THE ARCHITECT’S WIFE
HAVE YOU HEARD this one? OK, here goes.
She can’t help laughing all over again, even though she’s told the joke many times now, she laughs, and the others are already laughing in any case, she really does like to laugh, sometimes as a child she’d gotten stuck in her laughter, that’s what her father called it, getting stuck in laughter, as though her body were holding on to the laughter and absolutely refusing to give it up, convulsive laughter that just went on and on without her. Even her big sisters who had to take her, their little sister, everywhere they went, would laugh when she crossed her eyes and made faces or let them talk her into trying sneezing powder as healing salts for her nose or hot chilies in place of sweet peppers. She would sneeze, snort or spit, and the others would laugh. A tightrope walker is what she wanted to be, or else a lion tamer, but this she confided to no one, not even her father, the chief mogul, who was really chief consul, all she wanted to do was laugh and travel for the rest of her life while her sisters went on growing, got fat and had children. Unlike them, she would go on tour forever and ever. As soon as she was old enough to balance on a tightrope or start training lions, the chief mogul, who was really chief consul, recommended she take a course in stenography. Stenography, said the mogul to the lion tamer, was worth as much as six foreign languages. Stenographers and typists were in demand all over the world, the chief mogul said. Now she was sitting with her husband and a few friends out on the terrace around a big pot in which crabs were floating that she had caught herself in the lake that afternoon and then boiled until they turned red, in her hand she held a crab’s pincer and was continuing to laugh. Even before the war she’d sat here like this with her husband and several of the neighbors, or else with friends, a practice she continued during the war as well, sitting out on the terrace until late at night with a view of the lake, and still she was sitting here. She would happily keep sitting here like this unto all eternity.
Before she met her husband, for whom she started working as a stenographer as soon as she completed her training, she would never have thought that one of the greatest adventures could consist in having someone marry her. At the time her husband was still married to his first wife, he possessed a family — a wife and child, as one says. For the first time in her life, weeping borrowed her body from laughter for several evenings in a row. It had taken three quarters of a year before her boss had given her a first kiss, and a further half a year followed before the two of them began to joke about a life they would live together, and then several months more before, lying in the grass beside her on one of their outings to the countryside outside Berlin, on the shore of this wide, glittering lake, he suddenly said: This is where we could live, don’t you think? Not until this day did the tightrope walker understand that a person who possesses all sorts of things, including a wife and child, must first finish sitting, then get up, then begin to walk, and then much, much later work up some speed, and only then will this person be able to take a leap, if indeed he is ever able to do so, and that when a person like this leaps, he wants to land somewhere and not nowhere. Not until this day when he said to her: This is where we could live, don’t you think? and she was lying there on her back watching the pine trees sway back and forth before the blue sky — from this day on it was clear to her that he would arrive where she was only if she was willing to wait for him on this one particular bit of earth located not terribly far from Berlin. And so the young stenographer, who would have liked best to go on tour for the rest of her life, surprised herself by replying: Yes.
It then took another half a year before he really did have the contract of sale prepared and had her sign it so that when his divorce became final half the property would not go to his wife, to whom he was still married at the time, and their son. All together, things took first as long as she had imagined they would, and then twice that, so that it was as much as she could possibly endure, and finally an additional length of time beyond the point of what was endurable. When she signed the contract of sale for the property beside the lake, she was so exhausted that when her future husband used the word “sod” to refer to the piece of land, she involuntarily heard “sad” instead and couldn’t help thinking back to that forlorn Berlin winter far in the past when, as a child, she had secretly leapt from the shore onto the frozen Spree River and the very piece of ice she happened to land on cracked off from the impact and began to float downstream with the current. The sliding and balancing, her feet like ice in their wet shoes and finally the grasping to catch the hands, ladders and canes being held out to her — but above all her fear that she could drift out of Berlin before anyone succeeded in rescuing her — left her so exhausted that, still dripping, she fell asleep in the arms of the man who was carrying her home to her parents.
After signing the contract of sale, the architect had indeed gotten divorced, had shortly thereafter married her and begun construction on the house. Her laughter had returned to her, and as if her husband wanted to build this laughter into the house forever, he fulfilled her every most extravagant wish: He had a little iron bird forged onto the balcony railing in front of her room, he concealed her clothes closet, fitted with a secret mechanism to open it, behind a double door; for the telephone, there was a tiny niche in the wall beside her bed, the bedding could be stowed away behind three flaps that were built into the paneling around her bed and covered with rose-colored silk, various windows in the house were set with panes of colored glass, one of the two chairs at the dining table bore his initials, the other hers, and the shutters on the ground floor could be opened and shut by means of a concealed crank in the interior of the house — when someone was walking by, how amusing it was to startle the stranger with the silent, ghostly movement of the black shutters. Like a genie at her service, he conjured up the house for her, and she laughed. That no room was provided that might some day become a nursery was accepted by both as a matter of course.
She continued to work in her husband’s office in Berlin, but on weekends the two of them always drove out to the country, and since her husband was soon designing houses for one or the other neighbor who wanted to build beside the lake and then supervising the construction, they came to spend more and more time on their bit of sod, as her husband still liked to refer to this piece of land, and their circle of friends continued to grow. While they were eating crabs, one of them — sometimes he, sometimes she — would begin to tell stories, and the more practiced they became, the more effortlessly one would interrupt the other as if by chance, to deepen their guests’ laughter, and the more skillfully they delivered their punch lines. Haven’t we told you this one yet? How he, and then how she, how then he, and how she, how he — how surprised she was when, how she literally had thought that, and that finally he, and so really, she says, now shaking her head mutely to fill the pause guaranteed to come. Her husband adds, she interjects, he elaborates, but she really has to add that, and he agrees with her. Just before the climax she herself starts laughing in advance, then finally the punch line, and everyone laughs, they all laugh and laugh, another beer, another glass of wine, oh yes, not for me, thank you, maybe just a glass of seltzer. In this way the architect and his wife pass the time on many evenings both for themselves and for their guests.