The Girl Who Wasn't There by Ferdinand von Schirach Read Free Book Online Page B

his travelling bag, and placed her photo on top of his shirts.
    When he came out of the arrivals hall at Charles de Gaulle airport, he couldn’t see her. He stood outside the automatic doors. Men and women on business were hurrying out. Someone pulled a wheelie case over his foot, and a child’s scream rang through the hall.
    Eschburg sat down on a metal bench. He opened his bag and looked at the photo.
    ‘It came out well,’ she said. He hadn’t noticed her sitting down beside him. She kissed him on the cheek.
    She had hired a car. Paris was unbearable in summer, she said, but the seaside resort of Deauville was wonderful at this time of year. The dinner given by her agency was not, in fact, for another two days.
    She drove the little car too fast, phoning her clients on the way. She had two phones; she spoke French, English, Arabic and German. He looked out of the window. A point came when he stopped listening to her. This was a mistake, he thought, and he couldn’t now think why he was sitting in a car beside this woman.
    Sofia wanted to drive along the coastal road. Thirty kilometres from Deauville it began raining so hard that they had to stop. Sofia parked the car under a tree. She bent down to him, kissed him, and opened his trousers. He had an almost painful erection. She sat on top of him. Through the rear window, he saw a cyclist who had taken shelter under the same tree. The man’s hair was hanging over his face; he stared at Eschburg and Sofia. Eschburg closed his eyes. Sofia was lying on him now, her face close to his. Her movements, her aroma were strange to him. The car windows were steaming up. After half an hour the rain slackened, and they drove on.
    All the Deauville hotels were fully booked, but they found a room in a run-down boarding house. They went down to the sea, and sat on a bench in the drizzling rain, not touching.
     
    Long after they had fallen asleep in the boarding house, he woke and went out on the tiny balcony, closing the door behind him. The sky was black and merged with the sea. It would soon start raining again. The neon advertisement on the boarding house shone on the wall above him. He wondered whether there would be a train back to Paris at this time of night; he could go down to the station now and find out. He went back into the room, looked for his clothes in the dim light and put them on.
    ‘Don’t go,’ she said.
    ‘It’s too complicated,’ he replied. He had his shoes in his hand.
    ‘It always is,’ she said. ‘Come here.’
    He lay down on the bed beside her fully dressed. He looked at the dust on the slats of the wooden Venetian blinds. Sofia’s breath was calm and steady. He gradually relaxed.
    She turned over on her stomach and propped her chin in her hands. ‘Are you always so serious?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
    ‘Your photos are serious. You’re doing something that I don’t yet understand with those pictures. My father was like that, but he died long ago,’ she said. ‘Did you know that the colour of your photographs, that sepia colour, is the ink of the squid? Many doctors prescribe it for depression, to cure loneliness and a sense of the void. They say it can heal a human being’s wounded dignity.’
    He heard the wind and the rain, which had begun to fall again and was beating against the window panes.
    ‘What about your parents?’ she asked.
    ‘I’m not in touch with my mother any more.’ His mouth was dry.
    ‘And your father?’
    He did not reply. He thought of the house by the lake, far away now, and then he was glad of Sofia’s voice, her mouth, her hair and her skin that was warm and the colour of bronze.
    ‘Did seeing that cyclist arouse you?’ she asked after a while.
    ‘You noticed him?’ he asked.
    She nodded. Then she stood up and opened the door out into the corridor. She came back to bed, pushed up his shirt and unzipped his trousers. She kissed his chest and belly, and slipped between his legs. He wanted to pull