In the Dark

by Andreas Pflüger

  Not bad for a blind woman! She’s only sorry that Pavlik will miss her one triumphant escape.

  Suddenly she comes to a halt. Her knee collides with an obstacle. She runs her hand over it. Just as Aaron works out what it is, chaos breaks out.

  She has ended up between a truck and its trailer, and what she feels against her knee is the drawbar. The engine starts and the truck sets off.

  Adrenalin floods her veins like a dam breaking. She jumps on the coupling piece, becomes a blind passenger. Everything happens at a crazy speed, but for Aaron time becomes infinitely slow. She has to let go of her stick. It falls under the wheels. Aaron hears of it being crushed, hears the dark roar of the engine, the metallic crunch under her feet, the flapping of the tarpaulin cover behind her, even the indicator of the truck, which is impossible.

  As the vehicle slips among the traffic and accelerates, the balancing tips of her toes are her only contact with the coupling piece. Her hands seek something to cling on to and find a ventilation slit. She claws the fingertips of one hand into it like a free climber. She hammers with her other fist in the insane hope that the driver might be able to hear her. The truck speeds up. Right bend. They careen to the side. The drawbar bucks. Aaron has to stop hammering, she needs the fingertips of both hands.

  And she slips off.

  For a moment she stands freely on the drawbar like a surfer who has caught a monster wave and is riding with his keel on a single drop of water. Aaron knows that she will die if she does the wrong thing now. Everything gets even slower. The world almost comes to a standstill.

  She falls backwards. At the same time her right leg shoots upwards. Aaron wedges one foot against the front wall while keeping the other fixed on the drawbar, presses her back against the plastic sheet of the trailer, spreads both arms to increase her body surface area. The stiffness of the tarpaulin is her salvation. She’s going to be spending the next few seconds in that position as she reflects:

  I’ve got to stay on as far as a red light. I’ll jump off then. But how will I know that it’s a red light? If he just stops for a moment and then drives off again, I’m dead.

  The driver is also surfing, on a wave of green lights.

  Another turning, to the left this time, sharp. Her right leg is stretched out as far as it will go, so far from her other leg that she’s almost doing the splits and can’t exert greater pressure.

  Aaron sees the action in her mind’s eye and guesses that she has a five per cent chance. She bends her right leg and stands on the drawbar like a flamingo. She puts all her strength on her left leg and catapults herself forwards. If she doesn’t catch the ventilation slit at the first attempt, it will be the last movement she ever makes.

  One hand reaches into the void, but the other finds the metal. Aaron pulls herself over with the tip of her middle finger. She reaches across with her other hand and somehow holds on. Suddenly she is thrown against the wall of the vehicle. Brakes screech.

  The truck stops.

  Feverishly she wonders whether she should jump off.

  Yes! Do it!

  But this thought and the jolt when the driver steps on the accelerator are simultaneous. He only paused for a pedestrian, a cyclist, a dog, for some random person. Having decided to jump, Aaron had reduced her body tension.

  And is pulled apart by the drawbar.

  She’s only holding on by three fingertips. Her legs are dangling in the void. They look for the drawbar and can’t find it.

  It’s over.

  Just as she loses her hold and falls, the truck brakes again. Aaron plummets from the drawbar to the tarmac. Rolls up in a ball so as not to be hit by the trailer. Shifts her weight to the left. Is hurled under the chassis, can’t do anything, is nothing but a pine cone, a faded leaf, a snowflake, a grain of dust thrown this way and that at the whim of a hurricane. Adrenalin explodes. Aaron screams and crashes against an obstacle.

  She’s out of breath. She sucks raging fear into her lungs.

  Forces herself to touch the obstacle.

  A wheel. Big. Static.

  In her head there is the eye of a needle with a thousand thoughts trying to get through it all at once. They jostle and shove, they are in an incredible hurry, each one wants to be first.

  Two questions make it into her consciousness:

  Right or left?

  How many lanes?

  She opts for the most likely solution and creeps out from under the trailer on the right-hand side. Engines idling. She feels a warm, wet radiator, runs her hand along a bumper and stumbles over the edge of the kerb.

  The cars drive along behind her. The truck is so quiet it could be five streets away. She wants to snap her fingers, but they’re stiff as a plank. Tries to click her tongue, but produces only a faint squelching sound. Tries again, until she feels her head will burst. It’s like shouting into a storm. Somehow she emits a pitifully faint click.

  But the echo comes back.

  Her feet get moving. She bumps into the wall. The seven steps to the front door don’t belong to her. She slumps down on the steps. The adrenalin is only an aftershock from the previous mighty flood.

  Her hands trembling, Aaron taps her watch. The computerized voice blankly reports: ‘Seventh of January. Thursday. Six o’clock, seventeen minutes, eleven seconds.’

  She only left the hotel two minutes ago.

  Her phone vibrates in her jeans. Pavlik.

  A new wave rolls in. Tears this time. Aaron is sitting in front of a house in the middle of nowhere, weeping incessantly.

  But not because of those two minutes.

  The pain has many names. Boenisch, Barcelona, Holm, Niko, Sandra, Dad, all the others. She doesn’t want to be strong any more. Doesn’t need to be strong any more. Can’t be strong any more. She sits there until she is still crying but no tears come. Then she feels as if she’s dead and can’t even lift her head when she hears a friendly, concerned voice.

  ‘Are you all right? Do you need help?’ a man asks.

  She doesn’t even have the strength to answer.

  ‘Do you speak German?’

  Somehow she manages to stagger to her feet. ‘Can you tell me where I am?’

  ‘Good heavens, look at the state of you!’

  Only now does she reflect that falling under the truck, the mud she crawled through, must have left traces.

  ‘You’re injured.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On your hands.’

  Blood. Her skin has been scraped off. No pain. Numb. She moves her fingers. They’re in working order. ‘It’s fine. Please, it’s really important for you to tell me where I am.’

  ‘I assume you aren’t from Berlin?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re looking straight at the Holocaust Memorial.’

  ‘I’m blind.’

  ‘You don’t look it.’

  ‘I know. Could you please call me a taxi?’

  *

  They drive along the Stadtring. The windscreen wipers are turned off, which means it isn’t snowing any more. In the back of the taxi she rests her temple against the icy glass of the window. Her hand finds the coffee bean that she always carries in her coat pocket. A single thought revolves on an endless loop:

  How can I stand up against Holm when crossing a street defeats me?

  Her phone vibrates again. Pavlik’s third call. Then she listens to her mailbox. ‘What are you thinking, have you gone completely crazy? Where are you? If you don’t call right now I’m going to send out a search party.’

  He has lowered his voice by a third. She has only known him so furious on one other occasion; she still remembers.

  When the twins were eleven, one day they didn’t come home from school and no one knew where they were. Aaron sat for hours with them while the search went on and Sandra and Pavlik were insane with worry. At ten o’clock at night the boys were standing at the door. They were both in love with a girl from the other class and had plundered their piggy banks to a
sk her out skating and show off a little bit.

  Pavlik raised his hand to them. The twins ran to their room and locked themselves in. But when Aaron sat down outside their door and told them seriously how when she was eleven she fell in love with a boy who was as sweet as spring cherries, they let her in. She talked to them like adults, while Pavlik threw tools around in the garage and Sandra tried to calm him down.

  Aaron told the twins that their father had slapped them not out of rage but out of relief. She asked what the girl was like, and the boys argued about whether the most awesome thing about her was her tousled hair or her freckles or her amazing ability to whistle through her fingers. She advised them to work out as quickly as possible which one of them the girl liked, otherwise it would all turn into the most dreadful muddle. Aaron ruffled their hair and said the smoke would have cleared by tomorrow. Perhaps over the next few days they should help their father clear up the garage. And it certainly wouldn’t be a bad idea to get rid of the chaos in their room which was driving their mother to despair.

  Pavlik had left and came back when Aaron was drinking another glass of wine with Sandra. He had been to see the girl’s mother to apologize for his sons’ behaviour. The woman was drunk and hadn’t even noticed that her daughter was out. Pavlik couldn’t get over it. He fixed himself a drink. Even Sandra couldn’t get through to him. After she’d yelled at him she left him alone with Aaron.

  She wanted to talk to him, but he snapped at her angrily, saying that she couldn’t possibly understand. She had no family. What did she know? Aaron got to her feet. She reached into her jacket and set down on the table the photograph in which she can still see her face, even today. A self-timed snap. Aaron, Sandra and Pavlik and the twins, all dressed up as cowboys and Indians. It was the five of them, and after that not much happened for a long time. Aaron always carried the photograph with her except when she was working under cover.

  She left without a word of farewell.

  The next morning she flew to Barcelona.

  Pavlik showed her no sympathy at the hospital, it was his way of grieving. Before he left he put something in her hand. She knew straight away what it was. After he had gone she hugged the photograph, the picture in which from now on she would see herself on her own, as if the others had never been there.

  *

  The taxi driver brings her to the door. Aaron asks him to ring the bell marked Askamp. No, he doesn’t need to wait. She assumes that the men observing the house are already on the phone to Pavlik. If no one opens, she will stand here until he comes and rages at her.

  But the buzzer is activated.

  She goes into the house. Doesn’t know the floor. Cautious steps to the stairs. On the first landing she pauses.

  ‘Miss Askamp?’ she calls out quietly.

  No reply.

  Aaron goes up a floor. She clicks her tongue. The echo shows her the open door to a flat. ‘Miss Askamp?’ Something darts past. A cat runs mewing down the stairs.

  There is a rushing sound in Aaron’s head that drowns out her heartbeat. She pulls off her pumps, takes off her coat and drops it on the floor. She goes into the flat. Smells camellia. Trips. She kneels down and feels a lifeless body. It is small. A child. She plunges down an endless shaft and crashes to the bottom, alone with the child. She tries to find the child’s pulse. It’s alive. High above her, music rattles from the speaker of a mobile phone. Roy Orbison’s ‘Pretty Woman’.

  Icy cold flows into her body like a drip. The door falls shut. A hand grabs her, pulls her out of the shaft as if she is a doll and slings her against the hard floor.

  She creeps through a tunnel of fear. A blazing flash pierces the light. It explodes and vaporizes in sudden darkness. Inside her chest the tunnel walls press together. She tries to get her breath back as she finds the handle of a drawer and drags herself up. Buttons. Stove. A kitchen.

  Legs spread, she assumes the attack position. Bends her knee, turns her strong foot out. Her right fist is outstretched, her left arm along her body. Holm’s voice comes from the realm of the dead. ‘Kind of you to accept my invitation.’

  He is standing right in front of her.

  Two metres.

  Aaron darts at him. Her left foot kicks at where she assumes Holm’s kneecap will be. At the same time she turns on her own axis and aims her foot at his pubic bone, hoping to break it, destroy Holm’s stasis.

  She didn’t even feel the draught when he jumped to the side. Aaron kicks into the void and is thrown against the door frame by the momentum of her movement. Roy Orbison continues to smarm.

  Holm’s voice is a breath of wind over a fresh grave. ‘Is that it?’

  Aaron flies at him, her hands outstretched as if for an embrace. She claps them together, but misses Holm’s head, and her empty palms strike against one another. He has silently switched position again, and is now standing beside her.

  ‘A very effective move if it finds its target,’ he observes. ‘It takes only one bar of pressure to burst my eardrum. You can squash a fly with that. Do you think I’m a fly?’

  Aaron tries to connect this voice with the man who said to her so charmingly in Barcelona: ‘I would even have waited two minutes for you.’ She can’t do it. She knows Holm is talking to her. But he’s someone else. No. He’s only shed his skin and is revealing what he always was: her demon.

  ‘Why me?’ she asks querulously.

  Words blow like ashes from his mouth: ‘My life belongs to duty; but in spite of death dancing on my grave, you will not have my good name to cover it with dark disgrace.’

  She feels him going outside. He hasn’t made a single sound apart from the words he uttered. Aaron wants to take her phone from her jeans pocket, but can’t do it straight away, she has no feeling in her fingers.

  At last she succeeds.

  But he’s back. With a blow of his hand he casually flings the mobile phone across the kitchen. Something heavy crashes to the floor.

  She hears a dull moan like an animal caught in a trap.

  ‘This woman and I exist in completely different worlds,’ Holm says. ‘If she screams in her world, I don’t even hear it in mine.’ He is hurting Eva Askamp, injuring her. She is trying to scream behind her gag. It sounds like glass being crushed in a mortar.

  Aaron’s thoughts run through her synapses at the speed of light. She is standing with her back to the stove. In just about every kitchen you’ll find a knife block. If Eva Askamp is right-handed it’ll be on the right of the stove.

  She whirls round, wipes her hand across the work surface and pulls a big knife from the block. She feels the draught when Holm jumps. Her left leg jerks backwards into a standing split and strikes him on the temple. Aaron calculates that he’s going to stagger to the right, and throws the knife over her shoulder. She knows she has hit him. Holm grunts with surprise. Aaron does a half back-handspring, brings her ankles together and catches his head in a vice. She brings Holm to the ground. Her crossed ankles throttle him while her right elbow bores into his kidneys, and with her left she grabs his crotch and twists her hand.

  Holm’s fist comes down on her cheekbone. A fast second blow catches her between chin and bottom lip. The pain makes her head explode. She has to relax her grip. He springs into a standing position, drags her up by her hair and throws her against the wall. She just lies there. Her body is finished.

  Holm turns the music off. He chews ash and spits it out. ‘I will feel and touch this scar for as long as I live. Thanks for that.’

  He throws the knife on the floor. ‘I’m going to count to ten. Tell me why I followed you in Barcelona. If you lie I’ll kill the woman.’

  Tears of despair shoot into Aaron’s eyes.

  ‘One.’

  ‘I shot your brother.’

  And knows it’s not that.

  ‘Two.’

  ‘I killed his lover.’

  And knows it’s not that.

  ‘Three.’

  ‘I had the money.’

 
And knows it’s not that.

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Why me? Why me?’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘I left Niko on his own.’

  ‘Six.’

  ‘I was a coward.’

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘I hate myself for it.’

  ‘Eight.’

  ‘Please don’t hurt the woman any more.’

  ‘Nine.’

  She begs: ‘Kill me. Not her.’

  ‘I’ll give you one more chance,’ he says coldly and definitively. ‘Take time for your answer. For the woman, everything hangs on it.’ He savours the seconds.

  ‘What was I thinking when we were looking at each other in the tunnel?’

  ‘Eye for an eye,’ Aaron whispers.

  ‘Ten.’

  Eva Askamp doesn’t even groan. It’s just silent. Terribly silent. Aaron plunges back into the shaft. She lies there with the boy and the woman and waits for death.

  The ash floats down to her in the darkness. ‘Receive/when my life is over/my all-consuming love for you/from the smoke/that rises from my burning body.’

  She doesn’t hear him leave. Just knows he’s gone. She lies for ever in the shaft until her heart starts beating again. She is so afraid of stretching out her hand. The woman is dead. The camellia flower lies in her lap. There is blood on Aaron’s hand. She pulls Eva Askamp to her, takes the gag off her mouth, rocks her in her arms, dies a second, third, fourth time.

  Footsteps in the corridor.

  He’s coming back.

  She crawls across the floor. Looks for the knife.

  Finds it. Throws the knife.

  Hears it stick into the door frame and quiver.

  ‘Aaron, it’s me.’

  Pavlik.

  She tries to creep out of the shaft. Slides back. Crawls her fingers into the stone and slides slides slides. At last she feels Pavlik gently lifting her up. He holds her tight, she lies against his chest. Memories fly past like snowflakes. She looks into a bag of newspaper cuttings. She opens the gift box with the Starfire. She rests her hand on Boenisch’s television. She kisses Niko at the Djemaa El Fna. She drinks limoncello with Sandra. She lies on the ice and reaches for Ben’s hand. She sees the Audi in the rear-view mirror. She weeps for the woman in the Hotel Aralsk. She takes a bag of hot chestnuts from Niko. She sees Ben sinking into the depths. Nothing but snowflakes. They spray in all directions and are gone for ever.