The Summer House, Later. Judith Hermann
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takes the steep and rocky road to Kaspar’s house every morning in the blazing sun, silently puts the fruit on the kitchen table, then goes to sit down on the porch, only to lapse into immobility. Kaspar watches Cat, who leans back in the blue porch chair, his eyes, as always, half closed, smoking a lot of hashish, clicking his lighter open and shut with his thumb and watching Nora and Christine. They remain unresponsive, noticing nothing; besides it’s hot, and they’re much too close to each other to be aware of a stranger’s attentions. In the morning they drink unsweetened black coffee, smoke five Craven ‘A’ cigarettes in a row, cadge some coconuts from Kaspar, restless to do something, then run down the meadow and disappear. Kaspar feels shut out and is angry. He would have liked to have more of Nora to himself; after all, that was the reason for her visit. He says ‘Back then’. He says ‘Remember’, he says ‘We’ and ‘We in the city back then’, such funny words. Christine raises her eyebrows mockingly and Nora looks away.
‘That was then, Kaspar,’ she says, kissing him on the cheek. She wants, perhaps, a new kind of friendship, perhaps nothing at all any more.
‘Why did you come anyway?’ Kaspar asks. Nora answers casually, ‘Because you invited us,’ or, ‘Because I felt like seeing you. How you live here, and if you’ve changed.’
‘Have I changed?’ Kaspar asks himself. ‘Did I come here to change?’ He has no answer and feels hurt, deserted.
Every day Nora and Christine take the Jeep down to the harbour and then one of the beaches. ‘Kaspar, want to come along?’ Kaspar stays behind, as does Cat, not even asked, immobile in the blue chair. ‘All right then, see you later.’ Not the slightest note of disappointment in Nora’s voice; she guides the Jeep in a serpentine line down the meadow to the little sandy road, Christine waving exaggeratedly. For two or three minutes you can hear the car’s engine, then there’s silence.
Kaspar lies down in the hammock and looks at Cat through the mesh. Cat draws in his left leg, extends the right one, scratches his head, sits still again. He’ll stay till evening, till Nora and Christine come back. He’ll stay till after supper, and presumably he’ll sleep here too, that’s what he did yesterday, on the old sofa in the kitchen. Cat’s sleeping in Kaspar’s house is something new. It doesn’t bother Kaspar. The islanders come, stay uninvited for a day or two, disappear again. It’s the custom. Kaspar could go to Brenton’s house, lie down in his bed, stay there four days, and then go home again; Brenton wouldn’t ask any questions. And Kaspar doesn’t ask Cat any questions either. But he wants to know whether Cat is thinking about Christine, or about Nora. Christine?
Christine and Nora watch Cat while he eats. Cat eats everything with the same expression on his face, a stoic fork-to-mouth motion with his head slightly bent toward the plate, his left hand lying flat on the table while he holds the fork in his right.
He eats everything without betraying the least emotion, and never says this is good or that tastes funny. ‘He eats because he’s hungry,’ Christine thinks, ‘because you eat to satisfy hunger, and that’s all.’ She watches him, and sometimes he looks at her with half-closed eyes until she lowers her gaze. She puts rice on his plate, akee and salt fish. She likes putting food on Cat’s plate.
The evenings are long, and Christine becomes restless. Nora lies in the hammock, plays the didgeridoo, blowing long, hollow, vibrating tones out into the night. She does this for hours, and won’t allow herself to be distracted even by Christine, who walks back and forth on the porch, arms crossed over her chest, nervous and bored. ‘Kaspar, why do you live here?’
Kaspar is on the lawn, watering the azaleas. Christine, an intent expression on her face, leans against one of the porch columns six feet away from him. Kaspar doesn’t like these questions. He doesn’t like Christine’s restlessness, but still he says, ‘I guess because I’m happy here. Happier than elsewhere, I mean.’
‘How come?’ says Christine, trying to listen to him, though she’s already bored again.
‘Look around you,’ Kaspar says, straightening up and pointing toward the jungle, toward the ocean, the fiery glow in the mountains, down in the inlet the misty, orange-coloured lights of the harbour. Christine follows his glance. Kaspar remembers how, on the first night after her arrival, she sat on the porch, her knees drawn to her chest, and stared into the darkness for a really long time, very quiet.
‘All right,’ she now says defiantly. ‘All right, I know. But still, you must miss something. Autumn, for all I know, snow and the changing seasons; you’re not a native. I mean, you must miss the city, your friends, your old apartment, all that – don’t you miss all that?’
‘No, I don’t,’ Kaspar says, sounding annoyed.
Christine slowly slides off the porch and walks along behind him.
‘What do they talk about here anyway, Kaspar. I wouldn’t want to spend my life talking about papayas and breadfruit. About mangoes. Sex, children.’
‘You don’t have to,’ Kaspar says. Christine replies, ‘One has to make up one’s mind,’ then turns and runs down across the meadow.
‘Christine!’ Kaspar calls after her in an attempt to be conciliatory. ‘The hang glider pilot is coming tomorrow!’ Christine, already out of sight, calls back, ‘And when is the goddamn hurricane coming?’
The hang glider pilot arrives early in the morning, but the islanders are already there. They must have started out at dawn, because when the hang glider pilot’s small red car comes crawling up the mountain the villagers from Stony Hill and Snow Hill are already gathered on the porch, silent. ‘Flyman,’ Cat says, as always sitting in the blue chair, and starts to laugh, Christine watches him out of the corner of her eye. Nora squats in the shade, smokes Craven ‘A’s and drinks black coffee; the hang glider pilot unfolds plastic tarpaulins, pulls out rods, perspires, inserts metal into metal.
It is hot. The sun beats down, and there is almost no wind. Kaspar wonders how the flyman is planning to lift off here, down the hill all the way to the harbour: he has picked the big taxi parking lot as his landing site. The flyman puts on a helmet and climbs into a harness bundle resembling a sleeping bag. ‘Flying bag,’ Kaspar thinks. The flyman now looks like an angry giant insect just before it emerges from its strange cocoon, and on the porch suppressed merriment is spreading.
‘Flyman fly,’ Nora sings softly. Christine squats down next to her and giggles. Eagles are ascending over the hill, and far out at sea a ship is blinking. Cat gently shoos away the flies and closes his eyes. The flyman starts to run, the grass rustling under his flying harness bundle. The glider lifts off, a murmur passes through the ranks of the spectators from Stony and Snow Hill, the eagles above the hill soar and glide. The flyman rears up, the harness bundle flaps, the glider flies for twelve feet and then, with a dull thump, drops down into the reeds at the edge of the meadow.
Someone gets up and runs into the house. Christine says, ‘I’m going to take a shower’; morning turns into noon, unnoticed. The ship far out at sea changes course and heads for the harbour. Nora is standing in the kitchen, squeezing mangoes and guavas and breaking ice into small pieces. Christine is singing in the shower; Cat in the blue chair lowers his head and opens his eyes. The islanders go around to the back of the house with Kaspar to check out the new goats, a light breeze blows from the mountains. The flyman kneels again, the glider rattles and rises. It rises three feet, then six, it shimmers blue, rises further, glides in a straight beautiful line over the meadow towards the jungle, glides at an angle, rises higher and higher. Only Cat sees it disappear, a small pair of wings above the trees, a steel strut catches the sunlight, glitters briefly, then it is gone, merging with the blue of the sea; Cat sees the ship, now nearly at the entrance to the harbour, a white banana freighter that will be heading for England.
‘You must learn to wait,’ Cat says that evening; Nora and Christine are disappointed because they didn’t see the flyman’s take-off. ‘For minor events too.’ Christine stares at him: it is the first time that Cat has ever spoken to her, and she doesn’t know whether she should consider it impertinent. She says, ‘What do you mean – minor events?’ Cat doesn’t answer, but