by Craig Nova
She felt a shadow sweep over her.
“Hello.”
The man from across the way stood with the sun at his back. It was the first time she really saw him. Not handsome, not ugly, his face symmetrical with a big, hawklike nose. Not cruel. He dropped his robe and then stretched out nude on a chaise that was close to hers.
“You don’t mind, do you?” he said. “I could come back another time if you want to be alone.”
“No,” she said. “That’s all right.”
Beads of moisture formed on her upper lip and brow, on her chest. The sun had a pushing quality, which she felt as the gravity tugged her down into the chaise. It caressed her with a sense of the inevitable, as though it were the physical manifestation of her doubt, her sense of having been reduced to part of what she had always despised: those tawdry scenes in the park and along the river. She strained against it, began to sit up just to prove that she could resist it, and then lay back in a rush of embarrassment that spread across her face with heat that was just like the sun’s.
The light that came through her lids was red, fuzzy, and hard to look at, and as she was suspended in that rust-colored glow, she could feel his presence, just a couple of feet away. She wanted to say something, to get control of this, to introduce herself, to make this moment seem natural and easy, but she was afraid of saying the wrong thing, of making a fool of herself. Finally, when she had to admit she was at a loss to know what to do, she stood up and put on her robe. In the distance there was a wall of clouds, like something that was sprayed on the sky, thin but broad, from one side in the west to another. It made the greens beneath it darker.
She put her hands through her hair, then tightened the belt of her robe, bit her lip.
“I wish I could stay longer,” she said. “But my skin burns. I have to be careful.”
She blushed, but he had kept his eyes closed, and so she just stood there, looking at him.
“So, you’re new in the building?” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“Well,” she said. “Welcome.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“I …,” she said. She thought for a moment of that fleeting peacefulness in the kitchen, the warmth that came from looking at him. “I’d like to invite you for dinner sometime.”
“That would be nice,” he said.
She blushed. He open his eyes and looked at her.
“My name is Rainer Lesser,” he said.
“Armina Treffen,” she said.
“Nice to meet you,” he said.
She turned away. Then she went down the stairs and back into her apartment, slamming the door, and sitting on the sofa, head in her hands. Now I don’t know if it was a good idea or not, she thought. Just what kind of error will this turn out to be? Am I doing the same thing here that I have done at work? Made another mistake?
Then she closed her eyes and knew that at night, when she tried to sleep, she would feel the effect of the sun when she went to bed, the heat of it caressing and maddening. She knew she’d hear that drip drip drip—the silver drop forming, swelling, and then falling away.
Armina waited in earnest now, and as she sat in her kitchen she admitted that she had abandoned all objection to looking in the window across the way. In the middle of the next week, she saw the light in Rainer’s kitchen, and his shadow moved in the rear of the apartment. He had a visitor, a woman who wore a clingy silk dress that made her seem sleek and glistening when the light hit her hips and thighs. Armina sat on a stool in the dark.
The next day, when she came home, she found a note stuck under her door. It was in a gray-blue envelope and her name had been written in dark ink. She read the letter as she sat in her living room, the light there failing as the evening seeped in through the windows. The handwriting was large, basic, written with a broad-tipped pen. When she put the paper to her nose, she noticed a clean, promise-filled scent: almonds, sheets dried in the air, lavender soap. She touched her lip with an edge of the paper and wondered just what the promise of this note was, and while she knew it was there, she couldn’t describe it, and the presence of something she couldn’t name left her agitated, as though unable to remember the name of an old friend.
I’m sorry, the note said, that I have taken so long to write to you, but I have been busy with my sister, who has come from out of town. But now she has gone home, and I wonder if we could have that dinner after all?
Before going out for dinner, they had a drink in his apartment. It was spare and smaller than hers, a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen. The white walls, the few kitchen utensils, the furniture, some of it Bauhaus and lean, all contributed to a cool, serene quality that she thought of as monastic. He didn’t seem to need anything, and in fact, when she first came in he said that the spare white walls made it easier for him to think. The place had the aspect of a mathematical diagram in a scientific paper: straight lines, cleanly intersecting on white paper, descriptive of some keen, stern beauty. The severity of the place made her uneasy.
He told her that he was a professor, but that people thought that his subject was funny.
“What’s that?” she said.
“Botany,” he said. “And then I have another job, too. I’m the orchid curator at the botanical garden. A lot of people think that is funny, too.”
“I don’t think it’s funny,” she said.
“Well,” he said. He looked down. “I’m glad.”
She thought that he had blushed. Was it possible that such a thing could happen in Berlin? Then she thought of her own confusion about the unnamed promise he suggested to her and the evenings she had spent looking out the window. She blushed, too, and then all the more so because she was blushing, and finally a third time when he noticed.
They went to a café where they were served on a white, starched tablecloth, and the waiter was formal yet warm, like the best Berlin waiters. They had champagne and a chocolate dessert, and lingered while the waiter stood a short distance away.
“Well, I’ve got to be up early,” she said.
“I understand,” he said.
“Do you?” she said.
“Well, isn’t it just before dawn when things go … well, wrong,” he said. “When you get a call to see something …”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s right. First thing, just when the sun comes up. That’s when someone will notice something out of the ordinary….” And when a mistake of mine is obvious, she thought.
Rainer walked her to her door and stood there, taking her hand, saying good night, smiling, thanking her for the lovely time.
Armina thought about his apartment, and how she wanted to resist it, not completely, but to make it a little more, well, she didn’t want to say human, since it was surely that, but less ascetic and cold. So, she went from shop to shop, to the department stores, and then finally she came to a place not far from where she lived. It was downstairs, below the street, dark. The woman who owned it was a contradiction: her hair was gray, pulled back into a severe bun, and she wore gray sweaters and gray skirts and black shoes. No jewelry of any kind, aside from what appeared to be a stainless steel watch that hung from a chain attached to her skirt. She made quilts that were a combination of precise, small pieces of cloth, the patterns mathematically correct but mysterious, too, as though describing the way a nautilus shell grows, and at the same time the quilts were a series of the most striking colors, reds, yellows, blues, all soothing and warm. Armina had the sensation that this woman’s restraint, her gray essence, her discipline, had been turned into something else, as though the woman were the chrysalis and the things she made were a butterfly.
Armina bought a quilt. Then she wrote Rainer a note and said she would like to bring him a present for his apartment, and when he called and asked her to come by, she took the quilt across the courtyard and up the stairs. The quilt was wrapped in brown paper and tied with a piece of string. She carried it up to the door, thinking that she would be upset if he didn’t like
it and almost praying that he would say something to hurt her so that she could forget about this. And, at the same time, she was dreading just such a comment, if only because she could imagine the silence of her apartment after such a comment had been made. She knocked on the door and stood there, holding the bundle, offering it.
He took it by the string. They went in. In the living room they sat down, the bundle between them, and then, with a look at her, he opened it, and when he took out the quilt and spread it in front of them, over his knees, he looked at her with a glance that was so pleased, so keenly delighted as to give Armina a moment’s pause. The quilt, the colors, and the mathematical precision of them were absolutely right for the apartment, for his bedroom. The quilt acknowledged how he lived, the sparseness of his existence, but the colors cheered and brightened the room in just the right way, not to mention that its presence showed what had been lacking. He stood up and took it into the bedroom and put it on the bed, tucking it in, smiling, almost laughing at how she could have done that.
He thanked her and got her to sit down with him, right there, the two of them like kids, holding hands, and taking an almost youthful delight in the touch of fingers, in the faintly embarrassing sweat of hands.
He made dinner for her. They ate slowly and drank some wine and he told her the most obscene joke, which she thought was funny.
Then she waited. She had made her offer, her attempt to show how she could fit into his life. Was that what she was really saying? Well, it was possible, she guessed, and if that’s what she was saying, why then she wanted him to respond. Or maybe she was drawn to that quality she couldn’t describe. She had made a gesture, or she had tired to communicate, and now it was his turn. She hadn’t really understood that the colors and math of the quilt would work so perfectly, or that they would suggest an understanding that she saw now but didn’t before she had given it to him. But now she wanted some response. She wanted him to speak this same language to her, which wasn’t a matter of things so much as using things to invoke possibilities that were so complicated and delicate as to be beyond words.
So, she waited. She walked up to the building near Alexanderplatz with the gloomy entrance, the gray stone, the stink of cigars, as though the police were small engines that made clouds of exhaust. She came home exhausted and sometimes exasperated, too, that she was waiting for him.
One evening he showed up with a small cardboard box, which he offered as he stood at the doorway, almost as though it were a flower, an orchid for her to wear.
“I thought you might like this,” he said.
So they went into her apartment and observed the ceremony as before, or she realized that it seemed to have become a ceremony. A drink and some talk before she opened the box. Her apartment was similar to his, although hers was more comfortable, with an overstuffed leather chair and sofa in the living room, a painting on the wall that had been done by a friend of her father’s, which was a precise, technically exact execution of a woman’s sewing table on which bright scissors, sharp needles, and bullet-colored thimbles were all photographically rendered.
She opened the box and removed a ship’s barometer. It was as precise as the objects in the painting but also silver and antiquated and part of a world that had nothing to do with the miserable details she confronted after people had made a mess. And, of course, she wanted to know what the weather was going to be, since she often had to be outside. He had a screwdriver and four black screws, and he put the barometer on the wall near the door, where it gave her just the right amount of precision and beauty, but it didn’t clash with the leather furniture, the warmth of the apartment, the flowers she liked to put on the tables in the dining room.
When she saw it as she went out the door, she realized that it had demonstrated a combination of beauty and precision that worked in her life, too, and that he had been able to do for her what she had been able to do for him, although she was still amazed at her good luck. Then she thought, with a thrill, with a delight and terror that was like looking at the stars, that maybe she was in the midst of something that was so large it worked without her even knowing it. She’d gone into the store and bought the quilt and given it to him without even having to think about it, since her knowledge of him and herself was so deep and worked so perfectly that she wasn’t even aware of it, or able to name it. And, one evening, when she was thinking about this, wondering if he had gotten lucky, too, if he had stumbled on the barometer in the same way that she had found the quilt, he said, “It looks nice on the wall. I didn’t really know until I gave it to you what I wanted to say. It was recognizing something when I was with you that I didn’t even know about. Crazy.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
Still, she was waiting, looking for clarification of what was happening to her. She had a superstitious notion that if she could say what attracted her or describe the precise nature of the promise she felt, she would fall in love with him—so she waited, suspended between a desire to know and a fear that she’d find out.
She continued to wait. They had dinner together, went to the cabaret, watched the Tiller girls, laughed at the jokes, and sometimes didn’t laugh, and this silence, this worry was the same, too. They went by a street fight, and both looked at it with a fatigued and quiet disbelief.
He said that he wanted to go with her to Austria. She agreed, although she thought, Well, he will make a mistake here. It’s going too well. When he makes a mistake, will I forgive him? Or will that be another flaw of mine: that I am so slow to forgive?
He arranged their reservations, and they took the train to Gmunden, where they stayed in an old hotel with a thatched roof. It was a quiet place where the employees went out in the morning to gather mushrooms to use in the food that was served in the evening. In the afternoon Armina and Rainer went for walks along the river, where there were benches here and there.
They hired a driver and drove into the mountains, where he went fishing in the Steyer, a stream the color of crème de menthe. She read a book on the bank while he stood in that green water, and in the evening, when it was too dark to read, she found that she was not thinking anything at all, that she was almost hovering in the warm fog that hung over the river, and then when he came up, they walked back to the car, through the pine forest close to the stream, and when they did this, the fireflies came out, some as big as her thumb, it seemed, and as they drifted along, each green pulse had about it the suggestion of something she couldn’t say but still felt, as though this trip were another one of those items that revealed a matter not subject to words. As she looked around in the dark, which seemed so Old Europe, so filled with all the terrors of the night, now illuminated with these enormous glowing creatures, he reached over and took her hand, just like that, and they went up to the car and the driver in the same state of what appeared to be complete understanding.
In Gmunden, they went to a café that was on the lake. The café had a terrace and the water was about a foot away from the tables, which had white tablecloths and flowers. Mountains and a cliff were reflected in the still water. As they had an ice cream with a thin wafer, they watched as climbers worked their way up the face of the cliff, bound together by ropes. A hut sat at the top. Armina imagined that this was where the climbers were going to spend the night. A swan glided along on the lake next to the table, and the water was so mirrorlike that the swan appeared to float on its own image, or that there were two swans, one on top of another, and while Armina tasted the ice cream, which was made from wild strawberries, she thought about the almost impossible-to-discern line where the two swans were bound together. It was this membrane of silver and light that mesmerized her, since she saw it as the visual expression of how she was bound to the man in front of her. Almost impossible to describe but so obvious as to be frightening.
When they came back to Berlin, she wanted that same communication as before, as when she had given him a quilt and he had given her the barometer or taken her to Austria, w
here they walked in those green fireflies with the membrane of the river just behind them. Through it all, she had the oddest sensation of not being able to tell what was what: was there really something there or not?
Rainer asked her to visit him at the botanical garden. He met her at one of the hothouses, where they passed through double doors into the heat. The hothouse was onion shaped, and in silhouette it looked like a building in Arabia. It was frankly industrial, too, since the supports were riveted steel, but they weren’t noticeable because they had been painted green. The glass walls rose three stories to a glass ceiling, and beneath it ferns grew in enormous fans as in a jungle. The light came down in glowing bars.
There is something in this heat, Armina thought, something that has to do with us. He must know that. Of course he does, she thought, that’s why I’m here.
They went through the ferns, the tips of the fronds beaded with water. She had the same impulse to give voice to what was impossible to say, and as she watched the silver thread described by a falling drop of water, she thought, with a thrill, that the heat did just that: it made the invisible obvious. They stood in it together.
“It’s hot,” she said.
He pushed open the next door, where there was a sign that said THIS SECTION CLOSED. They came into another room, three stories high as well, all glass as before, but here it was more damp. The orchids hung from other plants, their petals open, some of them almost as large as her hand, the blooms white and red, lipped and wet, hanging there in the mist. Copper pipes ran along the wall of the glass, and every now and then a little spray, from a series of nipples, came into the room and turned back on itself, like smoke.
In the cascade of flowers, in the heat, she whispered, her breath against his ear. She said, “I’m so glad you brought me here.”
