Chapters (64)
I didn’t think she’d mind me telling the truth. ‘A little.’
‘Me too,’ she said. ‘That’s why it’s all quite so painful. I thought we’d patched things up. I thought we were friends again.’
‘Everyone has bad luck, you know. You. Me. Irmi. Even Kaspar.’
‘Not Kaspar,’ she said. ‘Maybe if I read more Nietzsche I’d feel less confused.’
‘Kaspar doesn’t actually read Nietzsche. He just finds the good quotes. And he still lives with his mother. Which is another kind of luck. Do you want to go find Josef and Anni?’
‘Not really. Do you?’
‘No,’ I said.
We idled on the balcony, talking about work, and about our plans for next year; whether either of us would make it as a junior Master. Charlotte dismissed the idea for herself. ‘You will be, though,’ she said, ‘I’m sure of it.’
As we talked, I had the feeling that I was dipped in an old September day, back in Weimar, years ago, when I had tried, in the shadow-tossed cafeteria, to make sense of the inscrutable challenge of her gaze, and the privacy of her smile, and the intrigue of her self-possession, and I’d made not head nor tail of any of them, but felt on the brink of falling in love with someone I had only just met – and the way that sensation had already in that moment felt dreamlike and treasured – and how I had wanted to lead her away so that we could sleep it off, this feeling of inescapable lightness, of flight, and how I hadn’t let myself feel that in a long time.
My heart was a scrap of cloth; still, she held it in her hand.
Soon we went inside. After a while we lay on the bed. The breeze coming in was fresh, and the light was like that which fell from the cliffs at Rügen. Moths were going berserk in the open burn of the lightbulb. I could hear the click of her eyelids as she watched them. There are a few nights in my life that stand out: some, for their abjection, others, for their beauty. All night it was enough to rest my mouth behind her ear, my hand on her hip. We did nothing; which, as Walter had said, is my favourite word; but I can safely say it was one of the best nights of my life; the very best.