Next World Novella (3 page)

Only then did Schepp focus on what little the painting showed of the cold lake itself – water so calm that it reflected the vertical walls of rock without any tremor on its surface, motionless all the way to the horizon, which was nothing but a straight line. An endless, dead sea.

How, he finally whispered to Fräulein Dorothee, did she know it was a lake? She seemed unwilling to abandon her mood of rapt attention.

Anyone could see that, she said.

He gave up on the muted whispers appropriate for a museum. Lake or not, it certainly wasn’t empty; there was even an island in it, a place where life went on, as it were, for the dead. Wasn’t that prospect worth something?

‘Please forgive me,’ Fräulein Dorothee interrupted him without taking her eyes off the picture, ‘but it’s not an island.’

They stood in front of the painting for a long time, so long that one of the attendants wandered over and confided in a friendly tone that this was his own favourite picture. After he had turned away to keep an eye on the other visitors lingering only briefly in front of various pictures, Fräulein Dorothee explained.

Anyone could see, she said, that the painting was intended to be surreal; it skilfully kept its real subject hidden; the island was nothing but a reflection, an illusion that the painter had added as a kind of consolation. The boat, the ferryman, the muffled figure were all concessions to the taste of the time. The whole thing might just be reflected light from the depths of the lake, designed to lure us into the next world. ‘Oh, Hinrich,’ she said, the words wrenched out of her, ‘I don’t want to go there.’

At that moment it happened:
it
because Schepp himself was not quite sure what he was doing when he began to speak, telling her that he wasn’t afraid of death; he would simply die before she did and scout out the terrain for her.

‘Would you really do that for me?’ asked Fräulein Dorothee after a while.

Schepp nodded mutely; he could not even begin to feel certain of the full import of her question. Then he added: if he died first he’d wait for her – again, it was not like Schepp, growing bolder, to reach for Fräulein Dorothee’s little clenched fist, pressing it clumsily. And then, he said, he’d take her hand and go with her, they would reach the far shore together. Or at least the island. If the island turned out to be real.

The next moment he was wishing the ground could have swallowed him up. Fräulein Dorothee took a deep, audible breath, but she was looking at him, and not even in surprise, or with amusement or indignation –

‘Or we’ll drown together,’ she said, exhaling, also audibly. ‘At least that’s better than drowning alone.’

Still she did not withdraw her hand. As he turned to her slowly, looking cautiously at her through the thick lenses of his glasses, she seemed to be a hallucination which might dissolve into thin air if he regarded her too closely, translucent, untouchable, a creature from another star. And yet, and yet, she left her hand in his for an extraordinary length of time. She stood beside him, smiled at him, as if a burden had been lifted from her mind.

That decided things. In the same year, Dorothee Wilhelmine Renate, Countess von Hagelstein became Doro Schepp, rejecting a double surname, and instead of fulfilling the hopes of the East Asia department of the Faculty she soon became a mother, abandoning her dissertation and, to the horror of the entire teaching body, the promise of her glittering career. Nothing much became of the now fully qualified Dr Hinrich Schepp either, number one in the field of ancient Chinese language. His professor was able to prevent at least that.

Schepp found that he was now sitting on the floor, propped against one of the legs of the desk. If only he could go on sitting there, lost in his memories, maybe even dropping off to sleep, dissolving into the past, quietly disappearing. If it hadn’t been for that smell. Schepp turned away from the sun; since his operation he hadn’t been able to tolerate bright light. He moved around the desk without rising from the floor. He was now looking at Doro’s legs, the kimono hanging down below her knees. Almost at once he was wide awake and slid closer. Looked at Doro’s swollen calf. Oh no, how fast it was changing, marbled in shades of pale violet; she would have hated that. Schepp groped in her direction, finally grasped one of her legs, then pressed cautiously with his other hand, trying to banish the ugly marks of
livor mortis
from her calf; that was its name, wasn’t it,
livor mortis
, discolouration after death. But where to make the marks go? First he tried upwards, then he pressed down equally towards her slipper. There was a dull sound. Alarmed, Schepp hit his head and saw Doro’s hand dangling in front of him. This was too much. He took the hand and held it firmly until it stopped moving, until he had calmed down. Held it as he had held it twenty-nine years ago, as he had promised he would if the worst happened. Now at last he was doing just that.

‘I’m here with you,’ he promised Doro’s hand tenderly. ‘I’m holding you tight. Even if you can’t feel it any more, we’ll get through this.’

A while later he was standing beside her, moved to tears by his own solemnity, and placing her left arm back on the desk. However, it immediately slipped off again. First Schepp had to straighten Doro’s torso. That was difficult; it was almost impossible to correct the angle of her throat and neck. But though he had to push and pull quite hard, he tried to comfort himself with the thought that he was helping Doro, even with these pitiful efforts – just as she would help him one day. From now on she would wait for him on the shore of the lake, ready to offer him her energetic little hand as soon as he found himself there with her. On their wedding day she had told him she would do for him exactly what he had said he would do for her.

If
she
were the first to die, she said, she would wait there for him; it would be better to go together, whatever happened, much better.

She had renewed that promise on all of their wedding anniversaries, and although Schepp was as sceptical as ever about the existence of the lake and all the rest of it, he did not express his doubts, and indeed saw the promise as reassurance that their marriage would last for ever.

Curiously enough, today Doro’s idea of the next world did not seem to him at all ridiculous but perfectly credible, indeed consoling. He was glad he could cherish one last hope of seeing her again. A lake was better than nothing. How frail she looked! Only now did it strike Schepp that she could no longer disguise her frailty with the radiant smile he had always loved. She sat in his desk chair like a porcelain doll, her nose a little sharper than usual, her cheeks visibly paler, as pale as – Schepp couldn’t help thinking of the new waitress, the look she had given him when he had settled his bill the previous night, and her captivatingly pale face.

He forced himself to turn his full attention to his wife. She had become a little less familiar with no colour in her cheeks. Having said that, even during her lifetime she had somehow always been distant and strange in spite of her daily presence. Perhaps because of his middle-class origins, which made him ill at ease in an eight-room apartment with such elegant furnishings. Or perhaps because of her ikebana flower-arranging sessions and her meditative silences. She talked to plants and engaged with objects in her mind; her intuitive nature was not only quick to understand human relationships but also went straight to the heart of the inanimate world. Everything whispered its meaning to her, a meaning that eluded Schepp, meticulous philologist though he was.

For him, her attraction probably lay in that very attitude. She did not need cheerful company, she was in constant touch with things both higher and more profound. Bringing up the children, looking after a rather remote freelance Sinologist, seemed to be all that linked her to the pitiful world this side of the grave. In the evenings she usually sought the company of the I Ching, equipping herself for the challenges of the future, no doubt also of the next world. Before every important decision she sought the advice of the ancient signs. Usually the outcome was good. However, as the years passed she had become ever quieter, more fragile, almost transparent. She did not often smile at Schepp, or take him in her arms to tell him about the cold, dark lake. Or was that just her way of avoiding the conversations that a husband and wife should really have? Schepp could never again touch the heart of her life’s secret, as he had on that day when, faced with an isle of the dead, their lives had been decided. Admittedly he had at best a very vague idea of the nature of Doro’s fear of the next world. Probably because as a man who did not know much about mysticism he was bound to ask the wrong questions, inevitably conveying some of his own slight distaste, or the derision that would be hard for him to suppress, or his categorical doubts. And of course Doro sensed that. At least, she never tried to discuss the matter with him.

How different she was when it came to praising or criticizing his essays and papers! Schepp glanced across the top of the desk, lingering where there was nothing, now, between Doro’s hands but a dark mark on the leather surface – and then he remembered what it was that he wanted to do. He found the manuscript, with the final page added by Doro on top. Sorting through it quickly, he glanced over her notes in the margins and between the lines without really understanding them. At last he had all the sheets in the correct order, with Doro’s closing comments at the bottom of the pile. He could begin reading.

But that was impossible. Who could read in this situation, beginning at the beginning, reading every word? There was also the fact that the pages began with his own text, the work he had surely discarded long since. It was absurd. Schepp kept looking through them again and again, at the place where Doro’s closing comments began – how familiar her writing was! At least there was that to cling to.

But as soon as he began dipping into the manuscript, the sight of her handwriting made him feel perplexed. Increasingly uneasy, then downright discontented. How could he bear to read what she had written on that final page? Doro had probably not been responsible for her own actions so close to the end. Schepp put that sheet aside quickly, but his eyes lingered on another one of the last pages: ‘I am under some pressure, because I must finish this farewell letter tomorrow.’ Oh God, what had she been intending to do? Did she realize that her own death was imminent? Or, as she wrote what she wrote, had she even – even anticipated it, gone to meet it? No, out of the question, Doro would never have done such a thing.

Or would she?

That morning, Schepp reluctantly turned back into what he had been all his life, a patient interpreter of primary sources. At the end of his typescript, Doro’s notes began with a question mark in the margin, and on the back of the final sheet she had written an abrupt ‘As if he would have said such a thing in that situation’. Within the text she had crossed out the name of a bar and substituted the name of his local. What was the point of that? Equally puzzling was the marginal question mark nearer the beginning: ‘Why not just call him Hinrich and be done with it?’ Schepp leafed through to the conclusion again. ‘You and I know that’s not the end of the story.’ Good heavens, it sounded as if he would have done better not to read it at all.

But to take the comments in at a glance was impossible. He had to read the entire manuscript. Read it from the beginning, or it would be far more difficult to endure. And he really wanted to know, for now he was feeling angry, reproaching Doro, and at the same time he was horrified by the strength of the anger building up inside him. There should be no rancour, no harsh words in the face of death. There must be a misunderstanding. He only needed to read the manuscript from the beginning, then Doro’s final lines would surely make sense. Yes, now Schepp really did want to know what she had intended to discuss with him, and why she had chosen this particular manuscript, one he had never shown her because … because he had decided it was a miserable failure and resolved not to pursue his ambitions to write fiction. He had never regretted the decision, or he would hardly have become the authority he undoubtedly was among Sinologists. Very well, so the novel he had tried to write back then,
Marek the Drunkard
, had come to such a hopeless dead end on page twelve that he had had no idea how to continue, and he had abandoned it. Only to add a few more wild, frantic scenes which he then destroyed immediately out of embarrassment, or at least he had tucked them away somewhere safe.

Marek the Drunkard
. No sooner had Schepp begun reading at last, beginning with the first line, than he noticed that he was not really concentrating. At first he read as if in a trance, instantly forgetting each word. Then he skipped entire scenes, not wanting to linger line by line over a manuscript he had picked up only because of Doro’s final comments, wishing still less to dwell on her detailed deletions, rephrasings and additions. The church clock struck twelve. He perceived the sound like an admonition to devote himself to reading the pages with the gravity they required. Shafts of sunlight shone into the room. He saw the motes dancing in them. Schepp now stood at the tall reading desk at the far end of the room, where the light was noticeably more muted. He shifted his gaze wearily to the back of Doro’s head, her black and silver shock of hair falling over the chair-back, and noticed a fly circling in the air. With some effort he moved and shooed it away.

His gaze passed over the gladioli to the
chaise-longue
, and he remembered how, in the early years of their marriage, Doro would often lie there reading while he worked at the desk, both absorbed in their separate occupations yet not alone. This arrangement struck him as ideal for the situation in which he found himself.

It was not easy to lift Doro out of the chair. Her shoulders were already stiff, while the rest of her was so limp that she kept slipping from his grasp. When he had finally got a firm hold on her he felt the dampness of her kimono; the fabric around her hips was soaked. But he managed to downplay the awkwardness of this through assiduity – Doro lay so light in his arms, so light.