Where’s the money?
There. . there. Ella’s mouth was making baby sounds as she spat, dribbling, so as not to swallow any broken glass, and she pointed to her school bag lying on the floor. Thomas crawled under the table to retrieve it, and had to empty the whole bag to find the money at last lying loose in it. He picked out all the coins and the note and placed the money on the little silver booklet that the waiter was holding open. As the waiter went on standing there motionless, Thomas put his hand in his own pocket and added something to it.
I’m sorry, sir, that’s not enough.
Can you send us the bill at home?
What about your taxi?
We’ll take the suburban train. I’m sorry about this. Thomas took a pencil out of Ella’s bag and wrote the address on the bill for the waiter. Another waiter brought their jackets. But Ella couldn’t stand up on her own, and had to be supported. Thomas hauled her up, got his arm under hers, supported her back while her sour breath blew in his face. His poem was still lying on the table. How could he ever have mentioned his doubts of the Red Way to her? She’d hardly listened to his poem, he had written it for nothing, given it to her for nothing.
Can I walk? Ella spoke like a small child now as she sank to the floor and fell to her knees, holding Thomas’s hand.
You can, yes, you can. Thomas was sweating all over and wondering how he was going to get Ella home.
Daddy dear, I love you, said Ella, pressing her cheek to the back of Thomas’s hand, kissing his hand, turning up her eyes soulfully, I love you and only you.
Standing
What’s the matter? Don’t stand around like that, get undressed. Käthe turned her back to her adolescent son, cigarette in one hand, holding her chisel against the rotating whetstone with the other. She called through the noise, in her powerful voice: If you’re cold do some knee-bends. He could hardly hear her, and only guessed what she was saying. The screech of the chisel against the whetstone raised gooseflesh on Thomas’s arms and legs. It was a noise that seemed to flay him. He stood motionless and watched her smoking, which she seldom did. Käthe’s blue working jacket, the one she often wore when she was working on stone, particularly in winter because she wanted to keep the stone dust from settling in her sweater, was white on the back; perhaps she had draped it over the side of the vat of plaster when she was making a model, or had brushed against the freshly painted wall later. Thomas took off his shoes, his trousers, his socks. It was cold. He breathed deeply and imagined the warm sand under the pine trees beside the Müggelsee, sun warming his skin. Under the soles of his feet he felt cold concrete with small stones scattered over it. The screeching stopped. Käthe switched off the motor of her whetstone and tested the edge of the chisel with her fingertips. The silence could feel like warmth to Thomas. His gooseflesh went away. A cool, glittering November sun shone through the opaque upper window of the studio. He took off his sweater and vest, finally his underpants. Käthe scrutinised him.
His body hair was still sparse, his chest smooth, nothing but blond down growing in his armpits and on his upper lip, and you could easily see not only his armpits but his testicles as well. Thomas crossed his arms over his chest, rubbing his skin to warm it up until it showed red weals.
Käthe looked him up and down. Weedy for a model, aren’t you? Don’t quite make the grade. She stubbed her cigarette out. Don’t make such a fuss about it, she said. A boy who lounges around his room all day writing poetry ought to go swimming now and then, run in the woods. It’s all on your doorstep. A lad like you needs fresh air or you’ll waste away. Käthe took several steps towards him. Put your arm up in the air. She showed him the angle she wanted. He knew it already, he’d been holding it at that angle for many days, hand behind his head; he had stamina, Käthe valued that in him. And he cost her nothing. Now, move your right leg slightly forward. There, that’s it. Käthe took another step towards him. Thomas could smell the garlic on her breath.
He was good at standing still; for several years he had been sitting for Käthe as a model, not to mention standing and lying down for her. It made sense, it was only natural, since after all they were living under the same roof, and he had some years to go yet before his school-leaving exam. Weedy was a nasty description, Thomas squirmed when he heard it, nor did he like to be told he didn’t make the grade, but he didn’t want to show that she had hurt his feelings. In her mouth those didn’t sound like mere insults. Käthe was describing the kind of person who, in her eyes, was an inadequate and lesser being. She would never say such things to one of the sculptors or writers she revered, nor to any woman friend of hers. They were reserved for inferior creatures, for Thomas, for children, for subservient models. She could speak to Ella in a way that demeaned her too. Käthe walked across the big room to her radio, which stood on a low bookshelf, covered with dust like everything else in the studio, and searched for a station broadcasting music. She loved Brahms and Vivaldi, Handel and Shostakovich, music for strings, powerful Romantic concertos full of universality and emotion, melancholy and cheerfulness. Up in the smoking room Käthe had had a record player for some time, but the records and needle were too sensitive to stone dust, so as she worked she had to listen to whatever was being played on the radio. If she couldn’t find any classical music, she listened to the discussion programmes. She was lucky today; the familiar female voice announced the string quartet no. 2 in A minor, op. 51, by Brahms. A Romantic start to the day’s work. She put on her protective goggles and took a few steps round the block of stone on which she had been working for three weeks, assessing it. Thomas thought he could sense her impatience. Käthe was breathing fast enough to make her big breasts heave. Her eye held the keen glance of an eagle about to discover and perceive the potential of every moment: she was already chipping away at the stone. Thomas sensed her hope, which to his mind had something childish about it. Käthe believed, defiantly and to some extent arbitrarily, that her creative work would succeed. He admired her for her lack of doubts; he himself had doubts at every moment of his life, and even deciding whether to buy potatoes and carrots or cabbage and meat when he went shopping cost him a great effort. Maybe he just didn’t have much taste? Thomas thought of cherries and how much he liked the taste of those, so much so that they gave him a stomach ache every summer. But shopping called for more than taste; it meant weighing up the preferences of other people who would be sitting at the same table with you, eating the meal.
Käthe seemed as certain of her taste as she was of her ability. You could already see, in broad outline, the head of the sculptured figure and the arms, which were bent level with each other. They had a pale, warm glow, their sandy yellow and earthy ochre made the human form appear inviolable. The body and legs were still hidden in the block of sandstone quarried from the Elbe area. The lower part of the stone was almost black; if sandstone was left out in the open for a long time it darkened. Greenish shadows made you think of lichen, moss or mould. Käthe’s stone had drawings in oil pastel on its surface, where she wanted to show the stonemason the places to chip away superfluous material in line with her sketches and models. Thomas knew how much Käthe loved the stones; he knew the look in her eyes as she tested a stone’s qualities, how she would strike one and make her assessment of its content of iron oxide and quartz. She liked sandstone from the Elbe. It had strangely dark veining, it was soft enough for her to work at it for hours on end, and so firm and resistant to damage that it stood a good chance of keeping the shape she gave it for centuries, even millennia. There was something monotonous about her tapping at the stone, something that radiated calm, and did not just demand patience but engendered it, at least for Thomas.