Kindness (from the Munich Tales)

KINDNESS
By Michael Kroetch

Everybody was sure he could be a movie star. He had that kind of look. His was the easy, languid grace of a river at sunset. You liked him even before you met him. It was impossible not to. Something in his eyes drew you toward him. There was a slowness in them. A gentle thunder. You always wanted him to walk by on his way to the torpedo factory where he worked. And whenever he did, you always enjoyed seeing his footprints glitter wet on the pavement under the red marquee of the pizza place. He didn´t seem to notice your burgundy lipstick of the tiny black dress which you wore especially for him. But then again, you couldn´t be sure. With him you couldn´t be sure of anything. He was so full of surprises and tiny kindnesses. Plus, he was so different from everyone else. The thing that bothered you the most about the place where you lived was the sameness of it all and the sameness of the people. You only had to look at them once to know their whole story and what they named their cat—if they had a cat, that is, which many of them did, even though it was against the apartment complex´s rules. With him you didn´t know anything really, except how he made you feel. He could be thinking anything and you´d never know it from his little smiles and nicely polished shoes. You couldn´t really help yourself from wanting to know more about him. Sneaking into his apartment when he was at work wasn´t really an invasion, it seemed to be what he wanted you to do. He was just to shy to ask. Okay, so you broke that little window. Yes, that was probably not the nicest thing to do, but he would understand. You knew he would. Just like he would understand why you stood so long in his shower looking up at the spigot imagining him there waiting for the water to fall on him, how his skin would feel under your palms, wet, strong, alive with excitement and passion. How could it be wrong to get into his bed and lay there awhile and look up at the same ceiling he looked up at as he drifted off to sleep? This was not criminal behavior, you were getting to know him. That´s why you took all those photos of the pretty girl out of the album on his night stand, tore them up into tiny, tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet. You were protecting him from her. She did not live anywhere around here and had never taken the trouble to visit him so she was obviously bad news and toying with his gentle heart. That´s why you kept searching for signs of her and everywhere you came across anything related to her, you destroyed it and erased all signs of your act. You knew he would be happy in the long run that you had done this. But it would take awhile and a lot of tender talking between the two of you, which you were more than ready to begin until you saw him standing behind you and no words came out of your mouth.