The Left-Handed Woman Read Free

me.”
    After a while Bruno nodded slowly, raised his arms in a gesture of helplessness, and asked, “For good?”
    The woman: “I don’t know. All I know is that you’ll go away and leave me.” They stood silent.
    Bruno smiled and said, “Well, right now I’ll go back
to the hotel and get myself a cup of hot coffee. And this afternoon I’ll come and take my things.”
    There was no malice in the woman’s answer—only thoughtful concern. “I’m sure you can move in with Franziska for the first few days. Her teacher friend has gone away.”
    Bruno: “I’ll think about it over my coffee.” He went back to the hotel.
    In the long avenue leading out to the colony she took a hop step and suddenly started to run. At home she opened the curtains, switched on the record player, and started making dance movements even before the music began. The child appeared in his pajamas and asked, “What are you doing?”
    The woman: “I think I’m depressed.” And then, “Dress yourself, Stefan. It’s time for school. I’ll be making your toast in the meantime.” She went to the hall mirror and said, “Christ … Christ … Christ.”
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    It was a bright winter morning; the mist, which was breaking up, shed an occasional slow snowflake. Outside the school the woman met her friend Franziska, who was also Stefan’s teacher, a solidly built woman with short blond hair and a voice that made itself heard in the midst of any gathering, even when she wasn’t raising it. She was always expressing opinions, less from conviction than for
fear that her conversation might otherwise be thought trivial.
    The school bell had just begun to ring. Franziska greeted the child with a slap on the back and said to the woman as he vanished in the doorway, “I know all about it. Bruno phoned me right away. Do you know what I said to him? ‘At last your Marianne has woken up.’ Is that how you feel? Are you really serious?”
    The woman: “I can’t talk now, Franziska.”
    The teacher started into the building and called back, “Meet me at the café after school. I’m so excited.”
    The woman emerged from the dry cleaner’s carrying bundles; stood in line at the butcher’s; in the parking lot of the town supermarket stowed heavy plastic shopping bags in the back seat of her Volkswagen. Then, with still a bit of time to kill, she walked around the big, hilly park, past frozen ponds with a few ducks sliding about on them. She wanted to sit down somewhere, but the seats of all the benches had been removed for the winter. And so she stood looking at the cloudy sky. Some elderly people stopped near her, and they, too, looked at the sky.
    She met Franziska at the café; the child sat beside her reading a comic book. Franziska pointed at the book and said, “That duck is the only comic-book character I tolerate in my class. I even encourage my pupils to read his sad adventures. They learn more about real life from this eternal victim than they could from anyone else in this homeowner’s paradise, where all existence boils down to
imitating TV.” The woman and the child behind the comic book exchanged glances.
    Franziska: “And what will you do now that you’re on your own?”
    The woman: “Sit home biting my nails.”
    Franziska: “No, seriously. Is there someone else?”
    The woman only shook her head.
    Franziska: “What will the two of you live on? Have you thought of that?”
    The woman: “No. But I’d like to start translating again. At the publishing house where I used to work, they kept me busy with the foreign contracts. But when I left, the boss said I could do books. He’s been making me offers ever since.”
    Franziska: “Novels. Poems! Good God! I bet they’ll pay you twenty marks a page. Maybe three marks an