Letti Park

by Judith Hermann

  She told Vito at breakfast at eight in the morning on a Saturday; they were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table; Patricia had rubbed and scrubbed the tabletop until the wood surface turned silvery and velvety – wood like a dull mirror. Vito had got up early to go out and buy the paper; he had boiled two eggs, put the tea on the teapot warmer, and turned on the radio, then said three seconds later, I think I’d better turn it off again, Pat; let me turn off the goddamn fucking radio; he turned the radio off again. Then he was slicing the bread. He listened to Patricia with an amiable, calm expression quite rare for him.

  Patricia said, André is sick; he won’t last much longer.

  She was thinking, Each and every sentence I think is an abyss. Should I say it this way, or in a different way, or would it be best not to say it at all. Blue-grey? Or greyblue. I shouldn’t be merely weighing every word, I should be weighing every single syllable, the individual letters, the breath I have to take in order to speak, the sleep I need so that I can think. How dangerous this life can suddenly become again.

  She said, So, here’s the story, André won’t last much longer. He needs money for medicine. He is going to die. For that reason nothing matters a damn to him any more. He is dying.

  André had moved out of the house next door a year ago. Had moved to a place near a hospital with cardiologists, ultrasound machines, osteopaths. In your middle years you move to a house at the edge of the forest; when you’re old there are different priorities. A tall, fat man with a broken nose and arms that are too long. Patricia can still see him walking down the meadow to the forest to check on his fence, a melancholy ape in red overalls, and calling back over his shoulder, he says, Tell your guy not to keep taking the branches out of the fence to throw into your stove; the fence is alive; the branches are part of the fence; and she can see Vito giving André the middle finger behind his back. No close ties. They never went over there; they never invited André to their house. Conversations were only held over the fence or in the autumn while raking leaves on the street, or at the borderline of the property, always careful to keep their distance. Towards the end he suddenly had a Chinese wife, fetched or sent for from a catalogue or from the airport, a Chinese wife with a hairless dog who had to be smeared with suntan lotion in the midday heat, a sight that, as Vito said several times, made him want to puke. Then they moved away, and André rented out the house and the antisocials moved in.

  Did you know that their son broke into our place, Patricia had said to André on the telephone, had said to André wherever he was, on the outskirts of some city; the connection was poor with a gurgling on the line as if André were dipping the receiver into a pail of water every now and then, only to shake it vigorously for a while before continuing to shout into it. Steven Gonzales Soderberg. He broke into our house. That’s an untenable situation; can you imagine it?

  They had been away for a week and when they came back home, around midnight, Vito stepped on broken glass in the entrance hall before he’d even turned on the light. The side window had first been smashed and then forced open, and the door to the hallway was wide open, and all the things in the house had been turned upside down, their things had been turned inside out. Torn cushions and pillows, a flurry of bed feathers. Pictures pulled off the walls and torn from their frames – as if people were still hiding money behind etchings these days. There were also installations, photographs of Patricia, of Pat when she was young, with that reserved face she still has occasionally even now; only nowadays her reserve points in a totally different direction, no longer to a possible revelation; in any case, photographs of Pat in her young years spread out on the floor of her workroom, and the table in front of the concealed door, behind which there was actually nothing except the dusty attic, had not been simply turned or kicked over, but carefully moved to one side. And yet, alcohol and sugar syrup had been poured out, shelves turned over, and chairs kicked to pieces, the whole shooting match, except no faeces on the kitchen table, and you could sense that one person had been in the house alone, someone with enough time who possibly had sat down for quite a while in Patricia and Vito’s kitchen and imagined how it would feel to be someone else.

  The antisocials had moved in with suitcases, not with a moving van, just with suitcases; André had rented them the house furnished; presumably they didn’t have any furniture, no possessions, no belongings. A woman with four children, three girls and a teenage boy, and there was also a father who had been picked up by the police that first week after some incredible yelling and screaming; and apparently it wasn’t the woman who’d called the police, but one of the girls, the oldest, a thin, hunched-over figure in pyjamas standing on the street in the early dawn shouting curses after the police van as it drove off with her father until it turned the corner.

  The antisocials trashed the garden in no time; they threw the furniture out of the windows and got themselves three cats and a big dog; they would start up the circular saw without sawing anything, and the saw would screech pointlessly into the quiet afternoon. Patricia had no problems with their garbage and the yelling and the saw. She had problems with the expression on the woman’s face as she stood in front of the house waiting for the dog to finish his business, that satisfied and self-absorbed expression on the woman’s bloated face dreamy from medications.

  On some days, after the children had got on the school bus, the father would come back holding himself stiffly erect, and of course they didn’t close the windows; you could hear everything. Animals. Sometimes the teenager, Steven Gonzales, would stand at night under the street lamp with his back to the house, smoking. Or he would ride figure eights on his bicycle in front of the garden gate for hours and hours. Didn’t say hello. Didn’t even raise a hand in greeting, but Patricia knew that he was looking at her, and she knew that he’d once been an intelligent child.

  Did you know that their son broke into our house, Patricia had asked André on the phone, and surprisingly André had said, Yes, yes, I knew; I was told about it. And for a moment Patricia didn’t know what to say – I was told about it. Who told you about it, and if you knew, how could you ignore it?

  She said, These people have to go. I’m telling you in Vito’s words; it’s what Vito thinks; these people have got to go. Those aren’t my words, but it’s what I think. It’s what I want. It’s only a question of time, you understand? The next time he’ll come over when we’re at home; I don’t dare go down to the lake by myself any more. I don’t dare go out into the garden alone after dark. That’s no way to live. Do you follow me?

  For the first time in her life she had called the police. She had called the police, and the police came at two o’clock at night, a huge policewoman and a sleepy, puny policeman, and they had collected fingerprints and written down everything and photographed it all. Later that same night, at three o’clock, the doorbell rang and it was the woman from next door, and with a triumphant voice she said, It was my son; my son did it, Steven Gonzales Soderberg, and I can’t cope with him any more. She had pronounced her son’s name as solemnly as if it were a precious object, as if it were all about a rare and marvellous exemplar of an extinct species. The police officer had placed the form for lodging a complaint on the kitchen table, and Patricia had said, May I sleep on this for a night and think it over; I have to think about it; the officer had looked at her as if she were a hopeless case.

  What is there to think about. About Steven Gonzales?

  Yes, about Steven Gonzales. About Steven Gonzales Soderberg, dammit, Patricia had said. I have to think about him; I’ve never brought a charge against anyone before; I don’t want to be responsible for his getting fucked in the ass in jail, if you know what I mean; she’d begun to feel extremely hot; she had looked past the police officer, watching Vito as he led the woman to the door, pushed the woman towards the door, making sure to keep his distance. The woman had left an organic smell in their kitchen that she hadn’t been able to get rid of since. In the end Patricia did press charges.
Of course she had pressed charges; she had written it out and had signed a statement saying that she wanted to see Steven Gonzales Soderberg appear before a judge; she had put every single one of the letters of his name on the scale. Sixteen years old. With ears that stuck out, badly cut hair, bags under his eyes, a shifty look. Wiry. No prospects, nowhere.

  André’s voice on the telephone. Complaining, monotonous. He would never be able to get those people out. No one more unhappy about the situation than he was. He had rented the house furnished; not a single piece of furniture was intact; all the garden tools, gone; sold no doubt: the electric pruning shears, the lawnmower, the drills. The knife collection, a suitcase full of Chinese knives, and who has them now? Well? Who would have them? Patricia could have three guesses.

  He said, I’ll give you three guesses. There’s nothing to be done, nothing at all. I can’t get them out; if they’re ever to go away, you have to buy the house; with a change in house ownership they can be thrown out. It’s just that I’d have to ask quite a bit for it. The roof and the heating system. You know. Will he come before a judge? Won’t he be put away in any event?

  No, he won’t come before a judge, Patricia had said. Of course not. The break-in will go on his record; he is sixteen years old; in such a case there’s nothing you can do. If he bashes in my head in revenge for my having brought charges against him – then he would come before a judge. Then he’d come before a judge, and André at the other end of the line, had laughed at that, a booming and at the same time an affected laugh.

  Patricia watches Vito as he puts the teapot back on the teapot warmer, the handle of the pot carefully turned towards her. She just sits there, she’s not hungry, she isn’t tired and isn’t fully awake, for a moment she is in an in-between state, something light, resounding, as if hovering on the verge of a realisation.

  Vito says calmly, There is no alternative, Patricia. We will buy the house, and we have to do it quickly before that idiot André comes to his senses and asks for more money. There’s nothing to think over; it’s a stroke of luck. Just think of the garden, take a look at it from upstairs. The house is big. The barn is huge.

  But I’d like to think it over, Patricia says. I have to put my mind to it; I’d like to be able to justify it morally, ethically. They’ve got to go somewhere, these people have to have a place to live; I don’t want them as neighbours, but neither do I want them to fetch up on the street.

  But morality doesn’t come into this, Vito says. You can forget your idiotic moral standards, besides people like these will always find a place to live. Once they’re gone, you’re going to have to fumigate the house, to fumigate it from cellar to attic; you can start worrying about that. Nothing else. Call André. Tell him we’ll buy the house. We’ll buy his house today.

  Patricia says nothing. She looks across the table past Vito through the room; the linoleum floor gleams like a body of water; the sun is now up above the trees; the sun’s rays fall at a slant through the bay window, onto the table, onto the flowers in the vase on the table; God shows himself at Vito’s back, silent and emphatic in the deep blue of the hyacinths.

  Mother

  Half asleep, my mother had written in her diary, I’m lying on my back half asleep, watching my life pass before my eyes. A succession of days that will pass ever more quickly from year to year. When I’m lying on my back at three o’clock at night half asleep and see my life pass before me, I lose all eagerness for, and confidence in, the future. And tomorrow? The world will look different.

  She was twenty when she wrote this in her diary, neatly and carefully in her – back then and even into old age – girlish handwriting. I was fifteen when I read this diary, by accident and surreptitiously, and then when I turned the page, there was only one single sentence on the next page, written diagonally across the paper with a red pen; this sentence, in large and seemingly outraged letters: I am afraid.

  I closed the book, almost dropped it as if I had burned myself.

  My mother grew up in the city on a quiet street lined by plane trees; a long row of identical blocks of flats; she grew up with her mother and two older brothers in a three-room flat; she played in the rear courtyards that ran endlessly into one another, in the laundry rooms, and in the attics. Her best girlfriend was named Margo Rubinstein, and my mother and Margo Rubinstein together kept a yellow notebook in which they wrote down aspects of their physical characteristics, of the persons they were, and the persons they would be or could be.

  You are – Margo noted the key points – small and dainty, thin lips and freckles beneath your face powder, hair short like Audrey’s in Roman Holiday, perhaps glossy black. Somewhat quiet, but intelligent. Predilection for foreign words; you read the newspaper! Love angora wool sweaters, bergamot perfume and Bakelite necklaces. Slow lazy movements, your expression: attractively sleepy, a slight squint, ears sticking out a little?

  My mother was an athletic girl with long brown hair that she wore in a braid fastened on top of her head. Her expression was alert, shy, amiable and stubborn. She wrote, You are as tall as my brothers, curly hair down to your chin and platinum blonde, grass-green eyes, lashes like a porcelain doll, and you absolutely have to smoke, Senoussi Orient cigarettes, with an amber cigarette holder. Negligee, velvet slippers with pompoms, and toe nails with coral nail polish. Laughter like a glockenspiel! Cheeky, a heartbreaker.

  They wrote these sentences into their yellow notebook in Margo’s mother’s room. Margo’s mother’s room was cool and crepuscular; the window always open a crack, and the curtain moving in the wind, changing the light. Along one wall stood a wide bed with a shiny quilt on it; across from the bed, a make-up table with an oval mirror; furs and tulle skirts were crammed inside the clothes closet; a slight aroma of sandalwood, pepper and vetiver hung in the air. It was strictly forbidden to enter this room. Margo and my mother wrote their sentences secretly and hurriedly into the notebook lying on their stomachs on a carpet on which lions were pursuing gazelles. Before they tiptoed out of the room again, they straightened the carpet fringes, placing a ruler against the fringes; they pushed the curtain one millimetre to the right and back again.

  They wrote, You will be happy. You will have a great deal of money. You will go far away to America or to Australia; you will lead a rich life.

  When she was sixteen, my mother graduated from school and began working for the city administration. She married my father when she was twenty, against her family’s wishes, and moved with him into an apartment that was two houses away from the apartment in which she had grown up. She had five children, all of them girls.

  Margo Rubinstein became a nurse. She started an affair with a doctor and moved out of her mother’s apartment into a nurses’ residence; the affair with the doctor lasted three years; then it was over, and Margo moved back in with her mother. She came to see us once or twice a month, a raw-boned spinster in a fur coat that smelled of dust and mothballs; and she allowed my father to take this coat from her shoulders in a way that embarrassed me. Under the coat she wore corduroy dresses and pearl necklaces, small brooches in the shape of cat heads with red, feverish cat eyes made of garnets. She drank tea with my mother, and she always had a perplexed, apologetic expression on her face, an expression halfway between embarrassment and irony, as if she wanted to say she knew very well that everything had gone wrong, even though it didn’t have to go wrong at all. That she herself knew and regretted it. Her eyes were as round as circles, a deep brown, and outlined with black eyeliner pencil. Her right front tooth seemed to be getting longer and longer with the years; it clacked against the teacup when she drank, and I had to avert my eyes. My mother had told us that Margo Rubinstein had always been the first to be asked to dance. The very first one, and for her entire youth she had been pursued by a swarm of boys; she had, my mother said, a unique way of turning her head back over her shoulder to see who was following her, and then looking away again and venturing a little smile, a mysterious, lackadaisical, wonderful smile.<
br />
  Margo Rubinstein spoke so slowly it seemed as if she were under the influence of sleeping pills, and her hands were pale and narrow, and cold. My mother’s posture as she sat at the table with her indicated that she would not tolerate any silliness or impudence from us; when she’d had too much of our staring and giggling, she would get up and push us out the door.

  On Margo’s birthday my mother went to visit her. She came back around ten o’clock and told us, in answer to our questions, that she’d had supper with Margo and her mother and after that they had watched the news on television together. A birthday party that left us speechless, which we wanted to hear about over and over again – how could that be. Margo Rubinstein resembled some of the characters in books we’d read: sad old girls who lived with their mothers and hoped for deliverance.

  What is her mother like? Mrs Rubinstein, what is she like? We asked our mother that, and she answered, Margo’s mother is mean, but she’s still Margo’s mother.

  Margo Rubinstein died when she was fifty years old, unmarried and childless; she died of cancer. She had continued to live with her mother, taking care of her, until the end. When Margo died, my mother took over that task. I don’t know what Margo’s death meant for my mother. I have no recollection of her grieving, and I don’t think I ever spoke with her about it. Margo Rubinstein disappeared from our lives, and my mother now took care of Mrs Rubinstein in her stead. She did this for many years, and she always addressed Margo’s mother the way she had in her childhood. She never addressed her by her first name, and she continued to address her formally as ‘Sie’. In our family the name Mrs Rubinstein took on the nature of a synonym.