Ingo Schulze - One More Story - Thirteen Stories in the Time-Honored Mode

The neighbor’s door opened. An older man with a bag of garbage in each hand stepped out. Could he be of any help? Ute told him about the bomb, and that we were here much too early. At first I didn’t even notice the woman who appeared behind him in the dark entryway. She was standing at the threshold now. While her husband repeated Ute’s story, she observed us from deep-set eyes. Her mouth and nose were almost abnormally delicate, a good match for the gesture with which she now invited us in. No need to be bashful, the man said, and then asked if we lived in B. proper — he’d seen our license plates. He had studied in B. for a year, shortly after the war. They and their apartment gave off the odor of underclothes that have lain in the drawer too long, of a cleanliness that does without deodorant or perfume.

The man winced at the sound of creaking floorboards behind Marco’s door, but then went thumping down the stairs with the élan of a good skier plunging down a steep slope. His wife had already vanished into the darkness of their entryway as the locks on Marco’s door began clicking.

Marco looked dreadful, bloated, with reddened eyes and a grubby bathrobe gaping enough to reveal a strip of belly. He asked us in. We apologized and, under the pretext of fetching breakfast rolls, set out again at once. A stroll in the park might have been fairly pleasant had the place not seemed so bleak somehow. Ute and Fritz trotted reluctantly behind me up the big hill. We were the only strollers among the joggers and dog walkers. Ute remarked that our encounter with Claudia and Marco’s neighbors had made her realize that there were hardly any older people in the neighborhood.

We bought our rolls at the Vietnamese grocery. I was instinctively keeping an eye out for the woman from last night. I wanted to see her up close and hear her voice.

Over breakfast Marco said there were considerably more bombs in the sand around here than hagstones on a beach. He explained for us the system behind the bombing of Berlin. It was probably purely accidental that early on bombs landed in neighborhoods that had been the first to declare themselves “free of Jews.” Unfortunately accidental, he added. Here in Prenzlauerberg there had been hardly any bombing. I knew nothing about all that, had never heard his theory either, and hoped that Ute wouldn’t start in again with the story about her grandparents and Dresden.

Claudia tried hard to keep Fritz entertained while he waited for Dennis to finally get up. Ute said that for some reason she found the bomb depressing, which was followed by much too long a silence around the breakfast table.

I sensed that we were both just in the way at this point, and even assumed I knew what Claudia would most likely call us—“wet blankets.”

Marco asked about my work. I told him about our discounts and the kinds of binders we provided and how important service contracts were for us, which was another way of adding to our coffers. “That’s always a good thing,” Marco said. Claudia said that if our shop was in Berlin we’d definitely be making a small fortune. “Marco always has so much paper to push, right?” Marco nodded with a full mouth. Then Claudia told about how upscale things had become at Ufa, and that in the passageways linking sets there was enough free fruit and coffee to keep a modest eater like herself well nourished. She followed this with: “They fight tooth and nail to get Marco onboard.”

I asked who all they had invited. Claudia managed to insert Julia’s name so offhandedly among the others that I felt no need to react.

Ute said we had nothing planned and could lend a hand anytime today. There was the constant racket of fireworks outside, and at one point a boom so loud that Ute exclaimed: “The bomb!”

By the time we took off without Fritz around one o’clock, the whole bomb hoopla was over. No one barred us from returning to our apartment. I felt privileged to have a key to a Berlin apartment.

“We’re keeping the roses,” Ute said, put on some music, and wriggled out of her sweater and pants. She moved through these strange rooms with a sense of belonging that suddenly made me feel like her guest, as if in fact I were visiting a strange woman. Did I like her new bra, her new lingerie, Ute asked — it was really very comfortable.

She left the bathroom door open. I followed her. She smiled at me in the mirror and closed her eyes at the first touch. As I’ve said, when it comes to sex we were made for each other.

Ute held on to the windowsill, so that looking over her head I could see into the apartment from last night and, just by shifting a little to the left, the construction site. The bulldozer was now at the edge of the lot. The red-and-white barrier ribbon ran, oddly enough, right through the cab.

Later as we lay under the Oriental blanket, Ute kept running her fingers through my hair. I had already seen sleep’s first images when she said, “I’ve slept with Claudia.”

“You and Claudia have …”

“Yes,” Ute said. “Once and never again.” I could feel her warm breath on my neck, the tip of her nose was cold.

“When?” I asked.

“Before you came along.”

I sat up in bed.

“The really stupid part,” she said, “is that I never told you before.”

For a moment I hoped that her disclosure might change things between us. I wondered if I ought to take advantage of the opportunity, to jump up and shout: “Why did you do that? It’s over!”

“And why,” I asked, “are you confessing now?”

“Let’s leave it behind in this century. It’s over and done with, we won’t mention it ever again, okay?”

I’d have loved to ask lots of questions — how it came about, what Claudia had done, what her touch had felt like and so on.

I asked her whether Claudia really had nipples as big as I thought I’d seen yesterday in that low-cut dress.

“All you had to do was join us in the sauna,” Ute said. That settled that, as far as she was concerned.

We slept way too long, and it wasn’t until almost eight o’clock that we set out again. At first I thought the haze was smoke from fireworks, but it was genuine fog — you could barely see anything of Friedrichshain Park — weighing down on the city with a real sense of doomsday.

Claudia looked as if she had had no time to change. She was wearing a thin, very delicately knitted, almost fuzzy sweater that was not exactly opaque, plus an everyday knee-length skirt. In contrast Ute had put her hair up and looked downright sophisticated in her long skirt and plunging neckline. She’d find another man quick enough.

When she held a cup of coffee under my nose, I realized that Claudia had been keeping an eye on me the whole time. “So you’ll have stopped yawning by the time Julia arrives,” she whispered.

Everybody was waiting for the arrival of an actor whose name meant nothing to me — but I’d recognize him, Marco remarked, the moment I saw him, from television.

Claudia kept introducing me as the fellow who had been driven out of his apartment by a bomb that morning. In response to which I then had to tell the story in detail, and Marco, dressed in a ruffled white shirt and black suit, would then usually repeat his comparison with hagstones on the beach. Claudia gave a loud laugh, kissed Marco, and said, there was a whole “treatment” in that one image.

Was it the coffee or the alcohol or simply the fact that at any moment Julia would be standing at the apartment door with its three locks — at any rate, my palms were sweatier than they had been in ages.

I washed my face and hands, and as I was looking for a guest towel I heard the doorbell. I saw myself smiling in the mirror and stepped out into the hallway. There in front of me was the woman from last night. No doubt of it. Her hair was now in a braid that hung down to her breast on one side.