Blood on Snow Read Free Page B

member of Hoffmann’s family, but I could see them in my mind’s eye as I sat there looking into the apartment on the other side of the street. I liked looking in on other people. Always had done. So I did what I always did, and imagined family lifein there. A nine-year-old son, home from school, sitting in the living room reading all the strange books he’d taken out from the library. The mother singing quietly to herself as she prepared dinner in the kitchen. The way mother and son tense for a moment when there’s a noise from the door. Then how they suddenly relax when the man in the hall calls out “I’m home!” in a clear, cheerful voice, and they run out to greet him and give him a hug.
    While I was sitting there immersed in happy thoughts, Corina Hoffmann walked into the living room from the bedroom, and everything changed.
    The light.
    The temperature.
    The calculations.
    —
    That afternoon I didn’t go to the supermarket.
    I didn’t wait for Maria the way I sometimes did, I didn’t follow her to the underground at a safe distance, I didn’t stand right behind her inthe crowd in the middle of the train, where she always liked to stand even if there were empty seats. That afternoon I didn’t stand there like a madman, whispering things to her that only I could hear.
    That afternoon I sat bewitched in a darkened room, staring at the woman on the other side of the street. Corina Hoffmann. I could say whatever I wanted, as loudly as I wanted—there was no one to hear me. And I didn’t have to look at her from behind, look at her hair so hard that I managed to see a beauty in it that wasn’t actually there.
    Tightrope-walker. That was the first thing I thought when Corina Hoffmann walked into the room. She was wearing a white terry-cloth dressing gown, and she moved like a cat. By that I don’t mean that she ambled along like some mammals do, cats and camels, for instance. Moving both legs on one side before moving the others. Or so I’ve heard. What I mean is that cats—if I’ve got this right—walk on tiptoe, and that they put their back paws on the same spot as their frontpaws. That was what Corina was doing. Setting her naked feet down with her ankles straight, and putting the second foot down close to the first. Like a tightrope-walker.
    Everything about Corina Hoffmann was beautiful. Her face, with its high cheekbones, Brigitte Bardot lips, her blonde, mussed-up, glossy hair. The long, thin arms emerging from the wide sleeves of the dressing gown, the tops of her breasts, so soft that they moved as she walked and when she breathed. And the white, white skin of her arms, face, breasts, legs—bloody hell, it was like snow glittering in sunlight, the way that can make a man snow-blind in just a few hours. Basically, I liked everything about Corina Hoffmann. Everything except her surname.
    It looked like she was bored. She drank coffee. Talked on the phone. Leafed through a magazine, but ignored the newspapers. She disappeared into the bathroom, then came out again, still wearing the dressing gown. She put a record on, and danced along to it rather half-heartedly. Swing, it looked like. She had something to eat.Looked at the time. Almost six. She changed into a dress, fixed her hair and put a different record on. I opened the window and tried to hear, but there was too much traffic. So I picked up the binoculars again and tried to focus on the record-sleeve that she’d left on the table. It looked like there was a picture of the composer on the front. Antonio Lucio Vivaldi? Who knows? The point is that the woman Daniel Hoffmann came home to at quarter past six was a completely different one from the woman I had spent the whole day with.
    They skirted around each other. Didn’t touch each other. Didn’t talk to each other. Like two electrons pushing away from each other because they’re both negatively charged. But they ended up behind the same bedroom door.
    I went to bed, but couldn’t