Judith Hermann: Where Love Begins

Stella sits down with the letter on the bench next to the front door. The outside thermometer says fourteen degrees centigrade, and the little olive tree ought to be watered; it stands just under the gutter and seldom gets any rain. A shiny blackbird comes hopping across the grass along the hedge. Stella crosses her legs, puts the letter down next to her on the bench.

Then she opens it. She tears it open. She picks it up and rips it open. The feeling she had only the day before yesterday — the quiet amazement, the memory of what it was like once to be tempted — is totally gone.

*

By evening the next day Jason is back. He puts Ava to bed while Stella cleans up in the kitchen; she can hear Ava jumping upstairs. Jason was away for a week. Ava is exuberant.

It’s nice when Jason comes back. And in a certain way also nice when he goes away again.

Jason builds houses. Restaurants, hotels, workshops, apartment houses, pavilions, factories, bungalows. Sometimes Stella thinks that maybe he really wanted to do something else. She couldn’t say why she thinks that; she can sense a certain disillusionment in the way Jason deals with his work, his reluctance to talk about it; she is glad that she doesn’t have to sense this disillusionment every day. She herself is not disillusioned about his work. He was already doing this work when she put her hand in his on the airplane as it took off; the dirt on his hand wasn’t from working as a sculptor but from laying tiles; and Stella claims that she knew that. Sometimes Jason draws a cat for Ava, a cottage with a smoking chimney, and also a big bee; sometimes he draws Ava with braids sitting at the kitchen table early in the morning in front of a bowl of porridge. Drawings that frighten and delight Ava; but Jason is hiding something, it’s in the way he then takes the drawings away from Ava. Probably, Stella thinks, Jason feels that he missed out on something. He hides the drawings in the waste-paper bin, and she retrieves them from the waste-paper bin and saves them for Ava. Jason earns enough money with his work, money for this house, for Stella and Ava, and the work distracts him and tires him. Without his work he would feel worse. Jason is calm only when he is tired. Back then, on the airplane, he was. So tired that he fell asleep before the plane had flown through the clouds. Otherwise he might not even have got involved with Stella. None of all they had here would have come to be. None of it, not even the glass of water on the table, and certainly not Ava’s little voice upstairs in the house.

*

Did I let go of your hand on the plane when I was sleeping?

No, you didn’t let go of my hand. I could feel that you were asleep; you twitched in your sleep; you were dreaming. I could tell you were dreaming.

They keep asking each other. The same question, the same answer. As if to hold on to the beginning, to keep reaffirming it.

*

Stella puts Jason’s clothes into the washing machine, his black work trousers, the blue overalls, the green shirts. Coins in the trouser pockets, a pencil, a pebble. Jason brought back a piece of wood for Ava with an ingrown pine cone; he brought her a booklet full of glittering decals. The piece of wood and the book are lying on the kitchen table, like proof of his return. Stella puts on her jacket, unfolds the second chair on the terrace, and turns off the light in the sunroom. This year the hornets simply moved from one corner of the shed to the other; when the light in the sunroom is turned on, they leave their nest, flying in the darkness across the lawn, bumping against the glass panes, and falling stunned onto the windowsill. Jason comes out on the terrace with two bottles of beer; he stops briefly and looks around as if to make sure where he actually is. Then he sits down next to Stella.

You look tired, he says. Ava says you should come upstairs again. To say goodnight and bring her something to drink.

In a little while, Stella says.

They sit next to each other looking out across the garden, to the wild meadow; skylarks swoop diagonally down into the grass, the nocturnal sky is lilac-coloured. Jason stretches and exhales. He opens the two beers with his lighter and says, Jesus. I have four days, maybe five; then I have to leave again. There’s something I’m doing wrong, and someday we’ll do something else, Stella; we can’t stay here like this forever.

When Ava has to start school, Stella says. She says, By then at the latest, a year and a half to go still.

Jason says, A year and a half. Do you know how long that is? You’ve got to come and see me at the construction site next weekend; you have to plan to do that, and you should make a note of it on the weekly schedule before someone else wants to take that time off. The first storey is done. The roof isn’t on yet; the stairway just reaches up into the sky. They’ve now decided on the materials to be used; they want the doors made of rusty metal. What do you think of that. Metal from barn doors; they want to see the traces of other people’s work when they sit down evenings by the fireplace.

Stella would like to stay with the image of the metal from barn doors; it’s a picture she could spend some time on, but she can’t stand it any longer. She takes Mister Pfister’s letter out of her jacket pocket; she wants to get it over with. She’s got to get it over with. She thought about not telling Jason about Mister Pfister’s letter. She thought about it pretty intensely. But she knows it’s better to tell Jason how matters stand than to let him find out on his own. If Jason were to find out on his own it might lead to misunderstandings. To a fight.

And Mister Pfister is an unpredictable factor. Hard to say what might happen next.

Jason takes the letter, even that is a relief. He looks at Stella, takes the envelope from her hand, takes out the letter, awkwardly unfolds it and reads.

I wish you would look at me.

That you would look at me and listen to me. I also wish that we had always known each other; you’re getting older, and we don’t have much time left. You’ll smile when you look at me; it can’t be any other way. I’ll show you what I see: the thrush, her spotted feathers, the park, pages of the book I’m reading.

Good lord, Jason says. What is this? He reads the letter all the way to the end, folds it up again, and puts it back into the envelope. He looks at the envelope, both sides; puts it on the table in front of him, then he leans back. The expression on his face is really quite inscrutable. He says, OK. And what’s that supposed to mean?

Stella says, I have no idea. She thinks her voice sounds false, even though she’s trying to tell the truth. She says, I have no idea; I don’t know him. I’ve never seen him before. On Wednesday he stood outside the door for the first time and wanted — to talk to me.

He wanted what? Jason says; now he’s looking at Stella.

To talk to me, Stella says irritably. I can only repeat what he said. He said he would like to talk to me, and I said I had no time to have a conversation.

He was standing outside our front door, Jason says. He says, Is that right?

He puts the bottle of beer down on the table without looking at it, and Stella realises that he can’t bring himself to stop looking at her face, that he doesn’t trust her. Jason thinks she would show her true face only the moment his eyes are turned elsewhere. She feels something electric between herself and him, something, surprisingly, from before, from their first months — fear and uncertainty, doubt about the feelings of the other, of one’s own feelings. Jason looks at her as if maybe he didn’t know her at all, as if he were discovering at precisely this moment, after five years and seven months, that Stella isn’t the person he thought she was. He looks as if he wanted to get up and leave, and Stella suddenly remembers an evening five years ago, an evening in the hallway of the apartment where they were living at the time, when Jason, drunk, banged his head against the apartment door, over and over again, because he wanted to leave and couldn’t leave. Her recollection of it is unexpected and it is frightening, and Stella leans forward and takes Jason’s hand.