Chapter 2: Der verbotene Anblick
The cellar air was cool and thick, tasting of damp mortar and cellulose decay. Beate’s sensible shoes made no sound on the stone steps. The cardboard box in her arms, a donation of local histories, was light. She intended to shelve it in the farthest corner, where the town’s forgotten narratives were interred.
A faint, rhythmic scuffing halted her.
It came from beyond a row of towering oak shelves crammed with municipal ledgers from the last century. The single bare bulb overhead cast a sickly yellow puddle that ended in deep shadow. She set the box down silently on the flagstones. Her fingers were dusty.
She heard it again. A stifled, wet gasp. The sound was unmistakable, a raw animal noise that seemed alien in this tomb of ordered words.
She did not call out. She moved, not with purpose, but with a slow, involuntary drift, one hand trailing the rough edge of a shelf. The wood was gritty under her fingertips.
She peered around the corner.
He was half-turned away, framed by the narrow canyon of shelving. Karl. His back was pressed against a ledger labelled 1897-1902: Water Tax Assessments. His head was thrown back, tendons in his pale neck stretched taut. His eyes were squeezed shut, his mouth a dark, slack oval. His right hand was shoved inside the unbuttoned flap of his trousers, moving in a frantic, jerking piston motion. The fabric of his cheap trousers strained and whispered.
Beate did not move. She did not breathe.
The image from two days prior—the mirror, his fixed stare on the straining fabric of her skirt, her own scorching flush—crashed into this one, superimposing itself. Then, it had been a glance, stolen and indirect. Now it was crude and absolute. A raw presentation.
She observed the details with a librarian’s cold precision. The frantic urgency of his wrist. The way his free hand clawed at the wood of the shelf behind him, knuckles white. The shallow, ragged pulls of his breath that stirred the dust motes in the air between them. A bead of sweat traced a path from his temple down to his jawline.
A part of her mind, the part that catalogued and sorted, noted the pathetic vulnerability of it. His youthful awkwardness was gone, stripped away to reveal something desperate and hungry. It was not beautiful. It was starkly functional.
Her own body betrayed her with a slow, internal clench of heat, a biological response as impersonal as the fluttering of a page. Shame followed instantly, a cold wave that started at her scalp and tightened the knot of her hair. But it did not root her feet to the floor. It did not make her look away.
His rhythm hitched. A low groan escaped him, choked and guttural. His entire body stiffened, arching away from the shelf for one suspended second before slumping forward, his forehead coming to rest against the spine of a book. His shoulders rose and fell.
Silence seeped back in, heavier than before.
He remained there, spent, for three heartbeats. Then, as if a switch had been thrown, he fumbled with his trousers, buttoning them with clumsy, shaking fingers. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He took a shuddering breath and turned.
His eyes, wide and glazed, met hers directly across the ten feet of dusty space.
All colour drained from his face. The nervous expression he usually wore was obliterated by pure, undiluted horror. His jaw worked, but no sound emerged.
Beate said nothing. She simply stood, a solid, respectable shape in her grey cardigan and long skirt, her hands hanging loosely at her sides. The chill of the cellar finally registered on her skin.
“I…” he croaked. “Frau Beate… I didn’t… I thought…”
His voice was a broken thing. He took a stumbling step back, his heel catching on an uneven flagstone. He flailed, grabbing a shelf for support. A cascade of thin, unbound pamphlets slid from an upper ledge and fluttered to the ground around his feet like dead leaves.
She looked at the pamphlets, then back at his mortified face. Her own heart was a dull, heavy drum in her ears.
“The floor,” she said. Her voice was flat, toneless, the one she used for reciting the library’s closing hours. “It needs sweeping. The dust is… excessive.”
She turned then, walking back toward the stairs with a measured, even pace. The sound of her footsteps was absorbed by the silence.
SIE BEOBACHTET WEITER.