G133: What Have We Done (18 page)

A sign at the roadside told them, then, that they had arrived at Trennfeld.

And there it was, the picturesque street of half-timbered houses. The Gasthaus Sonne. The low-beamed reception area. The narrow stairs with the Internet router flickering on the wall, up which the smiling Frau led them to their room.

She had a shower and found him lying on the bed, on the grape-coloured counterpane, waiting for her.
Later, when he emerges from the bathroom’s rose-tiled box, she is still crying. Naked except for the coverlet that she has pulled partially over her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, sitting down on the edge of the bed. It did not sound very sincere so he says it again. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s just,’ he says, ‘this is such a shock. To me.’

‘You don’t think it’s a shock to me?’ There is a pillow over her head. Her voice is muffled, tear-clogged, defiant.

He looks from her pale shoulders to the insipid watercolour on the orange wall.

‘Of course it is,’ he says. ‘That’s why we need to think about this. We need to think about it seriously. I mean . . .’ He wonders how to put this. ‘You need to think about
your
life. About what you want from it.’

He knows she is ambitious. She is a TV journalist – pops up on the local Kraków news interviewing farmers about the drought, or the mayor of some nearby town about his new leisure centre and how he managed to snare matching funds from the European Union. She is only twenty-five, and she is almost famous, in the Kraków area. (She probably makes more money than he does, now he thinks about it.) People say hello to her in the street sometimes, point to her on the shopping centre escalator. He was there when that happened. He enjoyed it. They were going down and someone on the way up pointed her out to the people they were with. He had put his hands on her shoulders – he was standing on the step above her – and said, ‘What was that about? You’re famous?’

‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Not really.’

She is though, and she wants more. He knows that.

‘Do you see what I’m saying?’ he asks.

They spend a few hours in the dim, curtained room as the afternoon wears on. Nothing outside the room, on the other side of the crimson curtains, which glow dully with the daylight pressing on them from without, seems to have any significance. The room itself seems pregnant, swollen with futures in the blood-dim light.

And the light persists. It is high summer. The evenings last forever.

Finally, as if outstared by the sun, they dress and leave.

Outside it is warm and humid. They start to walk up the picturesque half-timbered street. There are some other people around, people strolling in the evening, and on the terraces of the two or three inns, people.

She has said nothing. He feels, however, he feels more and more, that when she thinks about the situation she will see that it would not be sensible to keep it. It would just not be
sensible
. And she is sensible. He knows that about her. She is not sentimental. She takes her own life seriously. Has plans for herself, is successfully putting them in train. It is one of the things he likes about her.

He notices that there are cigarette vending machines, several of them, in the street, out in the open. They look strange among the fairy-tale houses. A village of neurotic smokers. He would like to have a cigarette himself. Sometimes,
in extremis
, he still smokes.

Nothing seems very solid, and in fact there is a mist, nearly imperceptible, hanging in the street as the warm evening sucks the moisture out of the wet earth.

They sit down at a table on one of the terraces.

He wonders what to talk about. Should he just talk about anything? About this pretty place? About the high steep roofs of the houses? About the carved gables? About the long day he has had? About what they might do tomorrow?

None of these subjects seem to have any significance. And on the one subject that does seem to have significance, he feels he has said everything there is to say. He does not want to say it all again. He does not want her to feel that he is pressuring her.

It is very important, he thinks, that the decision should be hers, that she should
feel
it was hers.

They sit in silence for a while, surrounded by soft German voices. Older people, mostly, in this place. Older people on their summer holidays.

He says, desperate to know, ‘What are you thinking?’

‘Why did you choose this place?’

‘Why?’ He is not prepared for the simple, ordinary question. ‘It wasn’t too far from the airport,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to drive too much farther today. It was in the direction we were going in. The hotel looked OK. That’s all. It’s OK, isn’t it?’

‘It’s fine,’ she says.

He turns his head to take in part of the street and says, ‘It’s not very interesting, I know.’

‘That’s why I like it.’ They share that too – an interest in uninteresting places.

‘I wouldn’t like to stay here for a week or something,’ he says.

‘No,’ she agrees.

Though after all, why not? He does find a lot to like in this place. It is tidy. Quietly prosperous. Secluded in its modestly hilly landscape. Evidently, not much ever happens. There aren’t even any shops – or perhaps there is one somewhere, one that is open mornings only, on weekdays (except Wednesday). Hence, presumably, the cigarette machines. Maybe, with a teaching post at the Universität Würzburg, twenty minutes up the motorway, he would be able to find a way of living here . . .

As a train of thought it is absurd.

And escapist, in its own weird way.

A weird escapist fantasy, is what it is.

A fantasy of hiding himself in a place where nothing ever happens.

She has another taste of her peach juice. She is drinking peach juice, though that does not necessarily mean anything – she is not a habitual drinker.

‘And now,’ she says, ‘we’ll never forget it.’

The noises around them seem to slide away to the edges of a tight, soundless space. He hears his own voice saying, ‘Why will we never forget it?’, as if it wasn’t obvious what she meant. And when she says nothing, he wonders, fighting down a wave of panic,
Is this her way of telling me?

He does not want her to feel that he is pressuring her.

Panicking, he says, ‘Please don’t make a decision now that you’ll wish later you hadn’t made.’

‘I won’t,’ she says.

They sit there, swifts shrieking in the hot white sky.

‘Just,’ he says. ‘Please. You know what I think. I won’t say it all again.’

And then a minute later, he is saying it all again, everything he said in the hotel.

About how they don’t know each other that well.

About the impact it will have on her life. On their life together.

There is a furtive desperation in his eyes.

‘Stop this
please
,’ she says, turning away in her sunglasses. ‘Stop it.’

‘I’m sorry . . .’

She starts to well up again; a solitary tear plummets down her face.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says again, embarrassed. People are starting to look at them.

He has, he thinks, really fucked this up now. His hand moves to take hers, then stops.

He feels as if his surface has been stripped, like a layer of paint, all the underlying terrors exposed.

‘I just need to know,’ he says.

‘
What
do you need to know?’

It seems obvious. ‘What’s going to
happen
?’

‘What you want to happen,’ she says.

‘It’s not what
I
want . . .’

‘Yes it is.’

‘I don’t want you to do it just because
I
want it . . .’

‘I’m
not
doing it just because
you
want it.’

It is like waking up from a nightmare, to find your life still there, as you left it. The sounds of the world, too, are there again. It is as if his ears have popped. ‘OK,’ he says, now taking her hand. ‘OK.’ It would not do to seem too happy. And in fact, to his surprise, there is a trace of sadness now, somewhere inside him – a sort of vapour trail of sadness on the otherwise blue sky of his mind.

She sobs for a minute or two, quietly, while he holds her hand and tries to ignore the looks of the pensioners who are watching them now without pretence, as if, in this place where nothing ever happens, they were a piece of street theatre.

Which they aren’t.

The motorway is taking them north-east, towards Dresden. In the vicinity of each town the traffic thickens. The sun looks down at it all, at the hurrying traffic glittering on the motorways of Germany. It is Monday.

They woke late, to find the sun beating at the curtains, beating to be let in. Heat throbbed from the sun-beaten curtains. They had kicked off the bedding. She had not slept well. She was, in some sense, it seemed to him, in mourning. He had no intention of talking about it, not today.

Last night, after the scene on the terrace, they had walked for an hour, walked to the end of the village and then along the river – little paths led down to it, to wooden jetties where boats were tied in the green water. Steep banks on the other side, where there were more pretty houses. Clouds of gnats floated over the water. It was evening, then, finally. Dusk.

They walked back to the Gasthaus Sonne. They hadn’t eaten anything.

In the harshly lit room, she said, ‘You always get what you want. I know that.’

‘That isn’t true,’ he murmured. Though even then he thought,
Maybe it is. Maybe I do.

She was undressing. ‘I should get used to that,’ she said. ‘I know people like you.’

‘Meaning?’

‘People that just drift through life, always getting what they want.’ She was speaking quietly, not looking at him, undressing.

‘You don’t know me,’ he told her.

‘I know you well enough,’ she said.

‘Well enough for what?’

She went into the bathroom with her washbag.

He lay down on the soft mattress. He was still trying to think of a single significant instance, in his whole life, when he did not get what he wanted. The fact was, his life was exactly how he wanted it to be.

It had been his plan to visit Bamberg the next morning, and that is what they did. They stuck to his plan, and spent the morning sightseeing, as if nothing had happened. In the Romanesque simplicity of the cathedral, he pored over the tombs of Holy Roman Emperors.

HEINRICH II,
† 1024

The Middle Ages. Yesterday’s mad scenes next to the motorway, among the trucks, seemed very far away in the limpid atmosphere of the nave. Their feet whispered on the stone floor. They were walking together, looking at statues. He felt safe there, doing that. He did not want to leave, to step out of the hush into the sun, the blinding white square.

She still wasn’t saying much. She had hardly spoken to him all morning.

Maybe this
was
the end, he thought, as they walked in the streets of Bamberg, every blue shadow vibrating with detail.

Maybe she had decided – as he had intended, in the madness of yesterday – that she didn’t like him.

He had disappointed her, there was no doubt about that.

Lunch, though, was almost normal.

Sunlight fell through leaves into the quiet garden where waiters moved among the tables.
This
was what he had imagined. This was what he had had in mind. Not the scenes next to the motorway. This windless walled garden, the still shadows of these leaves. This was what he wanted.

That she is pregnant, and what will happen about that, is the one thing he does not want to talk about. The decision has been made.
There is nothing else to say. They will, at some point, have to discuss practicalities. Doctors. Money. Until then, talking about it might simply open it up again – might somehow unmake the decision – so he stays away from the subject, or anything like it.

And then the disturbing little moment at the church of the Vierzehnheiligen.

After lunch they drove out of the town to the church of the Vierzehnheiligen. They were standing outside the church, and he was reading from a pamphlet they had picked up at one of the tourist stands. There were lots of people about – coachloads of people walking up from the car park. Sun hats and little battery-powered fans. ‘On the twenty-fourth of September 1445,’ he read, ‘Hermann Leicht, the young shepherd of a nearby Franciscan monastery, saw . . .’

He stopped.

He would not have started if he had known how the story went.

He went on, quickly, ‘A crying child in a field that belonged to the nearby Cistercian monastery of Langheim. As he bent down to pick up the child . . .’

He had already started on the next sentence when he saw, with a wave of something like mild nausea, that it was even worse.

‘As he bent down to pick up the child, it abruptly disappeared.’

He wondered whether to stop reading the thing out.

Deciding that that would only make matters worse, he went on, speaking quickly. ‘A short time later, the child reappeared in the same spot. This time, two candles were burning next to it. In June 1446, Leicht saw the child for a third time. This time, the child was accompanied by thirteen other children, and said: “We are the fourteen helpers and wish to erect a chapel here, where we can rest. If you will be our servant, we will be yours!” It is alleged that miraculous healings soon began, through the intervention of the fourteen saints. That’s it,’ he said, eager to move on. He shoved the pamphlet into his pocket. ‘Should we go in?’

They went in.

And then inside, in the mad marble dream of the interior, something similar happened.

They were standing at the altar, inspecting the statuary there; he was referring to a slip of paper he had picked up near the entrance that had a schematic representation of it – each statue was numbered and there was a key to indentify them. That was what he was doing. Pointing to each of the fourteen helpers, and telling her who they were, and how they helped. For instance, he pointed to one and said, ‘St Agathius, invoked against headache.’ Or, ‘St Catherine of Alexandria, invoked against sudden death.’ Or, ‘St Margaret of Antioch, invoked in . . .’