The last time he’d been out for a walk, a couple of days ago, he’d stopped at that garden gate. It was a small block of flats but it was a couple of years now since she’d lived there. She was nearly twenty-one now; it would be her birthday in twelve days. He’d leaned on the garden gate, and although it was quite cool — the entire summer had been cool and rainy — he’d broken out in a sweat. She had tied up her brown hair in two little bunches. A brightly coloured party dress. Balloons in the trees. Her parents had been sitting at a table, and he stood at the garden gate, stood there a good while and hoped they might invite him in for a cup of coffee and a piece of cake. But they hadn’t even said hello, even though they’d seen him. He waved at her again, and she smiled, then turned around and ran to her friends, who looked over at him and whispered and laughed. He turned away and left. The bag with the teddy in it knocked against his leg as he walked. The teddy was holding a calculator in both hands. The teddy had been quite expensive; the calculator was a new model. The calculator teddy was wearing a mortarboard and large spectacles. Its shirt was decorated with numbers; it didn’t have any trousers. It had small plastic rods on its hands where you could push the calculator in and out again. He’d given her the teddy later, after class. ‘Could you stay behind for a minute please,’ he’d said to her, ‘I want to have a word with you about the last test.’ She hadn’t done particularly well in the last test, even though she’d often stayed behind after class for extra tuition. There were four in the group: three boys and her. Sometimes they’d done more practice on their own after that, once the others had gone, twenty or thirty minutes, or longer. She was really good at German and most other subjects, among the best in the class, but maths … And he did everything he could for her, to help her understand numbers and learn to like them. He loved numbers.
‘Here, for you.’ He put the calculator teddy on the table in front of her. ‘Happy Birthday.’ She reached hesitantly for the teddy and pulled it slightly closer to her. ‘Belated best wishes,’ he said, ‘Happy Birthday, Juliana.’
‘For me?’ she said, smiling and raising her top lip slightly and looking down at the table. Then she lifted her head, looked at him and said, ‘Thank you, thanks.’
He sat down on the little chair next to her, his belly brushing against the table. ‘Imagine we’re in a florist’s,’ he said, ‘and you buy yourself seven lovely flowers, and they cost …’ he thought for a moment, ‘they cost seventeen marks fifty.’ ‘What kind of flowers, Mr Krein?’ she asked, still holding the teddy tight in one hand. He thought again. ‘Roses,’ he said. ‘No, lilies.’ The exercise was in the textbook and it said roses there, seven roses, but he wanted her to buy herself lilies, even though he knew nothing about flowers. ‘Why are lilies so expensive?’ she asked.
‘They’re,’ he said, ‘they’re especially beautiful lilies, special lilies,’ and she nodded. ‘So, one lily,’ he said, ‘how much does one lily cost?’
She took the calculator, removing it carefully from the teddy’s hands, and he said, ‘No, wait a moment. Write it down first and work it out, and then you can check it.’
She put the calculator aside, picked up her fountain pen and bent over her exercise book. ‘Seven lilies,’ she said softly. ‘Seventeen marks fifty,’ he said, leaning over to her. ‘And how much does one cost?’ He saw her writing the numbers in the little squares. He saw the small crease running from the top of her nose to her forehead.
Sweat ran down his face, and then the stabbing and aching was back again, from his chest to his left arm, and he held onto the garden gate for support. ‘Juliana,’ he said. Her friends called her ‘Juli’ — like the month. The school holidays were in July, the long summer holidays. He held onto the garden gate for support, with both hands. Then he closed his eyes and waited. He opened his eyes and saw the plate of food in front of him. ‘Happy Birthday, Juli,’ he said. But then he noticed that no time had passed, that he was still sitting at the table, with the same salami, the same cutlet in aspic shining in the light falling through the kitchen window. He ate salami and pork cutlet in aspic every evening; he hardly left the house now and he often thought of her birthday, the closer it came. Did she have a boyfriend, he wondered. Probably, she was almost twenty-one after all. But she’d always been so shy. Had always looked so shyly down at the floor when she came up to the blackboard. Perhaps she had a child already, a small child. He banged on the table, swept his open palm across the table. The plate fell on the floor and shattered, the salami bounced across the tiles, he had a nice tiled kitchen and the cutlet in aspic slapped onto the tiles with a dry splat and stayed put as if it were stuck to the floor.
He lowered his head carefully onto the tabletop. He was fifty-four and he was never going to have children. He stayed like that for a while, resting his arms on his belly and folding his hands together. ‘If I become a father at the age of fifty-five, and my daughter has a son at twenty-three, how old would I have to be for my five-year-old grandson …’ He fell silent. Even numbers brought him no pleasure any more. There was no one there any more to whom he could explain the magic of numbers. And there hadn’t been for a long time now. ‘Five to the power of four,’ he said. ‘That’s five times five times five times five. The small number controls the big one.’ He took her hand. ‘Count it on your fingers, go ahead. One times five, times five for the second time, times five for the third time, times five for the fourth time.’ She counted. ‘The small number controls the big one,’ she said, and he looked at the crease above her nose, ‘five to the power of two is twenty-five, that’s easy, five to the power of three is twenty-five times two.’
‘No,’ he said with a tap at her fingers, ‘the five for the third time, twenty-five times five. It’s like,’ he thought for a moment, ‘when you skim a stone, skim a flat stone across water, Juli, and it bounces off four times before it goes under. You can skim stones, can’t you, Juli?’
‘On the water,’ she said. He stood with her by the water, the lake outside town, the motorway beyond the embankment; they heard the hum of all the cars. She stood in front of him in her brightly coloured dress, the one she’d be wearing on her birthday, skimming flat stones across the water. ‘Seventy-five,’ she said, ‘seventy-five times five.’ He was wearing a loose Hawaiian shirt, watching her skim the stones across the water, and he was happy.
He walked slowly down the hallway, the white bathroom door ahead of him. He ran a hand over his face. He hadn’t shaved for a few days. Back then he’d shaved every morning and moisturised his face and gone to school with a smooth, shiny face. He’d usually started to sweat on the bus. Then he’d sat sweating in the staff room, his sandwiches and coffee on the table in front of him.
They talked about him behind his back; he knew that. Mrs Koch and Mrs Bräuninger put their heads together, Mrs Bräuninger with her silver whistle on a string round her neck all the time; he’d often stood by the window and looked out at the sports field, looking for Juli and hearing Mrs Bräuninger’s whistle. Juli was very good at sports, always a front-runner in races, and she won almost every sprint. She was wearing a pale blue tracksuit. She ran across the playing field to the other girls. She was laughing — he could see that from up here. He even thought he could see her teeth. He leaned against the windowsill and listened to the class behind him writing, the rustle of paper, the scratching of pens, now and then soft whispers. She didn’t have maths on Wednesdays, but when he taught 7b at noon he could look down at the playing field, if the weather was good. In the winter and when it rained she was in the gym with the others. Sometimes the girls and Mrs Bräuninger didn’t come out even though the weather was good; they played volleyball in the gym or did gymnastics and did all the things he’d never been able to do and had always hated as a child. He’d been bad at sports, fat and heavy-breathing, and when he thought about how they’d laughed at him when he clung onto the climbing bar and didn’t move an inch upwards, he wished he could clear the memories from his brain like old results on a calculator — ‘Fatty, fatty’ — he thought about numbers, about fractions, quadratic equations, matrix equations. He looked down at the playing field and looked for her in the group of girls, two or three pale blue tracksuits — there she was; he recognised her brown hair, which she tied up in a short ponytail. Eleven years, exactly a quarter of his life. Eleven years ago he’d been at a different school, in a different town. The German and Music teacher — a small, delicate woman. He thought about interior and exterior angles, about the first thirty-five digits of pi, about straight lines that would meet somewhere in infinity, but at night he dreamed of Miss Kerner, German and Music, and woke up sweating, and imagined inviting her to dinner, imagined himself calculating food and drinks, aperitifs and desserts and champagne in his head quick as a flash, then they’d sit on the sofa in his living room, close together, he’d explain the infinity of numbers and Miss Kerner would recite a poem.