The Girl Who Wasn't There by Ferdinand von Schirach

her down to him, but she pressed him back on the bed. He felt her breasts on his thighs. She pushed her hair away from her face so that he could see her.
    He wondered whether all this meant anything, if the room meant anything, or the picture over the sofa, or the balcony with its iron railing. It must mean something, but he didn’t know what.
    It took him a long time to reach climax.
    As soon as it was lighter outside, he got up and fetched croissants and coffee from the breakfast room. Sofia had gone back to sleep with her mouth open; she looked like a child. He sat on the balcony with his coffee. The beach was dark with rain.

15
    Two weeks later, the model for the advertising campaign was sitting on a stool in front of the brick wall in Eschburg’s studio. It was going to be a good photograph, like all the photos he took. Eschburg looked through the viewfinder. He didn’t know how often he had taken this picture already. The woman’s head and breasts were thrust forward, her throat was taut, she was smiling. Her face was perfectly symmetrical. The links of her necklace will be visible in the picture as an oval, they’ll have the brightness of her teeth, Eschburg thought. He saw it all even before he pressed the shutter. It felt wrong to take the picture. He could no longer distinguish between the people in front of the camera.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly to the woman. ‘You’re very pretty, but I can’t photograph you.’
    The model stayed sitting where she was. She looked at the manager of the advertising agency, and then stopped smiling. The manager began talking, his voice rose, he said something about payment and deadlines, he threatened damages and lawyers. Eschburg carefully put the camera back in its wooden case.
     
    That afternoon he went to the Old National Gallery. The picture he had come to see hung on the second floor. It was smaller than he remembered it, 1.70 metres wide, with a label beside it:
Caspar David Friedrich,
Monk By The Sea
, 1810.
The painter had never signed it, nor given it a date or a title. The construction was simple: sky, sea, rock. Nothing else, no houses, no trees, no bushes. Nothing but a tiny figure standing left of centre, with its back to the viewer, the only vertical in the composition. Friedrich had worked on it for two years; he had been suffering from depression while he painted it.
    The picture was first exhibited in 1810. Heinrich von Kleist wrote, at the time, that in looking at it you felt as if your eyelids had been cut away.

16
    Sofia and Eschburg were spending every weekend together now. Eschburg told her that he couldn’t go on taking those photographs. She suggested a visit to Madrid; there was something she wanted to show him there, she said. At the airport, they took a taxi to the museum. Sofia had spent time here once; she showed Eschburg the buildings where she had lived, she mentioned names he didn’t know, squares, cafés, her voice low and quiet. She told him that she had been in love with an older man at the time. Their relationship had lasted three years, and then he went back to his wife and children. She herself had moved to Paris to begin a new life.
     
    They went into the Prado through the visitors’
Goya
entrance, crossed the halls of Italian and Flemish painting, passed pictures by Titian, Tintoretto and Rubens, making straight for Goya’s picture of the royal family. To the right, in Room 36, hung the two pictures numbered 72. Both showed the same young woman lying on a sofa. In the left-hand picture she was clothed, in the right-hand picture naked. Seen from any angle, the tip of the clothed Maja’s shoe pointed at the observer.
     
    School students were sitting in a semi-circle on the floor in front of their teacher. Some of the girls were already wearing lipstick. The teacher asked her students to describe the differences between the two paintings. Sofia interpreted for him. One girl said that the clothed Maja in the picture was