He wanted to go back into the small room. Had she really called him, or had he been mistaken, as he squatted on the floor and read one of the letters that he was supposed to put in order. Just two sentences:
It is time, Almut, for me to travel to the coast and try to walk on the water, since the ships lying in harbour are going to places I do not want to go to.
The first sentence.
Take my word for it, the sun that burns here is not the same that should be warming you.
The second. But when three, or was it four, cats came hurtling down the stairs, ran through the hall and disappeared, he saw that the front door was open. He followed the animals that had already vanished amid the knee-high grass and the forests of stinging nettles. Slowly he walked around the house. Selma Bruhns was standing in the yard laid with flagstones, she could it reach from the kitchen through a side door. When Markus drew closer, he saw the pile of exercise books that she had piled up in the middle of the rectangular yard. As he came even closer he realised they were notebooks. He could read the name on the cover of the exercise book lying at the top of the heap. When he came up to her, Selma Bruhns, who was standing next to the great heap of paper and staring at him with indifference, as if she could barely perceive him, said: “You have a car”.
Markus was taken by surprise and answered yes, but he still did not know what she wanted from him, he still thought she wanted him to drive into town to do some shopping, or else she herself wanted to get away from her house with him.
“Yes,” he repeated, “I have a car.”
It was a pyre that Selma Bruhns had erected in the yard of her villa.
“Do you have a can of petrol?”
Since Markus realized the reason for her question, he hesitated to reply, as if he did not want anything to do with it, until Selma Bruhns said: “Go and get it.”
Markus had walked out to the street and opened the boot of his car. He took out the can that had lain there for weeks on end and that he had filled only a few days ago. He closed the boot and went back to the yard, where Selma Bruhns was standing next to the pile of exercise books, in exactly the same place where Markus had left her in obedience to her command, if such it was, since he had not dared to contradict her, and had gone to fetch the can.
“Open it,” said Selma Bruhns, and only with difficulty did Markus manage to repress his revulsion and fear, and to unscrew the can lid. Since it was a hot day and the sun was shining over the yard, petrol vapours rose up right into Markus’ face. He had the feeling that he wasn’t just smelling the petrol but also tasting it.
“Give me the can,” said Selma Bruhns, and took it, moving one step towards Markus, out of his hand; moving in slow motion, so that her action struck Markus as a ritual, she started to pour the petrol over the notebooks. She handed the can back to him.
“Screw the lid back on,” she said.
Markus waited, thinking that she was going to ask him for his lighter, but Selma Bruhns reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out a box of matches, took out a match and struck it on the rough side of the matchbox. It flared up. She threw the burning match onto the pile of papers. With an explosion of petrol fumes it burst into flames. The flames licked over the notebooks that were immediately ablaze, and spread out onto the flagstones until all the petrol he had poured out had been consumed. The flames were barely visible in the bright light of day, but the air started to shimmer.
“When it’s done, pour water over the ashes,” said Selma Bruhns, turning away and walking up to the kitchen door through which she must have brought the notebooks out into the yard.
“She never let anyone near.”
He is speaking about her in the past tense, thinks Markus, who is standing some distance away from him next to the poster in which the friendly young policeman is holding out his hand to the spectator.
“It’s true, I watched, especially to begin with, after I had bought the house and was trying to establish contact with the neighbours, I rang at her garden gate, but I didn’t dare to step into her garden and go to the house when she didn’t respond to the bell, I wrote a letter, no, no complaints, just an invitation for a neighbourly visit, and when she didn’t react, I tried to speak to her over the garden wall, but as soon as she saw me, she turned round and went back to the house—in those days there weren’t so many cats yet, and the house was still in good condition, only the garden had already gone to seed—and gradually her mostly invisible presence started to unsettle me, the windows draped over, yes, the stench and the cats, there were more and more of them and they didn’t pay any attention to the boundaries between our properties, in fact, though that wasn’t the decisive thing, how can I put it, of course I found it difficult to put up with the pervasive smell, we could hardly sit out in our garden, and the noise of the animals, their fierce fights often directly in front of my terrace door, the draped windows and the weeds that spread into my garden, no, it was all difficult to put up with, irritating, her property turned into a blot on our neighbourhood, but what really unsettled me was the music, her piano playing, every afternoon, when I came home, I would listen, I soon started waiting for it, I’m not a musical person, she always seemed to play the same piece, though I’m sure this wasn’t actually the case, and was much more a result of my ignorance of classical music, but what I really want to say is, I became addicted to this music as it wafted over to me from that increasingly decrepit house, it was a foreign body in my plain, modest world, my wife and I have no children, we lead a calm, uneventful life with fixed habits, perhaps that was it, this music became so to speak part of my habits, and on the days when she didn’t play, as the years went by there were more and more of such days, I felt something was missing, I began to wait impatiently for the music, and I began, as in the early days—when it may indeed have been out of curiosity and irritation—to keep watch on her again, but that was different, I had, maybe as a result of the music—I’m not a musical person, I don’t know—a feeling or a need to speak to her, as if I wanted, as it were, to find out whether her voice matched her music, the way I imagined it—I can’t quite find the words, maybe that sounds a bit crazy, but it seemed quite natural to me, this need, I wanted to know whether her words, as she uttered them, sounded just as mysterious—in my life there were no mysteries—yes, just as mysterious as the music, and I finally succeeded, when I caught her out, and she couldn’t get away, I was too quick for her, she was standing by the garden wall, perhaps looking for one of her cats, and I finally managed to speak to her, the only thing I could think of was to complain about the stench and the neglect of the garden.”
He does not look at Markus while he is speaking. The flush that had coloured his features under Berger’s attacks has disappeared, in the corridor light his face looks sickly, he leans against the wall and now and again rubs his shoulders against the smooth surface, as if he has an irritating itch in his back.
“How could I tell all that to the Superintendent,” he says.
The secretary, who Markus now believes is no secretary but perhaps indeed Berger’s deputy, had asked them to leave the room. Markus, together with Selma Bruhns’s neighbour, went out into the corridor where they are now waiting to be called back into the office either by the woman or by Berger himself. Markus has not made any attempt to try to talk to the man, he has deliberately moved slightly away from him and is standing next to the poster, and when Selma Bruhns’s neighbour speaks to him, as he has not stopped speaking to him, Markus wishes that Berger might open the door and ask the man to shut up.
It’s the woman, whose name Markus does not know, who comes out into the corridor and asks them to go back in. They go in, the woman first, followed by the man who has still not been able to make his statement, and last of all Markus, who is trying to keep as far as possible from the others; they walk across the outer office in which Markus had had to wait, and step into Berger’s office.
Berger has rolled his desk chair into the right-hand corner of the
room. Now it is standing to one side of the window. With his short legs stretched out in front of him, his elbows propped on the arms of the chair, and his hands folded in front of his chin, which he gently strokes with his thumbs, he is sitting in the corner and glances towards them. When Markus looks across at him, quickly, before he can turn his gaze away, he thinks he notices a cunning wink, but when he sits down again, he is sure that he was mistaken. Selma Bruhns’s neighbour has sat on his chair as well, but this time a little closer to Markus, as if their short stay in the corridor had created a sense of community between them, something that even here, in front of Berger’s gaze, he is reluctant to relinquish. The woman continues to stand next to the desk.
“Herr Vorberg, I’m now going to put a few questions to you; please answer them concisely and accurately,” she says.
When Markus hears the man’s name, it seems to him as if the man were changing and suddenly acquiring a firmer contour and a more secure place in the room.
“You’re saying that you were in your bedroom yesterday evening, from where you could look out into Selma Bruhns’s front garden,” the woman continues.
“That’s right,” replies the man.
“What time was it?”
Markus again glances across at Berger. As if this were nothing to do with him, Berger has turned his face to the window. Is he too observing the cranes, directed from the invisible crane operator high above in his glass cabin?
“It was just after ten,” says Vorberg, sounding relieved.
“Wasn’t it too dark to make anything out?” the woman asks. She pulls her chair closer to the desk and sits down.
“No, it wasn’t too dark yet.”
“What did you see?”
The man points warily at Markus. “He came out of Selma Bruhns’s house,” he says.
“Nothing so very unusual about that, is there?” says the woman. “What made you inform the police?”
Markus had not returned from the yard into the small room that, since the day before, had been his workplace, windowless, a bare light-bulb, no chair, no table, the walls grey with the dust that swirled up when Markus took a new pile of papers from one of the chests. Or had Selma Bruhns come in, opened the lid, and read the letters that she had collected?
He had gone into the garden, to a cast-iron bench surrounded by bushes that he had discovered the day before, on his way back into the house, carrying the empty plastic bucket. He still thought he could sense the heat of the fire under his skin. He didn’t know how long he had sat on the bench. He gazed out into the green wilderness, with a feeling that he would soon be unable to perceive any more of the details. He smoked a cigarette and observed the ants that came out from under his shoes and in some mysterious fashion seemed to know the goal they wished to reach. When he turned round she was standing behind him.
“How old are you, Herr Hauser?” said Selma Bruhns.
“I’m twenty-two,” answered Markus truthfully.
“What are you studying, Herr Hauser?” said Selma Bruhns, without leaving her place behind his back, thus forcing Markus to turn round and look at her over his shoulder.
Before Markus could answer her question, Selma Bruhns stepped out from behind the bench—he thought she was going to sit next to him and for a few seconds he stopped breathing—took a few steps towards the tree that stood about ten yards away, stopped, and said as she turned her back on Markus: “You don’t need to answer if you don’t want to.”
And even then, even before Markus could say anything in reply, she was moving away from him, had almost reached the birch tree and was supporting herself with her right hand against its trunk as if she felt overcome by a dizzy spell that had forced her to lean against the tree, whose branches hung down and covered her face with their shade.
“To be quite honest, I’m not studying anything. I don’t go,” said Markus. When the sun broke through the cloud cover and he was dazzled by the light from behind her, he could no longer make her out distinctly, but he felt that she was observing him through the hanging branches, and this made him feel uneasy and awoke in him the sense that he was sitting in front of a commission that was out to uncover his errors and failings.
“You must have some profession,” he heard her say.
“I want to be a writer,” he replied. For once he did not blush as he usually did when he betrayed his wish to others—a wish that he secretly considered wildly overambitious.
She stepped out from under the branches, and walked right past the bench towards her house, Markus would have to turn round if he wanted to keep her in view. But he did not.
When he had gone out into the street to put the petrol can back into the boot of his car, a woman had come up to him on the path, with a short-legged waddling dog on a leash; the dog halted right next to Markus, lifted his hind leg and pissed against the trunk of the tree in the street. The woman spoke to him. Perhaps with age she had become smaller, her back was bent forward in her thin summer coat, her hair hung in grey streaks from under her hat. With her thin fingers rounded into a little fist, she kept a firm grip on the dog’s leash as he strained at it.
“He’s a pug dog,” said the woman, perhaps under the impression that Markus would find the dog interesting, though in fact he had gazed at it in some alarm—or perhaps she was using the dog as a pretext to talk to Markus since the expression in her eyes already gave away her next question.
“I saw you coming out of Selma Bruhns’s house,” she said.
“I did indeed,” replied Markus.
“That’s very unusual,” the woman continued; as she went on speaking, her gaze was directed at Selma Bruhns’s villa, and she betrayed her annoyance when the dog again strained at the leash. “That’s very unusual. Are you a relative of Selma’s?”
She called Frau Bruhns ‘Selma’ as if she had known her all her life long, and the emphasis with which she uttered this first name suggested to Markus a certain familiarity that gave him the courage to ask the woman if she knew Selma Bruhns well.
“Selma. She doesn’t talk to me any more. She won’t let me into her house. Ever since she came back, and that’s many years ago, she hasn’t spoken to me. The furniture van drove up, things were carried into the house, the furniture van drove off, I stood by the fence and looked across at Selma, I was excited when she came to close the garden gate, but—she saw me, I know she saw me—not a glance from her, not a word, the gate was bolted, she went back to the house, and since then she’s never left it,” for a moment the woman paused, turned her eyes to Markus and looked at him, “how is it that Selma lets you in?”
“I work for her,” Markus had replied.
“You must think I’m being an inquisitive old thing, but perhaps you understand, Selma and I, every time I walk by this fence, I remember, and I always feel a short stab of pain, Selma and I, in those days we were inseparable, we were friends, when we were young, very young. We were silly young things, to tell you the truth. ‘Little flappers’ they used to call us. Selma and I, and of course Almut, the three of us were feared throughout the whole neighbourhood.”
The woman’s flood of words dried up. She stared at Markus is if only now had she realised that she was talking to a stranger. “I’m sorry.”
She made as if to head off, the dog was dragging her forwards, but quickly, as if this were an opportunity that would never return, Markus said:
“When was the last time you spoke to Frau Bruhns?”
“Before the war,” came the answer. Once again the woman turned to Markus.
“Don’t say anything to her, it’s gone on for too long, the silence, I’ve grown long in the tooth meanwhile. Selma always knew exactly what she was doing. She’ll have had her reasons.”
She finally allowed herself to be dragged off by her dog. Markus had thrown the petrol can he was still holding into the boot, slammed it shut and locked up the car again.
“Writers need success or a lot of money, otherwise they don’t have any time to write,�
� said Selma Bruhns, again standing behind the bench on which Markus was sitting. Since he felt reluctant to turn round to her, he stood up, feeling through the soles of his shoes the soft grassy ground beneath him, and, breathing out in some relief, he said: “I’m going to have both, success and money.”
As if he himself were alarmed at his words, he looked at her and saw Selma Bruhns lifting her right arm and wiping her forehead with a movement so light and effortless that Markus recognized in her the young girl of whom the woman in the street had spoken.
“He had left the front door open,” says Vorberg.
While Markus sits bolt upright on his chair, his gaze fixed straight out of the window, a window that, since he has narrowed his eyes, he perceives only as a bright rectangular patch, Selma Bruhns’s neighbour has turned to the woman sitting right by the desk and tapping a pencil on its wooden surface.
“He didn’t close the front door,” repeats Vorberg, now turning his back on Berger who is sitting perfectly still in his corner, “and he came running down the steps. He ran through the front garden. Before he could reach the street, there was a sudden shower. A heavy one. He held an attaché case over his head and ran to his car. He got in and drove away. He also left the garden gate open.”
The Game of Cards Page 4