Read Europa for Free Online Page A

number 63 Viale Lotto, that his birthday is on the nineteenth of the eleventh, and that his car registration number is Ml 807 653, but that none of this would even begin to lead him to deduce, or no? that he is sitting in seat number 47.
    Georg is very droll and my girl and the other girls laugh at this and they begin to talk about numerical consequences and about tarot. The girl to my right with the swollen lips knows how to read cards. She will read Georg’s cards, she says, if he wants. He raises and arches a very blond eyebrow, poses an expression of wry concern. The girls laugh again. Georg is deadpan. The last thing I need to hear is that I’m going to meet a handsome stranger, he says. The girls giggle. Until, with a ridiculous awareness
of competition
, of being two men among so many girls, of a bait that could only make a complete fool of me were I to rise to it, as I did rise to it so hopelessly and helplessly once before, I decide to seek refuge in my book. Read, I tell myself. I turn to my book again. Read. Do not rise to the bait, I tell myself. Do not engage in this conversation. Stop thinking of the number 45.
    Determinedly, I turn the novel over in my hands, inspecting its extravagant cover, the extravagant endorsements of names one presumes are famous. And I find myself asking, Why did your daughter give you this book? Why did she do that? Presumably in the hope that her father would share her enthusiasm for this fantastical tale of five poor young ethnically mixed East End urchins who start a rock band to collect money for the Third World and are constantly cheated and done down by the forces of capitalism and in particular because the lead singer is black and lesbian and has magical powers. Your daughter must have imagined, I tell myself, trying to ignore a story from the girl with her leg in the aisle about a woman in Naples who repeatedly dreamt the number of the hotel room she died in on the day of the great
mezzogiorno
earthquake, your daughter must have hoped, expected, that you would share her enthusiasm for this book. So you should be more patient, I tell myself, more tolerant. If only out of fairness to your daughter. You should try to relax and enjoy this book, which was certainly written with the best of intentions. Now they are talking about someone who dreamt the date of his child’s murder. I find my place some thirty pages in. But no sooner have I read a paragraph of this, as I said, extravagantly praised book by a fashionable woman writer, no sooner have I begun to tackle a flashback to lesbian incest between the lead singer and her twin sister, later tragically killed in a racist arson attack on a Brixton discotheque, than I remember how fascinated I was when
she
told me all the details of her lesbian affair with an Islamic girl who had been her housemaid and who the monstrous (but wealthy) husband had slapped round the face when he discovered them in bed. Why didn’t he slap
her?
I wonder now. Until suddenly it occurs to me - and at last this is a new thought, the first for many days if I am not mistaken, and for that reason alone electrifying - it occurs to me, as the narrator returns from the flashback to resume interracial love-making with the ruthless record producer’s neglected wife, that given this tendency on
her
part (and now the girl on Georg’s left is talking about a pilot whose income tax code, or at least alternate letters and digits, coincided with the flight number of the plane he crashed), given this tendency, lesbian I mean, on her part, she may one day attempt to
seduce my daughter
, who sometimes baby-sits for
her 
daughter. Such a thing is perfectly plausible, I tell myself. Your daughter is an attractive girl. She often goes to
her
flat now she has moved to Milan. To baby-sit. Why shouldn’t
she
try to seduce her? After all, she is eighteen as of tomorrow. And I have to ask myself, is this perhaps what the gift of this literary eulogy to