On the way home, she sat in the front, next to Manuel. It was a warm night, they had the roof of the 2CV down, as they drove back over the hill to the village. Manuel drew up in front of Andreas’s parents’ house. They said their good-byes. Fabienne leaned back between the seats and kissed Andreas on both cheeks. He stopped by the garden gate and watched the car disappear around the corner. Then he remained sitting on the front steps for a long time, smoking and thinking about Fabienne and his love for her.
When he next saw her, a couple of days later, she was different, still friendly but distant. They went swimming again, but Fabienne seemed to take care not to be alone with Andreas. Eventually the weather changed, and it got too cold to swim. Then they only saw each other with the rest of the group, going to the cinema or meeting in a restaurant. In the autumn, Fabienne returned to Paris, to study German. Andreas hadn’t gone to the station to see her off — why, he could no longer remember.
After Fabienne was gone, Andreas felt how little he and Manuel had in common. They saw each other once or twice still, but without Fabienne there, their meetings were boring.
He read the scene a second time. The footnotes explained those words that were not part of the basic vocabulary.
canaclass="underline" man-made waterway
alongside: next to, by the side of
kiss: two people pressing their lips together
At the end of the chapter there were some comprehension questions.
Why is Jens disappointed?
What do you know about Angélique?
Where is Schleswig-Holstein?
That time at the lake, Andreas felt glad that Fabienne had run away. He was in love with her, but for the time being that first kiss was enough for him, that first touch. In the ensuing weeks he sometimes imagined what would have happened if she had kissed him back. They would run into the forest together. They would hide in the undergrowth, take off their bathing suits. They would lie on the forest floor, which was warm and soft in Andreas’s imagination. Then Manuel would come calling for them, and they would hurriedly pull their bathing suits back on and stroll down to the lake, as though nothing had happened. Fabienne would look at Andreas, and smile. Manuel surely must have noticed what had happened, but Andreas didn’t care. In his imagination he felt strangely proud and solemn. They were all quiet on the drive back. Andreas sat in the back, studying Fabienne, her tanned neck, with little tiny, almost invisible hairs on it, her pink translucent ears, her pinned back hair. Through her T-shirt he could see the outline of her shoulderblades and the straps of her bra.
Fabienne’s beauty had always taken his breath away. It was the flawless beauty of a statue. He imagined his hands gliding over her body, which would be cool as bronze or smooth marble. In his projection, Fabienne had remained the young girl he had first met, and when he thought of her he felt as young and inexperienced as he had been at the time. He couldn’t imagine Fabienne sweaty or tired, or aroused, or in a temper. He couldn’t imagine her naked.
In the winter after Fabienne’s departure, Andreas’s mother died of breast cancer. She had known she was sick for some time, but she had first concealed it from the family, and then played it down. Even when she had only a little time to live, she still pretended everything was OK. The atmosphere in the house was unbearable, and finally Andreas rented a room in the city, and came home only at weekends. He would usually arrive after lunch on Saturday, and go straight up to his room. He said he had to work. Then he would lie on his bed and read his old children’s books, and only come down for supper. After supper, he disappeared as quickly as possible into the village, to meet friends. He drank too much, and when he came home late at night, drunk, he would sometimes run into his mother, who was unable to sleep. She was standing in the kitchen, swallowing some homeopathic remedy that she tried to keep him from seeing. She would say good night, and pad down the dark corridor to her bedroom, but, once Andreas was in bed, he could hear her getting up again and restlessly pacing about the house.
In those months he started going out with Manuel’s younger sister, Beatrice, who worked as a teller at the Canton Bank, and had just broken up with her boyfriend. The relationship lasted just six months. Beatrice was still living with her parents, who were religious people and wouldn’t have allowed Andreas to spend the night with their daughter. Sometimes, Beatrice visited him in the city, but she never wanted to stay over. Andreas said she was legal, but she shook her head and said, no, she couldn’t do that to her parents. She let him undress her to her underwear, then she said she wasn’t ready yet, she wanted to get to know him a bit better first. Even when she touched him, Andreas thought she didn’t really want to, and it was just to please him. Eventually he had enough. He called her at the bank and said he didn’t want to see her anymore. She said she was working, and wasn’t able to talk, and he said there was nothing to talk about, and hung up. After that he didn’t answer the phone for a week. He saw Beatrice at his mother’s funeral. She had come with Manuel. The two of them offered him their condolences, and they exchanged a few meaningless sentences. Years later, Andreas heard that Beatrice had got back together with her ex, and married him.
During his time with Beatrice, he started writing letters to Fabienne. He had thought about her a lot after her going away, and sometimes when he was lying on the bed with Beatrice, he shut his eyes and imagined it was Fabienne beside him. From that time, she had accompanied him through all his relationships. She was always there, as a shadow, fading a little over time, but never quite disappearing.
Andreas went into the kitchen to make some tea. Then he lay down on the sofa, and started reading the little book from the beginning.
The love between Angélique and Jens was almost as chaste as that between him and Fabienne. Sex did not play any part in the basic vocabulary, and Jens appeared more interested in the beauty of Schleswig-Holstein than in Angélique’s. He drove her around the area in his old Beetle, showed her the Viking museum at Haithabu and the famous Bordesholm altar in Schleswig, and walked along the North Sea-Baltic Canal with her, one of the most important waterways of the world, as he explained to her. He kissed her for the first time on the Rendsburg ferry, and then they went on excursions even further afield. A visit to Lübeck gave Jens the opportunity to deliver himself of the stupidest sentence on Thomas Mann that Andreas had ever read. He turned over a few pages, and it was fall. The date of Angélique’s departure was moving nearer, casting its dark shadow on the young happiness. Just as Jens was on his way to the station to say good-bye to Angélique, and promise to visit her in Paris, his car developed another problem, and by the time he finally got to the station, all he could see of her train were its two taillights. Foolishly, the two of them hadn’t even exchanged addresses, and for a couple of pages it looked as if they would never see each other again. But then Jens managed to get a place to study in Paris. In the spring, he set off after Angélique, and only a few days later, by a wildly improbable coincidence, he met her strolling down the Champs-Elysées. A happy ending in spring light, a jerky pen-and-ink sketch of bliss.
The story was implausible and badly written, but it had extraordinary parallels to Andreas’s own. He too had set off in pursuit of Fabienne, though only after two years. They had exchanged letters that whole time. Andreas had never referred explicitly to the kiss by the lake, but his letters had been full of hints. Fabienne must have sensed what he felt for her.