Judith Hermann - Alice

Malte had loved Frederick, and Frederick had loved Malte. That much Alice knew, a handful of words, and some sensory impressions — the smell of pine trees, lake water, and sun-warmed cat fur. That much she’d pieced together from the little they had told her. And they hadn’t told her much. Worked it out from the photos — a cat in the grass, her rear legs stretched out, her little head facing the camera with a haughty cat expression, that certain feline all-knowingness, a snapshot in black and white. Beneath it, on the photographic paper, her grandmother had used a crayon to write: Pumi . A photo of Malte, smoking. Wearing a striped shirt, sitting on the porch, his hair hanging over his forehead, his eyes cast down, twenty years old. Three years later Alice was born. No photo of the lake, no photo of the boat. Alice knew the lakes and boats. The word Maori had a good sound, a nice sound. Kissing in the heat. Skin and hair. To think of only one man, feeling despair and delight.

Alice didn’t know why Malte had taken his own life. She was surprised that nobody had been able to tell her why; they just looked at her in surprise, wide-eyed, when she asked. With faces like clowns. Well, there’s no way to know. There’s nothing to know. Depression, melancholy, manic-depressive psychosis? Tired of life. He was weary of life. But how could that be?

Alice drove her Japanese car down the narrow street, past the planetarium towards the main road, and was caught up in the morning traffic, her eyes half closed. The dream-catcher swung from side to side in slow motion, the coins rattled in the tray next to the gearstick. The traffic lights glowed. She had no idea why she’d phoned Frederick at this particular time. This year. In the autumn. Because he was getting older and older, just as she was. Because people were suddenly gone, vanishing from the scene from one day to the next. That’s probably why. She had been thinking about him ever since she had first heard his name mentioned; he was part of Malte’s story, but not part of the family; that was what made him stand out. He had some perspective. No one else did. Tidying up — it had something to do with tidying up, putting things in order, the desire to know which assumptions one could lay aside, and which ones not yet. To drop this particular assumption, and to look for another instead. To see connections, or to see that there weren’t any connections at all. Just presumed relationships. Illusions, like reflections, nothing more than changes in the temperature, the light, the seasons.

She drove down the main road from the north-east towards the west, towards the compass-needle point of the TV tower. Traffic stopped and then slowly started moving again. Behind the window of a coffee shop, a woman took off her sweater, her braid catching in the collar; the blouse under the sweater was a faded pink; her legs were twisted around the struts of a bar stool. At an entrance gate a worker stopped the drum of a cement mixer and stripped off his gloves. The driver of a taxi parked at the kerb was sleeping, his head on his chest. Fallow land, garages with caved-in roofs, a petrol station, a plastic tiger swinging from steel cables. Convention hotels, tourist hotels, lofts. Behind the panoramic windows of factory buildings people were running on treadmills, their heads turned up to watch TV monitors, the pictures changing rapidly. Advertising billboards: Smoked Fish. Play your Heroes. Ubu Roi. Bang bang, the night is over. Black Maple. The grey-green trunks of plane trees. Crows or magpies, or jackdaws. Red lights. In the car next to Alice’s, a woman was filing her nails, a cellphone clamped between her left ear and shoulder. Apparently she was saying a weary, slow goodbye, agitated, shifting gears, stepping on the gas. Then the woman turned off the main road, and Alice drove on towards the tall buildings of newspaper offices, the Haus des Lehrers, and the Haus des Reisens; a tram cut through the intersection, and a young woman who had taken shelter at the tram stop searched in the depths of her purse for something, something very small and apparently precious.

And Frederick. Frederick, meanwhile, was in his room at the hotel near the river. It was half an hour before his meeting with Alice, whom he didn’t know, whom he had never before seen, and of whom he knew nothing all these years. What is it like for him? Alice wondered. Is it like a game, is it serious, or does none of it matter to him? It’s possible he doesn’t care about anything. Or that it interests him only a little. That’s all.

She tried to imagine his hotel room, a single room with a wide, queen-size bed and an armchair at the window, a wine-red carpet, his overnight bag for short trips on the luggage rack and beside it, on a hook, his coat on a hanger, a sea-blue housecoat. Next to the door, framed in brass, a map showing the emergency exit routes in case of fire. You are here, a little red cross. True, in many ways. Signs to hang on the doorknob for the chambermaid: Do not disturb, Make up the room. Soundproof windows, a noisy air-conditioner. On the bedside table, a telephone next to the bedside lamp, a pad and pencil with the name of the hotel on them, and a piece of dark chocolate in a black and gold wrapper. I’ll call once I’m in the lobby, Alice had said. Is that all right with you?

Eventually Malte had moved out of the Zehlendorf house, the one with the porch, the cat, and the dandelions. He lived by himself in a one-room apartment in Kreuzberg, on a street called Eisenbahn Strasse, Railway Street. Frederick was away, studying elsewhere; they exchanged letters, saw each other rarely. A nearly empty room, a bed, no table, no chair, a clothes rail, and hanging on it, a wire hanger with a blue shirt, a second hanger with a pair of black trousers. A cast-iron lamp, a tape recorder, reels of tape, a radio, a record player on the floor, and books stacked in crooked piles. File folders. A pair of dumb-bells. Photo albums, records. Malte’s room, Malte, who, they said, showed a troublesome inclination towards ending it all — did the others say that? Or did he say that about himself? Alice wedged her car into the street by the river, without paying attention to any of the traffic signs, exhaled, and finally took her foot off the accelerator. Almost forty years ago, the janitor had to force the door to that room open with a crowbar because the key was in the lock on the inside and Malte had not answered his mother’s persistent, fearful knocking. Once the door was open, it was too late. It was all over. All of this so long ago.

How did he kill himself? With painkillers, pills. Barbiturates — a word almost as sonorous as Maori. Back then you could still get barbiturates without a prescription, not any more, and that was all Alice knew. The end. That’s as far as she could think. Delicate threads between her in her Japanese car in the no-parking zone outside the hotel, shoulder-bag on her knees and fingertips on her throbbing eyelids, and Frederick in his room with the river view, waiting for the phone to ring, and Malte for whom there had been no one at the end to be a light in the darkness. Threads as fine as a spider’s web, cut the moment she tried to think about it. Alice opened the car door and got out.

In her own room there was a picture leaning against the wall next to the window. An owl. Its wings spread before a whorl of shadows. It was a picture Malte had painted. She couldn’t have said whether it was a good painting or not. That wasn’t the point. Sometimes she would sit at the table and gaze at the owl. Involuntarily cocking her head to the side. Then she’d get up and do something else.

The golden hand of a train-station clock hanging above the hotel reception desk moved to the top of the hour. The smell of leather and furniture polish, peppermints in a glass bowl. Alice said, Hello, would you please ring Room 34, her left hand on the reception desk in an attempt to get some attention. Water dripped onto the floor tiles from her furled umbrella; she could hear it drip. The hotel clerk had a deformed ear; it was twisted and stunted; his hair looked as if it had been cut with nail scissors, but the name-plate on his lapel shone like filmed-over silver. He ignored Alice for a while, drawing lines and circles with a pencil in a big ledger, deadly earnest; Alice couldn’t see exactly what he was doing. Two waitresses were clearing away the buffet in the breakfast room, aggressively clattering the plates, sweeping off the tables with hand brooms, collecting crumpled newspapers. Disorder, a restless atmosphere, coy giggles. The hotel clerk mumbled to himself, his head averted.