Nothing but Ghosts. Judith Hermann

very small. There were moments when she clearly was not listening to me as I told her something. No photo exists of the two of us together. Did I really know Ruth?

      

      The trip from Berlin to Wüurzburg took six hours, and I was happy during those six hours. I read and I slept, and woven into that light sleep were momentary dreams: Ruth on a staircase, looking for me, mute; Raoul at a table in the theatre canteen, alone, a stranger; my empty room in the Berlin apartment, sunlight on the wooden floor; the voice of the train conductor, ‘We will be arriving in Braunschweig in a few minutes’; Ruth whispering; my legs asleep; Raoul standing in the rain under the awning of a hotel. I woke up again, my face swollen and hot.

      I went to the buffet car to smoke a cigarette; people sat hunched over their beer glasses, silent; the landscape outside the tinted windows hilly and green, the fields already harvested, small birds perched on the swinging telephone wires, forming a long, dark chain. The train rolled on and on, measuring the time, the distances, getting closer, inescapably, and I wished myself back at home, and further back into an earlier time, a before, and at the same time I was so impatient that my stomach, my head, my limbs ached. Ruth, I thought, Ruth, I would so much like to tell you about all this.

      I returned to my seat, walking along the corridor, past all those faces looking at me. I read and then couldn’t read any longer and stared out of the window and got so tired that my hands shook and my knees became weak. Another hour to WÜrzburg, half an hour, twenty minutes, soon. The street lamps went on in the suburbs, there were lights in the apartment blocks, small, bright windows in the dusk. Perhaps that kind of life? That table under that lamp in that room with that view of the garden, faded asters and flowerbeds covered with branches for the winter, a children’s swing, a concrete terrace. What is going on, I thought, what is going on…This yearning of mine was both terrible and inane.

      The train was slowing down, and that was vaguely comforting. I got up, took my little bag, my coat, my hot face; I thought, ‘Raoul, I’m dreadfully sad.’ Then the train stopped, coming to a standstill with a single resolute jolt. WÜrzburg’s main terminal, 6.22 p.m. I joined the long line of passengers waiting to get off, step by step by step; no one detained me, and then I was on the platform, walking towards the exit. And when at last I spotted Raoul, I knew instantaneously and with hopeless certainty that I had made a mistake.

      He was standing at the end of the tracks leaning against a board listing the train schedules; he had on a coat I had never seen him in at the theatre, was wearing his glasses; he looked a bit arrogant and bored, arms crossed over his chest, shoulders raised. He stood there looking like someone who’s meeting someone coming in on a train, waiting, in expectation, perhaps impatient; he stood there like all the others, and he was not afraid. I walked towards him and I could see that he was not afraid; he might have been unsure and nervous, but the fear that had me shaking, this fear he didn’t have.

      When he saw me, his bored expression changed in seconds to one that was joyful, convincingly happy and at the same time incredulous; he came towards me in two or three quick strides, and before I could have warded him off he drew me close and held me in a tight embrace. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, my arms, my face. I embraced him too, we stood there like that; he smelled of shaving lotion, his cheek was soft, the frames of his glasses pressed slightly against my temple; it was almost preposterous to feel him so suddenly, only now. He held me for a long time before letting me go. He said, ‘How wonderful, how wonderful that you really came.’ I didn’t know what to say, and he took my hand and pulled me along behind him through the station concourse. He said we’d get something to eat; he had reserved a table in a Chinese place; he was hungry, was I hungry? I wasn’t hungry.

      In the square outside the station we got into his car, a small red Alfa Romeo; I had never before been in an Alfa Romeo, and I wanted to tell him so, but then it seemed silly and I didn’t say anything. He started the engine, drove off at breakneck speed, looked at me, shook his head, kept bursting into laughter, seemed to find something inordinately amusing. Did you have a good trip? How was the weather in Berlin? Heard anything from Ruth? I didn’t answer the last question, nor the first two either, really.

      He parked four blocks away in a no-waiting zone. The Chinese restaurant where he had reserved a table was totally empty except for the Chinese family behind the counter staring at us unwaveringly and eerily, till one of them came to our table and handed us a much-fingered menu. Raoul ordered appetizers and a main course; I wanted a salad, if anything at all; I felt ill; my stomach was in a knot. ‘Jasmine tea, please,’ I said to the unfriendly face of the waiter.

      We sat across from each other and looked at each other; nothing else seemed possible. Actually, I thought, I had come to WÜrzburg just to look at him, the way you want to look at a person you’ve decided to love. Raoul was good at that, he endured my gaze and I his; his eyes were large, wide open, they seemed to be brown, amber tinted, in their corners a smile that would not go away. We looked at each other and that took all the strength I had, until the waiter finally stepped in, putting the jasmine tea, the appetizers and my salad on the table. I looked away from Raoul’s eyes in which there was no longer any light, no remoteness, and no promise, and I resolved not to look at him like that again; it wouldn’t change anything.

      Raoul ate, not the way he had in the canteen, but like a normal man; he used chopsticks, skilfully dissecting the vegetables, the fish, talking from time to time in a matter-of-fact way that took my breath away. Actually, during those four days with Ruth, he and I hadn’t talked at all, saying only disjointed words with an absolute meaning-lessness that seemed to intoxicate him as much as me. He had said ‘I miss you’ into the face of a total stranger, into a utopia, in the hope that the sentence would reach its destination and then dissolve into nothing or everything.

      That’s how it had been, and now he was sitting across from me, eating Chinese noodles and intermittently taking small sips of beer, smiling at me and talking about the Musil production, his colleagues and disagreements at the theatre. And I nodded obediently and said, ‘Aha,’ and, ‘No, really?’ What had I expected? Something different? Nothing at all? And what now? How were we supposed to go on from here? I pressed my hands together under the table; they were cold and damp. My heart was pounding; I felt ill; I thought of Ruth, of Ruth.

      ‘Did you tell her that you were coming here?’ Raoul asked. I shook my head and he looked at me expectantly. It seemed as if he wanted to talk about it, as though my betrayal of Ruth on his account excited him, made him happy, so that he wanted to savour it a little longer, but at least I didn’t do him this favour. I shook my head again, and he shrugged and turned back to his food; he enjoyed eating; I could see that.

      We sat at that table in this restaurant for maybe two hours, and in all that time not another customer came in. It was as though the world outside had gone under and only we were left – he and I and the Chinese family, who after they had served us had again withdrawn behind the counter. Sometimes I could hear the shuffling of their feet. Raoul talked a lot in those two hours; I talked very little. Sometimes he interrupted himself to stare at me, but before there was a chance that we would again gaze at each other like lovers, or before he could ask me anything else, I would ask him a question.

      I asked him about his father, his childhood, Ireland, his ex-wife, and he liked being questioned and replied readily. Once when he told a friend about the premature death of his father, the friend had said to him, ‘Lucky you,’ and he had punched his friend right in the kisser. Today he regretted it, and he now understood what his friend had meant, that his father’s early death had given him a certain strength, invulnerability and maturity. No one at the theatre really knew him for what he was because he wasn’t actually an actor but only an imposter, a loner, and he wasn’t going to stay in the theatre much longer; what he really wanted to do was to write stories, plays, poems, to reveal himself.

      He said, ‘I want to reveal myself.’ As for his ex-wife in Munich and their child, that was a difficult relationship and it was impossible to end it completely; they had been together too long for that. And the light in Ireland was terrific, the wide expanses, the colour of the meadows when the wind blew through them and reversed the blades of grass to white – it was the same phrase he had used weeks before to describe the colour of Ruth’s eyes. But