t say anything back, just looked forward and kept going. After a while, Jana came back. She said it didn’t make any sense. Erwin seemed not to have noticed her at all. The journalist doubted there was much we could do. Biefer was a free man. No one could force him to speak with us if he didn’t want to. Someone could tell the administration if we decided that was necessary. But everyone agreed this was a bad idea. We decided to wait and see. A little meekly, we returned to work.
From then on, Biefer was there every day. He sat at his accustomed place most of the time, wandering through the complex only occasionally. Jana tried to speak with him a few more times. Finally she gave up. She told me her sympathy card had been sent back to her in the mail with a note that the addressee had moved without giving a forwarding address. We decided to spend one of the next evenings in the violin maker’s studio, which had the best view of the gatehouse. We wanted to watch Biefer and see where he went.
The violin maker opened a bottle of wine and drank a glass with us. At seven he gave us the key and told us he was heading home. Jana and I sat down at the window, drank the wine, and looked over at the gatehouse. We had turned off the light to be able to see better and in order not to be seen in turn. Although we’d known each other a long time, we’d never exchanged more than a few words. Now Jana began to talk about her childhood in a mountain village and how she’d left at sixteen to take her oral exams. Since then she’d barely had any contact with her family. She would drive to their town once a year at most. Her parents couldn’t understand her art, and she’d never said a word to them about her living with a woman. She could imagine how they’d react. I asked what kind of art she did anyway. She said it was hard to explain, but she’d be happy for me to visit her in her studio. Then she’d show me the stuff she made. We were already pretty tipsy and Jana laughed and said we should invite Erwin to have a glass of wine with us. Then we were quiet and looked out the window. The moon had risen, almost as full and light as the snow. Its light outshone every one of the floodlights that lit the abandoned site. In the snow was a complicated pattern of foot and car tracks. Over there, in the window of the gatehouse, the little lamp was still burning.
“Have you noticed the look in his eyes?” Jana asked. “Like he’s far away.”
“I wonder why he wanted to go to Canada of all places,” I said.
“The main thing is having a goal,” Jana said.
At eleven, Biefer stood up and turned off the light. Then nothing else happened. We waited a bit, but w
hen he didn’t come out, we finally went home.
January was unusually cold that year. Ice formed at the lakeshore, though the waves broke it up again. The wind pushed the chunks over one another, forming odd landscapes that were strikingly beautiful. The snow, which had fallen shortly after Christmas, remained on the ground, becoming tightly packed and dirty. In some places in the complex, it had frozen into a thick sheet of ice. On the rare occasions Biefer would leave the gatehouse at all, he would move very slowly, almost without lifting his feet from the ground.
Then, one day toward the end of the month, he disappeared. When I came to work in the morning, there was no light in the gatehouse, though the blinds were raised. The door was unlocked. I opened it cautiously and went in. It still smelled like pipe smoke, but the heater was cold. It took some time before I found the light switch. The door to the back room wasn’t locked either. It was tiny. There was a thin rubber foam mattress on the floor. Otherwise there were no signs that anyone might have been living here. I went back to the front room, started the oil heater, and sat down at the console. I waited. I didn’t know what for. When a car drove into the complex I instinctively raised my hand and greeted the driver. It got warmer. Dawn came, but the sky was still gray and solid. Around ten, Jana arrived. I waved to her, and she put her bike away and came inside to meet me.
“Has he left?” she asked.
“I was waiting for you,” I said.
She stood behind me, as I had stood behind Erwin Biefer a month before. She laid a hand on my shoulder. I turned to her and she nodded at me. Now, for the first time, as if I’d been waiting on a witness, I opened the drawer. I was not surprised to find the light brown briefcase in it.
TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN BY DUSTIN LOVETT
[UNITED KINGDOM: ENGLAND]
DEBORAH LEVY
FROM Swimming Home
We realized my friend and I
That the little car had driven us into a new era
And although we were both already mature men
We had just been born
[GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE]
A MOUNTAIN ROAD. MIDNIGHT.
When Kitty Finch took her hand off the steering wheel and told him she loved him, he no longer knew if she was threatening him or having a conversation.
She was driving too fast. He dared not look down at the waterfalls roaring against the rocks or the uprooted shrubs that clung to the sides of the mountain. Sex had brought them to the edge of something. His tongue tasted of her. Her hipbones had gored into him. Her silk dress was falling off her shoulders as she bent over the steering wheel.
He smoothed down his hair and glanced at his watch. A rabbit ran across the road and the car swerved.
He heard himself say, “Why don’t you pack a rucksack and see China like you said you wanted to?”
“Yes,” she said.
He could smell petrol. Her hands swooped over the steering wheel like the seagulls they had counted from their hotel room two hours ago.
She asked him to open his window so she could hear the insects calling to each other.
He wound down the window and told her, gently, to keep her eyes on the road.
“Yes,” she said again, her eyes now back on the road.
He leaned his head out of the window and felt the cold air sting his lips. Early humans had once lived in this mountain forest. They knew the past lived inside their bodies and in rocks and trees and they knew desire made them awkward, bad, mysterious. This was the road they were on, cut from these ancient memories. Was having sex with Kitty Finch a transgression or a mistake? When he was fifteen he had very lightly grazed his left wrist with a razor blade. Nothing serious. Just an experiment. The blade was cool and sharp. His wrist was warm and soft. They were not supposed to be paired together. It was a teenage game of Snap. He had snapped. Like the razor blade and his wrist, sex with Kitty Finch had been a perverse pleasure and a pain, but most of all a mistake. He stared miserably at his watch again and asked her to please drive him safely home to his wife and daughter.
“Yes,” she said, and thumped her foot on the accelerator. “Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely.”
The swimming pool on the grounds of the tourist villa was more like a pond than the languid blue pools in holiday brochures. A pond in the shape of a rectangle, carved from stone by a family of Italian stonecutters living in Antibes.
The body was floating near the deep end where a line of pine trees kept the water cool in their shade.
“Is it a bear?” Jonathan Mines waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the water. He could feel the sun burning into the shirt his Hindu tailor had made for him from a roll of raw silk. The silk was too raw. His back was on fire. Even the roads were melting in the July heat wave.
His daughter Nina Mines, thirteen years old, standing at the edge of the pool in her new cherry-print bikini, glanced anxiously at her mother. Rachel Mines was unbuckling her watch as if she was about to dive in. From the corner of her eye she could see Mitchell and Laura, the two family friends sharing the villa with them for the summer, put down their bags and walk towards the stone steps that lead to the shallow end.
Laura, a slender giantess at six foot three, kicked off her sandals and waded in up to her knees. A battered yellow inflatable mattress knocked against the mossy sides, scattering the bees that were in various stages of dying in the water.
“What do you think it is Rachel?”
Nina could see from where she was standing that it was a woman swimming naked under the water. She was on her stomach, both arms stretched out like a starfish, her long hair floating like seaweed at the sides of her body.
“Jonathan thinks it’s a bear,” Rachel Mines replied in a detached war-correspondent voice.
“If it’s a bear I’m going to have to shoot it.” Mitchell had recently purchased two antique Persian handguns at the flea market in Nice and shooting things was on his mind.
Yesterday they had all been discussing a newspaper article about a sixty-four kilo bear that had walked down from the mountains in Los Angeles and taken a dip in a Hollywood actor’s pool. The actor had called the authorities, the bear was shot with a dart and then released in the nearby mountains. Jonathan Mines had wondered out loud what it was like to be tranquillised and then have to stumble home? Did it ever get home?
Nina watched her mother dive into the murky green water and swim towards the woman. Saving the lives of bloated floating bodies in rivers was probably the sort of thing her journalist mother did all the time. She disappeared to Northern Ireland and Lebanon and Afghanistan and then she came back as if she’d just nipped down the road to buy a pint of milk. Her hand, magnified under the water, was about to clasp the ankle of whomever it was floating in the pool. A sudden violent splash made her run to her father who grasped her sunburnt shoulder, making her scream out loud.
When a head emerged from the water, its mouth open and gasping for breath, for one panicked second, Nina thought it was roaring like a bear.
A woman with dripping waist-length hair climbed out of the pool and ran to one of the plastic recliners. She looked like she might be in her early twenties, but it was hard to tell because she was frantically skipping from one chair to another searching for her dress. It had fallen onto the paving stones but no one helped her because they were staring at her naked body.
Nina felt light-headed in the fierce heat. The bitter sweet smell of lavender drifted towards her, suffocating her as the sound of the woman’s panting breath mingled with the drone of the bees in the wilting flowers. It occurred to her she might be sun-sick because she felt as if she was going to faint. In a blur she could see the woman’s breasts were surprisingly full and round for someone all made from bones. Her thighs were joined to the jutting hinges of her hips like the dead legs of the dolls she used to bend and twist as a child. The only thing that seemed real about the woman was the triangle of golden pubic hair glinting in the sun
. It was somehow an obscene intervention in the design of her. A suggestion that she could be explored and entered, a thought that made Nina fold her arms across her chest and hunch her back in an effort to make her own body disappear.
“Your dress is over there.” Jonathan Mines pointed to the pile of crumpled blue cotton lying under the recliner.
They had all been staring at her for an embarrassingly long time.
The woman grabbed it and deftly slipped the flimsy dress over her head.
“Thanks. I’m Kah…Kah…Kitty Finch by the way.”
She stumbled on her name as if she was trying to remember it.
Nina realised her mother was still in the pool. When she climbed up the stone steps, her wet swimming costume was covered in pine needles.
“I’m Rachel Mines. My husband thought you were a bear.”
Jonathan Mines dragged his hands through his hair and glared at his wife.
“Of course I didn’t think she was a bear.”
Kitty Finch twisted her lips in what might have been an effort not to laugh. Her eyes were grey like the tinted windows of Mitchell’s hired car, a Mercedes, parked on the gravel at the front of the villa.
“I hope you don’t mind me using the pool. I’ve just arrived and it’s sooo hot. There’s been a mistake with the rental dates.”
“What sort of mistake?” Laura glared at the young woman as if she had just been handed a parking ticket.
“Well, I thought I was staying here from this Saturday for a fortnight. But the caretaker…”
Best European Fiction 2010 Page 35