by Peter May
Bauer had been forced to close the gallery after the government implemented the pandemic plan of the Robert Koch Institute in March, just two days before the exhibition was due to open. When restrictions were finally eased, he had only been able to reopen the gallery to view by appointment. Face coverings obligatory. But very few people had ventured in across the summer. He had promised the artist that he would keep his work on show until the end of the year. So far it had generated very little interest, and he had nothing lined up to replace it. The virus had plunged the art world into crisis and Bauer had no idea how much longer he could keep the gallery going.
He had always supposed that his mother would continue to subsidise it no matter what. Because, after all, wasn’t it really her son that she was subsidising?
And now she was gone. And he probably wouldn’t have to worry about money ever again.
He glanced at the laptop open on the desk in front of him, and an unfinished draft of a new website designed to raise the profile of the gallery. Maybe he would just close down and sell up. But, then, what would he do with his life?
For several minutes he sat staring at the screen, wondering why he didn’t feel anything about the death of his mother. Was he really so insensitive? His eyes felt gritty, but there were no tears in them. He reached out and snapped the lid of his laptop shut and stood up. His coat and scarf hung on a coat stand by the door. He pulled them on as he ran down the stairs on long, spindly legs. The girl who welcomed visitors and took care of the gallery’s administration, such as it was, looked up from her desk in surprise and seemed fleetingly guilty. She ran rapid fingers over the keyboard of her computer, and he saw her screen reflect a brighter light in her face. She’d been playing some computer game, probably, or talking to friends on social media.
‘I’m going home for the rest of the day, Erika. If there are no other appointments, you might as well just close up.’
She looked pleased and smiled happily.
Outside, a cold wind blew all the way down from Boxhagener Platz. The Italian trattoria across the road, where he used to lunch almost every day, was shut. It had never reopened after the lockdown, and the tables and chairs they set out on the pavement during the summer were stacked against the front of the restaurant, dusty and forgotten.
This, he thought, was the first day of the rest of his orphan life.
Bauer’s Wilhelminian-style apartment was on the third floor of a restored building on Paul-Lincke Ufer. It offered glorious views through nearly leafless trees of the canal opposite. It was not an apartment he could ever have afforded himself. His mother had bought it ten years previously as an investment and rented it out until her precious Hans had graduated from university and wanted a place of his own. Now he shared it with Lise, but he was sure that the only reason she stayed with him was financial.
His heels echoed back at him off the tiles of the building’s beautifully restored entrance lobby, and all the way up the marble staircase as he climbed briskly to the third floor. He turned his key in the lock and pushed the door to the apartment open. ‘Lise, I’m home.’
The sitting room was beautifully sunlit, rows of windows along the front wall divided by French doors that opened on to a terrace overlooking the street. Two sofas stood around a large wall-mounted television at one end, and Bauer kept a desk for work and his home laptop at the other. Polished floorboards were strewn with oriental rugs, and the walls were hung with startling modern works by young German and American artists. Bauer had been building his own collection since opening the gallery.
Lise was sitting at his desk, his laptop open in front of her. She looked up, startled, when he came in. He should not have been back for at least another two hours. Her face flushed. An attractive face, with slightly wide-set dark eyes and full lips. Black hair cut in a fringe hung in curtains to her shoulders to hide the bruising.
He stopped in the doorway. ‘What are you doing?’ He could read panic in her eyes.
‘I let the battery in my iPad run down, and I needed to do a couple of internet searches.’ She closed the lid of the laptop quickly and stood up. ‘I didn’t expect you home so soon.’
‘No, you didn’t, did you?’ He reached the desk in three strides and lifted the laptop to crook it in his arm and throw open the lid. Fingers slid back and forth across the trackpad to launch the browser, revealing it to be open on a history of his own internet searches. He glanced up at Lise with dangerous blue eyes. He felt anger suffuse his whole body like ice-cold water surging through a sluice. ‘You’ve been spying on me!’
She moved around the desk, keeping it between them. ‘No, honestly, Hans. I was just checking my own history.’
‘You have no history on this computer. Or, at least, you shouldn’t.’
Her frightened rabbit eyes glanced around the room as if looking for some means of escape. The late afternoon sunshine flooding through the windows behind her cast her face in shadow. ‘No, I was, honestly.’
‘Don’t lie to me!’ His voice reverberated in the stillness of the room. ‘You were fucking spying on me, weren’t you?’ He almost threw down his laptop and started around the desk towards her.
She moved quickly away, across exotic floor coverings that felt soft beneath her bare feet, and he broke into a run to catch her. She knew there was no escape, and lifted clenched fists to protect her face, pulling her elbows tight into her sides. He grabbed her and swung her violently across the room. She hit the wall with a sickening thud. The whiplash slammed her head back and her world filled with light and pain. As she slid to the floor she curled up in a foetal position to shield herself from his kicks, and heard herself pleading, ‘Please, Hans, don’t. Please. Please.’
Blinds were drawn on the last light of the day, but evening sunlight still leaked in all around their edges. Lise lay face down on the bed amidst a chaos of twisted bed sheets, her face pressed into the pillow. Her tears had long since dried up, but the occasional sob still tore itself from her chest to be muffled by duck down.
Bauer sat on the edge of the bed hanging his head in shame, hands clasped in his lap, knuckles bruised, fingers whitened by their tortured wringing. His voice was barely audible in the hushed stillness of the room. ‘I’m so sorry, Lise. Honest to God, I’m so sorry. You know I didn’t mean it.’
Which prompted her to roll, finally, on to her side and gaze up at him with the strangest look in her eyes. She seemed tiny and vulnerable curled up like that on the bed. In a voice even smaller, she said, ‘You’re always sorry, Hans. Always. You never mean it. Ever.’
He screwed up his eyes and shook his head. ‘I know, I know!’ He stole a glance at her. ‘I don’t even know why you stay with me.’
She drew a long, slow, trembling breath, summoning all of her strength and courage. ‘I can’t,’ she said.
‘Can’t what?’
‘Stay with you. Not any longer. I can’t, Hans. I can’t take it. I can’t.’ She had lost count of the number of times she’d said it. But this time, she swore to herself she really meant it.
‘Jesus, Lise, don’t leave me. It won’t happen again, I promise.’
‘How many times have you promised me that?’
He turned and reached out to brush the hair gently back from her face and saw the fresh bruising he had inflicted, older yellow bruising behind it, and he felt nothing but shame.
‘I just don’t know what comes over me,’ he whispered. ‘I really don’t. It’s like some angry red mist that just takes control. I’m not me any more. I have no way to stop it.’
She hesitated, aware that what she was about to say might stoke the flames of the anger that had prompted the attack in the first place. ‘Is that why you’ve been doing research on the evil gene?’ Which was an open admission that she had been spying on him.
But his shame was greater than his anger. He hung his head again. ‘There’s no such thing. It�
�s a myth.’
‘But you believed in it enough to search for it on the internet.’
He shrugged hopelessly. ‘I just need to understand why, Lise. Why I’m like this.’
‘And what did you find?’
‘Nothing conclusive. Maybe some sort of genetic predisposition to violence, but’ – he looked at her imploringly, as if seeking her sympathy – ‘there’s no one in my family that I know of with that kind of history. My dad was a mouse by all accounts. Though I barely remember him. I was only six when he died.’
‘He was a lot older than your mother, wasn’t he?’
‘Twenty years.’ He nodded. ‘I know, it’s a lot. She was still in her thirties when he had his second heart attack.’
‘What about his family?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t really know much about them. His mother was a gentle soul. He always had a great fondness for her. Though, of course, I never knew her. And his father died before he was even born. Happened a lot in the war, I think.’
‘And your mother?’
He felt the first flush of emotion since hearing the news. Perhaps he wasn’t so dead inside after all. He pressed his lips together, trying to hide it from her, but a large tear trickled down his cheek.
She frowned, stung by surprise and confusion. She had never seen Hans cry before. She sat up, concerned, in spite of everything. ‘What’s wrong?’
He looked away, unable to meet her eye. ‘It’s why I came home early,’ he said. ‘She passed away this afternoon.’ And just saying it seemed to open the floodgates. Tears streamed down his face now. ‘She’d been ill for so long, I should have been expecting it. But somehow I didn’t.’ He hurriedly wiped his face dry with the backs of his hands, taking a deep breath to control himself. ‘I’m going to have to shut down the gallery for a while, to make arrangements for the funeral, and deal with the estate. I know she’s named me as executor in her will.’ He turned to gaze at her very directly and said solemnly, ‘We’re going to be very wealthy, Lise, you and I.’
The leaves had almost all gone from the trees in the cemetery at Mariendorf. It was little more than fifteen minutes’ walk from his mother’s suburban villa on Röthspitzenweg. She must have passed it many times.
A woman of strong opinions, she’d had few friends, as evinced by the handful of mourners who turned out on this bright, cold, mid-October day to bid her farewell. Bauer recognised a couple of faces, but knew none of them. Not even the pastor. His mother had not been a religious woman.
Sunshine cast the elongated shadows of semi-naked trees across the freshly dug earth as the young man in the cloth of his church muttered oft-recited banalities from the Bible for a woman he had never known.
Bauer stood apart from the others, aware once again of how little affected he was emotionally by her death. Perhaps the tears with Lise had been an aberration. Relief more than grief.
She had not accompanied him to the funeral. An excuse about a meeting at the Gorky Theatre where she worked as a make-up artist. Despite all the months of unemployment brought on by the Coronavirus, she had still been able to practise her art. On herself. After nearly two years, she had become adept at hiding the fruits of her relationship with Bauer from others.
He was glad to be on his own, though. He did not relish the idea of company going back to his mother’s house after the funeral. He wanted to rake through the ashes of his past in private, wallow in his memories, cry without shame if that’s what he felt like.
Although the wind was chill, there was still warmth in the sun, and he raised his face to its light, feeling it on his skin, and wondering how it was possible that the world still turned even when the woman who had borne him was gone.
Mariendorf was an upmarket suburb of south Berlin. His mother had bought a house here in the early 2000s and, stealing a playbook from the Americans, torn it down to build a large pink and white villa in its place. The house sat in extensive private grounds, and reflected echoes of the art deco period of the 1930s.
Tall narrow windows around the curve of its front wall lay long slabs of daylight across the polished floor of the huge salon beyond. Bauer wandered listlessly among the soft furnishings and lacquered Chinese cabinets with their intricate inlays of mother-of-pearl. His mother had been possessed of a passion for oriental furniture. It had always left Bauer cold.
He had spent most of his teenage years here, seething with adolescent rage, wrestling with the violent urges that had lost him so many childhood friends. Lashing out without thinking at every contradiction, every imagined slight. The gift of the apartment and the purchase of the gallery were, he was sure, his mother’s way of steering him towards a safe and responsible career, and away from the violence that had led to his conviction for assault as an eighteen-year-old. A stupid fight in a bar to impress a girl who was not even interested in him. A fight that he had taken a step too far.
And it had worked. To all intents and purposes he appeared, to those who knew him, to be a serious and responsible young man carving out a career for himself in the world of modern art. His violence was private now, taking place only behind closed doors.
He shied away from thoughts of the damage he had inflicted on the girl he professed to love. He really didn’t mean to harm her, and the pain of regret each time he did was almost overwhelming.
Light refracted through frosted glass in the semi open-plan kitchen, and lay in dappled patches all across the work surfaces that his mother had kept shiny clean. He opened the fridge and took out one of the bottles of beer she’d always kept for his visits, and heard the pfft as he removed the cap.
He drank from the neck of it as he wandered through the house from room to room. The TV room at the back, off the formal dining room. The second reception room on the east side. Walls hung with paintings that were not to his taste. She had been very traditional.
A wide, polished timber staircase curved up to a first-floor landing that ran like a gallery around the entrance hall below. He hesitated for a moment at his old bedroom door before pushing it open to revisit the unhappy Hans he had been through all his miserable adolescence. Nothing had changed, though it was some years since he had slept here. The same teenage posters on the walls. Heavy metal bands and goth idols. His own electric guitar mounted on the wall above his bed. She had bought it to indulge him, as she did with everything. He had abandoned trying to play it within a week.
On a chest of drawers sat a threadbare old teddy from his childhood. She must have found it in a cupboard or a box somewhere and put it on display to remind her of the polite little boy he had been before he grew into a monster.
There was very little of himself that he recognised in this room. Someone he had been once, in another life that he had no desire to revisit. He closed the door very firmly on that part of him that was gone.
His mother’s room, by contrast, was full of her. That familiar aromatic fragrance of roses and honey. Her silvered hair clinging to the teeth of a comb on the dresser. At some point after the bed had been made, and before she had been taken to the hospital, she’d lain down on it, leaving a perfect impression of her body in the softness of the quilt, and of her head pressed into the pillow. Bauer was almost spooked by it. As if her death was somehow a hoax, and she was still here, watching him as he voyaged through a life they had once shared.
He moved quickly into the little bureau off the bedroom where she kept all her documents, and administered her lonely existence. A deep desk drawer revealed hanging folders which he laid out one by one on the desktop. Bills, insurance policies, the original architect’s plans for the house. A valuation of it that she had recently requested from a local estate agent, perhaps suspecting that she was not long for this world. A cool 1.4 million euros. He exhaled softly. He was almost certain to inherit. Even after death taxes, it would be a small fortune. Taking his apartment and the gallery into account, her property portfol
io alone would make him rich. He found himself suffused with a guilty sense of pleasure.
He knew that she had inherited considerable wealth from his father, though Bauer knew precious little about how Klaus Bauer had made his money. He knew, too, that she had kept items of value – jewellery, bonds, and probably cash – in a safe behind a Rubens reproduction on the wall. Although she had gone to some lengths to conceal it from him, he also knew that she kept the combination taped to the underside of the middle desk drawer. Parents always believed that they could hide things from their children, and invariably underestimated them.
With the Rubens resting on the floor, he heard tumblers click as he turned the combination lock on the safe, until finally the door swung open and he was struck by an odd fusty smell of age.
There was, as he had expected, a jewellery case, and a portfolio of government bonds that on the briefest flick-through seemed to offer the prospect of handsome financial rewards. But he was surprised by an old shoebox, barely intact, that he lifted down to place carefully on the desk. Written in old-fashioned script along one end of it was his father’s name. Klaus Bauer. One by one, he took out the items it contained and laid them beside the box. A collection of letters, franked with dates in the thirties and forties, and still in their original envelopes, yellowed now and brittle with age, tied together with a faded pink ribbon. Half a dozen black, leather-bound notebooks. The elastic band which held them had lost its elasticity, crumbling and breaking apart at his touch. Rolled up together were a number of official documents. Again, the elastic that held them broke, and he unrolled them to smooth open on the surface of the desk. They were birth and death certificates.