She looked at her reflection in the mirror, checking from each angle that the silk blouse was tucked into her waistband correctly, without bunching or creasing. She checked that the seams of the pale gray skirt that she was wearing out for the first time were aligned properly, the front ones on the inside of her hipbones, the back extending along her spine. She adjusted the thin buckle of her belt to the left by half a centimeter, then changed her mind.
She was aging, subtly but surely. There were faint lines on her forehead, and the beginning of a wrinkle in the corner of her right eye; on a bad day, if she had slept poorly, or failed to drink enough water, she could see her skin becoming slack, starting to separate from her flesh and bone like a mask that she would one day slough off. Her friends assured her she could still pass for twenty, or twenty-three at most, and that with the right combination of creams and powders she could blot out every trace upon her face that up close suggested otherwise. But Nina was not ashamed nor displeased.
It had been a while. At one point in her life, she kept an exact count, to the day. It rooted her, like a mantra, reminding her where she came from; but eventually she settled into a routine of an ordinary, prosaic life, of a cycle of work and grocery shopping and little sicknesses and sprains and the superficial, fleeting excitement of outings with friends.
Five years earlier, she gave in, and reluctantly began to date a geologist she had ended up going home with one night. He had just enough charisma and originality to distract her from the feeling that she was settling for a relationship out of loneliness and duty, but she had always known it would not last, and when he grew resentful of her nonexistent libido, of always being dry, she found that she was able to close that chapter of her life with a frightening ease. Only once after the breakup did she falter - she had drunk a glass too many with Karl and Lotte, and afterward curled up on her couch, weeping as she composed a long email to Tenma that she luckily had the presence of mind not to send. He had been back in Germany for eight months then, having at length accepted a university post. A childish, needy part of her felt betrayed. The adult silenced the hurt and buried it beneath a schedule of yoga, aikido, biking, and farmer's market visits. She occupied her mind with little things so that it would not roam free, backtracking into the crevices of ugly memories or stumbling upon windows into a painful future.
A knock came at the door. "You ready?"
"Yes, Dieter." She picked up her purse and took a final glance at the mirror. She would turn other men's heads, she knew. It didn't matter.
It was Dieter's eighteenth birthday. She had arrived in Munchen laden with gifts - a football jersey from her trip to Italy, some of her favorite sweets from a bakery in Heidelberg, a paperback copy of Siddhartha on a recommendation from one of her friends, and an envelope stuffed with cash. Dr. Reichwein had reserved a restaurant for them in the afternoon, and then Dieter would go out with his girlfriend and his teammates and his school friends, leaving the three of them to reminisce. It had become routine at this point, and she knew exactly how it would go down. The walls she had built to protect herself would come down the moment she saw him, she would be flooded with warmth and hope, and feel the afterglow of that genuine and selfless love for weeks. And then, once apart, separated by miles of land and hours upon hours spent on work, on others, a silence would ensue between them that made the dark parts of her emerge, and question whether he truly cared.
Last year, when they said goodbye at the station, she held him for eight and a half minutes. The departure board kept changing with a fluttering sound. Six different trains ascended in succession to the top before she let him go. In her mind, it was the closest thing to lovemaking, the pressing of flesh against flesh, feeling the pulse of his blood and the warmth of his skin through layers of fabric. He held her firmly, but without squeezing, without a need to possess or explore - only to contain.
They had decided to go on foot. Dieter was fast and impatient, and struggled to slow down as much as Dr. Reichwein struggled to keep up, but his excitement was contagious, and it made her smile. She felt different this time around. Not like a nervous child, not like a dreamy schoolgirl. She had become someone definitive, someone who knew how to say no and knew how to say yes, someone who had taught herself to want very little, and need even less. She sped up alongside Dieter, linking her arm with his. Dr. Reichwein looked at them with unabashed pride in his eyes. They had come so far.
The station was busy, crowded, full of unsmiling people weaving hurriedly through clusters of tourists, stationary around their forts of suitcases and duffels and every other kind of bag. There were other kinds of travelers, too, thin young men with tanned skin and sun-bleached hair, carrying large, once brightly colored backpacks now faded with dirt, with shoes and other possessions tied to the straps with loops of sturdy string. They looked at her, some with a friendly appreciation and some with undisguised hunger. She averted her eyes, unwilling to meet their gaze, more uncomfortable than flattered.
They waited near the platform where the blue screen indicated Tenma's train would arrive.
"Nina," said Dieter, "I'm going to visit you in Heidelberg."
She laughed. "I'd love that! But don't get too excited, it is not a big city like Munchen."
"Look," Dr. Reichwein pointed, "the train is arriving."
Instinctively, Nina moved closer to the gate, colliding with another woman who reflexively swore in another language. Slovak, Nina knew. It was frightening how much the brain retained under the surface.
When the locomotive stopped, and the passengers began to spill out of the wagons after a pregnant pause, the three of them craned their necks, hoping to catch a glimpse of him among the throng of different shapes and colors. Nina spotted him first, although she did not know whether it was with a lover's intuition, or a predator's. She fixed her eyes on him as he walked; he went straight for a few meters, slowing down to let people past, then picked up his pace and began to weave in and out of the crowd.
"Tenma!" Dieter called, waving his arm aggressively. He ran ahead, and grabbed Tenma's bag with one hand while hugging him with the other.
"My God, you just keep growing!" Tenma said, tousling his hair before greeting Dr. Reichwein. She kept back, off to the side, unsure of her place in the world, in his world. He looked at her for a moment, with that inscrutable kind of love that she always felt coming off of him, and pulled her in an embrace.
She had read about shared trauma mimicking romantic love, about the emotional dependence of survivors on savior figures. It seemed so reductive to her, so two-dimensional, so unconcerned with the plain, raw fact that the acts that bonded them were steeped in choices. She loved him because he made the choices no one else willed themselves to make.
They went to Dr. Reichwein's first, so that Tenma could shower and change. He dressed himself in a powder-blue button-down shirt and slacks. With his hair neatly parted, he bore a resemblance to that American actor from the movie about the Devil. Though she was glad that he looked healthy and well fed, some strange, broken part of her missed the feral side of him, the haphazard but utilitarian appearance of a fugitive, the stubble and the stolen trench coat and the sweaty T-shirt underneath. He was not the type of man who expressed himself through his clothes, and so he dressed plainly, in whatever way or fashion was most customary and unobtrusive. Who was he when he undressed? she thought, not lewdly but metaphysically. When he looked at her, she did not blush.
She had changed into a long floral dress, simple, but made of silk, picked up at a flea market in Berlin. It suited her form perfectly, flaring gently over her hips, falling just above her ankles.
A long time ago, her friend Ena had advised her to be direct.
"You're mistaken," Nina had said. "It's nothing like that."
"Okay," Ena had responded with a nod. "You're not in love with this man who is your hero and who risked his life and limb for you. But, if you were, hypothetically, you might want to consider being a little more provocative. Let him see you in a different light."
Dr. Reichwein called a taxi. Him in the front, the rest in the back.
"Nina, you're the smallest one now," Dieter said, voice dripping with ulterior motive. "You should go in the middle."
Her thigh pressed against Tenma's for the duration of the ride. Was that provocative enough? They talked about innocuous things, mostly Dieter's school and football matches; he had an infinite well of stories from his travels with his team, especially about Florian, who Nina had met a couple of times when Dieter entered high school, and who had ever since harbored delusions of romancing her with a rare and stubborn dedication.
"Dieter has a girlfriend now," Nina said. "That's why he's so cocky and such a know-it-all."
"What about you, Tenma?" Dieter said loudly. "Do you finally have a girlfriend?"
"No, no."
Nina's jaw tightened. He never told them about the women he was seeing, perhaps because they were not serious relationships, or perhaps because he did not think it was their business. But Dieter would overhear Dr. Reichwein speaking on the phone, and then casually pass it along, never breaking the fourth wall of the pretense that he was merely reporting mundane news of their friend in the absence of anything more significant. She knew about Laure, the thin, athletic Frenchwoman getting over a divorce, and Sandra, a dark-haired architect he would see once or twice every two weeks until the novelty fizzled out. They had both been in their early thirties, not significantly older than she was. Maybe she was wrong to consider the tricks of coquetry beneath her.
The car pulled up in front of the restaurant, and Tenma and Reichwein engaged in the brief ritual of insisting to pay before Tenma slyly handed a bill to the driver. Nina followed him out of the car, and they stood side by side, waiting for the traffic to thin out.
"Come," he said, grabbing her hand, deciding to lead her around the back when the last of the oncoming bikes had passed. Dr. Reichwein and Dieter waited on the sidewalk. She loosened her fingers, and so he released them, leaving her with the uncomfortable feeling of something missing.
Sometimes she thought of human beings as sponges. They soaked things up, but they could also be wrung out. Was the natural state of a sponge expanded and moist? Or shrunken and dry? Was she herself because of all that has happened, or did she have to shed it all in order to return to what she once was?
The restaurant was half full. The waiter led them to a square table that had been reserved for them, with a corner bench and two chairs, which by some tacit agreement seemed to have gotten assigned to him and her. She ordered a gulasch; a safe meal for someone with no appetite. It restored her somewhat, as did the beer - she began to laugh more earnestly, thawing out little by little until most of her nervousness was gone. She cherished the feeling of falling into step with old friends, as though time and distance counted for nothing. And yet, in the back of her head, she could not shake the falseness of it, nor the phantom presence of those uncomfortable topics that hung between them, damned to silence. They spoke of vacations and school and work and banal, well-rehearsed anecdotes, as if what tied them together were not much deeper and more painful than any other relationships formed along the way.
At one point, when Dieter started to outline his summer plans, she tuned out, instead imagining herself on her way to the washroom, intersecting Tenma as he left the men's room, quite on accident, and with an irresistible, magnetic pull, ending up in a dark corner, red-tiled, of the winding passage to the toilets. Would he be capable of that? Did he have in him any fibers of passion and abandon? He often acted on a strange, impulsive physicality, but that never seemed tinged by desire.
After dinner, when Dieter left to meet his friends, Reichwein decided to excuse himself as well. "So the young people can catch up," he said. Last year, she would have blushed like a beet. This time, she smiled faintly.
"I heard there's a great new ice scream shop," she said casually. "Would you want to try it?"
"There's always room for ice cream," he said.
"I'm sorry if I seem tense," she said when they sat down. She had tried two flavors, while he had decided on three with a boyish, apologetic smile. "I've had a lot on my mind."
He reached over the table and squeezed her free hand. To her surprise, his fingers lingered. His thumb began caressing the inside of her palm. She felt her heart expand like a balloon, with a rush of blood that made her almost ill, and looked at him fearfully. He slid his fingers between hers.
"I feel so nervous when I see you," he said. "As if some part of me is always lying to you."
"You're only nervous because you think I'm going to do or say something stupid," she said quietly. He looked surprised.
"For years I have wished I could speak to you candidly," she continued before he could contradict her. "But I always felt like a child. I was a child. It didn't feel fair to burden you with unsolvable problems."
"I never thought you were going to do anything stupid. I was nervous because I could not trust my judgment. My own thoughts and actions were unclear to me, and somehow I projected all of that on you."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that I wanted certain things, selfishly, and I think that in fighting against them, I have pushed you away."
Nina felt a wave of cold sweat wash over her. The ambiguity in his every word and action was becoming physically intolerable. "Do you mind if we go outside?"
They walked to a park. She licked her ice cream slowly, with no appetite left at all. He led her to a bench - not a romantic one, perched on a grassy knoll by a solitary tree, overlooking a pond, but one in a row of many, lining a hedge and facing a plain, flowerless lawn. She left the exact amount of space between them that decency allotted, at the midpoint between overly familiar and insultingly distant. Tenma leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. Time seemed to slow down. The park was empty, filled with layers of wispy shadows and dim lights, and she began to feel unhurried and loosened and, for once, able to talk about anything.
"I wish I could see you more often, you know? I'm afraid to impose, and so I don't say anything. But I miss being closer to you. Is that strange?"
He looked at her, at the wood of the bench filling the space between them, at the pale, lovely hand clutching the edge of it beside her knee.
"Do you want me to move to Heidelberg?" he asked. Her heart clenched with a strange kind of pain, and accelerated in her chest until she felt her lungs battling for air.
"You would do that?"
He reached out and brushed a fingertip against her cheekbone - and though it made her skin prickle, she did not quite dare believe her senses. Her eyes followed his in confusion as he traced a path down her face, from the corner of her eyebrow to the edge of her jaw to her chin. His expression was gentle, with a hint of something she struggled to place. Perhaps it was hope, she decided. Or happiness.
There was no question about not going back to Dr. Reichwein's. They had far too much respect for that. She waited in an armchair of a hotel lobby while he booked a room. Her head spun with euphoric disbelief; although she had always hoped a moment would come when her patient, quiet love would bear fruit, she did not picture herself checking into a hotel room, like a businessman's mistress or a call girl. It was tawdry and unromantic, but they did not have a wealth of options.
It occurred to her, as she waited, that she had not had a lot of sex for a woman her age. Would it matter? Could she get by on raw chemistry between them? What if he underperformed? What if she was to be disappointed? She dug her nails into the leather swirls of the armrests, trying to ground herself. Yoga breath, she told herself. In through the nose, out through the mouth, same as fogging a mirror. She fogged five imaginary mirrors by the time he returned with a keycard. They smiled at each other nervously while waiting for the elevator.
The room was a stereotypical marriage of plainness and kitsch found in hotels across the world: a generic work of art, a boxy night table with a glossy finish, a bed with sheets stretched out with practiced precision beneath a dark red cover. He took her hand. "Are you having second thoughts?"
"I'm always having second thoughts," she said. "But not about this."
They kissed, shakily at first, exploring, memorizing the other's rhythm. It stirred a hunger in her, a need that emerged rarely, very rarely, so infrequent that it always seemed like an anomaly, like a fever or a spasm. In all of her adult life, she had only ever owned one vibrator, and used it sparingly, with the punctuality of monthly hormonal changes; and when she used it, she seldom thought of him, because she did not know how to frame him as a lover in her head. Yet, her fantasies often took the shape of older men, cleanly shaven and outfitted in expensive suits, quietly forceful. Sometimes there were multiples, roomfuls of them, as in the Red Rose Mansion. She felt filthy and guilty and damaged in those moments.
She helped him remove her dress, then attacked the buttons on his shirt, oblivious to his awestruck gaze at the sight of her bare body. They had stopped at a convenience store along the way. She had purchased water. At the other register, he paid for two packets of condoms. They lay in his blazer pocket, forgotten.
He let her lower him onto the bed. It surprised her how much pent up emotion he could squeeze out of her with every kiss. There was years' worth of pain in there, and longing, and despair, and he drew them out like the venom from a snake bite, leaving her both fainter and stronger.
She pressed her sweaty forehead to his and looked into his eyes, and as his pupils focused on her, she sank her body onto him. A guttural sound escaped past his teeth. It had been a while, and she was tight, tight to the point where the pleasure of his entrance bordered on pain. She felt the back of his thumb graze the curve of her hip, and then, without warning, he grasped her flesh with both hands, relinquishing the last of the self control that had restrained in him the desire that he had carried since Prague, perhaps even before Prague, from the days of hunting and being hunted and relying on her iron spirit to continue believing that he was doing the right thing. She heard herself moan. It was unlike her, to be uninhibited, to show vulnerability, to reveal the animal side of herself. She kept her eyes wide open, wanting to miss nothing. He combed his fingers through her hair and brought her face down to his again.
Afterwards, when they had turned the overhead light off, and answered Dieter's text messages, and used the bathroom with the door open as a token of intimacy, she laid her head on his shoulder.
"Would it scare you if I told you that I have wanted this for a very long time?"
He kissed her on the temple. "No."
"I still don't feel like this is really happening. I feel like the moment I get back on the train to Heidelberg, this will feel like a dream, and nothing will change."
He gave her shoulder a soft, reassuring squeeze. "Then I'll get on that train with you."
"You promise?"
"Yes."
Dieter eyed them suspiciously across the breakfast table.
"You look very chirpy for someone who stayed out late, Nina."
"That ice cream gave me a lot of energy," she said with a wily smile before bringing the fork to her mouth. Tenma suppressed a yawn.
"It's a shame you two cannot stay here longer," said Dr. Reichwein.
"I wish we could," Tenma said. The plural did not escape her.
"When is your train?" Dieter asked. "We could get some more of that fantastic ice cream if you have time."
"I actually decided to take the train with Nina," Tenma said, smiling. "After all, Heidelberg is along the way."
They sat side by side, leaning into the dark blue plush of the seats. Dieter had wormed his way to the window, and latched onto the opening with both hands.
"Can I name your firstborn?" he shouted before Dr. Reichwein smacked him upside the head. Following an automated voice, the train doors slid shut.
As they pulled out of the station, Tenma took her hand in his and brought it to his lips.
"It feels real now," he said. "Like you are really here."
She looked at him, at his beautiful eyes that had never changed, never grown cynical nor dull, and kissed each cheekbone slowly.
"I am here."