Letti Park

by Judith Hermann

The hours at the Yuri Gagarin were above all polite and characterised by an amiable distance, as if they were each trying to leave the other alone or as if, on the whole, they were not really much interested in each other. They talked about books they’d read or hadn’t read, about exhibitions, about this or that film. Effi had a trying habit of retelling films in their entirety; it would never have occurred to Teresa to interrupt her. Then shortly before one o’clock Effi would pay for her tea and set off to her appointment, which Teresa for some time suspected was with a lover, maybe one who wrote letters, a rather corpulent, bearded Arab with soft hands whose kitchen smelled of fresh mint. Unfortunately, there was no lover. Effi merely spent that time in the apartment of Doctor Gupta, whose practice was just around the corner and on whose couch Teresa too would be lying one year later.

  At one of those midday meetings at the Yuri Gagarin, Effi told Teresa about a dream she’d had. Teresa didn’t know the first thing about the interpretation of dreams; she listened to Effi; she understood what she heard; she would have said, I simply understood what I wanted to understand.

  I dreamed about you last night, Effi said. I dreamed that we were both on a tram; we get on together and have to buy a ticket; we’re standing next to each other at the ticket dispenser and suddenly you get very small. You shrink, get smaller and smaller, until you’re really tiny, a dwarf.

  She indicated Teresa’s diminutive size with her hand, using thumb and forefinger, half a centimetre. She said, And then I pick you up. I pick you up and put you into my coat pocket.

  Effi had a round face, expressive green eyes, slightly Asiatic features; her teeth were crooked, and she smiled one-sidedly, smiling only with the right side of her mouth, which always gave the smile an involuntarily sarcastic expression. Or was it voluntary? Teresa looked at Effi for a while. Then she thought, Effi dreamed that she was protecting me. Because she assumed that I’m actually tiny, tiny and small, and as fragile as an egg.

  But some time after that Teresa felt so bad that she didn’t know how to keep going. In Effi’s words she was having ‘a really lousy time’. She could no longer read the newspapers; she broke out in tears when she heard the traffic reports; and the growing hordes of refugees, catastrophes at sea, earthquake victims, forecasts of droughts, climate summits, plagues and massacres caused her to feel an irrational anxiety that got worse with each passing day. She developed a severe, itchy rash on the inside of her elbows, on her neck and on her face. She couldn’t stand the sound of ambulance sirens, the radio and the newscasts any more, she would wake up at three o’clock at night with a racing heart and have great difficulty going back to sleep, and she could scarcely move because of an overwhelming feeling of grief. On dozing off she dreamed of missed appointments, elevator shafts and slugs. And one morning when she started to cry before it was even light outside, she phoned Doctor Gupta. She went to see him in his office for the first time on a November afternoon, and she pushed a piece of paper across his desk that she had prepared at home; she had managed to write no more than the one sentence: Somehow I don’t know how to go on from here.

  But that was long ago. Years ago. By now Teresa has been going to Doctor Gupta for years. She hasn’t gotten pregnant. She has survived numerous separations – among them her separation from Effi; she simply broke off her idiotic relationship with Effi. But the relationship with Doctor Gupta continues; it remains intact. During those years Doctor Gupta has moved his office four times. He moved from the office near the Café Yuri Gagarin into a communal practice where there were people sitting in the crowded waiting room who obviously had more serious problems than Teresa. For a few months he moved his office to a carriage house in a shaded, damp and chilly rear courtyard, and then he moved into a medical office building at an intersection that was so noisy that a timidly spoken word could barely be understood. For some time now he has managed to hold out in an attic apartment, in a consulting room from which Teresa, lying on his couch, can see the wide sky and birds gathering in great flocks; she can see satellite towns, factory chimneys and windmills far away on the horizon.

  Doctor Gupta practises classic psychoanalysis. He sits behind Teresa in an armchair; she cannot see him while she is talking or not talking. The office furnishings have remained the same through all the moves; the couch is the same couch Effi used to lie on, the enigmatic painting of a hot air balloon above a ridge of hills is the same; the bookshelves contain only professional literature; there is always a carefully chosen flower arrangement in a floor vase next to his desk. The curtains are cream-coloured. The carpet, an oriental, the blanket on the couch, also oriental. Doctor Gupta’s armchair is shabby, especially the headrest. Sometimes he puts a personal book on his desk like a lead. A clue, a mysterious hint: Oblomov. Julia Kristeva’s Tales of Love, short stories by Capote. Teresa picks up on these hints. She collects them, keeps them, and thinks about them, occupying herself with them in a way that is insistent and in spite of that strangely uninvolved. Perhaps it’s similar in nature to the way Doctor Gupta listens to her, following her long-winded, always identical, clueless circling around a central point. Or not following – there are hours when she is certain that she can tell from his breathing that he is asleep. She thinks, Just turn around. Sit up and look at him; catch him sleeping dammit.

  But she doesn’t sit up, she doesn’t turn around.

  At home she puts the same flowers next to her desk, moves her couch over to the window, and reads Julia Kristeva. Doctor Gupta has revealed to her in which section of the city he lives, and she knows that he has a passion for the English language; when he uses English diagnostic terms, his voice trembles with emotion. He plays classical guitar; some days the guitar stands in a corner of the room; the fingernails of his right hand are long and manicured. He is fat and sad, a massive man with a shaved skull, carefully polished shoes and a penchant for unusual, extravagant shirts and expensive trousers. One entire summer he wore a cork on a piece of string around his neck that looked as if it were supposed to remind him of something important.

  Is he homosexual?

  Married?

  Why does he keep moving all the time.

  Does he have children?

  He has no children; Teresa knows, although she doesn’t know how she knows, yet she knows for certain.

  But once when he opened the door for her, he had a black eye. A black eye; his right eye was impressively discoloured: blue, green, dark violet and black.

  Oh, Teresa said. Who started it. Did you hit first? Or were you defending yourself; did you by chance hit back.

  I hit back, Doctor Gupta said, surprisingly candid. He emphasised each single syllable – I hit back.

  He smiled; there was no more to say.

  At another of her sessions Teresa happened to think of the Café Yuri Gagarin, of Effi, of her dream, the dream Effi had dreamed back then. With the years, Teresa has been dreaming less and less; her dreams are blurry and she remembers them only vaguely, and she thinks that Doctor Gupta is probably disappointed in her because of this lack of dream material. From time to time she runs into Effi on the street with her child in a baby carriage, in a stroller, on a child’s balance bike, and finally holding his hand, then the child with his own bicycle, the child with a school satchel, the child alone on his way home, lost in thought, dawdling – this strange, totally unfamiliar child. And Effi and Teresa pass each other with a nod in greeting, or they raise their hands, nothing more. And there are also days when they don’t greet each other at all. There is the day after which they won’t ever greet each other again. In the first years of her analysis Teresa talked about these encounters, then less often, and then not at all any more. But at one particular session, for whatever reason, she again remembered Effi’s dream, and she talked about it. She retold the dream – Effi had dreamed that we were on the tram together; we were standing by the ticket machine, and I was next to her and suddenly I was very small, a tiny being, as small as a dwarf, and she bent down, picked me up and put me into h
er coat pocket – and as she was recounting it almost exactly in Effi’s words, she remembered that Doctor Gupta knew Effi. That in all likelihood he also knew this dream. And of all the people about whom she tells him, session after session, Effi was the only one about whom he knew quite a bit, even though he may not have known everything, and he could picture her in person, in three dimensions and real. Effi’s green eyes and her crooked smile; the expressive gestures of her hands – as if Effi were the one colourful figure in a series of black-and-white figures, as if she were a pulsatingly alive person in the midst of the dead.

  Doctor Gupta is a reserved, almost passive man. He leaves almost all questions unanswered, leaves almost all of them open as if he felt that there was no one valid answer for any single question and no truly compelling reason for any decision. He evidently doesn’t think that you can think anything through to its conclusion; perhaps he assumes that a new difficulty would come to light behind every insight arrived at. He leaves Teresa alone in her thicket of conjectures and haphazard assessments, and yet in spite of that it is important that he is there, on the periphery, a vague figure, but a figure of a certain size. During the session in which Teresa talked about Effi’s dream, she suddenly thought she knew what it was that Effi was actually dreaming – Effi was dreaming about putting her, Teresa, into her pocket. Turning her into a dwarf, making her tiny, causing her to disappear once and for all. That’s what Effi had dreamed, and when Teresa arrived at that conclusion, Doctor Gupta, behind her, made a sound that was doubtless one of affirmation, of pleased agreement, almost a tender compliment.

  That autumn the birds flock early; the wind tears the flocks apart, but they re-gather and become smaller, more distant, and then move off. The trouble spots of war move elsewhere and borders shift, the flood of refugees increases; far, far away typhoons destroy entire regions, and epidemics break out and die down. There is a book by Bunin on Doctor Gupta’s desk. He has cut the delicate orange flowers growing in clay pots on the French balcony and put them into a vase on his desk, and covered the clay pots with branches. This painstaking care tells Teresa something about him. The number of insights is small: the revelation with regard to Effi’s dream, insights about one thing or another; and Teresa thinks that at this rate she won’t arrive at any clear idea or get to the bottom of anything essential. She might talk about it with Doctor Gupta; he would for a long time say nothing; then he might say that this was acceptable. That one could live with this after all.

  The East

  They arrived in Odessa at six in the morning. Ari says, I didn’t sleep at all. I didn’t sleep a wink, not one second. Seven lousy hours lying on my back submitting to this torture.

  Jessica knows this isn’t so. He did sleep; not long, it’s true, but on and off. He slept while the train was taking them east through the night; she slept too. Their compartment had two beds across from each other with daytime cover-lets of threadbare tapestry, little nightlights at the head ends above stacks of three firm pillows, and for each of them there was a linen runner to put on the small table. Jessica had put hers in her bag. Ari had spread his on the table; the runner was blue with delicate lighter woven stripes. They had peeled oranges on the runner. Ari had gone off and come back with a glass of tea in a silver holder, lumps of sugar the size of small chocolate bars. They had looked out at the unfamiliar landscape until it got dark. Ari was the first to get undressed and stretch out on his bed; he was the first to fall asleep. There’s no point in telling him.

  In Odessa it is still dark at six in the morning and there’s a sickle moon in the sky above the train station roof. It’s cold, but Jessica read somewhere that September at the Black Sea can be golden, that only the nights are cold; the days will surely still be warm. The other passengers get off the train and immediately walk away, hurrying along the station platform and disappearing at the end of the tracks to the right or left; there’s no one being picked up and no one who would tarry or just stand there; everyone has a destination. Ari knows that there are old women at the train stations who rent out lodgings. It used to be that way before, why should it be any different nowadays; as long as there are still train stations and old women on earth, this won’t change. The old women hold up cardboard signs with the words Lodgings or Room for the Night.

  He says, We’ll pick one.

  And indeed, there inside the train station concourse are the old women with their cardboard signs. There are several – Jessica hadn’t expected they would see even one. But there must have been at least twenty, and they were not at all alike. Which one are we going to take? At least they agree on which ones they don’t want to pick. Not the ‘madam’ and not the alcoholic. Ari rejects any signs of religious symbols, certainly not the old one with the silver cross around her neck, and under no circumstances the one in the mangy fur coat. The old women stand silently in the station hall, some walk back and forth a little, just two or three steps in one direction then a couple of steps in another; they don’t talk to each other, and they don’t accost anyone. Their cardboard signs are creased, and the writing on them is faded and hard to read, it’s possible they don’t even say, Room for the Night, Lodgings; perhaps they say something completely different.

  Indulgence.

  Expectation. Or Annihilation.

  Jessica has no idea why only words like that come to mind.

  Not one of the old women is anything like what Ari had expected, had imagined – he’d say he hadn’t imagined anything; it was simply too perilous to imagine anything beforehand. There aren’t any who look like what Jessica is after. An old woman like those in the fairy tales: kind, serious. Extinct; they don’t exist any more; at least they don’t rent out rooms any more.

  That one, we’ll take that one there, Ari says.

  A thin woman with short ash-grey hair, wearing a track-suit and trainers, jacket closed; hands clasped.

  We’ll take her.

  Ari bargains.

  Jessica puts down her backpack and looks around the train station. There’s a waiting room as large as a theatre, rows of chairs one behind the other, at the entrance a woman in uniform standing at a desk that’s bare except for a telephone, and in front of the door leading out to the tracks, a heavy raspberry-red curtain. Enter: The Distant Land. Jessica had wanted to go to Odessa; Ari hadn’t. Ari hadn’t wanted to go to Odessa; in his opinion Odessa had nothing to offer except for the military and prostitution, pigeon droppings and a dirty sea. He came along in spite of that, out of kindness. To please Jessica. The old woman holds a crumpled pad in one hand and is writing numbers on it with a pencil stub; Ari takes the pencil stub from her and crosses out the numbers, writes down different numbers. She takes back the pencil stub and crosses out the numbers Ari has written. After a while they find a number they both like.

  OK, let’s go, Ari says. We’ll go with her.

  Night still hangs over the city; the streets are deserted. They walk three abreast, the old woman on the left, Jessica in the middle, Ari on the right. The old woman is in a hurry. She doesn’t try to start a conversation with them; she doesn’t say anything. Jessica can’t possibly imagine – and, unlike Ari, she likes to imagine things, she’s constantly imagining things – that this woman would have a room to rent in which she, Jessica, would like to spend any time. With a really clean bed, white, starched sheets and rustling down quilts, a table with chairs, and outside the window lovely scenery, not to mention a bouquet of anemones, a carafe of cold water, a bowl of berries. This old woman looks as if she doesn’t even have a room of her own, has nothing of her own except the crumpled pad and pencil stub. She doesn’t look as if she had a key in her trouser pocket, and there’s something haphazard and hopeless about her tracksuit. But it’s possible that she isn’t – isn’t evil; Jessica thinks she can judge this: the old woman isn’t devious or contemptuous; she’s just indifferent, resigned. Jessica hurries along the dark street next to her and Ari, and she says the one word she can say in this language; she says Chernomorsky.
The old woman nods and points to the left, vaguely down the street somewhere; it seems she doesn’t think this is important. Back there. Somewhere. There. As if the Black Sea were some minor little thing, something that could be anywhere.

  The old woman says, Uliza. Franzuski. Uliza Franzuski. She says it once more; obviously they’re supposed to remember it. She doesn’t say it a third time. She stops in front of a metal door, the only door in an infinitely long wall. She points up and down the street; at the end of the street two figures are sweeping up the fallen plane tree leaves with birch brooms. Jessica can hear the swish of the brooms on the pavement. There’s nothing else to be heard. The old woman resolutely pushes open the metal door, and they step inside. It is getting light now, and the inner courtyard behind the wall is bathed in an unreal brightness. Low wooden barracks, one next to another; a blonde prostitute is sitting in front of one of them, rolling a cigarette; she’s wearing a nightgown and green high-heeled shoes, and she looks as if she just got up. Grey cats roam around plastic bowls of leftovers; wild grape vines grow on the wire netting stretched over the courtyard, turning it into a big cage. On the right is a new building of unpainted concrete. The old woman guides them to the wooden barrack next to the blonde prostitute’s barrack, and the blonde prostitute turns away, but says something first to Jessica. Something hard to understand. Hard to interpret.

  The old woman opens the door and points wordlessly into the interior of the barrack. Dark, maybe there’s a piece of furniture by the wall; it’s hard to make out anything. A torn towel on the floor.

  Jessica says, This won’t do. Ari; I can’t do this. Absolutely not. Totally impossible; I’m sorry.

  Ari says, Because of the hooker or what.

  Jessica says, Not just because of the hooker.

  Ari says, I told you so. This is Odessa, I said so earlier.

  The prostitute lights her crooked cigarette and yawns indulgently, smiles. She gets up, disappears into her little house, and comes back out with a canary-yellow sweater that she drapes over her naked shoulders. The old woman tries to divert Jessica’s gaze from the prostitute back into the barrack.