When she woke me again on the fifth day, shoving me from the warm lap of the armchair, I ran furious to the door, flung it wide open in spite of the screaming, and stepped outside. My feet had barely touched the soil when everything went quiet. I stepped back inside, thinking all the screaming had finally finished her off. But she wasn’t gasping for breath on the floor. And she wasn’t clawing at her chest. She stood upright beside the armchair, stroking the cushion as if it were a dog’s neck, and smiling dreamily.
“Uhh-ehh?” she asked.
I cleared my throat, bewildered.
At which point she rushed over to me and slipped her arm through mine. “Uhh-ehh!”
What was I supposed to do? I liked her smile. Together we stepped out into the daylight. The sun dazzled me; I blinked.
“Uhh-ehh!” urged the old lady, and licked her lips. Her white dress glittered like new-fallen snow. “Uhh-ehh!”
She showed me the way. Our stroll took us once around the cabin, then the old lady began to wheeze so alarmingly that I moved her toward a dirty gray chair on the porch. Only she didn’t want to let go of my arm. As she sat gulping air, I knelt beside her. Before long her head tipped to one side, and softly she began to snore. As soon as I dared to move, she tightened her grip and snuggled her head into my shoulder. This close to her, that ancient odor was especially strong. Even as she slept, the smile didn’t slip from her face. And something peculiar was happening to my lips and eyes, to my cheeks. I wished I had a mirror, a window, or just a puddle of water, but even without them I knew what this was.
I was smiling.
The next day we went out for a walk before lunch. The old lady gathered the hem of her dress so that its skirt wouldn’t drag in the dust. This time we rounded the house twice: a porch with a chair, a blunt ax, piled cordwood, the opaque window, rusty saw blades and nails, a big rock, flat and level like a table, and beside it a slew of daisies, a worm-eaten wooden chest with a padlock, spiderwebs, a metal bucket filled with slate, a tattered snakeskin nailed to the wall, the porch with the chair …
Now and then, the old lady cheerfully said:
“Uhh-ehh!”
and tugged at my arm. Later on, she ate three bowls of lentil soup.
“Uhhhn!”
“Iii-uhh!”
Within a week we’d increased our daily workout to six circuits of the cabin. Sometimes we even went counterclockwise. The old lady was breathing more smoothly now, and it was rare that I had to support her. Three times a day she spooned her soup, and three times a day she disappeared into the latrine. At night she left the door to her bedroom open a crack. While eating, she muttered:
“Uhh-ehh.”
While walking she panted:
“Uhh-ehh!”
After getting up, and before going to bed, she’d greet or take leave of me with
“Uhh-ehh.”
Strangely, only I grew sunburned from our walks. The skin of my face was peeling. Delicately the old lady pulled shreds of it from my forehead; I put up with it.
“How come you live here?”
The old lady shrugged her shoulders.
“My name’s Julius. How about you?”
She dangled an especially long strip of skin in front of my nose.
“Eh.”
“What?”
“Eh.”
“Can you write? Yes?”
The old lady nodded.
“I can read,” I said.
She clapped her hands.
“Do you have any chalk?”
She shook her head.
“Coal, we can use coal.”
Again she shook her head, and when I made to stand up, she pushed me back into the armchair, took a plate from the kitchen, shoveled a dishful of lentils onto it, and laid it in my lap.
“Hungry?”
She sighed, bent over, and shaped four letters from the lentils.
“Else? Your name is Else?”
“Eh!” She nodded, erased her name, and wrote:
“Du”—the informal “you.”
“My name’s Julius.”
She shook her head, and tapped her hand against her chest.
I understood, and repeated, addressing her informally as Du: “Your name is Else.”
“Uhh-ehh!” she shouted.
“What does that mean? What is it? Write it, write it out!”
Else pressed her lips together, crossed her arms behind her back, and stepped from one foot to the other like a little girl caught red-handed. What I read in the lentils was this: For more than sixty years Else had lived in this cabin, she’d been born here, married here, gotten pregnant here, and one day, like her ancestors, she’d be buried in the forest. Her parents had chosen her husband for her, and over forty-five years she’d first gotten to know and then to love him. When at the end of World War I (this was the first time I’d heard of it) she learned that her husband had fallen at Verdun in France, she’d thrown open the wardrobe and pulled on the most expensive fabric she owned: her wedding dress. Bedecked in that whitest of white embroidery, she’d managed to suppress the fear of being as alone as she now was. Since then that whiteness had shrouded her in comforting memories — of her husband’s desperate groping for the dress’s buttons on their wedding night, of the napkin with which her mother had so frequently patted her mouth, of her grandfather’s pale hair, of the first time she’d seen her baby boy, of the wreath of daisies she’d worn on her head at her wedding.
By now, the dress wasn’t blinding to me anymore. Instead, it shone. I polished off each spoonful of lentils with gusto, and the tastiest were the ones that Else had used for writing. At night, I peeped through the cracked bedroom door, trying in vain to see more than I could smelclass="underline" grease, dried flowers, and bitterness. Every day I plucked a daisy and adorned the edge of Else’s plate with it. On the velvet nap of the pillowcase I wrote I love you, wiping the letters away before Else could read them. I conversed with her with the help of the lentils, observing carefully how she bent her fingers, clenched her hands, swung her arms.
This change did not go unnoticed. One evening, the bedroom door was cracked wider than usual. I hesitated not one moment, only took a deep breath, and went in to her. I lay down beside her. Maybe, I thought, on that next-to-last night in Segendorf I’d actually crawled deep enough into myself, and now I’d emerged in that other, that wondrous place? She touched me only once, stroking my face before she fell asleep, with a motherly “Uhh-ehh,” giving me a warm moment in which I felt so at home, suspended in that letterless silence, that for the first time I was able to drift off without missing Anni.
My first love was, at the same time, my shortest. The next morning, a faint autumn morning, she lay stiff and cold beside me. I noticed it immediately on waking, but clenched my eyes shut and clung to her. Until the afternoon, I barely moved. The fall of her hair shimmered silver, her pale skin, generously strewn with age spots and birthmarks, made me think of porcelain. She smelled bitter, rancid, with a fading undertone of sweetness. Her eyes were open, and gleamed with every color from hazel to mossy green. I shut them, passing my hand across her face, feeling furrows and crow’s-feet, and dimples like Anni’s, and couldn’t look away, nor bring myself to give her a farewell kiss on the cheek.