Nothing but Ghosts

Nothing but Ghosts

Judith Hermann

for Franz

Wouldn’t it be nice

If we could live here

Make this the kind of place

Where we belong

The Beach Boys

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

Ruth (Girlfriends)

Cold-Blue

Acqua Alta

Nothing But Ghosts

Pimp

Where Are You Going?

Love for Ari Oskarsson

About the Author

Also by Judith Hermann

Copyright

About the Publisher

Ruth (Girlfriends)

Ruth said, ‘Promise me that you’ll never start anything with him.’ I still remember the way she looked when she said it, sitting on the chair by the window, bare legs drawn up to her chest. She had showered and washed her hair, and she was in her underwear, a towel wrapped around her head, her face very open, wide, looking at me intently, more amused than worried. She said, ‘Promise me that, OK?’ and I looked past her out of the window at the multi-storey car park across the street. It was raining and already getting dark. The car park sign shone blue and beautiful. I said, ‘Listen, why should I promise? Of course I won’t start anything with him.’ Ruth said, ‘I know. Promise me anyway,’ and I said, ‘I promise,’ and then I looked at her again; she shouldn’t have said that.

I’ve known Ruth all my life.

She had known Raoul for two or three weeks. He had come to do a guest appearance at the theatre where she had a two-year engagement; he wasn’t staying long; perhaps that’s why she was in such a hurry. She phoned me in Berlin – we had shared an apartment until she had to move because of her stint at the theatre. We weren’t good at dealing with being apart. In fact, she called me every evening. I missed her.

I was sitting in the kitchen, which was empty now except for a small table and a chair, staring at the wall while we talked on the phone. There was a little piece of paper she had tacked up on the wall once: ‘Tonight, tonight it’s gonna be the night, the night.’ I kept thinking about taking it down, but then I never did. She had phoned as usual and blurted it right out. ‘I’m in love,’ she said. And then she talked about Raoul, and her voice sounded so happy, she made me feel restless, in a way even nervous, and I had to get up and, still holding the phone, walk through the apartment.

I’d never been interested in her men, nor she in mine. She said, ‘He’s so tall.’ She said all the things you always say, and a few new things too. Being in love this time didn’t seem to be different from her other, earlier infatuations. For a week she and Raoul had been tiptoeing around, stealing glances and trying to be near each other. After a party one night, drunk, they had kissed for the first time in the pedestrian mall of the small town. They kissed behind the scenery during the break between scenes and in the canteen after their colleagues had left and the canteen cook had put up the chairs. Raoul had such soft hands, she said. His head was shaved; sometimes he wore glasses – small, bent metal frames that didn’t suit his face. He looked strange with them on. She said, ‘He’s really more your type, really, exactly your type. You’d faint if you saw him.’

I said, ‘What’s that supposed to mean, my type?’

And Ruth hesitated, giggled, then said, ‘I don’t know, maybe physically? A little common maybe?’

He said nice things to her – ‘The colour of your eyes is the colour of grass when the wind sweeps through it, reversing the blades to white.’ She quoted him reverently; he was also vain, she said (and laughed), like a child in a way. He was playing the part of Caliban in The Tempest. Evening after evening, the audience went wild. He was from Munich. His father died a long time ago. Raoul had studied philosophy. Actually, this summer he was going to Ireland, would sleep in his car, would try to write while sitting on the cliffs with a view of the sea. Raoul. Ruth pronounced it Ra-uhl.

When I visited Ruth – not because of this new love of hers; I would have gone to see her in any case – she picked me up at the railway station and I saw her before she saw me. She was walking along the platform, looking for me. She wore a long, blue dress, her hair pinned up. Her face glowed, and the physical tension, her walk, the way she held her head and her searching gaze expressed an expectation that could in no way ever be meant for me. Nor did she find me, and eventually I simply walked over and stood in front of her.

She was startled but then she hugged me, kissed me, and said, ‘Oh, my dear, my dear.’ The new perfume she was wearing smelled of sandalwood and lemons. I took her hands and held them in mine, I looked into her face; her laughter was very familiar.

Ruth had rented a tiny apartment downtown, an American-style apartment, one room, a kitchenette, a bath. There were no curtains at the big windows; the bathroom was the only place you could hide from the drivers who parked their cars in the multi-storey across the way and then stared over at you for minutes at a time, seemingly absent-mindedly. The room was small, one bed, a rack on which to hang up clothes, a table, two chairs, a stereo system. On the windowsill stood a photo I had given her as a goodbye present, the view from our apartment in Berlin. On the table, a silver ashtray from Morocco, and tucked into the frame of the mirror over the bathroom sink a passport picture of me.

There must have been a moment when I was alone in the apartment – Ruth at the theatre or shopping with Raoul – and I remember that I sat on the chair by the window, on Ruth’s chair, smoking a cigarette and exposing myself to the eyes of the people in the multi-storey; the neon sign flickered, the room was unfamiliar, the stairwell on the other side of the apartment door dark and quiet.

Ruth doesn’t look anything like me. Everything about her is the opposite of me. All the places she’s round and soft and big, I’m skinny and bony and small. My hair is short and dark; hers is very long and light, curly and bouncy. Her face is beautiful, quite simple, and everything is in proportion – her eyes, her nose, her mouth, all in symmetry. The first time I saw her she was wearing a pair of huge sunglasses and even before she took them off I knew what the colour of her eyes would be – green.

I intended to stay three days, go on to Paris, and then return to Berlin. Back then I would often travel to foreign cities, stay for an aimless, dogged week and leave again. While we were still at the railway station, Ruth said, ‘Stay a little longer, won’t you?’

It was a small town and easy to get your bearings in. The pedestrian zone was right behind the station; the theatre was on the market square; and the church steeple was always visible above the roofs. Taking my suitcase Ruth regarded me closely; she said she was worried that I might become cynical – disparaging and arrogant about the pedestrian zone, the Tchibo coffee bar, the department store, the hotel in the market square – this place where she’d be living for the next two years. I had to laugh; I was far from becoming cynical; I envied her these two years in a small town, without really being able to explain why.

We sat down in an Italian cafe, ordered strawberry ice cream with whipped cream, coffee and water; I lit a cigarette and turned my face up to the late summer sun. I thought, ‘I could feel more carefree in a small town.’ The waiter brought two small coffeepots, dishes of ice cream, glasses, and looked at Ruth, enthralled; she didn’t notice. Me, he ignored. Ruth was restless; didn’t finish her ice cream, ordered another coffee, kept glancing up and down the pedestrian zone, a rushed, hurried, searching glance at the people there, back to my face, and away again.

Then she smiled. ‘It’s awful, awful, awful,’ she said, looking not at all unhappy. ‘You have to tell me what you think of him, all right?’ she said. ‘You have to be honest.’ And I said, ‘Ruth – ’ and she said, very serious, ‘It’s important to me.’ Things had become more difficult with Raoul last week; there was a fight, a stupid misunderstanding, all in the past now, and yet…Evidently there was some sort of ex-wife in Munich with whom he had long telephone conversations while Ruth was in the room; from time to time he withdrew, didn’t keep dates, or arrived late, was sometimes untalkative, sullen and then again euphoric, impatient, intoxicated with Ruth’s beauty.

She wasn’t sure what he wanted from her; she said, ‘Maybe he only wants to go to bed with me.’ Up to that point he hadn’t yet done that. And there were these rumours. Someone said he had a reputation and it wasn’t the best. Actually something like that wouldn’t rattle Ruth. Still, she said, ‘I don’t want to become his trophy, you know?’ looking at me so innocently and openly that I was almost ashamed, ashamed for myself, for Raoul, for the rest of the world. I said, ‘Ruth, that’s silly, you’re not a trophy. Nobody is going to betray you, and nobody wants to prey on you; that much I know.’ I meant it sincerely, and for the moment Ruth looked comforted and reassured. She took my hand and said, ‘And you? How are you?’

As always, I evaded the question and, as always, she allowed me to be evasive, and then we sat there like that, sleepy in the afternoon light, feeling close. Towards seven o’clock Ruth had to go to the theatre, and I went with her.

Ruth, sleeping. When we shared our first apartment – how many years ago? was it five, ten? – we slept in one bed. Often we went to bed at the same time, lay next to each other, face to face, Ruth’s eyes dark and shiny in the night; she would whisper half-sentences, hum softly, then I would fall asleep. I could never have gone to sleep like that with a man; I don’t know whether Ruth could. Her sleep was deep and sound, heavy and motionless. She always lay on her back, her long hair fanned out around her head, her face relaxed, like a portrait. She breathed quietly and slowly. I always woke up before she did and then I lay there, my head supported on my hand, watching her. I remember that once, during one of our rare arguments, I threatened to cut off her hair while she slept. I don’t want to believe that I could ever have said something like that, but I know it’s true.

Ruth owned a nightmarishly huge metal alarm clock; its earsplitting ring was the only thing that could actually wake her. The alarm clock stood on her side of the bed, and even though I was always awake first, I never woke her up but let the crazy ringing do it; she emerged from sleep visibly tormented, opened her eyes, hit the ‘off button on the alarm, and immediately groped for the cigarettes she always put next to her side of the bed at night. She would light one, sink back into the pillows, smoke, sigh, and at some point she would say, ‘Good morning.’ Later, in other apartments and other beds, she gave up smoking in the morning. Maybe because by then we were no longer waking up together.

Ruth was playing the role of Eliante in Molièere’s Misanthrope. I had seen her in many productions while she was an acting student at the academy. As a Viking king in Ibsen’s The Vikings of Heligoland her small form was wrapped in a bear pelt and her hair arranged like a cloud around her head. She was carried on stage on a sea of lances and bellowed her soul out for two hours. As Lady Macbeth she was suspended head down by silken threads in front of a white wall and made fishlike gliding motions with her hands. But I thought she was strangest as Mariedl in Schwab’s Lady Presidents, scarcely recognizable in a grey house-cleaning smock, cowering under a table. Ruth was a good actress, a comedienne with great stage presence, very physical, but she was always Ruth to me; I recognized her, her face, her voice, her posture.

Perhaps it was because I was always trying so hard to recognize her – the Ruth who dressed in the morning, slowly, carefully, one item after the other, then looked in the mirror with that special expression intended only for the mirror, and always sideways. The Ruth who drank her coffee holding the cup with both hands and not setting it down till she had emptied it, the way she smoked, made up her eyelashes, smiled into the receiver with her head tilted to one side when she was on the phone.

She had wanted to impersonate me, do a portrait study of me, and she followed me around for three days with a scholarly expression on her face, imitating my movements until I stopped, stood stock still in a corner of the room, and yelled at her to quit it. Later she imperson-ated her mother with a precision and attention to detail that made me shudder.

The staging of The Misanthrope was straightforward and faithful to the original, far removed from the chaotic and improvisational student productions. At first I was bored; then I found it beautiful, perhaps because, for the first time, I saw Ruth as if from afar, unencumbered by pretentious suspensions from steel scaffolding. She was wearing a kind of white children’s sailor suit with her hair twisted into a braid; her face was clearly defined, thoughtful and sensible. Perhaps her voice was a little too trembly for Eliante, too cracked, as if she were choking, and not quite authentic: ‘That isn’t really how love works at all for most people. You find that a man in love always justifies his own choice. His passion makes him blind to all faults and in his eyes everything in the woman he loves is lovable. He counts her defects as perfections or finds flattering names for them.’

I was disappointed and at the same time relieved not to see her in the role of Céelimèene, the foolish, vulnerable, loving Céelimèene. There was sustained applause after each act; but, then, I had expected nothing less in this small town. Ruth took a deep bow, beaming, radiant. She had a new habit of immediately running off stage like a child; in other productions she had gone off hesitantly and reluctantly.

I remained in my seat till the last person in the audience had left the auditorium. The stagehands were beginning to dismantle the sets and the lights were turned off. Dust rained down onto the stage. There were times when I had envied Ruth her talent, her profession, the applause, the possibility of fame. But this envy faded at some point when I realized that I was absolutely unsuited, really quite impossible, for the theatre. I sat in the empty row of seats, leaning forwards, and tried to understand Ruth, to understand what she was doing here, how she worked, what she felt. I couldn’t, didn’t understand a thing, and then I stood up and went to the theatre canteen. Raoul’s performance on the second stage would be finished at about eleven o’clock; Ruth had asked me to wait with her for him.

On the day she moved out of the apartment we shared and left Berlin for this small town, I was in no state to carry even a single box out to the removal van. Her entire family had come to help with the move, her mother, her two sisters, and her brother and his wife. We all had breakfasted together; it was January and the harsh winter sunlight streamed pitilessly through the windows. I had tried to draw out breakfast as long as possible but then it was over, and everybody got up and began to pack Ruth’s things, while I sat as if turned to stone in my chair at the table, with the remains of our breakfast. I clutched the arms of the chair; I couldn’t move; couldn’t even get up.

Ruth’s family worked around me; they pushed bureaus, chairs, cartons across the room, carried Ruth’s suitcases and boxes, her bed, her bookshelves, her kitchen cupboard, her desk, all of her things, down the three flights of stairs, all the while making it clear how impossible and rude they thought I was. I couldn’t help it; I sat there motionless, mute.

The apartment door was wide open, and cold air swept in from time to time. Ruth briefly came over, putting her dirty hand on my cheek; then she left again. When everything was packed, one of her sisters put the breakfast dishes into the last of the removal boxes and managed to get the table outside as well. Eggshells, a jam jar and one coffee cup were left on the floor. I got up. The family disappeared down the stairwell; in the van Ruth’s brother blew the horn. Ruth put on her coat; we stood facing each other in the empty hall, then we embraced. She said, ‘See you soon.’ Or maybe I said it. Then she left. I closed the apartment door behind her and stood there until I was certain they were gone.

For a long time I didn’t know what to do with Ruth’s room. It stood empty for a month, two months, three. At some point I began using it to watch Super 8 home movies. I would sit on a chair, the projector humming, and on the white wall a child, supposedly me once upon a time, walked across a sand dune. In May or June, I moved my bed into Ruth’s room, to the same spot where hers had stood.

The theatre canteen was small, stuffy and filled with cigarette smoke. It had Formica-topped tables, wooden benches, spherical light fixtures and mirrored walls that did nothing to make the room look larger. Instead it seemed smaller in a labyrinthine, chaotic way. The stagehands were sitting at tables in the rear, the actors in the front. Behind the counter, a fat woman, who was the cook and looked dead tired, drew beer from the tap. Ruth was nowhere to be seen.

I sat down at the only unoccupied table, ordered a cup of coffee and a glass of wine, not sure whether I wanted to wake up or get drunk. I wondered where my suitcase was. Ruth had taken it either into her dressing room or left it with the doorman. Suddenly I wanted to have my things back again, my book, my appointment calendar. I felt insecure sitting at this table, a stranger, someone who had absolutely nothing to do with the theatre. I looked over at the actors; there was no one sitting there who was ‘so tall’ with a shaved skull and a face at once childish and manly, and then the canteen door opened and he came in.

I recognized him instantly. It was a two-fold recognition, and it was so unmistakable that impulsively I actually ducked, hunching my shoulders and drawing in my head. I hastily moved my chair out of the circle of light cast by the ceiling lamps, and he walked by me without noticing me and sat down with the actors, who seemed delighted to see him. He took off his jacket without getting up, a suede jacket with a brown fur collar. Touching someone’s arm, he laughed, spoke, I could hear his voice distinctly among all the other voices. I tried not to listen; I would rather have seen him first with Ruth, Raoul as Ruth’s Raoul. You have to tell me what you think of him.

I searched for my cigarettes in my coat pockets; the cigarettes weren’t there; they were in my bag, probably in Ruth’s dressing room; I felt a brief flash of anger. I wanted to analyse what I was feeling, to examine some particular thought, and a cigarette might have helped. I could still hear his voice and I could see his face in the mirror, an alert, open face; he wasn’t wearing his glasses; his look was one of attentive concentration, the dark eyes narrowed; there were remnants of white theatrical make-up at his temples. His profile, on the other hand, was not beautiful, but dull, complacent and ordinary, a protruding chin, a low forehead. He really was very tall, his body heavy and massive, and he had coarse hands with which he gesticulated and rubbed his shaved head. I could hear Ruth’s voice – I don’t know, physically, maybe a bit common – I knew what she had meant to say, but that’s not what he was. I stared at him. I thought I knew everything there was to know about him and yet nothing at all. I carefully moved my chair back to the table. My breathing was shallow, soft; suddenly I felt at a loss. Then the door opened and Ruth came in.

She came in and saw Raoul immediately. Her eyes went straight to him, and her face took on an expression that was new to me, and then she looked over the heads of the others, across the room until finally she saw me. She made an indecipherable signal with her right hand, stopped at the counter and ordered a beer. She was standing very erect, like someone who thinks she is being watched, but Raoul hadn’t even seen her yet. Then she came over to my table, sat down next to me, thirstily drank some beer, put the glass down, and said, ‘How was it?’ and then, ‘Did you see him?’ I said clearly, ‘By any chance would you have a cigarette?’ and she raised her eyebrows, irritated, then smiled and pulled some cigarettes from her pocket.

She was wearing her blue dress again, her hair still in the Eliante hairdo; she looked beautiful, tired; she said, ‘It’s good that you’re here.’ And then again, ‘Did you see him?’ She nodded her head in his direction, and I said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘He’s already here, he’s sitting over there.’ I said, ‘Where?’ She whispered, ‘At the third table on the left in the middle.’ I lit my cigarette, repeated to myself the words we had just exchanged – did you see him, no, did you see him, where – turned my head and looked over at Raoul, and just then he turned round in our direction.

He looked at Ruth and smiled, and Ruth smiled back while she pressed her leg against mine under the table. I puffed on my cigarette, I said, ‘I really liked the play’; I said it again. Raoul got up. It looked as though he wanted to excuse himself from the others, was held back, pulled himself away, came over to our table, slowly, calmly, all the while very clearly presenting his body, his entire person. I looked away, and then I looked back; somehow I felt embarrassed. Raoul sat down, he could have sat next to Ruth, but he took the chair across from us. Ruth introduced me, and we shook hands across the table; I quickly pulled mine back. Under the table Ruth’s leg kept pressing against mine. He said, ‘Ruth told me a lot about you,’ and he smiled; his eyes revealed nothing even though they were fixed directly on mine for a long time. The cook called out his name, ‘Raauuul,’ like a howl. He got up again and went over to the counter. Ruth said, ‘Good Lord,’ and then, ‘What do you think; quick, tell me,’ and I had to laugh and I said, ‘Ruth, I met him less than sixty seconds ago.’

He returned with a plate of soup, sat down again, and began to eat, saying nothing. Ruth watched him as though she had never seen anyone eat before, so I watched him too; I had no choice. Actually his eating was quite odd; perhaps he had some particular role in mind, a special way of eating, a Franciscan monk at a wooden table in the refectory of his monastery, a South Tyrolean peasant holding a tin plate on his lap, or something equally absurd. He ate bent forwards over his food in stolid absorption. He slurped and carried his spoon to his mouth and back to the plate with the regularity of a machine, swallowed noisily, and none of us said a word until he had finished. Then he pushed away the empty plate, and for a moment I expected him to emit a loud burp, but the performance was over. He seemed to be a master of brevity. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaned back, smiled at us, and said, ‘Well, how are you?’

The tone of voice in which Ruth said ‘All right, thanks’ was new to me; it had a note of stiffness and insecurity that I hadn’t heard before; she seemed nervous, testy, and there was a strained expression around her mouth. ‘How did the performance go?’ Raoul asked; actually he was making it easy for her, he asked it pleasantly, showing real interest, and Ruth answered sarcastically, ‘As usual, a roaring success.’ She made a disparaging face, as though to indicate that the small-town public was an undemanding one, an attitude I knew was foreign to her. ‘I didn’t have to give it my all.’ With that she finally moved her leg away from mine and looked around the canteen with feigned nonchalance. Raoul smiled, still pleasantly; it seemed that he neither expected this kind of capri-ciousness from her nor found it appropriate. Ruth, however, was sticking to that line, or perhaps she couldn’t backtrack; it was as though she wanted to prove something to him.