by Uwe Tellkamp
He had hardly rung the bell for a second than Josta was embracing him, kissing him. ‘You’re late.’
‘No reproaches, now.’
She grasped his shoulders and, as so often, he was amazed at how undisguised the emotions that could be read on her face were. A changing flush of hurt, pride, anger, defensiveness and the hunting urge of a hungry cat flitted across her face that was a Mediterranean brown with black-cherry eyes.
‘Ah, Count Danilo is in a bad mood again. As he came up the stairs to see his mistress that old hag Frau Freese watched him through her spyhole. In the lobby it smells of wet washing and –’
‘Oh, do stop it!’ he broke in grumpily. ‘And give up these silly nicknames, I’m no Count Danilo.’
‘Well, what are you then? My little spoilt darling.’ Josta threw her head back and laughed so that he could see the single amalgam filling in the row of her teeth, took his hand and stepped back.
‘Your eyes, you … witch!’
‘Ooh, I can see it,’ Josta cried merrily, lifted his hand to her mouth and took a vigorous bite at the ball of his thumb.
‘Stop! that hurts.’ She bit even harder, undid his belt.
‘Daniel,’ he murmured.
‘Playing football. He knows you’re here. At the moment he has no great need to see you. Unlike me.’
‘Where’s Lucie,’ he whispered as Josta knelt down.
‘Don’t worry, the apple of your eye is fast asleep.’
He looked at the bite marks on the ball of his thumb, dark red and deeply incised. His desire, which had flared up so abruptly, subsided as he looked through the corridor door into the living room, where the television he’d got for Josta through connections was on. He was overcome with resentment and a sudden feeling of disgust at the sight of the gas meter in the corner of the hall behind the sliding door into the kitchen and, on a shelf beside the key rack, the two dolls with loving smiles holding out their hands in a tender gesture. Josta stood up and embraced him, remaining silent. He released the ponytail that stuck out sideways; it looked pertly determined to go its own way and had caught Richard’s eye the first time they’d met, in the Academy photocopying office, of which Josta was the head.
‘Happy birthday,’ she said quietly.
‘Fifty, for God’s sake.’
‘For me you’re younger than many a thirty-year-old.’ They went into the living room. Richard switched the television off. It was one of Josta’s idiosyncrasies to leave it on while they were talking.
‘I’ve got nothing for you – apart from myself,’ she said with a kind of furtive coquettishness. ‘You’ve forbidden me to give you anything.’
‘A tie I pretend I bought myself? Scent?’ Richard smiled sarcastically. ‘I can’t take it home.’
‘You could leave it here?’
He looked up. A slight undertone of bitterness in her reply told him she was trying to challenge him again.
‘Josta …’
‘Your family, I know. Oh, don’t keep using your family as an excuse. You’ve got a family here just as much as there. Your daughter’s here, your son’s here –’
‘Daniel isn’t my son.’
Josta came up to him, twisting her lips in a mocking grin. ‘No, he’s not your son. But he calls you Dad.’
‘He despises me. I can feel how he always goes on the defensive when I’m here and try to get closer to him.’
‘No, he doesn’t despise you! He loves you …’
‘What?’
‘I know he does, I can sense something like that, I know him very well. That penknife you brought him is sacred, and recently he got into a fight because of you, the mother of one of his classmates was a patient of yours and supposedly was treated badly … supposedly on your ward … He’s coming up to twelve …’ Josta turned away. ‘I was so looking forward to your visit. You’re the one who’s cold, not Daniel!’
Richard went over to the window. This grey sky over the district and tenements opposite with straw stars and sad washing fluttering stiffly in the wind … Down below, a fenced-off playground illuminated by lamps with well-wrapped-up mothers keeping an eye on pale children who were shooting at each other with toy cap pistols. Along the wire fence of the playground was a row of overfull dustbins, the snow round them stained by piles of ash that had simply been dumped beside the bins because of a lack of space. ‘I can’t come at Christmas.’
‘No, of course not.’ Josta clenched her lips in a forced smile. ‘But Lucie’s made a present for you. You can’t forbid her to do that. Oh, she’s woken up now after all.’ Lucie came in, a teddy bear under her arm. Her hair was sticking out all over, she looked pale and tired. When she saw Richard, she ran straight over to him without a word. He knelt down, she wrapped her arms round his neck, a gesture that suddenly made him feel easy and free, as if Lucie’s embrace had broken the dejection he had felt even on the way to Josta’s.
‘Tummy ache,’ she said. ‘Daddy, make my tummy ache go away.’
‘My little girl.’ He stroked and kissed her. ‘My little girl’s got tummy ache … Let’s have a look.’ She lay down, Richard carefully palpated her stomach. The abdominal wall was soft, there was no point of pain and Lucie didn’t have a temperature either. Nothing serious. He asked how long she had had stomach ache, what she had eaten, how her digestion was. Josta waved his questions away. ‘She has that quite often.’ Richard kissed Lucie’s stomach and covered her up again. The little girl laughed. ‘Better now, Daddy.’
‘There you are.’
‘Do you want to see the drawing I made for you.’
‘Show me.’
It was a sheet of paper covered with numbers. They had arms and legs, happy and sad faces, a seven was wearing a hat, a fat-bellied five was smoking a cigar and had a little, chubby, sheep-like eight with dachshund ears on a lead.
‘Lovely! You’ve drawn that beautifully. Is this for me?’
‘Because it’s your birthday.’
‘What made you think of the numbers?’
‘I saw them. When Mummy takes me to the kindergarten, we always go past a seven.’
Josta laughed. ‘It’s a poster for 7 October. They’re learning the numbers in the kindergarten just now, that’s why.’
‘And are you staying here now, Daddy?’
Richard turned away from the bright little face looking up at him so trustingly; it hurt, and all the gloominess that the sight of Lucie had driven away came back. ‘Not today.’
Richard left. Josta stood at the window and didn’t return his farewell wave.
He went down the stairs in the darkness. It seemed not only to sharpen his eyes, he felt he perceived the smells and sounds more intensely than when he had come up the stairs half an hour ago. The smell of ash, damp washing, unaired beds, moisture and mould in dilapidated masonry, potato soup. From an apartment on the second floor – Josta lived on the fourth, the top floor – came loud voices, cries, bickering, the crash of crockery. Frau Freese on the upper ground floor, the block supervisor’s apartment under the Nazis, must have heard him, for even on the half-landing above it, where the door of a shared lavatory was open, letting out a pungent smell of Ata scouring powder, he could see that her spyhole was open: a yellow needle of light pierced the darkness of the staircase and disappeared immediately as soon as he tried to creep past on tiptoe – Frau Freese had either closed the spyhole or greedily glued her beady eye to the opening.
The front door snapped shut behind him. The air was cold as iron. He went down to Rehfelder Strasse and turned towards the Sachsenbad, where he kept his swimming things. The pool attendant knew him as a regular and had even offered, in return for a doctor’s certificate that kept him out of the army reserves, to give him a key, in case he should want to go swimming later because there were too many people doing their lengths. That he went swimming after work every Thursday, when he wasn’t on duty, was his alibi for Anne and the boys. Anne had accepted that once a week he needed some time to himself and firmly
rejected all suggestions that they use the time together. Anne, he felt, would not spy on him. Richard feared the boys, most of all Robert. During the week Christian was at the senior high school, so he was unlikely to meet him here. Moreover he tended to stay at home. Robert was different. He was adventurous, thought nothing of trailing all round Dresden with his pals, of getting on the city rail system or one of the suburban trains and, to Anne’s amazement, bringing home some bread and fresh rolls he’d bought with his pocket money from a baker’s in Meissen. Moreover he enjoyed swimming as much as he, Richard, did and there weren’t that many swimming pools in Dresden. Also he had the feeling that Robert sometimes watched him, scrutinized him sceptically when he came back from swimming on those Thursdays. Was he imagining things? He had assumed the rapid gait, sniffing for danger on all sides, of a timid person who feels observed. It was not only Anne and the boys he had to fear, there might be acquaintances he knew nothing about – Frau Freese might be the aunt or grandmother of one of Robert’s pals. Or of the boy Daniel had had a fight with … Chance, pure or not, loved such unfortunate encounters. Or one of his colleagues from work, a nurse or a physiotherapist who happened to live in the area, might see him and wonder what Dr Hoffmann was doing in the building where Frau Josta Fischer, the attractive – and divorced – secretary in the Administration department of the Medical Academy, lived alone with her two children in a two-and-a-half-room apartment on the top floor, even that was suspicious given the shortage of accommodation … And he couldn’t be certain that Josta kept to her part of their agreement with the same strict rigour, the same constant, never-slackening caution as he did … Were there questions regarding Lucie? Did Daniel keep his mouth shut? He felt miserable and would have given a lot to get out of the tangle of lies. Five years ago he’d tried to end his affair with Josta, but then she’d got pregnant; his immediate reaction was to suggest an abortion but she had refused categorically, even used the word murder to him. Do you want to murder your child? Even today her reproach made him shudder. If he’d had his way, Weniger would have carried out an abortion, the box for ‘child’s father’ in the case history would have been left empty. His Lucie, his daughter whom he loved more than anything! Richard leant against a wall. What have I become … ! A beggarly scoundrel, a cheat who creeps through the town every Thursday, caught in a net of falsity, lies, nastiness … Sometimes he couldn’t look Anne in the eye, sometimes he was tormented by fear when he met Meno or Ulrich and they greeted him as their brother-in-law … What would they think of him, if it were to come out? That he was a swine, definitely, a vile wretch … who couldn’t get away from Josta. When her eyes flashed, as they had just now, when she threw her head back challengingly, especially when she had that ponytail on the side of her head, that for others was probably no more than a quirky detail – it aroused him, almost took his breath away, had aroused him the first time he saw it, that time when he’d taken the typescripts of his lectures to the office to be hectographed. She was twenty-five and in the prime of womanhood. She was aware of it and used it. Not like a girl who is flirtatious but doesn’t really know where it might lead because she doesn’t yet really know either the other sex or herself; but like a mature, experienced woman, and when you were alone in a room with her, it crackled with tension – every time he would be reminded of the plastic rods the physics teacher used to rub with a cloth and you couldn’t touch them without getting an electric shock. When he slept with her, he felt young, it wasn’t followed by the sadness that had overcome him with other women. She clutched him and whimpered and screamed, drove him to efforts he had hardly been capable of as a thirty-year-old. Josta was insatiable and made no secret of her sexual appetite and the pleasure it gave her. Everything about her was violent: her physical reactions, her desire, once it had been aroused – sometimes he thought it was like a powder keg and when you went past, all it took was a bit of friction to set it off – her fury, her muscles, her demands and her hatred. Wild rage, feverish desire, what he thought of as her witch’s fury urging his blind scattering of seed on to the very last drop: that was how he had fathered Lucie in seconds of unimaginable happiness. His daughter! He thought of her hair, her large brown eyes that gave him such an intelligent, questioning look, the child’s calm, attentive quickness to learn, her unobtrusive curiosity and touching imagination. She’d given him a picture with numbers that had eyes, ears and clothes, numbers, ‘I saw them, we always go past a seven.’ He’d left the sheet of paper at Josta’s, but it was his best birthday present. He would really have liked to take it with him and show it to everyone! Sometimes he felt the urge to take the girl home with him, to present her proudly to Anne and to say, Isn’t she marvellous. My little daughter Lucie! Simply so that Anne could share the joy, this exhilarating feeling with him, so that he could give some of it to her and not selfishly keep it all to himself. Do you know what great happiness, of which you have no idea, there is in my life, come here and have a look at it, it’s called Lucie, Lucie, I can’t keep it to myself or I’ll burst, I’m crazy with happiness; I have to share it round liberally otherwise it will tear me apart! That was how he saw it in his mind. My God, am I really so naive, Richard thought, that’s impossible. Could I really do that to her? – You’ve already done it to her, he heard himself say. You’ve already done it to her.
15
Who has the best Christmas tree?
It was clear that Scheffler, the Rector of the Medical Academy, didn’t know exactly what course to set: on the one hand Comrade Leonid Ilyich had died, scarcely two months ago, and the great ship of socialism was drifting along, leaderless. On the other, Christmas was approaching – and every restriction beyond a certain limit would be interpreted not as respect for the dead, but as weakness, and an expression of paralysis. Richard glanced round the Rector’s office, Brezhnev’s gorilla face, with the sly look in his deep-set eyes beneath his bottle-brush brows, the black lines across the corner of the photograph, next to it the Comrade Chairman of the State Council in a grey suit before a sky-blue background, a winning smile on his lips; then the series of Scheffler’s predecessors.
‘So you’re rejecting my lecture?’
‘Please, Herr Hoffmann.’ Scheffler made a gesture of irritation. ‘You must understand my position. It’s bad enough that this stupid battle of the Christmas trees is starting again.’
‘We hardly have any painkillers, Rector.’
‘Yes, I know. The pharmacist came to see me this morning. There’s one thing I’m asking of you Herr Hoffmann – don’t panic. We’ll find a way to deal with it. This very day I’ve an appointment with Barsano. His wife will be there. I’ll ask for the Friedrich Wolf to help us out.’ That was something that hospital had never done, Scheffler knew that, Richard knew that. ‘Don’t panic, that’s the most important thing at the moment. There are enough rumours as it is. And what we’ve discussed is just between ourselves, yes?’ Wernstein said, as he and Richard were washing their hands outside the operating theatres: ‘They say the Internal Medicine people have found a beautiful Christmas tree.’
‘And ours?’
‘The senior nurse was at the Christmas Market, the Christmas tree stall: just the halt and the lame.’
That meant that the Surgical Clinic was in danger of losing the competition for the best Christmas tree, and to Internal Medicine of all people! That, it was decided in a specially convened meeting, must not be allowed to happen. In the Orthopaedic Clinic Wernstein had seen a rachitic specimen that had probably grown to maturity in the dry sand of Brandenburg; in the Eye Clinic a well-proportioned, charming tree, but scarcely five dioptres tall; in Urology a hulking great Douglas fir, ten foot wide at the bottom but only eight high, moreover it ended in a three twigs arranged like a whisk. Neurology was entering one from the Christmas Market, three foot wide at the bottom and twelve foot high, thin, brittle and touchy, for it had immediately started to shed its needles and still hadn’t stopped.
