The Reader (4 page)

CHAPTER TEN

O
N THE
first day of Easter vacation, I got up at four. Hanna was working the early shift. She rode her bicycle to the streetcar depot at a quarter past four and was on the streetcar to Schwetzingen at four-thirty. On the way out, she’d told me, the streetcar was often empty. It only filled up on the return journey.

I got on at the second stop. The second car was empty; Hanna was standing in the first car close to the driver. I debated whether I should sit in the first or the second car, and decided on the second. It promised privacy, a hug, a kiss. But Hanna didn’t come. She must have seen that I had been waiting at the stop and had got on. That’s why the streetcar had stopped. But she stayed up with the driver, talking and joking. I could see them.

The streetcar passed one stop after another. No one was waiting to get on. The streets were empty. It was not yet sunrise, and under a colorless sky everything lay pale in the pale light: buildings, parked cars, the new leaves on the trees and first flowers on the shrubs, the gas tank, and the mountains in the distance. The streetcar was moving slowly; presumably the schedule was based both on stopping times and on the time between each stop, and so the speed of travel had to be slowed down when there were no actual stops. I was imprisoned in the slow-moving car. At first I sat, then I went and stood on the front platform and tried to impale Hanna with my stare; I wanted her to feel my eyes in her back. After some time she turned around and glanced at me. Then she went on talking to the driver. The journey continued. Once we’d passed Eppelheim the rails were no longer in the surface of the road, but laid alongside on a graveled embankment. The car accelerated, with the regular
clackety-clack
of a train. I knew that this stretch continued through various places and ended up in Schwetzingen. But I felt rejected, exiled from the real world in which people lived and worked and loved. It was as if I were condemned to ride forever in an empty car to nowhere.

Then I saw another stop, a shelter in the middle of open country. I pulled the cord the conductors used to signal the driver to stop or start. The streetcar stopped. Neither Hanna nor the driver looked back at me when they heard the bell. As I got off, I thought they were looking at me and laughing. But I wasn’t sure. Then the streetcar moved on, and I looked after it until it headed down into a dip and disappeared behind a hill. I was standing between the embankment and the road, there were fields around me, and fruit trees, and further on a nursery with greenhouses. The air was cool, and filled with the twittering of birds. Above the mountains the pale sky shone pink.

The trip on the streetcar had been like a bad dream. If I didn’t remember its epilogue so vividly, I would actually be tempted to think of it as a bad dream. Standing at the streetcar stop, hearing the birds and watching the sun come up was like an awakening. But waking from a bad dream does not necessarily console you. It can also make you fully aware of the horror you just dreamed, and even of the truth residing in that horror. I set off towards home in tears, and couldn’t stop crying until I reached Eppelheim.

I walked all the way back. I tried more than once to hitch a ride. When I was halfway there, the streetcar passed me. It was full. I didn’t see Hanna.

I was waiting for her on the landing outside her apartment at noon, miserable, anxious, and furious.

“Are you cutting school again?”

“I’m on vacation. What was going on this morning?”

She unlocked the door and I followed her into the apartment and into the kitchen.

“What do you mean, what was going on this morning?”

“Why did you behave as if you didn’t know me? I wanted . . .”

“I behaved as if I didn’t know you?” She turned around and stared at me coldly. “You didn’t want to know me. Getting into the second car when you could see I was in the first.”

“Why would I get up at four-thirty on my first day of vacation to ride to Schwetzingen? Just to surprise you, because I thought you’d be happy. I got into the second car . . .”

“You poor baby. Up at four-thirty, and on your vacation too.”

I had never seen her sarcastic before. She shook her head.

“How should I know why you’re going to Schwetzingen? How should I know why you choose not to know me? It’s your business, not mine. Would you leave now?”

I can’t describe how furious I was. “That’s not fair, Hanna. You knew, you had to know that I only got in the car to be with you. How can you believe I didn’t want to know you? If I didn’t, I would not have got on at all.”

“Oh, leave me alone. I already told you, what you do is your business, not mine.” She had moved so that the kitchen table was between us; everything in her look, her voice, and her gestures told me I was an intruder and should leave.

I sat down on the sofa. She had treated me badly and I had wanted to call her on it. But I hadn’t got through to her. Instead, she was the one who’d attacked me. And I became uncertain. Could she be right, not objectively, but subjectively? Could she have, must she have misunderstood me? Had I hurt her, unintentionally, against my will, but hurt her anyway?

“I’m sorry, Hanna. Everything went wrong. I didn’t mean to upset you, but it looks . . .”

“It looks? You think it looks like you upset me?
You
don’t have the power to upset me. And will you please go, finally? I’ve been working, I want to take a bath, and I want a little peace.” She looked at me commandingly. When I didn’t get up, she shrugged, turned around, ran water into the tub, and took off her clothes.

Then I stood up and left. I thought I was leaving for good. But half an hour later I was back at her door. She let me in, and I said the whole thing was my fault. I had behaved thoughtlessly, inconsiderately, unlovingly. I understood that she was upset. I understood that she wasn’t upset because I couldn’t upset her. I understood that I couldn’t upset her, but that she simply couldn’t allow me to behave that way to her. In the end, I was happy that she admitted I’d hurt her.

So she wasn’t as unmoved and uninvolved as she’d been making out, after all.

“Do you forgive me?”

She nodded.

“Do you love me?”

She nodded again. “The tub is still full. Come, I’ll bathe you.”

Later I wondered if she had left the water in the tub because she knew I would come back. If she had taken her clothes off because she knew I wouldn’t be able to get that out of my head and that it would bring me back. If she had just wanted to win a power game.

After we’d made love and were lying next to each other and I told her why I’d got into the second car and not the first, she teased me. “You want to do it with me in the streetcar too? Kid, kid!” It was as if the actual cause of our fight had been meaningless.

But its results had meaning. I had not only lost this fight. I had caved in after a short struggle when she threatened to send me away and withhold herself. In the weeks that followed I didn’t fight at all. If she threatened, I instantly and unconditionally surrendered. I took all the blame. I admitted mistakes I hadn’t made, intentions I’d never had. Whenever she turned cold and hard, I begged her to be good to me again, to forgive me and love me. Sometimes I had the feeling that she hurt herself when she turned cold and rigid. As if what she was yearning for was the warmth of my apologies, protestations, and entreaties. Sometimes I thought she just bullied me. But either way, I had no choice.

I couldn’t talk to her about it. Talking about our fights only led to more fighting. Once or twice I wrote her letters. But she didn’t react, and when I asked her about them, she said, “Are you starting that again?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

N
OT THAT
Hanna and I weren’t happy again after the first day of Easter vacation. We were never happier than in those weeks of April. As sham as our first fight and indeed all our fights were, everything that enlarged our ritual of reading, showering, making love, and lying beside each other did us good. Besides which, she had trumped herself with her accusation that I hadn’t wanted to know her. When I wanted to be seen with her, she couldn’t raise any fundamental objections. “So it was you who didn’t want to be seen with me”—she didn’t want to have to listen to that. So the week after Easter we set off by bike on a four-day trip to Wimpfen, Amorbach, and Miltenberg.

I don’t remember what I told my parents. That I was doing the trip with my friend Matthias? With a group? That I was going to visit a former classmate? My mother was probably worried, as usual, and my father probably found, as usual, that she should stop worrying. Hadn’t I just passed the class, when nobody thought I could do it?

While I was sick, I hadn’t spent any of my pocket money. But that wouldn’t be enough if I wanted to pay for Hanna as well. So I offered to sell my stamp collection to the stamp dealer next to the Church of the Holy Spirit. It was the only shop that said on the door that it purchased collections. The salesman looked through my album and offered me sixty marks. I made him look at my showpiece, a straight-edged Egyptian stamp with a pyramid that was listed in the catalog for four hundred marks. He shrugged. If I cared that much about my collection, maybe I should hang on to it. Was I even allowed to be selling it? What did my parents say about it? I tried to bargain. If the stamp with the pyramid wasn’t that valuable, I would just keep it. Then he could only give me thirty marks. So the stamp with the pyramid was valuable after all? In the end I got seventy marks. I felt cheated, but I didn’t care.

I was not the only one with itchy feet. To my amazement, Hanna started getting restless days before we left. She went this way and that over what to take, and packed and repacked the saddlebag and rucksack I had got hold of for her. When I wanted to show her the route I had worked out on the map, she didn’t want to look, or even hear about it. “I’m too excited already. You’ll have worked it out right anyway, kid.”

We set off on Easter Monday. The sun was shining and went on shining for four days. The mornings were cool and then the days warmed up, not too warm for cycling, but warm enough to have picnics. The woods were carpets of green, with yellow green, bright green, bottle green, blue green, and black green daubs, flecks, and patches. In the flatlands along the Rhine, the first fruit trees were already in bloom. In Odenwald the first forsythias were out.

Often we could ride side by side. Then we pointed out to each other the things we saw: the castle, the fisherman, the boat on the river, the tent, the family walking single file along the bank, the enormous American convertible with the top down. When we changed directions or roads, I had to ride ahead; she didn’t want to have to bother with such things. Otherwise, when the traffic was too heavy, she sometimes rode behind me and sometimes vice versa. Her bike had covered spokes, pedals, and gears, and she wore a blue dress with a big skirt that fluttered in her wake. It took me some time to stop worrying that the skirt would get caught in the spokes or the gears and she would fall off. After that, I liked watching her ride ahead of me.

How I had looked forward to the nights. I had imagined that we would make love, go to sleep, wake up, make love again, go to sleep again, wake up again and so on, night after night. But the only time I woke up again was the first night. She lay with her back to me, I leaned over her and kissed her, and she turned on her back, took me into her and held me in her arms. “Kid, kid.” Then I fell asleep on top of her. The other nights we slept right through, worn out by the cycling, the sun, and the wind. We made love in the mornings.

Hanna didn’t just let me be in charge of choosing our direction and the roads to take. I was the one who picked out the inns where we spent the nights, registered us as mother and son while she just signed her name, and selected our food from the menu for both of us. “I like not having to worry about a thing for a change.”

The only fight we had took place in Amorbach. I had woken up early, dressed quietly, and crept out of the room. I wanted to bring up breakfast and also see if I could find a flower shop open where I could get a rose for Hanna. I had left a note on the night table. “Good morning! Bringing breakfast, be right back,” or words to that effect. When I returned, she was standing in the room, trembling with rage and white-faced.

“How could you go just like that?”

I put down the breakfast tray with the rose on it and wanted to take her in my arms. “Hanna.”

“Don’t touch me.” She was holding the narrow leather belt that she wore around her dress; she took a step backwards and hit me across the face with it. My lip split and I tasted blood. It didn’t hurt. I was horrorstruck. She swung again.

But she didn’t hit me. She let her arm fall, dropped the belt, and burst into tears. I had never seen her cry. Her face lost all its shape. Wide-open eyes, wide-open mouth, eyelids swollen after the first tears, red blotches on her cheeks and neck. Her mouth was making croaking, throaty sounds like the toneless cry when we made love. She stood there looking at me through her tears.

I should have taken her in my arms. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know what to do. At home none of us cried like that. We didn’t hit, not even with our hands, let alone a leather belt. We talked. But what was I supposed to say now?

She took two steps towards me, beat her fists against me, then clung to me. Now I could hold her. Her shoulders trembled, she knocked her forehead against my chest. Then she gave a deep sigh and snuggled into my arms.

“Shall we have breakfast?” She let go of me. “My God, kid, look at you.” She fetched a wet towel and cleaned my mouth and chin. “And your shirt is covered with blood.” She took off the shirt and my pants, and we made love.

“What was the matter? Why did you get so angry?” We were lying side by side, so satiated and content that I thought everything would be cleared up now.

“What was the matter, what was the matter—you always ask such silly questions. You can’t just leave like that.”

“But I left you a note . . .”

“Note?”

I sat up. The note was no longer on the night table where I had left it. I got to my feet, and searched next to the night table, and underneath, and under the bed and in it. I couldn’t find it. “I don’t understand. I wrote you a note saying I was going to get breakfast and I’d be right back.”

“You did? I don’t see any note.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I’d love to believe you. But I don’t see any note.”

We didn’t go on fighting. Had a gust of wind come and taken the note and carried it away to God knows where? Had it all been a misunderstanding, her fury, my split lip, her wounded face, my helplessness?

Should I have gone on searching, for the note, for the cause of Hanna’s fury, for the source of my helplessness? “Read me something, kid!” She cuddled up to me and I picked up Eichendorff’s
Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing
and continued from where I had left off.
Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing
was easy to read aloud, easier than
Emilia Galotti
and
Intrigues and Love.
Again, Hanna followed everything eagerly. She liked the scattering of poems. She liked the disguises, the mix-ups, the complications and pursuits which the hero gets tangled up in in Italy. At the same time, she held it against him that he’s a good-for-nothing who doesn’t achieve anything, can’t do anything, and doesn’t want to besides. She was torn in all directions; hours after I stopped reading, she was still coming up with questions. “Customs collector—wasn’t much of a job?”

Once again the report on our fight has become so detailed that I would like to report on our happiness. The fight made our relationship more intimate. I had seen her crying. The Hanna who could cry was closer to me than the Hanna who was only strong. She began to show a soft side that I had never seen before. She kept looking at my split lip, until it healed, and stroking it gently.

We made love a different way. For a long time I had abandoned myself to her and her power of possession. Then I had also learned to take possession of her. On this trip and afterwards, we no longer merely took possession of each other.

I have a poem that I wrote back them. As poetry, it’s worthless. At the time I was in love with Rilke and Benn, and I can see that I wanted to imitate them both. But I can also see how close we were at the time. Here is the poem:

When we open ourselves

you yourself to me and I myself to you,

when we submerge

you into me and I into you

when we vanish

into me you and into you I

Then

am I me

and you are you