She leans forward and looks at it. A photomontage – Freud’s couch replicated multiple times and placed one behind the other, an image from a dream. No caption. The paper feels sticky.
Ella says, How long have you been carrying this around with you; and the boy says evasively, Oh, I don’t know any more. I think a couple of weeks. Quite a while. Anyway, you don’t want it either.
No, Ella says firmly. Sorry. I don’t want it.
She’s sorry, but she really doesn’t want it. She thinks he ought to burn it. And finally the boy says of his own accord, I should burn it. Don’t you think.
Ella says, That’s a good idea. You ought to do that.
She gives the photo back to him, and he crumples it up into a ball and puts the ball into the glowing embers, pushes it into the middle of the fire with his stick. Detached. The ball flares up and melts away. The boy sighs. Ella looks at him sideways. Was this his first sacrifice? His first time. He turns his round head slowly to face her, and his eyes seek hers with a surprising and solemn authority.
Your turn, he says.
The following morning is cool. Windy and sunny. Carl hasn’t come back, and Ella is awakened by the cold. She had gone to sleep without adding any coal to the stove, and it went out. She pushes the door open and lets light into the trailer. She puts a sweater on over her nightgown and sits down on one of the steps; it occurs to her that she’s sitting there just as the skeletal figure had been the previous day; she thinks, It can happen quickly. The girl’s caravan is as quiet as if it were empty and the girl gone. The fire in the fireplace is out; Ella and the boy have burned up all the wood. She’ll have to fetch some more wood in case Carl doesn’t come back today either and in case she decides to stay in spite of that; she will have to ask the man who owns this universe for it. Awkward, but not impossible. What does Carl expect? The answer to this is important, but she feels that the answer can wait.
The sun rises quickly over the river. The boy comes as silently as the evening before. He is wearing a velvet cape. His movements are sleepy, have a dragged out, exhausted beauty. He doesn’t smile, but he stands next to Ella on the steps and she raises her hand and touches his cheek and his hair.
He says, We’re leaving.
Ella gazes after him until he disappears among the birches by the house. The Tibetan prayer flags flutter in the wind. There is no one else in sight.
Solaris
Ada and Sophia lived together while they were studying. Sophia was studying drama in college; Ada was training as a photographer. They shared a two-room apartment whose rooms were connected by a French door. Sophia had the room on the left with three windows on two sides of the room; Ada had the one on the right. The right-hand room had two windows, and when they moved in Ada painted her walls blue. Sophia painted her walls white, first folding herself a hat out of newspapers for the paint job. During that time, while they were redecorating the apartment in undershirts and bare feet, Sophia smoking, the paper hat on her head, popular songs playing on the radio – Dance a Samba with me because dancing a Samba makes us happy – all five windows wide open, Sophia said, quite offhand, We’re going to stay here till we’re old and grey and dusty. Till we’re ashes and everything is over. Ada! I promise.
Someone had once assured Ada and Sophia that their voices sounded identical; so when the phone rang, and Ada answered and there was somebody on the line she didn’t want to talk to, she’d say, Oh, I’m sorry, but Ada isn’t here just now. I’ll tell her that you called; she’ll call you back. OK?
But she never called back.
When fellow students came to visit Sophia, she would spread a white sheet out on the floor of her room and put wine and water and glasses in the middle of it. The drama students came in the evening; they sat down by the white sheet as if they were sitting in the grass under birch trees; grass and birch trees growing around the white sheet. They leaned up against one another; they drank a fair bit, but never too much. Ada stayed in her room. Sophia never closed the French doors. Ada sat at her desk; she could see the others, and late at night after she had turned off the light and was lying on her back awake in her bed, she heard them singing.
Many years later Sophia has an engagement at a big theatre, and Ada comes to the opening night, to the opening night of Solaris. She lives in another city, is married and has two children; she sees Sophia only rarely, but they often talk on the phone; they visit each other; they write emails. They make the effort.
Sophia had also married, but then she got divorced. She has three daughters and a Nigerian au pair girl, and now she’s living in an apartment that is so large you can get lost in it.
Ada arrives on the overnight train. She had asked Sophia, When do you get up? I don’t want to wake you; the train arrives at six in the morning at the main station; I’d be at your place at half past six. Isn’t that too early for you?
But Sophia said that she gets up every day at seven o’clock anyway. The children are already up at four. Ada should come directly from the main railway station to her place. Without any delay, without stopping for coffee at some terrible joint, without any detours. Without a detour, Ada. Listen, Sophia had said. Take a taxi.
And so, at seven o’clock Ada is standing in front of Sophia’s door. She rings briefly and hesitantly, and of course Sophia doesn’t open the door. Ada knew this would happen. It’s still half dark; the hallway is a gallery open to the courtyard out back; the leaves of the trees in the courtyard are rustling dramatically in the wind.
There is a chair in front of the door.
It’s standing as if placed there for Ada, like a chair on a stage, and so she sits down and waits. Listening, hearing the rustling of the leaves and waiting for Sophia to wake up.
The birthday of Sophia’s youngest daughter falls on one of the days Ada is visiting Sophia; she is turning five. Sophia is busy with the final rehearsals; the au pair girl is preparing for the birthday party; the older daughters are at school. Ada is alone much of the time. It rains from morning to night, and she hardly leaves the house. She stays in Sophia’s large apartment where she can do whatever she wants; the au pair girl’s room, a small bedchamber, is the only one closed to her. The rooms lead into each other; they form a circle. Ada goes from the kitchen through the hall through the daughters’ rooms, the living room, the dressing room, Sophia’s bedroom, a room that has only an armchair standing in it, a room for a vase of gladioli, and one with a fabulous bookshelf, and then she is back in the kitchen, where the au pair girl who, in Ada’s presence, acts as if she were deaf and dumb, is stringing paper garlands from one wall to the other, and filling punch bowls with red berries and tangerine slices. The windows are open as they had been back then; rain drizzles into the rooms.
Everywhere Ada finds traces of their former life together. A photo – the wintry view from Sophia’s room out into the grey street. A blouse embroidered with little horses hanging on the clothes rod. A mother-of-pearl barrette. A hashish pipe. A knife. She lies down on the sofa in the otherwise totally empty living room; she lies on her side, her cheek resting on her folded hands; she is so calm that she feels as if she were dissolving, almost forgetting who she is.
The opening night of Solaris is on the evening of the youngest daughter’s birthday.
Sophia is playing Harey.
Alexander is playing Chris Kelvin. Alexander was at drama school with Sophia; he was one of the students who used to sit around the white sheet; maybe he was the one who was too much for Ada back then – with his physique as massive as a gladiator’s and the sculpted planes of his face.
At breakfast Sophia tells Ada that Alexander cheats on his wife and is forever watching porn on the internet, that in the daytime before rehearsals he meets women from the internet in scruffy hotel rooms down by the train station.
She says, When he stands in front of me at the rehearsals he smells of semen. Of sweat and sex and semen, of the secretions of the aroused genitals of different women. Of cunts.
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sp; She says this while she is preparing the lunch boxes for her three daughters; she wraps sandwiches, cookies; she washes small green apples and peels cucumbers and carrots, cuts them into little pieces; she says it nonchalantly, matter-of-factly, almost pleasantly.
Of cunts. She repeats the word, turning it this way and that.
But in the afternoon when Alexander, who has come to drop off one of his children at the birthday party, stands in front of the door, holding his child’s hand and a large gift tied with a pink ribbon under his other arm, Ada thinks he manages to conceal all this fairly well. Actually, he smells of soap. His face is open and clean, just as in the past; his expression almost bewildered.
He introduces himself to Ada; he says his name and shakes hands, and Ada says, We already know each other.
She can see that he is trying to remember. That he is doing his best.
Sophia is the most beautiful mother a birthday child could wish for. Absolutely the most beautiful. She is wearing a slim dress and the most wonderfully crafted silvery stockings, sparkling rhinestone earrings, and her hair is severely yet softly combed back from her face. She sways a little in high-heeled shoes, looking festive and serious; she is brave.
Thirteen children arrive. The au pair hangs up their jackets and puts the bouquets of flowers into vases; she blindfolds the children and places marshmallows under old pots. Torn wrapping paper rustles on the floor, puffed rice crackles. The older daughters have withdrawn to their rooms and are on their phones. The youngest daughter has red cheeks and is trembling with excitement. There are chocolate muffins, jelly-filled doughnuts, a strawberry tart, whipped cream, punch and cream puffs. Alexander stays. Sophia opens a bottle of champagne, and they clink glasses. The au pair finally stops watching them and arranges the room for a game of musical chairs. One of the children is picked up early and cries bitterly. The champagne is ice cold, and for Ada it turns the afternoon into something that hurts behind the ears, hurts in certain places in her body where, she suspects, happiness is hiding.
Alexander and Ada have a conversation that she will recall later as having gone something like this:
Alexander says, And what do you do. What are you up to these days.
I take photographs, Ada says. She says it with exactly the same intonation, the same insecure manner and idiotic indecision as fifteen years earlier.
I still take photographs; I try to make a living with it; it’s going pretty well.
What do you photograph, Alexander says. His expression indecipherable.
Ada says, People? And places. Water. A bowl. A child. I can’t describe it for you. But you can look it up on the internet. I’ve heard you know your way around there.
Ada has no idea why she said that. She can’t believe she really said it. Alexander’s gaze rapidly, very pointedly, turns to Sophia at the other end of the living room where the party favours are being snatched out of her hands, and then back again to Ada.
He says, speaking slowly, Yes, I know my way around. You mean I can look at your photos on the internet. Download one for my stash.
She remembers how they both burst out laughing. Gasping for breath with hands raised. And on Ada’s part, with a pounding, racing heart.
Ada is allowed to stay with Sophia. And to leave the birthday party together with Sophia and Alexander; driving through the rain in a taxi to the theatre, to stay in Sophia’s dressing room and to watch as Sophia turns into Harey. As she changes from the mother of a birthday child into Harey, as she whispers, Does that mean that I am immortal? Does that mean that I … am immortal. The assistant producer knocks and brings in a sumptuous bouquet of white roses; she brings good wishes for the premiere and good luck charms, spits three times over Sophia’s shoulder, careful not to spit over her shoulder while on the threshold. On the loudspeaker above the make-up mirror, the stage manager summons the actors to the stage. Ada stands near the technicians; the animated, tense murmuring of the audience comes through the closed curtain. It’s hot on the stage. The objects on the stage are either in disorder or already weightless, a field cot, a space module, a control console, a microphone, a folding screen, all enveloped in an artificial fog.
Alexander has turned into Chris Kelvin.
He is wearing a golden space suit; he stretches his hand out to Ada. He walks over to her, takes his helmet off again, and kisses Ada on the mouth; he gives her a cosmonaut’s kiss.
There are no bridges between Solaris and Earth, whispers Sophia standing next to Ada.
There cannot be any.
She says, Ada, we’re starting now. You have to leave. We are starting.
Poems
I used to visit my father once or twice a year. On my last visit I brought him some cake; it was mid-summer, and I bought a piece of plum tart and a piece of apricot tart at the pastry shop café next to the house where he had been living for some time. The tarts and cakes in the glass cases looked gorgeous, and all the tables in the café section were occupied. People were eating large pieces of cake, drinking iced coffee, iced chocolate or tea from dainty white porcelain cups. I took a long time choosing. I let a few people go ahead of me. Had there been an empty table, I would gladly have sat down and also ordered an iced coffee. I wanted to delay the visit to my father. I wanted to put it off.
My father lived in a tiny, cluttered apartment that was crammed full of things. An apartment with so much furniture, so many pictures, objects, boxes and crates that there was really no room for my father, which says it all. That was how he wanted it. Exactly this way and no other. He wanted to sit on a packed suitcase in the middle of a stage-set consisting of a chaotic jumble, on top of a heap of rubble; then he could more or less face life’s demands. Whenever I went to visit him it was difficult to rustle up even the most basic dishes. Where was the kettle? The last time there was still a dented tin of instant coffee; the tin turned up in a box full of old plaster death masks. The curtains were always closed. Packages and boxes that presumably didn’t belong to my father were piled up in the hall. He was wearing two unmatched slippers. He was unshaven; his hair stood on end. On the day I visited him with the plum and the apricot tarts, it was a miracle that we were eventually able to sit down at a table in front of two plates and two cups, and that there was hot, bitter coffee in the cups. There was no milk or sugar.
This spoon, my father said, and pointed with emphasis at the tarnished and bent spoon next to my plate, was your great-grand aunt’s. It’s a spoon that belonged to your maternal great-grand aunt.
My father had been ill for a very long time. I should add that he had been in a psychiatric institution for many years; again and again he had to have himself readmitted. He wasn’t doing well; he couldn’t think clearly; he couldn’t take care of anything; and everything was too much for him. My father had been ill in this way as far back as I can remember; I can barely remember ever having had a healthy father, and this is probably the reason I left home as soon as I could. I went far away, and the connection was almost broken; my father was in no position to take any interest in my life, and I felt there was no reason to force him to. I visited him now and then in the psychiatric clinic; there he was totally self-absorbed, and later he probably didn’t even remember those visits. Back then he practised being able to endure poems. He would try to read a poem without breaking down, and I must say, it proved extraordinarily and surprisingly difficult for him. We practised it together; there wasn’t much else that we could have done together in that institution – he had borrowed a fat volume of poetry from the library and would open it at random to a page and ask me to read to him. And there were days when one single line was too much for him, when he couldn’t even bear the line ‘The seagulls all look as if Emma were their name’; a line like ‘We sat under the hawthorn till the night swept us away’ would have killed him.
In the end he gave up.
Later he disappeared. He climbed out of the window in the ward’s occupational therapy workshop and was gone for quite a while, then when h
e turned up again, it emerged that he had got surprisingly far. He had been far away, in a city way up north, yet there too he landed in a psychiatric institution, but they didn’t want to keep him; there was no room for him. I drove north with my husband and we picked him up. Without ever having discussed such matters with my father, I had married very young, and this was the first time my husband and my father had met. In the middle of the night in a windy car park in front of that institution at the edge of the city, my father climbed into the back of the car, leaving the car door open, and didn’t even look at my husband. My father behaved as if my husband were a chauffeur. A taxi driver. He sat in the back seat with an expression on his face like that of an offended child; he was silent during the entire trip, staring out into the night; he said not a single word, except once – once he leaned forward and said:
I’m hungry. I’d like a hot dog.
Only crazy people can pull off stunts like that.
Luckily my husband had no problem with it. He understood, and it’s quite possible that he felt sorry for my father.
That day in midsummer when I visited my father for the last time, he eyed the slice of plum tart on his plate with his head tilted to one side for a long time – he had gone for the plum tart; rejected the apricot – and then he put his spoon, about whose origin he had left me in the dark, back on the table.
He said, This piece of tart is from the gay pastry shop.
And I said, Which gay pastry shop.
The gay pastry shop downstairs here, in the building. Next door, my father said. They’re gays, homosexuals; you must have noticed; only gay people can bake fruit tarts this way. Whip the cream, decorate and glaze the fruit; only a gay person is able to create this kind of plum tart, or an obscene apricot tart like the one on your plate, a picture-book apricot tart, thought up, mixed and baked by a fag. I walk past that pastry shop sometimes and I’m amazed. Amazed.
Letti Park Page 2