Judith Hermann: Alice

I’ll drive you to the airport, the woman said to Maja. Of course I will. I’ll drive you to the airport this evening; and Alice had said she’d take a taxi to the train station even though no one had asked her.

Maja and the child slept for two more hours. Then they got up, each in her own way sleepy and confused. The child’s bare feet on the kitchen floor made a sound that Alice couldn’t stand. She said, I have to go now. She had to restrain herself to keep from putting on her jacket then and there.

I know, Maja said. It’s all right; I still have some things to do here, and then in a little while we’ll be driving to the airport. Would you take Misha’s suitcase with you? I’ll pick it up later at your place in Berlin.

It was a small suitcase. With wheels, not heavy. At the hospital that afternoon when the room had to be cleared, Maja had sorted Misha’s things. Sunlight was falling on the shiny linoleum and on the plastic sheet covering the freshly made bed. The nurses had given them a bin bag. Alice held the bag open and Maja lifted up each item in turn: pills, information about alternative cancer treatments, new socks, new pyjamas, slippers — all went into the bin bag. The things Misha had worn when he was flown to Zweibrücken went into the suitcase; the photo of Maja and the child, into the suitcase; the notebook with the blank pages, into the suitcase. They took the bag back to the nurses’ station. The child was sitting in the lap of one of the nuns and was saying newly learned words to herself, repeating them over and over, proudly, but hard to understand. Actually it sounded like: Abra. Ca. Dabra:

Abracadabra. It really did.

I don’t mind taking the suitcase, Alice said. I’m grateful to you. I don’t mind at all. She had no words for what she really wanted to say.

The cab driver was walking up the garden path. On the broken paving stones, past the flower beds and the clay turtle. The taxi was black, a limousine with tinted windows, no name of a cab company visible.

But this is a taxi, isn’t it? Alice said, not at all sure; everything was out of sync, anything was possible. The cab driver didn’t deign to answer the question. He took the suitcase from Alice, her overnight bag, retraced his steps, and loaded everything into the boot; then he got in, waiting.

We’ll see each other in Berlin, Alice said.

Yes, Maja said. She was standing in the open doorway with the child on her arm. The straw witch rustled in the draft. The azaleas in the conservatory. Afternoon light. Have a good trip.

Alice turned and walked through the garden, out to the street, and to the cab. She got into the back, rolled down the window and waved. Maja waved back. She said something to the child, the child waved too. The cab started up. Maja stepped inside the front hall with the child, closing the door behind her.

They had directions for getting there. Conrad had sent them to Alice in Berlin the old-fashioned way, by mail: the address, telephone number, and a little sketch of the house in which he and Lotte lived, a white rectangle, and the yellow house south of it. Conrad’s handwriting was delicate and shaky, already familiar to her. How quickly you can get to know someone’s handwriting, Alice thought, much more quickly than the person himself. The sketch was in her lap. She was wearing a crumpled, flowered skirt and sitting in the passenger seat. Anna was sleeping in the back, her head leaning against her backpack, her arm over her face. The Romanian was driving. Ever since they had crossed the border into Italy, he had been speaking Italian. Seemed to have become another person. He asked, Know what the word for cream is in Italian? Alice said she didn’t know. Why of all things, cream? Incomprehensible.

And the other way round — from Italian into German — macchiato? Latte macchiato ?

I don’t know, Alice said Aren’t you listening to me? I don’t know it the other way round either.

Stained milk, the Romanian said. Stained milk.

They took the Rovereto Sud exit. Continuing in the direction of Riva, still thirty kilometres to Gargnano Bogliaco. Then the mountains opened up to a view of the lake. Glorious. Dark blue. Countless white sails, a flotilla. It got hotter and yet at the same time cooler — all you had to do was look at the water. The water is ice cold; it’s a mountain lake, after all, said the Romanian who had been here before.

Frosta or something, Alice said irritably.

Something like that, the Romanian said, smiling to himself. He’d also been holding the wheel differently since they’d crossed the border, more relaxed, with just his left hand, steering with just his left hand into a tunnel. Its blackness took her breath away until she realised that she ought to take off her sunglasses. Anna, in the back seat, woke up. They were gliding out of the tunnel again — cypresses to the right, the lake to the left, blinding light and very sharp turns, then another tunnel. Can you sense your pupils contracting, Alice said to Anna, turning round, and she felt how sweaty she was.

This is crazy, Anna said. We’ve got to stop, right now. I feel really sick.

They stopped after a bend in the road. Anna and Alice stood next to each other beside a stone parapet and looked out over the water, so misty in the distance, you couldn’t see the other shore. Palm trees. Lemon trees. The mountains, dark and gloomy. There was nothing but the mountains, then the road, then the water. Actually no landscape, little space for people, cramped and spacious at the same time.

Do you think this is beautiful? Anna asked.

I don’t know, Alice said. It probably is very beautiful. Isn’t it?

The Romanian, standing somewhere behind them clicked the shutter of his camera. They could hear it. A panoramic view: Anna and Alice at the lake.

OK, Alice said, you have to keep your eyes open now. I think we’ll be there soon. Attenzione, capito?

Five o’clock in the afternoon on the road between Gargnano Bogliaco and Toscolano-Maderno. Seen from above, a little car on the road that runs along the shore of the lake — Anna in the back, the Romanian and Alice in the front, baggage in the boot, water bottles rolling around on the floor and ashtrays full of cigarette butts, paper ice-cream wrappers and foil from packs of cigarettes. The excitement now infects all three, the car windows are open, Anna holding her hand out of the window into the air rushing by, and Alice calls out: Turn right! Here. Bear right, up there on the right towards that restaurant, keep to the right, go past it. Right, exactly. We’re almost there. Fifty metres from here, Conrad had written, there’s a spot where five roads come together. Take the one that leads through the forged-iron gate, the ‘fifth road’. It leads to the yellow house.

The fifth road is a dirt road. To the left a little stream, an olive grove, and among the trees, goats raising their heads, indifferent. The car rocks from side to side. They pass Lotte and Conrad’s house, a large, old, converted barn in the bend of the road on the side of the mountain, tall windows facing the lake, shutters closed tight. Ahead, at the end of the road, the yellow house. An Italian palazzo. Shuttered up, ivy, two balconies, one facing the mountain, the other the lake. A terrace, fig trees, agaves, and bougainvillea. From the back seat Anna says, You can actually hear the cicadas. There is rapt amazement in her voice. They get out of the car, leaving the doors open and going off in different directions.

Alice walked up the dirt road to Conrad and Lotte’s house. Pebbles in her sandals. She looked up at the black mountain behind the house and ducked. She climbed the broad steps between huge, tropical lavender bushes. Cardinal beetles, bright red, their little bodies chained to each other. In a hurry. And a rustling in the trees, a light breeze. Lotte was sitting on the terrace, which was empty except for a green hose on a drum, a grey stone sphere and the chair in which she sat. Three doors on the lower part of the house, two of them closed, the middle one slightly ajar. Lotte got up as Alice reached the terrace and came towards her; they greeted each other with a tentative embrace, cautiously, as if, at a touch, the other might dissolve into thin air.