Turkish Delight by Jan Wolkers

Author:Jan Wolkers
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Tin House Books

Miss Wasp-Waist

What had happened? With her, with Olga? What had changed in the course of time? Had I been blind to something that had always been there? Had I not seen that my sweet, red animal had been trying—hesitantly at first and almost imperceptibly, but later more and more desperately—to free herself from my embrace? That was what I kept asking myself, in all my desire and despair, in the days and weeks after she left me. It wasn’t true, of course, what I said later from time to time, that if I hadn’t put in a phone she would never have left. More and more often though, when I came home, I found her talking to her mother. There was nothing especially strange about that, especially after her father died, but that she suddenly ran out of things to say and hung up as soon as I came in made me suspicious in the long run. That, and the effect it had on her for the rest of the day. A sort of dissatisfied air. She would sit with a book in her lap, without reading. And when I would ask what she was thinking about she’d say: “Oh, nothing, just thinking.” Then she would pick up the book quickly and start to read. But later, when I looked up again from my work, she’d be sitting there the same way. During dinner, she often came out and told me. How one of her old girlfriends had dropped by to visit her mother, in her own car, a birthday present from her husband. And how she had told her mother enthusiastically about the trips she and her husband made all over Europe. The cupboards full of clothes she had to choose from whenever she went into town for an afternoon with her girlfriends. I could imagine exactly how her mother had conveyed that news. That dirty, sneaky old bag. In that saccharine voice, supposedly without any ulterior motive. Because she knew that made the poison enter the system more quickly. At first I would joke about it. About how, after less than a year of marriage, that friend, Nancy, already looked pale and unsatisfied, with crummy, sagging tits and varicose veins on her flabby calves after her husband had been rendered impotent by managerial stress. About how that pale little shitbird definitely didn’t own a dress as pretty as the one she’d made from the material I bought her last week. And that Olga wouldn’t like it either if I was the deputy director of a factory that made margarine that caused people to break out in a rash. That she’d be traveling around Europe at the expense of other people’s mange, her cupboards bulging with boleros and stoles made from dyed rabbit skin. That the fabric for Olga’s dress had been bought with money I’d at least earned with my own hands, not by sucking the lifeblood out of two hundred employees. That was true too; one day,

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