A NEW LIFE BEGINS

In what has been a stressful week, I needed to make ample space for our grandson while also stealing time to finish this German book by the late Siegfried Lenz.

Life stops for all adults in a home when a newborn arrives with his paraphernalia of a car seat, diapers, burp cloth and blankets. Suddenly the home resounds with the strident cries of a human who weighs barely a few pounds but roars like the fiercest lion cub in Serengeti. The whole house shudders when our grandson squirms. It may be said that he’s adjusting to the world of humans but let it be known that we are truly the ones cleaving to his shrieks.

While awaiting his birth, I was reading for my Substack in the hope of quelling my nervousness over what was in store for us over the course of the week. The baby arrived in the end of May, and all reading and every intention to read and write seemed to end abruptly, marking the before and after of our lives.

It turns out that what I was reading was a short work called Stella by the late Siegfried Lenz. This German novella was translated by the renowned Anthea Bell whose work I’ve loved so much.

Stella is a quiet book about a young man’s feelings for his English teacher. In a small town on the Baltic coast, in a community steeped in maritime life and culture, a teenager falls in love with his English professor.

“Do you know her?” asked Frederick.

“Yes, she’s my English teacher,” I said.

“What, her?” Frederick asked incredulously. “Looks more like a schoolgirl herself.”

“Don’t let that fool you,” I said. “She has to be some years older than us.”

The young man, Christian, looks much older than his 17 or so years, and Stella who is clearly beautiful looks way younger than her age. They are at least a decade apart in age but hardly a world apart in their love of dancing, of the ocean and of nature.

The narrative about Stella begins at the very end—at her memorial service, in fact—where Christian relives the memories he shared with his first love. This is a simple story of love that seems doomed right from the beginning. Viewed against contemporary mores, it seems that Stella would have been charged because teacher-student affairs, especially those involving students below the age of consent, are illegal and unethical.

Oddly enough, this novella does not touch upon any of that and it’s not concerned with societal mores. What Stella does seem to suggest is that there is something not entirely acceptable in a relationship where the adult is in a position of power.

I wanted the memory we shared to be confirmed by a gesture, a glance; close to her as I was I didn’t want to be alone with those thoughts. She did not seem surprised when I spoke up, but asked, “Yes, Christian?” So I told the class what I found out about the author: his time with the police in Burma, his resignation in protest against certain governmental measures, his years living in poverty in London and Paris. As she listened to the information, there was a strange brightness in her eyes, a gleam of recognition or involuntary memory. I thought I saw not just approval but also understanding there, and when she came over to where I was sitting and stood in front of my desk I was expecting her to put a hand on my shoulder—her hand on my shoulder!—but she didn’t; she didn’t venture to touch me.

As you can see, this surfaces in several key moments in the story when Christian who is not Stella’s star pupil desperately wants to impress her; privately, Stella is forced to tell him why his paper did not deserve the grade he might have expected. Then, before anything else can happen in the story, the tale is interrupted rudely by nature’s fury.

I was left pondering the fitting end to this love story and the nature of poetic justice in a tale that could never have ended satisfactorily. I was drawn in by the sparseness of Siegfried Lenz’s narrative. Before I read Stella, I’d never heard of its author and until I looked him up I had no idea that Lenz was a master stylist with so many laurels to his name. I learned that before his death in October 2014, Lenz initiated the Siegfried Lenz Prize and every two years in Hamburg, the Siegfried Lenz Foundation awards it to deserving "international writers who have gained recognition with their narrative work and whose creative work is close to the spirit of Siegfried Lenz."

It took just a page of reading Stella for me to realize that I was embarking on a story told with great feeling and concision. There feels an inevitability to this story of two people whose connection never feels like a fling, at least from the perspective of the protagonist, our narrator. Perhaps the reason Stella is profoundly moving is because it suggests that, above all, age and circumstance are inconsequential in a connection that’s preordained.

Through the envelope, I could feel that there was a postcard inside. It was a photograph of a landscape, inviting people to visit a museum of oceanography, and showed a dolphin leaping into the air, to come down on top of a wave. There was just a single sentence written in English on the black side of the card: “Love, Christian, is a warm wave bearing us up,” and then there was her signature, Stella. I put the postcard beside our picture, propped against my English grammar book, and felt an instinctive pang at the idea that I had missed something, or had been cheated of something, that I had wanted more than anything else in the world.