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

In the middle of May last year, three weeks before his forty-fourth birthday, Boris died of a stroke while swimming in Schwielow Lake. In the early nineties he had become a badminton instructor (“Shuttlecock coach,” Susanne called it) and “business was good.” He had leased an old glider hangar in Pankow, formerly East Berlin, which he later bought, and he knew all sorts of people. You seldom met the same person twice at his place. This was also true of his girlfriends, all of them terribly young and thin. He visited us only once or twice. The thing was, he loved to cook.

The last time we visited Boris was not for a birthday party but for what he called his “housewarming.”

Sacrificing two evenings for him inside of three months — it was now early September — was way too much for Susanne. Even though it was she who accepted the invitation on the phone — according to her, she’d had no choice. Boris had sounded so proud of his apartment that she couldn’t bring herself to do it.… The sole topic at his birthday party had been his new condo. He sent me an e-mail asking for my expert opinion of the girl who would be at his side — the judgments of an old friend counted a lot for him. He had often asked me for my “expert opinion,” so often that I read right past the word “girl,” instead of taking it as a warning or, at the least, an attempt to set the tone.

Boris had requested wine from the Saale-Unstrut region as a housewarming gift, and so Susanne and I carried one case each of Müller-Thurgau and Sylvaner up four flights of stairs. The elevator goes directly to the penthouse, which is now home to the people who used to own the entire building.

As Boris came down a few steps to greet us, his legs looked longer than usual and his silly pointy shoes much too big for the stairs.

Two other couples had already arrived. They were still holding packages and bouquets, plus wadded-up wrapping paper. Needless to say, we didn’t know them.

Boris told us to put the stuff on the coffee table and strode on ahead through the room, his heels rapping against the hardwood floor.

Except for a few new pieces of furniture — we made a point of admiring a long dining table and two large sand-colored “four-seaters”—the rooms were empty, in some even the baseboards were missing. Boris showed us what were to be his office and a guest room, and emphasized the southern exposure. The bath, kitchen, and bedroom — with boxes from the move still piled high — looked out onto the rear courtyard.

Boris railed at the ambulances that for no earthly reason, but with sirens howling just that much louder, raced up and down Greifswalder Strasse, but Marienburger Strasse was relatively quiet. Susanne had especially liked the big bathroom with its black-and-white tile floor. She said in her next life she’d play shuttlecock too — that way at least she’d make a go of things.

“It’s called badminton, bad-min-ton!” Boris barked and led the way back. Suddenly there she stood right before us, on the broad threshold between the entryway and the living room, her shoulders hunched forward, a stack of large white plates in her hands.

“This is Elvira,” Boris said, laying an arm around the girl’s shoulders. Elvira cast us all a fleeting glance, the corners of her mouth twitched. Susanne came to her assistance and carried almost the entire stack of plates to the table. Of all the women that Boris had introduced us to over the years, Elvira was the most diaphanous and the youngest.

As if trying to explain the dark rings under her eyes — he evidently noticed our uneasiness — he said that Elvira had spent the night on the train. Her mother had in fact recently moved south, to the Allgäu region. Elvira shook hands all around and vanished again into the kitchen without our having heard her utter one word.

As Boris filled our glasses, I was afraid Susanne would make some remark within his earshot about the age difference. But she just accepted her glass with a smile and nodded graciously when Boris excused himself to follow Elvira into the kitchen.

As always at the beginning of evenings at Boris’s we were now left to ourselves, which I found rather strenuous. With each successive year I had less and less interest in getting to know total strangers I would never see again.

The black-haired couple were Lore and Fred — she was a carpenter, he a structural design engineer with the plodding gait of a farmer. Pavel made his living giving piano lessons at the music school in Spandau and played keyboard with a band called the Wonderers, or something like that. The only reason Pavel played badminton was to please his redheaded girlfriend Ines, whom Boris had introduced to us as a colleague of mine — her latest plan being to actually write a book.

Lore and Fred had done work for Boris. Lore had built the black shelving for his CDs, five rows high and running the full length of the room. Fred had done the calculations for the extra steel beams needed to bear the weight of his library — Boris collected lexica of every sort, most of them foreign-language editions. In fact he read almost nothing but lexica and allegedly even took a few volumes with him on vacation.

Fred said he had never met such an interesting and multifaceted person as Boris. And Lore found his collection of CDs overwhelming — she hoped to borrow the whole lot over time. It made her very happy to think how at some point she could have much the same collection at her disposal — even though the CDs she burned wouldn’t look as fancy as Boris’s originals.

Shortly before dinner an ex-colleague of Boris’s named Charlotte — we’d met her at the birthday party in June — appeared. She was now teaching courses at Jopp, a women’s fitness studio. She was wearing the same lilac dress as before, and she’d also done her hair the same way — a ponytail that emphasized the high vault of her forehead.

Pavel, to whom Susanne took a liking — she later said his face was so striking it was as if he had pondered every note he ever played — busied himself inspecting CDs, but finished the task fairly quickly. He asked us how we knew Boris and Elvira. Instead of answering his question Susanne divulged that a few weeks earlier Boris had introduced us to a different woman — a remark to which no one had a follow-up. Although Charlotte, who was standing at the window smoking, did set her bracelets clinking softly and gave a telling nod. A moment later Boris entered and pretended not to notice our silence. Balancing a large tray at his belly, he followed Elvira, who filled plates with food and deposited one at each setting. Once they had circled the table, she started to head back with him to the kitchen. “Stay put,” Boris said somewhat angrily. “I can manage.”

I had sensed something wasn’t right between the two of them. But it wasn’t easy to watch Elvira wince before turning around with head held high and crying, “Dinner is served!” Most of the time I’m far too busy imagining what Susanne is thinking and how she will react. This time, however, I likewise found the situation beyond the pale. What was this child doing here with us? What was she doing at his side?

Oddly enough there were place cards — he got the idea, Boris claimed, after discovering Elvira’s calligraphic skills. Even Boris could barely conceal his own discomfort. For him, the perfect host, it was a major glitch to have opened only one bottle of red wine. As he set to work on the second, the cork broke, and he cursed much too loudly. Pavel took over the job, and Lore remarked that two months ago no one would have believed we’d ever be sitting here together like this so soon. In early July, Fred added, they had still been balancing their way on his beams. Pavel inserted a CD — tango music, but barely audible.