It wasn’t my idea to visit Stella in the hospital. Georg Bisanz suggested it to me at the end of the day’s classes. He knew the visiting hours; he’d been to the hospital several times to see his grandmother, who, he said, had to learn to walk for the second time and was waiting for her hair to grow again.
We set off, four of us, and when the nurse discovered that we wanted to visit our teacher she smiled and told us the floor and the room number. “You know your way around here,” she said to Georg. Stella was in a room by herself. We went in quietly and slowly approached her bed. The others let me go first; an observer might have thought they were trying to hide behind me. As we came in, Stella turned her head. At first she didn’t seem to know who we were. No pleasure or surprise or even confusion showed on her face, she just stared and stared, and only when I went right up to her and took her hand, which was lying on the covers, did she raise her eyes and look at me in amazement. I thought she whispered my name. Georg Bisanz was the first of us to pull himself together. He felt a need to say something, and looking down at Stella he said, “Dear Ms. Petersen,” and then fell silent—as if he had just jumped the first hurdle. Then, after a moment, he went on. “We heard about your accident, dear Ms. Petersen, and we’ve come to give you our good wishes. And we knew you like candied fruits, so we’ve brought you some of your favorite nibbles”—that was what he said, “favorite nibbles”—“instead of flowers. They’re from all of us.”
Stella didn’t react to what he said, not even with her familiar understanding smile. Little Hans Hansen, who wore short pants and striped socks even in winter, thought it was up to him to say something as well, and very solemnly offered to help her if she needed anything. Stella had only to say what he could do for her, said Hans, “just a word, Ms. Petersen, and it will all be done.” Stella didn’t react to this offer either; she lay there looking abstracted, deep in thought, and I sensed that even I wouldn’t be able to get through to her, at least not as long as the others were present. I wanted to be alone with her more and more urgently, more and more strongly.
I don’t know what made Georg Bisanz think of singing something, her favorite song, the one she had taught us, “The Miller of Dee.” But anyway, Georg started singing and we all joined in, suddenly finding ourselves back in the classroom with Stella standing in front of us, cheerfully conducting, encouraging us to try our voices out. We sang in loud and probably fervent tones. It was the only song we knew in English; she had sung it to us herself several times. Per Fabricius had liked her voice so much he had wanted her to sing us other songs, including modern hits, he thought “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” would be a good one. While we were singing we looked at her, hoping to see some kind of response, but her face gave nothing away, and I was trying to get used to her inaccessibility when something happened that cheered me. Tears appeared on your face, Stella. She didn’t move her lips, she didn’t raise her hand, but tears suddenly appeared from her eyes. They came when we reached the bit where the self-satisfied miller says, “I care for nobody, no, not I / If nobody cares for me.”
Perhaps because he had heard our singing, the young doctor who had met us when Stella was checked in entered the room. He nodded briefly to us and bent over Stella, put two fingers on her throat, and then said to us, “I’ll ask you young gentlemen to let my patient rest. Rest is what she needs.” That was all, he said no more, although I think some of us may have hoped he would. We moved away, and as the door opened we had a brief glimpse of Georg Bisanz saying hello to his grandmother and talking to her for a moment, cheerfully and encouragingly, the way you talk to old people.
I left my classmates; I didn’t go home, I went a long way around back to the hospital and sat on one of the benches donated by former patients, commemorated with their nameplates. I sat on the bench donated by Ruprecht Wildgans and waited. I was waiting for the young doctor. I wanted to find out the most important facts about Stella from him. Visiting time was coming to an end; it was interesting to see the people walking out through the swinging doors, still showing how they felt about seeing their relations. Instinctively I imagined what they had seen, what they had discovered, that old lady with the hard, reserved face, the elegantly dressed young woman holding hands with a little girl who was all dolled up but began hopping and skipping as soon as she was out in the road, the young man in a hurry running to the car park, the large and obviously Turkish family—I thought I saw three generations of them—weighed down with baskets and bags. A naval officer marched confidently out through the doors too. The doctor I was waiting for didn’t appear. I’d had practice in waiting. Nothing showed at the window of Stella’s room. I thought of a wedding, the first time I’d been to one was when Aunt Trude, my mother’s younger sister, married the owner of a fast-food kiosk who made his living by selling sandwiches and sausages and refreshments, and my father, at the bridal couple’s request, made a speech at the reception. What he said culminated in something that he meant as good advice: “If two people want to live together, they have to agree from the beginning who cleans the house and who does the cooking.” I couldn’t get my head around the idea that this could also apply to Stella and me.
Two nurses came through the swinging doors in their uniforms, followed by an old man who filled his pipe as soon as he was out in the fresh air and lit it, hastily, like an addict. He puffed hard, looked around, and walked toward me. With a gesture, he asked if he could sit down beside me; he read the name of Ruprecht Wildgans aloud, shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Well, why not?” and then sat down. He showed me the pipe. “They won’t let you smoke in there.”
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
There was something challenging in the way he looked at me. He seemed to be wondering whether I was someone he could talk to, and I couldn’t help noticing that he seemed under pressure and wanted to get something off his chest. Asking no questions himself, and without any introduction, he said abruptly, “They don’t know whether my son will pull through, they can’t be sure, that’s what his doctor said just now.”
“Is he sick?”
“Sick?” he repeated, as if he were thinking the matter over. “Well, you could say he’s sick. Sick in the head, I’d call it.” He drew on his pipe and groaned, in bitterness, in despair, and confessing to the misfortune that had made him need to talk, he said, “He tried to do away with himself.”
I didn’t understand what he meant at first, but after thinking for a moment he explained further. “We’ll never understand how he could have done it, he shot himself in the chest, wanted to hit his heart, but he just missed it.” The old man shook his head as if warding off what he was thinking. He bit his lips, hesitated, but then went on. His misfortune seemed to force him to talk. He couldn’t grasp the fact, he said, that anyone would try to kill himself these days because he hadn’t passed his exam, a gifted, popular boy who knew, or ought to have known, how much everyone had done for his future. “Two hundred years ago, maybe, but these days?” To take his mind off it, he turned to me and assumed the right—a justifiable right—to question me, he wanted to know what brought me here. “How about you? Is one of your family in there?”
“My teacher,” I said, adding, “Some of the others in my class and I went to visit our teacher. She had a bad accident.”
“A car crash?”
“No, in the harbor,” I said. “In a storm. She was thrown against the pier.”
He thought about that, perhaps trying to work out just what had happened, and said, “Our teachers, ah, yes,” and then, “I expect you think highly of her?”
“More than highly,” I said, whereupon he looked at me thoughtfully, but seemed satisfied with my answer.
I guessed why he suddenly left me without a word of thanks or farewell when he stood to follow the two men in white coats who had just come through the swinging doors. They were walking toward a plain annex building, deep in conversation. He shuffled after them, plainly intending to ask for confirmation of his h
opes. The doctor I was waiting for myself still didn’t appear. I’ve had practice in waiting.
As the contents of my cigarette pack shrank I thought of Stella. It was clear to me that at school we’d have to wait some time for her to return. They had found a substitute for Stella already, for the first class, an Englishman from Lessing High School. His name in itself aroused lively interest in the class; this substitute teacher was called Harold Fitzgibbon. He was not slender, not one of those tough, wiry Englishmen you admire in TV films; Mr. Fitzgibbon was chubby, with short, sturdy legs, and his red-cheeked face invited you to trust him. We were all pleased to hear him say good morning in English, and I was silently grateful to him for mentioning Ms. Petersen’s accident—“her sad misfortune”—at the beginning of the lesson, and saying he hoped she would recover quickly. Familiar with the homework Stella had assigned in her last English class, he praised Orwell’s Animal Farm, and told us that at first no publisher had been prepared to bring it out, but then it was published by the firm of Warburg and became a huge success. Mr. Fitzgibbon said how good a choice of a book it was for us, Stella, and I couldn’t help thinking he was congratulating us on having you as a teacher.
I was surprised when he wanted us to tell him what we knew about England. Stella had pointed out that the Germans were particularly anxious to find out what people thought about their country, whereas we’d wait in vain for any English person to ask, “How do you like my country?” But anyway, our substitute did ask that question—we never found out how he assessed our general knowledge of England, but what he heard must have given him plenty to think about. I still remember his surprise, his slight smile, his approval when we replied to his question: an ancient kingdom, Manchester United, Lord Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar, the mother of democracy, a passion for betting, the Whigs and the Tories, judges wearing wigs, gardens—and Peter Paustian went on about gardens, having been to the British Isles once with his parents—and in addition a sense of fair play and colonies that had now been given up. Georg Bisanz seemed to have been listening to all this indifferently, unwilling to take part in the question-and-answer game, but then he suddenly said, in his usual firm voice, “Shakespeare.” Mr. Fitzgibbon paused in his walk up and down the room past the tables, looked at Georg, and said, “Yes, indeed, Shakespeare is the greatest writer we have, perhaps the greatest in the world.”
During recess he was our sole subject of conversation. We talked about his looks, the way he spoke—his English accent when he spoke in German was easy to imitate, and several of us had a go. A good many people wanted to have him as their teacher for the next English class, too. I suppose no one thought then that you would never come back.
Georg Bisanz, who had lavish supplies of pocket money—he must have got some from his grandmother—could afford more than the rest of us. That Sunday he was sitting alone at one of the wooden tables outside the kiosk. He had ordered meatballs and fruit juice, and when he saw me he invited me to come and share his snack, as he called it. Not only that: he had something to tell me, he said. He had been to the hospital, and after the usual short visit to his grandmother he decided to look in on Ms. Petersen. There was a notice on the door of her room saying, “Please do not enter Room 102 without permission.” Georg did not comply with the notice; he opened the door of Stella’s room and stood there in the doorway. “She was dead, Christian, she was lying there with her mouth open and her eyes closed. No doubt about it, if you ask me. She’s dead.”
I couldn’t listen to him any longer. I set out at once, hitched a ride part of the way, went on and on, wouldn’t let anyone stop me, not even the hospital porter who came out of his glass cubicle and shouted after me, or the ward nurse who signaled to me not to go any farther. I knew Stella’s room number, even at that moment I could rely on my memory. I opened the door without knocking. The bed was empty, the mattress and bedspread and pillows were lying on the floor, and there was an empty vase on the bedside table. The chair for visitors still stood beside the bed, as if it was waiting for me. I sat down and wept, I hardly realized that I was shedding tears, at least not to start with. I became aware of it only when the tears fell on my hand and my face began to burn. I didn’t notice the ward nurse coming in, and she must have been standing behind me for a while before she laid a hand on my shoulder—ah, that hand on my shoulder. She didn’t sound angry with me, asked no questions, didn’t want to know why I was there. She let me go on weeping out of sympathy, or because her experience told her that there was nothing else to be done at such a moment. When she did speak, it was quietly, considerately. She said, “Our patient has died. She’s already been taken downstairs.” As I said nothing, she added, “And who knows what she may have been spared? She had very severe injuries. She was flung right against the stone wall of the pier.” With a consoling gesture, she left me alone.
Looking at that empty vase, I thought of Stella’s father. I saw him before me, sitting among his sunflowers in the little garden, and I decided to take him the news myself. At the same time I felt that I had to be where Stella had lived.
He knew already, he didn’t seem very surprised to see me there in front of him. “Come in,” he murmured, and went on changing his clothes, not bothered by my watching him—just as it didn’t bother my father if anyone was there when he was dressing or changing. Stella’s father took my hand for a moment and pointed to the bottle of rum, showing no interest in whether I helped myself or not. Once he had put on the pants of his dark suit—close-fitting, old-fashioned drainpipe trousers—he held the jacket up to the light, and buffed and rubbed it a little before putting it on. Perhaps I didn’t hear him properly, but when he said something at last, it seemed to be “My little squirrel”—he must have called Stella his little squirrel when they were alone together. He disappeared into Stella’s room for a while, opened drawers there, looked through school exercise books, and when he came back he gave me a letter. I recognized Stella’s handwriting on the envelope. He apologized for not giving me the letter before; his daughter, he said—the old radio operator was calling her just “my daughter” now—had sent it while she was away, asking him to deliver it personally if possible. Then he apologized again and said he was going to the hospital now; they had asked him to come.
I didn’t read your letter in front of him, or in the garden or in the road. I knew it was your very last letter, so I had to read it alone in my room at home. Through the envelope, I could feel that there was a postcard inside. It was a photograph of a landscape, inviting people to visit a museum of oceanography, and showed a dolphin leaping into the air, to come down on top of a wave. There was just a single sentence written in English on the blank side of the card: “Love, Christian, is a warm wave bearing us up,” and then there was her signature, Stella. I put the postcard beside our picture, propped against my English grammar book, and felt an instinctive pang at the idea that I had missed something, or had been cheated of something, that I had wanted more than anything else in the world.
I often repeated that sentence. I felt that it was a confession, a promise, and an answer to the question that I had thought of asking but never did.
I repeated it as I looked at our photograph, and that evening as well, when a sharp shower of rain pattered against my window, a dry pattering, rain that wasn’t rain: Georg Bisanz was standing outside, picking up another handful of sand to throw against my windowpane. As soon as he saw me standing there he pointed to himself and me, and I beckoned to him to come up. Georg, her favorite student. He didn’t stop to look around and see what my room was like, he felt he had to tell me what he had just found out, and it concerned me in particular. Since it was his job to carry the exercise books home for Stella, he knew her father. Georg had met him down by the navigation marks, he said, and they hadn’t said much to each other, but now he knew that Stella was going to be buried at sea. The two of them, the old radio operator and his daughter, had discussed all such things with each other long ago, and they both wanted to be
buried at sea when their time came. So now that was to be her funeral. “Will you be coming?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
The undertakers who arranged burials at sea had their place down by the little river mouth, a plain, windowless brick building where they worked, father and son, wearing black even in the mornings, with expressions of professional sympathy on their faces. Yes, they could tell us at once when Ms. Petersen’s funeral was to be. They waddled as they moved, and I couldn’t help it, but they looked to me like two penguins. She was to be laid to rest on Friday morning. When I said, rather too quickly, that I wasn’t a family member, one of the penguins explained, with impeccable regret, that the boat would hold only a limited number of mourners, it was a shallow vessel, a converted landing craft, and as a great many mourners had already reserved—“reserved” was the word he used—including the entire school staff, they were fully booked. That was how he put it: “fully booked.”
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