Letti Park

by Judith Hermann

  She says, Tomorrow I’ll get up again. Or, the day after tomorrow at the latest. Promise.

  Maude says, I’ll take you at your word. I’ll call and remind you that you intended to get up again. An announcement.

  Greta nods. Like a child, as if she believes what Maude says.

  Maude says, In two days I’ll be gone. Do you remember? I’m going away. The day after tomorrow I’m taking a plane to go on holiday.

  Oh yes, Greta says. Where was it you were going?

  To Lago d’Iseo, Maude says quite loud. To Italy, to Lago d’Iseo.

  Lago d’Iseo, aha, Greta says.

  Maude has been living at Greta’s for almost a year. She never thought she would stay so long – to be honest, she expected that living with Greta might be trying, but the year is almost over and so far she hasn’t thought about looking for another room. Greta lives in a large house next to the park. She is eighty-two years old, more than fifty years older than Maude. She used to live with her family in this big house, three floors and seven people – Greta, her husband Albert and five children. Unimaginable, five children, three of them from Albert’s first marriage; two of them Greta’s own. There was a dog, and numerous cats. Albert is dead. The children are gone. The dog is dead too; of the cats one is left, a calico who is blind in the left eye. Greta lives in the rooms on the ground floor. What used to be the dining room is now her bedroom, but the living room is still the living room; she has her own bath, rents out two rooms on the first floor and also the attic room; the kitchen is there for everyone, the garden too. The garden is wonderful. Rambling and untamed, there are paths leading to islands full of mullein and lupines; as a young woman Greta always had a weakness for butterfly bushes and now her butterfly bushes are dense as a forest.

  Maude won’t ever forget the introductory interview. Greta was sitting in the kitchen, busy with gas and electricity bills, distracted, unfocused; she made a confused impression on Maude. Gaunt and hunchbacked, her white hair cut short – clearly she had cut it herself – and her face looked masculine and serious, only the eyes had a lucid quality, blue and very light, and at first Maude had to avert her own when Greta looked at her. The kitchen was messy, not dirty, just untidy, and there was no way to tell whether that was Greta’s or her housemates’ fault. Greta had been going through her papers; her hands seemed huge to Maude, tanned a dark brown, spotted, with enlarged knuckles and wrists already curved inward.

  Do you read books, Greta had asked her; she had asked without looking at Maude, casually and quite indifferent. Do you have any complicated psychopathological relationships that might lead me to expect that doors would be slammed here and you would be sitting at my kitchen table, crying. What kind of work do you do, do you work at all? Have you ever had anything to do with an old person? Do you take drugs. Do you do any sort of Far-Eastern meditation. Do you wash your hands before you eat supper? Do you like being alive? Do you value what you have? Do you cherish your Life?

  Well, to be frank, I don’t read all that much, Maude had answered. For a while I used to read detective novels, but that was a long time ago, and whenever anything gruesome happened in those books, I couldn’t forget it; so I stopped reading them. I don’t know what you mean by psychopathological; at the moment, anyway, I don’t have a relationship and it’s unlikely that I will have another one anytime soon, and you’ll never find me sitting at your kitchen table crying. I am a waitress. I didn’t train to do that, but I can do it, and I work at the Mexican restaurant by the train station. I smoke marijuana. After I finish work, I roll myself a joint, and I smoke it before I go to sleep, and I’m sure you wouldn’t forbid my doing that. The last old person I had anything to do with was my grandmother, but I was still a child then. Is an old person different in some way? I’m not at all involved in meditation. I wash my hands three times a day.

  She had been sitting facing Greta with her arms crossed. She thought each of her answers had been wrong – above all, the one about the books – but Greta had looked up pleasantly from her bills and said, and Life? How about Life. You didn’t answer my last question.

  No idea, Maude had said. Don’t know whether I like living, whether I value Life. Should I?

  Well now, I don’t know about that either, Greta had said with a smile so enigmatic and mysterious that Maude felt chills running down her spine. The room is 300 a month. You can go upstairs and look at it. Then come back down in fifteen minutes and tell me what you’ve decided. I’ll wait here for you. By the way, if you intend to move in here, you don’t have to look after me. Under no circumstances.

  Maude had gone upstairs and stood in the middle of the room for fifteen minutes; it was large, bright and unfurnished except for a crooked tree branch suspended by two ropes from the ceiling that was perhaps supposed to serve as a clothes rod. There were seashells lying on the window-sill as if someone had forgotten them there, and a postcard wedged into the light switch showing a ship against a lemon-yellow sky. The windows were open, and Maude could hear the wind in the fir trees and the sound of bicycles on the earthen paths in the park as well as a soft clattering down in the kitchen. She had gone back downstairs and had said to Greta, I’d like to rent the room, and Greta had said, Wonderful, do!

  That was a year ago. The Chilean student who lived under the roof went back to Chile, and the bookkeeper who had rented the room next to Maude for a while got married and moved with his wife to an apartment on the other side of the park. For two months now Maude has been alone in the house with Greta, and she has a feeling that Greta is not really looking for new tenants; no one has come by, and as far as she knows, Greta has not advertised the rooms. Maude likes being alone with Greta, but she also finds there is something disquieting about this situation, and now she is going away on a trip; Greta will remain in the house, and Maude sees this as a difficulty. She goes to visit Greta around noon – that’s what she calls it, visiting Greta; it means that she knocks on Greta’s living room door or, in the summer, goes out on the terrace in order to sit with Greta for an hour or two. Maude likes Greta’s living room. An enchanted room, plants clustered at the terrace door, full of things, untidy – the untidiness in the kitchen was Greta’s untidiness; it hadn’t taken Maude long to discover this – a room like a cave. Shelves line all the walls, and the books stand on them not simply in one row, but sometimes two, sometimes three rows deep. They’re piled up in corners, on the table and around the chaise longue. Sometimes Greta picks out books to give away, but then she can’t part with them. She told Maude that it was possible to read between four and five thousand books in a lifetime. Four thousand to five thousand – for Maude this is an inconceivably large number. She asked Greta whether she had read all the books in the living room, and Greta had answered gloomily, Not even a fraction; she repeated it, Not even a fraction. In the beginning Maude sometimes read aloud to her. It had just come about. On Greta’s instruction she had stepped over to the bookshelf and with her eyes shut had picked a book at random from the many there and read one paragraph from it, and it was quite obvious that Greta knew every single book; her reactions went from being delighted to disgusted. In the evenings when Maude, having smoked her joint in the garden went, slightly stoned, to Greta in her room, it seemed to her as if the room, the books and Greta were part of a common structure, like a web, a latticework made of a material for which there was no name. But recently Greta had declined being read to. It’s getting on my nerves, she said. This is gradually but clearly getting to be much too much for my nerves, and Maude had stopped in front of the bookshelves as if before a fissure in a rock that was closing.

  From all the pages she had read aloud, she had chosen two sentences to memorise; she had learned the two sentences by heart. The sentence: ‘Memory sheds the echoes of songs and of passions until nothing remains,’ and the sentence, ‘In the end the little white kid runs away from us and we become orphans.’ Greta said that the first sentence surely didn’t apply to Maude but rather to herself, to Greta.
Maude said, Well, neither one applies to me. I just find them beautiful. I like little white kids. These are beautiful sentences; do you know what I mean? And sad sentences, Greta had added, and Maude had agreed. Yes, and sad sentences too. OK.

  She knocks on the living room door, a sliding door with leaded stained-glass panes; she can’t really make out anything through the vine tendrils and grapes. It takes a moment until Greta answers her knock; Maude slides the door open with a pounding heart. It’s true, she doesn’t have to take care of Greta, but that doesn’t change the fact that she thinks about Greta.

  Greta is lying on the chaise longue. Just like yesterday – yesterday she had also lain there and hadn’t got up. Hanging on the wall behind the chaise longue is a tapestry on which helmeted warriors with lances are gathering; the small table is overflowing with newspapers, documents, old letters: correspondence, that’s what Greta calls it, my correspondence. She always has to be careful not to put the newspaper on top of the ashtray with her burning cigar. Greta stacks the empty cigar boxes in which she collects scraps of paper and newspaper clippings into towers; she writes key words on scraps of paper that she leaves lying around everywhere. Sometimes she asks Maude; she says, Maude, do you know why I wrote that down? Glacier milk. Why did I want to remember that? And she mumbles to herself and shakes her head, saying, Glacier milk, glacier milk.

  Maude stands by the chaise longue, hands on hips. She looks at Greta; at other times Greta would return her gaze; she often senses when Maude is depressed, and she can also tell when Maude is truly happy, and sometimes she says something about it. But today she doesn’t seem to be in the mood to say anything at all. She is lying on her back, her large hands folded on her stomach, looking at the ceiling. The cat is lying at her side. Greta says dully, What does the Mexican make. Tacos and burritos. Are you finished at work, or did they fire you. Excuse my mood, but I don’t feel myself. I don’t feel well today either, that’s all.

  I’ll make us some coffee, Maude says. I’ll make some coffee that will wake the dead, along with a quark and jam sandwich.

  The dead can go to hell, Greta says, but she does make an effort; sits up, and starts looking for her glasses on the table.

  Maude brews the coffee and prepares a sandwich for Greta and one for herself. Coming back to the living room with a tray, she puts it on the chair next to the chaise longue and says, Shall I open the terrace door, and Greta nods in agreement or simply absent-mindedly. Maude slides the door wide open and the cat bounds to the floor, brushes past her legs and soundlessly leaves the house. They both look out into the garden for quite a while without saying a word, almost in surprise at so much sunlight on the still-bare trees. Spring. The cool air coming into the room smells of fresh-mown grass.

  I remember Lago d’Iseo, Greta finally says. Lago d’Iseo, that’s where you’re going, right? I was there once too.

  Yes? Maude says. She turns to Greta. When was that? Have a little sip of coffee, for my sake; I made it Mexican style – added a little nutmeg and a teaspoon of cocoa. When were you at Lago d’Iseo.

  A long time ago, Greta says. Fifty years? Even longer? I was about the same age as you are now. It’s an impressive landscape; the mountains around the lake are impressive. Quite magnificent. But also morbid. Not my kind of landscape actually. Not at all my kind of landscape.

  She lifts the cup off the saucer and blows into it. She’s wearing one of her linen shirts and her bangles, several narrow silver bangles; for some reason Maude finds it reassuring that Greta put the bangles on that morning. She takes a tiny sip. She says, The nutmeg in the coffee is a good idea; then she puts the cup down again.

  I’ve never been there, Maude says. I just thought that one could go swimming there. It will be hot, I’d like to swim and lie in the sun and drink Campari; that’s all I want.

  I went swimming, Greta says. Suddenly she looks as if she had a slight fever, flushed and pale at the same time. I went swimming just the way you’ll go swimming. I sunned myself and drank Campari and read. The water there is wonderful, ice cold, dark blue; the lake is very, very deep. Pebbly beach. Really, so much time has passed, but I remember the beach and some of the names. Riva di Solto. Lovere, Paratico. There was an accident, I remember that too.

  An accident, Maude says. She pulls a chair over to the table and sits down. She drinks some of her coffee and eats her sandwich, and then she eats the sandwich she made for Greta; she is sure that Greta won’t eat it. The warriors on the tapestry stand behind Greta like her followers. Stand behind Greta like ancestors. Greta looks past Maude, so she says it again, An accident?

  A swimming accident, Greta says. Is that what you call it? I had a green-and-red-striped towel. A deck chair close to the water. There was a family standing in the water. You’ll see that too; that certainly hasn’t changed; these Italians don’t really swim. They stand around in the water; they stand in the water and talk. Grown-ups and children. One of the children had a boat, a little boat made of wood, a very fine boat with a white sail. The boat sailed off. I saw it sail off. Maybe I should have told them. Called their attention to it.

  Greta says, I shouldn’t be telling the story. Shouldn’t talk about it.

  Nonsense, Maude says. I’m not such a softie. What happened next?

  Greta says, The boat sailed off. It sailed away, and they saw it too late; it was already too far out when they saw it. The little boy started to cry. And his father swam after the boat, an athletic man and strong, confident swimmer’s strokes; for quite a while things looked all right. But that lake is treacherous. There are currents, whirlpools, ice-cold spots. Who knew that.

  And then …, Maude says hesitantly.

  He didn’t come back, Greta says. I wasn’t watching the entire time. What was I doing – I was reading, sleeping, I was sunning myself. But when I looked back again, he still hadn’t come back, and the entire family was in a state – how should I say it. In a state of hysteria. Two carabinieri came along the beach. How odd they looked, their uniforms, their black official severity among all the bathers.

  It seemed, Maude thinks, as if Greta had reached back into her memory. Her past. Or as if she were shedding her memories? Like leaves, like a skin.

  Maude looks at Greta; there’s a question on the tip of her tongue.

  Did you know him? The athletic man who swam after the boat, the little boy’s father. Did you know each other? Why didn’t you say anything when you saw the boat sailing away.

  But she doesn’t ask. No, she doesn’t ask.

  Yes, Greta says. That’s the way it was. But this certainly won’t happen to you at Lago d’Iseo. You won’t swim so far out, Maude. You’ll be careful.

  Shall I bring you your cardigan, Maude says.

  That would be very kind, Greta says distractedly.

  Maude goes to fetch Greta’s cardigan from the bedroom. She glances at the photographs hanging over the bed – photos of Greta’s husband, the children, the dog and the house, Greta’s entire long life at a glance. Too little time. Too little time to discover Greta. Greta’s expression half a century ago. Coming back to the living room, she puts the cardigan over Greta’s shoulders, and she senses her touch isn’t unpleasant for Greta, hasn’t yet become alien to her.

  She says, I have to go out again. I have to buy some odds and ends, and I have to pack my suitcase. I’ll be away for two weeks; I don’t think I told you that before. In two weeks I’ll be back again.

  She says, Will you be able to cope? You’ll be able to manage by yourself like this, yes?

  Hail to you, beautiful bay in which my youth came into bloom, Greta says.

  She says, One really remembers the strangest things, from one moment to the next. Beautiful bay where my youthful dreams awakened. Of course I’ll be able to cope by myself. Don’t worry. Have a good trip, Maude. Take care.

  Brain

  Philip and Deborah have been trying for several years to have a child; by the time they give up, Philip is already fifty years old. He’
d like to just drop the subject – he feels he could live out his life perfectly sensibly without a child. He is a successful photographer; there are still some things in this world he would like to photograph, things he’d like to put his mind to; it’s not as if new ideas weren’t occurring to him any more. But Deborah sees things differently. Deborah feels that she can’t be happy without a child; she feels a terrible incompleteness, as if, without a child, a very crucial portion of knowledge would be denied her once and for all.

  That is how she expresses it.

  She keeps repeating it over and over again. She says, I feel as if I can’t breathe any more without a child, and Philip can’t think of anything to say in reply.

  So, they agree to adopt.

  Back then they were married and well off. Deborah had brought money to their marriage; she hails from prosperous circumstances. Money is not the problem. The problem is Philip’s age; actually, he is too old to adopt a child. Deborah is exactly the right age; she is thirty-five, but Philip is a good ten years more, and only after some research does Deborah find an agency that also places children with old, with older parents – exclusively children from Russia. This agency doesn’t care at all about the age of the parents.

  Philip and Deborah spend a weekend at the agency. They sit together in a circle with seven other couples and talk about themselves, attempting to say something about themselves; they are supposed to try to be open. They listen to one another; it is astounding and also touching, how similar they are to one another; their modest needs, the simple longing for a family.

  I long to get to this point, Deborah says. I have a longing for a table set for three.

  Philip, sitting next to her, watches as she searches for words, wringing her hands, twisting her wedding ring – a woman in a state of extreme distress. But the sentences she then decides on are the exact opposite of the complicated theories she normally favours, her often-fatal weakness for on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other; here there seems to be just the one hand. Deborah is facing away from him, her knees drawn up to her chest and her eyes fixed on the floor; she is surprisingly and totally alien to him. She is barefoot; he looks closely at her bare feet. He hears the way in which she pronounces the word ‘longing’, how she draws it out. He imagines a table set for three. The light on the table, falling on the table from the side, the blinding whiteness of the tablecloth.