Out of the Line of Fire by Mark Henshaw

Author:Mark Henshaw [Henshaw, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: CLASSIC FICTION
ISBN: 9781925095463
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2014-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

18

(I must confess that even before I had reached this point in my first reading of the material Wolfi sent me, I had already begun to suspect that there was more amiss in Wolfi’s family than either the breakdown of his parents’ relationship or the unsatisfactory relationship between him and his father. My suspicions were intensified when I discovered between the previous bundle of papers and the next a photograph carefully wrapped in a sheet of newspaper. It was a photograph I recognized instantly.

Now as I sit looking at it, looking at Elena standing there with Anya supported on her hip, it is Anya’s eyes that immediately strike me. They are almost unnaturally blue, unnaturally intense. In my mind I can see an image of Wolfi as I saw him for the first time, standing nervously outside the door to my room in Heidelberg. I see his intense blue eyes, and then through them, I see Elena on the beach. I see the wisp of pubic hair poking out from beneath her swimming costume. I feel Wolfi registering her as a separate being for the first time.

Returning to the photograph, I look first at Anya’s face and then at Elena’s—and back. The resemblance is unmistakable. Behind Elena’s smile she seems to be laughing, as though at some shared secret. I reread the inscription: ‘Viele Grüsse von Deinen zwei Lieblingen’ [A big hello from your two little darlings].

For a long time I sat trying to reformulate conversations I had had with Wolfi, trying to piece together chance remarks that might have confirmed or denied what I had begun to think. I tried to recall when Anya had first come up in our conversation, what exactly had been said. I felt as you would feel if, as a reader, you were now forbidden to go back to the conversation that took place the day she actually was first mentioned. And yet I cannot be sure that this was the first time. I simply cannot remember.

Moreover, it did not end there. It wasn’t until I had begun to rewrap the photograph and the phrase ‘sexuelles Verlangen’ [sexual desire] caught my eye that I took a good look at the piece of newspaper in which it had been wrapped. It was a page torn from the issue of Die Zeit dated 12 June 1982. On it was reprinted an interview with the Latin-American writer Ramon Fernandez together with the last half of one of his short stories. I have translated this from the Die Zeit article not from the original Spanish. An alternative version can be found in Fernandez’s collection Internal Exile and other stories [Hoddard & Co., New York, 1984]. It would be years before I was able to confirm that its inclusion had been no accident.)

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