Necessary Lies(34)
January, 1990. When I was coming back to Berlin I saw the dawn. It stretched, pink and red, and golden. “A ribbon at a time,” Darling. Remember? Maybe you are right, maybe I’m not that tough. I telephoned Lothar, and he came and let me speak of you. He made me some tea and we finished off the brandy you left behind. I couldn’t drink it alone.
November, 1990. So it’s next week. In Munich. I have a map of the world and put red tags for every city where we have been together. The spots of love. The map is pretty red, by now. Three days and three nights. I’m waiting already.
In some of the envelopes Anna finds dried wildflowers, which now crumble under her fingers, shreds of cloth, splinters of grey wood. Short notes give way to longer letters, to more newspaper clippings, pages with passages highlighted and peppered with exclamation marks. She opens the envelopes, blue, white, pink, unfolds the pages. Most of the letters have been mailed in Germany, Mit Luftpost, the blue sticker informs, by Deutsche Bundespost, but there are notes scribbled on grey stationery from Hotel Intercontinental Genève with its bilingual warning that, L’expéditeur de cette lettre n’engage pas la responsabilité de l’h?tel. The sender of this letter does not entail the hotel. By now Anna has abandoned all search for order, picks the letters at random, little snitches of the love William hid from her so well.
Mutti came for a few days, and she said I had to let her remodel my bathroom. The faucets were leaking and she gasped in her funny way. “My poor darling!” Her daughter is impractical, erratic, irresponsible. Smokes and drinks too much. Loves too much. Places no limits on herself, gives herself away. I said she could do whatever she wanted to the bathroom, a bloody mistake. I left for a few days for Paris, and when I came back I found this pink(!!!) heaven. The basin and the tub are two inverted shells. I have a mirror across the wall and pink tiles with white shells on every sixteenth one. I counted them, so I know. The floor is white — a damn nuisance, for every fallen hair stands out. She has also bought me a pile of pink and white towels, thick and fleecy. Only the taps are decent, a kind of Bauhaus style, brass, quite nice to the touch, you will like them. She went away, pleased with herself and I, quite sinfully, poured her strawberry bubbles into this shell and soaked in the water until my skin resembled prunes. I tried to call you, but you were already at home so I imagined you instead.
Dearest, We love each other so much because we are far away and we save for each other only what is best in us. We meet, full of longing, we part before we are filled, before impatience sets in. When I come back here, I thank the gods for you and hold my breath not to spoil anything, but you, you try to imagine the limits of what we could be for each other, what life together could mean. I’m not that brave. Urs.
Anna stands up so fast that she overturns the oak swivel chair. Valerie, William’s secretary, must have heard the noise for she is now knocking on the door. “Are you all right?” she is asking, her voice filled with concern.
“I’m fine,” Anna says. “It’s just the chair. I … it fell down.” She opens the door and even manages a faint smile. “It’s nothing.”
“I’m right here, if you need me,” Valerie says, smiling gently, and Anna can see that she is relieved.
“Yes. Thank you,” Anna closes the door and waits until the steps fade away, before settling down to work. Time is rushing forward, and she is trying to catch up with it. The first thing she needs is to be back home. Here, she is too much aware of the presence of other people: Valerie, William’s colleagues. Malcolm’s office is right next door. If she screamed, he might come running.
The boxes are lying on the floor. With a thick black marker smelling of paint thinner she quickly writes “discard” on the side. First she empties the contents of the top drawers, removing everything from them in scoops. Paper clips, pens and pencils hit the cardboard bottom. Thumb tacks, scissors, rolls of tape. Then she opens the side drawers and yanks the papers out. She throws them into the boxes, handful after handful, until the boxes are filled.
Soon the only things left on William’s desk are the two photographs and Ursula’s letters. Anna stuffs the letters and Julia’s picture back into the manila envelope and into her handbag. Her own face on the other photograph annoys her with its smug grin of contentment.
She remembers that they made love here once, in this office, right behind the door. A few weeks after their wedding, after their Barbados trip where she had seen palm trees for the first time, where she tasted glistening, moist slices of papaya. She came running in to see him, her face flushed, her voice bubbling with excitement. “Darling, I want to show you something.” She doesn’t even remember what it was. What she recalls with the sharpness that hurts so much now is how he stood up and locked the door behind them. “And I want you,” he said and kissed her, and ran his hand down her spine. He pushed her against the door, pressed her back against it. For a moment, before she closed her eyes, she saw her own face, in that photograph, watching them, smiling, amused. Was he thinking of Ursula then?
Anna removes the cardboard from the back of the frame and takes the picture out. She tears it in half, then in half again, into smaller and smaller pieces that she throws into the box.
The door to William’s office closes with a piercing squeak. Anna waves to Valerie from the corridor, walks quickly down the stairs, hoping she won’t meet anyone who might want to stop her and talk. By the statue of Queen Victoria, she turns around for another look at the soot-covered walls. She is holding her purse close to her body as she walks. On the bus, she sits in the back and watches the lanterns along Sherbrooke Street light up, the whole row of them, still decorated with tinsel and evergreen wreaths, in memory of another passing year.