Bruno mumbled something that Anna understood to mean Walk over and get her yourself.
The direct walk from their front door to Ursula’s was two minutes long, if that. Anna had no incentive to hurry. She took a winding, oblique route that led her in the opposite direction up the hill behind her house. It was a path she often traipsed; she knew it well. During the day it was clogged with Nordic walkers and people exercising their dogs. At night, it was empty and the open fields seemed haunted. The feeling was cryptic. On the hill Anna felt disconsolate, isolated, and renounced. I am blanched by the moonlight, she thought. A revenant in a pauper’s graveyard.
“DO YOU BELIEVE IN ghosts?” Anna asked Doktor Messerli.
“It doesn’t matter whether you believe in ghosts. The ghosts believe in you.”
ANNA FOLLOWED THE PATH until she reached a bench at the crest of the hill. This hill, this bench, the middle of many, many nights—Anna couldn’t say how many times she’d wandered up the path just to sit. In the rain, in the snow. On weekends or in the middle of the week. During nights of abject despair. On nights when the air was crass or unemotional. When the horrible ache of loneliness bit her on the neck. When the landscape and its hurt heart had its way with her. This was her bench. The bench she came to sit and cry upon. A yellow Wanderweg sign pointed in the direction of the woods. Behind the bench, a fenced-off acre that penned a farmer’s cattle. That night, the cows were in the barn and Anna was entirely alone. Every several minutes and from just over a kilometer away, Anna heard a night train juddering down the tracks. Where is it going? Who’s inside? Is she asleep? Is she sad? It always surprised her how clear and close the trains sounded even from the top of the hill. I can feel it. A woman on that train is sad.
Anna waited for the tears to come. They didn’t. Five trains passed in the valley beneath her before she rose and made her way to Ursula’s.
URSULA WAS PREDICTABLY CURT when Anna finally came home that afternoon. Anna had barely said hello before Ursula pushed past her and left. Anna let it go. Ursula had a right to be annoyed.
Polly was screaming and the boys were bickering. Anna looked at her watch—she’d been on the train for three and a half hours. After the first hour she’d lost patience with introspection. She let her mind turn gray. Her pulse slowed. She relaxed her eyes and tried to focus on the spaces between things as the loll of the train rocked her like a mother would. But the house, the noise, the children, her mother-in-law, the lateness of the afternoon and that evening’s dinner plans all converged to a sharp, fine point that forced Anna to the wall of her own woe. There was nothing she could do at that moment but allow it to happen. So she let the boys squabble and left Polly Jean to cry herself out. Some tears can’t be soothed, they can only be shed.
By the time Bruno came home from the office, his sons were dressed, his wife was made up, and Polly Jean was ready to go to Ursula’s for the evening. Bruno volunteered to walk her over. Anna watched them from the living room window. Bruno was bouncing her on his hip and whistling. Polly had stopped crying before Anna finished her shower.
Roland’s last lesson that morning was on subordinating conjunctions. Falls means “in case of.” And weil means “because.” “Remember to pronounce it ‘vile,’ ” Roland said, which Anna found apropos. When Roland wrote down damit, the class chuckled. “Yes, just like the bad word. It means ‘so that’ or ‘in order to.’ ” Then he reminded them they were adults and they should stop laughing because it wasn’t that funny in the first place.
Anna stood at the window in order to watch them as they walked away, her husband and her daughter. Anna stood at the window so that she could see. She watched until they rounded the corner and disappeared from view.
Dammit, dammit, dammit, goddammit.
ANNA RAPPED GENTLY ON Ursula’s door even as she opened it. Ursula’s distaste for Anna aside, they’d long passed the formalities of first knocking, then waiting on one or the other to answer the door. Anna walked into the house and whispered hello. Ursula had fallen asleep in front of the television, her knitting in her lap. Mike Shiva, a popular psychic and tarot card reader, was taking live phone calls. His programs ran every night; there was no escape from his plate-round face and straight stringy hair held back with a woman’s headband. Anna thought he was weird and wonderful alike. A psychic seemed so un-Swiss, so unempirical.
Ursula stirred when Anna switched off the set. She woke with a start and for a moment seemed not to recognize her daughter-in-law.
“I’m here for Polly,” Anna announced, as if there would be any other reason for her to appear in Ursula’s house so late at night.