Only once did I ever see Hanna by chance. It was the end of July or the beginning of August, in the last few days before summer vacation.
Hanna had been behaving oddly for days, moody and peremptory, and at the same time palpably under some kind of pressure that was absolutely tormenting her and left her acutely sensitive and vulnerable. She pulled herself together and held herself tight as if to stop herself from exploding. When I asked what was upsetting her so, she snapped at me. That was hard for me to take. I felt rejected, but I also felt her helplessness, and I tried to be there for her and at the same time to leave her in peace. One day the pressure was gone. At first I thought Hanna was her usual self again. We had not started a new book after the end of War and Peace, but I had promised I’d see to it, and had brought several books to choose from.
But she didn’t want that. “Let me bathe you, kid.”
It wasn’t summer’s humidity that had settled on me like a heavy net when I came into the kitchen. Hanna had turned on the boiler for the bathwater. She filled the tub, put in a few drops of lavender oil, and washed me. She wore her pale blue flowered smock with no underwear underneath; the smock stuck to her sweating body in the hot, damp air. She excited me very much. When we made love, I sensed that she wanted to push me to the point of feeling things I had never felt before, to the point where I could no longer stand it. She also gave herself in a way she had never done before. She didn’t abandon all reserve, she never did that. But it was as if she wanted us to drown together.
“Now go to your friends.” She dismissed me, and I went. The heat stood solidly between the buildings, lay over the fields and gardens, and shimmered above the asphalt. I was numb. At the swimming pool the shrieks of playing, splashing children reached me as if from far, far away. I moved through the world as if it had nothing to do with me nor I with it. I dived into the milky chlorinated water and felt no compulsion to surface again. I lay near the others, listening to them, and found what they said silly and pointless.
Eventually the feeling passed. Eventually it turned into an ordinary afternoon at the swimming pool with homework and volleyball and gossip and flirting. I can’t remember what it was I was doing when I looked up and saw her.
She was standing twenty or thirty meters away, in shorts and an open blouse knotted at the waist, looking at me. I looked back at her. She was too far away for me to read her expression. I didn’t jump to my feet and run to her. Questions raced through my head: Why was she at the pool, did she want to be seen with me, did I want to be seen with her, why had we never met each other by accident, what should I do? Then I stood up. And in that briefest of moments in which I took my eyes off her, she was gone.
Hanna in shorts, with the tails of her blouse knotted, her face turned towards me but with an expression I cannot read at all-that is another picture I have of her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
N EXT DAY she was gone. I came at the usual time and rang the bell. I looked through the door, everything looked the way it always did, I could hear the clock ticking.
I sat down on the stairs once again. During our first few months, I had always known what line she was working on, even though I had never repeated my attempt to accompany her or even pick her up afterwards. At some point I had stopped asking, stopped even wondering. It hadn’t even occurred to me until now.
I used the telephone booth at the Wilhelmsplatz to call the streetcar company, was transferred from one person to the next, and finally was told that Hanna Schmitz had not come to work. I went back to Bahnhofstrasse, asked at the carpenter’s shop in the yard for the name of the owner of the building, and got a name and address in Kirchheim. I rode over there.
“Frau Schmitz? She moved out this morning.”
“And her furniture?”
“It’s not her furniture.”
“How long did she live in the apartment?”
“What’s it to you?” The woman who had been talking to me through a window in the door slammed it shut.
In the administration building of the streetcar company, I talked my way through to the personnel department. The man in charge was friendly and concerned.
“She called this morning early enough for us to arrange for a substitute, and said that she wouldn’t be coming back, period.” He shook his head. “Two weeks ago she was sitting there in your chair and I offered to have her trained as a driver, and she throws it all away.”
It took me some days to think of going to the citizens’ registration office. She had informed them she was moving to Hamburg, but without giving an address.
The days went by and I felt sick. I took pains to make sure my parents and my brothers and sisters noticed nothing. I joined in the conversation at table a little, ate a little, and when I had to throw up, I managed to make it to the toilet. I went to school and to the swimming pool. I spent my afternoons there in an out-of-the-way place where no one would look for me. My body yearned for Hanna. But even worse than my physical desire was my sense of guilt. Why hadn’t I jumped up immediately when she stood there and run to her! This one moment summed up all my halfheartedness of the past months, which had produced my denial of her, and my betrayal. Leaving was her punishment.
Sometimes I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t her I had seen. How could I be sure it was her when I hadn’t been able to make out the face? If it had been her, wouldn’t I have had to recognize her face? So couldn’t I be sure it wasn’t her at all?
But I knew it was her. She stood and looked-and it was too late.
PART TWO
CHAPTER ONE
A FTER HANNA left the city, it took a while before I stopped watching for her everywhere, before I got used to the fact that afternoons had lost their shape, and before I could look at books and open them without asking myself whether they were suitable for reading aloud. It took a while before my body stopped yearning for hers; sometimes I myself was aware of my arms and legs groping for her in my sleep, and my brother reported more than once at table that I had called out “Hanna” in the night. I can also remember classes at school when I did nothing but dream of her, think of her. The feeling of guilt that had tortured me in the first weeks gradually faded. I avoided her building, took other routes, and six months later my family moved to another part of town. It wasn’t that I for got Hanna. But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It’s there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you?
I remember my last years of school and my first years at university as happy. Yet I can’t say very much about them. They were effortless; I had no difficulty with my final exams at school or with the legal studies that I chose because I couldn’t think of anything else I really wanted to do; I had no difficulty with friendships, with relationships or the end of relationships-I had no difficulty with anything. Everything was easy; nothing weighed heavily. Perhaps that is why my bundle of memories is so small. Or do I keep it small? I also wonder if my memory of happiness is even true. If I think about it more, plenty of embarrassing and painful situations come to mind, and I know that even if I had said goodbye to my memory of Hanna, I had not overcome it. Never to let myself be humiliated or humiliate myself after Hanna, never to take guilt upon myself or feel guilty, never again to love anyone whom it would hurt to lose-I didn’t formulate any of this as I thought back then, but I know that’s how I felt.