Katherine Carlyle Read Online Free PDF

pretend to be the tourist he took me for, spending the afternoon at a gallery. Later, in the shop, I buy a notebook with unlined pages and several Gerhard Richter postcards. His blurred portraits seem a comment on my own existence, all the unimportant details stripped away.
    By five-thirty I’m back in Walter-Benjamin-Platz. This time I notice the hexagonal green kiosk at the east end of the square. As I approach Klaus Frings’s building a man of about seventy stepsout, his white hair gathered in a ponytail. I slip past him, into the lobby. Behind a desk of blond wood is a man in a gray uniform, his newspaper open at the sports pages.
    “Good evening,” I say. “Is Herr Frings at home?”
    The porter looks up. “He’s not back yet.”
    I glance at my watch.
    “He should be here in half an hour or so.” The porter’s gaze drops to my breasts. “Would you like to wait?”
    I shake my head. “Thanks all the same.”
    Out in the square again I lean against the kiosk. The sky has clouded over and a damp wind is blowing. It’s beginning to get dark. During the next thirty minutes only two people enter the building. The first is a middle-aged woman cradling a pug in the crook of her arm. The second is the man with the ponytail.
    At ten past six a tall figure turns out of Wielandstrasse and into the square, passing within an arm’s length of me. He wears a fawn overcoat and is carrying a leather briefcase. Instinctively I know it’s Frings, even though he looks nothing like the person I imagined. I wait until he’s about to open the door to his building, then I call his name. He jerks to a halt, then turns slowly. Standing between two of the pillars that form the arcade, he peers out into the dark.
    “Hallo?”
he says.
    My heart somersaults. He responded to the name!
    “Valentina?”
    Valentina
. She must be the girl who left him. But would she really wait in the dark for him to come home from work? Surely not — especially if she was the one who ended the relationship. It’s more likely that he is upset at having been rejected and can’t stop thinking about her.
    “Valentina? Is that you?”
    I flatten myself against the kiosk and keep quiet. Since he only heard his name called once, I’m hoping he will think he imagined it. A sound carried on the wind, a voice inside his head … He looks right and left, then swings round and vanishes into the building. I pray the porter doesn’t mention me. The last thing I want is for Klaus to learn that a foreign-sounding girl has been asking for him. I need to come from nowhere, like an apparition. Like a gift.
    Like a reward.
    /
    The next morning I’m in Walter-Benjamin-Platz at half past six. I have no idea when Klaus leaves for work and I don’t want to miss him. It’s still dark and the air has a bitter, coppery smell that is faintly sulfurous, like burnt matches. The layout of the square proves useful. I take up a position on the south side, behind a pillar. Once in a while I walk out onto Wielandstrasse, but never so far that I lose sight of the glass front door and its upright rectangle of yellow light.
    I have been waiting for about an hour when Klaus appears, his head lowered, his face illuminated by the small screen of his phone. He turns right, towards Leibnitzstrasse. He’s dressed in the same fawn coat and carrying the same leather briefcase. I can’t help smiling. It’s as if he understands what is required of him — that he needs to be immediately recognizable — and is cooperating.
    He has long legs and he walks fast. Every now and then I have to break into a run, otherwise I might be left behind. He stops at a kiosk to buy a paper. I hang back, feigning interest in a shopwindow. The air is fuzzy, pixelated, like a kind of interference. A row of cars trembles at the lights.
    On Giesebrechtstrasse he hurries across the road and disappears into a
café-konditorei
. From the pavement I watch him talking to the waitress. They seem to know each