Читать книгу Crocodile Tears онлайн

50 страница из 53

For her, spying on her neighbours goes through three stages. First, the bad mood triggered by this inconvenient situation of closing the blind, dimming the lights and setting up the telescope that she takes out of its hiding place and which she will have to dismantle and put away again later. Second, the feeling that comes over her when she looks into other people’s lives, the unchecked arousal. And 50finally, the sense of guilt at having done something wrong, the remorse that arrives at the end, the certainty that she should not cross this boundary again. But she knows, how well she knows, that her remorse is no more than crocodile tears, that she will do it again, that she will always return to spying and regretting and then spying again.

But let’s be patient: we are still finishing the first stage, the one where she is in a bad mood because of the work and the inconvenience. The telescope is assembled and in place but Ursula hasn’t occupied her vantage point.

She turns out the final light, places the chair with precision, settles herself neither very close to the edge of the seat nor leaning very heavily on the backrest. She aims the telescope, adjusts the range controls of the German device – a Carl Zeiss Jena inherited from her father – and focuses; she no longer sees the things surrounding her: this gloomy room with obsolete furniture, the display case with the Japanese figurines, the embroidered tablecloth with its faded colours, the slightly worn Persian rugs, the table covered with medicines, the yellowing family photographs sitting on the marble tops of chests of drawers, the walls darkened by the passage of time, her whole house.