A week or so later, with Maria absent and out of touch, the gentlemen decided to make good on their long-mooted plan to watch the football, it being one of the many big games that seemed to give the essential form of the modern social calendar, for man and woman alike. Given that half the world was in Irish pubs that afternoon anyway, they were as well to take up the opportunity to watch the titanic clash of Blue and Red in one of the capital’s own Irish pubs; although, this being Dublin, they were, to expand upon a Jerry Seinfeld routine, simply pubs here. Given that it was Sunday, and they had spent the weekend at what could be grouped under the rubric “literary pursuits,” they elected to first take a refreshing walk in the park, culminating at a pub in the __ area of the city, where Guinness would be drunk.

The three men came along the road to the park, Sebastian lanky and rosy in his grey suit, Karl grumpy and Richard all hair and mumbles. They turned into the park. Surprisingly, they were talking, and after a review of their various predictions of the likely outcome, they turned to the subject of their mutual passion and interest: Maria.

“Of course, I’ve known her the longest,” said Karl.

“Well — that doesn’t prove anything,” countered Richard.

“Mmm,” said Sebastian. “Vielleicht. Finders keepers, as it goes.”

“I”m the person she’s departing from, you see. The blueprint.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, alter Fuchs!”

“Silberfuchs,” Karl retorted.

“It seems to me we’re all got something invested in this girl.”

Richard smiled, and laconically forwarded, “Yeah, like a love square.”

“Ha! That’s good!” said Karl. “I do like that very much.”

Richard continued, “Ich finde — ich finde — es ist besser, wenn sie zu mir kommt. Ich schreibe ihr ein Gedicht, ein schöner Gedicht … Ich meine.”^[20]

“Ich,” said Karl, correcting Richard’s incorrect pronunciation of the fricative.

“Perfect!” said Sebastian. “He’s trying to speak Platt.”

“Nee, isch schwätz der Platt!”^[21] snarled the Professor in his best Saarlandisch. Karl would have objected to anything Rich said now. He would have objected to praise. Here he shook his hands, flustered; “Enough — enough now. What are we going to do about Maria?”

Richard said, “I don’t understand but — I think it’s creepy, you know, you two.”

“I have no one else. I’m forty-six.”

Richard went on, “You could.”

“Maria is a potentially brilliant student.”

“Is that really where your interest lies?” said Sebastian.

“And yours, entirely altruistic I’m sure.”

They had wandered up a small mound within the park, and now stood in a half circle with the city and the hedge around it out visible below. After a moment’s quiet, Sebastian was the next to speak.

“As I said, I think those days are over for me.” The wind blew a bit more.

“You know it’s a resigning matter.” It was Richard who had spoken, as if thinking from a distance.

“What do you mean?” Karl replied.

“Like, having a relationship with a student. Es geht nicht.”

“Well, there we have it then,” said Sebastian, measured. “The University has it.”

“Not if you’re prepared to resign,” Karl said, and there was a quiver in his voice.

“What?”

“If it”s a resigning matter,” Karl said.

The wind tugged at the old man’s hair; the air was too cold for him.

“And what will you do — write? Come on, I’ve read your books,” said Sebastian.

“Really? Did you like them?”

“I’m in love with her,” Richard went on, which seemed to go almost entirely unnoticed.

“Well well — I fear we have reached something of an impasse. And the match is on in forty minutes; we’d better get our skates on,” said Sebastian.

The three men walked out of the park and into a crowded lane, where great crowds of fans were already milling around the pavement along the strip of pubs. There was a bright, zesty springiness to the day, beneath all the smoke and car horns and fog that now drifted into view, and the gentlemen approached O’Riordan’s in good spirits. Karl gave rather formal hallos to the waves of a group of laddish football shirted students, sat at the beer table with their golden sloshy pints. A glass of beer broke and everyone cheered.

There was a bright, zesty springiness to the day, beneath all the smoke and car horns and fog that now drifted into view, and the gentlemen approached O’Riordan’s in good spirits.

Inside the pub there was talk aplenty and people seemingly rammed into every cranny; even immediately at the entrance, heads craned up at a tiny screen. Richard had now met friends and Karl disappeared to the bar leaving Sebastian looking for a place to hang his hat. Overdressed, suited indeed, he battled on down the corridor and was somewhat relieved when Karl appeared into view, holding a pint of lager. “Here.”

Through the next room and the scene raised in drama — there were multiple screens, rows stuffed full, girls laughing as beer was spilt by rowdy suitors on their replica shirts. The whole place smelt of beer and fat. The furniture, of a uniform brown, was almost entirely occupied, except for a chink of space over at the room’s side, surrounded by thick-necked, red-faced supporters of the blue team today.

In football, Sebastian was without alliances — except to the 1974 Dutch side of course — and so made himself a place among the blues; where, indeed, his seniority brought a little respect from the football fellows who moved and addressed him as Sir. Dear Sir!; like Pierre Bezukhov adopted by the soldiers in War and Peace. If they had only known how he had ruminated in his days among them, how he had thought ill of their country, so brash and nouveau riche just like the football club they followed. But they were not necessarily any more local than he, there being a patchwork of nations in there today, Poles, English, even Germans, all apparently prepared to stay indoors in good weather to survey the exorbitant wares of the Premier League.

The players were well into the opening minutes now and already ripples of noise, spasms of chant, were drifting around the pub audience. Sebastian had watched the occasional Ajax Amsterdam game back in his vaderstad but it only equated on final days and European nights to the scale of fanship before him now. When Bayern were beaten in 1972. How he rankled at the faces before him, seeing their energy consumed so entirely by something so tribal and meaningless; if their passion could have been channelled into literature for just one day…

A kind of funny fury took over him, only deflected by his gazing defiantly over the swelling, supportive crowd. His two rivals sat about him and he found himself looking at them. There was Richard, his protégé, the tousles of his hair shaking while he rolled a cigarette before stowing it in his pocket for later. The young man had not displayed an ounce of perturbation in face of the tremendous art he spent his life surrounded by and any exultant moments he had stumbled across must have been falsely comprehended by him. Yet just the other night the young man had sat in his room, Bach endlessly on loop, watching the smoke rise to the ceiling. There were no words needed to grasp that sound.

Elsewhere a ball flew past the post and the crowd reacted with a collective pant of breath. Idiots. Ireland, the land not of Dichter und Denker but of dickheads and drinkers — and there Karl, perfectly assimilated, joyously complicit in the general sporting rapture. What was wrong with the FC Köln? What was wrong with Germany? Why did its people have to work so assiduously hard at becoming just about anybody other than themselves? — Even, in Karl’s case, to the extent of speaking Dutch with him! Meanwhile the Richards of this world managed to avoid learning German while doing a German degree, um Gottes Willen.^[22]

They, these rivals, these sweating rivals, were certainly not fit to clean the boots of him, Sebastian Beetjes, author of, albeit in 1974, de duivelwals. And that was a part of the problem: start with a book like that and you got pretty much a lifetime off, you were excused from duties. After that life had not presented enough of a challenge but now, like an elderly football coach bad-mouthing his younger rivals, he felt exerted once again. Maria was too good to leave to these dolts; he pictured her now, in a kitchen, looking at the sea, hearing the gulls. The gulls cawed. When she returned he would make sure that their relationship was resumed, complicated and established, hoping to make her the final augmentation of his reputation. At this stage of development the rivals had gathered together to pause. Upon her return, love letters ought to be handed at her from all sides, entreaties made of her, the comedy resume once again: may the best man win.

At this stage of development the rivals had gathered together to pause. Upon her return, love letters ought to be handed at her from all sides, entreaties made of her, the comedy resume once again: may the best man win.

Maria closed the door behind and began to walk down the driveway. Stacey’s mother was at the window, chopping up a salad, and she gave a little wave to her through the glass; the same answer came back to her from the kitchen.

She took the route along past the school, walking along the treed lanes to the park. As ever her thoughts slid between German and English and sometimes her thoughts would change language within a single sentence, like this: schön look die Bäume this year. Like most bilinguals — and her German studies had certainly recovered some of the damage inflicted by that fleeing father — she associated certain vocabularies — Germany, friends, Karl — with one language, and certain — breakfasts, hurling, Richard — with another. But to her credit, in contrast to many bilingual people, Maria refused to praise one of her languages at the expense of the other, and a need to denigrate her Germanness had never been in her either. Why should it? The Germany she visited now was a peaceful, verdant land, full of tolerant if a little inflexible people of often considerable physical beauty. How she was looking forward to her stay abroad next year in __ster, not least to check out the local boys. Perhaps it was time to give herself to someone for a while.

She was now at the gate to the park, and she pulled up her skirt to be sure not to get mud on it at the seam. Last month there had been a festival here the there was still the one billboard against the fence there. There was an ice cream truck, too, but the weather had been bad all morning and business slow. But tell a lie, the sun was coming out amidst the clouds: island clouds as grey as the iron of the playground. She went to sit on one of those hoop — mounted wooden horses put there for the children’s amusement. Maria wasn’t particularly big, so she could still sit comfortably on one in her third decade.

“Dreiundzwangzigjahre! Und nichts für die Unsterblichkeit getan!”^[23] — so, she thought, quoting Don Carlos in Schiller’s play, she had two years left. And yet what if some of the things she had heard were true? That the ambition went, that, like her mother said, when she had got past her degree she’d wanted to do nothing more than settle down and meet the right man. Unthinkingly, she had never believed it, but she feared now for her ambitions and her own sense of being special. She wanted to do a PhD, go to Burning Man, and learn Arabic, which necessitated spending some time in what her two native languages denoted as either the Middle or Near East. She had so many ambitions and so little time, even if she secretly felt that she had.

It was warmer now in the small suburban park, the trim little area covered in sun shine and the young couples orbiting the playground”s wood staves. Most young women of her age didn’t even go for walks, let alone disappear for hours on end, mobile off, emails unchecked. She spent her time looking at the young mothers, digging their prams out from the wood staves beneath the swings, smoking their value brand cigarettes. They seemed happier than she was.

One of the kids was crying quietly, steadily, its tears on show; the mothers were stressed, no doubt, in all kinds of ways unknown to her, although she too felt a pang of anxiety as she thought of the work she had to do: the term paper for Doctor Muur, the round robin email for the photography club. She should have brought her camera out now, in fact: Stacey would have liked to have seen evidence of the outside world, holed up as she was today with her medical books — but at least, as Stacey was quick to point, they had pretty pictures in them. Later that afternoon they would both put down their books to cook pottage and head out the local art cinema, which tonight was showing, of all things, The Sound of Music.

She had risen now from her short horse and begun the gradual meander back to Stacey’s. At the gate, back on the path, a jogger came bristling past, awash with sweat on his pudgy face. Maria put her hands in her coat pockets and walked quicker. From behind, she heard a sudden scuffing sound; the jogger appeared to have caught their leg on a gate or a post, and gone forward, skittering to a violent halt; now they writhed in a tumble of their own shoes and legs, groaning. She walked down the hill, his muted sobs drifting away from behind her ears, thinking about the food that would be made tonight, and of maybe the possibility of an hour alone reading before eating.

Wedded to her dreams, engrossed in herself, complex in her outlook; there was Maria, the wonderment of any passing male. And yet to each of those her thoughts seemed only to distance her from the rest of the people in the world around her.

There were some girls though, she thought, hands ever deeper in pockets, who managed to get into really good positions at an early age: a girl called Naomi had already got an internship at the Irish Times, and the Taoiseach’s daughter had sold that novel of hers. She thought it was pretty stupid, all told, all those beautiful people socializing in fashionable ineloquence; better Kleist’s Marquise from O, who was so well brought up she couldn’t even tell she’d been raped. It seemed clear that these things had always been going on; it was more the attitudes to them that changed, she mused, caught in spirals of thought she could barely contain or brake.

Thinking, then, in her own manner, furrowing her brow, she moved back along the road in the crisp late summer air. Wedded to her dreams, engrossed in herself, complex in her outlook; there was Maria, the wonderment of any passing male. And yet to each of those her thoughts seemed only to distance her from the rest of the people in the world around her. She wouldn’t speak much more today, just a few words at dinner, like reading aloud the SMS she had received earlier, or having a brief chat before heading off to bed and into gnomic dreams, alone.