Me and Kaminski Read online

  “She knows where we’re headed,” said Kaminski. “She’ll get a taxi and follow us.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything about Bahring?”

  “It was only about Paris and poor Richard. You get everything else. Surely that’s enough.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  The street headed into a long curve, and in the distance I could see the artificial sweep of a dike.

  “Well, you’re just going to have to write about someone else,” said Kaminski, looking unmoved. “Pity about your big closing scene.”

  “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” I said. “Bruno and Uwe. Mr. Holm and his herbal products.”

  “And that sunrise.”

  He laughed and against my will I laughed too. I replayed it in my head: the living room, the carpets, Holm’s chitchat, the old woman’s face, the painting in the hall.

  I hit the brake, almost choking the engine. “Just a moment. How do you know?”

  “About what?”

  “You understood me. How did you know about the picture?”

  He took off his glasses and turned his head toward me.

  “Oh, Sebastian.”

  XIII

  A WEB OF CLOUDS had spun itself across the sky. An umbrella with a broken shaft was stuck in the sand; a hundred yards away from us a boy had just gotten a kite up into the air and was letting out the string. A dock reached out over the water. Kaminski walked cautiously beside me, it was hard for him to keep his balance, with sand sticking to his shoes. Everything smelled of seaweed. The beach was strewn with broken mussels.

  “I want to sit down,” said Kaminski. He had put on the dressing gown again, the creased material fluttered around him. I held him as he carefully lowered himself to the ground. Then he pulled his legs up and laid the stick down beside him. “Hard to believe. I could have died without ever having been here.”

  “You’re not going to die any time soon.”

  “Rubbish!” He tipped his head back, the wind tugged at his hair, a big wave slung a shower of spray at us. “I’m going to die soon.”

  “I have to go back one more time.” It was hard to make myself heard over the roar of wind and water. “To get my suitcase.”

  “Is there anything in it you need?”

  I thought. Shirts, pants, underwear and socks, photocopies of my articles, writing stuff and paper, a few books. “I have nothing.”

  “Then throw it away.”

  I nodded. Then I stood up and walked out onto the dock. The planks groaned under my feet. Out at the end I stopped, opened my bag, and pulled out my notepad. Page after page, tightly written in my messy scrawl, interleaved with dozens of photocopies from books and old newspapers, and everywhere the letters, underlined in red, M.K. I hesitated for a moment, then let it fall. I thought it would float away slowly, but the water swallowed it at once.

  As I went back onto the beach, I reached into the bag and pulled out the camera.

  I weighed it in my hand. The entire series of his last paintings. I put my thumb on the buttons that would erase all the pictures from the card.

  I hesitated.

  My thumb lifted itself again as if of its own volition, and I put away the camera. Tomorrow was another day; time enough to think. I sat down next to Kaminski in the sand.

  He reached out his hand. I gave him the car key. “Tell her I’m sorry.”

  “Which her?”

  “Both.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He raised his head, and for a moment he laid his hand on mine. “That’s good, Sebastian.”

  I stood up and left, the sand crunching under my shoes. As I looked back, Kaminski was stretching his legs. The sky was low and wide. High tide was flooding in.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Daniel Kehlmann was born in 1975 in Munich, the son of a director and an actress. He attended a Jesuit school in Vienna, traveled widely, and has won several awards for previous novels and short stories, among them the 2005 Candide Award, the 2006 Kleist Award, and the 2008 Thomas Mann Award. His works have been translated into more than forty languages, and his novel Measuring the World became an instant best seller in several European countries, selling more than 1.5 million copies. Kehlmann lives in Vienna and Berlin.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Carol Brown Janeway’s translations include Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, Jan Philipp Reemtsma’s In the Cellar, Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s Lost, Zvi Kolitz’s Yosl Rakover Talks to God, Benjamin Lebert’s Crazy, Sándor Márai’s Embers, Yasmina Reza’s Desolation, and Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World.

  ALSO BY DANIEL KEHLMANN

  Measuring the World

  Translation copyright © 2008 by Carol Brown Janeway

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Germany as Ich und Kaminski by Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, in 2003.

  Copyright © 2003 by Suhrkamp Verlag,

  Frankfurt am Main.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kehlmann, Daniel, [date]

  [Ich und Kaminski. English]

  Me and Kaminski / Daniel Kehlmann ; translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway.

  p. cm.

  I. Janeway, Carol Brown. II. Title.

  PT2671.E32I3413 2008

  833’.914—dc22

  2008003920

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37781-4

  v3.0