Free The Girl Who Wasn't There by Ferdinand von Schirach Page A

drove down the highway to Santanyí in the south-east of the island. The air conditioning wasn’t working; Sofia tied a scarf over her hair and let the window down. The air was hot and salt. They stopped in Llucmajor.
    The espresso in the Café Colon was burnt, market women were talking loudly at the bar, the fruit machine was on. They bought a few things in a food store and climbed back into the car. Beyond S’Alqueria Blanca they turned off the main road and drove between narrow walls up to the house.
    That evening they toasted dark bread and ate it with olive oil, tomatoes and garlic. The sea was almost two kilometres away, but even up here it smelled of seaweed. They sat on the terrace, where they could see over the almond trees and Aleppo pines down to the plain and on to the sea. The earth was red with iron oxide.
     
    He was woken by the misfiring of a motorbike somewhere down on the road. Sofia was no longer lying beside him. He went into the garden. She was sitting in a deckchair near the pool.
    ‘Perhaps these are our last days,’ she said.
    He looked at her. The underwater lighting from the pool was greenish-blue.
    ‘What do you mean?’ He was awake but at the same time felt dull-witted. He wanted to go back to bed.
    ‘I’m afraid you won’t be here any more. And I’m afraid of your fantasies. Loving you is such a strain.’ She was silent, and so was Eschburg. Then she said, ‘Who are you, Sebastian?’
    Eschburg got up and went to find a bottle of water. When he came back, the light in the pool had switched itself off. He lay down with her, put one hand to the nape of her neck and closed his eyes. He thought of the colour of the ears of oats that he had rubbed apart with two fingers, and the colour of the reeds beside the boathouse. They were sharp and cut your legs.
    ‘You’re still a stranger,’ she said.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said Eschburg. Far out to sea he saw the ships, the wandering lights, amber, agate, carnelian, and then he waited for the silence between the sentences they uttered, which was his only measurement of proximity to another human being.
     
    That night, the wind brought sand from Africa, and in the morning everything was covered by a thin, pale yellow layer of it.

21
    After a week they flew back separately. Sofia had to go to Paris, Eschburg wanted to return to Berlin. He took a taxi to Linienstrasse from the airport.
    He carried his case up to the first floor. His neighbour’s door was wide open. Eschburg glanced into her apartment. It was almost empty, with only a sofa and a small table in the middle of the room.
    A woman was lying on the sofa. She was naked. Eschburg couldn’t see her face; she had laid her head over the arm of the sofa and wasn’t moving. For a moment he thought the woman was dead. He was about to go to her, but just then Senja Finks appeared in front of him. She had been standing by the door. She nodded to Eschburg, slowly and seriously. Then she placed her right hand on his chest, pushed him gently back into the hall and closed the heavy door. She did not say a word.
     
    Eschburg went into his apartment, unpacked his case and lay down in bed. He slept restlessly. When he woke at about five in the morning, he felt that he was not alone. The apartment was dark. He waited with his eyes closed, not moving. Suddenly he smelled cedars, and then he felt her breath on his face.

22
    Over the next few days Eschburg cleared his studio. He painted the partitions, dealt with his post, took his cameras apart and cleaned them, phoned his publisher and the gallery owner who showed his work, got his hair cut and bought new trousers. He went for long walks in the city and its parks, visited exhibitions and sat in the café for hours without doing anything. He realized that he was taking Sofia’s absence badly.
     
    After ten days he flew to Paris. Sofia’s agency was holding a reception for an animal protection organization that evening, and Eschburg went straight