Nothing but Ghosts. Judith Hermann

me.’ I didn’t say anything, and Ruth repeated, ‘You said that, didn’t you?’ I had to laugh, and she said seriously, ‘Actually, why wasn’t he?’ I could have said, because he’s the right one for me. Under different circumstances Ruth might have laughed at that. I didn’t know how to answer her. I said stupidly, ‘Maybe he’s a size too big for you,’ and Ruth asked, understandably nonplussed, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

      I got up and walked through the apartment, taking the telephone along – Ruth’s room at the end of the hall, dark and wide; I still expected to see her bed there whenever I went in, her desk and the chair on which she sat when she was sad. Now the chair stood next to a window in her apartment in another town. I said, ‘Ruth, I don’t know either; I don’t know him at all; he’s good-looking but more than that I can’t say, except I had the feeling that you didn’t understand each other.’ ‘Yes. That’s possible,’ Ruth said simply.

      In the hall I leaned against the wall, my knees were giving way; suddenly I had a feeling of utter hopelessness, Raoul far away, his face – now I remembered what it looked like. I wanted to get some information from Ruth that could prepare me for him; I didn’t know how I should phrase it, and what it really was I wanted to know. I said, ‘Did you sleep with him?’ and instantly felt the blood rush to my face. ‘No,’ Ruth said and didn’t seem to find my question odd. ‘No, we didn’t. Somehow he didn’t want to, or maybe he wanted precisely that; it was strange. At any rate, I didn’t sleep with him, and I can’t tell you how glad I am about that.’

      I was silent, and she was too, or maybe she was listening to my silence, then she said, ‘Was that the right answer?’ And I laughed, embarrassed. She asked me again about Paris; I told her a little – about the Black African at the Place de la Madeleine, the hotel room, the African markets on the side streets of that section of the city. I thought, I should really have been consoling her, but I didn’t know how; also, she didn’t seem to want to be consoled. She said, ‘I’ll call you again tomorrow, all right?’ I said, ‘Ruth. Take care of yourself.’ She said, ‘You too,’ then we hung up. I drank a glass of wine in the kitchen; the refrigerator hummed. I thought he would call, soon. I was sure he would. Then I went to bed. Very late at night I woke up because the telephone was ringing. It rang three or four times; then it was still. I lay on my back and held my breath.

      

      I could never have explained to Ruth, I couldn’t have explained what it was all about for me, how I felt. I never had to explain anything to Ruth; she didn’t ask me to, even though there must have been many times when she didn’t understand me. She was with me during all those years, in good times and in not-so-good times. Sometimes she asked, ‘Why are you doing that?’ She didn’t expect an answer and I couldn’t have given her one. She watched me; she knew me very well; sometimes she imitated me: the way I held my head to the side, smiled, looked away. She knew I had no secrets.

      

      The letter arrived on September 20th, the fifth day after my return from Paris. Somehow Raoul must have got hold of my address at the theatre before he left for WÜrzburg; he knew that it was Ruth’s former address; anyhow, he knew pretty much everything about me from Ruth. He had gone to WÜurzburg, had probably organized his rehearsal schedule and moved into his new quarters, had spent one evening alone or maybe not, and had addressed an envelope to me the next day and sent it off. He was fast. In the envelope was a second-class ticket to WÜurzburg for the midday train on September 25th along with a return ticket. Also a piece of paper on which was written only a single sentence: ‘It would be nice if you came.’ Oddly enough, instead of signing it he had drawn a cartoon-type side view of his face, an unflattering profile.

      I put the letter on the table; it looked strange and yet quite ordinary, a narrow white envelope on which my name was written. I had four days to decide, but there was nothing to think over; I knew that I would go. I no longer felt different than usual, no longer borne up by great expectations. I slept a lot, got up late, sat around in the afternoons in the cafe in front of my house, drinking coffee, reading the newspaper, looking up and down the street, never looking anyone in the eye.

      The telephone rang several times; sometimes I picked it up and sometimes not; it was always Ruth, mostly towards evening. She wasn’t feeling well, but not really bad either. She was very busy and seemed distracted; in spite of that, she talked a lot about Raoul, lots of questions which she herself answered. Nothing was clarified before his departure; he had left without their having another talk. ‘You should be happy that he’s gone, that idiot,’ the make-up woman had said to her several times. She said, ‘I’d like to write to him; do you think I ought to write to him?’ and when I didn’t reply, she said, ‘It’s probably useless, completely useless, I know.’

      As we were talking on the phone, I leaned out of the window so she could hear the street noises, the traffic at the intersection, fragments of the conversations of people sitting outside the cafes. Ruth used to like that; now she whispered, ‘Stop it, it’s making me homesick.’ Talking to her on the phone wasn’t hard. During the phone conversation we had just before I took the train to WÜrzburg, we didn’t talk about Raoul at all; I didn’t ask about him, and Ruth didn’t mention him. It was as though he had never existed. She told me she had had a call from a theatre in Hamburg; she’d probably get out of her contract and move again; she seemed happy and excited about that. She said, ‘Then we’ll be much nearer each other again.’

      We talked a long time; I was drinking wine, was drunk by the time we finished and feeling melancholy. I said, and I meant it, ‘Ruth, I miss you very much,’ and she said, ‘Yes, me too.’ Then we hung up.

      I went to bed but couldn’t sleep; the street was noisy and full of people until late into the night. I lay there listening with a single absurd picture in my head – Raoul carrying me through a dark, unfamiliar apartment, through a hallway and many rooms, till he finally put me down on a bed, gently, as though I were a child. The morning of September 25th, I stood in front of my wardrobe, uncertain; I didn’t know how long I would be staying – one night, a few days, for ever? I didn’t know what he wanted, and actually I didn’t know what I wanted either. Finally, I took nothing except my toothbrush, a book and a nightgown. I turned off the telephone answering machine, locked the apartment door, and took a bus to the railway station, much too early.

      

      What else is there to say about Ruth and me; what else can there be? We kissed each other once, just once, at night in a bar. Actually it was only to get rid of someone who wouldn’t leave Ruth alone. Ruth leaned over and kissed me on the lips, deeply and tenderly; she tasted of chewing gum, wine and cigarette smoke, and her tongue was peculiarly sweet. It was a beautiful kiss, and I remember that I was surprised and I thought, ‘So that’s what it’s like to kiss Ruth.’ I thought we would feel embarrassed afterwards, but we didn’t, nor did we talk any more about it. Ruth’s admirer disappeared without saying another word.

      When we were younger, Ruth was more effusive and exuberant; she drank a lot and loved to dance on top of bars and tables. I liked that and urged her on, ‘Go do it, Ruth, dance on the table!’ Without further ado, she would push aside glasses, kick the ashtrays off the table with her high-heeled shoes, and then she’d dance provocatively. Not until much later would she rebuff me, getting angry sometimes, saying, ‘I’m not living a vicarious life or whatever for you.’ We wore the same clothes, long skirts, coats with fur collars, pearl necklaces – but we never looked alike. Someone said, ‘You’re like two lovebirds, like those little yellow canaries; you always sit there the same way and move your heads back and forth in the same rhythm.’ We liked that comparison.

      Sometimes when someone asked us a question, we answered simultaneously, saying exactly the same thing. But we rarely read the same books, and we never cried together over anything. Our future, which in the beginning didn’t exist and which later became more like a space to which we had to accommodate ourselves, was a shared one – Ruth and I. Ruth was not afraid to say it: ‘We won’t ever part.’

      I often looked at her, trying to imagine what she’d be like when she got old; I never could. She is most beautiful when she laughs. When she just sits there and doesn’t speak, I don’t