Alice (12 page)

Tell him Alice is here, she whispered. He raised his eyebrows, put the receiver to his good ear, and listened. No one there? Would someone have to break down the door? Did Frederick need a little more time so that he could change his mind about the whole thing? After all he'd had to learn to do without.

Alice knew that Frederick, sitting in the armchair next to the suddenly ringing telephone, must have flinched in shock. Even though he had been waiting for it to ring. Just because of that. The abrupt shock. His heart pounding, the theoretical acknowledgement of futility.

Alice is here, the clerk said. Almost pleading. He had been given the key word, knew the text. He nodded, listened some more, a pained half-smile on his lips. Then he replaced the receiver. Looking at Alice, looking right through her, he said, The gentleman is coming down to the lobby. Right away.

Alice didn't know where to go. She was standing in front of the elevator, in the middle of the lobby, the reception desk to her right and the breakfast room to her left. Circling the elevator were the stairs, a cabaret stairway with wide steps, the banister rail of dark wood and golden diagonal posts. Would Frederick take the elevator or the stairs? Either way he'd be making an entrance. The elevator was waiting on
the fourth floor; the digital display above the elevator door remained steadily on the number 4. The lobby floor was paved with black and white tiles, freshly washed, showing distinctly the tracks left by Alice's shoes and her dripping umbrella. An old woman was pushing a cart full of wrinkled, soiled laundry past the reception desk down the long hall. Umbrellas swam by outside the windows; it seemed to be getting dark already. The hotel clerk yawned like a tired child. He undid the foil wrapper around a stick of chewing gum and pushed it into his mouth. Sucking on it thoughtfully. In the breakfast room the waitresses were crawling around on their hands and knees under the tables. They straightened tablecloths, flower arrangements, cinnamon sticks, and dried orange slices. They bumped their heads, pulled their braids tight with both hands.

Alice switched the bag from her right shoulder to the left, took the umbrella into her left hand. She thought of her grandmother who all her life had had a recurring dream in which she was in a large room, sitting at a festive table set only for her, in front of a tureen made of the finest porcelain. When she raised the lid, there in the white bowl was a black, multi-legged, unusually intricately equipped insect, stretching out and flicking up its shiny feelers. Tentacles. Tendrils like wire. In the autumn, Alice's grandmother liked raking the leaves of the nut trees, leathery leaves, the smell of earth and oil. Every other year, there would be nuts, shrivelled and plentiful; they would lie spread out on newspapers by the window, and at noon the sun would shine for an hour on their shrivelled husks. Her grandmother
had supported the first small sunflower stems with paint brushes, tying the stems to the brushes with thread. When she came downstairs to the kitchen after her midday nap, her bronze bracelet clattered on the banister. She believed in the nerve-strengthening power of bananas. In the evenings she played Napoleon patience and, despairing when it didn't come out, would leaf through a French grammar book to compensate, rustling the yellowed pages until her eyes closed. Then she would feel for the switch inside the shade of the cast-iron lamp that had been her mother's and her mother's mother's before that and afterwards had been Malte's, and then again hers and now Alice's. Alice's grandmother had died in a hospital even though she had expressly asked to be allowed to die at home. In her last hour of life she had spoken steadily and insistently, but Alice hadn't understood a single word because the nurses refused to put her grandmother's teeth back in her mouth – saying she might have a convulsion and choke to death. That's how it was. Then, later, Alice was handed a plastic bag containing her grandmother's cardigan, a pair of shoes, and the bronze bracelet. She had turned down the offer to say goodbye to her one more time in the morgue the following day.

Her grandmother wouldn't have said anything about the meeting between Alice and Frederick. Neither for nor against it, not the one nor the other. Alice thought that her grandmother, in her old age, had been a happy person in a humble way. Frederick came down the stairs. An old man. Very fine hair, white, almost gleaming, and Alice realised with amazement that she had actually assumed he would be
young. As young as he had been almost forty years ago. She had assumed Frederick had stopped ageing when Malte died. That his story had stopped at the point where hers began. She made an almost apologetic movement towards him, and Frederick let go of the banister on the last step and came towards her, his gaze focused attentively on Alice's face – and Alice knew that he would be disappointed at finding no external resemblance between her and Malte, not the least. On the other hand it was no longer possible to know what Frederick had looked like back then. On the porch. Light, shadow, and light, alternating on his features. But despite all that, they looked at each other. Shook hands and their touching was encouraging, it was what was left to them.

Well now, let's go outside for a bit, Frederick said. He had a slight squint. Sounded indulgent, and he smiled that way too. Good thing you brought an umbrella, he said.

They walked together along the river. The voices of the tourist guides on the excursion boats floated across the water, fragmented and windblown, …
once stood here
,
used to be
,
will be and is today
. Frederick walked under the umbrella Alice held over him, every now and then sticking his face out into the rain. He was shorter than she was. They walked slowly. He was carrying a plastic bag with something in it. No coat over his blue suit. Alice thought he would dissolve if it weren't for the umbrella she was holding over him. Dissolve and run like watercolours, different hues of
blue: marine, hyacinth, hydrangea. An express train roared across the bridge. Pigeons flew up. Signals. Departure and arrival. The river water lapped against the bulwark, carrying trash, paper and bottles. Building cranes swayed next to the Tränenpalast. Frederick said, This time I'd like to go to the Bode Museum. Back then, he paused, it wasn't possible. But I'm going there this afternoon. It was not an invitation for her to go with him.

They sat across from each other, the only customers in a dimly lit café, Alice drinking tea, Frederick too, no sugar, no milk. The waitress behind the counter was reading a book. At Frederick's request she had turned off the radio. An ice crystal was rotating with psychedelic slowness on the computer screen of the cash register. Now and then Alice gazed at Frederick, his white, feathery light hair, his reflective glasses, his skin dark and meticulously shaved, an expression of weariness and arrogance around the mouth. Also a childish look of hurt feelings. He had a problem with swallowing. Coughed frequently. His hands looked soft, carefully cut fingernails and a signet ring showing a rising or a setting sun.

Alice wondered what Malte would have looked like today. What sort of mood, what sort of shape would he be in. Her homosexual uncle. No children, unmarried. A long table of scarred wood, the smell of oil paints, turpentine, varnish, sticks of charcoal, hand-rolled cigarettes, pale, transparent cigarette paper as thin as tissue, and tobacco, black and dry. A slightly acrid smell that clung to his
fingertips for a long time, the index and middle fingertips on his right hand tinted yellow. An inclination towards ending it all. He would have pushed aside the papers, cups, ashtrays, and sticks of charcoal to make room for her at his table. Alice thought, I would have gone to see him, lovesick. Would have picked up a short, cynical remark of consolation. An indication. And she realised with amazement that she missed Malte, that his departure had spread into her life, even if only as an illusion, a projection aimed almost into nothingness.

How is your father? Frederick asked. He spoke past Alice, through the window. Wait a minute – yes, yes, your father, Christian, Malte's brother.

He's well, Alice said automatically. He's well.

And Alice? He pronounced the name of Alice's grandmother as if he had forgotten that Alice had the same name. True. It wasn't the same. Not the same name.

Alice has been dead a long time already, Alice said. She stumbled inwardly, but only over the short, dry word. It wasn't as if she were talking about herself, it had never been like that. Her grandmother had been dead for almost twenty years. That was hard to believe; she had to repeat it. Alice died twenty years ago. But she wasn't sick for long. She felt fine, almost to the end.

I'm glad, Frederick said. She was very gentle. Your grandmother. A gentle, wise, and patient woman, extraordinarily patient, considering what a hard time she had. And not only with Malte.

Alice's grandmother had not been gentle. Or patient.

Those weren't the right words, not at all. But Alice didn't contradict him; she hadn't known her as Malte's mother. Had no image of the woman who walked out on the porch of the house on Waldhüterpfad in the mornings. The cat purring around her feet, its matted fur. Her grandmother's hands half a century ago. Her voice back then, Malte's voice, her gestures, the tender words, all the futile good intentions. When finally her sons were grown men, she got sick. Malte and Christian sold the house on Waldhüterpfad.

There was nothing left of all that. Only the picture of the owl, three chairs, the cast-iron lamp, a few records, the two dumb-bells for a while – and then those too were gone, swept away by something. What's it like? Alice asked her father every year as they passed the house on their way to the cemetery to place a candle in a red plastic container on the neglected grave. Every year they stopped at the house, and Alice would peer in at the window next to the front door, into the living room, past the furniture of strangers, and out to the rear of the garden, without understanding anything. To be allowed to sit on the porch just once. Just once. What is it like to stand outside the house in which you grew up, now that other people are living in it? Her father raised his hands. What can I say?

Does Christian know we're meeting? Frederick asked, at the same time signalling to the waitress. The waitress saw him out of the corner of her eye, got up, but not until she had finished reading the page she was on, only then did she close her book.

No, Alice said. No one knows. But not for any particular
reason; it's just that – this is my affair. It's my business. And Frederick nodded, that's how he felt too.

Well, then, the bill for the two pots of tea, please.

The waitress stood next to their table, not as if Frederick had signalled to her, but as if she had been assigned by someone else to put an end to their meeting. She held her waitress purse open in her left hand, having placed the right one protectively over her left wrist, covering her pulse. Out of politeness, Alice leaned down to get her shoulder bag, but Frederick paid for them both, leaving the correct tip. Scarcely looked at the waitress, not interested. The waitress snapped her purse shut with a flourish, rattling the coins. Well now, she said. Have a nice day, Hope the rain lets up.

I brought you something, Frederick said. It was a small, fat blue file folder that he had been carrying in the plastic bag. He put it on the table in front of him without opening it.

Malte's letters. These are the letters Malte wrote to me in the years before he died. You can read them. I think they'll tell you everything you might want to know. Actually everything is in those letters.

Yes. He looked at the blue folder as if he wanted to reconsider, then he slid the file folder back into the bag, pushed the bag across the table. Alice kept her hands in her lap.

The letters have been in a safe deposit box at the bank all this time. I'm getting old now, and I don't know when I might pass out and not regain consciousness or something, and I don't know who might find me then.

He got up, pushed the chair back against the table. His
voice sounded quite unemotional. He probably wanted it that way to make it all bearable.

He said, I'd like to have the letters back after you've read them.

They both knew this wouldn't happen.

I'll give them back to you, Alice said emphatically. Thanks.

She said, By the way, I was there once. I passed by there once.

Where, Frederick asked. Passed by what?

Eisenbahn Strasse 5, Alice said. The house where Malte lived in those days.

Really, Frederick said. And what was it like? He seemed to be truly interested, even if at some remove, from a safe distance.

It was strange, Alice said. How can I describe it – I was nervous; it was as if I were following someone. Spying on someone …

For quite a while she had stood across the street from the house, looking at it, an apartment house like all the others, from the 1870s, its facade renovated. She had thought about the fact that Malte had come and gone across that threshold for a whole year, and then walked in one last time and had not walked out again; they had carried him out, a sheet covering his body and his face. But she preferred imagining what it would be like if the front door were to suddenly open and he were to walk out, hands in his jacket pockets, casting an inquiring glance up at the sky. She wondered if she would recognise him and how – by the scar on his
forehead, the protruding ears, old Alice's eyes, his posture in general. She was sure she would recognise him, and a wave of indignation and affection passed through her, even though the front door remained shut tight and no one left or entered. But it could have been possible. Anything was possible. Raymond might have come out of the house. Or the Romanian. Or Misha, who seemed more alive the longer he was dead; everything seemed to be connected with everything else, and from that perspective it wasn't surprising that the thing that glittered among the paving stones directly in front of the apartment house door should turn out to be an undamaged gold-coloured cartridge. Without looking to the left or to the right, Alice had crossed the street heading towards the front door, had bent down and picked the cartridge up out of the soft, sandy depression between two cobblestones. And put it in her pocket.