It is the dates Anna is checking now. Date stamps, for many of the notes are not dated at all. She remembers that William kept a magnifying glass in one of his drawers. It is still there, in its black leather case. She examines these smudged dates, carefully. 1980, 1977. Some months are missing, or so it seems to her, but then they appear, merely misplaced, overlooked. William has known Ursula for a long time.
“A Berlin photographer I know,” he said to her once. For months there was no name attached to this phrase, and she didn't ask.
In another conversation, she remembers hearing Ursula's name. Someone mentioned it, Malcolm perhaps, asked him about his photographer-friend from Berlin. “Ursula?” William said and Anna asked, “Who?” and he said, “Ursula, you know, the German friend I told you about.”
From the tinge in his voice she knew that it gave him pleasure to hear her name spoken.
“Quite mad,” he also said, “doesn't believe in sparing herself.”
Many of the notes are hand-written and these Anna has to decipher slowly, match the shapes of letters, guess their meaning.
Life is too short for pettiness
, she reads.
You are too impatient, but I do love you
. She skims over them waiting for the change of tone. Hopes for the signs of love fading, turning into friendship.
September 1981, What's wrong with our love, William? It weakens me; it makes me mellow. I walk through the day with a self-satisfied grin on my face and see your smile everywhere. I catch myself whispering your words. I hum, I skip as I walk. Don't be too pleased with yourself, though, this is a pitiful sight! This is why I'm asking you to stay away. Please don't be angry, you won't lose me, ever. You'll just let me breathe, and for this I will love you even more.
October 1981, It's our souls, darling; they cannot stand letting go of the other lives they could have led. It scares me to think how much we have to cast off in order to choose.
October 1981, A Polish woman and a refugee, William? Isn't she another one of your atonements?
Her lip hurts, but it takes a few second before Anna realises that her teeth have sunk deep into it, cutting the skin. There is blood on her finger when she runs it over her lip, and she stares at the red smudge before wiping it off. She has run out of excuses. “Fool,” she says aloud, “fool.” Her mother's voice is with her now. “What were you expecting, Anna,
from a German
?”
Each date now is like the lash of the whip. “Until the end,” she murmurs in disbelief, “until the very end.”
May, 1987. I've never promised I'll be faithful, and I don't ask for your exclusive interest. Oh, I know, you will never admit that you are jealous! You will just sulk and try to punish me with your silly little games. How sordid of me! Sorry! Am I hurting
your sensitivity? Poor Willi. I don't believe in secrecy, and I don't hide you from anyone else in my life. You are the one who pretends that the past and the present can be kept apart and I let you, so, please spare me your little sermons.
March, 1989. Don't sulk! I woke up in my darkest mood, today, despairing. I looked at the last shots and they were all wrong. False, contorted, smug. Too light, too clean. What rot! A good photograph is like a prediction, isn't it? It captures something about the future, but you have to hurry before time turns it into a cliché. So I hurry, rush, follow my hunches.
January, 1990. When I was coming back to Berlin I saw the dawn. It stretched, pink and red, and golden. “A ribbon at a time,” Darling. Remember? Maybe you are right, maybe I'm not that tough. I telephoned Lothar, and he came and let me speak of you. He made me some tea and we finished off the brandy you left behind. I couldn't drink it alone.
November, 1990. So it's next week. In Munich. I have a map of the world and put red tags for every city where we have been together. The spots of love. The map is pretty red, by now. Three days and three nights. I'm waiting already.
In some of the envelopes Anna finds dried wildflowers, which now crumble under her fingers, shreds of cloth, splinters of grey wood. Short notes give way to longer letters, to more newspaper clippings, pages with passages highlighted and peppered with exclamation marks. She opens the envelopes, blue, white, pink, unfolds the pages. Most of the letters have been mailed in Germany,
Mit Luftpost
, the blue sticker informs, by
Deutsche Bundespost
, but there are notes scribbled on grey stationery from Hotel Intercontinental Genève with its bilingual warning that,
L'expéditeur de cette lettre n'engage pas la responsabilité de l'hôtel
. The sender of this letter does not entail the hotel. By now Anna has abandoned all search for order, picks the letters at random, little snitches of the love William hid from her so well.
Mutti came for a few days, and she said I had to let her remodel my bathroom. The faucets were leaking and she gasped in her funny way. “My poor darling!” Her daughter is impractical, erratic, irresponsible. Smokes and drinks too much. Loves too
much. Places no limits on herself, gives herself away. I said she could do whatever she wanted to the bathroom, a bloody mistake. I left for a few days for Paris, and when I came back I found this pink(!!!) heaven. The basin and the tub are two inverted shells. I have a mirror across the wall and pink tiles with white shells on every sixteenth one. I counted them, so I know. The floor is white â a damn nuisance, for every fallen hair stands out. She has also bought me a pile of pink and white towels, thick and fleecy. Only the taps are decent, a kind of Bauhaus style, brass, quite nice to the touch, you will like them. She went away, pleased with herself and I, quite sinfully, poured her strawberry bubbles into this shell and soaked in the water until my skin resembled prunes. I tried to call you, but you were already at home so I imagined you instead.
Dearest, We love each other so much because we are far away and we save for each other only what is best in us. We meet, full of longing, we part before we are filled, before impatience sets in. When I come back here, I thank the gods for you and hold my breath not to spoil anything, but you, you try to imagine the limits of what we could be for each other, what life together could mean. I'm not that brave. Urs.
Anna stands up so fast that she overturns the oak swivel chair. Valerie, William's secretary, must have heard the noise for she is now knocking on the door. “Are you all right?” she is asking, her voice filled with concern.
“I'm fine,” Anna says. “It's just the chair. I ⦠it fell down.” She opens the door and even manages a faint smile. “It's nothing.”
“I'm right here, if you need me,” Valerie says, smiling gently, and Anna can see that she is relieved.
“Yes. Thank you,” Anna closes the door and waits until the steps fade away, before settling down to work. Time is rushing forward, and she is trying to catch up with it. The first thing she needs is to be back home. Here, she is too much aware of the presence of other people: Valerie, William's colleagues. Malcolm's office is right next door. If she screamed, he might come running.
The boxes are lying on the floor. With a thick black marker smelling of paint thinner she quickly writes “discard” on the
side. First she empties the contents of the top drawers, removing everything from them in scoops. Paper clips, pens and pencils hit the cardboard bottom. Thumb tacks, scissors, rolls of tape. Then she opens the side drawers and yanks the papers out. She throws them into the boxes, handful after handful, until the boxes are filled.
Soon the only things left on William's desk are the two photographs and Ursula's letters. Anna stuffs the letters and Julia's picture back into the manila envelope and into her handbag. Her own face on the other photograph annoys her with its smug grin of contentment.
She remembers that they made love here once, in this office, right behind the door. A few weeks after their wedding, after their Barbados trip where she had seen palm trees for the first time, where she tasted glistening, moist slices of papaya. She came running in to see him, her face flushed, her voice bubbling with excitement. “Darling, I want to show you something.” She doesn't even remember what it was. What she recalls with the sharpness that hurts so much now is how he stood up and locked the door behind them. “And I want you,” he said and kissed her, and ran his hand down her spine. He pushed her against the door, pressed her back against it. For a moment, before she closed her eyes, she saw her own face, in that photograph, watching them, smiling, amused. Was he thinking of Ursula then?
Anna removes the cardboard from the back of the frame and takes the picture out. She tears it in half, then in half again, into smaller and smaller pieces that she throws into the box.
The door to William's office closes with a piercing squeak. Anna waves to Valerie from the corridor, walks quickly down the stairs, hoping she won't meet anyone who might want to stop her and talk. By the statue of Queen Victoria, she turns around for another look at the soot-covered walls. She is holding her purse close to her body as she walks. On the bus, she sits in the back and watches the lanterns along Sherbrooke Street light up, the whole row of them, still decorated with tinsel and evergreen wreaths, in memory of another passing year.
At home she disconnects the phone and puts the letters on the dining room table, on the white tablecloth she no
longer bothers to take off. She leaves them lying there and goes to the kitchen to get a glass of water. It is something she can concentrate on, letting the water run from the tap, filling the glass, swallowing. Her hands are unsteady and she has spilled some water on the kitchen counter. She wipes it off with a yellow j-cloth.
Back in the dining room, she arranges the letters in even rows on the table, like cards in the game of solitaire. The proofs that for ten years her husband has been in love with another woman. All these years he has lied to her, laughed at her behind her back. She has never suspected anything. There is some grim satisfaction in these thoughts, some dark pleasure in laughing at her pathetic love, her own smugness. She used to think Marie was too suspicious of men, too cautious. She used to think that of many women.
You can write it all down, now, she tells herself. The wisdom of Anna Herzman, the biggest fool of them all.
The water has helped. She is no longer feverish; her heart has hardened. The letters in front of her are her evidence. She will read them slowly, carefully, one by one. Nothing will be skipped, nothing overlooked.
A Polish woman and a refugee, Willi? No, I'm not jealous and, yes, I'm quite cynical about atonements. But love becomes you, darling, it always has. You are not doomed, like I am. You will learn to live on a leash, if it is not too short, and she will learn to be happy with you if she is anything close to what I imagine. Perhaps what you are doing is the only intelligent thing to do, so don't take it as criticism. I do pray for you at times like that, so I'm not that bad.
Dearest, I have just finished speaking to you on the phone. You said I knew you so well. I wonder what is it that I know. I merely watch you, I have watched you for years, and I take what I see. And you, you mistake this resignation for knowledge. The truth is that you never cease to amaze me. Urs
Jealousy is a smuggler's prop. It has secret compartments and hidden bottoms that appear when Anna thinks she has reached its limits. False pockets to confuse her, revealing layers of bitterness, more and more of them, crumpled, entangled, choking her now, cutting off the passage of air.
She can imagine William and Ursula together, in this house, perhaps. In the same bed in which she sleeps now, alone. She can see their legs, arms, entangled, their bodies pressed against each other. Heaving, pulsating, inseparable. Was he also moaning into Ursula's ear when he came? Nuzzling her neck, after they have made love, making her laugh with his stories? Telling her of his doctor friend who, seeing a stripper spread her legs, thought. “I could cauterize this.” Was Ursula laughing as much as she had?
It is the vividness of such thoughts that breaks her. The whisper in her heart that when he came home from his love trips she would be the one to unpack his bags and wash his dirty clothes. Take the brown tweed jacket to the dry cleaner. Put the laundered socks and underwear back on the shelves, slide the folded shirts into drawers.
Her heart is hardening, she can feel that. From the darkest corners of her memory come the thoughts she has never allowed herself to think. What was it that Hitler thought of all Slavs? An inferior race of slaves? The dirt of history, a mere notch above the Jews. Slated for death to make living space in the East for the master race.
Drang nach Osten. Lebensraum
. Hasn't she been warned so many times? Hasn't she seen the evidence, the ruins, the graves? But she wouldn't listen, would she?
Lebenslüge
, she says, remembering the German word William once used telling her of his marriage. The word Marilyn liked to throw back at him so many times.
Lebenslüge
. The lie that transforms your life.
I'm sorry I was difficult, darling. I wasn't really, you were. You were jealous, and cranky, and you sulked. Perhaps it is time you stopped blaming me for who I am. It's a bit as if you asked me to change the colour of my eyes. But, then, your letter was beautiful, and I had to forgive. Love. U.
Dearest, The exhibition went very well, but I won't quote the reviews. They only distract me, make me chase phantoms. The evening was rather quiet. I saw Fassbinder's “The Marriage of Maria Brown,” another variation on his obsessions. Love for sale and the corruption of innocence. Incredibly bitter and quite brilliant, as he often is. He made me think of us, all of us, locked together in these little, deceitful transactions, of the secret
agreements between submission and power, the craftiness of innocence! This is my obsession, too, as you have noticed so many times. Yes, I believe we, Germans, have a duty to expose self-delusions. Keep checking the collective pulse. We, of all people, cannot be caught filming another “Triumph of the Will.”