The Girl Who Wasn't There Read Free

Sebastian the skin, cartilage, bones and nerves in this diagram. Perhaps the skin of his ears was too thin, the doctor suggested. Gleaming chrome instruments lay on his desk; they were cold, and hurt when they were pushed into his ailing ear. Sebastian thought of the cook at home, who used to make him compresses of finely chopped onions to cure the pain. She said that onions made you cry, but they could do you good as well. The cook would sit on his bed and tell him about Tunisia, the spices on sale in the markets of the Medina quarter, the desert lynx that had ears with tufts like paintbrushes, and the heat of the Saharan wind that she called the
chehili
.
    In the dark months at the boarding school, when books were no longer enough for him, when the nursery garden, the sports field and the benches were covered with snow, the colours in Sebastian’s head were his salvation.

4
    It was the first day of the long summer holidays. Sebastian had hardly slept. They set off for the game preserves at four in the morning. It had been raining overnight: the meadows were damp; earth stuck to their gumboots and weighed them down. Sebastian’s father was carrying his double-barrelled shotgun over his shoulder. The stock rubbed against his loden coat where the fabric had worn thin with the years. The roses and gold lines of the English engravings on it were hardly visible, the stock itself was almost black. The loden coat smelled of rabbits and tobacco. Sebastian thought of the gun that his father had promised him when he took his hunting examination. He could take it when he was seventeen, so there wasn’t long to wait.
    He liked walking with his father. Hunting is a serious business, his father had often said, and Sebastian knew what he meant. It was different only when they were out on a shoot with beaters. Then there was potato soup in the yard of the hunting lodge, and it was all rather noisy. Often there were new guests, ‘wild boar piglets’ as the beaters secretly called them. They wore new coats and had new guns. The wild boar piglets were taken to special places where they couldn’t do any harm with their guns. They talked all the time, even when they were waiting for game to turn up. They talked about their work in the city, or about politics or something else, and Sebastian knew that they didn’t understand hunting. Later, when the kill was laid out in front of the hunting lodge, the animals were dead and dirty. Sebastian stopped going on shoots like that. But when they were alone, and his father hardly spoke, the forest and the game belonged to them, and there was nothing dirty and nothing wrong about it.
     
    They climbed to the hide and waited until the morning mist had dispersed. When the roebuck came out into the clearing, Sebastian’s father gave him the field glasses. The deer was a fine six-point stag, he was tall and proud, and very beautiful. ‘We have plenty of time,’ Sebastian’s father whispered. Sebastian nodded. It was early August, and the close season wouldn’t begin until mid-October. He wondered why his father had a gun with him at all if he wasn’t going to use it. But then he thought that later on he would always bring his gun with him too.
    His father produced a cigar from his cigar case; the leather was stained and old, just as everything that his father owned was old. From here they could see far down into the valley, to the tower of the village church, and on a clear day even further, all the way to the Alps. Later on, Sebastian would recall every detail: the cigar smoke, the smell of resin and wet wool, and the wind in the trees.
    They took turns with the field glasses, which were so heavy that Sebastian had to prop his elbows on the crossbeam of the hide. They watched the roebuck for a long time.
     
    Then his father briefly took aim and fired. They clambered down from the hide, and Sebastian ran across the clearing. The deer’s forelegs looked as if he were still trying to run, they