Read Online Me and Kaminski by Daniel Kehlmann - Free Book Online

threw away my cigarette, found the footpath, and started climbing. I didn’t need any taxi, it was easy for me now, even though I had the suitcase to carry, I was soon up at the signpost. Up the road, first bend, second bend, third bend, then the parking area. The BMW was still standing in front of the garden gate. I rang, Anna opened the door immediately.
    “Nobody home?”
    “Only him.”
    “Why is the car still here?”
    “She took the train.”
    I looked her straight in the eyes. “I’ve come, because I forgot my bag.”
    She nodded, went inside, and left the door open. I followed her.
    “My sister called,” she said.
    “Really!”
    “She needs help.”
    “If you want to go, I can stay with him.”
    She inspected me for a few seconds. “That would be kind.”
    “Think nothing of it.”
    She smoothed her apron, bent down, and picked up a well-stuffed overnight case. She went to the door, hesitated, and looked at me questioningly.
    “No worries!” I said softly.
    She nodded, breathed audibly in and out, then closed the door behind her. Through the kitchen window I watched her as she walked across the parking area with small, heavy steps. The bag swung in her hand.

VI
    I STOOD IN THE HALL , ears cocked. To my left was the front door, to my right the dining room, and straight ahead the staircase went up to the second floor. I cleared my throat, my voice echoing oddly in the silence.
    I went into the dining room. The windows were closed, the air stale. A fly was banging against a pane. I carefully opened the top drawer of the chest of drawers: tablecloths, neatly folded. The next one: knives, forks, and spoons. The bottom one: twenty years’ worth of old magazines,
Life, Time, Paris-Match,
all jumbled together. The old wood resisted; I almost couldn’t close the drawers. I went back into the hall.
    To my left were four doors. I opened the first: a little room with a bed, table, and chair, a TV, a picture of the Madonna and a photo of the young Marlon Brando. It must be Anna’s room. Behind the next door was the kitchen, the one after that was the room where I’d been received the day before. The last one opened onto a staircase going down.
    I took my bag and groped for the light switch. A single bulb cast its dirty light onto wooden steps, which creaked, and their downward pitch was so steep that I had to hang on to the banister. I hit another switch, spotlights crackled as they sprang to life, and I squeezed my eyes tight shut. When I’d gotten used to the glare, I realized I was in the studio.
    A windowless space, lit only by four spotlights. Whoever had worked here hadn’t needed any natural light. In the middle was an easel with a painting in its genesis; dozens of brushes were scattered over the floor. I bent down to feel them: all of them were dry. There was also a palette, the colors on it were hard as stone and cracked. I sucked in a mouthful of air: a normal cellar smell, a little damp, a faint odor of mothballs, no hint of paints or turpentine. Nobody had painted here for a long time.
    The canvas on the easel was almost untouched, only three brushstrokes cut across its whiteness. They began in the same spot down on the left and then pulled apart, in the top right was a tiny field crosshatched in chalk. No sketching, nothing to indicate what should have grown out of this. As I stepped back, I noticed that I had four shadows, one from each spotlight, that cut across one another at my feet. Several large canvases, covered with sailcloth tarps, leaned against the wall.
    I pulled the first tarp away and winced. Two eyes, a twisted mouth: a face, curiously distorted, like a reflection in flowing water. It was painted in bright colors, red lines pulled away from him like dying flames, his eyes as they observed me were questioning and cold. And although the style was unmistakable—the thin layer of color, the preference for red-yellow, which both Komenev and Mehring had written about—it looked