Ingo Schulze - One More Story - Thirteen Stories in the Time-Honored Mode

My greeting was perhaps a little too cheery. “Do we know each other?” she asked.

“Frank Reichert,” Claudia said, “let me introduce Sabine, my dearest colleague, and her husband, Matthias.” I almost burst into laughter. Handsome as her husband was with his shaved head, he was not the fellow from last night. Sabine actually blushed when I asked if they didn’t live in this neighborhood too. “No, in Hellersdorf.” It was a pleasant voice. Her neck sported a red spot just below her right ear, only half hidden by her turtleneck sweater.

“Be careful where your eyes wander,” Claudia hissed, and followed the two into the living room. I found a spot to stand where, in the course of the choreography of greetings, Sabine would have to pass by me again. Ute had been leaning in a bay window the whole time, talking with Renate, a matronly friend of Claudia’s whom we had met previously.

When Sabine was right in front of me again, I would have loved to whisper some double entendre in her ear. I didn’t recognize myself now. I was even itching to pick a fight with her husband, although he was clearly bigger and in better shape than I.

“Can it be,” I heard myself saying, “that I saw you around here yesterday?”

“Ah, so that’s why you’re acting this way!” I could have sworn that Sabine sounded disappointed. “We were in the Ore Mountains yesterday,” she said softly. “And where was it that you saw me?”

At that same moment Claudia thrust her arm under mine — sorry, but she had to kidnap me. Once in the hallway she closed the door behind us, and pointed in the direction of the kitchen.

“There,” she said and, crossing her arms, waited for me to follow instructions.

I was very calm as I walked toward the kitchen door and pushed it open.

“There you are,” Julia said with a smile, and got to her feet.

I had never pictured to myself how those ten years might have changed her, but I was truly startled. Nothing, nothing had changed at all. There before me stood the very same Julia who had deserted me ten years before.

We hugged, at first tentatively, then more tightly. She pressed against me, I could sense her flushed body.

“Did you run all the way here?” I asked.

“Well, I did hurry,” Julia said. We kissed, she wove her arms around my neck. “Here, of all places,” she whispered.

“Better here than not all,” I said. Everything was exactly the way I had dreamed it for ten long years.

I no longer know how we managed to sit down at the table. I held her hands in mine, and Julia explained that she had arrived so late because she had had to take her daughter, Alina, to Mecklenburg.

“And so what are you up to?” she asked, then laughed and gazed off to one side as if embarrassed by her own question.

“Run a copy service,” I said. “And you?”

“Another kind of copy service, but it doesn’t pay as well.”

Whenever our eyes met, we had to smile. I kissed her hands.

The curious thing was that although I had thought of Julia every day, I had never pictured the shape of her fingertips, the slightly reddened skin at the base of her nails, or the tiny scar on her left thumb.

“You can’t go on kissing and cuddling here like this!” Claudia called from the doorway. “So come on, let’s go. People are going to notice.”

We obediently stood up, I followed Julia and was almost over the threshold when Claudia’s arm blocked my path. “Always keep a proper distance,” she said, “and your head on your shoulders.”

“I need to be excused,” I said like a third-grader, pointing in the direction of the bathroom.

“Oh, really?” Claudia didn’t budge. She looked at the floor. When she raised her head again I expected to be chastised or given some new instructions. Claudia, however, let her arm fall.

“Thanks,” I said and moved past her.

Once in the bathroom I held my hands under lukewarm water and gazed in the mirror. There was a knock, and Claudia slipped through the door. She locked it, raised her skirt, and sat down on the toilet. I was just about to ask which was the guest towel as her stream hit the water.

“Everything okay?” she asked, plucking paper from the roll, dabbing herself dry, and letting her skirt fall as she stood up.

“Everything’s fine,” I said, and dried my hands on a long white towel.

At first I thought Claudia wanted to leave, and stepped aside. But now she laid her arms around my neck.

“Thank you,” I said. I was truly grateful to Claudia, and so I hugged her too — and could feel how her back, her shoulders, her whole body trembled under my touch. I felt like a bear. I’ve never embraced a woman that delicate. Did she nestle against me, or did I pull her closer? I felt her lips at my neck, I could hear her breathing, I heard my name. In my numbed state I heard sounds so intimate, so plaintive and lustful, that I lost control — or maybe I should say my bearings. My hands hitched her skirt up, groped at her butt, I thrust them between her legs. We kissed. Claudia was so light, so incredibly light.

Before I could even get my trouser button open, it had happened — Claudia bit into my shoulder, grabbed my hand, went rigid. It may sound a little eerie, but I could swear she stopped breathing. I didn’t dare make the slightest motion until Claudia awoke again and, as if wary of some injury, pushed my hand down and stepped back.

“Your turn will come later,” Claudia whispered, kissed me on the mouth, tugged at her sweater, adjusted her skirt, cast a glance with raised eyebrows at her reflection in the mirror, and unlocked the door.

I sat down on the toilet or, better, sank onto the lid and stared at the diamond pattern in the tiles at my feet. Claudia’s intrusion — or attack — hadn’t lasted five minutes. I could still feel her body against my chest, fuzz balls from her sweater were stuck to my left hand. I could probably have gone on sitting there like that if a man hadn’t burst in, but then beat such a hasty retreat that all I saw of him was a gray suit and a burgundy tie.

I washed my hands and face again, inspected the damp spot Claudia’s lips had left on my jacket, and then also discovered the little pile of folded towels in a wall inset and the basket for used ones below it. Determined to step firmly with head held high, I left the bathroom.

Ute was still carrying on a conversation with Renate. Claudia was sitting on the couch next to Julia and waved me over. “She looks totally different now,” Julia said, while I examined a photograph of Alina. “Where,” I asked, “did she get that hair from?”

“Obviously not from me!” Julia plucked the picture from my fingers and stored it in her wallet. I had to be careful, I no longer had myself under control. Claudia said that now that train service had been discontinued, it took almost a whole day to get to the village where Julia’s mother lived. I asked Julia if she had a car and if her parents had gotten divorced.

“My father died a year and a half ago,” Julia said, and smiled at me.

When Marco came around pouring red wine, I held an orphaned glass out to him and then drank it down at once.

Suddenly there was Fritz. He wedged himself in between me and the arm of the sofa.

“He’s older than Alina,” Julia said.

“By two years at the most,” I said. Julia laid a hand on my knee but then immediately took it away again.

Marco sat down across from us and talked and talked. Since he told it several times, the only story I remember is the one about the whiskey: It was in the garden of the villa that belonged to the same actor we all were waiting for. They were lying in lounge chairs drinking whiskey. “The carton it came in was beside my chaise,” Marco explained. “When I tried to put the bottle back, it didn’t fit, it stuck up a little. I tried three or four times, so I forced it down in, hard.” Marco made a motion as if screwing something into the floor. “When I take the whiskey out again the next evening, there’s something sticking to the bottle.” Marco pretended he had a bottle in his hands. He felt the bottom of the bottle with his fingertips and cried in triumph, “A squashed toad!” Claudia, who had listened the whole time on the edge of her seat, burst into a snort of laughter.