“What should we do?” she asks.
“The BMW Museum?”
She laughs.
It’s become a joke between them—that he wants to go to the BMW Museum and she doesn’t, and also that whenever it’s raining and they have nothing else to do he suggests it.
Since then, joking apart, he’s been planning to go on his own one day. Now he says that maybe he’ll do that this morning.
“And what am I supposed to do?” she says.
“Whatever,” he says. “I don’t know.”
“Thanks.”
“Come with me?”
“Seriously? No thank you.”
“Why not?”
She makes a face.
“Why not?” he says again.
They take a taxi, an old cream-colored Mercedes. The long, straight streets look bleak in the rain as the taxi’s wipers squeak and its dispatching radio fizzes and blurts. They’re traveling through parts of the city that they’ve never seen before—sparse, gray, and modern. It takes twenty minutes to get there. When they arrive she pays the driver and they get out into what seems to be a grimly futuristic landscape. The departure of the taxi leaves them feeling marooned among noisy roads. Strange towers loom at various distances in the rain and more immediately there’s a large bowl-shaped structure, apparently made of brushed aluminium, which is the BMW Museum.
Inside the self-conscious modernity feels less alienating, and it is at least warm and dry. She pays for the tickets and then they proceed up a wide ramp into something like a history of the twentieth century told in the form of BMWs.
“I didn’t know BMW made planes,” she says as they start up the ramp. The first displays are mainly old photos of aircraft.
“Only the engines,” István says.
“Okay.”
He explains that the famous logo is a sort of stylized propeller, in the blue and white of Bavaria. It was only after the First World War, he says, at a time when Germany wasn’t allowed to have an aircraft industry, that the company turned first to motorcycles and then cars.
“You already knew all this, did you?” she says.
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
They proceed up the ramp.
The whole place has a strangely peaceful atmosphere. It’s quite pleasant to stroll along and observe the passage of time expressed in the slowly changing forms and colors of the cars.
The silver of the 1950s.
The bright orange of the ’60s.
The beige of the ’70s.
The white of the ’80s.
And so up and up to the display of electric vehicles at the end.
They stop, sometimes, to read the text that accompanies the exhibits.
Often they stop at the same text and read it together in silence, and then take a second look at the vehicle in question, and then move on without saying anything.
From the summit a long escalator takes them down again and they are reunited with their coats.
“What now?” she says when they emerge into the bleakly monumental landscape and the ongoing rain.
There are no taxis in evidence anywhere.
She wonders if they should go back in and ask somebody to call one for them.
Instead he suggests they take the U-bahn.
She looks doubtful. “Yeah?”
“Why not?”
“Okay,” she says, after thinking about it for a moment. “Why not?”
There’s a station a few hundred meters away, where the various buildings of the BMW estate turn into the equally vast but visibly older structures of the Olympic Park. The station is marked by an elevated U high above the noisy road that they’re walking along. It’s also the terminus of the line, which makes it easy for them to know what to do. They board a train that’s already there and as they sit on the orange plastic seats waiting for it to leave he wonders how long it’s been since she’s traveled like this. Although her own family were ordinary middle class, she has been married to her husband for more than fifteen years and it seems unlikely that she’s made much use of public transport in that time. Not that she looks out of place or anything—she’s wearing skinny jeans, Ugg boots with tidemarks from the snow, a puffer coat. She looks perfectly normal, except for the way she’s peering around at things with at least as much interest as she did in the museum.
She sees him looking at her and probably guesses what he’s thinking.
“What?” she says.
“Nothing,” he says.
More self-conscious now, she just stares at her own reflection in the window opposite her, like everyone else.
There’s an alarm sound and the doors slam shut.
“I think we need to get off at Odeonsplatz,” he says as the train starts to move, leaning toward her so that she can hear him over its noise.
“Okay,” she says.
It’s half a dozen stops, and when they arrive at the surface they immediately know where they are—at the corner of the Hofgarten, not far from the Luitpold.
“Okay,” she says.
“What should we do for lunch?” he asks.
“I don’t know. The Italian place?” she suggests.
They sit at their usual table at the Italian place, the one near the front, and she tells the waiter, who knows them, that she’ll have what she usually does.
“The same,” István says to the waiter, who’s pouring fizzy water.
The waiter nods and moves away.
Weeks pass.
Spring arrives in the Hofgarten.
Her husband’s sister Mathilde visits him at the hospital and after that has lunch with her in the hotel restaurant with the Michelin star.
“How did you find him?” Helen asks her.
“I was shocked,” Mathilde says. “Frankly.”
“He’s better this week,” Helen says. “Last week it was like he wasn’t there.”
“It was still a bit like that,” Mathilde says.
“It was worse last week,” Helen says.
Mathilde sighs. “What do the doctors say?”
“They don’t say anything.”
Helen picks at her Caesar salad, aware that she doesn’t look very presentable.
“And how are you?” Mathilde asks her. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m okay.”
“You need to look after yourself.”
“I know.”
“You mustn’t let yourself go.”
“I know,” Helen says.
“It must be hard for you, to be here on your own.”
“István’s here with me.”
“István?”
“Our security driver.”
“Okay,” Mathilde says, possibly sounding surprised that his presence is enough for Helen to suggest that she’s not there “on her own” in the sense that Mathilde obviously meant.
They talk about other things.
Mathilde does most of the talking.
They’ve always had this slightly awkward way of dealing with each other. Though there’s a sort of formal equality between them, as sisters-in-law, Mathilde is of course a generation older and has always treated Helen more like a younger family member, like a niece or something, than as an actual equal.
There has always been a subtle element of pity there too, as if there was something inherently pitiable about Helen’s being married to a man so much older than she is.
And then again the pity has always been undercut by a suspicion that Helen was only ever interested in Karl for his money.
And naturally Helen has always resented both the pity and the suspicion.
It’s a warm spring day and the glass front of the restaurant has been folded open so that at their table it’s almost like being outside.
When the wind blows, which it sometimes does, it rattles the menu cards in their holder.
Mathilde is talking about something else now, about some opera that she saw in Munich once.
Helen nods, pretending to be more interested than she is. Unlike Mathilde, who has a Coke Zero, she’s drinking wine, and while Mathilde speaks, she wonders if she should order another. If Mathilde wasn’t there she probably wouldn’t. She wants another one partly just because Mathilde is there, and she’s having to listen to her and talk to her, and the wine makes doing that less difficult, and yet the fact that Mathilde is there is also inhibiting her from having another one because she doesn’t want her to think that she’s an alcoholic.