The light is fading outside my kitchen window and I look at my watch. It’s just gone four o’clock. I’ve got a reading lamp in my bedroom, so I go and get that and plug it in behind the sofa and then place it on the windowsill. That’s better. I can aim it directly at the pages of the book. One lamp can’t use up too much electricity, surely?
At about half past five I hear the sound of the door downstairs, and then the dissonant tinkle of Wolfgang’s bicycle bell as it scrapes against the wall. Although I really want to finish reading my book, my eyes are hurting and I haven’t spoken to another human being for hours. So when there’s a faint tap on my door a few minutes later, I call out that it’s open and get up to make coffee.
Wolfgang comes in and sits down awkwardly at the kitchen table.
‘Good day?’ I say, although his posture should answer the question for me.
‘Ha,’ is all he says, putting his head in his hands.
‘Wolf?’
‘What is Sunday for?’ he asks. ‘Tell me that.’
‘Um … Church?’ I suggest. ‘Family? Sport?’
The coffee hisses and I take it off the gas ring. I pour a cup for each of us and sit down at the table facing Wolf. I offer him a cigarette and then light one myself. He does not respond to my suggestions, so I try to think of some more. Without meaning to, I effortlessly transport myself back to Mr. Y’s 1890s world, and summon up half-finished colouring-book images of women walking through parks in hobble skirts, children playing with hoops, and vague dot-to-dot trips to the seaside involving parasols and slot machines, although I don’t think they had slot machines until the turn of the century. It’s an after-church, afternoon world that I can’t even begin to understand. I try to think myself back out of the 1890s.
‘Sex?’ I suggest instead. ‘Reading the papers? Shopping?’
‘Ha,’ says Wolf again, sipping his coffee.
‘What happened?’ I ask.
‘A weekend with Catherine’s family,’ he says, with some disgust.
‘It can’t have been that bad,’ I say. ‘Where did you go?’
‘Sussex. Country house. And it was very bad …’
‘Why?’
He sighs. ‘Where to begin?’
I think of The Odyssey. ‘Try the middle,’ I suggest.
‘Ah. The middle. OK. In the middle, I run over the dog.’
I can’t help but laugh, even though this is obviously not funny.
‘Is the dog OK?’ I say.
Wolfgang looks sad. ‘He is now lame.’
I sip my coffee. ‘How exactly did you run over the dog?’
Wolfgang doesn’t drive: thus the bicycle.
‘In a … How would you say it … ? What is the word … ?’
This is something of an affectation of Wolf’s. He speaks English better than most of the literature students in the department, but sometimes he’ll fish for a word like this, playing on his foreignness to add drama and, sometimes, melancholy to whatever story he’s telling. I don’t dislike the affectation; in fact, I find it funny. But that doesn’t mean I’m not familiar with its mechanics.
He’s still at it. ‘A … Like a little tractor.’
‘You ran over your girlfriend’s family dog in a “little tractor”?’
‘No. Well, yes. But I mean, what is the word for little tractor?’
‘I don’t think there is a word for little tractor. What do you do with it?’
‘You cut the grass with it.’
‘Oh! A lawnmower.’
Wolf looks at me as if I’m simple. ‘I know lawnmower,’ he says. ‘You push a lawnmower. This other thing you sit on.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Yeah, like a lawnmower you sit on. A … Oh, God. What do you call those things?’ I think for a while. ‘I think they’re just lawnmowers that you sit on. What did Catherine’s family call it?’
‘I think they called it the “mower”. But I was sure there would be another term.’
‘I’m not sure there is. So, anyway, why were you on the mower?’
‘The father, Mr. Dickerson, he had got it stuck and he wanted a “big strong lad” to drive it out.’
I laugh at the thought that anyone would call Wolfgang a ‘big strong lad’. He isn’t any one of those three things.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Ha ha.’
‘Sorry. So, anyway, what were they like, the family?’
‘Rich,’ says Wolf. ‘From carpets.’
‘And is there a future with Catherine?’ I ask.
‘For me?’ He shrugs. ‘Who knows?’ He gets up and takes the bottle of slivovitz from the shelf. He pours himself a large glass, but when he offers some to me I shake my head. ‘Anyway,’ he says, when he has sat down again, ‘how is your curse?’
‘Hm,’ I say. ‘Can you keep a secret?’
‘You know I can. And I’ve already said that I don’t care if I become more cursed.’
‘I don’t think you’ll become cursed just from hearing about it,’ I say.
‘So what is it? An object?’
‘A book.’
‘Ah, the curse of knowledge,’ he says immediately.
‘I’m not sure if it is that,’ I say. ‘It’s a novel. I think the curse might just be some superstition. But the book is very rare and potentially very valuable – although my copy is damaged, so it’s probably actually worth nothing.’
‘And you bought this on Friday?’
‘Yeah. With, basically, all my money.’
‘How rare is it?’
‘Very rare.’ I explain to him about there being no known copies anywhere in the world, apart from the one in the German bank vault. ‘Even with the damage, it’s still a pretty amazing thing to have. It’s by that author I’m studying: Thomas Lumas. I could be the only person in the world to write a paper on the actual book rather than the mysteries surrounding it. I must be one of the only people to have read it in the last hundred years.’ Just as I’m getting excited about it, Wolf interrupts.
‘And the curse is what?’
I look down at the table. ‘The curse is that if you read it, you die.’
The book is still on the sofa where I left it, and I notice as Wolf’s gaze travels around the room and then rests on it. He gets up and goes over to the sofa. But instead of picking up the book, he simply looks down at it as if it were an exhibit in a museum. For a moment I imagine that he’s much more frightened of curses that he has let on, and this is why he doesn’t touch it. But then I decide that it must be simply a respect for the age and rarity of the object. Wolf isn’t scared of curses: he’s said so.
He comes back to the table. ‘What’s the story about?’
‘It’s about this man called Mr. Y, who goes to this Victorian fairground,’ I begin. I tell Wolf the story as far as I know it, ending with the last scene I read, where Mr. Y’s wife has implored him to stop spending all night poring over