The blind side of the heart - By Julia Franck Page 0,62

the time. Do you remember how we danced half the night away in our attic? You sweet, dear girl, I’m with you so often in my thoughts. It goes to my heart to think I won’t be able to come and see you this Christmas! Lorenz won’t hear of it. He thinks it would be an unnecessary expense; after all, he says, my father is comfortable with my sister Mimi’s family and no one at home misses me. Lorenz always has to be in the right, of course. Nothing he says ever admits the faintest doubt. I tell you, he ought to have been a lawyer. He’d have been really at home in the law courts. Our domestic life together isn’t comfortable, not with the righteous glances he gives the world, narrowing his eyes like a lizard’s. You can imagine how the things he says annoy me. I could always contradict him, but then I suddenly find I couldn’t care less about his remarks, and I usually leave the room and even the house without answering him. He loves to have the last word – well, he’s left alone with it more and more often. Does that satisfy him? Luckily we don’t see much of each other. He sleeps in the library and every morning I tell him his snoring can be heard all over the house. I wish that were so, but to tell you the truth he snores as little as you and I. However, I’d rather have him sleeping at the other end of the apartment so that we meet as little as possible. I’m going to the theatre with Antonie this evening. The Terra Cinema in Hardenbergstrasse has closed and a theatre’s going to be opened there in October instead. The production of Miss Sara Sampson is famous all over the city. I’m sure Lucie Höflich must be simply wonderful as Marwood. But why do I tell you these things, my dearest, when you’ve never seen her on the stage? What wouldn’t I give to be going to the theatre with you this evening. Don’t be jealous, my sweet honey-tongued love. Antonie’s getting married in April, she says she’s very much in love. I saw her fiancé at a distance once, he didn’t look exactly elegant – a burly, broad-shouldered fellow! Just the opposite of delicate, pretty Antonie. How did Helene’s exams go? Give my love to the little one. Love and kisses to you, from Leo.

She signed it just Leo, like a man’s name, with a long inky curve hinting at the rest of the name, but it was certainly Leontine’s handwriting. Helene did not show that she had read Leontine’s letter to Martha, but now, days later, when the girls sat face to face over Aunt Fanny’s invitation, with Martha crying over it and laughing for joy the next moment, Helene was sure there was nothing Martha would rather do than pack a suitcase at once and leave for Berlin, to stay there for ever. In fact, Bautzen had a large railway station of its own, but what did that matter? Helene often went to meet her professor’s colleagues there on his behalf, other doctors and professors from all over Germany, and Bautzen station couldn’t properly be called provincial. Railway carriages built in the carriage factory here were sent halfway round the world, and some of them must certainly go to Berlin. However, Aunt Fanny couldn’t be blamed for thinking of Bautzen as a village and she showed extraordinary generosity with those first-class tickets. To think that neither Martha nor Helene had even been on a train at all!

One afternoon in January, when darkness had already fallen, the professor of surgery asked young Nurse Helene to come to his consulting room. He told her he intended to go to Dresden for a week in March. He was meeting colleagues at the university there, he said, they were planning a jointly written book on the latest developments in medicine. He asked Helene if she would go with him. It would be to her advantage, he said. He didn’t want to hold out too many hopes, he added to the fifteen-year-old, but he could imagine her as his assistant some day. Her nimble fingers on the typewriter and her knowledge of shorthand impressed him. She was clever and gifted, he would feel it an honour to take her to his meeting with his academic colleagues. He expected she’d never been in a motor car, had she?