Fame (18 page)

“Useful.”

“Is that bad?”

She shrugged and went back inside. Lara Gaspard was holding a pencil and drawing in a sketchbook with dreamlike concentration. How graceful she was! Beside her Rotmann was reading a worn French paperback,
The Art of Being Oneself
by Miguel Auristos Blanco. Müller and Rebenthal were playing cards with one of the militiamen.

“Sometimes he deals,” Müller whispered. “Sometimes we deal, then we look at the cards and he tells us who’s won. What the hell kind of game is that?”

Elisabeth shrugged to show she had no idea what kind of game it was. She sat down and leaned her head against the wall. She was dead tired, but she wanted to stay awake. What kind of dreams would she find herself in if she fell asleep? “So where’s Leo?”

Müller looked up. “Who?”

Elisabeth nodded. That’s how they did it, that’s how they evaded their responsibilities. Already he was everywhere, behind things, and above the sky and beneath the earth like a
second-class God, and there was no remaining possibility to hold him accountable.

“We should go to sleep.” Lara Gaspard closed the sketchbook. “Tomorrow will be a hard day.”

Elisabeth shut her eyes. Mind you, if this was a story, something would happen and things would become hard, and if they didn’t become hard, then it wasn’t a story. Where was sleep going to take her? Suddenly she didn’t care. Her phone rang. She paid no attention.

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
and
Me and Kaminski.