Stella Page 4

  I didn’t agree, I thought the reason she gave was patronizing, even arrogant. I said, “But being better is something you’ve achieved for yourself. It’s an honest ability.”

  She smiled and said, sighing, “Oh, Christian, you need the right conditions if you’re going to get a result that means anything. The conditions have to be right.” She kissed me, a hasty kiss, then she jumped up and ran lightly down to the water. “Come on, come in with me.”

  Swimming fast, twisting and turning, we made for deeper water, reaching out for each other. I drew her to me, pressed close to her body and held her. I’ll never forget the look of amazement and happy consent on her face. Our bodies pressed against each other as if they’d been waiting for this. We laughed when the buoyancy of the water made it hard for us to stand there. I pointed to the two red flags blowing in the breeze—just scraps of fabric—warning swimmers of an eel trap at that spot, and called, “Come on, Stella, once around the flags and the winner can make a wish.” And without waiting for her to agree, I swam away. At first I didn’t look to see if she was following, I was swimming as fast as I could, the flags were bobbing in the moderate swell, I hadn’t quite reached them when I glanced behind me. Stella had accepted my invitation, taken my challenge, she was joining in, she was following me, doing long crawl strokes. I thought she was taking it easy as she swam, sure of her victory, and that spurred me on. Reaching the flags she changed her style and now, as if in high spirits, she was doing the backstroke without decreasing the distance between us. I put on a spurt, or what I thought was a spurt, and drew away by several yards, by now almost sure of reaching the beach ahead of her. But then she raised an arm and waved, the kind of wave someone sure of doing better would give, cheerful, forbearing, and she accelerated and swiftly caught up, her legs kicking and whirling, as if she were being driven by a ship’s propeller.

  You passed me so easily, Stella! I didn’t even try to catch up with you, I gave up, let myself drop back and watched as you waded ashore without the slightest sign of exhaustion.

  Among the pines, in the hollow among the pines, I reminded her that she could make a wish. She declined; not now, she said, not at that moment, she’d come back to it. It was always useful, she added, to have a wish available, and you had to think carefully about the right time to make it, you mustn’t waste it. As she spoke she was brushing sand off my back and chest; she once bent down so close that I thought she’d discovered something there, an old injury, a scar, but something else had struck her. “It really does smile,” she said, “your skin is actually smiling, Christian.” Stella had once read that at certain moments the skin can smile, and now, it seemed, she’d found confirmation. Curious, and more than curious, I turned over on my side, but all I could see was that it was my skin, just as it always had been, and it didn’t show so much as the suggestion of a smile. But what I couldn’t see, or perhaps couldn’t perceive, she could. Her remark had set off in me something I wasn’t prepared for: a restless longing that, in my imagination, began growing more and more urgent, made me touch her. I stroked her thighs and sought her eyes at the same time, our faces were so close that I could feel her breath. Her gaze held mine, I had a feeling that it responded to my longing, or that it was offering a gentle invitation. I took off her swimsuit, and she let me, she helped me, and we made love there in the hollow among the pines.

  How ready she was to talk, as if now we had to say something we hadn’t yet said. The past came back into our minds, we wanted to know more about each other, to feel safe, or justified, or just to soothe ourselves. Our need for that meant we shrank from no questions. It’s a long story, she said, as my head lay in the crook of her arm, and she said again, “It’s a long story, Christian, it begins back during the war, in Kent, in the skies above Kent.”

  “How do you mean, in the skies?” I asked.

  “My father was a radio operator in a bomber, his plane was shot down on its first raid, his companions died in the crash but he survived, his parachute was working. So that’s how I became an English teacher,” she said.

  “That’s how you became an English teacher?” I asked.

  And Stella told me about her father, how after being shot down he was taken to a POW camp near Leeds, where he spent some weeks giving himself up to apathy, like most of the prisoners. That changed when he and some of the others were sent to work on the land at harvest time. He enjoyed working on Howard Wilson’s farm, and most of the POW agricultural laborers used the time during the political lectures back at the camp to catch up on their sleep. Stella’s father ate at the same table as the Wilsons, he went to a modest birthday party they gave, and once they asked him to take their sick boy to the doctor by bike.

  “Is your father a countryman himself?” I asked.

  “He was an electrician,” she said. “He could show people that there wasn’t enough light in their houses, and prove it. Wherever he went he always had a couple of spare electric bulbs in his case. He’d leave them with his customers at cost price, and because of that his favorite customer called him Joseph, the bringer of light. The Wilsons just called him Joe. One day, long after the end of the war, he decided to visit the Wilsons, he didn’t tell us why; he simply said it was about time for all of us to go and see them.”

  She said she now understood the urge to go back to a place where you’d had an important, maybe even crucial experience. Then, after a pause, Stella added, “We were there for seven days, Christian. We were only planning to spend an afternoon with the Wilsons, but we stayed a week.”

  I couldn’t, I just could not take my eyes off her picture; while the school orchestra was playing I kept gazing at the photograph. It was as if we had made a date for this hour of remembrance in the hall, meaning to say something we didn’t yet know about each other. I had heard our orchestra rehearsing twice, the orchestra and the choir, and now, in front of your picture, the Bach cantata unexpectedly took a strong hold on me—that sense of abandonment, that desperate search, the hope for an answer, for salvation, an appeal to the victorious power of the Father and the Son. God’s time is the very best time, in the words of the cantata.

  How your face suddenly shone, Stella, the face I’d kissed all over, on your forehead, on your cheeks, on your mouth. Praise and glory unto the Lord, I call upon Thy names, I am resigned, glory unto Thee. And then that Amen, taken up like an echo by our orchestra, an echo dying away, growing quieter and quieter, losing itself most wonderfully in a universe of consolation, the Actus Tragicus overcome. I stared at your face, I had never before felt a loss so powerfully, which was strange enough, because I had never before known what it was to have possessed what was lost.

  When Principal Block stepped up on the podium, I thought he was going to make another speech, but he only thanked us for remembering her in silence. He did not actually ask us to leave the hall; without a word, he indicated the two exits. The crowd began to move, became jammed, then thinned out and passed into the hallways, where voices immediately rose. I held back, I waited until the little kids had also found their way to the exit, then I went up to the podium, looked briefly around me, and quickly snatched Stella’s photograph. I put it under my sweater and left the hall with the others.

  There were no classes after the hour of remembrance. I went downstairs to my classroom on the first floor, entered the empty space, and sat down at my desk. I put Stella’s photograph in front of me. I couldn’t sit like that for long; I put the photograph away in the drawer and decided to take it home later and keep it beside the photograph of my class. A tourist had taken the class photo, an old retired teacher who was staying at the Seaview Hotel and knew Stella. He grouped us in his own way: the first row reclining on the ground, the second kneeling, the tallest students standing behind them, and in the background three fishing cutters putting out to sea in line. You were standing among the kneeling students, Stella, placing a hand on the heads of those closest to you. To one side of the picture—I don’t know why—stood Georg Bisanz, St
ella’s favorite, clutching a package to his chest with both hands: a package of exercise books, mine among them. It was Georg’s responsibility to collect them.

  I wasn’t surprised when, at the beginning of the double English class, she gave us the subject for the essay. Stella had told us ahead of time to read, among other books, Animal Farm, but I was disappointed by her cool, objective tone. There was no trace in her expression now of secret understanding, she did not indicate in any way what we shared and what was ours. She looked at me just as she looked at the others, even when she was standing beside my desk, her body so close that I could have pulled it toward me. I thought I sensed an unexpected distance in her: what happened, happened, that’s all, you can’t call on it now.

  I was sure I’d written that latest English essay to Stella’s satisfaction, I had enjoyed describing the animals’ revolution on Mr. Jones’s Manor Farm. I had expressed my cautious respect for the fat, clever boar Napoleon, who excels in the art of persuasion. I paid special attention to the seven commandments that the animals had given themselves, written in white paint on a tarred wall—a kind of Tablets of the Law, binding on all living things. I dwelt on some of the laws, for instance the first: “Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.” And the seventh as well: “All animals are equal.”

  I was pleased with my essay, and I waited impatiently for the exercise books to be returned. Stella didn’t hesitate to give reasons for her grades when she returned our work, telling us why one essay was marked Satisfactory, another Poor, another Good—she had only once felt able to give an essay the grade of Very Good. But she didn’t appear, several of her classes were canceled, and it wasn’t easy to find out what was keeping her away from the school.

  Heiner Thomsen knew where you lived; he wasn’t in our class, but he came to Hirtshafen from Scharmünde every day. Stella had taken the room at the Seaview Hotel only for a few days during the summer. I just had to know what was going on, or what had happened to her. Sometimes I wondered whether she was staying away from school because of me.

  The next day, in spite of some misgivings, I set out for Scharmünde. I hoped to find her at home. I found the road where she lived, I found her house. The old man on the garden bench was sitting as if he had just knocked off work for the day, with a pipe in one hand and the knob of a walking stick in the other. When I opened the garden gate he raised his head—I saw a fleshy, badly shaved face—and looked at me with a smile.

  “Come closer,” he said. “Come closer, boy, or shouldn’t I call you a boy?”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I’m still in school.”

  “Wouldn’t think it to look at you,” he said. After examining me critically for a moment he asked, “One of her students? My daughter’s, I mean?”

  “Ms. Petersen is my English teacher,” I said.

  He was satisfied with that; I didn’t have to say any more about the reason for my visit. He called, “Stella!” and again, turning his face to the open door, “Stella!”

  She appeared. She didn’t seem too surprised to find me with her father; perhaps she had seen me coming and was prepared for this moment. Wearing jeans and a polo shirt, she came out of the house and said, “I see you have a visitor, Dad.” Her handshake gave no more away than a matter-of-fact greeting.

  “How nice to see you, Christian,” she added formally. No displeasure, no reproof in her voice, and no surreptitious sign of delight.

  Her father wanted to go indoors; it was getting too chilly for him. He needed her to support him: she pulled him to his feet, put an arm firmly around him, and helped him away. Looking back over her shoulder, he told me, “Trouble with my backbone, a little souvenir from the past.”

  The old radio operator asked to be helped to his room, a small one with sunflowers nodding in at the window, which had a kind of workbench below it, and there was an old-fashioned sofa by the wall, with a rug carelessly thrown over it. The old man dropped heavily into the basket chair at the workbench and nodded to me, indicating that I should sit on a stool there.

  “A ship in a bottle?” I asked, picking up his handiwork. A harbor scene was immortalized inside the glass, a big container ship in several colors being towed by a tug.

  “My hobby,” he said. “I pass the time that way. Sometimes I like to tackle the problems.” He pointed to a clear bottle with a sailing ship in it, its three masts lying flat on deck. “I’ll have to get those up again,” he said, adding that many people wondered how you got a three-master into a bottle. “But it’s perfectly simple. First you fit the hull in place, then you add the superstructure, the masts and rigging, and the artificial waves go in later as well.”

  As he talked about what he was doing, I listened to Stella’s footsteps moving around the house, heard her on the telephone, doing something in the kitchen, dealing with a visitor or delivery man at the front door. I was beginning to doubt whether I would get a chance to speak to her alone at all when she came in with a tray and put it down on the workbench. I saw a large mug with the English words THE GARDENER on it, and a bottle of Captain Morgan’s Rum. Her father took her hand, patted it, and said, “Thank you, my dear,” adding to me, “Rum works wonders for a mug of tea.” She did not leave him to help himself, but opened the bottle and poured a shot of rum into the tea. Then she patted her father’s shoulder, said, “Your good health, Dad,” in English, and then, firmly, to me, “There’s something for you in the next room, Christian.”

  White-painted bookshelves, a green-and-white desk with several drawers, a leather-upholstered chaise longue, two wicker armchairs, and on the wall a large and puzzling reproduction of a picture: A Queen Surveys Her Country. On the desk, beside a stack of exercise books, stood a mug of tea, this one inscribed THE FRIEND. I didn’t particularly like your room, Stella; it seemed to me familiar, or at least I didn’t feel as if I were entering strange territory. Alone with her, I embraced and kissed her, or rather I tried to kiss her, but she stiffened and resisted. “Not here, Christian, please, not here!” And when I put my hands under her shirt I also felt her resistance as she repeated, “Not here, Christian.” I sat down, looked at the mug of tea, read aloud the words THE FRIEND, and pointed to myself with a questioning gesture. Stella didn’t answer. Instead, she asked, “Why did you come?”

  At first I didn’t know what to answer, but then I said, “I had to see you again, and anyway I wanted to suggest something.”

  With an expression of weary forbearance, Stella asked me to show consideration—consideration for her and other people as well. She asked me whether I’d considered how this relationship between us was going to work out: “Do you know what it means for me? And for you, too?”

  “I couldn’t stand it anymore,” I said. “I’d have waited outside the staff room to see you again, even if it was just for a moment.”

  “Yes,” she said, “but then what, Christian? Or rather ask yourself calmly, now what?” You were letting me see that you had thought ahead, you had considered and anticipated what lay before us. “Now what?” is a question you ask in uncertainty, in a mood of depression, or when you’re completely at a loss. Suddenly she said, “Maybe I ought to get myself transferred to another school. It would make things a good deal easier for us.”

  “Then I’m coming with you.”

  “Oh, Christian.” She shook her head, forbearance in her voice again. She seemed to feel nothing but regret at my remark. “Oh, Christian.”

  The stack of exercise books on her desk mesmerized me. I kept glancing surreptitiously at it. My essay was in there, she must have read it and marked it. When I thought of that I dared not touch Stella again, or ask what she thought of the essay.

  As if reluctantly, her father suddenly called, “Stella!” and then again, like a request, “Stella!” She put the cigarette she had been about to light down on an ashtray and left me alone. Evidently the old radio operator was feeling chilly even at his workbench; he asked for his warm indoor jacket, then they whispered together and I kne
w it was about my visit. My exercise book with the essay wasn’t on top of the pile, but even if it had been I wouldn’t have picked it up. For behind the pile of exercise books on her desk stood a framed photograph of a blond, athletic man looking challengingly at the camera, threatening whoever was taking the picture with a rolled-up journal. On the margin of the photograph I read the words, in English: “Stella, with love. Colin.”

  Not right away. I didn’t want to ask her right away who this Colin was and how they were linked. I was trying to guess his age. He couldn’t be so much older than me. I picked up the cigarette lying on the ashtray and lit it. I looked at the poster of A Queen Surveys Her Country, by some English painter, I think his name was Attenborough. The queen’s country was in twilight, no paths, no roads, you could just make out houses beside a stretch of water, low buildings out of reach.

  Oh, your smile, Stella, when you came in and immediately saw that I was smoking your cigarette. With a movement of your hand, you told me to stay sitting where I was. This is different territory, you implied. It’s not the classroom, you don’t have to stand up here when I come in.

  “He’s feeling better,” she said. “Today my father’s feeling better.”

  She took a few steps, stopped in front of her desk, and placed one hand on the pile of exercise books. I still dared not ask her opinion of my essay. She herself, I thought, must choose the moment. The longer her pause lasted, the surer I was I couldn’t expect praise. She never withheld praise, she began with it every time she gave exercise books back, discussed our work, and told us her reasons for our grades. I was waiting for her to sit down beside me, but she didn’t, she went to the window and looked out. It was as if you were searching for something, Stella, something to say, an idea. After a while I saw the expression on her face changing, and with a touch of slight sorrow in her tone, not forbearance this time, she said, “What I’m doing now, Christian, is something I’ve never done before, you could call it subversive. Yes, when I think of what links us, the school would see it as subversion. What I have to say to you really should be said in class.” As she spoke I remembered that room in the Seaview Hotel, the pillow we had shared, and I felt a vague fear and a vague pain, but only briefly, because after she had lit herself another cigarette she went back to pacing the room.