All the Lights by Clemens Meyer

There were four in the group: three boys and her. Sometimes they’d done more practice on their own after that, once the others had gone, twenty or thirty minutes, or longer. She was really good at German and most other subjects, among the best in the class, but maths … And he did everything he could for her, to help her understand numbers and learn to like them. He loved numbers.
    ‘Here, for you.’ He put the calculator teddy on the table in front of her. ‘Happy Birthday.’ She reached hesitantly for the teddy and pulled it slightly closer to her. ‘Belated best wishes,’ he said, ‘Happy Birthday, Juliana.’
    ‘For me?’ she said, smiling and raising her top lip slightly and looking down at the table. Then she lifted her head, looked at him and said, ‘Thank you, thanks.’
     
     
    He sat down on the little chair next to her, his belly brushing against the table. ‘Imagine we’re in a florist’s,’ he said, ‘and you buy yourself seven lovely flowers, and they cost …’ he thought for a moment, ‘they cost seventeen marks fifty.’ ‘What kind of flowers, Mr Krein?’ she asked, still holding the teddy tight in one hand. He thought again. ‘Roses,’ he said. ‘No, lilies.’ The exercise was in the textbook and it said roses there, seven roses, but he wanted her to buy herself lilies, even though he knew nothing about flowers. ‘Why are lilies so expensive?’ she asked.
    ‘They’re,’ he said, ‘they’re especially beautiful lilies, special lilies,’ and she nodded. ‘So, one lily,’ he said, ‘how much does one lily cost?’
    She took the calculator, removing it carefully from the teddy’s hands, and he said, ‘No, wait a moment. Write it down first and work it out, and then you can check it.’
    She put the calculator aside, picked up her fountain pen and bent over her exercise book. ‘Seven lilies,’ she said softly. ‘Seventeen marks fifty,’ he said, leaning over to her. ‘And how much does one cost?’ He saw her writing the numbers in the little squares. He saw the small crease running from the top of her nose to her forehead.
    Sweat ran down his face, and then the stabbing and aching was back again, from his chest to his left arm, and he held onto the garden gate for support. ‘Juliana,’ he said. Her friends called her ‘Juli’ – like the month. The school holidays were in July, the long summer holidays. He held onto the garden gate for support, with both hands. Then he closed his eyes and waited. He opened his eyes and saw the plate of food in front of him. ‘Happy Birthday, Juli,’ he said. But then he noticed that no time had passed, that he was still sitting at the table, with the same salami, the same cutlet in aspic shining in the light falling through the kitchen window. He ate salami and pork cutlet in aspic every evening; he hardly left the house now and he often thought of her birthday, the closer it came. Did she have a boyfriend, he wondered. Probably, she was almost twenty-one after all. But she’d always been so shy. Had always looked so shyly down at the floor when she came up to the blackboard. Perhaps she had a child already, a small child. He banged on the table, swept his open palm across the table. The plate fell on the floor and shattered, the salami bounced across the tiles, he had a nice tiled kitchen and the cutlet in aspic slapped onto the tiles with a dry splat and stayed put as if it were stuck to the floor.
    He lowered his head carefully onto the tabletop. He was fifty-four and he was never going to have children. He stayed like that for a while, resting his arms on his belly and folding his hands together. ‘If I become a father at the age of fifty-five, and my daughter has a son at twenty-three, how old would I have to be for my five-year-old grandson …’ He fell silent. Even numbers brought him no pleasure any more. There was no one there any more to whom he could explain the magic of numbers. And there hadn’t been for a