‘During our last supper, coincidentally or not, she asked me whether I had a Messiah complex. Maybe I actually was seeing myself in a sort of holy light, while in reality I was her vicious little dog. I’m ashamed of being arrogant enough to think I could be someone else’s salvation. In the plane on the way here I had a lot of time to think about that. It’s amazing how, in one fell swoop, you can chase away the only two people who really matter. At first they fought over me, like the two mothers before King Solomon — and now neither of them wants to see me anymore. Be glad you didn’t have to go through all this, Dylan, be glad. Especially the loneliness. Sometimes that can be glorious, you soar above the world on wings of wax, above everything and everyone, with that kind of loneliness it’s actually a pity not to have an audience, no oohing and aahing. But you also have the other kind, when you’re buried like a stone under the earth, all locked up in yourself, and no-one comes to dig you up. You might be there, you might not, you’re dead to the world. My optimism, if you can call it that, consists in not making a production of that. In not bowing to the heaviness or to the lightness.’
The irrepressible light of morning, you had almost forgotten how pure it is. The day lies before you like a swimming pool without a ripple, you’re the first bather. Gradually it becomes populated with the things that were interrupted by sleep.
Where Sarah is.
My knees go weak when I consider the possibilities.
I leave the house only in order to go shopping, to get takeaway meals, grab a macchiato on Rose Avenue. That light, the glaring, open sky, I can barely stand it. I hurry back to the apartment’s shadows, to my waiting room. She could come back any moment, and be gone again before I arrive.
The days faded into each other. I folded her clothes and piled them neatly in the wooden chest. My fingertips slid over cloth that had been a second skin to her. I went to a laundromat to do the dirty clothes and looked at the crotch of her panties as though reading her diary. Her underwear, the pale stripes at the crotch often in plain view, had been scattered everywhere, despite my comments. Her voice, sounding offended, ‘But we’re open down there, Ludwig. .’
‘Your mother’s a dirty girl, Dylan,’ I said. ‘The sweetest dirty girl I know.’
Sometimes my heart leapt at a noise from the backyard, but no-one ever came. I lit the candle in front of Dylan’s photo. Someone had to keep the ritual alive. It had to be her hands that held him, it was a dramatic gesture, I could see her doing it, and also the father’s revulsion at the theatricality of it.
One afternoon I went out, to UCLA, to see whether they might know where she was. The girl who went to fetch the boss seemed vaguely amused, as though I were not the first to ask about Sarah. The boss came, looking like a man who had never been able to cash in on his college degree. She had quit weeks ago, he said, he had told her she could always come back.
‘She’s a good person to have around, always cheerful, even when the going’s tough.’
‘Do you know where she went? Why she quit?’
He raised his hands and shrugged.
‘A boyfriend maybe? She didn’t say anything, in fact I don’t know very much about her, now that you ask me.’
It seemed unlikely that she would have gone home to her parents, but still I looked up their number in Augusta.
A woman said hello? I said hello? back.
‘Hello?’
‘This is Ludwig Unger, I’m. .’
‘Hello?’
I hung up and tried again.
‘I guess something went wrong,’ the woman said. ‘It’s been snowing.’ She didn’t know where her daughter was.
‘Yesterday I ran across a picture of her, such a sweet child. She still is, of course, but back then, so. . You can’t imagine that, that your heart breaks sometimes when you see what they were like.’
The child, a rank weed, should have grown no further, now it’s too late.
‘You sound too young to have children yourself. Do you have children?’
Sarah had disappeared for a while before, then she simply forgot to tell people where she was.
‘Don’t you worry,’ she said, ‘we mothers do enough worrying already. We worry so much that it’s enough for everything and everyone. That’s why we’re here, to carry the worries of the world. Sarah’s real strong, she adapts quickly. A real survivor.’
I had made contact with a white and distant land, a woman was writing her fears in the snow.
I didn’t see Sarah again. She must have wondered who had folded her clothes so neatly. Whenever the TV shows demonstrators railing against G8 summits or Olympic Games in a rogue country, I still examine the crowd. A shopping cart perhaps, with Sarah pushing it, her clenched fist raised in the air. When I dream of her, she laughs at me. Crazy Ludwig, don’t go thinking you miss me. Shame spots my skin like a disease, in her I have passed on while she is still always in me. You only get one chance, and it’s better not to end up in a position in which you have to ask a woman for forgiveness.
What I would have liked to be able to say was: I have learned to be at home wherever I am. But perhaps this comes closer to the truth: I have learned not to desire a home wherever I am. In that way, the life of a musician moving from hotel to hotel is almost tolerable. To pose no demands that exceed the possibilities of that particular place and time.
‘The language of music, people speak that wherever you go, don’t they?’
A sentence which people often use to start up a conversation at the bar. The commonplace is our natural habitat, the cliché our private lives. Sometimes an unexpected story follows, the trauma or the glory of a human life.
I learn how to drink without slurring my words. To beat back the drunkenness. Reeds beaten by the wind, the stalks bend over further and further towards you, the important thing is to remain upright no matter how the alcohol rages through your veins. I’m conscientious about my little jobs. It’s a delicate balance, I go to the trouble of getting things just the way I want them: that is to say, I sometimes insist that they give me a room and that the hotel, if at all possible, be in a favorable climate zone. Portugal, the Caribbean, Monaco, the Côte d’Azur, cities with Dior and Chanel in their coats of arms. The palaces in which, after the nobles left, the hoteliers have taken residence.
Cannes, the Majestic Barrière — the shrouded life, the sounds muffled by the thick carpets. Time eludes us with a whisper.
Biarritz, Hotel du Palais. The dazzling Atlantic light, life that passes you by like a caravan through the desert sand.