Kairos

by Jenny Erpenbeck

What’s her name? Katharina. And his? Hans.

Strange, she thinks, all these years a little bit of my life has gone on existing in this stranger’s head. And now he’s given it back to me.

She had only just been born when his first book appeared. He took his first steps under Hitler. What would a girl do with a book about death and dying? She thinks he doesn’t think she can read. And he thinks he’s afraid of being an old man in her young eyes.

Face-to-face with the man sitting opposite — a great happiness, a great unhappiness, and a question mark — she appreciates that this is the beginning of her life, for which everything so far has been mere preparation. He thinks she looks lovely even with her mouth full.

Good music is always appropriate,

I can only be a luxury for you, because I am a married man. I know, she says. Perhaps that won’t be enough for you, he says. I understand that. She looks him straight in the face, there is a ring of yellow around her pupils, he now sees. I’m not just married, I’m also in a relationship with a woman who works in radio. If you had a thousand women, she says, all that matters is the time that we get to spend together. How can he ever refuse her anything, if she doesn’t demand anything?

He pours her wine, white to go with her trout, and notices that a fish holds no terrors for her.

My grandfather used to take me fishing when I was little, she says. He has a sudden vision of her sitting on a pier, bare legs dangling, holding a fishing rod. The power of a simple sentence like that, he thinks. Makes you see something, whether you want to or not.

From now on, he thinks, the responsibility for their existence is entirely hers. He has to protect himself from himself. Maybe she’s a monster? She thinks, he wants to prepare me for difficult times ahead. He wants to protect me. Protect me from myself, and so he gives me the power of decision over us. He thinks, as long as she wants us, it won’t be wrong.

Didn’t she come this way only three days ago, in another life, only to run into him on the bus? The thought that everything might have come about differently if she’d left home ten minutes later, or not happened to have the exact change in the bookstore, that’s enough to make her head reel.

The mighty Danube separates the two cities of Buda and Pest,