Code for the Door to Markus’s Building

A9624

Thirty-nine

The next morning, he got up early. So early that he wasn’t even certain he’d slept. He waited impatiently for the sun, as if it were an important date. What was going to happen today? What kind of mood would Natalie be in? And what should he do? Who knew what to do when a beautiful woman kisses you without giving the slightest reason for it? Questions bombarded his mind, and that was never a good sign. He needed to take some calm in-and-out breaths (…) and (…), whew, like that (…), very good (…). And tell himself that it was just a day like any other.Markus loved to read. It was a nice point in common with Natalie. He used his trips on the suburban railway to satisfy that passion. He’d recently bought a number of books and had to choose the one that was going with him on this great day. There was that Russian author he liked a lot, an author who was read markedly less than Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, for no real reason, but it was too bulky a book. He wanted a text he could peck away at when he felt like it, because he knew he wouldn’t be able to concentrate. That’s why he chose Cioran’s Syllogisms of Bitterness. Once he arrived, he tried to spend as much time as possible near the coffee machine. To make it seem normal, he drank several cups. After an hour of this, he began to feel a little too worked up. Black coffee and white nights with no sleep were never a good combination. He went to the men’s room, felt peaked. Went back to his office. No meeting with Natalie was planned for today. Maybe he should just go and see her? Use file 114 as an excuse. But there was nothing to say about file 114. It would be stupid. He was fed up with letting himself be eaten away by indecision. After all, she was the one who should come! She was the one who’d kissed him. You had no right to act like that without giving an explanation. It was like stealing something and then running away. It was exactly that: she’d run away from his lips. However, he knew she wouldn’t come to see him. Maybe she’d even forgotten that moment; for her was it just a gratuitous act? He had good intuition. He sensed a terrible injustice in that possibility: how could the act of kissing be gratuitous for her while it was inestimable for him? Yes, priceless. That kiss was everywhere in him, storming his body. Forty

Дата добавления: 2015-10-26