The Gordian Knot - Bernhard Schlink [4]
He got up and gave the watering can a kick.
3
DEBTS, GEORG DELIBERATED, ARE very much like the weather: I might be driving to Marseille, leave here in bright sunshine, and arrive there in the pouring rain; on the way there’s the odd cloud over Pertuis, a thick cloud cover over Aix, and by Cabriès the first raindrops fall. On the other hand, I might be sitting here on my terrace: first the sun is shining in a clear blue sky, then a cloud or two appears, then more, then it starts drizzling, and finally it pours. In both cases it’s a matter of an hour—an hour in the car, or an hour on my terrace, and for me the result is the same whether I drive from good weather into bad, or stay where I am and the weather turns bad. The clouds look no different, and either way I get wet. And then my parents and friends warn me not to get any deeper into debt! Not that they’re wrong. Sometimes I do things that make me go deeper into debt. But all too often the debts grow into a mountain that keeps on rising. But how they grow is of no consequence to me. The result is the same.
Georg had just come home from dining at Gérard’s Les Vieux Temps. He had a tab running there, but usually paid up. When he finished a job and had some money, he’d even leave a bit extra. But how petty people could be, Georg thought angrily. He’d gone to Les Vieux Temps after receiving the disappointing letter, and Gérard had served him salmon fettuccine along with wine, coffee, and Calvados. When Gérard brought the check he didn’t refuse to put it on the tab, but he made a face and dropped a hint. Georg couldn’t let that pass. He paid up in full on the spot, and then some. Even though it was the money with which he was intending to pay his phone bill.
The following morning he began cleaning up the studio. He had ordered some firewood to be delivered in the afternoon, and he wanted to store it there. The wood was ordered and, luckily, already paid for. He couldn’t recall the foolish impulse that had led him to place the order. There was more than enough wood lying about in the woods of Cucuron.
Georg didn’t like going into the studio. The memory of Hanne was especially present and painful. Her large desk by the window, which they had assembled together and on which they had made love by way of inauguration and to test its sturdiness. The sketches for her last big oil painting hung on the wall, and the smock she had left behind was hanging on a hook. Because the boiler and the boxes of books were in the studio, he couldn’t avoid going there altogether, but he had neglected it.
He wanted to do something about the studio, but didn’t get very far. By the time he finished, the boxes of books were stacked up, there was space for the firewood, and Hanne’s smock was in the trash. But then what did he need the studio for?
A car pulled up outside, but it wasn’t the wood being delivered or the mail. It was Herbert, another German living in Pertuis, whose aim in life was to paint, but who always seemed to be kept from doing so by things coming up. They had a bottle of wine together and talked about this and that. Mostly about the latest things that had come up.
“By the way,” Herbert said as he was leaving, “can you help me out with a loan of five hundred francs? You see, there’s this gallery in Aix, and …”
“Five hundred? I’m sorry, but I don’t have that kind of money,” Georg replied with a shrug, holding up his empty hands.
“I thought we were friends!” Herbert said angrily.
“Even if you were my own brother, I couldn’t give you anything—I don’t have anything.”
“I bet you have enough to pay for the next bottle of wine and the next month’s rent. At least you could be decent enough to say you don’t want to give me the money!”
The truck delivering the firewood arrived. It was a scratched and dented pickup with an open bed, the doors of the cab missing. A man and a woman got out, both quite old. The man had only one arm.
“Where would Monsieur like us to stack the wood? It’s good wood, dry and aromatic.