Granta 165, page 6
I assume she didn’t know that.
When I had my baby, five years after hers, we began to spend the holidays together in my family’s summer house on the North Sea. Tides and dykes, the treeless coast, the eternal triste rain were alien to these people from Frankfurt, Brandenburg, East Berlin. The house, once my grandmother’s home, made up for that lack of familiarity. Old, decrepit, provisionally furnished, with no curtains, light perforated through the windows via a tangle of climbing plants, in one room a fantastic uncle who took part in the nightly parties and could quote Heine, albeit rather patchily; an overgrown garden with trees for hammocks and lanterns, and friends came and went over the weeks, extended and chosen family, taking it ever more for granted. It was that house where Ada explained her family principle to me, and she did so with a gentle gesture at everything around us. Furniture, framed certificates, turn-of-the-century photographs, stopped clocks with bent hands, chipped crockery and the name of the house, which someone had hammered in golden letters beneath the gable a hundred years ago.
Daheim: home.
All this, Ada said, is yours but it doesn’t have to be. You can accept it – or let it go. You can be here but you don’t have to feel responsible for anything. Anything at all. And then she stood up, walked away and left me alone with her suggestion.
I remember a dress made of tatty indigo-blue silk that she often wore, bought for ten euros at the market on Kollwitzplatz; of all the dresses I’ve seen, this was the most beautiful. She took it off the only time just the two of us went out to the mudflats, as far out as possible, up to the North Sea’s edge. It can’t have been a coincidence that this was the one evening we spent without the others. We’d cycled to the wild beach, to the spot where the promenade ended and the dunes began. We leaned our bikes against each other, removed our shoes and walked out towards the open sea; once we reached the water, Ada took off her dress and stood naked next to me. Dusk, the sky above the land far behind us now night, the sky above the water still bright, the water mother-of-pearl, Ada’s body pale and slow against the dark seam of the sea. I didn’t take my dress off. She had put hers back on at some point; then we’d walked back, cycled back to the house. On another afternoon, she embraced me fiercely and unexpectedly, in the hall by the rack of rain-soaked coats, between the children’s countless wellington boots, Ada’s scent suddenly so perceptible, dark, sandy, almost masculine.
In every one of those summers back then, Ada gave me flowers on my son’s birthday, an August bouquet picked on the edges of the fields the night before; she was the only person who considered that tradition important. The summers were exhausting. Nerve-racking, making us happy in an exorbitant way that was painful for everyone, our goals all variable and movable, life one long lyrical transit. Once Ada’s child was old enough to go to school alone in Berlin, she sometimes let her husband and child return to the city without her. One summer, her husband called me after getting back home to thank me for his stay and sum up how important it had all been for him, and then he asked me to get Ada on the phone, only to tell her the washing machine was broken and the fridge was mouldy. After that conversation, she sat down on the bench by the front door and cried. I’d never seen her cry before, and never did again. I’d like to say she left her husband shortly afterwards, met another man and had a second child; in real life, years passed between that crying on the bench and the second child, years that feel only in retrospect like a single step from one room to another. With her second child and that child’s father, Ada still spent her summers at the house; we stayed close. The second child’s father got the place at the head of the table; he left that spot after every meal as if he were the youngest of all the children. There was a walk on which he and Ada set out, and when they got back his glasses were broken, his shirt ripped, and his nose was bleeding. Things didn’t seem to get easier.
And yet – it’s unforgettable how Ada would retire at noon with her second child, still toothless and chubby-cheeked, for a nap. How she drank a big glass of milk before the nap, the baby perched on her hip, snuggled into the curve of her arm, round cheek laid on Ada’s shoulder, how she held the glass with her free right hand, downed it in one, head tipped all the way back, in deep, earnest gulps. Ritually, as if it were not milk but something far more exquisite, essential, not a drink but a colour, a material she was ingesting before she escaped with her child into the in-between world of sleep, which I knew would be deep, heavy with dreams and genuinely delicious; nothing compares to a nap shared with your own child. She put the empty glass back on the table, ran the back of her hand, her wrist over her mouth, gave me a mysterious and tender smile, went to her room and closed the door gently behind her. In the years of her separation from her first husband, the dissolution of her chosen family, her love for the father of the second child and the birth of that child, she attended analysis with Dr Dreehüs, something I didn’t know at the time; she only told me about it once the analysis, the restructuring, was over. She disbanded her family. Or her family disbanded itself. The father of her first child had a baby with a woman from Tierra del Fuego, the father of the second left Berlin. The building on Helmholtzplatz was sold and its tenants were evicted. Ada moved into a small apartment a few streets away, in a building with a camera hooked up to the doorbells, which was the beginning of the end, domesticating us all.
My child got older.
The summers were limited; sometimes school resumed in early August and we had to go back to Berlin, dog days in the city, days which always made me melancholy, full of yearning for the water, the garden, the bed in the attic room with the sandy sheets, listening to my child’s breathing in the night. On one of those dog days, I was sitting in a cafe with Ada, and as she went to leave, she said in passing that she had to go to her analysis session, one of the last. She gestured down the street, towards where the practice must be. She said: A good analyst, if you ever need one.
And that was all.
That tiny scene – the cafe, the remark, the gesture in the direction – crops up in my story ‘Dreams’. Two or three sentences that deliberately conceal all else – the indigo dress, the light on the mudflats and the water, the glass of milk and the nap, the chosen families, the children, mine and hers – negating them. Those two or three sentences sum up something that’s impossible to grasp. They decide in favour of a single instant, a snow-globe moment. They cast all the rest overboard.
Omission.
Writing imitates life, things disappearing, images constantly being left behind, falling out of focus, sputtering out. But the autonomous decision in favour of that omission – not the glass of milk, not the dress, but yes to the cafe scene, although the milk and the dress are more sensual – makes it easier, balances out anguish and grief over loss and time elapsed. The father of Ada’s second child once said that above all else he fell in love with her hands, her gestures; a remark I could instantly relate to. I always found Ada’s hands even more beautiful than her breasts: their distinctive knuckles, slim fingernails, the explicitness with which she stretched out those hands, spread her fingers when she made her decisive, capricious observations, the elegant nonchalance with which she touched things, moved them, dropped them. She was a beautiful and quite cold woman with an upright, always rather defiant posture, although her gait might suddenly become bouncy, light-hearted.
I never trusted her; perhaps that’s why it’s hard for me to say I was friends with her. I’d rather say I used to know her. It would be easier to say I used to love Ada. After that occasion in the cafe we lost touch, I broke off contact. It may have been because I took her comment seriously, made an appointment with Dr Dreehüs, began my analysis. Too much closeness, perhaps: Ada’s sessions on the couch, my own sessions on the same couch. Dr Dreehüs, I thought, knows something about me that I’d never tell him of my own accord, he knows things about me that Ada told him. I must have felt the need to regain control, to place the other at a safe distance. In the first years of my analysis I crashed, and I didn’t want to expose myself to Ada in that state, have her observe me. We lost one another; I can’t remember missing her. I was busy leaving my own family, and I didn’t intend to start a new one.
I wanted, I think these days, to be alone.
The story ‘Dreams’ describes a realisation – a retrospective classification of a relationship, the insight that we delude ourselves, fool ourselves, how glad we are to be fooled. Ada may have felt a vague sense of endearment towards me, but she never let me out of her sight; I would never have become a member of her family. In the summers with the children, she always wanted us all to do a reading of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard together. A scene she dreamed of – the circle of friends around the long garden table by night, with white wine, cigarettes, candlelight and the classic yellow Reclam paperbacks, reading roles she’d already allotted, but that had never gone any further. Those paperbacks are still on the bookshelf in the house by the sea. What would have happened if we’d agreed to Ada’s suggestion? No one wanted to read The Cherry Orchard. Everyone wanted to drink to excess, smoke, tell stories, let themselves go, take different roles, and perhaps that was the only sign of Ada’s vulnerability – that she wished we wanted to put on a play together. We didn’t play together. And now our children have left home. The story focuses on the separation, a futility. Putting a copy of Lettipark in Ada’s letter box would have been a superfluous gesture – and beyond that, I assume Ada would prefer to leave me in the dark about her possible reading of my view of our years.
In Trommel, Dr Dreehüs was sitting alone at the bar, with his back to the door. The barman saw me coming and Dr Dreehüs followed his eyes, turned round to me over his shoulder and smiled – he hadn’t expected me but he promptly patted the bar stool next to him, ridding me of my embarrassment. To an outsider, it might have looked like we’d arranged to meet. Dr Dreehüs seemed to like being alone in a bar, we were the only guests. He smoked. The light was dim, the bar not clearly of any particular persuasion, and the slightly thuggish-looking barman seemed to sense that the encounter between Dr Dreehüs and me was – let’s say, somewhat shady. A little illegitimate.
I took off my jacket, asked him for a second cigarette. Dr Dreehüs casually tapped one out of the soft pack and held it out to me.
He said: What are you drinking? He said: It’s on me.
At that point in time, he and I had spent over a thousand hours of our lives together. I had talked about all sorts of things I usually kept to myself. Dr Dreehüs knew a good deal about me, I knew nothing about him, and our encounter in Trommel was an unexpected expansion of our configuration, a small and puzzling mutation. To this day, I’m not sure whether Dr Dreehüs was a competent analyst. When other people talk about their analyses, I get an impression of lively and heart-warming communication; Dr Dreehüs, however, almost never spoke to me, I remember perhaps five utterances in ten years. The minutes passed while I spoke to myself, searchingly, pausing between my sentences, posing questions and reaching for the answers alone. These days I think that kind of analysis was exactly right for me: it was ideal.
In one of our first sessions, I had told Dr Dreehüs about my fear of no longer being able to write at the end of the analysis, having to sacrifice writing to the analysis. He had replied that that remained to be seen, and submerged after that mysterious remark into a silence from which he did not reappear for ten years. More or less. I’m exaggerating, but that is what I remember, and that is what the narrator in the story remembers: Dr Dreehüs-Gupta never said anything, and in some moments she was certain – as I was – that he’d fallen asleep. He would always sit behind me, at the top end of the couch, I would never turn round to him, having the superstitious impression it would bring bad luck to turn round to him. Sometimes we’d laugh together – he had a sense of humour. Occasionally, he might express sympathy or understanding through half a sigh or a longer exhalation. But whenever I’d ask him a question he would ask me why I was asking him, and refuse to answer. There had been sessions when I’d arrived early, paced up and down the park outside the building, looked up at his windows and seen him smoking a cigarette on the balcony, and I’d felt great satisfaction that Dr Dreehüs had his own addictions, was dependent on such an unhealthy habit. He played classical guitar, the guitar rested against his desk in an expensive bag every Monday. And that was all I knew about him. The night-time encounter in Trommel brought with it the risk of gazing at a face that wasn’t what I thought I knew. Instead, the face of a stranger to whom I had entrusted my whole life in the mistaken assumption that he understood me – and now it might prove that he’d understood nothing at all and aside from that was a know-it-all, unlikeable and cold. I was afraid Dr Dreehüs might simply not be the man I had taken him for, might, to use a preferred phrase from Ada’s chosen family, be an utter idiot. A total and utter idiot. Ten years would collapse in on themselves, crumble into nothingness:
Cinders.
Realisation in time-lapse – a little more specific than the realisation over years that the person you love is not the person you think they are, a gradually dawning awareness that you are alone in the world, your partner a mirror image of your needs, a reflection which will fall away the moment you let go. Held by nothing, responsible for no one, least of all for you.
You are, in Turgenev’s words, alone like a finger.
I didn’t know what to drink, but Dr Dreehüs ordered for me in a manner that had a clear and absurd touch of the paternal: a gin and tonic. The barman mixed the drink placidly as I watched on. And then I took the first sip, lit my second cigarette myself, turned to the side, gathered my courage and looked at Dr Dreehüs. His expression was friendly, rather arrogant in a way that was familiar for no good reason, a little weary, beneath the weariness essentially: earnest.
He was perfectly fine.
His gaze was perfectly fine, as was his gentle and mockingly interested amusement; he was nothing but a man in the late years of his life sitting at a disconsolate bar at two in the morning – on a weekday; he’d get up early and go about his specific work – and that fact alone had something deficient about it, and the deficiency had something calming about it, and I had evidently not, at least not at this first glance, been wrong about him.
He said: You were brave to come into Trommel. You were brave to come in, I’m glad, and it was clear he meant what he said.
I said: Does this barman here know what your job is?
He said: This barman here thinks I’m an electrician.
I said: I can imagine you doing almost any job but that.
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