Forbidden Passion

by Ruth Gogoll

  Are you sure?

  Kim growled. She stood up and left her office. “I’m going out to Eichhalde; they’re having service problems there,” she called to her colleague, the same one who’d helplessly relinquished the furious customer to her earlier.

  “Eichhalde?” the woman asked back. “We don’t have a service point out there.”

  But the door had already shut behind Kim.

  The Eichhalde building was the company’s oldest. The company’s founder had once established its first offices there, and immediately next door sat the original production hall, no longer in use. The best thing would have been to abandon the office building entirely, since it was nowhere near up to modern standards, and the production hall ought to have been razed, but the company’s founder was attached to his beginnings and had strictly forbidden any such sort of demolition. The building was to continue to be used productively, but not changed in its essence. A difficult, if not insoluble, exercise during any reorganization.

  Kim knew that management’s opinion was completely different from the company’s founder’s. They would’ve liked nothing better than to tear down the old buildings, since they just cost money and didn’t bring any in. One of Sonja’s assignments was to find a compromise between these two extremes. How she was supposed to do that was a mystery to Kim. The two positions were basically irreconcilable.

  She drove into a courtyard and stopped in front of the old hall. It looked ramshackle indeed. There were almost no windows left, mostly empty frames with a few sharp-edged glass fragments around the edges. Scorch marks on walls, doors, and some of the windows didn’t exactly inspire confidence. Time and again, homeless people had moved in, lit fires, and set parts of the building ablaze.

  Too bad they never quite managed to burn the whole hall down, Kim thought. Then Sonja would have one less thing to worry about.

  Where could she be? Kim looked around. From one end of the building to the other, there was nothing to see, or at least no human being. In the office building next door, a few windows were open; people were working in there. Apparently there was no air conditioning, as in the modern buildings, which was why the windows could still be opened.

  No one would jump at the chance to work there, given how uncomfortable it was, but still, the founder insisted on its use. If perhaps not the hall, then at least the office building, as old as it may be.

  There wasn’t much even Sonja could do to rescue the hall, so she must be in the office building.

  Kim headed in that direction. She pushed open the antique wooden door, whose hinges squeaked a bit, and entered. It smelled musty; apparently even the open windows couldn’t change that. The foundation itself seemed to be damp.

  An ancient wooden staircase spiraled upward from the foyer. There was no elevator. To her right she saw a door standing open. She approached it.

  “Good afternoon, I’m Kim Wolff,” she introduced herself to the surprised employee sitting at a tremendously nostalgic desk in the office behind the door. “Service team leader at Michelbergring.”

  The employee just gave her a questioning look.

  “We were wondering if we might not be able to move over here in the course of the reorganization,” Kim ad-libbed. “So I wanted to have a look at the building.”

  “The service team? Here?” The employee stared at her in bewilderment. “Over here, the fuses blow every time the refrigerator kicks on.”

  “Fuses can be replaced,” Kim replied nonchalantly. “May I have a look around?”

  “Do you have your company ID?” the employee asked. “I mean . . .” She laughed. “There’s not much to worry about here, of course, old papers at the most, files from the beginning of time, but –”

  “Of course.” Kim pulled out her ID card.

  The employee nodded. “Your colleagues have been here for a while already. On the second floor.”

  A shiver ran through Kim’s body. She could only mean Sonja. Kim nodded. “Thanks.”

  She left the office and looked up the stairs. Should she really dare? What if Sonja chased her out of the building? But how would she? She was evidently not alone. She wouldn’t show any such weakness in front of others.

  Kim set one foot on the staircase and hesitated again. Then she nudged herself onward and started upstairs. As she approached the topmost landing, she heard a murmur of voices. The closer she came to the landing, the clearer it became. She took the last step and peered around the corner.

  A small group stood at the far end of the hallway. Sonja was nowhere to be seen.

  She couldn’t just keep standing here. One of the men had noticed her and was looking in her direction, startled. She quickened her pace and walked over to the group.

  Just before she reached them, Sonja stepped out of a door on the left side of the hall. Her head was lowered; she was studying a blueprint.

  “Pardon me,” she said absently, because she’d almost walked into Kim without recognizing her.

  “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Kantner,” Kim replied with emphasis.

  Sonja froze, but then forced herself to look up. “Ms. Wolff,” she said flatly. “What are you doing here?”

  “We might perhaps wish to move the service team over here from Michelbergring,” Kim repeated her fabrication, which now almost sounded like the truth to her. “So I wanted to have a look at the building.”

  “Don’t you like it on Michelbergring?” Sonja asked, her voice still flat. Like a robot playing back a prerecorded text.

  “Oh, sure, sure,” Kim assured her easily, “but of course, it doesn’t have the same . . .” she cleared her throat, “nostalgic charm.”

  Sonja could no longer maintain her pillar-of-salt demeanor. “Ms. Wolff used to be my assistant,” she introduced Kim to the men. “Now she leads the service team at Michelbergring.”

  “Ah, you’re the one,” one of the men said. “Wolfgang Schäfer. I’ve heard only good things about you. You’ve brought a breath of fresh air to the service department.” He offered her his hand.

  “I think Mr. Winkelmann had a good handle on things before, too,” Kim said with a smile, shaking Mr. Schäfer’s hand.

  “Rolf is an old soldier who’s fought too many campaigns,” another man said. “They needed some fresh blood in there.” He reached out his hand to her as well. “Jürgen Niederkreuz.”

  Next the other two men introduced themselves to her. “You really want to do this to yourselves?” Wolfgang Schäfer asked. “With all your high-tech equipment?”

  “Well, you know, I thought . . .” Kim found herself skidding slightly out of control. “Precisely that would be the attraction.”

  “No doubt.” Wolfgang Schäfer raised his eyebrows. “That would require a real pioneer spirit. This thing isn’t a reorganization, it’s a suicide mission.” He looked at Sonja. “I don’t envy you, Mrs. Kantner.”

  In earlier days – not so very long ago, in fact – Sonja would’ve reacted to such a statement with her delightful laugh and said that she loved a challenge, but at the moment, she said nothing. She simply remained silent.

  “The idea isn’t really all that new.” Kim couldn’t bear seeing Sonja so lacking in drive. “Old buildings that are restored so that only the façade remains. Everything inside gets gutted and outfitted with the latest technology.”

  “Puh!” Jürgen Niederkreuz folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t suppose you happen to have brought the cost estimates for that with you?”

  “That would far exceed the budget set for the reorganization project,” Sonja interjected, still relatively detached.

  Wolfgang Schäfer laughed. “That would blow any budget!”

  Kim raised her hands. “I didn’t say it was a solution I could imagine here. It was just an idea I read about somewhere.”

  “It’s not a terrible idea, at least in principle,” one of the two men, who had yet to participate in the conversation, said. “No one’s proposed it so far. We’ve mostly been looking for ways to c
onvince the owner to tear down the whole thing.”

  “Because every other solution is too expensive,” Jürgen Niederkreuz said. “It’s obvious.”

  “Forget the idea.” Kim was starting to feel embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to intrude on your work.”

  “It’s really not such a bad idea.” Sonja’s voice sounded ruminating, not indifferent as before. “One would just have to modify the implementation.” She took the blueprints, she still held in her hand, back into the office on the left. “We can forget about all this.” She tossed the blueprints onto a desk. “We have to start over from the beginning.”

  “If you think you can pull this off . . .” Jürgen Niederkreuz stood there with his arms crossed once more, clearly signaling that he doubted Sonja’s abilities in that respect.

  “Would you really move over here?” Sonja looked at Kim.

  Oh no! What had she gotten herself into? It was just a spontaneous idea, and now she couldn’t escape it.

  “I still have to discuss this with my team. It was more of a . . . well, we’ve thought about it.” Kim wished she could mop the sweat from her brow.

  “It wouldn’t happen overnight in any case,” Sonja said. “I’m sure the renovations would take months. And first, we’d have to get the okay for it.”

  Oh, my goodness! How on earth am I going to sell this to my team? And Rolf? Hot and cold shivers were running up and down Kim’s spine, because she didn’t doubt for one second that Sonja would achieve whatever she set out to do.

  “I think we can conclude our meeting for today,” Sonja said at that moment. “This is a completely new situation. I need to think it over.” She now seemed very reminiscent of the earlier Sonja, the Sonja that Kim had so much enjoyed working with.

  The men nodded. “Let us know when you’re ready to proceed,” Wolfgang Schäfer said. “I’m very curious to hear what you come back with.”

  Me too, Kim thought, her heart fluttering. Where is this going to lead?

  “Would you stay for a moment, Ms. Wolff?” Sonja asked in her usual efficient manner as the men headed off toward the stairs.

  “Umm . . . yes,” Kim stammered, taken by surprise.

  Sonja bent over the desk and allowed some time to pass. Then she turned around.

  “Why are you here?” She crossed her arms over her chest. “None of this has anything to do with your work.”

  Kim swallowed. “No, I . . . to be honest . . . I wanted . . .” She swallowed again. “I wanted to . . . apologize to you.”

  Sonja arched her eyebrows. “Apologize.” She fell silent for a moment. “For what?” she asked then.

  “Have I wronged you in so many ways?” Kim let out a nervous laugh. Then she became serious again. “For Friday. It wasn’t right of me to . . . None of it was right. I . . .” She wrung her hands. “I’m sorry, terribly sorry. Your private life is none of my business, and I had absolutely no right –” She broke off and examined Sonja’s withdrawn expression. “I didn’t want to hurt you,” she said softly. “That wasn’t my intent.”

  Sonja examined Kim’s face as well. Her eyes seemed to be searching for something there. “Good,” she said after a while. “Apology accepted.” She turned back to the desk.

  Kim was so surprised by Sonja’s reaction, she almost fell over. “Ah . . . um . . . that’s it? You’re simply going to accept my apology?”

  “What else am I supposed to do?” Sonja straightened up. “Shoot you?”

  “You could . . . well, you could rebuke me, for instance,” Kim said, taken aback.

  “I don’t have time for that sort of thing. I have work to do. And because of you I now have to throw out this entire concept and develop a new one.”

  “I . . . Sonja . . . really . . . I didn’t mean –” So many disconcerting shivers were running through Kim’s body right now, she couldn’t even count them. “I mean . . . the service team . . . they don’t even know . . . they don’t want to move.” Now it was out.

  “I know,” Sonja said.

  “You . . . kn-know?” Kim stuttered. She almost collapsed.

  “The idea is simply too good to scrap. I’m very grateful to you for it. We were stuck in a dead end before you arrived. We weren’t getting anywhere. And men –” Sonja broke off, then had second thoughts. “Men have no imagination, anyway,” she concluded.

  “So my team doesn’t have to move?” Kim asked cautiously.

  “Your team or another one – that doesn’t really matter. The idea isn’t tied to a single team.”

  Kim exhaled with relief.

  “That’s what you get for making things up that aren’t true,” Sonja said rather ambiguously.

  “Yes.” Kim took another deep breath. “You’re right. Thank you. I’ll never do it again.”

  “You will. That’s the way you are.”

  “But why . . . how did you know –”

  “That it wasn’t true?” Sonja looked at her. “The situation is not new to me.”

  Kim frowned. “What . . . situation?”

  Sonja sighed. “Let’s leave it at that,” she said tiredly. “I just knew.” She ran a hand across her eyes.

  Kim’s concern, which had temporarily retreated into the background in all the commotion, reawakened. Sonja looked no better today than she had on Friday, perhaps even worse. True, she’d just found her energy again briefly, but her basic condition seemed to resemble that of the production hall outside: nearing collapse.

  “Now that I’ve caused you so much trouble again,” she said guiltily, “can I make up for it somehow? Can I help you?”

  “Do you want your old job back?” Sonja asked, still tired. “I don’t think Ms. Mayrhofer is very happy with me.”

  “That . . . that . . . She just doesn’t know you very well,” Kim replied evasively.

  A hint of a smile crept into the corners of Sonja’s mouth. “If you’re one thing, you’re loyal. But that isn’t necessary. She has every reason to complain about me. I don’t treat her very well.”

  “Why? What’s the reason? Our work together always went so smoothly. I mean, until we . . . but even afterward . . .” Once again sharp twinges of embarrassment went shooting down Kim’s limbs.

  “A great deal has changed since then,” Sonja said. “A very great deal.”

  “Is it because . . .” Kim swallowed. “Is it because of me? Then, please, don’t take it out on Jo. I’ll volunteer for that.”

  “Jo?” Sonja looked at her. “Is she a particular friend of yours?”

  Kim sighed. “Jo and I know each other, that’s all. I met her shortly before she took over my job. Meanwhile we’ve become good friends, but that’s all.”

  “And she’s also –?” Sonja asked hesitantly.

  “Seeing as you’re her boss, I can hardly answer that,” Kim replied. “You’d better ask her yourself.”

  “That’s enough for me.”

  “Please . . . Sonja . . .” Kim interlaced her fingers rather tensely. “This won’t have any effect on your work together, will it?”

  “As poorly as I’ve been treating her lately? I hardly think so,” Sonja replied with a trace of the dry humor she had previously exemplified. “Unless, of course, she –” She broke off.

  “Unless she tries to drag you into bed, like I did?” Kim asked stiffly. “Don’t worry, she won’t do that. You’re not her type.”

  “Oh.” Sonja walked around the desk and stood on the other side. “I’m not?”

  “No.” Kim had to laugh, because Sonja looked genuinely disappointed, or at least confused. “I know people usually throw themselves at your feet, but Jo . . . Jo is the exception that proves the rule. I hope you’re not too disappointed.”

  Sonja didn’t answer right away. “No,” she said then. “I’m not disappointed. That would be ridiculous.”

  “Because you’re not attracted to women?” Kim asked. “Yes, indeed, that would be ridiculous.”

  “Are we back on that subject again?” Sonja asked clearly e
xhausted. “Please . . .” She sat down and rested her forehead in her hands. “Please . . . not . . . today,” she said, quiet and halting.

  “Sonja . . .” Kim immediately regretted what she had said. She went around the desk and crouched down next to her. “Sonja . . .” she repeated. “You’re not feeling well. Why won’t you admit that? Go home. Get some sleep. You look dreadful, like you’re about to fall right over.”

  “Oh, thanks.” Sonja raised her head. “I love compliments.”

  “I did commit myself to telling the truth.” Kim smirked gently. “That’s what you get out of it.”

  “Yes, true.” Sonja’s voice sounded dead, as if it rose from a grave. “That’s what I get.”

  “Are you not sleeping well?” Kim asked. “Or just not enough? Do you have too much work? What’s going on?”

  “Oh, I . . . it’s fine.” Sonja lifted her head, but her eyelids didn’t follow. She looked as though she were already asleep.

  “You’re practically falling asleep in your chair. Should I take you home? I’m not letting you drive like this.”

  “No!” Sonja’s eyelids flew open again. “Not home.”

  What was that about? Kim hesitated. “But you need to sleep,” she said. “Seriously, Sonja. You’re about to keel over. I could take you to my house,” she suggested.

  Sonja squinted at her from one eye, skeptical.

  “Not what you’re thinking.” Kim laughed. “I’ll go to my office. You can sleep in my bed. Or on my couch, if you’d rather. I won’t be there.”

  “I . . . I don’t want . . .” Sonja murmured. She was nearly asleep already.

  “So before you fall asleep completely here, we’re going to my place.” Kim stood up. “Come on.” She placed her hand on Sonja’s shoulder. “Get up. My car is right outside the door. You can come back for yours tomorrow.”

  Sonja rose slowly, as though her arms and legs each weighed a ton. “I . . . can . . . drive,” she said laboriously.

  “Sure. You look like it.” Kim laughed. “No, I’ll drive. No ifs, ands, or buts. This isn’t a matter of company hierarchy anymore, just common sense.”

  Remarkably, Sonja said nothing further, but followed Kim downstairs. She got a few things out of her car – all very slowly – and then sat down next to Kim.