The clouds suddenly gave way to the sun and, dazzled, Gillian took a backward step. The doctor came in to say goodbye. He said she shouldn’t go out in the sun for the time being and should avoid getting her face wet for a few days. Also she shouldn’t take any exercise, and should avoid all forms of exertion. Apart from that, she could please herself. He shook hands with Gillian and said he had to go, they would see each other again in five months’ time. Gillian looked at her watch. It was a little after two. She packed her case and went out into the corridor. She quickly said goodbye to the nurses. Something kept her from walking out of the main hospital exit. At the end of the landing was a staircase that went down to the emergency ward and a side exit. She called a taxi. While she waited, she wondered where she would go. She didn’t want to see any of her friends, no one she had known from before, who would compare her old face to the new one. When the taxi finally arrived, she put on her dark glasses and almost ran the few steps to it.
From home, she called the police station and asked to speak to Frau Bauer. She was away from her desk, but the man took a note of Gillian’s number and promised his colleague would get back to her. When she phoned three hours later, Gillian was almost in tears. She reminded the policewoman who she was.
What can I do for you?
Gillian hesitated, then she said, my husband wasn’t to blame for the accident. I was supposed to drive us home. And then I got drunk and I couldn’t.
You told me that already, said the policewoman.
It wasn’t his fault, said Gillian again, and by now she was crying.
He still shouldn’t have been driving, said the policewoman coolly. Perhaps you do need help. Shall I give you that victims’ support number again?
I’m not the victim, said Gillian and hung up.
She called Matthias’s mother and told her everything, but she wouldn’t hear of Gillian’s guilt either. She said there was no point in looking for a guilty party. Matthias’s death had been God’s will. The conversation was over almost as quickly as that with the policewoman.
Over the next few days, Gillian kept thinking of the New Year’s party and of how the accident might have been avoided. She should have insisted on staying the night at Dagmar’s, she shouldn’t have gotten into the car, she should never have allowed Hubert to take photographs of her nude.
Early on Sunday she called her parents at the vacation house. Her father picked up. She asked him where exactly the accident had happened. Someone from his workshop had picked up the totaled vehicle, and he was able to tell her the place. Gillian said she was happy to take his offer of staying in the house for a while. He said they wouldn’t be leaving till tonight, the weather was fine, and they wanted to get another day’s skiing in.
What about coming up today? It would be good to see you there.
I can’t manage that, she said.
Well, you know where we keep the keys, said her father.
She spent Sunday straightening up the apartment and packing a suitcase, though she didn’t know how long she would be staying in the mountains. On Monday morning she drove to the scene of the crash. She parked by a forest path a hundred yards farther on and went back on foot. By the side of the road was a withered bouquet of flowers with a burned-down votive candle, the only clue that there had been an accident here. Gillian wondered who had put it there. She picked it up and put it on her backseat. When she stopped at a rest stop an hour later, to fill up, she threw it in a trash can that had Thank You written on it in four languages.
Chapter 2
Never will I succeed in putting as much strength in a portrait as there is in a head. The mere fact of living demands such willpower and energy …
Dust was time in material form, Hubert could no longer remember who had said it, or where he had read it. At any rate, a lot of time seemed to have collected in his studio, because there was a thin, almost transparent layer of dust over everything. He didn’t bother to wipe it away, he had only come to take a look through his old stuff and see if there was anything he could use. The big nudes, the naked housewife series, as his gallerist called them, he didn’t even look at, they had become so strange to him, it was as though they were by someone else. He took a stack of large folders from a shelf and opened them one after the other, industrial landscapes, pencil drawings of machinery, portraits, and nudes, the oldest things dated back to his student days. After briefly hesitating, he took down a folder labeled Astrid. It contained two dozen photographs and a few sketches. He had done them right at the beginning of their relationship, during a summer holiday in the south of France. They had driven around, staying in campsites. In every picture there was Astrid naked in a different landscape, sometimes so small that she could hardly be made out. He had thought of drawing the whole series in crayon but only finished a very few. In his memory they had been better than they were. He put them all back in the folder and went on to the next one.
An hour later, Hubert was back outside the building. He had managed to find nothing usable, but carted the slides and projector into his car anyway, raw material that sometime might come in handy. It was midnight, but the air was balmy.
He had been teaching at the art school for six years now. There were two weeks left of the semester, but he was already finished, and he felt that strange mix of freedom and what now? that he was caught up in every summer.
He had lit a cigarette and rolled the window down. There were still plenty of people around, in the distance he heard a police siren. All month, the weather had been unusually warm and dry. First, Hubert had been pleased about it, then the longer it went on, the more it disquieted him. The news carried reports of desiccated crops, and everyone was talking about climate change, but that wasn’t the cause of his disquiet. When he drove over the bridge, he saw the lakeside lights flashing a storm warning.
The next morning a light rain was falling. Hubert had opened the window, and a cool wind blew in his face. He had gotten up early and prepared the apartment for a few months without him. On the car radio he listened to the weather forecast. It seemed the next few days would remain cold and rainy, and the snow line would fall below a thousand meters.
He got caught up in the rush-hour traffic. He wasn’t a very experienced driver, and when he abruptly changed lanes, or got moving too late after the lights turned, the cars behind him honked. On the Autobahn other cars sat on his tail. After two hours, just before he exited the Autobahn, he stopped at a rest site and drank a cup of coffee. In the restaurant there were some pictures by a painter who had made a name for himself depicting elephants and tigers. A little leaflet was provided, which listed the absurdly high prices that were charged for the works. Hubert was almost physically disgusted by the paintings, and he soon set off.
Driving on, he briefly entertained the thought of making a living like that artist. Since he’d begun teaching, he hardly got around to painting anymore. He persuaded himself that it was because he was pushed for time. In his younger days, he always used to mock artists who feathered their nests as professors, but following Lukas’s birth he accepted an offer from the college. A regular job seemed to be the only way of having a reasonably comfortable middle-class life and not ending up as an impoverished artist in the gutter.
When Lukas started kindergarten, Astrid went back to work in the property department of the same bank where she had worked before. They moved into the town next door, where they managed to buy a small house on the edge of the fields.