Free Where Love Begins by Judith Hermann

tea, turns the washing machine on and the radio off, and sits down with the newspaper at the kitchen table.
    Mister Pfister rings the bell at nine twenty-three.
    Stella, her head propped in her hands, looks closely at a photo of some Chinese mine workers. Black faces, iridescent eyes. She reads the caption without understanding a single word. She turns one page back, then forward again. After a while she gets up from the table and goes into the living room, casually, just a woman looking out of the window, nothing more. The street is deserted. Nobody standing outside the garden gate. Nothing moving.
    Stella closes the sunroom door, takes her jacket from the coat rack in the hall, and leaves the house. She doesn’t look inside the mailbox. Pulling the garden gate shut behind her, she turns left and walks down the street.
    *
    A dog is lying in the sun outside the house next door. The front door is open; the student – Political science? Medicine? English literature? – who sometimes, either shyly or rudely, says hello over the fence, is nowhere to be seen. Her dainty vests and yellow dress hang on the rotary clothes dryer on the lawn; the grass hasn’t been cut; the flowerbeds are neglected; sunflowers are already shooting up in several flowerpots. The picture window is dusty; in its right-hand corner, a skeleton, its bony hand held up in warning; candles in bottles on the windowsill. Stella looks at the display; she has the distinct feeling that it all has a meaning, a hidden message.
    The house of the Asian family next to it is freshly painted; the garden, well cared for, the hedge trimmed and almost impossible to see through, a silver car in the driveway, the blinds down at all the windows.
    An old woman one house farther on is clipping the branches of a rhododendron with huge garden shears; she greets Stella indulgently, and Stella greets her in return as she goes by, then she passes an empty, undeveloped lot. Stella vaguely remembers a house burning, an accident. Fallow land, yarrow and lupines, dried-out soil, no birds, finches, wrens in the grass. Next, a house with a glittering pool on the lawn, another one with an awning extending over the picture window and the terrace in front, an ironwork table, four chairs set around it as if for an important meeting. And then a house with a man sitting out front on a folding chair, setting the spokes in a wheel; on the stairs leading up to the front door a portable radio is playing; a mirrored sphere hanging in the branches of a sumac between the two properties throws spectrally coloured points of light on the house and the lawn. The man raises a hand. Stella has seen him before – where was it, in the city, at the shopping centre, at the kindergarten? She saw him at the kindergarten, a bicycle mechanic; he was fixing the children’s bicycles. A boat lying under a tarpaulin, old bicycles leaning against each other in the rear part of the garden. Something makes Stella pause, and the man gives the wheel a push and sits up. Carlyle was in a spot, he’d been in a spot all summer, since early June, when his wife had left him, a voice on the portable radio is singing. Stella can hear each and every word clearly; she can see everything in detail, heightened and exaggerated; possibly it’s because her heart is beating rather fast that she feels as if she were afraid. But afraid isn’t the right word. She sees the wheel slowing down and coming to a stop, sees the man lean back in his chair; the chair is standing on sand, the garden path isn’t paved; the sand is dazzling, summery. The next house is Mister Pfister’s house. Number 8, and Stella looks away and walks on before she can change her mind. She can still hear the voice on the radio. A man softly and suggestively whistling to himself. Then she’s there.
    *
    Mister Pfister’s house is white. A grape vine grows skyward next to the front door. The grass is bleached. No flowerbeds, no