The Method Read Free

in?’
    ‘She’s always in,’ says Driss. ‘Well, at the moment, at least.’ She moves closer as if to impart a secret. ‘We hardly see her any more.’
    ‘What Driss means,’ Lizzie corrects her, ‘is that Frau Holl is taking a break from work.’
    ‘Ah, a holiday …’
    ‘Hardly,’ snorts Pollie. ‘Such a pretty girl and always up there by herself. The poor thing is trawling through possible matches.’
    ‘We think Frau Holl is looking for a partner,’ explains Lizzie knowingly.
    Kramer nods. ‘Thank you, ladies. Now if you’ll excuse me.’
    ‘Mia’s a decent person.’
    ‘Herr Kramer never thought otherwise. Honestly, Driss!’
    ‘This is a monitored house, remember!’
    ‘Thank you, ladies,’ says Kramer, exiting the circle. He nods to each in turn. ‘You’ve been most helpful. And congratulations on your impeccable house.’
    Their mouths are open but no one says anything as Kramer, long legs and elastic body, disappears up the stairs.

The Ideal Inamorata
     
    ‘SINCE LIFE,’ SAYS Mia, ‘is meaningless and yet you have to keep going, I sometimes feel like making sculptures out of copper pipes. I could weld them together and make a crane, or pile them up randomly like a nest of fossilised worms. Afterwards, I’d put them on a plinth and give them a name: “Temporary Structures” or “The Ideal Inamorata”.’
    Mia is sitting at her desk with her back to the room; from time to time she jots something down on one of the sheets of paper in front of her. Meanwhile, the ideal inamorata is reclining on the couch, clad in her beautiful hair and the light of the afternoon sun. We don’t know if she understands what Mia is saying or even if she can hear her voice because she doesn’t show any sign of listening or understanding. For all we know, the ideal inamorata may live in another dimension that borders on Mia’s world. Her gaze, as she stares into space, resembles the lidless stare of a fish.
    ‘I’d like to make something that will last,’ says Mia. ‘Something useless. Things with a purpose become redundant once their purpose is fulfilled. God’s purpose was to give us solace, and look what happened to him! So much for his being immortal. Am I making any sense?’
    The room is a mess. It looks as though no one has cleaned, tidied or aired the apartment for weeks.
    ‘Of course you know what I’m talking about; I was quoting Moritz. “Anyone interested in the eternal must abandon all notion of purpose, including the purpose of one’s continued presence on this earth,” he used to say.’
    When the ideal inamorata says nothing, Mia swivels round in her chair. ‘An artist, that’s what he said I should be. He was trying to provoke me. In his view, I was corrupted by science. How can you look at an object, let alone a person you love, if at the same time you’re thinking that everything – the viewer and the viewed, the world and everything in it – is just a mass of spinning atoms? How can you cope with knowing that the brain, our only way of seeing and understanding, is made of the same basic material as everything we see and know? What are we left with? A world of matter staring at itself. That’s how he put it.’
    The ideal inamorata’s relationship to matter is tenuous, which might be why Mia enjoys their conversations. She carries on talking without waiting for a response. ‘Science,’ she says, ‘destroyed the divine and shifted humankind to the heart of the action. It left us stranded without any answers in a position that’s patently absurd. Moritz said so all the time, and he was right. He and I had the same way of thinking; our conclusions were different, that’s all.’
    Mia points her pen at the ideal inamorata as if to accuse her of an unspecified crime.
    ‘He wanted to live his life for love. From the way he said it, love was just a word for anything he liked: love was nature, freedom, women, catching fish, hellraising. Being different. Hellraising.