Judith Hermann - Alice

Alice.

Would you please be sitting downstairs when I come home? Alice cleared her throat. She looked at the big intersection, and for a second she had the feeling that she had lost track of the meaning of everything. As though everything was dissolving and re-forming differently with a new meaning. Scribbles. Acoustic scrawls. She pressed her eyes closed with her left hand. The feeling went away. She said, I don’t know, am I interrupting something?

No, Raymond said. You’re not interrupting anything. Are you saying I should go down to the bar? In front of the house?

It would be nice, Alice said. What are you doing right now?

Reading, Raymond said. He laughed. Oh well. Actually I was sleeping. I’ll go downstairs. See you soon.

See you soon, Alice said.

The street was still full of people. Talking constantly. No end in sight, no final word. But now that it was getting dark, everything sounded more muted. Lanterns on the tables. Men and women sitting across from each other. Heavy green trees. Bicycles, locked together along the edge of the pavement, the moon above the park, the ship, empty now, an empty wooden ship with an openwork railing in a sea of sand. The benches all around it, deserted. Paper cups, newspapers, bottles. Bottle collectors emerging from the bushes, polite and quiet, picking up the bottles, letting others go first. Bats among the trees. Swifts, their angry, crazy screams. The ping-pong of table-tennis balls, cellphone tunes, symphonies. Alice walked along the edge of the park towards the house where she lived, where Raymond had been sleeping and reading that afternoon and early evening. On the first floor the light was on, also on the third floor, and there was a light in her window. Before going downstairs Raymond had turned on the little light near the window for Alice. She could see him now. He was sitting in front of the house, under the blue awning of the bar, at the last in a long row of tables, right next to the front door of their house. His back was to the wine-red house wall; he was drinking a small beer. His jacket was draped over the back of the chair next to him. Alice almost stopped walking. She tried an old game — to see him as if she didn’t know him. As if he were just anyone. As if she were seeing him for the first time. What would she think of him? What did he actually look like? It didn’t work. She gave up.

’Evening, the waitress said.

’Evening, Raymond answered for Alice, inimitable, it sounded exactly right.

Tired?

Yes, I’m a little tired, Alice said. I’ll have a small beer too, please.

The waitress smiled, first at Raymond, then at Alice, then up at the sky. She stood there with them a little longer. Like Raymond, she had a tattoo, a Mexican sun on her back, in the exact centre between her shoulder blades. Sometimes when Alice ran into her in the hallway of the house, they would ask each other, How are you? Thanks, pretty good. Lots of work. Always a lot of work. Never enough time. No time. Time for what, actually? They agreed that they didn’t quite know what for.

The waitress was the same one who, every morning, wrote, Happy Hour on the blackboard next to the front door of the bar. Above that, she drew a smiling moon face. Day after day. She knocked lightly on the table with her knuckles, then she walked away. Alice and Raymond didn’t often sit at the bar in front of the house.

Alice took off her jacket and sat down next to Raymond. They sat there next to each other and watched the people walking to the left across the park, to the right down the street.

Are you hungry? Raymond asked. Would you like something to eat?

I’m not hungry, Alice said. I already had something to eat. Mango and papaya and pineapple. It sounded funny. She thought of the male nurse who was now sitting on some rooftop in a folding chair, grilling and stuff, with a view of the entire shining, glittering city, holding his third bottle of beer, his cellphone in his pocket. Margaret might call him. Margaret might call Alice, too. The nurse had had very dark eyes, somewhat distant, serious.

Alice said, He’s become inconceivably small. I mean Richard. He’s become as small as a child these past two weeks. His skin is yellow. It’s all over, but his heart is still beating; it simply keeps on beating.

He wasn’t conscious this time, Raymond said. Or was he?

No, Alice said. He isn’t conscious any more. But the nurse thinks he notices everything. Could be; I’m not sure. How would he know? I touched Richard. He sighed. Is that a reaction?

Yes, Raymond said, that’s a reaction.

Maybe, Alice said.

The waitress set the beer down in front of Alice. Golden, in a tall glass on a beer mat that Alice pushed away after the waitress had left. The beer was ice-cold and sweet. What was it you were reading? Alice asked.

Science fiction, Raymond said. He looked happy. Some great parts in it about rain.

He didn’t say anything more. Neither did Alice. It was quite all right this way. Most likely the nurse wouldn’t have said anything either. At least nothing about Richard, about other things, yes — football news, polar bears, weather forecasts, the presidential elections.

Margaret had said, After you leave I’ll put the folding cot next to Richard’s bed. And lie down next to him. I won’t sleep, I’ll just lie there. So she was now lying on the folding cot next to Richard’s bed in the room with the white muslin curtains of her girlhood, and so on and so forth. Until Richard was gone. One’s girlhood, What is all the rest, then. Alice wondered.

She thought of Margaret. Of the male nurse. Of Rheinsberger Strasse and about the Sundays of her own childhood … When a blind man with a hurdy-gurdy and a little monkey on a rusty chain had sung in the rear courtyard; she’d been allowed to throw coins wrapped in newspaper out of the kitchen window — when she told this to Raymond he hadn’t believed her. But why not? She also thought about Richard, but in a different way. She looked past Raymond and the dark park; far away, a late-night plane rose into the sky, and she remembered that Raymond, on one of the first nights they had sat together like this, had said the sound of a plane at night made him sad. Why? Alice had asked. Because it’s as if it were the last possible plane. For me, Raymond had said, and Alice had understood a part of it and a part of it she didn’t understand, and something of what he said had also caused her to feel hurt. She was reminded of all this whenever she saw a plane at night. Whether she wanted to or not, she remembered it every time. A sort of price to pay. But for what?

Will you be going there again? Raymond asked.

No, Alice said. I think today was the last time.

Sunday, they drove into the country. With the Sunday paper, a tartan blanket, a Thermos of tea, three apples, and a bottle of water. Northward. On a secondary road. They parked at the edge of the forest, then walked into the forest on a sandy path until they reached the lake. Alice dawdled, walking quite a way behind Raymond; sometimes he was out of sight, then again there he would be in front of her on the path and in the middle of the light slanting down through the pine trees brightly illuminating something seemingly insubstantial. Fat bugs waddled along at the edge of the path, persistently and stubbornly. Somewhere a woodpecker was pecking. Raymond was far ahead of her. They walked around the lake, looking for a place to spread out their blanket. It was important to Alice, Raymond didn’t care. They couldn’t find a spot for the blanket, only bumpy, swampy grass, criss-crossed by tree roots. So they were left with no choice but to stay in the shade, close to the trees, Alice leaning her back against a tree trunk, her feet almost in the water. The water was green, muddy, and warm.