“How can you even ask!” she cried. “With a couple of words you half-killed me at the table, so that I could hardly stay and sit there – and now you’re asking me!”
“Oh, that redundancy!” I now said, because I recalled her look which was caught by the landlady. “For those words I beg you a thousand pardons, but I really didn’t know what to answer to the landlady’s question.”
“So you just said it anyway?” she queried, more happily, and for a moment I hesitated over whether to tell her the truth or conceal it at first. Finally I told her anyway, “No, it is true after all, and that’s why I shouldn’t have said it at the lunch table.”
“So you knew it already when you were visiting grandfather!” she almost screamed.
“Yes, I knew it already,” I said, crestfallen.
“You’ve known it for a long time!” she pressed me further.
“No, I heard it only this morning,” I explained. “If I’d known it a few days earlier, I wouldn’t ever have appeared before your grandfather.”
“But how could you tell grandfather that you’re hoping for a pay increase?” she now exclaimed, which was a double blow to me: firstly, they must have taken it seriously after all when they kept such a trifling thing as my pay increase in mind, and secondly, this pay increase revealed me as someone who, one way or another, was untruthful and deceitful, in short a person who can be trusted only guardedly. This was clear to me in a moment. Therefore I shouted, “Oh miss, you can’t even imagine my state of mind when I came before your grandfather! When I heard about these redundancies at the ministry in the morning, my only wish was not to go anywhere. But what was I supposed to do? Tell you that I wouldn’t be coming today, that I wouldn’t come at all until it was clear whether I have a job or not? But the decision might take weeks, even months. What would you want me to tell your grandfather? He would not have understood? No, I had no choice, I had to got and see him, because that seemed the only reasonable thing to do. Once I got talking with your grandfather, though, I liked him right from the start so much that…“
“You really liked him?” Erika asked happily.
“Believe me, I liked him so much that through him I started to love and honour you much more ardently. And I wanted so much to win his support and trust that I forgot the real or likely situation completely and came out with hopes that were aroused by my love for you. Because I had earlier assured myself so many times that if I managed to win your trust and love, then I would also achieve a salary increase, which would be insignificant compared with the first thing. So that was how I talked about it to your grandfather. But as soon as I had done it, my heart began to hurt within me, because I felt it wasn’t decent or proper to talk like that.”
“But if grandfather had changed his mind because of it, what then?” she persisted, as if enjoying my embarrassment.
“Oh Lord!” I cried, almost distracted. “I don’t know what then! It was so terrible that I had to talk like that to the one I least wanted to tell it!”
“But just think what I had to go through when I lied to my grandfather,” she said, as if in consolation. “For me it’s even harder. But thank God, my heart is so pure, and I’m glad that you lied too, for now you have your own sin of love staining your heart.”
And as if she felt closer to me because of that, and as if a particular wave of tenderness were rising within her toward me, I came closer so that her hand touched mine, and her shoulder touched mine, so as to almost support herself on me. But when my fingers closed tightly around hers, she seemed to awaken from a stupor, shifted away from me and slipped her fingers from my grasp, albeit gradually, as if regretting it or fearful of upsetting me.
Having reached the park, we sought out our old familiar avenue where we had walked when Erika had lied to her grandfather the first time. Today I was the liar. There were still plenty of leaves on the trees; today they dappled the light on to the road. Showers, storms and night frosts had done their work. Underfoot in the dark it felt like a thick, soft, scarcely rustling carpet. It smelt of damp and incipient mould, awaiting everything that was vital. This was the usual late autumn weather, neither warm nor cold, but sharply cool, as if a whiff of approaching winter could be felt. The wind had spent itself. The cloudy cover of the sky remained in place and no star penetrated it. Nor was the moon in sight, but from a faint glimmer of light through the clouds one could guess that the moon was moving unseen across the canopy.
Along the road people were moving; occasionally talk and laughter could be heard, sometimes it was peaceful and silent, as if everything had died. We were alone.
“Grandfather told you?” I said at length, when we had been silent long enough.
“He did,” she replied.
I wanted to say something else, for the silence emphasised that I couldn’t find the words. So the moments stretched into eternities.
“What now?” she finally asked.
“I don’t know – I don’t know anything any more,” I replied.
“You must know, you must decide,” she said oppressively.
“Of course I must,” I agreed, “and yet I don’t know. I’m desperate, I’ve been going crazy all day. Everything’s dark, everything’s confused, everything’s incomprehensible, only one thing is certain: I love you more and more, more madly, and that seems to rob me of my power to decide, because I’m terrified of losing you.”
“But you must do something so as not to lose me,” she said, as if wanting to entice me.
“I can’t find any way out,” I said hopelessly, at length. “Or if there were a way out, I couldn’t use it, not any more.”
“What way out would that be?” she asked with a slight tremble in her voice.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.
“But I want you to,” she said insistently, almost angrily. “I want to know what way out it is.”
“It’s what our landlady recommended,” I explained instead of answering.
“So she knows about our affair.”
“Probably not,” I replied, “she was just talking, as usual.”
“What did she say?”
“She said we should elope.”
“I’m ready for anything,” she said unhesitatingly.
“Are you even thinking about what you’re saying?” I asked, almost in terror, for somewhere deep in my being something seemed to emerge that wanted to postpone his insane step.
“No! What for? I’ll do whatever you want,” replied Erika just as unhesitatingly.
This moved me so much that I grabbed both her hands and kissed them almost tearfully on the gloves; in the meantime we had reached a solitary bench and wordlessly sat down on it. And when I had kissed her hands enough, I left them in my own, as if wanting to warm them.
“Our elopement would mean compromising you,” I told her.
“Yes, of course,” she replied, “but what’s to be done if there’s nothing else, if grandfather doesn’t really believe that we love each other?”
“Aren’t you really thinking of what will happen afterwards?” I exclaimed.
“Of course I am, if you are too, but if you aren’t, then I won’t either,” she explained.
“Then I have to think for the two of us,” I said. “Our landlord said that in the present circumstances elopement would be completely mad. For if I arbitrarily didn’t turn up at work today or tomorrow –”
“Why arbitrarily?” she interjected. “Can’t you ask for a few days off?”
“Now, when they’re all taking about redundancies?” I exclaimed. “Asking for days off at the moment would be like asking to be dismissed from service. So, one way or another, eloping would mean me losing my job. And what would we have gained by that?”
“I would be compromised,” she replied.
“And I would be forced to leave you on the spot, because I would have nowhere to put you, I wouldn’t have anywhere left to lay my own head, I might have to move to my parents’ in the country.”