The Summer House, Later - Judith Hermann

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want to listen to anything, and he knew nothing of the winter morning in the year 1905 when my great-grandmother kept the train from leaving so that his great-grandfather could escape at the very last moment. My lover just lay on his bed and, when he said anything at all, spoke just this one sentence: ‘I am not interested in myself.’ His room was cold and dusty and faced the cemetery, where the death bells rang constantly. If I stood on tiptoe and looked out of the window, I could see the freshly dug graves, the bouquets of carnations and the mourners. I would often sit on the floor in a corner of the room, knees drawn up to my chest, gently blowing the dust balls through the room. I thought it strange for someone not to be interested in himself. I was interested exclusively in myself. I looked at my lover, and my lover looked at his body as if it were already dead; sometimes we would make love like enemies, and I would bite his salty mouth. I felt slender and skinny, even though I wasn’t; I could act as though I were not myself. The light coming through the trees outside the window was green, a watery light, a light one sees near lakes, and fluffs of dust floated through the room like algae and seaweed.

      My lover was sad. Sympathetically I asked him whether I should tell him a short Russian story and my lover replied enigmatically that the stories were over, he didn’t want to hear them, and anyway I wasn’t to confuse my own story with other stories. I asked him, ‘And do you have a story of your own?’ and my lover said, no he had none. But twice a week he went to a doctor, a therapist. He forbade me to go with him; he refused to tell me anything about the therapist, and said, ‘I talk about myself. That’s all.’ And when I asked him whether he talked about the fact that he wasn’t interested in himself he looked at me with contempt and said nothing.

      So my lover was either silent or he repeated his single sentence. I was silent, too, and I began to think about the therapist, my face always as dusty as the soles of my bare feet. I imagined myself sitting in the therapist’s office, talking about myself. I had no idea what I should talk about. I hadn’t really talked for a long time; for as long as I had been with my lover I hardly spoke with him, and he practically never talked with me, saying only this one sentence. There were times when I thought the language consisted solely and exclusively of six words: ‘I am not interested in myself.’

      I began to think a lot about the therapist. I thought only of talking to him in an unfamiliar room, and that was pleasant. I was twenty years old, and I had nothing to do, and on my left wrist I wore the red coral bracelet. I knew the story of my great-grandmother; in my mind I could walk through the dark, twilight apartment on Maly Prospekt, and I had seen Nikolai Sergeyevich in my grandmother’s eyes. The past was so tightly intertwined within me that it sometimes seemed like my own life. The story of my great-grandmother was my own story. But where was my story without my great-grandmother? I didn’t know.

      The days were silent, as though under water. I sat in my lover’s room, and the dust wove itself around my ankles. I sat, knees drawn up to my chest, my head on my knees, and with my index finger I would draw symbols on the grey floor; I was lost in thought about I don’t know what. It seemed years passed this way; I was just drifting along. Could I talk about it? From time to time my great-grandmother came by and with a bony hand knocked on the apartment door, calling for me to come out and go home with her, her voice sounding as if it came from a great distance through the dust that had spun about the door. I made no move and did not answer her, my lover also just lay on his bed without moving and stared at the ceiling with dead eyes. My great-grandmother called to me, luring me with pet names from my childhood – dear heart, little nut tree, precious heart – insistently and doggedly she tapped with her bony hand on the door. Only when I called out triumphantly, ‘You sent me to him, now you have to wait until it’s over!’ did she finally go.

      I heard her footsteps on the stairs getting softer and softer; at the door, the dust balls disturbed by her knocking settled and gathered into a thick mass of fluff. I looked at my lover and said, ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to hear the story about the red coral bracelet?’

      Lying on the bed my lover turned toward me with a tortured face. He stretched out his fish-grey hands and slowly spread his fingers, his fish-grey eyes protruding slightly from their sockets. The silence of the room quivered like the surface of a lake into which one has thrown a stone. I showed my lover my arm and the red coral beads on my wrist, and my lover said, ‘Those are members of the family Coralliidae. They form a little stem that can grow to be three feet tall, and they have a red, horny skeleton of calcium. Calcium.’

      My lover spoke with a lisp, awkwardly and slurring his words as though he were drunk. ‘They grow off the coast of Sardinia and Sicily, Tripoli, Tunis, and Algeria. There, where die sea is as blue as turquoise, very deep, one can swim and dive, and the water is warm …’ He turned away from me again and sighed deeply; he kicked the wall twice then he lay still.

      I said, ‘Listen, I want to tell you the stories! The St Petersburg stories, the old stories. I want to tell them so I can leave them all behind and move on.’

      My lover said, ‘I don’t want to hear them.’

      I said, ‘Then I’ll tell them to your therapist,’ and my lover sat up, taking a deep breath so that several fluffs of dust disappeared in a small stream into his gaping mouth, and said, ‘You’re not going to tell my therapist anything, you can go to anyone else, but not to my therapist.’ He coughed and thumped his naked grey chest, and I had to laugh because my lover had never before talked so much at one stretch. He said, ‘You’re not going to talk about me with someone to whom I talk about myself, that’s impossible,’ and I replied, ‘I don’t want to talk about you, I want to tell the story; and my story is your story too.’ We were really fighting with each other. My lover threatened to leave me; he grabbed me and pulled my hair, he bit my hand and scratched me, a wind blew through the room, the windows flew open, the death bells in the cemetery rang like crazy, and the dust balls drifted out like soap bubbles. I pushed my lover away and ripped the door open; I really felt thin and skinny. As I was leaving I could hear the dust balls sinking softly to the floor, my lover with his fish-grey eyes and his fish-grey skin standing silent next to his bed.

      The therapist, whose fault it was that I lost my red coral bracelet and my lover, was sitting in a large room behind a desk. The room was really very large, almost empty except for this desk, the therapist behind it, and a little chair in front of it. A soft, sea blue, deep blue carpet covered the floor. As I entered the therapist looked at me solemnly, looked me straight in the eye. I walked towards him. I had the feeling of having to walk for a very long time before I finally reached the chair in front of his desk. I thought about the fact that my lover usually sat on this chair and spoke about himself – about what? – and felt a tiny sadness. I sat down. The therapist nodded at me. I nodded too and stared at him, waiting for it to begin, for the conversation to start, for his first question. The therapist stared back at me until I lowered my eyes, but he said nothing. He was silent. His silence reminded me of something. It was very quiet. Somewhere a clock I couldn’t see was ticking: the wind blew around the tall house. I looked at the sea blue, deep blue carpet beneath my feet and pulled nervously and diffidently at the silk thread of the red coral bracelet. The therapist sighed. I raised my head, and he tapped the gleaming desktop with the needle-sharp point of his pencil. I smiled in embarrassment, and he said, ‘What is it that’s worrying you?’

      I took a breath, raised my hands, and let them drop again. I wanted to say that I wasn’t interested in myself, but I thought, That’s a lie, I’m interested only in myself, and is that it? That actually there is nothing? Only the weariness and the empty, silent days, a life like that of fish under water and laughter without reason? I wanted to say that I had too many stories inside me, they put a burden on my life; I thought, I could just as well have stayed with my lover; I took a breath, and the therapist opened his mouth and his eyes wide, and I tugged at the silken thread of the red coral bracelet and the silk thread broke and the six hundred and seventy-five red-as-rage little coral beads burst in glittering splendour from my thin, slender wrist.

      Distraught, I stared at my wrist; it was white and naked. I stared at the therapist, who was leaning back in his chair, the pencil now in front of him, parallel to the edge of the desk, his hands folded in his lap. I covered my face with my hands. I slipped off the chair onto the sea blue, deep blue carpet; the six hundred

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