The Summer House, Later
The bestselling voice of Europe’s fastest-growing, fastest-living city: the new Berlin.‘The little jewellery box also held the red coral bracelet from Nikolai Sergeyevich. Its six hundred and seventy-five little coral beads were strung onto a silken thread, and they glowed as red as rage. My great-grandmother put the hairbrush down in her lap. She closed her eyes for a long time. Then she opened her eyes again, took the red coral bracelet from the little box and fastened it around her left wrist. Her skin was very white. That evening, for the first time in three years, she shared a meal with my great-grandfather.’Coral bracelets ‘as red as rage’ from Russian lovers; a sad old woman who nonetheless ‘sometimes sang and winked with her left eye and laughed till the tears came’; country houses ‘away from Berlin, linden trees out front, chestnuts in the back, sky above’: ‘The Summer House, Later’ is an elegant, measured, reflective collection of stories which captures beautifully the promise of bright colours lying just out of reach of our grey daily routines.Set in and around Europe’s fastest-growing, fastest-living city, these stories take as their starting point the monotony of modern urban life – the endless antennas and chimneys, the pigeons in the gutters – and looks beyond them to ‘the narrow strip of sky over the rooftops’. The literary sensation of the year in her native Germany, Judith Hermann is a wonderfully talented young writer whose ability to find drama and beauty in the smallest, most trivial moments makes ‘The Summer House, Later’ a very special debut indeed.
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JUDITH HERMANN
The Summer House, Later
Translated from the German by
Margot Bettauer Dembo
These stories are works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 2001
First published in German by S. Fischer Verlag as Sommerhaus, Später 1998
Copyright © S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt-am-Main 1998
Copyright in English translation © Margot Bettauer Dembo 2001
Judith Hermann asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Margot Bettauer Dembo asserts the moral right to be identified as the translator of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780007115754
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007396962
Version: 2016-08-10
Contents
For F.M. and M.M.
The doctor says, I’ll be alright but I’m feeling blue
Tom Waits
My first and only visit to a therapist cost me my red coral bracelet and my lover.
The red coral bracelet came from Russia. To be more precise, it came from St Petersburg and was more than a hundred years old. My great-grandmother had worn it on her left wrist; it cost my great-grandfather his life. Is that the story I want to tell? I’m not sure. Not really sure—
My great-grandmother was beautiful. She went to Russia with my great-grandfather because my great-grandfather was building furnaces there for the Russian people. My great-grandfather rented a large apartment for my great-grandmother on Vasilevsky Ostrov, one of the islands of St Petersburg. The Greater and the Lesser Neva lapped at the shores of Vasilevsky Ostrov, and if my great-grandmother had stood on tiptoe to look out of the window in her apartment on Maly Prospekt she would have seen the river and the great Kronstadt Bay. But my great-grandmother did not want to see the river or Kronstadt Bay or the beautiful tall houses on Maly Prospekt. She did not want to look out of the window at a foreign land. She drew the heavy red velvet drapes and shut the doors – the carpets swallowed all sound, and my great-grandmother sat on the sofas, the chairs, or the four-poster beds, rocking back and forth and feeling homesick for Germany. The light in the large apartment on Maly Prospekt was dim, like the light at the bottom of the sea, and my great-grandmother may have thought that this foreign place, that St Petersburg, that all of Russia was nothing but a deep, twilight dream from which she would soon awaken.
My great-grandfather, though, was travelling all over the country building furnaces for the Russian people. He built shaft furnaces and roasting kilns and self-dumping reverberatory furnaces and Livermore furnaces. He stayed away for a long time. He wrote letters to my great-grandmother, and whenever one of these letters arrived my great-grandmother would open the heavy red drapes a little and read by the narrow chink of daylight:
I would like to explain to you that the Hasenclever furnace we are building here consists of muffles that are connected to each other by vertical channels and are heated by the flames of a grate-firing furnace – you remember, don’t you, the retort furnace I built in the Blome Wildnis in Holstein, which you liked so much at the time? Well, in the Hasenclever furnace the ore is also loaded through an opening in the top muffle and …
Reading these letters made my great-grandmother very weary. She could no longer remember the retort furnace in the Blome Wildnis but she could remember the Blome Wildnis, the pastures and the flat countryside, the hay bales in the fields and the taste of cold, sweet apple cider in the summer. She let the room subside once more into its twilight and lay down wearily on one of the sofas, repeating, ‘Blome Wildnis, Blome Wildnis.’ It sounded like a children’s song, like a lullaby, it sounded nice.
