Next World Novella Read online

  Curiously enough, however, she picked up on it the next day exactly where she had broken it off. As soon as Schepp appeared in her doorway she asked him, sounding quite anxious, almost imploring, how, as a thinking human, he could say such a thing. All the cool, objective distance that constituted not a little of her magic was gone; she pleaded with him as if he were a friend who must be saved from some terrible error. There had to be something after death, she said; surely life with all its beauty couldn’t end just like that? There were tears in her eyes. Then, as soon as Schepp had agreed with her, nodding vigorously, they grew even darker, and she said softly, as if he wasn’t there, as if she was completely alone, that of course it wouldn’t go on in as beautiful a way as before, far from it. In the Southern Commentaries on the I Ching, she came across passages in which the sign for ‘lake’ was curiously ambivalent, as if – unlike, for instance, the signs for ‘wind’, ‘mountain’ or ‘sky’ – it wasn’t just referring to something joyful, which was what the Commentaries usually stressed, but also to its opposite, something dark that had to be overcome. However, none of the commentaries told you how to do that, as if the lake – ah, well, she didn’t suppose the mystical side of it would interest a linguist.

  Far from it. Schepp dispelled that illusion immediately. And so it was that while for two years he had known nothing about his new colleague in the Faculty apart from the rumours circulating about her, he now discovered her most secret fears in the course of a single afternoon.

  After death, she said, if she understood the Southern Commentaries correctly, the process of dying only really begins when the soul is judged and purified. Sooner or later you come to a lake, its waters motionless, in the midst of a bleak landscape. From a distance it may seem like a mountain lake, only larger, much larger, and the far shore can only be vaguely discerned in the diffuse light. Indeed, all the light in that place is muted, she said; there are no colours, no smells, not a breath of wind, not a sound, and that is sufficiently terrible, but worst of all you are entirely alone, yet you must enter the cold water and swim across. Swim to the far shore where perhaps life goes on somehow or other, but that makes no real difference, for you have no chance at all of reaching the shore; your powers are bound to fail by the time you get to the middle of the lake at the latest, everyone’s powers fail. Then you let yourself drift for a while, becoming colder and colder, and at last you are drawn down into the depths as if by a giant hand, and …

  And?

  No ‘and’. Then you are really dead, and it’s all over.

  For ever?

  For ever. And the lake, she said, was so dark and cold, and it frightened her.

  But who says, asked Schepp, that you have to go into the water? You could just stay on the shore. Or walk around the lake if you really wanted to reach the other side.

  Oh, said Fräulein Dorothee, and there were tears in her eyes again, the lake exerts a magical attraction, and although you know you’re sure to meet your end in it, it shimmers promisingly like a new beginning, and you can’t escape it.

  Schepp briefly thought of responding with a knowing grin in anticipation of a smile in return – for there was no way she could mean all this seriously – but instead ironic objections spilled out of him. Surely, he said, the lake must be full by now, full to the brim, and in fact if all the people who had died over thousands and millions of years had drowned in it, Doro probably wouldn’t have to swim when her turn came, she could walk across the water dry-shod. The next moment he could have bitten his tongue off, but Fräulein Dorothee just regarded him briefly, and once again the conversation was over.

  After that not a day went by when Schepp didn’t think of the lake and its inhospitable shores, and the way Dorothee Wilhelmine Renate, Countess von Hagelstein shuddered at the thought of having to undress there. Sometimes he pondered whether she might enter the water fully dressed, or whether he might swim from the far side of the lake to meet her. He didn’t make much progress with her that way at all. But he made headway with the cold, dark lake. By winter’s end he had a very clear picture of it, could even imagine the surrounding landscape, the vague shape of a mountain pine, a wan sky flashing with distant lightning. So he was greatly surprised when Fräulein Dorothee, still in her coat, came into his room. Since that last conversation she hadn’t deigned to glance at him when he had brought her pots of tea in silent plea for forgiveness. Her hair was a bit tousled; a film of perspiration gleamed on her forehead and upper lip.

  Could she show him something, she asked. She knew he didn’t believe in it, but now, now she could prove it. Prove that it existed. The lake. Scarcely an hour later they entered the great glass cube of Berlin’s New National Gallery, which was flooded with light. The little that Schepp had found out from Fräulein Dorothee on the way amounted to the fact that on a recent visit she had discovered a picture that, she could have sworn, hadn’t been hanging there before, a picture that, as far as she knew, had been missing since the war. It had suddenly turned up again without any fanfare although its reappearance should have caused a sensation. She had been deeply moved when she had suddenly been confronted with it; the original had a power at which copies merely hinted, a shattering finality in fact. It was proof.

  With great determination she led him to the basement of the building – grey, carpeted floor, functional atmosphere – where suddenly her mood became reverential. She stopped in front of a gilt-framed painting perhaps one and a half metres wide by just under one metre high. In the picture … the surprised Schepp turned to his companion, but she was gazing in silent fascination, so he had himself to come to terms with the fact that the painting showed not a cold, dark lake but a huge island, a monumental, towering wall of rock, a rocky curve around a group of cypress trees with a flickering violet-tinged sky in the background. Before the island, as Schepp’s eyes became accustomed to the gloomy hues, he saw a boat making for its shore, with a white, muffled figure standing in front of a coffin draped with white cloth. He could also make out various steps and openings in the rock resembling archaic portals. Just to make sure, he glanced at the picture’s title. He had already realized that a few strokes of the oars would bring a new corpse to the island, to be placed on a plinth or in one of the burial chambers. Yes, the island impressed him; there was something so fundamentally desolate about it that he imagined the peace of the dead reigning in that place as a dignified form of despair. What fate as dark as those cypresses awaited the newly dead?

  Only then did Schepp focus on what little the painting showed of the cold lake itself – water so calm that it reflected the vertical walls of rock without any tremor on its surface, motionless all the way to the horizon, which was nothing but a straight line. An endless, dead sea.

  How, he finally whispered to Fräulein Dorothee, did she know it was a lake? She seemed unwilling to abandon her mood of rapt attention.

  Anyone could see that, she said.

  He gave up on the muted whispers appropriate for a museum. Lake or not, it certainly wasn’t empty; there was even an island in it, a place where life went on, as it were, for the dead. Wasn’t that prospect worth something?

  ‘Please forgive me,’ Fräulein Dorothee interrupted him without taking her eyes off the picture, ‘but it’s not an island.’

  They stood in front of the painting for a long time, so long that one of the attendants wandered over and confided in a friendly tone that this was his own favourite picture. After he had turned away to keep an eye on the other visitors lingering only briefly in front of various pictures, Fräulein Dorothee explained.

  Anyone could see, she said, that the painting was intended to be surreal; it skilfully kept its real subject hidden; the island was nothing but a reflection, an illusion that the painter had added as a kind of consolation. The boat, the ferryman, the muffled figure were all concessions to the taste of the time. The whole thing might just be reflected light from the depths of the lake, designed to lure us into the next world. ‘Oh, Hinrich,’ she sa
id, the words wrenched out of her, ‘I don’t want to go there.’

  At that moment it happened: it because Schepp himself was not quite sure what he was doing when he began to speak, telling her that he wasn’t afraid of death; he would simply die before she did and scout out the terrain for her.

  ‘Would you really do that for me?’ asked Fräulein Dorothee after a while.

  Schepp nodded mutely; he could not even begin to feel certain of the full import of her question. Then he added: if he died first he’d wait for her – again, it was not like Schepp, growing bolder, to reach for Fräulein Dorothee’s little clenched fist, pressing it clumsily. And then, he said, he’d take her hand and go with her, they would reach the far shore together. Or at least the island. If the island turned out to be real.

  The next moment he was wishing the ground could have swallowed him up. Fräulein Dorothee took a deep, audible breath, but she was looking at him, and not even in surprise, or with amusement or indignation –

  ‘Or we’ll drown together,’ she said, exhaling, also audibly. ‘At least that’s better than drowning alone.’

  Still she did not withdraw her hand. As he turned to her slowly, looking cautiously at her through the thick lenses of his glasses, she seemed to be a hallucination which might dissolve into thin air if he regarded her too closely, translucent, untouchable, a creature from another star. And yet, and yet, she left her hand in his for an extraordinary length of time. She stood beside him, smiled at him, as if a burden had been lifted from her mind.

  That decided things. In the same year, Dorothee Wilhelmine Renate, Countess von Hagelstein became Doro Schepp, rejecting a double surname, and instead of fulfilling the hopes of the East Asia department of the Faculty she soon became a mother, abandoning her dissertation and, to the horror of the entire teaching body, the promise of her glittering career. Nothing much became of the now fully qualified Dr Hinrich Schepp either, number one in the field of ancient Chinese language. His professor was able to prevent at least that.

  Schepp found that he was now sitting on the floor, propped against one of the legs of the desk. If only he could go on sitting there, lost in his memories, maybe even dropping off to sleep, dissolving into the past, quietly disappearing. If it hadn’t been for that smell. Schepp turned away from the sun; since his operation he hadn’t been able to tolerate bright light. He moved around the desk without rising from the floor. He was now looking at Doro’s legs, the kimono hanging down below her knees. Almost at once he was wide awake and slid closer. Looked at Doro’s swollen calf. Oh no, how fast it was changing, marbled in shades of pale violet; she would have hated that. Schepp groped in her direction, finally grasped one of her legs, then pressed cautiously with his other hand, trying to banish the ugly marks of livor mortis from her calf; that was its name, wasn’t it, livor mortis, discolouration after death. But where to make the marks go? First he tried upwards, then he pressed down equally towards her slipper. There was a dull sound. Alarmed, Schepp hit his head and saw Doro’s hand dangling in front of him. This was too much. He took the hand and held it firmly until it stopped moving, until he had calmed down. Held it as he had held it twenty-nine years ago, as he had promised he would if the worst happened. Now at last he was doing just that.

  ‘I’m here with you,’ he promised Doro’s hand tenderly. ‘I’m holding you tight. Even if you can’t feel it any more, we’ll get through this.’

  A while later he was standing beside her, moved to tears by his own solemnity, and placing her left arm back on the desk. However, it immediately slipped off again. First Schepp had to straighten Doro’s torso. That was difficult; it was almost impossible to correct the angle of her throat and neck. But though he had to push and pull quite hard, he tried to comfort himself with the thought that he was helping Doro, even with these pitiful efforts – just as she would help him one day. From now on she would wait for him on the shore of the lake, ready to offer him her energetic little hand as soon as he found himself there with her. On their wedding day she had told him she would do for him exactly what he had said he would do for her.

  If she were the first to die, she said, she would wait there for him; it would be better to go together, whatever happened, much better.

  She had renewed that promise on all of their wedding anniversaries, and although Schepp was as sceptical as ever about the existence of the lake and all the rest of it, he did not express his doubts, and indeed saw the promise as reassurance that their marriage would last for ever.

  Curiously enough, today Doro’s idea of the next world did not seem to him at all ridiculous but perfectly credible, indeed consoling. He was glad he could cherish one last hope of seeing her again. A lake was better than nothing. How frail she looked! Only now did it strike Schepp that she could no longer disguise her frailty with the radiant smile he had always loved. She sat in his desk chair like a porcelain doll, her nose a little sharper than usual, her cheeks visibly paler, as pale as – Schepp couldn’t help thinking of the new waitress, the look she had given him when he had settled his bill the previous night, and her captivatingly pale face.

  He forced himself to turn his full attention to his wife. She had become a little less familiar with no colour in her cheeks. Having said that, even during her lifetime she had somehow always been distant and strange in spite of her daily presence. Perhaps because of his middle-class origins, which made him ill at ease in an eight-room apartment with such elegant furnishings. Or perhaps because of her ikebana flower-arranging sessions and her meditative silences. She talked to plants and engaged with objects in her mind; her intuitive nature was not only quick to understand human relationships but also went straight to the heart of the inanimate world. Everything whispered its meaning to her, a meaning that eluded Schepp, meticulous philologist though he was.

  For him, her attraction probably lay in that very attitude. She did not need cheerful company, she was in constant touch with things both higher and more profound. Bringing up the children, looking after a rather remote freelance Sinologist, seemed to be all that linked her to the pitiful world this side of the grave. In the evenings she usually sought the company of the I Ching, equipping herself for the challenges of the future, no doubt also of the next world. Before every important decision she sought the advice of the ancient signs. Usually the outcome was good. However, as the years passed she had become ever quieter, more fragile, almost transparent. She did not often smile at Schepp, or take him in her arms to tell him about the cold, dark lake. Or was that just her way of avoiding the conversations that a husband and wife should really have? Schepp could never again touch the heart of her life’s secret, as he had on that day when, faced with an isle of the dead, their lives had been decided. Admittedly he had at best a very vague idea of the nature of Doro’s fear of the next world. Probably because as a man who did not know much about mysticism he was bound to ask the wrong questions, inevitably conveying some of his own slight distaste, or the derision that would be hard for him to suppress, or his categorical doubts. And of course Doro sensed that. At least, she never tried to discuss the matter with him.

  How different she was when it came to praising or criticizing his essays and papers! Schepp glanced across the top of the desk, lingering where there was nothing, now, between Doro’s hands but a dark mark on the leather surface – and then he remembered what it was that he wanted to do. He found the manuscript, with the final page added by Doro on top. Sorting through it quickly, he glanced over her notes in the margins and between the lines without really understanding them. At last he had all the sheets in the correct order, with Doro’s closing comments at the bottom of the pile. He could begin reading.

  But that was impossible. Who could read in this situation, beginning at the beginning, reading every word? There was also the fact that the pages began with his own text, the work he had surely discarded long since. It was absurd. Schepp kept looking through them again and again, at the place where Doro’s closing comments began – how fa
miliar her writing was! At least there was that to cling to.

  But as soon as he began dipping into the manuscript, the sight of her handwriting made him feel perplexed. Increasingly uneasy, then downright discontented. How could he bear to read what she had written on that final page? Doro had probably not been responsible for her own actions so close to the end. Schepp put that sheet aside quickly, but his eyes lingered on another one of the last pages: ‘I am under some pressure, because I must finish this farewell letter tomorrow.’ Oh God, what had she been intending to do? Did she realize that her own death was imminent? Or, as she wrote what she wrote, had she even – even anticipated it, gone to meet it? No, out of the question, Doro would never have done such a thing.

  Or would she?

  That morning, Schepp reluctantly turned back into what he had been all his life, a patient interpreter of primary sources. At the end of his typescript, Doro’s notes began with a question mark in the margin, and on the back of the final sheet she had written an abrupt ‘As if he would have said such a thing in that situation’. Within the text she had crossed out the name of a bar and substituted the name of his local. What was the point of that? Equally puzzling was the marginal question mark nearer the beginning: ‘Why not just call him Hinrich and be done with it?’ Schepp leafed through to the conclusion again. ‘You and I know that’s not the end of the story.’ Good heavens, it sounded as if he would have done better not to read it at all.