Rupert Thomson - Katherine Carlyle

“Have you any idea,” he murmurs, “how seductive that is?”

Wie verführerisch das ist .

At that moment I experience a sudden craving for Adefemi, like someone running a finger up the middle of me, but on the inside. I’m sure things have happened . I face back into the room.

“On that morning in the café,” I say, “you talked about privacy …”

“Did I? Yes, I suppose I did.” He sighs, then turns heavily away and slumps down on the sofa. Switching the TV on, he stares at the screen with a sullen intensity.

“What’s seductive,” I say, “is not the fact that no one knows I’m here. It’s the fact that I’m living the way I want to live — or rather, I’m getting closer to the way I want to live.”

“I’ve no idea what that means.”

“You’re part of it. In a way, you’re the most important part. You’re where it all began.”

He looks up at me. Though he still doesn’t understand, he senses the veiled compliment.

The doorbell rings. The take-away.

“I’ll get it,” I say.

Returning, I unpack the cartons.

“More wine?” Klaus appears to have sobered up.

“No, not yet.”

I fetch plates, forks, and paper napkins from the kitchen. Even rejected, Klaus remains polite, and I’m not sure I don’t despise him for it. I’d almost rather he tore my shirt off and pushed me down onto the sofa. At least that would be honest. I picture my buttons skittering across the floor like chips of ice.

He’s ignoring me again. He’s trying to punish me. It’s not easy for him, though. Deep down he’s hoping I will change my mind. He keeps channel-hopping, settling at last on a crime drama.

“I love crime,” he says.

I watch with him and find myself enjoying it more than I expected to. Down-at-heel tower blocks, rainswept motorways. Characters with stringy hair and bad complexions. Kitchens, ashtrays. Guns.

Even before the end Klaus is asleep, one arm laid across his upper body, a half-finished green chicken curry next to him. I tidy things away, then stand by the sofa, looking down at him. His chest rises, falls. The air rumbles in and out of him. Without waking, he reaches up and brushes at his face. What’s supposed to happen here?

/

For the rest of that week Klaus is on his best behavior, as if he knows he went too far and is trying to make amends. On Friday he asks me out to dinner. He takes me to a restaurant on Schlüterstrasse, a few minutes’ walk from his apartment. The girl at the next table has skin that is pale and luminous, and her long neck rises out of a clingy gray wool dress. With her is a man who has rolled up the sleeves of his jacket like an eighties pop star.

I ask Klaus if he finds the girl attractive.

“Not particularly.” He signals to the waiter. “The man looks Russian,” he says. “You often get Russians in here.”

I smile. When I called Cheadle on Thursday, as arranged, he told me he was meeting some Russian friends in a Vietnamese restaurant on Saturday, and that I was welcome to come along.

“I have to go out tomorrow evening,” I tell Klaus.

“Is it the same person you saw before,” he says, “when you were out all night?”

“No. This is a different person.”

“For someone who doesn’t know anyone, you know a lot of people.”

I laugh at that.

During the meal I hardly take my eyes off Klaus’s face, not because I’m becoming interested in him, but because I’m trying to determine whether or not he has outlived his purpose. A word I noticed in Farewell to an Idea shimmers in my head like a neon sign. EXITLESSNESS. In the book it’s attributed to the Russian artist Kasimir Malevich, who wrote about “the exitlessness of life.” This is what I have to guard against. This is the danger. Is it enough, for instance, that in taking me to the Konzerthaus Klaus has inadvertently introduced me to J. Halderman Cheadle? Is that where my future lies, with a shabby, fifty-something American expatriate? Or should I be focusing on Oswald Überkopf? One thing is certain: as comfortable as it is in the penthouse on Walter-Benjamin-Platz, I should think about moving on. It’s September 20, and my father will soon be flying back to Rome. Though he has never heard the name Klaus Frings, I don’t feel I can afford to stay in one place for too long. I need to muddy the scent. And the fact that I have acquired a new name, an identity Klaus knows nothing about, suggests I have already left him behind, and that he is having dinner with a previous incarnation, a discarded chrysalis, a cipher.

Back at the apartment Klaus offers me a Jägermeister, then pours himself a tumbler, half of which he knocks back when he thinks I’m not looking. Encouraged by my attentiveness at dinner, he is working up to some kind of declaration. He has an eager clumsy quality that I find touching.

I settle on the sofa, my legs folded under me. “Why don’t you come out and say it?”

Klaus replaces the top on the bottle. “Say what?”

“You want to go to bed with me.”

He looks over his shoulder, startled. I feel I might have drunk too much but I can’t stop.

“You want to sleep with me,” I say. “You want to fuck me —”

“Don’t.”

“Well, don’t you?”

“It’s too brutal, putting it like that.”

“How would you put it, then?”

Klaus walks over and looks down at me. He seems older than me, but not wiser.

“It’s true,” he says.

He takes my hand and pulls me to my feet, then embraces me awkwardly, his face buried in my hair. I see him reflected in the plate-glass window, enormous and dark and stooping over me. One person devouring another.

Straightening up again, he leads me past the gray painting, across the hall, and down the corridor. I have already seen his bedroom. I explored the entire apartment on my first day, while he was out at work. I have even used his bath, which is round and deep, like a Jacuzzi or a well, and covered with tiny turquoise tiles. I know that his sheets and duvet are maroon, and that he keeps his boxer shorts on shelves, in neat ironed piles. He drains his drink in a single hurried gulp as he follows me into the room.

I put my glass down next to a book on Fabergé and lie back on the bed. Sitting at my feet, he removes one boot, then the other. He handles them as if they’re objects of great value, like the jeweled eggs he has been reading about. Why am I thinking of sleeping with him? No, wait. That’s the wrong way round. If I don’t sleep with him, there will be a sense of incompleteness. This tenuous, artificial relationship, which I have fabricated out of nothing, seems to require it of me. It’s partly my desire to see it through to its conclusion — going to bed with Klaus is an end, not a beginning — and partly the need to clear the way for whatever might come next.

He places his glasses in their case, then closes the case with a crisp snap. At that moment I have the feeling I won’t be able to go through with it. He isn’t the kind of man I’m used to or have ever thought of sleeping with. When he turns away to hang his jacket on the back of the door I take off my tights and skirt and slide beneath the covers. He strips down to his boxer shorts, his body larger and whiter than I imagined it would be. The maroon sheets don’t help.

After it’s over, I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling, my pubic bone bruised from where he ground himself against me, trying to force an erection. The fact that he couldn’t get it up doesn’t bother me. In a way it’s a blessing. Since I wasn’t excited to start with I’m not left feeling frustrated. I sense possible orgasms, but they glide far below the surface like fish in deep water, incurious, unruffled.