Your Perfect Year(9)
January 1
You can’t give your life more days,
but you can give your days more life.
Anonymous proverb.
Jonathan winced. What a trite calendar motto! Only “Carpe diem!” was worse. Or those often-quoted and flogged-to-death words misattributed to Charlie Chaplin, to the effect that a day without laughter was a day wasted. As corny as a cheap greeting card! And yet he found the whole thing fascinating, so he read the rest of the entry for that day:
Sleep in until noon. Have your breakfast in bed with H., followed by a walk by the Alster including mulled wine at the Alsterperle.
In the afternoon: marathon DVD session. Possible movies:
P.S. I Love You
The Bucket List
The Notebook
The Silence of the Lambs
Alternative: all episodes of North & South
Evening: tagliatelle with cherry tomatoes and grated Parmesan, accompanied by a good bottle of rioja
Night: Cuddles, stargazing, whispering sweet nothings
Jonathan had to laugh. What a choice of movies! What kind of “whispering sweet nothings” would follow The Silence of the Lambs? And whether there would be any time left over for eating or cuddling or anything else after all the episodes of North & South was extremely doubtful, since the series dragged on for hours.
Years ago, Tina had forced him to sit with her week after week watching the schmaltzy love story between Orry and Madeline—and as he recalled, he’d found the experience about as vile as watching ten chainsaw-massacre movies back-to-back.
His curiosity piqued, he turned the page. He was well aware that it wasn’t right, since it was like peeking into someone’s private thoughts, but he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. As he skimmed page after page, an undeniable sense of admiration crept up on him. Here was someone who had made the effort to enter something for every single day of the year. All the pages through to December 31 had been filled out. Despite the numerous popular platitudes with which every entry began (“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry), he couldn’t help feeling a degree of respect.
Sometimes the plans were in greater detail, such as on August 25:
Rent a camper and drive to the seaside at St. Peter-Ording, collect shells on the beach, have a barbecue, and sleep under the stars. Don’t forget to take music!
And there were smaller undertakings, like the one on March 16:
H.’s birthday!
Take H. to the Lütt Café on Haynstrasse in the afternoon and eat cake until it makes us ill.
On June 21 it simply said:
First day of summer! Get up at 4:40 to watch the sunrise on the banks of the Elbe!
As he leafed through, Jonathan felt a strange sadness rising up in him.
Partly because this diary clearly wasn’t meant for him—for one thing, he didn’t know a single “H” apart from his neighbor on the left, Hertha Fahrenkrog. But even if that good woman’s birthday were on March 16, she had to be over ninety and lived for no one but her poodle, Daphne. Jonathan could safely rule out the notion of her sitting down every day for weeks and filling out a diary for Jonathan in a spidery copperplate hand (which this wasn’t, but which he associated with Hertha Fahrenkrog). And the thought of breakfast in bed . . . no!
In fact, the handwriting was the second reason for that strange feeling of melancholy—Jonathan felt oddly touched by it.
It took a while for him to realize why: the rounded script reminded him of his mother, Sofia, who had divorced his father when Jonathan was ten. Her writing had looked just like this, with all its long, looping tails. Jonathan hadn’t thought about her for ages, but as he skimmed the entries, he recalled with painful clarity all the letters and notes she used to leave him throughout the house.
Good morning, darling, have a lovely day!—on the breakfast table next to his plate of scrambled eggs and bacon. And later, as he unpacked his sandwiches during the school lunch break, she would always have written Enjoy! on the parchment they were wrapped in, adding a heart in red ink. Don’t worry, your next attempt will be better!—stuck in a schoolbook next to a flunked math test. Sweet dreams!—she had tucked the very same wish under his pillow every single evening.
But they were just notes. They didn’t change the fact that Jonathan’s mother had left not merely his father but him, her only child. Her sweet words had not stopped her from returning to her home near Florence, which she had reluctantly left after meeting Jonathan’s father, who’d gone to Italy as a student in the late 1960s.
She had fled over thirty years ago, back to her beautiful, warm homeland, leaving Jonathan behind in the cool north with his equally cool father.
It was Jonathan’s well-kept secret that the N in his name stood for Nicolò. He could almost hear his mother whispering, “Nicolino, my treasure.” Right into his ear. “Ti amo molto. Molto, molto, molto!”
Well, molto or not, she had left. And after three years of her occasional letters, phone calls, and mutual visits, at the height of puberty, Jonathan had told his mother by postcard that as far as he was concerned, from that moment on she could stay where the lemons grew.
He had been astonished to find that she had taken him at his word—he hadn’t heard from her since.
And yet here he was, staring at that handwriting, which so strangely reminded him of her.