Free All Days Are Night by Peter Stamm Page B

clear her throat, somewhere she had an itch that she would give anything to scratch. As time passed, she got used to sitting still. She still felt the pain in her back and bottom, but it had become part of her. She became stiller, stopped wondering what she would look like in the picture and who would get to see it. The painting would exist independently of her, it wasn’t a copy, not a depiction. Every snapshot would contain more of her than this painting. The next time the egg timer went off, she walked around next to Hubert and looked at what he had done.
    If you want, she said, you can paint me naked.
    For two days Gillian had been going around with the proofs of the second book by a rising young novelist. She had taken the train out to Hubert’s studio and had read another dozen pages. When she looked down at her cell phone during one of the breaks, she saw that her editor had sent her a text, asking if the book was worth devoting a slot to, and if she had an idea for how to do it. It wasn’t easy for books to get coverage, you couldn’t get interesting images out of writers. Think outside the box, the series editor said every time, I don’t want to see another shot ofa moody author tramping through autumn leaves. Gillian wrote back to say she wasn’t far enough along yet, but she’d know by tomorrow. After dinner, she went on reading the proofs and wondering how the young author could be produced for television. She was glad of the distraction. At eleven Matthias came into her office and said he was going to bed. By midnight she had roughed out a concept for a film, no walk in the woods but a retelling of the novel with some archive footage, and a brief interview with the author on the difficulties of a second novel, and a couple of clips from a reading, with comments from readers. That should stand a chance in the editorial meeting. She went to the bathroom and got undressed. She looked at herself in the mirror for a long time. She turned and looked over her shoulder.
    Normally, Thursdays weren’t too strenuous, but Gillian spent almost the whole morning editing a piece. In the afternoon it was okayed, and she made a couple of phone calls to advance the concept she wanted to present in the editorial meeting tomorrow. She still hadn’t gotten to the end of the book. It was an eccentric story with lots of humorous inserts, but even so — or maybe just because — she was bored by it. If you asked her, most literary publications were superfluous anyway. Perhaps it was her fault, but it was more and more unusual for her to be caught up in a book. When writers complained that they were never invited to be on the program, she often felt tempted to say, write better books.
    She was already thinking of canceling the proposal, but when she met her boss by the coffee machine he said he was looking forward to hearing from her. She wenthome at three. She read a bit more of the proofs, but she couldn’t concentrate. She had told Matthias at breakfast that she was going to see Dagmar that evening.
    When she set off a little before six, it was raining gently, and it felt colder than in the morning. She looked at the other passengers in the streetcar and tried to imagine them naked. Old women, businesspeople, mothers who had collected their little ones from day care — all naked. A young, smartly dressed businessman whose upper body was densely haired, a man with such a big belly that you couldn’t see his penis, a big-breasted woman, a young woman with thin reddish pubic hair and a genital piercing. Pleats of skin, wrinkles, light and dark skin, spots, freckles, and moles. Gillian felt reminded of medieval pictures of the Day of Judgment, tiny little people doubled over with pain and guilt. She tried to remember the name of the painter who had persuaded hundreds of people to take off their clothes for him and all lie down on the ground.
    She had to change at the central station. The big hall was full of people. Gillian