The Summer House, Later - Judith Hermann

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and he drew his foot back a tiny bit as I touched it. It was dark under the desk, but the red coral beads glowed.

      I thought of Nikolai Sergeyevich; I thought, if he hadn’t given my great-grandmother the red coral beads, if he hadn’t shot my great-grandfather in the heart. I thought of the hunchbacked, stooped Isaak Baruw; I thought, if he hadn’t left Russia, if my great-grandmother hadn’t stopped the train for him. I thought of my lover, the fish; I thought, if he hadn’t been silent all the time I wouldn’t now have to crawl around under a therapist’s desk. I saw the therapist’s trouser legs, his folded hands, I could smell him. I bumped my head on the desktop. Once I had collected all the red coral beads under the desk, I crawled back into the light and across the room, picking up the coral beads with my right hand and holding them in my left. I began to cry. I was kneeling on the soft, sea blue, deep blue carpet, looking at the therapist, the therapist looking at me from his chair with his hands folded. My left hand was full of coral beads, but there were more still glowing and blinking all around me. I thought it would take me all my life to pick up all these coral beads, I thought I would never get it done, not during a whole lifetime. I stood up. The therapist leaned forward, picked the pencil up off his desk, and said, ‘The session is over for today.’

      I poured the red coral beads from my left hand into my right. They made a lovely, tender sound, almost like gentle laughter. I raised my right hand and flung the red coral beads at the therapist. The therapist ducked. The red coral beads rained down onto his desk, and with them all of St Petersburg, the Greater and the Lesser Neva, my great-grandmother, Isaak Baruw and Nikolai Sergeyevich, my grandmother in the willow basket and my lover the fish, the Volga, the Luga, the Narva, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and the Aegean Sea, the Gulf of Finland, the Atlantic Ocean.

      The waters of the earth’s oceans surged in a huge green wave over the therapist’s desk and ripped him out of his chair. The water rose rapidly and lifted the desk up with it. Once more the therapist’s face emerged from the billows, and then it disappeared. The water roared, broke and sang, swelling and flushing away the stories, the silence and the coral beads, flushing them back into the seaweed forests, into the shell beds, to the bottom of the sea. I took a deep breath.

      I went back one last time to see how my lover was doing. He was drifting – I knew he would be – on his watery bed, his pale belly turned to the ceiling. The light was as grey as the light at the bottom of a lake; dust balls were caught in his hair, trembling softly. I said, ‘You know that coral turns black when it lies too long at the bottom of the sea.’ I said, ‘Was that the story I wanted to tell?’ But my lover could no longer hear me.

       Hurricane

       (Something Farewell)

      The game is called ‘Imagining a Life Like That’. You can play it evenings when you’re sitting at Brenton’s Place on the Island, smoking cigarettes and drinking rum and Coke. It helps to have a little sleeping island child whose hair smells of sand in your lap. The sky should be clear, preferably filled with stars, and it should be very hot, perhaps even humid. The game is called ‘Imagining a Life Like That’; it has no rules.

      ‘Just imagine it,’ Nora says. ‘Just imagine.’

      On the radio they’re broadcasting hurricane reports four times a day. Kaspar says it doesn’t get critical until the hurricane reports come every hour. Then the islanders would be asked to go to special safety zones. German citizens could ask their embassy to arrange for them to be flown to the United States. Kaspar is quite determined, saying, ‘I won’t leave the Island.’ He is going to stay, and he expects all of Stony Hill and Snow Hill will seek shelter at his place. The Island is in the low-pressure region of the tropical depression. Nora and Christine are sitting on the sun-dry wooden boards of the porch, raptly repeating to themselves, ‘Tropical depression, tropical …’

      It is unbearably hot. Thick white clouds motionless above the Blue Mountains. The hurricane, named ‘Bertha’ by die meteorologists, is building up far away over the Caribbean; it isn’t moving but seems to be gathering strength for Cuba, Costa Rica, the Island.

      Cat beats Lovey, Nora later writes to Christine, who is already back home in the city, Cat beats Lovey, and Lovey beats Cat, oh Christine my dear, it’s not really your fault. Kaspar talks too much: I like you, I like you; he carves wooden birds, and I only wish he’d leave me alone once in a while; dearest Christine, I miss you … Christine is reading this at the kitchen table, her legs drawn up to her chest. Sand trickles from the pages of the letter. She marvels at how things always have their effect, feels far removed from the Island, feels tired, too.

      Kaspar knows that Christine kissed Cat – on her last evening on the Island. They had driven down to Stony Hill in the Jeep. ‘Let’s drive to Brenton’s Place, okay?’ Christine had begged, wide-eyed. Kaspar let himself be persuaded. He liked Christine’s phrase ‘Brenton’s Place’ to designate Brenton’s store, a wooden shack in the village, in the shade of a breadfruit tree; you could drink dark rum there and buy Craven ‘A’ cigarettes by the piece while old men play dominoes with grim concentration, and a long drawn-out high-pitched whistle comes out of Brenton’s radio. They had driven down to Stony Hill in the Jeep, and the clouds had parted to permit a view of the high, star-spangled sky.

      Brenton had a new refrigerator. Christine duly admired it, but she was restless and kept staring hard into the darkness towards Cat’s bench at the edge of the clearing – ‘Is he sitting there or isn’t he?’

      Kaspar knew very well that Cat was sitting there. Cat always sat there; all the same Kaspar said, ‘No idea,’ gloating over Christine’s anxious indecision. Christine, nervous, quickly drank her dark rum, tugged at Nora’s dress, then ran out and was swallowed up by the darkness. After some time her white legs were seen dangling down from the bamboo bench.

      ‘Because he was clicking his cigarette lighter,’ she said later, proud of her powers of deduction, and Kaspar remembers the pale shadow of her face, turning towards something and merging with it. Later, when he and Nora wanted to drive home, he called her name. At first she didn’t answer, then some minutes later she said, ‘Yes?’ in a very sleepy and soft voice before jumping up off the bench and silently getting into the Jeep. Kaspar knows that she kissed Cat and made him God-knows-what promises; he does not approve.

      But it’s Nora and Christine’s first time on the Island. Kaspar doesn’t miss the chance to repeat this every day: he sings it to himself. After a week of this Nora says firmly, ‘Kaspar, enough now.’

      ‘You’re always so amazed by every little thing,’ Kaspar says. ‘“Look at those guavas,” and “Look at that sunset sky,” that’s ridiculous too.’

      In the hammock Christine yawns sleepily and says, ‘Kaspar, you’ve simply been here too long, you live here, that’s what makes the difference.’ Kaspar, triumphantly, says, ‘That’s why I have to keep saying it – it’s Nora and Christine’s first time on the Island.’

      Kaspar is no longer amazed. Guavas, mangoes, papayas, lemons big as a child’s head. Coconuts, lianas, azaleas. Spiders hopping through the room like frogs, the tiniest salamanders and poisonous millipedes. The fruit of the akee that looks like an apple and when fried tastes like an egg. Mangoes are cut open and then spooned out. ‘Are you thirsty?’ Kaspar asks graciously, getting a coconut from the garden, cracking it open and pouring the white, milky liquid into glasses. ‘Good,’ says Nora. She makes a face as if to say there’s a first time for everything, then says, ‘Kaspar, stop watching me.’

      Christine collects everything. Coconut shells, black seashells, akee pits, palm fronds, matches, butterfly wings. ‘What are you going to do with that stuff?’ Kaspar asks. Christine says, ‘Well, it’s to show them. Back home.’ Kaspar replies, ‘They won’t be interested.’

      Since Nora and Christine arrived Cat has been coming to see Kaspar almost every

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