Following the Summer Read Online Free PDF Page A

she had picked up the prettiest piece, a rhinestone necklace whose cheapness was cancelled by the purity of the setting, a circle in which the brilliance of the stones diminished regularly against some minuscule agates, black and regal. The two men barely debated the price, both of them eager for this day to end: it was six o’clock and the light was waning, leaving behind a cloak of dampness, the certainty, finally, of winter.
    He crossed the Hofburg through the inner courtyard. A solitary guard stood watch at the entrance to the imperial quarters. He had thought vaguely of bringing her here, despite his loathing of the gilding of another era, and of wrinkles of every kind. He wouldn’t do it.
    They walked for a long time, as usual, through streets left empty by this first cold. The wind rose, whistling across the stones, and the chill rain of Vienna lashed down suddenly as they approached their neighbourhood. The public square for meetings, the Servitenkirsche. Outside the church they huddled in their new silence — bitter for him, terrifying for her — in their distance.
    Still, she held out the necklace for him to hang around her neck, icy coals against the red sweater. There was a moment of tenderness as he lifted the hair of this thin young girl, made thinner by the rain. What would become of her? Already the tension in her neck, the defiant motion she had when she was hunting or lying in wait, had subsided into fear before this man who was leaving her now. He pulled her hair into a young woman’s chignon and saw how heavy makeup, a broken oval, would make her ordinary by the time she was twenty, and he was sorry he had.
    Gently he twisted her hair, the child’s head on his hip. Night had fallen. Ervant was tall and warm in his wet clothes, and he felt Fatima’s hand on his sex, firm, determined, the palm engaged at once in a back-and-forth motion that travelled to the root of his stomach. Night had come.

Four
    A T THAT POINT IN HIS STORY HE TALKED about his sadness, then told how he had taken the child to the Maria Schneider café, right to the door that night, refusing to say goodnight in the hope that she’d understand her misbehaviour. A moral man, he felt indignant with Leonel, suspecting him of having taught his daughter that act, and others. Of having ordered her to beg, of having himself paid her in jewellery, the gold bracelet and the cheap ornaments, of having shown her how to offer herself. And of having left her for weeks with this solitary boy, for the money it brought her and with orders to seduce him should he become aloof. But Fatima was eight years old, ten perhaps, and Ervant’s scenarios didn’t always jibe with his recollections of that strange autumn, from which a little girl had emerged and then returned to the implacable silence of stone angels.
    He had left Vienna a few weeks later, without going back to the café, without seeing Fatima again, though he watched her pass, up to her old tricks again, nothing changed.
    When Marie heard the story she scarcely believed it. Especially that ending, left hanging. She imagined Ervant instead having surrendered to the child’s strength, stiff, perhaps moaning in the hollow of that little hand that would have taken the time to slip inside his clothing, to rub the skin beneath the cloth, he would have encouraged her rhythm, his back against the wall and legs apart, then closed over the slender fingers and wrist, gushing in a slow, feeble spasm, just as he comes when she, Marie, caresses him standing against doors where he abandons himself in the daylight shadows of the empty house. She preferred the Ervant of agitation and suffocating heat to his cursing and self-pity, to his going home in the rain, detaching himself from a girl who was there to be taken, who was troubled and fiery, slave-girl with a necklace, the ugly girl who wins out over night.
    And so she asked him no questions. It is he who would be