The Reader

Perhaps I only became aware of all this some time later.

Nor do I remember how I greeted Frau Schmitz.

I don't remember what we talked about in the kitchen.

Her face as it was then has been overlaid in my memory by the faces she had later. If I see her in my mind's eye as she was then, she doesn't have a face at all, and I have to reconstruct it….I know that I found it beautiful. But I cannot recapture its beauty.

Years later it occurred to me that the reason I hadn't been able to take my eyes off her was not just her body, but the way she held herself and moved.

I knew none of this-if indeed I know any of it now and am not just making patterns in the air.

I don't know why I did it. But today I can recognize that events back then were part of a lifelong pattern in which thinking and doing have either come together or failed to come together…Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do.

Why does it make me so sad when I think back to that time? … Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?...Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily.

The memory that illuminates and fixes my first meetings with Hanna makes a single blur…I remember our meeting in those weeks as one single long meeting.

Later I wondered if she had left the water in the tub because she knew I would come back.

I don't remember what I told my parents.

While I have no memory of the lies I told my parents about the trip with Hanna, I do remember the price I had to pay to stay alone at home the last week of vacation.

I have them stored away, I can project them on a mental screen and watch them, unchanged, unconsumed.

I no longer remember when I first denied Hanna.