Where Love Begins (9 page)

Fourteen

I'd like to show you something, Jason says.

He takes Stella by the hand and goes outside with her; hand in hand they walk to the garden gate; later Stella will think of this hand-in-hand as a betrayal. Jason opens the gate and steps with Stella out into the street. At the far end of the street a large flock of birds alights on the pavement. The wind is high up in the treetops, the pine trees at the edge of the forest creak. Stella feels an inordinately burdensome grief, a longing for another life or a life she once had; exactly which life she can't recall.

Jason's hand is dry and warm. It is the most familiar thing about Jason.

He stops in front of the garden gate, lets go of Stella and looks at her. She is supposed to see something that he saw long ago, something about this situation is like a déjà-vu. But Stella doesn't see it. Jason touches her shoulder, he turns her back around to face the house and waits; then he points at the mailbox; he points at it. On the mailbox, under Stella's and Jason's names, there is a third name written neatly and like theirs with a white grease pencil directly on the metal of the box, except in a different, a distinctive, feminine handwriting.

Mister Pfister.

Don't touch it, Jason says, quite superfluously.

He says, Do you have any idea how long that's been there? Can you somehow make sense of this?

Fifteen

Ava is sitting in the sandpit, talking to herself. She whispers, sternly shakes her head, with her tongue makes soft, clicking sounds that she must have heard from the aunties in the kindergarten. She has spread some objects out on the wooden board of the sandpit; she is offering them.

An apricot.

A little car.

A pen, a seashell, a shekel, a coin.

Ava pushes the objects on the board back and forth, she rearranges them; then she returns them to their original positions.

She says, You can buy the apricot, or you can take the shell. You can make a necklace for yourself with the shell. This here is a car. Papa's car from his childhood. A very old car. Old.

She puts the pail upside down on the board and the car on top of the pail. She gets out of the sandpit and walks over to the edge of the field, she looks at it and thinks it over thoroughly; then she snaps off a yarrow, a poppy and a chamomile flower, ties them together into a bristly bouquet, and puts the bouquet on the board next to the apricot.

She says pensively, I'm thirsty.

She says, Today at kindergarten there was a man nobody knew. Nobody knew him. He had on a black sweater with a hood, and he told me to say hello to you, Mama. I didn't say anything. Do we know him? Have you ever seen him?

Sixteen

When Stella picks up Esther and Walter's key from the office, Paloma, telephone receiver at her ear, signals to her to wait. She beckons with her index finger, indicating the chair in front of her desk.

Stella makes coffee while Paloma is telephoning. She listens to Paloma's unemotional, cool voice. If the family doesn't want to rely on the nursing staff, we have to end the relationship. You're underestimating your mother. You underestimate your mother's abilities, the mental faculties of elderly people in general.

Paloma listens to the voice on the receiver with a nasty smile. The kettle rumbles and switches off. The smell of the instant coffee is delicious and artificial, reminding Stella unfailingly of campsites, nights in tents, waking up by the ocean; it never and will not later ever remind her of Paloma's office, of the postcards above Paloma's desk, or of the static stillness of those years.

She takes a mug with a tiger on it for herself and one with the words
destroy something
on it for Paloma. She waits, then pours water over the two teaspoons of coffee, stirs some coffee whitener into each, then places Paloma's mug next to the phone.

Paloma says, Think it over. Best wishes for the time being; please get in touch once you've made your decision; she makes a horrible grimace, puts the receiver back and turns to Stella. She says abruptly, This morning there was a man here. Standing outside the office when I arrived; could be he'd already been waiting for a while. He asked about personnel. About a nurse for his mother. He asked about you.

What did you say, Stella says. She feels as if she's falling, falling forward, towards Paloma.

Well, he asked for your phone number, Paloma says slowly. To contact you; he wanted your number.

Paloma looks at Stella for a long time. Then she says, Of course I didn't give it to him. I said I was in charge of making arrangements. He can't choose his own personnel here anyway.

Yes, Stella says.

Paloma says, Stella, I'm not sure. That was a pretty weird sort of guy, and he didn't look like someone who'd be worried about his sick mother. To be frank, he looked deranged. I told him we were fully booked. We had no available staff. A young man in a black hooded sweater, good-looking actually. But all done in. Do you know who that could have been?

No, Stella says. Don't know, no idea.

She has to get out of there before she starts to cry; she really has to see to it that she can get out of there, disappear.

She says, OK, Paloma. I've got to go now. Esther is waiting. I've got to go. I'll come back later. Maybe you'll still be here then.

I'll still be here, Paloma says. Of course I'll still be here then. Why did you make coffee for yourself if you have to leave right away. You're as white as a sheet, Stella. What's the matter with you?

Seventeen

Stella tries not to think about Mister Pfister. She tries to do away with him by not thinking of him, to get him out of her house by not thinking about him. It's impossible.

She wakes at daybreak; the coordinates of the days intrude into her half-sleep.

Ava.

The house in the development on the outskirts of the city, the room under the roof, the bed with the window on the right, the not-quite closed door on the left, and on the other side of the door, the hall, Ava's room, Ava.

Jason. Present, his slender form next to her in bed so surprisingly slight in sleep; Jason's absence, Jason rather far away, and the bed next to Stella is empty.

Time of day, morning around six, and the season, summer.

The window is open; many diverse and wary bird voices.

And Mister Pfister. Still there.

Stella turns on her side and imagines Mister Pfister waking up. He wakes up in his room next to the kitchen. She is sure he doesn't use all the rooms in his house, that the many rooms in his house are too much of a challenge for him. He'll keep the doors to them closed, possibly locked; he'll only rarely go upstairs to the first floor. He has retreated to the room next to the kitchen, the room that corresponds to Stella and Jason's living room. The room is dark because the picture window is draped with black felt. Mister Pfister isn't awakened by daylight and wakes up at all sorts of times, sometimes at dawn, sometimes during the night, also in the afternoon or early evening. Time, Stella thinks, is relative for Mister Pfister. It is dark when he wakes up, or it is bright, it is dawn turning into day or already dusk turning back to night; it rains, snows, then the sun rises.

For Mister Pfister time is different, it ticks differently; Stella's time is what determines Mister Pfister's time. If Stella's time didn't exist, and Ava's and Jason's – then there would be a different one for him. Mister Pfister wakes up and lies there, simply lies there with closed eyes, and at six o'clock in the morning he hears exactly the same things as Stella – birds, the distant noise of traffic, the slamming of car doors – yet under or maybe over it, he hears something completely different, a mesh, a web of voices that Stella can't hear, a disembodied whispering.

Then he gets up.

Stella sees Mister Pfister getting up and going into the kitchen and turning on the kettle. He rolls himself a cigarette while he waits for the water to boil. The kitchen is only dimly lit. There's quite a lot of paper on the floor; in a bowl in the corner by the window onions are sending glowing green shoots up into the air like flames; there are far too many bottles in this kitchen, beer bottles, wine bottles, pickle jars, and piles of paper under which the essential things – pens, packets of tobacco, lighters, notes, viewpoints and thoughts – get lost; but they'll all turn up again, no need to worry about that. Nothing gets lost; it all goes around in a circle.

The water is boiling. Mister Pfister pours hot water on top of a large spoonful of coffee in a dirty mug; the image of the dirty mug fills Stella with satisfaction. He drinks his coffee black, without milk and without sugar. What does the aroma of coffee in the morning remind Mister Pfister of; I don't even want to know, Stella thinks; I really don't want to know.

Mister Pfister opens a beer to go with his coffee. He finds one among all the empty bottles; there's always one last beer still there. The cigarette crackles extravagantly. Everything is hot and cold at the same time, light and dark, soft and loud. And paper is scattered everywhere. Paper spreads from the kitchen into the living room, crunched-up paper, paper densely covered with writing, graph paper from school notebooks in the midst of stacks of newspapers, notebooks, boxes, piles of wrapping paper, advertisements and cardboard; but Mister Pfister strides through it all as if over water, he strides back to the living room and only now turns on the music, frees up the room – it's Bach.

It's all you can hear.

Stella has never before heard Bach. Not knowingly heard Bach, not this way. She decides never to listen to Bach. Never.

Mister Pfister searches for an ashtray. He crawls around the room on all fours and finds a plastic ashtray. The coffee is pitch black; the music will be clear as glass. Mister Pfister has to drink a second beer immediately. He is ill too, he feels ill, tired, exhausted. To listen. To lie down, to listen lying down, and rummaging from his bed among the papers, to find a pencil and write down something, compulsively write something down, namely three words:

Emergency, memory, light.

All of them words that beat their wings, Stella thinks. Maybe it feels as if, by writing them down, they will keep still –
Resistance, presence of mind, ward, thirty-seven, Monday, back then.
It isn't as if these were merely ugly words, dull, blunt words. They are words that might be an announcement, an excessive demand. Or just an invitation?

Transitions. Dogs. Despair.

Mister Pfister's pencil scribbles and scratches across the crumpled paper and breaks. Now and then Mister Pfister is carried along on a wave of self-assurance, of arrogance and glaring confidence. A third beer. There's also always a third beer, and the atmosphere clinks among all the bottles. Mister Pfister ought to eat something. But before that he has to lie down again; perhaps he'll fall asleep again, and when he wakes up for the third time, there suddenly, on the floor next to his bed is an alarm clock; it's already afternoon, high time; the alarm clock ticks deafeningly, each second a detonation. Mister Pfister gets up at once and gets dressed. Trousers, hooded sweater, trainers. He fumbles in the pile of stuff and crud on the kitchen table; a photo slides out of the pile, in it he's sitting on the edge of a bed in a room at a completely different time; he absolutely has to get rid of this photo; this photo can't remain in the system for a moment longer; it's got to go.

Mister Pfister puts the photo in his pocket.

Leaves his house.

Carefully double-locks the door, locks the garden gate.

He walks past the bicycle mechanic's house. The bicycle mechanic is sitting in front of his door on a folding chair as he does every day; the wheel he's holding turns, releasing sparks; the sparks fly into the dark, warm day. This bicycle mechanic belongs to Mister Pfister. Everything about the house, the small workshop, the bikes, the golden sparks, the light and the friendliness belong to Mister Pfister; later on he'll say this to Stella just like that – you were just speaking to my bicycle mechanic, and you'll be punished for that. Punished. That's how he'll say it. He walks along the street past the house with the awning; the awning is drawn up, not that this would interest Mister Pfister, none of it interests Mister Pfister at all. He walks past the silent gardens, and at the end of the street Stella comes around the corner; she's coming; she's already there.

Mister Pfister steps out of the way onto the fallow land, the empty lot. He stumbles off towards the right, onto rubble and debris.

Stella gets off her bike. There are two bags hanging from the handlebars. That child is sitting in a child's seat, pointing here and there. Stella leans the bike against the garden fence, puts the bags down, lifts that child out of the seat and hands her the keys; the child unlocks the gate with a lot of fuss and disappears into the garden. Stella pushes the bike along behind her; comes back to get the bags, and only now, only now, she glances down the street in the direction of Mister Pfister's house. But Mister Pfister has just stepped to one side; actually he doesn't give a damn, doesn't give a damn, whether she sees him or not; that's not what it's all about at all, that's not what it's about.

A blazing look.

Supper, Friday.

Mister Pfister stands with his hands in his trouser pockets, waiting. Behind him in the shrubbery on the fallow land, the nightingales are beginning to sing.

Lighthouses. Morse code. Quite clearly the arcs are beginning to come together, to close. These and those. Mister Pfister's feelings vacillate between hate and love, anger and confidence; this is quite normal, it happens to everybody; it really happens to everybody; he can be quite sure on that score.

And then it's evening.

In Stella's house, in the many rooms in which she lives and thinks and sleeps and eats and talks with her people, the back door to the garden opens. That child comes walking out.

Well then, let's go. Let's go.

And Mister Pfister pushes off and gets going. Towards Stella's house; he stops at the garden gate, puts a finger on the bell below which on the mailbox is her name, and under her name is his: Mister Pfister; and he presses the bell as hard as he can.

He takes a step back and looks at the house. For the thousandth time. The house is exactly the same house as his. There's no one in the living room. The dormer window is open, the orange flag is waving from it. The child has gone into hiding. The garden is wild and very luxuriant. Stella's predilection for mullein, lupines, unmown grass, for shells, stones, the child's fondness for little sticks and junk.

Mister Pfister listens. He listens a moment longer, stands there another moment among the atmospheric shards, Stella, the bike, the child's little hat, the little cherry-red dress, the paper bags, the sentences spoken between Stella and this child, words, gestures, handing over the keys, the touching, then he steps forward.

Mister Pfister kicks open the garden gate; for the very first time he simply goes ahead and does that now. The gate yields, opens up, swings on its hinges, and the garden at last becomes large and bright; it was, after all, high time. Mister Pfister takes the photo out of his trouser pocket, the gruesome, wrinkled photo of the bed in the room,
back then,
and he opens the mailbox and drops the photo into it, as matter-of-factly as if into a fathoms-deep well, how else, for bloody damn sake.

Nobody in sight.

Somewhere water is dripping.

Tomorrow they'll meet again.

Mister Pfister goes, leaving something behind. He goes to the right or the left, depending, there are no rules, only a few rules; the rules here are made some place else.

*

And Stella turns in her bed and sits up. The entire room smells of forest, of pines and sand. She sits on the edge of her bed, hands between her knees like Dermot on a boulder by the water forty years ago, and she looks out of the open window up into the morning sky. This is not the way she'll be able to kill Mister Pfister. This image will keep him alive for sure. The thought is onerous and disgusting, and Stella feels compassion and the opposite of compassion, but she can't get away from the image; it's her way of defending herself. The pictures come from books she's read, the memories of people she's known, and from herself, from Stella alone; it could be that none of all this has anything to do with reality. That Mister Pfister is an entirely different person, possibly someone who isn't sick or is sick in a different way than she imagines; what actually does the image she has formed of him say about her? It's possible that Mister Pfister doesn't touch even a drop of alcohol. That he telephones his girlfriend every evening, sitting erect at a neat desk in a clean room, and that Stella's image of him is naïve. Stupid. But aren't they alike then, Stella and Mister Pfister? Isn't this something that connects them to each other, in spite of everything.

*

Dreams, like the shedding of skins.