All the Lights
Page 5
‘Here, for you.’ He put the calculator teddy on the table in front of her. ‘Happy Birthday.’ She reached hesitantly for the teddy and pulled it slightly closer to her. ‘Belated best wishes,’ he said, ‘Happy Birthday, Juliana.’
‘For me?’ she said, smiling and raising her top lip slightly and looking down at the table. Then she lifted her head, looked at him and said, ‘Thank you, thanks.’
He sat down on the little chair next to her, his belly brushing against the table. ‘Imagine we’re in a florist’s,’ he said, ‘and you buy yourself seven lovely flowers, and they cost …’ he thought for a moment, ‘they cost seventeen marks fifty.’ ‘What kind of flowers, Mr Krein?’ she asked, still holding the teddy tight in one hand. He thought again. ‘Roses,’ he said. ‘No, lilies.’ The exercise was in the textbook and it said roses there, seven roses, but he wanted her to buy herself lilies, even though he knew nothing about flowers. ‘Why are lilies so expensive?’ she asked.
‘They’re,’ he said, ‘they’re especially beautiful lilies, special lilies,’ and she nodded. ‘So, one lily,’ he said, ‘how much does one lily cost?’
She took the calculator, removing it carefully from the teddy’s hands, and he said, ‘No, wait a moment. Write it down first and work it out, and then you can check it.’
She put the calculator aside, picked up her fountain pen and bent over her exercise book. ‘Seven lilies,’ she said softly. ‘Seventeen marks fifty,’ he said, leaning over to her. ‘And how much does one cost?’ He saw her writing the numbers in the little squares. He saw the small crease running from the top of her nose to her forehead.
Sweat ran down his face, and then the stabbing and aching was back again, from his chest to his left arm, and he held onto the garden gate for support. ‘Juliana,’ he said. Her friends called her ‘Juli’ – like the month. The school holidays were in July, the long summer holidays. He held onto the garden gate for support, with both hands. Then he closed his eyes and waited. He opened his eyes and saw the plate of food in front of him. ‘Happy Birthday, Juli,’ he said. But then he noticed that no time had passed, that he was still sitting at the table, with the same salami, the same cutlet in aspic shining in the light falling through the kitchen window. He ate salami and pork cutlet in aspic every evening; he hardly left the house now and he often thought of her birthday, the closer it came. Did she have a boyfriend, he wondered. Probably, she was almost twenty-one after all. But she’d always been so shy. Had always looked so shyly down at the floor when she came up to the blackboard. Perhaps she had a child already, a small child. He banged on the table, swept his open palm across the table. The plate fell on the floor and shattered, the salami bounced across the tiles, he had a nice tiled kitchen and the cutlet in aspic slapped onto the tiles with a dry splat and stayed put as if it were stuck to the floor.
He lowered his head carefully onto the tabletop. He was fifty-four and he was never going to have children. He stayed like that for a while, resting his arms on his belly and folding his hands together. ‘If I become a father at the age of fifty-five, and my daughter has a son at twenty-three, how old would I have to be for my five-year-old grandson …’ He fell silent. Even numbers brought him no pleasure any more. There was no one there any more to whom he could explain the magic of numbers. And there hadn’t been for a long time now. ‘Five to the power of four,’ he said. ‘That’s five times five times five times five. The small number controls the big one.’ He took her hand. ‘Count it on your fingers, go ahead. One times five, times five for the second time, times five for the third time, times five for the fourth time.’ She counted. ‘The small number controls the big one,’ she said, and he looked at the crease above her nose, ‘five to the power of two is twenty-five, that’s easy, five to the power of three is twenty-five times two.’
‘No,’ he said with a tap at her fingers, ‘the five for the third time, twenty-five times five. It’s like,’ he thought for a moment, ‘when you skim a stone, skim a flat stone across water, Juli, and it bounces off four times before it goes under. You can skim stones, can’t you, Juli?’
‘On the water,’ she said. He stood with her by the water, the lake outside town, the motorway beyond the embankment; they heard the hum of all the cars. She stood in front of him in her brightly coloured dress, the one she’d be wearing on her birthday, skimming flat stones across the water. ‘Seventy-five,’ she said, ‘seventy-five times five.’ He was wearing a loose Hawaiian shirt, watching her skim the stones across the water, and he was happy.
He walked slowly down the hallway, the white bathroom door ahead of him. He ran a hand over his face. He hadn’t shaved for a few days. Back then he’d shaved every morning and moisturised his face and gone to school with a smooth, shiny face. He’d usually started to sweat on the bus. Then he’d sat sweating in the staff room, his sandwiches and coffee on the table in front of him.
They talked about him behind his back; he knew that. Mrs Koch and Mrs Bräuninger put their heads together, Mrs Bräuninger with her silver whistle on a string round her neck all the time; he’d often stood by the window and looked out at the sports field, looking for Juli and hearing Mrs Bräuninger’s whistle. Juli was very good at sports, always a front-runner in races, and she won almost every sprint. She was wearing a pale blue tracksuit. She ran across the playing field to the other girls. She was laughing – he could see that from up here. He even thought he could see her teeth. He leaned against the windowsill and listened to the class behind him writing, the rustle of paper, the scratching of pens, now and then soft whispers. She didn’t have maths on Wednesdays, but when he taught 7b at noon he could look down at the playing field, if the weather was good. In the winter and when it rained she was in the gym with the others. Sometimes the girls and Mrs Bräuninger didn’t come out even though the weather was good; they played volleyball in the gym or did gymnastics and did all the things he’d never been able to do and had always hated as a child. He’d been bad at sports, fat and heavy-breathing, and when he thought about how they’d laughed at him when he clung onto the climbing bar and didn’t move an inch upwards, he wished he could clear the memories from his brain like old results on a calculator – ‘Fatty, fatty’ – he thought about numbers, about fractions, quadratic equations, matrix equations. He looked down at the playing field and looked for her in the group of girls, two or three pale blue tracksuits – there she was; he recognised her brown hair, which she tied up in a short ponytail. Eleven years, exactly a quarter of his life. Eleven years ago he’d been at a different school, in a different town. The German and Music teacher – a small, delicate woman. He thought about interior and exterior angles, about the first thirty-five digits of pi, about straight lines that would meet somewhere in infinity, but at night he dreamed of Miss Kerner, German and Music, and woke up sweating, and imagined inviting her to dinner, imagined himself calculating food and drinks, aperitifs and desserts and champagne in his head quick as a flash, then they’d sit on the sofa in his living room, close together, he’d explain the infinity of numbers and Miss Kerner would recite a poem.
Thirty-three, eleven, forty-four years. A series that almost fit together. He leaned against the windowsill and saw Juli among all the other girls, lining up in several queues, raising their arms and moving their torsos, Mrs Bräuninger in front of them, the silver whistle in her mouth. He had invited Miss Kerner to dinner back then, but she’d just smiled and said, ‘How nice, thank you,’ and told him she couldn’t come. Somehow, even the pupils had got wind of his rejected invitation, odd nasty remarks now and then, ‘K and K, Kerner and Krein,’ his colleagues smiled about him and in his mind he drew huge circles, with a giant set of compasses, huge intersecting circles, and he had to calculate the area of the cross section. And now they were whispering behind his back again after so many years, a different school, a different town, gossiping in the staff room, ‘Fatty and Juliana, something’s not right there,’ and he saw her down there on the playing field, and when she raise
d her hands above her head she seemed to be waving at him.
He stood in his living room, not knowing how long he’d been standing there, not quite knowing what day it was, not quite knowing what time it was, still seeing Juli, her light blue tracksuit getting paler and paler, and he shook his head. He looked over to the window; it was still light outside. It was summer and the days were still long. Then he remembered the cutlet in aspic that had splatted onto the kitchen floor, and suddenly he knew there were exactly eight days to go until her twenty-first birthday. And then he knew why he was standing in the living room in front of his cabinet. He took a couple of steps towards it, turned the key and opened the small glass door. The class photograph and the dog made out of conkers. Ever since he’d stopped taking the bus to school, he’d often stood in front of the cabinet in the morning – he still woke up at the same time – and looked at the dog and the photo through the glass, not opening the little door. She was in the last row at the back. She was smiling. He picked up the photo, for the first time in years; he had to squint and hold it right up to his face – he must need glasses. She was smiling. He was standing to one side. His bald head was shining and he was red in the face. ‘My dear Mr Krein,’ the headmaster said, ‘my dear Mr Krein, you’ve been teaching your syllabus very well for years, you’ve been popular for years with your colleagues and pupils,’ the headmaster hesitated, probably aware that wasn’t quite true. ‘My dear Mr Krein,’ he started in again, and Mr Krein interrupted him – even years later he was amazed at his courage, but actually it hadn’t been courage, it was sadness, the onset of sadness, for he knew what was coming. ‘Please stop all this “My dear Mr Krein” business,’ said Mr Krein. ‘Just get to the point and stop it, will you just stop it …’ Then he almost shouted, ‘Get to the point, will you, for God’s sake!’
The headmaster flinched, leaning forward so their heads were almost touching. ‘It’s about the thing with the girl, Juliana. Her parents came to see me. Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?’
‘I’m not getting myself into anything,’ said Mr Krein softly. ‘I’m not getting into anything at all.’
He put the photo back in the cabinet and reached for the conker dog. As he stretched out his arm the pain came back, but he took no notice. He held onto the dog with both hands, took a few steps back and dropped down onto the sofa. Four times they had sat here. The textbooks and her exercise book in front of them on the table. A large bottle of juice and a bar of chocolate. She took the dog made out of conkers out of her satchel and put it on the table between the books and the juice and the chocolate. ‘I made this for you,’ she said. A little animal made of conkers and matchsticks. He hadn’t realised right away that it was supposed to be a dog; it could have been a sheep or a cat, but then she’d said, ‘It’s a dachshund, Mr Krein, for you.’
‘Thank you, Juli,’ he said. ‘I’ve always wanted a dachshund.’
She smiled, and he took the conker dachshund, balanced it on his belly and cautiously stroked the large conker that was its head. ‘My parents,’ said Juli, and he said, ‘Yes?’ but he wasn’t listening, he was stroking the dachshund moving up and down on his belly as he breathed. She talked, and he closed his eyes and saw three circles, two large and one small between the two large ones. The two large circles touched in the middle of the small circle, then they moved apart again, and it looked like they were holding the small circle tight in the middle. ‘I’m going now,’ she said. She stood in front of him, pressing her exercise book to her chest and her chin. ‘Bye, Mr Krein.’ The dog fell off his stomach as he reached a hand out for her. ‘Stay a bit longer, Juli, I’ll take you home.’
‘No.’ She pushed the exercise book higher, until it touched the tip of her nose, and spoke through the paper. ‘My parents, Mr Krein …’
The dachshund was lying on the floor at his feet. He bent down and balanced it on its short matchstick legs. A stabbing pain in his head. He took a deep breath as he leaned back. ‘Is there a law against going for an ice cream with Juli? Is there a law against going swimming with Juli? Is there a law against …?’ He started shouting but there was no one there, only the dachshund at his feet. He had shouted when the man from the school inspection board had sat opposite him in the secretary’s office. ‘Investigations, you go ahead and do your investigations!’
‘At the moment all it’s about is unjustified favouritism and support for a pupil …’
He stood in front of the mirror in his bathroom, pressing both hands to the glass. How did that little poem go again, the one she’d recited for him when they were sitting in the sun? That May had been so warm … two ice cream sundaes. He saw her lips moving, her hands gesticulating above her ice cream while she recited the poem. She closed her eyes when she got stuck, the small crease from the top of her nose to her forehead. Was it Goethe? He knew nothing about literature. Yes, it was Goethe. Or maybe Schiller or some other poet? He’d been so happy, next to her at the table, and her hands above the ice cream sundaes, and the poem, but the only thing he was good at remembering was numbers. ‘My heart it beat …’
He took his hands off the mirror, saw the moist prints they left behind fading. ‘… the evening bowed t’ward the earth …’ The blackboard … He shuddered, didn’t want that in his head, the blackboard, the big white letters; he went to the door. He walked back down the dark hallway to the kitchen.
He stood on the tiles, feeling for the light switch. He looked over at the window; it must be evening by now. He turned on the light and took a couple of steps, then his legs fell away beneath him, he raised both arms, nothing to hold onto, then he was on the floor, and his head smashed against the wall. He lay on his back like that for a while, then slowly turned onto his side. The trampled cutlet in aspic lay next to him.
He went into the classroom. He went to the blackboard, not looking around, heard the children talking softly, the rustle of paper; he opened the two flaps of the blackboard. ‘Fatty loves Juli,’ it said in wobbly white capital letters, a heart drawn beneath it in red chalk. He placed one hand on either side of the heart and stood like that for a while, supporting himself against the blackboard, all quiet behind him now. He stood upright, saw the moist prints left behind by his hands – he could make out each separate finger – then he turned around slowly. Juli’s seat was empty. He went to the door.
He walked down the hallway. He was sweating, and the sweat ran into his eyes.
OF DOGS AND HORSES
It started when his dog suddenly started to limp, and then came to a halt outright. It was a pretty big dog, a Rottweiler-Doberman mix, a hundred pounds, and in the six years that Rolf had been living with him the dog had never limped and had never just stopped walking either. He’d been with him in the mountains and by the sea, took long walks with him every day, and the dog’s long ears moved up and down when he ran.
‘Piet,’ said Rolf, ‘what’s up with you, boy, you’re not that old yet.’ Piet stood in the middle of the pavement, his back legs far apart; he stood there as if straddling something, looking at him with his dark eyes. He pulled on the leash but the dog didn’t move. He squatted down in front of him and stroked his head. ‘What’s up, boy, what’s the matter, shall we just have a bit of a rest? You’ll be all right in a minute, won’t you Piet?’
He’d called his dog Piet because of Pete Sampras, the tennis player, but he’d written the name with an ‘ie’ on the dog licence to make it a bit more mysterious. Rolf wasn’t really a tennis fan at all, but he’d seen Pete Sampras a couple of times on TV in some tournament or other, and the elegance with which he outplayed his opponents had impressed him. And now Piet was standing there and wouldn’t budge an inch and hung his head. They were still a mile or so away from home and he wouldn’t be able to carry him. He’d lifted him up for fun a couple of times and lugged him around the apartment, but the dog had wriggled around and his back had started aching after only a few yards.
He gave another tug on the leash and said, ‘Come on, le
t’s go home, there’ll be a treat for you when we get home.’ And the dog took a few steps; his back legs buckled strangely inwards and he limped a little, but he was walking. They walked home very slowly, and sometimes Piet stopped again, and then he stroked him and waited until he could carry on. They lived on the first floor, up half a flight of stairs, and the dog had problems getting up the couple of steps to the apartment door; that morning when they came back from their first walk of the day there had been no stopping him; he knew his food was inside.
He opened the front door and Piet went straight to his corner and lay down. ‘Damn it,’ he said, ‘what on earth’s up with you boy, you’re not gonna …’ He sat down in the armchair right in front of the dog’s blanket. He often sat here and read the newspaper or watched TV, his dog right next to him. All he had to do was reach out his hand to touch him.
‘You’re not gonna give up on me,’ he said, putting his hand on Piet’s head and stroking him behind the ears. ‘You can’t give up on me.’ He sat in the chair and looked down at Piet, who lay quite still, only his back rising and falling slightly. It was very quiet in the flat, with only the fridge humming in the kitchen, and he sat there and took his hand off Piet’s head, folded his hands and rubbed them together over and over. They had been living together for six years, Rolf and Piet, and he couldn’t imagine sitting alone in his flat again, like eight years ago when his wife had gone, just the humming of the fridge in the silence. He rubbed his hands together, then jumped up and ran to the kitchen. He fetched the big pack of dog biscuits out of the cupboard and took out a handful. Usually the sound of the cupboard doors banging was enough to make Piet come running, but he didn’t come even when he shook the pack. He put it back in the cupboard and stood in the kitchen with the handful of dog biscuits, waiting. The fridge hummed next to him, and because he couldn’t stand it any more he shouted, ‘Piet, where are you boy, I’ve got a treat for you!’ And then Rolf heard him. He heard the tip-tap of his steps in the hall, and then he saw Piet’s head in the doorway, ‘Come on, come and get it,’ and the dog ran towards him, jumped up at him, and he said, ‘Down boy, sit,’ and Piet sat down in front of him and stretched out a paw towards him, although he hadn’t said ‘Shake’, and then he gave him the dog biscuits and Piet crunched them up and ate them, and he said, ‘There you are boy, you’re eating them up nicely, you’re not feeling so bad are you, you were just tired before.’ He watched as Piet ate the dog biscuits one after another, and he was happy.