You said this could go on as long as I want, and now I don’t want. That’s what Katharina will say when he finally gets through to her when she’s back in Berlin, he’s almost certain of it now. Can you help me?, the damned cork broke off. No, he can’t help Ingrid with her cork just now, he needs all his concentration to keep the inaudible sentence in check, the one that goes: and now I don’t want. You’ll manage, he says, and stays in his seat by the window. He senses the silence suddenly thickening in the room, but he doesn’t care, his desire hasn’t sounded like Mozart for days now either. Why are you in such a bad mood? And now I don’t want. Or the phone rings, and no one picks it up. Sorry, what? Why are you in such a bad mood. I’m not in a bad mood. And now I don’t want it. He can think of three to five reasons why it should be that way. Why would she even bother picking up his letter from the post office? Well, as long as you’re sitting pretty. He needs to get through one more week on the Baltic, while the girl readjusts to a life in Berlin in which he no longer figures. Would you stop quarreling please, says Ludwig. We’re not quarreling, says Hans.

Barbara is the name of the waitress at the Arkade. She’s tall, and taller when she puts her hair up. Two coffees and two glasses of Rotkäppchen, please, Barbara. A celebration. It’s their third 11th day, their trimensual anniversary, and if Katharina had a wish, then she would wish that fate never ran out of elevens. Nine years, three years. How long will she and Hans be good for? Is what they have nothing but a so-called affair? Will he be sitting with someone else in ten years’ time, showing off a snapshot of her, Katharina, and saying: that was Katharina, she was my lover? How to endure the way that the present trickles down moment by moment and becomes the past? So why did he show her the photos? Of course he’s been with other women, he’s been around that much longer. Even she’s had three or four others, plus Gernot. What makes her so jealous is the secrecy around the other women, the trouble Hans must have gone to to keep each relationship going: rubbing the lipstick off a wineglass after a meeting in his apartment, or telling Ingrid, we were working late in the office, using her hairdresser’s appointment for a phone call or taking advantage of a moment at night when the wife’s gone to bed to whisper into the telephone: O darling, O beautiful, O sweetheart. The way he does now, with me. Little Ludwig was revolted by it, she recalls. And isn’t he right to be? And now she’s a part of this tissue of deceit. And even thinks of these little treacheries of Hans’ as a distinction. Not long ago, when Hans went to the cinema with Ludwig, she sat three rows behind them, just to have some proximity to the man she loves. In the general crush when everyone filed out, Hans brushed against her hand.

Two weeks ago, when Ingrid was taking Hans’s jacket to the dry cleaner’s, she found a passport photo of Katharina in the inside pocket and wouldn’t talk to him for three days. He didn’t tell Katharina. In October Katharina cried for the first time about the fact that he was married, and in November for the second time, and since then he’s avoided mentioning Ingrid’s name. And if Katharina now sometimes looks deadly earnest, he knows she’s making an effort and is repressing something she ought really to talk about. Anything the matter? No. Because everything is avoided that might make one or other of them sad, sadness suddenly comes to occupy a lot of space between them. He is old enough to know how the end likes to set its roots first imperceptibly, then ever more boldly, in the present. Without my marriage I wouldn’t be the man I am. That’s what he told Regina as well, the newscaster, and Marjut, the Finn. They went along with it until he’d had enough. Where Katharina is concerned, the sentence carries a different meaning, but she would deny it if he were to write it to her. Without his marriage, there wouldn’t be the danger, the secrecy, the circumstances that give rise to yearning. Not the content of their love, but factors that energize and quicken it. Just as if/ in a gallop/ an exhausted mare/ thirsted for the nearest well. Thirsting. Another one of those dead words. The marriage that threatens and attenuates their affair is also the ground that nourishes it. And probably, if Hans were honest, the other way around as well. Wasn’t Ingrid — when at the end of three silent days she started to speak again, and during the ensuing scene to cry, and when the makeup ran down her face and she picked up the nearest thing that came to hand, which happened to be a clothes brush, and threw it out of the window into the yard — wasn’t Ingrid in her desperation more beautiful and desirable than she’d appeared to him in a long time?

[...] She knows that it’s perfectly possible that while she’s asleep he’s maybe writing the sentences that will sunder them. Just when the bill for everything is due, just before their wishes become reality, everything is once more up for grabs, teetering at the top and maybe about to collapse, she knows that. Yesterday, he fell asleep with her, two spoons on the narrow bed, and she thought she had never been happier in her life. But sometimes he clings on to her too hard. Sometimes he says: I feel tense — and that means she has to take her clothes off. And other times it’s so perfect she could die. What does she want from him? She laughed herself silly the other day when he put forward their alphabet soup, Noodle ABC, for the State Literary Prize. And in the shower, the way he rubs away at his eyes with the washcloth like a little boy. Does she love him because he’s really a child, despite being ostensibly thirty-four years older? He thought he was addicted to her, he wrote not long ago, and she thought, no, she’s addicted to making him addicted. Is whatever she is and has enough to keep him? And what is she exactly?

He’s sitting in the bar of the Berolina, getting drunk. Ingrid didn’t want to talk to him tonight, which was maybe for the best, but what was he going to do by himself in his one-room box. He didn’t want to take a single step without Katharina. The kid has optimism for two, she needs to, and she sweeps him along. A creature of the new age. Unbroken, hale, well-raised. Somehow pure. If she were otherwise, he would hardly desire her as he did. And not in that way. She uses B for belt in her diary on those days. Table + B. Her shame shows, even through the abbreviation. She’s ashamed but goes on sticking her bottom out to him. She knows how beautiful she is. A human being, doesn’t that sound splendid. Maxim Gorky wrote. And he, Hans, pulls off his belt, and brings it down with a hiss on her behind. And when she’s not there, he gets tight in the bar of the Hotel Berolina. When the moment comes for you to die, and you wonder: what are you dying for? Then suddenly with shocking clarity, a gaping black void will open before you, Bukharin had said to the court that had just sentenced him. There is nothing here to die for, only death full of regrets. Bukharin, Lenin’s comrade in arms, darling of the Party, shot by a firing squad of his own people in 1938. Gorky’s sentence and Bukharin’s last words as the two poles of the Soviet system. That’s what he would like to write his novel about, only no one would print it in the East. And in the West no one would understand it.

Each time before she props herself on her forearms and turns her bottom to him, he first checks whether the legs will hold, not hers, but those of the collapsible table. Everything about his life at this time is provisional. And could come crashing down at any moment. Himself first of all. Transitions require strength, sometimes more than one needs to arrive in a new life. As he knows. Katharina doesn’t know this yet. Her sense of the new society isn’t anything achieved but a kind of featureless condition. She shares his enthusiasms, but the murk from which they take their being, and the efforts that were necessary for him to assemble himself from the wreckage of his childhood and make a new man of himself, those she doesn’t know, can’t know. Is that just as well for her? Or is it what, objectively speaking, separates them?

Her life. Even when she’s not to pick up the telephone when she’s alone in the apartment, in case it’s Ingrid on the other end. Last Monday, for instance, when Hans was at the ophthalmologist’s, it kept ringing and ringing. And she sat there, pretending not to exist. And for all that: her life. Is she happy at Ingrid’s expense? Or just happy? Is it always in relation to someone else, is it a zero-sum game? Or is it random and disassociated, one here, one there? Then in the evening, when Hans was back, he picked up and he spoke to Ingrid. Katharina took herself out to the balcony, but she could still hear every word. He spoke to his own wife as to a stranger. Katharina should have been pleased, but in fact it depressed her. Is that all that’s left of a thirty-year marriage? When she’s old, will she too have a husband who speaks to her on the phone, while his lover is on the balcony, waiting to be waved back in? If one knew the whole truth about everything, could hear what was unsaid, and see what was parked in the shadows — then would there be any sense in wanting anything at all?