Anna nodded opaquely. A sparrow landed on the outside sill and just as quickly flew away. “I’ve got a hole.”
“Over time it widens. From the size of a one-franc piece to the size of a small plum, then an apple, then a man’s fist. Eventually the hole becomes so large that the bucket has no bottom at all. Then it is useless.”
“I have a useless heart.” It was a vacant statement.
Doktor Messerli shook her head. “No, Anna. All I am saying is you cannot treat a mortal wound with iodine and plasters. Repair the hole. That’s the only thing to do.”
IN JANUARY AND FEBRUARY and the first half of March 2006, Anna spent every available moment in Stephen Nicodemus’s arms. They were wiry and able—not strong, but his. Anna had fallen in love. Or a version of love.
They spoke most often of things both scientific and theoretical. It was how they flirted. It was almost the whole of their windup. It became Anna’s challenge to ask him questions no one had asked him before. Why is fire hot? she asked. Is fire ever cold? Why won’t wool burn? Does a flame have weight? Have mass? Is there anything that is entirely resistant to fire? Can fire itself catch fire? Can fire freeze?
Anna made a fetish of all things fire. She passed her palms through the flames of candles she lit in the den. She lifted the covers of the stove and stared at the pilot light. She dreamed of explosions, of houses burning down. She’d wake in the night with ecstatic sweats. What would it be like to strike a final match and set it to the center of this bed? Even Anna knew that she might be approaching the rim of her reason.
Stephen tried to explain his work to her. Pyrology is an applied science, with practical uses in many fields, he said. Anna replied, Apply it to me, this science of yours, Professor, then threw herself open on his bed.
“DIFFERENT SYSTEMS GIVE DIFFERENT names to alchemy’s stages,” the Doktor said. “But the step that follows the burning is the washing. Solutio. The bathing of the calcified elements in water. For example, the water of tears.”
DAVID AND DANIELA’S HOUSE abutted the woods. Anna and Karl entered the forest under a vault of foliage, a canopy of trees. They passed a mannish woman walking a Rottweiler. “Grüezi mitenand,” she greeted them in the local dialect. Anna and Karl greeted her back. She was the only person they passed. Anna wondered if they should have brought the umbrella. It began to drizzle just a few steps in.
Karl and Anna walked in relative tandem silence for three or four minutes. Karl was a bruising, muscular man, slightly heavyset and almost imperceptibly bowlegged. His blond hair had been bleached by the sun, his hands were calloused, and his was a ruddy, affable face. Karl worked for Kanton Aargau as a Holzf?ller, a lumberjack. Karl and Anna shared the most minuscule of small talk. He mentioned Willi, his thirteen-year-old son who lived in Bern with his mother, the woman from whom Karl was divorced. He spoke of a vacation they’d taken the year before to California. He told Anna a joke he’d heard on a television program and asked her if she missed the USA. For Anna he named aloud the plants and trees: Bergulme. Elsbeere. Hagebuche. Efeu. Scots elm. Service tree. Hornbeam. Ivy. Anna wasn’t feeling any better. Her stomach pulsed with queasiness as if her body sensed an encroaching inevitability.
IN MID-MARCH 2006, ANNA lay on the floor before Stephen in his apartment on Nürenbergstrasse. She wailed: Take me, take me, take me with you. It was the worst day of her life. She’d never felt so awful.
No, Anna. That’s not going to happen. He spoke patiently, but there was irritation in his voice. He didn’t want to be cruel. Anna clawed at ways to keep him. I’m coming anyway. You cannot stop me.
That was true. He could not have stopped her. If Anna had found the nerve she would have needed in order to chase Stephen back to America, she would have brandished it, proved herself, made good on her promise to follow. But she couldn’t find it. She didn’t even have a bank account.
Hi, um, Bruno? Yeah, I need a one-way ticket to Boston. The only thing that made her laugh that day was imagining that phone call. No. Stephen had to be the one to carry her off. He had to do it for it to count, for it to be real. He had to grab her and drag her out. She needed to be able to say I had no choice.
But Stephen didn’t do that. And Anna didn’t follow him to Boston.
For three entire months they’d spent at least an hour of most days together. They met at his apartment. They met in the woods and went for walks. They met near the ETH for lunch, coffee, drinks, a fast bout of lovemaking behind the closed door of his office. But the inevitable soon inevited: Stephen left. He went home. He did not come back.
I feel so fucking used.