“Smart woman,” said Kevin. “She was right. And she barely knew you then.”
Beatrice stared at the candle flame. Its light flickered on the wall. “She said one more thing: She said she had never been like I was, and never would be. And it would never be possible for her to live her life as she would want to.”
Kevin carefully arranged vegetables, potatoes, and fish on plates he had kept warm beforehand.
“Typical Helene,” he said. “But that’s nothing new. She talks like that all the time.”
“But back then,” Beatrice insisted, “right at that moment, she was saying it for the first time. And I should have taken it as a warning. You see, she wasn’t just whining and moaning like she always does these days. There was envy in her voice, sheer envy. It was ugly. I never heard it there later on. She’d gotten it under control, or better yet: she had found a strategy for dealing with it. She had simply decided to make my life resemble hers — unknowingly, perhaps, but she was no less intent on her decision on that account. By saddling me with all her fears and all her worries and all the hundreds of precautions that she herself had always been saddled with, she managed, to a degree, to be comforted. She had found a comrade. By making me a victim as well, Helene was able to bear her own role as victim. And on that day in the garden she began to make me a part of her restrictive, unfulfilled, unhappy life.”
Kevin poured more wine and sat down across the table from Beatrice. “If you had been able to see all that at the time,” he said, “which, as I see it, was in no way possible for an eleven-year-old girl — but if in fact you had been able to recognize her envy and to have come to the right conclusion about what its consequences would be — what would that have changed? Where would you have had the opportunity to do something differently?”
“Nowhere,” said Beatrice. “Come on, let’s eat before it gets cold.”
9
Franca woke in the middle of the night. She had been having a nightmare. She couldn’t remember at first what it had been about, but her whole body was covered in sweat, her heart was racing, and she felt an odd trembling within her. She lay on her back and stared out into the darkness. All at once, images from the dream crowded her mind. She moaned softly. Michael, lying next to her, immediately began to stir, and she held her breath in order to not wake him. He was a light sleeper, and, besides that, had an unerring sense for Franca’s psychic state. He would notice right away that she wasn’t doing well; he’d be irritated and react with reproaches or with advice that would make her feel even worse. She had reached the point by now where she would rather have spoken with the plumber about her problems than to discuss them with her husband — this even though marriage, as she understood it, was something you entered into so that both parties could be there for each other in times of crisis.
Perhaps her crisis had simply lasted too long. That, in any case, was what Michael would have said, had she presented him with her idea of what marriage was.
“Of course you stand by each other in crises,” he would say, “but when a crisis lasts for years and years, the partner can’t be a place of refuge any longer. At that point it’s up to the person going through the crisis to pull themselves out of the muck.”
He was fond of using this expression. Being able to pull yourself out of the muck obviously represented for him the epitome of strength and determination. By his own estimation, Michael had performed this feat at least a dozen times in his life, whereas Franca stuck to the conviction that, first of all, Michael had in reality never been stuck in any kind of muck, and second, as to this much-invoked trick of doing it on your own, such a thing didn’t exist.
You need help in life, she thought. Time and time again, you need help.
But on reflection she realized that it wasn’t right for her to speak abstractly. She shouldn’t be saying “you” — it should be “I.” She was the one who needed help. Michael had never once needed it.
She got up silently. She didn’t dare search for her dressing gown out of fear that she would wake Michael; instead, she simply slipped out of the room and down the stairs. She was shivering; sweat-soaked as she was, she’d catch cold if she didn’t watch out. In the living room she found a wool blanket. She wrapped herself in it and sank down into the chair by the window. Outside, through the bent blinds, there was not a single glimmer of light to signal the coming dawn. The night was black and deep, a very dark night in October. She knew that outside it would smell of damp, of leaves that would soon fall from the trees. It would smell of farewells, and of a cold that would last for a long time. She trembled under the soft, thick wool of the blanket, a trembling within her that stemmed from a feeling of utmost isolation.
That morning she had written Beatrice a letter. She had responded to Beatrice’s account of her first encounter with Helene Feldmann and to her description of Erich, of his mood swings and unpredictability. “Could it be that he was taking psychopharmaceuticals?” she had written. “Tranquilizers, stimulants, anti-depressants — depending on whatever he thought he needed at the moment? The way you present things, it seems very likely. He probably needed ever higher doses and displayed ever more extreme forms of behavior during the phases in between.”
Then she had deliberated writing something about herself — about the nightmares she had so often, and about a few things that had happened in her life that still would not leave her in peace. In the end, though, she hadn’t been able to go through with it. She had ended the letter with a few hackneyed lines. She didn’t have the impression that Beatrice would be interested in anything she had to say. Beatrice had already told her loads about herself, and perhaps she would continue to do so. There were obviously things that she wanted to get off her chest. Then again, it might just as well be the case that she stopped all of a sudden, didn’t answer anymore, pulled back completely. Either way it was certain that she hadn’t the slightest inclination to listen to her, Franca’s, problems within the discussion they were conducting through these letters. And besides, they would seem all too banal next to everything Beatrice had lived through.
In her nightmare, on account of which she now sat cowering under a blanket like a sick animal — sweat-soaked and trembling, her heart pounding in her chest — she had been standing once more in front of a classroom, looking out at an unruly mob that was feasting on her agony.
She used to tell Michael about what happened at school. His view, however, had been that she boundlessly exaggerated the facts in the way she interpreted things.
“There wasn’t any mob that was feasting on your agony! It was a few kids who were fed up with having to sit still in their seats and pay attention in a class that they were sick of — your colleagues’ classes just as much as your own, by the way. They just sensed that they could get away with causing trouble in front of you and not in front of the other teachers. Children are like little dogs that way. They just try to see how far they can push it. And only you can decide where to draw the line.”
She had often thought about whether that was true, whether her students’ acts of cruelty weren’t directed towards her personally or if instead they would have seized upon anyone who wasn’t able to defend themselves. Either way, the end result was the same: she was a victim. And a victim seldom inspires compassion. In the best case a victim comes away from things being only mildly hated. In the worst case the victim provokes ongoing, sadistic forms of torture. From a certain point onwards the students had come to consider it a kind of sport. They just wanted to see if there was some act of cruelty that would drive Franca Palmer either to leave the school or to commit suicide.
They’d done everything they could think of: They had blocked the elevator doors to keep her from getting out, forcing her to ride down again. They had sprayed ink on her clothes and stuck signs with obscenities on the back of her jacket. They had slashed her tires and filled her purse with dog shit. They had drawn a picture
of her on the blackboard as a grotesque, hideous caricature. Eventually, it was no longer possible for her to get a single word out during class that wasn’t lost in the screaming din. There had been complaints from colleagues about the noise that came from the classrooms in which she taught. Once, someone had informed the principal, who then had shown up unannounced. He must have felt like he’d landed in the middle of a war zone, Franca thought later. The students had been throwing paper airplanes and shooting spitballs; they’d been jumping on the desks and the stools; some had drawn all over the blackboard and then started howling as they hit one another with the wet sponge. Pieces of chalk flew out the open window. Two girls had parked themselves by the sink and were putting on mascara in front of the mirror. Somewhere in the middle of all this chaos, Franca stood lecturing about the English revolution of the 17th century. Throughout this time she was constantly trying out new strategies for dealing with her disastrous situation, and on that day she had decided on the tactic of ignoring the mayhem and giving her lesson as if everything was in perfect order. Screaming and threats from her end had proven to be completely useless as attempts at bringing things under control, and besides, she felt too exhausted to fight any more.
She hadn’t noticed the principal at first, but then there was an immediate hush as the students stopped their mad yelling. Neither chalk nor spitballs flew through the air, and the girls put down their mascara brushes and slunk, somewhat embarrassed, back to their seats. Franca didn’t think for a second that it was something in her behavior that could have caused this turnaround; for a long time she had been incapable of believing either in her own abilities or in the possibility of a miracle. She felt a draft and turned around. When she saw the principal, she felt herself going white.
The principal waited until there was complete silence — it took only seconds — then said in a booming voice, “What’s going on here?”
No one said anything in reply. Most of the students looked down at the floor, too cowardly even to grin. The principal was highly respected at his school.
“Who is the class representative?” he asked.
The class representative raised his hand. He seemed extremely uncomfortable. The principal asked again what the cause of all the commotion was, but of course the representative didn’t know how to answer.
“It’s … almost the weekend,” he finally managed to say, and now some students were, in fact, grinning.
The principal turned to Franca, who stood at her lectern with her arms hanging down at her sides and had the feeling that she smelled of sweat. “Please come and see me during the break, Mrs. Palmer,” he said. Then he turned towards the door and left the room without another word.
Later, the principal had not been unfriendly; rather he had acted worried and sympathetic, and Franca had felt more humiliated than she ever had before. It seemed that a number of her fellow teachers had already complained, and for a while now she had been considered a serious problem at the school. In words that were tactful but impossible to misinterpret, the principal advised her to see a psychologist. There had to be a reason for these difficulties she kept having.
Even today, cowering under her blanket in the living room, Franca still remembered how she had felt as if she’d been slapped. She had been filled with rage inside, which, as always, she had kept well-hidden. Why me? She had thought. Why doesn’t it occur to anyone to take these half-crazy monsters and have them lie down on the couch?
She remembered how cruelly she had felt her colleagues’ lack of solidarity. How often had she pleaded for assistance, with both words and looks. She had spoken of students who were especially difficult, and her eyes had begged for a response in the manner of “Oh, I know what you mean. I myself have a rather hard time with …” But she had never heard such a response. On the contrary, it seemed to give them all a certain sadistic joy to tell her the opposite of what she wanted to hear. They loved to protest, saying they’d never had any trouble with this student, or with this class. They never had any difficulties, any of them. She noticed how strong and superior they felt comparing themselves to her, how much each of their egos drew strength from her instead of even once lending her a bit of support. The truth of the expression, one she had always dismissed as a cliché, became painfully and insipidly clear to her: she was down, and they were kicking her.
It was true. They were kicking her to their hearts’ content. She took anti-anxiety pills in order to be at all capable of setting foot inside the school in the morning. She began to suffer from asthma and insomnia. She consulted a doctor about her stomach pain and he discovered a serious infection.
“You’ll have an ulcer soon,” he warned. “You have to reduce stress levels and avoid agitation.”
She could still hear her own bitter laughter even today. The doctor could also have suggested that she pluck the moon out of the sky and hang it up in her living room. The stress and agitation grew worse with each new day. She lost pound upon pound; she could hardly eat, and what she did eat she mostly threw up again. It took an astonishingly long time for Michael to notice just how serious Franca’s condition was. Or really, she thought now under her blanket, it wasn’t astonishing at all. It was completely typical. You could drop dead next to Michael and he wouldn’t notice a thing.
At some point — as far as she could remember, it had been at breakfast one day — he had shot her a piercing look all of a sudden and then had stated, in an almost reproachful tone, that she had gotten awfully thin.
“Or better yet: skinny. What’s going on? Are you on a diet?”
Naturally he’d heard about what had happened with the slashed tires, and every now and then he might notice the ink stains on her clothing, but he still wasn’t aware of the full measure of abuse that was daily meted out to her.
“I’m not feeling well,” she had murmured. There had been a school day ahead of her, and in the mirror that morning she had seen how the skin around her nose was turning a shade of green.
“If you’re not feeling well then you have to see a doctor,” said Michael. Then he had looked at her more closely and added, “You really do look terrible. Do you have some pesky something or other that you’ve been putting off dealing with?”
“A cold, maybe.”
“Go to the doctor,” he’d repeated before jumping up and finishing the last bit of coffee in his cup, standing. He’d been late again.
She was careful not to move from beneath the protective cocoon of the wool blanket. Her current condition seemed a reflection of her whole being: huddled up, trembling, a sheet over her head to shield her from the world. Where, she asked herself, do people find the strength they need to live? Where is this hidden well they’re drawing from? Where did young Beatrice find the strength to cope with the cruel collapse of her once solid world?
Beatrice, this she had taken from her letters, possessed a remarkable ability to adjust to circumstances without being false to her true self. She didn’t cozy up to people, she didn’t tell anybody what they wanted to hear, but she also didn’t rebel against what couldn’t be changed. She made the best of things as they were. She learned German in order to understand the enemy, and she cultivated her friendship with Will in order to have an ally who at some point might be helpful to her. She tried to stay out of Erich’s way because instinctively she had recognized that he was dangerous, but she made sure that she was more or less on good terms with him. Her fear and worry over her parents she dealt with herself. In the letters there was no talk of her having grieved or complained — although Franca suspected that she must have spent weeks trapped in a kind of shock. It seemed, in fact, that she suffered most from the unthinking ease with which Erich had assumed ownership of her parents’ house. She had seen herself as being constantly under siege, and everything within her had raged against it.
Franca tried to imagine how she herself would feel if strangers were to take over her
house and act as if it were their own. It was clear to her that the injury went far beyond a matter of being a violation of her private property. Strangers’ boots stomping over her carpet, strangers’ hands touching the windows and doors, strangers’ mouths drinking from the glasses — all of this caused injury to something in the soul, something that might never really heal. You might lose a fundamental sense of trust, the belief that your own private realm would always be intact.
She heard quiet footsteps on the stairs and held her breath. The lights came on and blinded her. Michael stood in the doorway. He was bare-chested and wore only tight briefs, showing off his flawless physique. And he looked extremely taken aback.
“Franca,” he said. “What are you doing down here?”
She was all too aware of what a strange scene she must have presented. Scrunched up like a squaw under her blanket, staring straight ahead of her. She didn’t know how to answer at first and just twisted her face into an apologetic smile.
“It’s half past two,” said Michael. “Why aren’t you in bed?”
“I was in bed,” Franca replied.
“I know. And why did you get up? Why are you just sitting there staring into space? You could read or watch television at least.”
Of course, she thought, feeling a twinge of anger. If you’re not asleep than you should at least be doing something, even if it’s staring at the tube.
“I was thinking,” she explained.
Michael sighed. It sounded like he was dealing with an incorrigible child whose stubbornness always got the better of him. “What were you thinking about?” he asked, annoyed. “About your students? About what happened back then?”
He couldn’t have known anything about her dream, but by bringing up “what happened back then” — and he knew this of course — he could be certain of hitting close to the mark. Franca had no interest in confessing to anything. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I wasn’t thinking about that,” she fired back contrarily.
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