"I was a very good little girl," she said, almost laughing, "I lied."
I knew what she was talking about: the very thing I wanted to know more about, for knowledge of these unnamed but important facts meant time and a chance to get away, but I couldn't ask her about them without giving myself away.
But she, too, was in flight, and betraying me would have meant betraying herself as well; still, she would have liked me to be grateful.
I, however, wanted to vanish from my present life without leaving a trace, not even a telltale, breathless, inquisitive question from which those who remained behind could afterward surmise my real intentions; I wanted to leave nothing behind but a traceless void.
She understood all this, though she couldn't really know what she understood, and though I wasn't going to deny her my gratitude, I had to pull away a little to see all this on her face.
Yes, it was all there, but I was wrong about her laughing, in fact she was crying.
With my tongue I lapped up her large teardrops, and was glad I could show my gratitude in such a simple way, and when I drew her to me once more, the strange feeling of a moment ago, that we were not alone, simply melted away.
But this feeling made me realize what deadly silence reigned in the room, indeed in the entire hotel, and that the soundless light streaming through the window came from an infinite silence.
It occurred to me that the valet had already been taken away.
Later she whispered something about having come only to say goodbye, they were leaving.
I'm going home, too, I lied, but it wouldn't look right if we traveled together, I added.
No need to worry about that, she said, breathing hotly down my neck as if we were exchanging words of love; they'll go to Kühlungsbronn first, and will probably spend a few days there before returning to their estate in Saxony.
After so many years, with a very different sort of life behind me, a respectable life free of dangerous passion and excesses, what shame prevents me still from describing our farewell?
It was as if we had to part not from each other — that we wanted to do most anxiously, to get away, and the quicker and farther the better — but from him, we had to take gentle leave of the one who was staying behind.
She didn't give me away, she lied for me, something I'm not at all sure I would have done in her place, and for this reason, even in this situation, in this impossible parting, she had to be the stronger.
She pushed me away and stepped back; I could say we were looking at each other, but what we both did was to look at him in each other.
By drawing apart we left him too big a space between us, it made him loom too large.
Flustered and stammering, not knowing how we could get around him, get around someone who was growing larger and larger between us, not to mention his corpse still lying on the other side of the wall, I said that maybe I ought to go and say goodbye to her mother; I thought that if we left the room together, we could somehow shake off his lingering presence, but in response, something so sharply painful flashed in her eyes that one could justifiably call it hatred, hatred and reproach, reproach for using such a poor alibi to get away from the dead, but hatred, too, because at the same time I'd also be pushing her away, who was still alive; I had to stay.
But staying meant the hopeless intermingling of the living and the dead.
And then she smiled, the way a mature woman smiles at the blundering of her child.
After a little while she took off her hat, slowly pulled off her gloves, threw hat and gloves on the table, stepped closer to me, and with those fingers touched my face.
"Silly, how very silly you are!"
I said nothing.
"It's only natural," she said, and while instinctively responding to her advance, I felt on my hands that the face I was touching was not the face of the woman I loved and to whom I was about to make love; I was holding the woman that he, the dead man, had loved, and would keep on loving; even now he loved her through me, by reaching into me, into my hands and my body, just as this woman wasn't touching me directly.
No more words passed between us; what's more, we had no more moves and gestures of our own, everything was his.
With measured and dignified slowness we consummated his time for him, and for this long hour, whose every minute was sober and serene, even the specter of Hans the murderer had vanished.
As if responding to some inner upheaval, our pupils widened and narrowed; we were staring at death through the alluring veils of each other's eyes.
After she got dressed, pulled on her gloves, arranged her hair in front of the mirror, and put on her hat, she turned around once more to look at me, as if to say that if I wished, I could now say goodbye to her mother.
But after what we had done in that long hour, a polite goodbye would have made no sense; it was best to leave everything just the way it was.
I may have shaken my head, or she may have guessed my thought and agreed.
She lowered her veil over her face and walked out.
The following night, standing at the window of my speeding train, I was looking out to see — for I did want to see — my departure forever from the part of the earth that others, more fortunate or less fortunate than myself, called their homeland.
It was a dark, foggy winter night, and of course I couldn't see anything.
No More
I am a rational man, perhaps too rational. I am not inclined to any form of humility. Still, I would like to copy my friend's last sentence onto this empty page. Let it help me finish the job no one's commissioned me to do, which should make it the most personal undertaking of my life, the one closest to my heart.
It was a dark, foggy winter night, and of course I couldn't see anything.
I don't think he meant this to be his last sentence. There is every indication that the next day, as usual, he would have continued his life with a new sentence, one that could not be predicted or inferred from the notes he left behind. Because the novel of a life, once begun, always offers an invitation: Come on, lose yourselves in me, trust me, in the end I may be able to lead you out of my wilderness.
My role is merely that of a reporter.
I begin, then, my voice choking, with the fact that it must have been around three o'clock in the afternoon. That's when he usually stopped working. It was a bright, cloudless, summerlike late September afternoon. He got up from his desk. Outside, the old garden that had thinned out in the August heat was now slumbering peacefully. Now and then, through the sparsely grown tree branches and bushes, he could catch a glimpse of the shining dark river. The unusually narrow, vaulted windows of the house were framed by creeping vines, their yellow and red berries ripened by the sun at this time of the year. Lizards and the various insects that made their home in the clinging vines were now basking in the sun or cooling themselves under the shady leaves. He described something like this in the first chapter of his memoir, and he must have seen something like this on that day, too. Later, he had a bite to eat, exchanged some pleasantries with my aunts in the kitchen, then tucking the morning paper and the day's mail under his arm and throwing a thick towel over his shoulder, he went down to the Danube.
Two mangled legs, a crushed-in chest, and a cracked skull. That's all that was left of him, that's what they brought back.
So, without attaching any symbolic significance to it, the sentence quoted above was the last of an eight-hundred-page manuscript. It was left to me, though I am not his legal heir.