Nothing but Ghosts. Judith Hermann
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an anecdote that was intended to dovetail with the other anecdotes, forming a picture of the man he was. He seemed to think that it was enough for a start. I had shown him my lovely silence, my mouth, my hands, my head tilted to the side. The back of my neck hurt.
He waved to the waiter, who brought the bill and two little porcelain cups of rice brandy. At the bottom of the cup you could see a naked woman, her legs spread. She disappeared as soon as I had drunk the brandy. He paid, refusing to take my money, nodded to the Chinese family, who didn’t move; then we left. It was already dark outside and windy. We got back into his little car. He said, ‘Shall we drive home, OK?’ Perhaps the wording was intended to console me.
We drove through the dead city, terribly fast, then he slowed down, turned into a side street, parked the car in front of a small house that stood between two large villas. Instead of a hotel room, the theatre had made this place available to him – there were two rooms, kitchen, bath and a garden. He said he preferred this to a hotel room, he was fed up with his unsettled existence. We climbed out of the car. Staggering a bit, I held on to the garden fence and took a deep breath. I wanted to just stand still for a while in this dark garden. But he immediately unlocked the door, pulled me into the house, put on the light, set my bag on the floor, went to get wine from the kitchen, and pushed a chair over. ‘Sit,’ he said, ‘sit down. There’s something I have to do, but we’ll have something to drink first, OK?’
I sat down, took off my coat and lit a cigarette. The room was tiny and low ceilinged: a table, two chairs and a desk on which were the things he said he always took along with him – two or three books, a small brass elephant, a Pelikan fountain pen, and a large grey rock. A small narrow stairway led from this room to the upper floor, presumably to the bedroom. I sat there and watched as he walked across the room, unpacked his bag, sorted through the scripts on the desk, lost in thought or maybe not.
He poured wine for me and for himself too. I drank some immediately; in a terrible way nothing mattered any more. There was nothing. There were no words for our relationship, no silence and no closeness, not even a feeling of shock about the other person; even my fear was gone, the picture I had, all the images, Raoul in the rain, Raoul carrying me to his bed – none of his actions affected me any more. A tall, heavy man walking across a room in which a lamp casts a golden cone of light on a wooden table. The cigarette tasted rough and bitter and good. I drank my wine and refilled the glass, and he sat down at the table for a short while, talked a bit, and then he said, ‘Let’s go to bed.’
I brushed my teeth in front of the bathroom mirror and washed my face till it was rosy and soft, drops of water on my eyelashes, water on my temples, then I put on my nightgown and, placing my hands on the tiled bathroom wall for support, I took a deep breath. I climbed the narrow staircase and went into the tiny bedroom. Raoul was already in bed, apparently naked, lying on his stomach. He moved aside and held up the blanket. I crept under it and turned to him immediately; he would misunderstand, I knew that, but there was no other way than to touch him right away, to embrace him, to clutch him tightly.
His body was surprisingly soft and warm, a lot of skin, a lot of strange surfaces, unfamiliar – what an immense imposition. I touched him, and he immediately misunderstood, misjudging my queasiness, my fear and my shock. I said, ‘I don’t want to,’ and he said, ‘Why not?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know.’ That was true; I really didn’t know why, I only knew that I didn’t want to. And then he said, ‘But sooner or later we’d do it anyway.’ He was right, wasn’t he? I lay under the cool blanket. It was dark. He had turned out the light. His face was indiscernible in the dark. He said, ‘But sooner or later we’d do it anyway,’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ to his indiscernible face, ‘of course we would.’
The knowledge that he was right, the understanding of the logical consistency and at the same time its impossibility filled me with an unexpected, crazy cheerfulness. He didn’t say, ‘See?’ But he thought it, and while he did what he was eventually going to do anyway, I lay there and couldn’t help laughing, softly and violently, not wanting to stop, and he laughed too, but differently, and I held on to the edge of the bed and thought of Ruth. The way she came into the kitchen in the morning, making herself coffee and sitting down at the table with me and reading the little piece of paper on which she had written what she had to do that day: go to the post office, the supermarket, the chemist, call H. and D., get a present for M., pay the telephone bill. And then it was over and yet it wasn’t, and finally it was, and we rolled apart, he turned round, his back like a wide landscape. Then I fell asleep.
The next morning I was awakened by the ringing of the alarm clock. It must have been very early; the light in the room was still grey; my left hand had gone to sleep, and my shoulders hurt. I was instantly awake, at once tense, on my guard. Next to me Raoul groaned, threw back the covers, turned off the alarm and got up; his naked body was heavy and massive and in the dusky light seemed strangely blurred. He began to get dressed, in an awkward way, then he suddenly turned round to look at me as though it had just occurred to him that I was there – that there was someone else lying in his bed.
When he saw I was awake, he smiled at me and said, ‘I have to memorize a script now, and the rehearsal begins at nine; you can sleep a little longer.’ I said, ‘How late is it?’ He said, ‘A little before seven.’ Our voices were rough and scratchy. He opened the little dormer window; cold morning air came into the room, the dampness almost palpable. When he reached the stairs, he turned round once more and came back, stopped at the doorway and said, ‘When does your train leave?’
I think he dealt me this blow quite intentionally, but I was awake and alert enough not to look taken aback or hurt or surprised. I had no idea when my train left; I didn’t think there was a train back. I said, pleasantly, ‘Eight forty-two,’ and he said just as pleasantly, ‘That means I can still take you to the station.’ Then he disappeared; I heard him in the kitchen putting water on to boil, the refrigerator door opened and shut; he briefly went out into the garden; he turned on the radio.
I sat on the edge of the bed, put my bare feet next to each other on the floor, pressed my knees together, placed my hands on my hips and arched my back. Fleetingly I thought about the expression pulling yourself together. Then I got dressed and went downstairs. Raoul was sitting at the desk reading softly to himself and rocking his upper body back and forth. Without turning to look at me, he said, ‘There’s coffee and some fruit in the kitchen. Unfortunately, I don’t have any real breakfast stuff here.’
I took a tangerine from the kitchen table, poured coffee into a mug. ‘It’s seven thirty,’ the radio announcer’s voice said. I didn’t know where to go; I didn’t want to disturb him – there were no chairs in the kitchen, and going back to bed was out of the question; so I went out into the garden.
The garden extended down to the street, a narrow rectangle of unmowed lawn, two fruit trees, neglected flower borders, a rubbish bin, an old bicycle, and on the lawn in front of the garden fence a swing suspended from a carpet rod. The grass was dark and damp from the night, and rustling sounds came from the piles of leaves under the fruit trees. By now it was light; the sky was clear and a watery blue. I walked down the length of the garden path and back again; then I sat down on the swing.
The coffee was hot and strong; I would have liked to drink it the way Ruth always drank coffee – in one single long gulp – but my stomach rebelled. I swung back and forth a little. I knew that Raoul could see me through the window, and I was afraid that by swinging, indeed by sitting on the swing, I might present a certain image, like some poster, a metaphor, but by then it didn’t matter to me.
The street was quiet – one-family houses, one next to the other, expensive cars parked at the kerb under nearly bare linden trees. There was hardly anyone in sight, but now I could hear voices in the distance, children’s voices coming closer, and then I saw them – kids on the other side of the street on their way to school with colourful satchels on their backs, gym bags, trainers tied together by the laces and hung over their shoulders. I could see the wide driveway into the schoolyard, paper cutouts pasted on the window panes, the school clock on the gable. The children walked past the garden; they didn’t notice me. I watched them. They came by in small groups, some by themselves, slower and still sleepy-eyed, lost in thought, others