MOSELLE WINE. Cool, refreshing, like it had been drawn from a well deep in the earth.
Gisela Obermann wished she still had the Bohemian crystal glasses she’d inherited, instead of the dull, mass-produced glasses of the staff quarters. But she’d given the old glasses away to charity, and they had been sold to raise funds. She had given everything away when she got the chance to work at Himmelstal. She had gotten rid of her beautiful apartment and put an end to a damaging long-term relationship. The only things she kept were a few decent items of clothing, some psychiatric textbooks, and her cat, Snowflake.
“I’ve burned my boats,” she said to herself.
She loved that expression. In the past generals would burn their boats so that their men wouldn’t be tempted to set off for home when the fighting got too tough. She could see the burning boats before her, flames reflected in the water. A beautiful, terrifying sight.
Gisela lay down on her bed and curled up beside her long-haired cat, breathing in its faint, clean smell. Unlike dogs, cats always smelled good. She’d have liked to have a cat-scented perfume.
The cat purred, its soft white coat vibrating gently against her face.
The window was ajar. A blackbird was singing outside. She could hear voices and the sound of metal scraping against stone. Then she picked up the smell of burning charcoal. Yet another staff party. She wasn’t thinking of going.
She closed her eyes, letting the cat’s fur caress her cheek and pretending it was Doctor Kalpak’s hand.
She would never see Doctor Kalpak at a staff party. He didn’t go to parties. She had shaken his hand when she arrived at the clinic and introduced herself to him. She had never forgotten the touch of his hand. Slender and brown, with the longest fingers she’d ever seen. It was more like an independent object than a hand. Some sort of animal. A quick, agile, silky animal. A weasel, maybe.
His lilting accent fit in well up here in the mountains, soft, with a rising note to it, like Austrian or Norwegian. But his expressive hands were his true language: When you saw them you almost forgot to listen to what he was saying.
Gisela Obermann had let go of most of her dreams. One by one she had let them fall and drift off on the harsh winds of life. But the dream of one day feeling Doctor Kalpak’s hands on her naked body remained, and she would take it out and enjoy it when she was alone.
She shut her eyes again and felt the wine drawing swirling patterns in her brain. She remembered that Max had had a visit today. From his brother. Max was the only one of her clients who still gave her a glimmer of hope. What would a visit like this do to him?
The cat’s purring motor speeded up.
“I love animals because they are alive without being human.” Who was it who said that? Mayakovsky? Dostoyevsky?
Gisela went back to thinking about Doctor Kalpak’s hands. Two silken weasels padding over her body. One on her breasts, and the other on her stomach and down between her thighs.