Necessary Lies(35)
At home she disconnects the phone and puts the letters on the dining room table, on the white tablecloth she no longer bothers to take off. She leaves them lying there and goes to the kitchen to get a glass of water. It is something she can concentrate on, letting the water run from the tap, filling the glass, swallowing. Her hands are unsteady and she has spilled some water on the kitchen counter. She wipes it off with a yellow j-cloth.
Back in the dining room, she arranges the letters in even rows on the table, like cards in the game of solitaire. The proofs that for ten years her husband has been in love with another woman. All these years he has lied to her, laughed at her behind her back. She has never suspected anything. There is some grim satisfaction in these thoughts, some dark pleasure in laughing at her pathetic love, her own smugness. She used to think Marie was too suspicious of men, too cautious. She used to think that of many women.
You can write it all down, now, she tells herself. The wisdom of Anna Herzman, the biggest fool of them all.
The water has helped. She is no longer feverish; her heart has hardened. The letters in front of her are her evidence. She will read them slowly, carefully, one by one. Nothing will be skipped, nothing overlooked.
A Polish woman and a refugee, Willi? No, I’m not jealous and, yes, I’m quite cynical about atonements. But love becomes you, darling, it always has. You are not doomed, like I am. You will learn to live on a leash, if it is not too short, and she will learn to be happy with you if she is anything close to what I imagine. Perhaps what you are doing is the only intelligent thing to do, so don’t take it as criticism. I do pray for you at times like that, so I’m not that bad.
Dearest, I have just finished speaking to you on the phone. You said I knew you so well. I wonder what is it that I know. I merely watch you, I have watched you for years, and I take what I see. And you, you mistake this resignation for knowledge. The truth is that you never cease to amaze me. Urs
Jealousy is a smuggler’s prop. It has secret compartments and hidden bottoms that appear when Anna thinks she has reached its limits. False pockets to confuse her, revealing layers of bitterness, more and more of them, crumpled, entangled, choking her now, cutting off the passage of air.
She can imagine William and Ursula together, in this house, perhaps. In the same bed in which she sleeps now, alone. She can see their legs, arms, entangled, their bodies pressed against each other. Heaving, pulsating, inseparable. Was he also moaning into Ursula’s ear when he came? Nuzzling her neck, after they have made love, making her laugh with his stories? Telling her of his doctor friend who, seeing a stripper spread her legs, thought. “I could cauterize this.” Was Ursula laughing as much as she had?
It is the vividness of such thoughts that breaks her. The whisper in her heart that when he came home from his love trips she would be the one to unpack his bags and wash his dirty clothes. Take the brown tweed jacket to the dry cleaner. Put the laundered socks and underwear back on the shelves, slide the folded shirts into drawers.
Her heart is hardening, she can feel that. From the darkest corners of her memory come the thoughts she has never allowed herself to think. What was it that Hitler thought of all Slavs? An inferior race of slaves? The dirt of history, a mere notch above the Jews. Slated for death to make living space in the East for the master race. Drang nach Osten. Lebensraum. Hasn’t she been warned so many times? Hasn’t she seen the evidence, the ruins, the graves? But she wouldn’t listen, would she?
Lebenslüge, she says, remembering the German word William once used telling her of his marriage. The word Marilyn liked to throw back at him so many times. Lebenslüge. The lie that transforms your life.
I’m sorry I was difficult, darling. I wasn’t really, you were. You were jealous, and cranky, and you sulked. Perhaps it is time you stopped blaming me for who I am. It’s a bit as if you asked me to change the colour of my eyes. But, then, your letter was beautiful, and I had to forgive. Love. U.
Dearest, The exhibition went very well, but I won’t quote the reviews. They only distract me, make me chase phantoms. The evening was rather quiet. I saw Fassbinder’s “The Marriage of Maria Brown,” another variation on his obsessions. Love for sale and the corruption of innocence. Incredibly bitter and quite brilliant, as he often is. He made me think of us, all of us, locked together in these little, deceitful transactions, of the secret agreements between submission and power, the craftiness of innocence! This is my obsession, too, as you have noticed so many times. Yes, I believe we, Germans, have a duty to expose self-delusions. Keep checking the collective pulse. We, of all people, cannot be caught filming another “Triumph of the Will.”
I went to dinner with a rather too willing and confused friend of Rainer who got drunk and made a few passes at me, at first rather to my amusement and then much to my growing boredom. I’ve heard the first nightingale this spring, right in the Tiergarten, and you will be happy to know that I slept alone.
Dearest, I know what I’m talking about. Once you said that with you I would change, but I know I would only bury it all, and I would hate you for it. Perhaps I’m not that different from Marilyn, after all. We would have turned love into hate, and I don’t want hate, not here, not in this country. You can be both guilty and wronged, Willi, nicht wahr? U.
She shouldn’t be going through this alone, Anna thinks. But Marie is in Prague. Marie, who would put a bottle of wine on the table, fetch the glasses, put a fresh box of Kleenex in front of Anna, and start her interrogation. “So who is she? How long did he know her? How often did they meet? Where?” Sharp, pointed questions, tracing the logistics of betrayal. But Anna wouldn’t know what to say.