I pulled onto the shoulder, stopped, and got out. What did I want from Irene Gundlach, or Irene Adler? To tell her that I still resented her? To finally tell her in person what I had said in my thoughts? That it is not right to use people and drop them? That I had been too naïve and awkward, but that I had loved her nonetheless, and that it is not right to play with someone else’s love? That she could at least have written me a letter, an explanation to ease the sting?

I would only make a fool of myself again. It all happened forty years ago; she would think I was an idiot who was stuck in the past. I myself found it idiotic, how present the past was to me. It was as if we had sat on the bench by the Main River only yesterday, as if only yesterday I had waited for her in the VW bus, only yesterday that she dropped me off outside the village. As if I would still be the person I was back then, when we sat on a bench together now.

Is that how it is with things that don’t quite come to an end? But things do not come to an end, one has to bring them to an end. I should have brought that episode to an end back then; I should have given it a meaning. I had wanted to convince myself that without Irene things would have not gone so well with my wife, but it wasn’t true. I had filed away my schooldays and university years, my deceased mother, my father who visited me at my grandparents’ a couple of times before moving to Hong Kong and dying there, as things that were as they were, and couldn’t have been different. Why did something inside me insist things could have turned out differently with Irene?

I had stopped on a rise. To the west, the mountains were covered in brush and scrub, straight trees and bowed trees. The upright trees had pale, barkless trunks, as if naked or sick. The sea lay to the east, beyond two mountain ridges. I crossed the road and sat down on the embankment. The sea was dappled, gray and blue, smooth and rough. In the distance, two ships were sailing but appeared to be staying in the same spot.