Never mind, thought Irina, looking at her outstretched legs, which, to be honest, were still in pretty good shape, particularly compared to Catrin’s thin, stakelike limbs, and so she decided not to wear the long, backless dress that she’d worn last year, but her less festive sea-green skirt, even if it was a little short for a woman of her age—never mind, thought Irina, let them be happy together, or not, as the case may be, but just once a year, she thought, it ought to be possible for Sasha to come home on his own. Just once a year she wanted to eat pelmeni with Sasha, the way they used to. What was so bad about that? Seeing that Catrin didn’t like pelmeni anyway. And after lunch, Irina thought to herself, Sasha would go upstairs to lie down for a rest, and then later the menfolk would sit in Kurt’s study and play a game of chess, drinking little glasses of cognac, and when she had finished doing the dishes she too, Irina, would pour herself a little glass of cognac and sit with them in silence—promise! —at the most only surreptitiously kicking Sasha under the table if he failed to see that he was making a dangerous move. Then they would all go to the birthday party together—a tolerable, indeed almost pleasant idea, at least so far as the little walk through Neuendorf in the fall was concerned, an idea that could conjure up even more distant and even more improbable memories, memories of a time when dead leaves were still burned in Neuendorf, when Sasha still skipped along beside her, holding her hand…
But then the telephone rang for the third time that morning. Before she knew it, Irina had jumped up and was holding the receiver.
“Can’t you leave us to have our breakfast in peace just for once?” she hissed, without even letting Charlotte get a word in.
She slammed the receiver down, stared at the telephone for a few moments as if it were an animal that she had just killed, and she might well have been capable of smashing it with a single blow next minute—but it didn’t ring again.
“You don’t have to get so upset,” said Kurt.
He was standing behind her with an eggcup (containing an egg!) in each hand.
“You always stick up for her,” spat Irina.
Kurt didn’t reply, but put the eggcups down and hugged Irina. It was a fatherly hug with no ulterior motive, a hug in which Kurt wrapped both arms around Irina’s body, and rocked her gently back and forth. At the same moment her mother’s door opened with a creak—which meant that Irina froze, waiting for the shuffling sound that would inevitably come a few seconds later. Instinctively, she saw in her mind’s eye the stooped figure wearing the nightcap that she had knitted for herself and that she wore year-round, and the key ring that she had hung on a chain around her neck, as if afraid that Irina might lock her out with malice aforethought, saw the wretched slippers, more reminiscent of rags than shoes, that her mother liked to wear because her feet hurt, disfigured as they were by bunions… Nadyeshda Ivanovna, the ghost who presaged her own future.
The ghost shuffled closer, but stopped and stood invisible behind the half-open living room door, muttering something.
Irina flung the door open.
“What do you want?”
She spoke Russian to her mother; in the thirteen years that Nadyeshda Ivanovna had been living here, she hadn’t learned a word of German apart from
“What time is Sasha coming today?” asked Nadyeshda Ivanovna. “How would I know what time Sasha’s coming?” snapped Irina. “Put your dentures in, why don’t you? And have some breakfast!”
“Don’t need any breakfast,” said Nadyeshda Ivanovna, shuffling off to the bathroom.
Irina sat down and fished a Club cigarette out of her pack.
“Have something to eat first,” said Kurt.
“I need a smoke first,” Irina insisted.
“Irushka, you mustn’t get so upset about everything,” said Kurt. “Look at the sun shining so beautifully.”
He made a hideous face to cheer Irina up.
“Don’t need any breakfast!” said Irina, mimicking her mother.
“She’s not about to starve to death,” said Kurt.
Irina dismissed this. It was all very well for Kurt to talk; he wasn’t the one looking after Nadyeshda Ivanovna. He didn’t know what her room was like: the moldy food that Irina kept finding there, because Nadyeshda Ivanovna was always taking something that was beginning to go bad into her room to eat it—in secret, because she wanted to prove at all costs that she wasn’t a burden on anyone. It wasn’t Kurt who had to do the dishes over again after Nadyeshda Ivanovna, renowned for her thriftiness, had washed them in lukewarm water without any detergent. It wasn’t Kurt who had to endure the epidemic of pickles that broke out every year at about this season because Nadyeshda Ivanovna insisted on making herself “useful” by occupying the kitchen for days and weeks on end, pickling the cucumbers that she personally had harvested—an activity that made some kind of sense in Russia, in the Urals, but here, where you could buy a jar of pickles for a few pfennigs in any store, it was totally pointless.
“It’s terrible,” said Irina, “to be entirely surrounded by old people.”
“Want me to move out?” asked Kurt.
Irina didn’t think that particularly funny, but when she looked across the table at Kurt, when she saw him sitting there with his face marked by life, his ever bushier eyebrows (he really must trim them before the birthday party!) and his blue eyes, one of which had been blind since his childhood and had gradually given up imitating the movements of the other (an oddity that Irina hardly noticed after forty years of marriage, although she liked to cite it in explanation of Kurt’s character defects, for instance, his boundless ambition and his notorious womanizing)— when she saw him sitting like that, grinning mischievously at his own joke, she felt a sudden surge of affection for the man. Even more, she felt a surprising temptation to forgive him everything—at least at this moment, when she realized that Kurt, too, was growing old. In that respect at least he wasn’t letting her down.
“Tell you what, Irushka,” said Kurt. “This is Sunday, who knows how long the fine weather will last? Let’s go out into the woods and look for mushrooms or something.”
“But you don’t like looking for mushrooms,” said Irina.
Not only did Kurt not like looking for mushrooms, he never found any. But Irina didn’t say so, because she connected it with the blind eye. “I like watching you look for mushrooms, though,” replied Kurt. “Kurtik, I have to make lunch, I have to get Wilhelm’s present…”
“What present?”
Irina rolled her eyes. “Wilhelm has had the same present for the last thirty years.”
The present was ten packs of Belomorkanal cigarettes, classic Russian
“Irushka,” Kurt objected. “Wilhelm gave up smoking two years ago.”
The stupid thing was, Kurt was right. After a severe attack of pneumonia (well, in fact he had had several severe attacks of pneumonia), Wilhelm had stopped smoking. On his last birthday he had even passed the Belomorkanal cigarettes straight on to Horst Mahlich, who had the barefaced cheek to crease one of the
“And who’ll cook lunch?”
“Make something simple,” said Kurt.
“Something simple!” Irina shook her head. “Sasha’s coming—and you tell me to make something simple!”
“Why not?”
“Because we always have pelmeni for lunch when Sasha comes on the first of October.”
“Oh, well,” said Kurt, “what difference does that make?”
He tapped the end of his breakfast egg and began peeling the bits of shell off and putting them in the eggcup, a method that Irina thought inconsiderate, because she didn’t like scraping them out of the eggcup again later.
But she didn’t say so. She took a deep breath, which made her feel slightly dizzy. Heard Nadyeshda Ivanovna coming out of the bathroom. “I’ll just go into the bathroom first,” said Irina.
