Yann Andrea Steiner Read Online Free

speech to be noisy, mendacious, and she had chosen silence and the written word.
    You asked what part of Germany the station was in. She believed it was south of Krakow, heading south toward the border.
In those cursed lands. She was of British origin, but she had grown up in Belgium. She didn’t know European geography very well: like many English, she liked only London-Paris and the Gulf States.
    You asked if the man who guarded the station visited her in her sleep. It was what I believed I’d written, yes, when she slept. I wasn’t certain that the man was not the master of that station where she lived for two years of war. Why wouldn’t he be? Or that they had loved each other – I’d thought of that too, and even that it was from the pain of it that she later died.
    I said that I didn’t try to find out, that I never asked anything of that nature about Theodora, but I believe it wasn’t out of the question that they should become lovers.
    You asked me what I thought. I told you that I had never asked for names, neither of the man nor of the young woman in white, in the drawings. I said that as soon as I heard that story, I spoke the name I’d surely heard before, of Theodora Kats. Then at the end, after several years, around me, people applied that name to the woman in white lost in a Europe of death.
    I remind you that I’m sure I knew Theodora but that my only memories are of Betty Fernandez, whom I knew well and who,
for her part, as I told you, was a friend of the young Theodora Kats. That I knew Betty Fernandez loved and admired her.
    I had never forgotten that name, that time, the white of her dresses, that innocent wait for the train of death or of love – they weren’t sure which; no one has ever been sure.
    You say that even if I didn’t know Theodora, even if I never went near her, I must tell you what I think might have become of her.
    Personally, I believe she went back to England before the end of the war. First she landed a job with a well-known literary review in London. And then she married the British writer G. O. She wasn’t happy. I had mainly known her after her marriage to the British writer G. O., who was famous the world over and whom I admired enormously. She had never liked him very much, neither the writer he was nor the man.
    You asked me what Theodora was like in London. I said that she had put on weight. That she no longer made love with her husband, that she didn’t want any more of that, ever. She said, I’d rather die.
    You said, “Was that woman, in London, the one from the German train station?”
    I never tried to find out. It’s the most I can say. But if you
ask me, it isn’t out of the question. She had made something of herself even so, even dead she would have become something; she would have been claimed by a family in England or somewhere else. But no. No one claimed the body of Theodora Kats.
    â€œStill, at some point she left that station.”
    Yes. Unless they found her after the defeat of Nazi Germany and left her there, in that station, just as they had left “political prisoners” in the camps, thousands of them. As for her lover, nothing was ever known. She was there, in that same station. I see her there, still in her white outfit ironed that very morning, and later that day speckled with her blood.
    I believe this is why no one has ever forgotten her, or that whiteness. It was the white of her dresses, the excessive, uncommon care she took of them, which made the people who had heard of her never forget her; those canvas hats, also white, her canvas sandals, all those things, her gloves. Her story spread throughout Europe. There was never any certainty. We still don’t know who she had been or why she had been there, in that station, for two years running.
    Yes, it was the whiteness of the dresses, of the summer suits that made her story spread throughout the world: a very