The Rose Gardener

by Charlotte Link

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Yes, I’m sure of it.”

  “Okay then,” Michael said. He stepped from one foot to the other. He was probably freezing. “Then were you thinking about your English pen pal?”

  “And if I was?”

  Michael rolled his eyes. “My God, you said the old lady is over seventy years old! What is it about her that’s so fascinating?”

  “I don’t think that you actually want to know.”

  His eyes narrowed. He’d probably registered the quiet edge to her words — an edge that she had not shown for a long time, if ever. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t want to know.”

  Astonishingly, she didn’t have the least bit of desire to relate anything. Instead, she looked at her long, bare legs and tried to remember when she had last slept with him. It must have been around a year and a half ago. He had been invited to a formal dinner, and she, as usual, hadn’t gone with him. When he had come home, in the middle of the night, he was in a brilliant mood and a little tipsy. She had been asleep already, but had woken up when he’d fallen into bed beside her and reached for her.

  “What’s wrong?” she had asked groggily. As always, she had taken pills so that she could fall asleep, and now she could barely manage to wake up.

  “You’re beautiful,” he murmured. “So beautiful.”

  He practically never said that to her, and his words had so stunned her that she woke up a bit more. He touched her, and she let him, though in truth she didn’t want him to. She felt too miserable, too broken to be able to permit herself any kind of sexual feelings. He rolled onto her, moaning softly, and the whole time she tried to think that it was alright, that it was nice to be wanted in this way, to excite physical desire in a man. But a voice within her had spoken clearly, telling her that she shouldn’t kid herself, that Michael wasn’t really thinking of her. Something that evening — probably another woman, another guest at dinner — had gotten him erotically charged, and she was simply the first woman he was able to lay his hands on. After that one occasion the event hadn’t repeated itself. He hadn’t told her that she was beautiful again, either.

  “Do you even see me as a woman?” She asked. “I mean — a woman in the sexual sense?”

  Confused, he said to her, “What is it you’d like to know?”

  “Exactly what I just asked you.”

  A smile stole its way across his features — actually just the hint of a smile, but it was enough to make it clear what it was he saw in her. She could see in this smile the image that she offered him. She could have been looking in the mirror: cowering under a blanket, freezing, tormented by bad dreams and chased out of bed. Weak. A weak person. She read from his expression that he would think of her as having no other attribute than this. How foolish her question must have seemed to him.

  She rose and shook off the blanket, but in doing so she felt neither stronger nor freer.

  “Forget it,” she said. “Just forget what I asked. It was stupid of me.”

  “Listen, now ….,” he began carefully, but she cut him off. “I don’t want to talk about it. I was talking nonsense, and I’m asking you to just not think about it anymore.”

  “Alright then.” He didn’t pursue it any further. Franca was too hurt to recognize the small victory she’d just won. Michael turned around. “Are you coming back to bed?”

  “You go ahead. I actually am going to watch some television. I don’t think I can sleep right now.”

  Michael seemed like he still had something he wanted to say, but then decided against it. His bare feet slapped lightly on the stone tiles in the hallway.

  Franca’s forehead felt hot all of a sudden. She pressed it against the cool glass pane of the living room window. Free. If she could only be free. Free from her painful memories, free from old images and feelings. Free from herself.

  10

  December 24, 1999

  Dear Franca,

  Today is Christmas Eve and I’m sending you a whole stack of letters. I’m sure you’ve been thinking I don’t want anything more to do with you since you haven’t heard from me in so long. But as you can see, I was still hard at work writing you, ten letters, I’ve just counted them. I just had some strange inhibition that prevented me from sending them off. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s because you’re a stranger to me still, which, on the one hand, is an invitation to share things with you that up to now I’ve kept for myself, but on the other hand means that there are moments when I get blocked and I really start to think about things. I ask myself then why I’m writing to you, and as I never hit upon a satisfying answer I get insecure and for the next few days I’m withdrawn and less inclined to conversation — or better yet: less inclined to write. Better still: I’m inclined to write these letters, but not to send them. Every time I think: I’m doing it for myself. I write it all down, the bad memories and the good, and then I put it all in a drawer where it can just sit and collect dust.

  Writing is like an avalanche. It starts with just a little bit of snow, but then there’s more and more snow, and also boulders and earth and whole trees. Finally, there’s something crashing down into the valley and there’s nothing in the world that can hold it back. I wouldn’t be able to stop now, and I don’t want to, either. And because naturally I am not without vanity and your interest flatters me, today I’m going to take heart and send you the whole stack of letters that has been piling up.

  It’s still early in the morning but I’ve already been outside with my dogs. It was pitch black. We don’t have any snow; it’s extraordinarily rare to get snow on the islands, but I remember that the Christmas of 1940, the first Christmas under German occupation, a thin layer of white powder lay over all the meadows, trees, and stone walls. Germans are crazy for snow at Christmas, and so weren’t they all thoroughly touched when we presented them with this, almost like a gift to welcome them to Guernsey? Of course it still snowed sometimes, in the many, many years that followed, although I can’t remember any of them individually. But I’ll always think about December 24th, 1940.

  The 24th of December was Erich’s birthday. I think that on the one hand, Erich was always proud of having come into the world on such a privileged date — and on the other, he was angry that each year Christ upstaged him. Differently than it is with us, in Germany the 24th is the big day, and as much as Erich made sure that others celebrated him to the extent he felt was his due, he could do just as little to change the fact that even his most deferential countrymen had completely different things on their minds than his birthday. In the five years I had the pleasure of living under the same roof as Erich Feldmann, every single Christmas celebration — except for the very last one — ended in disaster, because every time Erich felt that he wasn’t being appreciated enough.

  We’ll celebrate tomorrow, a proper English Christmas. I hope the day will go smoothly. I’ve put together a present for Helene, a few useful things, books, CDs, and tons of marzipan, which she’s crazy about, even if she claims — just like with everything else — that she can’t eat it.

  I’ll be getting perfume from her. It’s what I always get — for Easter, for my birthday, for Christmas. And she’ll have made me a calendar with photos glued onto it, she does that every year as well. Roses are the theme. A different rose for each month: sometimes a whole rosebush, sometimes a single, closed bud; sometimes a blooming flower, with beads of dew on its petals, and sometimes a glass bowl filled with water, with different-colored flowers floating inside. She puts a lot of effort into it, she finds proverbs and poems that she writes under the pictures and that correspond in some way to each month. I’ve received just such a calendar every year for almost fifty years now. Helene is just about obsessed with taking photos of the roses in the garden. She must have thousands of pictures by now. Her favorites are the roses that grow between the white wall and the bird bath, in t
he place where we met for the first time. She snaps photos there like it’s her job. I often get strangely aggressive when I see her there creeping around with her camera. She moves very cautiously, as if a sudden movement might kill off all the roses, or as if she could somehow desecrate the spot.

  The stupid thing about it is that I don’t particularly like roses, so the whole calendar is a waste of effort. Have I told you about this already? About my aversion to roses? Normally, you would expect a rose gardener to love the plants that she’s given her life to, since life and career are one and the same, somehow — or do you see it differently, Franca? And that’s the problem with me: the damn roses set the course of my life, when the life I’d wanted to lead was actually quite different.

  After my studies over in Southampton I would have liked to see the world, but then Cambridge came in between, which was alright too. Cambridge is not the whole wide world, but it had an atmosphere that I liked. But instead of traveling more, I wound up back on Guernsey, where, with rather middling success, I grew roses. I will die in the house in which I was born and in which I have always lived. In case Helene doesn’t die before I do — she’s ten years older than I am, but that doesn’t mean anything, really — there will be a rose calendar hanging over my bed in my final hours. Perhaps I’ll summon the strength to turn it around or tear it off the wall. When I die, I would like it if a dog licked my face, I would like to smell that warm, always somewhat foul breath, and I should like to bury my hand in soft, thick fur. Then I’d get to feel like I was taking a piece of life along with me. But Helene would manage to hold a newly blossoming rose under my nose in order to “sweeten” my final moments, and I can’t guarantee that I won’t have to vomit.

  Oh, Franca, what a Christmas card this is! Now I’m describing my final hours and you’re probably thinking, ‘The old lady is completely off her rocker.’ But today is hardly the day to brood over gloomy thoughts, much the opposite! Alan arrived just yesterday, he’s asleep in the guest bedroom, and today I won’t see his face before noon. He only gets out of bed around midday when he’s on vacation, especially when he’s spent the night before staring at the bottom of a glass. Yesterday he emptied an entire bottle of French red wine by himself. He proceeded to have more liquor afterward, and before all that, he’d drunk a double shot of whiskey as an aperitif. I ask myself how his liver can handle it all. It’s likely it’ll just give up at some point.

  Kevin will be cooking for us this evening, which means of course that he’ll be starting sometime this afternoon. He brings practically his whole kitchen with him, his view being that he could never once prepare a good-tasting meal with the inadequate tools I have on hand. It would probably be simpler for us to go to his place, but it’s a tradition that we eat here on December 24th, and one shouldn’t break with tradition. It’ll be yet another marvelous feast, and not even Helene will be able to claim she can’t get a single bite down. She won’t because of how much she loves Kevin. And knows that he loves her. Somehow they mirror each other in their fussy ways. The two of them are also the biggest hypochondriacs I know. Never does one of them make fun of the other’s whininess; rather they listen to each other attentively and full of empathy.

  And then I’ve also invited Mae and Maya, which is to say that, actually, I only asked Mae to come, but yesterday she called and asked if she might bring Maya with her. She’d had another falling out with her parents and it would be better to keep her away from them till after Christmas.

  I couldn’t very well say no. Maya is a nymphomaniac, but that had never bothered me really; quite the opposite, it had always cheered me up to take note of Helene’s indignation. But since I’ve known that Alan is under her spell, I’d most like to see her on the other side of the world. I hope it’s not something to do with her that he’s drinking so heavily again, but if so, it’s not like I could do anything to change it.

  I would like so much to set his idiot head straight, to be able to somehow influence his unbearably bad taste when it comes to women. Maya is a worthless little so-and-so, and cold as ice besides, but he won’t listen when I tell him that. You’re always the mother, it’s like a curse. You’re still worried about your little baby, even if he’s a forty-year-old attorney with a drinking problem.

  Quickly now: It will be nice, we’ll all go for a walk while Kevin cooks, and then we’ll find our way back to a beautiful, warm house full of wonderful smells, and we’ll eat for hours and hours. At some point Helene will complain about how tired she is (she can’t simply say that she’s tired, she immediately has to whine about it) and go to bed, and Alan will drink and stare at Maya, who for her part will make a game of ignoring him.

  What are you doing for Christmas, Franca? You write little about yourself. I’m guessing you’d like to keep your problems to yourself. Things between us get a bit one-sided that way, but that’s to your detriment, not mine; you would have to change it and not I, wouldn’t you agree?

  Merry Christmas, Franca. I wish you well in the new millennium. I have a strange feeling that next year will be significant, but it could just be my imagination. You never know what’s coming, and that’s what makes life so worrisome. How nice that in between there are things you can count on. For example, that tomorrow I’ll be getting perfume and a rose calendar.

  Perhaps you have a bit of time to read, Franca. About what happened next back then, with me and Helene and Erich.

  I hope you enjoy the holidays.

  Ciao,

  Beatrice.

  GUERNSEY, AUGUST – SEPTEMBER 1940

  For a while, Beatrice had thought that should Erich ever need a victim she was first in line, and she had tried to inwardly prepare herself. She soon realized, however, that this role was reserved for Helene. And she was in no way a victim only when he needed one; she was always in that role. Or perhaps it was just that he always needed one. Whatever the case, Helene seemed to be the ideal choice.

  She was twenty-one years old, just shy of her twenty-second birthday. At some point she mentioned that her birthday was September 5th, and Beatrice said this was hers as well. Helene was overjoyed.

  “That’s no coincidence!” she cried. “It must mean something.”

  “What’s it supposed to mean?” Erich asked angrily. “Do you always have to see some kind of magic behind even the most banal happenstance?”

  Red splotches rose to Helene’s cheeks immediately. She bit her lip. But on this occasion, Erich was also angry with Beatrice.

  “Listen up, young lady. This very special line of resistance that you’re obviously attempting to pursue won’t get you very far with me,” he said. “You will fit yourself into our life here as a family, this I can promise you!”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Beatrice responded.

  “You know very well what I mean. We’re coming up on the end of August. There’s just one week left till your birthday. But you don’t make a peep. If Helene hadn’t started in, you’d have let September 5th pass by without saying anything. We’re all living here together under the same roof. We should know one another’s birthdays, don’t you think?”

  “You never asked me.”

  “Then you will tell me things even when I don’t ask about them. You will tell me simply because you are a child who was raised well and knows what’s appropriate. Of course, I can take it upon myself to teach you manners, but you should reflect on whether it’s not simpler for you to remember the ones you already have.”

  “How old will you be?” asked Helene in the squeaky voice she always had whenever her husband had put her in her place.

  “Twelve.”

  “At twelve you’ll be almost a young lady already,” said Erich affably. “Maybe we should have a small party for you that day — though you don’t deserve it, keeping quiet like that!”

  “We could have a party for both of us,” Helene suggested, but in doing
so she just brought Erich’s anger back out again.

  “Can you not once leave yourself out of it? Is that really so completely impossible for you? Will your minimal sense of self-worth collapse if you let a twelve-year-old child come before you?”

  “No, I just thought …”

  “You didn’t think at all, Helene, and that’s the problem exactly. You simply had the feeling, yet again, that you might get less than your share, and so you went ahead and put yourself front and center. My God, sometimes I ask myself when you’ll finally grow up!”

  Helene’s eyes filled with tears. With a wild movement she pushed back her chair and headed for the door. Erich shouted, his voice razor sharp, “you stay right here. We’re discussing Beatrice’s birthday party now!”

  Beatrice had never known her father to speak to her mother in such a harsh tone. She couldn’t imagine Deborah would have obeyed a command delivered so harshly. But Helene stopped at once, like someone had jerked on a leash tied around her neck. She looked pale and tense.

  “Now then,” said Erich, turning back to Beatrice, “what were you thinking for your birthday party?”

  Beatrice hadn’t been thinking anything at all. She just looked at Erich and waited.

  “We should invite guests. Whom would you like to have come here?”

  Beatrice hadn’t the slightest interest in having a party, but she picked up on the aggression buzzing behind Erich’s paternal amiability. It seemed advisable to accept what he was offering.

  “I’d like to invite Will,” she said.

  Erich raised his eyebrows. “Will? A grand friendship there, hmm? Well, okay, it’s your birthday. You know best.” He seemed somewhat annoyed. “Who else?” He asked. His fingers drummed irritably against the table’s surface.

  Beatrice decided to take a second risk.