Judith Hermann - Where Love Begins

She says, I’ll go to another concert with you soon. Please turn around to face me. Have something to eat.

She feeds Walter and wonders if, concealed in the way he takes the food off the spoon she holds out to him, there’s a little of the way he used to take food from the spoon his mother fed him with as a child. In Ava’s way of eating, in that tiny final swallow, she still recognises the baby, still recognises Ava’s baby-like snatching for the spoon, for the sweet porridge.

Walter’s ancient mother might say that she recognises her baby in Walter. What a sad thought.

Walter, would you like to go outside?

Walter doesn’t answer and Stella disregards this; she gets him out of bed. Dresses him, lifting his arms and dangling legs; she pulls thick socks over his ice-cold feet, puts on his useless slippers; then she wraps a scarf around his neck and, covering the wheelchair with his rain cape, she pushes him out onto the porch. She makes some tea and sits down with him. They sit next to each other, looking out into the rain, watching as the rain turns the tropical wood of the porch floor darker and darker.

A cold May.

Walter nods.

Stella unfolds the newspaper and holding it out to him, points to the blonde girl; he squints sceptically, then he waves it aside. There’s something missing in the blonde girl. Or something is too much. How would she tell Jason about this? How can one share such things, this and that, also the tenderness she is capable of when wiping Walter’s mouth, wiping his mouth with a napkin and, if she hasn’t got a napkin, then with the palm of her hand.

The linseed is used up, Stella writes with chalk on the slate on Walter’s kitchen cabinet for the evening shift. Next week the freezer compartment should be defrosted. Water delivery cancelled? Best regards.

She puts Walter back to bed, arranges the pillow roll under his head, covers him, and tucks the blanket neatly around his feet. She closes the porch door and tilts it.

Do the birds have food? Water? Walter’s pronunciation is slurred, as if he were drunk, as if he were telling a joke.

Of course, Stella says. Enough till the end of the year, Walter. See you tomorrow. Take care.

She locks the front door from the outside. Wonders if he can hear that. And what it might sound like to him.

*

A wind that smells of the sea is blowing through the streets outside. Stella turns around. Quite a few people. No one she might recognise or know.

*

She goes to pick Ava up from kindergarten. She pulls on Ava’s rubber boots, buttons up her jacket, puts the rain hat on her head and gently ties it under Ava’s round chin.

I want ice cream.

I definitely want to have a cat. Definitely.

I want to visit Stevie. I want to be with Stevie all the time.

I drew a picture for Papa. I drew a house without a roof, but the others just drew a roof on it; they just drew a roof on top of it.

They cycle home through the rain. The sand at the edge of Forest Lane is wet; the trees are almost black with wetness. Stella pushes the bike into the garden, lets the gate fall shut behind her, lifts Ava out of the seat and sets her down. Ava stands there, tilts her head back, holds her face up to the rain.

Stella unlocks the mailbox. There’s a card lying in the mailbox. One side of it is white, blank, on the other there is just one sentence; the writing blurred, hurried — those were long days.

*

Come, Stella says to Ava. Let’s go inside the house.

Clara phones in the afternoon. Her voice on the telephone is hoarse and absent-minded, so familiar and close, as if Stella could touch her; it is a huge relief to hear Clara’s voice.

Stella, Clara says. Before we talk about anything else. Your new admirer — what sort of guy is he? Can you tell me what sort of guy he is?

She says it casually and distractedly. She says it as if she were chewing gum. As if Stella would even consider getting to know Mister Pfister. As if that were really still a possibility — one man among many, and yet the only one, just as in the past, wouldn’t it be possible? Clara asks this as if Jason didn’t exist. As if Jason didn’t yet exist or not any more.

Clara, Stella says firmly. He isn’t my admirer. In any case, he certainly isn’t the type who would court me in some wacky way or other. Do you understand what I’m saying?

Oddly enough Stella knows this. She knows that Mister Pfister’s interest in her is nothing like the interest of those who ten years ago dropped letters and cards into her mailbox, scratched symbols into the doorsill, and who, pushing past Clara in the hall, would sit down at the kitchen table, a bottle of schnapps in one hand and in the other a hand-rolled cigarette: Is Stella home, your roommate, you know, the pale, blonde; oh, she isn’t, well then I’ll just wait for her here, don’t let me bother you; I’ll just sit down here; she’s sure to come back soon, isn’t she. Ten years ago it sounded different when someone knocked unexpectedly on the door; so it seems. Perhaps Stella could say that Mister Pfister is the Finale. The final summing up of all those who had stood outside her door during the years she spent with Clara in the city.

Stella says, Mister Pfister is a damned ghost.

She’s sitting at the kitchen table, drinking water, having peeled herself a green apple and cut it into little boats as she does for Ava; she eats the apple deliberately. Piece by piece, like a form of defiance. Clara, a thousand kilometres away, is also sitting at her kitchen table. At the cluttered table in her water-mill under a small square window, her children in kindergarten, Clara’s husband at school, the table full of cups and brushes, paints and glasses, nuts, fruit and candlesticks. Clara’s beloved clutter, her hopeless chaos. Clara is drinking tea. But not eating an apple with it, smoking instead; she puffs audibly, and she is sketching; Stella can hear the sound of the pencil drawing on paper.

She says, Mister Pfister is a retribution. He is a punishment.

Punishment for what, Clara says.

I don’t know, Stella says darkly. I haven’t found out yet, but I think I will soon, I’ll know soon, I’ll figure it out. Do you remember the man on the tram?

The memory of the man on the tram has come back to her at just that moment. How long ago was it, fifteen years? A stranger, and she had got off the tram with him, walked quite matter-of-factly along the entire street all the way to hers and Clara’s house, wordlessly climbed up the stairs, and finally arrived in the luckily empty apartment and gone to bed without any further ado. In the bright middle of the day. In Clara’s bed.

Not her own, but Clara’s bed. As if the encounter weren’t real, hadn’t taken place or had happened to someone else; Stella as Stella wouldn’t have dared to do anything. Only as Clara had she been up to it — hold out your hand, close your eyes — and this way, but just one single time.

She says, the man with whom I went to bed, without knowing him. Who I never saw again after that. I don’t remember his name, could also be that he never even told me his name, nor I mine, probably. My name is Stella? I never said that. But I remember everything else in detail. I dropped all scruples.

Actually I’m reserved, shy, Stella thinks, surprised. Was I always like that? Does Jason want me to be reserved? But in any case it makes no difference as far as Mister Pfister’s interest in her is concerned. Mister Pfister’s interest is a completely different type, and maybe it’s precisely this that makes it so humiliating.

She says, I don’t know any more whether I locked the apartment door in case you’d come home. You didn’t come home. I didn’t have to tell you about it, but I did tell you. I asked you whether I should put fresh sheets on the bed; the man wasn’t clean, in a way you wouldn’t have liked. In contrast to me.