Stella Read Online Free PDF Page A

faster, I felt the touch of her breasts, I kissed her again, and now she released herself from my arms and, without a word, moved toward the bed. She didn’t want to lay her head in the middle of the pillow, a long one with a flowered-pattern pillowcase and room enough for two. Deliberately she moved her head over to leave half the pillow free, with plenty of space for me. Without a sign, without a word from her, that pillow showed me clearly what she was expecting.
    You could tell from the faces in our school hall that some of the students were better than others at observing the obligatory minute’s silence. Most of them tried to make eye contact with their neighbors, some shifted from foot to foot, one boy was examining his face in a pocket mirror, and I saw another who had apparently succeeded in dropping off to sleep on his feet. Another was looking at his watch now and then. The longer the silence lasted, the more obvious it was that several students were finding it difficult to get through the time without drawing attention to themselves. I looked at your photograph, Stella, and I imagined how you would react, if you could, to the minute’s silence in your memory.
    We didn’t leave a double imprint on the pillow; once our faces turned to each other, they came so close that only a single large imprint was left. When I awoke, Stella was asleep, or at least I thought so. I carefully took her arm, which was lying relaxed on my chest, and moved it to the blanket. She sighed, she just raised her head a little and looked at me, smiling, questioning.
    I said, “I must go.”
    “How late is it?” she asked.
    I didn’t know. I just said, “It’s getting light. They’re probably expecting me home.” At the door, I stopped. I thought something ought to be said, a good-bye, or some reference to what lay ahead of us at school, in our separate everyday lives. I kept quiet because I wanted to avoid saying something that sounded final, or that Stella might understand as final. I didn’t want what had begun so unexpectedly to come to an end. As if of its own nature, it demanded to go on longer.
    When I opened the door she got out of bed, came over to me barefoot, put her arms around me and held me close.
    “We’ll see each other again,” I said. “Soon.” She did not reply, and I repeated it. “We have to see each other again, Stella.”
    I had never called her by her first name before, but she didn’t seem surprised; she accepted it naturally, and as if to let me know she was happy with that she said, “I don’t know, Christian. You and I must both think about what’s best for us.”
    “But surely we can see each other again.”
    “We will,” she said. “We’re bound to, but it can’t be the same as before.”
    I wanted to say: I love you, Stella! But I didn’t, because at that moment I couldn’t help thinking of a film starring Richard Burton, and he used exactly those hackneyed words saying good-bye to Liz Taylor. I caressed her cheek, and I could tell from the expression on her face that she wasn’t prepared to agree to my suggestion, or didn’t feel she was in any position to do so. I buttoned my shirt, put on my windbreaker, which Stella had hung over the back of a chair, and said—even out in the hallway I realized what a poor sort of good-bye it was—“Well, I can always ring your bell at home, can’t I?”
    I didn’t walk down the stairs, I leaped down them, full of a sensation I had never known before. There was someone at the reception desk now. When the man looked at me in surprise, I wished him “Goodmorning,” perhaps rather too cheerfully, for he did not respond and just stared after me as I went down to the beach. A fishing cutter was on her way out to sea, accompanied by the loud chugging of its diesel engine and surrounded by herring gulls. The water was calm. I went to the place where the navigation marks had been brought in and were waiting to be cleaned and painted, sat down,