III. LASSE

Hardly twenty-four hours ago Hedda had been standing on the platform with Lasse at her side, who waved at the mirrored glass, and as the train began to pull away she’d seemed relieved, or maybe I was wrong.

For twelve years I’d crawled from one fixed-term contract to another at the University of Göttingen, published articles that no one read, gave teaching my all but saw the students simply fall asleep or look out the window, offered reading circles that no one attended. Two years ago I’d finally been pushed onto the academic siding. My career was over, and when I thought about the university all I saw was a stony, bitter-faced audience looking down onto me in an orchestra pit.

Naturally, I hadn’t been released from my life. It continued to turn up surlily but insistently. For one and a half years I wrote for the local paper which paid worse than I let on to Hedda. We lived in a posh flat on Düstere-Eichen-Weg. The rent was pitched at an established professor, not someone scribbling for their daily wage, and so I wrote about all the nonsense I could that went on in that backwater, performances at the Deutsche Theater and inaugural celebrations at the university, student fraternities and bathing lakes, about dead scientists and resurgent restaurants, I wrote and I wrote and over and over again had to travel to Bremen to give my mother a picture of my disastrous financial situation, which would always be followed by her walking across the Persian rug to her bureau and filling out a yellowed, but nonetheless usable, bank-transfer slip.

We had a yard and four rooms, one of which was my office, and I can still hear Hedda laughing, ‘What do you need a study for?’ One room was a children’s room filled with lobster-red cars that would slide across the floor and under your feet as soon as you walked in, a bedroom (which would be better for me not to think about) and a sizeable, 50-square-metre living room that Hedda had decorated, all white and glass and light, every piece of furniture edged in chrome. Around us Hedda had erected a terrarium, and once a week she’d lead visitors through the rooms to have a look at that dying breed, the Stövers.

And those evenings we Stövers were deceptively lively as we made our way round the preserve, Hedda offering guests puff pastries before we all moved on to more solid fare like rolled roast. Hedda had learnt how to cook for me, and not by choice. Back when she’d got to know me, or, rather, my mother, an activist with the Bremen chapter of the Communist League of West Germany (a group which, at that point, she’d wanted to write her dissertation on), she was a true phenomenon of emancipation who rejected everything that could possibly have been seen as bourgeois, be it cooking, ironing or wedding rings.

In the end, however, an art-history professor had saved her by dragging her over to his discipline, explaining that one should never turn one’s passions into scientific themes and so she’d written on peasant violence in Peter Brueghel instead, and now even prepared rolled roast. The smell had already penetrated the living room by the time Hedda came back from the kitchen, gave the roast another ten minutes and, with a perfect smile, poured us all Prosecco. She fit the whole scene so well—that constantly luminous appearance, the white skin, blonde hair, she was almost diaphanous—as she walked with the bottle from guest to guest, Kalkreuther, as always alone, a hopeless case, the Schweigerts, and Hedda as the dancing hostess flitting among white and glass and light and a sofa I’d been sleeping on for fourteen months.

 

‘It has to do with a notebook, Herr Stöver, and I believe that notebook still exists,’ Brevi had said to me on the phone three weeks earlier, a light little dance in his syllables. For years we’d been exchanging editing questions about the Prison Notebooks, though we’d never personally met, and that was the first time I’d even heard his voice.

‘Listen,’ he explained, ‘one could easily produce another anthology of Gramsci’s writings, a book about his relationship with Stalin or an essay on the line-ruling of the Prison Notebooks. That’s a given. But if what I assume is correct, it would put Gramsci back on his feet for us. If—’

He paused and cleared his throat a number of times. Brevi could clearly allow as much silence as he wanted. He’d always been more comfortable in the quiet, he’d never shown up at any conventions or conferences and didn’t have to either. Brevi was an eminent authority in the world of Gramsci research, his essays were considered among the most astute, going so deeply into Gramsci’s thoughts it was as if Brevi lived in them, or they in Brevi.

‘If what?’ I asked carefully.

‘I have expressed my suspicion in the relevant circles that one of Gramsci’s notebooks is lost, and you know what “lost” in this context means. Not simply lost due to someone’s recognizing it to be of historical importance too late, nor because it disappeared into a prison’s rubbish. Not because time is rather scatter-brained and a lot gets misplaced over the years. No, Anton, lost because the archivists in Moscow wanted it to be. And so lost that it was never even recorded there. But I believe that this notebook still exists, somewhere here in Rome, I am positive that it never made it to Moscow.’

Brevi paused, I could no longer even hear him breathing. Thinking the connection had been lost, I went to the window in the absurd assumption that reception might get better.

‘That would interest you too, wouldn’t it, Tonio? And that would allow you back into the archives once more.’

‘Hmmm, yeah . . .’ I murmured while watching a young woman leaning back on a handrail across the street.

‘Gramsci will become someone else!’ Brevi cried. ‘And communism too.’

‘But, Signor Brevi, communism—’

‘Communism,’ he confirmed. The woman opened her jacket to reveal a white, slightly transparent top, turned her head and squinted up towards me, and it would’ve been so easy to forget for a moment that, outside of Brevi and myself, no one at all was really interested in Gramsci any more.

‘Communism is a tad too large for us,’ I demurred.

‘Oh, Tonio, you mustn’t go so far. One has to look where something is to be had. The secret of good research is to look where no one suspects the subject to be,’ he said and began to talk about the numbering of the notebooks, about the Communist Party in Moscow, about Stalin’s show trials, about Gramsci’s sister-in-law. As I bent forward in order to better see the woman on the other side of the street, she pushed herself off the railing, ran up the steps and disappeared.

‘When can I expect you in Rome?’

‘Excuse me?’ I asked.

‘I would like you to help me look for the notebook.’

For a moment I thought about Lasse and Hedda’s mood when she came back home in the evenings, and the sofa I slept or, rather, laid awake on, I thought about my boss Nordhoff and the view from the window of the newspaper’s office.

‘In four . . . in three weeks,’ I said hesitatingly.

‘That’s good,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll await you at the end of the month here in Rome.’

As soon as I hung up I lay my forehead against the windowpane and looked down onto the flagstones. Two schoolgirls were walking past, their satchels swaying behind them, a woman walked out of the bakery with a poppy-seed twist. To stay here, to reject Brevi’s proposal, simply become as invisible as a book that’s been put back in the wrong place and from then on can’t be found. But I couldn’t handle the silence between us any longer, between Hedda and me. Rome would be good for me, the noise, the liveliness, working at Brevi’s side even though I had no idea what exactly I intended to save with such research: my career, my marriage, Gramsci or myself.

 

‘It just wasn’t a good fit,’ I told Hedda during the last dinner we shared. By then we hadn’t eaten together in our flat for a long time thanks to the mutual, if unspoken, feeling that it was just too intimate. Hedda would prepare something, eat with Lasse, and later I would warm up some leftovers for myself, that or simply not eat at all. Now and then Hedda and I would seek out a neutral space, a restaurant or cafe where we could sit across from each other, hidden from our own place like two people that have just got together and aren’t comfortable enough with each other yet. That day, however, Hedda had demanded to have dinner at home. Lasse had already been enrolled for the upcoming school year that past summer, it only took a few sentences before the subject turned to us, as if there was anything left to say. Months earlier we’d agreed to no longer have any relationship and to only stay together for Lasse. Hedda had been the first to say it even though I’d thought of it before she had, and I’d already made the decision for both of us long before that.

‘It just wasn’t a good fit.’ That evening I said it again very quietly, unemotionally. Hedda didn’t say a word, she just continued to look for carrots in the pantry, no, no green beans with the meat. Only when I was no longer thinking about my observation did she let loose with all of her cold disappointment.

‘Fit! A suit fits or it doesn’t. But ten years? It just didn’t fit? A relationship is not a piece of clothing.’

‘How lovely to see you know so much about fashion.’

‘You can spare me the cynicism.’

‘Cynicism?’ I responded fiercely. ‘Hold on, if you really want hear it like it is, then I’ll count it out for you, year for year, month for month. Out of ten years, Hedda, listen, three and a half fit, and of those three and a half years, fourteen months were good, if not really good. Then there were four years where we thought it would get better, and two of those we only thought so because we’d had a son together and you have to. The last two and a half years we just held on, one and a half for Lasse and one because we were too tired to go.’

‘I left a long time ago.’

‘And yet you’re standing in front of me,’ I said and my face once more took on that, as Hedda put it, cage-like look. She moved her hand in front of her eyes as if she could no longer stand it. The look, I mean. She’d told me so numerous times: small, but intentional stabs that might have hurt if they’d been a little less obvious. Nevertheless, I knew, I’d seen it myself, when I was angry my face would tighten and every last bit of tenderness that remained around my cheeks would disappear. My expression became as hard as chitin.

‘Standing in front of you!’ Hedda yelled, throwing the hand towel onto the table. ‘And where is that? Take a look around. What kind of place is this? We both would love to have another five rooms each so we could avoid each other even better. Our neighbours are closer to me than you are.’

‘But we still have sex with each other,’ I objected.

Hedda laughed coolly. She was great at that, being cool, but I hated how afterwards she’d always break down about something so that it was impossible for me to treat her with any respect. We still had sex with each other, but of course I knew it was only because I also had sex with other women. Hedda talked about betrayal, I didn’t understand what she meant. I didn’t deny it, I would’ve even been willing to give her details, but she wasn’t interested. Be that as it may.

‘Your needs are only an escape,’ Hedda said as she continued to peel the celery. ‘You only want what you can’t have.’

‘I’ve always got the women I wanted,’ I countered and pushed her hand onto the cutting board. ‘And could you leave the celery alone for a moment?’

‘That hasn’t escaped me,’ Hedda said, looked up briefly and squinted, something she thought looked threatening but which really, not that she knew of course, just made me think of our neighbours’ Labrador.

In the meantime Hedda suspected an affair hiding around every corner. I had desires, true, but I couldn’t desire everything. Even if Hedda wanted me to so that she could finally tell me to go to hell. Hell had caught up with us, of course, just not around the corner. It had come at a moment that overwhelmed us both, one that could not be repeated, and that moment I experienced with you, Hedda, and that was the reason at some point I married you. Not because of Lasse, not because of all of this ridiculous reasoning: if something happens to him, or to me, and then you have to come to the hospital—

‘You could’ve just left it alone,’ Hedda said and, together with the celery, pulled her hands from my grip. ‘You could’ve simply pulled yourself together a bit.’

‘Sorry, what are you talking about?’ I asked.

‘You know what I’m talking about,’ Hedda said and pushed the cut celery into a glass bowl. ‘You know better than I do. After all, you were there.’

‘At least one of us was there!’ I answered. ‘You’ve completely removed yourself from life.’

‘Your greed just exhausts me,’ Hedda said. ‘That’s the only thing you still relate to. Ever faster, ever closer, like some crazy planet that keeps on spinning around the sun. That’s not appetite any more, that’s obsession.’

I reached for the corkscrew I bought for two euros and forty-nine cents the last time I’d gone to the supermarket. Lasse had exchanged our previous one—one that salvaged the cork out of the neck of the bottle like a kind of drilling station—with a friend for a plastic machinegun. Was loving kids even reasonable? At such moments, not loving them seemed all too sensible. As I tried to drive the two-forty-nine opener down into the cork, my hand kept slipping off.

‘You’re not interested in politics,’ Hedda said, criticising me. ‘Not in society, not in art. Just in yourself and your needs.’

‘I’m interested in Gramsci.’

‘That’s what I said. In yourself.’

Accusations didn’t really suit Hedda. Her face was too pretty, and when she laughed, when she wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, it shone with ease.

‘Well, you should know, you know a whole lot about passion, as painstakingly as you avoid it.’ I clutched the bottle between my shoes, pulled and wrenched and knew that I looked like Rumpelstiltskin but so what, Hedda wasn’t looking at me anyway.

‘And where were you the whole time?’ I asked. ‘You hid away, you weren’t there for me any more. What was I supposed to do? I need closeness every so often, and I don’t get it from you.’

‘I was busy taking care of our son,’ she said, cutting into the board with the knife. Now the onions, I thought, Hedda, take the onions. Show me how much you can cry.

‘Taking care of our son! That’s what you call “taking care of”,’ I replied. ‘He can barely think straight the way you’ve babied him!’

Hedda didn’t say a word. Naturally, she hadn’t grabbed the onions, she didn’t do me any favours any more, though, for all intents and purposes, she hadn’t ever really done me any favours. She quartered a pepper, took out the core, what was she even preparing? Were either of us even still hungry? Lasse for his part didn’t like vegetables, kids never like vegetables, everybody knew that.

‘Someone had to pay attention to him,’ she said. Her voice was calm. Hedda knew the game, she was a master of the high art of fighting. That’s not one of the reasons I’d got together with her. Well, it was one of the reasons. She could look perfect while hurting you. Precisely at that moment.

‘If I hadn’t taken care of him, who would have? You were more interested in yourself. In your damn needs. A little child, Toni, doesn’t survive on its own.’

‘Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to have a child,’ I said and felt the cork finally give way.

‘Not a good idea? This doesn’t have to do with an article in the paper, Toni, you’re talking about a child, you’re talking about your son. A human being, for Christ’s sake.’

The cork split, and again my hand slipped off.

‘What kind of wine did you buy, Hedda? A six-euro deal at the supermarket? Why are you so stingy?’

Hedda dropped the rest of the pepper into the bin. ‘Your needs, Toni. Always your needs. Could you please turn on some music?’

‘You don’t want to hear any music right now,’ I countered.

‘Yes, I do. I can stand your talking even less than your being quiet.’

Her barb had missed the target and she noticed. I pulled at the rest of the cork still stuck in the neck. Hedda expected something of me that only a dead man could give her. The rest of us had to live with needs. Life wasn’t made up of right and wrong, but major and minor. Did she want to live with someone who’d retreat to his hobby room when he no longer knew what to say in the living room or what to do in the bedroom and for everyone to see it about her? Hedda, did you want that dull kind of abstinence? With me, it was never dull. Too loud perhaps, too stressful, yes, but dull it was not.

‘Could you please put on some music, Anton?’

I placed the corked wine on the kitchen counter and walked into the living room. I could hear Lasse’s soft, anti-slip-socked steps on the stairs. Maybe he was hungry, maybe he was bored, maybe he’d ruined this marriage. Today I’d only accuse him of having traded the drilling station for a machine gun though. That’d be enough for starters.