‘Let me talk to her! You’ll see how quickly she remembers the name!’
‘You know that’s nonsense, Matthias.’
‘Oh, nonsense, is it?’
‘Of course we wouldn’t allow you to harass a witness.’
‘Lovely witness.’
‘You’re best placed to know how something like that can turn out,’ Gerd says with a meaningful look.
I open my mouth to say something, but then drop it.
‘Listen, Matthias. I’m sure we’ll find out the abductor’s identity very soon. That doesn’t automatically mean that we’ll discover what happened to Lena. You have to realise that.’ Turning back to Karin, he ventures a smile; a moronic, patronising smile. ‘But we’ll do our best.’
I clutch my chest; the pain tempers my tone.
‘I’ll bring your Lena home. Your words, Gerd. Your words.’
I cross the living room to the hallway with small, cautious steps. I mustn’t break down, not here, not in front of Gerd.
‘At least fathom some explanation as to why he took our girl away,’ I say over my shoulder when I get to the hallway. ‘And bring my wife a bloody bone so she can finally plant a few flowers.’
‘Matthias!’ Gerd calls out as I’m already by the stairs. ‘By the way, the DNA kit has also confirmed that Hannah and Jonathan are Lena’s biological children. Which means you’re officially a grandfather now. Congratulations!’
‘Idiot,’ I mutter as I carefully climb the stairs to my study.
Hannah
Sometimes I lie in bed at night and wish I could have my starry sky back. I stretch my arm as far as I can towards the ceiling and wish I could touch them, the stars. Like before. I imagine Mama’s hand on mine, moving my index finger from one star to another until they’ve all been joined up by invisible lines. ‘That’s a very well-known constellation, Hannah. The Plough,’ she says, smiling at me. I smile back, even though some time ago I read in the fat book, which is always right, that the Plough isn’t a real constellation, but it’s made up of the seven brightest stars of the Great Bear. When I think about my mama and the stars, my heart aches from the sadness gnawing away at it.
I don’t like the children’s clinic. I miss my family and my little Fräulein Tinky with her sweet, clumsy paws and her soft coat.
I don’t like my room. The ceiling is far too tall. I’ll never be able to reach it, no matter how far I stretch out my arm. There aren’t any stars up there. And I can’t see anything through my first proper window either, because the blinds have to be closed all the time. I threw a chair against the windowpane, but it just made a noise. And got me into trouble. Frau Hamstedt is still saying she’s a doctor, even though I haven’t seen her in a white coat yet. She’s the boss here. I’ve told her I’m not sick and so shouldn’t be in a children’s clinic, but I’m not allowed home. I can’t even go to the toilet when I need to and I just have to keep saying what I’m afraid of. But I’m not afraid of anything. I simply don’t like it here. And that’s why I don’t want to wait any longer; I want to go home, right now. When I tell her that, she just says ‘Hannah’ in such a funny way as if I were a little bit stupid. But I’m not stupid! And I’m not afraid either. There’s a boy here who sometimes has serious attacks just because he’s afraid. One moment he’s sitting at lunch perfectly normally, and the next he sweeps his plate and cutlery on to the floor and starts banging his head on the table. I secretly count the number of times he does it. His record is twelve before someone intervened. I asked Frau Hamstedt why the boy does that and she says it’s called ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’. You can get it if you’ve been through a terrible experience, she told me. Like an invisible injury that’s very slow to heal.
But I don’t believe they can really help the boy. They just stick a plaster on his head, give him the blue pills and send him off to do some drawing. All he ever does is black scribbles, even though I’ve told him a thousand times, ‘Jonathan, you can’t just do ugly black scribbles all the time. You have to make an effort with your pictures.’ You always have to make an effort with everything. But the boy just stares at me with funny eyes, which come from the blue pills, and then I think: this isn’t Jonathan anymore. This isn’t really my brother anymore. Frau Hamstedt and her helpers have destroyed him.
I’ve got to get away from here. This isn’t a children’s clinic at all. They’re just saying that, but it’s not true. Nothing that they say is true. They’re liars and wicked people. This is a really bad place.
My grandfather thinks so too. He visits me every day and also comes with me to my appointments. We’ve already been to the dentist, who gave me a star sticker because I’ve got such good teeth, and to other doctors who said I need lots of vitamin D. Vitamin D is important. You don’t grow without it. You get vitamin D from sunlight. In spite of this, I’m not allowed to have the blinds open in my room. I asked why, but the only answer I got was, ‘It’s very complicated, young lady.’ But it’s not complicated at all. Grandad was able to give me a very simple explanation: ‘Your eyes have to get used to the light slowly, Hannah. Otherwise you might get a detached retina.’ The retina is the nerve tissue that lines the inside of the eye. If the retina becomes detached, the eye is no longer supplied with the information it needs and can go blind. That’s why I always have to wear sunglasses when we go to my appointments. But I don’t like the sunglasses. They make the whole world brown. The trees, the sky, everything brown. Whereas the sky’s supposed to be a canvas, with snowy-white clouds against a blue background. The city looks completely different from behind the brown lenses too, and it smells bad. The houses are tall, brown boxes. If you look right up at them your neck starts to ache. Sometimes, when we’re on the way to an appointment, Grandad asks if he should drive slower to give me time to have a good look at the city. But I tell him to drive faster instead. Paris would be more beautiful. I’m not missing anything here.
My heart has been aching quite a lot recently. Every day and every minute, in fact. I’m sad, but I think Grandad is the only one who really understands. Yesterday he promised he would take me home. He also said I should just answer the questions to satisfy Frau Hamstedt, her helpers and the police, and I’ll be able to get out of here sooner. Jonathan can’t answer any questions anymore. The blue pills have made him so stupid that he’s forgotten how to speak. He doesn’t say a single word anymore, not even to me. My grandfather says, ‘Now it’s all up to you, darling Hannah.’ I would answer the questions, but all they ever want to know is what happened to Mama and where she is. I can’t think of an answer. The last time I saw her was that night at the hospital. It’s just that when I say this, they merely shake their heads and act as if I’m lying. They think I tell a lot of lies. Once Frau Hamstedt almost got cross with me. She didn’t have a go at me, but I could see it in her face. She said I was living in two worlds. One inside my head and the real one. She also said that wasn’t a bad thing, but she frowned and her eyebrows went into such a funny position that it looked as if she had a big brown ‘V’ right above her eyes. I shouldn’t have told her anything about our trips. Because unlike Sister Ruth she snitched on me to the police and the man in the grey suit came back and asked me about them. He had a big ‘V’ above his eyes too and lines on his forehead. He doesn’t believe all the lovely things I did with Mama. He believes we were locked up all the time like animals in a zoo.
‘You’re a smart girl, Hannah,’ he said. ‘Perhaps the smartest girl I’ve ever met. That’s why I believe you know very well what went on at home. And I’m certain you also know that the woman in the hospital can’t be your real mama, can she? Her real name, by the way, is Jasmin. Pretty name, don’t you think? Why don’t you tell me how you met Jasmin?’
‘I prefer Lena,’ I told him, then said nothing else. I don’t talk to people who think I’m lying.
Jasmin
It’s Tuesday or Wednesday or some other da
y. All I know for certain is that it must be after twelve-thirty, because I’ve already been to the loo. Frau Bar-Lev hasn’t come yet. My stomach is gurgling.
What I also know at once is that the knocking, which makes me jump from my reading chair, is wrong. The sequence isn’t right, it’s not three short knocks, followed by two long ones: knockknockknock – knock – knock.
I wipe my eyes – I barely slept last night – and listen. The tap is dripping in the kitchen. In the street below, the traffic is rumbling and a pneumatic drill is whining away.
More knocking at my door. It’s too hard and the wrong rhythm.
Knockknockknockknock.
Four short ones. I cross the sitting room cautiously in my thick woollen socks. The dim light coming from the small lamp on the side table next to my reading chair distorts my shadow, making it absurdly long.
Knockknockknock. Three short ones. I pause. Can that be Frau Bar-Lev?
I creep onwards, knowing I mustn’t make a sound, creep along the hallway, my shadow out in front like a sombre advance guard, sidling its way along the bare laminate towards the front door, and me behind.
Knockknockknockknock. Four short ones.
My eyes dart towards the bedroom door to make sure it’s closed.
Outside my apartment the floorboard creaks several times, as if someone is impatiently shifting from foot to foot. I hear a woman’s voice utter a tentative ‘Hello?’ and then she says, ‘Frau Grass, are you in?’
That isn’t Frau Bar-Lev.
When I get to the front door a current is surging inside my chest. Through the peephole I see the distorted image of a woman. A policewoman, perhaps, who’s been sent with another query? A keen reporter who’s found out where I live and wants to make me an offer for those things that can’t be said? Both possibilities only give rise to a more intense surge inside my chest. I’m going to ignore the knocking. I’ve already turned away and have my back to the door when the voice speaks again: ‘Frau Grass, if you’re there, then please open up. Frau Bar-Lev has sent me.’
My entire body is seized by the feeling that something’s not right, more than just the sequence of knocks. I reach out behind me to a cabinet on the left-hand wall of the hallway and, without taking my eyes off the locked front door, grope along the surface in a pointless search for a weapon. A picture frame clatters to the floor. Startled, I pull back my hand.
‘Frau Grass? Are you in?’ asks the woman, who must have heard the giveaway sound of the picture frame.
I exhale, turn the key in the lock and hesitantly open the door, just a crack. The woman, who’s about my age, has dyed hair, tomato red, with a slanted fringe on one side that falls down her face. She smiles sheepishly.
‘Oh good, I thought you weren’t in.’
I size her up, note that she’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and also see the pot she’s holding in front of her tummy.
‘I’ve brought your lunch, Frau Grass.’
‘Who are you?’
The woman gives a vague nod back towards the stairwell.
‘Oh yes, well, hello. I’m Maja, Frau Bar-Lev’s neighbour, her next-door neighbour. I live on the second floor too. Frau Bar-Lev went to see her son today and asked me to bring you this.’ She points her chin at the pot in front of her tummy. ‘She cooked this for you specially. Oh, and here,’ she says, tipping her head on her left shoulder. Beneath her crooked arm she’s carrying a few envelopes, a rolled-up newspaper and some leaflets. ‘I’ve brought your post too. Frau Bar-Lev says you’re recovering from a major operation and you’re not so steady on your feet yet.’
‘Yes,’ I say with determination, at the same time wondering whether she really doesn’t know who I am. Hasn’t Frau Bar-Lev already whispered to her about the tragic curiosity living on the fourth floor?
Frau Bar-Lev herself knew at once. With her crooked back and cumbersome movements, she was sweeping her doormat when, almost a week ago, just discharged from the hospital, I trudged up the steps to my apartment, accompanied by my mother and a policeman. I was walking with a slight stoop and breathing shallowly. As far as the doctors were concerned, my broken ribs were healing beautifully, but the stabbing pain still occasionally brought tears to my eyes, especially when I put any strain on my body. The cuts on my face were now just small, brown-encrusted triangles, and in some places there was still a slight yellow shimmer beneath the healed bruises.
Frau Bar-Lev put down the hand brush when she saw me and said, ‘Good God.’ Quite apart from my appearance, the presence of police officers, who must have been in my apartment several times while investigating my disappearance, and who no doubt questioned the neighbours, would have definitely set her thinking. Then there were the reports in the media. I was the woman from the cabin, it was as clear as day. Even if the press, for the sake of victim protection, had only printed my face with a black bar across my eyes or pixelated it, putting two and two together can’t have been that difficult.
‘Well, I’m sure you know that Frau Bar-Lev’s hip means she has difficulties with the stairs,’ the woman says. I’m still trying to work out if she’s actually been oblivious to the news these past few months, or if she’s just sensitive enough to hold back those things that people apparently say and do when they come face to face with the tragic curiosity. The ‘Good God’, the ‘You’ll be all right’, the sympathetic but fervent gaze that goes right through my clothes like an X-ray, intent on dissecting me for traces of some hellish abuse.
I nod and say, ‘Yes, her hip. It’s been bothering her for ages.’
That’s why Frau Bar-Lev only brings my post on the days when she’s obliged to leave the house herself, to go shopping or visit the doctor. Otherwise she doesn’t subject herself to the strain of going down all those steps to the mailboxes in the entrance to our building. Or, to be more precise, she doesn’t put herself through it just for my sake.
‘I recently noticed that your mailbox was overflowing, so I thought—’
‘I’ve never seen you here before,’ I state.
‘Me? No. I mean, I haven’t seen you either, but I’ve only been in the apartment for a few weeks.’
‘Next to Frau Bar-Lev?’
‘Yes.’ She nods, giving me another smile.
‘But there’s a family living there.’
‘The Hildners, yes. They moved out.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Yes.’ The woman shrugs. As she moves her arm the post falls to the floor. ‘Shit,’ she laughs, and holds out the pot to me. I take it and watch her sink to her knees to gather up the letters. ‘Not the best multitasking, eh?’ She giggles.
‘Wait a sec,’ I say, and step back behind the door to put the pot on the cabinet so I can help her.
‘It’s fine, I’ve done it.’ She hands me the pile of post through the gap in the door.
‘Oh yes, Frau Bar-Lev also asked for her dishes back from the past few days.’
I think of yesterday’s pot with the stew. The small, fireproof dish with the potato bake and the bowl with the pasta salad that stood outside my door, right on the mat, its inviting logo – Everybody Welcome – now very much obsolete. I appear in the door once more. Maja is still smiling.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say with a slightly forced smile. ‘I haven’t yet managed to wash the things up.’
‘Don’t worry, I can do that. Just give me it all.’
In my mind I see myself pottering in the kitchen, ashamedly scraping a few leftovers into the bin, while my front door stands wide open and standing there is the stranger supposedly sent by Frau Bar-Lev. Who now has access to my apartment. I feel a gentle panic well up inside me, a silly panic certainly, but I can’t comprehend it with logic and reason. The woman is supposed to bring me food and fetch dishes. What did she want inside my apartment? What did she intend to do to me?
My mind is working feverish
ly, but I can’t come up with any reason to shut the door in her face while she waits outside. No reason that wouldn’t make me look like a complete idiot.
‘I don’t know, I really ought to—’
‘Honestly, I don’t mind.’
Maja, smiling. Maja, sent by Frau Bar-Lev so I don’t starve. She has no reason not to think of me as what I’d sworn I wouldn’t be: the poor woman from the cabin, traumatised for the rest of her life, sensing danger in everything and at every turn. It was bad enough that I couldn’t bring myself to invite my new neighbour into my apartment while she waited for the dishes. Before, when Kirsten used to live here, we always had people over we hardly knew. They were just people others had brought along, and who liked to party as much as we did. ‘Fewer than a dozen and it’s not a party,’ Kirsten always said, laughing. Everybody Welcome back then, in another life.
I nod decisively, turn around as if being pulled on a string and hurry along the hallway to the kitchen.
My front door, open.
My heart is in my mouth. With jittery movements I stack the baking dish and little pot into the large salad bowl, in which streaks of dried mayonnaise draw accusatory patterns. How can I possibly let the elderly woman cook for me and not even wash up her dishes? You should be ashamed, Lena. Don’t you have any manners? There must be some Tupperware too somewhere. I turn right around, my woollen socks sliding over the tiles, and reach out for the edge of the work surface to give myself some support. My front door is open. Maja, who I’ve never seen here before. Who supposedly moved in only recently. Her voice: ‘Are you okay, Frau Grass? Do you want any help?’
‘No, no,’ I call out.
The Tupperware container, the fucking Tupperware, where is the Tupperware? I yank the handle of the dishwasher. Somehow the Tupperware container has made its way into the dishwasher, although it’s still waiting there, dirty, alongside a few cups and some cutlery, for me to turn the dial to the right programme. I take the container from the rack and keep the stack of dirty dishes balanced as I carry them through the kitchen and hallway back to my front door. Which is still open. Giving a view of the stairwell. The pile of dishes clunks in my shaky hands.
Dear Child: The twisty thriller that starts where others end Page 12