The Reader (3 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

T
HE NEXT
night I fell in love with her. I could barely sleep, I was yearning for her, I dreamed of her, thought I could feel her until I realized that I was clutching the pillow or the blanket. My mouth hurt from kissing. I kept getting erections, but I didn’t want to masturbate. I wanted to be with her.

Did I fall in love with her as the price for her having gone to bed with me? To this day, after spending the night with a woman, I feel I’ve been indulged and I must make it up somehow—to her by trying at least to love her, and to the world by facing up to it.

One of my few vivid recollections of early childhood has to do with a winter morning when I was four years old. The room I slept in at that time was unheated, and at night and first thing in the morning it was often very cold. I remember the warm kitchen and the hot stove, a heavy piece of iron equipment in which you could see the fire when you lifted out the plates and rings with a hook, and which always held a basin of hot water ready. My mother had pushed a chair up close to the stove for me to stand on while she washed and dressed me. I remember the wonderful feeling of warmth, and how good it felt to be washed and dressed in this warmth. I also remember that whenever I thought back to this afterwards, I always wondered why my mother had been spoiling me like this. Was I ill? Had my brothers and sisters been given something I hadn’t? Was there something coming later in the day that was nasty or difficult that I had to get through?

Because the woman who didn’t yet have a name in my mind had so spoiled me that afternoon, I went back to school the next day. It was also true that I wanted to show off my new manliness. Not that I would ever have talked about it. But I felt strong and superior, and I wanted to show off these feelings to the other kids and the teachers. Besides, I hadn’t talked to her about it but I assumed that being a streetcar conductor she often had to work evenings and nights. How would I see her every day if I had to stay home and wasn’t allowed to do anything except my convalescent walks?

When I came home from her, my parents and brother and sisters were already eating dinner. “Why are you so late? Your mother was worried about you.” My father sounded more annoyed than concerned.

I said that I’d lost my way, that I’d wanted to walk through the memorial garden in the cemetery to Molkenkur, but wandered around who knows where for a long time and ended up in Nussloch. “I had no money, so I had to walk home from Nussloch.”

“You could have hitched a ride.” My younger sister sometimes did this, but my parents disapproved.

My older brother snorted contemptuously. “Molkenkur and Nussloch are in completely opposite directions.”

My older sister gave me a hard look.

“I’m going back to school tomorrow.”

“So pay attention in Geography. There’s north and there’s south, and the sun rises . . .”

My mother interrupted my brother. “The doctor said another three weeks.”

“If he can get all the way across the cemetery to Nussloch and back, he can also go to school. It’s not his strength he’s lacking, it’s his brains.” As small boys, my brother and I beat up on each other constantly, and later we fought with words. He was three years older than me, and better at both. At a certain point I stopped fighting back and let his attacks dissipate into thin air. Since then he had confined himself to grousing at me.

“What do you think?” My mother turned to my father. He set his knife and fork down on his plate, leaned back, and folded his hands in his lap. He said nothing and looked thoughtful, the way he always did when my mother talked to him about the children or the household. As usual, I wondered whether he was really turning over my mother’s question in his mind, or whether he was thinking about work. Maybe he did try to think about my mother’s question, but once his mind started going, he could only think about work. He was a professor of philosophy, and thinking was his life—thinking and reading and writing and teaching.

Sometimes I had the feeling that all of us in his family were like pets to him. The dog you take for a walk, the cat you play with and that curls up in your lap, purring, to be stroked—you can be fond of them, you can even need them to a certain extent, and nonetheless the whole thing—buying pet food, cleaning up the cat box, and trips to the vet—is really too much. Your life is elsewhere. I wish that we, his family, had been his life. Sometimes I also wished that my grousing brother and my cheeky little sister were different. But that evening I suddenly loved them all. My little sister. It probably wasn’t easy being the youngest of four, and she needed to be cheeky just to hold her own. My older brother. We shared a bedroom, which must be even harder for him than it was for me, and on top of that, since I’d been ill he’d had to let me have the room to myself and sleep on the sofa in the living room. How could he not nag me? My father. Why should we children be his whole life? We were growing up and soon we’d be adults and out of the house.

I felt as if we were sitting all together for the last time around the round table under the five-armed, five-candled brass chandelier, as if we were eating our last meal off the old plates with the green vine-leaf border, as if we would never talk to each other so intimately again. I felt as if I were saying goodbye. I was still there and already gone. I was homesick for my mother and father and my brother and sisters, and I longed to be with the woman.

My father looked over at me. “ ‘I’m going back to school tomorrow’—that’s what you said, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” So he had noticed that it was him I’d asked and not my mother, and also that I had not said I was wondering whether I should go back to school or not.

He nodded. “Let’s have you go back to school. If it gets to be too much for you, you’ll just stay home again.”

I was pleased. And at the same time I felt I’d just said my final goodbyes.

CHAPTER EIGHT

F
OR THE
next few days, the woman was working the early shift. She came home at noon, and I cut my last class every day so as to be waiting for her on the landing outside her apartment. We showered and made love, and just before half past one I scrambled into my clothes and ran out the door. Lunch was at one-thirty. On Sundays lunch was at noon, but her early shift also started and ended later.

I would have preferred to skip the shower. She was scrupulously clean, she showered every morning, and I liked the smell of perfume, fresh perspiration, and streetcar that she brought with her from work. But I also liked her wet, soapy body; I liked to let her soap me and I liked to soap her, and she taught me not to do it bashfully, but with assurance and possessive thoroughness. When we made love, too, she took possession of me as a matter of course. Her mouth took mine, her tongue played with my tongue, she told me where to touch her and how, and when she rode me until she came, I was there only because she took pleasure in me and on me. I don’t mean to say that she lacked tenderness and didn’t give me pleasure. But she did it for her own playful enjoyment, until I learned to take possession of her too.

That came later. I never completely mastered it. And for a long time I didn’t miss it. I was young, and I came quickly, and when I slowly came back alive again afterwards, I liked to have her take possession of me. I would look at her when she was on top of me, her stomach which made a deep crease above her navel, her breasts, the right one the tiniest bit larger than the left, her face and open mouth. She would lean both hands against my chest and throw them up at the last moment, as she gave a toneless sobbing cry that frightened me the first time, and that later I eagerly awaited.

Afterwards we were exhausted. She often fell asleep on top of me. I would listen to the saws in the yard and the loud cries of the workers who operated them and had to shout to make themselves heard. When the saws fell silent, the sound of the traffic echoed faintly in the kitchen. When I heard children calling and playing, I knew that school was out and that it was past one o’clock. The neighbor who came home at lunchtime scattered birdseed on his balcony, and the doves came and cooed.

“What’s your name?” I asked her on the sixth or seventh day. She had fallen asleep on me and was just waking up. Until then I avoided saying anything to her that required me to choose either the formal or the familiar form of address.

She stared. “What?”

“What’s your name?”

“Why do you want to know?” She looked at me suspiciously.

“You and I . . . I know your last name, but not your first. I want to know your first name. What’s the matter with . . .”

She laughed. “Nothing, kid, there’s nothing wrong with that. My name is Hanna.” She kept on laughing, didn’t stop, and it was contagious.

“You looked at me so oddly.”

“I was still half asleep. What’s yours?”

I thought she knew. At that time it was the in thing not to carry your schoolbooks in a bag but under your arm, and when I put them on her kitchen table, my name was on the front. But she hadn’t paid any attention to them.

“My name is Michael Berg.”

“Michael, Michael, Michael.” She tried out the name. “My kid’s called Michael, he’s in college.”

“In high school.”

“In high school, he’s what, seventeen?”

I was proud at the two extra years she’d given me, and nodded.

“He’s seventeen and when he grows up he wants to be a famous . . .” She hesitated.

“I don’t know what I want to be.”

“But you study hard.”

“Sort of.” I told her she was more important to me than school and my studies. And I wished I were with her more often. “I’ll have to repeat a class in any case.”

“What class?” It was the first real conversation we’d had with each other.

“Tenth grade. I’ve missed too much in the last months while I was ill. If I still wanted to move up next year I’d have to work like an idiot. I’d also have to be in school right now.” I told her I was cutting classes.

“Out.” She threw back the coverlet. “Get out of my bed. And if you don’t want to do your work, don’t come back. Your work is idiotic? Idiotic? What do you think selling and punching tickets is?” She got out of bed, stood naked in the kitchen being a conductor. With her left hand she opened the little holder with the blocks of tickets, using her left thumb, covered with a rubber thimble, to pull off two tickets, flipped her right hand to get hold of the punch that hung from her wrist, and made two holes. “Two to Rohrbach.” She dropped the punch, reached out her hand for a bill, opened the purse at her waist, put the money in, snapped it shut again, and squeezed the change out of the coin holder that was attached to it. “Who still doesn’t have a ticket?” She looked at me. “Idiotic—you don’t know what idiotic is.”

I sat on the edge of the bed. I was stunned. “I’m sorry. I’ll do my work. I don’t know if I’ll make it, school only has another six weeks to go. I’ll try. But I won’t get through it if I can’t see you anymore.” I . . .” At first I wanted to say, I love you. But then I didn’t. Maybe she was right, of course she was right. But she had no right to demand that I do more at school, and make that the condition for our seeing each other again. “I can’t not see you.”

The clock in the hall struck one-thirty. “You have to go.” She hesitated. “From tomorrow on I’m working the main shift. I’ll be home at five-thirty and you can come. Provided you work first.”

We stood facing each other naked, but she couldn’t have seemed more dismissive if she’d had on her uniform. I didn’t understand what was going on. Was she thinking of me? Or of herself? If my schoolwork is idiotic, that makes her work even more so—that’s what upset her? But I hadn’t ever said that my work or hers was idiotic. Or was it that she didn’t want a failure for a lover? But was I her lover? What was I to her? I dressed, dawdling, and hoped she would say something. But she said nothing. Then I had all my clothes on and she was still standing there naked, and as I kissed her goodbye, she didn’t respond.

CHAPTER NINE

W
HY DOES
it make me so sad when I think back to that time? Is it yearning for past happiness—for I was happy in the weeks that followed, in which I really did work like a lunatic and passed the class, and we made love as if nothing else in the world mattered. Is it the knowledge of what came later, and that what came out afterwards had been there all along?

Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?

I think back to that time and I see my former self. I wore the well-cut suits which had come down to me from a rich uncle, now dead, along with several pairs of two-tone shoes, black and brown, black and white, suede and calf. My arms and legs were too long, not for the suits, which my mother had let down for me, but for my own movements. My glasses were a cheap over-the-counter pair and my hair a tangled mop, no matter what I did. In school I was neither good nor bad; I think that many of the teachers didn’t really notice me, nor did the students who dominated the class. I didn’t like the way I looked, the way I dressed and moved, what I achieved and what I felt I was worth. But there was so much energy in me, such belief that one day I’d be handsome and clever and superior and admired, such anticipation when I met new people and new situations. Is that what makes me sad? The eagerness and belief that filled me then and exacted a pledge from life that life could never fulfill? Sometimes I see the same eagerness and belief in the faces of children and teenagers and the sight brings back the same sadness I feel in remembering myself. Is this what sadness is all about? Is it what comes over us when beautiful memories shatter in hindsight because the remembered happiness fed not just on actual circumstances but on a promise that was not kept?

She—I should start calling her Hanna, just as I started calling her Hanna back then—she certainly didn’t nourish herself on promises, but was rooted in the here and now.

I asked her about her life, and it was as if she rummaged around in a dusty chest to get me the answers. She had grown up in a German community in Rumania, then come to Berlin at the age of sixteen, taken a job at the Siemens factory, and ended up in the army at twenty-one. Since the end of the war, she had done all manner of jobs to get by. She had been a streetcar conductor for several years; what she liked about the job was the uniform and the constant motion, the changing scenery and the wheels rolling under her feet. But that was all she liked about it. She had no family. She was thirty-six. She told me all this as if it were not her life but somebody else’s, someone she didn’t know well and who wasn’t important to her. Things I wanted to know more about had vanished completely from her mind, and she didn’t understand why I was interested in what had happened to her parents, whether she had had brothers and sisters, how she had lived in Berlin and what she’d done in the army. “The things you ask, kid!”

It was the same with the future—of course I wasn’t hammering out plans for marriage and future. But I identified more with Julien Sorel’s relationship with Madame de Renal than his one with Mathilde de la Mole. I was glad to see Felix Krull end up in the arms of the mother rather than the daughter. My sister, who was studying German literature, delivered a report at the dinner table about the controversy as to whether Mr. von Goethe and Madame von Stein had had a relationship, and I vigorously defended the idea, to the bafflement of my family. I imagined how our relationship might be in five or ten years. I asked Hanna how she imagined it. She didn’t even want to think ahead to Easter, when I wanted to take a bicycle trip with her during the vacation. We could get a room together as mother and son, and spend the whole night together.

Strange that this idea and suggesting it were not embarrassing to me. On a trip with my mother I would have fought to get a room of my own. Having my mother with me when I went to the doctor or to buy a new coat or to be picked up by her after a trip seemed to me to be something I had outgrown. If we went somewhere together and we ran into my schoolmates, I was afraid they would think I was a mama’s boy. But to be seen with Hanna, who was ten years younger than my mother but could have been my mother, didn’t bother me. It made me proud.

When I see a woman of thirty-six today, I find her young. But when I see a boy of fifteen, I see a child. I am amazed at how much confidence Hanna gave me. My success at school got my teachers’ attention and assured me of their respect. The girls I met noticed and liked it that I wasn’t afraid of them. I felt at ease in my own body.

The memory that illuminates and fixes my first meetings with Hanna makes a single blur of the weeks between our first conversation and the end of the school year. One reason for that is we saw each other so regularly and our meetings always followed the same course. Another is that my days had never been so full and my life had never been so swift and so dense. When I think about the work I did in those weeks, it’s as if I had sat down at my desk and stayed there until I had caught up with everything I’d missed during my hepatitis, learned all the vocabulary, read all the texts, worked through all the theorems and memorized the periodic table. I had already done the reading about the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich while I was in my sickbed. And I remember our meetings in those weeks as one single long meeting. After our conversation, they were always in the afternoon: if she was on the late shift, then from three to four-thirty, otherwise until five-thirty. Dinner was at seven, and at first Hanna forced me to be home on time. But after a while an hour and a half was not enough, and I began to think up excuses to miss dinner.

It all happened because of reading aloud. The day after our conversation, Hanna wanted to know what I was learning in school. I told her about Homer, Cicero, and Hemingway’s story about the old man and his battle with the fish and the sea. She wanted to hear what Greek and Latin sounded like, and I read to her from the
Odyssey
and the speeches against Cataline.

“Are you also learning German?”

“How do you mean?”

“Do you only learn foreign languages, or is there still stuff you have to learn in your own?”

“We read texts.” While I was sick, the class had read
Emilia Galotti
and
Intrigues and Love,
and there was an essay due on them. So I had to read both, which I did after finishing everything else. By then it was late, and I was tired, and next day I’d forgotten it all and had to start all over again.

“So read it to me!”

“Read it yourself, I’ll bring it for you.”

“You have such a nice voice, kid, I’d rather listen to you than read it myself.”

“Oh, come on.”

But next day when I arrived and wanted to kiss her, she pulled back. “First you have to read.”

She was serious. I had to read
Emilia Galotti
to her for half an hour before she took me into the shower and then to bed. Now I enjoyed showering too—the desire I felt when I arrived had got lost as I read aloud to her. Reading a play out loud so that the various characters are more or less recognizable and come to life takes a certain concentration. Lust reasserted itself under the shower. So reading to her, showering with her, making love to her, and lying next to her for a while afterwards—that became the ritual in our meetings.

She was an attentive listener. Her laugh, her sniffs of contempt, and her angry or enthusiastic remarks left no doubt that she was following the action intently, and that she found both Emilia and Luise to be silly little girls. Her impatience when she sometimes asked me to go on reading seemed to come from the hope that all this imbecility would eventually play itself out. “Unbelievable!” Sometimes this made even me eager to keep reading. As the days grew longer, I read longer, so that I could be in bed with her in the twilight. When she had fallen asleep lying on me, and the saw in the yard was quiet, and a blackbird was singing as the colors of things in the kitchen dimmed until nothing remained of them but lighter and darker shades of gray, I was completely happy.