Summer Lies: Stories by Schlink Bernhard

Author:Schlink, Bernhard [Schlink, Bernhard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary, Romance
ISBN: 9780307907295
Amazon: 0307907295
Goodreads: 13533114
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2010-08-01T07:00:00+00:00

8

I couldn’t watch the engine and the black smoke, but I was listening to the grinding noise. Till it stopped. At that moment a sigh ran through the plane, a collective sigh as the passengers saw a burst of flame shoot out.

My seatmate trembled and held tight to the armrests with both hands. “I can’t help myself, flying frightens me, even after I’ve flown around the globe I don’t know how many times. We weren’t created to fly through the heavens and fall to earth or into the sea from thirty thousand feet. Yet my head gives its total assent to death in a plane crash. You know it’s about to happen, you have a last glass of champagne, you say goodbye to life, and boom—it’s over.” He had been whispering again, but when he said “boom” his voice rose and he clapped his hands. The stewardess came and he ordered champagne. “You too?”

I shook my head.

After the stewardess had poured him a glass, he started talking again. “You know, I begin to feel at home in a new house or a new neighborhood only when I get to know people. When I know all about the life of the woman in the newspaper shop and I don’t have to tell her what I want each morning. When I know the pharmacist so well that he gives me my prescription medicine without a prescription. When the Italian restaurant a few houses down the road makes me a pasta that’s not on the menu.

“The neighbor who can see my balcony from hers is an old lady who has trouble walking and even more trouble carrying things; I often helped her across the street and up the stairs with her shopping. I like her, and she likes me too. During the trial she calls me up and invites me over and says she hopes she’s mistaken but can only say in court what she saw, and to her at least it looked like not only did I push my girlfriend but I forced her over the balcony. The neighbor had fought with herself about what to do and told me she was sorry and she was sure everything would clear itself up. Was it really me who’d been fighting with my girlfriend on the evening in question? She hadn’t been able to recognize me.

“What chance would my defense attorney have had with the court against an adorable old lady, a retired teacher, alert and lucid, and who also liked me? On top of it all an old friend of my girlfriend’s, a journalist, got into the act and ensured that the case made headlines and I looked bad. You know the kind of old friends women sometimes have? From school or even from kindergarten? Who don’t end up with the woman but cling to her obsequiously all through life? And make the woman wonder why her actual partner isn’t as clinging and obsequious as they are? He didn’t like me even without knowing a single thing about the whole thing.

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