Judith Hermann - Nothing but Ghosts

The apartment door was wide open, and cold air swept in from time to time. Ruth briefly came over, putting her dirty hand on my cheek; then she left again. When everything was packed, one of her sisters put the breakfast dishes into the last of the removal boxes and managed to get the table outside as well. Eggshells, a jam jar and one coffee cup were left on the floor. I got up. The family disappeared down the stairwell; in the van Ruth’s brother blew the horn. Ruth put on her coat; we stood facing each other in the empty hall, then we embraced. She said, ‘See you soon.’ Or maybe I said it. Then she left. I closed the apartment door behind her and stood there until I was certain they were gone.

For a long time I didn’t know what to do with Ruth’s room. It stood empty for a month, two months, three. At some point I began using it to watch Super 8 home movies. I would sit on a chair, the projector humming, and on the white wall a child, supposedly me once upon a time, walked across a sand dune. In May or June, I moved my bed into Ruth’s room, to the same spot where hers had stood.

The theatre canteen was small, stuffy and filled with cigarette smoke. It had Formica-topped tables, wooden benches, spherical light fixtures and mirrored walls that did nothing to make the room look larger. Instead it seemed smaller in a labyrinthine, chaotic way. The stagehands were sitting at tables in the rear, the actors in the front. Behind the counter, a fat woman, who was the cook and looked dead tired, drew beer from the tap. Ruth was nowhere to be seen.

I sat down at the only unoccupied table, ordered a cup of coffee and a glass of wine, not sure whether I wanted to wake up or get drunk. I wondered where my suitcase was. Ruth had taken it either into her dressing room or left it with the doorman. Suddenly I wanted to have my things back again, my book, my appointment calendar. I felt insecure sitting at this table, a stranger, someone who had absolutely nothing to do with the theatre. I looked over at the actors; there was no one sitting there who was ‘so tall’ with a shaved skull and a face at once childish and manly, and then the canteen door opened and he came in.

I recognized him instantly. It was a two-fold recognition, and it was so unmistakable that impulsively I actually ducked, hunching my shoulders and drawing in my head. I hastily moved my chair out of the circle of light cast by the ceiling lamps, and he walked by me without noticing me and sat down with the actors, who seemed delighted to see him. He took off his jacket without getting up, a suede jacket with a brown fur collar. Touching someone’s arm, he laughed, spoke, I could hear his voice distinctly among all the other voices. I tried not to listen; I would rather have seen him first with Ruth, Raoul as Ruth’s Raoul. You have to tell me what you think of him.

I searched for my cigarettes in my coat pockets; the cigarettes weren’t there; they were in my bag, probably in Ruth’s dressing room; I felt a brief flash of anger. I wanted to analyse what I was feeling, to examine some particular thought, and a cigarette might have helped. I could still hear his voice and I could see his face in the mirror, an alert, open face; he wasn’t wearing his glasses; his look was one of attentive concentration, the dark eyes narrowed; there were remnants of white theatrical make-up at his temples. His profile, on the other hand, was not beautiful, but dull, complacent and ordinary, a protruding chin, a low forehead. He really was very tall, his body heavy and massive, and he had coarse hands with which he gesticulated and rubbed his shaved head. I could hear Ruth’s voice – I don’t know, physically, maybe a bit common – I knew what she had meant to say, but that’s not what he was. I stared at him. I thought I knew everything there was to know about him and yet nothing at all. I carefully moved my chair back to the table. My breathing was shallow, soft; suddenly I felt at a loss. Then the door opened and Ruth came in.

She came in and saw Raoul immediately. Her eyes went straight to him, and her face took on an expression that was new to me, and then she looked over the heads of the others, across the room until finally she saw me. She made an indecipherable signal with her right hand, stopped at the counter and ordered a beer. She was standing very erect, like someone who thinks she is being watched, but Raoul hadn’t even seen her yet. Then she came over to my table, sat down next to me, thirstily drank some beer, put the glass down, and said, ‘How was it?’ and then, ‘Did you see him?’ I said clearly, ‘By any chance would you have a cigarette?’ and she raised her eyebrows, irritated, then smiled and pulled some cigarettes from her pocket.

She was wearing her blue dress again, her hair still in the Eliante hairdo; she looked beautiful, tired; she said, ‘It’s good that you’re here.’ And then again, ‘Did you see him?’ She nodded her head in his direction, and I said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘He’s already here, he’s sitting over there.’ I said, ‘Where?’ She whispered, ‘At the third table on the left in the middle.’ I lit my cigarette, repeated to myself the words we had just exchanged – did you see him, no, did you see him, where – turned my head and looked over at Raoul, and just then he turned round in our direction.

He looked at Ruth and smiled, and Ruth smiled back while she pressed her leg against mine under the table. I puffed on my cigarette, I said, ‘I really liked the play’; I said it again. Raoul got up. It looked as though he wanted to excuse himself from the others, was held back, pulled himself away, came over to our table, slowly, calmly, all the while very clearly presenting his body, his entire person. I looked away, and then I looked back; somehow I felt embarrassed. Raoul sat down, he could have sat next to Ruth, but he took the chair across from us. Ruth introduced me, and we shook hands across the table; I quickly pulled mine back. Under the table Ruth’s leg kept pressing against mine. He said, ‘Ruth told me a lot about you,’ and he smiled; his eyes revealed nothing even though they were fixed directly on mine for a long time. The cook called out his name, ‘Raauuul,’ like a howl. He got up again and went over to the counter. Ruth said, ‘Good Lord,’ and then, ‘What do you think; quick, tell me,’ and I had to laugh and I said, ‘Ruth, I met him less than sixty seconds ago.’

He returned with a plate of soup, sat down again, and began to eat, saying nothing. Ruth watched him as though she had never seen anyone eat before, so I watched him too; I had no choice. Actually his eating was quite odd; perhaps he had some particular role in mind, a special way of eating, a Franciscan monk at a wooden table in the refectory of his monastery, a South Tyrolean peasant holding a tin plate on his lap, or something equally absurd. He ate bent forwards over his food in stolid absorption. He slurped and carried his spoon to his mouth and back to the plate with the regularity of a machine, swallowed noisily, and none of us said a word until he had finished. Then he pushed away the empty plate, and for a moment I expected him to emit a loud burp, but the performance was over. He seemed to be a master of brevity. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaned back, smiled at us, and said, ‘Well, how are you?’

The tone of voice in which Ruth said ‘All right, thanks’ was new to me; it had a note of stiffness and insecurity that I hadn’t heard before; she seemed nervous, testy, and there was a strained expression around her mouth. ‘How did the performance go?’ Raoul asked; actually he was making it easy for her, he asked it pleasantly, showing real interest, and Ruth answered sarcastically, ‘As usual, a roaring success.’ She made a disparaging face, as though to indicate that the small-town public was an undemanding one, an attitude I knew was foreign to her. ‘I didn’t have to give it my all.’ With that she finally moved her leg away from mine and looked around the canteen with feigned nonchalance. Raoul smiled, still pleasantly; it seemed that he neither expected this kind of capri-ciousness from her nor found it appropriate. Ruth, however, was sticking to that line, or perhaps she couldn’t backtrack; it was as though she wanted to prove something to him.