Little Hands Clapping Read Online Free

door slammed upstairs, and Hulda smiled as she went through to Room Four, Unfortunate Survivors. She began by dusting the frame of a photograph of an American boy, half his face a mess of scar tissue. His parents had blamed heavy metal, but Hulda had a feeling there was more to the story than that. Whenever she looked at him she hoped his life had improved since the picture had been taken.
    ‘ Every minute of the future, ’ she sang, ‘ is a memory of the past. ’
    At ten twenty-nine they stood in the hallway, by the bolted front door. Hulda smiled at her superior. She saw him as somebody who needed to be brought out of himself, and had long ago decided that she would be the one to do the bringing out. ‘We’re quite a team aren’t we, Herr Schmidt?’ she said.
    He looked at his watch. At precisely ten thirty he unbolted the door, and with a bright smile and a See you tomorrow , Hulda went away. He hooked the door open, walked over to his desk and waited for people to arrive, hoping nobody would. But they did. His first visitors, a young man and a young woman, came in just before eleven o’clock. Lovers or siblings, he couldn’t tell. Maybe they were both. It was nothing to him. They wore matching waterproof jackets and carried identical backpacks. They didn’t look towards him as they passed, and they left after fifteen minutes, just long enough for them to have gone from room to room without stopping to look closely at anything. They put no money in the donation box, and before they were out of the door they were already huddling over a map, looking for the next attraction to visit. A few mumbled words about when and where they were planning to eat lunch told him they were from northern Italy, somewhere between Milan and Verona, most likely Travagliato or Gussago. He had heard this accent spoken before, and felt no satisfaction in hearing it again.
    One thirty, the time allotted for the guided tour, passed with no takers, as it had done every day since the museum opened. The old man left his post to go to the lavatory. When he returned to his desk he found an unmarked envelope lying there. He sat down and eyed it for a moment before sliding it towards himself with a long, grey finger. Inside was a handwritten note. It was unsigned, and just a few sentences long. He thought its confessional hysteria ludicrous, but for a moment he almost smiled. Pavarotti’s wife will love this , he thought. He slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

    At five o’clock he closed the front door. The day had ended with a total of twenty-six visitors, not one of whom had stayed for any length of time or made an enquiry. He emptied the donation box and found two euros thirty, which he entered in the logbook. Then in the Visitor Numbers column he wrote 78 . He had worked in museums for some years, and had always found it helpful to treble the real figures whenever possible.
    Switching off lights as he went, he made his way back to his rooms, where he ate a chunk of bread and a slice of hardening cheese, ironed a brilliant white shirt for the morning and started rereading the Þ section of an Icelandic–German dictionary. It was all very familiar, and around Þjónari, Þjónkan and Þjónn, his eyelids began to fall. He got up and changed into his nightshirt and nightcap, then remembered the woman’s bag. He emptied its contents on to the kitchen table. There was a small mirror, some tampons, a paperback novel, an unopened packet of chewing gum, a ballpoint pen, a small tin of lip balm, some old train, bus and cinema tickets, and a wallet which he opened to find a credit card, and a driving licence that told him her name and that she had lived in Frankfurt. From the photograph he could see she had looked much the same in life as she had in death. A zipped compartment revealed the only item he was interested in keeping: a twenty-Euro note. Everything else went into the bin.
    With no reason to stay awake any longer, he lay on