Sample Pages: The Cavern (page 2 of 12)
There was the screeching of cabs stopping at the Hotel Indochine across the street, picking up travelers, who were rushing to catch an early plane to Berlin or Munich or the United States at Charles de Gaulle. Wisent imagined Herr Kühn sitting rigidly behind the desk of the reception area in the small hotel, bleary-eyed from his night on duty, his beard darkening his slender, wolf-like face, awaiting Frau Kühn, his French wife, to relieve him so he could return home, shower, shave, and sleep until he had to reappear at 4 p.m. That was the time Kühn relieved his wife so she could hurry home to prepare dinner for their family of five.
Wisent threw off the sheet covering his nude body, stretched broadly, and paused to listen to the grating rattle of the automatic shutters in the grocery store that occupied the ground floor of his building. The rattle signaled the arrival of the Korean trucks delivering fresh fruit and flowers. He rubbed the ruddy hair on his chest, stretched his long hairy arms out across the bed, and sniffed Hélène’s parfume still redolent on the sheets. She left at 11 p.m. in a hurry to return home before Gaspard, her petit ami, arrived from the theater. Gaspard had a small part in a Giraudoux play, currently being performed by a troupe of young French actors in the Marais. The Marais was an area on the east side of Paris, a banlieu built upon the swamps for Parisian aristocrats, fleeing Paris and its taxes, by the Knights Templar, a religious order of militant monks, in the twelfth century.
As he lay in bed, fighting the urge to fall back to sleep, Wisent’s thoughts fluttered from one association to another, like a butterfly flitting from one flower to another, or the flickering light of the silent movies he watched at the art house cinema near his mother’s tiny, one bedroom flat in Berlin when he was a teenager. The memory