To the Back of Beyond(35)

With their reading, their conversations changed. After they had both read Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, they spent weeks discussing love and relationships. Thomas would have liked to think that mature love wasn’t based on sex, and that it wasn’t love for a single being but for the whole world, but everything in him was at odds with the views of the distinguished psychologist. You love what you take trouble over, and you take trouble over what you love, said Astrid, and to him that was like a secret message he wasn’t sure he understood.

Things could have gone on like that for ages if Astrid hadn’t one day told him about a boyfriend she was going to Italy with for the summer holiday. He had always thought it was too soon to declare his love; now it was too late. All through the summer he thought about what he would say to Astrid when he saw her next, but when he finally saw her again at the end of August, tanned and fresh and laughing, he didn’t manage to say anything at all. Instead, he bought the book she recommended to him, The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavese, and scoured it in the following week for secret messages.

For a time they both moved in the same circle of friends. Thomas suffered when he saw Astrid with her boyfriend, but when he didn’t see her, he suffered worse. Then he finished his traineeship and had to do his national military service. When he returned to the village, Astrid had moved to the city with her boyfriend. Thomas started working for the company where he had been a trainee. He was loosely in touch with Astrid; they wrote each other postcards on holiday and from time to time short letters full of ordinary day-to-day stuff and phrases. When Astrid was in the village visiting her parents, they would sometimes run into each other at parties or just on the street. By this time, Thomas was involved with someone himself, a halfhearted thing with a woman in the handball club he had joined. He tried without much success to justify his lack of love by Erich Fromm’s philosophy. When the woman moved on after a year or so, he still suffered like a dog.

On her twenty-fifth birthday, Astrid had a party and invited Thomas. That evening he learned that she had broken up with her boyfriend and was single again. He took the plunge and asked her out for dinner.



There were good days and bad days. The grief didn’t get any less, but it came over Astrid less often. Sometimes she wouldn’t think about Thomas for whole days at a time, only at night in bed, when she imagined sleeping with him. It was always the same scene, she was lying on the bed, Thomas kneeling beside her. Neither of them spoke. He carefully undressed her, as though unpacking a sensitive instrument. He would keep stopping to look at her or touch her, as though to convince himself that she was real. They were both smiling. Then he took his clothes off and lay on top of her. Their movements were slow, it was as though they were talking to each other, not alternatingly in a dialog but in a language in which they spoke the sentences together, and the sentences were at once question and answer. When Astrid shut her eyes, she had the sensation of being utterly filled by Thomas. As her excitement gradually ebbed, his image dulled, dissolving in the darkness until all that was left of him was a kind of halo, and once that was gone too, a vast emptiness that seemed to draw everything out of her.

The very first time they slept together, Astrid had come, even though they had both been wound up. They had gone to the movies and then to a pub. They hadn’t had much to drink because Thomas was driving, and even so in the car Astrid had felt drunk. It was after midnight when Thomas drew up outside her apartment and then simply went up with her. The tension between them was so great there was no other possibility than touching, than holding on to each other. Everything else had happened perfectly naturally. Really? said Thomas. Do you always come as quickly as that? Astrid smiled and shrugged. She didn’t feel like talking, and without turning a light on went into the kitchen for a glass of water. Thomas followed her. As she stood by the sink, he put his arms around her from behind and she felt that he was still aroused. Hurry, he said. She turned, took a sip of water, with her arms crossed in front of her, then passed him the glass. He set it down on the counter, took her hand, and led her back to the bedroom. That was the enduring image Astrid had of their first night together: walking through the apartment hand in hand, and naked.

Later on, Thomas told her that he had loved her from the very beginning, was eaten up with desire for her. He told her without pathos, more with the pride of a successful long-distance runner, describing the torments of a recently finished marathon. From his tone, Astrid could tell he was also interested to hear whether that had been the case with her as well, if she had been in love with him in the same way, dreaming of him, sending him hidden signals. She was so tired she kept drifting away, and sometimes couldn’t be sure whether she had been sleeping or had heard Thomas speaking or just dreamed of it. You still there? he asked. Yes, she said. Nothing more. She listened to him describing their first meeting in the bookstore, a masked ball in the Traube, going to a concert with her and her boyfriend in the city. She remembered the occasions, but Thomas’s version was so different from her own, a story full of love and despair and hope, in which every word, every facial expression, every gesture had its significance. Had she not noticed anything then? No, she would have had to say. I liked you, but I wasn’t in love with you and I didn’t feel your love either. So why did she take him up to her apartment that time? Not everything you did had a reason. It was no big thing, more a sequence of small decisions, aimless in themselves, part negligence, part giving in. Not to take her hand back when he took it in his, not to turn her head away when he tried to kiss her, to stay sitting in the car until he turned off the ignition, not to say anything when he got out with you, went up the stairs behind you, walked into your apartment with you. I could never picture you in a sexual situation, said Thomas, with his head in her lap. I don’t know why, I just couldn’t. I couldn’t even picture you naked. She didn’t know whether his words were a compliment or just a simple statement of fact, and whether he expected an answer from her and if so what. It had never even occurred to her to picture Thomas naked or in a sexual situation. Not that she was someone who pictured things to herself anyway, she didn’t plan ahead or obsessively rehash the past. When Thomas talked about their relationship, even later on, when they’d been together for a long time, she was always surprised how complicated everything was in his head. But she liked the stories, and the feeling that their history was deep and complicated and inevitable. You’re so beautiful when you come, he said. Your smile, your movements. He wouldn’t stop talking. Are you still there? Yes. I love you. I need to sleep now, said Astrid. Your arms, he went on, you have beautiful arms, your shoulders, your back, the lovely dimples over your bottom. Is that right, said Astrid. She switched on the light to set the alarm, then turned it off, and rolled away from Thomas. In the darkness she could feel his hands, his warm body, his kisses. They made love again, more vehemently than before, like a silent tussle, as though they couldn’t get close enough to each other. Astrid no longer felt her body as a whole, only in parts, in Thomas’s touch, his weight, the force with which he held down her hands over her head.