Following the Summer Read Online Free

one he selected were three short-haired young men speaking English, fast and loud, while huddled over a road map. Beside the exit an old woman in trousers, her back arched, sipped a Coca-Cola that she held aloft. She smiled at him over the waxed-paper cup. The broom creaked along the floor which seemed to be plastic, too. The light fell evenly over music that he didn’t hear. Here he was free.
    It was to this place that he brought Fatima, on the first Sunday they left the neighbourhood.
    For the child had continued to accost him, at random, when there was no one to witness their meeting and she could still hold out her hand. A ritual of silence, to which he lent himself wholeheartedly, vaguely curious to see if she’d impose it on the others in the café, too. But he didn’t know them well enough to ask, and above all he would have been afraid of putting an end to Fatima’s little game. Sometimes he caught himself looking for her in the dusk of an empty street. A form, a being, a violence. Someone, in a word, who was not indifferent to him.
    She never spoke, not even on the evening when they met some distance away, in the little square that dips down to mark the entrance to the Servitenkirsche. In any case they had no common language, and murmurs need time to acquire a meaning. It was raining, she wasn’t even shivering, but still he ventured a protective move, a hand on her shoulder, and it nudged her onto the square in front of the church. The side door was ajar, she wanted to go inside, and immediately stood rooted to the spot before the mass of the confessionals, the twisted columns, the drawn curtains blocking the entrance to a baptistry, which was perfectly bare. He loathed churches, this one as much as any other: the side aisles with their padlocked grilles over blank-eyed Virgins or martyrs in their grimy tombs; the creaking of an old lady’s chair, or the fearful rustling of a nun’s habit — this one was counting the take from the candles while Fatima looked on, astonished; the brass plates of benefactors that celebrated their own death. Absences disguised as presences, so many lies amidst the lingering smell of cold incense and the humiliation of the kneeling benches.
    A single rose-window cast its quicksilver light on the ageless statues, the plaster cones of paper flowers that marked the passage from one archway to the next. A Saint Sebastian carved in wood, as were the Stations of the Cross, hung from a column in the central nave, suffocated by the same flowers. Fatima dragged her creaking sandals across the false marble floor, slowly seeing everything there was to see. She touched nothing. But when the nun’s headdress had disappeared she lit five candles. Resenting the viscous light that made the child as credulous as the women, he waited for her in the shadows, at the back. She returned to him with her impudent walk, she was out on the street before he could catch up with her. He had to go home by himself.
    Then there was the castle, and the walk along the Danube. Fatima chose the places for their excursions, and he understood that she’d done so during the week. He became the guardian of longer escapades, of explorations. The castle was not a real castle but a big stone house dozing behind a high wall interrupted at either end by porte-cochères. The latches vanished under wall ornaments shaped like bunches of grapes, baroque reminders of some nouveau-riche splendour. One was broken, Fatima knew, and she waited for Ervant to push the heavy door. He did so without thinking, more sure of his abdication of will than of his curiosity.
    Nothing happened. The courtyard was deserted, the gravel on the path poorly raked, and some dying ivy hung along the length of the servants’ quarters, with their blind casements. Standing out against the horizon in a classical harmony as surprising as it was perfect, the central part of the house was invisible behind the truncated