The Reader (2 page)

CHAPTER THREE

I
DIDN
’
T KNOW
the woman’s name. Clutching my bunch of flowers, I hesitated in front of the door and all the bells. I would rather have turned around and left, but then a man came out of the building, asked who I was looking for, and directed me to Frau Schmitz on the third floor.

No decorative plaster, no mirrors, no runner. Whatever unpretentious beauty the stairwell might once have had, it could never have been comparable to the grandeur of the façade, and it was long gone in any case. The red paint on the stairs had worn through in the middle, the stamped green linoleum that was glued on the walls to shoulder height was rubbed away to nothing, and bits of string had been stretched across the gaps in the banisters. It smelled of cleaning fluid. Perhaps I only became aware of all this some time later. It was always just as shabby and just as clean, and there was always the same smell of cleaning fluid, sometimes mixed with the smell of cabbage or beans, or fried food or boiling laundry.

I never learned a thing about the other people who lived in the building apart from these smells, the mats outside the apartment doors, and the nameplates under the doorbells. I cannot even remember meeting another tenant on the stairs.

Nor do I remember how I greeted Frau Schmitz. I had probably prepared two or three sentences about my illness and her help and how grateful I was, and recited them to her. She led me into the kitchen.

It was the largest room in the apartment, and contained a stove and sink, a tub and a boiler, a table, two chairs, a kitchen cabinet, a wardrobe, and a couch with a red velvet spread thrown over it. There was no window. Light came in through the panes of the door leading out onto the balcony—not much light; the kitchen was only bright when the door was open. Then you heard the scream of the saws from the carpenter’s shop in the yard and smelled the smell of wood.

The apartment also had a small, cramped living room with a dresser, a table, four chairs, a wing chair, and a coal stove. It was almost never heated in winter, nor was it used much in summer either. The window faced Bahnhofstrasse, with a view of what had been the railroad station, but was now being excavated and already in places held the freshly laid foundations of the new courthouse and administration buildings. Finally, the apartment also had a windowless toilet. When the toilet smelled, so did the hall.

I don’t remember what we talked about in the kitchen. Frau Schmitz was ironing; she had spread a woolen blanket and a linen cloth over the table; lifting one piece of laundry after another from the basket, she ironed them, folded them, and laid them on one of the two chairs. I sat on the other. She also ironed her underwear, and I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t help looking. She was wearing a sleeveless smock, blue with little pale red flowers on it. Her shoulder-length, ash-blond hair was fastened with a clip at the back of her neck. Her bare arms were pale. Her gestures of lifting the iron, using it, setting it down again, and then folding and putting away the laundry were an exercise in slow concentration, as were her movements as she bent over and then straightened up again. Her face as it was then has been overlaid in my memory by the faces she had later. If I see her in my mind’s eye as she was then, she doesn’t have a face at all, and I have to reconstruct it. High forehead, high cheekbones, pale blue eyes, full lips that formed a perfect curve without any indentation, square chin. A broad-planed, strong, womanly face. I know that I found it beautiful. But I cannot recapture its beauty.

CHAPTER FOUR

“W
AIT
,”
SHE
said as I got up to go. ‘I have to leave too, and I’ll walk with you.

I waited in the hall while she changed her clothes in the kitchen. The door was open a crack. She took off the smock and stood there in a bright green slip. Two stockings were hanging over the back of the chair. Picking one up, she gathered it into a roll using one hand, then the other, then balanced on one leg as she rested the heel of her other foot against her knee, leaned forward, slipped the rolled-up stocking over the tip of her foot, put her foot on the chair as she smoothed the stocking up over her calf, knee, and thigh, then bent to one side as she fastened the stocking to the garter belt. Straightening up, she took her foot off the chair and reached for the other stocking. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Her neck and shoulders, her breasts, which the slip veiled rather than concealed, her hips which stretched the slip tight as she propped her foot on her knee and then set it on the chair, her leg, pale and naked, then shimmering in the silky stocking.

She felt me looking at her. As she was reaching for the other stocking, she paused, turned towards the door, and looked straight at me. I can’t describe what kind of look it was—surprised, skeptical, knowing, reproachful. I turned red. For a fraction of a second I stood there, my face burning. Then I couldn’t take it any more. I fled out of the apartment, down the stairs, and into the street.

I dawdled along. Bahnhofstrasse, Häusserstrasse, Blumenstrasse—it had been my way to school for years. I knew every building, every garden, and every fence, the ones that were repainted every year and the ones that were so gray and rotten that I could crumble the wood in my hand, the iron railings that I ran along as a child banging a stick against the posts and the high brick wall behind which I had imagined wonderful and terrible things, until I was able to climb it, and see row after boring row of neglected beds of flowers, berries, and vegetables. I knew the cobblestones in their layer of tar on the road, and the changing surface of the sidewalk, from flagstones to little lumps of basalt set in wave patterns, tar, and gravel.

It was all familiar. When my heart stopped pounding and my face was no longer scarlet, the encounter between the kitchen and the hall seemed a long way away. I was angry with myself. I had run away like a child, instead of keeping control of the situation, as I thought I should. I wasn’t nine years old anymore, I was fifteen. That didn’t mean I had any idea what keeping control would have entailed.

The other puzzle was the actual encounter that had taken place between the kitchen and the hall. Why had I not been able to take my eyes off her? She had a very strong, feminine body, more voluptuous than the girls I liked and watched. I was sure I wouldn’t even have noticed her if I’d seen her at the swimming pool. Nor had she been any more naked than the girls and women I had already seen at the swimming pool. And besides, she was much older than the girls I dreamed about. Over thirty? It’s hard to guess ages when you’re not that old yourself and won’t be anytime soon.

Years later it occurred to me that the reason I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off her was not just her body, but the way she held herself and moved. I asked my girlfriends to put on stockings, but I didn’t want to explain why, or to talk about the riddle of what had happened between the kitchen and the hall. So my request was read as a desire for garters and high heels and erotic extravaganza, and if it was granted, it was done as a come-on. There had been none of that when I had found myself unable to look away. She hadn’t been posing or teasing me. I don’t remember her ever doing that. I remember that her body and the way she held it and moved sometimes seemed awkward. Not that she was particularly heavy. It was more as if she had withdrawn into her own body, and left it to itself and its own quiet rhythms, unbothered by any input from her mind, oblivious to the outside world. It was the same obliviousness that weighed in her glance and her movements when she was pulling on her stockings. But then she was not awkward, she was slow-flowing, graceful, seductive—a seductiveness that had nothing to do with breasts and hips and legs, but was an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the body.

I knew none of this—if indeed I know any of it now and am not just making patterns in the air. But as I thought back then on what had excited me, the excitement came back. To solve the riddle, I made myself remember the whole encounter, and then the distance I had created by turning it into a riddle dissolved, and I saw it all again, and again I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

CHAPTER FIVE

A
WEEK LATER
I was standing at her door again.

For a week I had tried not to think about her. But I had nothing else to occupy or distract me; the doctor was not ready to let me go back to school, I was bored stiff with books after months of reading, and although friends still came to see me, I had been sick for so long that their visits could no longer bridge the gap between their daily lives and mine, and became shorter and shorter. I was supposed to go for walks, a little further each day, without overexerting myself. I could have used the exertion.

Being ill when you are a child or growing up is such an enchanted interlude! The outside world, the world of free time in the yard or the garden or on the street, is only a distant murmur in the sickroom. Inside, a whole world of characters and stories proliferates out of the books you read. The fever that weakens your perception as it sharpens your imagination turns the sickroom into someplace new, both familiar and strange; monsters come grinning out of the patterns on the curtains and the carpet, and chairs, tables, bookcases, and wardrobes burst out of their normal shapes and become mountains and buildings and ships you can almost touch although they’re far away. Through the long hours of the night you have the church clock for company and the rumble of the occasional passing car that throws its headlights across the walls and ceiling. These are hours without sleep, which is not to say that they’re sleepless, because on the contrary, they’re not about lack of anything, they’re rich and full. Desires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again. They are hours when anything is possible, good or bad.

This passes as you get better. But if the illness has lasted long enough, the sickroom is impregnated with it and although you’re convalescing and the fever has gone, you are still trapped in the labyrinth.

I awoke every day feeling guilty, sometimes with my pajama pants damp or stained. The images and scenes in my dreams were not right. I knew I would not be scolded by my mother, or the pastor who had instructed me for my confirmation and whom I admired, or by my older sister who was the confidante of all my childhood secrets. But they would lecture me with loving concern, which was worse than being scolded. It was particularly wrong that when I was not just idly dreaming, I actively fantasized images and scenes.

I don’t know where I found the courage to go back to Frau Schmitz. Did my moral upbringing somehow turn against itself? If looking at someone with desire was as bad as satisfying the desire, if having an active fantasy was as bad as the act you were fantasizing—then why not the satisfaction and the act itself? As the days went on, I discovered that I couldn’t stop thinking sinful thoughts. In which case I also wanted the sin itself.

There was another way to look at it. Going there might be dangerous. But it was obviously impossible for the danger to act itself out. Frau Schmitz would greet me with surprise, listen to me apologize for my strange behavior, and amicably say goodbye. It was more dangerous not to go; I was running the risk of becoming trapped in my own fantasies. So I was doing the right thing by going. She would behave normally, I would behave normally, and everything would be normal again.

That is how I rationalized it back then, making my desire an entry in a strange moral accounting, and silencing my bad conscience. But that was not what gave me the courage to go to Frau Schmitz. It was one thing to tell myself that my mother, my admired pastor, and my older sister would not try to stop me if they really thought about it, but would in fact insist that I go. Actually going was something else again. I don’t know why I did it. But today I can recognize that events back then were part of a lifelong pattern in which thinking and doing have either come together or failed to come together—I think, I reach a conclusion, I turn the conclusion into a decision, and then I discover that acting on the decision is something else entirely, and that doing so may proceed from the decision, but then again it may not. Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do. Something—whatever that may be—goes into action; “it” goes to the woman I don’t want to see anymore, “it” makes the remark to the boss that costs me my head, “it” keeps on smoking although I have decided to quit, and then quits smoking just when I’ve accepted the fact that I’m a smoker and always will be. I don’t mean to say that thinking and reaching decisions have no influence on behavior. But behavior does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided. It has its own sources, and is my behavior, quite independently, just as my thoughts are my thoughts, and my decisions my decisions.

CHAPTER SIX

S
HE WASN
’
T
at home. The front door of the building stood ajar, so I went up the stairs, rang the bell, and waited. Then I rang again. Inside the apartment the doors were open, as I could see through the glass of the front door, and I could also make out the mirror, the wardrobe, and the clock in the hall. I could hear it ticking.

I sat down on the stairs and waited. I wasn’t relieved, the way you can sometimes be when you feel funny about a certain decision and afraid of the consequences and then relieved that you’ve managed to carry out the former without incurring the latter. Nor was I disappointed. I was determined to see her and to wait until she came.

The clock in the hall struck the quarter hour, then the half hour, then the hour. I tried to follow its soft ticking and to count the nine hundred seconds between one stroke and the next, but I kept losing track. The yard buzzed with the sound of the carpenter’s saws, the building echoed with voices or music from one of the apartments, and a door opened and closed. Then I heard slow, heavy, regular footsteps coming up the stairs. I hoped that whoever he was, he lived on the second floor. If he saw me—how would I explain what I was doing there? But the footsteps didn’t stop at the second floor. They kept coming. I stood up.

It was Frau Schmitz. In one hand she was carrying a coal scuttle, in the other a box of briquets. She was wearing a uniform jacket and skirt, and I realized that she was a streetcar conductor. She didn’t notice me until she reached the landing—she didn’t look annoyed, or surprised, or mocking—none of the things I had feared. She looked tired. When she put down the coke and was hunting in her jacket pocket for the key, coins fell out onto the floor. I picked them up and gave them to her.

“There are two more scuttles down in the cellar. Will you fill them and bring them up? The door’s open.”

I ran down the stairs. The door to the cellar was open, the light was on, and at the bottom of the long cellar stairs I found a bunker made of boards with the door on the latch and a loose padlock hanging from the open bolt. It was a large space, and the coke was piled all the way up to the ceiling hatch through which it had been poured from the street into the cellar. On one side of the door was a neat stack of briquets; on the other side were the coal scuttles.

I don’t know what I did wrong. At home I also fetched the coke from the cellar and never had any problems. But then the coke at home wasn’t piled so high. Filling the first scuttle went fine. As I picked up the second scuttle by the handles and tried to shovel the coke up off the floor, the mountain began to move. From the top little pieces started bouncing down while the larger ones followed more sedately; further down it all began to slide and there was a general rolling and shifting on the floor. Black dust rose in clouds. I stood there, frightened, as the lumps came down and hit me and soon I was up to my ankles in coke.

I got my feet out of the coke, filled the second scuttle, looked for a broom, and when I found it I swept the lumps that had rolled out into the main part of the cellar back into the bunker, latched the door, and carried the two scuttles upstairs.

She had taken off her jacket, loosened her tie and undone the top button, and was sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of milk. She saw me, began to choke with laughter, and then let it out in full-throated peals. She pointed at me and slapped her other hand on the table. “Look at you, kid, just look at you!” Then I caught sight of my black face in the mirror over the sink, and laughed too.

“You can’t go home like that. I’ll run you a bath and beat the dust out of your clothes.” She went to the tub and turned on the faucet. The water ran steaming into the tub. “Take your clothes off carefully, I don’t need black dust all over the kitchen.”

I hesitated, took off my sweater and shirt, and hesitated again. The water was rising quickly and the tub was almost full.

“Do you want to take a bath in your shoes and pants? I won’t look, kid.” But when I had turned off the faucet and taken off my underpants, she looked me over calmly. I turned red, climbed into the tub, and submerged myself. When I came up again she was out on the balcony with my clothes. I heard her beating the shoes against each other and shaking out my pants and sweater. She called down something about coal dust and sawdust, someone called back up to her, and she laughed. Back in the kitchen, she put my things on the chair. Glancing quickly at me, she said, “Take the shampoo and wash your hair. I’ll bring a towel in a minute,” then took something out of the wardrobe, and left the kitchen.

I washed myself. The water in the tub was dirty and I ran in some fresh so that I could wash my head and face clean under the flow. Then I lay there, listening to the boiler roar, and feeling the cool air on my face as it came through the half-open kitchen door, and the warm water on my body. I was comfortable. It was an exciting kind of comfort and I got hard.

I didn’t look up when she came into the kitchen, until she was standing by the tub. She was holding a big towel in her outstretched arms. “Come!” I turned my back as I stood up and climbed out of the tub. From behind, she wrapped me in the towel from head to foot and rubbed me dry. Then she let the towel fall to the floor. I didn’t dare move. She came so close to me that I could feel her breasts against my back and her stomach against my behind. She was naked too. She put her arms around me, one hand on my chest and the other on my erection.

“That’s why you’re here!”

“I . . .” I didn’t know what to say. Not yes, but not no either. I turned around. I couldn’t see much of her, we were standing too close. But I was overwhelmed by the presence of her naked body. “You’re so beautiful!”

“Come on, kid, what are you talking about!” She laughed and wrapped her arms around my neck. I put my arms around her too.

I was afraid: of touching, of kissing, afraid I wouldn’t please her or satisfy her. But when we had held each other for a while, when I had smelled her smell and felt her warmth and her strength, everything fell into place. I explored her body with my hands and mouth, our mouths met, and then she was on top of me, looking into my eyes until I came and closed my eyes tight and tried to control myself and then screamed so loud that she had to cover my mouth with her hand to smother the sound.