Peter Stamm
All Days Are Night

Chapter 1

All days are nights to see till I see thee,

And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Half wake up then drift away, alternately surfacing and lapsing back into weightlessness. Gillian is lying in water with a blue luminescence. Within it her body looks yellowish, but wherever it breaks the surface, it disappears into darkness. The only light comes from the warm water lapping her belly and breasts. It feels oily, beading on her skin. She seems to be in an enclosed room, there’s no noise, but she still has a sense of not being alone. Love is somewhere, filling her.

Time skips ahead. When she hears a whooshing sound, she opens her eyes. Now she is all alone. On the wall are rows of points of light that weren’t there before. She closes her eyes; the whooshing sound fades and disappears entirely.

Later, a white-clad figure is moving by her side, hands soothingly extended, and disappears. Gillian feels a faint nausea that is almost pleasant, a wooziness tugging her down, back into sleep. Then it’s light, everything is dazzlingly white. On the bedside table is a tray with breakfast. A smell of coffee, also of flowers. Very slowly her body awakens, she can feel her legs and her arm, pushing away the covers, the cool air on her bare skin. She feels little pain, only a sense of collecting herself and dissolving again, a slow pulsing. Next to her is a hand. It presses a button, it is her hand. Something lifts her up, she can hear a quiet humming. Breathing feels unusually easy, as though the air streamed into her body and left it again perfectly unhindered. A finger presses a green button, which has a little icon of a bell on it. Time passes.

The white-clad figure enters the room, approaches the bed, and, without asking, pushes the bedpan under her. And once again, the feeling of dissolving, the warmth streaming from her body.

Are you done?

Gillian says something; it sounds like a short bark. She feels she is only inhabiting a tiny part of her body, which seems very big to her, an empty building full of noises and uncontrolled movements. Each time she walks into a room, someone seems to have just left it. From somewhere she can hear conversations, laughter. Gillian dashes down a flight of steps, but once again she’s too late. Napkins lie crumpled on the white tablecloth, with wine stains and breadcrumbs.



It’s raining. Gillian wonders how long she has been lying here, but she expects no answer. She barely has strength for the question. She is sitting forward in bed, though she can’t remember how she got into such a position. Suddenly she can feel something cold, first it’s just a point, then it becomes a spine. It’s dabbed on stroke by stroke, until she can feel it all, from top to bottom. There’s a smell of alcohol. The radio is on, Gillian hears the time signal, a voice is speaking very quickly, she can pick out single words that don’t make much sense. The UN special representative, the Mars probe Beagle 2, a semifinal victory in the Australian Open, an area of low pressure over the Bay of Biscay. Isolated showers. In her thoughts she repeats: the UN representative, the Mars probe, the area of low pressure, and she tries to grasp the connection between them. The cold sensation passes, and she no longer feels her back, the nightshirt drops like a curtain. Breathlessly, Gillian waits for it to rise again. Someone gives her a push, and she’s running onto the stage, looking utterly disorientated. She turns to face the audience, looks into the footlights, and bows low. Three, four curtain calls, and the applause dies away, the brief moment of happiness is over. Gillian knows she was no good and that the director will tell her so, again. You were just acting, he will say. You need to live the part.

You can lean back now. Would you like me to leave the radio on?

Gillian tries to concentrate. Everything depends on her reply. She wants to be herself, to get up, but she can’t. She can’t move her legs, it’s as though she has no legs. The radio stops, the nurse walks over to the window and draws the curtains. Gillian remembers: the rain, the low-pressure area. There must be a connection.

You should try and get some rest.

Rest from what? Something has happened. Gillian is hovering around it, the memory, she is moving closer and then getting farther away from it again. When she puts out her hand, the pictures disappear, and the blue water comes instead, the blue water and the empty space. But the other thing is there all the time, waiting for her. She knows there is a way out, and she will take it. Later.



The doctor pulled a chair up to the bed and settled himself on the armrest. In his hand he was holding a mirror, a toy mirror in a pink plastic frame. He asked her how she was doing.

Better, said Gillian. I’m getting there.

For the first time, she could remember.

Two days, he said, when she asked him how long she had been here. A month, a year — it wouldn’t have surprised her.

We had to give you strong painkillers.

It wasn’t a bad trip, said Gillian, and tried to laugh.

When she raised her hand, the doctor caught it with a sudden, gentle movement. Don’t, he said. You shouldn’t touch the place.

He launched into a description of her face, a dispassionate and technical listing, but Gillian couldn’t quite understand what he was saying. Then he described the operations — the procedures — that would be necessary.

In six months there will be little or no trace.

Trace of what? asked Gillian.

It’s relatively straightforward to put an ear back, said the doctor, but a nose has a great many delicate blood vessels. We are going to have to build you a new one.

It doesn’t look very pretty at the moment, he said, but I still think it’s a good idea for you to take a look at it.

Gillian closed her eyes, opened them, and put out her hand. The doctor handed her the mirror. She turned it this way and that, like a weapon she didn’t know how to use. She saw the window, the many bunches of flowers in the room, the door, and the doctor’s face. He smiled and asked her a question, but she missed it, she was still adjusting the mirror in space, as though looking for the right frame, and then she lowered her arm.

Is it very bad?

He nodded and said again, in six months’ time. Someone who doesn’t know you will hardly notice a thing.

What about someone who knows me?

We try to get as close a likeness as possible, God knows there are enough photographs of you. You’ll be surprised, he added. Plastic surgery has made great strides.

How come I can smell coffee without a nose?

The olfactory centers are in here, said the doctor, bracketing his nose with his finger and thumb. He stood up. Would you like me to leave the mirror with you?

No, she said, and then, yes.

After the doctor was gone, Gillian picked up the mirror with a quick movement and held it very close to her face — as though to hide behind it.



She couldn’t remember when they told her. Maybe they hadn’t told her at all, and she just knew. Or guessed. Matthias was dead. There was silence, just the soughing of the wind in the trees, a dripping of water, and an erratic creaking sound, as of bent metal slowly relaxing. An orange light flashed on and off. Gillian felt no pain, only the sense that her face was wet. In her mouth she had the metallic taste of blood. She wasn’t able to turn her head, but out of the corner of her eye she had noticed Matthias slumped over the steering wheel as though exhausted. He didn’t move, he surfaced, disappeared, surfaced, disappeared. Even when there was light, his face looked dark, ruddy like the face of a drinker. If only she had been able to turn off the blinking light, then everything would have been all right, and she could have gone to sleep. But she couldn’t move. And then, slowly, the pain came, in her chest, in her legs, in her face. It was as though she had never felt her face before, her features seemed to be bunched together like a fist. Matthias was dead. What was she going to do with all his things? What would she say to his family and friends? She thought of the food in the refrigerator, spoiling, and the potted plants drying out. Then she suddenly felt certain that Matthias was not dead. It’s not possible, and the thought came as such a relief to her that she almost laughed out loud. It’s not possible.



When Gillian came around, her father was standing by her bedside, in quiet conversation with the doctor. Gillian didn’t listen. She closed her eyes and saw the hole in her face through which she had seen inside her head. She tried to raise her hands to hide, to protect herself. The covers were pressing down on her, she could hardly move her fingers. Suddenly breathing was a struggle too. She opened her eyes. The two men were still there. They weren’t talking now, and were looking down at her, into her. It was more than Gillian could do to stop their looking or deflect or respond to it. She closed her eyes and ran away as far as she could. A silly game, a dance, a children’s skipping rhyme with endless verses. Then she heard her name, the doctor had said it. When she looked up at him, her eyes met her father’s. Her father turned away.

How are you feeling?

She didn’t say anything. She mustn’t give herself away. She was hiding, and if she didn’t move, they would never find her. She was capable of staying hidden for hours on end, in a wardrobe or behind the sofa, in the attic, before she realized that no one was looking for her. Then she would slowly start to creep back, show herself more and more blatantly, but it was as though her long period in hiding had rendered her invisible. Her parents seemed to see right through her. What a relief when she’d been standing for a quarter hour in the kitchen doorway, and her mother finally told her to set the table, as though nothing had happened. She heard the door and saw her father leave the room. The doctor followed him out.

Something was broken. Gillian remembered the feeling of despair when she held the pieces in her hand as though they could knit together and be whole again. She couldn’t remember how the crash had come about. Only the feeling of weightlessness. Suddenly she understood that time had a direction, that it was irreversible. Her first memory was that sense of not being able to do anything anymore, of having no force and no mass. It was as though consciousness had already deserted her body, which accelerated through space, collided with something, was thrown back, hit something else in a ridiculous to-and-fro.

Gillian had always known she was in danger, that she would sometime have to pay for everything. Now she had paid. When the doctor asked her what she could remember, she had slowly moved her head from side to side. She wasn’t shaking her head, she was looking for her memories on the white walls. But the things she saw there had nothing to do with her. Her job, her parents, Matthias — they were all from another life.

Everything is still there, she said, only I am gone.



The careful movements of the nurses, their deliberate smiles.

Tell me if this hurts.

Pain was small events that took place just in front of her face, a fireworks of stabbings that Gillian couldn’t connect with herself. It was her body that reacted to it, flinching or convulsing. The nurse apologized, her voice sounded impatient. Gillian didn’t want to apologize for her body, which was nothing but an heirloom. She was someone else, she had only just moved in here. When people came along, she opened the door to admit them. She watched her visitors, tried to read in their expressions what they thought of the address. If they seemed impressed, she was happy. It is nice here, isn’t it. Bit of a work in progress, of course. She laughed. The nurse explained what she was doing, but Gillian wasn’t listening. She tried to bring the pain into harmony with her face, to make one single image, but she couldn’t do it. The picture was incomplete, the proportions didn’t work.

Almost done now, said the nurse. There, that wasn’t too bad, was it?

She left the room. The mirror lay on the bedside table. Gillian was thinking about the mirror, not her face. The mirror was the face she could hold up in front of herself. She put out her hand, hesitated, waited a moment longer, then took it. She played with it, turned it around and looked at its shiny back, a dim reflection of her face, a sense of intactness. If someone had looked at her now, it would be his face in place of hers. Then she turned the mirror around again and looked at herself for a long time. Earlier, she had sometimes stood in front of the mirror at home and gazed deep into her eyes. But her eyes were glass, the pupils black holes, and at the bottom of their impenetrable darkness was her body.

She tried with all her might to recognize herself in that flesh. She saw eyes, eyebrows, mouth, but they formed no whole. When the doctor or a nurse entered the room, she quickly put the mirror down on the table and imagined her image was trapped in it, so that she could hide from the looks of the others. She tried to make out disgust or horror in the expression of the nurse. But all she saw was a friendly indifference.

She looked at the faces of the nurses, tried to make herself a nest in them. In her mind she copied their expressions, pursed her lips, blinked her eyes, furrowed her brow. She involved them in conversation just to be able to watch their faces, and to be able to rest in them.



Her father moved a chair up to the bed. When Gillian turned her head, she could see him sitting there staring at an exhibition poster on the wall, three red dots placed diagonally on a green background.

Do you like that picture?

Three dots. She had picked her head up off the pillow. He looked at her quickly and then looked away.

John Armleder, she said. The artist’s name suddenly sounded rather threatening.

They would pull off some skin, she didn’t quite understand it, but the doctor wanted to take some skin from her forehead, and without cutting the blood supply, fold it down, and use it on the new nose.

Matthias is dead, said her father.

Yes, said Gillian, of course.

She had known it, she had seen him. The tears were running down her temples before she realized she was crying. Her father took a Kleenex from a box on her bedside table and wiped them away, in an unusually gentle gesture.

I’m sorry.

I could have been dead. Gillian had said the sentence over and over to herself, but it didn’t have any meaning. The tears stopped as suddenly as they had begun. Her father dropped the Kleenex in the bin by the door and returned to the bed, settled down on the chair. He waited for a moment, then said he had a couple of practical things he needed to do.

Your mother was in your apartment and tidied up a bit.

Ever since she’d been in the hospital, Gillian had thought a lot about her childhood and the time after she’d left her parents’ house, of drama school, the years on small provincial stages. She had a vague memory of how the story continued, her getting married to Matthias, her job in TV. She had come up with an ending, too, a scene in a garden, a sunny afternoon in summer, she was older now, but still attractive, there was a man, they were drinking white wine together and talking about old times.

Matthias is dead, said Gillian.

He had a blood alcohol level of 1.4, said her father. It sounded like a statistic, as though he had given Matthias’s height or weight.

I’m tired, she said.

At least you’re alive, said her father.

That’s what people say. I’m not really sure …

He gave her a short look and then turned away.

Your friend said you and Matthias had had a fight.

Maybe, said Gillian, maybe we did.



Matthias had found the roll of film and taken it to the photo shop to be developed. Just before they were due to drive to Dagmar’s to see in the New Year, he had slammed the prints down in front of her.

Who took these?

Gillian had taken the pictures without looking at them and slipped them back in the envelope.

That’s nothing to do with you.

Matthias gave a humorless laugh. Of course you think it’s perfectly acceptable to appear in photographs like these.

You can rest assured, she said, they’re not going to be published.

Oh, so you took them for fun?

Maybe they were going to be a present for you, she said.

For a moment Matthias didn’t say anything. What if the guy in the photo lab kept a set of prints? he asked. But then you don’t seem to care who sees you like that.

It was you who took the film to be developed, said Gillian, I never asked you to.

Matthias walked out. An hour later he was standing in the doorway in his dark suit and asking if she was ready. It was at that moment that Gillian lost all respect for him.

Okay, she said, we’ll go. I’ll just get changed quickly.

She went to the bedroom and put on her shortest dress, black fishnet stockings, heels. She put on scarlet lipstick and applied a little scent behind her ears, a sultry perfume Matthias had given her that she hardly ever wore. Matthias stood impatiently in the corridor.

When she passed him on the way to the front door, he hissed after her, where do you think you’re going, a party with friends or a brothel?

Neither of them said a word in the car, and at the party he did his best to stay away from her. Gillian saw him in the distance with his gelled hair and shiny suit.

By two a.m. there was just a hard core of partiers left sitting around the big table, which was full of dirty plates and empty glasses. Matthias was the only man, he stood off, glass in hand, staring through the patio door into the dark garden. Dagmar, who had recently broken up with her boyfriend, was saying she was finding it increasingly difficult to see men as erotic objects. Even though the agreement had been that Gillian would drive them home, she had had a fair bit to drink. She agreed with Dagmar and said women simply had nicer bodies than men. Dagmar got up to go to the bathroom. She stopped behind Gillian, placed her hands on her shoulders, and kissed her on the cheek. Matthias opened the patio door and stalked out into the garden.

Matthias was arts editor of a magazine that was not noted for its coverage of the arts. When they first met, Gillian was still working for the local TV station. She had been impressed by the way he seemed to know everyone in the cultural scene. Their paths kept crossing, Matthias introduced her to people and talked her into going to openings and premieres. One very cold winter day they met at the premiere for a musical in a small theater in the city. After the show they sat together with some of the cast. Gillian talked to the composer for most of the evening. He had asked her what her name was, and she explained her mother was English. She had a sense the composer knew something about her that she herself was unaware of. When they all left the theater a little after midnight, the streets were full of snow, and an icy wind was blowing. Matthias said he had something he wanted to tell her. While the others walked to the funicular, he took her across the street to a small belvedere. The lights of the city glittered in the cold; even the stars seemed unusually close. Matthias showed her a memorial stone under a big linden tree and told her this was where Büchner was buried. He put his arm around her shoulder and told her the story of the poor child in Woyzeck, which Gillian dimly remembered from school. And the moon was a piece of rotten wood, the stars were little golden midges and the earth an upside down harbor. And then they kissed.

That was as far as things progressed that evening. They had parted at a tram stop and gone home their separate ways. It wasn’t until the spring that they first spent a night together. Gillian had a couple of difficult relationships behind her and was glad that Matthias was straightforward and seemed to like her. He was very tender, but over time they slept together less and less often. They were both so busy that Gillian kept putting off the conversation she meant to have with him about it.

When he dropped to his knees and asked for her hand in marriage, she laughed and tousled his hair. It was in an expensive restaurant where they knew her and greeted her by name. First, the situation felt embarrassing, then she enjoyed it. Over the course of the following years, there had been a good many carefully orchestrated candlelight dinners and champagne breakfasts, and a surprise party for her thirty-fifth birthday with the guests in masks, weekend outings to spa hotels, overnight trips to specially decorated rooms for romantic couples.

Then she got the job as host, and suddenly she was making as much as Matthias. What really seemed to get to him, though, was the fact that when they were both reporting on the same events, she was the one who seemed to matter. Only now did Gillian understand that he might know everyone by name, but no one really took him seriously. When she did interviews, she sometimes out of the corner of her eye saw him standing around nearby. No sooner was the camera switched off than he would turn up and jump into the conversation. He would demonstratively throw his arm around her, or kiss her.

Is he really offended? asked Dagmar when she came back.

We had a fight this afternoon, said Gillian. She got up and went out into the garden. Matthias was on the terrace, smoking. What’s the matter? Her voice sounded harsher than she had intended. Come back in, it’s freezing out here.

He claimed she had been flirting with Dagmar. Was it her who took the pictures? he asked.

That’s enough, said Gillian.

We’re going, said Matthias, as though he hadn’t heard her.

I’m not good to drive, said Gillian, and she traced a one-fingered spiral in the air. We can always stay with Dagmar.

You’d like that, wouldn’t you, he said.

She left him and went back into the house. Someone spoke to her, but she didn’t reply, and poured herself a glass of grappa, knocked it back, and then another. Are you planning on staying the night here? asked Dagmar. Perhaps we’d better, she said with a laugh.

Yes, said Gillian, we had a fight. But that doesn’t matter now.

Her father stood up. Take some of the flowers, why don’t you, she said. I’ve no idea who sent them all. Do you want me to read the cards? he asked. She shook her head. I feel like I’m a corpse in a mortuary.



That afternoon her mother called to thank her for the flowers. She asked when she could visit Gillian.

Ideally never.

Every intact face reminded Gillian of the destruction of her own. And she had the feeling she had to bear the horror of the other person, and comfort them with her own bravery. The only thing she could endure was the presence of the doctors and nurses.

Her mother didn’t push it. She said she had been to the apartment and cleared out the fridge and done the laundry.

Thank you, said Gillian, there’s no need. My operation’s tomorrow, and then we’ll see. She said she was tired.

Take care.

You too.

She tried to sleep, so as not to think of the crash, the operation, Matthias.

In the afternoon her father came by again. He was very matter-of-fact. After the first operation she could theoretically go home, he said.

But it’s probably advisable to stay in the hospital until you’re half —

You mean until I look like a human being again? asked Gillian.

Until you can walk properly. When can you put weight on your leg?

They’ve inserted a plate, said Gillian. I should be able to walk in a week.

Anyway, it’s very nice here, said her father. As good as a hotel. We can’t offer you that quality of care at home.

I don’t need looking after, said Gillian.

If anything crops up, give me a call. He got up and held out his hand.

I’ve got all I need, said Gillian. Say hi to Mom for me.

Try and understand her, said her father, almost in the doorway.



The anteroom to the theater was full of people in green scrubs. Gillian tried to pull herself upright to get a better view of them, but she didn’t manage. She saw the faces from below, surgical masks and oblique eyes under brows that looked more salient from that angle, ridiculous little gauze bonnets. A face bent down over her, friendly eyes with smile lines, and a voice asked her how she was feeling. Always that question: how am I feeling. She tried asking herself others: What’s left of me? And is what’s left more than a wound? Can it ever heal? Will that be “me”?

Before she could reply, the face had moved away, and the eyes were looking elsewhere. The surgical masks wagged, and she heard sentences she made no effort to understand, instructions spoken calmly and quietly. She could sense the concentration and a kind of happy expectancy. It reminded her strangely of field trips at school. The class met at the station, one person after another joining the group, curt greetings, not a lot of talk. The surgeon said something, very softly. Movements still seemed to be unconcerted, everyone was busy and trying not to get in each other’s way. The anesthetist told Gillian what he was going to do. The green shapes disappeared one after another, and for a brief moment Gillian thought she had been forgotten. That same instant she had a sensation of her legs being lifted, as if she were being shoved into a dark tube and left. She slipped down into the dark, faster and faster, lights whizzed past, sounds were suddenly very near, a bright bell sounded, an echoey voice slowed down beyond intelligibility spoke. Then it got very bright. She felt a hand gently touch her shoulder. The friendly face once more. Gillian’s stomach knotted. She felt hands raising her, a shaking, heard metallic sounds. Lamps slid past her. Breathing became difficult. Her nose was blocked. She had a nose.



In the night after the operation, Gillian had nightmares. She couldn’t remember what she had dreamed, but she could feel the nocturnal landscapes through which unseen people were moving, not talking but in some secretive way in communication with one another. If she opened a door, at that same moment the room behind it would come into being, when she turned away, it disintegrated.

The mirror wasn’t where she had left it. The doctor was holding it in his hand when he walked into the room. He explained to her exactly what he had done, taken some cartilage from her rib area and shaped it into a nose, and then folded over a piece of skin from her forehead and covered it.

It’s not very pretty just at the moment, he said. And maybe you can’t imagine how it’s all going to heal, but I can assure you …

She said it couldn’t be any worse than what it was before.

I’m very pleased with you, he said.

Why? What have I done?

You’ve been brave.

Gillian had the feeling he was playing for time. She held out her hand. The doctor nodded and put the mirror down on her covers.

In three weeks, the skin should have taken sufficiently for us to sever its connection to the forehead, and then it will look better right away. And in another three months you’ll come back to us. Now you’ve only got another couple of days here. After the second operation you should be able to work again. Do you have anyone to look after you?

No, said Gillian, and then on an impulse: Yes, it’s no problem.

The doctor shrugged. Don’t worry. It’ll all turn out well.

Breathing was still difficult for Gillian. When she touched her top lip with her tongue she could taste blood and feel the rough gauze. The doctor went away. Carefully she felt for the mirror on the cover.



Before lunch she called her father in his office. Presumably he wasn’t alone, there was a customer with him or a mechanic. He spoke quietly, and she sensed that he was in a hurry to bring the conversation to an end.

I was going to visit you, he said, I’ll come and see you for a little bit after work.

I wouldn’t, she said.

Really? he asked vaguely. Have you got everything you need?

I don’t need anything, said Gillian, just to be left alone. You don’t need to come.

I’ve got a lot going on, he said, in advance of the holidays everyone needs things done.

It looks even worse, said Gillian, and suddenly she was crying.

Her father seemed not to notice, he just said that was part of the healing process, the doctor had shown him pictures of the various phases.

It’s not like with your cars, you know, said Gillian, where you can hammer everything out.

As if you knew, said her father. How are you feeling?

She had to laugh. Oh, I’m fine.

I’ll come by tonight, he said and hung up.

The prospect of his visit made Gillian uneasy. It was conceivable that one day there would be a person with a different face, who would be her. But there was as little connecting her to that person as to the other one she had been before the accident. In drama school she had imitated faces and tried out gestures, and that had produced a sort of vague echo of whatever feeling was to be expressed. She turned down the corners of her mouth and felt a weak, unspecific sadness, she pulled them up and straightaway her mood brightened. Now, without a face, she couldn’t do that. All sorts of feelings, relief, fury, grief, were just possibilities that couldn’t be realized. Even other people’s faces, those of the nurses and people in magazines, became illegible scribbles to her.



In the evening, Gillian’s father hung his coat on a hook and hovered near the door. Then he approached her bed. He looked at her, not saying a word, gripped the bed frame, and reluctantly slid down onto the chair beside the bed. He didn’t look at her while they spoke, he took her hand in his. His voice was quieter and more hesitant than during his other visits, and he only stayed for fifteen minutes.

After he had gone, Gillian called her mother-in-law. The phone rang a long time. At last a breathless Margrit picked up. When she heard who was calling, she fell silent.

I’m sorry, said Gillian.

It’s not your fault, said Margrit.

Then she talked about Matthias’s funeral, which had been beautiful, and she wanted to get Gillian’s approval of the music and the restaurant where they had held the wake, and the text of the death announcement, which she read to her. She listed the people who had attended.

That’s fine, said Gillian, I’m sure you did everything right.

It’s too bad you couldn’t be there, said Margrit.

Yes, said Gillian. I’ll visit the grave as soon as I’m out of the hospital.

She got along with Margrit better than she did with her own mother. They talked a while longer, then Gillian said she was tired.

Call anytime, said Margrit.



Gillian wondered what Margrit and her parents would say if they saw the photographs. She was briefly alarmed that her mother might have found them in the apartment, but then she remembered that she had put the envelope away in her desk. She hadn’t looked at the pictures herself. They were evidence of an evening she would prefer to forget. She still remembered her sense of shame, and then panic. She had pulled her clothes on as in a trance. Hubert stood in the open doorway. For the first time that evening, he was looking straight at her. She grabbed the film, which was still on the table. Then she walked off without either of them saying a word. She went to the train station. There was a man on the platform who stared at her as though she had nothing on, and she realized that she didn’t feel up to taking a train or a streetcar home. She followed the road into the city center, first through the industrial precinct, then suburbs she had never set foot in before. She kept running into children in costume moving from house to house. They were strikingly quiet. A few were accompanied by their parents, who hung back a little while the children rang doorbells and asked for treats. It was fully an hour before Gillian locked the door of her apartment behind her. She was pleased that Matthias wasn’t home yet. She could have exposed the film and destroyed it, but she had the illogical feeling that that would release the pictures into the world. Instead she stashed it in her desk. Then she ran a hot bath.

Matthias came home while Gillian was still in the bath. She heard the door shut, and then he walked into the bathroom and sat down on the side of the tub. He played with a few remaining scraps of foam that were drifting on the water. Gillian hoped he would leave, but he started telling her about some editorial meeting or other. She didn’t listen. She leaned out of the bath and reached for her robe. Matthias picked it up and held it open for her. She stood and turned her back to him. When she had climbed out of the bath, he put his arm around her and kissed her. She twisted out of his embrace and took a towel to dry her hair.

Over time, Gillian had almost forgotten about the film, the only time she was reminded of it was when she was looking for something in the drawer. She hadn’t asked Matthias what he was doing there. Maybe he was snooping, but he could have been hunting for a perfectly innocent paper clip or postage stamp. She wondered if the lab assistant who developed the film might indeed have run off some prints for himself. But in fact she didn’t care either way. The woman in the photographs no longer existed.



The next morning, soon after breakfast, a policewoman came to the hospital. She was pretty and rather delicate looking. She shook Gillian’s hand and introduced herself, Manuela Bauer from the cantonal police. She unpacked a laptop and a small printer. Gillian said she had no memory of anything, but the policewoman was busy with the machinery and didn’t react. At last she was ready, sat in the chair by the bed, and began to type. She read Gillian her rights and said she didn’t have to make a statement that would incriminate her or her husband.

It was an accident, said Gillian.

The policewoman said it was a case of grave physical injury.

Are you going to lock him up? asked Gillian.

The policewoman said of course there wouldn’t be any proceedings against the deceased, but the case needed to be looked into just the same. She asked Gillian about the night of the accident, she wanted to know where they had been, and who else had been there. Gillian wondered if she would be made responsible for the whole thing if she confessed. She was the only person who knew the truth, and she wasn’t obliged to make a statement. In spite of that she related everything as she remembered it.

And what was this fight about? asked the policewoman.

That’s neither here nor there, said Gillian, it was silly. Anyway, I had quite a lot to drink in a short time afterward.

Did you ask your husband to drive?

It was obvious that I wasn’t capable anymore.

You could have called a taxi.

Yes, said Gillian, we could have spent the night there too. But we didn’t.

She had thought she didn’t remember anything of the night, but as she spoke, quite a lot swam into her consciousness: she had to hold on to the car as she climbed in, Dagmar had tried to persuade her to stay. Matthias had said he would take back roads, that way they wouldn’t get caught up in any police checks. Gillian felt sick, she rolled down the window, and the cold night air cut into her face. Matthias drove in silence. At that moment, she couldn’t imagine they would ever be reconciled. Only the thought that that meant a separation oppressed her.

She must have dropped off. When she awoke, they were driving along a narrow forest road. The asphalt glistened with moisture, scraps of mist appeared among the trees. There were no other cars around. The radio was playing loud rock music. Gillian switched to a jazz channel and closed her eyes. Without a word, Matthias switched back to the heavy metal station. Was that the moment he lost control of the car? Her next memory was the weightlessness. And then the ghostly silence.

He struck a deer, said the policewoman.

It wasn’t his fault, said Gillian, and she started to cry.

He shouldn’t have been driving, said the policewoman, never mind what you said or did.

It was my fault, said Gillian, still crying.

I’m sorry, said the policewoman, sounding impatient, I can’t help you. Legally, you’re not to blame.

Before she left, she gave Gillian a leaflet from a victims’ support group and asked if she wanted any support or psychological assistance.

Gillian shook her head. My parents are there for me. I need a new nose.

She tried to laugh, the whiffling sound she made disgusted her.



The taxi driver helped Gillian into the wheelchair and rolled her to the foot of the stairs, and then he went back to fetch her suitcase from the trunk.

It’s okay, she said, someone will come down.

She had to lay the suitcase across her lap because she couldn’t steer the wheelchair with just one hand. She took the elevator to the top floor. Luckily the thresholds were flush throughout the building. The silent apartment was a shock.

Hello, called Gillian, even though she knew there was no one there. Hello?

They had bought the place three years ago. The rooms were large, there were light parquet floors and full-length windows. In the living room there was a glass door that gave on to a balcony. From there you could see right across the city and the lake. A person standing outside could see into the living room, but that had never bothered Gillian. On the contrary, she loved the transparency and laughed when friends said she was living in a shop window or an aquarium.

Most of the other apartments were occupied by older people, who hung curtains in the windows and rolled down blinds every evening. Gillian hardly knew her neighbors. They exchanged greetings when they ran into each other on the stairs or in the underground garage.

The living room had been tidied, there was a bunch of withered roses on the dining table. Gillian had bought them two weeks before, to give to Dagmar, but she had forgotten to take them. Presumably her mother had left them there out of respect. The water in the vase was cloudy and stank, some of the petals had fallen. Gillian collected them in her hand, they felt satin soft. She crushed them in her fist, then she dropped them.

She rolled into the kitchen, which was spotless. That was her mother’s way of showing love or care. When Gillian watched her at work sometimes, she was reminded of the stewardess her mother had once been. Every movement was practiced, even her smile looked experienced. Sometime Gillian had stopped confiding in her and started treating her with the same friendly inattentiveness as her father did.

The fridge was largely empty, a couple of jars of different mustards, some dried tomatoes in olive oil, dill pickles, a few cans of beer, and the bottle of Prosecco they kept for unexpected visitors.

Gillian tried to shift off the wheelchair onto the toilet. Instead of getting the crutches in the living room, she pulled herself up on the sink. Her legs gave way, and she crumpled on the floor and banged into the footrests of the chair, which rolled away and struck the wall with a loud crash. Sitting up, she pulled and shuffled her way to the toilet. If it had been up to the doctor, she wouldn’t even have been given the wheelchair, but she had asked, just for the first couple of days. Still lying on the floor, she pulled her trousers down. The chill of the tiles heightened her need to pee, and she tried to pull herself up. Then it was too late, she felt the warmth of the quickly spreading puddle. She tried to get her pants off, but it was too late. Gillian felt nauseous. She stripped off, and mopped the floor with her sodden pants. All she could manage were a couple of dry sobs that didn’t sound much like crying.

Her life before the accident had been one long performance. Her job, the studio, the designer clothes, the trips to cities, the meals in good restaurants, the visits to her parents and to Matthias’s mother. It must have been a lie if it was so easy to destroy with a moment’s inattention, a false move. The accident was bound to happen sooner or later, whether in the form of a sudden catastrophe or a gradual unraveling, it was coming.

She knew she could use her legs, the doctor had even encouraged her to. She heaved herself back into the wheelchair and rolled into the living room. On the sofa lay a book she had started a couple of weeks ago, a Swedish thriller. She found her place but was unable to concentrate and soon put it aside. She flicked through a fashion magazine. In the building opposite a window was opened, her neighbor shook out a duvet. Gillian knew her, vaguely. She shrank back, half naked as she was, but the woman didn’t seem to have seen her, remained standing in the window for a minute or two, and looked down at the street. Perhaps she was looking out for the mailman or her children who might be back from school soon.

Gillian rolled into the corridor to get her suitcase. Back in the living room, she locked the wheels of the chair and slipped to the floor. She lay on the thick woolen carpet. That way she couldn’t be seen from outside. It was warm, but she felt chilly. She rummaged in her suitcase for clean underwear and a pair of trousers, but the only things she found were dirty. She pulled a blanket off the sofa and rolled herself up in it. She longed to be back in the hospital where nothing more was demanded of her than that she be able to endure her pain. And even that had been taken away from her with the drugs she at first took gratefully and then increasingly refused. She had the idea that pain was part of the healing process, and that she needed to submit to it as part of becoming whole.



She propped herself up on her elbows and looked around. Nothing had changed, but the room had become strange to her. She asked herself who had bought these books, hung up these pictures. A silkscreen print by Andy Warhol, Marilyn, the same face ten times over, lifeless as an advertising poster. The minimalist furniture, the soulless accessories, carefully chosen from expensive design shops, souvenirs though they were connected to no particular memories. She rolled onto her back and looked up at the Italian designer lamp that seemed to hang just above her, dropped her arms, and hit the wheelchair several times. Locked now, it didn’t move.

She crawled over to the enormous flat-screen, switched it on, and started zapping through the channels. She stopped at a nature program. There was a wide beach at twilight across which thousands of primitive creatures were creeping, looking as though they were put together from a round shield and a long sting or tail. From time to time one of the creatures would be picked up by a wave and dumped onto its back, and you saw its wriggling little legs and the way it tried to turn onto its front with little jerks of its tail. This fascinating spectacle only occurs for a few days each year, said the narrator adoringly. Horseshoe crabs have lived in shallow coastal waters all over the planet for over five hundred million years, and in all that time they have hardly changed. That’s why they are occasionally called living fossils. In early summer they gather on the shores of their native seas to lay their eggs.

Gillian looked through the DVDs that were piled up beside the little TV console, but none of the films grabbed her. Finally she put on a DVD of one of her shows that she had had burned and never watched. She didn’t like seeing herself on screen, it was only when something had gone wrong during one of the recording sessions that she watched the show.

She fast-forwarded it. She could make out the show’s opening credits, a short introduction to the week’s subjects, torn faces silently moving their mouths, smiling, a painting, ballet dancers. Now you could see the studio, a white room, or rather a white wall, with Gillian in the background seeming to float in white. The camera zoomed up to her at breakneck speed. She switched over to Play, and when the camera was very near, she froze the frame. There was her old face, wide staring eyes, mouth open in welcome. Gillian pressed a button, leapt forward from frame to frame. Her mouth closed and opened, but the expression in the eyes didn’t change.

She never felt nervous before the programs and was surprised now by the look of fear in her eyes. It was as though the face could already sense its destruction ahead. An unexpected noise, a reflection, a sudden memory changed the expression, for a split second the cameras created a person there had never been before and who would never exist again. Twenty-five frames a second, twenty-five people who didn’t have much more in common than their physical details, hair and eye color, height and weight. It was only the linking of the pictures that created the fuzziness that constituted a human being.

She pressed Play and lay on her back. She heard her voice, promising young talent, first one-person show, return to figurativeness. Gillian turned her head to the screen and saw herself announcing a film clip. Turned through ninety degrees her face looked thinner and younger. It looked unfamiliar, perhaps that was why she saw each individual feature with greater clarity, the lips, the dimple in the chin, the nose and eyes. She thought of Tania, who had never managed to make her up without passing some remark about her appearance, her heavy eyebrows, her thin lips, or her complexion. Her problem zones, she liked to say.

The woman on the television stopped talking, and her face looked tense for a moment that to Gillian seemed unending. At last the film began. The camera swung through an exhibition room, you saw life-size naked women washing themselves, getting dressed or undressed or doing chores. Although the poses were everyday, they seemed somehow classic. Then there was a close-up of Hubert’s face, and his name was flashed up on-screen, Hubert Amrhein, and in brackets his age, thirty-nine, the same as hers. He talked about his work, about how he found his models on the street, professionals didn’t interest him. Ordinary women, he said. They get undressed, I photograph them. It all has to happen right away, on impulse, there are no prior agreements, no second chances. The hunt for models was a large part of the artistic process, he said. Of a hundred women he spoke to, maybe one or two agreed. Of ten whose photographs he took, he might paint two or three, often months later, long after he had forgotten their names. While he spoke, some of the pictures were faded in. The editor’s questions were cut out, all you heard was Hubert’s voice, always beginning again, riffing and spieling. He didn’t really know how he came to choose his models, sometimes he thought they chose him. It wasn’t primarily beauty that interested him but intensity, power, and pleasure, also lostness, aggression, fear. It was like when you fell in love with someone. Usually you couldn’t explain that either. His smile looked at once shy and conceited. Perhaps that went into the pictures, desire and the impossibility of fulfillment.

Jerk, thought Gillian. Now there was a street scene, passersby in a pedestrian neighborhood, filmed from a slight degree of elevation. The camera fixed on a woman and followed her through the crowd, a good-looking young employee or businesswoman in a boring suit. Gillian tried to picture her naked, but she couldn’t do it. Sometimes he would imagine one of his models happening to see the picture of herself, Hubert said. She was strolling through the city, stopped in front of the window of a gallery, and saw herself naked in her apartment, washing the dishes or vacuuming. I think she would probably recognize her kitchen fixtures before herself, he said. The photos are the work of seconds. They capture the secret life of our bodies while we’re busy with something.

The final shot of the report was one of Hubert’s paintings that showed a heavyset fortyish woman washing her foot in a sink. She was standing on one leg, the other was up. With one hand she was holding her ankle, with the other she was washing her foot. The fingers and toes were interlaced in a complicated way. Although the pose looked demanding, the woman seemed introverted, almost meditative.

Then they were back in the studio. Gillian and Hubert were facing each other for the interview. She had a few questions from her editor that she had written on index cards. She asked him about working with models, whether he gave them instructions or not. The movements need to be their own, said Hubert, that’s actually not all that easy to achieve. I tell a woman to wash herself, and suddenly she’s got her foot up in the sink. It would never have occurred to me. It’s like a gift. Gillian saw herself smile and heard herself asking whether it was difficult to work with women who had no modeling experience. She stopped the shot. Now she looked disgusted. She clicked on until Hubert was next in a shot. The expression on his face was hard to interpret, a mixture of irony and sadness, or perhaps just conceit. She hit Play, and Hubert — as though coming out of a deep pause for thought — said, on the contrary. Professional models are practiced at reducing themselves to their bodies and wearing nudity like a garment. It’s striking how some women change through being naked, and my looking at them. How the inside comes to the surface. It’s a very private moment. Gillian had the sense he was saying these sentences specifically to her and not thinking of the TV audience at all.

Oftentimes nothing happens at all, he said. Generally I know before developing them whether the photographs will be any good, whether there’s something useful there. Then who’s the artist, you or the model? Gillian heard herself asking. It’s not about the artist, said Hubert, it’s about the work of art. And that has nothing to do with the model or the artist.

Gillian ran the recording back to the beginning and watched the whole interview again, frame by frame. She wanted to work out what had transpired between them. Ninety seconds, more than two thousand individual shots. The secret lives of our bodies, she thought. Hubert was a chatterbox, which made it all the more striking to her that he had said what she was thinking, or perhaps had even given her the thought in the first place. She had often caught herself adopting other people’s ideas and taking them for her own.

The dialog between their two faces was very different from the one she had just listened to. From the outset there seemed to be a tense intimacy between them, often a barely perceptible smile flickered over one of their faces, and once at least Gillian caught admiration in her eyes, a girlish beam. Hubert’s initial boredom gradually gave way to an expression of tenderness, which struck Gillian. Her own face in countershot looked down, as though his look confused her. She turned to face a different camera, and her face took on a rather foolish look of surprise and delight — she was introducing the next segment. Gillian stopped the film and took the DVD out of the player. On TV, it was still the horseshoe crabs, which were now back in their native element, water. And so each year they lay their eggs, said the warm voice of the speaker, and probably will continue to do so long after human beings have vanished from the face of the earth.



Gillian spent almost the whole day lying on the floor in the living room. Gradually she calmed down. She thought she was gaining strength, but when she pulled herself up, she felt dizzy. She sat there for a while and waited for it to pass. Then she picked up her crutches, which were lying beside her, and got up. It was easier than she expected, and she hobbled into the kitchen and ate a can of tuna and a couple of rice cakes she had bought months ago and hated. She drank a glass of Prosecco, even though the doctor had told her to stay away from alcohol while she was taking medications.

She went to the bathroom and opened her side of the medicine cabinet, which was stuffed with over-the-counter remedies and personal hygiene products. The woman who lived here was evidently terrified of bad breath, she gulped vitamins, presumably because she had a poor diet, she suffered from chronic headaches and an acid stomach. She was afraid of getting old and of cracked fingernails. A working woman who had more money than time, who bought expensive olive oil soaps in little boutiques and didn’t get around to using them, and new toothbrushes before she threw away her old ones. It occurred to her that at last she would have enough room for all her stuff. Somehow she couldn’t feel properly sad about Matthias. Sometimes she cried and cried without stopping. At other times she completely forgot that he was gone. They were always spending a day or two apart, being alone wasn’t an effort. Gillian hadn’t even been to his funeral, how could she know he was really dead?

She took off her blouse and bra. Looking down herself, it was easy to imagine nothing had happened. The accident had left her with a couple of bruises on her torso and some stitches on one leg, but other than that there were no signs on her body. Then she raised her head and looked at her face. In the hospital all she had seen were the wounds. What she saw now, over an almost intact body, took all her strength away. Her stomach knotted, and she crumpled to the floor. She crawled to the bedroom on all fours and flopped into bed. She felt her naked body, belly, waist, hips.



In the middle of the night Gillian awoke and couldn’t go back to sleep. She got up and hobbled over to her office. She turned on the computer and went through her e-mails. She had more than three hundred items in her in-box. She quickly scanned the subject lines. Get well. Recovery. Sympathies. Forthcoming meetings and, days later, summaries of what had been said at them. She deleted all the messages. The in-box of her other address, the alias under which she had corresponded with Hubert, was empty. She Googled her name. Apart from a few short news reports about the accident, she found mentions of her TV show, a couple of articles that had appeared about her, a Wikipedia entry that some fan of hers must have posted, which was surprisingly accurate. She wondered how much longer you lived on in the Internet after you were dead. In a blog she came across a longish analysis of her work as a host. The blogger seemed to have a deep loathing for her. Her first thought was that it had to have been written by a man, but as she read on she saw that it was certainly the work of a woman. It sounded as though the author had met her personally, perhaps she was an artist or an arts worker Gillian had interviewed. When someone laid into her in the press, she at least knew who it was. Now she had the feeling of listening at the door of a room where she was being talked about. You won’t please everyone, Matthias said sometimes when she had been criticized, but that wasn’t it. She had never learned to keep a distinction between her work and herself, whoever criticized what she did attacked her as a person. At the bottom of the blog, comments were solicited. There were a couple of brief entries, broadly in agreement with the blogger, semiliterate statements full of misspellings and obscenities. Gillian briefly wondered whether to write something herself but decided against. She turned off the computer and opened the top drawer of her desk. The envelope containing the photographs was still there where she had left it.



Gillian hadn’t met Hubert until immediately before the interview in the studio. In their initial conversation, he had laid into television for ruining his pictures, and eyed her shamelessly. Under the lights he asked her if she fancied having a drink with him afterward, and she declined.

Don’t worry, he said with a mocking smile, I’m not thinking of painting you. It sounded like an insult.

By the time the recording was in the can, Hubert was already gone, and even though he had irked Gillian, she still felt disappointed. As Tania was cleaning off her makeup, she showed Gillian a little sketch he’d done of her, nothing wonderful, but Gillian was still annoyed about it.

Matthias wasn’t home, so she fixed herself a sandwich and went into her office. She clicked on Hubert’s website. The only entry under “News” was something about a group exhibition two years ago. Under “Who am I?” she found a photo of Hubert no bigger than a postage stamp, and a short biography. He had done an apprenticeship as a sign painter and then gone back to school. There followed a series of obscure grants and scholarships and group shows he had taken part in. Gillian clicked on “Gallery.” There were five pictures of unoccupied rooms: an office, a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. In all the pictures it was nighttime, and the rooms were dimly lit. Although not much could be seen, Gillian still had the sense that there was someone in all the rooms, hiding in a corner or else behind the onlooker. Under the pictures it said they were crayon on paper, and their dimensions were fifteen by twenty-one centimeters. They seemed to be older than the series of nudes. Under “Contact,” she found an e-mail address.

What was she going to say to Hubert? Why didn’t he want to paint her? She spent a long time staring out the window, then she selected as sender Miss Julie, an account she had acquired in order to send anonymous e-mails. Each time she used it, she felt she really was someone else, as though she was back to playing the part of the irresponsible and yet determined character in Strindberg’s play. She remembered the graduation show at drama school, and even some of her lines. When I really feel like dancing, I want someone who knows how to lead. There had been a lot of applause. When it was over she felt she could do anything. Looking at photographs of the production later, she saw a scrawny-looking girl with a silly face and staring eyes.

Not thinking anymore, she wrote to Hubert that she admired his work and was sorry not to see any newer pictures of his posted on his home page. After a brief hesitation she wrote: And as I’ve just seen, you’re good-looking as well. She signed herself Julie, and pressed Send.

When she went to bed, Matthias still wasn’t home. She woke at five and saw him lying beside her. She thought of Hubert and imagined meeting him in his studio. She knocked, he opened the door and showed her in. Without taking off her raincoat, she walked through the room and looked around. The studio looked like something from an old Hollywood film, with high windows, a potbellied stove, and a big easel. Hubert watched her with the blunt curiosity that had struck her in the course of their interview, and pointed to an old leather sofa. She ignored him and stepped up to the window through which she could see the rooftops of the city, and away in the distance, the Eiffel Tower. There were dark rain clouds in the sky, but at the horizon the cloud cover was broken and the sun shone through and illuminated the pale gray roofs of the city with its dazzling light. Gillian heard Hubert walk up behind her. Finally she turned around and took off her raincoat. Underneath she had on a simple black dress. He smiled, took her coat, and tossed it over a chair back. Then he picked up a notebook and a charcoal crayon from a low table, and started drawing. Gillian shut her eyes. She heard the scratch of charcoal over the paper.

Matthias turned over. Gillian quietly got up and went out onto the balcony. Although it was cold, she didn’t feel it. It was daybreak, the birds were rowing, it all sounded as though she was in a glass bowl. In the distance she heard the occasional sounds of sparse traffic and the shunting of locomotives.



Before long, Hubert and Gillian were writing to each other every day. Matthias wondered why she was checking her e-mail all the time. She shrugged. Under cover of her pseudonym, Gillian asked Hubert why he wanted his models to undress when he claimed their bodies didn’t interest him. He answered in almost identical words to those he had used at the interview, so she didn’t believe him. He wrote about the encounter as part of the process, of the right moment, of the impossibility of planning. He asked her for her picture. Gillian wrote back that she didn’t have any photographs of herself.

Have we ever met?

Gillian didn’t see his e-mail till the next morning. She had to go to Hamburg for a couple of days to record a feature about an elderly writer who had produced a kind of autobiography. Her flight didn’t leave until midday, and she was still in bed when Matthias left for work. He kissed her goodbye.

She had slept badly and felt depressed without knowing why. Even before her first cup of coffee, she sat down at the computer. She told Hubert that she didn’t want to model for him. She had imagined him taking her photograph in her apartment and it hadn’t felt right. Not the nudity, but his presence in her apartment, his looking around and making a picture of her life. No hard feelings.

She drank her coffee and smoked a cigarette. While she showered, she imagined Hubert painting her portrait. She looked around his studio. He pointed to an old leather sofa. Without taking off her coat, she sat down. He took a chair, sat down facing her, and started sketching her. After a time he put down his sketchbook and appeared irresolute. At last he said, very softly so that she barely understood, she could change behind the partition.

When Gillian reappeared, naked, from behind the partition, Hubert was just loading film into a big camera. Not looking up, he asked her to lie on the sofa with a book. He peered into the camera’s viewfinder, she couldn’t see his eyes, but sensed his cold, prying look.

Gillian packed her traveling bag. She still had time, and checked her e-mails. Hubert had written back already. He wrote that if she didn’t want to be photographed in her apartment, they could meet at his studio. You’re giving yourself away, she thought, you’re changing the rules as you’re going along.

Their e-mails were batted back and forth in double-quick time.

Are you alone?

You wish.

So you are.

Now you’re taking advantage of me.

How so?

You’re imagining me.

What alternative do I have if you refuse to show yourself to me?

Why do you only paint women? And why naked?

This time it took longer for an answer to come. His answer disappointed Gillian. She thought a moment, typed a question, deleted it. Wrote it again.

Do you sleep with your models?

When she fired off the e-mail, there was another one from Hubert. He wrote that the model’s nakedness created upset, disturbance, erotic tension. Art was the harnessing of this energy in a painting.

Gillian regretted her question now. Again, Hubert’s answer took a while.

Shall we meet?

That’s unprofessional.

Shall we meet?

You’re repeating yourself.

Life is repetition.

No.

Then what do you want?

Gillian thought. She typed her answer, read it back, and smiled as she pressed Send. She didn’t wait for his reply and switched off the computer. The sound of the ventilator ceased, and the apartment became very quiet.



In Hamburg it was raining. Gillian took a taxi from the airport to the author’s apartment. The film team was already there, and the author was getting annoyed because the cameraman wanted to rearrange his living room. He also refused makeup, even though he had probably worn it hundreds of times. Gillian explained that it was to allow him to look his most natural. He seemed at least to like her, and over time he unwound, and even started flirting with her a bit. They filmed him sitting at his desk and in front of his bookshelves, out walking along the waterfront, in a smart café he would never dream of going to, as he explained. Gillian asked him to write something down for her, but it turned out he had nothing to write on. She lent him her black Moleskine, and he scribbled something in there. Then they trooped back to his house to film the interview. Gillian sat beside the camera. When she opened the notebook to review her questions, she saw what he had written: This engenders such a clichéd view of the writer: television is the pits. She didn’t flinch and asked her first question.

The author seemed offended that he was getting more critical attention, and more readers, for his autobiography than for his ambitious experimental oeuvre.

Even though this book is just as fictitious, he said.

And what is reality?

If it’s reality you want, I suggest you look out the window.

Then why write?

He looked at her with a pitying smile. For professional reasons, a colleague of mine used to say. And another said it was lust, greed, and vanity that motivated him. In my own case, it’s presumably …

The soundman said he had picked up a noise in the background, could he possibly repeat the last few sentences, but this the author refused to do.

That’s the thing with reality, he said, you can’t repeat it to order, you can’t correct it. Perhaps we should read more books.

Would you do something else if you had your time again? Gillian asked.

The writer was suddenly angry and said he was tired, and gave monosyllabic replies to her remaining questions. At the end of four hours, Gillian said goodbye. She would manage to knock her material into a four-minute feature, but it would have even less to do with reality than the three hundred and fifty pages of the autobiography (not really) under discussion.



While in Hamburg, she didn’t check Miss Julie’s e-mail. She no longer felt comfortable with her part in the correspondence.

When she got home four days later, though, she did. Hubert had written to her twice, once immediately, moments after she had turned off her own computer, and then the next day. In the first he offered a detailed description of how he would kiss her. He had assembled a pretty accurate picture of her, and wrote about her cropped hair and slender waist. In the second e-mail he apologized for the first. He said he had allowed himself to be carried away and was sorry. Gillian didn’t know which of the e-mails to be more upset about. She decided she would meet Hubert. She wrote that she didn’t want him to paint her or kiss her, but she would agree to have a drink with him. As a venue she suggested a café in an outer suburb where she had once met a curator. She looked at the time.

I’ll be there at seven tonight, she wrote. You’ll have no trouble recognizing me. Yrs, Julie. Hubert’s reply came quickly, and was friendly but reserved.

Normally Matthias didn’t get home till late. Gillian scribbled a message on a Post-it, she had to go back to the office, she couldn’t say when she’d be back. She spent a long time wondering what to wear, and in the end decided on the most unspectacular things she could think of, a pair of tan cords and a white T-shirt with lace trim. She knotted a gray sweater over her shoulders. She didn’t put on any makeup, even though she didn’t normally set foot outdoors without at least a dab of powder and some mascara.



Gillian was early. There was no one in the café except two women and a young couple who were preoccupied with themselves. The women looked at her curiously, perhaps they recognized her. She took a table at the back and ordered a mint tea.

Hubert turned up shortly after six. When he spotted Gillian, he seemed relieved. He walked up to her table and smiled.

Oh, it’s you, I might have guessed.

Gillian hadn’t got up, he held out his hand to her. He seemed less sure of himself than in the TV studio, at any rate Gillian liked him much better. Hubert didn’t say anything, and Gillian didn’t know what to say either. In the end he asked her why she called herself Miss Julie.

After the Strindberg play, said Gillian. It was a part I played once. In my drama school graduation show.

The waitress came over. Hubert smiled at her and ordered a beer. When she came back with it, he took it from her with a little pleasantry and had a sip right away. The waitress walked away, you could tell by her walk that she knew Hubert was looking at her.

Do you like her then?

He apologized. I can’t help seeing a potential picture in every face.

I had the sense it was more her bottom you were looking at, said Gillian. What do you see in my face?

He looked at her attentively. I don’t know, he said. I always watch your program.

Really?

Your face is too familiar to me.

Then look at it more closely, said Gillian. She liked it when Hubert was looking at her with his keen, appraising look.

Your complexion isn’t as clear as it seemed to be in the studio, he said finally, that must be the makeup. Your nose is a bit shiny. And you have unusually heavy eyebrows for a woman.

Gillian winced. I could have done without the detail.

I like the little hairs on your neck, said Hubert, and the mobility of your features. The way you sometimes open your eyes very wide. Are you nearsighted?

A little bit.

Hubert asked her why she wanted to see him. Gillian shrugged.

They were silent again, but it wasn’t the disagreeable silence of two people who have nothing to say to one another. Gillian’s cell phone went off. She looked down at the display and declined the call.

Will you show me your pictures?

Sure, he said, and went over to the bar to pay.

Although it was only late September, autumn was already very much in the air. It was almost dark outside, and distinctly chilly.

I’ve got my car in the car park, said Gillian.

Hubert gave her directions. During the drive, he asked her what she did in her free time. A bit of exercise, swimming, jogging, said Gillian. And I read a lot. What about you? She hadn’t had a conversation like this in a very long time, and it made her smile. In a minute you’ll be asking me about my taste in music.

The drive took less than a quarter of an hour. Hubert’s studio was in an old textile works on the edge of the city. To the south was a dark wooded chain of hills, the slopes in the north were not so high. The valley drew in here, and it was dotted with ugly industrial buildings. The main building in the textile works was a wreck, its roof stove in, the windows boarded up. The walls were propped by a heavy steel scaffold to keep them from collapsing.

They crossed the yard to a side building. The sky was still bright, and there was a thin sliver of new moon. As Hubert and Gillian approached the building, a security light came on. Hubert unlocked the graffitied metal door, switched on a light, and led Gillian down a narrow corridor past a number of doors. His studio was at the back, a big, almost empty room with a paint-spotted linoleum floor. The walls were in an uncertain yellowish color, in some places you could see gray marks where shelves had been once. On the ceiling there were halogen bulbs that bathed the room in a chill, garish light. On one side of the studio were tall windows, the blinds were down. Along one wall were metal shelving units full of bottles and tubes, brushes, stacks of books, and sketch pads. There was a sofa, a couple of old kitchen chairs, a mattress in a corner. On top of a small fridge was a single hot plate, with a beat-up aluminum saucepan on it. Side by side along one wall leaned three evidently recent pictures like those in the exhibition, one was still unfinished. Next to them were the backs of half a dozen canvases, protected by clear plastic sheeting. A large empty easel stood in the middle of the room. Hubert took a couple of folders from the shelf and laid them on a table improvised from two wooden blocks and a length of chipboard. He opened them one after the other and quickly flicked through sketches, begun and completed drawings, as if that wasn’t the purpose of their being there. Rooms, bodies, body parts, sometimes he turned one of the drawings around and looked at it as if for the very first time. He said a few words, perhaps he was talking to himself. The last folder he pushed aside unopened. Gillian saw the name Astrid marked on it. Then Hubert went over to the canvases that were propped against the wall, pulled off the plastic, and turned them faceup onto the floor, one after the other. Gillian stood next to him.

Most of my newer stuff is in the exhibition, of course, he said, all I’ve got here are a couple of older pictures.

All were of the same woman in various positions.

Who is she? asked Gillian.

He didn’t reply. They were both silent now. When she wanted a little more time, Gillian placed her hand on his to delay it. It felt like they were peering through the skylight of a strange apartment.

Very nice, said Gillian, when Hubert propped the pile back against the wall. Her phone rang again. She switched it off without looking at the display. Hubert coughed nervously and took a step away from her.

Are you interested in seeing the photographs as well? he asked.

She nodded.

He said he couldn’t offer her much in the way of refreshment. Beer, a glass of wine, tap water.

Beer is fine, she said, and sat down in an old armchair into which she disappeared. Hubert took a couple of cans of Czech lager out of the fridge and poured them carefully into two large glasses with gold rims. He looked concentrated, as though it were a very demanding task. He brought her one of the glasses, took a chair himself and moved it to about ten feet from Gillian. As he sat down, he took a sip of beer and then set the glass on the floor next to him.

She said again that she liked the paintings, but he seemed not to want to talk about them. He made minimal replies to her questions and took sips of beer in between. Finally he got up and fetched an old slide projector from the corner of the room and perched it on a wobbly old barstool. He switched off the overhead lights, moved his chair closer to Gillian’s armchair, and pushed the first slide tray into the projector.

Without a word, Hubert went through the photographs, one tray after the other. There were hundreds of nudes, women ironing, dusting, reading, making coffee. There were dozens of shots of each woman. To begin with there was an amused expression on many of the faces, later on they looked more serious and stopped staring into the camera.

Gillian got up, went over to the window, and sat down on the window seat. Hubert didn’t notice. She saw his silhouette and the images of the naked women on the wall. She imagined his face, pale in the reflection of the slides, his cold, critical gaze. She felt reminded of a photograph of a cinema audience she had seen once, incomplete faces with staring eyes and mouths opened in laughter. That was always how she had pictured her viewers.

In the next tray were pictures of a small woman with wide hips and large, pendulous breasts. She had short blond hair and hairy armpits. Both her posture and her facial expression had something theatrical about them. She hung washing on a low rack in a tiny bathroom, baby things and men’s socks. She took a book from a shelf, hunkered down on the floor, and swept up with a dustpan and brush, maybe crumbs from biscuits she had given her child. The apartment was cluttered and untidy. In the last pictures, the woman looked close to tears.

She looks terribly lonely, said Gillian. Do you have any idea what you put these women through?

They agree to take part, said Hubert, switching the trays. Even in their nakedness they try not to reveal themselves. They hide behind their movements, their smiles, their way of exhibiting themselves.

Gillian was surprised that she didn’t seem to get used to nakedness, as in the sauna or the shower at the gym. The more pictures she saw, the stranger the bodies became to her. A big mole, a fold of skin, pubic hair shaved back to a narrow strip, everything acquired exaggerated significance. The bodies fell apart, looked disproportionate, ungainly, ill made.

Is it like that for you as well? she asked.

You’re starting to see them, said Hubert. That’s the way I paint them, detail by detail, surface after surface. Even when I’m taking the photographs, I try not to be overly present. That’s why I use a camera with a big viewfinder. When the models look into the camera, they see only their own reflection in the lens.

He had clicked rapidly through some pictures of a young, gangling woman, then stopped at one where she was looking at herself in a mirror. The woman’s arms were hanging down, and her stomach was slightly protuberant. Her gaze looked critical, as though dissatisfied with what she was seeing.

Could perhaps do something with that one, he said, although mirrors are tricky.

What good is it for the woman, if she never sees the picture? asked Gillian.

Nothing, said Hubert. She’s just the model. I’m not a portraitist.

And why do they take part?

I’ve no idea, he said. Maybe they have a need to be recognized in some way. He switched off the projector. Are you tired?

Gillian nodded.

I’m going to stay here awhile longer. Shall I walk you back to your car?

Yes, please, said Gillian.

It took her a while to find the way home. It was ten, later than she’d supposed, but traffic was still heavy. She felt disappointed, and annoyed with herself for being disappointed. He could at least have asked her to sit for him. The thought had a strange attraction.

While she was waiting at a light, she switched her phone back on. She got three text message signals. At the next light, she read them. Two were from Matthias, the third was from Hubert. She deleted them all without answering.



Gillian woke early. She was in pain again, but she didn’t want to take any more pills. She stepped out onto the balcony in her dressing gown to smoke a cigarette. It was raining, and a strong, cold wind was blowing. She could hear some birds, but not as many as usual. The thought of birds sheltering from the rain, cowering in shrubbery somewhere, feathers ruffled and heads tucked in, moved her in a sentimental way. It got sneakily brighter, but the sky remained gray and the rain kept falling.

The fear set in quite unexpectedly. It seemed to come from outside, but it had nothing to do with Matthias’s death or the accident, more the rain, the gray skies, and the shapelessness of the beginning day. Fear is the possibility of freedom, a sentence she had read once long ago and without ever understanding it, never forgotten. She still didn’t understand it, but it seemed to describe exactly what she felt. In front of the building was a sandbox, a dismal parody of a children’s playground, under a gray cover. The clattering of the rain on the polyethylene was very close and loud as the voices of the solo birds against the city’s backing track. It was odd that rain always seemed to take Gillian back to her childhood, as though it had only ever rained then. She was ten or twelve, it was early morning, and she was on her way to school. She could hear the sounds of the rain on her hood, the drips splashed her face.

Gillian, she spoke her name out loud. She thought of the girl who had just graduated from drama school and had got her first engagement at an obscure provincial theater. She had played a dwarf in a Christmas pantomime, a serving girl in a comedy, and Rebecca Gibbs in Our Town. She told George about the letter Jane Crofut got from the preacher when she was ill. The envelope was addressed to Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America, Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God. You don’t say, said George, who never got anything. And still the mailman had delivered the letter. Each time she said that sentence, it brought tears to her eyes.

It was a time when everything seemed possible, but freedom unsettled and scared her. She didn’t suffer from stage fright, oddly, she never had, but a sort of fear that was worse after the show was over. Her boyfriend had been taken on at another theater, but they had never bothered to break up. They telephoned less, and then stopped entirely. Gillian was left to her own devices, she lived over a pizzeria in a little apartment where it was always too warm. She had no friends outside the theater, and none in it really either.

It took her a while to discover that she wasn’t a good actress and never would be. She played women who gave themselves, who loved unconditionally, who sacrificed themselves, but she couldn’t take any of the roles quite seriously. A part of her always watched herself acting. I can’t regret, or flee, or stay, or live — or die! The little miss marched resolutely out the door, but the audience surely realized she wasn’t going to the barn to hang herself, but to the dressing room to take off her makeup.

Only after she had entered journalism did she start to feel more secure. She got the job in television and then she started playing the beautiful and successful cultural correspondent for the viewers, for the media, for Matthias, and for herself. She avoided making crass mistakes, Matthias played along, basically he was the better actor. They were continually in demand, giving information, playing themselves. Their voices were louder, they moved differently in public. When they got home, half soused and tired, and stood side by side brushing their teeth in the bathroom, Gillian sometimes had to laugh at the two faces in the mirror. Even the laughter was part of the performance.

Gillian felt slightly sick from her cigarette. She put it out and went inside. She stopped briefly in front of the coffeemaker, then she went into the bedroom and lay down again. The window was open a crack, and the rain was audible only as a steady hiss. She spent all day in bed, delaying trips to the kitchen or bathroom as long as possible. Her pains had let up, but that didn’t make it any easier, they had battered her back into her body, had made her boundaries all the more distinct. Gone with the pain were her points of reference, and now Gillian had to go to the trouble of finding them all again. She leafed through old photo albums. There were family albums, with pictures of her as a little girl, photos of holidays and birthdays, family portraits that barely changed over the years. These albums held the first pictures of elementary school productions, Gillian as Mother Mary, as Snow White, as a cat in a musical. Eventually her story detached itself from the family’s. Everything concerning her profession was in a separate album, which Gillian had started. Theater programs, interviews, photos taken at parties, reviews, all clipped and pasted. The first page, the one that in the other albums bore a name or dates, was empty.

She read an interview she had given shortly after she had taken on the television job. Every week the same questions were put to a different person. The journalist had been perfectly pleasant, they had met in a café. Each time Gillian was stumped, they had made up the answers between them. When did you first make love? One afternoon. What would you most like to know? What my friends really think of me. What was the saddest moment in your life? They were both stumped by that one. Then the journalist had suggested: My death. And that had to do.

The life in those magazine pictures was inexplicably more personal and more concrete than the interchangeable family snaps in the other albums. In the interviews Gillian was asked about things she never discussed with her parents. Alongside these compressed and edited conversations, those she had at home seemed alarmingly banal. Sometimes her mother would talk to her about things she had read her daughter saying. Is it true that you don’t believe in God? Gillian didn’t know. It’s just an interview, she would say, you have to tell them something.

Once or twice she had complained about becoming a celebrity, but in fact she had loved being recognized on the street.

At the back of the album were some clippings she hadn’t stuck down yet. A write-up of her wedding, a double-page spread with photographs of the service and the party afterward. Gillian was astounded that Matthias hadn’t made a fuss. The journalist and photographer hardly stood out, they integrated themselves better into the wedding company than some of Matthias’s friends or Gillian’s relations. And they were restrained too, only asking for the occasional shot or a few words. When Gillian saw the piece in the magazine a week later, she had the feeling the whole celebration had been staged. After that she became more wary. But then, after she had been gone from the magazines for a while, she missed the attention, and she agreed when asked for a feature about her home life. Matthias and her in their tidied apartment, reading, cooking, eating, or standing dreamily out on the balcony. We’ve been mugged, she thought, this isn’t our apartment, that isn’t Matthias, this isn’t me. When she saw Matthias’s expression, it suddenly seemed to her as though he was a part of the conspiracy, and had known about it all along.



The following day the sun shone. It was cool outside but almost too warm in the flat. The doctor had told Gillian not to go out in the sun, but she didn’t want to go out anyway. For lunch she cooked some pasta. Afterward, she ordered food from an online grocery. She filled her virtual basket with things she had steered clear of so far, frozen meals, sausages, potato chips, pastry, white bread, ketchup, and mayonnaise. She bought enough to last her three weeks and paid with her credit card. Gillian started to sort through Matthias’s clothes and shoes. She stuffed them into big garbage bags. It was difficult, on crutches, to get everything into the spare room. She emptied the contents of Matthias’s desk into a cardboard box. Margrit had told her to do whatever she thought best. Sometimes she sat there for minutes, staring at a piece of clothing or some other item.

The deliveryman from the online store came toward evening. There was a ring at the door, and Gillian buzzed him in. When he rang again at the top of the stairs, she called through the door to leave the things outside. The man stood there for a moment and then went away. Only when Gillian heard the engine of the delivery truck downstairs did she cautiously open the door.



She ate a lot over the next weeks. She watched TV, surfed the Net, slept late. Her parents called her on the landline, and when she didn’t pick up, on her mobile. Gillian said she was fine, she needed quiet, and she promised to visit them, next week, or maybe the week after.

Will you call if you need something? asked her mother.

I need time, she said. It’s not about you.

She stopped answering the phone, she didn’t even look at the display when someone called. She deleted her e-mails as well, without bothering to read them. She waited for Hubert to get in touch, but he didn’t. Presumably he didn’t even know anything had happened to her.

At night, Gillian dreamed of men attacking her and raping her and violating her. Her body exploded, her flesh flew in scraps through the air, the walls were stained with her blood. It was dark in the rooms, and yet everything could be clearly seen. In the middle of the night she woke up. She listened to the darkness. It was perfectly still, but she heard the emptiness just the same. She thought about the times at the end of recording sessions when the soundman said, atmosphere, and everyone froze, so that he could record the silence for a minute.



The days went by like the weather in a constant back-and-forth. It got cold, then warmed up overnight. Once, a lot of snow fell in the space of a few hours, but it all melted away within a day or two. Gillian no longer felt bored. Some mornings she didn’t even get the newspaper out of the mailbox. She spent a lot of time thinking about Matthias and their former life together, but she still couldn’t deal with the fact of his death. Grief came quickly and unexpectedly, a sudden stab of pain that made her reel.

For days she had worn the same pajamas, she didn’t wash or shower, and she lived entirely on junk food. She watched her body change as she put on weight and developed spots on her back and her chin. For the first time in years she was aware of her body odor.

One sunny day she thought she would go for a trip. The late-afternoon light was as golden as it was in autumn. She rode the elevator down to the basement and followed the passage into the underground garage. She kept stopping to listen, but she couldn’t hear anyone. Her dark green Mini stood where it always stood. She drove to a wood on the edge of the city and parked near a recycling station. A man was coming out of the wood toward the parking lot with his dog. Gillian crouched down and waited. The man opened the door of his car, which stood a couple of spots away from hers, and the dog jumped in. When he had driven away, and there was no one else around, she climbed out and set off. The path led along the edge of the wood. In its interior there were still a few scraps of leftover snow. After a while, Gillian saw a couple approaching with Nordic walking sticks. They were perhaps two hundred yards away. She stopped and looked around. Behind her was a woman pushing a stroller. The underbrush beside the path was fairly dense and difficult to penetrate. She kept her arms up to shield her face, branches scratched her hands. Thereafter it got easier. The ground was thickly covered with dense leaf mulch that gave underfoot. Gillian heard voices, and then she saw through the underbrush that the couple and the woman with the stroller passed each other. She waited a moment longer and then plunged deeper into the wood. The light fell diagonally, making long shadows. Sometimes Gillian stopped and contemplated the silver bark of a tree that looked like the hide of an animal, or a piece of tree root that was worn smooth by the elements. She laid her hand on the cool wood, feeling tiny unevennesses. The terrain became flatter. It was already starting to get dark, from the nearby zoo she heard animal cries. When she got back to the parking lot it was dark and the streetlights were on.



The following morning Gillian awoke early. It was still dark. She had no sense of her body, only when she moved did a shape gradually come to her. She turned her head to the side, felt her cheek brush against the soft pillowcase, then a leg under the duvet, her other leg, numb, the sole of her foot, the chilly floor, a slight feeling of dizziness. She passed through the rooms as though the apartment were her body, a big prone body, too heavy to pick itself up.

After her first cup of coffee she slowly came around, and under the shower her body knitted itself together to what it was. She vaguely remembered the time she was still growing. Her hips widened, her breasts deepened. It was like one long inhale, a picking herself up. Now she exhaled, for a long time she had done nothing but exhale, sometimes she had the sense of not having any more air in her and still having to go on exhaling.

Every other day or so, Gillian had to go to her doctor to get her dressings changed. In the waiting room, the other patients avoided her eyes. When the doctor said the wounds were healing well, it sounded to her like mockery. After the dressing had been changed, she often went for a drive around the city. Behind the wheel she felt invisible, only waiting at a light sometimes she noticed the driver of a car in the next lane eyeing her and quickly looking away when she turned. She was drawn to empty spaces, drove to the industrial park on the edge of the city, parked her car at the soccer stadium. There was no one around, only a couple of building machines parked on the gravel. Around the perimeter was a tall wire fence, the gate stood open. She walked in, climbed a wide flight of steps. The stadium was much bigger than it seemed from outside. The stands were empty, tiers of colored seats, blue, orange, gray, and green. She stood there for a while, looking down at the playing surface and trying to imagine the scene when there was a game on and the stands were full of spectators. Another time, she drove up to the top floor of a multistory parking garage. The morning had been dry, but it started raining again at midday. The walls of the garage were cement, with wide spaces through which a powerful wind blew. Gillian got out and made her way among the handful of parked cars. She spun on her own axis, made wide sidesteps as in fencing classes at drama school, leaps forward and back. She occupied the space, as their speech tutor had taught them to do, put out the flat of her hand as though to push the walls away. She accompanied this with long, drawn-out hissing. She felt excited, she didn’t even know why. The space seemed to be too big, it afforded no resistance. In little pattering steps she ran to one of the openings and looked out at the industrial buildings, at the multilane highways packed with traffic bordered by trimmed poplars, at the mountain away in the distance, dimly visible through the downpour. She felt cold.

When she returned to her Mini, she saw a man sitting in one of the parked cars. He sat there motionless. Their eyes met, and Gillian wondered if he had been watching her entire performance.



The day before the second operation, a Sunday, Gillian visited her parents. She hadn’t seen her mother since the accident. When her mother opened the door and saw her, she turned aside and started crying. Her father stepped up and with an expression of annoyance pushed her mother out of the way.

Come on in, he said.

Her mother said lunch was almost ready, and she disappeared back into the kitchen. Gillian followed her.

The sounds of silverware on the plates seemed so deafeningly loud that Gillian could hardly hear what her parents were saying. The two aged faces contorted themselves to ugly grimaces as they chewed their food, Gillian looked down at her plate, broke up her food in small pieces, which she swallowed, almost without chewing them.

Aren’t you hungry at all?

What’s that?

You’re hardly eating anything.

I’m not hungry. Gillian put down her knife and fork and stood up. I’ll be back in a minute.

As she was shutting the bathroom door behind her, she saw her father get up to refill his plate.

She sat on the toilet and waited. It was cold in the house, she was shivering. Her father kept the thermostat way down, her mother had whispered to her in the kitchen. Her father hadn’t finished eating, but her mother had already started to clear the table. They had their coffee in the living room. Her father read the newspaper, her mother was sitting next to Gillian in such a way that she couldn’t look at her. Gillian looked at her mother’s hands as she poured coffee, passed her a cup, took one herself, wizened hands too brown for the early season, with age spots and half a dozen rings on her fingers. As a young woman, her mother had been beautiful. Gillian wondered how she coped with the loss of her beauty, and if it was easier when it happened gradually and not just like that. She had read somewhere that most people had a completely false self-image, thinking of themselves as slimmer, younger, and more attractive than they really were. Perhaps to herself her mother was still the beautiful young woman in her wedding picture that stood on the sideboard. Certainly, she still looked after herself, but the futility of her efforts only made her decline sadder.

You look like you’ve put on weight, said her mother.

Gillian stayed longer than she had meant to. She went out to the garden with her father, and he showed her a couple of bushes he had planted. Later on, all three of them were in the living room again, reading. Gillian went to lie on the bed in her old room. Her mother was in the kitchen, getting dinner ready. Her father wandered around, perhaps he was looking for something. The times Gillian had visited him in his workshop, he had been a different man altogether, full of energy, choleric, but often in a good mood and generous. Whereas at home, he resembled a wounded animal, looking for a place to hide.

And you’re sure it’s all right if we go skiing next week? her mother asked.

Oh, yes, said Gillian, it’s not a dangerous operation. And you’ll see my new face soon enough.

Then why don’t you go somewhere, to the mountains or the sea? asked her mother. You’ve got time.

By myself? said Gillian, and carried the glasses into the living room.

She set the table. When she came back to the kitchen, her mother looked at her apprehensively, but Gillian didn’t say anything else. After dinner, they watched the news.

I’d better go now, said Gillian.

Her parents made no effort to keep her. They saw her to the door, her mother hugged her, her father shook hands. Break a leg, eh, said Gillian, and climbed into her car. When she had turned, she looked at the house again. The door was shut.

That evening Gillian checked her e-mails, but there was nothing for Miss Julie.



The text Hubert sent her after showing her his pictures had offended Gillian. He had asked if she was disappointed. After that she didn’t write for two weeks, and he hung back as well. Matthias asked her what the matter was, but she just shook her head and said she had a lot to do, half the editorial team was away on autumn breaks.

Finally she wrote him an e-mail that accused him of exploiting her. Not every woman you lure into your studio will strip for you.

Hubert answered at once, it was as though he had been waiting for her to write. He was friendly but provocatively calm, wrote that he hadn’t asked her to model for him, though he admitted he had entertained the possibility. He had decided basically not to continue with the series of nudes and to start on something new, but it might be interesting to have one last go. It would be different anyway, he wrote, seeing as you’re not a complete stranger to me, and I wouldn’t want to photograph you but paint you from life. Might you be interested?

What happens with the picture? asked Gillian without a salutation or greeting.

I’ll give it to you, replied Hubert.

I can hardly come home with a nude painting of myself, wrote Gillian. He wrote: I wasn’t thinking in terms of a nude.



Unusually, the program was wrapped on a Monday, and Gillian got Tuesday off. When she woke up, Matthias was standing by the window, a cup of coffee in his hand.

Look at the fog, he said, you’re lucky.

No sooner was he gone than she showered and dressed. She tried to imagine the picture Hubert would paint of her. In his last e-mail he had asked her to wear a dress. She spent a long time in front of her wardrobe. Finally she decided on a classical high-necked chiffon dress that Matthias liked. She put on a pearl necklace and pearl earrings he had given her for their engagement. She didn’t care for them, they made her seem old, but they seemed the right thing for an oil painting.

Now, by daylight and in fog, the area around Hubert’s studio seemed even bleaker. Opposite the old textile mill was an ugly ’80s office block with red metal cladding. It was a busy road. Outside the studio building stood a young man and an even younger woman, smoking. They took in Gillian. The man was standing directly in front of the door and only moved aside at the very last moment.

Are you looking for someone? asked the young woman.

I’ve got an appointment, said Gillian, though the expression sounded a little absurd here.

The long passageway was dimly lit. Gillian walked down to the end, knocked on Hubert’s door, and walked in without waiting to be admitted. Hubert had tidied up since the last time she’d been here. He had set up the easel in front of the sofa and put a big piece of chipboard on it.

Did you find the way all right? he asked casually and helped Gillian out of her coat. He looked at her. A dress without pleats would have been easier, technically speaking. How much time have you got?

Till midday, said Gillian.

He asked her to sit on the sofa, any way that was comfortable. No sooner had she sat down than he told her not to slump. He went up to her, laid his hand very gently on her shoulders, and pulled her upper body forward a little.

Is this all right?

When she nodded, he marked the position of her feet with red tape. Then he paced about the room in silence and looked at her from different angles. He put a film in his camera and took a few pictures.

Just to have something to fall back on, he said.

Finally, he moved the easel back from the sofa a little, marked its position with tape as well, and clipped a piece of packing paper to the board. Her position quickly became uncomfortable.

Is it all right if I take my shoes off?

Hubert nodded, and Gillian slipped off her pumps. After a while, her feet felt cold, and she put them on again.

Do you mind sitting still? asked Hubert. And don’t smile. But no sooner had she changed her expression than he complained again. This isn’t a photo shoot. Can’t you just look normal? As if you were alone?

Gillian asked him if he was already working on her face.

It’s your whole posture, he said. I can’t see you if you’re acting.

Gillian had been photographed many times, but it had always been a matter of playing a part, first in the theater, then in publicity shots. She struck a pose in front of the camera, got into positions she had seen in magazines. The best pictures were ones in which she could hardly recognize herself. Now that she wasn’t allowed to move, she had no real sense of how Hubert was seeing her.

You have an enormous head, he said matter-of-factly. He unclipped the sketch, let it fall to the floor, and put up a new piece of packing paper on the backboard. After three-quarters of an hour they took a break.

Can I have a look? asked Gillian.

Sure, said Hubert, as he took an old espresso can apart. Do you want coffee?

Marked on the paper in charcoal she could see the shape of the room and the furniture. Her body was roughly sketched but it looked astonishingly lifelike. Even so, she wasn’t satisfied. She had hoped the picture would tell her something new.

I wonder what you’re going to discover in me, she said to Hubert, who had filled the espresso can and put it on the hot plate.

I don’t see anything in you. I’ll be pleased if I manage the exterior half decently.

Gillian knelt on the floor and leafed through the sketches. Hubert brought two full cups of espresso. He stopped just in front of her and said, stay like that. He set the cups on the floor, got a big sketchbook off a shelf, and started drawing her in quick strokes. By the time Gillian was allowed her coffee, it had gone cold.

Maybe it’s better if you’re standing up. He drank his coffee all in one go, left the dirty cups in the sink, and clipped a fresh piece of paper on the board.

They tried out all sorts of poses that morning: Gillian sitting on a chair, standing behind the chair leaning against the back, looking at Hubert, looking out the window, with her back to him or sideways. Sometimes he just looked at her without drawing her. Sometimes he took one or two photos. The poses tired Gillian, but she enjoyed the atmosphere of concentration, the attention Hubert gave her, and the gentle touches with which he coaxed her into different positions. By the time it was twelve and she had to go, there was a whole heap of sketches on the floor next to the easel.

Tomorrow the same time? asked Hubert. And please be sure to wear something different.



When Gillian arrived in the studio the next morning, the previous day’s sketches were taped up on the wall. Again, Hubert helped her out of her coat. She wore a tightly fitting short skirt, sleeveless top, and dark stockings.

He had decided on a pose overnight. He set Gillian in an uncomfortable straight-backed cane chair and asked her to cross her arms. He took her right hand and put it on her left knee, and put the left on her right thigh.

Sit up straight, he said. How does that feel?

Not comfortable, said Gillian. Any chance of a cushion?

Hubert shook his head. We mustn’t let you be too comfortable, otherwise you’ll get that self-satisfied look on your face again.

This position feels stupid, said Gillian. I’d never sit like this.

So much the better, he said. Before he began, he set an egg timer for forty-five minutes. When it goes off, we can have a break, he said.

He went up to Gillian again and tweaked her clothes. He hardly spoke while drawing, but his facial expression changed continually, sometimes he looked angry, then suddenly he brightened. He drew his eyebrows together, looked intensely focused for a while, then relaxed again. Gillian looked out the window, where there was a huge mound of gravel, presumably spoils from some sort of dig. Behind it was a wooded slope. The sky was overcast. In spite of the uncomfortable position, Gillian’s thoughts started to wander, as though the cramped attitude evoked certain memories. She thought about her early days at drama school, her strickenness when the teacher had criticized her. You’re acting — that was his refrain — be yourself, show yourself. Only when she was completely exhausted, despairing and close to tears, did the teacher sometimes say, now that was the real you. Just for a moment.

Gillian was jolted out of her memories when Hubert asked her to please concentrate.

What does that mean? She asked. I thought as far as you’re concerned I might as well be a milk jug or a bowl of fruit.

A jug doesn’t look out the window, he said. You’re dissolving.

When the egg timer rang, they took a short break. Gillian went to the bathroom, which was at the other end of the passageway. It was dirty, and even though the window was open and it was freezing cold in the tiny space, the stink was sickening. When she returned to the studio, Hubert had replaced the board with a prepared canvas and was in the process of mixing colors and getting brushes lined up. She walked up and down the room, stretching her legs.

All ready? he asked finally and wound the egg timer again.

She sat down. He adjusted her attitude and ran his hand over her hair to smooth it. Gillian settled down to watch Hubert paint. He had the brush out, and to judge by his sweeping movements he was painting the outlines.

It comes and goes, he said. Painting from photographs is definitely easier. Then he stopped talking; a little later he swore. It’s not possible to render a three-dimensional object on a flat canvas.

By the object do you mean me? asked Gillian.

I don’t even know what makes people try, he said, ignoring her. I only know I can’t paint what I see. It would be better just to look at people instead of painting pictures of them.

So why do you do it?

He groaned.

Gillian imagined a museum with empty walls. People walked through the rooms, stopped in front of one another, took a step back, circled and scrutinized each other.

Hubert snapped his fingers. Hello? Anyone home?

The worst were the first few minutes after each break. Each time Gillian would think she couldn’t possibly hold her pose for another forty-five minutes. Her mouth was dry, she needed to clear her throat, somewhere she had an itch that she would give anything to scratch. As time passed, she got used to sitting still. She still felt the pain in her back and bottom, but it had become part of her. She became stiller, stopped wondering what she would look like in the picture and who would get to see it. The painting would exist independently of her, it wasn’t a copy, not a depiction. Every snapshot would contain more of her than this painting. The next time the egg timer went off, she walked around next to Hubert and looked at what he had done.

If you want, she said, you can paint me naked.



For two days Gillian had been going around with the proofs of the second book by a rising young novelist. She had taken the train out to Hubert’s studio and had read another dozen pages. When she looked down at her cell phone during one of the breaks, she saw that her editor had sent her a text, asking if the book was worth devoting a slot to, and if she had an idea for how to do it. It wasn’t easy for books to get coverage, you couldn’t get interesting images out of writers. Think outside the box, the series editor said every time, I don’t want to see another shot of a moody author tramping through autumn leaves. Gillian wrote back to say she wasn’t far enough along yet, but she’d know by tomorrow. After dinner, she went on reading the proofs and wondering how the young author could be produced for television. She was glad of the distraction. At eleven Matthias came into her office and said he was going to bed. By midnight she had roughed out a concept for a film, no walk in the woods but a retelling of the novel with some archive footage, and a brief interview with the author on the difficulties of a second novel, and a couple of clips from a reading, with comments from readers. That should stand a chance in the editorial meeting. She went to the bathroom and got undressed. She looked at herself in the mirror for a long time. She turned and looked over her shoulder.

Normally, Thursdays weren’t too strenuous, but Gillian spent almost the whole morning editing a piece. In the afternoon it was okayed, and she made a couple of phone calls to advance the concept she wanted to present in the editorial meeting tomorrow. She still hadn’t gotten to the end of the book. It was an eccentric story with lots of humorous inserts, but even so — or maybe just because — she was bored by it. If you asked her, most literary publications were superfluous anyway. Perhaps it was her fault, but it was more and more unusual for her to be caught up in a book. When writers complained that they were never invited to be on the program, she often felt tempted to say, write better books.

She was already thinking of canceling the proposal, but when she met her boss by the coffee machine he said he was looking forward to hearing from her. She went home at three. She read a bit more of the proofs, but she couldn’t concentrate. She had told Matthias at breakfast that she was going to see Dagmar that evening.

When she set off a little before six, it was raining gently, and it felt colder than in the morning. She looked at the other passengers in the streetcar and tried to imagine them naked. Old women, businesspeople, mothers who had collected their little ones from day care — all naked. A young, smartly dressed businessman whose upper body was densely haired, a man with such a big belly that you couldn’t see his penis, a big-breasted woman, a young woman with thin reddish pubic hair and a genital piercing. Pleats of skin, wrinkles, light and dark skin, spots, freckles, and moles. Gillian felt reminded of medieval pictures of the Day of Judgment, tiny little people doubled over with pain and guilt. She tried to remember the name of the painter who had persuaded hundreds of people to take off their clothes for him and all lie down on the ground.

She had to change at the central station. The big hall was full of people. Gillian wriggled through, the proximity of so many others was suddenly disagreeable to her. During the train ride, she remained standing by the door.

By the time she got there, it was almost dark. She hadn’t taken an umbrella, and her face and hair were wet as she strode quickly down the passageway of the studio building. She walked in without knocking. Hubert was on the sofa, reading the newspaper, beside him on the floor was a bottle of beer. He put the newspaper away and looked up at her. She dropped her coat on the sofa beside him. He looked apathetic. He got up and kissed her on both cheeks.

Are you ready?

Gillian stooped to pick up the beer bottle, took a long drink, and set it back on the floor. She looked at him and nodded. Hubert said she could leave her things on the sofa and went over to the easel to fix the backboard.

The floor’s not very clean I’m afraid, he said with his back to her. Sorry.

In front of the easel stood the empty chair that Gillian had sat in yesterday, with a small electric heater by it.

She pulled her sweater over her head with both hands. Underneath she had on a sleeveless linen blouse. She undid the top two buttons, hesitated briefly. All the time she hadn’t taken her eyes off Hubert. He stood in front of the easel, turned away from her, busying himself with his sketching things. Even so, she turned her back on him when unbuttoning her jeans. They were quite tight, and she had to wriggle to get them off. She thought how silly that must look. She took off her thin kneesocks, and undid the rest of the buttons on her blouse. Then she asked Hubert for a hanger. At that stage he had to turn round, but he kept his eyes on her face.

Linen creases so easily, she said, smiling, when he passed her a wire hanger.

Now she had the feeling that the situation was under control. In her underwear she sat down on the chair.

Do you want me to sit like yesterday?

I thought …, Hubert began, but he didn’t finish the sentence.

Gillian stood up, turned away, and quickly took off her bra and underpants. When she walked naked through the room, she moved differently than usual, slower and more erect, a little stiffly. She was sure that Hubert was watching her now. The thought that he had already seen and painted so many women naked unsettled her. She folded her underwear under the other things on the sofa and sat down on the chair in front of the easel.

Do you like what you see, then? she asked, and right away was furious with herself.

Hubert didn’t reply. She had taken the same position as the day before and was happy at the way her crossed arms were shielding her. Hubert walked around for a while, and then very slowly approached her, repeatedly stopping to look at her. She tried to sense what was in his mind, his expression was serious and intent.

Do you mind if I take some photographs?

Gillian hesitated, then nodded.

He clicked in a roll of film, then went in very close with the camera. He seemed to have more courage when he was able to hide behind the equipment. When the film had been shot off, he put it in an envelope and sealed it. Then at last he started sketching.

The cane seat cut into her bottom, and the electric heater only warmed one side of her body. She tried to think of something else. She asked herself what she was doing there. If Matthias saw the painting, he was certain to make a huge scene. Of course he would recognize her, whatever Hubert said. And he would never believe that she hadn’t slept with the painter. He knew her past, for ten years after drama school she had done pretty much whatever she felt like doing. Sometimes she had slept with a man purely because she admired his lifestyle or because she wanted to know what it would feel like to deceive her boyfriend of the time. Matthias often quizzed her about those years, and she didn’t keep anything from him. Well, you’re mine now, she had often heard that sentence from him, and even though she didn’t much like the expression, it did give her a kind of security. She had no reason to play around now. If she did, and he found out, that would be the end of everything, of that she was certain. She couldn’t account for what it was about Hubert that attracted her. He dressed scruffily and didn’t seem to be interested in his appearance. And his laconic, even grouchy manner was enough to lead Gillian to expect coarseness or inattentiveness. She had had a brief relationship with a painter once before, and that had been a disaster. Perhaps she was in search of uncertainty, in the hope of being unsettled. She needed perhaps to be made to feel who she was. That sounded like something that would be more at home in a self-help book. Sometimes she and Matthias had giggled over the tips in magazines, techniques to keep a tired relationship alive, and even so he arranged for them to spend holidays in a spa hotel in the mountains where they would be pampered with massages and baths and good food. Then they slept together, as though that too was on the menu. Currently, Gillian found sex with him less satisfying than the fact that they had it at all. It was proof that their relationship was in good shape, and that things could go on as they were.

The egg timer went off. Her pose had come to feel like a protective garment, but as soon as she got up she felt her nudity again. Even so, she walked over to Hubert who still had the charcoal in his hand. He took a step back to inspect the drawing, quite as though not to be too close to her. He was more careful of her altogether since she was naked. She turned to him, stood next to the drawing, and copied the uncertain expression on the girl’s face.

Did I really look like that?

She tried a big confident smile, but it didn’t come off. Hubert went over to the door and took down a thin kimono from the hook and passed it to her.

I don’t want to be responsible for your catching cold.

She looked at the sketch. Even though it was just a rough sketch, she could see the likeness, but it didn’t strike her as significant.

Are you happy with it? she asked.

Hubert shook his head. I get the feeling there’s nothing coming from you, he said. A bit of shyness at the start, but after that you were just gone.

What do you expect from me? I’ve never done this before.

Presence. You’ve got to be here so that something can happen between us.

Gillian smirked.

Get undressed, he said. Stand here. Feet apart. So that you feel solidly rooted. Do you feel the floor? Your weight?

Gillian recalled the exercises in her first year of drama school, even then she hadn’t quite understood what they meant by presence. Hubert circled around her at a distance, stopped still behind her. She could feel his attentiveness.

What are you thinking about?

I was remembering drama school.

How do you feel?

I don’t know. Tired.

Sit down.

She had to sit on the cold floor, her knees drawn up, arms on her knees, one hand grasping her other wrist. She thought of a statue by Aristide Maillol in exactly that pose. Hubert wound up the egg timer, started drawing. Sometimes he groaned loudly, or hurled the charcoal on the floor. It’s not working. The timer went off, they split a beer, a new pose. The more it went on, the more taciturn Hubert grew. Sometimes he would crumple up a sheet of paper after a single line. Gillian was tired, her body cramped, she was hurting. In the next break, she did a couple of stretches, but Hubert had already wound the clock again.

Get undressed.

She opened the kimono. He stepped up behind her and almost ripped it off her.

Lie down.

She lay on her front, her head pillowed on her folded arms. She could feel herself getting goose pimples all over.

I need to go to the bathroom.

Not now. Arms down by your sides.

The cold floor pressed against her cheekbones. Hubert stood close beside her, she could only see his feet and legs.

Lie on your back.

When Gillian turned over, bits of grit were clinging to her belly, her breasts, her face. Chill from the floor crept into her, her breasts rose and fell. She covered her pudenda with her hand.

No, said Hubert.

She took her hand away. Slowly she calmed down. She lay there like a corpse. Hubert was still standing very close to her, looking down. She studied the ceiling, the electric wires that led to the ugly halogen lamps. Dirty gray shadows had formed around the lamps. She tried to look Hubert in the eye. After he finally returned her look, he walked away. She sat up and saw him standing at the window, staring out into the dark. Gillian stood up, and with her hands brushed the dirt off her face and body. Then she picked up the kimono off the floor and went over to Hubert.

I’m sorry.

It doesn’t matter.

She pressed herself against him, placed her hands on his chest. When he still didn’t react, she undid the belt of the kimono.

It’s all right, she said.

Her voice sounded false, she was speaking lines from a script. She started stroking his neck and shoulder, her breath came faster, she kept her mouth close to his ear. She wanted to be aroused, wanted him to. He broke away with a jerk and took a step to the side, without turning to face her.

Stop that!

For a long time neither spoke.

Don’t you fancy me?

Finally Hubert turned toward her and looked at her.

My girlfriend’s having a baby. The due date’s next month.

Gillian laughed and took a step toward him.

Who cares, we’re grown-ups.

She was playing a part in a bad film. Even so, her lust was genuine. She wanted him to grab her and push her onto the sofa. It would be like a punishment that would relieve her. Just then the egg timer went off. It seemed not to want to stop. Hubert went to the door and opened it.

Please go.



Gillian’s father stood by the window, even though there was nothing to be seen anymore besides the doctors’ parking spaces, a bit of lawn, and some small detached houses. In the past few days Gillian had often stood at that same window and asked herself who lived in those houses and what sort of lives were conducted in the rhythm of the lamps going on and off, behind the opening and closing curtains, whose shadows were flitting over the blinds. But her father wasn’t looking out, his head was lowered. He had hardly been there for fifteen minutes, and already he was restless. One of the nurses had taken off the bandage so that he could see his daughter’s face.

Gillian stepped behind him and stopped a couple of paces away. He had driven down from the mountains and interrupted his skiing holiday expressly for her sake. She was touched, but when she tried to say so, he gestured dismissively, it hadn’t even taken him three hours.

The doctors have done a good job, he said. It’s looking all right, almost like before.

Gillian looked nothing like before. Now that she could identify her features again, she saw even more clearly how she had changed. She would never look the way she had before the accident.

I had a word with the doctor, said her father, after the third operation there’ll be hardly any trace left.

That’s in five months, said Gillian. In summer.

She had called her boss after the operation. He had suggested expanding her editorial function, since she wasn’t able to appear in front of the camera for now. He had cautiously felt her out about the prognosis for her face. In five months it’s supposed to be fully restored, said Gillian, with the help of a bit of makeup. Let’s talk nearer the time, said her boss. When can you start work?

When can you start work? asked her father.

He had never liked her job, never even approved of drama lessons. She was surprised to see him at her graduation show. Nor was her father impressed with her journalistic training. For him, journalists were all lefties, out to wreck the private sector. As a student Gillian had started presenting a lifestyle show for a local television station. She had been so good at it that she was called in for a screen test when the national broadcaster was looking for a host for a new flagship arts program. But even after Gillian started getting more and more prominence, her father continued to criticize her profession. The thing that most got on his nerves was when a customer or acquaintance of his asked if he was related to her, and he had to undergo a detailed commentary on the program and what she was wearing and what the magazines had to say about it.

After the accident a tabloid newspaper published a blurred hospital picture of her. Her father had pulled the page from his briefcase and held it out to her. He said no one could account for the picture, presumably it had been taken by someone working here, who had sold it to the paper. Gillian was barely recognizable, it must have been taken by a cell phone camera and with poor light. Under the picture was a brief report: tragic accident and so forth. She didn’t feel like reading the piece. Instead she looked at the other picture, of her and Matthias, taken at some party or other, her smile appeared forced, and she looked older than she was.

What am I supposed to do? she asked. It could have been almost anyone.

She passed the paper back to her father, and he returned it to his briefcase. She thought he would say that’s your comeuppance, but all he said was that he had lodged a complaint with the hospital management and telephoned the paper. He had even talked to his lawyer, but the lawyer wasn’t interested. She was of public interest, it made it difficult to defend her privacy. If you shared your happiness with journalists, you shouldn’t be surprised if they were interested in your misfortune as well.

When are you starting again? asked her father.

That’s finished, said Gillian. You won’t have to be angry with them anymore now. I’m not going back into editorial to receive anyone’s sympathy.

She didn’t feel like writing scripts for Maia, who, thanks to her accident, was getting the chance to move from her desk to in front of the camera.

What will you do instead? asked her father.

She couldn’t tell from his tone if he was relieved or concerned.

I don’t know yet, she said, something will turn up.

Do you want the use of the holiday house for a while? he asked. We won’t be there past Sunday.

Neither of them mentioned that she and Matthias had been going to spend the next week in the mountains.



On the first floor was the maternity ward. In the elevator was a list of the babies born during the past few days. When Gillian went down to the kiosk in the entrance hall for cigarettes or a newspaper, she would see the young couples standing around with their new babies. They looked lost, as though they were waiting for someone to come by and say something complimentary. Behind their smiles Gillian saw panic in the face of the horrifying creature they had made, and for which they were now responsible, without really knowing what they were going to do. She felt them avoiding her eye.

It was a sunny day in February, the air was cool, and the wind chased the occasional cloud across the sky. Gillian stood on the balcony of her room, smoking. She had wrapped herself in a blanket and was looking down at the city and the lake. She felt chilly as she lit another cigarette. Smoking was banned everywhere in the hospital and a nurse passing by outside made an indignant face and wafted her hand in front of her face. Gillian ignored her. A young couple left the building. The man carried the baby awkwardly under his arm. The woman had linked arms with him, she walked a little uncertainly, and didn’t look particularly pleased. Suddenly the w-word made an appearance, I am a widow, and it was more shocking than her injury, than Matthias’s death, than anything.

The clouds suddenly gave way to the sun and, dazzled, Gillian took a backward step. The doctor came in to say goodbye. He said she shouldn’t go out in the sun for the time being and should avoid getting her face wet for a few days. Also she shouldn’t take any exercise, and should avoid all forms of exertion. Apart from that, she could please herself. He shook hands with Gillian and said he had to go, they would see each other again in five months’ time. Gillian looked at her watch. It was a little after two. She packed her case and went out into the corridor. She quickly said goodbye to the nurses. Something kept her from walking out of the main hospital exit. At the end of the landing was a staircase that went down to the emergency ward and a side exit. She called a taxi. While she waited, she wondered where she would go. She didn’t want to see any of her friends, no one she had known from before, who would compare her old face to the new one. When the taxi finally arrived, she put on her dark glasses and almost ran the few steps to it.

From home, she called the police station and asked to speak to Frau Bauer. She was away from her desk, but the man took a note of Gillian’s number and promised his colleague would get back to her. When she phoned three hours later, Gillian was almost in tears. She reminded the policewoman who she was.

What can I do for you?

Gillian hesitated, then she said, my husband wasn’t to blame for the accident. I was supposed to drive us home. And then I got drunk and I couldn’t.

You told me that already, said the policewoman.

It wasn’t his fault, said Gillian again, and by now she was crying.

He still shouldn’t have been driving, said the policewoman coolly. Perhaps you do need help. Shall I give you that victims’ support number again?

I’m not the victim, said Gillian and hung up.

She called Matthias’s mother and told her everything, but she wouldn’t hear of Gillian’s guilt either. She said there was no point in looking for a guilty party. Matthias’s death had been God’s will. The conversation was over almost as quickly as that with the policewoman.

Over the next few days, Gillian kept thinking of the New Year’s party and of how the accident might have been avoided. She should have insisted on staying the night at Dagmar’s, she shouldn’t have gotten into the car, she should never have allowed Hubert to take photographs of her nude.

Early on Sunday she called her parents at the vacation house. Her father picked up. She asked him where exactly the accident had happened. Someone from his workshop had picked up the totaled vehicle, and he was able to tell her the place. Gillian said she was happy to take his offer of staying in the house for a while. He said they wouldn’t be leaving till tonight, the weather was fine, and they wanted to get another day’s skiing in.

What about coming up today? It would be good to see you there.

I can’t manage that, she said.

Well, you know where we keep the keys, said her father.

She spent Sunday straightening up the apartment and packing a suitcase, though she didn’t know how long she would be staying in the mountains. On Monday morning she drove to the scene of the crash. She parked by a forest path a hundred yards farther on and went back on foot. By the side of the road was a withered bouquet of flowers with a burned-down votive candle, the only clue that there had been an accident here. Gillian wondered who had put it there. She picked it up and put it on her backseat. When she stopped at a rest stop an hour later, to fill up, she threw it in a trash can that had Thank You written on it in four languages.

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