My feelings for you bordered on the uncontrollable. I thrive best where the boundary between allowing and rejecting becomes porous. I never begged you for anything, our relationship didn’t last long, it was all in the past before I had understood what had happened.
And now there’s your book, a memoir. A detailed record of your conquests, daily routine and attempts to write, published in the Private Confessions series. A widely read friend told me about it. When she read your diary, she noticed similarities with my story. I could confirm it; this was about us. You have now shared the game you played with me, shared it with the world and, in doing so, turned it into a game once again. I forgive you for the first time — after all, I was in it too. I won’t forgive you for the second time.
You wrote line after line about my glances, excessive use of mascara, habit of looking away and being embarrassed about anything vaguely erotic. All you see are natural phenomena that must be noted down.
Where should I begin? It’s an unequal situation. Wherever I begin, you were already long on your way to me.
I worked from Mondays to Thursdays in a shoe shop on the country’s busiest shopping street. A great job with a lot of variety. I soon became the shop manager; the girls I worked with were competent. I usually wore mid-heel court shoes because at one metre seventy I don’t need to add much height. People have called me “a calculated beauty”. When I made the transition from girl to woman, my mother remarked that I had ideal lines. She admired my symmetrical face. I went out into the world full of self-confidence, mainly thanks to my mother’s words.
We staff observe a lot but see nothing. That day was no different. My biggest mistake was cherishing the thought, even long after you’d gone, that you’d come purely to buy some shoes. A potential customer, not a butterfly collector. Even when it became clear to me how skilfully you had operated, I couldn’t bring myself to see your actions as entirely premeditated, so I pretended to myself that it had all started when you just happened to walk in looking to buy a pair of comfortable loafers. But you didn’t walk in. Your diary describes precisely what you did and it doesn’t correspond at all with my memory. You would never have walked into our shop. Because you would never have bought our shoes. Mediocre quality, unattractive finishing.
I can barely justify to myself what happened. The destroyer destroys and forgets. The one who got hurt has to be on her guard when telling her story long after the dust has settled.
What I can’t stomach is that I didn’t realise I was being spied on. You had been involved with me for much longer and much more intensely than I had seen you. You looked at me in that shop like a choreographer watches his prima ballerina. You saw I wore light blue nail polish. I wore a green woollen cardigan that fell down to my thighs. And the black, tight trousers I wore were indeed tight and black.
You were ahead of me. You knew how I walked, you knew the way I used my hands. A luxury I would never know — the luxury of the voyeur. While I was looking out for bargain hunters, somewhat dreamily — I dream best when surrounded by objects — you did precisely the opposite: you dissected me. You gave me no space.
Doesn’t everyone have the right to get to know the other person before that person is aware of any particular interest? This is the only way to form a good impression of the person you will later be calling your lover. Then, when things look very different later on, we can still say we had the upper hand over them. Wow, I really am kidding myself!
I switched on the burglar alarm and stepped into the outside air. Finally I was heading home. As I came out, you approached me. The face of a fanatical boxer who has had a hot shower after training and emerges relaxed into the cold light outside. The charm of a healthy person. Light, copper-coloured skin. You were not much taller than me. I don’t like tall men: they give me an uncomfortable feeling of reverence. I like to feel someone’s equal at all times, including in height. Only then can I relinquish control. You had clearly waited until I was separated from the other shop workers. You stopped me as I walked towards the tram stop, just when I had left the working day behind me and was absorbed by the blubbery mass of hurrying crowds — the grey area between work and private life. You chose the ideal moment. I was immediately impressed by the easy, relaxed tone in which you presented yourself. The opening sentences came short and fast. That’s how you prepared the attack, or the ‘operation’, to use the word in your diary.
That unconscious threat — present but silent in the conversation — threw me off balance. You unerringly divined that I would need that tension to start feeling interested in you. Although my words were rushed (mumbled conventional phrases), I slowed down; my body was already conceding because my body wanted contact with you. That body of mine betrayed me there, at that point!
It was all you needed. That slight waver was what you had hoped for, without expecting you would get it. It was still an experiment, after all. Somewhere under the cashmere coat of the cosmopolitan gentleman that you were — God, you were such a gentleman — was a highly aggressive virus that was able to circumvent my defence system. You invited yourself into the same tram as me; we stood next to one another as two total strangers who are preparing for the intimacy that will develop in no time at all. When we got out, you touched me for the first time, lightly on the shoulder. You must have hardly felt it but I felt everything, and what my body wanted was to be touched there again, for longer. Which you didn’t do. That was the only physical contact the entire evening. You did that well. Didn’t you write in your diary that more serious study goes into all that intuitive stuff than into the best prepared role?
What I read there doesn’t match my experience. You made it difficult for me to have any spontaneous contacts after that. I don’t work at the shoe shop anymore. It was just a temporary job. I recently joined a media company specialising in film adaptations of books. They like your diary. They want to turn it into a series. They’ve suggested discussing the proposal with you.
I will turn the story I gave you into my own story again.
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