Judith Hermann - Nothing but Ghosts

I went to bed but couldn’t sleep; the street was noisy and full of people until late into the night. I lay there listening with a single absurd picture in my head – Raoul carrying me through a dark, unfamiliar apartment, through a hallway and many rooms, till he finally put me down on a bed, gently, as though I were a child. The morning of September 25th, I stood in front of my wardrobe, uncertain; I didn’t know how long I would be staying – one night, a few days, for ever? I didn’t know what he wanted, and actually I didn’t know what I wanted either. Finally, I took nothing except my toothbrush, a book and a nightgown. I turned off the telephone answering machine, locked the apartment door, and took a bus to the railway station, much too early.

What else is there to say about Ruth and me; what else can there be? We kissed each other once, just once, at night in a bar. Actually it was only to get rid of someone who wouldn’t leave Ruth alone. Ruth leaned over and kissed me on the lips, deeply and tenderly; she tasted of chewing gum, wine and cigarette smoke, and her tongue was peculiarly sweet. It was a beautiful kiss, and I remember that I was surprised and I thought, ‘So that’s what it’s like to kiss Ruth.’ I thought we would feel embarrassed afterwards, but we didn’t, nor did we talk any more about it. Ruth’s admirer disappeared without saying another word.

When we were younger, Ruth was more effusive and exuberant; she drank a lot and loved to dance on top of bars and tables. I liked that and urged her on, ‘Go do it, Ruth, dance on the table!’ Without further ado, she would push aside glasses, kick the ashtrays off the table with her high-heeled shoes, and then she’d dance provocatively. Not until much later would she rebuff me, getting angry sometimes, saying, ‘I’m not living a vicarious life or whatever for you.’ We wore the same clothes, long skirts, coats with fur collars, pearl necklaces – but we never looked alike. Someone said, ‘You’re like two lovebirds, like those little yellow canaries; you always sit there the same way and move your heads back and forth in the same rhythm.’ We liked that comparison.

Sometimes when someone asked us a question, we answered simultaneously, saying exactly the same thing. But we rarely read the same books, and we never cried together over anything. Our future, which in the beginning didn’t exist and which later became more like a space to which we had to accommodate ourselves, was a shared one – Ruth and I. Ruth was not afraid to say it: ‘We won’t ever part.’

I often looked at her, trying to imagine what she’d be like when she got old; I never could. She is most beautiful when she laughs. When she just sits there and doesn’t speak, I don’t know what she is thinking. Her eyebrows are plucked into thin silvery sickles; her hands are very small. There were moments when she clearly was not listening to me as I told her something. No photo exists of the two of us together. Did I really know Ruth?

The trip from Berlin to Wüurzburg took six hours, and I was happy during those six hours. I read and I slept, and woven into that light sleep were momentary dreams: Ruth on a staircase, looking for me, mute; Raoul at a table in the theatre canteen, alone, a stranger; my empty room in the Berlin apartment, sunlight on the wooden floor; the voice of the train conductor, ‘We will be arriving in Braunschweig in a few minutes’; Ruth whispering; my legs asleep; Raoul standing in the rain under the awning of a hotel. I woke up again, my face swollen and hot.

I went to the buffet car to smoke a cigarette; people sat hunched over their beer glasses, silent; the landscape outside the tinted windows hilly and green, the fields already harvested, small birds perched on the swinging telephone wires, forming a long, dark chain. The train rolled on and on, measuring the time, the distances, getting closer, inescapably, and I wished myself back at home, and further back into an earlier time, a before, and at the same time I was so impatient that my stomach, my head, my limbs ached. Ruth, I thought, Ruth, I would so much like to tell you about all this.

I returned to my seat, walking along the corridor, past all those faces looking at me. I read and then couldn’t read any longer and stared out of the window and got so tired that my hands shook and my knees became weak. Another hour to WÜrzburg, half an hour, twenty minutes, soon. The street lamps went on in the suburbs, there were lights in the apartment blocks, small, bright windows in the dusk. Perhaps that kind of life? That table under that lamp in that room with that view of the garden, faded asters and flowerbeds covered with branches for the winter, a children’s swing, a concrete terrace. What is going on, I thought, what is going on…This yearning of mine was both terrible and inane.

The train was slowing down, and that was vaguely comforting. I got up, took my little bag, my coat, my hot face; I thought, ‘Raoul, I’m dreadfully sad.’ Then the train stopped, coming to a standstill with a single resolute jolt. WÜrzburg’s main terminal, 6.22 p.m. I joined the long line of passengers waiting to get off, step by step by step; no one detained me, and then I was on the platform, walking towards the exit. And when at last I spotted Raoul, I knew instantaneously and with hopeless certainty that I had made a mistake.

He was standing at the end of the tracks leaning against a board listing the train schedules; he had on a coat I had never seen him in at the theatre, was wearing his glasses; he looked a bit arrogant and bored, arms crossed over his chest, shoulders raised. He stood there looking like someone who’s meeting someone coming in on a train, waiting, in expectation, perhaps impatient; he stood there like all the others, and he was not afraid. I walked towards him and I could see that he was not afraid; he might have been unsure and nervous, but the fear that had me shaking, this fear he didn’t have.

When he saw me, his bored expression changed in seconds to one that was joyful, convincingly happy and at the same time incredulous; he came towards me in two or three quick strides, and before I could have warded him off he drew me close and held me in a tight embrace. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, my arms, my face. I embraced him too, we stood there like that; he smelled of shaving lotion, his cheek was soft, the frames of his glasses pressed slightly against my temple; it was almost preposterous to feel him so suddenly, only now. He held me for a long time before letting me go. He said, ‘How wonderful, how wonderful that you really came.’ I didn’t know what to say, and he took my hand and pulled me along behind him through the station concourse. He said we’d get something to eat; he had reserved a table in a Chinese place; he was hungry, was I hungry? I wasn’t hungry.

In the square outside the station we got into his car, a small red Alfa Romeo; I had never before been in an Alfa Romeo, and I wanted to tell him so, but then it seemed silly and I didn’t say anything. He started the engine, drove off at breakneck speed, looked at me, shook his head, kept bursting into laughter, seemed to find something inordinately amusing. Did you have a good trip? How was the weather in Berlin? Heard anything from Ruth? I didn’t answer the last question, nor the first two either, really.

He parked four blocks away in a no-waiting zone. The Chinese restaurant where he had reserved a table was totally empty except for the Chinese family behind the counter staring at us unwaveringly and eerily, till one of them came to our table and handed us a much-fingered menu. Raoul ordered appetizers and a main course; I wanted a salad, if anything at all; I felt ill; my stomach was in a knot. ‘Jasmine tea, please,’ I said to the unfriendly face of the waiter.