You Should Have Left: A Novel by Daniel Kehlmann

Author:Daniel Kehlmann [Kehlmann, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Literary, Ghost, Supernatural, Fiction
ISBN: 9781101871980
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-06-12T23:00:00+00:00

I stared at the drawings. Something was disconcerting: When you didn’t force your gaze to stay on them, it glided over them as if of its own accord.

A trick ruler, what else! I held the triangle up to the light and shut one eye. The right angle looked unsuspicious and the degree scale normal, no numbers were missing. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that someone was standing in the doorway. I started. It was Susanna. For a moment I had forgotten her.

The phone, how obvious, she said, as she placed the baby monitor on the table. Whenever you hear about people getting caught, it’s the cell phone, because they couldn’t bring themselves to delete the damn messages. She brushed her hair back and gave me an exhausted look. Of course, she said, you think you would be smarter. You consider yourself clever, and then you develop such a ridiculous attachment to those saved messages that you can’t bring yourself to delete them. Like all the other idiots. You keep the thing with you at all times and never leave it lying around, but you underestimate the tenacity of the jealous husband, who swipes it from your bag. And the way things stand, you can’t even fault him for his jealousy. She sat down and rested her head on her hands.

I said in a shaky voice that I absolutely did not steal her phone from her bag. Something like that never would have occurred to me. It had been lying here on the table, and I had wanted to find this Steller’s—

Nonsense, she said. She never would have just left it on the table. She stood up, looked at me for a long time, and said in an actor’s voice: You went through my bag.

I stood up too, felt the blood rushing to my face. I had just enough air to yell: That’s absurd, and besides, I’m not the one who has to justify himself—but at that very moment we heard Esther’s voice from the speaker. She was sitting up in bed. Susanna ran out. Seconds later I saw her on the screen, kneeling next to the bed and singing.

I sat down. I felt like everything inside me had turned to stone. I didn’t know how much time passed. Finally, she came back.

Of what happened next my memory has retained only fragments. I see myself shouting and throwing something on the table, I see myself pounding my fist on the table. She’s speaking slowly, she’s pale in the face, I’m crying, I’m calming down again. I’m speaking, she’s listening silently. I’m asking questions, she’s walking back and forth. Then she’s the one who is sitting at the table and crying, and I’m standing silently by the window, then I’m shouting at her, but that must be a while later, because the darkness outside is already dense and impenetrable, and then she’s shouting too, and I see myself on one side of the table and her on the

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