Banana Yoshimoto
At the airport, a woman with blond curled hair stared at me looking nervous. She took a book out of her wheelie bag, the cover title read „Nutritional lies“ but just a few minutes later she put the book aside, looked around, fumbled on her shoelaces, looked around again, then fetched a glossy newspaper, a German political magazine, skimmed the pages. The advertising on the wall switched too quickly to gain me as a potential client, „s'engager pour ses clients“, a young man in a grey suit was staring over the shoulder into the cleavage of a young female. The woman with the curled hair somehow looked like waiting that I talked to her but I still thought of the girl with the dark hair in the library. When I glanced out of the window of the airport, I saw a seagull circling around, I never expected to see a seagull in this area, close and familiar but locked away by the pane.
I had not seen her face but when she told me her Russian name, I liked her voice. She had pulled a book from the shelf. Banana Yoshimoto, she said, it has a beautiful feeling, a little sick maybe. Give it back to me when you’re finished.
But when I walked down the road to the library again, pondering how I could approach her and whether we could just skip this boy-girl thing, skip the usual conversation pattern, I did not find the place, my mental map was tricking me, I walked around and looked into the face of each black-haired girl looking around 28, and when I asked the guy in the grocery at the corner he said, I’ve never seen a Russian girl round here. But there was a Chinese recently, a Japanese, who knows, these Asians all look alike, don't they? Wanna buy anything?