Letti Park

by Judith Hermann

  The agency’s residential meeting centre is located in the mountains. In the morning when Philip steps out on the terrace he doesn’t know for one dizzying moment why they are really here. The smell of pine trees, snow on the mountaintops. What are they doing here? Deborah behind him in the shadowy room lying in bed, her hair spread out on the pillow like a fan. Then he remembers.

  Sunday afternoon, the agency representative invites them to come to the conference room, just the two of them. The other couples are gone, have left, or they never really existed, just a sham, an arrangement of mirrors to allow the couple Philip and Deborah to become visible. To let everything come out into the open, especially those things they want to conceal.

  The conference room is empty. The mats on which they had sat in a circle and were supposed to talk about themselves have been neatly piled up in a corner. The agent asks them to sit down at the table that is now in the middle of the room; he sits down across from them, puts a portfolio on the table, opens it, leafs through it searching, hesitating at one spot, turning back a page then forward again. He pauses one very last moment, then he turns the portfolio around and places it in front of Philip and Deborah, precisely between them.

  He says, Alexej. As if there were only this one choice, no other.

  In a shiny plastic cover, the photo of a child, perhaps two years old, below it a few details about his origin and adoption history.

  Why Alexej, Philip says. Why this child. He senses that this is a question Deborah would never have asked. She already knows. This is her child.

  The agency representative says, Because of the look in his eyes.

  Deborah says nothing. She looks at the picture of the child, bends down close to examine it.

  Philip and Deborah fly to Russia. Philip has been in Russia several times before, Deborah never. It doesn’t seem to matter in the slightest to her that they are flying to Russia; since the weekend in the mountains, since the decision for Alexej, she has turned oddly silent, and sometimes Philip thinks of it as brooding, an image he would rather avoid. They fly to Moscow and from Moscow they proceed by bus; outside the city a broad, dark plain stretches to the horizon. In N. they take a hotel room in which you can neither turn off the heat nor open the windows. The orphanage is at the edge of the city; a Soviet-style building in an overgrown birch forest. For an hour they wait in a room that has seven chairs standing next to each other against a wall painted red; then the door opens and someone pushes Alexej into the room. He looks paler and thinner than in the photo. He looks stunted. He immediately goes to stand in a corner of the room and refuses to come out of it.

  Come here, Deborah says. Come, come out; I won’t hurt you. Sitting on her chair by the wall she leans forward and tries to entice the child as if he were a kitten; she is crying as she cajoles him. The child stands in the corner, not moving. He stares at them.

  At supper they eat in the empty, spooky hotel dining room; they eat green salad with hard-boiled eggs and ice-cold peas and drink a sweet red wine that immediately goes to Philip’s head. The waitresses stand in a row like soldiers; they stand there motionless, hands folded over their aprons; outside snow is falling in fantastic, fat flakes.

  The peas are very good, Deborah says. The wine is a bit strange, don’t you think; it’s pretty sweet. But I think it’s good. I’m OK with everything.

  Besides them there’s no one else eating supper in the hotel, and they take what’s left of the wine back to their hot room. They phone their families. Philip phones his brother Joseph who sells cars and is the father of three children; the feeling of a family bond – his brother’s voice, the barking of the golden retriever in the background, the noise of the television and the children fighting; Philips’s sister-in-law calling them for supper, then someone ringing the doorbell – is absolutely overpowering. Where are you, Joseph calls into the telephone. Philip! The connection is terrible; I can’t understand you. Call me again later! All the best!

  Deborah calls her sister who lives in Hawaii and is a teacher. She leans her back against Philip’s back while she’s talking; Philip feels the vibration of her voice in his spine. She says, I don’t know; maybe he’s autistic. He seems so odd to me, motionless and silent; he doesn’t talk; he just stares at us; can we risk it. Can we do this.

  Deborah’s sister seems to be saying something reassuring, to know a way of giving some comfort.

  On the second day Alexej takes a hesitant step out of the corner. He clings to the wall, keeps his hands on the wall; he says nothing but turns around to Deborah three times. Philip, having thought long and hard about it, finally took his camera. He photographs the visitors’ room. The view from the window. Deborah on the chair, her hands reaching out to the child; she is wearing a sweater made of brown, fluffy wool, and all the colours in the room turn darker from the outside towards the inside.

  He also photographs the child’s back, his soft, fragile neck.

  On the third day Alexej comes towards them already in the entrance hall of the orphanage; Philip suspects that someone may have had a serious talk with him. He’s wearing an anorak that’s much too big for him, and he reaches for Deborah’s hand in a calm and definitive way. The three of them take a short walk in the garden. They walk around the birches and look at their tracks in the freshly fallen snow, two big sets and between them one small set.

  We’ll take him, Philip says that evening to the director of the orphanage; we are quite certain; we want to take him. The silent manner in which the director adds this information to the files seems right to him, appropriate.

  That evening in their hotel room Deborah blows up several balloons. She had bought the balloons back home and taken them along to Russia; that had been her preparation. Red, yellow and blue, round and heart-shaped balloons; she leaves them lying around in the room, and during the night they keep bumping against each other in the hot drafts from the radiator. The next morning they pick Alexej up from the orphanage, and he walks out with them and between them without once turning around. Later they have the impression that this is the first time in his life that he has ever seen a balloon. He is delighted, totally enraptured.

  One year later Philip begins working again. He has stayed home for all of twelve months; each and every day was spent taking care of the child together with Deborah; the child has adapted, he’s doing well; Philip feels he can start working again, and it’s high time. He rents a new studio and starts a new series; he has always had a great interest in surgical medicine, and he starts photographing in operating rooms; first during heart surgery, then during brain surgery. He photographs the delicate, highly specialised technological surgical instruments, silvery robots behind shimmering plastic sheets that seem to him like poetical images in the bluish light of the operating room, like deepsea creatures. He photographs this for quite a while, for several weeks, and finally, at the end of the series, he photographs an operation on an exposed brain.

  He talks about this photo with Deborah that evening at the table in the kitchen. He tells her about the arrangement of the machines, the surgeons’ conversations during the operation, which of course were not about essentials, but rather strictly extraneous things, the exact opposite of the operation – tickets for the opera, the weather forecast, golf trips. In the past he used to talk a good deal about his work with Deborah, but since the child has been with them they’ve had little time for such conversations, and Philip thinks that he misses this; he misses Deborah’s former predilection to want to see things from all sides. The child, whom they renamed Aaron – the name Alexej was too harsh for them, the x in the middle of the name too hard – is sitting with them; he is supposed to be eating his supper, and he is listening to them.

  What sort of person was it on whose brain they were operating. Whose brain you photographed today, Deborah says as she looks at the child eating, watching him as he eats, again and again pointing to the cut-up tomatoes, the butterfly pasta; how is that person doing now. After the operation. What will ha
ppen from now on.

  A woman, Philip says. The person whose brain I photographed was a woman. I photographed a female brain. I discussed it with the doctors first, and she agreed to it. I assume she’s doing well.

  Deborah waits for the child to swallow. She wipes the child’s mouth; she praises him.

  Philip hesitates, then he says, If I had known what kind of person lived with this brain, how she would do after the operation, I wouldn’t have been able to photograph it.

  He watches as Deborah hands the child a glass of water, and he sees from the look she gives him while the child is drinking that they have arrived at a demarcation line, a fork in the road where, surprisingly enough, he will again be compelled to make a decision. Even though he has told the truth. In spite of having told the truth. Precisely because he did.

  The child drinks all the water in the glass and puts the glass back on the table by himself, carefully. Not looking at anyone.

  A Letter

  For Helmut Frielinghaus

  On the way back I spent a few days in Boston. I like being in Boston, and I also wanted to visit my friend, Walter, who like me comes from C., and his wife. Walter’s father was Jewish, but they got out of Germany in 1939 or 1940, just in time. Our parents were friends and as a little boy I often played with Walter; he had, I remember clearly, a large model train set up in his cellar. Locomotives and express trains, tracks that led through papier-mâché mountains; the mountains were dusted with snow and in the ravines there were tiny fir trees. There were crossings and signals, a train station, a conductor and an engineer, baggage cars, figures waving on the platform, and suitcases and hatboxes the size of rice grains.

  Walter is an eye doctor. He was an eye doctor, occasionally he still sees patients he has known for a very long time. He writes – big fat novels told at a rambling and leisurely pace in German, and he engages in extensive correspondence on his computer. He maintains his command of German by reading old German literature. He never reads anything new, or anything American, even though he speaks English fluently; after all, he grew up in America and studied at Harvard. He quotes Hölderlin, Goethe, Kleist and Rilke by heart in German, carefully and correctly, with a flat American accent – dies ist ein Ding, das keiner voll aussinnt, und viel zu grauenvoll, als dass man klage: dass alles dauert und vorüberrinnt. (This is something really quite unbearable for anyone to fully imagine, and much too ghastly for one to complain: that everything lasts for a time and then passes.)

  These days Walter is actually a crazy man. A highly intelligent screwball, a philosopher, an eccentric. Still a good doctor; sometimes he gives me advice, he advises me about eye diseases, and he originated the sentence: An eye is as fragile as a Ming vase; I’ve adopted this concept for the entire body. He is an excellent technician. In the last few years he has built a three-storey annex to his house in Belmont near Boston, an annex with baths, heating and all the frills; he does almost all of it himself with the help of instructional manuals. And he has a project for his old age – a wooden house on Nantucket. The shell of the wooden house on Nantucket is complete, but for months now work on the house has had to be postponed because the authorities on the island won’t grant approval for the use of his self-designed and self-built sewage treatment setup. He is taking them to court. He says he would continue with the legal proceedings until his death and even beyond.

  During the time I was visiting Walter and his wife in Boston, we talked about the house on Nantucket, and I said if I ever came again I’d like to see it.

  And he said, Shall we drive there tomorrow?

  He said, Shall we drive there tomorrow, as if he assumed that I wouldn’t be coming again, or as if he assumed that he wouldn’t be around any more when I came again.

  He asked Edna.

  He said, Edna, shall we drive to Nantucket tomorrow, the three of us? Go on a little excursion. What do you think.

  Edna is eighty-six years old. She is a quiet woman, a lover of wild flowers; she must have a rich and private inner life, and most of the time she is occupied with mysterious notations that I would much rather read than Walter’s novels. When Walter asked her whether we should drive to Nantucket together, she looked at us in silence, then she closed the botanical encyclopaedia in which she had just been looking up a branch that she had brought back from her daily walk; she got up and began to pack her rucksack.

  They picked me up at six o’clock the following morning at my hotel. The hotel wasn’t serving breakfast yet, and none of the staff were in sight, but there was fresh coffee along with a bowl of green apples on a table in the lobby. So I had a cup of coffee and ate an apple while I was waiting for Edna and Walter, reminded of other trips fifty years ago, of early departures at dawn, of the cold, of fading stars in a sky just beginning to turn light.

  We drove to Cape Cod, to Hyannis; in Hyannis we parked the car and got on the boat to Nantucket. The trip took two hours, and we spent the time up on deck. From Nantucket Harbor we took a taxi to Walter’s house. It is situated on a hill, and from the outside it looks like all the other houses on the island; it’s a simple house of grey-stained wood. It has a cellar and two floors above that and sits on a large parcel of land covered with nothing but low-growing, creeping vegetation. Walter has two surveillance cameras, one in the house and one outside that is trained on the house, and both are connected with his computer in such a way that with the help of the internet he can check from Boston or any other conceivable place in the world to make sure that all is well; later I saw us on the videotape – Edna, Walter and me – entering the house, in the entrance hall, on the roof and on the terrace: our figures, our unsure but natural movements.

  Edna, setting down her rucksack, taking something small out of it, and putting it in a corner of the room.

  We had four hours to spend in the house on Nantucket before the taxi would pick us up again and the last boat left the harbour to return to Hyannis. During those four hours we mostly stood around one or the other of the two radiators; it was a bitterly cold day, windy and frosty, and the winter sun seemed only to intensify the cold. I walked swiftly through the garden several times to warm up. The walls inside the house were still missing; there was only the framing to show where they were supposed to be, and Walter led us through the rooms and furnished them out of the blue with beds and chairs, shelves and sofas, desks and carpets; he did this forcefully and believably. From the upper windows we could look out over a row of houses and down to the beach and the sea. We saw the surf; we could hear the breakers. We held our hands to the radiators, ate doughnuts from a cardboard box and drank hot tea from the thermos, all three of us from the same cup. During those four hours, Edna’s face had a strange expression of contentment, at once glowing and secretive.

  On the boat trip back she went below deck. I stood with Walter at the bow. The sun went down; the water turned silver, then blue, and then black. Nantucket stayed behind. Walter said that in the language of the Indians the name of the island actually meant ‘the far distant land’.

  From Hyannis we drove in the car back to Boston. We said goodbye in the hotel car park; I seem to recall that Walter and I embraced. At half past nine I was back in my room. Half frozen and strangely cheerful, I changed my clothes and went downstairs again to the bar to get something hot to eat and, above all, to have a drink.

  I ordered a whiskey.

  And then another.

  This actually isn’t my best time.

  But I survived it all. I went back to New York and still had twenty-four hours to spend there, hours that were pleasant even though I didn’t do anything special. I walked around, looked at the people, the streets, until I went to the airport in the afternoon and flew home.

  Dreams

  I liked him, and I think he liked me pretty well too. Effi had just dropped this sentence, lightly and in passing, but with a meaningful half-smile and a look that neatly passed right over Teresa. Just as if she had fully understood the lesson of her psychoanalysis, as if she h
ad learned it all. She said it conclusively, there was nothing more to add, and with this assessment the positions were clearly assigned.

  Back then Effi had had a mysterious appointment three times a week; for two years she had talked about having these appointments. And at the end of those two years, during which she separated from the man to whom she’d been married for an eternity and married another, she had confessed to Teresa that the appointments had been for psychoanalysis sessions. Not really a confession – she had simply cleared up the mystery, and at the end she said, By the way, I can recommend him to you. Doctor Gupta. I mean, if you’re ever feeling bad, having a really lousy time of it, I mean if you simply don’t know how to go on. I can recommend him to you.

  By this time Effi’s psychoanalysis was over and she was pregnant. As if Doctor Gupta had pulled off this feat, as if Effi’s child were a creation of the mind.

  During those two years when Effi had her appointment three times a week, the two of them would sometimes meet around noon for a cup of tea. They would meet in a café called the Yuri Gagarin; in the winter they sat inside; in spring and summer and also during the long autumn they sat outside. The chairs at the Yuri Gagarin had red seat covers, and dusty sparrows darted around the tables; they fed them the cookies served with the tea. Invariably Teresa found that the tea wasn’t hot enough.