Where Love Begins (3 page)

But still, she could say it that way, blush and then laugh about it, and maybe with the laugh this unpleasant feeling would go away – uneasiness, anxiety, as if she had overlooked something. She steps to the front of the desk.

Just for once, stick to the arrangement, Paloma is saying. She holds the receiver away from her ear, and putting her hand over the mouthpiece and rolling her eyes up towards the ceiling, she whispers, Good Lord.

Till later, Stella mouths soundlessly. She points at the clock, holds out four fingers. She leaves the office, passing the empty tables, the display cases in which there are pictures by the schoolchildren held in place by colourful magnets: giant suns, smiling flowers, children from all the continents holding hands. She says hello to the janitor. She buttons up her rain jacket, walks out of the foyer.

*

Esther is eighty-two years old. She isn't Stella's favourite patient, but not unbearable either. It's best not to have favourites among the patients. Even so, Stella likes Dermot best, Julia's husband. Esther is lying in bed. Actually, she still gets up every afternoon and walks from her bedroom into the living room or the kitchen. But for the last few weeks she's just wanted to lie in bed, dozing, maybe eat a piece of buttered toast with a little orange marmalade, drink some tea with it, and have Stella open the window every two minutes and then close it again. Not in a good mood today, the carer doing the night shift had written into the record book. Esther's bedroom is small. Her bed stands in front of a wall of bookshelves; when Esther lies on her side she'll grab a book from the shelf at random, open it, read a sentence aloud, shake her head at what she's read and drop the book behind the bed. The little night table is full of medications, pill dispensers, water glasses, various watches, glasses, thermometers and first-aid kits. Esther's skin is parchment-thin and wrinkled; it tears like paper. The room smells of old age and illness, but of something else too. Of incense and myrrh, Esther's cigars, dusty books, and the flowers on which Esther insists and which stand around in large glass vases. The window is open, the radio is on, with a lackadaisical, sleepy lecture that sounds like a lot of drivel to Stella, about something imaginary, a lot of drivel from the world of shadows. Now finally, in taking care of Esther, she emerges from those other thoughts into the familiar rhythm of touching, sick-room procedures, responsibilities, the counting of drops, emptying of tubes, pots, pails, Esther's spit cup, the glass for her teeth, the bowl for the warm soapy water. Don't be so lazy, Esther, try to help a little. And Esther pulls herself up by means of the handle that's part of the apparatus rigged up over her bed, sitting up and dangling her legs over the edge of the bed with the same expression Ava sometimes has, sullen, restrained, pretending to be far away.

Esther says, My feet are cold, please close the window; turn off the radio now; put on my socks; I want those soft socks Ricarda knits for me. Ricarda is Esther's daughter, and Stella can't remember any more when she last saw her here. Esther's eyeballs are red-veined; the irises are a bright, profound blue. Seven drops into the left eye, seven drops into the right. Her blood pressure has dropped through the floor. Last night, though, it was one hundred and eighty. What caused that, Esther? Sometimes they can joke with each other, find a common language, common ground, two people forced to touch each other, to handle each other, to share information. It could just as well be the other way around. It could be Esther who swaddles Stella. The present arrangement is a coincidence, nothing more. Do you have a fever? Come, Esther, lift up your arm and hold the thermometer. You feel quite hot.

Esther says, Nonsense.

Stella squeezes a drop of blood from her earlobe, measures the blood sugar level, enters Esther's catastrophic numbers on the chart in the record book, as if they weren't catastrophic. She calculates and counts out drops and pills, and all that time Esther keeps talking to herself, jumping from one subject to another, from a long-ago year into the here and now, from a suspicion to a fragile memory, from the memory to the stubborn pain flaring up in her back or in her eyes or in her chest, her knee, the joints of her fingers, her head, her behind, her back.

Don't be so rough, Stella. What are you thinking of? Don't keep frowning all the time. You'll look like an angry parrot when you get old.

Esther giggles.

Stella washes Esther's face. She washes Esther's hands, her back, her armpits, her private parts. Esther's feet; Esther is very proud of her feet; they're the only part of her body that seem unscathed, the slender feet of a dancer.

Are you hungry?

No.

Esther doesn't want to eat anything, but she claims that the bread for toast is all gone; Stella should go shopping; Stella finds enough toasting bread in Esther's kitchen to last for months, goes shopping anyway. In the supermarket she stands leaning against the newspaper rack, reading the week's horoscope; she's tired; the in-store music has something sad about it. To Stella it seems as if the lights were being turned out in slow motion.

Esther is asleep when she gets back. Or pretends to be asleep, and Stella quietly closes the curtain, does the rest of her work. She cleans the bathroom and the kitchen, straightens the living room table, stacks the entire spring's newspapers, one on top of the other; she looks to see what Esther has marked in the television listings, the programmes she wants to watch or might watch: a travelogue about Mongolia, a political round table, a concert in Venice, an evening's discussion of mortality. Stella puts some orange marmalade on a piece of buttered toast and cuts it into tiny squares; she makes coffee, puts the bread and coffee by Esther's bed and sits down for a while on the chair next to it. She sits next to Esther's bed the way she sometimes sits next to Ava's bed. The hands of the large clock on the wall above the bookshelf drop, stand still and drop again.

I'm leaving, Esther, Stella says. The night shift will be here at eight. Take care of yourself; be sensible.

Esther doesn't reply.

In the record book Stella writes: Sleeping; pretends to be sleeping. In the hall she puts on her rain jacket and closes the front door behind her. Bicycling back to the Community Centre, she signs out on the weekly schedule, and hangs Esther's key back up on the board behind Paloma's desk. Paloma has already left; she leaves her office so tidy every day that it looks as if she weren't ever coming back. The lobby is deserted; the ferns in the big buckets stand motionless as if before an explosion. The idyll of the children's pictures in the glass case looks suddenly ugly and slightly suspect. At the far end of the hall the janitor is on his knees in the twilight, fiddling with an electric outlet.

Good evening.

Same to you.

The entrance door stands wide open; outside, the real world.

*

Stella picks up Ava from kindergarten.

She can finally pick Ava up from kindergarten. In the cloakroom Stella takes off Ava's slippers and puts on her street shoes. Ava can do all this by herself already; she's four, going on five. But at the end of a long day in kindergarten she's so tired that she forgets her independence and holds out her legs to Stella, little fat legs in tights put on backwards. Stella is grateful. Ava isn't the last child to be picked up. There are six or seven other kids there; their jackets still hanging on the clothes' hooks; little pictures of tractors, flowers and butterflies are pasted next to the hooks. A snail is pasted next to Ava's hook, which she has been and continues to be distressed about since her first day in kindergarten. Ava has the same black hair and eyes as Jason. She's a loner and just as stubborn as Jason. She's affectionate and impatient. Maybe as impatient as Stella. The teachers had asked Stella whether she reaffirms Ava sufficiently. Stella had a hard time understanding the question. Whether she reaffirms Ava sufficiently? She reaffirms Ava from morning to night. Sometimes she's afraid she reaffirms her too much. Why the question? Because Ava lacks confidence. Because she holds back, because she doesn't dash off right away, doesn't want to recite any poems and doesn't want to stand in the middle during their morning circle. Because she doesn't want to dress up for the carnival, because she only wants to dress up at home. All these things are part of a pattern; the teachers observe Ava carefully. I reaffirm Ava, Stella said; of course I do. She takes Ava's round face in her hands and kisses her on both cheeks. Ava. Avenka. How was your day.

Rabbits can have shaggy fur, Ava says. Like dogs. They can be as shaggy as a dog, did you know that, and she slides off the bench dragging her jacket behind her; she says, Put out the light, Mama, you shouldn't forget to put out the light. Why do I have to tell you that over and over again.

Stella switches the light off in the cloakroom. She says to Ava, And you should wave to them, and together they wave to the teachers sitting with the last of the children at the round table outside on the lawn. The children have put their heads down on the tabletop. The inevitable pot of peppermint tea stands on the table, coloured plastic cups next to it. Stella thinks she knows what the tea smells like and how it tastes. She buckles Ava into the child's seat on the bicycle and pedals out of the courtyard. The paths through the park are so green that they seem almost dark, and out of the thicket at the edge of the path come peacocks heavily dragging their long feather trains through the sand.

*

Stella and Ava cycle home. Through the new development, along Fir Tree, Stone Pine and Pine Tree Lanes, past the shopping centre, across Main Street and into the old development where a few cars are now parked in front of the houses and the front doors are open; it smells of lilac, charcoal grills and lighter fluid, of neighbourhood. Stella unlocks the gate, pushes the bike into the garden, lifts Ava out of the child seat, and hears the gate close behind her; she listens for the solid sound of the lock snapping shut.

What are we having to eat today?

Pancakes. With apple sauce and cinnamon and sugar.

I'm going to eat seven, Ava says. Seven pancakes. Definitely.

*

Stella washes her hands at the kitchen sink. She listens to the telephone answering machine – a message for Jason, one from Paloma about the week's schedule, and Clara's voice, relaxed and pleasant: Stella, call me back; I'm thinking of you. Is everything all right?

Stella opens the door to the sunroom all the way. She turns on the radio, empties the washing machine, prepares the pancake batter, sings along with the radio, drinks tea in the basket chair in the garden and watches Ava in the sandpit making spirals with shells; she listens to Ava's conversations with herself. Questions, counting rhymes, whispered riddles.
Tomorrow morning I'll get the queen's child.

The evening is cool, the humidity moving into the garden from the field, almost palpable. They eat in the kitchen at the table, sitting across from each other, Ava and Stella under the lamp in the company of the radio voices, the alternation of reports on war, climate catastrophes and jazz.

Don't take so much sugar, Stella says; better if you take more apple sauce.

I'll never eat in kindergarten again, Ava says; I'm not going to ever eat anything there. If I ever, one single time, eat something at the kindergarten again, I'm going to throw up. She gives Stella a long, searching look. Stella endures it, doesn't comment. Ava eats five pancakes. She says, There's a boy in my group, his name is Stevie. Then she gets up, walks around the table, sits down in Stella's lap, and wraps her arms tightly around Stella's neck.

*

Outside the sky turns dark blue and black at the edges. Lights go on in the house next door and in the house across the street. Ava's bath mixture smells of peach and melon; her quilt rustles, her pyjamas are soft as moleskin. Stella puts Ava to bed, she reads to her, sings to her.
The pear tree sways, it sways as in a dream.
Stella thinks that she ought to see to it that Ava is more self-assured as she's going to sleep, to see to it that Ava is more self-confident at the end of her day. She ought to be more pragmatic, the way she is with Esther, Julia, Walter; she ought to close the door to Ava's room behind her with pragmatic authority and call out in a firm voice, Good night! Sleep well now. Go to sleep! But she finds it hard to do. The room is safe still, and the globe glows; the Atlantic glows. But the night is the more defined, it is the greater constant. Ava doesn't know that, Stella thinks that
she
knows it.
Tomorrow morning, if God will.

When is Papa coming back, Ava says. Maybe she does know after all.

In three days, Stella says. Three more sleeps, then Papa will come back.

Three

Next day the stranger comes again, at the same time. He apparently knows when Stella is at home, and when she's home alone. Stella is in the kitchen looking in the cabinet under the sink for the brush for Ava's shoes when the doorbell rings, and even though she hadn't been thinking of him at all, even though she never assumed that he would come back so soon – even though she had actually forgotten him, he immediately comes to mind again. She knows who's ringing the bell. She knows that it's not the postman, not a messenger, not her neighbour, not a child in need of a bicycle pump, unfortunately not the chimney sweep, and not the man from the gas company. She puts the little suitcase in which Jason keeps the shoe polish things down in front of the sink, and straightens up. Her knee joints crack as she stands up, and for a moment she feels dizzy. She goes out of the kitchen down the hall to the front door. Looking out of the window she takes hold of the intercom receiver; she says, Yes.

Yes, as she looks at the stranger standing on the street outside her garden gate in the same clothes he was wearing yesterday, his hands in his jacket pockets, and, as far as she can see at this distance, the same totally expressionless face as yesterday. She can't really see his face, but his aura is expressionless, and the way he now leans down to the intercom, not taking his hands out of his jacket pockets nor looking in her direction, but rather keeping his face turned towards the pavement – his manner is so flat and toneless that it gives Stella the chills.

Hello. It's me. I wanted to ask if maybe today you have time for a conversation.

No, Stella says. She feels her knees trembling; she is surprised at how quickly that can happen. Is she really trembling again? It's true. She is trembling.

She says, No, I don't. I don't have time today. And tomorrow I won't have any time either; on the whole, I don't have any time. I'm sorry, excuse me.

The man outside on the street says, You really don't have to excuse yourself. You really don't need to do that. He stands there still leaning forward as he says it, looking at the grass between the paving stones. He coughs.

Stella hangs up the receiver.

This he seems to understand, he straightens up stretching a little; it almost looks as if he were yawning.

You really don't need to do that.
What is it that makes this remark such an impertinence? Why is this remark an effrontery behind which something else seems to be concealed. The word ‘threat' comes to Stella's mind like a warning. Her mouth is dry and her heart barely beating. She sees the stranger walk to the corner of the street. From Jason's window she watches him smoking; she wishes he would turn around, just once, turn around and look towards Jason's room, and she hisses it: Turn around. But clearly the stranger is the stronger one. He smokes, as deliberately as yesterday; then he flicks the finished cigarette onto the pavement and walks off.

*

Later, Stella can't remember any more whether she didn't say, after all, that she knew what she needed to do and what not. Did she say it? I know what I need to do and what I don't, and then hung the receiver back up? Or did she only think it. Wasn't she quick or aggressive enough to say it out loud? She cannot remember. But she remembers clearly the feeling of humiliation and her decision to let this be the last time she ever talks to that man. Not even to go to the door from now on when the bell rings. Going to the door twice was enough; there will be no third time, and it remains to be seen if he'll even ring a third time.

*

That evening she locks the front door from the inside.

Waiting till Ava is asleep, she takes the telephone to the kitchen, but then changes her mind; she doesn't call Jason after all. She sits at the table in the kitchen, reading the paper and drinking a beer she's taken from the refrigerator; she reads a story about Calcutta and another one about Siberia and then something else. She looks up between the lines and sees herself from outside, from a point outside the house, a corner of the garden perhaps, from the fence, the high grass in the uncultivated meadow. She sees a woman sitting alone at a table under a lamp, reading.

*

That's me, Stella thinks. That's me. Stella.