Where Love Begins (5 page)

Six

Ava doesn't cry at all. But that evening she insists that Stella tell her a story. Stella should tell her some story. Ava won't take no for an answer. For Stella telling such a story is like a free fall. The characters that Ava wants to hear about tumble around in Stella's head, can only be held on to with great effort, they soar up and float off like helium-filled balloons.

Couldn't I tell you a fairy tale, Stella says weakly.

No, Ava says, firm and unrelenting. Tell me the story about the little giraffe and the prince.

Stella tries. She tries; afraid to think that, years later, she might regret never having told Ava the story of the little giraffe and the prince. (Back then. One evening in May. You were four years old, and Jason wasn't there. In that house in the suburbs where we used to live; I think you can still remember it a little. You had a room upstairs under the roof, your night-light was a globe; you always wanted to see the Atlantic Ocean on it. Outside your window there was the garden and a wild meadow; once we watched a buzzard; the buzzard caught a field mouse and flew away with it; you cried so hard; do you still remember? Back then. When I refused to tell you a simple story.)

This regret always stays with Stella. It is like a defect, like a tiny but important flaw in the system. Sometimes Stella thinks that Jason also feels this regret, but he passed the whole thing along to Stella; she took over his regret; she carries it with her. Why does she think this? Regret makes things difficult; at the same time unique, special.

*

The little giraffe can't fall asleep. She's lying next to the little prince and tries to close her eyes.

Tries desperately to close her eyes, Ava says.

Tries desperately to close her eyes. The little prince puts his arms around the neck of the little giraffe and presses his face into her furry coat. The little giraffe's coat is warm. The moon is shining through the window. The little giraffe says, I'm hungry. I'd like a glass of milk. The little prince gets up. The hallways in the castle are dark and very cold. In the kitchen the fat cook is sitting by the warm stove doing a crossword puzzle. She says, It's a good thing that Your Grace has come just now. Your Grace probably knows what falls from the sky and has four letters. And Your Grace probably wants a glass of hot milk?

*

Ava is lying on Stella's arm, her head on Stella's stomach. Her black hair is soft; her entire body is soft. She's twisting the buttons on Stella's cardigan; she sighs. She loves simple sentences; Stella knows that Ava is happiest with a story in which nothing actually happens. A story without a point, maybe also without any excitement, a story that tells about the uneventfulness of all days, about everything staying the way it is.

What falls from the sky and has four letters?

Rain. Rain falls from the sky and has four letters.

Snow also falls from the sky. Can I wear my red rubber boots tomorrow? No matter what? Even if it doesn't rain?

Tomorrow you can wear your red rubber boots, no matter what, even if it doesn't rain.

We were going to call Papa.

We'll do it tomorrow. Sleep well, Ava. Go to sleep quickly.

Stella leaves the door ajar and the light on in the hall outside the three rooms. She stands in the living room next to the armchair by the window; turning on the floor lamp, she looks at her reflection in the picture window, and behind her own reflection, the night-time garden, the fence, the street lamp and the street; the images slide into each other, depending on how she looks at them. Stella turns the lamp off again. She sits down at the table in the kitchen and makes a list of the things she wants to remember –
light bulbs, coloured oak tag for Ava, ask Walter about medication allocation, letter to Clara, weekend shift schedule, apples and pears
– she feels there's something else she should write down, that there was something she forgot; she can't think what it could be, and finally she gives up. The radio is softly playing classical music, series of discreetly withdrawn notes. Stella sits at the table holding a pen; she thinks that sitting here doing nothing at the day's end must be a sign of old age. How did she go to bed before? Before Ava? In the years with Clara, in the years before the decisions for this or that life or a completely different one were made. It seems to Stella that they used to go to bed while talking. Went to sleep still talking, got up again, talking. Went to bed drinking, smoking. Indignant or shaken – by what, actually? – or drunk. Used to fall asleep and wake up again precipitously. Everything was important. Everything was important.

The stillness at the kitchen table, the meaning of Ava's sleep, that her own encounters are limited to Jason, Paloma, Dermot, Walter and Esther, is odd. Suspect, as if it should mean something.

But I like being alone, Stella says aloud into the kitchen. I like being alone. Before this I didn't like being alone; now I just am.

She says, Mister Pfister presumably likes being alone too.

Mis-ter Pfis-ter.

What is Jason doing now, alone at the construction site, in the house without a roof, with doors of corrugated metal and floors of Alaska cedarwood. What is Jason doing? With whom actually would Jason like to talk?

*

Stella gets up from the table, runs water into the kettle, puts the kettle on the stove, and stands there until the water boils. She listens to the sound of the gas flame, the voice from the radio, the gradual bubbling of the water. She stands in the kitchen, waiting.

Seven

Rain.

Ava puts on her rubber boots, rain coat and rain hat, and, having done that, she looks long and seriously at herself in the mirror.

Stella pulls on her rain cape.

She goes to get the newspaper from the delivery man at the garden gate before he can drop it into the mailbox. Then she takes Ava to kindergarten on her bicycle and picks up Walter's keys from the office, arriving too late to have coffee with Paloma; she probably came too late intentionally. At Walter's house the porch door is wide open and the dampness hangs like a mist in the room, like fog. Walter's canaries are squeezed close together on the perch in their cage. Walter, lying on his side in bed, is pretending to be asleep, as if he had arranged it with Esther. Stella gently touches his shoulder. Would you like to get up, Walter?

Walter would not like to get up. Stella knows that she ought to force him to get up, but she feels much too weak herself. Walter is in his mid-fifties; he has multiple sclerosis. He was an architect, unmarried, childless; he likes to mention that he was an attractive man before the illness confined him to bed. Stella does not know him as an attractive man. She knows him as a patient, in need of help, dependent on her, ill. She knows his spit, his digestion, the smell of his urine. There are models of his work in the room: bridges and halls. Walter built mainly bridges and halls. Stella can't imagine his attractiveness, but she is touched by the delicacy and precision of the models, the accuracy and concentration that Walter was once apparently capable of. Whenever he wants to drink something nowadays, she has to put the straw to his mouth, to hold it in his mouth. On the wall around Walter's bed are posted pages of a newspaper series in which people talk about their dreams, having allowed themselves to be photographed for the series with closed eyes. Walter is crazy about this series, about the photos of the women, less about the description of their dreams, more about their faces, about their as-if-asleep faces. He keeps pretending that he's forgotten Stella's name and can't remember his mother any more, but he knows exactly when Wednesday comes around, the day the newspaper series appears. Today is Wednesday; Stella opens the newspaper in Walter's kitchen. A twenty-year-old blonde girl with an unfriendly narrow face and a dream that Stella doesn't feel like reading.

Will Walter want to put this girl up over his bed? Stella assumes so. She isn't sure exactly what it is about these women's faces that is important for Walter – the closed eyes? They're to be near him but not supposed to see him in his helplessness? The desire to look at someone's face when you wake up. The desire as you wake up to see the sleeping face of the person you love. Stella feels she would go crazy if she were to think too long about Walter. Some of the carers consider Walter's gallery to be psychopathic. Stella doesn't express an opinion on the subject.

She cleans the bathroom, the kitchen, the refrigerator and the kitchen cabinets. She cleans out the birdcage, puts fresh water into the little dishes, hangs a new branch of hawthorn on the cage bars; the birds are sitting close together silently and reproachfully watching Stella with their black eyes. Carefully she hooks the little cage door shut and goes shopping.

She talks on the phone to Paloma and writes down Walter's doctors' appointments for the coming week. She mixes quark, plums and linseed; when she sits down next to Walter's bed, he doesn't even want to turn around to her, but he says he would be happy if they were to go to another concert soon. Stella sometimes does that. She goes out with Walter, to the movies, to a concert, to the theatre, and they can each put up with it for about half or three-quarters of an hour; then Walter says he wants to go home; he says it not just once; he says it a hundred times, says it until they're back again with the wheelchair in the entrance hall of the large house in which his life is now confined to one room. Every time Stella is in complete agreement with what he says. In spite of that she keeps going out with Walter. She has the feeling that the resistance each of them has to overcome makes them both stronger. For a while at least.

She says, I'll go to another concert with you soon. Please turn around to face me. Have something to eat.

She feeds Walter and wonders if, concealed in the way he takes the food off the spoon she holds out to him, there's a little of the way he used to take food from the spoon his mother fed him with as a child. In Ava's way of eating, in that tiny final swallow, she still recognises the baby, still recognises Ava's baby-like snatching for the spoon, for the sweet porridge.

Walter's ancient mother might say that she recognises her baby in Walter. What a sad thought.

Walter, would you like to go outside?

Walter doesn't answer and Stella disregards this; she gets him out of bed. Dresses him, lifting his arms and dangling legs; she pulls thick socks over his ice-cold feet, puts on his useless slippers; then she wraps a scarf around his neck and, covering the wheelchair with his rain cape, she pushes him out onto the porch. She makes some tea and sits down with him. They sit next to each other, looking out into the rain, watching as the rain turns the tropical wood of the porch floor darker and darker.

A cold May.

Walter nods.

Stella unfolds the newspaper and holding it out to him, points to the blonde girl; he squints sceptically, then he waves it aside. There's something missing in the blonde girl. Or something is too much. How would she tell Jason about this? How can one share such things, this and that, also the tenderness she is capable of when wiping Walter's mouth, wiping his mouth with a napkin and, if she hasn't got a napkin, then with the palm of her hand.

The linseed is used up,
Stella writes with chalk on the slate on Walter's kitchen cabinet for the evening shift.
Next week the freezer compartment should be defrosted. Water delivery cancelled? Best regards.

She puts Walter back to bed, arranges the pillow roll under his head, covers him, and tucks the blanket neatly around his feet. She closes the porch door and tilts it.

Do the birds have food? Water? Walter's pronunciation is slurred, as if he were drunk, as if he were telling a joke.

Of course, Stella says. Enough till the end of the year, Walter. See you tomorrow. Take care.

She locks the front door from the outside. Wonders if he can hear that. And what it might sound like to him.

*

A wind that smells of the sea is blowing through the streets outside. Stella turns around. Quite a few people. No one she might recognise or know.

*

She goes to pick Ava up from kindergarten. She pulls on Ava's rubber boots, buttons up her jacket, puts the rain hat on her head and gently ties it under Ava's round chin.

I want ice cream.

I definitely want to have a cat. Definitely.

I want to visit Stevie. I want to be with Stevie all the time.

I drew a picture for Papa. I drew a house without a roof, but the others just drew a roof on it; they just drew a roof on top of it.

They cycle home through the rain. The sand at the edge of Forest Lane is wet; the trees are almost black with wetness. Stella pushes the bike into the garden, lets the gate fall shut behind her, lifts Ava out of the seat and sets her down. Ava stands there, tilts her head back, holds her face up to the rain.

Stella unlocks the mailbox. There's a card lying in the mailbox. One side of it is white, blank, on the other there is just one sentence; the writing blurred, hurried –
those were long days.

*

Come, Stella says to Ava. Let's go inside the house.

Eight

Clara phones in the afternoon. Her voice on the telephone is hoarse and absent-minded, so familiar and close, as if Stella could touch her; it is a huge relief to hear Clara's voice.

Stella, Clara says. Before we talk about anything else. Your new admirer – what sort of guy is he? Can you tell me what sort of guy he is?

She says it casually and distractedly. She says it as if she were chewing gum. As if Stella would even consider getting to know Mister Pfister. As if that were really still a possibility – one man among many, and yet the only one, just as in the past, wouldn't it be possible? Clara asks this as if Jason didn't exist. As if Jason didn't yet exist or not any more.

Clara, Stella says firmly. He isn't my admirer. In any case, he certainly isn't the type who would court me in some wacky way or other. Do you understand what I'm saying?

Oddly enough Stella knows this. She knows that Mister Pfister's interest in her is nothing like the interest of those who ten years ago dropped letters and cards into her mailbox, scratched symbols into the doorsill, and who, pushing past Clara in the hall, would sit down at the kitchen table, a bottle of schnapps in one hand and in the other a hand-rolled cigarette: Is Stella home, your roommate, you know, the pale, blonde; oh, she isn't, well then I'll just wait for her here, don't let me bother you; I'll just sit down here; she's sure to come back soon, isn't she. Ten years ago it sounded different when someone knocked unexpectedly on the door; so it seems. Perhaps Stella could say that Mister Pfister is the Finale. The final summing up of all those who had stood outside her door during the years she spent with Clara in the city.

Stella says, Mister Pfister is a damned ghost.

She's sitting at the kitchen table, drinking water, having peeled herself a green apple and cut it into little boats as she does for Ava; she eats the apple deliberately. Piece by piece, like a form of defiance. Clara, a thousand kilometres away, is also sitting at her kitchen table. At the cluttered table in her water-mill under a small square window, her children in kindergarten, Clara's husband at school, the table full of cups and brushes, paints and glasses, nuts, fruit and candlesticks. Clara's beloved clutter, her hopeless chaos. Clara is drinking tea. But not eating an apple with it, smoking instead; she puffs audibly, and she is sketching; Stella can hear the sound of the pencil drawing on paper.

She says, Mister Pfister is a retribution. He is a punishment.

Punishment for what, Clara says.

I don't know, Stella says darkly. I haven't found out yet, but I think I will soon, I'll know soon, I'll figure it out. Do you remember the man on the tram?

The memory of the man on the tram has come back to her at just that moment. How long ago was it, fifteen years? A stranger, and she had got off the tram with him, walked quite matter-of-factly along the entire street all the way to hers and Clara's house, wordlessly climbed up the stairs, and finally arrived in the luckily empty apartment and gone to bed without any further ado. In the bright middle of the day. In Clara's bed.

Not her own, but Clara's bed. As if the encounter weren't real, hadn't taken place or had happened to someone else; Stella as Stella wouldn't have dared to do anything. Only as Clara had she been up to it – hold out your hand, close your eyes – and this way, but just one single time.

She says, the man with whom I went to bed, without knowing him. Who I never saw again after that. I don't remember his name, could also be that he never even told me his name, nor I mine, probably. My name is Stella? I never said that. But I remember everything else in detail. I dropped all scruples.

Actually I'm reserved, shy, Stella thinks, surprised. Was I always like that? Does Jason want me to be reserved? But in any case it makes no difference as far as Mister Pfister's interest in her is concerned. Mister Pfister's interest is a completely different type, and maybe it's precisely this that makes it so humiliating.

She says, I don't know any more whether I locked the apartment door in case you'd come home. You didn't come home. I didn't have to tell you about it, but I did tell you. I asked you whether I should put fresh sheets on the bed; the man wasn't clean, in a way you wouldn't have liked. In contrast to me.

What did I say, Clara says; she sounds interested now.

You said, No need to.

Stella has to laugh about it; Clara laughs too. Knowingly, probably wistfully; it's so pointless.

So you do remember now, Stella says.

Yes, Clara says, I remember. And why are you telling me?

Because Mister Pfister is the exact opposite, Stella says; she straightens up and takes a deep breath. I'm probably telling you because he is the exact opposite. Well, in any case he comes by here every day. Every day. When Jason is here, he doesn't; since Jason left, he's coming again. Rings the bell, puts something in the letter box, doesn't even wait any more; he knows that I'm here, that I won't come out; he knows it very well.

Stella gets up, goes to the sunroom, opens the screen door and stands in the doorway. May sunshine on the lawn; the trees cast hard, precise shadows. The lilac is withered, the flower-clusters are brown. A biting wind blows around the corner of the house, and the clouds near the horizon move swiftly.

Mid-thirties? Maybe he's in his mid-thirties. Stella thinks it would be better not to talk any more about Mister Pfister, it's not doing her any good, but she can't back off. She says, Actually he looks pretty good. Youthful, open, you know what I mean, but it's as if … damaged, you know. He looks quite normal, just like the rest of us, but something else comes through from underneath, exhaustion, neglect. Misery. Are you listening?

Yes, Clara says, surprised. I'm listening to you.

Stella listens for sounds. Then she says, He's absolutely alone. He acts as if he had all the time in the world. Endless amounts of time. By now I've seen him scores of times walking away from our house down the street, and he doesn't look like a man going to work. He wears unremarkable clothes, a dark jacket, light-coloured jeans; he never has a briefcase, never a book or a newspaper or a mobile. But always a packet of tobacco, always cigarette papers, always a lighter.

She thinks about it. Then she says, with hostility in her voice, He smokes constantly.

She says, I'm certain his fingers are yellow from the nicotine. Index finger and middle finger; Stella can feel that she's talking herself into a fury that might seem suspicious to Clara; nevertheless she keeps talking. He lives on our street. Five or six houses away. Jason walked by it. I haven't. Maybe I ought to do that sometime? I think he considers himself somewhat superior; you can tell from his handwriting. In any case, his spelling is correct and he listens to classical music; he wrote that to me. I have the feeling he got stuck. He got stuck; one day or other in his life something just didn't keep going; he's caught in a time warp and thinks he can pull me into it with him – that's what it looks like.

Stella says, Do you follow me, and she listens to Clara's thoughtful silence on the other end of the line, Clara's thoughtful silence in her oh-so-distant life. But today, just as back then, Clara still prefers to sit in the kitchen and, Stella knows, she has her feet up on the chair and the telephone clamped between her head and shoulder because she has to hold the cigarette in her left hand and the pencil in her right.

Clara, I'm asking you whether you can follow me. What are you drawing?

I can follow you. I'm drawing spirals, of course, Clara says drily. I'm drawing a time warp.

And how should I visualise that, Stella says.

Well, like a black hole, Clara says. A spiral, a very delicate one; I drew a delicate spiral, more of a vortex. In the middle, a black hole. Undertow or a deep void. The deep void in which Mister Pfister got stuck, that's what I'm drawing, it's obvious.

Please cut it out and send it to me, Stella says. Write something comforting under it, maybe something botanical. As if the spiral were something beautiful, a plant.

I will, Clara says. Already doing so.

*

Back then – in the apartment in the city, in the three rooms of which Clara had the left one, Stella the right one, and the middle room had only a sofa, the telephone and always a bunch of flowers – Clara had cut a poem out of the newspaper and hung it up on the apartment door. And the poem had stayed there until they moved out. The last line, as far as Stella can remember, was,
Let everyone in, whoever may come.

*

Do you remember the title of the poem you hung up on our door?

House Rules.
The title of the poem was
House Rules.

Stella says, that's right.
House Rules.
Now I remember. If you were here, it would still apply. I would have to let everybody in, and I would have let Mister Pfister come in too. Would have invited him into the kitchen and put a cold beer on the table for him.

But Clara isn't here, and without Clara the commandments of these
House Rules
are defunct. Mister Pfister seems to know this; perhaps it's precisely because of this that he began to take note of Stella, Stella without Clara's protection and apparently without Jason's protection as well.

Do you think I should let him in? Open the door for him and speak to him?

No, Clara says slowly, and her voice sounds so earnest and profound that Stella suddenly becomes quiet. No, you should not let him in. Shouldn't open the door for him, or talk to him either. You should look out for yourself. Stella. Will you do that?