Judith - a short story

Judith Green

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She arrives at the hotel where he is staying and asks the clerk at reception to call up to the room to say she's there. Just because of that. But Hermann is not waiting in her room today — I'm a little early, so I wait for her in the lobby.

When she arrives she waves away the notion that she might have been avoiding such a moment herself, that a call from reception on this occasion would have troubled her in the slightest. Tall, smart, her hair scraped back behind her head, Hermann sits her chair with such an air of self-possession that the idea her composure could be disturbed by something so banal seems suddenly ridiculous. After all, she continues, "Frederick is waiting in a particular way".

Hermann is in Edinburgh as one of two authors published in the launch season of a new imprint, The Clerkenwell Press. It consists of five interlinked short stories, each of which brings Alice face to face with mortality. Death comes unexpectedly in Tuscany, with agonising slowness in a town near Germany's border with France, after meticulous planning in Berlin, but it is always there. In one story, Alice sits at the bedside of a former lover who is in a morphine daze, turned toward the window "like a plant", while an old, wrinkled nun asks "what sort of man he had been" — a question which confronts her with her inability to explain a life.

She stops to buy an ice cream at a petrol pump on her way back from the hospital, but her friend is not "doing much better", as the doctors have assured her; instead his heart has "fibrillated and stopped beating, just like that, and no goodbye". He has specified "No sermon by the minister" at his funeral and "sandwiches with plum jam, meatballs and beer" for after.

But despite the number of deaths it describes, Hermann insists that this "not a book about dying, it's a book about living," More particularly, she insists with a penetrating stare, it's about "living while somebody is dying. Like all her stories, Alice grew out of an "autobiographical kernel", a moment from her own life which she wanted to explore. The last five years have been "filled with loss" of various kinds, though she is quick to close off discussion of what those losses might have been.

For an author born in it's "totally normal" to have experienced the loss of friends and family, she continues; death is part of life. The toddler has begun to cry unconsolably on the road to visit her father. Hermann says she wanted to explore the "atmosphere" of Alice living for a few days with her former lover's family, and of the time she spends with the dying man at the hospital.

Judith Merril

If she wanted to put it together with others it wouldn't be "possible to write other stories about travelling or about a couple. Three more stories followed, with Alice living through the contrasting loss of two friends and trying to make sense of a death from long ago, but then Hermann says she felt there was one story missing. She decided that Alice had to lose her partner Raymond — a character who had already appeared in a supporting role. I did feel like someone announcing a death. She's slipping in and out of German, apologising for her imperfect mastery of a language learned only at school and then practised during a year spent working for a German newspaper in New York before returning to Berlin.

I was delighted; my husband Ron not quite so much. My trip to Cairo meant that he was on deck with our two-year-old son for the very first time. I waved goodbye with a broad grin on my face and never looked back.

Tales from a traveling life

There was most likely no direct flight from Jakarta to Cairo in those days, although I have no memory of changing planes or of the penultimate leg of our trip at all. The ultimate leg I remember all too well. Jessica and I checked that the flight was on time, went through security, and joined the people waiting to board the plane. We waited, without even a bottle of water, for five hours.

A hijacking rumor, unspecified, was causing the delay. Ultimately, exhausted and hungry, we arrived in Cairo and straggled into the baggage area just in time to see a large bearded man trying to walk off with my suitcase.

Egypt was a shock. Jakarta is one of the most crowded cities in the world, but our house, in a quiet residential neighborhood, saw very little through traffic. In Cairo, crossing the street was an adventure, and not in the good sense of the word. If they existed, no one paid them any mind.

Donkey carts, bicyclists, stray dogs all wove randomly through the traffic, posing no threat to anyone. The problem was cars and their drivers.

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I had the clear feeling that Cairo drivers took aim at Western pedestrians in a crazy game of Russian Roulette. Perhaps I was imagining things, but when I asked Jackie about it she made a face. Curly red hair falling below her shoulders was enough to stop traffic, but had she shaved her head bald, Jackie still would have stood out in any crowd. I, on the other hand, hardly ever used more than occasional lipstick and once-in-a-blue-moon eye shadow. Between college and graduate school, when I made a real effort to act and look like normal people, I tried my hand at the kind of eyeliner you paint in a fine line just above your eyelashes.

It took a lot of time, and I could never get it thin enough, so I lost interest. We all know what it looks like: You can darken a line on the upper lids, too, joining the corners up for a sloe-eyed look whatever that means. The result looked good, so I practiced.

I was totally unprepared for the result. All of a sudden, I was beautiful. It could have been my imagination, but men seemed to be looking at me. At the pyramids, where I waited outside with Laura while Jessica and Jackie took the tour, I was offered a free camel ride! Wherever we went, men looked at me. After the first day it felt kind of creepy, but I kept on practicing with the eyeliner. On our last day in Cairo, as Jackie was driving us to the airport, the unthinkable happened.

We were stuck in traffic, as usual, when a man walked up to the car and knocked on the window. He shook his head urgently and pointed a finger at me. Not her, he mouthed. Sitting on the plane going home, the Egyptian man next to me seemed to be mesmerized. I finally told him I was Jewish, hoping that would turn him off. It made him more interested than ever. I wondered how Jackie tolerated the attention. Scroll to the bottom of the page to leave a comment for Judith.

Judith, This story about your encounter with the two Indian boys is symbolic to what all Americans need to hear- move into the fear and unknown to find something wonderful.

You are an inspiration. I am looking forward to many more. Hi Judith, Milli told me about your whale story, but I got stuck reading the story about the two boys in Rajasthan. I love your true adventurous spirit, and ability to follow your heart rather than the cautions others tell you.

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