Inseparable

by Heldt,Dora

  “Six.” Ruth opened her purse and took an envelope from it. “This is Marie Erdmann’s questionnaire. I showed it to you last time we met up and then took it away with me again by mistake. Here, Ines, I just remembered it. She called me two weeks ago and has already booked a hotel room for when she comes here.”

  Ines scanned the questionnaire quickly before putting it in the binder.

  “That’s right, Marie, I’d almost forgotten. The postcard from Emden, right?”

  Luise nodded.

  “Exactly, the one who did rumba with her cousin on those silly holidays. I think we’re doing well here.”

  Ines counted out loud.

  “We’ve found six women, five of whom are coming. And there are four of us, so that’s nine, and Marleen and Gabi, too, that makes eleven. I’m her sister, so discount me for a moment, and that’s ten friends. Not bad at all.”

  Contentedly, Ruth gave Luise a nudge. “Do you still remember our conversation by Alster Lake back in the spring? And how offhand Christine seemed about female friendship? Now she’ll be celebrating her birthday with ten girlfriends. Some people just need a little push in the right direction when it comes to their happiness. I think we’re going a great job. And I can’t wait to see Christine’s face.”

  Ines looked at Ruth, thinking about how badly her sister had been betrayed by her best friend. Perhaps this party really was an opportunity to give her more confidence again, but—on the other hand—perhaps Christine was right, too, and having a best friend wasn’t as important as all those glossy women’s magazines implied.

  Anyway, it was too late to change their plans now; everyone had already been invited.

  Ines finished her beer. “So where are we going to have the party anyway? Christine always books a table at the Italian place.”

  Dorothea shook her head. “No, we’ll do it somewhere else; Georg and I will take care of that. We thought everyone could maybe make a contribution, with Georg; you, Ines; and me giving a little more and Christine’s parents paying for the rest. That’s a good idea, right? Instead of presents.” Contentedly, she looked around her, then raised her glass. “Cheers, girls, I think we’ve done a good job here. The rest will take care of itself. Oh, Ines, show me Marie Erdmann’s questionnaire, will you? I still don’t know what to write on mine.”

  She took the sheet from Ines and smoothed it out.

  Questionnaire

  Name, age, and place of residence?

  Marie (Annemarie, in full) Erdmann, 44, Büchen

  When and where did you meet Christine?

  On the school playground, we were twelve years old and in the sixth year of school. We hit it off right away.

  What was your best experience together?

  At the graduation ball from our dance lessons when we both wore the same dress. I found that really funny.

  It was a great ball. We felt like little Scarlet O’Haras, danced the whole night long, and even drank a little champagne.

  What made your friendship stand out? And what sets Christine apart as a friend?

  We stuck together through thick and thin, did almost everything together, and were practically Siamese twins. Christine was often too shy so I had to encourage her a lot. But she also made me a little calmer, stopped me from being too hotheaded. Who knows, perhaps I would have run wild otherwise.

  What’s your motto in life?

  Nothing is impossible.

  A friend is…?

  Someone I know everything about, whom I can tell everything, and who is always there for me.

  What was your first reaction to this invitation?

  It’s great, it’s been far too long since we saw each other. I don’t know why we haven’t done it sooner. Everyone should meet up with their old girlfriends much more often.

  Hamburg

  Christine was looking for the boxes of her old things. She was sure that they had always been at the top of her wardrobe on the left-hand side. But all she could find was a folder with old insurance documents and a bicycle pump. Finding the pump was just as confusing as not being able to find what she wanted: she had no idea how it had ended up there. Christine vowed to be more organized. While she was up there she wiped the dust away, then climbed back down from the chair. She sat down on the bed, staring at the wardrobe.

  The boxes had old photos and letters in them. Five years ago she had fled her old home with Bernd in such a hurry that she’d thrown all her memories and keepsakes haphazardly into boxes. She had meant to sort it all out at some point, but at first she hadn’t been in the mood to be reminded of her old life any more than was necessary, and after she’d just forgotten about it it—in the same way that she’d suppressed lots of memories from her old life.

  When Marleen had mentioned Dani the day before, Christine was stunned. She had completely forgotten the two of them knew each other from her wedding. She hadn’t heard from Dani in over eight years, and now Marleen was casually mentioning Dani’s lover. Marleen had looked just as stunned, which had made Christine wonder why, but she quickly brushed it aside. Wanting to hear more about Dani, she pushed for more information.

  “There’s not much to tell, Christine. A few weeks ago she just turned up here in the pub and asked if I remembered her. She recognized me again right away. She was visiting her parents and had gone on a bike ride with friends. That’s all.”

  “And? Where does she live? What does she do?”

  “I don’t know, the pub was full to the rafters, and I didn’t have time for a proper chat with her.”

  “You have no idea where she lives, but she told you she has some toy boy lover? Are you kidding me?”

  Marleen kept on peeling the potatoes. “She didn’t tell me; I just overheard when I was serving her table. Anyway, I thought I’d already told you about running into her; I was sure I had.”

  They were interrupted by the waitstaff arriving. Marleen seemed relieved.

  And now Christine was looking for her old letters and photos of Dani. She must have her parents’ address hidden away somewhere; they would know where their daughter was living now. But where were those damn boxes?

  Berlin

  Just as Dani was taking a long soak in the bath, the phone started to ring. She rolled her eyes, which cracked her face mask and left a funny expression. It must be Lars again.

  The evening before, they had been at one of his friend’s birthday parties. Dani groaned just thinking about it. Jörg was turning thirty, and his girlfriend Svenja was twenty-five. The other four couples all knew each other, but it was the first time Dani had met them. She was the only one in a pantsuit; the other girls—and they were actually girls in the true sense of the word—were wearing barely there skirts, tight-fitting blouses, and colorful tights. Their conversations revolved around the trendiest hangouts, the newest shops, and the relationship dramas of absent couples. Dani felt ancient, which compared to the others, she was. She was also the only one who had to get up early the next morning; all the others were studying or worked freelance, like Lars.

  After a while Dani had decided to go home. Lars immediately offered to accompany her, but she refused, waved a quick good-bye to the others, and then took a deep breath of relief as she got in the taxi. She had only just gotten back to the apartment when Lars called to say he wanted to come by; it seemed the party wasn’t the same without her. Thinking to herself that she hadn’t enjoyed it at all, even with him, she told him she just wanted to go straight to sleep. He had sounded hurt and stayed at the party.

  And now he was probably calling to apologize, which wasn’t even necessary. She had been overjoyed to have her bed all to herself.

  Dani propped herself upright in the bath to be able to hear what he was saying on the answering machine. But it wasn’t Lars at all. Instead she heard Marleen’s voice.

  “Hi, Dani, I just wanted to let you know that I almost let the cat out of the bag with Christine. She was at the bar yesterday at lunchtime and I let something slip…”

/>   Dani sank back down into the bath as she listened. As she heard the beeps signaling the end of the message, she smiled. Marleen was worried that Christine was now trying to get Dani’s address from her parents. But she wouldn’t be able to, because Dani’s parents had flown off on a month-long holiday a couple of days before and wouldn’t be back until after the party. Christine’s friends had beaten her to it.

  Dani ran more hot water into the bath and gazed at the lit tea lights at the foot of the bathtub. Her thoughts wandered back twenty years.

  Back then, she had just made the biggest mistake of her life by marrying Hannes. She had met him on a skiing holiday. Maybe it was just the intensity of the mountain sun or the high altitude, but once he looked at her there was no holding Dani back. Her sister was appalled: she thought Hannes was a good skier, sure, and he was certainly charming, but apart from that it was a complete mystery to her what Dani saw in him. He was two years older than her, was doing theater studies, and had no money or any real plan of what to do with his life. He told Dani all the things she wanted to hear, read her love poems by Erich Fried, and called her his “beauty.” She moved in with him in Bremen and took over paying the rent along with all the bills, waitressing at night and studying by day. Half a year later they were married. Dani was twenty.

  Hannes wrote poems, slept late, was very demanding, and found life in Bremen bourgeois. Every day he had new plans and great ideas about how they should live. Dani, tired out from her job and studies, just wanted to sleep, not emigrate. Before long, he found her bourgeois, too. A year later he started an affair with a forty-year-old theater actress, who came to see him in the evenings while Dani was at work, after which he would put clean sheets on the marital bed. To start with Dani was a little puzzled at Hannes’s sudden liking for fresh bedding but was too tired to give it any real thought. She only found out why after she slipped in the bar one night and broke her wrist. Hannes didn’t answer the phone. When she arrived home from the hospital in a taxi around midnight, with her wrist in cast, the lovers were closely entwined in her bed.

  The next morning Dani went to stay with her sister. Her broken heart took much longer to heal than her broken wrist. Then, after eight months of tears, Dani stumbled upon an ad in the newspaper.

  Country getaway. Old farmhouse, six rooms, two bathrooms, open-plan kitchen living area, 1000-square-meter garden, in need of renovation, situated between a dike and a meadow, to rent, available immediately.

  Just reading the ad comforted Dani. She drove out to view it. The house was old: “in need of renovation” was an understatement, but the location was perfect. Dani couldn’t help but think of the idyllic surroundings in the Gilmore Girls.

  As the realtor led her through the rooms, Dani fell in love. For the first time since that awful night, her heart felt light again. She wanted to live here.

  But she wasn’t the only one: there was another prospective tenant. Christine. As the three of them stood in the large open-plan kitchen, Dani and Christine looked out of the window down to the dike and said, simultaneously: “It’s like paradise.” They looked at each other and nodded. Thinking they were viewing the place together, the realtor asked if the rental contract should be made out jointly. Dani was just about to explain when Christine nodded and said:

  “Yes, in both our names, please.”

  The realtor nodded, made an appointment with them for the signing, and drove back to her office. Christine and Dani sat down on the steps outside the front door and introduced themselves to each other for the first time.

  Three hours later they stood up, brushed the dust from their jeans, and drove directly to the realtor’s office, where they signed the contract.

  They only really got to know each other while they were renovating the house. Both took time off work, and they spent days standing on ladders and filling in cavities, ripping up old tapestries, putting new ones up, painting, cleaning…and talking nonstop. There were so many parallels in their lives that they sometimes wondered how it was they hadn’t met sooner. They both had two siblings, had been brought up by strict parents, both loved books, liked the same music, and had experienced similar relationships at the same time.

  In the very same month that Dani married Hannes, Christine had met Malte. He studied philosophy, read her love poems by Erich Fried, wrote little notes with declarations of love, and believed her love could save him. Christine had moved out of her parents’ house and in with him. She worked in a bookstore, but he moped around when she wasn’t at home. He phoned her at work, picked her up at the end of the day, and was jealous of the friends—both male and female—that she gradually gave up for him, one by one.

  After two years Christine felt suffocated; she had had enough of endlessly having to justify things and suggested to Malte that they separate for a while. He refused, deeply hurt, and after that it just got worse and worse. In the end she had turned to a realtor, who suggested she view this house.

  Christine had never lived alone, and when she saw Dani, she immediately knew she wanted a house share. Dani was just as relieved as Christine was.

  The first tea light flickered out, bringing Dani out of her thoughts and back to the present. Looking at her wrinkled fingertips, she suddenly realized how cold she was. As she stood under the hot shower, a series of images ran through her head. Christine, sitting opposite her at the kitchen table on Sundays, her hair damp, with one of her three cats in her lap and a book in her hand. Christine, reading her a sentence out loud now and then, which they would then talk about. Christine, lying on her bed in tears after she found out that Malte was living with a fellow student who had moved in just four days after Christine moved out. Christine, lying on a blanket in the garden and watching as Dani and her dance partner Peter practiced rock ‘n’ roll moves, back when they used to be in a dance club.

  In those three years there was nothing in Dani and Christine’s lives that they hadn’t shared and discussed around that kitchen table. And there was certainly nothing they hadn’t found a solution for.

  Moisturizing herself, Dani realized she was still using the same brand of lotion Christine had given her as a present back then. She felt a pang of longing to be sitting back at that table with Christine, and to tell her about Lars. Christine would listen, then look out of the window down to the dike for a moment before turning back to her and saying: “Listen, it’s simple really, you just need to…”

  Dani closed the bottle of lotion and put it back in the cabinet.

  Soon, she thought, very soon.

  Hamburg

  Christine closed the second drawer and pulled the third open with a flourish. Gabi looked up.

  “What’s with all the commotion? Have you lost something?”

  Christine rummaged around in her desk. “I can’t seem to find anything at the moment, but right now I’m looking for the address stickers. I think I’m going senile; I keep losing things.”

  “They’re behind you, in the cabinet; I put them there. What else have you lost?”

  Christine rolled her chair over to the cabinet. “So they are. Thank you. Yesterday evening I was searching for two old boxes for hours and couldn’t find them. I have no idea where they’ve gotten to. They always used to be at the top of my wardrobe.”

  “You have boxes in your wardrobe?”

  “They’re small metal ones, with lots of photos and letters in them. Why are you looking at me strangely?”

  Christine was puzzled at her shocked expression. Gabi was remembering going into Christine’s bedroom with the two boxes, hearing Ines’s voice in her memory: “They were at the bottom of the wardrobe.” So Gabi had pushed them right to the back.

  “What did you need them for?” She felt herself going red. Christine noticed it, too.

  “Are you too warm? You can open the window if you like. I’ll get us something to drink.”

  By the time Christine came back, Gabi had regained her composure. She took the glasses from Christine.

  “
Thanks. So? What did you want them for?”

  Christine smiled. “Well, it was really strange. I was at Marleen’s on Sunday, a friend of mine who lives in Cuxhaven. I think I’ve already told you about her.”

  “The one with the pub, right?” Now, be careful you don’t let anything slip, thought Gabi.

  Christine nodded. “That’s the one. Anyway, we spent the whole morning peeling potatoes and laughing about various things.” Reminded briefly of podgy old Bernd she couldn’t help but laugh again. “And then Marleen suddenly mentioned Dani. She used to be a very good friend of mine; we used to live together. We haven’t seen each other for almost ten years, and Marleen saw her in the pub recently.”