When a man and a woman begin to entertain feelings for each other, be it in the form of a simple love affair or a marriage, there is a tacit understanding between them that they form a bond. It is understood that they owe each other a degree of loyalty and confidence that is denied to others.
The problem with this bond it that its conditions are seldom articulated. Each party assumes that the other knows and subscribes to the unspoken terms of what is and is not permitted within the relationship. This silent agreement comes into effect once the couple begins intimate relations, that is once sex enters the picture.
These assumptions are at the back of the minds of those in a love relationship, irrespective of what they may tell themselves. Each partner longs for permanence, for love beyond any superficial level of physical communion. However, as the present tale is about to illustrate, unvoiced feelings often lead to betrayal in modern love.
Middle-aged Frank was still good looking, despite a bit of grey around the temples and a bit of weight around the mid-drift. He had a winning smile and could be charming when he chose to be.
He had been living in Europe for ten years when he met Erika. On a rainy day, he spotted her getting off the commuter train. She worked in the same office complex as he did.
On this particular day, the morning drizzle and the light combined in a perfect way to illuminate her demure, shapely figure in the haze in front of him. He was so charmed that he felt compelled to offer her the protection of his large black umbrella. The girl’s hair was already damp as he spoke:
“Hello. You’re getting very wet. Can I offer you shelter under my umbrella?”
She looked over at him with large but suspicious brown eyes. A few drops jumped off her eyelashes. She looked absolutely enchanting.
“Oh. Thanks. Nice of you,” she smiled shyly. “Thank you. You work here too?”
She was a little out of breath from battling the drizzle but accepted his offer. They headed out of the drizzle for the doors of the glass tower.
Frank was an American in Germany. He was a reserved man, but every once in a while he dared to hope that a chance encounter might be the beginning of something meaningful and exciting. He had had a couple of futile love affairs behind him, all with migrant workers in the country — people without relatives or friends, women who were happy someone took an interest in them. Ultimately, though, there was no meeting of hearts and minds and only sad regret remained.
The Germans are a tribal people, despite the superficial cosmopolitanism of their modern cities. This means they tend to look on the stranger as someone who comes to work but not to stay and raise a family amongst them. In this they are very European.
In all his years in Germany, Frank had made no German friends, although he had met numerous foreigners like himself. So, when he met Erika, a “real” German, a tentative hope awoke in him.
Erika worked in a department for which special security clearance was required. She was one of the firm’s elite researchers. Frank learned this not from her, but from a colleague.
When next he met Erika, it was again by chance in the company cafeteria.
She was sitting alone at a table, bent over a bowl of soup and a sandwich. She was frowning, engrossed in thought, but when she noted him coming to her table, she smiled immediately. He asked if he could join her.
“Yes certainly. I haven’t forgotten you and your umbrella… Frank, was it?”
He was pleased and encouraged that she had remembered his name. It had been a week since their first meeting. He hadn’t forgotten her at all.
The cafeteria was noisy with the clatter of dishes and chatter, but they did manage to hear each other. He asked why she looked so serious, then he followed up with a series of questions intended to keep her talking, keep her smiling, keep him enchanted.
Frank thought he was the cause of her apparent improvement in mood. He did all of the probing, evaluating, weighing of responses, to see what the possibilities were; although, for the most part, she seemed quite incurious about him. She smiled during the good-natured interrogation, seemed to enjoy his attentions.
For his part, Frank was waiting to be asked but volunteered little about himself.
Lunch hour came to an end. He left to go back to work wondering if anything had been accomplished. She seemed a conventional woman in a good job, as unremarkable as he was. Still, he sensed there was far more to her than what he had been able to glean. She was so secretive.
Frank saw Erika in the cafeteria again a couple of days later and decided he would have to ask her out if things were to progress. So they made a date for dinner the following Saturday. High hopes for happiness took flight.
When he called her on Friday night to confirm arrangements, there was no answer. No machine clicked on to take a message.
She must be out, he thought. A touch of worry went through him. She must have lots of friends; maybe she went out every night of the week. He thought he would seem dull to her. Perhaps all those smiles were smiles of derision. Maybe she needed to lead men on in order to get her kicks, to confirm her attractiveness.
Women were complex creatures even to themselves. They played games. Frank went to bed that evening with his hopes dashed. He upbraided himself for being stupid, for having dreamed of impossibilities. Why should Erika be interested in him?
But, Saturday brought a different picture. The rain had ceased, the clouds parted and the sun shone in the late afternoon. He called an hour before they were supposed to meet.
“Yes, it’s on,” she assured him: “Sure, I’m expecting to see you at the station. Six o’clock sharp? There is a nice restaurant nearby.” Her voice was enthusiastic; her mood upbeat. Frank was happy.
Erika came off the train ten minutes late, but she smiled her apologies, and it was alright. The sun was just about to set as they made their way to the restaurant, arm in arm, almost like a married couple. Frank was both nervous and elated.
The puzzle-that-was-Erika lessened a little over dinner when she filled in some facts of her life. She had lived with her parents in the East till the Wall came down; thereafter she had gotten this job. Her academic credentials were impressive; her father had been a professor high up in the East German research establishment; now he was retired. It sounded exciting.
Frank seemed to be in reach of the “real thing”, a genuine German woman with a history. However, as earlier, Frank did most of the asking. For her part, Erika seemed incurious. Frank worried, but suppressed his doubts. Have some faith, he told himself.
You can’t really tell much from a word or a smile. Most of the time, we hear what we want to hear and see what we want to see. More often than not, people aren’t even sure what they want from each other. They more or less wait to see what happens, what possibilities present themselves. Life will fall into place, they say to themselves. Life will begin one day; I just have to be patient. Frank was patient.
Frank came home, turned on the television set with its sound turned off, then sat staring at the screen, listening to the rain.
He felt that the evening had been a failure. He had probably made a fool of himself. Maybe his eagerness showed; she was probably disappointed.
He had decided not to see her again, but fate had other plans. When he stepped onto the commuter train the next day, there she was, all smiles. She chatted and he listened; then she fell silent.
As they walked to work, he stared at the blank faces of the commuters around him, wishing he were somewhere else. “What are you doing for lunch?” he heard himself saying.
Frank and Erika were married six months later.
Of all illusions about security, marriage has to be the biggest. We assume vows still mean something, even though we know times have changed and words themselves have become devoid of their magic properties. No higher powers or profounder meanings are hidden in their forms. Still, Frank believed there was something in a vow. So he vowed everlasting devotion.
But from the start of their life together there were signs of the turmoil to come, yet Frank chose to ignore them. Her parents, for instance, did not take to him. They saw him as a former capitalist enemy and now some kind of opportunist, although just what he wanted was unclear to them, as they themselves had little in the way of wealth.
The father looked at Frank from behind his thick DDR glasses and saw an unambitious shirker, someone beneath what his daughter was capable of snaring. Of course, given that she was in and out of relationships with alarming regularity, marriage might not be the worst option, he concluded.
Frank’s conversations with the father increasingly took an ideological turn. According to the older man, America was at the root of all of the problems that had brought down the socialist states. The arms race, for instance, was a plot to bring socialism to its knees and subject it to capitalism.
Frank listened to the old man’s diatribes and cringed. Such conversations became trials of patience, but Frank considered himself a patient man. Besides, he wanted to be accepted into his wife’s clan. And he had taken the vow.
Erika was determined to see her parents on most weekends. She was like a homing pigeon that flew East no matter what Frank had planned for the day.
“I have to see Mutti and Vati this weekend,” she would say when Frank proposed something.
“You know they’re expecting me for lunch. But you don’t have to come, you know…” This last statement was said in a tone that implied he really was not expected.
It pained Frank to see how dependent Erika was on her parents. She was an only child, the apple of their eyes, and it became apparent he wouldn’t be able to wean her away from home anytime soon. But, be patient, he told himself. Be patient.
Life ran on as it was supposed to: an endless round of work, shopping, eating and sleeping; workdays followed weekends, rain followed snow, then sunshine and more rain. Somehow things didn’t feel any different than before. Frank didn’t feel changed as he had expected to. He and his wife hadn’t “merged” in the sense of “two becoming one”, as popular thought liked to have it. If anything, he thought, something had been lost rather than gained, but he couldn’t articulate it.
Then one day, life did change. Erika didn’t come home. She had gone to the vegetable market, a ten minute stroll from where they lived. Frank had stayed home to vacuum the flat, planning on lunch. Twelve o’clock came and went, then it was three, but Erika still wasn’t there. He assumed she’d stopped off at a friend’s, but where?
Six o’clock arrived and she still wasn’t home. He began to worry. He called friends, then the parents. No, Erika hadn’t been by that day. Finally, he phoned the police. They had no reports of anyone injured or taken into custody. Did he want to file a missing person’s report? No. He decided to wait.
Erika did not come home that evening. To appease his worry, Frank went looking for her. He walked to the market then retraced the steps she would have taken to the apartment. He looked for something dropped – a clue of some sort. From a payphone, he phoned his own answering machine: No message.
His stomach in turmoil, his wretched mind racing, he did not want to go back to an empty apartment. He went into a bar instead.
Finally, around ten o’clock, he went home, expecting a friendly Hello…There you are! But, she was not there.
That night, he nodded off only a bit, sitting up in the glare of the television set. In the morning he called the parents once more, then some of her friends. No one could offer any reassurance. He called local hospitals, wrestled with the option of reporting her missing to the police. He walked the empty neighborhood once more, sinking deeper and deeper into despair.
What had happened? He felt somehow responsible for Erika’s disappearance. He felt guilty but couldn’t say why. He had failed to assure her of his love, had failed to provide somehow, had proven disappointing. But in the late afternoon, when he entered the kitchen of their flat, there she was.
Startled, she turned from the stove to look at him, a wooden ladle in her hand. She laughed: “I’m sorry. So sorry…I ahh, I forgot to come home.” She casually licked the ladle, and stuck it back into the spaghetti sauce.
He was stunned.
With her back turned to him, she added: “I was at Josie’s and I just forgot, that’s all. Ha. Ha. Ha. I forgot the time. We were talking all night long, and then I stayed for lunch. We had a few drinks, a little party.”
He stared at her, incredulous. He said nothing.
Now her expression changed. Her mouth became hard as she said vehemently: “Besides, you don’t own me!”
With that, she wiped her hands on a towel and stomped off into the bathroom.
Frank didn’t know what to say or do. He would keep silent so as not to further upset her. He would have to figure things out. He felt foolish and helpless.
When Frank called Josie from work, Josie said she hadn’t seen Erika that week or anytime recently. This revelation troubled him deeply. It occurred to him that he could not trust his wife. He worried and wondered at her duplicity. She had lied. What else had she lied about? Still, he said nothing to her. He wanted to avoid any confrontation until he figured things out. He needed to be patient.
Things did not get any better. A few days later, after continuous tension between them, Frank came home early. He was desperate for answers. He needed to know where he stood.
Going to the bedroom, he quickly but carefully went through Erika’s dresser. The drawers revealed nothing. He went into the large closet where her skirts and dresses hung. He went into pockets, then through the many boxes on the shelf above. Nothing. He wasn’t even sure of what he was looking for except an end to his turmoil.
That evening he waited impatiently for over an hour for her to come home. But six o’clock went by, then seven, then eight, then nine. By eleven o’clock he was partly asleep in front of the mute television set when a smallish bang from the hallway woke him up. The front door had closed. Feet were moving about, trying to remain quiet. He heard a clothes hanger being put onto a hook. Then he heard:
“You’re still up…? I tried not to wake you…”
A hot flash went through Frank. He tried to remain calm, play his cards to his advantage. Confrontations would not work with Erika. But, what was he supposed to do, what to say? He reacted instinctively.
“Where were you?” he growled in restrained anger. She looked at him, a touch worried now.
Concerned, she said: “I know you worry. But you don’t have to worry, you know. I can take care of myself. I’m a big girl.”
“I’m not worried about your being a big girl,” he growled. “You’re a married woman. Are you forgetting that?”
She looked at him for a moment, seemingly unsure of her next line. But it came:
“You don’t OWN me!” she shouted. ”YOU DON’T OWN ME!”
Taken aback, Frank thought she was right. He didn’t don’t own her. She was, after all, liberated.
He had agreed in principle that men and women were not to be bound by conventions. But this … this surely was going too far.
He tried to find words which would put her on the defensive, but nothing came to mind. He couldn’t think properly; his head was in turmoil; words just wouldn’t come…
He sprang from his seat and in a flash he was upon her. His outstretched hands seemed automatically to lock onto her throat like the teeth of a rabid dog; hands began to squeeze—hard.
“Fucking whore! I’ll kill you!” He squeezed and squeezed.
The more adrenalin that pumped into his brain, the bluer Erika’s face became. Her eyes bulged; her throat gurgled, when all of a sudden something clicked in Frank’s mind: he was committing murder. Stop. Stop he heard his brain say. He loosened his grip to let her stagger away, stagger away into the hall, then stumble into the bathroom. His mind reeled but it came back. The adrenalin shock subsided.
The bathroom door locked with an accusing click and he was alone. The room sank into a dark quiet; the television’s grey-blue light flickered as though a cold flame had begun to lick the place.
Frank lowered himself into his chair. He was frozen, drained. He had done a terrible thing, and now he would have to pay for it.
Erika did not come out of the bath. He remained immobilized on the couch where he went to sleep. In the morning, she was gone.
Erika did not show up for work that day. Frank went to the Personnel Department to see if she had called in sick. The woman behind the counter looked at him perplexed. A husband who didn’t know whether his wife was sick? He hoped he would not attract attention. He felt a keen sense of culpability.
That day he came home early, but she was not there. Erika’s travel bag was missing. Yet, most of her things were still in the drawers. He had a faint hope of her return.
Later, when he went to the bank to check on their joint savings account, he found that several thousand Euros had been withdrawn, although the bulk of their savings remained. He was both worried she would not come back and angry at how he was being deceived.
She was gone ten days. Then one night Frank came through the front door. He smelled the aroma of cooking. Spaghetti! She had returned.
He froze momentarily in the hall, afraid he would spoil things. Maybe she had had a change of heart. Words failed him; he had not been prepared for this. The strange thing was his sense of relief that she had come back at all. A burden fell from him as if by a miracle and he felt grateful.
“Hi. Come and eat,” he heard her joyfully calling. What was going on?
She had a bottle of wine, two glasses, a candle, and two big plates on the kitchen table. At the stove, she stood with an apron on, a wooden ladle in hand, and a shy smile on her face – the picture of happy domesticity. It seemed a miracle. She was penitent. He was astounded.
As he took a seat at the table, no words came to mind. It was as if they were both in a soap opera, and it was Act III Scene I. What would happen next? He wasn’t in charge of direction. That much he realized.
She took a seat opposite him, folded a napkin demurely on her lap, smiled a bit coyly as if this were the first meal she had ever cooked.
“Hope you like it,” she said.
Shaking his head, he couldn’t help smiling at the absurdity of it. He ate cautiously, as though expecting to be struck by a rolling pin or to be told she had poisoned the sauce. She wanted something. What did she want? What did she want?
“You’ve changed your hair,” he ventured softly, bent over the plate.
“You like it? I’ve always wanted it short.”
“I missed you…”
“I think it looks better like this, don’t you?”
“Couldn’t you have phoned? I was so worried about you.”
She was silent. Then, the script demanded a change of tone, a change of mood.
“It’s actually none of your business, you know. I’m a free woman. No one owns me.”
She said this calmly, deliberately, as if she were a lawyer and he a client being told the nature of the charges against him.
Frank’s brain would not function. The weeks of worry and strain had worn it out. He went blank; his eyes would not focus; his hands began to tremble as sweat formed on his forehead.
He got up without a word, went into the living room where he turned on the television set, and sat down, staring at the screen without seeing a thing. Control. Control yourself, his inner voice said.
In the kitchen, Erika finished up, then went into the bath. Moments later, she came out and went to bed. The bedroom door closed almost silently.
Much later, Frank recalled only that at some point during the night he had gone to the kitchen closet, gotten a hammer and had entered the bedroom.
He couldn’t remember what happened next, but in his mind he did see a dark figure standing in a doorway, an object in his hand and a dark room before him. And silence. He only ever recalled an overwhelming silence.
