“Anna,” Doktor Messerli asked, “is there someone else? Has there ever been anyone else?”
The lunch hour folded into early afternoon. Archie and Anna shared a plate of cheese, some greengage plums, a bottle of mineral water. Then they set everything aside and fucked again. Archie came in her mouth. It tasted like school paste, starchy and thick. This is a good thing I am doing, Anna said inside herself, though “good” was hardly the right word. Anna knew this. What she meant was expedient. What she meant was convenient. What she meant was wrong in nearly every way but justifiable as it makes me feel better, and for so very long I have felt so very, very bad. Most accurately it was a shuffled combination of all those meanings trussed into one unsayable something that gave Anna an illicit though undeniable hope.
But all things move toward an end.
That night, after she had put the children to bed and washed the dinner plates and scoured the sink to the unimpeachable shine that Bruno demanded (Doktor Messerli asked “Is he truly that much an ogre?” to which Anna responded no, which translated as sometimes), Anna spread her notebooks on the table and began her German exercises. She’d fallen behind. Bruno was locked in his office. Separate solitudes were not an unusual arrangement between them, and Bruno retreated to his office most nights. Left alone, Anna would either read or watch television or put on a jacket and take an evening walk up the hill behind the house.
The house, when Anna was alone inside it, often assumed a pall of unbearable, catatonic stillness. Has it always been like this? Anna would be lying if she’d said it had. They’d shared good times, Bruno and she. It would be unfair to deny it. And even if he barely tolerated what he called her “melancholic huffs” or her “sullen temperaments,” Bruno too, if pressed, would have admitted a love and fondness for Anna that, while often displaced by frustration, held an irrefutable honor in his heart.
IT WAS JUST THE previous Monday that Anna steeled and sent herself to school for the first time since college. The class at the Migros Klubschule was called German for Advanced Beginners. This was the course intended for anyone pre-equipped with a minor to moderate knowledge of the language but who lacked a rigorous understanding of grammar and a nuanced usage of syntax.
Migros is the name of the largest chain of supermarkets in Switzerland and Switzerland’s biggest employer. More people work for Migros than any Swiss bank worldwide. But Migros is bigger than supermarkets alone. There are Migros-owned bookshops, Migros-owned gas stations, Migros-owned electronics outlets, sports stores, furniture dealers, menswear shops, public golf courses, and currency exchanges. Migros also governs a franchise of adult education centers. There isn’t a Swiss city of significant population where at least one Migros Klubschule doesn’t exist. And it’s not just language classes they offer. You can study most anything at the Migros Klubschule: cooking, sewing, knitting, drawing, singing. You can learn to play an instrument or how to read the future with tarot cards. You can even learn how to interpret dreams.
DOKTOR MESSERLI, AT THE onset of Anna’s analysis, asked Anna to pay attention to her dreams. “Write them down,” the Doktor instructed. “I want you to write them down and bring them to our meetings and we will discuss them.”
Anna protested. “I don’t dream.”
The Doktor was undeterred. “Nonsense. Everyone dreams. Even you.”
Anna brought a dream to her next appointment: I am sick. I beg Bruno for help but he won’t give it. Someone films a movie in another room. I am not in it. A dozen teenage girls kill themselves for the camera. I don’t know what to do so I do nothing.