10
She talked. She’d given up her studies, because her husband needed her. He had got a job as a senior physician, although he had no doctorate; it was assumed he would remedy that as fast as possible. Besides which, he had taken on the editing of an important professional journal. She wrote and line-edited for him. “I was good. Helmut’s successor offered me a job as assistant editor. But Helmut told him it would have to wait till I was a merry widow.”
Then the children came. They arrived quickly one after the other, and if there hadn’t been complications with the fourth, there would have been more. “You have a daughter—I don’t know how you did it, but with four children there was absolutely no question of picking up my studies again. I had my hands full. But it was also great to watch the children grow up and make something of themselves. The eldest is a judge in the federal court, the next is a museum director, and the girls are housewives and mothers like me, but one is married to a professor and the other to a conductor. I have thirteen grandchildren—do you have some too?”
He shook his head. “My daughter isn’t married and has no children. She’s a little autistic.”
“What was your wife like?”
“She was almost as tall and thin as I am. She wrote poetry—wonderful, crazy, despairing poetry. I love the poems, although I don’t often understand them. I also didn’t understand the depressions Julia battled her whole life long. Or what triggered them and what ended them, if there was some rhythm of the moon or the sun that played a role, or the things she ate and drank.”
“But she didn’t kill herself!”
“No, she died of cancer.”
She nodded. “After me you looked for someone completely different. I wish I’d read more in my life, but for the longest time all I read were the things I had to edit and then the other things I wanted to read because they were what the children were reading and I wanted to be able to talk to them about them—so I got out of the habit. I should have plenty of time now, but what would I do with anything once I’d read it?”
“I was standing in the kitchen as you came up the short path from the street to the house, and I recognized your step immediately. You walk as firmly as you ever did. Clack, clack, clack—I’ve never met a woman who walks with such determination. Back then I thought you were as determined as your walk was.”
“And back then I thought you’d lead me as lightly and safely through life as you led me when we were dancing.”
“I would like to have lived the way I danced. Julia didn’t dance.”
“Were you happy with her? Are you happy about your life?”
He breathed deeply in and out and leaned back. “I can no longer imagine life without her. I also can’t imagine any life other than the one I have. Of course I can figure out this possibility or that, but it’s all abstract.”
“That’s not how it is with me. I’m always imagining things differently from the way they happened. What if I’d finished my degree and then worked? If I’d actually taken on the job as assistant editor? If I’d got a divorce from Helmut when he had his first affair? If I’d raised the children less seriously and severely and allowed them to be more chaotic and happy? If I’d seen life as more than a mechanism of duties and responsibilities? If you hadn’t left me?”
“I …” He stopped.
She’d had to say it again. But she didn’t want a fight and she didn’t want to anger him and asked, “Will I be able to understand the things you’ve written? I’d like to try.”
“I’ll send you something that may perhaps interest you. Will you give me your address?”
She opened her purse and gave him a card.
“Thank you.” He held it in his hand. “I never got as far as having cards in my life.”
She laughed. “It’s not too late.” She stood up. “Would you be kind enough to call a taxi?”
She followed him into his study. It was next to the room with the terrace and had the same view of the mountains. While he was on the telephone, she looked around. The walls here too were crammed with bookcases, the desk covered in books and papers, on one side a table with a computer, on the other a bulletin board full of bills, claim tickets, newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, photographs. The tall, gaunt woman with the sad eyes must be Julia, the younger woman with the closed expression his daughter. In one picture a black dog with eyes as sad as Julia’s gazed into the camera. In another Adalbert, in a black suit, stood next to other men in black suits, as if they were all a school class late for their leaving exams. The man in uniform and the woman dressed as a nurse standing outside a front door must be Adalbert’s parents.
Then she saw the little black-and-white photo of him and her. They were standing on a platform in each other’s arms. It couldn’t be … She shook her head.
He put down the receiver and came to stand next to her. “No, that’s not when we were saying goodbye. We picked you up at the station once, your friend Elena, my friend Eberhard, and I. It was late afternoon and we all went to the river and had a picnic. Eberhard had inherited a wind-up gramophone from his grandfather and found some old 78 records at a junk dealer’s and we danced into the night. Do you remember?”
“Did that picture always hang next to your desk?”
He shook his head. “Not in the first years. But since then. The taxi will be here any minute.”
They went out to the street. “Do you take care of the garden?”
“No, a gardener does that. I prune the roses.”
“Thank you,” she said, put her arms around him and felt his bones. “Are you healthy? You’re nothing but skin and bones.”
He put his right arm around her and held her. “Look after yourself, Nina.”
Then the taxi came. Adalbert held open the door, helped her in, and closed the door behind her. She turned around and saw him standing there, getting smaller and smaller.
11
Emilia had been waiting in the foyer. She leapt to her feet and ran to meet her. “How was it?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow while we’re driving. All I want to do now is have supper and go to a movie.”
They ate on the terrace in the inner courtyard. It was early, they were the first guests, and the square of houses protected them from the sounds of the street and of traffic. A blackbird was singing on a roof, the bells rang at seven o’clock, otherwise everything was still. Emilia was rather hurt and didn’t want to talk, so they ate in silence.
She didn’t care what kind of film she saw. She hadn’t been to a cinema very often in her life and had never got used to television. But she found the bright, moving images on the big screen overwhelming, and this was an evening when she wanted to be overwhelmed. The film achieved this, but not in a way that made her forget everything; it made her remember—dreams she dreamed as a child, her longing for something bigger and more wonderful than her everyday life of family and school, her pathetic attempts to find it in ballet and the piano. The little boy whose story they were watching was fascinated by film, gave the man in the little Sicilian village who ran the projector no peace till he let him help in the projection room and finally become a director. In the end the only one of her childhood dreams that survived was the dream of finding the right man, and she hadn’t managed to do that, either.
But she had never allowed herself self-pity and she wasn’t going to allow it today, either. Emilia came out of the movie theater with tears in her eyes, put her arms around her, and held her close. She patted Emilia’s back soothingly; she couldn’t bring herself to put her own arm around her granddaughter. Emilia soon let go again and they walked side by side through the city in the bright summer evening to the hotel.
“You really want to go home tomorrow?”
“I don’t have to be back early, so we don’t have to set off early. Is breakfast at nine okay?”
Emilia nodded. But she wasn’t happy with her grandmother and the last two days. “You’re going to sleep now as if nothing had happened?”
She laughed. “Even if nothing happened, I don’t sleep as if nothing happened. You know, when you’re young, you’re either asleep or wide awake and up and about. When you’re old, there’s a third possibility: the nights when you’re neither asleep nor awake and up and about. It’s a state all its own, and one of the secrets of getting old is to accept it as such. Why don’t you go for a wander through the city again if you want, I’ll allow you.”
She went up to her room and got into bed, arming herself for a night of sleeping and waking and remembering and thinking and sleeping and waking again. But when she woke up, it was morning.
Then they were in the car, driving along the little road again, following the winding river. It had dawned on Emilia that her questions were getting her nowhere, so she’d stopped asking. She waited.
“It wasn’t the way I told you on the drive here. He didn’t leave me. I left him.” That basically was it. But for Emilia’s sake she kept talking. “When we said goodbye at the station, I knew he’d be coming back soon, and also that he wouldn’t be able to write or call. I could have waited for him. But my parents had found out that I wasn’t doing any practical training course, and sent Helmut. He was to bring me home, and he did. I was afraid of life with Adalbert, of the fact that he’d grown up in poverty and didn’t care, of his mind, which I couldn’t follow, and of the break with my parents. Helmut was my world, and I ran back to that world.”
12
“Why did you tell me a different story?”
“I believed it had all happened differently. Even while I was talking to Adalbert.”
“But you can’t just …”
“Yes, Emilia, you can. I couldn’t bear it, that I made the wrong decision. Adalbert says there are no wrong decisions—I couldn’t bear it that I’d decided the way I’d decided. And did I decide at all? What I felt back then was that I was being pulled first toward Adalbert and then even more strongly back into my old world and to Helmut. When I wasn’t happy in that old world and with Helmut, I didn’t forgive Adalbert for not seeing my fear and helping me, and not holding on to me. I felt abandoned by him and my memory turned this into the entire scene when he said goodbye on the platform.”
“But you were the one who decided!”
She didn’t know how to answer. That it didn’t make any difference, because she’d had to live with the consequences one way or the other? That she didn’t actually know what making decisions meant? After Helmut had brought her home, it was a given that she was going to marry him, it was a given that the children would be born, and it was a given that he would have affairs. The duties she had lived for were there and had to be fulfilled—where was the decision in that?
Irritated, she said, “Should I have decided not to take care of the children? Not to look after them when they were sick, not to talk about what was on their minds, not to take them to concerts and plays, not to find the right schools, and not to help with their homework? And with you grandchildren—should I have neglected my duties—”
“Your duties? Are we just duties to you? Were your children just duties for you?”
“No, I love you all, of course. I …”
“That sounds as if love to you is just another duty.”
She felt Emilia was interrupting her too often. At the same time she didn’t know what to say next. They left the country road and threaded their way into the heavy traffic on the Autobahn. Emilia drove fast, faster than she had on the way down, and sometimes recklessly, without paying attention.
“Please, can you slow down? It’s making me afraid.”
Emilia swerved alarmingly into the slow lane between two trundling trucks. “Happy?”
She was tired, didn’t want to sleep, but dropped off nonetheless. She dreamed she was a little girl walking through a city holding her mother’s hand. Although she knew the houses and the streets, she felt like a stranger in the city. That, she thought in the dream, is because I’m still little. But it didn’t help; the further they walked, the more oppressed and anxious she became. Then she was terrified by a big black dog with big black eyes, and she woke up with a cry of alarm.
“Something the matter, Grandmother?”
“I was dreaming.” She saw on a road sign that it wasn’t much further to home. While she was asleep Emilia had switched back into the fast lane again.
“I’m going to bring you home and then take off.”
“To your parents?”
“No. I don’t have to be home to wait for news of whether I’ve got a place at the university or not. I have a little money and I’m going to visit my girlfriend in Costa Rica. I’ve always wanted to learn Spanish.”
“But this evening …”
“This evening I’m driving to Frankfurt and I’ll stay with another girlfriend until I get a flight.”
She felt she should say something, either encouraging or by way of a warning. But she couldn’t think that fast. Was Emilia doing things right or wrong? She admired Emilia’s decisiveness, but she couldn’t say that without knowing that it was the right thing to do.
After Emilia had brought her home and packed, she took her to the bus stop. “Thank you. Without you I wouldn’t have got well again. And without you I wouldn’t have made the trip.”
Emilia shrugged. “No problem.”
“I’ve disappointed you, haven’t I?” She searched for words to make it all right again. But she didn’t find any. “You make things better.” The bus came, she took Emilia in her arms, and Emilia did the same. She climbed into the bus in front and took some time to work her way to the back. Before the bus disappeared around the curve in the road, she knelt up on the backseat and waved.
13
The fine summer weather continued. In the evenings there were often storms, and she would sit out on the covered balcony to watch the clouds darken, the wind bend the trees, and the drops begin to fall, one by one at first, then in torrents. When the temperature dropped, she would cover herself with a blanket. Sometimes she fell asleep, waking only when it was night. On mornings after the storms, the air was intoxicatingly fresh.
She lengthened her walks and made plans to take a trip, but couldn’t decide where. Emilia sent a postcard from Costa Rica. Emilia’s parents hadn’t forgiven her for letting Emilia go. She should at least have insisted on being given the address of the girlfriend in Frankfurt, so they could have located her before she flew and talked to her. Finally she said she didn’t want to hear another word on the subject, and if they couldn’t stop talking about it, please, would they stop coming to visit.
After a few weeks a little package arrived from Adalbert. She liked the slender book bound in black linen; she liked looking at it and picking it up. She also liked the title: Hope and Decision. But she didn’t really want to know what Adalbert thought.
What she really would have liked to know was if he still danced so well. How could it be otherwise? When she’d visited him, she should have stayed a little while, turned on the radio, and danced with him, out of the room and onto the terrace, his arm leading her as safely and as lightly as if she were floating.
About the Author
Bernhard Schlink is the author of the internationally best-selling novel The Reader. He is a former judge and teaches public law and legal philosophy at Humboldt University in Berlin and at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City.
About the Translator
Carol Brown Janeway’s translations include Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader; Jan Philipp Reemtsma’s In the Cellar; Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s Lost; Zvi Kolitz’s Yosl Rakover Talks to God; Benjamin Lebert’s Crazy; Sándor Márai’s Embers; Yasmina Reza’s Desolation; Margriet de Moor’s The Storm; Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World, Me and Kaminski, and Fame; and Thomas Bernhard’s My Prizes.
Also Available in eBook Format from Bernhard Schlink
Flights of Love • 978-0-307-42593-5
The Gordian Knot • 978-0-307-74267-4
Homecoming • 978-
0-307-37715-9
The Reader • 978-0-375-72697-2
Self’s Deception • 978-0-307-49071-1
Self’s Murder • 978-0-307-45668-7
Self’s Punishment • 978-0-307-42766-3
The Weekend • 8-0-307-37952-8
Visit Pantheon Books: http://www.pantheonbooks.com
Also by Bernhard Schlink
The Weekend
Homecoming
The Reader
Flights of Love
Self’s Murder
Self’s Deception
Self’s Punishment (with Walter Popp)
Summer Lies: Stories Page 21