In mid-September he said he needed to stay in the city for a while, the term was beginning, and there was lots of organizational stuff to take care of.
How long? asked Jill.
I can’t tell you yet, maybe a week or ten days.
Why didn’t you tell me sooner? she asked. That way I could have gotten used to the idea a bit.
At night she dreamed of Matthias for the first time in ages. They had a child together, a boy who looked like Lukas. In the morning she couldn’t remember any details, she was left with just a picture, a family photograph of her and Matthias in mountain scenery, and the boy between them.
Hubert phoned every other day. He didn’t have much to say for himself, and Jill didn’t know what to say either.
Things are the same, she said, will you be coming on Saturday?
Yes, he said, almost certainly.
You can come whenever you want, she said, but I’d just like to know first.
She felt worse after that call than before. She had taken Saturday off but still got up early. She spent more time than usual in her bath. She wasn’t a particularly gifted or enthusiastic cook, but she wanted to make a welcome feast for Hubert. The village butcher recommended the beef pot roast and explained how to prepare it. Back at home, she put the meat on to cook and laid the table and decorated it with the few remaining flowers she could find in the garden. When everything was ready, the phone rang. It was Hubert. He said he wouldn’t be coming today after all. He hadn’t been able to call her any earlier. Astrid wasn’t doing well, she needed him.
Are you with her now? she asked.
I need to go, he said.
Jill sat in front of the house, but it was cooler than she expected and she went back inside. She started to clean the house. When she took Hubert’s dirty clothes down to the laundry room, she sniffed them, and that settled her a bit. She tried to imagine what it would be like on her own again. In a few years she’d be fifty, and for the first time she had the sense that it was too late for certain things in her life.
She vacuumed the stairs. Outside Hubert’s workroom she hesitated. Since he had moved in there, she had hardly set foot in the place, she didn’t want to bother him, or pressure him. She switched off the vacuum and opened the door. The sudden silence unsettled her, it was like the silence of childhood seeping out of the room and wrapping her up. Jill was about to close the door when she changed her mind and sat down in the threadbare armchair in the corner. The room looked almost the way it had when she was a child. Hubert had left hardly any traces of his occupation, only he had cleared the table, and there were some piles of books, notebooks, and sketch pads on the floor. The ceiling lamp gave a weak yellowish light. She went over to the desk and opened a pad that was lying there. She picked up a pencil, as though she were going to sketch something herself. The pages of the book were covered with pencil cross-hatching. Some were so heavy that they formed shiny reflective surfaces, and you couldn’t see the individual lines anymore, still they had a spatial effect. Other pages seemed to be unfinished, they looked like dream landscapes, like maps, a juxtaposition of small crosshatched spaces going in different directions and forming unpredictable patterns with their occasional intersections. Jill hadn’t a clue what to make of these drawings. Were they artworks or desperate attempts to kill time? As she leafed on, she saw that it was the block with the nude drawings Hubert had done of her the first time he had stayed the night here. Presumably they weren’t anything special, just quick sketches. Not one of them was intact, it looked as though Hubert had crossed them all out before he had embarked on the cross-hatching. Jill was suddenly convinced that he wouldn’t be back.
She started covering one of the sketches with her own hatchings, the one of her kneeling on the bed with her hands behind her back, as though chained. The pencil was too hard, so she took another one. She deleted the picture, as though burying her unprotected body under a layer of graphite, making a fossil that no one would ever discover.
It was almost midnight. Jill took off her socks and stepped out of the house barefoot. The air was cool, and the ground under her feet was cold. She walked down the road. A couple of years ago they had built a new bridge over the gorge, but she took the old way. The road down into the gorge was blocked off, in the spring floods there had been a landslide and the underpinnings needed to be secured. Jill scrambled over the barrier and walked past the machines that stood around like sleeping animals. There were lights on in some of the rooms in the cultural center, and the hotel was lit up as well. She crossed the meadow to the annex where the pool was. It had been rebuilt when the club took over the building. She peered in through the big windows, but she couldn’t see anything except the glimmer of some light switches. She leaned against the cold glass and looked out at the starry sky. Someone must have opened a window, because there was music coming from the hotel. Today it was Captain Jack Sparrow’s turn again, The Curse of the Black Pearl. Jill was freezing. She remembered she had a spare jacket in her office. She went around the annex to the main entrance.
Sitting at reception was a young Greek boy who had started there this season and whose name Jill couldn’t seem to remember. He asked her if she was going to the open-air concert. She said she had just stepped in to collect something from her office. When she came down in her wool jacket and a pair of sandals she slopped around in at work, a couple of employees were standing in the hallway. They wore colorful clothes and looked as though they were in disguise. The men greeted Jill rambunctiously.
Are you coming to the open-air? asked Ursina.
She was one of the few who came from here, she could even speak Romansh, but she was down on the locals and seemed to prefer the hotel to the village.
I don’t know, said Jill, I just came in to pick something up.
Oh, come on, said the masseuse and put her arm around Jill. When did you last dance?
At reception a couple of the men were teasing the Greek boy, who was on night duty and who therefore couldn’t come with them. Outside a minibus drew up.
Marcos is driving, said Ursina. Jill was pulled along by the others and finally clambered into the bus.
They took the main road up the valley. Marcos had put on a CD, a tinny-sounding guitar with a melancholy woman’s voice. From the backseats the men complained — wasn’t there any other music? — but the driver ignored them. Jill, on the front seat, asked what the music was.
Fado, he said, from Portugal, Amália Rodrigues.
And what is she singing?
Marcos didn’t say anything, at first Jill thought he didn’t understand her question, but then she realized he was listening. When the guitar was playing on its own, he embarked on his halting translation.
What a strange way my heart has to live. Lonesome heart, independent heart, not for me to command. If you don’t know where you’re going, why do you want to run.
That’s nice, said Ursina.
Her voice was very near. Jill saw that she had craned forward to listen. Marcos didn’t say anything. Only when they turned off the main road after half an hour and followed a narrow little mountain road into a side valley, did he ask what sort of concert they were going to.
It’s a Goa party, said Gregor, a young cook, from the backseat. Trance, you know.
He explained the difference between the various techno forms to Marcos. Jill didn’t listen, she was so tired her eyes were falling shut. They passed a village, and a little later a spectrally illuminated campsite. There were torches stuck in the ground, big fires were burning, and some of the brightly colored tents were lit from inside. Marcos slowed to walking pace. In the headlights Jill saw strange figures walking up or coming down the mountain, some were moving as though dancing, others had drooping shoulders. Finally they got to the entrance of the festival area. You couldn’t see the stage from there, but you could already hear the music, a monotonous boom-boom-boom. Marcos asked what time he should come back for them.