Seven Years, page 10
She was staying with Ferdy for the moment, she was going to apply to the Academy of Arts. She was an artist. The young woman was like a simple peasant girl, she had red cheeks and she wore a handmade sweater and wide pants with some African pattern. I asked her what sort of things she did. She shrugged her shoulders. All kinds of things, for the moment she was thinking about bread. What do you mean, thinking about bread? You know, bread, she said. What bread means. Bread, I said. Yes, she said, bread. Her father was a baker, her name was Elsbeth.
He’s so awful, said Sonia in the taxi, the way he kept going on and on to me. What did he talk about?, I asked. Cow udders and folkloric costume had been Jakob’s subjects of choice. He had said in all seriousness that a dirndl was the ideal outfit for the female body. And stared at her the whole night as though he had X-ray vision. It wouldn’t be a bad life, you know, I said, married to a vet in the Bayerischer Wald. Sonia made a face. You would give him eight children, and you would hold on to the cows while he injected the semen into them, and look after his ancient parents. The arrogance of it, she said, with proper indignation. He’s obviously crazy about you, I said, it’s not his fault. It’s not mine either, she said. I always get these madmen coming on to me. If only it was someone with money for a change, or good-looking. You’ve got me, haven’t you?, I said. She was silent for a moment, and I could tell she was thinking about a question in her head. Then she took a deep breath, made a skeptical face, and asked: Are you still seeing that Polish girl? From time to time, I said. Did she knit you that vile sweater that’s in the apartment? I nodded. You’d tell me if it was anything, wouldn’t you? I didn’t answer right away, and then I slowly said, it was something. What do you mean? It started before we got together, I said. What started?, asked Sonia. What are you talking about?
The taxi driver didn’t seem to be interested in our conversation, he had his radio on and was listening to electro music. Even so, I spoke very softly. I could easily have talked my way out of it, after all, I’d never slept with Ivona. But I didn’t. I said I’d had an affair, I didn’t quite understand it myself. It’s finished now, I said, I ended it. Perhaps I really believed that just then, I wanted to believe it. The thing with Ivona had been really stupid, I had risked my relationship with Sonia for nothing at all. Sonia still didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about. She looked at me like a stranger. I hadn’t seen her cry before, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. Her face seemed to melt away, her mouth was contorted, her whole posture dissolved. I tried to take her in my arms, but she slid away from me and looked out the window. She said something I didn’t understand. What did you say?, I asked. Why? I don’t know why. She’s not good-looking, she’s boring and uneducated. I have no idea.
That night we made love for the first time since Sonia’s return. She had gone into the bedroom without first going to the bathroom. I went after her, and watched her get undressed with awkward movements. There was something broken about her, only now did it occur to me that she might have had too much to drink. She sat down on the side of the bed, her shoulders hanging down. Her hair was tousled, and when she turned toward me, I could see her eyes were shining. In bed she pressed her back against me, and I noticed that she even smelled differently than usual, perhaps because, unlike the other nights, she hadn’t showered. Her body felt softer, more relaxed, and very warm, almost fevered. After a while, she turned toward me and held me tightly and started kissing me, very quickly and frenziedly, all over my face.
Late that night, we were lying exhaustedly side by side, not touching. I asked Sonia to marry me. Yes, she said, tenderly, and without any great surprise or excitement. Let’s talk about it tomorrow.
If we hadn’t slept together that night, I probably wouldn’t have asked Sonia to marry me, and she would have left just as uncertain and undecided as she’d been when she arrived. Perhaps then she would have stayed in Marseilles, or gone to England or America. I sometimes wondered afterward what would have happened to us if we hadn’t gotten married, but Sonia never seemed to quarrel with destiny, not even at the worst of times, when everything seemed about to go up in smoke. She had made her decision that night, or maybe even earlier, and she stuck to it and accepted the consequences.
I got up and walked along the lakefront. I asked myself if Antje was right when she said passion was an inferior form of love. It wasn’t for nothing that it didn’t last. What connected me and Sonia was more than a brief intoxication. We had after all stayed together for eighteen years. Maybe our relationship worked precisely because we’d never gotten really close. Even so, I wasn’t sure if I wouldn’t one day find myself in a situation where I’d be willing once more to risk everything for nothing.
I went home. Sonia and Antje were still sitting on the terrace, talking. Sonia said they were going to go to the movies, they wanted to see The Lives of Others. We’ve seen that already. Yes, but Antje hasn’t, said Sonia. You’ll have to stay here anyway and watch Sophie. I didn’t understand what Sonia thought was so great about the film. When we went to see it, she cried. The last time she’d done that was for Schindler’s List, and I couldn’t understand that either.
I sat down at the table with the two women, even though I could sense I was intruding. Are you still talking about old times? It’s an inexhaustible subject, said Antje. Sonia was just telling me how her family reacted when she brought you back to meet them for the very first time. That was on Christmas Eve of ’89, I said. I remember because we argued about the fall of the Berlin Wall. I expect you were against it, said Antje. I wasn’t against it, I said, what I was against was prompt reunification. I think most of us at the time hoped that something of the GDR would be preserved, and that the West would be changed in some respect as well. Then Sonia’s father trotted out his war experiences. That wasn’t it at all, said Sonia, he was just a kid in the war. And then her parents asked me all kinds of questions about my family, I said. I was surprised they didn’t ask how much my old man made. Rüdiger would have suited them better. Antje laughed. That’s what Sonia just said too. They thought you were a bit rude, said Sonia, and my father had the feeling you were a socialist. He still does, I said. In Bavaria, it doesn’t take much to be thought of as a socialist. I think I just wasn’t good enough for them, they would rather their daughter married someone from their own circle.
Alex had to sleep in my sister’s room, Sonia laughed. And you slipped in to be with him?, Antje asked. Did I?, asked Sonia. No, I said. To this day you behave like a little girl when you’re with your parents. Sonia protested. Probably she was just too tired. Antje said she could remember Sonia arriving back in Marseilles after Christmas, and telling her she was going to get married. I looked at Sonia. She creased her brow thoughtfully. It’s a long time ago, she said, and stood up with a sigh. I’m getting chilly out here.
Sonia and Antje left at six, they wanted to get something to eat before the film. I stuck a frozen pizza in the oven for Sophie. When we began to eat, Mathilda meowed plaintively next to my chair. She hopped onto my lap. I grabbed hold of her and dropped her on the floor again. Didn’t you feed her?, I asked. Sophie made no reply. Did you hear me? Sophie looked at me furiously, and said Mathilda isn’t getting anything to eat today, she pooped on my bed, and that’s her punishment. I tried to explain to Sophie that you couldn’t treat a cat like a human being, but she acted deaf. I lost my temper, and said if she didn’t give Mathilda something to eat right away, she wouldn’t get anything either. I took her plate away from her, and she got up seething with rage and ran upstairs. I ate, still furious at Sophie’s behavior. Then I gave the cat some food and went up to see Sophie, but she didn’t respond to my knock, and I didn’t feel like giving in. When I looked in on her an hour later, she was lying on her bed, fully dressed and asleep.
I went up to the attic to look for the model that Sonia had given me back then, the house she had created for the two of us. I was pretty sure it was in one of the boxes of my student stuff, but it took me a long time to find it. It was in a shoebox, along with the plans for it. It was much smaller than I’d remembered it. The cardboard was yellowed, and the glue had come off in one or two places, the two figures that represented Sonia and me had fallen off. I found them at the bottom of the box. They were plastic figurines of the sort you can get in any model shop. I looked at the plans and sketches. Le Corbusier’s influence could clearly be seen. The house occupied a relatively small area, but it was three stories and had a roof terrace. The rooms were generously cut. Light came in through a wall of windows, and through skylights on the top floor. I imagined what it would be like to live in that house, asked myself how it would have changed our lives. The house we were in now was much cozier, but there was something small-scale about it, with its narrow staircase and saddle roof. It was conventional in every way, and emanated a modesty and unobtrusiveness that might have suited me but that certainly didn’t express Sonia’s nature. It’s absurd, she said to me once, we think about beautiful buildings all day long, but we’ll never be able to afford one for ourselves. And the people we build for have no appreciation of quality. I took the model downstairs to the living room and put it on the sideboard.
Sonia and Antje weren’t back until almost midnight. Antje wasn’t wild about the film, but Sonia had cried again. I made myself some tea, the two women drank wine. Presumably they had had something to drink in the city, at any rate they both talked fast and volubly, and I could hardly get a word in edgewise. They talked about the film, but I got the impression the real subject was something else. Antje was aggressive, while Sonia defended herself to the best of her ability. She seemed unhappy, something was bothering her. After a while she got up and said she was going to bed. On the way to the door she noticed the model. She picked it up and turned to face us, as if to speak. For a moment she stood there with half-open mouth, and then she clumsily set the model down and quickly left the room.
Antje had settled herself comfortably on the couch. She leaned back and looked at me expressionlessly. Why should I give a damn?, she finally said. I asked her what she was talking about, and she gestured dismissively. If I hadn’t brought you together, you would have found some other way. What you made of it is your affair. You’re free individuals.
I wondered what Sonia had told her, what they had discussed. Strange as it may seem, I said, the only one of us not to have compromised at all is Ivona. She’s the only one who knew what she wanted from the get-go, and who followed her path to the end. Didn’t exactly make her happy, did it?, said Antje. Who can tell?, I said. You didn’t get to the end of the story, she said. I don’t know if I can tell you the end of the story, I said, but I can at least tell you how it goes on. Antje poured herself some more wine and looked expectantly at me.
I told her how I had started seeing Ivona again during Sonia’s internship. I know about that, Antje said, Sonia told me. I was lonely, I said, all my friends had left the city, the office I was working in was staffed by idiots, and I was living with these two crazy women. I think the worst thing for Sonia was that it had to be the Polish girl, Antje said, she didn’t understand that. She still doesn’t understand it. She loved me, I said, she loves me to this day. It was as though that absolved me of all questions. You told me in Marseilles that I mustn’t demand too much from Sonia. I could ask for everything from Ivona. The more I asked of her, the more she loved me. Then why did you ask Sonia to marry you?, asked Antje. I don’t know, I said, maybe I couldn’t stand the responsibility. Antje groaned aloud. After I split up with Ivona, I didn’t hear from her for years, I said, and I couldn’t say I missed her. They were difficult years. We opened our firm and took every job we were offered, renovations, little things that brought in neither money nor fame. At the same time we entered loads of competitions, were up against two hundred other firms. We worked for eighty hours a week, basically we did nothing but work. But it wasn’t a bad time, for all that. We knew what we wanted. We were still living in the three-room apartment in Schwabing, we had one of the rooms equipped as an office. Sometimes we didn’t go outside for days on end. I slept badly, and often I was half dead with exhaustion. Sonia’s parents offered to support us, but we didn’t want that. Then we won a contest to build a school in Chemnitz. Our project got some attention, and soon we got more contracts. We were able to start employing people, and move into bigger premises. Sonia was the creative brains of the enterprise. She did most of the designs, while I took on the organizational and managerial tasks. I hardly gave Ivona a thought. I assumed she was back in Poland, when one day I got a letter from her.
The letter came at the worst possible moment. I had a thousand things on my mind, a building that was supposed to be finished and was going wrong in every way, a builder who kept calling me about some guarantee or other, a contest jury that I needed to prepare myself for. Sonia had been home all that week, she had a migraine and was bedridden, and only got up for a short time in the evenings when I came home, and we had something to eat together, and then she went back to bed.
The mail had been on my desk since lunchtime, but I only got around to looking at it in the evening. The envelope was made out by hand in a clumsy writing that I couldn’t recognize; there was no return address. I pulled out two pieces of paper, saw the signature, Ivona, and immediately had a bad feeling. The secretary had already left for the day, so I went to the kitchen to get a coffee. Then I sat down at my desk and began to read.
Dear Alexander, perhaps you still remember me. After everything that had happened between us, I thought it was absurd, Ivona addressing me formally. Of course I remembered her. I sometimes used to wonder what had become of her, but never made any effort to find out. She wrote to say she thought about me every day, and the lovely time we had together. She had often meant to write to me, to ask to see me again, but then she had learned that I was married now, and she didn’t want to interfere. She was sure I had lots to do, she sometimes saw my name in the papers, and was proud of knowing me.
For a brief moment I had the absurd thought that Ivona wanted to blackmail me, but she had nothing on me. Sonia knew about our affair, and after that night when I told her about it, I hadn’t seen Ivona again, I just stopped going, and she’d never tried to get in touch. Sure, I’d behaved badly toward her, but that wasn’t a crime.
The reason she was writing, I read on, was that she was in dire straits. She was still illegally in Germany, getting by on badly paid jobs off the books, cleaning and child minding and occasional little bits of translation work for a Christian publisher in Poland. The money had always been enough, Ivona wrote, she had even been able to support her parents on it, who had had a hard time after the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, but a few months ago, she had gotten sick, some abdominal condition. She never had health insurance, she had just been lucky enough to stay well. Now she was facing expenses that dwarfed her income. She had turned to God for advice, and one night in her dreams she had seen me as her rescuer. Even then she had hesitated for a long time before asking me for help. If I wasn’t able to give her anything, she wouldn’t bother me anymore. I owed her nothing, she would see any help as a charitable act, and try to pay me back as soon as possible.
The letter was cumbersomely expressed. I was pretty sure someone must have helped Ivona write it. Even so, the formulations were full of that blend of submissiveness and impertinence that had struck me about her from the start. I could picture her face before me, the expression of humility that made me wild with lust and rage. Ivona had signed with first and last names. Below her signature was an address in Perlach and a phone number. I pocketed the letter, shut down the computer, and went home.
The lakeside house of Sonia’s dreams turned out to be beyond our means. Instead we lived in a row house in Tutzing, away from the lake. We had been able to buy the house after an aunt of Sonia’s had died and left her a small inheritance. The first time we looked at it, we wandered into a small room under the eaves with a slanting ceiling and Sonia said, this is the nursery. I didn’t say anything, and we talked about a couple of modifications. But that same evening, Sonia brought up the subject again. She said she didn’t have that much time left in which to get pregnant, after thirty-five things got critical. We had a very objective conversation about the pros and cons of having children of our own, and in the end decided that Sonia would come off the pill.
After some years at the planning stage, the building work finally began on the school in Chemnitz. I rented a room there, and often stayed away all week. It was only on Sonia’s fertile days that I absolutely had to be in Munich.
In spite of, or maybe even because of her beauty, Sonia was pretty inhibited. She was incapable of passion, and I sometimes got the feeling she was watching herself while we made love, to make sure she kept her dignity. Initially, synchronizing our nights to her ovulation had a positive effect on our sex life. On those evenings Sonia was nervous, she blushed easily and upset glasses and knocked things over. Then she would disappear into the bathroom for a long time, and when she came out and joined me on the sofa in her silk wrap, it felt as though she was offering herself to me, which was a thought that stimulated me. Sometimes we made love on the couch, and I thought Sonia was turned on as well, and forgot herself at least for a little while. But when she didn’t get pregnant, my feeling of failure got more pronounced, and I lost all pleasure in this game.
Birgit, who had been Sonia’s roommate in their student days, had opened her own practice by now. She was Sonia’s gynecologist, and ran all kinds of tests, and sent us to specialists. Finally she told us that medically everything was okay, and she urged Sonia to work less, but we couldn’t afford to take advice like that. It’ll be all right, said Birgit. Don’t think about it so much, then it’ll just happen naturally.
