for/pq2
Jenny Erpenbeck,
Shirley Hazzard,
Ingmar Bergman,
Michael Ondaatje
She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water.
She returned to her husband.
From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.
Seas move away, why not lovers? The harbours of Ephesus, the rivers of Heraclitus disappear and are replaced by estuaries of silt. The wife of Candaules becomes the wife of Gyges. Libraries burn.
What had our relationship been? A betrayal of those around us, or the desire of another life?
She climbed back into her house beside her husband, and I retired to the zinc bars.
I’ll be looking at the moon,
but I’ll be seeing you.
aaaaahhh
"Yes." A flicker over her stare was the facial equivalent of a shrug. "Now you have a wife to give you both."
They stood fronting one another. Paul removed his hand from the door. "Caro. For pity's sake."
The figure of speech appeared to move her, and for an instant it seemed she might laugh. Again he pressed what he took for an advantage: "Have a bit of mercy."
She herself leaned back on the chalky wall, and closed her eyes. "How should you hope for mercy, rendering none?"
"These walls are full of dirty quotations, one way and another."
There was silence while she leaned there, austere with her umbrella, sheathed and closed. She roused herself and did step past him, then, to pull at the heavy door.
From behind her, Paul said, "You've got white all over your back." And in the most natural way in the world brushed his hand down her coat. Then passed his arms about her waist and put his mouth to the nape of her neck, and said, "Almighty God."
We will only see each other occasionally, he says, but each time will be like our first time — a celebration. She listens to him attentively and nods. I can only be a luxury for you, because I am a married man. I know, she says. Perhaps that won’t be enough for you, he says. I understand that. She looks him straight in the face, there is a ring of yellow around her pupils, he now sees. I’m not just married, I’m also in a relationship with a woman who works in radio. If you had a thousand women, she says, all that matters is the time that we get to spend together. How can he ever refuse her anything, if she doesn’t demand anything? The black velvet ribbon moves him, it makes her look like a schoolgirl. If he doesn’t manage to say quickly what he needs to say, it’ll be too late. And you can’t expect any sort of public acknowledgment — I know, and you know, and that will have to do. That’s fine, she says, and smiles. Where terms and conditions are set, there is a future. All yesterday and today she was afraid he would just toss her out.
When they part very early the next morning, he is instructed by her to buy pepper and breadcrumbs. Padlizsán, says Katharina, but she won’t tell him what it is in German, it’s to be a surprise. Tomorrow they are planning to cook together, Ingrid and Ludwig will be away at a summer party in the Uckermark. Ingrid knows her husband isn’t keen on such festivities, just stay home, why don’t you, she said. Who knows, maybe she’s planning to meet someone there herself. Years ago now, the couple made a joint decision not to watch each other too closely. Only they didn’t want to make it public, lest it seem too much of a slight to either party. Is there enough wine in the house? When he woke up this morning, he called her his darling, and she reciprocated.
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.
this KILLS me
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?
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?
this always kills me
I had my thirty-first birthday during that summer of 1949. Hitherto I had worked hard and relentlessly in my profession. So coming to this autumn warm Paris was an experience which had the effect of knocking down barriers. Love had both time and opportunity to grow freely, opening closed rooms and knocking down walls. I could breathe. My treachery to Ellen and the children existed somewhere in a mist, ever-present but strangely stimulating. For a few months, there lived and breathed a bold production that was incorruptibly true, so therefore priceless, although it turned out to be horribly expensive when the bill came.