Read Sorry for Free Online Page B

Hackeschen Markt. When Wolf crosses the market square today he feels uneasy, as if the tourists are watching him, as if everyone knows that this is the place where he failed.
    There was hardly anyone to be seen in the square that morning. There was just a council street-cleaning machine going around sweeping up the dirt from the previous night. Wolf had no idea what day of the week it was. A romantic veil lay over his eyes. Everything about Erin was right—taste, humor, every touch found a perfect echo, no words were out of place, their gestures were almost synchronized. Wolf knew he had found the right woman.
She is mine and belongs to me alone!
He wanted to sing it out loud.
    When the first people walked past the café on their way to work, Erin snuggled up to him and said, “You and me and me and you.”
    “No,” Erin contradicted him. “You
and
me, you
and
me.”
    She laughed, stood up, and explained she just had to go to the little girls’ room for a moment. Wolf didn’t follow her. He sat there and played with a beer mat and let five minutes go by. He should have followed her right away.
If only I had … Then I would have …
Guilt began. Erin didn’t come back.
    There are days when Wolf sees her in the street, at a newsstand or waiting by a traffic light. Sometimes she sits down next to him on the subway and he doesn’t dare look at her. Today on his way to Woolworth’s he saw her on a park bench. Her legs were crossed and she had a cell phone pressed to her ear. Of course she paid him no attention, and he didn’t stop to chat with her because he had accepted long ago that Erin settled wherever and whenever she felt like it.
She hides in details, she is never the sum of the whole
. Since Wolf accepted that, he has stopped talking to women who are complete strangers.
    Wolf is still Wolf. He’s a bit broken, he has lost himself a little, buthe’s still Wolf—a man who thinks that the love of his life is still nearby. He finds her in the tiniest detail. As if her spirit were in turmoil; as if her spirit wanted him to see her.
    Wolf found her in one of the stalls in the bathroom. Her head was thrown back, her half-open eyes stared at the ceiling as if there was something to see there. He doesn’t know how long he crouched by her motionless body watching her. At some point he leaned forward, closed her eyes, and carefully pulled the needle from her arm before asking one of the waitresses to call an ambulance. When he went back to the bathroom Erin’s left eye had opened again.
Automatically
, thought Wolf, feeling hopeful nevertheless, but there was no breathing, there was no pulse. He walked back to the table, sat down, and waited until the police came. He didn’t want to know what they had to say. He didn’t want to know anything. But he couldn’t go. He couldn’t simply leave Erin on the toilet in that café. Alone.
    For this reason there are days when he even avoids his friends. On those days he doesn’t want to exist, or be reminded that he does. He knows it sounds absurd. But the attempt to keep out of his own way is absurd enough already. Wolf just wants to function, with a feeling of guilt by his side and melancholy in his head. The million-dollar question is how long you can go on doing that without feeling like an idiot.
    “Look who it is,” Wolf shouts across Woolworth’s. “It’s Frauke!”
    Frauke turns around, surprised. Wolf feels his heart contracting.
    Such joy
.
    “Yeah, look,” Frauke calls back. “It’s Wolf!”
    At school Wolf was two classes behind his brother. Little Wolf, so different from big Kris—wittier, noisier, more present. Kris’s clique treated him as a mascot. They took him along to parties, watched him bouncing around, trying to get off with girls and puking into the bushes behind the house. When the clique left school, they left Wolf behind like a dog that wasn’t old enough to join the pack. The two years till his own school-leaving exam were a torment