Mrs Sartoris Read online

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  The statement is pointless

  The finger is speechless

  —RONALD D. LAING, Knots

  I see myself as a piece on the chessboard, and the opponent is saying, “This piece may not be moved.”

  —SØREN KIERKEGAARD, Either/Or

  The street was empty. It was drizzling, as it often did in this region, and twilight was giving way to darkness—so you can’t say that the visibility was good. Perhaps that’s why I was so late in spotting him, but it was also probably because I was deep in thought. I’m often deep in thought. Not that anything comes of it.

  I was on the way home. I had been shopping in the town and had met Renate, who had come over to L. for the afternoon. We had a drink, really just one—two at the most. I knew I would be driving, and besides, Ernst checks my breath. Sometimes he does it for some reason that may have nothing to do with me. He comes out to meet me before I reach the front door, to relieve me of the shopping bags or some other excuse. He strokes my cheek with a kiss, inhaling deeply along the way. He doesn’t know I figured it out long ago, because he prides himself on using his knowledge discreetly. This means he doesn’t reproach me immediately. He bides his time, even if it’s only for a minute—however long it takes me to make an excuse and get through the door. Or skip the excuse, if we’re alone.

  So I didn’t drink a lot. Maybe one, two sherries. If you’re a wine drinker, the only thing they serve in Hirmer’s Café is a Moselle, because Hirmer Senior, when he opened the place more than ninety years ago, was a Moselle fanatic, which was quite common back then. It’s a big wine, and too sweet for us these days, and sweet isn’t even the right word. There’s something too full-bodied about it, it’s too heavy to drink with anything except meat in aspic, and they no longer serve meat in aspic at Hirmer’s either. So when we’re there, Renate and I drink sherry. It tastes okay going down, and it’s cheap compared with Campari or other respectable drinks. We can hardly drink schnapps, because we’re in L. after all, and I live here, and when a lady lives here, if she ever feels like having a drink for no reason and she’s not part of some group, she orders sherry.

  The first time I saw her was in Dr. Lehmkuhl’s waiting room. Dr. Lehmkuhl’s grandfather still had a big farm outside town, his father had been the first interim mayor after the war, and he himself had a major reputation as a neurologist. I was there because my nerves were in a state—or more precisely, because Irmi and Ernst had noticed. I set off in the car to buy bread and soap powder and came back with cigarettes, which Ernst gave up ten years ago. I forgot my godchildren’s birthdays and pulled up the marigolds I’d sowed in the garden myself, because I mistook the stalks for weeds. Twice I suffered every housewife’s nightmare of leaving the burner of the stove on with an empty pot on top. There are apparently electric stoves you can get now that switch themselves off before the pot melts and there’s a catastrophe. But we had an old one, because that’s what Irmi manages best. She has her head together as well.

  The two of them decided something was the matter with me. And they were right. That I slept badly at night and sometimes dozed off in the early evening on the sofa was nothing new. I could even make Ernst believe it had always been like that. He didn’t know that I often woke up at one-thirty in the night and lay awake till morning, doggedly watching the peregrinations of the hands round the face of the alarm clock. The hands glow in the dark; the clock was a honeymoon present from Irmi. Things like that were incredibly modern back then and also much better made. The clock will outlive us all.

  But the state of my nerves was something new to them. Both of them claimed they were worried about me, and I actually believed it of Irmi. Their conversations would sometimes break off when I came into the living room, or Irmi would lower her voice when she was talking to Ernst in her room. Eventually their verdict was unanimous: I was going to harm myself. They couldn’t very well involve Daniela; she was already quite independent for her age and didn’t let herself be told much anyway—unless she wanted to get permission to spend the night at a friend’s house.

  So an appointment was made with Dr. Lehmkuhl, and I went—I didn’t even put up a fight.

  When it came right down to it, I didn’t care one way or the other, and the thought of someone taking care of me was an appealing one. There was a woman sitting in the waiting room who was around my age, clothes a little loud, expensive jewelry on both wrists, and the kind of subtle tan that signals regular skin care and sessions with a sunlamp. I didn’t know her by sight, which in a town like L. is quite a surprise. Sooner or later you meet someone like that at the theater, or at a coffee morning or one of Ernst’s club evenings. She thumbed through magazines, glancing up periodically at the clock, and then sighed so heavily that it would almost have been impolite not to react. We exchanged a glance, and she asked in a deep, very attractive voice if one always had to wait so long here. I said this was my first visit too, and that’s how we fell into conversation. Although she didn’t know anyone in town, she didn’t seem to be lonely or afflicted in any way, on the contrary she radiated energy. When the nurse finally came into the waiting room to make apologies for Dr. Lehmkuhl—he had been called out on an emergency and unfortunately would not be back at the practice before the end of the day—she collected her things abruptly, put a wonderful lightweight pale summer coat over her arm, and invited me to a cup of coffee: the afternoon was wasted anyway, so why didn’t we make something out of it? And so we did. When I came home after dinner, Irmi and Ernst stared at me in amazement. They were probably asking themselves if Dr. Lehmkuhl had dispensed neat alcohol by way of a prelude to his treatment. But it wasn’t Dr. Lehmkuhl, it was my friend Renate. And it wasn’t neat alcohol, it was a very good red wine. Good for the blood vessels, at least.

  Further appointments were made, of course. I liked Dr. Lehmkuhl right away. A sinewy man, obviously a tennis player; he emanated self-control and rigor, which impressed me. I immediately told him more about myself than Irmi and Ernst will ever know; he listened patiently and without emotion, but in such a way that I knew I was understood. He did some tests—tapping the knee-caps, tickling the soles of the feet, etc.—with care but a lack of enthusiasm that conveyed a belief, which I shared, that there was nothing to be learned from them. He asked me about drinking—perhaps Ernst had put him onto this—and I lied to him with an equanimity born of long practice. Much later, I poured him red wine, straight up. It was fun to watch him shake his head and to know that his helplessness was tinged with fellow-feeling. He had certainly noticed my talent for being able, at will, to seem healthy or sick, energetic or frail, aggressive or sweet, as circumstances required, and yet he also sensed that I didn’t want to play games with him. I didn’t want to lose his attention, and that involved being honest with him—up to a point.

  He gave me pills. He did it unwillingly, as he told me, but because I refused to switch to one of his colleagues who was a psychotherapist—I was perfectly aware why this would be a bad idea—it seemed to him the only way to help me for the moment. I took the first dose in his office, and I can still remember the feeling of armor-plated protection I had when I got home. I was more alert than usual; I emptied the ashtrays, said good night to Daniela in her room, and left the car key in the exact place where Ernst always wanted it left. I was enjoying myself along the way, watching myself doing all this and congratulating myself the way we used to congratulate the poodle when he came to us carrying his bowl in his mouth. My imperturbability seemed strange even to me, and when Ernst asked me how I felt, I said: the same way our car feels right after it’s been inspec
ted. For him, my visit to the doctor had its desired effect: I was functioning again. If only for that first evening.

  Because I didn’t get the prescription filled. I decided to pull myself together, and it went reasonably well. I wanted to go back to Dr. Lehmkuhl, but I wanted to get through the days without some official inspection sticker saying I was okay. There were times when I dealt with the whole daily round—getting my child to kindergarten and the school, making two meals a day and serving them at set times, shopping, doing the garden, organizing children’s birthdays, appearing at club evenings, doing holidays, doing bookkeeping and finances, hairdresser’s appointments and obedience school for the dog, doing Easters and Christmases and on and on—I dealt with the whole thing as if it went without saying. And that wasn’t really the problem anyway.

  I don’t know when it got lost. The certainty, the strength, the concentration that was automatically there for what is known as everyday life. I can still see myself sitting on the sofa with Ernst, and Irmi in the big armchair that we had had reupholstered. We would eat crackers and salted nuts, drink beer or wine, even schnapps later in the evening. I can see Peter Frankenfeld and Dieter Thomas Heck, Hans Rosenthal, and Hans Joachim Kulenkampff as clearly as if they were my brothers-in-law. Carrell who couldn’t pronounce his r’s, Kulenkampff’s broad grin. Whenever there was ballet on television, Ernst always said, “Our girls aren’t so bad either,” and Irmi or I would agree with him. We’d watch those muscular thighs working away as they swung forward and backward, left and right, and I would look down surreptitiously at my legs—those were the days when we wore gabardine trousers in dark colors, brown or blue, very close-fitting— and think about a diet. Irmi and I tried them all, for Ernst’s sake too, because he claimed he was battling his paunch. But no matter what we cooked in the evenings— steamed vegetables, lean fish, even fillet steak and salad— none of it changed a thing. Ernst blamed it on his digestion, but when it came down to it, all three of us knew that the evening beers and schnapps and nuts and chips and breadsticks and double-thick sandwiches were having their effect. And Irmi didn’t want it any other way. “Isn’t this cozy!” she always said as she poured another little glass of wine, took the bowl of peanut flips, and beamed at us. Ernst’s paunch didn’t bother her—he was a grown man, after all!—and she attributed my spreading waistline to having given birth. Daniela was a heavy baby, she said from time to time. Both of us knew this was a lie: Daniela was made of feathers, light as a butterfly, with red-gold down for hair, eyes that were almost transparent, more of a delicate moth than a baby.

  She had inherited nothing from either of us. I can still feel the shock I felt the first time I saw her—she seemed absolutely foreign to me, and after some hesitation I asked the nurse whether it was possible there had been a mix-up. She looked at me, disconcerted, and would have launched into a hymn to mother love but the sister was already in the room. What are you thinking of, Mrs. Sartoris! she declaimed in vigorous horror, you were the only woman to be delivered this morning, and besides, all the babies get a tag on their ankle, and you can see, it’s all on there: time of birth, weight at birth, length, body temperature, name of doctor in charge; mix-ups are impossible. Enjoy your little baby girl, I haven’t seen such a beautiful baby for . . . and so on and so on. I was far too exhausted to contradict her, and besides I wanted to make my peace with this remarkable creature lying in a portable crib next to my bed. Yet as far as I still knew, Ernst’s hair was mouse brown, and my own mop of curls was dark blond, as was Irmi’s hair, and this daughter of mine, my first and last, had red-gold down on her head and was so delicate she could disappear at any moment, whereas the rest of us were tall and quite well built. Later a priest arrived too, and said some nice words of praise for me and the baby. Then came Ernst and Irmi with carnations and women’s magazines, then came the tasks that ran from day to night and back to day again, the fennel tea, the walking to and fro with her, the hopeless attempts to stop her crying, and Irmi’s inexhaustible interventions. Some years ago, when we were having a fight, Ernst said the only reason I had accepted him when he proposed was Irmi. I didn’t tell him the truth—not then, not later—but as a supposition it’s not entirely wrong. When we got engaged, Irmi had just turned fifty, and she dazzled me. She was a war widow, her only son had had one lower leg blown away in battle, her income could even be described as wretched—but she always looked as if she’d won the lottery and was just waiting for people she could share it with. The first time she saw me—it was an overcast Sunday afternoon in April, warm and sticky, as it often is around here—she immediately embraced me and led us into the parlor for coffee as if I were the daughter of a queen. Ernst told me you are beautiful, she said as she cut into the cake, but he didn’t tell me just how beautiful you are!

  That afternoon wasn’t the decisive one. I had gone more or less out of boredom; the time I’d spent in the sanatorium had shriveled me up. I wanted to be surrounded by people and activity, and anything that achieved this was fine by me. The idea that Ernst the quintessential club man wanted to introduce me to his mother struck me as quite comic, but there weren’t many distractions back then, and an afternoon of pound cake and local gossip was definitely more entertaining than sitting around at my parents’ house. We opened a bottle of Rhine wine and played cards until late in the dark; I hadn’t laughed so much for months. Irmi positively enjoyed losing; she piled the pennies on my side of the table and said these are for the bridal shoes and never once looked at Ernst, and that really pleased me. As we were walking home—it went without saying in those days that a man would accompany his young lady back home, even if that meant the other end of town—I was raving to Ernst about his mother, while he remained monosyllabic. Perhaps he had had all too much experience as an awkward young man, already ten years an invalid, of being outshone by his mother in her gaiety and the good mood she created around her. It was almost as if he regretted that we’d spent a Sunday afternoon (when the local football team was playing) in our own little group with his mother on the edge of town, away from his regular friends, with the surprising result that his mother and I—the girl who above all didn’t want to be anyone’s bride—came together in a friendly pact and made the tiniest bit of fun of him.

  He did not find himself the slightest bit funny. He cared a great deal about his appearance, bought his suits at Moll’s, and polished his shoes to a high gloss. When he walked, he barely dragged the leg with the prosthesis at all, and if you hadn’t known better, you would have assumed that the faint hesitation in his left foot was merely a physical quirk. He was well built, with a tendency to corpulence detectable only in his chin. His father had been stocky, as you could see from the photograph on the sideboard—in uniform, looking vaguely but firmly away at a half-right angle from the viewer, a kind of standard expression back then. You sensed rather than saw the girth below the chest. Ernst didn’t have much to tell about him, and even Irmi kept silent for a long time about her marriage.

  Without hesitation I was immediately ready to attribute all Ernst’s annoying characteristics—including his ridiculous name—to his father. For example, Irmi was always proper and took herself seriously, as was the expression back then, but Ernst’s displays of pedantry must have come from Heinz-Günther. The way on every trip he kept reaching into his wallet to check the tickets, his mania for placing his glasses on the top right-hand corner of the TV guide, his throat-clearing every time we sat down to eat—all these tics, which made him seem so much older than he was, must have come from his father. He could check himself in the mirror three or four times to be sure his hair was parted straight before we set off for a club event. He laid out the amount of money he was prepared to spend in the course of an evening, then sorted it back into his wallet, having put the surplus bills into a tin in the sideboard. He never helped me on with my coat without saying “May I please?” which went back to some joke in his youth which he had totally forgotten, along with its punch line, but which had this one
utterly pointless detail in it that stuck with him and that he never wearied of repeating. And finally there was this way he had of picking up things—a menu, an ashtray, a garden spade—as if he doubted their utility or their very substance. He hesitated to take hold of them properly and instead he turned them a little, checking each thing’s fit, as if the world were some kind of prosthetic device that would go kaput if you grabbed onto it too hard. He couldn’t hold me properly either. I cannot remember our first kiss, but I still know the feeling of his hand reaching under my blouse for the first time, his fingers grasping as carefully as they had when they were searching for his napkin at dinner shortly before.

  All pleasures back then were harmless. What was there to do in L.?! Saturday afternoons, bowling, followed by a “happy circle” of the club. I was too exhausted to wonder about this, I just went along. Twenty or thirty of you sat at a long table, very occasionally at several tables, and talked about something. Politics was taboo, so was the past, and the future was confined to two-room apartments in town, an allotment on the outskirts, and your father’s workshop. There were some employees in the group—Freddy and Thomas, for example—and you could recognize them by the fact that they paid more attention to their appearance and were carefully polite. Ernst fitted right in. He was also much loved. Almost nobody had a TV set at home, the only movie house in L. didn’t change its programs more than once every few weeks—so people were drawn to anyone with something approaching talent. And to some degree Ernst had talent.

  His mother had taught him to play the lute. Irmi was very musical; whenever someone started singing a folk song or a popular hit, she would slip spontaneously into singing harmony in a beautiful, soft alto voice. Her first love was operetta, and in the fifties and sixties the radio was full of it. The Gypsy Baron, The Cousin from Nowhere, The Czardas Princess, etc. She knew the most famous arias by heart, complete with libretto, and accompanied herself on the lute. She did duets with Ernst, the two of them sang to each other, and it was beautifully done and quite unself-conscious; however, on club evenings Ernst performed solo. On these occasions he also sang operetta favorites, but deliberately chose the ones with silly words, which allowed him to roll his eyes and make extravagant gestures. He acted out the Italian in love, the hot-blooded Hungarian, and the Cousin from Nowhere by chortling, snorting, cooing, and snapping his fingers; it was all absolutely perfect, and yet the result was that everything became a joke: the music, the text, Ernst, even the audience. You’ve become so serious! my mother often said, and pushed me, whenever I was hesitating about whether I wanted to go on one of these evenings with Ernst: Go, it’ll do you good, these young people are full of energy and it’s time you enjoyed yourself again!