“Your turn will come later,” Claudia whispered, kissed me on the mouth, tugged at her sweater, adjusted her skirt, cast a glance with raised eyebrows at her reflection in the mirror, and unlocked the door.
I sat down on the toilet or, better, sank onto the lid and stared at the diamond pattern in the tiles at my feet. Claudia’s intrusion — or attack — hadn’t lasted five minutes. I could still feel her body against my chest, fuzz balls from her sweater were stuck to my left hand. I could probably have gone on sitting there like that if a man hadn’t burst in, but then beat such a hasty retreat that all I saw of him was a gray suit and a burgundy tie.
I washed my hands and face again, inspected the damp spot Claudia’s lips had left on my jacket, and then also discovered the little pile of folded towels in a wall inset and the basket for used ones below it. Determined to step firmly with head held high, I left the bathroom.
Ute was still carrying on a conversation with Renate. Claudia was sitting on the couch next to Julia and waved me over. “She looks totally different now,” Julia said, while I examined a photograph of Alina. “Where,” I asked, “did she get that hair from?”
“Obviously not from me!” Julia plucked the picture from my fingers and stored it in her wallet. I had to be careful, I no longer had myself under control. Claudia said that now that train service had been discontinued, it took almost a whole day to get to the village where Julia’s mother lived. I asked Julia if she had a car and if her parents had gotten divorced.
“My father died a year and a half ago,” Julia said, and smiled at me.
When Marco came around pouring red wine, I held an orphaned glass out to him and then drank it down at once.
Suddenly there was Fritz. He wedged himself in between me and the arm of the sofa.
“He’s older than Alina,” Julia said.
“By two years at the most,” I said. Julia laid a hand on my knee but then immediately took it away again.
Marco sat down across from us and talked and talked. Since he told it several times, the only story I remember is the one about the whiskey: It was in the garden of the villa that belonged to the same actor we all were waiting for. They were lying in lounge chairs drinking whiskey. “The carton it came in was beside my chaise,” Marco explained. “When I tried to put the bottle back, it didn’t fit, it stuck up a little. I tried three or four times, so I forced it down in, hard.” Marco made a motion as if screwing something into the floor. “When I take the whiskey out again the next evening, there’s something sticking to the bottle.” Marco pretended he had a bottle in his hands. He felt the bottom of the bottle with his fingertips and cried in triumph, “A squashed toad!” Claudia, who had listened the whole time on the edge of her seat, burst into a snort of laughter.
People were still laughing as a man in a gray suit sat down on the coffee table, raised his glass, and called out to Marco: “Here’s to your not being let go!” I took it for a joke, but Marco turned to stone and Claudia set her glass down. This did not prevent the tall guy from finishing off his wine in several quick swallows. His shirt collar stuck out from under his jacket, which drew your eyes to his pointy, bobbing Adam’s apple. Then, as if making a crucial move in a game of chess, he put his glass down among ours. With a smack of his lips he stood up and left the room.
Claudia’s friend Sabine, who probably wasn’t the woman from the night before after all, said she hadn’t been able to arrange for a taxi before three o’clock. She said that on a night like this money was no issue, but that she herself wouldn’t work tonight, not for all the world, because nothing could compare to a change of millennia. Julia asked what she would be paying the cabbie tonight, twice or three times the usual?
Somehow everything seemed to go off track. Later on Julia started making one weird remark after the other. It used to be, she declared, that we at least got something of an education in comparison with schools nowadays. At one point she mentioned her father, too, and it sounded as if financial difficulties had put him in his grave. Marco said that she should be glad that she could finally live in freedom, and Claudia’s colleague Sabine added that she wouldn’t give up her freedom for anything now.
“Which freedom do you mean?” Julia asked, which brought Marco to his feet. Shaking his head, he made for the buffet.
It wasn’t till Ute was standing in front of me that I realized Fritz had fallen asleep under my arm. Ute extended a hand to Julia. Since this required a slight bend of the knees, it looked as if she were curtsying to greet her. Claudia introduced her two good friends to each other.
There wasn’t time now to take Fritz back to our place. So I left him on the couch and helped Marco open the champagne. One after another the guests found their way up the narrow spiral staircase to the penthouse, where the door to the terrace stood open.
At midnight I toasted with Ute, I toasted with Julia. I toasted with Claudia, I toasted with last night’s doppelgänger and her husband, I even wished the tall guy in the gray suit a “Happy New Year!” Ute and I went back downstairs to wake up Fritz so he could watch the fireworks, or at least what could be seen of them in the haze.
After that I had to assist Marco and Dennis. Although we kept firing off several rockets at once, it soon got too cold or too boring for our audience out on the terrace. I wanted to go downstairs as well, where people were dancing now. Ute took Fritz back to our place.
Julia was dancing alone. Again and again our eyes met. When she left the room — Julia still had that same unique walk she’d always had — I took it as an invitation. She was waiting just outside the kitchen for me. I took her by the hand and opened a door at the end of the hallway — the master bedroom. It was cold and smelled, to put it politely, unaired. We embraced, we kissed, I stroked the back of her neck.
My life was suddenly like an equation that’s easily solved. What I was doing now seemed to be automatically derived from what I had always dreamed, as if I no longer had any need of my will, or my courage. I was caught up in the feeling of having come to the end, having achieved finality — and all was well.
“I didn’t know,” Julia whispered, “that you were married.”
“I’m not married,” I said and noticed the narrow band of light coming from the door and falling across the unmade bed and nightstand with two lumps of Ohropax on it.
“It’s the same thing, you live together.”
We held each other tight, two actors at a rehearsal, waiting for the director’s instructions. I even attempted to slide my hand inside Julia’s blouse, but quickly gave up.
“I’m leaving now,” Julia said. We kissed one more time and returned to the living room together.
It took a while for Julia to say her good-byes. Claudia saw her to the door.
When after a good while Ute had not yet returned, I was pretty sure she had decided to stay with Fritz.
Claudia asked me to dance. It didn’t take me long to get into the swing of things.
I couldn’t remember the last time I had danced.
Sabine, Claudia’s favorite colleague, didn’t budge from my side. Surprisingly, she danced in a lumbering sort of way, just kept repeating the same moves, no matter what the music. Claudia on the other hand was a wonderful dancer, she must have taken lessons. Marco was fairly drunk. He bad-mouthed the actor who had never showed, and soon vanished into the bedroom.
Once she started to dance Claudia evidently no longer saw herself as a hostess. She stopped seeing people to the door and helping them find their coats.