Stella

by Siegfried Lenz

  It was at this time that I first dreamed of Stella, a dream that made me think. In the dream I arrived late at school, the others were already sitting there, and turned to me grinning, smirking and expectant; when I was sitting down they made me look at the board. There were printed words in block letters, in English: PLEASE COME BACK, DEAR STELLA, CHRISTIAN IS WAITING FOR YOU. I rushed to the board and wiped the words away. The smug pleasure on their faces told me that they thought they had won a game.

  Waiting, waiting for your return; although I sometimes thought I was doomed to wait, and I was used to it by now, it seemed to me particularly difficult in Stella’s absence. I took guests at the Seaview Hotel out in the afternoons in our Katarina, almost always to Bird Island, where a small landing stage had been built. I guided my passengers around the island, showed them the bird warden’s hut, told them about the old man who liked his solitary life and sometimes shared it with a domesticated seagull that had once been injured by a shot and couldn’t fly anymore.

  Even as the man got in and paid for the trip, he seemed familiar to me, and later—he found himself a seat in the stern—I was almost sure of it: he was that Colin whose photo I’d seen in Stella’s room. He was wearing a linen jacket over a checkered shirt, he bore a remarkable similarity to Colin, and only when he spoke, turning to the stout lady sitting next to him and explaining something to her with a wealth of gestures—probably what to do when a ship capsizes—did I begin to doubt it, although only fleetingly, because as soon as he looked keenly at me in a rather self-conscious way I was sure he was Colin, and he had turned up here in the hope of seeing Stella. “Stella with love, Colin.” He helped the older passengers to get out on the landing stage, and during our tour of the island he asked more questions than anyone else. He told us he collected gulls’ eggs, and would have liked to find a few here, but it wasn’t the season.

  It was not in the hut but on the tree trunk that had been washed up, where we were sitting watching the waves coming in on the beach, that he began to suffer from breathlessness; first he cleared his throat, then he put his head back and gasped for air, clutching his neck, and fighting for breath with violent swallowing movements. He was looking at me now not keenly, but in need of help, and he searched his pockets, patting them to find something.

  “Aren’t you well?” I asked.

  “My spray,” he said, adding, “Sanastmax, I left my spray in the hotel.”

  I asked the passengers, but not many of them wanted to return yet, so I got him on board and took him back to the hotel. The concierge led the man, who was still breathing heavily, to a sofa and asked what he needed. “It’s on the bedside table, my inhaler is on the bedside table.” The concierge took a key from the board and quickly climbed the stairs. Alone with the man who looked like Colin, and whom I had momentarily taken for Colin, I decided to find out for certain; I drew up a chair and sat down beside him, dismissing the thanks he was straining to express. I told him about our party, the Hirtshafen beach party, saying he could have joined in if he’d only been here a little earlier, people had come from all over the place, I said, even my teachers didn’t want to miss the Hirtshafen beach party. It didn’t interest him, he didn’t want to know any more about it, but I still had a feeling that he sometimes cast me an inquiring glance. However, the concierge settled the matter. When he came back with the inhaler he said, “There was a phone call for you, Dr. Cranz, a call from Hanover. The car is coming tomorrow.” Something about me seemed to have intrigued him earlier, but his mind wasn’t on me now.

  Back at home I reread Stella’s letter, I read it several times, and thinking of the bird warden’s hut I decided to write to her, I simply had to. Without any hesitation I wrote, “Dearest Stella,” and told her at once how dreary everything here in Hirtshafen was without her, “too many old people, boring boat trips, that smell of fish all the time, and the wind never changes, it’s always a cool easterly.” And then I told her about my idea. As I wrote I felt more and more enthusiastic, even happy about it. I outlined my plan for the two of us. “Imagine, Stella: we could move into the bird warden’s hut, just you and me, I’ll put up a notice on the landing stage saying: No Landing Here. I’ll repair the roof and put a lock on the door, collect firewood for the stove, I’ll buy some cans of food and dried goods from our marine stores. We won’t go short of anything.” Finally there was the prospect of swimming together, and best of all, from the moment we woke up we’d be there for each other. I thought of a PS, and added: “Maybe we could learn how to live together.” At first I was going to sign it in English with “Yours sincerely,” but then I decided on “Yours truly, Christian.” I put the letter in an envelope and slipped it into the English grammar textbook, for later.

  While I was still thinking about the letter, my father called me downstairs, a brief call in a voice used for giving orders. He was standing at the open window with his binoculars in his hand, and he pointed out to the bay. “Take a look at that, Christian.” Our barge was drifting there, and not far from it our tug Endurance. The two vessels were connected by a line that was not taut but hung loose, dipping into the water. Looking through the binoculars, I could see that our barge was carrying a heavy load of rocks, I could also make out Frederik on the tug, standing at the stern and manipulating a boathook, pushing and shoving.

  “Come on,” said my father, and we went down to the landing stage where our inflatable was lying. I took us out and we tied up to the tug.

  My father was soon up to speed. Frederik hardly needed to tell him that the tug had run into a fish trap unmarked by flags and become entangled before he was handing me a diving mask and knife. “You go down and take a look.” The tug’s propeller, turning furiously, had worked its way into the trap, pulled it over itself, and was now crippled, strangulated and with part of the trap hanging loose from it. Without surfacing to tell them what the scene looked like underwater, I set to work with the knife right away. There was a mackerel caught in the net; it had shot in like a torpedo and choked to death. I cut it out and went on carving away at the hard, apparently waxed cord of the trap, coming up for air now and then. If our knife had had a serrated edge, I could have freed the propeller from the tangled trap more easily, but as things were I had to push and press the knife hard until I finally managed to cut the tangles away. My father and Frederik praised my work, consulted briefly, and agreed on what to do next.

  The engine of our tug was reliable. Slowly, very slowly, we got under way. The slack line to the barge rose from the water, stretched taut, and there was enough traction on it for the barge to move, turn, and follow the course of the tug. I thought we’d be taking this last load to the mouth of the harbor, to add to the rocks shoring up the breakwater, but my father had decided against that. We threw out the anchor before reaching the breakwater, Frederik went to the winch, and as usual raised rock after rock into the air, swung them overboard, and let them sink. He didn’t send me down to check the way the stones were lying; it was enough for my father to deposit them on the bottom there so that, as he said, they would break the first onslaught of waves coming in, thus checking their full impact on the breakwater at the harbor mouth. Our work didn’t immediately seem to be having much effect, but when we’d sunk almost the whole cargo of rocks, the movement of the waves coming in changed; they rose and broke, tumbling into one another, leveled out, rippled, and lost so much strength that they dispersed as if exhausted, without the strength to gather force and rise high again.

  A rowboat came into view near Bird Island, moving with slow oar strokes and apparently making for Hirtshafen; it unexpectedly turned in our direction, and the oarsman waved a couple of times, indicating that he wanted to tie up to us. My father lowered his binoculars. “It’s Mathiessen, the old bird warden,” he said, and motioned to me to help the man on board. Falling easily into conversation, he and my father spoke each other’s first names and shook hands. Wilhelm? Andreas? was their form of greeting. They were old friends. Over a rum, they aske
d one another about their families, their future plans, and their health, and that was when I learned that Mathiessen had finally retired. “I’m packing it in, Wilhelm, it’s my arthritis. The place will be unmanned for now.” He had just been to his hut for the last time, he said, to fetch a few personal items. He reported that over the last year not much had happened. They talked about a naval rescue exercise out at sea in which a sailor had died, and then my father told me to tow Mathiessen back to Hirtshafen. He sat in the inflatable beside me, his pipe in his crooked, arthritic fingers as if he were defending it from attack, and closed his eyes now and then. When I asked him what was going to happen to his hut now, he didn’t seem surprised, just shrugged his shoulders. Was he planning to sell it? I asked, to which he replied, “Such things aren’t for sale, Christian.”

  “Is it going to stay there, then?”

  “Might as well, so far as I’m concerned. It could come in useful, a place for someone to go, take shelter there.”

  “Shelter?”

  “From bad weather, yes.”

  “People don’t easily lose their way and end up there.”

  “Don’t be so sure, there’s been folk in the hut not long ago. Could be they wanted shelter, could be they just wanted time alone together. I notice that sort of thing right away, I can feel it.” He nodded, as if to confirm what he said.

  “And does anything ever go missing?” I asked.

  “Never,” he said. “I’ve never yet known anything to go missing, and that makes me think. Sometimes people leave something behind, a handkerchief, a half-eaten chocolate bar, a barette for a woman’s hair, but those who want to be alone there have never taken anything, boy, that’s the way it is.”

  He had cast out a trolling line as we crossed the water, a long line with two wobblers on it. At the harbor entrance he pulled it in and was pleased to have caught two garfish. After I had secured his boat he gave me the two fish, saying, “Take them home, Christian, I expect your mother will pickle them in aspic, garfish in aspic, that’s the thing to do with them. See you, then,” he added, clapping me on the shoulder by way of good-bye.

  The photo of Stella and me among the sandcastles on the beach had been in my room for several days, and my mother didn’t seem to have noticed it, or at least she didn’t examine it for any length of time or ask questions. She did once turn it toward the light, however, and looked at it inquiringly—that was the day when I was making my way through one of Orwell’s essays. She was about to put it down again when something about it suddenly struck her. She sat down by my window, brought the photograph close to her eyes, and looked at me and then back at the photo. The way her gaze switched from it to me and back again, I could tell she was trying to find something out that she didn’t yet know. A clouded expression appeared on her face; she was obviously registering the fact that she no longer knew everything about me—as she always used to—and in a certain sense she had lost me. She always wanted to know everything, no doubt because when I was a little boy she had wanted to spare me disappointments and pain and mistakes. She spent ages looking at the photo in silence; I couldn’t suppose that it gave away anything much, and was about to say something, when she finally commented, in her usual thoughtful way, “She looks older than you, Christian. The woman in the photo beside you, I mean.”

  “She’s my English teacher,” I said. “We met by chance on the beach.”

  “Pretty woman,” said my mother, adding, “Does she have any children?”

  “As far as I know she’s not married.”

  “A very pretty woman,” my mother repeated.

  After that observation, I ventured to suggest, “If you don’t mind, I’ll bring her home for coffee some day.”

  “Your teacher?” asked my mother, surprised.

  “Why not?” I said. “I’m sure she’ll come if I invite her, she’s very nice.”

  “I can see she is,” said my mother. “And you like each other. I can see that too.” Without another word, she put the photo back in its place, caressed my hair, and left me alone.

  How she knew more than she was letting on was her own secret. Or if she didn’t know, she guessed, she sensed it. They were talking about me in bed, and I could hear them through the door, which happened to be not quite shut. They had come home late.

  My father hadn’t noticed the photo yet, and at first it didn’t seem to surprise him that I had a picture of Stella and myself on my desk. “Oh, come on, Jutta,” he said, “these things happen all the time. Every boy wants to admire someone, and it’s all the more likely if this teacher is pretty.”

  “If only it were just admiration,” said my mother. “I’ve nothing against admiration, but it’s more than that with Christian, believe me, it’s more than that.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “The way they’re sitting happily on the beach, hand in hand, he’s hand in hand with his teacher, and the way they’re looking at each other. You’d think they’d just been waiting for one another.”

  “Maybe Christian took a bit of a fancy to her, that’ll be all. I know his teacher; she’s very good-looking.”

  “In that picture you’d think they were about to fall into each other’s arms any moment. I really do think you should take this seriously.”

  “Christian is eighteen, Jutta.”

  “Yes, well,” said my mother, “and this teacher is considerably older.”

  “So? A difference in age is sometimes an advantage.”

  I couldn’t help smiling to myself when, after a pause, he said in a different and amused voice, “We both discussed that once ourselves, a long time ago.”

  Even after this reference to some shared experience of theirs, my mother’s mind didn’t seem to have been set at rest. She mentioned Christine, my friend at school, who had called several times to invite me to a barbecue and always went away disappointed. My father took his time before replying. “Sometimes you just don’t know what hit you, you’re defenseless.” I instinctively sat up in bed—I’d never heard my father talk like that before. I was thinking of opening the door a little wider, but I didn’t, because it seemed that was all they had to say, and they wished each other good night.

  It won’t surprise you, Stella, that I picked up our photo first thing the next morning to look for signs of what my mother thought she had seen in it, but I couldn’t see anything to confirm her suspicions or guesses.

  As if it would bring me closer to Stella, I went back to Orwell’s essays. I admit that I didn’t know the background well enough to understand everything he was saying, but what he wrote about the critics’ reception of Animal Farm made me think. He had expected his book to be understood as a parable about the rise and the theory and practice of all dictatorships—with one exception: the Russian dictatorship, which mustn’t be exposed to comparisons showing it in a bad light. I decided to talk to Stella not just about that but also—like Orwell himself—about the freedom of the press in extreme situations, for instance during a war. I imagined all of us discussing the subject in class, and all the students being invited to give their opinions. That never happened.

  And I remembered the time recently when sleepy little Hirtshafen woke up; all of a sudden it rose to the rank of a conference center. Fisheries experts from seven nations met here to discuss the projects closest to their hearts, come to an agreement on them, and most important of all to work out proposals to present to their governments. The experts—two of them of ministerial rank—stayed at the Seaview Hotel, and a green VW transporter van decked out with flags stood outside the hotel day and night.

  I could never have dreamed that, during this event, Stella would acknowledge me publicly for once, not with words but with a gesture. She had been asked to act as interpreter for the Scottish expert, standing in for his simultaneous translator, who had come down with the flu. Pleased, but a little apprehensive, she told me about this assignment. She was apprehensive because, she said, she had to confess she didn’t know enough ab
out fish species. “You see, Christian, there’s always a chance to learn something new.” And she made sure she knew the English names of gurnard, flounder, and pike perch. Herring and mackerel in English were very much the same as their German counterparts and presented no problems. The reception to mark the opening of the conference surprised me for more than one reason: the fisheries experts from seven nations greeted one another at length, as exuberantly as if they had really missed each other and the joy of their reunion called for particularly strong expression. All that hand shaking, clapping one another on the back, hugs and exclamations: you’d have thought it was a long-anticipated family party in progress on the terrace of the Seaview Hotel.

  When the delegation began moving into the large conference room—Stella had asked me to be there as well, saying “Just come along and listen”—I followed a couple walking arm in arm. Both had badges with Norwegian names pinned to their lapels, showing a leaping fish, probably a sea trout. Stella too was wearing a badge with her name on it. Before I entered the conference room I felt a firm grip on my upper arm. I was taken aside, and a tall security man asked me, in a not unfriendly tone, “Are you a delegate?” As I did not reply at once, he signaled to a colleague to join him. The second security man took my wrist and, with the words “Don’t give us any trouble now!” was about to lead me away to a corner full of house plants. Stella had seen this episode, and came purposefully toward us. In a tone of voice I had never heard from her before, she tapped her own name badge and told the two men sharply, “This is my adviser, so kindly let go of him at once.” You took my hand, and the two men looked at each other undecidedly, but they did let go of me, and we walked into the big room as if we belonged together. I found a chair in the front row with a good view of the stage, and Stella climbed up on it to join her Scottish delegate, who sported side-whiskers and looked relaxed.