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motionless, heeded by and
bothering no one. I went because Clara would make her afternoon toilet in the back
room. She kept her wardrobe in a small armoire and looked at herself in a broken
mirror that she leaned against the lamp on the trunk. The mirror was so old that the
polish had completely worn off in places and actual objects showed here and there
through the back of the mirror, merging with the reflected images as in a double
exposure.
    Sometimes she took off nearly all her clothes and rubbed cologne into her armpits,
lifting her arms with no embarrassment, or between her breasts, sticking her hands
between her shift and her body. The shift was short, and when she leaned over I had
a full view of her shapely legs tightly encased in their black stockings. She looked
very much like a half-naked woman I had seen on a pornographic postcard that the
park pretzel vendor had shown me. She aroused the same vague swoon as the obscene
picture, a kind of vacuum in the chest and a fierce pang of desire in the groin.
    I always sat in the same place—behind Eugen on the back-room sofa — waiting for
Clara to complete her toilet, because then, on her way into the shop, she would have
to pass between her brother and me in a space so narrow that her calves could not
help rubbing against my knees. I looked forward to that moment every day with the
same impatience and the same torment. It depended on any number of trivial
circumstances that I observed with a combination of exasperation and acute
sensitivity. All that had to happen was that Eugen should feel thirsty or tire of
playing or that a customer should come into the shop and he would abandon his place,
thereby leaving Clara room to pass without touching me.
    Every afternoon as I approached the door of the shop, my long, quivering antennae
would come out and test the air for the sound of the violin. The moment I heard
Eugen playing, I breathed a sigh of relief. I would enter slowly and shout out my
name from the threshold so he would not think I was a customer and interrupt his
piece. If he paused so much as a second, it might check the flow and magic of the
melody and induce him to put down the violin for good that afternoon. But this was
not the only unfavorable adventure possible. All kinds of things could go wrong in
the back room . . .
    As long as Clara was still at her toilet, I kept an ear out for the faintest of
noises, an eye out for the slightest of movements. Eugen might give a cough, for
instance, and, swallowing a bit of saliva, announce that he was off to the café for
a pastry. A trifle like that, a single cough, could herald the monstrous calamity of
a wasted afternoon. Indeed, the whole day would have gone to waste, and that night
in bed, instead of turning over leisurely in my mind (and pausing over each detail
to “see” and savor it as it deserved) the moment when my knees touched Clara’s
stocking, instead of delving, molding, and caressing the thought, I would toss and
turn feverishly in the bedclothes, unable to sleep and impatiently awaiting
daybreak.
    One day something totally out of the ordinary occurred. The adventure presaged
disaster at first, but had a surprise ending, one so sudden and dependent on such a
minor incident that the pleasure it subsequently gave me was like a construction
made of incongruous objects that only a prestidigitator could hold together. In one
fell swoop Clara radically altered the tenor of my visits, gave them a new meaning
and new titillations. It was rather like the famous chemistry experiment in which a
crystal dropped into a red liquid instantly transforms it to a bright green.
    I was sitting on the sofa in the usual place, waiting with my usual impatience, when
the door to the shop opened and in came a customer. Eugen immediately left the back
room. All appeared to be lost. Clara proceeded with her impassive toilet while the
conversation in the shop dragged on interminably. The question was whether Eugen
would return