Love in Case of Emergency, page 8
It must have happened that night.
Judith eats her soup and peers out of the window of the restaurant. Sleet, wind, hunched people with hooded faces. Barely any cyclists, but convoys of cars and the air so thick you could cut it with a knife. The spiciness of the soup brings tears to her eyes.
She puts on her coat, gets into the car, which she parked illegally right outside, puts on Winterreise, and drives to a house visit in eastern Leipzig.
Woman, sixty-eight, living on her own.
Judith switches off the television and empties the overflowing ashtray. She opens the window and examines the woman’s legs. This is the third incidence of phlebitis in half a year, she says in the tone that some patients need to understand the seriousness of the situation. I’m going to have you admitted to hospital as the risk of thrombosis is just too high.
The ambulance arrives swiftly. As the paramedics link arms with the protesting woman and lead her down the stairs, Judith writes Gregor another message. I have to see you. I’m pregnant. She steps outside, pulls the zip of her coat right to the top and the fur hood over her head, reads the message again, and sends it to Paula.
* * *
Paula opens the door in trainers and running gear, her cheeks red. Leni is sitting at the kitchen table cutting cookies from rolled-out dough. Since Paula started running regularly her state has dramatically improved.
We can talk in a minute, she says. Just let me have a quick shower.
Judith sits with Leni. Together they cut out Christmas trees, bells, hearts, and stars. Leni asks about the horse and when she can go riding again. Judith promises to take her along the next time she goes.
When Paula appears in her dressing gown and a turban towel, strokes Leni’s hair, and gives her a kiss on the forehead, Judith looks away.
Paula puts the baking tray with the cookies in the oven, sets the timer, then sends Leni to her room.
Judith ought to have known that Paula wouldn’t offer neutral advice in this matter. Before Leni was born she got the nesting instinct in textbook fashion. Then, after the birth, she, Ludger, and the baby cocooned themselves. For months they lived only in symbiotic unity.
It will change you, she says, you’ll have worries you never knew existed before, feel pain that’s deeper than any other pain.
All the same she advises Judith to have the child.
Does Gregor know? she asks.
Judith shakes her head.
Aren’t you going to tell him?
No, I don’t want to, Judith replies tetchily.
She gets up and looks out of the window,
The apartment in the building opposite is brightly lit. A child is sitting on a swing hanging in the doorway between two rooms. It appears in one window, disappears for a moment, then reappears in the other. The child swings so high that it looks as if it might hit its head on the ceiling at any moment. In the room to the left is the mother, in the one to the right the father. Both appear delighted by the wild swinging.
Judith tries in vain to see herself as a mother. She cannot picture herself with a child. And because there’s no picture, there’ll be no child.
Will you pick me up after the procedure? she asks.
Paula nods hesitantly, and outside it begins to snow.
* * *
It is not quite 8 a.m. when Judith arrives at the clinic with her overnight bag. She hasn’t eaten anything for twelve hours. The clinic is in the basement of a residential house. She and a group of other women are taken to the operating ward and divided up between three rooms. They are told to get undressed, lie in bed, and wait for the anesthetist.
Not all the women are here for the same reason.
Some are having cervical polyps removed, tissue samples taken from the mucous membrane of the uterus, or uterine abrasion to stop excessive bleeding. Separated from the invalids, Judith and two other women are in a connecting room. She’s not imagining it—the nurse is having a friendly chat in the next-door room, but to them she just gave terse, clear instructions: don’t eat anything, don’t drink anything, switch off your phone, wait for the anesthetist.
Judith looks around. Christmas decorations hang in the window, homemade origami stars. The two other women are lying quietly in their beds. They’ve turned to the wall and secretly switched their mobiles back on. Both are young. One is overweight, the other slim but nondescript.
Judith knows what to expect. Lie and wait. Listen for footsteps, keep an eye on the doors, calm the thoughts spinning around your head.
It’s not her first time.
If she’d managed to have her way when she was eighteen and ignored her mother, Judith would have a grown-up child now. Presumably it would be sporty and good-looking, just as she and her PE teacher were. But her mother painted such a bleak picture of her professional future that Judith eventually agreed to the abortion.
Something is happening in the neighboring room. The innocents are being seen to first. Brisk footsteps cross the room, a male voice speaks to the first patient. A last piece of advice, a joke that isn’t funny.
Where does she know that voice from?
It’s now fourteen hours since she last ate. She’s finding it hard to think clearly. This is her third abortion; the second was after sleeping with a man she barely knew. There is every indication that here and now she is giving up her last chance of having a child. Soon she’ll be too old; past forty the rate of spontaneous pregnancy is only two percent. Of one hundred women who have unprotected sex, two will get pregnant. It’s unlikely she’d be one of those two women.
She could get up, get dressed, and go.
She could call Paula and tell her to come and fetch her. They’d spend the day together drawing up a list of names.
Judith takes her phone from the bag beside her bed. Gregor and Paula were the last to call. Gregor rang yesterday evening from Berlin, where he was giving a lecture at a conference. He’d be staying on for another day to see his eldest daughter. By the time he returned she would be in good enough shape to keep the intervention secret from him. The abortion itself takes no more than a quarter of an hour; facemask anesthesia doesn’t require artificial ventilation. She would wake up, recover in a few hours, and sleep in her own bed tonight, as if nothing had happened.
One last time she allows herself to think about what it would be like to keep the child. For the first year she could organize a replacement at the office, and after that she would take on a nanny. They would have the money for this. If she rang him now and told him everything . . .
The mobile is still in her hand.
* * *
Ten days ago she came back from a riding vacation in Montana. Nobody picked her up from the airport.
For the past ten days she’s been trying in vain to find pleasure in normal things.
The nights are endless. Getting to sleep isn’t a problem, but she wakes up after a couple of hours. The contours of her body seem to be disintegrating. Her hands and feet feel very distant. Proportions are shifting. It’s as if invisible beings are pulling at her limbs, and only her head is in its place on the pillow. She doesn’t feel any pain, just a faint tingling.
The more awake she is, the more her body comes back together again. And then the image appears. Every night.
Before her lies a heap consisting of everything her body has lost to date: hair, shed skin, fingernails, toenails, snot, mucus, blood, sweat, feces, and urine. It’s a stinking, sticky mountain of organic material, and she can’t stop thinking that the other seven billion people on earth have piles like this too. She tosses and turns, takes deep breaths through her nose and breathes out again through her mouth. Reaches for the water glass beside the bed, drinks, and doesn’t dare glance at the clock.
At some point early in the morning, sleep returns. The dreams it brings are as dark as the thoughts preceding it. It’s only the noise of the alarm that releases her from the strains of the night.
Judith arrived at work tired again today, but still went riding in the afternoon—without saddle or snaffle, just with a rope and halter.
She makes a salad, then logs onto the site and looks at the latest dating suggestions. She doesn’t want to spend her next birthday alone.
Entrepreneur, 45, two children, neither at home, casual smoker and cat owner, has sent a smile. His response to the question of who he’d like to meet is: Me in ten years’ time.
She scrolls down. What I’m allergic to: Body hair (apart from on the head). Judith clicks to get rid of him and keeps looking.
Architect, 48, no pets, no children, no desire to have children. His personal quotation is from Hemingway rather than himself, but at least he makes no mention of body hair.
She gave up looking for almost two years, hoping for a chance meeting, and she even contemplated being on her own permanently. She had her work, her horse, and her friends—Paula and Brida. There was no room for a man. It was only when Paula rang to tell her about Wenzel that Judith became aware again of how difficult it is to be alone.
She goes into the kitchen, pours herself a glass of red wine, and checks the time. In an hour she needs to be at the bookshop. Brida is reading from her new novel.
Wenzel will be there too. When Paula introduced him, Judith was almost lost for words. Wenzel Goldfuss had barely changed since that day several years ago when, on one of her house calls, Judith visited his cancer-ridden wife, Maja, and then left their lovely apartment with a curious sense of envy. His wife was long dead and life had gone on. It had brought Paula and him together, and driven Judith and Gregor apart.
Brida would call it fate.
But Judith doesn’t believe in fate. What people call fate is nothing more than the sum of the decisions they make.
She’s craving a cigarette, but she’s given up smoking. She goes back to the computer and clicks open the next profile.
Engineer, 45, divorced, nonsmoker, two children, none at home, likes rock, pop, and easy listening, and is looking for a nice woman he can make happy.
She closes the laptop in resignation.
She didn’t meet another man like Gregor. They still bump into each other occasionally, and they’ll say a polite hello without stopping.
The child would be two and a half now. Back then in the day clinic, shortly before the abortion, there was a tiny chance it might have lived. But then the door opened, the anesthetist came into the room, and Judith realized where she knew the voice from.
So we meet again, he muttered, lowering his gaze. As he filled out the anesthesia form she couldn’t help imagining Doctor, 45, with his own horse, naked. Shackled, on all fours, with lash marks on his back.
They didn’t look each other in the eye. Later, on the way to the operating theater, Sven wished her all the best and a happy Christmas. Then the bright lights blurred, the voices faded, and she fell asleep. When she awoke, her pregnancy had been terminated.
Back from the conference in Berlin, Gregor appeared at her door with a bunch of white roses. It came out of her like a contaminated meal. She practically vomited it at his feet.
Gregor slowly repeated what she had said. She’d been pregnant with his child, but had an abortion, which meant the problem was solved and they ought to be more careful in the future.
As so often, it was only when he repeated them out loud that things seemed to acquire some order in his head and their significance become apparent. During the ensuing silence he must have made his decision. Judith had seen the change in his expression. Even before he said another word, she knew she’d be spending Christmas alone. It was the day before the winter solstice, with fewer than eight hours separating the rising and setting of the sun. She left the house in the dark and in the dark she returned. When Gregor went, she knew she’d miss him terribly.
The roses reminded her of him daily, and as if that weren’t enough, they didn’t wilt. They lasted through Christmas and were still standing upright in the vase on New Year’s Eve, with just the edges of the petals browning.
On Christmas Eve, as soon as she got out of bed, Judith sent Gregor a conciliatory message, but she didn’t receive an answer. So she went to see the horse and rode for a good two hours along muddy forest paths, then prepared a bucketful of feed pellets and watched the mare greedily demolish her festive treat. In the afternoon she opened a bottle of wine and began a television marathon. When the doorbell rang early that evening, she couldn’t help but hope.
Judith wandered slowly to the door, lifted the receiver of the intercom, whispered a timid Hello, and waited. But instead of Gregor’s serene bass she heard a high-pitched child’s voice wishing her Merry Christmas. The disappointment paralyzed her for several seconds. She made herself breathe deeply and calmly, then she went to the window, leaned out and saw her neighbors streaming out of the buildings. As every year, a small delegation from the Thomaner choir had come to the street, around ten boys who now started singing “Silent Night” with pure clarity.
Judith lit a cigarette. Cold air came pouring into her undecorated room. The boys sang the next song, “Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen,” in several parts.
She gently closed the window and resumed her series on the television.
Since then so little has happened that the last few years seem like days. Only her trips to the stables have interrupted the never-changing rhythm of work and exercise, expanding the time to an extent that didn’t correspond to what had actually passed, but it did allow for memory.
She carefully applies makeup, puts Brida’s new book in her bag, walks through a thick snow flurry for fifteen minutes, and wishes she didn’t have to enter the bookshop alone.
She could have asked Hans, but things have become awkward because the short, thin wife found out something, and since then Hans has made himself scarce.
She needs to hurry if she doesn’t want to be late. Snowflakes stick to her eyelashes and as she walks Judith thinks of her childhood winters in the Ore Mountains. Scratchy tights, hand-knitted scarves and hats. Her mother goose-stepping up front, Judith and her father behind, onward and upward through forests thickly covered with snow, until the trees became shorter, grew more sparsely, and were angled in one direction by the wind. They stood there like crooked sculptures, surrounded by ice and snow. Then the picnic in a wind-sheltered spot: sandwiches, tea, chocolate, nuts, and sometimes a helping of praise from her mother. For Judith did not complain. Neither about the cold nor her sodden boots or half-frozen limbs. Nor about the length of the walk nor the constantly high tempo, which was always quicker than a child’s.
Judith strides rapidly now, too, just as she did back then. She gets to the bookshop on time, takes off her coat and scarf, pats the thawing snow from her eyelashes, and looks around. Most of the seats have been taken.
Paula and Wenzel wave at her from the front row, while farther back somebody turns to her.
The seat next to Gregor is free. She sits down, says hello, then the lights dim and Brida begins to read. From the corner of her eye Judith can see his head turning in her direction.
Part Three
Brida
A stag emerges from the forest.
He steps forward, looks around, and begins to graze, suspecting nothing. From time to time the stag raises his head, looks from side to side, then continues to graze.
About one hundred and fifty yards separates the raised hunting stand from the stag, a stretch of uncultivated land—a wild, overgrown meadow from which the occasional bird flies up.
Brida lowers the binoculars and picks up an imaginary rifle. She aims, shoots, and hits the stag. Then she bends forward, leaning against the cracked rail. The old wood crunches. Insects have eaten their way into it. In the corners of the stand are large spiders’ webs full of prey.
Her legs shudder as rough hands move up the insides of her thighs. Götz pushes up her skirt. She raises her head and looks across the meadow at the setting sun. The stag turns and disappears into the forest.
She closes her eyes.
They take the winding path through the hills back to the vacation cottages.
Crickets are chirping and twice they come across a slow-worm. Götz holds her hand and sets the pace. When they reach the sign for Hollershagen, he lets go of her hand. He points up at the sky. A flock of cranes flies overhead. A corner of her panties protrudes from the right-hand pocket of his windbreaker. For a moment Brida fantasizes about leaving them there. Svenja would find them and then . . .
What then?
The thought of the children makes her reach for her panties and pull them out.
The girls come running toward them. She and Götz brought the children up together for four years, then Brida left him.
A renewed attempt gave them another year of family life. Now Hermine and Undine are eleven and nine, and Götz and Svenja have been a couple for more than two years.
* * *
Before Svenja appeared on the scene, Brida had seen their separation merely as a change in the status of their relationship. Although she and Götz no longer lived together and didn’t share their daily lives, they still had sex and she always felt that one clear sign would be all that was needed for a fresh start.
They agreed on the bird-nesting model, whereby the children stay in the apartment and the parents take turns living there. When Brida stayed with the girls, Götz would sleep in the workshop, whereas Brida had a room in a flat-share when she was not with the children.
They discussed the children’s issues very reasonably. They celebrated Christmas and Easter and went on vacation together.
The desire for a clean break didn’t come from her.
One day when Götz was moving back into the apartment and Brida was packing up her stuff, he asked her to stay for a while. They had dinner together with the children and she still remembers what they ate: green salad with tomatoes and toasted pine nuts, vegan spaghetti carbonara, and homemade chocolate mousse for dessert. Throughout the meal he avoided her gaze, and when the children got up from the table and rushed to their rooms, he stood up, too, and followed them.
Only later, when they were asleep, did he get to the point. We ought to think about getting a divorce, he said, adding softly, but it doesn’t have to be immediately.
