Bernhard Strobel: Ein dünner Faden (A Thin Thread)

Excerpt   de   en   fr   span   cz

Review

They were no longer sitting at table, but had in the meantime risen and were now strolling through the garden. He went over to them. They were standing in front of a small vegetable bed and talking in a loud manner, uncontrolledly loud, and it all seemed rather inconsiderate and disturbing, since round about them there was not a single sound to be heard. He thought to himself: they don’t seem to give a damn that I’ve returned. He waited for a sign of aggression, a need to let off steam, but nothing happened; what he felt instead was astonishment, bordering on disbelief. Only now did he notice that a great deal of naked skin was visible below the bathing robes: evidently they were still wearing their swimming things underneath and he realised that one of the robes belonged to him. Looking a little closer, during a moment when Karina bent forward to pick one of the big beef tomatoes, he discovered that she was not wearing a top. He abruptly stood quite still. He thought: hasn’t she got anything on down below either? She did have, and although he was of the opinion that he had every right to implicate Karina’s girlfriend as well as her, he nevertheless shrank from taking a closer look at her too. I don‘t want to know, I don’t want to know at all, he thought, but before he could think this thought through to the end, he already knew the answer. In this second, a twinge of anger became perceptible, even it was a rather unconvincing twinge, since the sight of the two women in bathing robes and the image of what they looked like underneath had become mixed with a slight surge of excitement, and he noticed how the aggressive impulse was increasingly becoming suppressed, until shortly afterwards it died down completely and he found himself in a reconciliatory, almost cheerful mood, as if a dark, thick mist had suddenly lifted. Yet when, immediately following this, he saw how Karina was behaving, and heard what she then said, his thoughts promptly returned to their original channels.
They were still standing at the vegetable bed. Karina had taken off her bathing shoes and was standing with one foot in the earth, plucking the biggest beef tomato that she could find and reaching it back, when her girlfriend, with an astonished expression on her face and in a voice that was much too loud, called out: ‘My goodness, what kind of tomatoes are these!’ Karina replied: ‘They’re my husband’s seeds.’ They giggled. ‘Your husband’s seeds?’ the girlfriend enquired. ‘Very special seeds!’ said Karina, at which the giggling developed into a fit of laughter, and they fell to shrieking and whinnying and had to support themselves with their arms on their thighs.
He was stunned. He could not quite grasp what had just occurred. A deep dark cavern opened up within him, and his mouth seemed to dry out from one second to the next.

(p. 51f.)
© Literaturverlag Droschl, Graz, 2015
Translation by Peter Waugh

>> Incentives