MONTREAL 1991

Sometimes, in Anna’s dreams, William is still alive and he laughs at her red, puffy eyes and tears that leave salty trails on her cheeks. “I’m still here, darling,” he tells her in the voice she is beginning to forget. “Can’t you see?” And then he laughs, a hollow laugh that echoes through empty rooms. “Not a thing has changed,” he says, and she touches his hands and laughs, too, cautiously at first, but then louder and louder, until the sound of her own laughter wakes her up.

William’s grave is a block of black granite with nothing on it but his name and the two dates in brass letters: William Herzman, 1940-1991. There is space on the lower half of the stone for other names. “Mine,” Käthe said, when Anna brought her here a few days ago. In the nursing home William’s mother is silent and tense; for hours she can stare out of the window but then, Anna is told, she walks around the room and has to be given a sedative to keep her from exerting herself.

Her bones are brittle; she may fall.

Anna recalls the deep hole of the grave, and the coffin slowly lowered into it. A pile of soil, half covered with flowers, lined the site. Someone handed her a trowel, an ordinary garden trowel like the one she had used to transplant flowers in her garden, and she let a clump of soil fall on the coffin. There was a soft, dull thump when it fell.

“I’m a widow now,” she thinks. Wdowa, the Polish word echoes, an ugly, black word she would like to recoil from. On All Souls Day in her childhood, flickering candles lit the sky over the Warsaw cemetery where her grandfather was buried, and she would spot this luminous orange glow from far away, growing brighter with each step she took. The cold November air was filled with the smell of paraffin. By the graves, women in heavy black coats muttered the prayers for the dead. They polished the headstones, fussed over the chrysanthemums in terra-cotta pots, pulled the weeds from the graves. “It’s the loneliness that gets you,” they would say. Her grandmother never protested. “Doesn’t get any easier,” she would add. “Ever.”

Spring is late in Montreal. The ground is still frozen, and the wind makes Anna shiver. William has been dead for thirty-six days and she has felt the weight of every single one of them. At his grave she crosses herself, just as she crossed herself at the hospital. Wieczne odpoczywanie racz mu da Panie, she whispers — grant him eternal rest, Oh Lord — the only prayer she remembers for the rest of the soul.

“But he was always so strong!” He played tennis, he swam, he lifted weights. She hadn’t imagined all that. There were proofs, indisputable, solid. His tennis rackets in the closet, his exercise bike still standing in their bedroom.

“There was nothing we could do. It was a quick, merciful death,” the doctor said. “Like a stroke of lightning … Believe me, I know.” He was a young man, nervous, unsure of how to talk to her, where to look. He couldn’t have done that sort of thing too many times, she thought, not enough to develop a procedure, to detach himself from death. “Please, believe me.”

She wished it for William, such an absence of pain. In a private hospital room on the first floor, she had leaned over his body hidden under white sheets and a blue blanket, trying not to look at the livid tips of his fingers, the purple frames around his nails. These were the signs of struggle, and she wanted to remember the peaceful stillness in his face.

Death made him look older. It must be the lips, she thought, frozen into a rueful smile, so cold when she kissed them. “Why have you done it, baby?” she murmured her reproach, smoothing his silver hair, half-hoping for a reply, for his eyes to open and wink at her, delighted at the success of this incomprehensible joke.

When the doctor took hold of her wrist, to check her pulse, she just kept staring at the assortment of objects in his little office. A jar with cotton pads, another full of tongue depressors, a box of latex gloves with one half pulled, a model of a human ear with the red and blue cords representing veins and arteries. She registered it all, but hazily, as if an invisible cottony gauze was thrown between her and the world. Outside the narrow window of the doctor’s office, a woman in a pink dress walked by, her head crowned with an unruly mop of dreadlocks, a folded cardigan over her arm. Stopping, she looked around as if deciding where to go, her soft, overweight body wobbling on the pointed heels of her black shoes.

“I didn’t know,” Anna said. “I didn’t notice anything was wrong.”

She had missed the signs of danger. On their last evening together she let her mind drift away, her eyes grow heavy. What was she thinking of? Laundry. The croissants she would buy in the morning. Student essays she would have to mark. She could have looked at him, instead, at his chin pressing the violin to his neck, at his right hand so perfectly in tune with the vibrations of the strings. His fingers, she often thought, possessed their own intelligence, quite separate from him, inexplicably fast, free of false moves. It wasn’t just the violin; he was like that with everything he touched. Rolling up phyllo pastry, fixing the cylinder pins and vibrating teeth of the musical boxes he brought home from auctions to restore. “Little miracles,” she used to think, but even miracles wane and pale with time.

She liked the piece he played that night, Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor, an ancient dance, its slow and solemn melody transformed each time it is repeated. But, unlike his, her mind could never stay long with the sequence of sounds alone. It was slipping away, unaware of what was already taking place. For there was still time to get him to hospital, to keep him with her. If only for a few more years, months, or even days.

“Are you all right?” the doctor asked.

She nodded.

“He flinched as he was getting up in the morning,” Anna’s voice cracked when she started to speak and she swallowed to soften the lump in her throat. “Then he rubbed his left shoulder.” The numbness that started around her heart began to spread. It crawled down her spine, to the soles of her feet. Like fear, it made her shudder.

“It’s nothing,” William had said, annoyed by the concern in her voice. She didn’t have to mother him all the time. He could take care of himself.

“It’ll go away.”

She believed him. He was so proud of his own strength. He had never had the flu in his life, never knew what back pain was. He could still beat younger men at tennis. She went out to do the shopping, took her time chatting with Pauline, her neighbour, who was shovelling snow next door, her morning exercise, she said, her cheeks rosy from the cold.

Back home she didn’t suspect anything. The kitchen smelled of cinnamon and baked apples, and she thought that William got tired of waiting for her and must have warmed a slice of pie in the microwave. She opened it and the pie was there, forgotten, enveloped in a shroud of plastic wrap. This by itself was not unusual. When he was composing, William would often leave things mid-way. He didn’t like to be interrupted. “By anyone,” he had told her once and she had learned to deflect telephone calls, avoid stepping on a squeaking board.

The kettle was still hot. His mug was beside it with a tea bag steeping inside. She put a brown paper bag filled with groceries on the kitchen counter and only then she noticed that the door to his study was half opened. That was unusual. “William?” she asked softly, half expecting an angry grunt of warning, but he didn’t answer. “Your tea is getting cold, Darling,” she said softly, and started unpacking the brown paper bag as quietly as she could. Cold cuts and cheeses went on the top shelf of the refrigerator, red peppers on the bottom. She was still in her coat, her purse over her arm. He would laugh, if he saw her like that. “Why can’t you ever finish one thing before starting another?” he would ask, and help her take off her coat.

It was only when she had placed the warm croissants on a wooden tray by the toaster, that the silence began to bother her. “William?” she asked again, and then, only then, she did push the door to his study open and saw him, on the floor, face buried in his hands as if he were hiding from her in some childish game.

She could feel her purse slide off her arm as she knelt beside him, its contents spilling on the almond boards of the floor. Her keys, her wallet, a compact powder fell out, a lipstick tube rolled under the desk and stopped. William’s face when she touched it was still warm, but a chill was already setting in, as if he had just returned from a brisk walk in the cold. Her hands shaking, she called the ambulance, cried into the receiver, begged the woman at the other end to hurry, to please hurry, for God’s sake. “Oh, my God,” she prayed, “Please, please, don’t punish me.”

“This pain in the shoulder area,” the doctor said, kindly, “could’ve been the first sign.” He gave Anna a quick look as she was getting up from the examination table, dizzied, her feet cautious and unsure, testing the firmness of the ground. “But you can’t blame yourself. It was easy to miss.”

He gave her a sedative that made her head swim, a small, white, oblong tablet.

“It couldn’t have been the first one,” he said. “There was scar tissue on his heart. For all we know it could have been hereditary.”

“What?” she asked, uncomprehending.

“Heart failure that strikes like that. It often runs in the family. How did your husband’s father die?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows for sure. He died in the war,” she said, slowly. It seemed to her that the lining of her mouth had lost all its moisture and something bitter in her throat was crawling toward the tip of her tongue.

At five in the morning the bedroom in the Westmount townhouse is still dark. Anna wakes up and lies motionless, terrified by the thought that the borderline between what is still possible and what is already lost is so thin, so easy to cross.

Once she had awakened to murmurs reaching her from his study; a low hum of his voice, breaking through her sleep. She kept her eyes closed, waiting for William to come back to bed. She heard him tiptoe through the room, freezing with a hiss as he tripped, trying not to wake her up. And he, thinking her asleep, sat down beside her. “I love you,” he whispered, his hand gently smoothing the curls of her hair. She held her breath, as he bent over to kiss her cheek.

Now she closes her eyes and imagines that he is still with her, lying flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, and she can almost hear the rhythm of his breath. Imagines he has just woken up, and rolls over toward her, his eyes heavy with sleep, and she extends her hand to smooth the hair on his chest. He locks her hand in his, and kisses the tips of her fingers. Shaking his head he smiles at her, a cheeky smile that softens his handsome, weatherbeaten face. At fifty-one his grey hair is no longer a statement.

“You dyed it? Why?” she asked him, once, just a few months after they met.

“To look older than my age?” he tried to laugh it off. “To make pretty women wonder?” His voice teased her, made her laugh with delight. “You do like it, don’t you?”

“Come on, seriously,” she wasn’t going to give up.

“Do all Polish women always have to know everything or is it just you?”

“Just me,” she said. They were walking up the Mountain, past the trees covered with ice, bending under its weight. He stopped. His eyebrows rose, deepening the lines of the forehead.

“Let’s say I’m not too partial to the Aryan look.”

She squeezed his hand and pulled him forward, and then she felt a surge of blood rising to her face.

In her mind she lets her eyes wander to the mound of ashen curls between his legs. “Hi there, sunshine,” he murmurs, and begins to hum as he swings his legs to the rug.L’ amour est un oiseau rebelle… she hears the phantom words. He is in the bathroom now, leaving the door half-open, vanishing into the vapours of a hot shower, emerging from the mist with a towel across his shoulders and she watches him directing an imaginary orchestra, bending over the green marble counter, stopping to inspect his face, to trim unruly hairs from his nostrils, and then, his voice rising to a crescendo of the finale, bending in a deep bow, waiting for her applause.

The feeling that death is an illusion, that nothing ever ends overwhelms her. Her heart begins to race. The soles of her feet tingle. If she hurries she can still catch him, bent over his desk, a steaming mug of coffee in his hand. In her father’s stories elves and fairies could be caught like that. All that was needed was to surprise them, to snatch something they cherished, without which they couldn’t remain invisible.

But death is no illusion. On her kitchen calendar January 26, 1991, is circled with a thick black marker. “At noon,” she wrote that day in her diary. It is already the first week of April. A few hours later, on the front lawn Anna will spot the first, shy patches of melting snow, revealing yellowed grass, last year’s uncut growth.

In the nursing home, Käthe’s room is painted pale blue. In certain light this is the colour of her eyes.

Käthe’s hands are gnarled, spotted, her skin is pale and wrinkled, folds of it gathering around her mouth. She raises her head and frowns. She is wearing a black dress with a white lace collar; her grey hair is taken back, braided tightly and woven around her head like a crown.

So often for the last ten years Anna has tried to find the connection between William and this small drying body, the pursed, thin lips, the mouth set back into the skull. William whom, in her blindness, she has thought so strong. Indestructible. There was little resemblance, she has decided, almost none. Perhaps a shadow, in his lips, in the shape of his fingers.

There is a patch of sun on the lawn, in front of Käthe’s window. Dappled, swaying in the wind, moved by the branches of an old oak tree. “Victory oak,” Käthe had said when they brought her here for the first time. “Like the ones in Breslau.”

Anna remembers them too, old, gnarled trees commemorating the Prussian victories of the last century. Black bark, leaves smaller than on Canadian oaks. One of them stood on the First of May Square in Wroclaw, with its twin monuments of Fight and Victory, on the left a naked man wrestling a lion, on the right, the same man, now triumphant, straddling the conquered beast. The oak tree was cut down in the seventies, sliced into slabs the size of a table to make room for a pedestrian crossing underneath the intersection, linking the city core with newly constructed districts. Wroclaw was bursting at the seams then, its narrow streets crowded with cars, the Jugendstil buildings blackening from the soot and diesel fumes, dissolving in acid rain. The streets paved with pre-war, smooth grey stones were slippery, treacherous, but the back asphalt with which some of them were covered was not much of an improvement. As it melted in the sun, it took in the shapes of car tires and stiletto heels, its black, sticky surface releasing the sickly smell of tar.

“The tree wouldn’t have survived in this air,” Anna has heard, but now she doubts such explanations. Because of something William once said, she went to the library and found out that, deprived of the means to stand up and leave, trees have developed formidable defences. Oak trees step up seed production every few years to support the extra population of mice that would feed on gypsy moth larvae. When attacked by fungi, some conifers can subdivide themselves into compartments, walling the infection in. Trees may seem slow, she read, insentient, brooding, but they have simply exchanged drastic and immediate responses to danger for a subtler strategy of survival.

“It’s cold here,” Käthe murmurs, and Anna spreads a brown chequered rug over Käthe’s knees. The nurse has dressed her in two pairs of thick stockings and a pink angora sweater. When she walks, Käthe’s feet shuffle, slowly, one after another, on the vinyl floor of her room. She knows she can no longer have rugs, for she can trip over them. The wires have to be neatly tucked against the walls and fastened with silver tape. She has to take precautions against falling. Her bones are thin and brittle, refusing to take any unexpected pressure, to bend more than absolutely necessary. She has broken her hip once already, and even her shuffle is unsteady, heavier on the “good side.”

Käthe turns to the window and watches a squirrel, his thin, scrawny body shaking as he digs a hole in the lawn.

“The squirrels are cheeky, here,” she says. “Black, not red. I could never believe that there were no red squirrels in Canada. When I came here, with Willi, after the war, he thought they were rats, and he was scared.”

It was William’s decision to bring Käthe here, after that November afternoon, a year ago, when Anna spotted her mother-in-law on her knees, climbing the steep flight of stairs to St. Joseph’s Oratory. She had never told William her own reason for going there. It was not a secret, just an omission. Her little Polish ritual, like slipping a layer of hay underneath the tablecloth on Christmas Eve or crossing herself every time she boarded a plane, quickly so that no one would notice. William would only tease her at times like that, say something about the bloodlines that ran that deep. It was the anniversary of her grandmother’s death and she lit a candle for her and prayed for her soul.

She had just come out of the Oratory, when a lonely woman pilgrim on the stairs caught her eyes. At first she only saw a loose, black coat, then she could make out the shape of the wobbly figure. Curious, she came nearer; the middle stairs were to be climbed on the knees, but Anna had never actually seen anyone doing it. In her black coat and hat, the woman looked like a giant ant surveying an unfamiliar path, probing the air in front of her before making the next step.

The sky was grey. Anna felt a drop of rain on her face and it was then that she recognized that the kneeling pilgrim was her mother-in-law. “She shouldn’t be here in this weather,” she thought. “She’s had such a bad year.”

Käthe had had a bad year. Her once strong body, which could withstand 36-hour shifts of nursing, was giving in. She’d had pneumonia in the spring. In late September, a fever that wouldn’t go away, painting the tops of her sunken cheeks with reddish hue. Anna visited her often, then, helped her around the house, stocked her fridge with groceries.

They got along fine, without William around. A thought like that was a sore spot, and Anna tried to ignore it. Käthe’s stories of her nursing days was what kept their conversations going.

Homo homini lupus, Käthe liked to begin, her lips twitching slightly, a grimace of disgust. People were like wolves to each other. A pack of predators, ruthless in pursuit. They left their traces behind, the trail of the hunters imprinted in the flesh of their prey. Bruises, torn muscles, broken bones.

Once she summoned a surgeon back to the hospital, dragged him from his New Year’s Eve party, because she didn’t like the paleness of her patient’s cheeks. “She was only a young girl, ya?” she would tell Anna in her thick German accent. “I knew she was bleeding to death.” The doctor tried to reason with her, but Käthe stood her ground. “What’s with you,” she asked, shaking with anger. Wasn’t it his duty? His sacred duty he swore to uphold? She had been right. The girl did have an internal haemorrhage and she, Käthe, had saved her life.

“Ya, ya?” she was like that, she would tell Anna. “The Iron Kate.”

That November afternoon Anna rushed back to the lobby of St. Joseph’s Oratory in search of a payphone. William said he would be right there, would have to miss a faculty meeting, but would come. “Watch her,” he snapped. “It’s going too far,” and Anna immediately regretted having called him at all. She should’ve tried to get Käthe into a taxi, call William only when she was safely home. But it was too late.

Fifteen minutes later she saw him in the courtyard, below. No hat, no scarf, his grey hair tousled by the wind. His black coat opened. He left the car parked by the curb, lights flashing.

“Where is she?” he had motioned to Anna from below, throwing his arms up, but then he noticed Käthe himself, the only pilgrim on the stairs. She had already climbed the first few steps of the second landing and was now motionless, her head bent.

“Mother!”

Käthe did not acknowledge William’s presence. She lifted her knees awkwardly to the next step, steadying herself with her hands and then stopping again to clasp her palms and pray. Anna thought that the boards must be hard, and that her knees must hurt her by now, but Käthe kept praying, her eyes fixed on the ground. William ran up the side flight of stairs and stood on the second landing, watching her from above, motioning to Anna to come and help him. Only when Käthe reached the landing did she open her eyes.

“Mother. How could you!”

There was no surprise in her eyes. But she did not protest when William took her firmly by the shoulders and led her down to the car.

The nursing home room is too small to let Käthe keep much from her old apartment. Most of her things are in Anna’s basement. The enamelled wineglasses and beer steins are carefully wrapped in layers of white tissue and placed in cardboard boxes marked, “For Julia.” So are her books and her embroidered linen. Out of all Käthe’s furniture William took one piece only, a rosewood curio cabinet with a crystal glass Käthe had bought years ago at an auction. He said he liked it when he was a boy, and that it would be just great for his music boxes. The bed and two night stands have been brought here, to the nursing home. The rest of the furniture, William decided, was not worth anyone’s trouble.

On the night stand to the left there are the photographs of William, Julia, and Marilyn at the seaside, their skins young, smooth, without a blemish. In the one Anna is looking at now, Julia is not more than three, and William holds her up, above his grey hair, like a trophy.

“Marilyn called,” Käthe says. “She will stay in Boston. The library is expanding, and she is now in charge of rare books.”

“She didn’t come to the funeral,” Anna says. It sounds like a complaint and it is.

Anna wrote to Marilyn after William’s death. A short note was all she could manage. A few details of how she found him that day. Then, in a moment she has regretted ever since, she added a plea for forgiveness. She could never understand why they couldn’t stop hurting each other, after all those years.

“They didn’t let me go to the funeral,” Käthe says in a cautious whisper, and looks around as if someone might hear her.

In one of the photographs on the wall, William’s hair is all blond. This is a Breslau picture, a determined look of a five-year-old, dressed in a velvet suit of a little lord. Anna knows this look. Tainted by impatience. With the photographer, the clothes that on this occasion are festive and uncomfortable. With his mother who, he told Anna many times, was there, too, a cold, watchful figure in the corner, her eyes ordering him to stay still.

“You had a fever, again. The doctor said you had to stay in bed. You were in no shape to go anywhere,” Anna says.

What a mess it all is Anna thinks, what a tangled mess. She is covering Käthe’s arms with a warm woollen sweater, light blue with white trimmings. It is lamb’s wool, silky to the touch. She feeds Käthe small morsels of bread with cream cheese and lean turkey. Baby food, she thinks. Käthe eats slowly, chewing each mouthful for a long time.

“Did you sleep well?” she asks and Käthe nods. They don’t talk much these days, but the silence is never uncomfortable. Even if there are things Anna finds hard to forget. “Your wife called me,” Käthe would say to William, meaning Marilyn. “Anna is my wife, Mother,” William would protest. “Is it really so hard to remember?”

When the meal is over Anna gathers the paper plates and places them in a plastic bag she has brought with her. She will throw it out on her way home; she does not want to leave any garbage in Käthe’s room. By the time the room is cleaned it would fill with the smells of stale food. She carefully gathers the crumbs from the table.

“Leave it,” Käthe says. “They can clean it up, nein? That’s their job.” She always says the same thing, and Anna always nods and keeps cleaning. This is what she has learned long ago, a thing William found so hard to do. “Just nod and do your own thing,” she kept telling him, “it’s not impossible.”

Käthe points to a small lamp by her bed. “Touch it,” she says. Anna touches the brass base with her finger. The lamp lights up.

“Julia gave it to me,” she says. “It’s very convenient. I don’t have to look for a switch when I wake up at night.”

“It’s nice,” Anna says. “Very nice.”

It was William who has made Anna think of his childhood as lacking. “Deprived” is the word he used. A war, he said, can be an excuse to deny a lot to a child.

“There was never enough love,” he said, and Anna thought of a little boy pulling at his mother’s skirt. He could plead and whine all he wanted and the most Käthe would do was to tell him to stop it, or hand him over to his nanny. He always felt the sting of her stubborn, silent mourning for his father.

Bel ami, bel ami, bel ami! he remembered the song from some afternoon tea-room, in Breslau, his mouth full of poppyseed cake, crumbs falling onto a tiny china plate with little flowers all around it. This was an unusual time, his mother was smiling then, listening to the song. For a moment her face was carefree, and so pretty that he thought her an angel. She was wearing a white dress with a v-shaped collar, with a single pink rose pinned to it. He felt a desire to put his head on her breasts, quickly, to feel the beating of her heart before she had the time to stop him. She was tossing her hair back and then, suddenly, as if she could read his thoughts, her face grew tense, and she sat up straight. “Let’s go, Willi,” she said, ignoring his protests. He had not even finished his cake.

“Is that all that happened?” Anna asked. It seemed to her strange that he would remember a moment of such little consequence. There could have been so many reasons to hurry.

No, he didn’t like it when she said things like that. He didn’t want her to find ordinary explanations for what he had felt. His mother was full of them, too. “But it was the war, Willi. Your grandfather was in prison! Those were dangerous times!” Words like these came too late, he said, and only after he had complained of her silence. A belated effort to soften his heart, or maybe just one more call of duty, a little, self-satisfied station on his mother’s way of the cross. How could she hope to atone for all the incomprehensible moments of harshness? To make him forget the sharp pulling of his arm, her kisses that brushed his skin lightly without leaving a trace. His mother never raised her voice. He used to dread her calm more than he would dread an outburst, her subtle sighs of resignation echoed by every wall in the room.

This was a dangerous zone Anna was trying to enter, a minefield of hurt feelings. She may have learnt quickly what not to say, but that didn’t mean she understood.

William said that his mother had always kept him at arm’s length. He liked this expression; it suited what he wanted to convey. Not too far, and not close enough. He was her duty, her responsibility so faithfully fulfilled, but he was not her joy. When Anna objected that there must have been other times, he conceded. Yes, during that terrible winter trek from Breslau. When he thought he would die and she, holding him close to her, promised he wouldn’t. She kept me warm, he said. She fed me. Then, there was nothing more important than hot cabbage soup and fur gloves she somehow managed to get. But as soon as they were out of danger she was back to her old ways.

His presence, William would tell Anna, was his mother’s punishment, a cross she had to bear with patience and humility. This is what he had really remembered from Breslau. These walks on which she always hurried him home. On which there was never enough time for another swing, an ice-cream. So, in the end, he would hurry, too, home to Gretchen, his beloved nanny, who waited for him at the door.

It was Gretchen who pinched his cheeks, drew his bath and tickled him until he sputtered with laughter and saliva. Gretchen who taught him songs and stories he would remember for a long time after. “Hear this?” she would ask, and he listened to the thunder rolling through the sky. “The Wild Hunt.” She told him about Wodan, the king of the gods, leading his frenzied gallop through the sky. Wild, wild horses carrying their masters, the warriors slain in battles, galloping through the darkened sky, in hot pursuit of some fantastic game.

“Good warriors, Gretchen?”

“The bravest. The best. The most valiant. In the heat of battle a beautiful Valkyrie, a maiden on horseback, would appear to the chosen one. ’Get ready,’ she would say, ’Get ready, my brave one. For you the great Wodan will open the sacred doors of Valhalla.’ And so went the valiant warrior, his eyes still filled with the memories of the fight. He would join Wodan at the last battle, at the twilight of the Gods.”

During all these uncomfortable evenings in Käthe’s living room, when conversations faltered, or went in circles, or stopped at unpredictable moments, it seemed to Anna that both, mother and son, tried to catch each other at some grave transgression. All they were looking for was one more proof that would finally lay bare what they both knew was there all along.

Anna remembers one such evening, a few years ago. Käthe’s sixty-fifth birthday. William bought her an old musical box and restored it himself. It was lovely, Anna thought, with its inlaid pattern of fern-like leaves. Käthe still lived alone, then, on Terrebonne Street, a housing complex for seniors.

Anna had her own worries consuming her then. Marie had just come back from Poland, her first trip after martial law was declared. She talked of dark grey streets, of people walking without a smile in their faces, trying to remain invisible. All telephone conversations were monitored, all letters opened and read. There was no food, no coal for the winter. Police were everywhere.

She had visited Anna s parents. “No one says martial law there. They all say the war,’ she said. ”Your mother said it was worse than the war because this time it was not the Germans who were pointing the guns at them.”

For days afterwards Marie spoke of nothing else but dark, dirty cities, of the Wroclaw Central Station smelling of spilled beer and sour vomit, of people standing in line-ups for hours, motionless, seemingly resigned to what was happening to them. Her visa said three weeks, but she had to leave after two - she couldn’t take it any more.

Käthe opened the door wearing a grey dress. Her only piece of jewellery was a golden chain with a small crucifix. They talked for a while, an innocent talk of the winter, the chill of the northerly winds, the slippery pavements, a city forgetful of its pedestrians.

There was a routine to their visits and this was not an exception, in spite of the musical box wrapped in golden wrap, and a card with best wishes of happiness and peace. They brought a cake from the Patisserie Beige in Outrement and a box of Belgian chocolates. Käthe cooked dinner. At that time her arthritis did not bother her that much. The movements of her hands were still quick and precise. Like William’s, Anna thought, but of course never said it. The table was set for three, with Käthe’s embroidered tablecloth, white damask roses on white linen, the wineglasses enamelled with grapes and vine leaves. The whole apartment smelled of garlic and parsley. And something else. Marjoram.

“Sit down,” Käthe said. “Before it all gets cold.”

“Doesn’t she mind living alone?” she kept asking William. “Shouldn’t we ask her to move in with us?” She thought of Babcia who came to live with her parents the day Dziadek died. But William only laughed.

“Of course not. She lives her own life. I told you she doesn’t need anyone else.” He was right, Anna thought, in a way. Käthe had her own friends, former nurses like her. At the time when she was less fragile, they went out to concerts, for walks. William recalled the times of her treks to the Rockies, to the Sierra Mountains, to the Grand Canyon, but Anna only saw pictures of these trips, Käthe in shorts and sweatshirt, knee-high woollen socks, a green knapsack on her back, leaning on a walking stick. Behind her were the mountains, the canyons, the springs.

Later, when her arthritis made hiking impossible, Käthe’s friends came to play bridge with her, leaving behind them full ashtrays and greasy aluminium trays from store-bought hors-d’oeuvres. “Buy and lie,” they called them. Alice Woolth, Bernice Camden, Vicki Norton. Old, wrinkled women, sitting around Käthe’s dining room table, smoking, remembering old patients. The woman who called Bernice at four thirty in the morning asking for the result of her pregnancy test from two months before. The man who looked up at Alice as she was wheeling him down the hall to surgery and asked if those three little donuts counted as food.

“Open it, Mother,” William urged her. Käthe unwrapped the golden wrap carefully, folding it, putting it away for later. “Come on, play it,” he said and she did, listening to the chiming notes of the Viennese waltz as if it were a funeral dirge. These were William’s words, said to Anna after they had left, for at the time she thought he was hiding his disappointment so well, navigating the conversation past the usual points of no return.

The first signs of trouble came soon enough. “Have you talked to Julchen?” Käthe asked, and Anna stopped eating, waiting for William’s reply.

“No, I haven’t heard from her for a while,” he said, and she relaxed for his voice was still normal, still ready to take this question as an innocent inquiry about a granddaughter, nothing else.

“You haven’t?” Käthe asked, her voice raising slightly, the first sign of a reproach she was still trying to cover. She hurried to the kitchen from which she emerged with a bottle of soya sauce, even though no one asked for it. William shot Anna a telling look, “See,” he seemed to be saying, “I told you.” But Anna averted her eyes. She was not going to encourage him.

“So what have you been up to, Mother?” William asked when Käthe sat down again. There was this false cheerfulness in his voice, the cheerfulness Anna did not like. It was a sign that he had been hurt and was now putting on a face.

“You should try to see her more often, Willi,” Käthe said. “I’m not going to interfere in your affairs, but a child is a child. You have to call her. She needs guidance, nein? Ya, ya, you will do whatever you want, you always did.”

“Lovely soup, Mother,” William said, and Anna nodded. “Yes, excellent.” On white china plates the broth looked pale, but it was strong and fragrant with herbs.

Käthe gave William a stern look as if he were still a little boy learning his lessons. A fork in the wrong hand, a drop of wine staining the tablecloth were no mere slips; they justified her suspicions that there was more at stake. His character, his entire life.

When they had finished the soup, Anna picked up the plates and carried them to the kitchen. From there, she could hear Käthe’s voice asking William what used to be so important that he had to leave Marilyn and Julia for months. “Your wife and child,” she said. Wasn’t he aware how hard it was for a woman to raise a child alone?

“Anna is my wife,” she heard him say. “I don’t want to talk about Marilyn.”

When Anna came back into the dining room William gave her a telling look. “See” it said. “I am trying.” He uncorked the bottle slowly, poured a small amount of wine into his glass to taste it and then filled the other two. Anna stared at her glass. The pink enamelled grapes on green stems seemed to quiver every time the table moved.

“To what shall we drink?” he asked. “Family love?”

Käthe took a small sip from her glass. William drank almost half of the wine, as if it were water, and Anna was tempted to do the same.

The pork roast with steamed white cabbage was an excuse for silence. Anna chewed on the meat, poured more sauce on the potatoes, praising the taste of wild mushrooms, the touch of coriander in the steamed cabbage. Then would come the cake, Anna thought, a cup of tea, and they could say good bye for at least another week. But that was not to be.

“Loyalty and duty, Willi,” Käthe announced all of a sudden, “set intelligent men apart from the rabble.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” William asked.

“Exactly what you’ve heard,” Käthe said. “I’m telling you what I think. But why should you care what I think? I’ll die soon. Don’t make a face like this, Willi. Lord is merciful and I don’t mind going. Not at all.”

“I’ve had enough, Mother,” William said, standing up. “We won’t take any more of your time.”

Käthe didn’t even rise from the chair to see them off. They were both so stubborn, so single-minded, Anna thought. Neither one would give in. It made no sense.

Anna followed William to the car, hardly able to catch up with him. He got in and opened the door for her from inside. Silence, Anna had learned by then, was often the best strategy. It was better to let William calm down, not to try anything hasty. After a day or two he would mention Käthe himself, comment on her stubborn character, on the way she always knew how to annoy him, suspected him of the worst. Anna would listen and nod and a few days later she would call Käthe who would invite them for dinner as if nothing had ever happened.

Käthe walks slowly to the window and looks out at the oak tree in the yard.

“Perfect to age cognac in, nicht wahr? ” she says. “Vati always said that only the oaks that grow alone, make good barrels. The wood has to soak up enough sun. If it doesn’t, it won’t release the taste or the smell.”

“Your father said that?” Anna asks, puzzled. It’s the first time ever that she has heard Käthe mention her father. But Käthe has already turned back and motions to her to help her lower herself into the armchair. She no longer wants to talk.

Conversations, even that short, mean improvement. When she learned of William’s death, Käthe wouldn’t speak at all. For days she sat frozen in her wicker armchair, staring at the crucifix on the wall, a wooden cross with Christ’s steel coloured body, the wounds of flagellation scattered all over it. “You see, darling,” Anna sobbed into the pillow. “You were so wrong about her. She does love you. She always has.”

The nursing home doctor, a nice, chubby man with a gentle smile, a favourite of all the residents, said he was watching her closely, but that Anna should let her grieve. Then one day he called. “I think you should come,” he said, and Anna could sense relief in his voice. “When I walked into her room, in the morning, your mother-in-law told me to straighten the pictures on the wall and stop grinning like a fool. I think that’s a good sign.”

That was a month ago, and now Anna has come bringing a bunch of red tulips with her. Käthe asks her to put them on the night table, and then, in a gesture that takes Anna by surprise, she smoothes Anna’s cheek with her hand.

“Annchen,” she says. “I am praying for him. And for you.”

Letters come every day. The screen door opens with a squeak; white envelopes fall through the mail-slot and spill on the floor. Anna picks them up and takes them to the kitchen to read. They move her, these words of sympathy, the memories of old conversations, the friendships of his other life, long before he met her. This one is addressed to Frau Herzmann, with the German double “n” William has dropped from his name in Canada.

The news of your husband’s death reached me only a few days ago through Frau Strauss, an old friend of the Herzmann family, from Berlin. I was saddened to hear that it was so unexpected, that he had no time to reflect, to reconcile what may have needed reconciliation. You will forgive me for saying that; we Catholics pray to be spared from a sudden death.

Your husband has often been in my thoughts and in my prayers. I’ve always considered myself to be his friend, even if we spoke rarely, for it is the depth of conversations that really matter. He came here for the first time in the spring of 1976, to examine some old music we have in our library, here at the monastery. I was asked to assist him. We talked a lot about Germany. He was of the generation touched by the war. Too young to have taken a stand, too old to say it happened before his time. This is a European disease, this mixing together of blood and soil. Pick a handful of it, they say, and you will squeeze blood.

At the time of this conversation, your husband was still shaken after a boat trip on Königssee, not far from here, in the Bavarian Alps. It was an occurrence of the utmost importance, he told me, the essence of what was wrong with us here, the blind worship of the past. He said that from the moment he boarded the wooden boat he was expected to behave as if he were in a church. Nobody on the boat dared to speak a word, he said. Everyone listened to a young guide in his twenties, with blond hair and blue eyes. The guide spoke of the purity of the place, of the mountains where Bavarian kings once hunted, of the sacred trees in these forests, of the lake’s crystal waters, the salmon and trout that live there. He stopped the boat and put his finger to his lips. They sat there for a long time, watching the darkness fall. Then, the guide blew his flügelhorn, and they all heard a single, long, haunting note. A moment later, reflected by the mountains, the echo of the horn came back, seven times. Your husband found it disturbing, very disturbing. One couldn’t help but notice that he was bitter about Germany that way. He said he never admitted he was German, if he could help it, that he refused to speak German, and looked at me when he said it as if he wanted me to protest. But I said he did what he needed to do. He asked me how I dealt with it. I said that for me it was a mission I had not chosen but could not refuse. He only laughed.

He came here one more time, as a visitor that year, for a retreat. We have a few rooms in the monastery where people come for peace. Perhaps it calmed him to be in a place where we accept the limitations of reason. I said to him then that in the depth of doubt there were always two roads, one of despair and one of hope, and that I always chose hope.

I pray to God that peace and hope comes to you, dear Frau Herzmann. You and your late husband will always be in my prayers. Father Albrecht

Once, at a party in Montreal to which William took her, Anna met a Filipino woman who said she could remember everything that ever happened to her. “Exactly the way it happened,” she said firmly, “As if I were watching the same film over again.”

Anna remembers feeling incredulous at first, then irritated with the certainty in the woman’s voice and then, guilty that her own memories came maimed, malleable, prone to manipulation. “I can close my eyes,” she can still hear the woman’s slow voice, “and I can see what I saw twenty years ago. Feel the shape of the rope with which we had to tie the house down before the hurricane. Smell the wax on the bamboo floor.”

“All of it, right here,” she knocked at the side of her head, a soft knock muted by a layer of black, shining hair, “forever.” But Anna no longer knows how much of what has happened is already lost.

How she regrets now the wastefulness of the first weeks after William’s death. Knits her brows at the recklessness of picking up the small silver scissors with which he trimmed his beard and then putting them back, in their place on the glass shelf in the bathroom. Of breathing in the air trapped in the fibres of William’s shirts, opening the book he left unfinished, a book mark pointing to a traveller’s account of the journey through the Russian steppes: The spring is chilly in the steppes. The wind has no barrier, here, no reason to stop.

How much smarter she is now. She knows that without her efforts William’s presence will evaporate from the rooms. Keeping it demands ministrations that rarely repay her with the vividness she craves. In the street she might see a man his size, turning his head in a gesture that is unmistakably William. Then she has to stop herself from running after him, grateful for this momentary sharpness of feeling, which is all she has left.

She has devised some temporary measures. “Stay away,” she tells herself. “Save it,” she murmurs. “Don’t look.” She stays away from the black case of his violin, hides William’s favourite mug, his navy-blue dressing gown still smelling of sandalwood soap, with some threads pulled out already, breaking the thickness of the terry cloth. These she guards, saves them for the empty time when memories have to be coaxed out, enticed.

She flings the door to his study open and walks in. She brushes her fingers over the surface of the mahogany desk, over the pile of papers, over the drawers with their round brass locks. She opens them, one by one, slides her hand inside, smoothing the things that retain the layer, however faint, of his touch.

“My haven,” he called it when he brought her here, for the first time, and she looked at the piles of books and papers lying on the floor, seeing in them a maze of paths that would take her years to unravel. His ex-wife and her inexplicable outbursts of hatred. Julia’s angry silence. William was standing right behind her, his arm around her waist, his mouth nuzzling her hair aside and touching her neck. She leaned back and pressed her head to his chest. When she was little she would ask her father to let them walk like that, together, her feet on his. He pretended to wobble as they walked and she laughed at these big steps she was making, the sweeping swings to the left and to the right, the sudden twists broken by a peal of laughter.

I am that which is.

I am everything that is, that was, and that will be. No mortal man has lifted my veil.

He is of himself alone, and it is to his aloneness that all things owe their being.

They frightened her then, these words, so beautifully penned on white parchment paper, in their wooden frame.

“These?” he repeated her question. “These are ancient oracles. Beethoven had them mounted under glass on his working table,” he had told her. “You don’t think I’m arrogant to do the same?”

“No,” she laughed, “I don’t.”

How relieved she felt then, how light! Borrowed, words somehow became less ominous, easier to tame.

“I’m worried about you,” Marie says as she so often does. The touch of her friend’s hand is firm and not unpleasant, but Anna withdraws her own hand swiftly. At Stach’s, a Polish restaurant in Old Montreal where Marie has taken her for a bowl of goulash and a thick slice of rye bread, Anna separates strands of soft meat with the tip of her spoon. She puts her spoon down, and sips water from a thick, green glass.

“It is this absent look,” Marie says, “I can’t stand it.”

No one, Anna thinks, has told her about the apathy of grief. Of the loathing of the slightest effort, the slightest gesture. Of the long, empty hours spent in bed, curled up, her head covered, hoping that the world has stopped as it should. Of the times, increasingly alarming to her, when she finds herself doing something she does not remember starting, as if, in these blank, missing moments, her mind floated somewhere above and could not be accounted for.

“Can you sleep?” Marie asks.

Anna shakes her head. That has changed, too. At first she could. Right after William’s death sleep was an escape, a relief; she could have slept night and day. Now she has to rely on Halcyon, her mind emptying itself in a heavy, dreamless slumber. The pill doesn’t help her fall asleep; she takes it for the dawn when, without it, she would have woken up, no matter how dark she has made the bedroom. At five in the morning her mind refuses all consolation.

Every day Marie insists on taking her out, or on coming by, placing food in front of her. For Marie, Anna’s appetite is the measure of her mood. If Anna pokes her fork into the leaves of lettuce, Marie pleads for a movie, or a walk. If Anna eats what is in front of her, she can be left alone.

“When will you go back to teaching?”

“I don’t know,” Anna says. It hasn’t been too hard to find a replacement for the two English classes she usually taught at that time of year.

“I don’t need the money,” she says as if that’s what Marie were worrying about.

“But you need something to do,” Marie snaps. “You can’t cry all day.”

In this other life, as Anna sometimes thinks of the time William was still alive, she had so many plans. There was a radio documentary she wanted to work on with Marie, interviews with Polish refugees who could now go back to the new, democratic Poland. “Would they?” Marie wondered.

“He wanted to have a trout pond. And a vineyard,” Anna says. She has taken to speaking in short sentences as if words tired her. A thought takes too long when it has to be wrapped up in words. Is this why William turned to music? She would have asked him if he were here.

Marie has heard it before, a list of what is no longer possible.

“Here,” she says and hands Anna an envelope with newspaper clippings, William’s obituaries she has collected. Brilliant composer… cruel loss… he had so much more to give. Hackneyed, threadbare words come too late, but Anna craves them nevertheless.

His music. In the last years he wrote so little, and what he wrote he tore to bits and threw away in disgust. She had to become an expert on consolation. From old reviews she had memorised whole passages and recited them back to him over the breakfast table. His music thrives on ambiguity and conflict. It is interested in the decay of sonorities, in patterns that collapse as we become aware of them. In its avoidance of pulse it mocks our need for stability. Change, when it happens, has no purpose; it is time that takes away some things and substitutes them with others…

“Listen to me, darling!”

Insatiable, seductive, brilliant. William Herzman’s music transcends the boundaries of genres. It takes us beyond our selves, shakes off our complacency…

He always listened. Rolled his eyes in mock impatience, but never ever stopped her. Never tired of praises, however stale she feared they’d become.

“What would I do without you!” he would say and, now, when she remembers it, she is awash with tenderness.

Marie orders two shots of Zubrówka, bison vodka, fragrant from a blade of sweet grass. The waitress places them in the middle of the table.

“Come on,” Marie says. “Together.”

They raise the glasses. Anna flinches as she drinks, but the vodka does warm her up.

“How’s your Mother?” she asks.

“Fine,” Anna says. “They’re all fine.”

“And Adam?” It’s all a deliberate, transparent effort to make her think of her family in Poland, and it works. She has a sister-in-law now, and a nephew. In a twist of fate it was Marie who had met them, and Anna has not. When Marie visited Anna’s parents in 1983 Adam was just a toddler with a crooked smile and small plump hands. When Marie was leaving, he gave her a wet kiss. She has had a soft spot for him ever since.

“Adam sent me a card,” Anna says. He is but a face she has traced on photographs, recognising the toys and clothes she and William have bought for him.

“I’m going to Prague next week. Why don’t you come with me? You could go to Poland, too. See your parents?” Marie says.

“All I ever got were false signs,” Anna says, as if she hasn’t heard. She is thinking of the times her heart stopped when she looked at the kitchen clock, its black hand moving too fast, advancing into spaces she found increasingly difficult to explain. “He is late,” she thought, trying to calm down, “a bit later than usual. He was stopped by a student. He had nowhere to call from.” She would pace to the window and back, all the time waiting for the sound of William’s car in the driveway, for the cheerful squeak of the storm doors, the sound of a key turning in the lock. When he did come in, ashamed of her fears, she would run to him, throw her arms around his neck, and press her cheek to his chest. “What’s that all about?” he would say, laughing. “Another bout of your Slavic soul?”

“Anna,” Marie says softly. “You can’t blame yourself for not knowing. You shouldn’t think of it like that.”

“Like what?” Anna asks.

“Like you could have somehow stopped it,” Marie says. Her black hair has a slight purple hue to it. It’s very becoming, but Anna will not say so. It annoys her that she would even notice a thing like that.

“I’ve been punished,” Anna says. “For coming here. For leaving Piotr. For leaving Poland.”

“That’s absolute bullshit and you know it,” Marie says, frowning. “So don’t even start it.” She is fixing her eyes on Anna now, her grey almond shaped eyes, clouded with anger and impatience. They have been through this before. Anna knows Marie doesn’t like these self-accusations, but she brings them out nevertheless, with blind persistence, like a tongue pushing on a loosened tooth. She longs to hear Marie’s protests. “For Goodness sake, Anna! People change, they grow! You had the right to think of yourself, of your own needs! Can’t you see that?”

Anna tries to nod, but she breaks into tears, instead. Warm, abundant, like a spring shower.

It was no business of hers to write to Marilyn, but she has always been rash, always trying to mend what wasn’t hers to mend in the first place. “I’m sure,” she had written, “that in the face of death a lot can be forgiven.”

Marilyn wrote “No” across Anna’s letter and returned it. Anna still has it in her purse when she is sitting in Julia’s living room in N.D.G. This is a new place, just rented. Anna is sitting in a wicker armchair and she is watching her stepdaughter make tea. At the funeral service she was glad to have Julia next to her, to see her swaying gently back and forth, crumpling a white handkerchief in her hand. Through the mesh of Anna’s veil, Julia’s face seemed darkened, turned into a shadow, but at that time Anna was grateful for the black muslin draped over her own hat, hiding her swollen eyes, dampening the brightness of colours, protecting her grief.

The peace between them is a fragile one. Seven years before, when her stepdaughter stormed out of their Westmount home, Julia was thin and nervous, her long hair tied into a golden ponytail. She always bumped into things, then, bruised her thighs on table corners, cut her fingers when she was slicing bread. Now, at twenty-seven, Anna’s stepdaughter moves with confidence, her gestures slow and deliberate. Her hair is cropped short, making her look slightly boyish, in spite of her full lips and her tight dress.

“Still with honey instead of sugar?” Julia asks her. She is placing a pot of herbal tea on a low coffee table with rattan legs. She holds it firmly by the handle.

Anna doesn’t really like Julia’s new place. It is too noisy, even on a Sunday, and too dark. The furniture is simple. A futon by the coffee table, a pine bookcase, and an armchair. On one of the walls Julia has put the same framed poster she had in her old apartment, the Expose Yourself to Art one William had given her, a man opening his coat to a sculpture of a naked woman.

“Yes, please,” Anna says to the offer of honey. She has been leaning to the side far too long, and now her right leg has gone to sleep. She lifts herself up and limps toward the window. Julia’s windows look right out on Sherbrooke Street.

“I wish I made myself call him,” Julia says. Her bottom lip trembles. She chews on it to stop the trembling. “I wish we had one good talk before he died.”

For the last few years William didn’t even want to speak about Julia. He frowned and shrugged his shoulders, defeated. “I’ve tried,” he said. “You are my witness. We’ve both tried.”

In 1981, when Anna met her, Julia was seventeen. There was a smell of talcum powder around her, then, and something else, something familiar and, at the same time, out of place. “Vanilla,” Anna realised a split second later, “a scent of vanilla.”

They were all rather nervous that evening. When Julia sat down she took a white paper napkin into her hand and began tearing it into small pieces and then, with her index finger and a thumb she rolled the pieces into little balls, and dropped them on the carpet.

“I hate school,” she announced when William asked her how she was doing. She was tall, pale, and very thin. Her lower lip was thrust forward, as if she were sulking, but this, too, could have been a calculated effect, for it gave her the aura of a pretty, spoilt child.

“Wow,” she said when Anna brought in an assortment of cheeses, prosciuto with melon, and smoked salmon spread. “How did you know I loved this stuff,” she asked.

Anna had hoped to become friends with Julia, then, had images of the two of them meeting for ice cream and coffee, or shopping for clothes. She wanted to smooth some of the lingering harshness in the way Julia spoke to her, some uneasiness, jealousy perhaps.

That evening Julia talked all the time, as if afraid to let them have a word, to contradict her. What did she talk about? Anna still remembers Julia’s admiration for some girl who really had class. The friend she so much admired, Marcia, was lethal.“ You should have seen her, Dad. Swinging her purse. Guys just lose their heads.”

Marcia thought it cool to pinch things from stores, a lipstick, a comb, a packet of chewing gum. “There is this older guy, a sick jerk,” Julia went on without a pause. “His fat lips quiver when he sees her. Waiting for her after school in his Jag. ’Just to see you, my angel!’ Julia’s voice rose at the end of each sentence, as if they were all questions, and waited for William to disagree.

“Marcia said he begged her to sit in the car. She sat there and pissed on the seat.”

When she laughed, Julia tossed her head backwards and her shoulders shook. She bombarded them with words, unable to stop the staccato of exclamations and forced, jeering laughter. It was a performance, Anna thought, a rehearsal. She came to hear herself speak and to check her own power, to see William’s eyes following her.

Julia, it seemed to Anna then, paid no attention to her. It was William she wanted, William with this smile on his face that betrayed him. He was so happy to see his daughter again that he would accept everything she told him, pay any price. Agree with everything she said.

“I wish you could speak to Ma!” Julia said, finally. So that’s why she came, Anna thought, to get him to fight her battles. She excused herself and went to the kitchen. From the living room Julia’s voice was a long murmur of which Anna could make only a few words. “You are in my house and you are under eighteen. I’m not going to let you ruin your life … Tell him to get out of here or I’ll call the police … She has no right! Hell, I’m not going to tell her everything.”

In the kitchen, Anna felt her body become heavier, harder to move. It was getting dark, time to switch on the lights. “Now,” she urged herself on and arranged a few more slices of poppyseed cake on a platter. When the murmurs in the living room became less intense, she walked in. Julia took a big piece of cake from the plate and winced.

“I’m eating like a pig. God, you must think I’m pregnant or something,” Julia laughed, addressing Anna for the first time. William laughed, too. It was a guilty laugh, begging for acceptance.

“Oh, no,” Anna said, quickly, and then thought that it was probably a stupid thing to say.

They never knew when Julia would come, when a few angry words from Marilyn would make her pack her bag and arrive on their doorstep. It became a way of life, a sea-saw in which they were only one of the sides — once up, once down. And there was always Käthe with her terse calls to William. “But Willi, she is only a child.”

Anna let words slip, betray her resentment. She was not good at sharing William, at changing plans at the last minute because of Julia’s arrival. It became harder and harder to pick up damp clothes from the bathroom floor, to remove Julia’s long golden hairs from her hairbrush.

“Why do you let her speak to you like that?” she made a mistake of asking William after a long series of “Oh, shut up Dad,” and “Lay off, will you!”

“What do you want me to do?” he asked in return.

“Tell her she can’t live like that. Tell her you don’t like it.”

He gave her a hurt look, then, as if she disappointed him, turned into someone else, someone he could no longer trust. “Then she won’t come here, at all,” he said. “Is that what you want?”

When Julia turned twenty she moved in with them, taking psychology and music at McGill. William beamed with pride. Anna could hear them, from behind the closed doors of Julia’s room, laughing, recalling stories from the past. Some cat with a striped tail making off with Julia’s doll. The bitter lettuce leaves from their garden in the country. She couldn’t shake off the feeling that they were talking about her, laughing at her behind her back.

Her own questions Julia answered with quick yes or no, flashing Anna a smile with her braced teeth, their conversations ending before they could begin. Anna thought herself only good enough for picking up the trail of crumbled tissue, dirty dishes on the floor, on the sofa, socks rolled into sweaty balls that had to be turned inside out and soaked before washing.

If only she and William could have a child, she thought, it would be all different. She wouldn’t mind it so much. But no matter how much they wanted it, she couldn’t get pregnant. Her doctor urged her not to despair. There was no medical reason why she couldn’t conceive, he said. It may be just a matter of time. She was not the only one, either. It happened so often in his practice.

The trip to Italy was to be an escape, a rest from the tensions of the last months. Two weeks alone with William, long walks though the streets of Florence, Tuscan meals at trattorias, his voice whispering in her ear how well-dressed people seemed there, how open about their bodies. “Look at the ease and grace with which they move,” he kept telling her, his eyes following the young women who passed them by. They went to see David at the Academia, and then sat looking at Michelangelo’s Bacchus in the Bargello, at the rounded belly and the lecherous half smile of the marble god, suspicious of the boundaries of virtue. When they sat there, a blind man in dark glasses walked in. He was holding a thin white cane, and a young boy who held his arm described to him, in a soft, humming voice, what sculptures they were passing by. When they reached Bacchus, the blind man leaned forward and slowly ran his fingers along the marble skin.

Something wasn’t right. She knew that as soon as the taxi brought them from the airport. Julia was standing behind the screen doors waiting for them, her hair gathered into a tight pony tail, her pale face covered with red blotches. “I’m sorry, Dad,” she said, biting her lips. “Could I talk to you … alone?”

“Go ahead,” Anna said. “I’ll wait.” She paid the driver, an elderly Sikh in a freshly ironed blue shirt, and asked him to leave the suitcases in the driveway. “The children, Ma’am,” he said with sympathy. “With them, there is always trouble. But without them, there is no life.” Anna nodded and waved to him as the taxi backed and left.

The lawn, she noticed at once, was a mess. Cigarette butts were scattered among drying, trampled grass, and broken beer bottles glittered in the sun. Someone had dug out deep square holes in the middle of the lawn. A splash of silver by the window turned out to be one of the junipers, sprayed with paint, its branches imprisoned in a shining amour.

Anna waited outside for a few more minutes, registering more broken flowers, spots where grass was painted red, blue, and yellow. Someone had pushed a tire into the flowerbed. She was growing anxious. “William!” she called. Nobody answered. “William! Julia! May I come in?”

She stood in the hall listening, but heard nothing. In the living room Julia was standing by the fireplace, leaning over the mantel. William was sitting on the sofa, his face hidden in his hands.

“No, I have nothing to admit,” Julia was saying when she Anna came in. “And I don’t have to take this shit, especially not from you!”

The sour smell of vomit, cigarette smoke and spilled beer filled the air. The walls and ceiling were covered with drying red flesh of tomatoes, yellowish seeds still clinging to the pulp. More broken glass; among the shards were fragments of William’s crystal wine decanter. Anna stepped on something soft that squiggled under her foot. Bending down, she saw it was a used condom.

“What has happened,” she asked. It was hard to believe that what she saw had a cause, a beginning, an intention.

When William didn’t answer, Anna walked up to him, took his hands and pulled them off his face. He was crying. The cigarette burns in the soft brown leather of the sofa formed a big, crooked star.

“Do you think I’ve been punished enough?” he asked.

Julia was moving fast behind the doors of her bedroom. When she emerged, she had her rucksack on, a red bandanna across her forehead. The doors closed and the storm doors followed with a thud.

“She threw a party,” William said.

“A party? What kind of a party?”

“The neighbours called the police,” he said. “Someone broke the window in the bedroom. A tire was lit up in the backyard. But they didn’t come fast enough to catch anyone.”

He brought a package of black garbage bags, and Anna opened the windows to get rid of some of the smell. “Don’t touch anything with your hands,” he said handing her a pair of latex gloves. With these rubbery fingers they picked up sticky condoms, crumpled paper towels, tablecloths and sheets glued together with dried vomit. Turning her head away, Anna pushed the soiled cloth into the black bags. William announced a list of damages: beer spilled into his violin case, the toilet seat broken, CDs missing, a handle torn from the door, black scratches on the living room floor. Flour and sugar dumped into the washing machine.

For days everything they touched seemed sticky, defiled. There were tomato seeds still hiding between telephone buttons; a slice of pizza was rotting behind the bookcase. It scared her to think of the destructive rage that must have fuelled it all.

The neighbours were forgiving. “You are not the first ones,” Pauline said. “A Canadian right of passage, a crashed party.” John and Louise apologised for not intervening earlier, but, they stressed, Julia seemed always so mature. She must have had a bit to drink, missed the tipping point beyond which there is no control. “Poor kid, who needs an experience like this? She must feel awful, now.”

Anna thought: Poor Julia? What about me? What about her father?

If she did regret what had passed, Julia kept such feelings to herself. She didn’t call, didn’t write. Not even a postcard with an apology. It’s just as well, Anna thought then. She needed time. She needed time not to feel a tinge of pleasure when William said that he didn’t want to speak of Julia at all. Ever.

The beige metal shelves in William’s office at McGill are full of papers, books, and records. Some of the books have white library stickers on them. Valerie, the secretary in the Music Department gives Anna a few empty cardboard boxes. One of them is marked, “Return.”

“This is for library books if you find any,” she says and sighs. Her red jacket is open at the front. “Take your time. There is no rush. We are all so sorry. He was still so young.”

This is not the worst, Anna thinks. At least she is not offered a spiritual lecture about the ebb and flow of life, the need to accept death. Or told, with an uneasy smile that she will get over it, with time.

“Fifty-one,” Anna says, “Only fifty-one,” and her heart shrinks, for words like these reduce William’s life to a number, a score.

There are two photographs on his desk in brown leather frames, one of her and another of Julia, her hair still long, her now straight white teeth exposed in a wide, cover-girl smile. Anna is glad to have the picture here. Julia called her in the morning and suggested they have dinner together. “Do you want me to come and help?” she asked, but Anna said she would rather go through it on her own.

That was in the morning. Now, overwhelmed by the inevitability of the task before her, Anna escapes to the washroom and stands motionless in front of the bathroom mirror, leaning over an orange Formica counter. Swallowing is hard, painful. She touches the purple shadows under her eyes. Her face has turned alien in grief, bird-like, she thinks, revealing the first short lines cutting into her lips, almost invisible, but already there.

Back in William’s office she goes through his things, slowly, refusing to part with any traces of his presence. A thought that he won’t, ever, touch anything else is what prompts her. At home, she hugs his dressing gown hanging on the door hook, kisses the rim of the collar, touches the polished tips of his shoes, still in the shoetrees to preserve their shape. Here, she is sifting through what has remained.

The papers on the upper shelves turn out to be students’ unclaimed assignments, dusty and yellowed. These the department can have. They can also have the music journals, some of them still in their plastic covers, unopened, unread, as well as the files in the drawers, minutes from committee meetings, grant proposals, students’ petitions asking for his recommendations.

A thick manila envelope is in the file marked personal. It is sealed and when Anna tears the flap to get inside, letters, postcards, and photographs spill on the desk. In these photographs, taken within moments of each other, William’s face is moving from his pensive frown to laughter. He is wearing the black turtleneck and the brown tweed jacket she always liked so much, leaning forward as if trying to convince someone of something very important. In the last picture the lock of his silver hair is falling over his forehead, just before the moment he would brush it away.

A postcard from Baden-Baden — an old, sugar-sweet postcard, flowery wreaths and bells ring merrily, musical notes spilling out. The handwriting is hard to decipher, the letters are tall and tight. It takes Anna a while to see a pattern in these edgy lines, to make out the words. L’absence est à I’amour ce quest au feu le vent, il éteant le petit il allume le grand. It is signed: Ursula.

Anna opens a small blue envelope, and takes out a folded piece of paper. Her heart stops for a few seconds and begins again to pump blood, rushing it to her face. The paper shakes as she holds it. Darling, It is so empty here without you. The rooms echo my steps, and your voice is still around me. I’m pretending that you’ve just stepped out for a moment and that you will be back, soon, a good husband, away on a short trip. I feel married to you in the most profound sense of the word. Why would we need anything more? Ursula

Another sheet, folded in four, rustles as she unfolds it. No date. Got home late, and the apartment was dark and cold; I had turned the thermostat down before I left. My old Prussian hatred of waste, the miserly me. I crawled into bed thinking of you. Today, I don’t want to talk to anyone, for then I would forget your voice. Urs.

London, then. We will have late dinner at Durrants Hotel and then walk on George Street and kiss. I want to be courted. Please, buy me a ribbon and a comb and take me to the wax museum, and we will laugh in the still faces. We will make love and drink horribly strong tea (milk first), and be as British as only Germans long to be.

Anna sits down, legs unable to support her. Something has snuck up behind her, is touching her shoulder. She turns her head and looks at the bookshelves she has just emptied. Nothing there but specks of dust. It’s not what you think, she says to herself. It can’t be.

“It’s just for a few days,” she remembers him saying. “I need to be alone. You do understand, don’t you?” She stood in the doorway and watched him pack his brown leather suitcase. Round balls of socks went to their place on the right, his beige corduroy pants lay flat on the bottom, Shetland sweaters were folded into even squares, empty sleeves tucked neatly inside. He closed the zipper of a brown leather sachet with its scent of sandalwood.

“Be together but not too close together, like two pillars of a temple,” he had said. A line from The Prophet, one of his presents for her, the maxims of the sixties. She didn’t drive him to the airport; he hated that. It was better to say goodbye here, at home, and she was careful not to hold him for too long, faking impatience to cover up the pain. Anger she couldn’t afford. It could simmer in her, but she would not let it boil over. “Thank God you are not like Marilyn,” he said once, and she remembered everything he had said about his first marriage. “You don’t have her vindictiveness.”

William was already anticipating his own return, slipping his hand under her sweater, around her waist and pulling her toward him. “I’ll call,” he murmured into her ear.

He did. From Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich, his voice cheerful, concerned. “Do you miss me, love?” he asked and she laughed. “You do understand, don’t you?” But she thought he just wanted to be alone for a while. Did he really believe she was allowing him to betray her? Not him. Not William. She must be wrong, of course she is. She has no right to suspect him.

Finished “The Faces of Women” today. All shots are black and white. Colour spoils the deadly transformations I want. You don’t have to be alarmed, William, my obsessions are not too easy to spot. The Nazi women are there in spirit only, in the looks of submission, fanaticism, and self-annihilation. I didn’t have to go too far for looks like that. A few night tours of Berlin bars sufficed. Lothar didn’t say anything, but gave me a bear hug. That was the best review I got. Walked along Ku-damm, still watching. Disco music pours out of the stores. Young women are wearing tight blouses and jeans and balance their bodies on platform shoes. Schoolgirls have loud voices and bold looks. Of course, I’m emptied and sore. Way too concerned with trivia, distracted by moments of inconsequence.

Anna takes off her glasses and closes her eyes. Her eyelids feel as if there were tiny cracks in them, itching and sore. She knows the only way to conquer the itch is to stop rubbing the eyelids, to wait through the surge of pain, but she rubs them until tears appear and torn eyelashes stick to her wet fingers. When she opens her eyes, the edges of the room look softer. Books on the shelves turn into patches of colour; the ceiling is a stretch of white, without a blemish.

Darling, No! No regrets. None! I wake up at night, watch the lights of Berlin and pretend that you are here with me. What I want is the sea — green, cold, smelling of seaweed and wet wood. Some escape from this constant fever. You tell me I’ve forgotten that there is something worthwhile beyond ecstasy and despair. I do listen. Sometimes, U.

Anna’s cheeks are flushed, and she presses her hands to hot skin. She waits for something to happen now, some necessary sequence to this discovery, something that would explain it, make it go away. From a distance she hears doors open and close, someone’s voice outside is rising then falling sharply, silenced, cut short. “Yes, yes of course,” she hears, “I’m sorry.” It occurs to her that Valerie must have placed all these letters into William’s mailbox; for years she must have watched as he picked them up and hurried to his room to read them.

She stands up and takes a few steps away from the desk. It’s not fair, she keeps thinking. Not now. Not when he is dead, when he cannot explain. She sits down again.

Darling, Your voice sounded rather sad and whiny, and I’m sorry I was so rushed. You caught me in the middle of a session. Tried to call you back, but you were out already. No, it’s not easier on me. Just because I was the one to say it, doesn’t mean it’s solely my decision. There is historical evidence that we would end at each other’s throat, and that we would burn in this hatred, so don’t try to change my resolve. I might be in Montreal next month, to photograph the faces in your Canadian national parades, the progress of the Referendum, so don’t sulk for too long. Rather, tell me what will your wonderful, innocent country do if it splits. “Je me souviens?” Isn’t that what your license plates say?

Quebec Referendum. Before she came to Canada. Of course! These letters were written before she even met William. They are from the time she has no rights to. She reasons with her own uneasiness: William had a love affair when he was married to Marilyn. He didn’t tell her about it. He didn’t want her to think him unfaithful, capable of betrayal. Such reticence is disappointing, but understandable. It may even be thought of as discretion. She didn’t tell him that much about Piotr, either.

October, 1979. Blackness is like poison, a drain of colour, and I succumb slowly. First goes hope, then energy seeps out. I sit and stare at the walls of my room and wait until it goes away. I wait until, by some divine intervention, a new beginning will grab me, and I will rise to start again.

There are magazine articles attached to some of the letters, folded, yellowed at the edges. In German, in English. Anna pushes them aside, impatient. There will be plenty of time to read them later. Now she needs to be reassured. January 1980. No, it wasn’t too bad. Just a skirmish between creativity and despair. You needn’t be concerned. I plunge into such days willingly and emerge fortified. The sky is sapphire-blue and the wind penetrates the skin. I slipped into a small church, round the corner from here, smelled the whiff of camphor from the furs, and listened to the pastor with a golden tooth and a slight lisp. “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.” Not much hope, then, for change, nicht wahr? Today I woke up full of resolutions. Like a prisoner I may have nothing but a teaspoon to dig a tunnel with, but I will go on. As chance presents itself, I’ll dispose of the soil, sand, and stones.

March 1980. I went to touch the Wall today. The doors and windows of the apartments facing the Wall in the East are sealed. This is a divided city, after all; German metaphors are solid, made of reinforced concrete. The guards on the other side will shoot to kill. Yet the brave ones dig their tunnels, scale the Wall, run for their lives. If they manage to get here, I see them, sometimes, drinking themselves into oblivion in West German bars, throwing their accusations in our faces. To them we are cold, callous, and naive. We don’t understand anything.

It is the dates Anna is checking now. Date stamps, for many of the notes are not dated at all. She remembers that William kept a magnifying glass in one of his drawers. It is still there, in its black leather case. She examines these smudged dates, carefully. 1980, 1977. Some months are missing, or so it seems to her, but then they appear, merely misplaced, overlooked. William has known Ursula for a long time.

“A Berlin photographer I know,” he said to her once. For months there was no name attached to this phrase, and she didn’t ask.

In another conversation, she remembers hearing Ursula’s name. Someone mentioned it, Malcolm perhaps, asked him about his photographer-friend from Berlin. “Ursula?” William said and Anna asked, “Who?” and he said, “Ursula, you know, the German friend I told you about.”

From the tinge in his voice she knew that it gave him pleasure to hear her name spoken.

“Quite mad,” he also said, “doesn’t believe in sparing herself.”

Many of the notes are hand-written and these Anna has to decipher slowly, match the shapes of letters, guess their meaning. Life is too short for pettiness, she reads. You are too impatient, but I do love you. She skims over them waiting for the change of tone. Hopes for the signs of love fading, turning into friendship.

September 1981, What’s wrong with our love, William? It weakens me; it makes me mellow. I walk through the day with a self-satisfied grin on my face and see your smile everywhere. I catch myself whispering your words. I hum, I skip as I walk. Don’t be too pleased with yourself, though, this is a pitiful sight! This is why I’m asking you to stay away. Please don’t be angry, you won’t lose me, ever. You’ll just let me breathe, and for this I will love you even more.

October 1981, It’s our souls, darling; they cannot stand letting go of the other lives they could have led. It scares me to think how much we have to cast off in order to choose.

October 1981, A Polish woman and a refugee, William? Isn’t she another one of your atonements?

Her lip hurts, but it takes a few second before Anna realises that her teeth have sunk deep into it, cutting the skin. There is blood on her finger when she runs it over her lip, and she stares at the red smudge before wiping it off. She has run out of excuses. “Fool,” she says aloud, “fool.” Her mother’s voice is with her now. “What were you expecting, Anna, from a German?”

Each date now is like the lash of the whip. “Until the end,” she murmurs in disbelief, “until the very end.”

May, 1987. I’ve never promised I’ll be faithful, and I don’t ask for your exclusive interest. Oh, I know, you will never admit that you are jealous! You will just sulk and try to punish me with your silly little games. How sordid of me! Sorry! Am I hurting your sensitivity? Poor Willi. I don’t believe in secrecy, and I don’t hide you from anyone else in my life. You are the one who pretends that the past and the present can be kept apart and I let you, so, please spare me your little sermons.

March, 1989. Don’t sulk! I woke up in my darkest mood, today, despairing. I looked at the last shots and they were all wrong. False, contorted, smug. Too light, too clean. What rot! A good photograph is like a prediction, isn’t it? It captures something about the future, but you have to hurry before time turns it into a cliché. So I hurry, rush, follow my hunches.

January, 1990. When I was coming back to Berlin I saw the dawn. It stretched, pink and red, and golden. “A ribbon at a time,” Darling. Remember? Maybe you are right, maybe I’m not that tough. I telephoned Lothar, and he came and let me speak of you. He made me some tea and we finished off the brandy you left behind. I couldn’t drink it alone.

November, 1990. So it’s next week. In Munich. I have a map of the world and put red tags for every city where we have been together. The spots of love. The map is pretty red, by now. Three days and three nights. I’m waiting already.

In some of the envelopes Anna finds dried wildflowers, which now crumble under her fingers, shreds of cloth, splinters of grey wood. Short notes give way to longer letters, to more newspaper clippings, pages with passages highlighted and peppered with exclamation marks. She opens the envelopes, blue, white, pink, unfolds the pages. Most of the letters have been mailed in Germany, Mit Luftpost, the blue sticker informs, by Deutsche Bundespost, but there are notes scribbled on grey stationery from Hotel Intercontinental Genève with its bilingual warning that, L’expéditeur de cette lettre n’engage pas la responsabilité de l’hôtel. The sender of this letter does not entail the hotel. By now Anna has abandoned all search for order, picks the letters at random, little snitches of the love William hid from her so well.

Mutti came for a few days, and she said I had to let her remodel my bathroom. The faucets were leaking and she gasped in her funny way. “My poor darling!” Her daughter is impractical, erratic, irresponsible. Smokes and drinks too much. Loves too much. Places no limits on herself, gives herself away. I said she could do whatever she wanted to the bathroom, a bloody mistake. I left for a few days for Paris, and when I came back I found this pink(!!!) heaven. The basin and the tub are two inverted shells. I have a mirror across the wall and pink tiles with white shells on every sixteenth one. I counted them, so I know. The floor is white — a damn nuisance, for every fallen hair stands out. She has also bought me a pile of pink and white towels, thick and fleecy. Only the taps are decent, a kind of Bauhaus style, brass, quite nice to the touch, you will like them. She went away, pleased with herself and I, quite sinfully, poured her strawberry bubbles into this shell and soaked in the water until my skin resembled prunes. I tried to call you, but you were already at home so I imagined you instead.

Dearest, We love each other so much because we are far away and we save for each other only what is best in us. We meet, full of longing, we part before we are filled, before impatience sets in. When I come back here, I thank the gods for you and hold my breath not to spoil anything, but you, you try to imagine the limits of what we could be for each other, what life together could mean. I’m not that brave. Urs.

Anna stands up so fast that she overturns the oak swivel chair. Valerie, William’s secretary, must have heard the noise for she is now knocking on the door. “Are you all right?” she is asking, her voice filled with concern.

“I’m fine,” Anna says. “It’s just the chair. I … it fell down.” She opens the door and even manages a faint smile. “It’s nothing.”

“I’m right here, if you need me,” Valerie says, smiling gently, and Anna can see that she is relieved.

“Yes. Thank you,” Anna closes the door and waits until the steps fade away, before settling down to work. Time is rushing forward, and she is trying to catch up with it. The first thing she needs is to be back home. Here, she is too much aware of the presence of other people: Valerie, William’s colleagues. Malcolm’s office is right next door. If she screamed, he might come running.

The boxes are lying on the floor. With a thick black marker smelling of paint thinner she quickly writes “discard” on the side. First she empties the contents of the top drawers, removing everything from them in scoops. Paper clips, pens and pencils hit the cardboard bottom. Thumb tacks, scissors, rolls of tape. Then she opens the side drawers and yanks the papers out. She throws them into the boxes, handful after handful, until the boxes are filled.

Soon the only things left on William’s desk are the two photographs and Ursula’s letters. Anna stuffs the letters and Julia’s picture back into the manila envelope and into her handbag. Her own face on the other photograph annoys her with its smug grin of contentment.

She remembers that they made love here once, in this office, right behind the door. A few weeks after their wedding, after their Barbados trip where she had seen palm trees for the first time, where she tasted glistening, moist slices of papaya. She came running in to see him, her face flushed, her voice bubbling with excitement. “Darling, I want to show you something.” She doesn’t even remember what it was. What she recalls with the sharpness that hurts so much now is how he stood up and locked the door behind them. “And I want you,” he said and kissed her, and ran his hand down her spine. He pushed her against the door, pressed her back against it. For a moment, before she closed her eyes, she saw her own face, in that photograph, watching them, smiling, amused. Was he thinking of Ursula then?

Anna removes the cardboard from the back of the frame and takes the picture out. She tears it in half, then in half again, into smaller and smaller pieces that she throws into the box.

The door to William’s office closes with a piercing squeak. Anna waves to Valerie from the corridor, walks quickly down the stairs, hoping she won’t meet anyone who might want to stop her and talk. By the statue of Queen Victoria, she turns around for another look at the soot-covered walls. She is holding her purse close to her body as she walks. On the bus, she sits in the back and watches the lanterns along Sherbrooke Street light up, the whole row of them, still decorated with tinsel and evergreen wreaths, in memory of another passing year.

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.

In William’s study, books take up the whole wall. These are mostly hardcover; he hated cheap editions that would fall apart before he finished reading them.

“I hate jealousy,” he kept telling her. “It’s not the way to live.” How convenient, she tells him now. How very convenient for you. I hate to be lied to, does this matter?

She starts by opening the desk drawers, one by one, yanking the papers out. She holds the white sheets to the window as if they could contain some hidden marks, some traces of invisible ink. Why would Ursula be the only one? Why not other women? Students? Colleagues? Friends? She looks for hiding places, empties each file. She opens books, upsets the even rows on the shelves, leafs through the pages in search of evidence. When she finds a folded sheet, she pounces on it, heart fluttering. On one there are a few musical notes. On another Julia’s childhood drawings of giant smiling heads on spidery legs, with arms sprouting from the ears. The books land on the carpet, one by one, and when she walks back to the desk she trips over them.

She has found a whole stack of last year’s birthday cards, Happy 50^th Birthday, Many Happy Returns of the Day. She is surprised William kept them. She had needed to hoard keepsakes, theatre programs, tickets, old calendars. Stash them away “like a hamster” he laughed, but now even this discovery hurts. What else did he keep away from her? She deciphers all the signatures. Malcolm, Jerry Dryden, Leanore. Old friends, everyone beyond suspicion. “Support the arts, kiss a musician,” Malcolm’s card says, letters dancing over a figure of a bass player, surrounded by floating notes. No card from Julia, the lingering disappointment of that otherwise splendid day.

The computer starts with a hum of the hard drive, the beeps of files loading. Anna stares at the screen, viewing the content of each file. Official letters, “On behalf of the editorial board of the Musical Quarterly…,” an unfinished article on the German performances of Beethoven’s Ninth in the last one hundred and fifty years, grant proposals, reports.

Nothing. Not that she really hoped she would find anything. He wouldn’t keep things here, not where she could’ve stumbled onto something by chance. Even now she has a feeling that William has prepared himself for this invasion, that he has foreseen her moves. Everything in this room is in order, everything can be accounted for.

“Liar!”

She pounces on the pile of telephone bills: Germany 20 minutes, Germany 10 minutes. Among his calls to London, Amsterdam, Moscow always the same Berlin number. The last call was on New Year’s Eve, only weeks before he died. Two minutes, enough for a short message on the answering machine. Ursula wasn’t home?

At night Anna wakes every hour, but manages to fall asleep again and again. The dreams are shallow and jittery, impossible to connect. She is walking through a field of grass and flowers, so high that they reach her face. She has to spread the grass with her arms, but even then each step is a struggle. Her legs get tangled in the roots, the blades of grass beat her face.

Ursula, her voice multiplied by echoes, shouts something to her from a long maze of tunnels. Someone laughs at Anna from afar, the laughter coming closer and closer. At dawn, William appears. He is standing over the bed telling her that nothing has really happened, that it is all just a bad dream from which she will soon wake. “I promise,” he says and when she does wake up, for a split second she believes him again, until her hand touches the empty space in her bed. Then she begins to sob, pounding the bed with her fists until she has no strength left.

In the morning, at William’s desk, Anna takes out a clean sheet of paper. How could you…. she starts and crosses it out, Why couldn’t he…. You owe me an explanation... Can you even try to explain why….. She crumples the sheets into balls and throws them on the floor.

I have found your letters to my husband, she finally writes. I know he was your lover. If he were alive I would ask him why he lied to me, but now I have to ask you. She catches the glint of her wedding ring as she writes. She slides it off her finger and throws it into an open drawer.

She licks the long white envelope, and the glue leaves a bitter taste on her tongue. She copies the Berlin address, and takes the letter to the mailbox across the street. Only when the envelope drops inside she wonders if Ursula knows of William’s death. If she does, who has told her.

Her conversation with Julia is a short one. “I’ve found Ursula’s letters,” Anna says. The silence on the phone is already a sign.

“Where were they?” Julia asks. She is not surprised but her voice is lower, deeper than a minute before.

“What does it matter where they were?” Anna snaps. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Where did you find them?”

“In his office. Why didn’t you tell me?”

It is the tone of Julia’s voice that maddens her. Slow, deliberate, calm. The voice of the social worker her stepdaughter has become. “It’s not so simple. You have to understand my position.” A voice so different from the sobs she treated William to, the late night calls for help.

“No, I don’t have to,” Anna says to that voice. “I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to. Isn’t that what you always believed in?”

“I’ve paid my price,” Julia says.

“You were not the only one. But why am I saying it? You never cared for anyone but yourself.”

Why should she let Julia forget the silence, the unanswered letters, the years of absence from their lives.

“That’s not true,” Julia says, still calm, still sure of herself. “You know it’s not true.”

“You told her he was dead, too. I shouldn’t be surprised, should I? You are his daughter, after all.”

Anna slams the receiver, silencing Julia’s protests. This may be just a small substitute for revenge, but it gives her pleasure.

The phone rings for a long time afterwards, but Anna doesn’t pick it up. Sorry, we are not available to take your call. Please leave your name and number or call us again, she hears her own voice, calm, carefree. She has forgotten that the answering machine switches itself on if one waited long enough.

“Anna … Anna, please … I have to talk to you,” she hears Julia’s voice. “You can’t cut me off like that.”