Sonya was pliant. I don’t mean as in “pliant as a reed” – not physically. Sonya was pliant … mentally. It’s hard to explain. Maybe what I’m trying to say is that she allowed me to project anything I wanted onto her. She allowed me to perceive her in any way I chose. She could be a stranger, or a little muse, or the woman you see once in the street and still remember years later with the feeling that you let something amazing pass you by. She could be stupid and petty, or cynical and clever. She could be wonderful and beautiful, and then there were moments when she was just a pale girl in a brown coat, truly insignificant. I think she was so pliant because she wasn’t really anything.
I met Sonya on the train from Hamburg to Berlin. I was on the way home from visiting Verena; I had spent eight days with her, and was totally in love. Verena had a cherry mouth and ebony-black hair that I wove into two thick, heavy plaits every morning; we went for walks on the docks, I danced around her, shouted her name and scared away the seagulls; I thought she was fantastic. She took photographs of docks, barges, and fast-food stands, talked a lot, and was always laughing at me. I sang “Verena, Verena”, kissed her cherry mouth, and couldn’t wait to go back home to Berlin and work, with the smell of her hair on my hands.
It was May; the train was passing through the Brandenburg countryside outside Berlin, and the fields glowed green under long, early-evening shadows. I left my compartment to have a cigarette and there, in the corridor, stood Sonya. She was smoking, leaning against the ashtray with her right leg for support. When I approached, her shoulders hunched forward involuntarily; something about her didn’t seem quite right. The situation was common enough: the narrow corridor of the fast train somewhere between Hamburg and Berlin, and two people end up standing beside each other by chance because they both want a cigarette. But Sonya stared out the window with an incredible stubbornness. Her posture looked like she was caught in the middle of a bomb alert. She wasn’t pretty. In fact, in that first moment she was anything but pretty, standing there in jeans and a white, too-short shirt; she had shoulder-length, straight blonde hair, and her face was so different, so old-fashioned, like a fifteenth-century Madonna; a narrow, almost pointy face. I looked at her profile; I was uneasy, and annoyed to feel the memory of Verena’s sensuality fading. I lit up and strolled down the corridor, smoking; I wanted to whisper something obscene in her ear. When I turned around to go back to my compartment, she was looking straight at me.
Some ironic remark flitted through my head, something about her having finally dared to look at me. The train rattled, and in a distant compartment a child wailed. There was nothing special about her eyes; they might have been green, were not particularly big, and quite close together. My mind was utterly blank; I just looked at her, and she looked back; there was no eroticism or flirtatiousness, no air of romance; her gaze was so serious and direct that I could have slapped her in the face. I took two steps towards her; she smiled, as if to encourage me. Then I was back in my compartment and I slammed the door shut behind me, almost out of breath.
It was dark when the train stopped at Zoo Station, Berlin. I got out, feeling strangely relieved, and convinced myself that I could smell the city. It was warm and the platform was thronged with people. I took the escalator down to get the Underground, and even though I hadn’t been looking for her, I found her immediately. She was about ten feet ahead of me, carrying a small, red hatbox in her right hand; her back seemed to issue a direct challenge. I ignored her, teeth clenched. I stopped at a news kiosk, queued with my newspaper and tobacco. Then she was beside me, saying “Shall I wait”.
It was a statement, not a question. She was looking at the floor, but there was no embarrassment in her voice; it sounded confident and a little husky. She was very young, maybe nineteen or twenty. My feeling of unease gave way to one of superiority. I said “Yes” without really knowing why, paid for the tobacco and newspaper, and we walked beside each other to the Underground. The train came, we got in; she stayed silent, and put down her ridiculous hatbox. Before the situation became uncomfortable, she asked:
“Where are you coming from?” This time it was a real question. I could have said that I had been visiting my girlfriend in Hamburg, but for some reason I said:
“I was on a fishing trip with my Dad.”
She was staring at my mouth. I wasn’t sure if she’d heard me, but suddenly I knew that she had decided that she wanted me. She must have seen me somewhere before – maybe in Hamburg, maybe in Berlin. She knew me before I noticed her for the first time, and when I stood beside her to have a cigarette, she hunched her shoulders forward because she had started to act. She had planned this situation, she knew that it would happen like this, and now it was all starting to feel creepy. I lifted my rucksack onto my shoulder and said: “This is my stop”. With incredible speed, she got a pen out of her hatbox, wrote something on a piece of paper, and pressed it into my hand, saying: “You can call me”.
I didn’t reply. I got out of the train without saying goodbye, and put the piece of paper into my jacket pocket instead of throwing it away.
That May was warm and sunny. I got up early in the mornings, worked long hours in my studio, and wrote countless letters to Verena. She hardly ever wrote back, but sometimes she called to tell me some story or other, and I enjoyed the sound of her voice and her light-heartedness. The linden trees were in bloom in the back yard; I played football there with the Turkish boys, and felt a pleasant yearning for Verena. After dark I would go out. The city seemed to be in a state of mild euphoria that summer. I would go drinking and dancing; there were women I fancied, but then I would think of Verena, and go home alone.
Two weeks later I came across Sonya’s phone number in my jacket pocket. She had written the number in big, round figures with only her first name underneath. I said it quietly to myself: “Sonya”. Then I called her. She answered the phone as if she had been sitting beside it for the past two weeks, waiting for my call. I didn’t have to say who I was – she knew straight away. We arranged to meet that evening in a bar by the river.
I hung up, not regretting a thing, called Verena and, on top form, shouted down the phone that I would love her to my dying day. She giggled and said she was coming to Berlin in three weeks. Then I started to work, whistling Wild Thing, and, towards evening, went out, hands in my pockets, without a care in the world.
Sonya arrived half an hour late. I was sitting at the bar and had ordered my second glass of wine when she came in. She was wearing an incredibly old-fashioned red silk dress, and I noticed with irritation that she was attracting attention. She tottered over to me on shoes that were much too high, said “Hi” and “Sorry”, and for a moment I was tempted to tell her that I wanted nothing more to do with her – her rig-out, her lateness, all of her. But then she smiled, climbed onto a barstool, rummaged around for cigarettes in a tiny rucksack, and my annoyance gave way to amusement. I drank my wine, rolled myself a cigarette, smiled back, and started talking.
I talked about my work, my parents, my fondness for fishing, my friend Mick, America. I talked about people who rustle sweet papers in the cinema, about Francis Bacon and Pollock and Anselm Kiefer. I told her about Denmark, the Turkish boys in my back yard, the affair my mother had ten years ago, how to prepare and cook lamb and rabbit, about football and Greece. I described Kos and Athens, the breakers around Husum, and salmon spawning in summer in Norway. I could have talked Sonya to death, and she would have let me. She simply sat there, her chin propped on her hand, staring at me, smoking countless cigarettes, and drank one glass of wine all night. I really believe she didn’t say one word the whole time I talked. When I was finished, I paid for us both, bid her good night, took a taxi home, and slept for eight hours, a deep, dreamless sleep.
I forgot Sonya immediately. I prepared for my exhibition, June came round, and Verena came to Berlin. She took my deposit bottles back to the supermarket, bought enormous amounts of groceries, filled the kitchen with flowers, and was always ready to go to bed with me. She sang in the flat while I worked, cleaned my windows, talked on the phone for hours to her friends in Hamburg, and was constantly coming into the studio to tell me something. I combed her hair, photographed her from all angles, and began to talk about marriage and children. She was tall, men turned around to look at her on the street, she smelled fantastic; and I meant it.
I opened my exhibition at the end of the month. Verena had gone to the train station to collect her friends; I paced up and down in the gallery, re-adjusted a last picture, and was nervous. Verena came back around seven o’clock and ushered her friends past my pictures. I went outside to be on my own for five minutes. I crossed the street and there, standing in a doorway, was Sonya. To this day, I don’t know if she was there by chance or if she somehow managed to find out about the exhibition. She only knew my first name and I hadn’t mentioned the gallery to her. She stood there looking incredibly angry, presumptuously angry actually, and said: “You said you’d call. You didn’t call. I want to know why, because I don’t like it.”
I was absolutely amazed at her presumptuousness. Annoyed and uncertain, I said: “My girlfriend is here. I can’t share myself around. I don’t want to.”
We stood in front of each other and stared. I thought she was being tactless. The corners of her mouth began to twitch; I had the feeling that something was going very wrong. She said: “Can I come in anyway?” I said “Yes”, turned around, and went back into the gallery.
She came in twenty minutes later. The gallery had filled up, nobody noticed her, but I saw her immediately. Her face when she came in was very tense; she seemed at pains to appear haughty. She looked very small and vulnerable. She looked around for me;
I caught her eye and then looked across at Verena, who was standing at the bar. Sonya followed my eyes and understood. I wasn’t worried about a scene, there was no reason for any scandal – although I knew that that wouldn’t necessarily prevent scandal. But nonetheless I was confident that nothing would happen. I watched Sonya as she walked up and down in front of my pictures. The only thing that betrayed her was that she spent half an hour in front of each picture. I sat and looked at her, and drank glass after glass of wine. Verena came up to me at some point and said something about being proud of me. I felt good, but underneath all that I was strangely uneasy. Sonya didn’t look in my direction again. After hanging around in front of the last picture for a quarter of an hour, she strode resolutely to the door and left.
Verena went back to Hamburg in July. I wasn’t tired of her; I was sure I would be able to spend my life with her; but after she went, the flowers in the kitchen withered, the deposit bottles started to build up again, the dust collected in the studio, and I didn’t miss her. For weeks, the city was bathed in yellow light; it was hot, and I spent hours lying naked on the floor of my room, staring at the ceiling. I wasn’t restless or edgy, just tired and in a strange, emotionless state of mind. Maybe that was why I did call Sonya again in the end. The whole thing seemed hopeless, but my God, it was the height of summer; the Turkish women sat plucking geese in my back yard, the white feathers floating up past my window; I dialled Sonya’s number and let it ring ten or twenty times. She wasn’t at home. Or at least, she wasn’t picking up. I tried the number again and again. I felt an almost despotic desire to torment her, to make her suffer. Sonya kept her distance.
She kept her distance for almost four months. It was not until November that I got a postcard from her, addressed to the gallery. On the front was a black and white photograph of some Chekhov-style gathering, and on the back was an invitation to a party at her flat.
I cleaned my shoes, took ages to decide whether to wear a leather jacket or a coat, picked the leather jacket, and set off around midnight. I was nervous because I knew I wouldn’t know anyone at the party. For ages I wandered around the industrial district where Sonya lived at the time. The building she lived in was right by the river Spree, an old grey block of flats between a car scrap-yard and a factory. It was completely dark except for the brightly-lit windows on the third floor. I stumbled my way up the stairs; the light wasn’t working. I found myself alternating between laughter and annoyance; suddenly it seemed to me that she had a nerve, inviting me here. But when I got to the third floor the flat door was open, someone pulled me inside, and there stood Sonya. She was leaning against the wall and looked slightly drunk. She smiled at me with an expression that unmistakably said: I won. For the first time, I thought she was pretty. A small woman with masses of red hair and a long seaweed-coloured dress stood beside her. Sonya gestured to me and said: “That’s him.”
She had invited about fifty people; I was sure that she was really friends with very few of them. But nonetheless the party was an assembly of people, faces, and characters that made it seem like the old block of flats by the river at some point detached itself from reality. I actually hardly ever get impressions like that, but sometimes, very occasionally, there are parties that you just don’t forget, and Sonya’s was one of them. Candlelight flickered in three or four almost empty rooms, and Tom Waits sang from a stereo somewhere. Although I wasn’t at all drunk, everything started to blur. I went into the kitchen and got myself a glass of wine, and then strolled through Sonya’s rooms, having countless strange conversations with countless strange people. It seemed like Sonya was everywhere. Wherever I was, there was Sonya at the other side of the room; or maybe I was everywhere she was. She had invited lots of admirers; or at least, she was constantly surrounded by a group of ever-changing young men, and the red-haired woman was almost always beside her. She drank glasses full of vodka and was never without a cigarette in her hand. We talked to other people while looking at each other across the room. I don’t think we said a word to each other. It wasn’t necessary; she seemed happy that I was there, and I liked moving around her flat while she watched me.
At some point I saw her standing by the door of the flat with a very tall and strangely awkward-looking man; she was leaning against him, and I felt a pang in my stomach. Maybe half an hour later, she was gone. She just disappeared.
Outside the windows, the light was turning grey. I went from room to room, looking for her, but she wasn’t there. The small red-haired woman came up to me, her smile just as victorious as Sonya’s when I first arrived, and said:
“She’s gone. She always leaves at the end.” So I finished my wine, put on my jacket and left too. I think I was hoping that she would be waiting for me downstairs, shivering with cold, her hands in the pockets of her winter coat, but of course she wasn’t. The Spree was the colour of steel in the morning light. I stumbled along the streets. It was very cold, and I remember how furious I was.
After that, I saw Sonya almost every night. I started getting up early in the mornings again; I would drink two pots of tea, have a cold shower, and begin working. Around midday I would nap for an hour, have a coffee, read the paper, and then go back to work. I was intoxicated with pictures and colours, an intoxication that was both wild and cool; I felt like my head had never been so clear. Sonya came around very late in the evenings; sometimes she was so tired that she fell asleep at my kitchen table, but she always came, and always looked determinedly bright-eyed. I would cook for us, we’d drink a bottle of wine together, and I would tidy up the studio with her padding behind me in her stocking feet.
At the time, I didn’t know that the fact that I let her into my flat and my studio, that I let her sit at my kitchen table in the middle of all my notes, that I developed photographs and made little sketches in front of her, that all this was like a gift to Sonya. She took me very seriously in her own way. She would come into the studio with an almost reverential air, would stand in front of my pictures in awe, as if in a museum, and would sit down at my kitchen table as if she had been granted an audience. It didn’t bother me, because at the time I didn’t realise how she felt. She didn’t get on my nerves because she was so stubborn and strong-willed. I didn’t notice that Sonya was gradually fastening herself onto my life. In those nights, I saw her as a small, tired, possessed person who kept me company in her strange way, who sat with me, listened to me, and made me feel important.
Sonya never talked. As good as never. To this day, I know nothing about her family, her childhood, where she was from, who her friends were. I have no idea where she got money from, whether she worked or whether someone gave her money, whether she had career ambitions, where she wanted to go and what she wanted in life. The only person she sometimes mentioned was the red-haired woman I had seen at her party; apart from that she never mentioned anyone, and definitely not any men, although I was sure there were plenty of those.
In those evenings, I was the one who did the talking. I talked as if to myself, and Sonya listened. Often we said nothing at all, and that was nice too. I liked the way she loved certain things, like freshly-fallen snow – that sent her mad with joy like a little child – or a Bach organ concerto that she played over and over again on my record player, or Turkish coffee after dinner, or travelling on the Underground at six in the morning, or watching the evening goings-on in the other flats across the courtyard through the brightly-lit windows. She stole little things from my kitchen, like walnuts, bits of chalk, and hand-rolled cigarettes, and kept them in the pockets of her winter coat like sacred relics. Almost every evening she brought books with her, put them on the table and implored me to read them. I never read them, and refused to talk about it with her. When she fell asleep sitting up, I would let her sleep for a quarter of an hour and then wake her with the briskness of a schoolteacher. I would change my clothes and then we would go out, Sonya holding tight to my arm, fascinated by our footprints in the courtyard, the only footprints in the newly-fallen snow.
We went from one late bar to the next, drank whisky and vodka, and sometimes Sonya would leave my side, go and sit at another part of the bar, and pretend that she didn’t know me, until I called her back, laughing. She was constantly being approached by men, but she would always turn away and come back to my side with a proud expression. I didn’t care either way. I felt flattered by her strange attractiveness;
I observed her with almost scientific interest. I think I sometimes wished that she would go off with one of those men. But she always stayed by my side until it got light outside and we left the bar, squinting in the grey, grainy morning light. I brought her to a bus stop and waited til the bus came. She got in, shivering and sad; I gave her a brief wave, then set off for home, my thoughts already back with my pictures.
Now I think that in those evenings, I was probably happy. I know that the past goes into soft focus over time, that memory rubs off the sharp edges. Maybe those evenings were just cold and, in a cynical way, entertaining. But now they seem so precious and so lost that it hurts.
At that time, Verena was away, travelling through Greece, Spain, and Morocco; she sent postcards with pictures of palm-lined beaches and Arabs on camels, and every so often, she called. When Sonya happened to be there, she would stand up and leave the room, and would only come back when I signalled the end of the conversation by making noise and moving around the chairs. Verena had to shout down the line; the connection was usually bad, it sounded like the roar of wind and sea, and provided a cover for my sudden lack of conversation. I hadn’t forgotten Verena. I thought about her, sent letters and photographs to her flat in Hamburg, and was always glad when she called. Sonya had nothing to do with it; if someone had asked me if I was in love with Sonya, I would have been surprised and definitely said – no. But Verena seemed to think she noticed a change in me; she shouted down the telephone that I had nothing to say to her any more; she asked how often I was cheating on her with other women. I laughed, and she hung up.
A postcard marked Agadir arrived at the end of January. On it, Verena wrote that she would be back at the end of March: I’ll be back in the spring, and this time I’ll stay longer. I left the postcard on the kitchen table and waited for Sonya to find it. I knew that she had a habit, without any deliberate nosiness, of flicking through the papers and notes on my desk. That evening, I watched from the doorway as she went over to the table, picked up a photograph, drew a little with my chalks, rolled a cigarette, and then saw the postcard, with its picture of a fireworks display. She read it, and stood there, still holding it in her hand. Then she turned around and looked at me as if she had known the whole time that I was standing there watching her.
“Well, yeah,” I said. She said nothing. She just stared at me, and I began to feel something almost like fear. We went out, and everything was wrong. I felt guilty and angry; I felt like I owed her an explanation, without knowing what I was supposed to explain. That night she stayed at my place for the first time. I had never kissed her, I had never even touched her; in the evenings we went strolling through the streets arm in arm, nothing more. While I was in the bathroom, she put on one of my shirts and when I came into the bedroom she was curled up in my bed, her teeth chattering. It was incredibly cold. I got in beside her and we lay back to back, only the soles of our cold feet touching. Sonya said, “Goodnight” in a small, soft voice; I felt tender towards her, and, in a strange way, moved. I was not at all aroused; nothing was further from my mind at that moment than to sleep with her, but when I realised from her quiet, regular breathing that she had fallen asleep, I was offended. I lay awake for a long time. It got warm under the bedclothes and I rubbed my feet gently against hers. It would have seemed incestuous to sleep with her, to touch her breasts; I wondered what it would be like to kiss her. Eventually, I fell asleep.
When I woke up the next morning, she was gone. She had scribbled “See you” on a torn-off piece of paper and left it on the kitchen table. I put on the shirt she had worn and went back to bed.
That was how she disappeared. She didn’t come round the next evening, or the evening after that. I waited for three evenings, and then started phoning her again. She didn’t pick up, or really wasn’t at home. I took to wandering around the city; I sat around in cafes she had mentioned; waited for hours in front of the old block of flats by the river; but there was no sign of her. There was never a light in her windows, but her name was still by the doorbell, and the piece of paper I sometimes placed under the front door always got moved. She escaped me in her own way. By March, I was weary of searching, and started preparing for Verena’s arrival.
I cleaned up my flat and tried to remove the traces of Sonya’s presence. But actually, there were no traces. Three months with a tired, enchanted little Sonya had left no traces behind. I searched in vain and got angry with myself. For the first time in ages, I phoned my friend Mick. We went playing pool and drank beer, danced with some women or other, and for a week, stormed through all the bars in the city. I tried a few times to tell him about Sonya, but then gave up. I didn’t know what to say.
At the end of March, the last of the snow melted from the roofs, and the swifts came back. I bought a new football for the Turkish boys and cut my hair short. I was waiting for something, and when Verena suddenly appeared at my door one evening, I stopped waiting. I had arrived. I fell asleep beside Verena in the evenings, I woke up beside her in the mornings, I plaited her hair, bought her an espresso machine. She seemed to want to stay longer this time; I didn’t ask how long. I worked, and she went strolling through the city. We went to the cinema and sat in the little cafes on the waterfront in the evenings. Verena hung her clothes in my wardrobe and got a job in a bar around the corner; when the phone rang, she answered it. Mick said she was just about the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and I agreed. The days took on their own steady rhythm. I felt good, maybe even happy; definitely very restful and calm. The linden trees in the courtyard began to bloom and the first summer storms blew over the city. It got very warm. It was only occasionally in the street that I got the feeling that someone was walking very close behind me; when I turned around, there was nobody there, but the niggling feeling remained. There were moments when I felt a yearning, without knowing exactly what for; maybe an event, some kind of sensation, some change; but the yearning disappeared as quickly as it came.
One morning in June we cycled to an open-air swimming pool by the Spree; Verena paid for us both; she said she was dying to go swimming, and ran along the grass in front of me, looking for a place to sit. She stopped triumphantly by a tiny patch of shade under a birch tree, spread out her towel, and sat down. Sitting directly beside her was Sonya.
My heart surged for an absurd moment. The thought passed through my head that this surge must be the yearned-for change, the break in the rhythm. I stood stock still and stared from Verena to Sonya. Sonya looked up from her book and saw me, then Verena.
I said, “Verena, I don’t want to sit here,” and looked directly at Sonya’s face, which somehow looked laid bare. Her hair was longer, she was brown in her blue swimsuit and very thin. It made me ache inside. Verena’s voice came as if from far away: “But this is the best spot in the whole place.” She didn’t seem to notice anything. I felt my head trembling. Sonya stood up very slowly, slipped into a red dress as if sleepwalking, and turned to go. Verena was talking about something, I couldn’t understand her. All I knew was that I didn’t hear any suspicion in her voice, so I dropped my bag beside hers and walked off after Sonya. I neared her as she approached the exit. She was walking fast, her posture bolt upright, from behind she looked like a little red stick. I almost broke into a run, caught up with her, and grabbed her by the arm. Her skin was glowing from the sun; she turned her madly serious face towards me and said, “Are we going to see each other or not.”
It was the same tone of voice as that time in the train station when she said “Shall I wait.” I felt like a fool, I was completely confused; I said “Yes”. She said “Well then”, shook her arm free and went through the gate and out onto the road. I looked after her until she was out of sight, and then went back to Verena, who was lying on her back, sunbathing, and hadn’t suspected a thing. The grass where Sonya had been sitting was flat; I stared at the two or three cigarette butts she had left behind, and tried to suppress the feeling of having lost control.
I didn’t have to ask Verena to leave (I wouldn’t have anyway – I would have seen Sonya behind her back); she went of her own accord. She said she didn’t want to disturb me in my “work phase”, whatever that meant; she packed her things, handed in her notice at the bar, and went back to Hamburg. I think she had tired of me for a while. She had wanted to assure herself that I loved her; she had got this assurance, so she left again. I brought her to the train station, feeling crushed and strangely sentimental. I said, “See you sometime, Verena?” She laughed and said, “Yes.”
That summer was Sonya’s summer. We went rowing on the lakes outside the city; I rowed Sonya over the glassy-smooth, dark green water till my arms ached. In the evenings, we ate plates of ham and drank beer in the little village inns, and the sun turned Sonya’s cheeks rosy, her hair white-gold. Afterwards, we would get the train back to the city, bouquets of wild flowers in our arms, which Sonya always took back to her place. I hardly worked at all; I studied maps of the area and wanted to go swimming in every lake around Berlin. Sonya always took a rucksack full of books with her on our outings; she would read to me and recite one poem after another. The evenings were warm, we counted our mosquito bites, and I taught her how to blow through a blade of grass. That summer was a string of bright, blue days; I dived into it and didn’t question anything. We spent the nights in Sonya’s flat, the river outside the high, wide windows; we didn’t sleep with each other, we didn’t kiss, we hardly ever touched; in fact, never. I said, “Your bed is a ship”; Sonya didn’t answer, as usual, but throughout that whole summer she looked like a little conqueror.
At the end of July, we were sitting in the tiny and deserted train station in Ribbeck, waiting for the evening train back to the city, when Sonya opened her mouth and said:
“You’ll marry me some day.”
I stared at her and slapped a mosquito on my wrist, killing it; the sky was red, and a bluish mist hung over the nearby woods. I said, “Sorry?”, and Sonya said:
“Yes, marry. Then we’ll have children and everything will be OK.”
I thought she was incredibly silly. Ridiculous and silly. Nothing seemed more absurd to me than to marry Sonya and have children with her. I said:
“Sonya, that’s ridiculous. You of all people should know that. How are we supposed to do that – have children? We aren’t even sleeping together.”
Sonya stood up, lit a cigarette, kicked a few pebbles, folded her arms and said: “Well, we will do, for that reason. Only for that reason. It’ll all work out, I know it will.”
I stood up too. I felt like I was reasoning with a misguided child. “Sonya, you’ve gone completely crazy. What’s this rubbish about – “it’ll all work out”? What’s that supposed to mean? It is all working out, we don’t need to get married.”
The tracks started to hiss; a low, piercing tone filled the air; a speck of a train appeared in the distance. Sonya stamped with her left foot, flicked away her cigarette, and marched defiantly towards the tracks. She jumped down from the platform, stumbling on the gravel, and then positioned herself, feet wide apart, on the track. The train got nearer, and I sat down again. Sonya screamed furiously: “Are you going to marry me, yes or no?” I had to laugh, and shouted back: “Dearest Sonya! Yes! I’ll marry you anytime you want!” Sonya laughed too. The train raced along the track, the air smelled of metal; I said her name, very softly, fearfully, then she leapt from the track onto the platform and the train shot past. She said:
“I don’t want to yet, okay. But later. Later I do.”
Autumn came and we saw less of each other, and then she went away for a while. One morning she was there at my door, already in her winter coat, saying: “Dearest, I have to go away and could do with a cup of tea before I go.” I asked her where she was going. She said she had to work and would be back in a month; as usual, she didn’t seem to want to tell me anything. We drank our tea in silence, then she stood up, pulled me up by the hands, and hugged me.
I held her tight; I felt helpless in the face of her deadly seriousness. She said: “Take care of yourself.” Then she left.
Everything that happened after that, happened because of fear. I think I was afraid of Sonya, I was afraid of the possibility, now suddenly so immediate, of spending my life with a strange little person who didn’t talk, who didn’t sleep with me, who usually just stared at me with huge eyes, about whom I knew almost nothing, and whom I probably loved – yes, when all was said and done, loved.
I felt that without Sonya, I didn’t want to carry on. Unexpectedly, I realised that I needed her, and I missed her. I was afraid she would never come back, and at the same time, I wanted her to stay away, forever.
At the end of the month, I packed my bags and went to Hamburg. I proposed breathlessly to an utterly surprised Verena, and she accepted. I stayed for three weeks; we went to visit my parents and announced the wedding for March the following year. Verena booked a honeymoon in Santa Fe, introduced me to her awful mother, and told me she wouldn’t be taking my name. I couldn’t have cared less about any of it. I felt like I was drowning, but at the same time was filled with boundless relief. I felt as if I had narrowly escaped a terrible danger, as if I had been rescued, and was now on safe ground. We argued a little about where we would live; Verena wanted me to move to Hamburg. I said as far as I was concerned everything could continue the way it was, married or not, and went back to Berlin.
There were no letters in my letterbox, the pictures in my studio had gathered dust, and there were cobwebs in my windows. No message from Sonya. I was master of the situation, I had prevented the unthinkable, and now I was prepared to be generous, conciliatory. I cycled over to her house, pedalling furiously, and ran up the stairs, whistling. She was in. She opened the door with an absent expression, obviously expecting someone else, then smiled and said: “Life’s treating you well, yeah?”
We sat in one of the big, almost empty rooms, Sonya at the writing desk, me in an armchair by the window; the river outside was brown, and seagulls circled over the scrap-yard. Sonya didn’t ask where I had been. Nor did she provide any information about her trip; she sat upright at the desk, looking a little anxious, and smoked one cigarette after another, almost like one possessed.
I chatted away casually about the weather, my plans for the winter, the new exhibition in the Nationalgalerie; I felt sure of myself. Sonya mentioned the party that she wanted to throw again in November. I said I would love to come, and she smiled stiffly. “Would you like to go away somewhere together in the spring?” she asked suddenly and I, who had waited the whole time, almost with anticipation, to finally have my chance, said my prepared piece, loud, clear, well-articulated and above all, polite: “Sorry, I can’t. Verena and I are getting married in March.”
She threw me out. She stood up, pointed to the door with outstretched arm and said: “Out.”
I said: “Sonya, come on, what’s this about,” and she repeated: “Out” with an expressionless face. I started to laugh, I wasn’t sure if she was serious, and then she screamed: “Out!” in a voice I had never heard her use before. I stood up uncertainly;
I wasn’t sure any more what I had expected in coming here. But I definitely didn’t want to go; I wanted to see Sonya lose control, I wanted her to cry and scream and maybe hit me and God knows what else.
But Sonya sat back down, turned her back to me, and stayed sitting quietly. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other; it stayed quiet; the river was unbearably brown. I breathed, and nothing happened. Then I left, closed the door behind me, and pressed my ear to it – nothing. No outburst, no muffled crying, no Sonya calling me back.
I cycled very slowly back home. I was – astonished. I had thought things would stay the way they were, stay the same, somehow.
Sonya didn’t contact me, but I had expected that at least. This was a game, I knew the rules. I waited for a week, then dialled her number; of course she didn’t pick up. I wrote her a letter, then another, and another, full of stupid nonsense and pathetic excuses. Needless to say she didn’t reply. I stayed calm, I knew this situation; I thought to myself: “Give her time.”
I called her regularly three times a week, let it ring ten times, then hung up. I worked, talked to Verena on the phone, went out with Mick, dialled Sonya’s number, just like the way you brush your teeth every morning or look in the letterbox. I was faintly amused, and proud of Sonya, proud of the stubbornness with which she withdrew from me; but I was beginning to feel that enough was enough. I wanted to see her; it was getting cold; the first snow fell. I thought of the previous winter, of the nights she had sat in my flat, and I wanted all that back again.
I thought: “Come on, Sonya, answer the phone, let’s go for a walk, I’ll warm your hands, and everything will be back the way it was.”
But at the beginning of December, the last letter I had sent Sonya arrived back in my letterbox. Confused, I saw my own handwriting and didn’t understand until I turned the letter over and read the rubberstamped “Not at this address”. I stood in the hall, uncomprehending; it was cold, and my teeth chattered. I put the letter back in the letterbox and cycled along by the river to the industrial district, the bike skidding in the snow. I cycled slowly and carefully and refused to think about anything. I locked the bike to a lamppost in front of Sonya’s house and looked up at the blank, dark windows. No curtains, no light, but that didn’t mean anything. The hall door creaked as I pushed it open; the smell of damp and coal dust hung in the air in the hall. I had always had the impression that Sonya was the only one who lived in this house, and now I sensed that the house was completely empty. Still, I went up the stairs; the banisters on the second floor were broken away, and the stairs creaked worryingly. I thought of the party, the cacophony of voices, the music, Sonya beside the small red-haired woman in the seaweed-coloured dress. The name beside the door had been torn away. I rang the doorbell: everything stayed quiet. I peered through the keyhole into the long, white, empty hall of the flat, and knew she was gone.
I’m sure they’re going to tear down the house one of these days. It’s February; I put more and more coal into the stove, but it won’t get warm. I haven’t seen Sonya, nor heard from her. The linden trees in the courtyard tap their bare branches against my window; it’s time to get a new football for the Turkish boys. I’m waiting to run into the small, red-haired woman, so that I can ask her where Sonya is living and how she is. Sometimes in the street I get the feeling that someone is walking very close behind me; when I turn around, there’s nobody there, but the niggling feeling remains.
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