The blind side of the heart - By Julia Franck Page 0,95
day, Helene had been spending her nights in Carl’s room. She sometimes did go to Achenbachstrasse, and was relieved to see that Martha seemed better now. Leontine had spent days on end shut away with her. It seemed that Martha had been ill, delirious and in pain, the mirror with the lily-patterned rim above the washstand was cracked, bedclothes had been torn and drenched with sweat in the morning, and had to be changed in the evening or sometimes in the middle of the day, but then she was calm again, weak but at peace. There was still a void full of questions: where did it come from, why, from whom? It was a marvel that Martha managed to get to work in the hospital every day. Leontine said Martha was tough. Her body had got used to it. The two of them had pushed the beds together, and only the trunk under one bed still reminded anyone of Helene and the time she used to spend here, because it had her possessions in it. One day Helene came to visit, opened the trunk, pushed the Baron’s letters aside, and took out the fish carved from horn and the chain.
You can take that with you, said Martha, who didn’t care about the trunk and wanted to be rid of it. Her cloche hat was moth-eaten now; Helene wondered where her own was. She must have left it in the cloakroom of the White Mouse club that evening two years ago.
There’s going to be a vacancy on my ward, said Martha. You could apply. Helene said no, she didn’t want to be travelling north to work in the Jewish Hospital. The pharmacist was paying her better now, and she no longer thought about him when she stood in the pharmacy alone in the evening, mixing tinctures. Carl wouldn’t take any rent from her; his parents gave him an allowance at the beginning of every month. When he went to visit them he took Helene with him on the train to Wannsee, left her in the garden of the inn on Stölpchensee, ordered a raspberry sherbet for her and came back an hour later. Sometimes he asked her if she wouldn’t go with him, saying he would like to introduce her to his parents, but she shrank from the meeting. They might not like me, Helene pointed out, and wouldn’t give way to either his encouragement or his protests. In fact, she enjoyed those Sunday afternoons when she could sit reading in the garden of the inn, undisturbed.
At the end of the summer, through Bernard’s good connections, they got tickets for the new play at the Schiffbauerdamm theatre. Carl sat next to Helene and forgot to hold her hand. His fists clenched, he struck his forehead, he wept, and next moment was shouting approval. Only when the audience demanded the Army Song again as an encore, and people in the back rows stood up, linked arms and rocked in time to the music, did Carl lean back, mildly exhausted, and look at Helene.
Don’t you like it?
Helene hesitated and tilted her head to one side. I don’t know yet.
It’s brilliant, said Carl. His eyes were on the stage again by now, and did not turn back to Helene throughout the performance. He listened, spellbound, to Lotte Lenya, looking almost dazed. When the first verse of the jealousy duet was over and a second followed, Carl was spluttering, doubled up with laughter.
His cheeks were red as he stood up, applauding, even before the final curtain fell. The audience was bubbling over. They simply wouldn’t go until the closing verses of ‘Mack the Knife’ had been sung again. They roared along with it – even Harald Paulsen, playing Macheath, moved his lips, although in all the noise no one could hear if he was singing that song or another one. There was stormy applause. Spectators in the circle and stalls threw flowers on stage. The actors bowed. They looked like dolls, Helene thought, tiny pop-up toys with claqueurs making them bow low, demanding their reappearance again and again. The spotlights wouldn’t allow any of the actors to leave the stage or any of the audience to leave the theatre. They were clapping too, thought Helene, cautiously looking around her. Roma Bahn, who had been cast only recently as Polly, tore off her long bead necklace and scattered the glass beads in the auditorium; she looked as if she was about to walk offstage, but men