The Girl Who Wasn't There (14 page)

On the other side of the bridge, Eschburg climbed down into the river. The water was cold, and pressed hard against his gumboots. He had his wickerwork bag and his old rod with him, but he was not concentrating on fishing. Sometimes he stopped in the middle of the river to smoke a cigarette. He took the case with the jade stone out of his pocket and ran his fingers over the Japanese characters on the inside. He thought of Sofia and he thought of their son. Soon he’d take the boy fishing with him. He would teach him how to throw out his line, and where to find the shady places in which the trout gathered during the heat of the day, and he would show him how to cook trout on a stick over the fire. He didn’t know if he had done things properly, or whether there was in fact any proper way to do things.

We get up every morning, he thought, we live our lives, all the little things that go into them, our work, our hope, making love. We think that what we do is important and that we mean something. We believe we are certain, love is certain, and the society and places in which we live. We believe in all that because otherwise nothing works. But now and then we stop, time tears apart for a moment, and in that moment we understand, all we can see is our own reflections.

Then, gradually, things come back: the laughter of a strange woman in the corridor, afternoons after rain, the smell of wet linen and iris and the dark green moss on the stones. And we go on in the same way as we have always gone on, and as we will always go on again.

The summer fields were bright until they reached the bank. Eschburg was walking downstream. He threw his line far out. For a brief moment the fly lay on the water, gleaming green and red and blue in the sun. Then the river swept it away on the current.