The Book Club
Katrin drags her stool closer to her building and settles herself with her book. She looks up at the sky and takes a deep breath. It’s a relief to be outside of her small apartment. As much as she loves its Berlin charm, its altbau grandness, after three weeks of isolation the walls are beginning to close in on her. It is Sunday and there is no work or significant other to give shape or structure to her day. Sometimes, she finds it is an effort to get out of bed on a weekend. There is the imperative to find something to do, make meaning out of this new normal. She is quite solitary by nature, an einzelkind from a small village in the South of Germany. Surely there is only so much of herself she can take, stranded In her late thirties and still unmarried. With men she has no luck and she accepts that. Lately she has hazarded a few Tinder dates with disappointing results.
Out here on the street she watches the people taking their daily walk. The old woman who lives on the second floor shuffles out of the door then stops as if unsure of which direction to take or if she should have left the building at all. The young wheel past on their bicycles. She knows they are heading to the local park to congregate in a group. They are heedless of the rules, cocky, all-knowing and thinking themselves invincible. This is an old people’s disease. Only their parents and their grandparents need worry. There are mothers and fathers too pushing prams with wriggling toddlers. Katrin is grateful that she is spared the responsibility of parenthood. From her own observations it is effortful. Trying to channel such wilful bundles of energy into a narrow path of obedience seems to defy the laws of physics.
She settles herself with her book, Zadie Smith’s Swing Time. It was chosen by a member of her book club...
