The Smoking Ashtray

Dave rubbed his eyes and looked again, it couldn’t be could it? Germany was a vast country, over 350000km squared, over 80 million people. Of those 80 million he only knew one and it seemed that she was sitting opposite him right now, right here outside a café on a blustery day in Augsburg. But he must be imagining it; he must be so keen to see her that he was hallucinating. Why would she be in Augsburg, a small provincial town in Bavaria? As far as he knew, she lived Hamburg - 450km away.

Dave didn’t come to Germany often, but every time he did he did he thought of her, that ‘little girl lost’ he had dated all those years ago. They’d never officially broken up, she’d gone back to Germany and they’d kind of lost touch, without ever really finishing it. He often wondered what happened to her, whether she had found that something that he had been unable to give her.

Now he watched the woman opposite, she was talking on the phone in German, animated, smiling. It certainly looked like her smile. He remembered how his Silke never really smiled in English - although she spoke it perfectly well, she never really smiled in it. She’d occasionally laugh and sometimes you might think there was a smile but it wasn't real, not like her German smile. He’d seen a different person when he’d travelled with her to Germany, smiling, laughing, joking, no longer the lost soul. Was he looking at that person now?

The woman opposite used her little finger to brush the hair from her eyes and now Dave was sure it was her, he’d watched her do that 1000 times before while reading the Independent, while watching TV or while smoking one of the million cigarettes she’d smoked in the short time they’d been together; always the little finger, always the left hand, always the right ear.

Now she lit a cigarette, inhaled and blew the smoke down her nose. His heart skipped, his stomach flipped, his imagination hadn’t blipped; that sealed the deal. He had to go over there, but what would he say and what if it wasn’t her?

Just then the waitress asked him if he was ready to order. He didn’t want to take his eyes off his girl but he looked up at the waitress and then down at the menu and tried to pronounce the kartoffel dish he had decided on.

As soon as the waitress was gone he looked back to where ‘Silke’ was sitting. But to his horror there was a void, a vacant chair; all that was left of his reunion was an empty coffee cup and a smoking ashtray.