Unusual Uses for Olive Oil Read Free Page B

wrote and announced that he was coming to visit her because he had to be in Regensburg for some reason or other. He turned up and asked for room fifty-two – or whatever it was – and they directed himto it. Then he realised that he had been corresponding for some time with a complete stranger.’
    The Librarian paused, allowing the full impact of the story to sink in.
    ‘And so?’ said von Igelfeld.
    ‘They became very good friends. He decided that he rather preferred this Inge to the other one and they continue to write to one another to this day. He sends her books and magazines, and she has knitted a whole set of very attractive bathroom accessory covers for him. My aunt showed me a picture of one of these – it was very beautifully worked, I must say.’
    Von Igelfeld rose to his feet. ‘I must dash, Herr Huber,’ he said. ‘As usual, it has been a great pleasure talking to you.’
    ‘We could continue later, over lunch if you wish, Herr von Igelfeld,’ said the Librarian, also rising to his feet. ‘That is, if you are free.’
    ‘I am not,’ said von Igelfeld. There were limits to the comity one had to show colleagues, and these had been reached, indeed had been exceeded, even before the conversation had come to an end. Besides, he had letters to write. The mistake that he had uncovered could not be left unchallenged. If there had been confusion, then it would have to be dispelled, painful though that duty might prove to be.
    * * *
    He travelled to Berlin by train, enduring a journey that could have been pleasant had it not been for the annoying conversation of his fellow travellers, some of whom insisted on talking on the telephone at great length about matters of a most personal nature. Von Igelfeld’s stares of disapproval were met with a blank response from a woman who spent at least fifteen minutes describing an operation for ingrowing toenails and the difficulties she had had with her insurance company over the resulting claim. Why should they pay such a claim, von Igelfeld asked himself. It was nobody’s fault that her toenails had grown in; or, if there were fault, then surely it would be her own, for not cutting them correctly in the first place. That was the trouble these days; nobody was prepared to accept responsibility for anything, not even for the state of their toenails.
    By the time the train drew into the Hauptbahnhof von Igelfeld felt in a thoroughly bad mood. Berlin, however, lifted his spirits, with its wide skies, its architecture and its air of being at the centre of something. This was undoubtedly a place where power was exercised and decisions were taken, even if some of these decisions, as in the case of Unterholzer’s nomination, were unfortunate ones. Well, if Berlin was a physical metaphor for decisions, then it was also a metaphor for the confrontation and rectifying of past mistakesand wrongs. There had been the horrors and moral disaster of the thirties, followed by the pain and penitence of the forties and fifties. These had been followed by the monstrous mistake of the Wall, and again that had been rectified by that structure’s dismantling. Wrongs, rectification, renewal: a mantra we might all commit to memory, he thought.
    The offices of the Leonhardt Stiftung, the body in charge of the prize, were not far from the main campus of the Freie Universität. Von Igelfeld was familiar with the university, as he had recently given a seminar at the Languages of Emotion Centre, or Cluster of Excellence as it was now called. That was not a very modest way of describing oneself, he had thought at the time. One might be excellent – indeed his institute in Regensburg was undoubtedly excellent – or largely excellent, if one left Unterholzer out of the equation – but that did not mean to say that they should change their name from the Institute of Romance Philology to the Cluster of Excellence of Romance Philology. How ridiculous people had become, he thought, in their