Letti Park

by Judith Hermann

  Jessica says, No. She shakes her head; she raises her hands and says, No. I’m sorry.

  Several times.

  The old woman hesitates; then she turns around and goes over to the new building. She tugs on a rope next to the door, and a bell shrills inside the new building. The old woman crosses her arms on her chest, staring at something lying at her feet, and waits.

  Ari says, Shit.

  The door opens and a fat woman in velvet pyjamas comes out, complaining noisily and swinging a huge bunch of keys. She pushes the old woman aside, kicks at the cats, and cursing unlocks the other barracks, all of them, one after the other, every single one. Light on, light out. This one. Not this one? Then this one. This one, or if not, then this one. Well now, which one. She points to a large plastic box in a corner of the courtyard and looking at Jessica, says, Toilet. She shows numbers with her fingers, any old numbers. The prostitute is leaning against the wall of her little house and smoking with her eyes closed. The old woman is now sitting on a dirty plastic chair with her hands in her lap.

  Come inside, Ari says. At least have a look at it.

  Jessica is afraid that once she’s inside the fat woman is going to slam the door shut and lock it from the outside. That she’s going to lock them inside.

  What for? Why ever.

  Come inside, Ari says.

  This barrack is a little larger than the others, and it actually has some light. There’s a double bed in the corner with a dusty mattress on it and next to it a cupboard with bare glass shelves. On top of the cupboard sits a spooky teddy bear. Next to the bed, an American refrigerator. Ari opens the refrigerator; it is empty and black with mould. He closes the refrigerator and turns around to Jessica.

  He says, Well then.

  Jessica says, Well, I can’t handle this. I’m too old for this. We’re both too old for this; you must feel the same way; you can’t want to stay here.

  She points around at things. She points to the bear. She tries to imagine just how she’s supposed to lie down in the evening with Ari in this bed. How she’s supposed to read her book in this bed. The walls are thin. The prostitute will go about her business; she won’t be the only blonde prostitute here. Jessica considers this room a punishment, but unlike Ari she doesn’t think she should be punished. What for?

  She says, Let’s go. Let’s get out of here somehow, all right? Let’s try to get out of this place; let’s just go, I beg you.

  The old woman looks over at them from where she’s sitting on her chair; she leans forward a tiny bit in the process. Not curious. Casually. The fat woman is whispering with the prostitute. She spits on two fingers and rubs at something on her pyjamas. They’re all waiting. Ari braces himself against the refrigerator and pushes it away from the wall and towards the door.

  He says, Could you help me, Jessica. Could you please switch on your brain?

  Jessica has no inkling how she is supposed to help.

  The fat woman comes running over to the barrack; she comes inside; she lifts up the electric cord of the refrigerator and shows it to them; she plugs it into an outlet above the baseboard; she says, Functional. OK? Functional.

  Ari says, Yes, but that’s not the problem. The refrigerator has got to go. It’s got to go.

  He pulls the plug out of the wall again and pushes the refrigerator farther towards the door; the refrigerator gets stuck in the doorway, and the fat woman pushes against it from outside. Jessica can see out into the courtyard through the window; she can see that the old woman has at least gotten up off her chair. The morning sun sets everything alight, and the dull hair of the prostitute – who has crossed one leg over the other and, cigarette in a corner of her mouth, is extensively scratching her ankles – almost gleams. Ari kicks the refrigerator through the door, right past the fat woman and into the courtyard. The fat woman shakes her head, refusing to believe this; the expression in her eyes as she looks at Ari is too incredulous to be hateful, but it wouldn’t take much.

  Ari opens the refrigerator door and points inside. Points inside for five seconds. Then he slams the door shut and gestures dismissively.

  What are you waiting for, Ari yells. You wanted to get out of this place, so come on now, dammit, Jessica, get a move on.

  Jessica reaches for her backpack. For a moment she doesn’t know where she left it, but there it is, and she grabs it. She tries one more time to see it all differently – the prostitute, the barracks, the fat woman, the light, the wild grape vines … to see the entire morning again differently; she knows that this is actually possible. You can almost always see everything in the world either one way or another. But she can’t manage it here. She simply can’t.

  Together they go back out into the street, Jessica, Ari and the old woman, and behind them the metal door clangs heavily shut. Ari puts his hand into his trouser pocket, takes out some money and gives the old woman something, and she takes the money without counting it, as a matter of course and as if a successful, exacting presentation had taken place and was now concluded. She says neither thank you nor anything else; she goes back to the train station.

  Jessica and Ari walk in the opposite direction, maybe the Black Sea lies in that direction. Chernomorsky. From time to time they turn around and watch the old woman walking in the middle of the street under the plane trees, free.

  Jessica says, I wonder what she’s thinking.

  She’s not thinking anything, Ari says. She’s not thinking anything at all, Jessica. She’s going back to the train station to wait for the next train. That’s what she’s doing. And that’s all. Nothing more than that.

  He says, We’ll go down to the sea. We’ll find something nice; I promise. I promise you.

  The Return

  Ricco has been gone for seven years, and now he’s back and would like me to listen to him. This isn’t necessarily easy for me. Oh, it’s not as if I resented his leaving, not at all. It was right that he should have left. It’s just that Ricco, once he starts to talk, can’t stop – he talks without interruption and as if there were no tomorrow. He talks about himself and all the inconceivable, incredible things that life has cooked up for him; he has to relate every single one, and in the process he forgets that I’m even there. That I exist on this earth too, that I too have a life, and that things happen to me too that I might like to talk about at some point.

  I have known Ricco since we were children. We grew up in the same housing development, went to the same schools; in the evening our mothers used to call us inside in the same tone of voice. But, in contrast to my father, Ricco’s father had blown himself up while he was experimenting in his basement workshop, and Ricco had been there, and since then he’s been wounded somehow. This is no secret. Ricco talks to everyone about it; he talks about it the way other people say that they like eating mussels, or that they go to the seaside every summer. He says, My father died when I was seven years old; he accidentally blew himself up, and I was there, and since then I can’t stop thinking about it.

  Ricco is now more than forty years old.

  We both left the suburbs to go and live in the city, and in the city we never lost sight of each other. In the winter when Ricco couldn’t pay his bills and they turned off his gas and electricity, he would come to me, and this happened frequently. When he was deeply and unhappily in love, he would also come to me, and that happened just as regularly. He turned dramatic when he was lovelorn; he cried uncommonly often for a man. He would tack a three-by-fourmetre-large piece of packing paper up on his kitchen wall and in red crayon write on it the words that reminded him of the woman who had left him, all sorts of words. Street, beer, sleeping, midnight, Mercedes Benz, highway exit, lighter, stamps, stroll, ringing alarm clock, icy cold, no end in sight. He told me that once the paper got full, he would write on the wall, but before it ever got to that point, he had stopped and was devoting himself to another woman. It’s possible that Ricco carried on this way because he knew a lot about sorrow – it was familiar territory for him, he ke
pt wanting to be immersed again in the same kind of grief and the same sort of panic he had experienced as a child. Perhaps he assumed it might still change something.

  When we were young and lived in the city, we drank a great deal. I drank a great deal, and Ricco drank twice as much. We were sliding downhill fast, things were going haywire; we lost track. At some point it got to be too much. Then I became pregnant; Ziggy was born, and Ricco left. He left from one day to the next; I think he left after – dead drunk and without a driver’s licence – he had tried to park a car that wasn’t his in front of a synagogue, and the police officers who were guarding the synagogue asked him to get out of the car and stood him up against the wall. He went up North and worked in a fish factory and on the big trawlers and finally on oil rigs. He made a lot of money, more than any of us had ever earned. He went into business for himself as a carpenter; with the money he made he bought himself a boat, a car, a house and a living room sofa set, and once he had his sofa set, he would sit down on it every evening and phone me.

  He would say, It’s me, Ricco. How are you?

  Ricco has a talent for telling stories. He can be funny; he exaggerates in the right places; he jumps up and demonstrates things; he imitates voices and illustrates his story with gestures and with expletives. Up there in the North he would sit on his sofa with his feet up on his coffee table and say, Guess what I’m drinking, and I would say, No idea, and he would say, proudly, I’m drinking chocolate milk. During that period when he was working in the fish factory, on the trawlers and the oil rigs, he had stopped with the alcohol. I said, Terrific. And then he took a breath and told me about everything. He talked about the helicopter in which he had flown over the Bering Sea, and how in the helicopter he always sat way back by the turbine; he said, It’s warm by the turbine, it’s the best place if you’re cold and you’re bone tired. He said, pointlessly, Do you know what it’s like when the water is so clear that you can see the whales? You can really see them, far, far down on the deep bottom of the sea. But it’s even better if you actually close your eyes and don’t look at all. The best thing is when it’s enough for you to know what you could see if you wanted to. Do you understand what I mean?

  He told about the oil rigs, about sleeping in a container, the carpenters’ jokes about women and fucking, cunts and asses, always the same, until sleep overpowered them all, and all night long the roaring of the icy wind around the containers. Working twelve hours a day. With the money I bought a car, he said, a Chevrolet Suburban. Offroad. Silver. Not new. V8 Big Block. 6.5 Litre turbodiesel. He said the words one at a time and carefully, putting a period after each word, each phrase. He did an impressive imitation of the crazy engine of his new car, and then he described the view he had from his picture window of the Skerries and the Sound, of the colourful boats and the night-time sea.

  He said, I’ll let you know when the beam of light from the lighthouse comes in here. Wait. It’s coming – now. And – now. And – now.

  He said, Shall I tell you something? I’m a happy man.

  And then one day he phoned and said, I’m lonely. The people here think I’m a freak. The people here work for their wives and children, for their one-family houses, family cars, family vacation trips, and they ask me, What about you? What are you working for. No idea what I should tell them. I have no idea. Do you realise that we’ve known each other, you and I, since we were children? We knew each other before we were grown up, and something about that seems so very important to me; I just can’t quite put my finger on what it is. It snows here all the time. I constantly have the feeling that tomorrow is Christmas. Come to visit me. No one ever comes to visit me; how can that possibly be true. I’m living here in the best place on earth, and no one comes to see me. Why is this. Can you tell me why it should be this way? Why don’t you come to see me?

  And I started and tried to say that I had my own life here to cope with, a life without whales and without the Sound, but Ricco wasn’t even listening. That was the problem – he couldn’t listen. Sometimes, while he was talking, I would put the receiver down on the table and go wash the dishes, and when I came back and held the receiver up to my ear again, he was still talking about his fishing rods and his neighbours and the Maglite he had just bought, and he hadn’t even noticed that I had been gone. And on the whole, this doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all. I know what Ricco wants to tell me anyway, and I understand the way he thinks. There’s a strange connection between his head and my head; it’s always been that way. I remember everything he says, and I also remember what he says while I’m washing the dishes. He told me about the girl he picked up that Saturday evening in the city; he told me how drunk she was, too drunk to take off her shoes by herself, too drunk to go to bed with him. And so Ricco simply sat on the edge of her bed and looked at her all night long until it got light outside. When it was light and she opened her eyes, he was still sitting there like that, and she said, Will you stay a little while longer, and he said, Of course. Why not?

  If he were to ask me, Do you still remember how often she dropped the key outside her apartment? I’d say, Three times.

  And if he’d say, Do you still remember which blouse she was wearing, then I can tell him that it was a white blouse with puffed sleeves gathered with embroidery, and that this reminded him of something that happened long ago.

  Ricco says, I don’t want to fuck at all. I just want to be touched.

  I say, I know.

  And now he’s here again. He has sold his company, his car, his house and all his fishing rods and has come back. It was too lonely up there. He bought a new house in the same area where we grew up, a house not far away from the housing development in which we were children, not far from the place where his father is buried. Ricco is here again; he has come to visit me and sits the entire evening on my sofa staring at Ziggy who has gotten quite big, a regular, genuine, big boy. Ricco taps the sofa next to him and says to Ziggy, Come here; and Ziggy isn’t a child who needs to be begged; he just goes right over to him.

  Ricco says, Do you know that I’ve known you from the time you were a baby? That I’ve known your mama since she was a baby? A fat, round, friendly baby?

  Ziggy politely acts as if he could imagine it, and Ricco and I both have to laugh. The three of us have supper together, and Ricco comes to sit with us when I read to Ziggy. Ziggy is eight years old; he still wants me to read to him, and I’m hoping he will want me to do that for a good while longer.

  The sentences in Ziggy’s books used to be simple. The lion met a rabbit. Once upon a time there was a king. One day the bear got sick and stayed in his cave. Nothing easier than that, said the grasshopper. Nothing easier than that! Today the sentences are already grown up and complex. A cold wind blew from the northeast; their course led northward; the water was ice cold; they walked on in their wet clothes.

  Ricco listens and all the time he is looking around at Ziggy’s room. He looks at Ziggy’s globe, the Titanic he built by himself out of cardboard, his little guitar. He looks at Ziggy’s years.

  I drink a glass of wine; Ricco drinks hot water. He wants to tell me everything – about his departure, about the day when he pulled the door of his house on the Sound shut behind him for the last time, about his new house, his plans for the future. He wants to tell me again about his father. He looks quite different from the way he did back then; he has become strong, and he’s brought back a sizeable belly from the North; back then he was slender and boyish, energetically charged somehow. I don’t want to know in what way I look different.

  Getting up from the kitchen table, I say, Can you tell me about it tomorrow? I’d like to go to sleep now. I have to work tomorrow, and Ziggy has to go to school early.

  Ricco looks surprised. He looks at me; then he looks away. He says, Where will I sleep; and I say, You’ll sleep in my bed, and I’ll sleep in Ziggy’s bed.

  Ricco lies down in my bed; he leaves the light on, and the door wide open. I wash the dishes and sweep the
kitchen; I lie down next to the sleeping Ziggy, and then I have to get up again to change the water in Ziggy’s goldfish tank; the fish keep coming up to the surface of the water, and I can’t stand the sound they make gasping for air. Ricco sees me walk through the hall with the goldfish bowl, and he sits up in my bed and says, What are you doing there. What on earth are you doing?

  I stop and stand there; I think that in all its simplicity this is hard to explain. I’d like to say, Do you still remember when we were children and we went into the forest and held long birch sticks to the power line? How it hummed inside us then, a humming in our entire bodies, from our toes all the way up to our scalps, and to this day I haven’t gotten rid of the humming; that’s what I’d like to say, but although I know what Ricco is thinking, Ricco doesn’t always know what I’m thinking. The light is already out in the hall, and the two fish in the glass bowl between my hands shimmer like gold leaf.

  Intersections

  She told Vito at breakfast. She didn’t have to say anything; she could have kept it to herself; it’s unlikely that Vito and André would ever run into each other. That André might then say, Listen, Vito, Patricia phoned me to complain about my tenants, and I told her that if she didn’t like my tenants, she should buy the house. I said to Patricia, Buy the house. Didn’t she tell you? It’s unlikely that there would ever be such an encounter. So she needn’t have told Vito about the conversation with André, she needn’t have mentioned it. Why, in spite of that, did she mention it. Why did she say, I spoke on the phone with André. I called him up to tell him about the situation here, and instead he told me about his own situation; for half an hour he complained about his miserable, dreary suffering. And right at the end, when he was almost finished and I was practically slipping off my chair with boredom and weariness, he said he’d be willing to sell us the house. I’m sorry, he said, but I’d have to ask a good bit for it. That’s what he said.