“That’s why you were sad?”
“That’s the only reason, only because of you.”
“And what were you thinking?”
Marek shook his head.
“What’s wrong?”
“I was just looking at you. I just wanted to go on looking at you, the way you were standing there, short, blond, and very tired …”
“‘Short and blond and very tired’?”
“I thought, She’s so beautiful she has to be tired.”
“Why’s that?”
Marek lowered his head beneath her gaze. In front of him lay a half-eaten roll smeared with liverwurst. When the commercial for Höffner Furniture was over, Marek said, “If someone is beautiful, then she has a boyfriend, maybe a couple. And they’re constantly wanting something from her. And so she doesn’t get enough sleep. I mean — oh, you know what I mean.”
“That in just one night I—?”
“No!”
“But you just said that I spend my nights with various men—”
“Boyfriends. I said ‘boyfriends’—”
“With various boyfriends—”
“I’m sorry. Please, I didn’t mean it that way. Please forgive me.”
Magda took a deep breath and sat up straight. She didn’t have to say another word, he knew he had ruined everything and that he should leave now.
“But if I hadn’t asked about the restroom? If I’d just taken off before you opened the envelope?”
“I wouldn’t have let you leave.”
“I usually give the doorman stuff like that.”
“I would have called the doorman to tell him to keep you there. I would have followed you, would have jumped out the window …”
Magda wrapped her hair around one hand and put it in some kind of knot. “So we’re both dreaming the same dream?”
“Yes.”
“Has this ever happened to you before?”
“No. Never.”
“And does it go on and on?”
“Of course. Once it’s happened, it’s happened, it can’t go on any other way.”
“That would be lovely,” she said.
Marek didn’t understand why she was suddenly so sad. “Are you tired?” Nothing and no one would ever be able to separate him from her again — nothing and no one. He reached for her hand and said, “You know, nobody is going to believe this. Not this kind of good luck. They’ll think I’m pulling their leg.”
She smiled. “You don’t have to tell them.”
“I’m not going to.”
“It’s not allowed, not during the first week. The first week is sacred.”
“Sacred,” he said, and it sounded far more serious than he had intended.
“I’ll be waiting for you from six o’clock on, and I’ll wait and wait and — wait.”
“I’ll be waiting for you,” he quickly said. “I’ll be counting the minutes.”
“I’m superstitious,” she said. The sun was shining on her feet.
“Because it’s the thirteenth? But it’s Wednesday, nothing happens on Wednesdays. Besides, thirteen is a lucky number.”
“Definitely not.”
“But what about us … this morning … it was already the thirteenth.”
“This morning?”
“And on the thirteenth they’ve made me a member of the firm, on June 13, 2001.”
“Okay, fine, then it’s a lucky number,” she said. The alarm clock rang at that same moment.
When Marek stood up from the table, Magda followed him. He opened the shower stall and turned on the water. She was still standing beside him. He grabbed her nightshirt, and like an obedient child she raised her arms to let him pull it over her head. There was a mosquito bite on each shoulder. They entered the shower holding hands. He soaped her and rinsed her off, and then she laid her head on his chest, right next to the spot where the jet of water struck him. He couldn’t understand what she said. But a moment later he heard it quite clearly: “The curious Mr. Lawyer.”
Their hair still damp, they stepped out onto Nauny Strasse, and it felt like he was onstage, because everyone was looking at him — that is, first at Magda, then at him. But that wasn’t the reason. It was the sun. It was already so high that except for a narrow strip along the right edge of the sidewalk it cast no shadows.
At Kottbusser Tor he waved good-bye to Magda, and although normally it would have embarrassed and upset him to turn around every few yards and raise his arm with total strangers looking on, he now even walked part of the way backward. Nothing, nothing should be different, he didn’t want to miss a thing, not even the mosquito bites on her shoulders.
Marek walked up the stairs to the U1 el station. He looked about him like a tourist. Normally he took taxis. He didn’t have a car, not even a driver’s license. He had also never learned to swim, but nobody knew that.
Suddenly he had the feeling he had done everything right. Of course he regularly met with success, that was his job. But only through Magda had it all acquired meaning and significance.
Marek had been married once, as a student, but neither his marriage nor other relationships had lasted.
Marek found it depressing that he’d been unable to tell Magda anything other than that he loved her, that she was his lucky charm, and his darling, his one and only, and the most beautiful woman besides, and that he would love to have children with her — all statements he had used often before. He had wasted the words, abused them, worn them out, and now he could only repeat them for Magda, the only woman they were meant for.
As Marek came up out of the subway station at Uhland Strasse, a large Mercedes drove past. The guy on the passenger side was holding a Brazilian flag out the window.
He entered the building with its large-lettered rooftop sign: Baechler, Thompson & Partners. It was obvious that the letters had been braving wind and weather for three decades now.
“I thought you were in Hamburg?” cried Frau Ruth, the executive secretary, who looked at everyone as if she were gazing out over reading glasses. “Congratulations,” she said and went on sorting files.
“Thanks,” Marek said. The door to Baechler’s office was ajar, he cast a glance inside. Baechler was on the phone.
Marek still thought Baechler looked like Sky Dumont, and it had bothered him to watch Sky Dumont dance with Nicole Kidman in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut—as if he had caught Baechler cheating on his wife. Old man Baechler was so handsome it was like a cliché, just as he, Marek, was likewise a cliché—the opposite one. Marek knew that people here too called him crumb cake, pizza man, or just pimple face. Why should it be any different at Baechler’s, of all places, than it had been in school, in the army, in college, in law offices or restaurants? Strangely enough, after the first few iffy minutes, it proved an advantage with clients, as if someone who looked like him must be especially intelligent or talented to have been brought on board by the handsome Baechler.
Files clamped under her left elbow, Frau Ruth preceded him. She almost always wore a white blouse and something black to match her black or black-dyed hair. Marek’s father would have called her a woman who took good care of herself. But after being hired by Baechler, Thompson & Partners, Marek had barely been able to hide his astonishment upon learning that Frau Ruth’s daughter was only twelve. Marek considered Frau Ruth to be spiteful.
“Not in Hamburg?” Baechler exclaimed, leaning back in his chair but not offering him a seat. “Yes, my good man, hang together and get hanged together. Our heads are in the same noose now.”
“I wanted to thank you, Herr Doktor Baechler. I—”
“No need for that, none whatever.” Baechler waved his large liver-spotted hand adorned with a ring with a large black stone. “You know I’ve refused to do the same for my sons.”