Seven Years, page 11
After the appointment, the three of us went for a drink together. Conversation turned to Tania. She and Birgit had continued to live in the apartment together for two years after I moved out. Tania’s hygiene neurosis had gradually abated, but she’d gotten crazier in other ways. She subscribed to German nationalist papers, Birgit told us, and expressed extreme right-wing views. I couldn’t invite anyone back to the apartment anymore, I would have been ashamed if they’d seen who I was living with. Also, Tania had grown increasingly suspicious. She had developed a thoroughgoing paranoia. She ended up marrying a Swiss guy who was also a member of the organization she had joined, and she had gone to live with him in Switzerland.
But it was so nice at the beginning, said Sonia, do you remember? How we used to cook meals together? She was always a bit uptight, said Birgit. She took everything so fantastically seriously, and had theories and views about everything. She couldn’t allow things just to be. Like any true believer, in other words, I said. Sonia said that was a mean thing to say. It’s not the worst people who end up in sects, said Birgit. It’s the seekers, the ones who are missing something, and can’t live without it anymore. Then they go and hang their hearts on some guru or some idea that’s in the air just at that time. Something that gives them security. A relationship can give you just as much security, said Sonia. Money gives you security, said Birgit. I said I hoped to be able to endure insecurity. Birgit laughed. If you expect a certain standard of living, there’s only the appearance of freedom for you anyway. Who said that?, I asked. Birgit shrugged her shoulders. Me? No idea. The only alternative is sainthood.
The office did better than we could have dreamed, we had taken on more staff, but somehow there wasn’t any less work for the two of us to do. You can’t plan everything, said Birgit. We’ve got time, said Sonia, and if it’s not meant to be, then it’s not to be. I knew how much she wanted a baby, and I felt bad that I couldn’t make it happen for her. We stopped talking about it, only sometimes Sonia would say she was fertile just then, and I would feel sorry for her, which didn’t make me perform any better. When we moved into the house, we used the room under the eaves as a storage room, but Sonia didn’t stop referring to it as the nursery.
On the day Ivona’s letter arrived I happened not to have my car with me. I had belatedly taken it to the mechanic that morning to have summer tires put on, and had gone to work by subway. It was a fine day, and after work I went to the station on foot, and was thinking about Ivona. The thought that she was still living in Munich was somehow disagreeable to me. I hadn’t seen her for almost seven years. It was surprising that we’d never bumped into each other in all that time, on the street or on a bus or in a store. I was sure I would recognize her instantly if I did happen to see her. Perhaps she was observing me, the way she did back then in the beer garden. I stopped with a jolt and spun around. A man who was following hard on my heels brushed past me and muttered, asshole. Not a trace of Ivona.
It had been my intention to tell Sonia about the letter and ask for her advice, but when I got home I saw that she still had her migraine, and I decided not to. She would only worry herself needlessly, or get all suspicious or something. I would call Ivona, meet her somewhere if it wasn’t possible otherwise, and lend her the money, provided the amount she needed wasn’t too much. And that would be an end to the matter.
Sonia said she was feeling a little better, and tomorrow she would go back to work. She had even cooked something. I’m just going to make a quick call, I said, and went to the basement where we had set up a little office.
I shut the door and rang the number in Perlach. A man’s voice answered. I asked for Ivona. Just one moment, he said, and I heard sounds, a door, a hushed conversation. Then there was silence, and I knew Ivona was on the line. I got your letter, I said. I didn’t want to, said Ivona. Want to what? Ask you for help. Silence again. I’ll see what I can do, I said. I’m not swimming in money. Silence from Ivona. It was no good, I’d have to see her. I asked if we could meet. The man came on the line again, said Ivona was sick, if I wanted to see her, I’d have to go there. His voice sounded dismissive, but I was pleased Ivona appeared to have someone looking after her. I asked who I was talking to. Hartmeier, he said, a friend.
The following afternoon I went to Ivona’s. I told Sonia I had a meeting, and she nodded and said she’d probably stay longer at the office, a lot had accumulated in the course of her absence.
Ivona lived in an apartment building in a characterless sixties development. The buildings stood right on the road, clustered around a green space with a few trees and a neglected playground. The facade was grimy and sprayed with cryptic graffiti next to the entrance, but other than that it was in surprisingly good condition. I rang the bell and after a while a bluff-looking man with gray hair came down the stairs and opened the door for me. Hartmeier, he said, extending his hand. We were expecting you. I looked at my watch, I was only a few minutes late. He took me to the third floor, to a small, cluttered apartment. He knocked on a door and went in. I stayed in the hallway and listened to him say, with false friendliness in his voice, that he had to go. You sure you’ll be all right? Then he came out and held the door open for me. When you leave, make sure she locks the door after you.
I entered the bedroom. The curtains were drawn, and it took me a moment to make out Ivona in the dimness. She was sitting on a chair beside the window. This room too was stuffed with junk. The air was stale and far too hot. I walked up to Ivona and gave her my hand. She had changed in the years of not seeing her. Her face had grown puffy, her hair was thinner. She was wearing an ugly quilted wrap of no particular color, and white socks under plastic sandals. She might be only two years older than me, but she was an old woman.
I had known her body in all its details, the heavy, pendulous breasts, the rolls of fat at her neck, her navel, the stray black hairs on her back, and her many moles. I knew how she smelled and tasted, how her body responded to touch, I knew its repertoire of familiar and less familiar movements, but when I saw Ivona sitting there, I had to acknowledge that I didn’t know the least thing about her, that she was a complete stranger to me.
She told me quite freely, almost pleasurably, about her condition before the impending operation. For some time now she had had very heavy bleeding and cramping during her period. The doctor had found myomas, harmless growths in her womb, and instead of putting her on hormone treatments for years, he had suggested having the womb and ovaries removed. A perfectly routine operation, she said, the removal would be done vaginally, there was no need to open her up. It felt strange to hear the technical medical terms in her mouth. She talked about her body as though it were a malfunctioning machine. She had no fear of the operation, she said, but what made her sad was the knowledge that she would be unable to have children afterward. Thirty-eight is leaving it a bit late for babies anyhow, I thought, but didn’t say anything.
Are you with someone?, I asked. Herr Hartmeier is just a friend, she said. She had the flu, that’s why she was home. And he looked in on her from time to time and checked up on how she was. She asked me if I wanted some tea, and I followed her into the kitchen and watched her heat up water and take a tea bag from one of the cupboards. Her way of moving had something coquettish about it, I could think of no other word for it. Presumably, I was the only man who had seen her naked apart from her father and the gynecologist, I thought. And suddenly I had the overwhelming desire to strip her naked. I came up to her from behind, and opened her wrap, and let it fall to the ground. She was wearing a thin short nightie underneath, maybe it was the same one she had years ago. I pulled that over her head, and took off her underthings too. She turned to face me. Her features were completely expressionless.
I was pretty sure Ivona had never slept with a man, and that her panting wasn’t excitement but fear. I knew I was making a mistake that could not be amended, but I was reeling with desire. I pulled her into the bedroom and onto the bed, and she lay down, and I lay on top of her. Again, I had the sense of Ivona’s body having a life of its own, that when it was naked it was quite divorced from her character, and was capable of unexpected responsiveness, a mute language all its own. While Ivona kept her eyes tightly closed, and her face looked as if it were asleep, her body was awake and reacted to every touch, every glance almost, with a shaking, a trembling, tension or relaxation, in a way that both excited and repulsed me.
At five I called Sonia in the office, and explained I was running late, the meeting was taking longer than expected. Then I went back to the bedroom. Ivona lay naked on the bed, her pose had something obscene about it. I lay down on top of her and she shut her eyes again.
It was almost seven before I could tear myself away. She was in the bath, and I was sitting on a kitchen stool, feeling liberated. I could hear noises in the apartment over us, and thought about the people who lived here, the human hordes who filled the subways in the morning and sat in front of the TV at night, who sooner or later fell ill from their labor and the hopelessness of their efforts. A camp of the living and the dead, as Aldo Rossi had once described the city, where only a few symbols manage to survive. Undecipherable references to people who had once lived there. I had always been half-afraid of the faceless masses for which we put up skyscrapers. I remembered the topping-out parties when we celebrated the completion of a project with the workers. How they sat hunkered together and looked at the rest of us, the investors and builders and architects, almost with scorn. Or when I visited one of these projects years later, when I saw how the buildings had been taken over—laundry hanging out to dry on the balconies, bicycles dumped higgledy-piggledy outside the doors, little flowerbeds arranged in defiance of any understanding of landscaping—then too I didn’t feel annoyance so much as fear and a kind of fascination with life swarming and seething and escaping our plans, the memories that sprouted here and merged with the buildings in some indivisible unity. Then I understood the remark that a building wasn’t finished until it had been torn down or lay in ruins.
I remembered listening once to Sonia explaining to a school janitor why the bicycle racks couldn’t be made any bigger. She talked about proportions and form and aesthetics. He looked at her in bafflement, and said, but the kids have got to park their bikes somewhere. Sonia had looked at me beseechingly, but I had just shrugged my shoulders, and said the janitor was right. She shook her head angrily and stalked out without another word.
Ivona emerged from the bathroom. She looked tired. I said I had to go. At the door I asked her how much the operation cost. About four thousand marks, she said. I was surprised it wasn’t any more than that. I’ll lend it to you, I said, you can pay me back whenever you can. I’ll bring you the money. She said she was always at home during the day. At night she went out cleaning. Don’t forget to lock the door now. I had to smile. She said Herr Hartmeier had her best interests at heart.
From then on I started seeing Ivona regularly again. My feelings toward her had changed from what they were seven years ago. I couldn’t claim she interested me as a human being, but I had gotten used to her, and no longer felt as aggressive toward her. I drank her herbal tea even though I couldn’t stand it, and I listened to her boring stories, and sometimes I told her something from my life, some office stuff that she listened to without a trace of interest or sympathy. It was still and exclusively the physical thing that tied me to her, those sluggish hours that we spent together in her overheated room, stuck to one another, crawling into each other, together and always separate. Once, I’d just gone to the bathroom, Ivona fell asleep, and I stared at her withered body and her face, by no means beautified by the relaxation of sleep, and I asked myself what I was doing here, why I couldn’t leave her. But she awoke, and looked into my eyes, and like an addict I had to lay hands on her again, and grab hold of her and penetrate her.
I asked her what she had done in all those years we hadn’t seen each other. She seemed not to understand the question. She had worked. And what else? Do you see girlfriends? Did you go abroad? Do you have a hobby of some kind? Sometimes she went to events organized by the Polish mission, she said, and she had a cousin who lived in Munich too, though she hardly saw her anymore. Once a year she went to Posen to visit her family.
Religion seemed to loom even larger in her life than it had seven years ago. She went to Mass regularly, and she belonged to a Bible group. That was where she had met Hartmeier. She talked about him often. He was a plumber. One of his sons was in charge of the family business now, he devoted himself entirely to the church, ever since his wife had died a couple of years ago. Once I asked Ivona if there’d been anything between them ever. We were lying on the bed side by side, she was gripping my hand, the way a child might hold its mother’s. I leaned over her, and asked, is he your lover then? Own up. She looked at me with an astonished and at the same time disappointed expression, perhaps because I doubted her fidelity. Herr Hartmeier wasn’t like that. Not like me? Bruno often came to see her, said Ivona, he had said he felt very close to her, but she told him she was keeping herself for someone else. It took me a while to understand whom she meant. I should have told her that I didn’t want anything from her, that I would never leave Sonia for her. The very idea seemed preposterous, to give up everything for the sake of a woman with whom I had nothing but a sexual obsession. But I guessed I would never manage to persuade Ivona to give up her idée fixe, so I didn’t say anything. I think she was firmly convinced that God directed our paths, and that He had plans for her and me. Let her think that if it did her some good, I didn’t care. I stood by the window and looked down at the deserted playground. It had been raining for days, and big puddles had formed on the grass. There was a large birdcage on one of the balconies opposite that was covered with a patterned cloth, maybe an old curtain. I opened the window and I could hear the sound of dripping water, the sound of flowing water, and the strained buzz of a light airplane. It was late spring, but it could just as easily have been fall. I turned to Ivona and asked her if it was true that she’d had nothing to do with men for seven years. And what if I hadn’t called her? Ivona didn’t reply.
I always saw Ivona during the daytime. To begin with I made up meetings, but Sonia knew what I was working on, so I had to think of something else. For years I’d suffered from occasional back pain, so now I claimed I was going to do something about it. I joined a fitness club, that way I could spend an hour or two a week with Ivona, without Sonia getting suspicious.
I had brought the money for Ivona’s operation to our second meeting, but I never asked her if she had gone through with it or not. She had started working again, now she was working as a cleaner in people’s homes during the day. Her hours were unpredictable, and often she canceled me at the last minute, because one of her employers needed her to be there. When she told me again that she wouldn’t have any time this week, I said I would pay her. She didn’t reply. I’ll pay you, I said, how much do you want? I had expected her to be insulted, but she just said she got paid ten marks an hour for cleaning. All right, I said, I’ll give you twenty. It was a bad joke, but now every time we parted I left her some money. I’d never gone to a prostitute, the idea of spending money on sex was offensive to me. But giving money to Ivona was something different. It wasn’t payment for services received. Ivona belonged to me, and my looking after her in that way was the justification of my claims of ownership. Sometimes, I don’t know what got into me, I started giving her commands, and naming a price, fifty marks if you do such and such. Maybe it was a way of humiliating myself. If it offended Ivona, she never let on. She did everything, regardless of what I offered, and she took the money with an apathetic expression, and didn’t bother to count it.
We were now meeting two mornings a week at regular times. Usually Ivona wouldn’t have left the house yet, and was waiting for me in her wrap. She offered me herbal tea, until I gave her an espresso machine. I drank an espresso standing up. Ivona was sitting at the kitchen table, looking at me inquiringly. Then I told her what I had planned, and we went to the bedroom, or the sitting room, or the bathroom.
It was an exceptionally rainy summer, and the city felt like a hothouse under its warm humid shroud. When I lay on the bed tangled up with Ivona, a great lassitude would come over me, our sweating bodies would seem to coalesce into one many-jointed organism that moved slowly like a water plant in an invisible current. Sometimes I dropped off into a sort of half-sleep, from which Ivona would rouse me when the agreed time came around. You have to go, she’d whisper in my ear, and I got dressed and walked out into the rain, where I only slowly woke up.
I had reckoned I would get sick of Ivona sooner or later, and get rid of her, but even though the sex with her interested me less and less, and sometimes we didn’t sleep together at all and just talked, I couldn’t shake her off. It wasn’t pleasure that tied me to her, it was a feeling I hadn’t had since childhood, a mixture of freedom and protectedness. It was as though time stood still when I was with her, which was precisely what gave those moments their weight. Sonia was a project. We wanted to build a house, we wanted to have a baby, we employed people, we bought a second car. No sooner had we reached one goal than the next loomed into sight, we were never done. Ivona on the other hand seemed to have no ambitions. She had no plans, her life was simple and regular. She got up in the morning, had breakfast, went to work. If it was a good or a bad day depended on certain little things, the weather, some kind words in the bakery or in one of the houses where she cleaned, a call from a friend with whom she had a drink after work or went to the movies. When I was with her, I participated in her life for an hour, and forgot everything, the pressure of time, my ambition, the problems on the building sites. Even sex became completely different. I didn’t have to make Ivona pregnant, I didn’t even have to make her come. She took me without expectations and without claims.
