Their breakup was already half a year behind them. Albert hadn’t expected that the mere thought of seeing her would stir up the desire for something that was officially in the past. It made him think of the warning you saw printed on the side-view mirrors of American-made cars: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.
The same thing applied to the past.
A year before, in the autumn of 2001, Albert had been sitting on the bus, reading the backs of heads. On a good, that is, a busy day, the selection would surely have been larger. But given the slim offering on hand, he began much as he did when watching TV: by flipping around. The asymmetrically shaved nape of the teen to his left simply bored him — it wasn’t evidence of a cheap hairdresser, an underprivileged family, rather the opposite: the homemade shave on either side of her lime-green hair was an expression of rebellion; she was probably on her way back from hanging around the provincial train station, frightening elderly people, flinging beer cans, and kissing the new Alsatian pup her daddy had bought her for Christmas.
And that woman whose little chignon resembled a puffy sandwich roll? How completely tickled she’d be if somebody plopped down in the seat beside her. To loosen her bun and let the long hair tumble free, how divine that would make her feel! She certainly didn’t have it easy, what with two kids and the house to look after, and her husband, whom she called “the old man” while talking on the phone with her girlfriends, just as her mother had done with her father. I certainly don’t have a smooth time of it, the tilt of her head declared, but what can I do, the world’s hard on me, I give it my all, but nobody’s interested, except maybe you — yes, you. Won’t you sit next to me and loosen my bun?
Albert yawned and pressed himself into his window seat in the last row so that he wouldn’t appear in the rearview mirror of the bus driver. Sheer habit. On this October 7, 2001, his last escape from Saint Helena was months behind him. There was no reason to run away any longer: he was of legal age, nobody could force him to stay there. But, as it is with things you’ve done for a long time, whether willingly or not, it was difficult to break a habit. To let himself appear in rearview mirrors, to deny himself chess duels with Sister Alfonsa, to forgo Sister Simone’s goulash or Fred’s newspaper report fixed to the upper slats of his stealthily squeaking bunk bed, would have been a violation of the rules of the past fifteen years of Albert’s life. The orphanage was his home — where else was he supposed to live? With Fred?
The bus pulled to a stop and Albert glanced away from the aisle, so as not to ruin his game if someone new should get on. Outside, a line had formed in front of a dry cleaner’s. Three of the waiting housewives carried IKEA bags filled to bursting. Nobody was chatting, they consulted their watches, they rolled their eyes: they weren’t happy. The bus drove on, and only then did Albert notice the small female head in the row before him. Dark-blond hair screened her neck and hid her ears. It was unusual for someone to sit directly in front of him. In his experience, people generally took the seat that would allow them to be as far as possible from their fellow riders. Someone should write a dissertation on that, he thought. The young woman was wearing a washed-out gray shirt with a soberly cut collar. She was doing something to her face with one hand. Gnawing her fingernails, applying lipstick, scratching her nose? No. She had a cell phone. Albert couldn’t tell what she was looking at on the tiny screen. Not texting, that was for sure, her thumbs weren’t moving. In 2001 not everyone in the Bavarian uplands had a cell phone. Her clothing suggested she could hardly have afforded a cell plan. It was more likely a gift from her not-especially-imaginative boyfriend for their one-year anniversary. If she were from the city she would have long since found herself a new man, but since the selection out in the country was humbler, she had to content herself with the kind of guy who compensates for lack of imagination with kindness. The only question was, how much longer? As soon as graduation was in the bag, and she’d enrolled at some Bavarian university, various fellow students would become keenly aware of her sassy way of tucking her naturally blond hair behind her ears. And said enticing fellow students would be in direct competition with her carpenter boyfriend, who expected nothing more from life than a solid mortgage and healthy offspring.
The bus hadn’t stopped, but the young woman stood up, and the way she was clutching the support strap scared Albert, since it meant she was going to twist her body to the left, that is, away from the exit, and toward him. Her gaze struck him like Sister Alfonsa’s when she caught him attempting to escape. Her face was shockingly beautiful. She came over and sat down beside him, blocking his escape route. How she managed to keep a straight face was a riddle to Albert. Seconds passed without her saying a word. Albert understood none of this, and therefore he didn’t like it.
“I’m going to Königsdorf, too,” she said.
Albert acknowledged this information in what was to him a reasonable fashion: he nodded. Under no circumstances would he show that she’d ruffled him, he’d play it cool, as if young women he’d never so much as set eyes on before sat next to him daily to make some disturbing communication or other. Albert was the observer, the head reader, he never lost his perspective.
“This is the part where you ask me how I know that you’re going to Königsdorf,” she said.
Albert turned to face her (making his appearance in the rearview mirror): “Or the part where I ask you to find another seat.”
“That would be unfriendly.”
“Frankness is like that, sometimes.”
“And what if I refused to go?”
“That would be even unfriendlier,” he said.
“But frank,” she said.
Albert tugged at his ear. He hadn’t counted on having to conduct an aimless, meandering Fred-dialogue before even reaching Königsdorf.
“My name is Violet.” She offered him her left hand, he reached out his right, and she took it in hers. “And you’re Albert.”
Albert often thought that he and Violet would never have gotten together if he’d known in the beginning all he found out about her in the course of time. The more she divulged about her life, so different from his own, the greater his fear grew that a relationship with her would never work out.
Once, when Violet was five years old, she’d been asked by her parents to use her fork when eating spaghetti, and she had replied: “Children, if you love your life, shun scissors, candle, fork, and knife.” At six she captured the attention of the grown-ups’ table with jokes about Honecker and Franz Josef Strauss. One year later she wrote a letter to George H. W. Bush, counseling him not to invade Iraq. Ever since childhood, Violet had been surrounded by an aura of self-confidence — it was as if she knew something no one else knew. Her first boyfriend put it like this: “What do you think, that the sun only rises for you?” He was immediately demoted to her first ex. Violet was the girl who asked questions that no other kid in the class would have dared to ask. She was the girl who never did anything just because she could, only because she thought it was right. She was the girl whom all the boys were intimidated by, and of whom they dreamed. She was the girl who played hooky to protest the Gulf War. She was the girl whose life, portioned out in videocassettes, filled a whole wall of shelves.