Clara and Franziska strewed the old plastic containers they’d found in the shed across their sandbox. My mother was lying in the hammock and brooding over tricky solutions for the sudoku in the Tagesspiegel that, after a long discussion as a couple, M. and E. had left behind for her. Leaning back, legs crossed, Natalia was sitting at the table and attempting to read the rest of the paper in her lap. But Clara kept asking: “What does the Wicked Queen say when no kids will play with her? Is she sad because Sleeping Beauty is prettier than she is?” This can go on for hours.
Instead of getting into the car and turning on the radio, I called our friend S. to ask her how the game between England and Ecuador had turned out, and who would be playing that evening. She wanted me to tell her why so many writers think using the German genitive is pretentious and so no longer use it. I had no explanation for her but decided to make a note of her turn of phrase, “jeopardizing good taste.”
With a still unread volume of stories by Ayala in one hand and a bottle with what was left of the now almost tepid prosecco in the other, I lay down on a blanket that had been hung out to air.
Suddenly I decided I wanted to be lying in a porch swing. I actually gave some thought as to where you could buy a porch swing and what one might go for, and figured that having it delivered out here would probably cost as much as the swing itself.
My sunglasses turned the sky as blue as in Italy, and our local pines had become stone pines. Now and then there was a sough of wind. To me it always sounds like a train moving through the forest, the way trains crossing the Dresden Heath used to. Then I tried picturing the sky as water and the pines as underwater plants. I must have nodded off for a few seconds — and woke up when Franziska came running by close to my head. She was laughing, almost hooting. She ran so fast I thought she’d go sprawling any moment, and since I hadn’t swept the woods she was barreling toward, I was afraid she might hurt herself. I immediately thought of how last year a fox had risked getting as close as our garbage pit to watch us — a rabid fox.
Franziska pulled up short, bent her torso forward, held out one arm, and cried, “’T’s that, ’T’s that?”
It was in fact very beautiful — a large perfectly unblemished piece of orange peel that someone had tossed over our fence. “An orange peel,” I said. “What?” she asked. “An orange peel,” I repeated. “What?” “An orange peel,” I shouted. “ ’T’s that?” An orange peel, and one more time, an orange peel. And suddenly I got it. An orange peel! Franziska understood me at once. By the tone of my voice or whatever, she realized I had finally given her the right answer. We both gazed at the orange peel and, along with it, the miracle that there are orange peels and us and everyone and everything, the whole miracle of it. There’s nothing more for me to say. We understood the miracle that we exist. Period. Should I say I saw us in the womb of the universe? But I saw not just us, but everyone and everything. Each man, each woman, each child, each thing, but not as some sort of panorama, but each man, each woman, each child, each thing up close. We were all at the mercy of horrors and of all things human, of every ugliness and every beauty. I wasn’t standing apart from it, there was nothing in between — between me, us, and everything else.
I’m not loony, and I won’t claim I saw electron clouds or Einsteinian space. But all the same, it was something like that.
As soon as I put it into words, however, it turns to nonsense. A bat of an eye, during which I understood everything. Nothing, nothing had ever been lost. I saw it and in the next breath knew that I saw it no more, that the curtain had fallen.
Ants were scrambling on the backside of the orange peel, setting Franziska laughing again, with renewed cries of “ ‘T’s that?” and “What?” “Those are ants,” I said, “ants,” and turned away. After a few steps I looked around. “Ants,” I said and walked back, intending to take the orange out of her hand. “No, no!” she screamed. And so I left her with the orange peel and the ants, and stretched out on my blanket again.
I can’t say that I was agitated or happy or sad. I merely thought about how truly lovely it would be if in fact just before death we do see our life repeat at fast forward again, because this moment would be part of it, this moment and this afternoon.
But as I’ve said, maybe I simply had had too much to drink; it had been a really hot day. But when around ten o’clock I took a last look at the thermometer, the blue column of mercury was still showing twenty-nine degrees Celsius. Think of that — twenty-nine degrees Celsius at ten in the evening!
III
New Year’s Eve Confusions
I used to be afraid of New Year’s Eve. But then I was leading an impossible life. Only the professional side of things was functioning. Functioning even better than I actually liked.
When I try to cast about for the beginning of this story, I instantly find myself leaning back in my office chair, my right foot on the handle of the middle desk drawer, the tip of my shoe wedged in under the desktop. I’m holding the phone receiver in my left hand, while my right hand plays the spiral cord like a violin string pressed against my knee. The smoke above the ashtray assumes shapes — a rumpled handkerchief, an upturned ice-cream cone, a castle from a cartoon fairy tale.
Startled at first by the display showing a call from Berlin, I was as always disappointed to recognize Claudia’s phone number. Claudia called me only when she couldn’t get hold of Ute at our branch in the old city. This time, however, she was in a chatty mood. She wanted to talk about New Year’s Eve, and I had no idea why she was telling me whom she would be inviting — the names meant nothing to me. But after a brief pause she added, emphasizing each word: “And your Julia too!”
This was on October 9, 1999, shortly before five o’clock.
Maybe you also have someone in your life who means the world to you, for whom you would sacrifice ten years of your life, for whom without hesitation you would leave your wife and child, give up your career. For me that was Julia, the Julia I first met at a carnival party thrown by the Arts Academy in Dresden in 1989. She was dressed as Hans in Luck, and could in fact have passed for a young lad, had it not been for the way she walked. She ordered a beer, I ordered a beer, we waited for them. I complimented her on her costume and went on to say that I had a thing for women who drink beer — a remark that leaves me blushing even now. We toasted. Julia assumed my general enthusiasm for theater — and in particular for a production of Kate from Heilbronn at the Leipziger Strasse rehearsal stage — came from my having recognized her. When the music struck up, we danced. Julia danced the whole evening just with me.
I was studying physics at the Technical University and working on my final-year paper. Julia was doing her year of practical training at the Staatsschauspiel.
The second time we met, as we sat across from each other in a milk bar near Goose Thief Fountain, Julia stretched her hands out to the middle of the table — and even a little farther — so that I couldn’t help laying my hands on hers.
Despite a lot of big promises, she hadn’t gotten hired in Dresden, and according to Julia the reason was her evaluation by the Berlin Acting School, which claimed she had problems “recognizing the leading role of the working class.”
Julia was more than happy to land a spot with a theater in A., a district capital, although I found that almost more frustrating than she did. But since I was convinced that sooner or later someone would be captivated by her, I came around to believing that A. was better for her than Dresden. For an acting student to get involved with a guy from a technical university was unusual in those days, to say the least. The best her theater bunch could come up with was Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists. They had no idea what it meant to plug away at five years of technical studies and — without becoming a party member — be granted a research slot, even if it was only at a technical school in B.