On A Day Like This (18 page)

“But I told you,” said Bettina. “I went to the funeral. It must be a year ago now.”

“What about their shop?”

“It was sold. It belongs to a chain now. But it’s not doing any better than before.”

At the edge of the village, a shopping center had been built, Walter explained. The small local shops had trouble competing. There was one butcher shop left in the village. They counted the number of butcher shops there had once been, and they got to seven.

After lunch, the children grabbed their chocolate, and ran upstairs to their rooms. Walter called work to take the afternoon off. The conversation took a while, there was something he needed to explain to a colleague. Bettina put on water for coffee. She leaned against the stove, and said their living there now must feel strange to him.

“If I know Walter, you won’t have changed many things.”

Bettina laughed, and then she was serious again. She said the death of their father had affected Walter very badly.

“If at least he’d talked about it. But he didn’t say anything, not one word. He continued to function, like a machine. At first, when we moved in here, it was terrible. You couldn’t change a thing, not take a picture off the walls, nothing. He made us put all our things down in the basement. If I moved a piece of furniture, in the evening he would move it back to its old place,
and not say a word. It was back and forth. Eventually, he gave up, and let me do some of what I wanted. But if it had been up to him, everything would still look exactly the way it did then.”

“The garden reminded me of before,” said Andreas. “Even though it was never as neglected as it is now.”

He said they had been through a lot, living in this house, but he couldn’t see it with the same eyes as then.

“Everything’s still there, I remember every detail. But it doesn’t have the same importance anymore.”

“There are still a couple of boxes of yours upstairs,” said Bettina. “School things, I think. Books and toys.”

Andreas said they could throw them away.

“Don’t you even want to look at them?”

“I looked through some old notes not long ago. It was weird. At times it felt as though I’d written them the day before, at times it was like someone from another planet. And I have to say neither kind was at all interesting.”

Bettina said she would hang on to the things. Maybe he would change his mind. There was enough room. Andreas asked after the children. Maia was taking her final exams next spring, said Bettina. She was very good at math. With Lukas, she didn’t know yet. He was just starting high school. There was plenty of
time to decide. He was a dreamy boy, she said, like a child in many ways. He reminded her of Andreas.

“Of me?”

“That’s what Walter says too. Didn’t you see the similarity? He has your eyes. Your father’s eyes.”

They drank coffee in the garden. Walter asked how Andreas was feeling, and he said he had a persistent cough, but he thought he was getting over it. Apart from that, everything was fine.

“Do you still smoke as much?” asked Bettina.

“I’ll stop at some point.”

“That’s what they all say.”

Andreas said he’d rather talk about something else. Walter asked if he wanted to see their parents’ grave. Yes, said Andreas, why not. When Walter went into the house to get his jacket, Bettina asked about Andreas’s cough. He said he had had to take a couple of tests, but had left before the results came through.

“You’re worried.”

“Yes,” said Andreas. “I’m worried.”

“It doesn’t change it whether you know it or not. But you don’t need me to tell you that.”

“I just wanted to take care of a few things first,” said Andreas.

Then Bettina said her father-in-law had been a wonderful man. She often thought of the last Christmas they had spent together.

“I phoned him about a month before he died,” said Andreas. “I meant to visit him, but I left it too late. No one expected him to fade as quickly as he did.”

“He was always very pleased when you called.”

Andreas said the funeral had been awful. It was like being in a bad film. He hadn’t understood what was going on around him.

“I think I was closer to him than I ever realized. I didn’t see much of him in his last years, and when I called him I was often stuck for things to say. But then I would see him in the things that I said and did myself.”

“He told me once he wished he could have had a life like yours,” said Bettina. “You really are like him.”

There were steps on the gravel, and Andreas asked Bettina not to mention his illness to Walter. It would only alarm him.

“Do you have someone you can talk to?” asked Bettina.

“Yes,” said Andreas. “I think so.”

“You know you can come here any time. You can stay with us too, if you can’t manage anymore. We’ve got plenty of room.”

“Things aren’t that bad yet,” said Andreas. “But thank you for offering.”

She said she wished he got in touch more often, and he promised to try. He saw her eyes were misting over. When Walter joined them, she turned away.

Andreas said he would go from the cemetery straight back to the hotel. He was leaving tonight. Walter said that was a shame.

Andreas went up to Bettina. She turned and hugged him. Then they all went into the house together. Walter called the children.

“Andreas has to go,” he said.

They walked to the cemetery. Andreas asked Walter how he was doing, what he was up to, and Walter started telling him. He told him about the vacation in Sweden that they had just returned from, and a canoeing trip in the rain. He made some comment about good-looking Swedish women. Andreas had never known Walter to be so talkative.

Walter said these might be their last vacations as
a family all together. Even this year, Maia would rather have gone hitchhiking with a girlfriend. Next year she was finishing school, and she might go to France for a few months to learn the language. She had been very taken with Paris, that time they had all descended on Andreas. Lukas had no idea what he wanted to do, but there was plenty of time to decide that. Bettina was thinking of going back to work, with the children out of the house. She was taking a computer course.

“And what about you?” asked Andreas.

“I’m fine,” said Walter. “My promotion has changed a few things.”

“You never told me.”

Walter gestured dismissively. That was a couple of years ago now. He said it wasn’t a dream job. He had often thought of doing something else. But with the economy as it was, it wasn’t a time to take risks. He imagined he would probably stay with the same firm until he retired. He laughed sheepishly.

“It must all seem terribly boring to you.”

“No,” said Andreas. “No, it’s not boring at all. Sometimes I envy you the children and Bettina. You’ve got on with your life.”

There was no one at the cemetery. Walter made straight for the grave, and Andreas thought he must have
been there many times. Walter knelt down, and plucked a few twigs from a little bush that grew in front of the stone.

He didn’t mind that the grave was being leveled, said Andreas. He often thought about his parents, but his memories of them were attached to the places where they had lived, not this place where they were buried. Walter didn’t say anything. In all their phone calls over the years he had never talked about his parents. Nor did he speak about them now, but just about their grave and the flowers on it, which he had replanted in the spring, even though it was really no longer worth it.

They stood in front of the grave in silence. Then Walter said, Well! as if he had completed a task. His voice sounded a little less burdened as they picked their way through the rows of graves and he spoke of one or another deceased whom they had both known, a school friend of Andreas’s who had died very young in a traffic accident, the proprietress of a haberdashery store, Walter’s former music teacher. They parted company at the level crossing.

“The next time you come you stay with us,” said Walter. “Will you promise me that?”

Andreas promised.

“And you’ll stay for a bit longer?”

“OK.”

“Be good, then, and drive safely.”

All at once, Andreas believed there would be such a thing as a next time. He quickly hugged his brother, and then they each went their separate ways.

Andreas thought of Delphine, all the moving she had been put through as a child, such that her childhood memories were not attached to any particular place. She had said she could feel at home anywhere. Andreas wondered if that was a fault or a strength in her. Perhaps it would be simpler not to have any roots. It was like scattering the ashes of the dead. They were everywhere and nowhere. Whereas his childhood was just as much buried in this place as his parents were, but when he stood in front of their grave, he didn’t see much more than a stone with their names and dates on it. His memories were no more alive there than anywhere else. Only the sense of loss might be greater. Perhaps he shouldn’t have gone back—either that or he shouldn’t have left, like his brother. Then he might slowly have gotten used to the changes, just as you got used to the changes in your body, and yet seemed to be the same person from your childhood into ripe old age.

In the hotel, he packed his bags. He went down to the front desk and said he was leaving. It took the desk clerk a long time to make out the bill. Andreas took a postcard from a display, five sunny views of the village: the Catholic and Protestant churches, the town hall, the community center, and the steps up to some historic building, where long ago some freedom fighter had given an important speech. At last the clerk had finished adding up the bill, and Andreas put back the postcard and paid.

The easy mood of that morning had left him. Andreas felt tired and confused. He drove off aimlessly, heading west. He had the radio on, a classical music program that was comparing different recordings of the same piece of music. The host talked about the details of the various interpretations with two guests—a male and a female musician. One interpretation was too quick for them, another one dragged. They criticized soloists who made too much of themselves, and others who played with too little expression, or were imprecise, or with a show of feeling. Andreas tried to hear the differences they talked about, but for the most part he couldn’t.

The further west he got, the weaker the reception. More and more the music was interrupted by hissing, and then suddenly there was a different station, a French-language
pop station, and a couple of excitable DJs who were talking nonsense and kept interrupting each other. Andreas pushed in the cassette that was in the player. It was the language course that he and Delphine had heard on the way here, the kind man who had cheese and sausage for breakfast, and took the bus to work, ate lunch in the cafeteria, where he had a choice of three delicious specials, and then went home at the end of his work.

After supper I sit down in front of the television and watch the news. The evening program is of no great interest to me. Usually, the interesting programs are on too late for me. I like to go to bed early. The night is quickly over. When the alarm clock goes off in the morning, I usually feel I haven’t had enough sleep. And the next day follows in the same way.

The tape had kept on playing. When Andreas next heard it, a woman was speaking with strange emphasis.

He took the tape out of the player. He got out of the car, and walked to the men’s room to wash his face. He dropped the cassette into a garbage bin that had thank you written on it in four languages. He sat down at one of the washable concrete picnic tables in the bright sun. When he had calmed down a bit, he drove on.

Fifty miles from Paris, Andreas took the highway west. He thought he had an aerial view of himself driving through the dark landscape, of which he had little sense. For a long time the road led through fields and woods, past scattered villages. Occasionally it brushed a town, and he could read advertisements for cheap hotels and shopping centers. Once, Andreas almost dropped off. His car had slowly drifted into the passing lane, without his noticing. It was only a loud, insistent car horn that woke him out of his dream. He jerked at the steering wheel, and the 2CV yawed off, wobbling wildly, and a car overtook him, so close that they almost brushed each other. Andreas’s heart beat wildly. He
opened the window. Warm air flowed in, and the cheeping of the crickets was so loud he could hear it over the sound of the engine.

Andreas turned the radio on again. He caught one of his favorite programs,
Du jour au lendemain
, on
France Culture
. The host was interviewing a French writer, whom Andreas had never heard of and who appeared to be quite unreadable. He gave long answers, of which Andreas understood about half, even after he’d closed the window. The writer had once been religious, had even wanted to become a priest, but, having become a creator himself, a writer, he had begun to question God. Now he only believed in the strength of the Self, the life force, which was stronger than any effort, any pain, than even the death that surrounded us all. The life force of every individual was finally stronger than the absolute, sapped its strength, crushed it, brought it to its knees. This Self, upper case, he said. Andreas envied the man’s self-confidence. He had never had a very clear sense of himself. Perhaps that was why he had led such a regular life. The monotony of his days had been his only prop. Without a job, without an apartment, without a schedule, his dates with women and appointments with friends were the only fixed points in a menacingly empty landscape.