This session we looked at creating tension and how fear can be a great driving force of a novel. I took the prompt: "Write a story from the point of view of a burglar." The fluttering leaves is a reference to an opera I saw at Unter den Linden, "Il Primo Omicidio". Just before he gets murdered, Abel asks: "Why do the leaves flutter?"
The wind picked up. Leaves fluttered as if they were announcing her arrival. But nobody was there to listen, she thought, glancing around the deserted parking lot. She brought her attention back to the villa hidden behind the bushes on the far end. Through the large window panes she could see the greenish light in the office space, which was the light they kept on when they left the house. Now at dusk the villa loomed even more as a secret threshold in the middle of the city. She shivered and her mouth tightened with resolution. The next steps would have to be quick: sliding into the bushes, leaping across the fence, cracking open the window. In less than a few minutes she would be standing inside the house and close the window behind her.
The villa had become an obsession a few months ago. First, she had seen it from the park side where its large mirrored window on the back had caught her attention. It was striking, at the same time also quite invisible for all the park visitors who had no eye for style. She had looked for its front entrance and found it behind the big housing blocks in the parallel street. The view of this lone villa had taken her breath away. It was a unique 1950s bungalow architecture, with golden coloured window frames and a facade entirely made of glass. The wing of the house was built lower, with its glass windows facing the backside, where, so she figured out later when looking at it from the parking lot, the study room was based. Enthralled by its beauty, she had googled the name “Tarek Aldin” that was written on the mail box and found out he was a neurologist. She wrote a postcard, expressing her admiration for the house and asking if she might be able to visit. No answer had come.
She kept on hovering around the house, looking at it from all angles and making plans on what she would do if she lived there. She imagined waking up in the morning, in a room flooded with sunlight and descending to a kitchen fragrant with lavender and mint, from the herb garden outside. She would drink a coffee on the vast terrace and then amble slowly around the garden. Snipping a weed here, plucking a flower there. In her imagination, it was a friendly house, despite the glass transparency of its living quarters. The intensity of her dreams about the house and the absolute rightness of her living in it, only served to heighten her frustration at not being able to get in. The postcard - which she realised might have scared the occupant or more likely, been lost in a thud of important mail, the type of mail an important neurologist would receive - was not enough. She had to find another way to get into that house.
So there she was, on an empty parking lot on a Friday night. Her eyes twitched from pure tension. Although it was cold, small drops of sweat had gathered on her forehead. She was standing on the tips of her feet as if ready to propel her body forwards. “Not bad, huh,” a low voice suddenly rose from behind her and shook her out of her trance. “What?” she muttered in surprise, turning her head. “The house,” he responded, flicking his cigarette in the gutter. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, annoyed. The moment had gone, the dream too. She kicked the can of coke that was lying on the ground. “What about a kebab?” he suggested while they shuffled towards the street.