Other Press, Belletristik, The Artificial Silk Girl (Englisch, Irmgard Keun, 2011)

It was a dark morning and I saw his face in bed, and it made me feel angry and disgusted. Sleeping with a stranger you don&rsquo t care about makes a woman bad. You have to know what you&rsquo re doing it for. Money or love. So I left. It was five in the morning. The air was white and cold and wet like a sheet on the laundry line. Where was I to go? I had to wander around the park with the swans, who have small eyes and long necks that they use to dislike people. I can understand them but I don&rsquo t like them either, despite the fact that they are alive and that you should take pity on them. Everyone had left me. I spent several cold hours and felt like I had been buried in a cemetery on a rainy fall day. But it wasn&rsquo t raining or else I would have stayed under a roof, because of the fur coat. I look so elegant in that fur. It&rsquo s like an unusual man who makes me beautiful through his love for me. I&rsquo m sure it used to belong to a fat lady with a lot of money&mdash unfairly. It smells from checks and Deutsche Bank. But my skin is stronger. It smells of me now and Chypre&mdash which is me, since Kä semann gave me three bottles of it. The coat wants me and I want it. We have each other. And so I went to see Therese. She also realized that I have to flee, because flight is an erotic word for her. She gave me her savings. Dear God, I swear to you, I will return it to her with diamonds and all the good fortune in the world.