ANNA AVOIDED GERMAN CLASS for two days. She dreaded looking Archie in the eye.
As angry as she was with herself, she was equally furious with him. She knew her indignation was unreasonable (Was it? It was Archie who swooped in and kissed her when she wasn’t asking for it, Archie who showed up at the party, Archie who propositioned her in the first place) but the haughtiness was serving the purpose of keeping Anna focused on the present task of behaving herself. Resentment was her arsenal’s secret weapon. When Mary called Tuesday afternoon, Anna gave an excuse that resembled the truth: that the exhaustion of the party caught up with her a day late and she needed rest. Mary volunteered to drop over with notes but Anna told her not to bother. So Anna stayed home and played house with her daughter. Anna baked for the first time in over a year and cooked Bruno’s favorite meal for dinner. It was a stab at atonement. The smallest of stabs.
SOMETIME DURING THE WANING hours of her second day in a row at home, Anna began to feel restless, bored, and lonely. Jesus, Anna, really? She scrambled to find avenues of acquittal. She blamed it first on the sunset and then on flaws fundamental to her personhood. The brokenness she was trying to mend. It wasn’t, after all, just about the sex.
This, she knew, was mostly true.
She couldn’t really call it missing them. She didn’t miss them at all (Who were they anyway to miss?). Anna had read that it takes far longer to break a habit than to make one. In the case of heroin, addiction can occur in the span of three days. Am I addicted? She didn’t want to use that word. These men were simply the embodiment of urges she no longer wished to deny herself. It’s just a handshake, really. A casual greeting made with alternate body parts. She could live without the favors of these specific men. The affair with Archie wasn’t even two months old and her relationship with Karl barely constituted a dalliance. But the nature of habits is this: they are habitual. They die very hard, those that die at all.
Anna fought her agitation by doing laundry.
ON THURSDAY ANNA RETURNED to German class. She’d paid for it, after all, and up until Monday, she’d mostly enjoyed it. So Ursula came over and Anna went to Oerlikon. She summoned the backbone to face Archie but was relieved when he didn’t show up for class.
Roland gave a lesson on comparatives. This is more whatever than that. That is less something than this. This and that are precisely equal to that and this.
They ran out of time before Roland could introduce superlatives, the proclamation of what is most of all.
Like so much else, this was a concept Anna already understood.
ON FRIDAY ANNA WOKE well before dawn. The clock blinked 4:13 A.M. She looked to her right. Bruno was asleep. Of course. She rose and dressed and tiptoed out of the bedroom and left the house as quietly as possible. She was practiced at this. She needed to be.
The pre-sunrise October chill had bite. Anna turned up the collar of her coat, put her hands in her pockets, and leaned into the oncoming wind as all around her Dietlikon slept unperturbedly at ease. She had no intentional destination; Anna followed her feet where they led her: first south toward the church, then down Riedenerstrasse past the traffic circle to the town cemetery.
Anna didn’t routinely visit the cemetery, especially in insomnia’s dark, horrible hours; that morning’s walk was unpremeditated. But there are times to talk to the dead, times when the dead want to talk. In these rare instances, the dead will draw you to them; your volition is irrelevant. Anna couldn’t tell if this was one of those times, but she was at the cemetery, so all signs pointed to yes. The gate was locked but Anna cut through a sparse hedge. She didn’t plan on staying long. I am not a ghost, I am a guest.
She passed slowly through the rows of graves. She attempted a measure of somberness but settled on worry and fatigue, which, when coupled, passed for solemnity. This would have to do. Things for Anna always had to do.
Opposite the cemetery gate lay a separate section for the graves of the town’s children. In the daylight, there was simply no way to pass these graves without breaking down. In the darkness, however, to stand in their presence was to enjoy a bearable, almost beautiful experience. They are babies asleep in their cribs, Anna imagined. Just sleeping. Earlier that year, the granddaughter of a friend of Ursula’s had drowned in Dietlikon’s community pool. Her name was Gaby and she was buried here. It was too dark for Anna to read the names; she didn’t know which grave was hers.