Sister Ruth is blinking a lot. “What,” she says, but then stops. I don’t say anything either, because I think she’s finally understood that she needs to make an effort herself. Mama always waits a while if I can’t immediately think of the right answers when we’re doing work. “It’s not going to help if I always give you the solutions straightaway. You have to get used to using your own head. Think, Hannah. Concentrate. You can do it.”
“What,” Sister Ruth says again. “A recir…?”
“Recirculation. It’s hard to say, isn’t it? Do you know what I do when I come across a difficult word?”
Again Sister Ruth says nothing.
“I say the difficult word over and over again in my head until it’s stored there. That’s why my vocabulary is much better than Jonathan’s. Sometimes I only have to say the word twice inside my head, but sometimes I have to do it ten times.”
Sister Ruth still isn’t speaking. Maybe she’s trying my trick and practicing the difficult word in her head.
Finally something happens and her mouth starts moving again.
“Will you now tell me what a…”—she takes a deep breath for the difficult word—“… recirculation unit is?”
“Well done,” I say, pleased at Sister Ruth’s progress and at myself. I’m a good teacher. I get that from Mama. “The recirculation unit makes our air,” I tell her, trying to speak as slowly as possible so Sister Ruth can follow me. “A person can’t live without oxygen. Every day we need to breathe in and out between ten and twenty thousand liters of oxygen. In terms of volume, that’s roughly ten to twenty thousand times as much as in one pack of milk. The air we breathe in contains about twenty-one percent oxygen and nought point nought three percent carbon dioxide. The air we breathe out contains about seventeen percent oxygen and four percent carbon dioxide, full stop. The recirculation unit ensures that the good air comes into our cabin and the bad air is taken away. We’d suffocate otherwise.”
Sister Ruth puts a hand in front of her mouth. I can see she’s trembling slightly. All of her, not just her hand.
“Why don’t you just open a window if you need air, Hannah.” I think that’s a question, but it doesn’t sound like one. You’re supposed to go up at the end of the sentence if you want to ask something. I start arranging the pencils on the table in a long, straight line, from light to dark, beginning with yellow and ending with black.
“Hannah?” Sister Ruth’s voice goes up this time. I look up from my line of pencils and into her eyes.
“Will you at least tell me who Jonathan is?”
“He’s my brother.”
“Does Jonathan live in the cabin too? With you and your parents?”
“Yes, of course. He hasn’t done anything wrong. Why should we send him away?”
“Tell me about the stains on the carpet.” Now Sister Ruth is looking very strict and she’s even winning the blinking competition. But that’s just because my eyes have started weeping again. I blame the light and because I’m tired.
“Hannah? Earlier you said that Jonathan was taking care of the stains on the carpet. What stains, Hannah?”
I shake my head and say, “I’m tired and I want to see my mama.”
Sister Ruth reaches for my hand across the table. “I know but, believe me, the doctors really will let us know as soon as you can go and see her. Maybe you’d like to draw another picture in the meantime? Tell me, is your brother older or younger than you?”
I tear the picture of Mama and Papa in the forest from the pad and put it to one side. Then I pick up the blue pencil and start drawing Jonathan’s face on a new piece of paper.
“Younger,” I say. “By two years.”
“Okay, don’t say anything, let me guess. That means he’s…” Sister Ruth says, looking as if she’s working it out. “Hmm, it’s hard. I reckon that makes him … six?”
I look up from the piece of paper. Poor, stupid Sister Ruth. She doesn’t seem to be any good at maths.
“Thirteen minus two,” I say, trying to help, but she just gawps at me.
“He’s eleven, of course!” I solve the sum for her. Sister Ruth really has a lot to learn in her life.
“Hannah?” Now she sounds as if she’s about to cry. “The cabin. And the circulation unit.”
“Recirculation unit!” I say in my lion’s voice.
Sister Ruth flinches. Fright, again. Wide eyes and red cheeks. She just won’t make an effort. “I’m not going to put up with this!” my lion’s voice continues and I slap the table. The pencils jump; the green one rolls over the edge and clatters on the floor. You mustn’t be stupid deliberately. I bend under the table to get the green pencil and when I reappear, she apologizes. That’s something, at least. You always have to apologize if you do something wrong.
“I didn’t mean to upset you, Hannah,” she says. “It must be a very difficult situation for you. I understand that. But I’d like to understand the rest too. I’d really like to know what it’s like at home. I don’t know anyone else who lives in a cabin in the woods.”
I turn the paper around and keep drawing Jonathan’s trousers. They’re his favorite trousers, the blue ones he’s only allowed to wear on Sundays.
“Hannah?”
I look up.
“Do you understand me?”
I nod, then go straight back to my picture. I’ve also given Jonathan his favorite red T-shirt. It really glowed when it was still new. I think he’d be pleased if he knew he was wearing his favorite clothes in my picture. To finish, I draw his curly hair. It’s almost black like Papa’s. Then I start drawing my own face right next to Jonathan’s. I’m going to put on my favorite dress too, the white one with the flowers. We’re all going to look very beautiful in my picture.
“So you can’t open the windows at home, Hannah? That’s why you need the unit?”
“The recirculation unit,” I mutter.
“Doesn’t the cabin have any windows?”
“Of course it does.” I need the yellow pencil for my curly hair.
“But you don’t open the windows? Why not, Hannah?”
“It’s too dangerous. That’s why they’re boarded up.” I wonder if it’s a lie if I draw myself with a red hairband. I don’t have a red hairband, only a dark blue one. But a red one would go much better with the flowers on my dress.
“Did your papa do that, Hannah? You said he’s a good handyman.”
“Yes.” My hand moves very carefully to the red pencil and I look Sister Ruth in the eye. There’s no way she can know I don’t have a red hairband, but I’m slightly worried she’ll see from my face that I’m trying to cheat. Worry isn’t proper fear, but it’s not a good feeling either. Worry is more like the feeling of sickness you get when you’ve got a tummy ache and you don’t know if you’re going to have to throw up or not.
Papa was very worried when Mama was away. He told us that he wasn’t certain she’d be coming back to us and then he cried. Papa had never cried before. I put my hand up to his face and felt the sticky tears running down his cheek. He didn’t say it, but I immediately knew that it was partly my fault that Mama went away. It was because of the Sara thing. Jonathan knew too. He just stared at me and wouldn’t talk to me for several days, until I reminded him that he didn’t particularly like Sara either.
“You know what, Hannah, I was just thinking. You’ve gone to so much trouble drawing your brother that it shows just how fond you are of him. Maybe we should send someone to your house to see how he’s getting on with the carpet? Or to help him?”
I grab the red pencil without taking my eyes off Sister Ruth. But it doesn’t seem to bother her that I’m going to cheat with the colors.
“Or,” she continues unfazed, “we could bring him here, to be with you. Then you could wait for your mama together. Some things seem only half as bad if you’ve someone important to you close by.”
“I’m not sure Jonathan would like it here,” I say. My imaginary red hairband looks really lovely with
the flowery dress. “I think he’d start trembling if he had to be here.”
“But you’re brave and you’re not trembling.”
“Yes, that’s true,” I say. “But maybe I’m just more courageous than Jonathan. Because I’m older or a bit smarter or both. He was much more terrified than me by the blood too. And by the noise.”
“What noise?”
“Well, where do you think the bad stains on the carpet came from?”
Sister Ruth looks as if she’s thinking, but I now know that she’s not particularly good at this. “Like if you drop a watermelon on the floor,” I say, to spare her more embarrassment. “What it sounds like when you bash someone’s head with something. Bam!” I say in my lion’s voice. Speaking normally again, I add, “And afterward it’s very quiet for a while.”
MATTHIAS
Four thousand nine hundred and ninety-three days.
I have counted and cursed each one of them. My hair has turned grayer, my heartbeat uneven. The first year I drove down her last route every day. I had flyers printed and stuck them on every single lamppost. On my own initiative, I questioned supposed friends and set a few people straight. Several times a day I would call my long-term friend Gerd, Gerd Brühling, who was looking for her in his role as chief inspector and head of the investigation team. I terminated my friendship with Herr Brühling when he failed to find her. When I reached the stage where I began to feel my efforts were pointless, I was determined at the very least that the lies should stop. I gave endless interviews, fifty or more.
Lena has been missing for 4,993 days. And nights. That’s over thirteen years. Thirteen years during which every ring of the telephone might signal the one message, the only message that would change everything. Our daughter had been abducted and they were demanding a ransom. Our daughter had been fished out of the Isar, blue and swollen beyond all recognition. Our daughter had been found, raped, slaughtered and thrown away like rubbish, perhaps abroad, somewhere in eastern Europe.
“Matthias? Are you still there?” Gerd’s voice is squawking with excitement.
I don’t answer, I just try to breathe. The receiver is shaking in my sweaty right hand. With my left, I grope for some support on the chest of drawers. This space, the hallway in our house, is losing its solidity; the stairs, the carpet, the wardrobe seem to slosh toward me, as if driven on by waves. The floor beneath my feet is soft. Beside me is Karin who, still half-asleep, hauled herself downstairs when I didn’t return to the bedroom. Nervously fiddling with the tie of her cream-colored toweling dressing gown, she hisses, “What’s up, Matthias? What is it?”
With great difficulty, I swallow the lump in my throat, the news and its significance, the thirteen fucking years. Hundreds of times both Karin and I have imagined Lena dying in the most terrible way possible, torturing ourselves with thousands of possibilities. In our thoughts we’d started to disregard only one of these possibilities: what if the telephone rings and they tell us they’ve found her alive?
“Lena,” I gasp.
Karin closes her eyes and takes a few unsteady steps backward until her back hits the wall and she sinks to the floor. She puts her hands to her face and starts to sob, not loud and histrionically, no, not like that. Too much time has passed, 4,993 days, leaving too little hope. No, the sounds she makes are like sad, feeble hiccoughs.
“No, no,” I say, finally managing to speak, and hold my hand out to her.
“Matthias?” Gerd says on the phone.
“What do you mean, no, no?” Karin says, slumped against the wall.
“They believe she was abducted. But they’ve got her. She’s alive,” I say in a voice that’s barely loud enough to reach my ears. I say it again: “She’s alive.”
“What?” Karin gets awkwardly to her feet. I grab her arm when it looks as if she might lose balance again on her wobbly legs.
“Yes,” the squawking Gerd says on the other end of the line. The information he’s just given me is vague. I don’t know if he can’t, won’t or isn’t allowed to tell me any more. Only this: running a description through the database of missing people threw up a number of similarities. He said he’s going first thing tomorrow morning to Cham on the Czech border to confirm Lena’s identity. Cham, only two and a half hours from Munich, so close. Lena is so close, perhaps she’s been so close the whole time. And I didn’t find her.
“I’m coming with you,” I bluster. “Let’s go. Not tomorrow morning, let’s go right now.”
“No, Matthias, you can’t do that,” Gerd says, in the tone of a grown-up trying to placate a stubborn child. “It’s not the way things are done…”
“I don’t care,” the child says doggedly. “Actually, I don’t give a fuck! I’m going to get dressed. You come and pick me up.”
I hear Gerd sigh.
“You owe me this,” I add before he can launch into an unnecessary, long-winded explanation about the usual procedure. “Let’s go.”
Gerd sighs again and I hang up. I decide to give him half an hour. If he doesn’t appear, I’m going on my own and that’s that. To Cham, to Lena. I put my arms around Karin. Her warm tears seep through my pajamas.
“She’s alive,” I murmur into her hair. How wonderful that sounds: she’s alive.
Within the next fifteen minutes we’re dressed, and Karin has even combed her hair. Side by side in the hallway, we’re itching to leave, both of us focused on the front door. We will immediately see the beam of the headlights through the frosted glass if Gerd drives up. Karin says what I’m only thinking: “Let’s not wait.”
I nod eagerly and grab the car keys from the hook.
To Cham. To Lena. She’s alive.
* * *
I’ve been in a bubble since Gerd’s call earlier on, but when our old Volvo turns on to the motorway slip road, it suddenly bursts. Now I’m wondering whether we ought not to have waited for him after all. And whether it was right to bring Karin. Gerd’s words on the telephone play back in my head. “Listen, Matthias, we can’t be sure yet. But I’ve had a call from a colleague in Cham, where a woman ran in front of a car in a wooded area near the Czech border. Apparently she’s called Lena. They suspect that the accident is somehow connected to an abduction, which is why they trawled through the missing persons database. There are some points of resemblance, such as the scar on the forehead. But she suffered serious injuries as a result of the accident. She’s in casualty and nobody can talk to her right now. Are you still there? Matthias?”
“Lena,” I gasped at Karin.
“Yes,” Gerd said. “I’m going to set off for Cham first thing in the morning. Until we can unequivocally confirm the woman’s identity…”
Me: “I’m coming with you.”
* * *
“Karin, I think I have to warn you,” I say when I realize that Gerd’s reservations don’t just relate to disregard for police procedure. I ought to have told Karin earlier, as we were getting dressed, but I could barely utter anything other than a mere “she’s alive,” over and over again, in wonder, in disbelief, in awe.
“Gerd says she’s in casualty. She might be seriously injured. Could you bear to see her like that?”
“Are you crazy? She’s our daughter!”
Karin is right. Lena needs us there with her, especially in her condition. I put my foot down and push our old Volvo to its limits. After more than thirteen years, only one hundred and twelve miles separate us from our child.
“Ciao, Paps! See you soon! And thanks again!” I hear her say as clear as a bell, and in my mind I see her skipping down the steps to the front garden. On the afternoon before she disappeared, she came to see us for a coffee. Her bicycle had been stolen from campus and I made sure I handed over the money behind Karin’s back. Karin thought the girl ought to be more independent and, like lots of other students, get a part-time job. I thought that was a very bad idea. The girl ought to concentrate on her studies. Well, now the girl needed a new bike, so I’d given her the three hundred euros.
Ciao, Paps! See you soon!
Ciao, my angel, see you in 4,993 days …
“Matthias?” Karin is waving my cell phone. Only now do I notice the ringing and the blue display light illuminating the dark interior of the car.
“Gerd,” I presume, and I imagine him standing outside our house at this moment, ringing the doorbell a few times and realizing that we’ve left without him. I glance at the dashboard. He’d have been on time.
“Don’t worry, answer it.”
Gerd moans so loudly into Karin’s ear that even I can hear it. Karin apologizes. “We couldn’t just wait, surely you can understand.”
Gerd tells her to tell me that I’m still an idiot—I hear this too and can’t help grinning when a feeling briefly flickers, a slight wistfulness. Gerd and I used to be best friends, in the past, in another life.
“Yes, yes, don’t worry,” Karin says to Gerd before she says goodbye, and at the touch of a button the car becomes dark again. “He said to meet him at the hospital. We’re to stay calm until he gets there, also on account of his colleagues at the hospital.”
I snort; the wistfulness is gone.
“Like I give two figs about Herr Brühling’s colleagues. We want to know what’s happened to our daughter and that’s that.”
I can hear Karin rummaging around in her handbag; I suspect she’s putting my mobile away. But then I hear the familiar sound of a packet of paper tissues being opened. From the corner of my eye, I see her wiping her face.
“Abduction,” she sobs. “But if she was abducted, why didn’t anyone contact us about a ransom?”
I shrug.
“It wouldn’t be the first time some sick bastard abducts a young woman to keep her.” I immediately think of Mark Sutthoff. What if he did have something to do with Lena’s disappearance after all? Good God, I could have had him …
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