Melanie Raabe: The Trap

I am not of this world.

At least, that’s what people say. As if there were only one world.

I am standing in the big, empty dining room I never eat in, looking out the large window. It’s on the ground floor. You look onto the meadow behind the house, and the edge of the woods. Sometimes you see deer or foxes.

It is autumn, and as I stand here gazing out, I have the feeling I’m looking in a mirror. The colors are building to a crescendo; the autumn wind makes the trees sway, bending some branches and breaking others. It is a dramatic and beautiful day. Nature, too, seems to sense that something is coming to an end; it’s summoning all its strength for one last surge. Soon it will be lying motionless outside my window. The sunshine will give way to wet gray and then crisp white. The people who come to visit me — my assistant, my publisher, my agent (there isn’t really anyone else) — will complain about the damp and the cold. About having to scrape the windscreen with numb fingers before they could set off. About the fact that it’s still dark when they leave the house in the morning and dark again by the time they get home in the evening. These things mean nothing to me. In my world, it is exactly 23.2ºC, summer and winter. In my world, it is always day and never night. Here, there is no rain, no snow, no frozen fingers. In my world, there is only one season, and I haven’t yet found a name for it.

This villa is my world. The sitting room with its open fire is my Asia, the library my Europe, the kitchen my Africa. North America is in my study. My bedroom is South America, and Australia and Oceania are out on the terrace. A few steps away, but completely unreachable.

I haven’t left the house for eleven years.

You can read the reasons why in all the papers, although some of them do exaggerate. I am ill, yes. I can’t leave the house, true. But I am not forced to live in complete darkness, nor do I sleep in an oxygen tent. It is tolerable. Everything is organized. Time is a current, powerful and gentle, in which I can drift. Only Bukowski introduces confusion into the order every now and then, when he brings in dirt on his paws and rain on his coat after a romp in the meadows. I love running my hand through his shaggy coat and feeling its dampness on my skin. I love the grubby traces of the outside world that Bukowski leaves on the tiles and on the parquet. In my world, there is no mud, no trees and no meadows, no rabbits and no sunshine. The twittering of birds comes from a tape, the sun comes from the solarium in the basement. It’s not a wide world, my world, but it is safe. At least, that’s what I thought.

The earthquake came on a Tuesday. There were no tremors beforehand — nothing that might have warned me.

I was in Italy when it happened. I travel frequently. I find it easiest to visit countries I know, and I used to go to Italy a lot. So I go back every now and then.

Italy is a beautiful and dangerous country because it reminds me of my sister.

Anna, who loved Italy even before she ever went there — Anna, who got herself Italian lessons on tape and listened to them so often that the tapes wore out. Anna, who saved assiduously for a Vespa and then careered around our hometown, as if she were winding recklessly through the narrow alleyways of Rome.

Italy reminds me of my sister and of the way things used to be, before the darkness. I keep trying to drive away the thought of Anna, but it’s sticky, like old-fashioned flypaper. Other dark thoughts get stuck to it; there’s no stopping them.

So it was off to Italy, in spite of everything. For an entire week, I retreated to three spare rooms upstairs that I never use, and named them Italy. I put on Italian music, watched Italian films, immersed myself in documentaries about the culture and customs of the country, leafed through coffee-table books, and had delicacies from various regions of Italy delivered by caterers. And the wine. Oh, the wine. It almost made my Italy real.

And now I’m walking through the alleyways of Rome, in search of a particular restaurant. The city is muggy and hot, and I’m exhausted — exhausted from battling against the current of tourists, exhausted from warding off the advances of street hawkers, exhausted from drinking in all the beauty around me. The colors amaze me. The sky is hanging gray and low over the Eternal City but beneath it the Tiber flows a dull green.

I must have fallen asleep because, when I wake up, the documentary on ancient Rome is over. I’m confused when I come to. I can’t remember dreaming, but I have trouble finding my way back to reality.

I seldom dream nowadays. In the first years of my retreat from the real world, I dreamed more vividly than ever before, as if my brain wanted to compensate for the lack of new impulses it was receiving during the day. It invented the most colorful adventures for me — tropical rainforests with talking animals, and cities of brightly colored glass inhabited by people with magic powers. But, although my dreams always started off light and cheerful, they would sooner or later grow dark, like a sheet of blotting paper dipped in black ink. The leaves in the rainforest would fall, and the animals would stop talking. The glass became so sharp you could cut your fingers on it; the sky turned the color of blackberries. And inevitably he would appear — the monster. Sometimes it was a vague sense of threat that I couldn’t get a proper hold on, sometimes a shadowy figure lurking almost out of view. Occasionally he would pursue me and I would run, trying to avoid looking back because I couldn’t endure the sight of his face, not even in a dream. Whenever I looked straight at the monster, I would die — die and wake up, every time, gasping for air like a drowning woman. And in those first years, when the dreams were still coming, I had trouble driving away the thoughts that came at night and settled on my bed like crows. There was nothing I could do about them; no matter how painful the memories, I couldn’t stop thinking of her in those moments — thinking of my sister.

No dream tonight, no monster, but I still feel uneasy. A sentence I can’t quite make out is echoing in my head. There is a voice. I blink, my eyes gummed up. I notice that my right arm has gone to sleep, and I try to massage it back to life. The television’s still on, and that’s where the voice is coming from — the voice that had found its way into my dream and woken me up.

It’s a man’s voice, business-like and neutral, same as all the other voices on these news channels that broadcast the lovely documentaries I’m so fond of. I heave myself up and grope for the remote control, but I can’t find it. My bed is vast, my bed is the sea, all these pillows and duvets, waves of coffee-table books and a whole armada of remote controls: for the television itself, for the receiver, for the DVD player, for my two Blu-ray players customized for different formats, for the sound system, for my old VHS recorder. I snort in frustration, and the news voice tells me about things in the Middle East I don’t want to know — not now, not today. I’m on holiday, I’m in Italy, I’ve been looking forward to this trip!

It’s too late. The real-world facts that the news voice is reporting on — all the wars and disasters and atrocities that I’d been hoping to block out for a few days — have forced their way into my head, chasing away my sunny mood in seconds. The Italy feeling has gone, the trip’s off. Tomorrow morning I’ll go back to my real bedroom and clear away all the Italy stuff. I rub my eyes; the brightness of the screen makes them ache. The newsreader has left the Middle East and is now reporting on domestic affairs. I watch him with resignation, my tired eyes watering. Now the man’s finished his spiel, and there’s a live broadcast from Berlin. A reporter is saying something about the Chancellor’s latest trip abroad, while behind him the Reichstag rises up out of the darkness, majestic and imposing.