Following the Summer Read Online Free Page A

pyramid of its double staircase. When Fatima had satisfied herself by lightly touching all the entrances they sat down in shared silence, sheltered by the bannister.
    Despite the acid autumn wind, the chill of the stone against his back, he was suffocating here as if he were in church, where objects were worn away, where fissures were worn smooth by worm holes and mildew, where flesh was everlasting marble. He wouldn’t move, though, as long as Fatima was there, questioning a pediment, a cornice, or simply the space, which was suddenly carved out differently for her, accustomed as she was to streets in blocks, to public squares, to the unbroken rustle of the city.
    She crouched on her heels just below him and he saw her from the back, her head more delicate now against her jutting shoulder blades. A father’s thoughts occurred to him now, just as she was escaping him by not asking for anything. Cut her hair, dress her as a little girl in white smocks and Viennese lace, in dirndl skirts of flowered wool. But she lacked the slimness of his models. He could see a sharp elbow under the red sweater, a harshness that did not belong to childhood. He observed on her wrist a bronze metallic line, slender thread of a bracelet that stood out only faintly against her olive skin.
    He took her hand, intrigued to find gold there rather than something nondescript made of glass. It was a perfect piece of jewellery, the clasp barely visible in the slim curved circle that clung to her wrist and moved so smoothly. He was sure he hadn’t seen it before.
    He gave her a questioning look, and she started to laugh, then gazed deeply into his eyes again with her old lady’s expression. She unfastened the bracelet, made it dance, put it back on her wrist. Then brought her hand to her neck and started kneading some imaginary necklace. He thought he heard words in her laughter, a smattering of Spanish, but it was only the hiccups of an excited child, silenced abruptly when no echo came.
    Their exploration of the castle was finished now; carefully he closed the porte-cochère, which would not engage, and they followed the brief maze of streets back to the square where they’d been just a short time ago. He didn’t know why he was unwilling to walk with her to the café, perhaps because she herself took her distance before it even came into view. That Sunday she begged another banknote from him, before she disappeared, and he went off to spend his evening elsewhere.
    The simplest of these October strolls had been their discovery of the path along the Danube. Ervant had gone there often, as had so many others like him who spent lonely Sundays in the city. There were no flowers, no fountains in their share of the border along the legendary river, where dreams no longer lingered as you drew near. From the paved walkway with its orderly row’s of benches one could inhale the always pallid Viennese sun in a kind of natural prison: opposite, the tall grey masses of the first post-war homes, to the left and right, identical bridges, and behind him, the embankment wall of a railway line. The closer you got to the centre the more ornate the bridges became, the more the paths opened up. On Sunday, though, each person stayed inside his own perimeter, and the men from elsewhere watched time drift by in rhythm with the brownish water which carried with it the scum of urban algae and garbage. Around the pillars that supported the bridges, under a projecting wharf, the Danube became decay. But in spite of everything you stood watching, because all rivers go somewhere, and they keep you awake.
    On Sundays around eleven o’clock, a man who rented bicycles opened his storage and display stand, setting up where the trains stopped. His only customers were young people who came here in groups and disappeared until nightfall. No sooner had Fatima come up to the platform than she was running towards the bicycles; they were too big for her and