Getting up, drawing back the curtains, street, houses, people, let's imagine something else. Not you and I and he and she, but we. Do you remember that afternoon? You said and I said, and then you said and we laughed. You were wearing that dress with all those buttons, I undid one, somewhere safe where it was allowed, somewhere around your knee or so. It was summer and we wanted to live, greedily, recklessly, didn't know how to start, rolled around in a field of tall wheat, for want of something better, laughing at the sun, each other and every casual passer-by. You had pearly white teeth which I could conjure up by telling crazy stories. Your little brother had yet to ascend his electric throne. He sat there high in the water tower gazing down at us. Or was he gazing at the sky?
Your teeth are still as white as ever. We are sitting on the couch in your house and doing what people do, talking, drinking coffee. You place your cup amongst the clutter on the coffee table, look around and say: It's high time somebody tidied up round here. We burst out laughing. Your teeth sparkle like the tiles in an ad for cleaning products. Don't ever die. Life is an addiction: the longer you live, the longer you want to live. Suicide is for children. Like your little brother, barely seventeen, who built himself an electric chair. The family was well aware of the youngest's passion for electricity, they encouraged it - who knows - later, he could earn his living at it. The boy was such an incorrigible dreamer, liked nothing better than to spend his days on the platform of the water tower, or shut up in his room, where he taught himself all about electricity. Weird, such a boy, water and fire, earth and air. The chair was completely wound round with copper wire. Copper is surprisingly expensive. Oh, sweet death, which delivers me from this earthly vale of tears...
You have gotten up from the couch to brew fresh coffee in the kitchen. You poke your head around the door. Would I like a pastry? No. I let my hand glide across the hollow you have left in the leather of the couch. After all these years, I still don't touch you. Shall we promise each other to die together?
Life lasts too long. Do you remember that summer, more than twenty-five years ago? You would go to, and I would go with, and then we decided, but your father thought and my mother said, but we would still, and then. When you are twenty you think you have four or five years at the most to arrange it all: love, passion, offspring. By the time you are fifty, you hardly have enough memory to remember all the things that have ever happened. But in death it all comes back. In a flash, they say. Or: like in a film. So also that moment when you and I met for the very first time. It was in the playground, you say, under the tall acacia, I had dug a tunnel through which I was pushing a red toy car, you watched and watched, shook your head when I offered the car, then finally took it. I must have seen you smile for the first time when you saw that little car disappearing into the tunnel and then appearing again. The moment has gone, it is difficult to believe that it was you who first noticed me, but you swear by all that's holy that that's the way it was. When death embraces me, I'll know for sure. Thousand of moments will flash before me, up to that fatal moment when, without you or your parents or your brother knowing, I crept up to the room of your newly-dead little brother and sat in his chair. Oh, sweet death! Shall I again glide my hand across the red copper wire and admire the craftsmanship of the one who had designed this chair so ingeniously, a copper chair with a shiny black lever and a cord which snaked across the floor to the socket like a length of fuse? What was I searching for? Not for death, but a feeling. If I stuck the plug in the socket, all I had to do was to throw the lever. I heard angry footsteps on the stairs. What are you doing up there? Where are you? The door was thrown open, hands tore at my clothes, fists pounded my chest, feet kicked against my shins. You, my darling, took part in the orgy. Bitch! you screamed and you tore at my hair. You're sick, that's what you are, screamed your mother and dragged me out of the chair. I realised it was not I but the suicide who was being punished. But a little later I was standing in the street and thinking: The casting out from the temple. Your mother had shouted: That friend of yours will never set a foot in this house again. I thought: She finally got her chance.
You say: 'My parents wouldn't let me see you anymore.'
I say; 'And you didn't see me anymore.'
We smile at each other, and with that smile transform ourselves into innocent little sweethearts. They wanted to be together but the water was much too deep. But we were almost twenty-one. And yet I keep on smiling. I caress you with my smile, and barely remember what my mother said to me years ago when she found photos of us in my pencil case: That's not a friend for you. You lived in a big house with a park of a garden. Every afternoon, your mother poured coffee into porcelain cups for a host of visitors. You had a maid. Not my cup of tea at all, said my mother. Give those photos back.
I don't ask you: Did you keep the chair?
I don't ask you: Did you ever sit in it?
I smile. Think: I would have kept it. In case it got so bad, and there was no doctor who was willing to help me... 'My grandparents, I say, used to pray to the Lord devoutly every evening that he would call them to Him together. She died fifteen years after he did, after first going blind and then later also senile. The Lord is merciful.' You burst out laughing, apologise, laugh again. 'On their bended knees, on either side of the bed. Would you,' I blurt out recklessly, because you are laughing so exuberantly at what I am saying, 'dare to phone your father and ask him: Dad, are you scared of dying, the coffin, the worms, the chilly soil?'
'Yes, he's as deaf as a post.'
And both of us burst out laughing. What a lot of fun we are having today. We laugh about this and we laugh about that. We laugh about life and we laugh about death. We even laugh about what idiotic girls we were, the girls who allowed themselves to be separated. Why? To get married. And to whom? To a man!
My father says: There comes a time when you're sorry about all the sins you didn't commit. Shall I give you a long list of all of the sins I wanted to commit with you, but didn't commit and still do not commit? When I was twenty-five, I was feeling old. Someone phoned me and said: I can't live without you. Irritated by the utter untruth of the statement, I said: But you're still alive. But he said: This is not a life. Why not? I said and I hung up. By then I had been living without you more than four years already. You were married, my mother had told me, to one of your own kind. Did I often think about you? I don't remember. You were certainly there in dreams. Now and again your face would suddenly float up out of nowhere. The man who had informed me via the telephone that he couldn't live without me, called again and said: Everyone who I've ever trusted has let me down. This statement was too painfully close to home to lay aside. My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me ? When you and I met again after twenty-five years, you said: Now I'll never let you go again. I smiled, squeezed your hand, smiled. You had become much slimmer. Your cheeks were a little hollow. You were wearing your hair shorter. Your husband, so my mother claimed, was beating you. Again I felt like a clumsy, lumbering monster, a mangy, slavering dog. My hands wanted, my tongue wanted, my lips wanted, but weren't allowed, and whatever the case were paralysed. I couldn't even trust my eyes. Never leave me! I can't live without you! From the mouth of the man who had called me, it was not a cry of despair. He did not believe in his mortality. I am never going to die, he had assured me repeatedly. There is a club for eternal-lifers. People who insist that they will never die. Death is all in the mind. Between your ears. You die because you expect to die. Because you surrender.
Your hand is lying next to mine on the couch, a bony hand like your whole body has most probably now become. Have your children sucked out all the strength from your body, or do you really get beaten each day? Your nails are varnished a bloody-red and perfectly manicured, however your husband treats you, you still have a maid to do the dirty work. Did you send her away so that we could be alone together undisturbed, or is she sick and is that why there is such a mess? I don't touch your hand, although it seems as if that is why you have laid it on the couch between us. I don't even think I want to touch your hand. Leave it lying on the couch as a possibility. But you have misunderstood my gaze, and say: 'My wedding ring.' You push it from your finger, it slides off easily. You lost those kilos after your wedding. I take it from you, read the inscription and ask: 'Why did you get married?'
'Because he asked me,' you say. 'It would have been impolite to refuse.' And again you double up with laughter.
'Do you think a man would ever get married out of politeness?'
'Of course. But they give it a different name. Men get married out of a sense of duty. Because he was the first. Because he plucked her cherry.'
'How was yours plucked?'
'With a little difficulty.'
'Mine was plucked by a tampax, although it was pushed by a penis. It seemed bad manners to say: I'm sorry, but there's a tampax in the way. Turn around a moment while I fish it out. But we are digressing. Men also get married because they've made a woman pregnant. I think that's a very good reason. Or a very bad one. Bad if they are going to hate the mother of the child. Drive her to desperation. Good if they make the best of things. Did you see your little brother after he'd died?'
'Yes.'
'Listen. I know why people are scared of death. The ultimate goodbye. Never again to eat a cheese sandwich dunked in coffee. Never to rush down the stairs to the telephone: Who could have called? Never again to stand in front of the wardrobe in the morning: What shall I wear. Never again to laze in bed, even though you are not the slightest bit tired anymore. If you could relive a single moment of your life just before you die, which moment would you choose? Something to do with your mother? The smell of her skin? Hanging on her skirts while she stirred the porridge? Or your first real kiss?'
You look at me and say thoughtfully: 'My birth. Flopping out of my mother, being laid on her belly, searching for her nipple and drinking. But this time consciously.'
I look away. Refuse to acknowledge this desire. Say: That's somehow rather obscene. Besides, we were never laid on our mother's bellies. We were slapped on the bottom and given a scrubbing. Life could begin. A different moment please.'
You laugh. Say sweetly: 'Then to lie with you in that wheatfield, near the water tower.'
'Do you think he could see us?'
'Who?'
'Your brother.'
'Perhaps.'
'What did you want to happen that summer?'
'I wanted it to last for ever.'
'Why didn't he jump from the water tower? Why did he do it at home? To punish your parents?'
'Punish?'
'Because they put him on earth. Forced him to live in a house, amongst people, with days that started with breakfast, then lunch, then dinner and then to bed only to have to get up again. Because there was nothing else and God did not exist. Because your mother had driven him out of her body.' I hesitate. Then ask anyway: 'Where is it now?'
'What?'
'The electric chair.'
'In his room. Which isn't locked. It is as if my parents wanted to say: Dearest children, as far as we are concerned, nobody has to live in this house. There's a suicide machine upstairs, stick the plug in the socket and off you go. The best antidote, I think. Knowing it's possible.'
I say: 'I'm not scared anymore. I don't think I've ever been scared.'
My best friend's younger brother, the handyman, the wizard with copper wire, crept to the top of the water tower and observed the people far below him, or gazed at the fleeting clouds. Away, you say, he always wanted to get away. Arrogance, I think, too good to live like everyone else. A loner, you say. No one was allowed to enter his room. Naturally, I think, otherwise curious eyes would have prematurely discovered his work of art. He never invited us into his tower and we never climbed up of our own accord. We stayed on the ground. Went cycling, lay in the grass or the tall wheat, laughing shamelessly at passers-by. We were as randy as a couple of young dogs in May, I think, and I tell you so because it is a thing of the past, something we can laugh about now. I say: 'I think we were pretty randy then.' I watch how you react to that word. With a smile. But you don't repeat it. You and I didn't kiss. A lot of girls that we knew did it, by way of demonstration. Practising, they called it. Two pursed mouths coming closer together. Pointy little tongues creeping out of those mouths in search of another little tongue. Sometimes I watched, sometimes I didn't watch. When I watched, I didn't dare to look at you immediately afterwards. Out of fear that you would read the wild desire in my face. You don't correct me. You don't say: You were the randy one, not me. True aristocrats never stoop to denial. 'You were so pure,' I say. 'You were innocence itself. I had the feeling I had to protect you from a world the malevolence of which you didn't even seem to suspect. A randy world.' I look at you and think: You're still just as pure. That summer when we used to go cycling and lying in the field day after day, when I used to gyrate around you lasciviously, I hoped again and again: this time her brothers will come along. Or: perhaps she is sick and her brother will come instead. Which brother? It didn't matter. A brother. A creature with a harder body, stronger arms, more weight. Your parents were right when they kicked me out. That I hung around with their daughter, that was bad enough, but I had to keep away from their sons. Children could come of it. Grandchildren. Who would bear their name.
Do you remember the horseman who galloped past one afternoon and then came back to see what that spot in the wheatfield was? His black horse stamped impatiently and snorted through flared nostrils. He had difficulty controlling it. This is my field, he said. I felt like answering: Come and join us then, but you stood upright, brushed the stalks from your clothes and said: We were just about to leave. You were already picking up your bike, while I was still lazing in the field. Come on, you said snapped. Were you jealous?
You and I are sitting serenely side by side on the couch, as if we must have died and gone to a paradisiacal afterlife. Fathers, mothers, husbands, lovers, they've all disappeared. And it is peaceful, so peaceful that I really begin to believe that this couch is no longer on earth, so peaceful that I look at you and smilingly say: 'Shall I tell you something? There was once a woman who I called mother. She said I shouldn't make friends with you. She said it would be dangerous for me to spend a lot of time with you. I'd forget who I was. Forget my place. And she wanted to know why I kept photos of us in my pencil case. Why I kept them hidden in there. She did not say: How nice, you and your friend together in a photo. She said: Give those photos back. And she wanted to know whether we wrote letters to each other. Letters? No, we saw each other every day at school. Those photos then, what were they doing in my pencil case? Her suspicions were aroused, she couldn't rest. Those photos. What did I want with those photos?
Do you still remember? It was a Wednesday afternoon. We were bored stiff. We had climbed over a garden wall to steal some apples, we had painted our nails with the sample bottle for clients in the supermarket, we had rung a doorbell somewhere and run away whooping, we couldn't think of anything else until we passed by the station where a photo booth had just been installed. First we sat on that little stool and posed for an imaginary photo. We sat next to each other, or on each other's lap, cheek to cheek, or with your head resting on my head, even then you were a head taller than I was. You let your head rest on my head, lay your hands on my shoulders, I pulled a funny face, but you turned all serious and said deliberately: Let's have our photo taken. So we rang a doorbell somewhere and asked whether we could wash the car. At the first house, the woman looked at our lacquered nails and shook her head. At the second, we kept our hands hidden beneath our sweaters and she said all right. How much did we want for it? Exactly as much as it cost to have our photos taken. When we were finished, the woman did notice our nails and gave us a product to clean them. Bits of lacquer had flaked off, while we were working. And we were given a cup of chocolate milk. How old are you? asked the woman. Thirteen. The same age as my daughter, she said and paid us twice what we had asked, so that later we popped out of the photo machine together eightfold, four times neatly side by side, four times with your head resting on my head. We didn't realise then that you had to let such photos dry for a while, so that the first strip was ruined by smudgy fingerprints, but the second was perfect. We asked the ticket clerk whether he would cut the strip in half, put our photos away and cycled home in silence.
The memory is shattered by my mother's command: Give those photos back! I've no idea what I did with them. I've always assumed I must have dumped them in a dustbin on the way to school, but you get up, walk out of the room and come back with an envelope. You give it to me and I take out four photos; your two, and the two which I seem to have given back.
'What was I saying?' I ask blushing.
'That you had to give them back. That you could still see me at school, but not outside.'
'Why did we do what they said?'
You shrug your shoulders. 'We were children.'
I hold the two strips up against each other and think: Separated for ever. I take my two photos and put them in my bag. I always react too late. It always takes a while for cold and pain to hit me. I always think I can manage. That things will sort themselves out. So when you suddenly rang me and invited me to renew our friendship, I thought: Why not? But now I am sitting here beside you on the couch, and I'm losing control. Sweet innocent, why did you let your parents throw me out? Why did you help them to prove my mother was right? Surely not because I had gone and sat in your brother's copper chair, come on, you must have done that yourself. My mother didn't say a word when you and I renewed our friendship. You had invited me to a birthday party, you were sixteen, and I was allowed to go, I even got a new dress. She adopted an expectant attitude. Perhaps the times have really changed, she must have thought, and girls from the lower classes are no longer simply the playthings of the daughters of the rich. And perhaps there is such a thing as friendship between women. But the times had not changed. It was a long time before I could get the words across my lips: You were right, mum. They've kicked me out.
I look at you, don't embrace you, don't press your body against mine, don't feel the softness of your breasts, don't run my hands through your hair, don't press your hands to my face. Have you missed me?
You lay the envelope with your two photos on the mantelpiece and say: 'Do you let your children call you mother?'
'Of course. Mum-my. I hate those call-me-by-my-first-name-parents. As if that changes anything.'
'Are yours still alive?'
'Yes.'
'In good health?'
'Yes, but they can't order me around anymore.' Give those photos back. And I gave those photos back. They were very sweet to me. Called me a sensible girl. A girl who knew what was best for her, or rather, a girl who realised that her parents knew what was best for her. I called them mummy and daddy and they called me a sensible girl. They gave me a lot of extra attention, the attention they thought I'd need to get over you. They were very loving, so loving that one day my father said: Can I see your breasts? My mother was standing next to him. They were standing side by side against the sideboard and I was sitting in a chair about four metres away. The fatherman and the motherwoman. And I, shameless hussy, did as he asked, sweater up, look.'
'You know what it is,' says you, whose breasts I have never seen and also never will see, God preserve me, I wouldn't know what to say, I wouldn't know what to do, 'they can't conceive that they have made a creature who is so entirely different from them and yet so much the same. So they want to look at it and examine it. Completely logical, isn't it?'
'Have you ever asked your son if you can see his willy? His willy in action? Sonny dear, that thing you were put on earth with, does it work? Is it well made? Any complaints? Even when my daughter was plagued by symbolic dreams night after night, even when she mournfully told me about them, mummy, I sleep so badly, I didn't say: Darling, the water in which he throws you is sex, the pistol he points at you is his penis, you're ready for it, my angel, no, I stroked her head, cooked her favourite meal, lit a candle so that she'd be spared as much of the suffering as possible. Did you cry a lot?'
'Of course I cried a lot.'
And because I don't ask: Who did you cry for, your brother or me? it is possible that in that flood there were also tears that were shed for me, for us, for our friendship. Or for our chastity. I've never felt your tongue creep out of your mouth like a snake. I never even considered the possibility, if you had suspected such thoughts, you would have banished me from your side immediately. Or so I thought. Now I think that we kept our hands firmly locked behind our backs and our tongues in our own mouths out of fear of what would have happened if we had thrown ourselves on each other in such a wheatfield. And so we kept each other prisoner. And so we compelled each other to chastity. We were the object and subject of each other's desires, but we also played their jailer. What would have happened if your parents hadn't denied me access to their family? You, darling, were the most jealous of the two. You couldn't stand it if I looked at a man. Even though your brother was dead and buried, I was still not allowed to enter his room. I was still not allowed to sit in his chair.
Don't touch me. Don't press your lips against my lips. What did you expect of me? Did you let your parents throw me out because you knew you couldn't monopolise my desires any longer? Had you seen me staring at your brother when he came to the kitchen to fetch a sandwich? How that boy could eat! And yet he was always as thin as a rake.
Not long ago in the train, I was sitting opposite a boy who looked just the way he did that summer. Rather tall, six foot two or three, muscled, not an ounce of fat, spots on his forehead and cheeks, hair that hung across his eyes like a curtain, that he repeatedly tossed aside. He was wearing faded jeans, a purple sweatshirt, from which the collar and cuffs had been cut away, and a leather band around his wrist. He stood up, his hips were at eye level, I felt sick with desire, his belly was hollow, nothing but muscles, not an ounce of fat. He took a bag from the luggage rack, sat down again and began to tie knots in the rope with which you could close the bag. After a while I realised he was trying to make a noose he could open and close. I stared at those big hands skilfully tying knots, they became your little brother's hands, and made my head swim, because I imagined how it would be to feel those hands on my body, those hips on my hips, that powerful muscled body on top of mine, but especially because I remembered how I had once leered at the hands of your little brother, the hands with which he was spreading a sandwich, the hands with which he was knocking together an electric chair upstairs. Was there nobody who could have told him: Cherish that body like a precious jewel. Use it to make women happy? But if he had realised, he would have become an arrogant macho. His whole charm lay in the fact that he didn't realise. I also let the boy in the train get off without imploring him: Stay alive. Do not destroy that body. I saw the spots on his face, the eyes that stared then shyly turned away, knowing what it meant and yet still said nothing. I averted my eyes, hoping that he wouldn't suspect my desire. Only in my mind did I beg him: Stay alive.
Never during his life did I slip into your little brother's room, never for more than a couple of seconds did I avert my gaze from you to peep at him. I didn't even dream about him. Years later, I made love to your other brother, but that is another story, another life. He was already married, or should I say married off, and dropped by now and then to talk about the old days. His hands were almost the same as your little brother's, but they were hands that had never made anything. There always comes a moment when all I can think is: I want his hands on my body. I want to lie down, lean backwards, close my eyes and wait for hands. That's the way it happened with your brother who dropped by to talk about the old days. He was earning his living as a travelling salesman and fixed it so he'd be visiting a client in my neighbourhood at the end of the afternoon. I don't know whether that episode had anything to do with you or your little brother. Like so many episodes in my life, it had to do with hands. I never knew your younger brother as a full grown man, but I don't think he would have scuttled off home to his wife after every lovemaking session, I don't think he would have kept a constant eye on his watch and mumbled excuses: Sorry, my wife, my dog, my children. Nor do I think that one day I would have poured a glass of water out over his head. I had told him: Don't call around anymore, stay with your wife, your children, your dog, but he didn't seem to understand, he belonged to a family of thrower-outs, not of the thrown-out. He told me: I'm sorry, I have to go, my sister's giving a party, to which I replied: Never come back again, never set another foot in this house, in this street, and so the next time I emptied a glass of water out over his head from the bedroom window so that he would finally believe what I said. But that, as they say, is another story and I won't burden your innocent ears with it. I'm yours now, I sit paralysed next to you. No longer capable of saying what I want to say or ought to say, of doing what I want to do or ought to do. I have eyes for nobody else. Only for you. I long for nobody else. Only for you. If you touch me, I shall die.
Translated by Stephen Smith
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Fiction
from The Literary Review
