Alice by Judith Hermann Page A

street, in the park, in the cafés, at the tables in the shade of the trees, he was the one she knew and knew about yet didn’t understand. He turned round, looked up at their apartment, raised his hand, and waved. Alice waved back. Then he was gone. She kept looking out of the window for a while longer. The last of the children left the park; the street lights went on. In the basketball court, hidden by the leaves of the trees, someone was still throwing a ball into the basket, again and again. Open windows, profusely planted balconies, and the water from the flowers dripping down on the pavement. A ring of fiery clouds around the sun hanging low in the sky. Tomorrow was Monday. Alice closed the window. She lowered the blind, searched for the phone, and found it on the floor beside the bed, next to Raymond’s open book.
The street lamps buckled weakly, newsstands and advertising columns dissolved into the air, everything everywhere crackled, hissed, and rustled, became porous and transparent, turned into little piles of dust, and disappeared. In the distance the outlines of the Town Hall tower became blurry and blended with the blue sky. For a while the old tower clock, detached from everything else, still hung suspended in the sky until it too vanished.
Alice took the book and the phone and went back to the kitchen. Pulling a chair over to the table, she sat down, placed the phone next to the book, and continued reading.

IV
Malte

    It was raining the day Alice saw Frederick for the first and only time. A light rain but steady – diagonal lines against the winter sky. Mid-November. Frederick had said he was coming to Berlin anyway; he hadn’t picked this weather for their meeting; neither had Alice, although it was the sort of weather that made her feel good. Reason enough to feel sleepy and lethargic, rain enough for an umbrella. As usual, her car was parked far away, umpteen streets away, at the edge of the district. Alice left the house too early, carrying an umbrella, wearing high heels, a grey coat, her bag slung over one shoulder, and feeling as if she were dressed for a state visit. On a whim, Frederick had taken a hotel room in the centre of the city, right by the river. Alice thought of itas a whim, but it might simply have been practical, a room downtown. With a view of the water and a steel bridge with pigeons nesting in its struts and trains rolling across from east to west and back. Milky green water with shimmering streaks of oil. The beautiful River Spree, its rusty freight barges, excursion boats, shabby tugboats, everything the same today as it had been forty years ago. Maybe Frederick chose the location because of that.
    Alice was to pick him up at the hotel, around eleven.
    In your room?
    In the lobby. Not in the room. I’ll come down to the lobby.
    She didn’t know exactly how old Frederick was. About seventy, a miracle actually that he was still around; he could have been gone by now; that would have been more likely. She had phoned him. He had answered the phone. This startled her so much she almost hung up. His voice sounded low and soft. Not frail. But soft. She took a deep breath. Hello, my name is Alice, she said. We don’t know each other, but I’m Malte’s niece.
    For a moment Frederick said nothing. Then he asked how she got hold of his phone number, his voice neither friendly nor unfriendly, matter-of-fact.
    From the phone book, Alice had said. It was the truth.
    In that moment, during which he said nothing, in that very short stretch of time, Alice knew that her call had forced Frederick to think back over almost forty years – whether he wanted to or not. Back through all the ups and downs, back to the day his friend Malte had taken his ownlife. Was that hard for him? With her phone call Alice had turned Frederick’s day upside down, had ripped him out of whatever he was just then doing, out of the equilibrium of his everyday world. Thoughtless and