She lay down on her back, arms behind her head. Now it was me who sat up to look at her. She was staring into space. After a while she turned her face to me. Her expression was curiously naked. “Yes, I like it when you call me Horse or those other horse names-can you explain them to me?”
Once we went to the theater in the next town to see Schiller’s Intrigues and Love. It was the first time Hanna had been to the theater, and she loved all of it, from the performance to the champagne at intermission. I put my arm around her waist, and didn’t care what people might think of us as a couple, and I was proud that I didn’t care. At the same time, I knew that in the theater in our hometown I would care. Did she know that too?
She knew that my life that summer no longer revolved around her, and school, and my studies. More and more, when I came to her in the late afternoon, I came from the swimming pool. That was where our class got together, did our homework, played soccer and volleyball and skat, and flirted. That was where our class socialized, and it meant a lot to me to be part of it and to belong. The fact that I came later than the others or left earlier, depending on Hanna’s schedule, didn’t hurt my reputation, but made me interesting. I knew that. I also knew that I wasn’t missing anything, and yet I often had the feeling that absolutely everything could be happening while I wasn’t there. There was a long stretch when I did not dare ask myself whether I would rather be at the swimming pool or with Hanna. But on my birthday in July, there was a party for me at the pool, and it was hard to tear myself away from it when they didn’t want me to go, and then an exhausted Hanna received me in a bad mood. She didn’t know it was my birthday. When I had asked her about hers, and she had told me it was the twenty-first of October, she hadn’t asked me when mine was. She was also no more bad-tempered than she always was when she was exhausted. But I was annoyed by her bad temper, and I wanted to be somewhere else, at the pool, away with my classmates, swept up in the exuberance of our talk, our banter, our games, and our flirtations. Then when I proceeded to get bad-tempered myself and we started a fight and Hanna treated me like a nonentity, the fear of losing her returned and I humbled myself and begged her pardon until she took me back. But I was filled with resentment.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
T HEN I began to betray her.
Not that I gave away any secrets or exposed Hanna. I didn’t reveal anything that I should have kept to myself. I kept something to myself that I should have revealed. I didn’t acknowledge her. I know that disavowal is an unusual form of betrayal. From the outside it is impossible to tell if you are disowning someone or simply exercising discretion, being considerate, avoiding embarrassments and sources of irritation. But you, who are doing the disowning, you know what you’re doing. And disavowal pulls the underpinnings away from a relationship just as surely as other more flamboyant types of betrayal.
I no longer remember when I first denied Hanna. Friendships coalesced out of the casual ease of those summer afternoons at the swimming pool. Aside from the boy who sat next to me in school, whom I knew from the old class, the person I liked especially in the new class was Holger Schlüter, who like me was interested in history and literature, and with whom I quickly felt at ease. He also got along with Sophie, who lived a few blocks behind our house, which meant that we went to and from the swimming pool together. At first I told myself that I wasn’t yet close enough to my friends to tell them about Hanna. Then I didn’t find the right opportunity, the right moment, the right words. And finally it was too late to tell them about Hanna, to present her along with all my other youthful secrets. I told myself that talking about her so belatedly would misrepresent things, make it seem as if I had kept silent about Hanna for so long because our relationship wasn’t right and I felt guilty about it. But no matter what I pretended to myself, I knew that I was betraying Hanna when I acted as if I was letting my friends in on everything important in my life but said nothing about Hanna.
The fact that they knew I wasn’t being completely open only made things worse. One evening Sophie and I got caught in a thunderstorm on our way home and took shelter under the overhang of a garden shed in Neuenheimer Feld, which had no university buildings on it then, just fields and gardens. It thundered, the lightning crackled, the wind came in gusts, and rain fell in big heavy drops. At the same time the temperature dropped a good ten degrees. We were freezing, and I put my arm around her.
“You know…” She wasn’t looking at me, but out at the rain.
“What?”
“You were sick with hepatitis for a long time. Is that what’s on your mind? Are you afraid you won’t really get well again? Did the doctors say something? And do you have to go to the clinic every day to get tests or transfusions?”
Hanna as illness. I was ashamed. But I really couldn’t start talking about Hanna at this point. “No, Sophie, I’m not sick anymore. My liver is normal, and in a year I’ll even be able to drink alcohol if I want, but I don’t. What’s…” Talking about Hanna, I didn’t want to say “what’s bothering me.” “There’s another reason I arrive later or leave earlier.”
“Do you not want to talk about it, or is it that you want to but you don’t know how?”
Did I not want to, or didn’t I know how? I didn’t know the answer. But as we stood there under the lightning, with the explosions of thunder rumbling almost overhead and the pounding of the rain, both freezing, warming each other a little, I had the feeling that I had to tell her, of all people, about Hanna. “Maybe I can tell you some other time.”
But there never was another time.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I NEVER FOUND out what Hanna did when she wasn’t working and we weren’t together. When I asked, she turned away my questions. We did not have a world that we shared; she gave me the space in her life that she wanted me to have. I had to be content with that. Wanting more, even wanting to know more, was presumption on my part. If we were particularly happy with each other and I asked her something because at that moment it felt as if everything was possible and allowed, then she sometimes ducked my questions, instead of refusing outright to answer them. “The things you ask, kid!” Or she would take my hand and lay it on her stomach. “Are you trying to make holes in me?” Or she would count on her fingers. “Laundry, ironing, sweeping, dusting, shopping, cooking, shake plums out of tree, pick up plums, bring plums home and cook them quick before the little one”-and here she would take hold of the fifth finger of her left hand between her right thumb and forefinger-“eats them all himself.”
I never met her unexpectedly on the street or in a store or a movie theater, although she told me she loved going to the movies, and in our first months together I always wanted to go with her, but she wouldn’t let me. Sometimes we talked about films we had both seen. She went no matter what was showing, and saw everything, from German war and folk movies to Westerns and New Wave films, and I liked what came out of Hollywood, whether it was set in ancient Rome or the Wild West. There was one Western in particular that we both loved: the one with Richard Widmark playing a sheriff who has to fight a duel next morning that he’s bound to lose, and in the evening he knocks on Dorothy Malone’s door-she’s been trying, but failing, to get him to make a break for it. She opens up. “What do you want now? Your whole life in one night?” Sometimes Hanna teased me when I came to her full of desire, with “What do you want now? Your whole life in one hour?”