All Days Are Night (7 page)

Only after she had entered journalism did she start to feel more secure. She got the job in television and then she started playing the beautiful and successful cultural correspondent for the viewers, for the media, for Matthias, and for herself. She avoided making crass mistakes, Matthias played along, basically he was the better actor. They were continually in demand, giving information, playing themselves. Their voices were louder, they moved differently in public. When they got home, half soused and tired, and stood side by side brushing their teeth in the bathroom, Gillian sometimes had to laugh at the two faces in the mirror. Even the laughter was part of the performance.

Gillian felt slightly sick from her cigarette. She put it out and went inside. She stopped briefly in front of the coffeemaker, then she went into the bedroom and lay down again. The window was open a crack, and the rain was audible only as a steady hiss. She spent all day in bed, delaying trips to the kitchen or bathroom as long as possible. Her pains had let up, but that didn’t make it any easier, they had battered her back into her body, had made her boundaries all the more distinct. Gone with the pain were her points of reference, and now Gillian had to go to
the trouble of finding them all again. She leafed through old photo albums. There were family albums, with pictures of her as a little girl, photos of holidays and birthdays, family portraits that barely changed over the years. These albums held the first pictures of elementary school productions, Gillian as Mother Mary, as Snow White, as a cat in a musical. Eventually her story detached itself from the family’s. Everything concerning her profession was in a separate album, which Gillian had started. Theater programs, interviews, photos taken at parties, reviews, all clipped and pasted. The first page, the one that in the other albums bore a name or dates, was empty.

She read an interview she had given shortly after she had taken on the television job. Every week the same questions were put to a different person. The journalist had been perfectly pleasant, they had met in a café. Each time Gillian was stumped, they had made up the answers between them. When did you first make love? One afternoon. What would you most like to know? What my friends really think of me. What was the saddest moment in your life? They were both stumped by that one. Then the journalist had suggested: My death. And that had to do.

The life in those magazine pictures was inexplicably more personal and more concrete than the interchangeable family snaps in the other albums. In the interviews Gillian was asked about things she never discussed with her parents. Alongside these compressed and edited conversations, those she had at home seemed alarmingly banal. Sometimes her mother would talk to her about things she had read her daughter saying. Is it true that you
don’t believe in God? Gillian didn’t know. It’s just an interview, she would say, you have to tell them something.

Once or twice she had complained about becoming a celebrity, but in fact she had loved being recognized on the street.

At the back of the album were some clippings she hadn’t stuck down yet. A write-up of her wedding, a double-page spread with photographs of the service and the party afterward. Gillian was astounded that Matthias hadn’t made a fuss. The journalist and photographer hardly stood out, they integrated themselves better into the wedding company than some of Matthias’s friends or Gillian’s relations. And they were restrained too, only asking for the occasional shot or a few words. When Gillian saw the piece in the magazine a week later, she had the feeling the whole celebration had been staged. After that she became more wary. But then, after she had been gone from the magazines for a while, she missed the attention, and she agreed when asked for a feature about her home life. Matthias and her in their tidied apartment, reading, cooking, eating, or standing dreamily out on the balcony. We’ve been mugged, she thought, this isn’t our apartment, that isn’t Matthias, this isn’t me. When she saw Matthias’s expression, it suddenly seemed to her as though he was a part of the conspiracy, and had known about it all along.

The following day the sun shone. It was cool outside but almost too warm in the flat. The doctor had told Gillian not to go out in the sun, but she didn’t want to go
out anyway. For lunch she cooked some pasta. Afterward, she ordered food from an online grocery. She filled her virtual basket with things she had steered clear of so far, frozen meals, sausages, potato chips, pastry, white bread, ketchup, and mayonnaise. She bought enough to last her three weeks and paid with her credit card. Gillian started to sort through Matthias’s clothes and shoes. She stuffed them into big garbage bags. It was difficult, on crutches, to get everything into the spare room. She emptied the contents of Matthias’s desk into a cardboard box. Margrit had told her to do whatever she thought best. Sometimes she sat there for minutes, staring at a piece of clothing or some other item.

The deliveryman from the online store came toward evening. There was a ring at the door, and Gillian buzzed him in. When he rang again at the top of the stairs, she called through the door to leave the things outside. The man stood there for a moment and then went away. Only when Gillian heard the engine of the delivery truck downstairs did she cautiously open the door.

She ate a lot over the next weeks. She watched TV, surfed the Net, slept late. Her parents called her on the landline, and when she didn’t pick up, on her mobile. Gillian said she was fine, she needed quiet, and she promised to visit them, next week, or maybe the week after.

Will you call if you need something? asked her mother.

I need time, she said. It’s not about you.

She stopped answering the phone, she didn’t even look at the display when someone called. She deleted
her e-mails as well, without bothering to read them. She waited for Hubert to get in touch, but he didn’t. Presumably he didn’t even know anything had happened to her.

At night, Gillian dreamed of men attacking her and raping her and violating her. Her body exploded, her flesh flew in scraps through the air, the walls were stained with her blood. It was dark in the rooms, and yet everything could be clearly seen. In the middle of the night she woke up. She listened to the darkness. It was perfectly still, but she heard the emptiness just the same. She thought about the times at the end of recording sessions when the soundman said, atmosphere, and everyone froze, so that he could record the silence for a minute.

The days went by like the weather in a constant back-and-forth. It got cold, then warmed up overnight. Once, a lot of snow fell in the space of a few hours, but it all melted away within a day or two. Gillian no longer felt bored. Some mornings she didn’t even get the newspaper out of the mailbox. She spent a lot of time thinking about Matthias and their former life together, but she still couldn’t deal with the fact of his death. Grief came quickly and unexpectedly, a sudden stab of pain that made her reel.

For days she had worn the same pajamas, she didn’t wash or shower, and she lived entirely on junk food. She watched her body change as she put on weight and developed spots on her back and her chin. For the first time in years she was aware of her body odor.

One sunny day she thought she would go for a trip. The late-afternoon light was as golden as it was in
autumn. She rode the elevator down to the basement and followed the passage into the underground garage. She kept stopping to listen, but she couldn’t hear anyone. Her dark green Mini stood where it always stood. She drove to a wood on the edge of the city and parked near a recycling station. A man was coming out of the wood toward the parking lot with his dog. Gillian crouched down and waited. The man opened the door of his car, which stood a couple of spots away from hers, and the dog jumped in. When he had driven away, and there was no one else around, she climbed out and set off. The path led along the edge of the wood. In its interior there were still a few scraps of leftover snow. After a while, Gillian saw a couple approaching with Nordic walking sticks. They were perhaps two hundred yards away. She stopped and looked around. Behind her was a woman pushing a stroller. The underbrush beside the path was fairly dense and difficult to penetrate. She kept her arms up to shield her face, branches scratched her hands. Thereafter it got easier. The ground was thickly covered with dense leaf mulch that gave underfoot. Gillian heard voices, and then she saw through the underbrush that the couple and the woman with the stroller passed each other. She waited a moment longer and then plunged deeper into the wood. The light fell diagonally, making long shadows. Sometimes Gillian stopped and contemplated the silver bark of a tree that looked like the hide of an animal, or a piece of tree root that was worn smooth by the elements. She laid her hand on the cool wood, feeling tiny unevennesses. The terrain became flatter. It was already starting to get
dark, from the nearby zoo she heard animal cries. When she got back to the parking lot it was dark and the streetlights were on.

The following morning Gillian awoke early. It was still dark. She had no sense of her body, only when she moved did a shape gradually come to her. She turned her head to the side, felt her cheek brush against the soft pillowcase, then a leg under the duvet, her other leg, numb, the sole of her foot, the chilly floor, a slight feeling of dizziness. She passed through the rooms as though the apartment were her body, a big prone body, too heavy to pick itself up.

After her first cup of coffee she slowly came around, and under the shower her body knitted itself together to what it was. She vaguely remembered the time she was still growing. Her hips widened, her breasts deepened. It was like one long inhale, a picking herself up. Now she exhaled, for a long time she had done nothing but exhale, sometimes she had the sense of not having any more air in her and still having to go on exhaling.

Every other day or so, Gillian had to go to her doctor to get her dressings changed. In the waiting room, the other patients avoided her eyes. When the doctor said the wounds were healing well, it sounded to her like mockery. After the dressing had been changed, she often went for a drive around the city. Behind the wheel she felt invisible, only waiting at a light sometimes she noticed the driver of a car in the next lane eyeing her and
quickly looking away when she turned. She was drawn to empty spaces, drove to the industrial park on the edge of the city, parked her car at the soccer stadium. There was no one around, only a couple of building machines parked on the gravel. Around the perimeter was a tall wire fence, the gate stood open. She walked in, climbed a wide flight of steps. The stadium was much bigger than it seemed from outside. The stands were empty, tiers of colored seats, blue, orange, gray, and green. She stood there for a while, looking down at the playing surface and trying to imagine the scene when there was a game on and the stands were full of spectators. Another time, she drove up to the top floor of a multistory parking garage. The morning had been dry, but it started raining again at midday. The walls of the garage were cement, with wide spaces through which a powerful wind blew. Gillian got out and made her way among the handful of parked cars. She spun on her own axis, made wide sidesteps as in fencing classes at drama school, leaps forward and back. She occupied the space, as their speech tutor had taught them to do, put out the flat of her hand as though to push the walls away. She accompanied this with long, drawn-out hissing. She felt excited, she didn’t even know why. The space seemed to be too big, it afforded no resistance. In little pattering steps she ran to one of the openings and looked out at the industrial buildings, at the multilane highways packed with traffic bordered by trimmed poplars, at the mountain away in the distance, dimly visible through the downpour. She felt cold.

When she returned to her Mini, she saw a man sitting in one of the parked cars. He sat there motionless. Their
eyes met, and Gillian wondered if he had been watching her entire performance.

The day before the second operation, a Sunday, Gillian visited her parents. She hadn’t seen her mother since the accident. When her mother opened the door and saw her, she turned aside and started crying. Her father stepped up and with an expression of annoyance pushed her mother out of the way.

Come on in, he said.

Her mother said lunch was almost ready, and she disappeared back into the kitchen. Gillian followed her.

The sounds of silverware on the plates seemed so deafeningly loud that Gillian could hardly hear what her parents were saying. The two aged faces contorted themselves to ugly grimaces as they chewed their food, Gillian looked down at her plate, broke up her food in small pieces, which she swallowed, almost without chewing them.

Aren’t you hungry at all?

What’s that?

You’re hardly eating anything.

I’m not hungry. Gillian put down her knife and fork and stood up. I’ll be back in a minute.

As she was shutting the bathroom door behind her, she saw her father get up to refill his plate.

She sat on the toilet and waited. It was cold in the house, she was shivering. Her father kept the thermostat way down, her mother had whispered to her in the kitchen. Her father hadn’t finished eating, but her mother had already started to clear the table. They had their coffee in the living room.
Her father read the newspaper, her mother was sitting next to Gillian in such a way that she couldn’t look at her. Gillian looked at her mother’s hands as she poured coffee, passed her a cup, took one herself, wizened hands too brown for the early season, with age spots and half a dozen rings on her fingers. As a young woman, her mother had been beautiful. Gillian wondered how she coped with the loss of her beauty, and if it was easier when it happened gradually and not just like that. She had read somewhere that most people had a completely false self-image, thinking of themselves as slimmer, younger, and more attractive than they really were. Perhaps to herself her mother was still the beautiful young woman in her wedding picture that stood on the sideboard. Certainly, she still looked after herself, but the futility of her efforts only made her decline sadder.