Judith Hermann - Where Love Begins

Stella stops, stands there almost devoutly. She thinks, astonished, I didn’t consider it possible that he existed. But he exists. He does exist after all. Here he is, he is here.

She recognises him from his posture, his expression; she is certain, yet she is surprised at how young he is, how good-looking and how tired. He’s wearing a black hoodie sweater. No jacket any more, in spite of the early evening, early summer cold. She can’t see what’s inside his cardboard box, what he’s buying. He takes another step forward and puts the box on the conveyor belt; then he looks up, maybe because he senses that someone is looking at him. His eyes move searchingly over the people. Meet Stella’s gaze.

Mister Pfister looks at her.

Stella looks at Mister Pfister; she thinks, Can you feel that the entire way one person can take to approach another is encompassed in this look. The way there, and the way back too.

Anger, courtesy, plus something else.

Stella almost wants to smile. With a great effort she manages to control the childish impulse to smile that threatens to burst through. She almost wants to say hello; the moment of recognition is so powerful that it seems the gracious thing to do, Oh, we know each other, hello. But there’s no need to greet Mister Pfister; he knows that she has recognised him, that she knows him. And he doesn’t smile, not even a little bit. To be precise, he doesn’t smile at all. Instead, he will wait. He will wait for her outside by the door, to begin what’s been demanded all along here: a conversation.

Perhaps it will be easy; in spite of everything it might be easy in a way. Stella might say, Don’t do it any more, you hear me. Do you understand, stop ringing the doorbell, all that mail; just stop coming by our house; give it up. Give up; that’s how she could say it.

Stella breaks eye contact with Mister Pfister. It’s possible he already broke eye contact with her earlier. How long were they looking at each other? No window, no garden gate, no fence separating them from each other.

Stella enters the supermarket through the turnstile; she doesn’t turn around again. She buys milk, eggs, alphabet noodles, butter, the things she wanted to buy, nothing more, nothing less, but she is in more of a hurry than usual; she is rushing. She dashes through the aisles, feeling utterly tense, and by the time she turns around the last rack of shelves before the checkout counter, those for lemonade powder, chocolate and candy, in front of which Ava always wants to stand forever, Mister Pfister is already gone. He has paid for his stuff — which Stella would have liked to see, knowing that Jason would find this curiosity of hers distasteful — and is already outside, he has already gone off. What is it that Stella actually wants to know, and how far can she stretch this question.

She puts her things down on the conveyor belt at the checkout. Her heart is beating more calmly now; even as she’s counting her change she has an inkling of an impending disappointment.

Have a good evening.

You too.

The car park outside the supermarket is deserted. Stella’s face is hot. Mister Pfister is nowhere in sight. Mister Pfister has lost his need, his fervent desire to speak to Stella. That’s both hurtful and a relief. But why? Why doesn’t he want to speak to Stella any more; what has changed, been lost. The long look between her and him becomes at first questionable and then humiliating. Stella puts her purchases into the basket on her bicycle. She thinks, Maybe I got even older these past weeks, and she has to laugh a little at that. She pushes her bike across the car park and Main Street, along Forest Lane, past the first houses of the development; she walks on the left side of the street and, as her house comes into view, the jasmine hedge, the fence, Jason’s car in the driveway, the open dormer window, she sees Mister Pfister standing at her garden gate. She’s still quite a distance away from the house, but she sees him clearly; he rings the bell, doesn’t wait, turns away and calmly walks off at a measured pace, down the street towards his house.

Stella stands still, hands tightly gripping the handlebars of her bike. She can’t believe it. Mister Pfister has rung the bell at her gate even though he knows that she isn’t home. Apparently he also knows that Jason and Ava aren’t home. Jason and Ava are at the children’s party in the Community Centre. Stella baked a lemon cake for it and standing outside her house had waved after them until they were out of sight. Mister Pfister couldn’t wait outside the shopping centre for Stella, but he has to stop outside her house; she can understand that as a tic, a compulsion; it’s simply impossible for Mister Pfister to walk by her house without ringing the bell. No matter whether Stella is there or not. Doesn’t give a damn. But she can also interpret it this way — There is no Stella. The Stella Mister Pfister has in mind doesn’t exist; in any case, she has nothing to do with that Stella. Mister Pfister recognised her, but that’s not who he’s interested in — this Stella who goes shopping after work in flat-heeled sandals and with a tired face without make-up, tense, harried, and obviously needy, this Stella doesn’t interest him. Mister Pfister is interested in Stella in her locked house. In her face behind the small windowpane next to the door, her distant figure in the chair at the edge of the lawn far back in the garden, in the Stella waiting at her desk upstairs in her room. That Stella is the one Mister Pfister is interested in. An imagined Stella. His Stella.

*

Stella realises that there’s nothing she can do against this. She can’t take this other Stella away from Mister Pfister.

She watches him walking away, his boyish figure; he’s pulled the black hood over his head, it looks like a suit of armour. She rolls her bike slowly forward until he arrives at his own house, having passed all the houses she’s now familiar with. She waits until he’s disappeared into his garden, and she knows that he knows that she is watching him.

I’d like to show you something, Jason says.

He takes Stella by the hand and goes outside with her; hand in hand they walk to the garden gate; later Stella will think of this hand-in-hand as a betrayal. Jason opens the gate and steps with Stella out into the street. At the far end of the street a large flock of birds alights on the pavement. The wind is high up in the treetops, the pine trees at the edge of the forest creak. Stella feels an inordinately burdensome grief, a longing for another life or a life she once had; exactly which life she can’t recall.

Jason’s hand is dry and warm. It is the most familiar thing about Jason.

He stops in front of the garden gate, lets go of Stella and looks at her. She is supposed to see something that he saw long ago, something about this situation is like a déjà-vu. But Stella doesn’t see it. Jason touches her shoulder, he turns her back around to face the house and waits; then he points at the mailbox; he points at it. On the mailbox, under Stella’s and Jason’s names, there is a third name written neatly and like theirs with a white grease pencil directly on the metal of the box, except in a different, a distinctive, feminine handwriting.

Mister Pfister.

Don’t touch it, Jason says, quite superfluously.

He says, Do you have any idea how long that’s been there? Can you somehow make sense of this?

Ava is sitting in the sandpit, talking to herself. She whispers, sternly shakes her head, with her tongue makes soft, clicking sounds that she must have heard from the aunties in the kindergarten. She has spread some objects out on the wooden board of the sandpit; she is offering them.