Sea Air (6 page)

Dearest Mathis and Uwe,

We are so happy that you both like the sea so much and that we don’t have to worry about you. Father has a lot of work to do, and I’m working to make the house a little nicer. You will feel right at home when you get back. The construction is going well, and you won’t believe how fast things are improving. Keep being good and have a nice time. We send you both big hugs.

Mother, Father, Anna, and Jürgen

Stunned, Mathis put down the letter and stared straight ahead. He couldn’t believe it. Not one word about when their family would be coming to the sea. Hadn’t they understood his letter? Maybe they hadn’t gotten it. He couldn’t believe what was happening. Mathis and Uwe stood up from the breakfast table and slipped back to their room. They didn’t even want to go when Harm offered to take them to the beach.

“What’s gotten into you two? The sun is in the sky and you’d rather sit in a dark old room?”

Wordlessly, Mathis handed Harm the letter.

“You’re feeling a little homesick, is that it?” Harm handed the letter back without reading it. “Your Momma really misses you, I’ll bet.”

“No! I mean, of course she misses us. But it’s not that. Uwe and I don’t want to go back. We want to stay here now. Father could be the lighthouse keeper. Why doesn’t he want to do that? We could all be together . . .” Mathis covered his face in his hands as the tears came.

“You know what really helps me when I’m sad?”

The boys looked at Harm as he pulled a harmonica out of his pocket and began to play a happy sailor song.

He stopped. “Do you want to try?”

“Can we really?” Uwe forgot his sadness for the moment.

Mathis stared at the shiny instrument. Harm put the harmonica in his hand and Mathis touched it carefully with one finger, as if it were a fragile treasure. After an encouraging nod from Harm, he pressed it slowly to his lips and blew into it, gently at first and then a little stronger.

Uwe covered his ears. “Let me! I can do it better!” He grabbed the harmonica out of Mathis’s hands and blew into it himself.

“Well, that isn’t the prettiest sound I’ve heard come out of a harmonica, but it might be the loudest.” Harm laughed. “Bring it to the beach and I’ll show you how to play it properly.”

He didn’t have to ask twice. The boys’ sadness was forgotten. If they were going to be real sailors, they had to learn to play the harmonica!

Harm was a good and patient teacher. By that evening, Mathis and Uwe could each play a short melody. Proudly, they sauntered back to the children’s home. Harm had promised them that he would teach them a little bit more every day, and by the time the day of departure arrived, each of them could—with just a few off notes here and there—play “Wir lagen vor Madagaskar.”

The end of the holiday was inevitable, and the time came for the children to return home. The farewell to the North Sea, and especially to their friend Harm Voss, was so difficult that even Harm’s kind words could not comfort them and they couldn’t keep themselves from crying. At the train platform, they clung so tightly to Harm that he had no choice but to push them gently into their compartment.

“Come back and visit now, you two. I’ll want to see if you really practiced the harmonica.”

Mathis sobbed loudly. “But we don’t even have a harmonica!”

“You do now.” Harm held up his own instrument. “This one.”

As the train pulled out of the station, Mathis clutched the harmonica so tightly his knuckles turned white. Harm stood on the platform and waved, and they watched him until the train took the first curve. Then he was gone.

Mathis had never felt so lost. He hunched down in his seat and didn’t speak during the whole journey home
. I will come back and become a sailor,
he vowed over and over again as the train took him away from the place he’d come to love. And indeed, the love he and Uwe had discovered for the North Sea would never leave them.

O
h my God, it had happened again. I looked in dismay at the novel in my hands, then dropped it on the floor. I had read yet another chapter without registering a word. I knew what my problem was: I was alone after spending five beautiful days with Mathis, taking long bike rides and endless walks on the beach, exploring local restaurants. We had talked not just about ourselves, but also about larger things like God and the world. I still knew little about Mathis’s present life. He didn’t seem to want to talk about it.

Even the most boring shows on TV had failed to put me to sleep the night before. It already felt like this would be the longest day of my life. Today I wouldn’t see Mathis. He said last night that he had to take care of his boat today. Even worse, we’d made no further plans, and I didn’t even know if I would see him again. He said nothing about it and I was too afraid to ask. I was calling myself every name in the book now as punishment for my cowardice, but what was the point? I had no idea where to find his boat, I didn’t even know where he was staying, and I sure didn’t know where he’d be going after his vacation was over. We had tiptoed around this question for days, as it had nothing to do with us now. The thought that he had a wife and children at home made me feel truly ill, so I’d done everything possible to ignore reality and pretend our time together would last forever.

I gave up my whole morning to daydreaming, and of course, all my dreams centered on the nonsailor, Mathis. Every effort I made to distract myself failed. I might as well admit it: I was in love, as I’d been countless times before.

But this time felt different because Mathis himself was different. When I was with him, even a conversation about the weather couldn’t be boring. For days I’d felt a repeated quickening of my heart and butterflies in my stomach.

Yes, I was in love. There was no going back. So, now what? My life was complicated enough. I didn’t need to be in love with a married man. And that wasn’t the only problem. I figured he was more than twenty years my senior. Maybe that was part of what drew me: his experience with life, his maturity, and most of all the sense of peace he showed and that I felt when I was with him. I’d never felt as though I was on the same wavelength as a guy before. Mathis was the one person who’d ever made me feel this way. He could be the love of my life . . . if he wasn’t already married to someone else and with kids to boot. A love story without a future was par for the course in my life. I should have listened to my conscience and not my heart. Crap. I wished someone could tell me what to do.

Sandra! She’d know what I should do. Maybe. But what if she gave me bad advice? Reluctantly, I grabbed my phone. It was time to check in with Paula, anyway. While I was talking to her, I could keep pondering whether I wanted to open up to Sandra about what was going on with me.

“Nele? I’m so glad you called! We’re sitting right on the Baltic Sea beach, having a picnic. I tell you, I could stay here and . . .”

“Me, too!” I heard. “Is that Momma?” I heard the sound of the phone being handed off, then Paula’s voice again, more clearly this time.

“Hi, Momma! It’s so cool here! Anneke says so, too. We’re having the best picnic on the beach. I want to live on the beach, then we can have picnics on it all the time. Have you had a picnic on the beach yet?”

“Not exactly, but—”

“I bet it’s really boring where you are.”

“Oh, I do plenty of fun things, like . . .” I heard more rustling on the other end of the line. “Paula, are you there?”

“No, it’s me,” Sandra said. “Sorry, my mouth’s full. Are things okay there?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? Are you sick? I thought you’d be enjoying your free time. What’s going on, Nele?”

“I fell in love,” I admitted.

“You . . .” Sandra lowered her voice to a whisper.
“You fell in love?
Wait, I’m taking you into the water right now.” I said a silent word of thanks. Everybody in Rügen didn’t need to know about my love life. Especially not my daughter.

“Who is he? I mean . . . wow. Falling in love while on vacation? I’ve got to hand it to you. What’s the lucky guy’s name?”

“Mathis. But I’m not really sure if he feels lucky.”

“Wait, but you’re happy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh Nele, stop beating around the bush. Is this going to be one of those beautifully romantic but horribly complicated stories that ends with you crashing and burning . . .
again
?”

“It looks like it.”

“Great. Okay, start at the beginning. What’s the problem this time?”

“He’s married.”

“Aren’t they all. Any kids?”

“Three.”

“Oh, dear. Now
that’s
a real problem. And how old is this guy?”

“Late fifties, I think.”

Silence. It seemed that this time I’d really shocked Sandra. I figured she was doing some quick math before she started nagging.

But she surprised me. “So are his children already grown up then, or what?” she asked.

Grown up? I hadn’t even considered this possibility. Children were children, as far as I was concerned. But Sandra was right. If Mathis was almost sixty, they would already be adults. He’d said nothing about the ages of his children. So, maybe . . .

“Huh. Maybe you’re right.”

“What? You don’t know? You didn’t even
ask
?”

“I didn’t have the nerve.”

“But he wants to keep his wife?”

“Don’t know.”

“Oh, Nele. How long have you known him? Ten minutes?”

“Five days.”

“And in those five days, all you’ve learned is that a woman named Nele has fallen in love with him but is too chicken to learn anything about him.”

“You think I should ask him?”

“Why would you? It’s such a little, irrelevant detail.”

“Okay, okay. You’re right.” Embarrassed, I chewed on a fingernail. I didn’t know anything about Mathis’s situation. This was just like me. I was always getting worked up about things, even when there wasn’t anything to get worked up about.

“When will you be seeing him again?”

“I don’t actually know.”

“Of course you don’t,” Sandra said. “Have you slept with him? And don’t say ‘I don’t know’ again, please.”

“No.”

“Well then, this is serious for him.”

“You think?”

“Just listen to yourself. He could have had you a long time ago if all he wanted was a little adventure.”

“And you really think he’s serious about me?”

“Unless he’s gay.”

“Or impotent,” I countered.

“Or both.”

“Or he doesn’t love me.”

“Or he’s Catholic.”

“Or he’s—”

“Nele, sweetie, why don’t you start with finding out who he is and what he wants from you. Once you know what’s really going on, this love thing might just sort itself out.”

“You’re right, Sandra. I’ll do that. Thank you so much, and I’ll see you soon. Give Paula a kiss for me.”

“Ciao, and good luck! I’m keeping my fingers crossed for you!”

“Thanks. I’ll take all the luck I can get.”

“You really love him?”

“I actually think I do.”

“All right then. Go find out whether or not he deserves you.”

Of course, none of this really changed anything. But Sandra was right, as usual. I couldn’t just sit around and pretend I didn’t have urgent questions that needed answering before I rushed into something that might hurt me in the end. But how should I go about getting answers? I didn’t know whether Mathis thought about me when we weren’t together, or if he felt the way I did.

I hated being so cowardly! It had always been this way. I’d lived my whole life by the motto that what I don’t know won’t hurt me. Things always looked clearer in hindsight, and living in a dream world seemed less painful than falling flat on my face, especially when it came to romance. My early love life had been such a mess, I now privately called myself Germany’s Greatest Loser.

Take Heiner, for example. My face flushed at the memory of him. How had I ever let myself end up with a guy like him? Even in bed he’d been a disaster. It had taken me nearly six years and a few hundred terrible sexual encounters with him to figure this out. Yet, I’d been sure I would marry him. My prospective in-laws had bought us a beautiful set of silver—the best quality that money could buy. I had the pieces engraved with the initials of my future married name, then packed them in my hope chest along with similarly monogrammed towels and bed linen. I had resigned myself to the idea that the ultra-erotic sex scenes in novels and films were the things of fantasy. I believed that, in real life, orgasms were for men and were intended primarily for the purpose of reproduction.

That was before I met Jean-Michel in the Caribbean, where I’d gone to study for six months. He was almost constantly stoned, yet I was helpless under his beautiful dark hands. I’d gone to the island to study local urban planning but wound up devoting most of my time to studying the wonders of the male anatomy. The trip was worth every minute. “
Ici, tu es devenue femme,”
Jean-Michel said just before he put me on the plane back to Germany. Here you became a woman.

Ludger, too, had been taken with my femininity when he selected me as one of the women he’d chosen to receive his affections. With his good looks and apparent future as a wealthy doctor, I figured I’d hit the jackpot. Then he began using my savings to buy the silk blouses and underwear he insisted I wear, even as he complained about the size of my thighs. I never had the sort of legs that looked good in short skirts and fishnet stockings, but if I wasn’t wearing these items, he informed me, he simply couldn’t take me to the oyster-and-champagne parties held on the yachts of his colleagues, who would be world famous one day and might even invite him to the Nobel Prize ceremonies he was sure were in their futures.

Perhaps that’s why I fell for Paula’s father, who loved the way I looked in the clearance rack men’s shirts I favored. He had no desire to show off his millions, he said, because he was a communist and a fighter for social justice. He was so determined to hide his alleged wealth that he decided instead to live on my meager salary. If the tax office became aware of his fortune, that would cause a financial setback to the imminent socialist world revolution. He became fairly sedated by drug use and believed he was a target of both capitalists and Nazis. He wanted to keep Paula and me in the apartment so his enemies couldn’t kidnap us—and so no other men could approach us. We should need no one but him, he said, and if we talked about this with anyone, he would make sure our telephone was disconnected. I couldn’t let Paula grow up with such a crazy person in her life, so I kicked him out. A thousand euros and at least ten pounds lighter, I began my new life. He insulted and threatened me for a while, but eventually he left us alone and found another sucker willing to believe his stories and join him in preparing—and paying—for the world revolution he saw coming.

It’s no wonder, then, that after this relationship, I ascribed all the world’s evils to the presence of men and gave them a wide berth. At least, I did until Steffen reappeared in my life. We lived together in a shared apartment during college, and he felt something for me even then. But at the time he was in a relationship with another woman, and I was caught up in my own ongoing relationship drama. A few years after graduation, we ran into each other again in the city. We started having coffee together, and this progressed to movie dates and then parties. Eventually, Paula and I moved in with him—to the delight of my mother, who had always wanted a doctor as a son-in-law. Steffen was a member of a successful local practice. Again, I thought I’d found the man of my dreams. But then he wanted me to quit working since he could provide for Paula and me, and he wanted more children—but I wasn’t ready. I felt trapped. Although I still loved him and found him sexually irresistible, the pressure drove me crazy, and eventually Paula and I moved out.

I hoped things could be different with Mathis, but if I was going to move forward, I had to be assured of his good intentions—assuming that he had any. I decided then and there that the next time I saw him, I’d ask questions until I was completely satisfied with his answers, and if he didn’t cooperate, I’d walk out and never look back. If he didn’t come clean, I’d be done with him for good.

Of course, things didn’t go quite as planned. For two long days, I didn’t hear from him. It was like he’d vanished from the earth. I stared at my silent phone and even had Sandra call me to make sure that it was still working. It was. But where Mathis was concerned, it remained silent.

In the end, I decided I couldn’t take it anymore and turned my phone off altogether. Alone again. No cell phone, and no man.

The next island ferry was scheduled to leave at eleven a.m. On my way to the ferry terminal, I passed the newspaper kiosk and bought some daily papers. For more than a week, I had remained ignorant about world events, and I figured that reading a newspaper would be a good way to return to harsh reality. I was right. Nothing had changed. Murder, manslaughter, and other catastrophes, both political and natural, still ruled the headlines. Unmoved by my personal disasters, world events continued their relentless march, and no one seemed able to make things better. Did anyone even want to? I wondered. I looked at the other ferry passengers, but nothing I saw changed my dubious view of the ability of humans to coexist peacefully.

In the battle for a coveted spot at the bow of the ship, it seemed there were no rules. Knees collided with strollers, sharp elbows poked ribs, and hostile children pulled on other little girls’ braids while outraged parents furiously defended their children’s right to a spot at the railing. When it was time to disembark, the scene repeated itself in reverse, as those at the bow shoved past the other passengers in order to be the first to reach solid ground.

I spent a few hours at the island’s beach, sunbathing and missing Paula. I wished she was with me so we could build a sand castle or have a picnic. I thought about driving to Rügen, but it was too late in the day to start. When my stomach started to growl, I decided to go look for something to eat. The small island town was thick with tourists, but finally I managed to get a small table in a terribly overcrowded restaurant. At the table next to mine, a child’s voice started to whine.