Officious, as ever. Another half-truth, as always.
I said, 'Gallen, I'm sorry. And I won't forget about you.'
'Then come to Vienna with me, Graff,' she said, and I couldn't tell what kind of edge her voice had now.
'I have to go to Kaprun,' I said.
'Then how will you find me?' she asked - my question. And it was her unsharp, thick and natural voice again - a genuine query.
'Kahlenberg,' I said, 'is a place you'll hear about when you're in the city. Take any Grinzing tram and a bus up through the Vienna Woods. Go there Wednesday evenings,' I said. 'There's a view of the Danube, and all Vienna.'
'And you'll come some Wednesday, I suppose,' she said.
'You be there every Wednesday,' I said. But this was pushing her too hard, and roundabout from where she'd first taken a stance.
She said, 'Maybe.' With a touch of that bright coldness in her voice.
'I'll take you to the buses in Klosterneuburg,' I said. 'The first outlying tram stop is in Josefdorf.'
'I don't want to ride with you,' she said. 'I'll just walk.'
And because I felt I was losing again, I said, 'Well, sure. You're a strong-legged girl, I know. It won't hurt you.'
'You said Thursdays?' she asked.
'Wednesdays,' I said quickly. 'Any Wednesday night.'
'You'll come then?' she asked.
'For sure,' I said, and she started to go. I said, 'Wednesday.'
'Maybe,' she said, and kept her fine legs strutting away from me.
Trying to make light of it all, I said, 'I'm going to watch your sweet behind till you're out of sight.'
But she wasn't exactly smiling when she turned round to me. 'Not a long, last look, though?' she said, 'Or is it?'
'No,' I said - so quickly that her mouth came close to smiling. She kept walking away from me; I watched her almost to where the road turned.
Then I called, 'Wednesday!'
'Maybe,' she called, in an uninterpretable voice, and didn't turn around.
'For sure!' I hollered, and she was gone.
I sat in the road ditch, letting her get all the way into Klosterneuburg; I didn't want to pass her on the road.
Around me the morning was coming on stronger. The domestic life of the trimly hedged and fenced fields. The borders separating cows from corn; the property lines orderly and unmistakable in the sun. All cows were belled; all sheep were ear-notched.
All men have names, and specific places where they're allowed to go.
A wind picked up and blew the roadside dust in my face. I watched the motorcycle brace against the little gale and shudder on its kickstand. I saw the mirror mounted on the handlebars, reflecting some anonymous patch of tar-smeared gravel off the roadside - and a petal-part of a flower, grown too close to the road. But when I looked behind the motorcycle, I just couldn't say, for sure, which flower lent its part to that reflection. Or just which stretch of tar-smeared gravel.
Things didn't piece together any better than before.
And that should have been no surprise to me. I knew. All the figures in your frotting column make the sum, but the figures are in no way bound to be otherwise related. They're just all the things you've ever paid for. As unfitted to each other as toothpaste and your first touch of warm, upstanding breast.
Gallen was in Klosterneuburg. Where there still were monasteries. And monks making wine.