Alice (13 page)

You know, she said, I suddenly had the thought that he didn't die at all. That all this time he's been living in the house on Eisenbahn Strasse, all these years. It's as if I'd finally found out something. Do you know what I mean?

Well, I can imagine it, at least, Frederick said.

There was a cartridge lying outside the front door, Alice said. A nine-millimetre Parabellum.

It's for you, Frederick said. Just like that, he said.

Yes, for me, Alice said. I wonder why.

You'll find out, Frederick said. You will find out.

Afterwards he walked across the bridge over the river, the brackish water the same today as back then, the iron Prussian
eagles forged into the bridge railing by their wings. And nobody was watching. Except Alice, who watched him walk off, freed now from the burden of the little bag containing the letters Malte had written in those years. It had stopped raining. Frederick strolled off, stopped once and turned to look up at the building cranes. What was he thinking about? Then he walked on. It wasn't he who had phoned Alice. Alice had phoned him. Was there someone after Malte? Alice had asked him. No, Frederick had replied. After Malte there was no longer anyone, only some physical encounters, but that's something quite different. It seemed he didn't think it remarkable that there was no one else after Malte.

A flatbed pickup truck was coming out of the narrow street of the hotel where the clerk handed room keys attached to heavy brass weights across the counter to new hotel guests, where the waitresses took off their aprons in the laundry room, brushing their hair in the light of fluorescent tubes. The pickup truck, turning with deliberate speed out of the narrow street on the eastern bank of the river, was carrying Alice's Japanese cardboard car. With its dream-catcher, petrol receipts, hair clips, broken umbrellas, picnic blankets, old newspapers, sand from Lake Müritz, peanut shells, sweet wrappers, and aspirin. On the passenger seat the little plastic card from the gypsy who – on the periphery of the new housing development – had looked up into the sky, the way Frederick had, and then had disappeared, vanished, never to reappear. Alice watched the pickup truck. She had a brief, feeble impulse to run after it but tripped again in her high heels.

Gripping the bag containing Malte's letters, she walked up the stairs to the train station. And now what? Read the letters right away or later or not at all? It didn't matter what was in them – it wouldn't change anything. But it would add something – one more ring around an unknowable permanent centre. Alice tightened her hold on the bag of letters. I am, after all, one of many, she thought, losing herself in the splendid, cold and wintry hall of the train station among so many others, and all the many possibilities of travelling here or there.

After Raymond died, Alice began getting rid of his things. Putting away, giving away, throwing away, selling. Keeping. A kind of excavation project, uncovering the layers, the various colours, materials, eras; in the end there would be nothing to salvage, nothing except for the fact that Raymond was dead. That's what it boiled down to. It wasn't the worst of jobs.

She started with his jackets. It just turned out that way, pure coincidence; maybe she should have started with something else, but in the end it probably didn't matter. The jackets were hanging in the hall, over the back of a chair in the living room, and on a brass hook, or downstairs in the cellar on nails hammered into the door. She started
with those in the living room. A green one and a blue one. The green one made of water-repellent nylon, the blue one of a soft cotton material with a removable lining; without the lining it was very light. Alice hesitated a moment; then she did what she had wanted to do all along, maybe just to see what it would be like. She knew it was actually senseless because the entire apartment still had Raymond's smell, particles of his skin and his hair; besides, it was a cliché from the movies, from books: Picking up the blue jacket with both hands, she buried her face in the soft fabric, but the fabric smelled of the apartment, of dust, of home, and of a particular detergent, and that was all, nothing else. Raymond had worn that jacket one afternoon a hundred years ago, in the spring, sitting outside the employment office on a bench next to a snack bar on a side street. A wooden kiosk, blue and white painted laths, a window in the middle of which was an opening, the glass completely blocked by a display of schnapps bottles, cigarette cartons, fizzy-drink cans. Music from a radio. Popular songs from the fifties, a weather forecast, jokes, and traffic reports. The penetrating smell of frying fat came through the opening. In front of the kiosk, some men, their dogs tied to the lamp post, were standing around an empty barrel, beer bottles in hand, snapping their braces and spitting. One of them was talking. The others, all listening. When the time came to laugh, they all laughed, one man laughing the loudest; the dogs barked like crazy; then, frightened, they stopped. Thorny bushes on both sides of the bench. Alice and Raymond had been sitting there next to each other. Alice
was drinking coffee out of a plastic cup, Raymond had a beer. The weather hadn't really warmed up yet, but the sky was already quite blue, radiantly white clouds chasing each other. Raymond had rolled himself a cigarette and looked at Alice. Nothing more. That look at Alice was perfect as long as it lasted. That was all.

Alice carefully folded the blue jacket. In the right pocket she found a spare part for the car, a tiny boomerang made of fine, stamped metal, shrink-wrapped in a little plastic bag, brand new. Daihatsu Cuore. She weighed it in her hand, then she put it on the table.

She put the blue jacket into the box headed for the attic. The green jacket was an aviator jacket with silver epaulettes, an American logo. Raymond had worn it once on a walk they took through the Botanical Garden. In the summer. He had said, sounding doubtful, Looks too good, or something. Alice had to laugh. They were both stoned, it was very long ago, walking arm in arm on a pebbled path past the silhouettes of the satellite towns at the edge of the garden, and they saw guards in the distance coming towards them, muzzled Alsatians on a short leash. They'd turned around then; the garden was locked after they left. Later they went to the cinema.

Which film?

Forgotten. A different memory.

It occurred to Alice that she apparently couldn't choose the memories; they came of their own accord: the memory of the garden, Raymond in the aviator jacket – soundless and yet part of it all. Later Alice had worn the jacket
occasionally. Looks too good, or something. She pulled up the zipper, put the jacket into the box for the Red Cross.

She added the jackets from the cupboard in the hall without stopping or checking any of the pockets. A scarf, two hats, everything into the box, one after the other. Everything.

But in one of the jackets from the cellar she found something she was utterly unprepared for – even though she'd tried to be prepared for everything. It was something small, it was almost as if Raymond had left it for her – a crumpled paper bag from a bakery containing the remnant of a little almond horn. The curved end of the little crescent, so old as to be almost petrified. And like a shell in a fossil, a smooth almond sliver on top.

Alice, standing there in the dim light of the cellar, the bag in one hand, the remains of the crescent in the other, shook her head. Whether she wanted to or not. Through the open cellar door, the childish chatter of the Indian cooks came floating down the cellar steps, the kitchen door slamming, propane gas cylinders rolling across the stone floor of the hallway, she could even hear the buzzing of the fat flies down here. The smell of the dustbins in the courtyard drifted down into the cellar, mixing with the cellar smell, the sharp odour of rat poison, mould, and damp bricks.

Raymond. He'd been hungry – a simple, lively hunger. Had bought himself an almond horn at that one particular bakery. Must have been on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday. Sunday and Monday this bakery
was closed, and the fact that it was closed on Mondays was for Raymond proof of its quality. Like the old days. It was winter – the bag was in a pocket of his winter jacket along with a glove. Where was the other glove? And had Alice been there at the time? Was she there when Raymond bought the little almond horn? Did he break off a piece for her, giving it to her or putting it in her mouth – at midday, in the afternoon, or in the morning of a cold and windy day while they were walking along next to each other, Alice's arm in Raymond's arm, and her hand shoved into his glove together with his. Some more? No thanks, and the last piece back into the bag. Raymond had dropped the last piece back into the bag, twisted it shut, and put it into his jacket pocket. When? Or had he been by himself, without Alice at his side; that also happened. And what to do with it now? A rising sun was printed on the paper bag. Good Morning. What to do with the rest, where to put it – that was something you had to learn.

Alice put the bag into the pocket of her own jacket. She just couldn't throw it away. There seemed to be a structure to these actions, time that had to pass. First find it, then comprehend it, then throw it away. Achieve a certain distance. Take your time – it annoyed her when Raymond used to say that. Take your time. Back upstairs. She put the winter jacket into the box for the Red Cross. The glove too. A glove for the right hand. She didn't slip her hand into it again.

And his shirts. His trousers. Underwear, T-shirts, hats, and shoes. A red and white checked shirt – no memories. A blue shirt brought a flood of memories, but she was able
to push them away; she was able keep at bay the memory of Raymond opening the door for her one day in July, the middle of summer, one of innumerable record-breakingly hot summers – Raymond, very busy, had gone back into the apartment right away but was happy she had come. His face, the way his face looked when he was delighted to see her. She'd had a glass of tea, sitting by the window, leafing through a newspaper. Will you read to me? Nothing important. Raymond was wearing that blue shirt, little holes in it, carefully mended with many stitches, a round, old-fashioned neckline, as if from another time. So this was the shirt, then. And grey, green, or black trousers. Holes at the knees. Paint stains, torn pockets, decent trousers. Precisely folded T-shirts. With or without pictures printed on them. A silly bear. Camouflage patterns. Colourful prints. And Raymond's shoes. His orthotics. No glasses. Swimming trunks. Don't hesitate, Alice thought, trembling, Stop hesitating so idiotically long; and she put everything away, put all of it together and into the Red Cross box; the blue jacket and a green T-shirt were still in the box intended for the attic.

She carried the Red Cross box down the stairs. The box, the first of many, was pretty heavy. She had taped it shut with adhesive tape; no one would ever be able to get the tape off. Downstairs, the Indian cook came out into the hallway. An incredibly dirty apron. Chicken curry. Behind him, Alice could see the second Indian cook, against the red tiles, in the steam of the dishwasher. Nice pictures. Moving? The cook already looked shocked.

No, not moving. Throwing out, sorting, giving away, back into the stream.

Oh yes, the Ganges. The cook gave a loud laugh. Alice had to laugh too. He took the box from her and carried it the entire block to her car. He was wearing flip-flops, and he had brought the chicken curry smell with him from the kitchen. Also the smell of fresh-sliced pineapple, basil, tomatoes, and vinegar cleanser. That smell clung to the box and the car and Alice's hands until she dropped the box into the maw of a Red Cross container.

That first summer without Raymond she stalwartly went to the swimming pool. Almost every morning of every day she had off. And because she didn't want to drive out to the lake by herself – was unable to drive there by herself with the picnic blanket for her alone, the rustling of the newspaper pages, and the impenetrable thicket of the forest, it was hopeless. So, off to the swimming pool, maybe a more civilised thing to do. A short stretch on her bike on the shady side of the street, almost 20 degrees at nine o'clock in the morning. To the same swimming pool near the park that Raymond went to as a child – Alice had a photograph of Raymond on the steps in front of the changing cabins, six years old, squatting on the wet stone, one leg drawn to his chest, the other stretched out. He was squinting at the camera, against the light, and his black and white child's face was distorted because he was dazzled by the sun; yet Alice always thought that it looked as if he were crying. Raymond claimed he wasn't crying, that he had been jumping off the ten-metre
diving board for an hour, constantly, without interruption; he had done that and then he'd gone home.

The stairs in front of the changing cabins were now blocked off. The paint on the broad steps was peeling, turquoise flakes; grass grew in the cracks between the stones. The spot where Raymond had been sitting back then was unrecognisable. But the diving board was in use today as it had been then, and swimmers were diving off the springy ten-metre board non-stop, a falling figure every three minutes. Alice spread out her towel near the large pool, next to a low wall behind which broom was growing and rubbish was piling up. Coffee cups, broken water wings, cigarette butts. She swam for half an hour, conscientious, neat lengths, her head held high above the water; then she walked back to her towel, stretched out on her back, closed her eyes. Planes. Sparrows in the broom, excited chirping. The ecstatic screaming of children and the quick steps of their little wet feet. Mothers spread out bath towels next to Alice, a dark shadow on her closed eyelids, as though a large bird were crossing the sky; then again the steady brightness, children, their teeth chattering, shaking the water from their hair, a shower of drops on Alice's stomach, like a human touch, something intimate.

Would you move over a little, please?