Read Next World Novella for Free Online

his trouser legs. For a moment Big Jörn glares at the dog, then sends him flying against the wall with a hearty kick. Now everyone would like to kick the shit out of Big Jörn, every last one of us. But while we still stand, gaping, only Marek – Marek of all people, who’d been hanging back until now – first he goes over to Mutt, who’s writhing about whining, then without a word he goes up to Big Jörn and smashes his nose in. You should’ve seen it! Big Jörn howls, there’s blood running through his fingers and down his neck, and off he runs.
    Next day no one’s waiting tables in the Blaue Maus. After much questioning we find out from Wolfi that he’s seen this coming right from the beginning, it couldn’t end well, a girl who carries on with the customers has no place here. Now what? Now nothing. Still nothing the next evening and the next one. When we threaten to go and drink wherever Hanni turns up if he doesn’t take her back of his own free will, Wolfi assures us that he’d rather go bust. But it’s not her fault, says none other than Marek, suddenly raising his voice and
     
     
    Schepp had managed to read up to this point in spite of Doro’s corrections, at first with sceptical curiosity, then with horror, finally with mounting anger. At the beginning she had just scored one or two sets of double lines in the margin to draw attention to something, followed by an exclamation or a question mark – he knew her annotation style well enough to understand what she meant. But soon the marginal notes became more extensive, forthright, cutting. Doro had always been a model of discretion, but now that the sharp tone of her comments was unmitigated by lenience, she sparkled with icy elegance. Did she want to make him feel inferior? How was he to take it when she, of all people, told him in the margin what she thought Marek was really doing when the text said expressly that he was just lying there thinking of Hanni? Schepp was embarrassed. In the next section wasn’t she openly criticizing not only his protagonist but him, the author, for being inhibited – why did he keep beating about the bush, circling around the subject? Had he never had a little nibble of someone himself? And when Big Jörn got into his stride, once again there was the remark, ‘Oh, why not call him Hinrich and be done with it?’ On the back of the sheet, however, she had written, ‘Your admiration for him is ridiculous.’
    Schepp was extremely annoyed. The solemn mood in which he had wanted to say his last goodbye to Doro was gone. Being dead means no one can answer you back, he snorted at her. But it was her next correction that cut him to the quick. The manuscript slipped from his hands, he got up and looked around him, at a loss. Then he started pacing back and forth, beating time in the air with his index and little fingers to the rhythm of the retorts bursting out of him.
    What had put him in such a rage, what had him pacing back and forth in full lecturing mode, was a single tiny pen stroke. At the place where Marek spoke up for the first time, Doro had crossed out the name Hanni and written ‘Dana’ over it. The louder Schepp’s heels tapped the wooden floor, the more baffled he felt. As soon as he had convinced himself that Doro had chosen that name at random, it struck him, however, that this could be no coincidence. She had come looking for him, hadn’t she, one evening maybe four years ago, in La Pfiff; she’d seen Dana, even spoken briefly to her. Or had it been five years ago? But what would a girl called Dana, might he ask, have to do with Marek the Drunkard ? The only parallel with Hanni being that Dana had been a waitress too – although decades later!
    Schepp stopped in the doorway through which he had come to begin the day what now seemed an eternity ago. He breathed deeply, in and out, until he thought, again, that Doro must have forgotten to change the water in the vase. With every breath the silence came