Eight Girls Taking Pictures by Whitney Otto Read Free Book Online

mathematics; he looked like he was thinking about love.

    When they went back into the searing light of day, Cymbeline, shielding her eyes, asked, “Why did you let me drink?”
    Without thinking, she reached for his watch. It was 2:00 in the afternoon. She moaned a little, to which he said, “It seems I corrupted you after all. Come on, we’ll get you something to eat.”

    The Tiergarten was less like a city garden and more like a garden city, with its wide boulevards, meadows, woods, flower beds, gazebos, outdoor theaters and café. Like those of the train station and the Piccadilly, the dimensions were impressive. “Does everything in Berlin have to be so excessive in size?” asked Cymbeline.
    “Only when you have a kaiser with a child’s arm,” answered Julius. Kaiser Wilhelm, the German emperor and King of Prussia, had been born with a withered arm that, it was rumored, emotionally ruled his life, and not in a good way.
    Rows of tulips bloomed in the plots next to them. When Cymbeline looked at Julius as he was telling her a story from his own student days, she noticed that it appeared as if the flowers were arranged on his head, like a strange sort of floral crown. Asking him to hold very still, she took another picture.

    She didn’t know what she expected the night she shared a room with Julius. He meant to sleep on whatever furniture there was in the room to allow Cymbeline the bed, but there was nothing usable. No sofa. One armchair. One small dresser. A rug on a floor that was mostly wood. He was almost apologetic about the whole thing, as if it were his fault.
    They were fortunate to have any room at all, since the train derailment had stranded so many passengers. There would be no trains untilthe early morning; there had been two casualties and many more injuries. “I’m trustworthy,” said Julius. And Cymbeline found herself thinking, I hope not.
    Julius said he was going to walk to the drugstore to buy them toothbrushes.
    As soon as he left, Cymbeline unfolded her camera and waited until he appeared, four stories down, on the street below.
    “Julius!” she called, causing him to look up, his hand shading his eyes. “Think of an impossible chemical compound,” she called. As he was posing, people passed all around him, so that he was only another face in the crowd. She took the shot anyway, knowing that he would be the clearest figure since he wasn’t moving.
    The awkwardness of their situation, made more awkward by their being unable to speak of its awkwardness, had them avoiding the room. In response, they stayed out as late as possible, which was how Cymbeline ended up seeing her first operetta, an entertainment that reminded her of the Piccadilly in that it wasn’t quite a musical, and not quite an opera, and less entertaining than advertised.
    Afterward they walked down a street of beautiful homes. Then a street of businesses. A street of bars and cabarets. A street of immigrants. They stopped beneath the Brandenburg Gate, huge, Neoclassical, with Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory, being pulled in a chariot by four horses. As Cymbeline stood between two of the Doric columns, running her hand on one of them, she asked, “This isn’t about the child-arm again, is it?”
    Julius laughed. “Someone else beat him to it.”
    “I think I saw one of these in the Piccadilly.”
    “Was it made of strudel?”
    “No, it was schnitzel.”
    The lights from the avenue of linden trees that stretched behind the gate created a ghostly effect. She stepped back from the gate. She unlocked her camera case. “Can you stand in the central arch? Under the horses?”
    “It’s not allowed actually. I’m not royal, so I must use the spacesat either end.” He positioned himself, without posing in the slightest, between two columns near the end.
    “Think about being allowed to walk through the center of the gate but choosing not to, and when you get to the most ridiculous part of that edict, I’ll