Lying on the sofa, breathing in the scent of roses from the cool cloth over my face, listening to Sophie’s and Elsa’s murmuring and the dulled street noises, I began to drift into sleep. Instead of Sophie’s face bending over me I imagined Anja’s, her eyes soft with concern, her hair falling a little over one shoulder. She smiled a slow smile, pulling me into sleep.
22.
AFTER MY COLLAPSE, JELEN HAD INSISTED THAT I STAY AT HOME for a few days. The collapse had an oddly calming influence on my nerves, as if a circuit had been broken, and when I woke from a heavy sleep the following day it was to a state of tranquillity that I had not experienced for many months. Wakefulness came to me gradually, and I became aware of the world of my bedroom. Light pooled in through the window and I saw every object in the room anew. My ears detected a complicated arrangement of sounds, through which I constructed the idea first of the house, and then of the city as it gradually spread out around me; Elsa’s steps on the stairs, the sound of my own breath, a carriage passing in the street, the trilling of a kestrel, and a jackdaw singing a complicated response.
I smiled to myself and closed my eyes again. I found that now I could easily fix my mind on the idea of Anja and Franz without it continually slipping from my focus, as it had the day before. The previous day had been the first that I had not called on Anja since my return from Karlsbad, but I was surprised to feel no urgency about this. I wanted to drift off again into sleep, but a persistent sound of footsteps going up and down the stairs prevented me. This became joined by the hissing whispers of Elsa and Sophie, together with my mother’s voice, which spoke at the normal volume, only to be immediately shushed by the others.
I remembered then that it was my birthday, and a moment later the bedroom door slowly opened and Sophie, Elsa and my mother crept into my room. My mother began singing ‘Happy Birthday’ straight away in a loud voice, and the other two joined in. Sophie brought me a breakfast tray with flowers and cards and letters that had arrived in the morning post.
Cups of coffee were distributed and I began to look through my birthday letters. There was one from Felix, and Kurt, and of course Uta, whose was written in a pale violet ink. There was another letter from our cousin in Brünn and a very thick one from Berlin, addressed in handwriting I could not immediately identify.
Sophie clamoured for me to read some of the letters aloud, and I opened first the one from Brünn and read out the birthday wishes and news of marriages and births of the extended family and the activities of the summer.
While I was reading, the letter from Berlin was lying on my lap. Something about the writing looked familiar and made me feel uneasy. After a moment I realised that the writing looked like Anja’s. I continued mechanically to read aloud. I wanted to seize the Berlin letter and tear it open, but there were many pages still to come of detailed news from Brünn. My cousin Oskar was an amusing letter-writer, and my audience was laughing and exclaiming at the incidents he described. My eyes kept sliding to the Berlin letter. It suddenly seemed to possess an extraordinary weight that pressed down on me through the bedclothes.
At last I reached the final page of Oskar’s letter and my fingers were itching to take up Anja’s letter immediately, but it occurred to me that perhaps its contents might not contain birthday wishes that could be read aloud to my assembled family. I had not had any communication with Anja since before I was in Karlsbad. The envelope looked thick and heavy, suggestive of the emotional outpourings I had been both longing for and fearing.
At last I finished reading my cousin’s letter and reached out for the other letter, but Sophie announced that it was now time for me to open my birthday presents. She jumped up from the bed and ran out of the room. My mother immediately began a long-winded story from the time of my childhood. Her memory of this period was surprisingly unimpaired and she had a ready collection of anecdotes that she recounted in the smallest details. Her words fell about my ears, while all my attention was on the thick envelope in my fingers.
I had heard the story she told many times before; it concerned my brother, Otto. While she spoke I surreptitiously began to slide my finger underneath the envelope’s seal. With one hand, this was a difficult feat. The fibres of the papers gradually gave way to the pressure of my fingers and I felt the paper tear a small distance. I edged my finger further along, extending the tear with a timid, dry crackle that I covered by rustling the bedclothes around over my legs and shifting about in the bed. I continued to tear along the envelope in tiny bursts, striving for silence, pausing to give the appropriate responses to my mother’s tale.
When I had torn it completely open, I slid my fingers inside the envelope and felt about in the folds of tissue-thin paper that it contained, all the while keeping my eyes on my mother’s face, nodding attentively.
She had reached the end of the story, and in a rare expression of emotion, had stretched out with both hands to take my hand, the one entangled in the hidden envelope. I was forced to discard the envelope, and my hand was caught now in her grasp. She told me what a delightful child I had been, such strength, such promise. Every year at my birthday she told the same tales of Otto’s childhood, having mistaken me for him. I never had the heart to remind her that Otto was long dead.
My hand lay limp between hers and she patted it absently, as though it were a small pet. Her eyes were far away in the dim past, while mine drifted to the area of bedclothes under which the letter was concealed. It felt vulnerable and exposed lying there, despite being covered up, as if there was a risk of it slipping off my lap and being blown away. I imagined it flying out of the open window, the folded pages of the letter being released and spreading out into the air like a flock of migrating white birds.
Sophie came back with a pile of parcels and I could at last detach my hand and tuck the letter into the safety of my pyjama waistband. After I had opened a few of the parcels I excused myself and went out of the room to read the letter in privacy. As soon as I was outside the bedroom door I examined the writing; it was clearly from Anja, but she had omitted to write her name over the return address.
While I had been unwrapping the parcels, I had tried to think of the worst possible things that the letter might contain, as though identifying the threat and ruminating on it would prevent it from happening. The worst, I mused, would be the news that Anja was together with Franz in that room in Karlsbad, although I knew that it was unlikely that Anja would write to me to impart this news. Or, worse still, she could be writing to tell me that she and Franz were to get married.
I no longer had any kind of objective view on the situation and was unable to judge what was a likely occurrence and what wasn’t. I went into the empty living room, and by the time I had closed the door behind me, my calm of earlier in the morning had vanished and I was in a high state of nerves once again. I stood in the middle of the room and reached into my waistband with hands that seemed not to be mine. My fingers felt thick and rubbery and out of proportion, as though I had a fever, and they fumbled the paper from the envelope. One sheet was folded separately from the others, and I opened this first.
The sight of the page covered in Anja’s writing flooded my eyes with tears. I immediately saw that her letter was a short one, more of a note than a real letter.
Her signature appeared two-thirds of the way down the page. I was so agitated that the words scurried like ants over the surface of the paper and I had to concentrate to make sense of them. The letter began with some banal greeting and enquiries about my time at Karlsbad and then a few lines of her impressions of Berlin. Then came the blow.