Stella (7 page)

“He’s my favorite author,” you said. “Well, one of my favorite authors this summer.”

“What do you see in him that’s so special?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“I want to know everything about you,” I said.

Without stopping to think much about it you initiated me into the world of Faulkner, his celebration of the Mississippi wilderness where bear and stag reigned supreme, the opossum and the water moccasin were at home, before the land was transformed by the saw and the coming of cotton mills. But you also told me about his characters: the masters and the scoundrels who
imposed their own law on the wilderness, contributing to the fate of the South.

I liked listening to her. She didn’t speak as she did in class, she was more hesitant, not playing the teacher. Her way of talking flattered me. I could almost have been her colleague. Naturally I made up my mind to read her favorite author at the first chance I got, or at least try to read him. We lay there side by side in silence for some time; I turned toward her and looked at her face. Her eyes were closed. Stella’s face was even more beautiful than it had been on the pillow, and now and then I detected the hint of a smile. Although I’d have liked to know what she was thinking about, I asked no questions. Just once, I did ask her who that man Colin was, and she said briefly a fellow student from her teacher training college who was now teaching at a school in Bremen. But once I thought I did know what she was thinking of, when an expectant expression appeared on her face. I suspected she was thinking of me, and she confirmed that by putting her hand on my stomach. You can think of someone even if he’s there beside you.

Who spotted us I’m not sure. Maybe it was Heiner Thomsen or one of his gang coming down to the beach
to play volleyball. Their voices announced their arrival. But suddenly the voices died away, and the next moment I saw several figures searching for cover behind the sand castles, ducking low as they crept up to us. They wanted to see anything there was to see, anything they could talk about at school. I didn’t need to point out my classmates to Stella; she had noticed them already, and she just winked at me, stood, and strolled toward the sand castles. One of them jumped up, then two more of them, and three, they stood there looking awkward, as if caught in the act of doing something wrong. One of them managed to say hello. Stella inspected them cheerfully, and said, as if she didn’t take offense at the way they had crept up in secret, “Sometimes it’s nice to spend an hour on the beach. Anyone who wants to join in is welcome.” No one wanted to join in.

I admired you so much at that moment, Stella, and I could have hugged you when you accepted their invitation to play volleyball with them. They clapped, delighted, and both teams wanted to have you on their side. Only you, all I could do was watch you, and I instinctively thought about sharing a pillow with you again, or feeling your breasts on my back as we embraced. Although
you were the mainstay of your team—no one served as well as you did, no one smashed the ball so precisely—it was defeated.

They tried to persuade Stella to play in the next round too, but she declined in a friendly way, saying she had to go home.

My classmates stood around the car, watching as Stella put her seat belt on and giving me ironic advice, and one or two of them whistled after us as we drove off. We went straight to her house. The old radio operator wasn’t sitting on the garden seat; two windows were open. I switched off the engine, expecting her to ask me in. As she said nothing, I suggested taking our inflatable out to the stone fields. Stella drew me to her and kissed me. She said, “My friends have arrived; they’re going to pick me up and take me sailing.”

“When?”

“It could be tomorrow. I hope so, anyway. I need a few days to myself.”

“Later, then?”

“Yes, Christian, later.”

Before she got out of the car, she kissed me again, and waved to me from the front door, not fleetingly, not casually, but slowly and as if she were telling me
to resign myself to our parting. Maybe she wanted to console me too. That was when I first thought of living with Stella. It was a sudden bold idea, and today I know that in many ways it was inappropriate, an idea born only from the fear that my time with her might come to an end. How naturally such a longing for something to last arises.

Hirtshafen seemed to me a dreary place from the day your friends took you on board their two-master. Sonja had been watching, and I learned from her that they sent a dinghy out to the beach to pick you up and take you over to the
Pole Star
. Apparently the owner hadn’t been able to think of a more original name for his yacht. You left. I wandered around and sat on the rusting navigation marks for some time, I sat by the three pines and on the wooden bridge, and I went into the Seaview Hotel without knowing what I would do there. One afternoon I thought of going to see Stella’s father, but I couldn’t think of a reason for any such visit. I just wanted to be around him because I hoped to feel near Stella. Then her letter came.

I had been cleaning our
Katarina
, I’d come home tired from working on her, when my father said, “There’s a letter for you, Christian. From Denmark.”
I went straight up to my room; I wanted to be alone with it. The sender’s address was written with a flourish and as if to conceal something; it read only: Stella P., Ærø Island. I realized from this vague phrasing that no answer was expected. I didn’t read her letter from the start; first I had to know how she signed it, and I was happy when I read, in English: “Hope to see you soon, best wishes, Stella.” I was so happy that the first thing I did was to think where I would keep her letter.

You wrote about calm seas, about a good time swimming in a quiet bay, and your party’s visit to a museum of oceanography on another island. There had been so much to see: the skeleton of a stingray, the skeleton of a whale—a huge blue whale that had been stranded on the shore—and several aquariums full of parrotfish and corals and little rosefish. You had particularly liked—and I couldn’t help grinning when I read this bit—a couple of king crabs eating a filleted herring. You called them the most lethargic feeders in all creation; it was a real test of patience to watch them having their dinner. You mentioned the sea horses as well, and how they looked to you like contented little creatures. In the end I couldn’t think of anywhere better to hide Stella’s letter than in my English grammar
textbook. As I folded it and put it inside, I thought ahead, without knowing what would happen I thought of some indefinite day, and imagined ourselves looking back and asking, “Do you remember?” Then, sitting side by side, we would read her letter together, perhaps surprised to find how much cause for cheerfulness it gave us.

It was at this time that I first dreamed of Stella, a dream that made me think. In the dream I arrived late at school, the others were already sitting there, and turned to me grinning, smirking and expectant; when I was sitting down they made me look at the board. There were printed words in block letters, in English: P
LEASE COME BACK, DEAR
S
TELLA
, C
HRISTIAN IS WAITING FOR YOU.
I rushed to the board and wiped the words away. The smug pleasure on their faces told me that they thought they had won a game.

Waiting, waiting for your return; although I sometimes thought I was doomed to wait, and I was used to it by now, it seemed to me particularly difficult in Stella’s absence. I took guests at the Seaview Hotel out in the afternoons in our
Katarina
, almost always to Bird Island, where a small landing stage had been built. I guided my passengers around the island, showed them
the bird warden’s hut, told them about the old man who liked his solitary life and sometimes shared it with a domesticated seagull that had once been injured by a shot and couldn’t fly anymore.

Even as the man got in and paid for the trip, he seemed familiar to me, and later—he found himself a seat in the stern—I was almost sure of it: he was that Colin whose photo I’d seen in Stella’s room. He was wearing a linen jacket over a checkered shirt, he bore a remarkable similarity to Colin, and only when he spoke, turning to the stout lady sitting next to him and explaining something to her with a wealth of gestures—probably what to do when a ship capsizes—did I begin to doubt it, although only fleetingly, because as soon as he looked keenly at me in a rather self-conscious way I was sure he was Colin, and he had turned up here in the hope of seeing Stella. “Stella with love, Colin.” He helped the older passengers to get out on the landing stage, and during our tour of the island he asked more questions than anyone else. He told us he collected gulls’ eggs, and would have liked to find a few here, but it wasn’t the season.

It was not in the hut but on the tree trunk that had been washed up, where we were sitting watching the
waves coming in on the beach, that he began to suffer from breathlessness; first he cleared his throat, then he put his head back and gasped for air, clutching his neck, and fighting for breath with violent swallowing movements. He was looking at me now not keenly, but in need of help, and he searched his pockets, patting them to find something.

“Aren’t you well?” I asked.

“My spray,” he said, adding, “Sanastmax, I left my spray in the hotel.”

I asked the passengers, but not many of them wanted to return yet, so I got him on board and took him back to the hotel. The concierge led the man, who was still breathing heavily, to a sofa and asked what he needed. “It’s on the bedside table, my inhaler is on the bedside table.” The concierge took a key from the board and quickly climbed the stairs. Alone with the man who looked like Colin, and whom I had momentarily taken for Colin, I decided to find out for certain; I drew up a chair and sat down beside him, dismissing the thanks he was straining to express. I told him about our party, the Hirtshafen beach party, saying he could have joined in if he’d only been here a little earlier, people had come from all over the place, I said,
even my teachers didn’t want to miss the Hirtshafen beach party. It didn’t interest him, he didn’t want to know any more about it, but I still had a feeling that he sometimes cast me an inquiring glance. However, the concierge settled the matter. When he came back with the inhaler he said, “There was a phone call for you, Dr. Cranz, a call from Hanover. The car is coming tomorrow.” Something about me seemed to have intrigued him earlier, but his mind wasn’t on me now.

Back at home I reread Stella’s letter, I read it several times, and thinking of the bird warden’s hut I decided to write to her, I simply had to. Without any hesitation I wrote, “Dearest Stella,” and told her at once how dreary everything here in Hirtshafen was without her, “too many old people, boring boat trips, that smell of fish all the time, and the wind never changes, it’s always a cool easterly.” And then I told her about my idea. As I wrote I felt more and more enthusiastic, even happy about it. I outlined my plan for the two of us. “Imagine, Stella: we could move into the bird warden’s hut, just you and me, I’ll put up a notice on the landing stage saying: No Landing Here. I’ll repair the roof and put a lock on the door, collect firewood for the stove, I’ll buy some cans of food and dried goods
from our marine stores. We won’t go short of anything.” Finally there was the prospect of swimming together, and best of all, from the moment we woke up we’d be there for each other. I thought of a PS, and added: “Maybe we could learn how to live together.” At first I was going to sign it in English with “Yours sincerely,” but then I decided on “Yours truly, Christian.” I put the letter in an envelope and slipped it into the English grammar textbook, for later.

While I was still thinking about the letter, my father called me downstairs, a brief call in a voice used for giving orders. He was standing at the open window with his binoculars in his hand, and he pointed out to the bay. “Take a look at that, Christian.” Our barge was drifting there, and not far from it our tug
Endurance
. The two vessels were connected by a line that was not taut but hung loose, dipping into the water. Looking through the binoculars, I could see that our barge was carrying a heavy load of rocks, I could also make out Frederik on the tug, standing at the stern and manipulating a boathook, pushing and shoving.

“Come on,” said my father, and we went down to the landing stage where our inflatable was lying. I took us out and we tied up to the tug.

My father was soon up to speed. Frederik hardly needed to tell him that the tug had run into a fish trap unmarked by flags and become entangled before he was handing me a diving mask and knife. “You go down and take a look.” The tug’s propeller, turning furiously, had worked its way into the trap, pulled it over itself, and was now crippled, strangulated and with part of the trap hanging loose from it. Without surfacing to tell them what the scene looked like underwater, I set to work with the knife right away. There was a mackerel caught in the net; it had shot in like a torpedo and choked to death. I cut it out and went on carving away at the hard, apparently waxed cord of the trap, coming up for air now and then. If our knife had had a serrated edge, I could have freed the propeller from the tangled trap more easily, but as things were I had to push and press the knife hard until I finally managed to cut the tangles away. My father and Frederik praised my work, consulted briefly, and agreed on what to do next.

The engine of our tug was reliable. Slowly, very slowly, we got under way. The slack line to the barge rose from the water, stretched taut, and there was enough traction on it for the barge to move, turn, and
follow the course of the tug. I thought we’d be taking this last load to the mouth of the harbor, to add to the rocks shoring up the breakwater, but my father had decided against that. We threw out the anchor before reaching the breakwater, Frederik went to the winch, and as usual raised rock after rock into the air, swung them overboard, and let them sink. He didn’t send me down to check the way the stones were lying; it was enough for my father to deposit them on the bottom there so that, as he said, they would break the first onslaught of waves coming in, thus checking their full impact on the breakwater at the harbor mouth. Our work didn’t immediately seem to be having much effect, but when we’d sunk almost the whole cargo of rocks, the movement of the waves coming in changed; they rose and broke, tumbling into one another, leveled out, rippled, and lost so much strength that they dispersed as if exhausted, without the strength to gather force and rise high again.