The blind side of the heart - By Julia Franck Page 0,91

here and she was too delicate for him to allow it.

Martha was very happy to know that Helene had a boyfriend, so that she herself could live even more openly with Leontine. But it was as if Carl Wertheimer’s appearance had robbed the sisters of their conversations. They no longer had anything to say to each other. Aunt Fanny’s apartment, which she had liked so much until now, seemed to Helene more and more unwelcoming every day. That was not so much because Fanny was taking one object after another to the pawnbroker’s, first the little samovar which, she said, she didn’t like as much as the big one, then the picture by Lovis Corinth, which she claimed she’d never liked – she had always felt the young woman with the hat repellent, she said, she’d rather have had his self-portrait with a skeleton – and finally the gramophone went; there was no denying the value of the gramophone, or the fact that she really did like it.

On many days Fanny sat with Erich on her little veranda at noon, arguing over plans for the day. When he rose to his feet because he’d had enough of her and would rather spend the rest of the day without her, she called after him in a loud voice that carried all over the ground-floor apartment: I wish I could feel an infatuation! Take me by storm, somebody!

It sounded both pleading and derisive, and Helene took care not to cross either Erich’s or Fanny’s path. She closed the door to her room. How sweet the hours she used to spend alone in the apartment had once been. But it seemed they were gone for ever, because whenever Helene came home someone was bustling about in the kitchen, someone else was shouting down the telephone, or sitting on the chaise longue and reading.

You don’t love me! The words rang through the rooms. Helene couldn’t help overhearing; the silence knew no mercy, it followed the long, slow, apparently never-ending definition of Fanny’s conjecture. Helene hurried along the corridor on tiptoe when she had to go to the bathroom. Only when Fanny was lying on the floor, claiming that she couldn’t live without love, did Erich reach his hand down to her. He pulled her up from the floor and pushed her into her bedroom ahead of him. Helene counted up her savings; they wouldn’t even rent an attic room for a month. The books for her classes were expensive, and Fanny made it clear that she couldn’t afford the money any more. Helene should be glad to have had the first two years of her course paid for her, she said; Fanny’s money was running out and, sad to say, she didn’t know what to do about it. Helene had stopped bringing drugs home from the pharmacy; it had proved impossible to forge a bond of confidence between her and her aunt, and Fanny’s kindness to Helene was wearing a little thin too. Sometimes Helene came into the apartment, Otta took her coat and Helene went into the living room to say hello to Fanny, but Fanny either did not look up from her book or pretended to be fast asleep, although a glass of steaming tea stood beside the chaise longue.

Nights in her narrow bed beside Leontine and Martha were a torment, since the pair never seemed to tire of their love and their lust. The Baron had begun writing Helene anxious letters. He saw her so seldom now, he said, his heart was both bleeding and freezing. His life was a poor thing without her. But the object of his affections did not reply. After her original bafflement in the face of his expectations, and his announcement of a love she did not share, Helene took to putting the letters she found pushed under the door of her room inside the lid of the big trunk that stood under her bed, still unopened. A first attempt by two Junkers to fly from Europe to America over the Atlantic had failed in August; the autumn storms and winter clouds were regarded as insuperable obstacles, so the next attempt to fly the Atlantic was postponed until spring. Carl and Helene were alone in waiting no longer.

Carl took Helene to the State Opera House, Unter den Linden. They heard Schreker’s The Singing Devil and stood applauding for twenty minutes, although shrill whistling from elsewhere in the audience rang in their ears, and while Helene’s hands