Summer Lies (17 page)

The bench was by the lake, on a part of the property that was separated from the rest and from the house by a small road. When they bought the house, his wife and children had been bothered by the road. They had got used to it. From the beginning he had liked it that there was a tiny kingdom to which he could open and close a door. When he came into his inheritance, he got the old boathouse fixed up and the roof built out. He had worked up there during many summers. But this summer he preferred to sit on the bench. It was his hiding place, invisible from the boathouse and the dock where his grandchildren liked to tumble around. If they swam out far enough, they saw him and he saw them, and they waved at one another.

He wouldn’t teach next spring in New York. He would never teach in New York again. His life in New York, which over the years had become such a self-evident part of him that he had long since ceased asking himself whether he was happy there or not, was over. And because it was over, his thoughts went back to the first semester he’d spent there.

To admit to himself that he’d been unhappy in New York
back then would not be so bad if it didn’t lead to the next admission. When he came back from New York, he was in an accident and got to know a woman; their bicycles collided when both of them were riding where they were not supposed to—he thought it was a charming way to meet someone. They dated for two years, going to the opera and the theater and to dinner, a few times they took trips together for a couple of days, and she regularly spent the night at his place or he at hers. He found her adequately beautiful and adequately clever, he liked holding her and being held by her, and he thought he’d finally arrived. But when she moved away because of her job, the relationship soon became labored and then died. Only now could he admit he’d been relieved. That he’d found the two years an effort. That he would often have been happier if he’d stayed home and read and listened to music instead of meeting her. He had met her because once again he thought all the components of happiness were there and he had to be happy.

How was it with the other women in his life? With his first love? He was happy when Barbara, the prettiest girl in the class, went to the movies with him, accepted his invitation to eat an ice cream, then let him take her home and kiss her at the door. He was fifteen; it was his first kiss. A few years later Helena took him to bed, and everything went fine the very first time, he didn’t come too soon, and she came too, and all through the night he gave her what a man can give a woman, he the nineteen-year-old, she thirty-two. They were together until at thirty-five she married a lawyer in London to whom, as he eventually discovered, she’d been engaged for years. He took his exams, did better than he had expected, became an assistant professor, wrote essays and books, and became a full professor. He was happy—or did he just want to be happy because everything was going well? Because all the components of happiness
were there. He had sometimes wondered if life were not elsewhere and then pushed the question away. Just as he had pushed away the fact that it was vanity that allowed him to court Barbara and serve Helena, and that he often found the effort in service of that vanity exhausting.

He shied away from any thoughts about happiness in his marriage and with his family.

He wanted to enjoy the blue sky and the blue lake and the green meadows and woods. He didn’t love the landscape for the distant view of the Alps, he loved it for the gentle curve of the nearby mountains as they rose upward and the lake found its place among them. A girl and a boy were out there in the boat; he was rowing and she was dangling her legs in the water. The drops falling from the oars glittered in the sun, and the little waves set up by the boat and the girl’s feet spread wide over the smooth surface of the water. The two children, it must be Meike, his son’s eldest daughter, and David, his daughter’s eldest son, weren’t talking. Since the mailman’s car had gone by, there had been nothing further to disturb the morning quiet. His wife was making breakfast in the house; a grandchild would come soon to fetch him inside.

Then he thought that he should take the insight about how deceptive his happiness had been not as negative, but as positive.

For someone who wants to take leave of life, what better insight could there be? He wanted to take his leave, because the last months that were ahead of him were going to be terrible. Not that he couldn’t tolerate pain. But when the pain became unbearable, he would go.

But he didn’t manage to take the insight as positive. The idea of summer together, his last summer, was the idea of a last shared happiness. It hadn’t taken much persuasion for his two
children and their families to come to the house on the lake for four weeks, but it had taken a little. He had also had to use a little persuasion on his wife; she would rather have gone to Norway with him, because that’s where her grandmother came from and they’d never been. Now he had his family together, and his old friend was also coming to visit for a few days. He had thought he’d prepared their last shared happiness. Now he wondered if once again he had only collected the components of happiness.

“Grandfather!” He heard a child’s voice and quick child’s feet running across the road and the meadow to the lake. It was Matthias, his daughter’s youngest son and the youngest of his five grandchildren, a sturdy five-year-old with a mop of blond hair and blue eyes. “Breakfast’s ready!” When Matthias saw the boat with his brother and his cousin, he called out to them again and again and hopped to and fro on the deck till they tied up. “Shall we race?” The children broke into a run and he followed them slowly. A year ago he would have run with them, and a couple of years ago he would have won. But watching them race up the hill ahead of him and then seeing the older children hang back to let the little one win was better than doing it with them. Yes, this was how he had pictured their last summer together.

He had also pictured how he would go. A doctor who was a friend and colleague had obtained the cocktail that organizations for assisted suicide give their members. Cocktail—he liked the description. He had never had a taste for cocktails or ever tried one; his first would also be his last. He also liked
the description “angel of death” for the member of the organization who brings the cocktail to the fellow member who is ready to die; he would be his own angel of death. When things were that far along, he would stand up without any fuss from the evening gathering in the living room, go out, drink the cocktail, wash out the bottle and put it away, and go back to join the others in the living room. He would listen, fall asleep, and die, they would leave him to sleep and find him dead the next morning, and the doctor would pronounce it to have been heart failure. A painless, peaceful death for him; a painless, peaceful farewell for the others.

Things weren’t that far along yet. The table was laid in the dining room. At the beginning of the summer he had extended the table and imagined that he and his wife would sit at the head. Next to him their daughter and her husband, next to his wife their son and his wife, with the five grandsons and granddaughters around the end. But the others didn’t see anything appealing in this order and sat wherever it suited them. Today the only free seat was between his daughter-in-law and her six-year-old son, Ferdinand, who was clearly in a sulk and had pulled away from his mother. “What’s the matter?” But Ferdinand shook his head wordlessly.

He loved his children, their spouses, and his grandchildren. He liked having them around him, liked their bustle, their talk, and their games, even their noise and their arguments. What he liked best was to sit in a corner of the sofa, lost in his own thoughts, amid them all and yet self-contained. He also liked working in libraries and cafés; he found it easy to concentrate while surrounded by the rustle of paper and conversation and movement. Sometimes he joined the others in a game of bowls, sometimes he accompanied them on the flute when they made music, sometimes he dropped a remark into their conversations.
They would be surprised, as he himself was to find himself part of their games or their music or their talk.

He also loved his wife. “Of course I love my wife,” he would have said if anyone had asked him. It was wonderful when he was sitting in the corner of the sofa and she came and sat next to him. It was even more wonderful to watch her in the circle of the family. Among the young ones she herself became young, as if she were the student again from the first semester, whom he met just when he was taking his exams. She was without sophistication and without malice, she had none of the traits that were both desirable and repellent in Helena. He felt back then as if loving her purified him of the experience of using and being used that was the residue of his relationship with Helena. They got married when she too had completed her education and become a teacher. The two children came in quick succession, and his wife soon returned to teaching half-time. She did everything effortlessly: the children, school, the apartment in the city, and the house in the country, even occasionally a semester with him and the children in New York.

No, he told himself, he mustn’t be afraid to think about his happiness in his marriage and with his family. It was real. Just as the first days of their shared summer had been real; his grandchildren were busy among themselves, his children and their spouses enjoyed time for its own sake, and his wife was happy working in the garden. Fourteen-year-old David was in love with thirteen-year-old Meike—he could see this, though the others seemed not to. The weather was beautiful day after day, weather fit for a king, his wife said with a smile, and the thunderstorm on their second evening was fit for a king too; he sat out on the veranda and was overwhelmed by the blackness of the clouds, the lightning and thunder, and finally the liberating downpour.

Even if what he had collected once again was no more than the components of happiness, even if the happiness of this last shared summer concealed a misfortune—so what? He wouldn’t be around to experience it.

When night came and they were in bed, he asked his wife, “Were you happy with me?”

“I’m glad we’re here. We couldn’t have been happier if we’d gone to Norway.”

“No, I mean, were you happy with me?”

She sat up and looked at him. “All the years we’ve been married?”

“Yes.”

She lay down again. “I didn’t like it that you were away so often. That I was alone a lot. And that I had to raise the children on my own. When Dagmar ran away when she was fifteen and was gone for six months, you were there, I admit, but you were in such despair you retreated into yourself and I was alone again. When Helmut … but what am I talking about? You know yourself when things were fine with me and when they weren’t. I know the same about you. When the children were small and I had started teaching again, you got the short end of the stick. You would have liked me to play more of a role in your working life, like reading the things you wrote. You would also have liked to have sex more often.” She turned onto her side with her back to him. “I would have liked to cuddle with you more often.”

After a while he heard her quiet breathing. Did this mean there was nothing more to say?

His left hip hurt. The pain wasn’t acute, but regular and constant and felt as if it wanted to become a permanent part of him. Or was it already a permanent part? Hadn’t his left hip and his left leg been hurting for days, no, weeks when he climbed the stairs? Hadn’t there been a long-standing weakness that he had to overcome with increasing effort and stabbing pain? He hadn’t paid attention. Once he’d climbed the stairs, the weakness disappeared. But the stabbing pain that accompanied the climb could have heralded the pain he was feeling now, and it made him afraid. Hadn’t the CT scan shown tumors spreading in his left hip?

He no longer remembered. He didn’t want to be one of those sick people who know everything about their illness, who research on the Internet and in books and conversations and embarrass their doctors. Left hip, right hip—he hadn’t been paying attention when the doctor told him which bones were already affected. He’d told himself he would notice soon enough.

He turned on his side too. Did his left hip still hurt? Or was it the right hip now? He listened to his insides, at the same time hearing the wind in the trees outside the open window and the croaking of the frogs by the lake. He saw stars up in the sky and thought, they’re not golden and they’re not resplendent, they’re hard and cold like little distant neon bulbs.

His left hip was indeed still hurting. His right hip too. When he touched his legs, the pain was there, and also when he felt his spine and up into his neck and arms. Wherever he felt, the pain was waiting for him, saying, I live here now. This is my home.

He slept badly and was up with the sun. He tiptoed to the door, opened it cautiously, and closed it the same way. The floors, the stairs, the doors, everything creaked. He made tea in the kitchen and took the cup out onto the veranda. The sky was light, and the birds were singing.

Occasionally he helped his wife with cooking or laying the table or doing the dishes. He had never put a single meal on the table by himself. In earlier days, if his wife had to be away, breakfast went by the board and he took the children to a restaurant for lunch and supper. But in earlier days he had also had no time. Now he had time.

He found Dr. Oetker’s cookbook for beginners in the kitchen and took it out to the veranda. With a cookbook even he, the philosopher with an expertise in analytical philosophy, had to be able to make pancakes for breakfast. Even he? Most specifically! “What can be described can also take place,” as Wittgenstein teaches in the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
.

At first he didn’t find pancakes in the cookbook. Did pancakes have another name? What cannot be named, cannot be found. What cannot be found, cannot be cooked.

But then he found the recipe and calculated up the quantity of ingredients for eleven people. He set to work in the kitchen. It took him a long time to assemble 1⅓ pounds of flour, eleven eggs, 2⅓ pints of milk, a generous ¾ pint of mineral water, just under a pound of margarine, sugar, and salt. He was annoyed that there were no specific quantities for sugar, and salt. How was he supposed to divide sugar and salt by four and multiply by eleven? He was also annoyed that he found no instructions on how to separate the egg whites from the egg yolks and beat
them stiff. He would like to have made the pancakes or egg pancakes soft and light. But he managed the sieving and the beating and the stirring without making any lumps.