Authors: Judith Hermann
Eleven
The week after Stella and Ava return from Jason's construction site the weather turns hot and summery. Twenty-eight, thirty, thirty-two degrees. Stella's alarm clock rings at five thirty. She turns it off and stays in bed, lying on her back, awake in her empty-without-Jason bed, feeling the morning coolness like a touch, precisely because it is so brief. At six o'clock in the morning the grass in the garden is damp and cold. A thrush perches in the hedge. The morning sun casts Ava's sandpit in shade so deep you could grasp it with your hands; at the edge of the meadow the first poppies are beginning to bloom. The sound of cars slowly rolling by the house, people on their way into the still-uncertain day.
*
Ava sleeps under a sheet; in the morning she lies there without the sheet, her arms stretched out in abandon, hair sweaty. The warm air enters the house like a guest. Stella breakfasts in the garden with Ava. She drinks tea, watching Ava engrossed in eating her porridge with berries, swinging her legs, then pressing her feet into the grass. All I need to wear is a dress, Ava says, serious. Just one single dress, nothing else.
At the kindergarten Stevie runs towards Ava, an expression of worried joy on his face; at any rate that's what it seems like to Stella. He is thin, has a fox fur hat on his head in spite of the heat, and doesn't give Stella even a glance. She holds Ava tight and says, Till later, Ava, till then. But Ava pulls away, has already turned away.
*
And where were you, Esther says. Where were you the entire weekend. You're certainly not the brightest but really, the other girls from your awful nursing service are even more stupid; they're all atrociously stupid.
Stella doesn't answer Esther when she's in this frame of mind, doesn't talk to her at all. She opens the windows and closes them again; lowers the Chinese rice-paper blinds, puts fresh sheets on the bed, and changes the flowers in the vases; she washes strawberries, cuts them up and sugars them.
I won't eat that, Esther says. I don't eat anything any more; I don't eat any of that stuff. Esther is sitting in her wicker chair, a wrinkled queen in sand-coloured underwear; she looks like an old, stubborn child. Her hair stands on end, her face glows. Stella lifts her into the wheelchair; for one moment they stand in a tight embrace in the middle of the room, Esther in Stella's arms, an invitation to the dance. Stella feels Esther's breath on her collarbone, feels Esther's fragility. She pushes Esther into the bathroom, lifts her onto the edge of the bathtub, puts Esther's feet into the tub and turns on the cold water; she washes Esther; then she sits on the toilet bowl and watches as Esther, eyes closed, lets the water run over the insides of her wrists, her arms, her knees. As if she were at a spring.
All right now, Esther says. Where were you. How was it. It's easy to see that you have some sort of problem. Tell me about it.
Stella has to laugh at this. She believes that Esther has cheated her way all through life with this faked interest in others whom she doesn't really want to know anything about, not about Stella and not about anyone else either. She
is
interested, but not in the details, more in the general, the overall picture. In world politics. The outcome of wars. War, in and of itself.
I was away in the country, Stella says. With my husband and my child. We went swimming. Everything's OK. I'll give you five more minutes here; then we have to go back to your room. You're going to eat the strawberries; I'll force you to.
Oh, what the hell. Go on, be like that, Esther says dully. Your husband and your child. I also had a husband and several children, and they're all gone. Up and away. Life is horrible; have you already discovered that?
She pushes Stella's hands away. Washes her face and neck by herself, still sitting on the edge of the tub, naked, an archetype.
*
During the lunch hour Stella cycles over to Paloma's office. Paloma has turned the cooling fan on the windowsill to the highest setting; a vigorous, artificial breeze blows through the room. In addition, Paloma is also using a paper fan to fan herself; she's barefoot, her tanned skin is shiny. She points to the chair in front of her desk; Stella obediently sits down. Paloma looks at Stella quizzically, then she folds up her fan and says, Well Jason isn't here, as if there were some connection between Stella's presence and Jason's absence. This isn't entirely mistaken. But it isn't correct either.
No, Jason has left again.
For how long this time, Paloma says, not waiting for an answer. She says, Let's go outside and put our feet in the fountain. Let's watch the sparrows.
She locks the office door, and Stella follows her through the stuffy foyer and out to the park. Dazzling light. Paloma is still barefoot and Stella takes off her shoes when they reach the fountain and sits down on the rim next to Paloma; she puts her feet into the water, supporting herself with her hands on the hot stone. No wind; the trees along the avenue stand motionless. Stella thinks she hears the kindergarten children's voices at the far end of the park. She's afraid Ava might come by, hand in hand with Stevie, in a column lined up two by two for a walk. She thinks again that everything in her life is too close together. Work, house, kindergarten. She longs for distances, distances to be covered; only Jason, Stella thinks, is always far away, too far away for me to reach him.
The sparrows bathe in the fountain, at a safe distance. Paloma pushes up her dress, submerges her wrists in the water; Stella can see little gold particles glittering in the bends of her elbows. She thinks of Esther on the edge of her bathtub, of Esther's dry skin, her sly look. Esther would have had something to say about the little gold particles.
I'm going on a trip this year, Paloma says. I'm staying at the summer house for a week; then I'll close it and go to visit my mother, driving on from there by car simply straight ahead until I arrive somewhere. Wherever that is. That's my plan.
They both shade their eyes against the sunlight and look down the park path as if something were coming towards them. The foliage is now dense and peacocks are calling from their hiding places. Stella imagines Paloma's mother, an old woman on a balcony in a development where, fifty years ago, there were many children and where today the clothes lines neatly stretched between wooden posts are empty. Perhaps Paloma's mother lives like that. Perhaps she lives completely differently.
Where do you sleep when you visit your mother.
I sleep on the sofa, Paloma says. I sleep on the sofa and wake up at night because the television set crackles. The housing of the TV crackles. Do you know that sound? Unpleasant. It's unpleasant.
She shakes her head, stands up and climbs out of the fountain; her footprints evaporate quickly from the stones.
I have to get back to work. The phone is ringing; I can hear it even out here, probably only imagining it. But the old people go haywire in this heat and die like flies. Like flies. Come inside with me. Stay with me a while until you have to go to Julia.
Maybe Paloma wishes Stella would talk. But Stella doesn't know what she should say. How she should explain her passivity, her waiting. What is she waiting for.
*
The tarpaulin outside the windows of Julia and Dermot's house seem to shade it from the heat, and the atmosphere in all the rooms is diffused. Stella washes Julia, dresses her, and takes her to the kitchen. Dermot goes shopping, to the library, for a walk; Stella doesn't know what he does when he leaves the house, when he frees himself for an hour from the togetherness with Julia. When he comes back, he has also brought strawberries. Julia is sitting on the bench in the kitchen leaning back against the wall, her head turned to one side, facing the blue light outside the window. In her lap is a silver spoon; Julia keeps putting her thumb into its bowl, feeling it. Dermot watches her. Then he says, I brought strawberries; naturally she says nothing in reply. Stella washes the strawberries; Dermot hands her a plate and then puts the plate with the strawberries on the table, in the exact centre.
Please sit down for another moment.
Stella sits down next to Julia. She wishes Dermot would ask her something, and he does, pleasantly. He clears his throat. Then he says, Did you get anywhere with your coup de foudre?
No, Stella says. She can't help smiling, as if she were lying. No, I didn't. We spent the weekend at the lake at Jason's construction site. In the house he is just building.
Dermot looks at her expectantly. Stella shrugs. What is there to tell? The house is on the shore, the framing shows where the walls will be; the windows haven't been set in yet; a house like an idea, a vision of a distant future. The opposite of Dermot and Julia's house, as well as the opposite of Stella and Jason's house. Views of the water, of the forest.
She says, It was the first warm weekend this year. We slept overnight in sleeping bags on the roof. Ate doughnuts, drank tea from a thermos; everything very makeshift; Ava liked it. Ava went swimming in the ice-cold lake.
Jays in the tops of the tall pines; warnings of something. Ava and Jason had vanished into the woods. Stella was sitting on an overturned paint pail in the middle of a room as large as a dance hall and thinking that she had lost one temporary arrangement after another in her life. Had thought about it with bitterness. But later Jason had laughed about it. He'd said, Changes will come again soon enough, Stella. Just wait. What is a temporary arrangement? Ava's question, and Stella had said, Papa and I are talking about two different things. Ava's hands, cupped together like a bowl, and in the bowl a stag beetle, iridescent and green. When they said goodbye, Stella had cried. Stella, not Ava.
She says, We had a quiet time. I felt detached. I'll have to see.
Julia doesn't turn to Stella. She is looking towards the window as if she were sitting in the kitchen by herself; the spoon in her lap turning like the needle on a compass. It doesn't matter to Stella. Still, it would be a gift if Julia would say something, unexpectedly, something simple and absolutely right.
The night under the open sky was beautiful, Stella says. The night under the open sky was actually the most beautiful part.
*
In the garden that evening at home Stella gets the lawn sprinkler out of the shed for Ava and turns it on. Ava squeezes her eyes shut, trembling in expectation before the jet of water pivots and falls on her; she stands under the lawn sprinkler, arms close to her body, hands balled into fists. Stella collapses the garden umbrella, sets the table. Two plates, two glasses. Too little. Voices from the other gardens, the slamming of screen doors, the chinking of ice cubes. The telephone rings, and Ava, soaking wet, runs into the house. It's Jason.
Is everything all right? How are you?
It's hot, Stella says. You're not here. We're all right.
*
And now Mister Pfister puts something into the mailbox every day.
A letter in a red envelope, sturdy, heavy paper, like an invitation to a children's birthday party, dropped in at three o'clock at night.
A letter in a yellow envelope with nothing on it but Stella's name.
An awful piece of graph paper covered with tiny letters from the first to the last square, an ants' scrawl with whorls and circles twining through them, all doodled with a ballpoint pen.
On Tuesday morning he puts a slip of paper into the mailbox with the word
Wednesday
on it.
He puts a Dictaphone into the mailbox. A USB flash drive. A self-burned CD in a sleeve sealed with gaffer tape. A small, transparent bag with some indefinable things inside â pips?
He puts a piece of cardboard into the mailbox; a symbol has been drawn on the piece of cardboard that perplexes Stella because it resembles the symbols somebody or other once scratched into the doorsill of Stella and Clara's apartment in the city ten years ago; three intertwined circular arcs, the symbol for an infinite connection; what does this symbol signify for Mister Pfister?
Mister Pfister puts a roll of twine into the mailbox. A burned-down match, a cigarette lighter and a dirty lollipop on a gnawed stick.
For one entire day he puts nothing into the mailbox, a nothing full of insinuations, a pulsating caesura.
Then he puts a sheet of music paper into the mailbox with scribbles between the lines of the stave and the clef thoroughly scribbled over.
I haven't been listening to music for a long time, Stella thinks. Anyhow, not for a long time.
She waits for mail from Clara. For Clara's perspective on Mister Pfister's abyss, the spiral with the botanical name, for her energetic protection. But it seems that Clara thinks Stella can take care of herself.
*
On Friday there's a photo in the mailbox. Stella tries not to look at the photo, and fails. On her way to the shed, to the shoebox, she stops in the glaring sunshine, holding the photo in her hand, bends down to look at it, studies it, can't help herself.
Is that Mister Pfister?
No doubt about it, it is.
Mister Pfister next to his mother or next to his grandmother, in any case Mister Pfister next to an older woman in a living room; the living room is gloomy, a couch, a low table, and a puny Christmas tree, half of its branches draped with tinsel. Mister Pfister's facial expression is indescribable. The woman beside him sits with staring eyes and seems petrified as if she were facing a serious threat; the atmosphere of the room is totally depressing. The room isn't a room in Mister Pfister's house, Stella is sure of that; the window behind the couch isn't the kind used in the housing development. Possibly it's a window in an apartment house, maybe a window in a high-rise building. The photo is out of focus, blurry, bad. It is so bleak that it makes Stella feel sick, a sick feeling somewhere between fear and anger. What is this photo doing in her mailbox anyway and in her hand. Why should she have to concern herself with a photo like this, with a stranger's private horror? Stella stands outside the shed with the photo; turning around, she looks across the garden out to the deserted street. Noonday. No shade, no birdsong, not a soul. She'd like to tear the photo into little scraps, but she has to show it to Jason, she has to pass it on, definitely must hand it over; she feels an intense need to wash her hands. The shed is stuffy and dark. The shoebox under the workbench has a pronounced heft.