The American Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

never had before. Frightened out of her wits.
    And that was the last time he saw her.
    Then he never, never saw her again.
    But walk. Walk. Walk. Walk. Bencku walked over the far meadow toward the outbuilding on the other side. How much time had actually passed between the one and the other, the side of the road and the outbuilding, was not clear.
    Slowly at first, but then he started running. Faster and faster. Over the fields until he got to where he was going.
    He stepped into the outbuilding. Saw right away what was in there. It was Björn.
    . . .
    And Bencku became completely mute.
    Now only he was left.
    “Nobody knew my rose of the world but me.”
    “Am I your rose now?”
    The District hates itself
. He stopped going to the Second Cape. But he found himself on the outskirts of the woods more and more often, where he wandered around, far away from everything else.
    That was how he found the house in the darker part. That was how he discovered it, where it stood in all its impossibility: an alpine villa on the low-lying damp ground by a turbid marsh. The nameless marsh.
    The entire house was a staircase. A hundred steps leading up to the main entrance.
    A staircase leading to nothing.
    On the other side of the house, the one facing the marsh, there were panorama windows covering almost the entire basement wall. He looked in and made out a large, rectangular hole in the ground in the middle of the basement.
    A swimming pool?
    The future angel in the mud. This was reality.
    Nevertheless he did go back to the boathouse on the Second Cape one last time. The key was in the lock. It was empty in there, but in a new way. And he was not surprised. That was what he had expected. Empty in the normal way: as if no one had ever set foot there.
    Chair, table, bed. The same furniture. The same light blue bedspread. Some flowers in a vase on the small table. Large tropical flowers, disgusting. The vase was made of thick crystal, and the tablecloth laid under it was newly ironed.
    Eddie had hated that vase, used it as an ashtray out on the terrace.
    The guitar was hanging by a brown leather strap from a nail on the wall above the bed. It was new, both the nail and the strap from which the guitar was hanging.
That was the way the baroness had wanted it
.
    He lifted the bedspread and looked under the bed. Nothing there, but that was no surprise. He went out and closed the door. Turned the key in the lock. Then he left the boathouse and walked up to the house.
    “I came to get my maps.” It was with the baroness up there in the Glass House that Bencku started talking again. “So you have a tongue in your head after all,” said the baroness not sounding at all surprised, where she was standing there on the veranda, which she called her Winter Garden, and pruning her plants. She had planted them in pots that filled the entire veranda. The veranda was an extension of the glass façade, with its own roof, also made of glass. This was where she forced her strange plants to grow: frivolous flowers in different colors, lit by different types of lamps and heated with extra heaters. “Good that you came. I’ve been waiting for you.”
    She set the pruning shears down on a windowsill, slowly pulled off her yellow rubber gloves, came up to him holding out her hand. Only then, because he had to, did he dare to look at her.
    They stood there in the baroness’s Winter Garden and shook hands, he and she.
    But at the same time, it was as if she wanted to say something to him now, the baroness, something kind and comforting. Something that did not go together with her nature at all. This rough, square, straight-to-the-point style that matched her clothes so perfectly. Linen pants and a dark blue shirt, shimmering silver hair that shone against her brown face. Patinated. Maybe sixty years old, fifty-five.
    “Wait here.” She let go of his hand and disappeared into the house for a while, leaving him among the plants in the Winter Garden that