Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything Read Online Free PDF

back soon. Then out into the alley, out of the village, away, away, away, just away. I feel calmer when the village is out of sight.
    On the walk back I cut across the cornfield. The young plants come up to my knees; the harvest won’t be for a good couple of months yet. I rarely come this way; it passes Henner’s farm, which means I have to pass the dogs and horses so wild only Henner can ride them. When he’s on good form he looks like a landowner from another era, tearing across the pasture at a gallop, his dogs running beside him. He not a man of the modern age, more like someone who’s been born in the wrong century. Marianne says he’s in better shape, he must have stopped drinking. No one seriously believes that, but when he was last in the shop he was stone-cold sober.
    The corn tickles my legs, my dress catches on the leaves. I brush the plants with my hands, which feel quite numb after my visit to my mother.
    In the distance I can see Henner. He’s in the paddock, wearing old riding boots, narrow brown pants, and a filthy shirt that must once have been white. The dogs are lazing in the shade of an apple tree. Marianne told me that they even killed one of his foals last year. After that, he beat the dogs with a stick until they howled.
    I walk slowly, thinking about my mother; she looked so sad. What will become of her without my father, without a job, having to live with her in-laws? It was her sadness that drove me from the house. It drains every scrap of energy from my body, and the joy from my heart.
    Henner truly is a handsome man. I realized that when he was in the shop: a hulking body that moves powerfully, but with fine facial features. He has deep-set, expressive eyes surrounded by small, dark lines, and a hint of bitterness around his mouth, although when he smiles it disappears completely. You can’t tell that he’s a drinker.
    Suddenly he turns around. The dogs leap up as if obeying a command, and in a few bounds they’re at the paddock fence. “Henner!” I scream. “Get them away!” He laughs, throwing back his head.
    “They don’t like skinny girls!” he shouts back at me, but whistles to them all the same.
    My legs are trembling. I feel queer, as Marianne would say, and collapse in a heap. Tears flood my eyes. I don’t know what’s happening to me; I sob and sob, burying my face in my arms. I only snap out of it when I feel Henner’s hands, and his heady, sour, male scent envelops me. He strokes my head—I’d never have thought he could be so tender—and slowly pulls me up. I don’t dare open my eyes, and he whispers soothingly to me, “It’s all right, Maria, nothing happened. It’s all right, I’ll take you back to the farm.” I can barely walk; his arm is around me and his hand brushes my breast: it feels like it’s burning. I stop. “Shhh,” he says, gripping my arm. In a single, fluid stroke his hand moves down my neck, across my breasts, tummy, to my inner thigh, then up a little. I wrestle free and run, but he soon catches me again, and this time he looks at me quite differently.
    “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to frighten you, I’m really sorry. Don’t say a word to anyone, Maria. Do you hear me?” Holding me with his outstretched arm he goes on talking softly: “Nothing happened, did it? Nothing at all!” I nod silently, he lets go of me, and I walk away without turning around.
    There is a commotion at the farm. Siegfried has discovered some thin, transparent tubing beneath the steering wheel of the Wartburg. He followed the tube to its origin and found a plastic container of vodka under the hood. Only one person could have put it there. When I walk into the yard I see Siegfried and Alfred standing by the door: Alfred with his head bowed; Siegfried gesticulating wildly. I creep past them—they don’t even notice I’m there—go upstairs to the attic and get into bed with The Brothers Karamazov . Zossima has died, but not before sharing the