The morning brings a pink glow into the library. It overlooks the herb garden with its low red-brick walls and a single pear tree in the centre. The fruits have now been removed. Henning has them lined up to ripen by the kitchen window like ornaments.
Lena is still asleep upstairs.
The library is awake. The books are quietly talking among themselves while the house is still silent. A low hum of voices, like a swirling cloud of pollen, hoping to take part in newly invented ecologies. Einstein compared the attempt to understand the universe to a child walking into a library. How can you figure out all those books at once? It’s like getting your head around the idea of God, or the concept of infinity – impossible to grasp that entire constellation.
Books stacked on tables, some left on the windowsill, some yet unread, some in columns beside piles of newspapers and magazines waiting to be assigned places on newly built shelves in an adjoining room.
All of them taking turns to tell their stories.
An English poet says people fall apart after love, like two halves of a lopped melon.
An Irish poet describes the act of love as two people getting the measure of each other.
Then there is an older Irish drama in which a woman falls in love with an outlaw on the run from the police for murdering his father. When the father appears and the outlaw status evaporates, her love dies and she loses the only playboy in the Western world.
And Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist who wrote about love as a dance between war and peace. He and his wife both secretly read each other’s diaries. They became mind-readers in the same house, stealing from one another to get ahead in that lovers’ guessing game.
And the German writer who felt love could not be love without an ending. After leaving behind their farewell letters, Kleist and his lover, who was dying of cancer and had agreed to take part in a glorious suicide pact, walked a short distance from their hotel to a lake where he first shot her and then shot himself.
Effi Briest tells how her husband invented a ghost in the house to keep her from stepping out of line. It was only a matter of time before the ghost became real in the form of her lover. Effi ended up falling in love with a ghost in order to escape from a dead marriage.
Is there a ghost in every marriage?
Maybe it’s only in dissolution that marriage is interesting in literature.
An American writer tells the story of a boy watching his father and mother as associates planning a serious crime. He finds a gun on the back seat of the car. His parents carry out a bank robbery and get caught. They are put on trial and go to prison, leaving him an orphan.
Another American novel describes the pregnant April Wheeler engaging in a moment of meaningless sex with her neighbour in the back of his Pontiac. Afterwards, when he tells her that he loves her, she says – don’t say that. It’s the last thing she needs to hear. She is still out of breath when he says it again – it’s true, I’ve always loved you – but she tells him to be quiet – take me home. In the darkness outside the dance hall she can’t see his face and says she doesn’t know who he is, because she doesn’t know who she is herself.
A memoir written by an Englishwoman talks about marriage as a fraud. Both parties are forced into extraordinary levels of self-deception just to keep the family enterprise afloat. A man is either a predator or a provider. She describes herself travelling further and further away from her disbanded marriage into places where love is never spoken about.
An Italian novelist describes a woman whose husband walks out on her, leaving her with two children and a dog. The dog plays a central role in the story as a witness to her grief and abandonment. He is eventually poisoned and found dead in the park.
A writer from California tells how she gave her husband’s clothes away after he died and then ran in grief to the charity shop to ask for his shoes back.
Does the pain of loss not describe love better than all signs of happiness?
The old man with his tape recorder comes across a love scene in his memory where he was once rocking in a boat with a woman. The brightness of that memory is too much. He can’t take it. He quickly spools forward to a more bearable part of his life.
The great Norwegian dramatist tells the story of a woman who murders a book. It contains all the pain of a lost love. She kills what she loves. When the murdered book is brought back to life by her husband with the help of another woman, she goes into a room next door and shoots herself.
And the contemporary Norwegian writer who murders his girlfriend with a poem. He describes how she ran off with his older brother. When she comes back to him, everything is set for a wonderful reunion. But instead of forgiving her, he takes out a poem written by the Romanian-born writer Paul Celan. The poem is called ‘Todesfuge’ – ‘Death Fugue’. It begins with the words – Black milk of the morning, we drink it in the evening. A powerful description of the Nazi terror, when people were forced to drink their own death. As he reads out the words, it becomes clear that he is using the poem to let her know that she is nothing in comparison to this enormous event in history.
And the murdered story written by the American poet whose husband wrote the poem about lovers falling apart like a lopped melon. She loved him so much that she wanted to be one of his ribs, right next to his heart. Her collected letters talk about the day the two of them found an injured starling and took it in, feeding it milk and diced-up raw meat. But the starling got sick and weakened. Out of mercy, they placed the dying bird into a small box and gassed it in the oven. It was a shattering experience for her and she saw in it some fatalistic portent of what was happening to their love. The story was called ‘Bird in the House’. It was never published. It disappeared. Like a missing person. Presumed dead.
And the book in which a mother murders her own child out of love, to protect it from slavery.
And the story of the artist who lost all the people he loved in the Nazi years. He painted their portraits and then erased them again. When a painting was finished, he began to scrape at the paint until the features became unrecognizable and he was left with nothing but a studio covered in human dust. The artist, described in a book called The Emigrants, went to live in Manchester, where he almost vanished himself, covered in a fine layer of dust that made him look like one of his own paintings, translucent, resembling a photographic negative.
Now it’s time to be quiet.
The library has become silent because the bell has begun to ring at the cathedral. The sound comes in waves through the streets, slipping under the doors. It enters the morning thoughts of people waking up in their beds. It enters the library and steps into the bookshelves, a familiar sound that has been ringing ever since the Middle Ages. Carrying the stories of the people who lived in this city, their sorrow and their happiness, the children, the adults they became, those who left and those who stayed, the living and the dead, the love they had and the memory they left behind.
There were twelve bells to begin with, but most of them disappeared over the centuries. The main bell, weighing as much as six elephants, crashed to the floor during the Second World War.
The science of bells could fill the library many times over. Sound patterns that can be worked out mathematically and written down in a score, like music. But there is also, inside each bell, a unique set of frequencies that remain imaginary. Layers of subtones that cannot be measured. Like hearing things that are not actually there. Here we are, a couple of thousand books debating all night about the intensity of love, and this is our answer. The famous Apostolica bell of Magdeburg. A scale of harmonies and musical shapes coming and going on the morning breeze, like a choir performing the ‘Ode to Joy’.