I gave the old man a once-over. He was breathing heavily and constantly seemed on the verge of wanting to cough, but evidently lacked the strength even for that. He tried to look at me but kept wincing the whole time, as if in great pain. Although he apparently had come away with just some scratches and abrasions, his chest hair was smeared with blood. Through the front door I could make out large white floor tiles and a huge exhaust hood.
We three were still at odds in Perugia. But it felt good to be among people again. If I ever have to go into hiding, I’d much rather do it in a city than in a forest or mountains.
I suggested we look for a hotel for the night and then inquire at the tourist office tomorrow about a new rental. Reiner and Harry agreed.
Harry said we should nip any stupid ideas in the bud, and Reiner threw an arm across my shoulder. “Let’s be nice to us for a change,” he said.
The women appeared marching at double time, large paper bags slapping at their calves and knees. They had hung their purses around their necks. Doreen’s face and arms were flecked with red spots. Cynthia was crying. This of course worked to our advantage.
Some beggar women with babies at their breasts had followed them. “We didn’t pay them much attention, we ignored them,” Sabine exclaimed. The beggars weren’t about to be shaken off, became more and more brazen, and had finally grabbed hold of Cynthia and Sabine by the arm. “I tried to break it up,” Doreen said. “But they started scratching at me, really sinking their nails in.” And Cynthia said that they couldn’t take their eyes off her new watch, a present from her parents.
Reiner then told our wives our story about a petty crook from Berlin and an Italian whore, adding that at least we’d been able to get our money back and weren’t going to let lowlifes like that ruin our vacation. And that I’d made a marvelous suggestion.
“That’s the best idea of the whole vacation,” Sabine said.
Harry went to arrange for a hotel, while we sat on a terrace directly next to where we had met and ordered mineral water and Campari-orange.
“The awful thing is,” Sabine said, “that you’ve constantly got to keep your eyes peeled in case those women show up again.”
Our hotel was the Fortuna, had four stars, and in front of its glass entrance doors was a thick red carpet with gold stripes at the edges and a coat of arms in the middle.
It turned out to be a very lovely evening. The women modeled their new frocks, and I had a sense that Doreen regretted her charge of treason. She drank at least as much as I did.
Harry whispered to me that I should just hold in there and had no reason whatever to hang my head. The moron had no one to blame but himself, and had collected more than enough for his pain and suffering. “He started it,” Harry said. “He wanted it that way.”
The redhead kept running through my mind, over and over. It’s hard to describe her. She looked like the chanteuse Milva when she was still quite young.
At the breakfast buffet Reiner grinned at me. The hotel bill, he said, had been taken care of.
We found a nice place in Passignano on Lago Trasimena. This was pretty significant territory. Hannibal had won a battle against the Romans here in 217 B.C., but except for a marked trail and a few excavated cremation graves there’s nothing left to see.
Lago Trasimena isn’t very big, and above all it’s shallow. That eased my mind, because news reports that planes unable to get rid of all their bombs over Yugoslavia were dropping them in the Adriatic near Venice were apparently no joke.
Except for an excursion to Orvieto we stuck to Passignano. I wasn’t about to have the redhead recognize us in a restaurant somewhere. Maybe they were looking for us.
But nothing ever came of it. Neither at the border — not a soul there anyway — nor back at home. Several weeks later I received a police notice — a speeding ticket. And at one point Doreen wanted to know what had really happened with the guy from Berlin. I had been expecting the question.
Apparently my answer was so convincing that Doreen didn’t pursue it. Hasn’t to this day. I think she’s forgotten about it. Everything seems okay with Reiner and Harry, too. We are back to calling one another on birthdays. I always intend to bring up what they did to Schröder. But that’s not easy on the telephone.
I know that things have changed somewhat since then, but I can’t put my finger on it. I’ve lost friends before Reiner and Harry, but that’s not it. We might even set things right again. It’s more as if I’ve crossed a threshold, as if my brain shifts automatically to memory — or at least is testing what that might be like someday, when old age really sets in.
I still think about the redhead a lot. Because as things are, she surely is and remains the only person who has ever seriously considered knocking me off. If a woman I don’t know at all decides I shouldn’t die, isn’t it within the realm of possibility that she could just as well have decided to have a go at it with me, maybe a life-long go? I would have climbed into her Passat as a hostage and never surfaced again. I know that sounds odd. But I increasingly find myself considering such notions, and it costs me more and more effort to find my way back to everyday life.
Sometimes, however, I give myself over to the most routine memories, our arrival at the place near Gubbio for instance. I see us unpacking the car that evening. Harry uncorks a bottle. We take a short walk in the meadow behind the house, looking across the hills and up at the towering snowcapped Apennines, each of us with a glass in hand. Nobody says a word, not even when we find ourselves in a circle as if by chance and clink glasses. At this point I never fail to get goose bumps and can think of nothing better than breaking into song.
Calcutta
For Günther Grass
This was three weeks ago, on a Tuesday. The forecast had been for rain, but it was clear and sunny all day. After putting in my two hours of practice, I ate an early lunch and set to work mowing the lawn. The plan was yard work for this week, the garage and the snow tires the week after — dealing with the car just in general — then came cleaning out gutters and another go at the yard, and finally, as my last outdoor chore before snow set in, the graves. If you wait until the week before Remembrance Sunday, the cemetery parking lot is full.
I first noticed her standing at the threshold of her back door and gazing my way. By “her” I mean Becker’s wife. We generally refer to our neighbors only in the plural, the Beckers — him, her, and their three kids, Sandra, Nancy, and Kevin.
Becker’s wife didn’t respond when I called over. I repeated my “Hello, hello!” and waved. She kept on looking in my direction but didn’t react. On Sunday, that is two days before, she had brought us the mousetrap, and we’d thanked her with a jar of quince jelly.
I didn’t have a clue what could have got her ticked off at us over the course of the previous forty-eight hours. I detached the half-full basket from the mower. But instead of emptying it into the blue plastic bag — which would have meant turning my back to her — I carried it to the compost heap behind the garage. I’m always amazed at how fast grass and our little hard apples are transformed into a kind of glop. The stupid thing is we have no real use for it. What we need is mulch to keep the weeds from shooting up over our heads, and good mulch is expensive.
I reattached the basket to the mower. When I straightened up I automatically looked in her direction, gave another wave, shouted, “The last time!”—I meant mowing the lawn — and attempted a smile. She stood there like a figure in a wax museum.