Summer Lies (26 page)

“Oh”—she made a dismissive gesture—“I told her about our summer. She had such idiotic ideas about life and love back then that I let myself be pulled in.”

“What did you tell her about our summer?” He wasn’t smiling anymore.

“What are you asking? You were there, at the doctors’ ball and the kiss at the door and in the room in the guesthouse.” She was getting angry. “And on the platform and it was you who got on the train and you who left and were never heard from again.”

He nodded. “How long did you wait in vain?”

“I don’t remember how many days and weeks. But it was an eternity, I do know that.”

He looked at her sadly. “It wasn’t even ten days, Nina. After ten days I came back and was told by your landlady that you’d moved out. A young man had come to get you, he’d loaded your things into a car, and driven off with you.”

“You’re lying!” She flew at him.

“No, Nina, I’m not lying.”

“Are you trying to knock the ground out from under me? Make me lose faith in my mind and my memory? Make me crazy? How can you say such things?”

He leaned back and ran a hand over his face and head. “Do you remember where I was going when I left?”

“No, I don’t remember. But I do remember you never wrote and never called and …”

“I went to a philosophical congress in Budapest and couldn’t phone you from there or write to you, either. It was the Cold
War and because I wasn’t supposed to be there, I couldn’t get in touch from there, either. I told you all that.”

“I remember you took a trip you didn’t have to take. But that’s how you were, first came your philosophy, then there was a long gap, then came your colleagues and your friends, and then came me.”

“That’s not true, either, Nina. I was working like a maniac on my dissertation back then because I wanted to finish, find a job, and marry you. You wanted to be married, that much was clear, and the boy from Hamburg was always ahead by a nose. Didn’t you know each other from your childhood? Weren’t your families friends and he was your father’s assistant?”

“That’s as false as everything else you’re saying. My father gave him advice about his studies and practical training, because he liked him, but his assistant—no, my husband was never my father’s assistant.”

He looked at her wearily. “Were you afraid you would fall out of your bourgeois world and land in my poor one? That with me you wouldn’t have the things you were used to and needed? I stood outside your parents’ house in Hamburg—was that it?”

“What are you trying to do: turn me into some spoiled bourgeois brat? I loved you and you destroyed it all and now you don’t want to know anymore.”

He said nothing, turned his head away, and looked across the meadows to the mountains. Her eyes followed his, and she saw sheep grazing in the meadow. “Sheep!”

“I was just counting them. Do you remember how angry I could get? I probably managed to frighten you that way too. I can still get really angry, and counting sheep helps.”

She tried unsuccessfully to recall any of his outbursts. Her husband, yes, her husband could turn her to ice with his cold
rage. If he kept it up for days on end, he drove her to complete despair. “Did you yell at me?”

He didn’t reply. Instead he asked, “Will you tell me about your life? I know that you’re divorced; I saw your husband’s picture in the newspaper on his eightieth birthday with another woman. His children were in the picture too—are they yours?”

“Do you want me to say my life went wrong, and I should have waited for you back then?”

He laughed. She remembered how she’d loved his uninhibited peals of laughter and how they’d also startled her. She realized he wasn’t just laughing at her question, he was laughing to dissipate the tension. But what was so funny about her question?

“I’ve written things about that, about how life’s really big decisions aren’t right or wrong, it’s just that one lives different lives. No, I don’t think your life went wrong.”

She talked. She’d given up her studies, because her husband needed her. He had got a job as a senior physician, although he had no doctorate; it was assumed he would remedy that as fast as possible. Besides which, he had taken on the editing of an important professional journal. She wrote and line-edited for him. “I was good. Helmut’s successor offered me a job as assistant editor. But Helmut told him it would have to wait till I was a merry widow.”

Then the children came. They arrived quickly one after the other, and if there hadn’t been complications with the fourth, there would have been more. “You have a daughter—I don’t know how you did it, but with four children there was absolutely no question of picking up my studies again. I had my
hands full. But it was also great to watch the children grow up and make something of themselves. The eldest is a judge in the federal court, the next is a museum director, and the girls are housewives and mothers like me, but one is married to a professor and the other to a conductor. I have thirteen grandchildren—do you have some too?”

He shook his head. “My daughter isn’t married and has no children. She’s a little autistic.”

“What was your wife like?”

“She was almost as tall and thin as I am. She wrote poetry—wonderful, crazy, despairing poetry. I love the poems, although I don’t often understand them. I also didn’t understand the depressions Julia battled her whole life long. Or what triggered them and what ended them, if there was some rhythm of the moon or the sun that played a role, or the things she ate and drank.”

“But she didn’t kill herself!”

“No, she died of cancer.”

She nodded. “After me you looked for someone completely different. I wish I’d read more in my life, but for the longest time all I read were the things I had to edit and then the other things I wanted to read because they were what the children were reading and I wanted to be able to talk to them about them—so I got out of the habit. I should have plenty of time now, but what would I do with anything once I’d read it?”

“I was standing in the kitchen as you came up the short path from the street to the house, and I recognized your step immediately. You walk as firmly as you ever did. Clack, clack, clack—I’ve never met a woman who walks with such determination. Back then I thought you were as determined as your walk was.”

“And back then I thought you’d lead me as lightly and safely through life as you led me when we were dancing.”

“I would like to have lived the way I danced. Julia didn’t dance.”

“Were you happy with her? Are you happy about your life?”

He breathed deeply in and out and leaned back. “I can no longer imagine life without her. I also can’t imagine any life other than the one I have. Of course I can figure out this possibility or that, but it’s all abstract.”

“That’s not how it is with me. I’m always imagining things differently from the way they happened. What if I’d finished my degree and then worked? If I’d actually taken on the job as assistant editor? If I’d got a divorce from Helmut when he had his first affair? If I’d raised the children less seriously and severely and allowed them to be more chaotic and happy? If I’d seen life as more than a mechanism of duties and responsibilities? If you hadn’t left me?”

“I …” He stopped.

She’d had to say it again. But she didn’t want a fight and she didn’t want to anger him and asked, “Will I be able to understand the things you’ve written? I’d like to try.”

“I’ll send you something that may perhaps interest you. Will you give me your address?”

She opened her purse and gave him a card.

“Thank you.” He held it in his hand. “I never got as far as having cards in my life.”

She laughed. “It’s not too late.” She stood up. “Would you be kind enough to call a taxi?”

She followed him into his study. It was next to the room with the terrace and had the same view of the mountains. While he was on the telephone, she looked around. The walls here too were crammed with bookcases, the desk covered in books and papers, on one side a table with a computer, on the other a bulletin board full of bills, claim tickets, newspaper clippings,
handwritten notes, photographs. The tall, gaunt woman with the sad eyes must be Julia, the younger woman with the closed expression his daughter. In one picture a black dog with eyes as sad as Julia’s gazed into the camera. In another Adalbert, in a black suit, stood next to other men in black suits, as if they were all a school class late for their leaving exams. The man in uniform and the woman dressed as a nurse standing outside a front door must be Adalbert’s parents.

Then she saw the little black-and-white photo of him and her. They were standing on a platform in each other’s arms. It couldn’t be … She shook her head.

He put down the receiver and came to stand next to her. “No, that’s not when we were saying goodbye. We picked you up at the station once, your friend Elena, my friend Eberhard, and I. It was late afternoon and we all went to the river and had a picnic. Eberhard had inherited a wind-up gramophone from his grandfather and found some old 78 records at a junk dealer’s and we danced into the night. Do you remember?”

“Did that picture always hang next to your desk?”

He shook his head. “Not in the first years. But since then. The taxi will be here any minute.”

They went out to the street. “Do you take care of the garden?”

“No, a gardener does that. I prune the roses.”

“Thank you,” she said, put her arms around him and felt his bones. “Are you healthy? You’re nothing but skin and bones.”

He put his right arm around her and held her. “Look after yourself, Nina.”

Then the taxi came. Adalbert held open the door, helped her in, and closed the door behind her. She turned around and saw him standing there, getting smaller and smaller.

Emilia had been waiting in the foyer. She leapt to her feet and ran to meet her. “How was it?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow while we’re driving. All I want to do now is have supper and go to a movie.”

They ate on the terrace in the inner courtyard. It was early, they were the first guests, and the square of houses protected them from the sounds of the street and of traffic. A blackbird was singing on a roof, the bells rang at seven o’clock, otherwise everything was still. Emilia was rather hurt and didn’t want to talk, so they ate in silence.

She didn’t care what kind of film she saw. She hadn’t been to a cinema very often in her life and had never got used to television. But she found the bright, moving images on the big screen overwhelming, and this was an evening when she wanted to be overwhelmed. The film achieved this, but not in a way that made her forget everything; it made her remember—dreams she dreamed as a child, her longing for something bigger and more wonderful than her everyday life of family and school, her pathetic attempts to find it in ballet and the piano. The little boy whose story they were watching was fascinated by film, gave the man in the little Sicilian village who ran the projector no peace till he let him help in the projection room and finally become a director. In the end the only one of her childhood dreams that survived was the dream of finding the right man, and she hadn’t managed to do that, either.

But she had never allowed herself self-pity and she wasn’t going to allow it today, either. Emilia came out of the movie theater with tears in her eyes, put her arms around her, and
held her close. She patted Emilia’s back soothingly; she couldn’t bring herself to put her own arm around her granddaughter. Emilia soon let go again and they walked side by side through the city in the bright summer evening to the hotel.

“You really want to go home tomorrow?”

“I don’t have to be back early, so we don’t have to set off early. Is breakfast at nine okay?”

Emilia nodded. But she wasn’t happy with her grandmother and the last two days. “You’re going to sleep now as if nothing had happened?”

She laughed. “Even if nothing happened, I don’t sleep as if nothing happened. You know, when you’re young, you’re either asleep or wide awake and up and about. When you’re old, there’s a third possibility: the nights when you’re neither asleep nor awake and up and about. It’s a state all its own, and one of the secrets of getting old is to accept it as such. Why don’t you go for a wander through the city again if you want, I’ll allow you.”

She went up to her room and got into bed, arming herself for a night of sleeping and waking and remembering and thinking and sleeping and waking again. But when she woke up, it was morning.

Then they were in the car, driving along the little road again, following the winding river. It had dawned on Emilia that her questions were getting her nowhere, so she’d stopped asking. She waited.

“It wasn’t the way I told you on the drive here. He didn’t leave me. I left him.” That basically was it. But for Emilia’s sake she kept talking. “When we said goodbye at the station, I knew he’d be coming back soon, and also that he wouldn’t be able to write or call. I could have waited for him. But my parents had found out that I wasn’t doing any practical training course,
and sent Helmut. He was to bring me home, and he did. I was afraid of life with Adalbert, of the fact that he’d grown up in poverty and didn’t care, of his mind, which I couldn’t follow, and of the break with my parents. Helmut was my world, and I ran back to that world.”

“Why did you tell me a different story?”

“I believed it had all happened differently. Even while I was talking to Adalbert.”

“But you can’t just …”

“Yes, Emilia, you can. I couldn’t bear it, that I made the wrong decision. Adalbert says there are no wrong decisions—I couldn’t bear it that I’d decided the way I’d decided. And did I decide at all? What I felt back then was that I was being pulled first toward Adalbert and then even more strongly back into my old world and to Helmut. When I wasn’t happy in that old world and with Helmut, I didn’t forgive Adalbert for not seeing my fear and helping me, and not holding on to me. I felt abandoned by him and my memory turned this into the entire scene when he said goodbye on the platform.”

“But you were the one who decided!”