The Pegnitz Junction

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She was a bony slow-moving girl from a small bombed baroque German city, where all that was worthwhile keeping had been rebuilt and which now looked as pink and golden as a pretty child and as new as morning. By the standards of a few years ago she would have been thought plain; she was so tall that she bumped her head getting in and out of airplanes, and in her childhood she had often been told that her feet were like canal boats. Her light hair would have been brown, about the colour of brown sugar, if she had not rinsed it in camomile and whenever possible dried it in sunlight; she could not use a commercial bleach because of some vague promise she had given her late grandmother when she was fourteen.

She had a striking density of expression in photographs, though she seemed unchanging and passive in life, and had caught sight of her own face looking totally empty-minded when, in fact, her thoughts and feelings were pushing her in some wild direction. She had heard a man say of her that you could leave her in a café for two hours and come back to find she was still smoking the same cigarette. She had done some modelling, not well paid, in middling ready-to-wear centers such as Berlin and Zurich, but now she was trying to be less conscious of her body. She was at one of those turnings in a young life where no one can lead, no one can help, but where someone for the sake of love might follow.

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