Sorry Read Free

Did you think I’d be faithful to you?”
    The man spits at the woman’s feet, turns his back on her and leaves. The woman starts crying. She cries silently; the people react as people always do and look the other way. The children go on playing, and a dog barks excitedly at a pigeon, while an indifferent sun sees nothing it hasn’t seen a million times before.
    On days like this it should rain
, Kris thinks.
No one should split up with anyone while the sun’s shining
.
    When the woman looks up, she notices him on the park bench. She smiles embarrassedly, not wanting to display her sadness. Her smile reminds Kris of a curtain that he’s been allowed to glimpse behind for a second.
Nice, inviting
. He’s touched by her openness, then the moment is just as quickly over, the woman rubs the tears from her face and looks across the water as if nothing has happened.
    Kris sits down next to her.
    Later he will tell his brother that he didn’t know what he was doing. But that’s later. From here on it’s all very simple. It’s as if the words had always been in his head. Kris doesn’t have to search for them, he just has to say them out loud.
    He explains to the woman what’s just happened. He takes the bastard who cheated on her under his wing, and invents a difficult past for him. He talks about problems and childhood anxieties. He says:
    “If he could, he would do lots of things differently. He knows he’s screwing up. Let him go. How long have you known each other? Two months? Three?”
    The woman nods. Kris goes on.
    “Let him go. If he comes back, you’ll know it’s right. If he doesn’t come back, you can be glad it’s over.”
    As Kris is talking, he’s taking pleasure in his words. He can observe their effect. They’re like a calming hand. The woman listens attentively and says she wouldn’t have been sure what to think about the whole relationship.
    “Did he talk about me a lot?”
    Kris hesitates imperceptibly, then pays her compliments and says what you say to an insecure, twenty-three-year-old woman who will find her next lover without any great difficulty the very same week.
    Kris is good, he’s really good.
    “Even though he’ll never admit it,” he says at last, “you shouldn’t forget that he’s sorry. Deep inside he’s apologizing to you right now.”
    “Really?”
    “Really.”
    The woman nods contentedly.
    Everything starts with a lie and ends with an apology—even this morning here in the park. The woman doesn’t know who Kris Marrer is. She doesn’t even want to know how he knows the bastard who has just left her. And although she has no other connection with Kris, she asks him if he’d like to go for a drink. The woman’s pain is like a bridge that anyone can walk on, if they can summon up some compassion.
    Sometimes
, Kris thinks,
we’re so interchangeable it’s embarrassing
.
    “A glass of wine would do me good,” she says, smoothing her dress over her legs as if the dress were a reason to think about her offer. He sees her knees, he sees the red-painted toenails in the sandals. Then he shakes his head. He didn’t do this to get closer to the woman. He acted purely out of instinct. Perhaps it was the banal primal urge of the protector. Man sees woman, man wants to protect woman, man protects woman. Later Kris will reach the insight that he has pursued his vocation—he had an urgent need to apologize. Later one part will find the other and form one big whole. Later.
    Kris rests his hand on the woman’s and says, “Sorry, but I’ve got a date.”
    There’s her smile again, but it’s not tormented now; she understands Kris, she trusts him.
    “Another time,” he promises and stands up.
    She nods. It’s over. The pain of separation has vanished, because she has seen a glimmer of light. A nice man has opened her eyes. And so we leave the woman sitting alone on the grass, and leave the park with the nice man. We are on the way to his job. It will be his last working