Your Perfect Year(122)
Didn’t feel a thing. That certainly wasn’t the case for Jonathan. At that moment he felt a whole range of things. For example, a monstrous, dreadful grief. All those years, he had felt a terrible knot in his heart whenever he thought of his mother, an impotent rage that grew from his firm conviction that she hadn’t cared an iota for him. Or had cared less for him than for her dolce vita in Italy, at least.
How wrong he had been! What injustice he had, yet again, done to another person! And what had it done to him as a person? An emotional cripple, a lonely old divorcé, a self-righteous know-it-all, an unbearable pedant. And on top of that, a coward who couldn’t even bring himself to stand up to his deranged father with his own point of view, to acknowledge that he had nothing at all against popular fiction. He had merely accepted his father’s stupid attitude and even made it his own. If he were honest with himself once and for all, he admired authors who succeeded in truly moving their readers, touching them deep in their hearts and minds. Whether that was J. K. Rowling or Sebastian Fitzek—or Simon Klamm.
Yes, while he was waiting in the Florence airport, Jonathan had actually begun to read Simon Klamm’s Hannah’s Laugh, which he had asked Renate Krug to scan and send to him so he could load it on his iPad. And however much pain it caused him to read what this near stranger had written about his (albeit allegedly fictionalized) Hannah, he finally came to understand why he had always found it hard to bear books like that. Because they could also hurt. Hurt very much.
There was no way he could use it to justify his rejection letter to Simon Klamm; that was and would remain a singular, unforgivable mistake, but at least he could now admit to himself why he had done it. Not because the manuscript was bad—on the contrary. Because at the time, with all his self-pity and his unjustified anger after his divorce from Tina, his inability to come out from his own shadow and allow any feelings in, he had not been able to bear reading something like that, and had dismissed it as “dreadful kitsch.”
What kind of a man had he, Jonathan N. Grief, become? Of course, it would be exaggerating to claim that his marriage to Tina had been a result of his emotional ineptitude. The fact that he had consciously chosen a woman who might have had things in common with him but whom he didn’t really love. One who—how had she put it?—“couldn’t get through to him.” No, Jonathan didn’t want to go that far; it would be mere kitchen psychology.
On the other hand, what was actually wrong with kitchen psychology? After all, sitting at his aunt’s kitchen table (well, almost, with a slight detour from the table to the German Institute), he had learned a few things about himself that, looking back, made quite a lot of psychological sense.
Jonathan strode rapidly down the long corridor to baggage claim. He had still barely gotten himself under control, and the sight of people on the other side of the sliding glass door to the arrivals terminal cheerfully waving to loved ones did little to improve his mood. If he could be granted just one small wish, it would be to see Hannah there waiting for him.
Instead, he would be getting into a taxi alone and going back to his lonely house by Innocentia Park. There was no one to meet him. Not a single person who was interested in him. Well, apart from Leo. But he still didn’t have a driver’s license.
“Hello, Herr Grief.”
Jonathan came to a halt midstride and turned in surprise. He saw Renate Krug smile uncertainly at him.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to meet you, but you were in such a hurry that you swept right past me.”
“Sorry, I never expected to see anyone here.”
“Why would you?” She still looked hesitant.
“Yes, well, thank you!” Jonathan said, making an effort not to look so grim. Probably in vain.
“You know now, I suppose.”
“Know what?”
“That your mother’s dead.”
“You know too?” he asked, perplexed.
Renate Krug nodded and lowered her eyes. “Yes,” she replied quietly.
“But how . . . Why . . . ?” He stuttered to a silence.
His assistant looked back up at him. “Jonathan,” she said, using his first name in a firm, determined tone. “I was afraid you’d have found it all out by now. Or almost all of it. That’s why I’m here. To tell you the rest.”
“What rest?”
“That I was the one. I was the reason your mother left your father.”
Jonathan N. Grief sat in the taxi home from the airport, deep in thought. His assistant had offered to drive him, but he had declined. He wanted to be alone, so that he could think in peace. To mull over what Renate Krug had confessed at the table of a bistro in the airport, over coffee that neither of them had drunk.
How she and his father had an affair, many years ago. It wasn’t a big, important affair, just a stupid fling, but it was damaging enough for Sofia Monticello, who had left her husband because of it. How they had all decided not to tell the boy, because that would be better for him. Not even after his mother died, since it would only have burdened him with guilt for the rest of his life if he believed he was somehow responsible for her accident because of his stupid postcard. Renate Krug had told him all that. Had asked him to forgive her for her behavior, explaining to him that there had been nothing between her and Jonathan’s father for years (as if that made the slightest difference!) and that she was aware what an unforgivable mistake she had made, how much she had wronged Jonathan.