Alice

by Judith Hermann

  She drove down the main road from the north-east towards the west, towards the compass-needle point of the TV tower. Traffic stopped and then slowly started moving again. Behind the window of a coffee shop, a woman took off her sweater, her braid catching in the collar; the blouse under the sweater was a faded pink; her legs were twisted around the struts of a bar stool. At an entrance gate a worker stopped the drum of a cement mixer and stripped off his gloves. The driver of a taxi parked at the kerb was sleeping, his head on his chest. Fallow land, garages with caved-in roofs, a petrol station, a plastic tiger swinging from steel cables. Convention hotels, tourist hotels, lofts. Behind the panoramic windows of factory buildings people were running on treadmills, their heads turned up to watch TV monitors, the pictures changing rapidly. Advertising billboards: Smoked Fish. Play your Heroes. Ubu Roi. Bang bang, the night is over. Black Maple. The grey-green trunks of plane trees. Crows or magpies, or jackdaws. Red lights. In the car next to Alice’s, a woman was filing her nails, a cellphone clamped between her left ear and shoulder. Apparently she was saying a weary, slow goodbye, agitated, shifting gears, stepping on the gas. Then the woman turned off the main road, and Alice drove on towards the tall buildings of newspaper offices, the Haus des Lehrers, and the Haus des Reisens; a tram cut through the intersection, and a young woman who had taken shelter at the tram stop searched in the depths of her purse for something, something very small and apparently precious.

  And Frederick. Frederick, meanwhile, was in his room at the hotel near the river. It was half an hour before his meeting with Alice, whom he didn’t know, whom he had never before seen, and of whom he knew nothing all these years. What is it like for him? Alice wondered. Is it like a game, is it serious, or does none of it matter to him? It’s possible he doesn’t care about anything. Or that it interests him only a little. That’s all.

  She tried to imagine his hotel room, a single room with a wide, queen-size bed and an armchair at the window, a wine-red carpet, his overnight bag for short trips on the luggage rack and beside it, on a hook, his coat on a hanger, a sea-blue housecoat. Next to the door, framed in brass, a map showing the emergency exit routes in case of fire. You are here, a little red cross. True, in many ways. Signs to hang on the doorknob for the chambermaid: Do not disturb, Make up the room. Soundproof windows, a noisy air-conditioner. On the bedside table, a telephone next to the bedside lamp, a pad and pencil with the name of the hotel on them, and a piece of dark chocolate in a black and gold wrapper. I’ll call once I’m in the lobby, Alice had said. Is that all right with you?

  Eventually Malte had moved out of the Zehlendorf house, the one with the porch, the cat, and the dandelions. He lived by himself in a one-room apartment in Kreuzberg, on a street called Eisenbahn Strasse, Railway Street. Frederick was away, studying elsewhere; they exchanged letters, saw each other rarely. A nearly empty room, a bed, no table, no chair, a clothes rail, and hanging on it, a wire hanger with a blue shirt, a second hanger with a pair of black trousers. A cast-iron lamp, a tape recorder, reels of tape, a radio, a record player on the floor, and books stacked in crooked piles. File folders. A pair of dumb-bells. Photo albums, records. Malte’s room, Malte, who, they said, showed a troublesome inclination towards ending it all – did the others say that? Or did he say that about himself? Alice wedged her car into the street by the river, without paying attention to any of the traffic signs, exhaled, and finally took her foot off the accelerator. Almost forty years ago, the janitor had to force the door to that room open with a crowbar because the key was in the lock on the inside and Malte had not answered his mother’s persistent, fearful knocking. Once the door was open, it was too late. It was all over. All of this so long ago.

  How did he kill himself? With painkillers, pills. Barbiturates – a word almost as sonorous as Maori. Back then you could still get barbiturates without a prescription, not any more, and that was all Alice knew. The end. That’s as far as she could think. Delicate threads between her in her Japanese car in the no-parking zone outside the hotel, shoulder-bag on her knees and fingertips on her throbbing eyelids, and Frederick in his room with the river view, waiting for the phone to ring, and Malte for whom there had been no one at the end to be a light in the darkness. Threads as fine as a spider’s web, cut the moment she tried to think about it. Alice opened the car door and got out.

  In her own room there was a picture leaning against the wall next to the window. An owl. Its wings spread before a whorl of shadows. It was a picture Malte had painted. She couldn’t have said whether it was a good painting or not. That wasn’t the point. Sometimes she would sit at the table and gaze at the owl. Involuntarily cocking her head to the side. Then she’d get up and do something else.

  The golden hand of a train-station clock hanging above the hotel reception desk moved to the top of the hour. The smell of leather and furniture polish, peppermints in a glass bowl. Alice said, Hello, would you please ring Room 34, her left hand on the reception desk in an attempt to get some attention. Water dripped onto the floor tiles from her furled umbrella; she could hear it drip. The hotel clerk had a deformed ear; it was twisted and stunted; his hair looked as if it had been cut with nail scissors, but the name-plate on his lapel shone like filmed-over silver. He ignored Alice for a while, drawing lines and circles with a pencil in a big ledger, deadly earnest; Alice couldn’t see exactly what he was doing. Two waitresses were clearing away the buffet in the breakfast room, aggressively clattering the plates, sweeping off the tables with hand brooms, collecting crumpled newspapers. Disorder, a restless atmosphere, coy giggles. The hotel clerk mumbled to himself, his head averted.

  Would you do that please Alice said.

  Of course, he said. Gently, with an expression of unlimited patience. As if he had just wanted to give Alice a little time, a small span of time, so that she could reconsider everything. Change her mind, retreat. Alice thought, But that’s something I never learned to do. Sorry, that’s not possible any more. She didn’t smile, felt her left eyelid twitch; inconspicuously she withdrew her hand from the counter, leaving a damp mark that vanished as she watched. The clerk closed the ledger and put the pencil down next to it. He lifted the telephone receiver and, as if he were in a silent film, dialled a number and held the receiver out to her over the counter. Alice angrily rejected it, almost pushing away the hand extending the telephone to her, almost touching him.

  Tell him Alice is here, she whispered. He raised his eyebrows, put the receiver to his good ear, and listened. No one there? Would someone have to break down the door? Did Frederick need a little more time so that he could change his mind about the whole thing? After all he’d had to learn to do without.

  Alice knew that Frederick, sitting in the armchair next to the suddenly ringing telephone, must have flinched in shock. Even though he had been waiting for it to ring. Just because of that. The abrupt shock. His heart pounding, the theoretical acknowledgement of futility.

  Alice is here, the clerk said. Almost pleading. He had been given the key word, knew the text. He nodded, listened some more, a pained half-smile on his lips. Then he replaced the receiver. Looking at Alice, looking right through her, he said, The gentleman is coming down to the lobby. Right away.

  Alice didn’t know where to go. She was standing in front of the elevator, in the middle of the lobby, the reception desk to her right and the breakfast room to her left. Circling the elevator were the stairs, a cabaret stairway with wide steps, the banister rail of dark wood and golden diagonal posts. Would Frederick take the elevator or the stairs? Either way he’d be making an entrance. The elevator was waiting on the fourth floor; the digital display above the elevator door remained steadily on the number 4. The lobby floor was paved with black and white tiles, freshly washed, showing distinctly the tracks left by Alice’s shoes and her dripping umbrella. An old woman was pushing a cart full of wrinkled, soiled laundry past the reception desk down the long hall. Umbrellas swam by outside the windows; it seemed to be getting dark already. The hot
el clerk yawned like a tired child. He undid the foil wrapper around a stick of chewing gum and pushed it into his mouth. Sucking on it thoughtfully. In the breakfast room the waitresses were crawling around on their hands and knees under the tables. They straightened tablecloths, flower arrangements, cinnamon sticks, and dried orange slices. They bumped their heads, pulled their braids tight with both hands.

  Alice switched the bag from her right shoulder to the left, took the umbrella into her left hand. She thought of her grandmother who all her life had had a recurring dream in which she was in a large room, sitting at a festive table set only for her, in front of a tureen made of the finest porcelain. When she raised the lid, there in the white bowl was a black, multi-legged, unusually intricately equipped insect, stretching out and flicking up its shiny feelers. Tentacles. Tendrils like wire. In the autumn, Alice’s grandmother liked raking the leaves of the nut trees, leathery leaves, the smell of earth and oil. Every other year, there would be nuts, shrivelled and plentiful; they would lie spread out on newspapers by the window, and at noon the sun would shine for an hour on their shrivelled husks. Her grandmother had supported the first small sunflower stems with paint brushes, tying the stems to the brushes with thread. When she came downstairs to the kitchen after her midday nap, her bronze bracelet clattered on the banister. She believed in the nerve-strengthening power of bananas. In the evenings she played Napoleon patience and, despairing when it didn’t come out, would leaf through a French grammar book to compensate, rustling the yellowed pages until her eyes closed. Then she would feel for the switch inside the shade of the cast-iron lamp that had been her mother’s and her mother’s mother’s before that and afterwards had been Malte’s, and then again hers and now Alice’s. Alice’s grandmother had died in a hospital even though she had expressly asked to be allowed to die at home. In her last hour of life she had spoken steadily and insistently, but Alice hadn’t understood a single word because the nurses refused to put her grandmother’s teeth back in her mouth – saying she might have a convulsion and choke to death. That’s how it was. Then, later, Alice was handed a plastic bag containing her grandmother’s cardigan, a pair of shoes, and the bronze bracelet. She had turned down the offer to say goodbye to her one more time in the morgue the following day.

  Her grandmother wouldn’t have said anything about the meeting between Alice and Frederick. Neither for nor against it, not the one nor the other. Alice thought that her grandmother, in her old age, had been a happy person in a humble way. Frederick came down the stairs. An old man. Very fine hair, white, almost gleaming, and Alice realised with amazement that she had actually assumed he would be young. As young as he had been almost forty years ago. She had assumed Frederick had stopped ageing when Malte died. That his story had stopped at the point where hers began. She made an almost apologetic movement towards him, and Frederick let go of the banister on the last step and came towards her, his gaze focused attentively on Alice’s face – and Alice knew that he would be disappointed at finding no external resemblance between her and Malte, not the least. On the other hand it was no longer possible to know what Frederick had looked like back then. On the porch. Light, shadow, and light, alternating on his features. But despite all that, they looked at each other. Shook hands and their touching was encouraging, it was what was left to them.

  Well now, let’s go outside for a bit, Frederick said. He had a slight squint. Sounded indulgent, and he smiled that way too. Good thing you brought an umbrella, he said.

  They walked together along the river. The voices of the tourist guides on the excursion boats floated across the water, fragmented and windblown, … once stood here, used to be, will be and is today. Frederick walked under the umbrella Alice held over him, every now and then sticking his face out into the rain. He was shorter than she was. They walked slowly. He was carrying a plastic bag with something in it. No coat over his blue suit. Alice thought he would dissolve if it weren’t for the umbrella she was holding over him. Dissolve and run like watercolours, different hues of blue: marine, hyacinth, hydrangea. An express train roared across the bridge. Pigeons flew up. Signals. Departure and arrival. The river water lapped against the bulwark, carrying trash, paper and bottles. Building cranes swayed next to the Tränenpalast. Frederick said, This time I’d like to go to the Bode Museum. Back then, he paused, it wasn’t possible. But I’m going there this afternoon. It was not an invitation for her to go with him.

  They sat across from each other, the only customers in a dimly lit café, Alice drinking tea, Frederick too, no sugar, no milk. The waitress behind the counter was reading a book. At Frederick’s request she had turned off the radio. An ice crystal was rotating with psychedelic slowness on the computer screen of the cash register. Now and then Alice gazed at Frederick, his white, feathery light hair, his reflective glasses, his skin dark and meticulously shaved, an expression of weariness and arrogance around the mouth. Also a childish look of hurt feelings. He had a problem with swallowing. Coughed frequently. His hands looked soft, carefully cut fingernails and a signet ring showing a rising or a setting sun.

  Alice wondered what Malte would have looked like today. What sort of mood, what sort of shape would he be in. Her homosexual uncle. No children, unmarried. A long table of scarred wood, the smell of oil paints, turpentine, varnish, sticks of charcoal, hand-rolled cigarettes, pale, transparent cigarette paper as thin as tissue, and tobacco, black and dry. A slightly acrid smell that clung to his fingertips for a long time, the index and middle fingertips on his right hand tinted yellow. An inclination towards ending it all. He would have pushed aside the papers, cups, ashtrays, and sticks of charcoal to make room for her at his table. Alice thought, I would have gone to see him, lovesick. Would have picked up a short, cynical remark of consolation. An indication. And she realised with amazement that she missed Malte, that his departure had spread into her life, even if only as an illusion, a projection aimed almost into nothingness.

  How is your father? Frederick asked. He spoke past Alice, through the window. Wait a minute – yes, yes, your father, Christian, Malte’s brother.

  He’s well, Alice said automatically. He’s well.

  And Alice? He pronounced the name of Alice’s grandmother as if he had forgotten that Alice had the same name. True. It wasn’t the same. Not the same name.

  Alice has been dead a long time already, Alice said. She stumbled inwardly, but only over the short, dry word. It wasn’t as if she were talking about herself, it had never been like that. Her grandmother had been dead for almost twenty years. That was hard to believe; she had to repeat it. Alice died twenty years ago. But she wasn’t sick for long. She felt fine, almost to the end.

  I’m glad, Frederick said. She was very gentle. Your grandmother. A gentle, wise, and patient woman, extraordinarily patient, considering what a hard time she had. And not only with Malte.

  Alice’s grandmother had not been gentle. Or patient.

  Those weren’t the right words, not at all. But Alice didn’t contradict him; she hadn’t known her as Malte’s mother. Had no image of the woman who walked out on the porch of the house on Waldhüterpfad in the mornings. The cat purring around her feet, its matted fur. Her grandmother’s hands half a century ago. Her voice back then, Malte’s voice, her gestures, the tender words, all the futile good intentions. When finally her sons were grown men, she got sick. Malte and Christian sold the house on Waldhüterpfad.

  There was nothing left of all that. Only the picture of the owl, three chairs, the cast-iron lamp, a few records, the two dumb-bells for a while – and then those too were gone, swept away by something. What’s it like? Alice asked her father every year as they passed the house on their way to the cemetery to place a candle in a red plastic container on the neglected grave. Every year they stopped at the house, and Alice would peer in at the window next to the front door, into the living room, past the furniture of strangers, and out to the rear of the garden, without understanding anything. To be allowed to sit on the porc
h just once. Just once. What is it like to stand outside the house in which you grew up, now that other people are living in it? Her father raised his hands. What can I say?

  Does Christian know we’re meeting? Frederick asked, at the same time signalling to the waitress. The waitress saw him out of the corner of her eye, got up, but not until she had finished reading the page she was on, only then did she close her book.

  No, Alice said. No one knows. But not for any particular reason; it’s just that – this is my affair. It’s my business. And Frederick nodded, that’s how he felt too.

  Well, then, the bill for the two pots of tea, please.

  The waitress stood next to their table, not as if Frederick had signalled to her, but as if she had been assigned by someone else to put an end to their meeting. She held her waitress purse open in her left hand, having placed the right one protectively over her left wrist, covering her pulse. Out of politeness, Alice leaned down to get her shoulder bag, but Frederick paid for them both, leaving the correct tip. Scarcely looked at the waitress, not interested. The waitress snapped her purse shut with a flourish, rattling the coins. Well now, she said. Have a nice day, Hope the rain lets up.

  I brought you something, Frederick said. It was a small, fat blue file folder that he had been carrying in the plastic bag. He put it on the table in front of him without opening it.

  Malte’s letters. These are the letters Malte wrote to me in the years before he died. You can read them. I think they’ll tell you everything you might want to know. Actually everything is in those letters.