Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki Read Free Book Online

just allow to kiss her – by now he really couldn’t believe his eyes – oh no! The lady bit the unknown woman’s neck. When she finally moved away, Schepp saw a mark on the skin. A dark blue tattoo the size of an one-euro coin. A few moments later they were all three standing at the bar as if nothing had happened. Schepp’s mouth was dry. For the rest of the evening he couldn’t help looking over at them frequently, especially at the alluring unknown woman. Soon he was certain about the sign. It sat right over one of the tendons at her throat, small enough to move every time she turned her head, and she turned her head frequently.
    Just once that evening her eyes met his, staring him down, forcing him to look away – what a humiliation – before they went on scanning the room. When she finally left with the other two, heading out into a night seemingly so vast that Schepp felt he could see the stars sparkling from where he sat, she passed close to him, and at last he could recognize the sign on her neck, a Chinese character. As he tried to decipher it, he almost became frightened, for he realized that he had seen it often, but where? The curve of the brushstroke was familiar, although it had not been elegantly executed as a tattoo; it was the sign for … what? Schepp mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. It took him some time to realize that such a coincidence was not the work of Fate, least of all deliberately arranged for him. And that he too could go home now.
    After that he dreamt of the sign at night. When Doro regarded him inquiringly during the day he looked down at the floor, ashamed. What could he have said to her? That evening an extraordinary thing had occurred in his life, a life that so far had known only an extraordinary absence of experience. From then on he kept a frequent eye on the scene of this event to see if there would be a sequel. Oh, he had no ambitions of his own; it would only have been a case of looking, of participating in something he imagined as the simultaneous height of depravity and of bliss.
    The devotion he had always received at home now became almost like a burden. He avoided it as much as he could. Yet it was Doro who solved the puzzle of the tattoo: as he sat in her room one afternoon at their usual time with a pot of green tea, his eye fell on the sign quite by chance. There it was among the other sixty-three signs of the I Ching; Doro had hung them on the wall here as well. Schepp stood right in front it; he couldn’t possibly miss it. How beautiful it was when written by a master of calligraphy! He immediately asked Doro whether he could borrow one of her commentaries, if possible the Southern Commentaries, if she could spare the book. Doro raised an eyebrow in surprise. But how could he have explained himself?
    Having found the sign and studied it almost daily, his peace of mind was definitely gone. The unknown woman, however, stood him up evening after evening, though he became a regular at the bar, exchanging banter with this or that member of the staff. Paul, the manager, a jovial soul in his late forties with a well-tended moustache, known to everyone as Paulus, would greet him with, ‘Evening, Professor, doing okay, are we?’ Paulus spent most of the evening behind the bar, an equable presence washing up glasses as if the goings-on were beneath his notice. La Pfiff was not plugged into the cultured bohemian milieu of the digital age; customers came in and either backed straight out again or didn’t leave until hours later. By midnight everyone had both argued and fraternized with everyone else. In his own fashion, anyway, Schepp became part of it.
    It was useful that La Pfiff was within walking distance of his apartment. The regular course of his days now gave way to an irregularity that in the end became routine, although it was the opposite of the former kind. Hitherto a man of the old school who combed his remaining hair over his bald patch and vacillated