Nothing but Ghosts
Judith Hermann

for Franz

Wouldn’t it be nice

If we could live here

Make this the kind of place

Where we belong

The Beach Boys

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

Ruth (Girlfriends)

Cold-Blue

Acqua Alta

Nothing But Ghosts

Pimp

Where Are You Going?

Love for Ari Oskarsson

About the Author

Also by Judith Hermann

Copyright

About the Publisher

Ruth (Girlfriends)

Ruth said, ‘Promise me that you’ll never start anything with him.’ I still remember the way she looked when she said it, sitting on the chair by the window, bare legs drawn up to her chest. She had showered and washed her hair, and she was in her underwear, a towel wrapped around her head, her face very open, wide, looking at me intently, more amused than worried. She said, ‘Promise me that, OK?’ and I looked past her out of the window at the multi-storey car park across the street. It was raining and already getting dark. The car park sign shone blue and beautiful. I said, ‘Listen, why should I promise? Of course I won’t start anything with him.’ Ruth said, ‘I know. Promise me anyway,’ and I said, ‘I promise,’ and then I looked at her again; she shouldn’t have said that.

I’ve known Ruth all my life.

She had known Raoul for two or three weeks. He had come to do a guest appearance at the theatre where she had a two-year engagement; he wasn’t staying long; perhaps that’s why she was in such a hurry. She phoned me in Berlin – we had shared an apartment until she had to move because of her stint at the theatre. We weren’t good at dealing with being apart. In fact, she called me every evening. I missed her.

I was sitting in the kitchen, which was empty now except for a small table and a chair, staring at the wall while we talked on the phone. There was a little piece of paper she had tacked up on the wall once: ‘Tonight, tonight it’s gonna be the night, the night.’ I kept thinking about taking it down, but then I never did. She had phoned as usual and blurted it right out. ‘I’m in love,’ she said. And then she talked about Raoul, and her voice sounded so happy, she made me feel restless, in a way even nervous, and I had to get up and, still holding the phone, walk through the apartment.

I’d never been interested in her men, nor she in mine. She said, ‘He’s so tall.’ She said all the things you always say, and a few new things too. Being in love this time didn’t seem to be different from her other, earlier infatuations. For a week she and Raoul had been tiptoeing around, stealing glances and trying to be near each other. After a party one night, drunk, they had kissed for the first time in the pedestrian mall of the small town. They kissed behind the scenery during the break between scenes and in the canteen after their colleagues had left and the canteen cook had put up the chairs. Raoul had such soft hands, she said. His head was shaved; sometimes he wore glasses – small, bent metal frames that didn’t suit his face. He looked strange with them on. She said, ‘He’s really more your type, really, exactly your type. You’d faint if you saw him.’

I said, ‘What’s that supposed to mean, my type?’

And Ruth hesitated, giggled, then said, ‘I don’t know, maybe physically? A little common maybe?’

He said nice things to her – ‘The colour of your eyes is the colour of grass when the wind sweeps through it, reversing the blades to white.’ She quoted him reverently; he was also vain, she said (and laughed), like a child in a way. He was playing the part of Caliban in The Tempest. Evening after evening, the audience went wild. He was from Munich. His father died a long time ago. Raoul had studied philosophy. Actually, this summer he was going to Ireland, would sleep in his car, would try to write while sitting on the cliffs with a view of the sea. Raoul. Ruth pronounced it Ra-uhl.

When I visited Ruth – not because of this new love of hers; I would have gone to see her in any case – she picked me up at the railway station and I saw her before she saw me. She was walking along the platform, looking for me. She wore a long, blue dress, her hair pinned up. Her face glowed, and the physical tension, her walk, the way she held her head and her searching gaze expressed an expectation that could in no way ever be meant for me. Nor did she find me, and eventually I simply walked over and stood in front of her.

She was startled but then she hugged me, kissed me, and said, ‘Oh, my dear, my dear.’ The new perfume she was wearing smelled of sandalwood and lemons. I took her hands and held them in mine, I looked into her face; her laughter was very familiar.

Ruth had rented a tiny apartment downtown, an American-style apartment, one room, a kitchenette, a bath. There were no curtains at the big windows; the bathroom was the only place you could hide from the drivers who parked their cars in the multi-storey across the way and then stared over at you for minutes at a time, seemingly absent-mindedly. The room was small, one bed, a rack on which to hang up clothes, a table, two chairs, a stereo system. On the windowsill stood a photo I had given her as a goodbye present, the view from our apartment in Berlin. On the table, a silver ashtray from Morocco, and tucked into the frame of the mirror over the bathroom sink a passport picture of me.

There must have been a moment when I was alone in the apartment – Ruth at the theatre or shopping with Raoul – and I remember that I sat on the chair by the window, on Ruth’s chair, smoking a cigarette and exposing myself to the eyes of the people in the multi-storey; the neon sign flickered, the room was unfamiliar, the stairwell on the other side of the apartment door dark and quiet.

Ruth doesn’t look anything like me. Everything about her is the opposite of me. All the places she’s round and soft and big, I’m skinny and bony and small. My hair is short and dark; hers is very long and light, curly and bouncy. Her face is beautiful, quite simple, and everything is in proportion – her eyes, her nose, her mouth, all in symmetry. The first time I saw her she was wearing a pair of huge sunglasses and even before she took them off I knew what the colour of her eyes would be – green.

I intended to stay three days, go on to Paris, and then return to Berlin. Back then I would often travel to foreign cities, stay for an aimless, dogged week and leave again. While we were still at the railway station, Ruth said, ‘Stay a little longer, won’t you?’

It was a small town and easy to get your bearings in. The pedestrian zone was right behind the station; the theatre was on the market square; and the church steeple was always visible above the roofs. Taking my suitcase Ruth regarded me closely; she said she was worried that I might become cynical – disparaging and arrogant about the pedestrian zone, the Tchibo coffee bar, the department store, the hotel in the market square – this place where she’d be living for the next two years. I had to laugh; I was far from becoming cynical; I envied her these two years in a small town, without really being able to explain why.

We sat down in an Italian cafe, ordered strawberry ice cream with whipped cream, coffee and water; I lit a cigarette and turned my face up to the late summer sun. I thought, ‘I could feel more carefree in a small town.’ The waiter brought two small coffeepots, dishes of ice cream, glasses, and looked at Ruth, enthralled; she didn’t notice. Me, he ignored. Ruth was restless; didn’t finish her ice cream, ordered another coffee, kept glancing up and down the pedestrian zone, a rushed, hurried, searching glance at the people there, back to my face, and away again.

Then she smiled. ‘It’s awful, awful, awful,’ she said, looking not at all unhappy. ‘You have to tell me what you think of him, all right?’ she said. ‘You have to be honest.’ And I said, ‘Ruth – ’ and she said, very serious, ‘It’s important to me.’ Things had become more difficult with Raoul last week; there was a fight, a stupid misunderstanding, all in the past now, and yet…Evidently there was some sort of ex-wife in Munich with whom he had long telephone conversations while Ruth was in the room; from time to time he withdrew, didn’t keep dates, or arrived late, was sometimes untalkative, sullen and then again euphoric, impatient, intoxicated with Ruth’s beauty.

She wasn’t sure what he wanted from her; she said, ‘Maybe he only wants to go to bed with me.’ Up to that point he hadn’t yet done that. And there were these rumours. Someone said he had a reputation and it wasn’t the best. Actually something like that wouldn’t rattle Ruth. Still, she said, ‘I don’t want to become his trophy, you know?’ looking at me so innocently and openly that I was almost ashamed, ashamed for myself, for Raoul, for the rest of the world. I said, ‘Ruth, that’s silly, you’re not a trophy. Nobody is going to betray you, and nobody wants to prey on you; that much I know.’ I meant it sincerely, and for the moment Ruth looked comforted and reassured. She took my hand and said, ‘And you? How are you?’

As always, I evaded the question and, as always, she allowed me to be evasive, and then we sat there like that, sleepy in the afternoon light, feeling close. Towards seven o’clock Ruth had to go to the theatre, and I went with her.

Ruth, sleeping. When we shared our first apartment – how many years ago? was it five, ten? – we slept in one bed. Often we went to bed at the same time, lay next to each other, face to face, Ruth’s eyes dark and shiny in the night; she would whisper half-sentences, hum softly, then I would fall asleep. I could never have gone to sleep like that with a man; I don’t know whether Ruth could. Her sleep was deep and sound, heavy and motionless. She always lay on her back, her long hair fanned out around her head, her face relaxed, like a portrait. She breathed quietly and slowly. I always woke up before she did and then I lay there, my head supported on my hand, watching her. I remember that once, during one of our rare arguments, I threatened to cut off her hair while she slept. I don’t want to believe that I could ever have said something like that, but I know it’s true.

Ruth owned a nightmarishly huge metal alarm clock; its earsplitting ring was the only thing that could actually wake her. The alarm clock stood on her side of the bed, and even though I was always awake first, I never woke her up but let the crazy ringing do it; she emerged from sleep visibly tormented, opened her eyes, hit the ‘off button on the alarm, and immediately groped for the cigarettes she always put next to her side of the bed at night. She would light one, sink back into the pillows, smoke, sigh, and at some point she would say, ‘Good morning.’ Later, in other apartments and other beds, she gave up smoking in the morning. Maybe because by then we were no longer waking up together.

Ruth was playing the role of Eliante in Molièere’s Misanthrope. I had seen her in many productions while she was an acting student at the academy. As a Viking king in Ibsen’s The Vikings of Heligoland her small form was wrapped in a bear pelt and her hair arranged like a cloud around her head. She was carried on stage on a sea of lances and bellowed her soul out for two hours. As Lady Macbeth she was suspended head down by silken threads in front of a white wall and made fishlike gliding motions with her hands. But I thought she was strangest as Mariedl in Schwab’s Lady Presidents, scarcely recognizable in a grey house-cleaning smock, cowering under a table. Ruth was a good actress, a comedienne with great stage presence, very physical, but she was always Ruth to me; I recognized her, her face, her voice, her posture.

Perhaps it was because I was always trying so hard to recognize her – the Ruth who dressed in the morning, slowly, carefully, one item after the other, then looked in the mirror with that special expression intended only for the mirror, and always sideways. The Ruth who drank her coffee holding the cup with both hands and not setting it down till she had emptied it, the way she smoked, made up her eyelashes, smiled into the receiver with her head tilted to one side when she was on the phone.

She had wanted to impersonate me, do a portrait study of me, and she followed me around for three days with a scholarly expression on her face, imitating my movements until I stopped, stood stock still in a corner of the room, and yelled at her to quit it. Later she imperson-ated her mother with a precision and attention to detail that made me shudder.

The staging of The Misanthrope was straightforward and faithful to the original, far removed from the chaotic and improvisational student productions. At first I was bored; then I found it beautiful, perhaps because, for the first time, I saw Ruth as if from afar, unencumbered by pretentious suspensions from steel scaffolding. She was wearing a kind of white children’s sailor suit with her hair twisted into a braid; her face was clearly defined, thoughtful and sensible. Perhaps her voice was a little too trembly for Eliante, too cracked, as if she were choking, and not quite authentic: ‘That isn’t really how love works at all for most people. You find that a man in love always justifies his own choice. His passion makes him blind to all faults and in his eyes everything in the woman he loves is lovable. He counts her defects as perfections or finds flattering names for them.’

I was disappointed and at the same time relieved not to see her in the role of Céelimèene, the foolish, vulnerable, loving Céelimèene. There was sustained applause after each act; but, then, I had expected nothing less in this small town. Ruth took a deep bow, beaming, radiant. She had a new habit of immediately running off stage like a child; in other productions she had gone off hesitantly and reluctantly.

I remained in my seat till the last person in the audience had left the auditorium. The stagehands were beginning to dismantle the sets and the lights were turned off. Dust rained down onto the stage. There were times when I had envied Ruth her talent, her profession, the applause, the possibility of fame. But this envy faded at some point when I realized that I was absolutely unsuited, really quite impossible, for the theatre. I sat in the empty row of seats, leaning forwards, and tried to understand Ruth, to understand what she was doing here, how she worked, what she felt. I couldn’t, didn’t understand a thing, and then I stood up and went to the theatre canteen. Raoul’s performance on the second stage would be finished at about eleven o’clock; Ruth had asked me to wait with her for him.

On the day she moved out of the apartment we shared and left Berlin for this small town, I was in no state to carry even a single box out to the removal van. Her entire family had come to help with the move, her mother, her two sisters, and her brother and his wife. We all had breakfasted together; it was January and the harsh winter sunlight streamed pitilessly through the windows. I had tried to draw out breakfast as long as possible but then it was over, and everybody got up and began to pack Ruth’s things, while I sat as if turned to stone in my chair at the table, with the remains of our breakfast. I clutched the arms of the chair; I couldn’t move; couldn’t even get up.

Ruth’s family worked around me; they pushed bureaus, chairs, cartons across the room, carried Ruth’s suitcases and boxes, her bed, her bookshelves, her kitchen cupboard, her desk, all of her things, down the three flights of stairs, all the while making it clear how impossible and rude they thought I was. I couldn’t help it; I sat there motionless, mute.

The apartment door was wide open, and cold air swept in from time to time. Ruth briefly came over, putting her dirty hand on my cheek; then she left again. When everything was packed, one of her sisters put the breakfast dishes into the last of the removal boxes and managed to get the table outside as well. Eggshells, a jam jar and one coffee cup were left on the floor. I got up. The family disappeared down the stairwell; in the van Ruth’s brother blew the horn. Ruth put on her coat; we stood facing each other in the empty hall, then we embraced. She said, ‘See you soon.’ Or maybe I said it. Then she left. I closed the apartment door behind her and stood there until I was certain they were gone.

For a long time I didn’t know what to do with Ruth’s room. It stood empty for a month, two months, three. At some point I began using it to watch Super 8 home movies. I would sit on a chair, the projector humming, and on the white wall a child, supposedly me once upon a time, walked across a sand dune. In May or June, I moved my bed into Ruth’s room, to the same spot where hers had stood.

The theatre canteen was small, stuffy and filled with cigarette smoke. It had Formica-topped tables, wooden benches, spherical light fixtures and mirrored walls that did nothing to make the room look larger. Instead it seemed smaller in a labyrinthine, chaotic way. The stagehands were sitting at tables in the rear, the actors in the front. Behind the counter, a fat woman, who was the cook and looked dead tired, drew beer from the tap. Ruth was nowhere to be seen.

I sat down at the only unoccupied table, ordered a cup of coffee and a glass of wine, not sure whether I wanted to wake up or get drunk. I wondered where my suitcase was. Ruth had taken it either into her dressing room or left it with the doorman. Suddenly I wanted to have my things back again, my book, my appointment calendar. I felt insecure sitting at this table, a stranger, someone who had absolutely nothing to do with the theatre. I looked over at the actors; there was no one sitting there who was ‘so tall’ with a shaved skull and a face at once childish and manly, and then the canteen door opened and he came in.

I recognized him instantly. It was a two-fold recognition, and it was so unmistakable that impulsively I actually ducked, hunching my shoulders and drawing in my head. I hastily moved my chair out of the circle of light cast by the ceiling lamps, and he walked by me without noticing me and sat down with the actors, who seemed delighted to see him. He took off his jacket without getting up, a suede jacket with a brown fur collar. Touching someone’s arm, he laughed, spoke, I could hear his voice distinctly among all the other voices. I tried not to listen; I would rather have seen him first with Ruth, Raoul as Ruth’s Raoul. You have to tell me what you think of him.

I searched for my cigarettes in my coat pockets; the cigarettes weren’t there; they were in my bag, probably in Ruth’s dressing room; I felt a brief flash of anger. I wanted to analyse what I was feeling, to examine some particular thought, and a cigarette might have helped. I could still hear his voice and I could see his face in the mirror, an alert, open face; he wasn’t wearing his glasses; his look was one of attentive concentration, the dark eyes narrowed; there were remnants of white theatrical make-up at his temples. His profile, on the other hand, was not beautiful, but dull, complacent and ordinary, a protruding chin, a low forehead. He really was very tall, his body heavy and massive, and he had coarse hands with which he gesticulated and rubbed his shaved head. I could hear Ruth’s voice – I don’t know, physically, maybe a bit common – I knew what she had meant to say, but that’s not what he was. I stared at him. I thought I knew everything there was to know about him and yet nothing at all. I carefully moved my chair back to the table. My breathing was shallow, soft; suddenly I felt at a loss. Then the door opened and Ruth came in.

She came in and saw Raoul immediately. Her eyes went straight to him, and her face took on an expression that was new to me, and then she looked over the heads of the others, across the room until finally she saw me. She made an indecipherable signal with her right hand, stopped at the counter and ordered a beer. She was standing very erect, like someone who thinks she is being watched, but Raoul hadn’t even seen her yet. Then she came over to my table, sat down next to me, thirstily drank some beer, put the glass down, and said, ‘How was it?’ and then, ‘Did you see him?’ I said clearly, ‘By any chance would you have a cigarette?’ and she raised her eyebrows, irritated, then smiled and pulled some cigarettes from her pocket.

She was wearing her blue dress again, her hair still in the Eliante hairdo; she looked beautiful, tired; she said, ‘It’s good that you’re here.’ And then again, ‘Did you see him?’ She nodded her head in his direction, and I said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘He’s already here, he’s sitting over there.’ I said, ‘Where?’ She whispered, ‘At the third table on the left in the middle.’ I lit my cigarette, repeated to myself the words we had just exchanged – did you see him, no, did you see him, where – turned my head and looked over at Raoul, and just then he turned round in our direction.

He looked at Ruth and smiled, and Ruth smiled back while she pressed her leg against mine under the table. I puffed on my cigarette, I said, ‘I really liked the play’; I said it again. Raoul got up. It looked as though he wanted to excuse himself from the others, was held back, pulled himself away, came over to our table, slowly, calmly, all the while very clearly presenting his body, his entire person. I looked away, and then I looked back; somehow I felt embarrassed. Raoul sat down, he could have sat next to Ruth, but he took the chair across from us. Ruth introduced me, and we shook hands across the table; I quickly pulled mine back. Under the table Ruth’s leg kept pressing against mine. He said, ‘Ruth told me a lot about you,’ and he smiled; his eyes revealed nothing even though they were fixed directly on mine for a long time. The cook called out his name, ‘Raauuul,’ like a howl. He got up again and went over to the counter. Ruth said, ‘Good Lord,’ and then, ‘What do you think; quick, tell me,’ and I had to laugh and I said, ‘Ruth, I met him less than sixty seconds ago.’

He returned with a plate of soup, sat down again, and began to eat, saying nothing. Ruth watched him as though she had never seen anyone eat before, so I watched him too; I had no choice. Actually his eating was quite odd; perhaps he had some particular role in mind, a special way of eating, a Franciscan monk at a wooden table in the refectory of his monastery, a South Tyrolean peasant holding a tin plate on his lap, or something equally absurd. He ate bent forwards over his food in stolid absorption. He slurped and carried his spoon to his mouth and back to the plate with the regularity of a machine, swallowed noisily, and none of us said a word until he had finished. Then he pushed away the empty plate, and for a moment I expected him to emit a loud burp, but the performance was over. He seemed to be a master of brevity. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaned back, smiled at us, and said, ‘Well, how are you?’

The tone of voice in which Ruth said ‘All right, thanks’ was new to me; it had a note of stiffness and insecurity that I hadn’t heard before; she seemed nervous, testy, and there was a strained expression around her mouth. ‘How did the performance go?’ Raoul asked; actually he was making it easy for her, he asked it pleasantly, showing real interest, and Ruth answered sarcastically, ‘As usual, a roaring success.’ She made a disparaging face, as though to indicate that the small-town public was an undemanding one, an attitude I knew was foreign to her. ‘I didn’t have to give it my all.’ With that she finally moved her leg away from mine and looked around the canteen with feigned nonchalance. Raoul smiled, still pleasantly; it seemed that he neither expected this kind of capri-ciousness from her nor found it appropriate. Ruth, however, was sticking to that line, or perhaps she couldn’t backtrack; it was as though she wanted to prove something to him.

Raoul simply ignored me; it wasn’t rudeness – actually, it was rather pleasant. He was very attentive to Ruth, yet to me he conveyed the vague feeling that this attitude of his was supposed to tell me something about him. He asked her about the simplest things, and she didn’t give straight answers but instead became involved in such twisted subtleties that I got up and excused myself because it was becoming unbearable. I went to the toilet, stood in front of the mirror for a while and gazed helplessly at my face. I wondered what Raoul thought of me. Then I went back out and walked up and down the corridor outside the dressing rooms.

The performance by the theatre’s resident ballet troupe had just finished; all the performers were rushing to the canteen, fat trumpeters, tipsy violinists, lean, cheerful dancers. I squeezed my way along the wall, took momentary pleasure in the palpable post-performance euphoria that emanated from them and immediately came down to earth again. The neon lighting was harsh and the musicians looked tired and seedy. ‘That Mozart shit,’ one of the dancers said to a cellist who was dragging his instrument case along behind him as if it were an old suitcase.

When I came back to the canteen, Raoul and Ruth seemed to have calmed down, or at least Ruth had calmed down; she looked more relaxed and her cheeks were flushed. She was leaning across the table, talking insistently to Raoul. When I sat down again, she stopped and leaned back, slightly embarrassed. Both looked at me, and I didn’t know what to say; I felt foolish, stared stubbornly at the tabletop. I tried to make Ruth understand that I didn’t feel up to this, didn’t feel like talking, not ready to help out, at least not now, but she smiled absent-mindedly and blissfully past me, put her hand on mine in an outlandish gesture, and said, ‘Would you two like something else to drink?’ I said dully, ‘A glass of wine, please,’ then I pulled my hand away. Raoul said, ‘Nothing, thanks.’

Ruth got up to order the wine, and as she passed Raoul, he turned towards her and suddenly grabbed her between the legs from behind – it was the ultimate of obscene gestures. She stopped, the expression on her face did not change a bit; she stood there in his grip and looked into space, he looked at her; no one was watching although they were like a sculpture caught in the beam of a searchlight. They remained there like that for a long time, much too long, then he let her go. Ruth swayed a little, straightened up, walked over to the counter. Raoul turned to me and said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like you in all my life.’

When Ruth is sad she cries. I remember a fight she had with her mother; afterwards she sat huddled by the telephone, inaccessible. I remember a scene on the street at night; she and a friend were having an awful argument, and he hit her, and I remember her stricken, surprised face, how she put her hand up to her cheek, not a theatrical gesture, very genuine. When Ruth was sad for reasons she couldn’t or didn’t want to talk about, she would sit in the chair at her desk, her hands on the armrests, her feet up on the edge of the seat, her body gone slack and given over entirely to her sadness. How often did I see her like that – twice, three times, maybe four? She would cry without making a sound; I would stand by the door, leaning against the doorframe and say, ‘Ruth, is there anything I can do?’ but she only shook her head and said nothing. I would push away from the door and walk through the apartment to my room, across the hall, into the kitchen, and back again.

When Ruth was this sad, I felt numb. I’d wash three plates, smoke a cigarette at the kitchen window, and read a page in some book, and then I’d go back to her room, and she would still be sitting there like that. At some point, much later, she would come over, give me a brief hug, and say, ‘Everything’s all right again.’ Her helpless, angry, hurt way of crying when we argued was different. As for me, I never cried in front of Ruth.

I stayed with Ruth for four days, one day longer than planned. Ruth had hardly any rehearsals to go to, but there were performances every evening. I had expected that she would want to spend her free time with Raoul and would have understood if she had, but Raoul had little time, and while I was there they saw each other alone only one afternoon. We dawdled over breakfast, walked into town, to the river, and along the riverbank to the outskirts of town and back. We were as close as always. Ruth talked constantly about Raoul, as if she were talking to herself, and I listened without giving her a lot of answers; actually she didn’t ask me anything. She said Raoul had withdrawn from her; she could no longer reach him; true, there was a sort of sexual attraction but everything else was baffling. In three weeks his guest appearance here would be over; then he would go to WÜurzburg for a guest engagement there, then to Munich, but they never talked about the future. ‘Maybe,’ Ruth said, ‘it’s already over. Whatever it was. But I’m sad about that, do you understand?’ I avoided looking at her.

Back at her apartment, I closed the bathroom door and looked at my face in the mirror, at the passport photo of me wedged into the mirror frame and then again at my face. In the evenings Ruth and I, the actors and Raoul sat together at the Formica-topped tables in the canteen. I drank quite a lot. Every time Ruth got up from the table and disappeared briefly, Raoul looked at me and said very distinctly, ‘I miss you.’ Nobody except me could hear it. He didn’t touch me. That first evening when Ruth went to get the drinks, he had laughed after he said that he hadn’t seen anything like me in his entire life. A happy laugh that I returned without giving it a thought. He had said, ‘Do you know who you are?’ At first I hesitated but then I did reply, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Are you the woman I think you are?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know.’ And he said, ‘Yes. You know.’ And then Ruth came back to the table and the words fitted into a precisely measured length of time. Just the right number of words.

When we fell asleep those nights, I turned away from Ruth, my face to the wall. I slept lightly. ‘What will you do once you’re back in Berlin?’ Ruth asked, and I said, ‘I’m not sure.’ How could I have explained to her that my whole life was suddenly open again, empty, a wide uncharted space? I stood by the window in her apartment looking at the blue neon sign of the multi-storey car park, the reflecting windows of the apartment block behind it. The moon was already up. Ruth said my name, and I turned round. We bought dresses, shoes, coats. I said, ‘I would like to stay, but I have to leave tomorrow.’

On my last evening, Ruth had an open rehearsal. Actors, onlookers and musicians sat here and there in the rows of seats; I sat on the stairs; Raoul came and sat next to me for a short while, and I moved away from him. On the stage Ruth looked over at us. We both looked at her; Raoul said, ‘You’re leaving?’ I said, ‘Tomorrow.’ He said, ‘And will we see each other again?’ I said, ‘Yes, we’ll see each other again,’ without taking my eyes off Ruth. He remained sitting there several minutes longer; then he got up and left.

Later on we didn’t sit at the same table in the canteen. ‘What did you talk about?’ Ruth asked. ‘About the play,’ I answered. She looked exhausted, pale and tense. The afternoon she had spent with Raoul, he had stretched out on the bed in his hotel room and watched television; Ruth had sat on the edge of the bed waiting for him to turn the TV off, but he didn’t turn it off. Ruth said, ‘I don’t know what he wants.’ That night we walked through the deserted pedestrian zone, our steps echoing on the pavement; Ruth had tucked her arm into mine; we were drunk and a little tottery; I had to laugh; Ruth’s hair brushed gently against my cheek.

The next morning she took me to the railway station; it had turned cold, windy; we hugged each other on the platform; the train was already there, doors open. ‘For heaven’s sake, what are you going to Paris for?’ Ruth said. ‘What are you going to do in Paris?’ I got on and leaned out of the open compartment window. Ruth was wearing a little black cap under which her hair had disappeared; her face looked stern. She put her hands into her coat pockets and hopped from one foot to the other; she said, ‘You haven’t told me yet what you think of him.’ Her voice sounded no different than usual. The conductor blew his whistle; the doors slammed shut. I took a breath, and then I said, ‘I don’t think he’s right for you.’ Ruth said, ‘Oh.’ I wasn’t sure she had really heard me. The train started. Ruth remained standing there; I looked out of the window as long as I could still see her slender figure in the light-coloured coat, the dark spot that was her cap; she didn’t wave. Then she was gone.

I had never travelled anywhere with Ruth. There was one winter when the temperature dropped far below freezing, and we took the S-Bahn out to the Grunewald and walked across the frozen lake; neither of us was wearing the right kind of shoes. That was our biggest excursion. Every summer we lay on the grass in the park and talked about going to Greece, Italy or Sicily, to the sea, but we never did. She went to Portugal with B. and to Poland with J. and to Italy with F. I flew to New York and London and travelled through Morocco and Spain. We didn’t miss each other during those times; maybe we had different expectations and weren’t suitable travelling companions.

In Paris I took a room in a small hotel in the north of the city, in the African quarter; for a week I walked through the city from morning to night; it was cold, the Seine was muddy and green; it rained constantly and I was freezing. What in the world was I doing in Paris?

There were long queues outside the Louvre, so I decided to forgo that pleasure and went instead to a small museum on the Rue de Cluny where there was an exhibition of talismans of twelfth-century pilgrims, tiny blackish pendants: a wheel, a Madonna, a frozen teardrop. For a long time I stood before the warmly lit exhibition cases and felt comforted without being able to say by what.

In the Metro it smelled of tobacco, metal and rain-damp coats; people’s faces were reserved and beautiful – Black Africans, Chinese, Indians. On my way back to my hotel at night there were men standing in doorways, whispering words in a foreign language behind me.

At midnight, once I was certain I wouldn’t be interrupted, I took a shower in the communal bathroom down the hall. I stood on the slippery tiles and let the hot water course over me till my skin became red and wrinkled. I thought about him, his name, and tried to understand – him, myself, Ruth, the difficulty of the situation. I couldn’t even have said what it was that was difficult. I miss you. I missed him, I kept thinking of him, of someone I didn’t know but someone I wanted to visualize. I tried again and again, but couldn’t assemble even his face from memory; there were only fragmented details, his eyes, his mouth, a gesture of his left hand – perhaps his voice was what I recalled best.

I tried to write a postcard to Ruth but couldn’t get beyond the first two words, ‘Dear Ruth…’ The rain kept falling on the silvery roofs. At night, I lay on the hotel bed smoking a cigarette in the darkness, listening to the reassuring foreign sounds from the street and tried to answer Ruth’s question at the railway station, For heaven’s sake what are you going to Paris for? Aloud, I said, ‘Ruth, maybe it’s that you keep searching for yourself and can really find yourself over and over again, and that I, on the other hand, want to lose myself, to get away from myself. And I can do that best when I’m travelling and sometimes also when I’m loved.’ I would never have spoken to Ruth like that, and I thought it would shock me to hear myself say it out loud, but I wasn’t shocked. My voice sounded strange in the dark.

The next morning I had breakfast at the mosque near the Natural History Museum, mint tea and sticky pastry. I was the only one sitting there; the windows were open and rain was getting in, and sparrows flew inside and up to the ceiling and launched themselves from there. I lost all sense of time.

A Black African came up to me at the Place de la Madeleine; he wanted money for stamps so he could mail his dissertation to the university; the university accepted only dissertations that arrived by mail; he had sent all his money to his family in South Africa. I gave him ten francs; he said, ‘Not enough’, I gave him twenty, then thirty; he continued to hold out his hand, looking at me as though I should be paying for something quite different. I gave him all the money I had in my trouser pockets, much too much; it was ridiculous. He handed me a piece of paper and a pencil and asked me to write down my address; he’d send me the money as soon as he found work. I wrote down an imaginary address that I immediately forgot, and he put the piece of paper in his pocket and mouthed the question: ‘What is your name?’ Then he walked off; I watched him go. The expression on his face was dignified and contemptuous; suddenly I knew that I had to leave, that I was no longer safe here.

People were streaming through the Gare du Nord; gypsy women squatted on baggage carts with sleeping children in their laps or draped over their shoulders. The letters on the information board announcing train departures and arrivals fell into a jumble, flashed out the names of cities and far-away places, and then disappeared again. I felt a longing, or perhaps I was running a fever; I couldn’t tell which any more. I thought, ‘Keep on going, keep on going, go away, as far as possible.’

The Asian woman in the glass ticket booth stared at me. ‘Berlin,’ I said, ‘a ticket for Berlin, please,’ and now the feeling in my stomach was clearly fear. I dropped my last coins into a pay phone and dialled Ruth’s number. I wanted to say, ‘Ruth, I’m taking a train home now, and then something will be decided.’ I hoped she would say, ‘I know,’ and maybe add, ‘Get lost,’ but she didn’t pick up. The answering machine came on, and I held the receiver out into the station concourse, recording the voices, the announcements on the public address system, and the sounds of the moving trains; then I hung up.

Oddly enough, it wasn’t me, it was Ruth who had said, ‘I’d like to be you.’ Not the other way around.

Late that evening, I arrived in Berlin. The apartment was stuffy and still, totally strange to me – whose bed was that? the chair? the books, papers, teacups, the shoes in the hall, whose were they? Ruth’s voice on the answering machine, three calls, the first one affectionate and yearning – ‘I miss you,’ she said; in the background someone seemed to be walking about in the room. In the second call she was short, ‘Are you there? Hello? Are you back?’ then she hung up. The third time it sounded as though she had been crying; her voice trembled; she said I should call her when I got back, whenever, even in the middle of the night.

I unpacked my suitcase, hung in the wardrobe the things I had bought with Ruth but hadn’t worn, not even once, opened all the windows and went to bed. I slept briefly yet soundly. The next morning was windy and grey; I went shopping, then back to the apartment, read a newspaper, did laundry, looked through the mail. And throughout, I watched myself from outside myself, from a distance, from far away, moving about lightly.

In the evening the phone rang. I let it ring four times even though it was right next to me; only then did I pick up the receiver. ‘Oh, you’re there,’ Ruth said. Her voice sounded so close it was as if she were standing beside me. I said, ‘I just got back.’ She said, ‘You don’t have to apologize.’ I said, ‘No, why should I?’ Then I had to laugh. Ruth did not laugh. She burst out crying, and I let her cry. I just sat there and looked out of the window – the night sky over the park, no moon, no stars. I imagined Ruth in her room, in the blue light of the car park sign, the silver ashtray on the table, the photo on the windowsill. Ruth’s hair, loose, her teary face. I said, ‘Ruth, oh Ruth.’ She went on crying for quite a while. Then she stopped, blew her nose; we were silent, then she said, ‘How was Paris?’ I said, ‘Nice.’ She said, ‘It’s over, you know. The thing with Raoul, I mean. It’s over,’ and I said, ‘Why?’ and she said, ‘Why. Good question.’

I thought about the fact that Ruth had never been alone, one affair or relationship or friendship had always merged into the next, and when one love ended, there was always a new one, a greater one, a better one in the wings. It seemed that now she would be alone for the first time. I said, ‘Is it worse than usual?’ and then Ruth did laugh, softly, and said, ‘No. It’s the same as always. But in spite of that it’s shitty, isn’t it?’

They had argued, she said. He had felt hemmed in, almost threatened, she had come on too fast, too close; he wasn’t as much in love as she was, basically he wasn’t in love at all. Drunk and desperate, she had called him at his hotel one night; she knew he was there, but he didn’t answer the phone for an incredibly long time and, when he did, he said only, ‘You must be out of your mind,’ and then he just hung up.

Now he was avoiding her; in three days he’d be gone for good. She didn’t know which was worse – to see him and not be able to be with him or not to see him at all any more. She said, ‘Somehow the awful thing is that I think he didn’t recognize me for what I am, you know? He sent me away before I could show him what I’m really like; he didn’t let me get close to him, he didn’t give me a chance. That’s what’s so terrible, do you understand?’ I said, ‘Yes. I understand.’ And I really did understand. Only I thought that he had recognized her quite well, and maybe she knew that too. Ruth was silent.

Then she sighed and said, ‘Actually nothing happened, nothing at all. We kissed a little, we told each other two or three stories; once we walked through town holding hands. That’s all there was. But I fell in love in spite of that, and he didn’t want me, and that makes me furious. You said he wasn’t right for me.’ I didn’t say anything, and Ruth repeated, ‘You said that, didn’t you?’ I had to laugh, and she said seriously, ‘Actually, why wasn’t he?’ I could have said, because he’s the right one for me. Under different circumstances Ruth might have laughed at that. I didn’t know how to answer her. I said stupidly, ‘Maybe he’s a size too big for you,’ and Ruth asked, understandably nonplussed, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

I got up and walked through the apartment, taking the telephone along – Ruth’s room at the end of the hall, dark and wide; I still expected to see her bed there whenever I went in, her desk and the chair on which she sat when she was sad. Now the chair stood next to a window in her apartment in another town. I said, ‘Ruth, I don’t know either; I don’t know him at all; he’s good-looking but more than that I can’t say, except I had the feeling that you didn’t understand each other.’ ‘Yes. That’s possible,’ Ruth said simply.

In the hall I leaned against the wall, my knees were giving way; suddenly I had a feeling of utter hopelessness, Raoul far away, his face – now I remembered what it looked like. I wanted to get some information from Ruth that could prepare me for him; I didn’t know how I should phrase it, and what it really was I wanted to know. I said, ‘Did you sleep with him?’ and instantly felt the blood rush to my face. ‘No,’ Ruth said and didn’t seem to find my question odd. ‘No, we didn’t. Somehow he didn’t want to, or maybe he wanted precisely that; it was strange. At any rate, I didn’t sleep with him, and I can’t tell you how glad I am about that.’

I was silent, and she was too, or maybe she was listening to my silence, then she said, ‘Was that the right answer?’ And I laughed, embarrassed. She asked me again about Paris; I told her a little – about the Black African at the Place de la Madeleine, the hotel room, the African markets on the side streets of that section of the city. I thought, I should really have been consoling her, but I didn’t know how; also, she didn’t seem to want to be consoled. She said, ‘I’ll call you again tomorrow, all right?’ I said, ‘Ruth. Take care of yourself.’ She said, ‘You too,’ then we hung up. I drank a glass of wine in the kitchen; the refrigerator hummed. I thought he would call, soon. I was sure he would. Then I went to bed. Very late at night I woke up because the telephone was ringing. It rang three or four times; then it was still. I lay on my back and held my breath.

I could never have explained to Ruth, I couldn’t have explained what it was all about for me, how I felt. I never had to explain anything to Ruth; she didn’t ask me to, even though there must have been many times when she didn’t understand me. She was with me during all those years, in good times and in not-so-good times. Sometimes she asked, ‘Why are you doing that?’ She didn’t expect an answer and I couldn’t have given her one. She watched me; she knew me very well; sometimes she imitated me: the way I held my head to the side, smiled, looked away. She knew I had no secrets.

The letter arrived on September 20th, the fifth day after my return from Paris. Somehow Raoul must have got hold of my address at the theatre before he left for WÜrzburg; he knew that it was Ruth’s former address; anyhow, he knew pretty much everything about me from Ruth. He had gone to WÜurzburg, had probably organized his rehearsal schedule and moved into his new quarters, had spent one evening alone or maybe not, and had addressed an envelope to me the next day and sent it off. He was fast. In the envelope was a second-class ticket to WÜurzburg for the midday train on September 25th along with a return ticket. Also a piece of paper on which was written only a single sentence: ‘It would be nice if you came.’ Oddly enough, instead of signing it he had drawn a cartoon-type side view of his face, an unflattering profile.

I put the letter on the table; it looked strange and yet quite ordinary, a narrow white envelope on which my name was written. I had four days to decide, but there was nothing to think over; I knew that I would go. I no longer felt different than usual, no longer borne up by great expectations. I slept a lot, got up late, sat around in the afternoons in the cafe in front of my house, drinking coffee, reading the newspaper, looking up and down the street, never looking anyone in the eye.

The telephone rang several times; sometimes I picked it up and sometimes not; it was always Ruth, mostly towards evening. She wasn’t feeling well, but not really bad either. She was very busy and seemed distracted; in spite of that, she talked a lot about Raoul, lots of questions which she herself answered. Nothing was clarified before his departure; he had left without their having another talk. ‘You should be happy that he’s gone, that idiot,’ the make-up woman had said to her several times. She said, ‘I’d like to write to him; do you think I ought to write to him?’ and when I didn’t reply, she said, ‘It’s probably useless, completely useless, I know.’

As we were talking on the phone, I leaned out of the window so she could hear the street noises, the traffic at the intersection, fragments of the conversations of people sitting outside the cafes. Ruth used to like that; now she whispered, ‘Stop it, it’s making me homesick.’ Talking to her on the phone wasn’t hard. During the phone conversation we had just before I took the train to WÜrzburg, we didn’t talk about Raoul at all; I didn’t ask about him, and Ruth didn’t mention him. It was as though he had never existed. She told me she had had a call from a theatre in Hamburg; she’d probably get out of her contract and move again; she seemed happy and excited about that. She said, ‘Then we’ll be much nearer each other again.’

We talked a long time; I was drinking wine, was drunk by the time we finished and feeling melancholy. I said, and I meant it, ‘Ruth, I miss you very much,’ and she said, ‘Yes, me too.’ Then we hung up.

I went to bed but couldn’t sleep; the street was noisy and full of people until late into the night. I lay there listening with a single absurd picture in my head – Raoul carrying me through a dark, unfamiliar apartment, through a hallway and many rooms, till he finally put me down on a bed, gently, as though I were a child. The morning of September 25th, I stood in front of my wardrobe, uncertain; I didn’t know how long I would be staying – one night, a few days, for ever? I didn’t know what he wanted, and actually I didn’t know what I wanted either. Finally, I took nothing except my toothbrush, a book and a nightgown. I turned off the telephone answering machine, locked the apartment door, and took a bus to the railway station, much too early.

What else is there to say about Ruth and me; what else can there be? We kissed each other once, just once, at night in a bar. Actually it was only to get rid of someone who wouldn’t leave Ruth alone. Ruth leaned over and kissed me on the lips, deeply and tenderly; she tasted of chewing gum, wine and cigarette smoke, and her tongue was peculiarly sweet. It was a beautiful kiss, and I remember that I was surprised and I thought, ‘So that’s what it’s like to kiss Ruth.’ I thought we would feel embarrassed afterwards, but we didn’t, nor did we talk any more about it. Ruth’s admirer disappeared without saying another word.

When we were younger, Ruth was more effusive and exuberant; she drank a lot and loved to dance on top of bars and tables. I liked that and urged her on, ‘Go do it, Ruth, dance on the table!’ Without further ado, she would push aside glasses, kick the ashtrays off the table with her high-heeled shoes, and then she’d dance provocatively. Not until much later would she rebuff me, getting angry sometimes, saying, ‘I’m not living a vicarious life or whatever for you.’ We wore the same clothes, long skirts, coats with fur collars, pearl necklaces – but we never looked alike. Someone said, ‘You’re like two lovebirds, like those little yellow canaries; you always sit there the same way and move your heads back and forth in the same rhythm.’ We liked that comparison.

Sometimes when someone asked us a question, we answered simultaneously, saying exactly the same thing. But we rarely read the same books, and we never cried together over anything. Our future, which in the beginning didn’t exist and which later became more like a space to which we had to accommodate ourselves, was a shared one – Ruth and I. Ruth was not afraid to say it: ‘We won’t ever part.’

I often looked at her, trying to imagine what she’d be like when she got old; I never could. She is most beautiful when she laughs. When she just sits there and doesn’t speak, I don’t know what she is thinking. Her eyebrows are plucked into thin silvery sickles; her hands are very small. There were moments when she clearly was not listening to me as I told her something. No photo exists of the two of us together. Did I really know Ruth?

The trip from Berlin to Wüurzburg took six hours, and I was happy during those six hours. I read and I slept, and woven into that light sleep were momentary dreams: Ruth on a staircase, looking for me, mute; Raoul at a table in the theatre canteen, alone, a stranger; my empty room in the Berlin apartment, sunlight on the wooden floor; the voice of the train conductor, ‘We will be arriving in Braunschweig in a few minutes’; Ruth whispering; my legs asleep; Raoul standing in the rain under the awning of a hotel. I woke up again, my face swollen and hot.

I went to the buffet car to smoke a cigarette; people sat hunched over their beer glasses, silent; the landscape outside the tinted windows hilly and green, the fields already harvested, small birds perched on the swinging telephone wires, forming a long, dark chain. The train rolled on and on, measuring the time, the distances, getting closer, inescapably, and I wished myself back at home, and further back into an earlier time, a before, and at the same time I was so impatient that my stomach, my head, my limbs ached. Ruth, I thought, Ruth, I would so much like to tell you about all this.

I returned to my seat, walking along the corridor, past all those faces looking at me. I read and then couldn’t read any longer and stared out of the window and got so tired that my hands shook and my knees became weak. Another hour to WÜrzburg, half an hour, twenty minutes, soon. The street lamps went on in the suburbs, there were lights in the apartment blocks, small, bright windows in the dusk. Perhaps that kind of life? That table under that lamp in that room with that view of the garden, faded asters and flowerbeds covered with branches for the winter, a children’s swing, a concrete terrace. What is going on, I thought, what is going on…This yearning of mine was both terrible and inane.

The train was slowing down, and that was vaguely comforting. I got up, took my little bag, my coat, my hot face; I thought, ‘Raoul, I’m dreadfully sad.’ Then the train stopped, coming to a standstill with a single resolute jolt. WÜrzburg’s main terminal, 6.22 p.m. I joined the long line of passengers waiting to get off, step by step by step; no one detained me, and then I was on the platform, walking towards the exit. And when at last I spotted Raoul, I knew instantaneously and with hopeless certainty that I had made a mistake.

He was standing at the end of the tracks leaning against a board listing the train schedules; he had on a coat I had never seen him in at the theatre, was wearing his glasses; he looked a bit arrogant and bored, arms crossed over his chest, shoulders raised. He stood there looking like someone who’s meeting someone coming in on a train, waiting, in expectation, perhaps impatient; he stood there like all the others, and he was not afraid. I walked towards him and I could see that he was not afraid; he might have been unsure and nervous, but the fear that had me shaking, this fear he didn’t have.

When he saw me, his bored expression changed in seconds to one that was joyful, convincingly happy and at the same time incredulous; he came towards me in two or three quick strides, and before I could have warded him off he drew me close and held me in a tight embrace. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, my arms, my face. I embraced him too, we stood there like that; he smelled of shaving lotion, his cheek was soft, the frames of his glasses pressed slightly against my temple; it was almost preposterous to feel him so suddenly, only now. He held me for a long time before letting me go. He said, ‘How wonderful, how wonderful that you really came.’ I didn’t know what to say, and he took my hand and pulled me along behind him through the station concourse. He said we’d get something to eat; he had reserved a table in a Chinese place; he was hungry, was I hungry? I wasn’t hungry.

In the square outside the station we got into his car, a small red Alfa Romeo; I had never before been in an Alfa Romeo, and I wanted to tell him so, but then it seemed silly and I didn’t say anything. He started the engine, drove off at breakneck speed, looked at me, shook his head, kept bursting into laughter, seemed to find something inordinately amusing. Did you have a good trip? How was the weather in Berlin? Heard anything from Ruth? I didn’t answer the last question, nor the first two either, really.

He parked four blocks away in a no-waiting zone. The Chinese restaurant where he had reserved a table was totally empty except for the Chinese family behind the counter staring at us unwaveringly and eerily, till one of them came to our table and handed us a much-fingered menu. Raoul ordered appetizers and a main course; I wanted a salad, if anything at all; I felt ill; my stomach was in a knot. ‘Jasmine tea, please,’ I said to the unfriendly face of the waiter.

We sat across from each other and looked at each other; nothing else seemed possible. Actually, I thought, I had come to WÜrzburg just to look at him, the way you want to look at a person you’ve decided to love. Raoul was good at that, he endured my gaze and I his; his eyes were large, wide open, they seemed to be brown, amber tinted, in their corners a smile that would not go away. We looked at each other and that took all the strength I had, until the waiter finally stepped in, putting the jasmine tea, the appetizers and my salad on the table. I looked away from Raoul’s eyes in which there was no longer any light, no remoteness, and no promise, and I resolved not to look at him like that again; it wouldn’t change anything.

Raoul ate, not the way he had in the canteen, but like a normal man; he used chopsticks, skilfully dissecting the vegetables, the fish, talking from time to time in a matter-of-fact way that took my breath away. Actually, during those four days with Ruth, he and I hadn’t talked at all, saying only disjointed words with an absolute meaning-lessness that seemed to intoxicate him as much as me. He had said ‘I miss you’ into the face of a total stranger, into a utopia, in the hope that the sentence would reach its destination and then dissolve into nothing or everything.

That’s how it had been, and now he was sitting across from me, eating Chinese noodles and intermittently taking small sips of beer, smiling at me and talking about the Musil production, his colleagues and disagreements at the theatre. And I nodded obediently and said, ‘Aha,’ and, ‘No, really?’ What had I expected? Something different? Nothing at all? And what now? How were we supposed to go on from here? I pressed my hands together under the table; they were cold and damp. My heart was pounding; I felt ill; I thought of Ruth, of Ruth.

‘Did you tell her that you were coming here?’ Raoul asked. I shook my head and he looked at me expectantly. It seemed as if he wanted to talk about it, as though my betrayal of Ruth on his account excited him, made him happy, so that he wanted to savour it a little longer, but at least I didn’t do him this favour. I shook my head again, and he shrugged and turned back to his food; he enjoyed eating; I could see that.

We sat at that table in this restaurant for maybe two hours, and in all that time not another customer came in. It was as though the world outside had gone under and only we were left – he and I and the Chinese family, who after they had served us had again withdrawn behind the counter. Sometimes I could hear the shuffling of their feet. Raoul talked a lot in those two hours; I talked very little. Sometimes he interrupted himself to stare at me, but before there was a chance that we would again gaze at each other like lovers, or before he could ask me anything else, I would ask him a question.

I asked him about his father, his childhood, Ireland, his ex-wife, and he liked being questioned and replied readily. Once when he told a friend about the premature death of his father, the friend had said to him, ‘Lucky you,’ and he had punched his friend right in the kisser. Today he regretted it, and he now understood what his friend had meant, that his father’s early death had given him a certain strength, invulnerability and maturity. No one at the theatre really knew him for what he was because he wasn’t actually an actor but only an imposter, a loner, and he wasn’t going to stay in the theatre much longer; what he really wanted to do was to write stories, plays, poems, to reveal himself.

He said, ‘I want to reveal myself.’ As for his ex-wife in Munich and their child, that was a difficult relationship and it was impossible to end it completely; they had been together too long for that. And the light in Ireland was terrific, the wide expanses, the colour of the meadows when the wind blew through them and reversed the blades of grass to white – it was the same phrase he had used weeks before to describe the colour of Ruth’s eyes. But that no longer surprised me.

Finally he thought he had revealed enough of himself. Each answer had been an anecdote that was intended to dovetail with the other anecdotes, forming a picture of the man he was. He seemed to think that it was enough for a start. I had shown him my lovely silence, my mouth, my hands, my head tilted to the side. The back of my neck hurt.

He waved to the waiter, who brought the bill and two little porcelain cups of rice brandy. At the bottom of the cup you could see a naked woman, her legs spread. She disappeared as soon as I had drunk the brandy. He paid, refusing to take my money, nodded to the Chinese family, who didn’t move; then we left. It was already dark outside and windy. We got back into his little car. He said, ‘Shall we drive home, OK?’ Perhaps the wording was intended to console me.

We drove through the dead city, terribly fast, then he slowed down, turned into a side street, parked the car in front of a small house that stood between two large villas. Instead of a hotel room, the theatre had made this place available to him – there were two rooms, kitchen, bath and a garden. He said he preferred this to a hotel room, he was fed up with his unsettled existence. We climbed out of the car. Staggering a bit, I held on to the garden fence and took a deep breath. I wanted to just stand still for a while in this dark garden. But he immediately unlocked the door, pulled me into the house, put on the light, set my bag on the floor, went to get wine from the kitchen, and pushed a chair over. ‘Sit,’ he said, ‘sit down. There’s something I have to do, but we’ll have something to drink first, OK?’

I sat down, took off my coat and lit a cigarette. The room was tiny and low ceilinged: a table, two chairs and a desk on which were the things he said he always took along with him – two or three books, a small brass elephant, a Pelikan fountain pen, and a large grey rock. A small narrow stairway led from this room to the upper floor, presumably to the bedroom. I sat there and watched as he walked across the room, unpacked his bag, sorted through the scripts on the desk, lost in thought or maybe not.

He poured wine for me and for himself too. I drank some immediately; in a terrible way nothing mattered any more. There was nothing. There were no words for our relationship, no silence and no closeness, not even a feeling of shock about the other person; even my fear was gone, the picture I had, all the images, Raoul in the rain, Raoul carrying me to his bed – none of his actions affected me any more. A tall, heavy man walking across a room in which a lamp casts a golden cone of light on a wooden table. The cigarette tasted rough and bitter and good. I drank my wine and refilled the glass, and he sat down at the table for a short while, talked a bit, and then he said, ‘Let’s go to bed.’

I brushed my teeth in front of the bathroom mirror and washed my face till it was rosy and soft, drops of water on my eyelashes, water on my temples, then I put on my nightgown and, placing my hands on the tiled bathroom wall for support, I took a deep breath. I climbed the narrow staircase and went into the tiny bedroom. Raoul was already in bed, apparently naked, lying on his stomach. He moved aside and held up the blanket. I crept under it and turned to him immediately; he would misunderstand, I knew that, but there was no other way than to touch him right away, to embrace him, to clutch him tightly.

His body was surprisingly soft and warm, a lot of skin, a lot of strange surfaces, unfamiliar – what an immense imposition. I touched him, and he immediately misunderstood, misjudging my queasiness, my fear and my shock. I said, ‘I don’t want to,’ and he said, ‘Why not?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know.’ That was true; I really didn’t know why, I only knew that I didn’t want to. And then he said, ‘But sooner or later we’d do it anyway.’ He was right, wasn’t he? I lay under the cool blanket. It was dark. He had turned out the light. His face was indiscernible in the dark. He said, ‘But sooner or later we’d do it anyway,’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ to his indiscernible face, ‘of course we would.’

The knowledge that he was right, the understanding of the logical consistency and at the same time its impossibility filled me with an unexpected, crazy cheerfulness. He didn’t say, ‘See?’ But he thought it, and while he did what he was eventually going to do anyway, I lay there and couldn’t help laughing, softly and violently, not wanting to stop, and he laughed too, but differently, and I held on to the edge of the bed and thought of Ruth. The way she came into the kitchen in the morning, making herself coffee and sitting down at the table with me and reading the little piece of paper on which she had written what she had to do that day: go to the post office, the supermarket, the chemist, call H. and D., get a present for M., pay the telephone bill. And then it was over and yet it wasn’t, and finally it was, and we rolled apart, he turned round, his back like a wide landscape. Then I fell asleep.

The next morning I was awakened by the ringing of the alarm clock. It must have been very early; the light in the room was still grey; my left hand had gone to sleep, and my shoulders hurt. I was instantly awake, at once tense, on my guard. Next to me Raoul groaned, threw back the covers, turned off the alarm and got up; his naked body was heavy and massive and in the dusky light seemed strangely blurred. He began to get dressed, in an awkward way, then he suddenly turned round to look at me as though it had just occurred to him that I was there – that there was someone else lying in his bed.

When he saw I was awake, he smiled at me and said, ‘I have to memorize a script now, and the rehearsal begins at nine; you can sleep a little longer.’ I said, ‘How late is it?’ He said, ‘A little before seven.’ Our voices were rough and scratchy. He opened the little dormer window; cold morning air came into the room, the dampness almost palpable. When he reached the stairs, he turned round once more and came back, stopped at the doorway and said, ‘When does your train leave?’

I think he dealt me this blow quite intentionally, but I was awake and alert enough not to look taken aback or hurt or surprised. I had no idea when my train left; I didn’t think there was a train back. I said, pleasantly, ‘Eight forty-two,’ and he said just as pleasantly, ‘That means I can still take you to the station.’ Then he disappeared; I heard him in the kitchen putting water on to boil, the refrigerator door opened and shut; he briefly went out into the garden; he turned on the radio.

I sat on the edge of the bed, put my bare feet next to each other on the floor, pressed my knees together, placed my hands on my hips and arched my back. Fleetingly I thought about the expression pulling yourself together. Then I got dressed and went downstairs. Raoul was sitting at the desk reading softly to himself and rocking his upper body back and forth. Without turning to look at me, he said, ‘There’s coffee and some fruit in the kitchen. Unfortunately, I don’t have any real breakfast stuff here.’

I took a tangerine from the kitchen table, poured coffee into a mug. ‘It’s seven thirty,’ the radio announcer’s voice said. I didn’t know where to go; I didn’t want to disturb him – there were no chairs in the kitchen, and going back to bed was out of the question; so I went out into the garden.

The garden extended down to the street, a narrow rectangle of unmowed lawn, two fruit trees, neglected flower borders, a rubbish bin, an old bicycle, and on the lawn in front of the garden fence a swing suspended from a carpet rod. The grass was dark and damp from the night, and rustling sounds came from the piles of leaves under the fruit trees. By now it was light; the sky was clear and a watery blue. I walked down the length of the garden path and back again; then I sat down on the swing.

The coffee was hot and strong; I would have liked to drink it the way Ruth always drank coffee – in one single long gulp – but my stomach rebelled. I swung back and forth a little. I knew that Raoul could see me through the window, and I was afraid that by swinging, indeed by sitting on the swing, I might present a certain image, like some poster, a metaphor, but by then it didn’t matter to me.

The street was quiet – one-family houses, one next to the other, expensive cars parked at the kerb under nearly bare linden trees. There was hardly anyone in sight, but now I could hear voices in the distance, children’s voices coming closer, and then I saw them – kids on the other side of the street on their way to school with colourful satchels on their backs, gym bags, trainers tied together by the laces and hung over their shoulders. I could see the wide driveway into the schoolyard, paper cutouts pasted on the window panes, the school clock on the gable. The children walked past the garden; they didn’t notice me. I watched them. They came by in small groups, some by themselves, slower and still sleepy-eyed, lost in thought, others holding hands and talking to each other in loud and eager voices. ‘Wait for me! Wait for me!’ one kid yelled to another and then ran off, his school bag bouncing on his back.

I peeled my tangerine and watched them. A sweet fruity aroma rose from the tangerine; it rattled me. Raoul sitting in the house, reading Musil. He was working, he was awake. Things could have been different, but this way was all right too. I ate the tangerine section by section; the school bell rang and even the slow kids started running, all in a jumble, bumping into each other or grabbing for the hand of a friend; none of them looked at me. I made the swing go a little faster. The school bell rang again, then stopped suddenly as though it had been cut off.

The front door opened and Raoul called my name; I turned towards him. Perhaps I still wished for something to happen, one last time, but not really. He said, ‘We have to leave now,’ and I got up and went back into the house, set my coffee mug on the kitchen table, the tangerine peel next to it, and put on my coat. We got into his car and drove off. Traffic was already heavy on the main roads, and at the traffic lights people were waiting to cross the street on their way to work, the office, the factory; I felt relieved, as though a burden had been lifted from my heart. I think we didn’t say much; he seemed to be in a bad mood; he said he did not know his lines, that on the whole the rehearsals were awful; he sounded as if he were talking to himself.

At the railway station he double-parked the car, saying, ‘I can’t go to the train with you; I’m going to be late anyway.’ And I said quite candidly, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ We embraced in the car, quickly, cursorily; he kissed my cheek, then I got out. I walked into the station without turning round; I could hear him rev the engine and drive off. The train for Berlin was scheduled to leave at 9.04. I got on and took a seat next to a window, opened my book, and read till we got to the Berlin-Zoo Station. Afterwards I couldn’t remember a single line I had read.

Later I thought I should have listened to him more carefully. I don’t know if that would have changed anything, if I would have made a different decision. Nevertheless, I should have listened to him properly. He had said, ‘Are you the one I think you are?’ and I had understood something totally different from what he had intended. He had recognized me in spite of that. What he had actually said was, ‘Are you a traitor for whom nothing counts, and who can’t be expected to keep a promise?’ He had asked, ‘Would you betray Ruth for me?’ I had said, ‘Yes.’

I see Ruth sitting across from me, naked, her legs drawn up to her chest, her face, a towel wrapped around her wet hair; she says, ‘Promise me.’ She shouldn’t have said it. I never told Ruth, ‘Ruth, I had to know; it had nothing to do with you.’ And I never told her about the kids going to school, their faces, the smell of the tangerine, about that morning. When we were still living together, we had a habit of writing little notes to each other whenever one of us went anywhere without the other. Whenever I came home after having been out without Ruth, there would be a note on the kitchen table if she was already asleep, a short, tender message, sometimes more, sometimes just a few words. Ruth never forgot. I happened to find one of these notes today, a bookmark in a book, the paper a little crumpled, folded up, Ruth’s large, flowing handwriting: ‘My dear, Are you well? It’s been a long day for me and I’m going to bed now – 10 o’clock – my feet are rubbed raw from the damned new shoes. I went shopping, fruit, milk and wine, that was all the money there was. A. phoned and asked where you were and I said, She’s out looking under every paving stone for a message. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that? Good night, till tomorrow. Kisses, R.’

[Translator’s note: the excerpt quoted is from Molièere, The Misanthrope and Other Plays: A New Selection, translated by John Wood and David Coward, Penguin Books, 2000, p. 114.]

Cold-Blue

The package arrives early in the morning. There’s postage due because Jonas didn’t put on enough stamps. It is addressed to both of them, to Jonina and Magnus. Magnus is sleeping. Jonina sits down on the white sofa by the window. It is still dark and she has to turn on the light. She doesn’t hesitate, not even for a moment. Maybe she acts as if she were hesitating, but she isn’t. She wouldn’t think of waiting for Magnus to get up. The package is rectangular and flat; it feels a bit heavy, there’s a ‘handle with care’ sticker on it, and the wrapping paper is sloppily secured with sticky tape. Amazing that it arrived in one piece. She rips open the paper and pulls out a framed photograph, very painstakingly framed, the photo surrounded by a green mount, and an enclosed card, nothing else: ‘The photo comes a little late, but we’ve been thinking of you constantly. The beautiful blue hour, eleven o’clock in the morning of December 3rd, much too short. Regards – see you soon. Jonas.’ The phrase a little late might be considered amusing; it was exactly a year ago; that’s not a little. It might be a little for Jonas. She doesn’t want to think about the phrase see you soon.

In the photo, the moon is suspended above the road that leads to the Old Althing. The sky is a glowing, diaphanous blue, everything else is white; the road is white, the mountains are white, blanketed in deep snow. Magnus, Irene and Jonina are walking towards the camera. Magnus in the middle; he is blurry, his face unrecognizable. Jonina is on his right, Irene on his left. The distance between Jonina and Magnus is greater than the distance between Irene and Magnus. Irene is laughing; she walks straight ahead. Jonina seems to want to walk out of picture towards the right but is looking directly into the camera. Jonas was standing in the middle of the road, his camera mounted on a tripod. Afraid that the light would change, he had yelled at them – ‘Now!’ Jonina remembers how he looked just then, his woollen hat pulled down over his eyes, the sheepskin jacket open, swearing at the cold, delighted and enthusiastic.

It’s not that Jonina has forgotten that beautiful, much-too-short, blue hour. She hasn’t forgotten it. She remembers it exactly, and if she wants to she can recall everything else too, each detail of those seven days. The Soviet star on Jonas’s belt buckle, the ring on Irene’s left hand – a moonstone in an oval setting – blueberry-flavoured Absolut vodka in a large frosty bottle. Coffee with sugar but no milk for Magnus in a snack bar on the Ring Road going north, the weather forecast on the third day they were together. Sunna’s childish drawing of two pugnacious snowmen and the colour of Jonas’s eyes – green, dark green with a thin yellow band encircling the iris. She hasn’t forgotten any of it. She just hasn’t been thinking about it any more. Thinking about it only induces a feeling of heaviness and weariness. And now she holds the photo in her hand early in the morning – nine o’clock, it’s not even light outside – and again she remembers everything. She can’t decide whether she wants to remember or not, but she can’t help it – everything comes back to her.

She recalls how she and Magnus were driving down the Barugata in their car; Irene and Jonas stayed behind, waving to them from the side of the road. ‘That’s that,’ Magnus had said, and Jonina wanted to say, ‘Stop, let me out. Let me out,’ but didn’t say anything. And they turned a corner and Irene and Jonas were gone, had vanished, once and for all. That was that.

She could hang the photo on the wall above the table, on the shiny grey unblemished wall and surprise Magnus with it when he got up. She could hammer a nail into the unmarred surface of the freshly painted wall and hang the photo on it. It is a beautiful photo. They’ll have to hang pictures in the apartment anyway. They’ll have to acquire things; there’s got to be some disorder and some dirt in this unlived-in cleanliness, otherwise she won’t be able to cope. But not this photo. Anything, but not this photo, not Jonas’s beautiful glimpse of this one, much-too-brief, blue hour.

Irene and Jonas were coming to Iceland for the very first time in late November. Magnus had known for a month they would be coming, but he doesn’t tell Jonina till fairly late: ‘I’m expecting visitors from Berlin tomorrow.’ Jonina doesn’t ask him why he waited so long to tell her. It will be disconcerting for him; visitors from the past are always disconcerting. On the other hand, she is rather curious. She has known Magnus for two and a half years. She had never seen him before that, and for Iceland that’s unusual, but that’s the way it was. They didn’t attend the same school; they were not distantly related; they hadn’t by coincidence gone to the same rock concert. They saw each other for the first time in 1999. Later they discover that Bjarni, the father of Jonina’s daughter, Sunna, had been Magnus’s best friend at school. They discover this long after all contact between Jonina and Bjarni was broken off. Magnus grew up on the west coast and Jonina on the east coast. When he was twenty, Magnus went to Berlin. Jonina went to ‘Vienna. Magnus studied psychology. Jonina studied literature. Twelve years later, they returned to Iceland at about the same time. In the end all Icelanders come back to Iceland, almost all. They study or work abroad and live there ten, twelve or fifteen years, and then it’s enough, and they come back. Almost all of them.

Jonina has never been to Berlin. She doesn’t know what that city in which Magnus lived for twelve years looks like. She can’t imagine what he looked like in those years, what he was like, what he did, can’t imagine him speaking German and spending his days with German girls.

When they first met, they talked a lot about those days abroad, how it felt to be a foreigner, and about the happiness and hardships experienced. They talked about it as if it were something that happened a long time ago and in no way affected the present. They never speak German with each other, not even for fun. They don’t even give it a try. A different Magnus and a different Jonina.

But she loves the story about Magnus’s first days in Berlin and the story about his departure. Perhaps she loves these two stories because they form a frame for the time before she knew Magnus; they enclose it and put an end to it.

Magnus was living in a one-room apartment in a rear building in Berlin-Neukölln. It is the winter of 1986 and colder in Berlin than it ever gets in Iceland, 20° below zero. His apartment has a tile stove but Magnus doesn’t know how to work it. All he has is a mattress, nothing else. When he comes home from the Institute, he lies down on the mattress with his clothes on, covers himself with a quilt, and smokes and reads. He has no curtains. His room faces the rear courtyard. Everyone else has curtains; he knows that they can see him lying in bed, smoking, alone – he doesn’t care. Around midnight he goes to a bar, annoying everyone there with his childish German, and stays till they throw him out. He knows some other Icelanders in Berlin, and he gets together with them, but he didn’t go there because of them. He’d love to meet someone, a foreign girl, just not a psychology student. But it doesn’t work; he remains alone. And then one day when he comes home, there’s a letter lying on the floor in the hall, dropped through the letterbox, a small, white, folded piece of paper. He takes the paper to bed, lights a cigarette, unfolds it and reads: ‘Hey, old man, I can see you, man. You’re pretty much alone and you lie around in your bed all evening and every weekend reading, and you really seem to be all alone, and I thought, maybe you could just drop in sometime. Side wing, fourth floor, left. Slick Chick.’ That’s all. Jonina loves this story. She loves it when Magnus mimics the Berlin accent: ‘Hey, old man, I can see you, man.’ And even though that was just what he had been wishing for, to meet someone by chance, he finds it impossible to simply drop in on someone who addresses him with ‘Hey, old man’. He never went to see Slick Chick; he doesn’t even know what she looked like. He says that sometimes he regrets it.

And then during his last days in Berlin, twelve years later – by then he had met lots of girls but didn’t yet know that these would be his last days there – he suddenly lost everything. He lost his apartment key, his money and his watch, he was fired from his job, hung out in bars with some guys he met, and had the feeling his whole life was coming apart, for no reason, inexplicably, out of the blue. He seemed to be falling and falling and there was nothing to check his fall. And then with the last of his money he bought himself the most beautiful suit he had ever owned, a pair of sunglasses, new shoes, and for two days and two nights he made the rounds of all the taverns and pubs in town. Early the third morning, at seven, he was standing at Hjalmar and Irene’s door in Schöneberg saying, ‘I’ve got to get some sleep. Would you please let me sleep here?’ And Hjalmar and Irene put him in their bed, closed the curtains and turned off the light. Magnus slept for two days, then he got up, said goodbye, broke into his own apartment, packed his things, left Berlin and returned to Reykjavíik.

‘Oh, Magnus,’ Jonina says and claps her hands when he tells her this story, ‘oh, Magnus, what a lovely story about your departure.’ Magnus hasn’t been back to Berlin since. He doesn’t keep in touch with the friends from those days any more. Jonina telephones a girlfriend in Vienna twice a year, that’s all. The past is shut as tightly as a clamshell. And then Magnus says, ‘Irene is coming to Iceland, and she’s bringing someone. I don’t know him; at any rate it isn’t Hjalmar and he’s not an Icelander.’

Irene. What a solid, compact, cold name. ‘Were you living with her?’ Jonina asks. It’s really the first thing she wants to know, and Magnus laughs a little defensive laugh. ‘No, never. She was with Hjalmar for a pretty long time; they didn’t break up till after I left Berlin.’

Irene is giving a slide lecture in Reykjavik about German architecture. Hjalmar gave her the phone number of another Icelander, in Japan, he in turn directed her to someone in California, and in California she was given Magnus’s phone number. She calls him and says, ‘Excuse me, Magnus. We haven’t been in touch for a long time. But I’m coming to Reykjavik soon and I thought we could get together.’

‘Are you looking forward to it?’ Jonina says. ‘In a way, yes,’ Magnus replies. ‘Of course I’m looking forward to it. It could turn out to be very nice. It could also misfire completely. I don’t know.’ You can’t know about anything, Jonina thinks. Dear Magnus, you can’t know about anything at all, and you always have to be prepared for the worst, and for the best too.

That year the snow came unusually early. In mid-November it is already four feet deep outside Reykjavík; the Ring Road has to be cleared daily; many of the roads leading into the interior of the island are closed; villages cut off from the outside world. In other countries the airports would be shut down in weather like this; not in Iceland. The planes of Iceland Air land even on iced-over runways. Irene and Jonas arrived at Keflavéik airport at the end of November, in a snowstorm with gale-force winds and below-freezing temperatures. Jonas will keep talking about it for the entire ten days of their stay.

Magnus doesn’t pick them up at the airport, although he has the time, but the first evening after their arrival in Reykjavik he goes to hear Irene’s slide talk. He really is interested in architecture. Jonina is driving to her parents’ summerhouse in Olurfsbudir with Sunna. ‘Ask them if they want to come to Olurfsbudir. Ask them if they’d like to drive out there,’ Jonina says. ‘Are you sure?’ Magnus asks. Jonina looks at him, annoyed. Of course she’s sure.

She’s been with Magnus for two years now. She-is thirty-five and has a six-year-old daughter who has no contact with her father any more. She met Magnus at a dinner at the house of some friends – he was described to her as someone she would surely be interested in, a psychologist, refined, a little odd, reserved and a bit mixed up, but good-looking; the description proved correct. Once they separated for four months, but now they’re together again.

She can’t stand it when Magnus asks if she’s sure. If she weren’t sure, she wouldn’t have said anything. She wouldn’t have invited Irene and Jonas – total strangers to her – if she weren’t sure that it would work out well. Or maybe not well. Why should it always work out well? They would either get along or they wouldn’t, whichever. She says, ‘I’d like to meet Irene, and it would be nice for Irene to get out of Reykjavék, so ask her,’ and then she drives off.

She has packed snowsuits, food, wine and packets of cigarettes into the boot of the car and has driven off with Sunna to Olurfsbudir. A cluster of small summerhouses on the west coast, six miles from the ocean – seventeen summerhouses on a hillside in the middle of the heath. Grassy hummocks, moss, dwarf shrubs, and on the horizon, very far away, the mountains. That is all. The summerhouses are simple low, log cabins, each with two small bedrooms, an eat-in kitchen, a terrace and a pool you can fill with hot-spring water.

Jonina’s favourite time to be in Olurfsbudir is winter when the snow has covered the heath and everything is white all the way to the blue mountains. It gets light at eleven o’clock and dark again at four. It is silent, vast and godforsaken – black herds of Iceland horses and the steam rising from the pool, the only things moving. And the light changes from minute to minute, fog, walls of fog, the sun, a sudden view of the mountains, the sky splitting open and drawing shut again with threatening, blue-black clouds, then again fog and no more light at all.

Jonina finds driving to Olurfsbudir soothing; it calms her nerves, her whole body and also her heart. She longs to sit on the sofa by the window in the wooden house, to stare out at the grassy hummocks and not think of anything. Even after all these years she still finds it purifying. She was afraid that Magnus wouldn’t know how to deal with Olurfsbudir when she took him out there for the first time, that he would think it all too monotonous, too quiet, but her fears were unfounded. Magnus enjoyed Olurfsbudir. On his first visit there, he took a small leather suitcase the contents of which Jonina inspected while he was in the bathroom. Three ironed shirts, three pairs of trousers, a perfect travelling case with shoe polish, brushes, polishing cloths, another case just as perfect containing sewing things, and a CD by Nick Cave. Jonina stood before the suitcase staring at its contents, at its touching and disquieting contents; then she snapped it shut again.

Magnus calls late that night. Sunna is already asleep. The other summerhouses are unoccupied in the wintertime. He says, ‘Well then, we’ll come tomorrow; they would very much like to come too.’ ‘What are they like?’ Jonina asks. ‘What’s the guy like and how did it go with Irene?’ Magnus laughs softly. Jonina feels a wave of affection; she suddenly feels very sorry for him; or rather, she would like to touch him now. It must really be awful – meeting again after such a long time. He says, ‘It was good. No, really, it was good. She gave a fine lecture and afterwards we went out to eat. It wasn’t difficult; actually it was the way it used to be,’ and Jonina says, ‘Then come. Don’t get here too late. It is very beautiful out here.’

Jonina folds the wrapping paper around the photo again; her breathing is shallow and quiet; her heart is pounding; she is afraid that Magnus might wake up any moment. He doesn’t. He is sleeping his sound, childlike sleep behind the white bedroom door. In the kitchen Sunna pours cornflakes into a bowl; the sound seems incredibly loud to Jonina. She gets up and walks over to the hall cupboard and puts the package under the boxes that contain her old school exercise books, her photographs and letters. She’s got to find another place for it, maybe get it out of the apartment entirely, or maybe she ought simply to show it to Magnus. She isn’t sure. ‘What are you doing,’ Sunna calls from the kitchen; it’s not a question, it’s a statement; she sounds suspicious and grown up. ‘Nothing,’ Jonina says. ‘I’m only putting things away.’ She has to laugh.

She, Magnus and Sunna moved into this apartment four weeks ago. When Irene and Jonas arrived in November, a year before, they had just bought it. They had been looking for a long time and then finally found it, a small five-room apartment in the old harbour district of Reykjavik, with trees outside the windows and plasterwork on the ceiling. They were both very busy at work – and so they planned to renovate in January and move in February. They began the renovation in March, painted the walls, enlarged one of the doorways, put in new windows, and everything was actually finished, but then Magnus pulled up a floorboard, then a second and a third and decided to lay new parquet floors.

At that point Jonina opted out. She simply let go. She let him do the renovating by himself, and he took the entire apartment apart and couldn’t finish, he simply couldn’t finish, and in dismay Jonina concluded that concealed behind his reserve, his quiet and absent-minded manner, there was an absolute mania for perfection.

For months after that she no longer went to the apartment. She just couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t bear to see the awful mess – the destruction of things that had really been quite all right, and Magnus still thinking of new ways to make more changes. Summer came, and finally autumn, and in October he forced her to come and look at the result. They stood facing each other in the empty living room where the sunlight fell on the shining parquet floor and the walls gleamed. The plasterwork on the ceiling was accentuated by white paint, the doorways leading from one room to the next were wide and high. The windows had received a third coat of paint, and a huge silvery refrigerator hummed in the kitchen. Sunna’s room. Your room. The dining room. Our room. Magnus took off his glasses; he looked ill. He said, ‘I still have to lay tiles in the bath,’ and Jonina said, ‘Either I move in tomorrow or not at all, ever. Take my word for it. Tomorrow or not at all,’ and then he gave in.

In the kitchen, Sunna, wise beyond her years, says as if she were talking to herself, ‘There’s nothing to put away here,’ and she’s right. Magnus didn’t have any things, and Jonina had sold her own furniture. In all the rooms except Sunna’s there was only what was absolutely essential. Perhaps Magnus thought this was the way it ought to be. This was how an apartment for the three of them should look. It had to be empty so that it could then be filled with their new, shared life. Maybe, in his awkward and insecure way, he had visualized it like that. But so far nothing has been added.

Jonina had sensed their friends’ astonishment, their embarrassed politeness: ‘What a wonderful apartment, such a lovely location. But it’s rather bare, isn’t it? You ought to hang some pictures, some photos, anything.’

‘Could it be that Magnus worked on the renovation for such a long time because he wasn’t actually sure?’ Jonina’s sister had asked hesitantly. And Jonina had said, ‘Could be. But I’m not sure either, and we still have time, all the time in the world.’ It was reassuring. Her sister’s conjecture reassured her. It was good to know that Magnus was afraid of living with her, of the decision and its outcome; she is afraid too.

She shuts the cupboard door, goes to join Sunna in the kitchen and sits down at the table with her. The tap is dripping. Sunna is silent. Jonina gets up to turn it off. Then she sits down again. Sunna eating her cornflakes from a lemon-yellow bowl, sleepily, slowly. The cornflakes crackle in her small, closed mouth. She gazes intently at her mother. It’s not yet light outside.

In Olurfsbudir, Jonina and Sunna spend the afternoon – the last hours before it gets totally dark again at five o’clock – on the terrace. Jonina is sitting in a garden chair in the snow; Sunna is in the pool. Jonina has set the water temperature at 40°C; whenever the water gets too cold, more hot water flows in automatically. The pool is made of turquoise-coloured plastic. The water glitters; the snow around the edge of the pool has melted, but deep drifts of it cover the terrace. Sunna is sitting in the blue water, naked; her cheeks are quite red, her eyes sparkle, an intense and disturbing turquoise. They don’t talk much; in general Sunna doesn’t talk much. The cold is a dry cold and there is no wind. The plain is white and smooth like a desert; the snow has covered the tough perennial grass. The Iceland horses are standing up to their bellies in snow, not moving. To keep Sunna from saying anything, Jonina doesn’t smoke; Sunna hates smoking.

Jonina can see Magnus’s car while it is still far off, maybe miles away, but in the clear air she can already see Magnus. He is driving slowly; his car doesn’t do well in snow, but he refuses to buy a Jeep. He says he isn’t the type for a Jeep, and he’s right. The car approaches at a tediously slow pace and stops at the foot of the hill on which the house stands. Jonina doesn’t move. Sunna doesn’t either, only the water ripples softly. Then the engine is switched off; it is quiet; the car doors remain closed. For one terrible moment, Jonina thinks it isn’t Magnus sitting in the car but someone else, someone she doesn’t know.

Then the car doors open, and Magnus gets out, Irene and Jonas get out. Jonina stands up. Magnus calls her name with exaggerated relief in his voice. She goes to meet them; they seem rooted to the spot, unable to move, just stand there, looking at the landscape, overwhelmed. Or they are only pretending to be overwhelmed? Jonina is always ready to assume the latter.

Had she known what Irene looked like, she wouldn’t have had to ask Magnus whether he had ever lived with her. She is too small. Too soft. Physically not enough of a presence for Magnus, who feels drawn to women who simply ignore his shyness, his tenseness and his absent-mindedness, and who win him over without his being aware of it. Maybe that’s how Jonina had done it. Or maybe she simply touched him, took him home with her and persuaded him to stay; she isn’t sure; she can’t remember exactly how it happened.

Irene looks shy and absent-minded like Magnus. She isn’t really short, but she isn’t tall either. Her face is tense, serious, intellectual, with girlish features. A young woman you would notice in the university library only because she’s already there when you arrive and is still there when you leave. Jonina knows and likes the type from her time in Vienna. The hand Irene now extends to her is cool, the handshake quite firm. She’s wearing an inappropriate denim coat lined with swan-white artificial fur. The artificial fur looks good on her, but the coat won’t keep her warm for more than ten minutes. Jonas is wearing a similar jacket of brown suede, also lined, a hippie jacket for a wintry Woodstock; naturally he’s wearing it unbuttoned. His jeans are tattered, his green woollen hat is pulled far down over his eyes. He has slung an army backpack over one shoulder; apparently he didn’t want to put it into the boot of the car. He doesn’t offer to shake hands with Jonina, but says, ‘Hey.’ Maybe that’s supposed to be Icelandic, but it sounds more American. ‘Hey,’ Jonina says in exactly the same tone of voice. He looks sexual. That’s the first word that occurs to Jonina for him; he looks sexual, and Irene looks pale. Magnus puts his left hand on the back of Jonina’s neck and gives her an awkward kiss on the lips. She’s told him often enough not to do that; he doesn’t have to openly demonstrate that they’re together. She can do without it; he seems not to believe her.

Jonas says, ‘Far out.’ He says it in German, abgefahren, pronouncing it’ab-ge-fahrn’ in a dark scratchy voice, and shakes his head. ‘Original, like on the moon.’

‘What’s far out? What do you mean by “far out”?’ Jonina asks in German. It feels odd to be speaking German, and Magnus’s German sounds weird to her ear.

Jonas shakes his head, looks at her for the first time; his eyes are green, dark green, a narrow yellow band around the irises. Maybe he’s trying to find an answer, but doesn’t say anything, merely stamps his feet on the snow a few times in his military boots. Irene’s expression is unfathomable; she lights a cigarette as if she thought she had to endure something for a long time yet.

Jonina takes a key out of her jacket pocket and hands it to Magnus. She says, first in Icelandic and then in German, ‘Show them their house.’ She points a short way up the slope where there’s an identical house for Irene and Jonas. ‘I’ve turned on the heat; you have to explain to them how the pool works.’ ‘Poool,’ Jonas says dreamily. Up on the terrace, Sunna emerges from the water and stands naked in the snow.

Outside the kitchen window the sky is now turning blue, the same deep blue that drove Jonas out of his mind every morning last year. Sunna pushes her bowl of cornflakes away, annoyed and tired, and says, ‘I’m leaving now.’ She has been attending school for four months and seems to be moving further and further away from Jonina. In the hall she laces up her boots, slips into her coat, and puts on her fur hat; she looks like an Eskimo, her eyes squeezed into slits. She comes into the kitchen again and kisses Jonina affectionately, then she slams the door shut behind her. The school is at the end of the street. Sometimes Jonina wishes it were further away so that she could take Sunna there, say goodbye to her at the school gate, and watch her until she disappears behind the big door. But Sunna doesn’t want to be taken to school. ‘Shall I take you?’ ‘No. I’ll go by myself.’

Jonina continues to sit at the kitchen table and gazes across the hall into the big room – our room – the white sofa in front of the window, a bunch of gladioli in a large green vase on the floor, on the windowsill a brass candlestick; that’s all. She really should wake up Magnus; he has to go to work in an hour. She doesn’t get up. She could put some small stones on the windowsill, the flat polished stones from the beach at Dyrhóolaey, abraded till they’re flat as paper, black and almost soft. Or some shells. Suddenly she feels close to tears, feels an unusual theatrical impulse to put her hands up to her face and burst into tears; it’s silly. She doesn’t even know why she should be crying.

She remembers the morning a year and a half ago when she woke up next to Magnus, in his apartment, in the bachelor room with the tiny window and the stone floor and his permanently clammy bed and the piles of books all around the bed, wine glasses, ashtrays. It seems that here in the new apartment Magnus wanted to put an end to that clutter once and for all. She woke up, watched Magnus sleeping for a long time; then she got dressed without waking him, and went home. Later, when he called, she didn’t pick up the phone. She couldn’t have explained why, not to anyone, and least of all to herself. Magnus didn’t call again, quite as if he had known. And four months later, she was standing outside his door again, chastened and determined, once and for all. He let her in, said, ‘That was that,’ and they didn’t talk about it, not ever again.

All the lights go on in the house across the street and then go out again. The sky gets lighter, someone walks down the stairs and slams the front door of the apartment block; further away a car drives off, the refrigerator hums softly. The odd simultaneity of the sounds, the concentration on an elusive something. Last year, after a night of drinking, Jonas had said, ‘I feel like sitting in a dark cellar and watching black and white cartoon films.’ Jonina found that he was often able to say things like that, things she immediately understood. Focused sentences, even though he was never focused, at least not focused on the outside world, on the things around him, the emotional and physical state of others. It was as if he were autistic, given up entirely to his own happiness or unhappiness. I’d like to be like that too now and then, Jonina thinks; I felt that way back then and then forgot about it, and the photo brought it all back – I want to be like that too sometimes.

Irene and Jonas stay in their house. Magnus comes back after he’s taken them up. They’ll be down for supper. Jonina knows that all the houses in Olurfsbudir are alike, and it makes her uneasy – identical furnishings, the same view of the mountains, the snow and the oncoming darkness – the thought that Irene and Jonas are moving about in front of the same backdrop as she and Magnus and Sunna. The same setting but a different conversation. What are they talking about up there, if they’re talking at all?

Sunna is lying on the bed in their bedroom, watching a children’s film on the portable TV. Magnus is sitting on the sofa, reading. He reads all the time. Every conversation with him is always a conversation between two paragraphs of the book he’s immersed in at the moment. Jonina has given up trying to break him of that habit. She knows she should start to cook, yet doesn’t feel the slightest urge to do so. She says, ‘Say something.’

‘Like what?’ Magnus asks amiably, not looking up from his book; he goes on reading.

‘What are they like, tell me what they’re like; for example, what sort of relationship do they have.’ Only for example.

‘They don’t live together,’ Magnus says slowly, finishes reading a sentence, then looks at Jonina. ‘Is that what you wanted to know? They’re not living together; they both seem to be stuck in tragic relationships. On the way here, Irene talked with someone on her mobile phone and then hung up, furious. And last night Jonas talked of nothing but the woman who’s just left him. They don’t live together, but Irene says Jonas is her best friend. Has been for years. They’ve known each other for a relatively long time; they must have met shortly after I left Berlin or while I was still there – I have no idea. I didn’t know all of Irene’s friends.’ He closes the book halfway, leaving his index finger between the pages.

‘That’s what Irene says,’ Jonina remarks. ‘And what does Jonas say?’

‘Jonas says nothing,’ Magnus replies with irritation. ‘She talked to me because she knows me. Because she was giving me some personal information. He wasn’t there when she told me. And he doesn’t know me at all; why should he say to me, “Irene is my best friend”?’

Magnus is right. He puts away his book and lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, puffs the smoke out; then he sighs. The conversation bores him. ‘And don’t you think they’re a peculiar couple? So very different from each other, at least at first glance?’ Jonina says, pushing the glass door open and shutting it again, trying to recall what it was she wanted to do just now.

‘Best friends are always different from each other,’ Magnus replied in a funny didactic tone. ‘Because they are different, they can be friends, right? Otherwise, what would be the sense in being friends? And you yourself said it – different at first glance. At first glance.’

‘I’m probably mistaken,’ Jonina says, perplexed. She empties the refrigerator, and then puts the things back again. Maybe they ought to grill something. Cook some fish, maybe soup. She has no idea what. She also realizes that they haven’t been together with other people for a long time. They’re mostly by themselves. She and Magnus and Sunna. They work a lot. Are tired in the evenings. Don’t drink as much as they used to. She says, ‘You cook. I can’t cook. I don’t feel like cooking.’ And Magnus says, ‘In a minute, OK? I just want to finish this page, and then I’ll cook for us all.’

Towards evening, she goes up to the other house to get Irene and Jonas. It has begun to snow again. The cabin is quiet and dark; Jonina is afraid of finding them naked in the pool, but the pool is empty. She steps up on the terrace; the glass door is open. For a moment Jonina can’t see anything; then she makes out Irene and Jonas on the sofa. Irene is sitting and Jonas is lying on his back, his head in her lap. ‘Hello,’ Irene says. Jonas sits up, not at all embarrassed, and turns on the light. Irene says matter-of-factly, ‘With the room dark, you can see the outside better. And we were in the pool for hours. It is beautiful here, Jonina.’ She has a way of pronouncing Jonina’s name in a childish, trusting way that sounds strange to Jonina. Jonina puts her hands in her trouser pockets and doesn’t know what to say. On the table are cigarettes, a bottle of vodka but no glasses, a camera, several rolls of film, three books, a bunch of keys, a hairbrush and an ashtray. Jonina feels a compulsive desire to pick up all these objects and examine them.

The door to the bedroom on the right is open, the door to the other bedroom is closed. Irene follows Jonina’s glance and says, ‘We’ll sleep in that room; it has the more beautiful view.’ ‘Yes,’ Jonina says, ‘I also prefer to sleep in the front.’ Jonas ties his shoes with vigorous, jerky movements, and says, ‘I’ve always wanted to have a bedroom like that, a room with a window that’s at the same level as the bed and has a view of the countryside, a room just like that, and now here it is, it is simply here.’’ He laughs, and casually looks up at Jonina. It doesn’t seem to matter to him whether she understands him or not. She says, ‘Well, supper is ready,’ then she turns and goes out. She doesn’t regret having invited them; she doesn’t regret it at all.

They come fifteen minutes later, kick the snow off their shoes on the house wall, hang up their coats in the hall, and sit down at the table. Magnus has made fish with lime and sprigs of rosemary. Sunna eats a potato and gazes uninterruptedly and with her mouth slightly open at Jonas, who speaks English with her. She says not a word and at eleven o’clock she just goes off to bed.

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