Robert disagreed. Would we feel sad if we thought the stars were cities? On the contrary, life would feel better for them, he said, with the thought that light years away, fools like themselves had existed who would surely have been just as confused. She smiled. How could he be sure they would be just as confused? He shrugged. He couldn’t imagine life without confusion. Unless you spend your life without knowing it, she replied. But then nothing would matter much, of course. Yes, he said. But it’s worse if you believe you are alive, even though your thoughts are merely the delayed light of a dead star. But, my dear doctor! she exclaimed and tapped out her ash outside the ashtray so the flakes drifted down over her left knee. She didn’t know he could be so philosophical. He didn’t know that either.
He put on a tape of Beethoven’s late string quartets and sank into the music as they passed industrial complexes and the looping junctions to big cities. All those emotions, he thought. The music vibrated with them, rough, smooth, hoarse or trembling, singing in the warm soundboard of the instruments, like slim crystal glasses vibrating from the circling of a damp finger. So many emotions were involved there, but they had lost their faces, they were no longer elicited by something or directed towards anyone, swallowed up by the transforming power of music. Their anonymity was the price of his own feeling, sitting in his car surrounded by strange cars and road signs, factories and cities, and yet being recognised and exposed. They sat silently listening to the music linking the cities as did the endless asphalt. It had different meanings to them, the same music, as it vibrated through their heads, and that could only be because in itself it meant nothing at all.
The ease he had felt in the morning at the prospect of going away had been superseded by a drowsy flatness, but he did not feel heavy as he usually did when he was tired. Nor was it the monotonous driving that exhausted him. His ease had changed into a strange, weightless feeling, and it seemed as if the restless or lingering string instruments echoed inside him as in a cavity surrounded by porous walls. Suddenly it seemed unrealistic to be sitting in his car beside his one-time patient on the way to the town whose name she had been given. In the past few months he had not had time to fall back into vegetating as usual. When he got home from work she was there, whether they talked or she sat by herself on the terrace, and at weekends Lauritz came and filled the house with his toys and his high-pitched babbling. He saw more of her son than of his own daughter, and the boy was becoming dangerously attached to him.
When they returned to the car after tanking up and having coffee at a service station outside Wurzburg, she put on the radio before he could go back to Beethoven. She zapped between programmes until deciding on a station playing pop. He never listened to that, but he thought it was her turn to choose and when they had driven another hundred kilometres the mindless pop music had merged with his strange, at once relaxed and melancholy mood. Now and then they chatted a little. She asked about details of what he had told her, or answered herself when he asked her to say more about some of the men she had known.
As he heard his own voice and listened to hers above the soft, stupefying pop, he recognised the feeling that had struck him when he was on the beach watching Lea swimming alongside the reef, the last Sunday before the summer holidays. It was the same feeling that overwhelmed him a few weeks later when Lauritz had stayed the night with him for the first time. He hadn’t gone into the house when he came back after driving the boy home. He sat in the car thinking of what Andreas had told him about his trip to Stockholm. His abortive attempt at flight from the life he now spoke of so devoutly was almost unbearable. As Robert alternately slipped into the overtaking lane and back into the line of cars driving south through Germany, he again recalled Lucca’s eyes in the photograph from Paris and the vague, intangible recollection her expression had woken. Like a mute reminder of something left undone, but what? Some act of negligence, he had thought, an unredeemed pledge, but of what and to whom?
It wasn’t so much the thought of how Andreas had smoked his cigarettes and gobbled up plums as he untangled himself from one illusion only to get wound up into another. It was not that which had paralysed him so he stayed on in his car listening to the sprinklers in the quiet gardens, staring at his own idiotic plastic chairs reflected in the window by the terrace. Nor was he suddenly struck by paralysis at the melancholy realisation that Lea would soon be a young woman who had no further need of him. That was not why he felt dumped on a siding when he waved to her out there between the poles and later, as the train moved off and he walked along the platform beside it to keep in sight of her face for a second or two longer.
Behind Lea’s face in the train window and Lucca’s at the pavement café, others appeared. He saw Monica’s face again, looking over the water and smoking a cigarette, one late afternoon on the beach a year or two before they were divorced. He saw his mother sitting on her balcony looking out over the railway towards the heating system’s blank red-brick wall concentrating the last sunlight. He saw another Monica blushing as she bent over him beneath a woollen blanket in the Alps, and he caught sight of Sonia’s inflamed young face behind Monica’s, bent over in the same way while she rode him like a mechanical toy horse. And behind them he was looking Ana in the eyes again, her dark gaze watched him through all the others’ as she lay down with loosened hair on the dim patterns of a dark red carpet, that winter evening when they were young and she finally gave him what he had wanted for so long he had forgotten why, and wanted it so frenziedly that she had not been able to quell his insatiable hunger.
He had been too young when he lost Ana, too young to lose something he had wanted so terribly much. He had withdrawn into a cave deep inside himself. It had terrified him to witness his own body amusing itself with anyone who came along. He had not dared come out until Monica pulled a woollen blanket over her head to protect their first kiss from the cruel light of the snow-clad mountains. By then he had learned to be more patient, less basic in his desires, but perhaps his body had grown used to being on its own. At any rate, it had gone off again when Sonia appeared in the barrister’s garden showing off her strong legs and slight breasts and doing her tai chi until he was totally mesmerised.
An incident of no importance had chanced to devour what meant everything, not with the insatiability of desire, but with that of silence. In fact he had not been as greedy as a lot of people, but what had been his had ended by slipping out of his hands again, because he let go, or because he was no longer capable of holding on with his previous conviction. As he watched them, the faces from the story of his life appeared before him and grew thin and transparent, Ana, Monica and Sonia, even his mother and Lea paled in his mind. Finally they fused and disappeared like reflections when a gust of wind whips up the surface of the water into sudden ripples. Again he visualised the flat landscape he had so often walked, the sand banks and reeds, the lonely shed of tarred planks, the birds’ signs on the sky and the tufts of grass on the inlet, their inundated stalks.
After midnight he drove into the car park of a motel between Stuttgart and Tübingen. Lucca had been asleep for the past hour. It was stupid to have driven so far when they were both tired, but he had been caught up into the trance-like monotony of driving and kept succumbing to the temptation to drive another hundred kilometres. As he switched off the engine and stretched out in his seat, fatigue came over him. He sat for a while looking listlessly through the drops on the windscreen, sparkling in the light from the motel’s yellow sign. The restaurant behind the white net curtains was in darkness, with only bluish neon strip lights to relieve it. He spoke her name several times, at first quietly, then with more insistence. Finally he laid a hand on her shoulder and shook it gently. She woke with a start, frightened and confused. He told her where they were. That far… Her voice was thick with sleep. She apologised for having slept instead of entertaining him. He carried their bags in one hand and took her arm as they hurried through the rain.