Käthe didn't even rise from the chair to see them off. They were both so stubborn, so single-minded, Anna thought. Neither one would give in. It made no sense.
Anna followed William to the car, hardly able to catch up with him. He got in and opened the door for her from inside. Silence, Anna had learned by then, was often the best strategy. It was better to let William calm down, not to try anything hasty. After a day or two he would mention Käthe himself, comment on her stubborn character, on the way she always knew how to annoy him, suspected him of the worst. Anna would listen and nod and a few days later she would call Käthe who would invite them for dinner as if nothing had ever happened.
Käthe walks slowly to the window and looks out at the oak tree in the yard.
“Perfect to age cognac in,
nicht wahr
?
”
she says. “
Vati
always said that only the oaks that grow alone, make good barrels. The wood has to soak up enough sun. If it doesn't, it won't release the taste or the smell.”
“Your father said that?” Anna asks, puzzled. It's the first time ever that she has heard Käthe mention her father. But Käthe has already turned back and motions to her to help her lower herself into the armchair. She no longer wants to talk.
Conversations, even that short, mean improvement. When she learned of William's death, Käthe wouldn't speak at all. For days she sat frozen in her wicker armchair, staring at the crucifix on the wall, a wooden cross with Christ's steel coloured body, the wounds of flagellation scattered all over it. “You see, darling,” Anna sobbed into the pillow. “You were so wrong about her. She does love you. She always has.”
The nursing home doctor, a nice, chubby man with a gentle smile, a favourite of all the residents, said he was watching her closely, but that Anna should let her grieve. Then one day he called. “I think you should come,” he said, and Anna could sense relief in his voice. “When I walked into her room, in the morning, your mother-in-law told me to straighten the pictures on the wall and stop grinning like a fool. I think that's a good sign.”
That was a month ago, and now Anna has come bringing a bunch of red tulips with her. Käthe asks her to put them on the night table, and then, in a gesture that takes Anna by surprise, she smoothes Anna's cheek with her hand.
“Ann
chen
,” she says. “I am praying for him. And for you.”
Letters come every day. The screen door opens with a squeak; white envelopes fall through the mail-slot and spill on the floor. Anna picks them up and takes them to the kitchen to read. They move her, these words of sympathy, the memories of old conversations, the friendships of his other life, long before he met her. This one is addressed to Frau Herzmann,
with the German double “n” William has dropped from his name in Canada.
The news of your husband's death reached me only a few days ago through Frau Strauss, an old friend of the Herzmann family, from Berlin. I was saddened to hear that it was so unexpected, that he had no time to reflect, to reconcile what may have needed reconciliation. You will forgive me for saying that; we Catholics pray to be spared from a sudden death.
Your husband has often been in my thoughts and in my prayers. I've always considered myself to be his friend, even if we spoke rarely, for it is the depth of conversations that really matter. He came here for the first time in the spring of 1976, to examine some old music we have in our library, here at the monastery. I was asked to assist him. We talked a lot about Germany. He was of the generation touched by the war. Too young to have taken a stand, too old to say it happened before his time. This is a European disease, this mixing together of blood and soil. Pick a handful of it, they say, and you will squeeze blood.
At the time of this conversation, your husband was still shaken after a boat trip on Königssee, not far from here, in the Bavarian Alps. It was an occurrence of the utmost importance, he told me, the essence of what was wrong with us here, the blind worship of the past. He said that from the moment he boarded the wooden boat he was expected to behave as if he were in a church. Nobody on the boat dared to speak a word, he said. Everyone listened to a young guide in his twenties, with blond hair and blue eyes. The guide spoke of the purity of the place, of the mountains where Bavarian kings once hunted, of the sacred trees in these forests, of the lake's crystal waters, the salmon and trout that live there. He stopped the boat and put his finger to his lips. They sat there for a long time, watching the darkness fall. Then, the guide blew his flügelhorn, and they all heard a single, long, haunting note. A moment later, reflected by the mountains, the echo of the horn came back, seven times. Your husband found it disturbing, very disturbing. One couldn't help but notice that he was bitter about Germany that way. He said he never admitted he was German, if he could help it, that he refused to speak German, and looked at me when he said it as if he wanted
me to protest. But I said he did what he needed to do. He asked me how I dealt with it. I said that for me it was a mission I had not chosen but could not refuse. He only laughed.
He came here one more time, as a visitor that year, for a retreat. We have a few rooms in the monastery where people come for peace. Perhaps it calmed him to be in a place where we accept the limitations of reason. I said to him then that in the depth of doubt there were always two roads, one of despair and one of hope, and that I always chose hope.
I pray to God that peace and hope comes to you, dear Frau Herzmann. You and your late husband will always be in my prayers. Father Albrecht
Once, at a party in Montreal to which William took her, Anna met a Filipino woman who said she could remember everything that ever happened to her. “Exactly the way it happened,” she said firmly, “As if I were watching the same film over again.”
Anna remembers feeling incredulous at first, then irritated with the certainty in the woman's voice and then, guilty that her own memories came maimed, malleable, prone to manipulation. “I can close my eyes,” she can still hear the woman's slow voice, “and I can see what I saw twenty years ago. Feel the shape of the rope with which we had to tie the house down before the hurricane. Smell the wax on the bamboo floor.”
“All of it, right here,” she knocked at the side of her head, a soft knock muted by a layer of black, shining hair, “forever.” But Anna no longer knows how much of what has happened is already lost.
How she regrets now the wastefulness of the first weeks after William's death. Knits her brows at the recklessness of picking up the small silver scissors with which he trimmed his beard and then putting them back, in their place on the glass shelf in the bathroom. Of breathing in the air trapped in the fibres of William's shirts, opening the book he left unfinished, a book mark pointing to a traveller's account of the journey through the Russian steppes:
The spring is chilly in the steppes. The wind has no barrier, here, no reason to stop.
How much smarter she is now. She knows that without her efforts William's presence will evaporate from the rooms. Keeping it demands ministrations that rarely repay her with the vividness she craves. In the street she might see a man his size, turning his head in a gesture that is unmistakably William. Then she has to stop herself from running after him, grateful for this momentary sharpness of feeling, which is all she has left.
She has devised some temporary measures. “Stay away,” she tells herself. “Save it,” she murmurs. “Don't look.” She stays away from the black case of his violin, hides William's favourite mug, his navy-blue dressing gown still smelling of sandalwood soap, with some threads pulled out already, breaking the thickness of the terry cloth. These she guards, saves them for the empty time when memories have to be coaxed out, enticed.
She flings the door to his study open and walks in. She brushes her fingers over the surface of the mahogany desk, over the pile of papers, over the drawers with their round brass locks. She opens them, one by one, slides her hand inside, smoothing the things that retain the layer, however faint, of his touch.
“My haven,” he called it when he brought her here, for the first time, and she looked at the piles of books and papers lying on the floor, seeing in them a maze of paths that would take her years to unravel. His ex-wife and her inexplicable outbursts of hatred. Julia's angry silence. William was standing right behind her, his arm around her waist, his mouth nuzzling her hair aside and touching her neck. She leaned back and pressed her head to his chest. When she was little she would ask her father to let them walk like that, together, her feet on his. He pretended to wobble as they walked and she laughed at these big steps she was making, the sweeping swings to the left and to the right, the sudden twists broken by a peal of laughter.
I am that which is.
I am everything that is, that was, and that will be. No mortal man has lifted my veil.
He is of himself alone, and it is to his aloneness that all things owe their being.
They frightened her then, these words, so beautifully penned on white parchment paper, in their wooden frame.
“These?” he repeated her question. “These are ancient oracles. Beethoven had them mounted under glass on his working table,” he had told her. “You don't think I'm arrogant to do the same?”
“No,” she laughed, “I don't.”
How relieved she felt then, how light! Borrowed, words somehow became less ominous, easier to tame.
“I'm worried about you,” Marie says as she so often does. The touch of her friend's hand is firm and not unpleasant, but Anna withdraws her own hand swiftly. At Stach's, a Polish restaurant in Old Montreal where Marie has taken her for a bowl of goulash and a thick slice of rye bread, Anna separates strands of soft meat with the tip of her spoon. She puts her spoon down, and sips water from a thick, green glass.
“It is this absent look,” Marie says, “I can't stand it.”
No one, Anna thinks, has told her about the apathy of grief. Of the loathing of the slightest effort, the slightest gesture. Of the long, empty hours spent in bed, curled up, her head covered, hoping that the world has stopped as it should. Of the times, increasingly alarming to her, when she finds herself doing something she does not remember starting, as if, in these blank, missing moments, her mind floated somewhere above and could not be accounted for.
“Can you sleep?” Marie asks.
Anna shakes her head. That has changed, too. At first she could. Right after William's death sleep was an escape, a relief; she could have slept night and day. Now she has to rely on Halcyon, her mind emptying itself in a heavy, dreamless slumber. The pill doesn't help her fall asleep; she takes it for the dawn when, without it, she would have woken up, no matter how dark she has made the bedroom. At five in the morning her mind refuses all consolation.
Every day Marie insists on taking her out, or on coming by, placing food in front of her. For Marie, Anna's appetite is the
measure of her mood. If Anna pokes her fork into the leaves of lettuce, Marie pleads for a movie, or a walk. If Anna eats what is in front of her, she can be left alone.
“When will you go back to teaching?”
“I don't know,” Anna says. It hasn't been too hard to find a replacement for the two English classes she usually taught at that time of year.
“I don't need the money,” she says as if that's what Marie were worrying about.
“But you need something to do,” Marie snaps. “You can't cry all day.”
In this other life, as Anna sometimes thinks of the time William was still alive, she had so many plans. There was a radio documentary she wanted to work on with Marie, interviews with Polish refugees who could now go back to the new, democratic Poland. “Would they?” Marie wondered.
“He wanted to have a trout pond. And a vineyard,” Anna says. She has taken to speaking in short sentences as if words tired her. A thought takes too long when it has to be wrapped up in words. Is this why William turned to music? She would have asked him if he were here.
Marie has heard it before, a list of what is no longer possible.
“Here,” she says and hands Anna an envelope with newspaper clippings, William's obituaries she has collected.
Brilliant composer⦠cruel loss⦠he had so much more to give.
Hackneyed, threadbare words come too late, but Anna craves them nevertheless.
His music. In the last years he wrote so little, and what he wrote he tore to bits and threw away in disgust. She had to become an expert on consolation. From old reviews she had memorised whole passages and recited them back to him over the breakfast table.
His music thrives on ambiguity and conflict. It is interested in the decay of sonorities, in patterns that collapse as we become aware of them. In its avoidance of pulse it mocks our need for stability. Change, when it happens, has no purpose; it is time that takes away some things and substitutes them with othersâ¦
“Listen to me, darling!”
Insatiable, seductive, brilliant. William Herzman's music transcends the boundaries of genres. It takes us beyond our selves, shakes off our complacencyâ¦
He always listened. Rolled his eyes in mock impatience, but never ever stopped her. Never tired of praises, however stale she feared they'd become.
“What would I do without you!” he would say and, now, when she remembers it, she is awash with tenderness.
Marie orders two shots of
Zubrówka
, bison vodka, fragrant from a blade of sweet grass. The waitress places them in the middle of the table.
“Come on,” Marie says. “Together.”
They raise the glasses. Anna flinches as she drinks, but the vodka does warm her up.
“How's your Mother?” she asks.
“Fine,” Anna says. “They're all fine.”