Text for You

by Sofie Cramer

  Clara shows him a few photos of her moon series on her phone. After seeing them he grabs her thin and deeply bewildered-looking face with both hands, kisses her on both cheeks, and declares: “Bambina, I’m excited. You’re such a fine girl. I believe in you.”

  Then he waves Clara and Katja over to join him at his table and sample a freshly prepared dish of crème brûlée.

  When Clara gets back home she feels like she’s going to burst. But still she’s so happy and motivated by all the encouragement from Katja and Beppo that she feels like she could get right to work.

  As she’s thinking about it, she also adds Ben to her group of supporters and starts putting together a long list in her head. What are all the things I still want to achieve in my life? she asks herself. What have I always wanted to try? When I get to the end of my life, what projects will I regret not having at least tried to make happen?

  Clara makes herself a cup of tea and reflects. For so many years now she has dreamed of developing a painting style that’s unmistakably her own. She wants to move people with her art, to speak to them; she wants to make the kind of work that people would want to hang in their living room. Whenever she lines up the canvases in the long hallway and silently takes in the impression they make on her, Clara is filled with an incredible feeling of happiness. At such moments, everything else around her is unimportant and far away. She is at peace with herself and the world.

  Maybe she should think seriously about a career as a painter? Clara senses a lot of positive energy all of a sudden.

  My moon paintings are just the beginning, she thinks. I can feel it!

  Now all of a sudden even her worries about financial security start to seem very small. She just can’t wait to make all her new ideas a reality. But would she really be able to support herself by selling paintings? From exhibiting and doing commission work?

  Niklas assured her that she could keep working for him on a freelance basis for a while, which would help her avoid a sudden drop-off in income. She would also be able to keep using the agency’s offices for a while after she left. Niklas seemed already to have done a lot of thinking about how he could best help to make the transition easier for her. And if he actually meant his offer in earnest, Clara could save a lot of money on printing costs for business cards and mailers, establishing a web presence, and other promotional steps.

  She already has her first official commission: Tonight Beppo ordered a handful of watercolors of Lüneburg scenes that he can present to his customers as surprise gifts.

  This in turn gave Katja the idea of Clara offering to do affordably priced commission work on an individual basis. She said that the market for tasteful nude photographs of pregnant women and new couples was booming. So maybe it could work with paintings, too.

  Clara thinks: If I approach this the right way and manage to make a name for myself, at least in the Lüneburg and Hamburg area, I might even be able to fill a very specialized niche in the market. Plus she could also go looking for customers on the internet. The customer sends a photo over email, and just like that she’s got something on which to base a portrait, a nude, or some other personalized gift.

  Katja had also suggested that she start building her network and really make an effort to reach out to people with similar interests on local networking sites like XING. She herself had been able to drum up a lot of work through such connections. More than that, by the time they were on the second bottle of prosecco Katja was almost bursting with excitement as the idea suddenly came to her of also offering her own clients an expanded portfolio. Sure, she could expand her standard package of services as an interior designer to include specific recommendations of ways her clients could use a few color accents to add a very personal and unique note to their space—for example by displaying Clara’s individually crafted works of art. Naturally Katja had immediately developed the idea further, which is to say she started thinking about all the great things they could do with the extra income. But then Clara did feel obliged to dampen her euphoria a bit. After all, she can’t take on everything at once; first she needs a well-thought-out plan for getting started as a freelance artist and graphic designer.

  For that reason the first thing on the docket now is to take a thorough inventory of what material she has on hand. Clara has a feeling that she has a massive reorganization effort ahead of her. When she and Ben moved into this apartment, she’d had to stick all her boxes and paintings way in the back of the long, narrow storage space in the basement. She never imagined that there would ever be a reason for needing to access them more frequently than their tools, flower pots, or spare bike parts.

  And all of a sudden curiosity takes hold of her. It’s late, sure, but why not go down there right now?

  Clara grabs her sweater and the key to the basement and marches off down the stairs.

  But when she steps into the somewhat musty storage room, she suddenly feels a sharp pain in her chest. There’s Ben’s bike. Well, of course, she thinks, trying to calm herself down; it’s not like it was going to just vanish into thin air. He had ridden it all over Lüneburg and the surrounding countryside—and he’d been riding it even more often in the time just before his death. Only now does it occur to Clara that maybe he had had to leave her car behind so often in the last few months of his life because he was using drugs more frequently than ever before.

  Clara had also forgotten the basketball—here it is rolling up to her feet. Ben might have been one of the shortest players on his club team, but he could jump higher than any of them.

  After music, basketball was his biggest hobby. But about a year after they met, he suddenly stopped wanting to go to practice. Today this decision of his also appears in a new light. At the time Ben just claimed that he couldn’t get along with the new coach.

  Clara looks down at all the other objects that suddenly catapult her back into the past and asks herself if it’s at all possible to look back objectively. Dr. Ferdinand has tried to get her to understand that the best she can do is to try to come up with her own version of the truth about what really happened to Ben. But even if she were to come up with one—what is it supposed to look like?

  Is suicide worse than an accident? Or is it the other way around? If someone chooses to kill himself as a way of escaping an unbearable life, is that less tragic than if he dies without choosing to, solely as the result of some unbearable combination of random circumstances?

  Clara sinks to a crouch on the floor and buries her face in her hands.

  She doesn’t want to cry. She wants to finally get out of the darkness. She wants to go into the light.

  She wants her colorful past back—and that means she now has to figure out the quickest way to get to her canvasses.

  Since not a single one of the boxes is labeled, she doesn’t have much of a choice other than to take a quick look inside each of them. But it’s mostly just old dishes and old junk—nobody could possibly have any use for this stuff. Same goes for this box filled with who knows how many cables—Clara doesn’t even begin to know what Ben might have wanted to do with it. She decides to take it upstairs with her and give it to Knut when she has the chance in the hopes that the guys find the courage to keep their band going somehow.

  After another quarter of an hour she has succeeded in reaching a canvas wrapped in an old bedsheet. She pulls off the covering—and even in the faint light of the cellar, a wonderfully radiant red has Clara beaming. She picks the painting up. Giant poppies are visible on the canvas; she had been smitten with them during one of the many vacations on the Baltic that she took with her grandparents as a child. With just a few, broad strokes she had hinted at the flowers’ shape. Immediately they take Clara back to a time when everything was more colorful.

  sven

  For several days now there hasn’t been a single sign of life from Lilime. And Sven’s impatience is starting to manifest itself in a blind urge to ac
t. Or at least that’s Hilke’s smug take on it, which she delivers, naturally, with a big grin on her face.

  By this point he has scoped out nine Hamburg neighborhoods on his bike in the vague hope that chance would put him on Lilime’s trail. Sure, he tries to tell himself that these extra rides and detours are just additional training for his triathlon, but deep down he knows full well that he would go to almost any length, however futile, in order to find this mysterious stranger.

  But why should Lilime live in Hamburg, anyway? She could just as well live in any other city or town in Germany, Sven thinks with a sigh.

  Whenever an opportunity has presented itself in the last few days, Sven has searched the web for anything that might lead him to exhibitions of moon paintings. He’s even started looking on eBay for paintings that meet this description.

  But so far all his efforts have been in vain. He’s even canvassed countless Italian joints—none of them have gotten him any further.

  David, who like Hilke continues to follow the story with interest, urges him to just call Lilime straight out. He should just say he’s a journalist and ask her for an interview. All he had to do when he called was claim that he’d heard she was trying to go freelance. And if he were to cleverly alert her to the fact that the article would basically be free publicity and would have an incalculable promotional effect, nothing could go wrong. He just had to sound serious enough when he made his request.

  If only it were that simple, Sven thinks, then he turns off the reading lamp in his living room. He stares thoughtfully into the darkness. The rain is pounding hard against the large windows and the flat roof, and the whole loft is filled with a wonderful sound.

  His reflection appears in the windowpane, and Sven sits studying his face for a long time. He looks tired. But he likes the stubble that he’s let grow for a few days; it seems to make a more mature man of him.

  Suddenly he sits up. If Lilime doesn’t write by Sunday, I will actually take matters into my own hands and just call her, he decides. He looks at his reflection and grins.

  clara

  After a long walk in the park, Clara is now sitting on a bench by the river and looking wearily out over the water. In her hand she holds an orange envelope. Before her the Ilmenau flows peacefully along. From here it continues on its course, running past the medieval buildings of Lüneburg’s busy city center and finally flowing into the Elbe.

  Just a few months ago, when Clara stood on the harbor in Hamburg with Dorothea and stared out over the gray water, Ben’s death was still shrouded in mystery. Only today does she finally seem to have arrived at a comforting and at the same time painful clarity—clarity over the fact that Ben probably fell from that balcony on purpose.

  For the past few days, Clara has only been functioning in the most basic mechanical sense, in a way that’s similar to how she acted in the time between when she first received news of his death and the funeral. The initial euphoria that she felt in planning her career as a painter was immediately wiped away when she found the thick folder in the box of music gear. The word “Private” was written on the cover in large letters, and below it the words “Please DO NOT read!”

  At first Clara was hesitant to open the folder, unsure whether the secrecy was just a bit of childishness or if Ben truly meant that the contents were nobody’s concern but his. She asked herself whether she or Ben’s family had a natural right to obtain information from his inner life.

  But that same night she worked up her nerve, opened the clasp with trembling hands, and spread the contents out on her bed. What she found were diary-like pieces of writing, a few photos and song lyrics of Ben’s, plus old photos and postcards. Even after a brief glance through the items, Clara understood what kind of documents she was looking at. Judging from the dates she could see that this material bore witness to several years of Ben’s life. It was instantly clear to her that she wouldn’t be able to ignore his request. On the other hand, however, she was incapable of disregarding Ben’s injunction not to read what was in this folder. She couldn’t go behind his back. Wouldn’t Ben have wanted his wishes to be respected? Wouldn’t that have been more important to him than any other consideration?

  But more than anything, Clara was terribly afraid of finding out something that would disturb her. For a moment she considered if maybe Katja or Dorothea . . . ? But she felt it wouldn’t be right.

  That night Clara spent hours tossing and turning in bed. It wasn’t until the early morning hours that she decided that the best thing would be to entrust the folder to a person who hadn’t known Ben. It would have to be someone who would read the material conscientiously and was in a position to judge whether the writings could really be of any comfort to Ben’s loved ones. In this way she would be acting at least partially in accordance with what Ben wanted.

  And all at once the solution to this problem seemed close at hand. First thing in the morning Clara called her therapist to ask if she would be willing to look through the folder for insights into Ben’s state of mind. Politely but firmly, Dr. Ferdinand asked for a day to think about it, but then she called back that same afternoon to say that she thought Clara’s idea was a good one and made sense.

  After Clara had dropped the folder off at the therapist’s office she was at first relieved not to have its contents lurking around her apartment anymore. But the following night she slept just as restlessly. Clara could hardly wait to find out what Dr. Ferdinand would say, even though she was terrified of what she might learn. She kept speculating over and over again about what the writings might reveal about Ben’s mental and emotional state.

  The next morning Clara got a call from Dr. Ferdinand asking her to come see her at her office. Clara let Antje know that she’d be a bit late coming into work and headed out.

  With knees trembling she stepped into Dr. Ferdinand’s office, which on every other occasion but this one always seemed like a warm and safe space. Dr. Ferdinand offered Clara some tea like she did at all her other sessions and asked her to sit. In her hand she held an orange envelope with no writing on it which had caught Clara’s eye when she’d first looked through Ben’s folder herself.

  Dr. Ferdinand placed the envelope on the small, low table between them and said with a gentle smile: “This letter is for you. Now, bear in mind, it was over a year ago that your boyfriend wrote it. But still, it might contain a few answers to your questions.”

  Clara felt like she couldn’t breathe. She didn’t know what she was supposed to feel or think, much less say.

  “It’s a farewell letter,” Dr. Ferdinand continued. “And even if Ben didn’t leave it to you directly, I still think you should read it.”

  “So it says in there that he wanted to kill himself?” Clara asked in a thick voice.

  “Not directly. But I think we can now assume that he didn’t want this life. There are many other indications in his writings that point to what I already suspected. Whether it was ultimately an accident caused by too much drug use or if he intentionally jumped—your boyfriend was clearly searching, in vain, for ways to bring his dark side in harmony with his radiant side.”

  Clara swallowed hard. She felt the tears welling up inside her.

  “Ms. Sommerfeld, I suggest you keep this letter for yourself and hand all the other documents over to his family. That way they can decide for themselves what they’d like to do with them. You don’t have to bear the responsibility for this all on your own.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Even now, sitting on the bench by the river, these words are still echoing in Clara’s head. She stares out at the water as if in a trance. She can’t stop thinking of the dreadful fight that she and Ben had the last night she saw him alive. Of how she told him she thought he was incapable of taking on any responsibility and criticized him for not being in control of his life. Even if she deeply regrets everything she said, a mute reproach would probab
ly have driven him just as far from her sooner or later. She was simply too weak to counteract the strength of the dark world he inhabited.

  She’s still holding Ben’s farewell letter in her hands. On a sudden impulse, she now decides to finally open it.

  With trembling fingers she pulls a letter handwritten on a white sheet of paper out of the envelope and starts to read:

  Dear Clara,

  When you read this, I’ll be gone, and I’m sorry that I’m too much of a coward to tell you the truth to your face.

  The truth is that ever since I was fifteen years old the only thing I ever think about is when’s the next time I can get high. I go from one bender to the next, and in between there’s just this buzzing in my head that I can’t bear anymore.

  I don’t want to drag you down any further into my screwed-up life. And you shouldn’t think any higher of me than I do myself. I hate myself. I hate myself for everything, but above all for not being able to love you the way you deserve to be loved.

  Follow your own path. Mine’s a dead end.

  Take care of yourself, you hear me!

  Ben

  Clara cries. She doesn’t sob; she just cries, silently and for a long time. Finally she takes several deep breaths, in and out. Then she takes a brief glance up at the overcast sky and folds the letter to make a little paper boat.

  She knows she will keep Ben’s words in her heart. But she wants to be rid of this letter, this letter that proves beyond a doubt just how little she knew the man she was going to marry and how brittle the foundation on which their love rested really must have been.

  Clara walks a few steps down to the riverbank, takes her ring off her finger, kisses it gently, and places it on the pointed top of the little boat. Carefully she puts the paper in the water. At first it threatens to tip over to one side and sink, but then it makes a little turn, rights itself, and the water carries it on ahead. Bobbing jerkily up and down, it finally finds its way downriver.