Read Online Where Love Begins by Judith Hermann - Free Book Online Page A

the street, and he doesn’t look like a man going to work. He wears unremarkable clothes, a dark jacket, light-coloured jeans; he never has a briefcase, never a book or a newspaper or a mobile. But always a packet of tobacco, always cigarette papers, always a lighter.
    She thinks about it. Then she says, with hostility in her voice, He smokes constantly.
    She says, I’m certain his fingers are yellow from the nicotine. Index finger and middle finger; Stella can feel that she’s talking herself into a fury that might seem suspicious to Clara; nevertheless she keeps talking. He lives on our street. Five or six houses away. Jason walked by it. I haven’t. Maybe I ought to do that sometime? I think he considers himself somewhat superior; you can tell from his handwriting. In any case, his spelling is correct and he listens to classical music; he wrote that to me. I have the feeling he got stuck. He got stuck; one day or other in his life something just didn’t keep going; he’s caught in a time warp and thinks he can pull me into it with him – that’s what it looks like.
    Stella says, Do you follow me, and she listens to Clara’s thoughtful silence on the other end of the line, Clara’s thoughtful silence in her oh-so-distant life. But today, just as back then, Clara still prefers to sit in the kitchen and, Stella knows, she has her feet up on the chair and the telephone clamped between her head and shoulder because she has to hold the cigarette in her left hand and the pencil in her right.
    Clara, I’m asking you whether you can follow me. What are you drawing?
    I can follow you. I’m drawing spirals, of course, Clara says drily. I’m drawing a time warp.
    And how should I visualise that, Stella says.
    Well, like a black hole, Clara says. A spiral, a very delicate one; I drew a delicate spiral, more of a vortex. In the middle, a black hole. Undertow or a deep void. The deep void in which Mister Pfister got stuck, that’s what I’m drawing, it’s obvious.
    Please cut it out and send it to me, Stella says. Write something comforting under it, maybe something botanical. As if the spiral were something beautiful, a plant.
    I will, Clara says. Already doing so.
    *
    Back then – in the apartment in the city, in the three rooms of which Clara had the left one, Stella the right one, and the middle room had only a sofa, the telephone and always a bunch of flowers – Clara had cut a poem out of the newspaper and hung it up on the apartment door. And the poem had stayed there until they moved out. The last line, as far as Stella can remember, was, Let everyone in, whoever may come.
    *
    Do you remember the title of the poem you hung up on our door?
    House Rules. The title of the poem was House Rules.
    Stella says, that’s right. House Rules. Now I remember. If you were here, it would still apply. I would have to let everybody in, and I would have let Mister Pfister come in too. Would have invited him into the kitchen and put a cold beer on the table for him.
    But Clara isn’t here, and without Clara the commandments of these House Rules are defunct. Mister Pfister seems to know this; perhaps it’s precisely because of this that he began to take note of Stella, Stella without Clara’s protection and apparently without Jason’s protection as well.
    Do you think I should let him in? Open the door for him and speak to him?
    No, Clara says slowly, and her voice sounds so earnest and profound that Stella suddenly becomes quiet. No, you should not let him in. Shouldn’t open the door for him, or talk to him either. You should look out for yourself. Stella. Will you do that?

Nine
    Now Mister Pfister comes by every day. He has figured out that Stella is trying hard not to be at home in the mornings, changing her shifts, starting them as early as possible, or being somewhere else; three times already she’s sat in a café in the pedestrian zone,