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 gray 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 day. All I know for certain is that it must be after twelve-thirty, because I’ve already been to the bathroom. 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 woolen 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 onward, knowing I mustn’t make a sound, creep along the hallway, my shadow out in front like a somber advance guard, sidling its way along the bare laminate toward the front door, and me behind.
Knockknockknockknock. Four short ones.
My eyes dart toward 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 toward the stairwell.
“Oh yes, well, hello. I’m Maja, Frau Bar-Lev’s neighbor, her next-door neighbor. 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?
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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 neighbors, 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 feverishly, 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, traumatized 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 neighbor 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 woolen 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 program. 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.
No Maja. Maja has gone.
You’re mad.
Maja was never here, she doesn’t exist.
There’s just us now. We’re your family.
I shoot an uncertain glance at the cabinet. The pot and the post prove she was here. With a clatter, I put the stack of dishes on the floor and venture a peek outside my door. Nothing, just the stairwell in complete silence. Not a trace of Maja. I listen out for footsteps—none. I close the door as gently as possible and tentatively turn my head to peer over my shoulder, while my heartbeats in an ominous rhythm.
Why should she have slipped into my apartment? logic and reason ask. There is a reason, panic screams.
JASMIN
The apartment I moved into more than three years ago had the following listing:
Flatmate (M/F) sought for three-room apartment in Regensburg old town. 770 square feet in building with twelve apartments, balcony with mostly good view. Preferably a smoker because I smoke too. Love of animals would be an advantage because apart from me, an employee in the hospitality industry, the apartment is also home to a cat. You will have exclusive use of the 130 square foot bedroom. Kitchen and bathroom shared. We have a dishwasher, fridge, microwave and washing machine. Monthly rent: 310 euros including bills.
The accompanying photographs showed a home, that was my immediate impression. Not a home in the purely architectural sense of four walls and a roof over the head, but clearly a place where someone lived. The rooms looked colorful and slightly haphazard, a collection of furniture from flea markets and little treasures. A dreamcatcher by the bedroom window, a mattress for a bed, above it, in a chunky, ornate golden frame, a kitschy picture of the Virgin Mary with her baby Jesus, and a chandelier with colorful glass bead
s. In the kitchen, a large, rustic wooden table, its scratches and blemishes visible even from a distance, and one of those large, pink, American-style fridges. Piles of books towered behind the worn-out reading chair in the sitting room, covering the entire wall. Vast quantities of books, just on the floor, without any shelves. That alone would have driven my mother crazy, and it made me crazy too, but in a completely different way. I was electrified, I simply had to live there. Especially once I’d met Kirsten, who’d posted the ad. Kirsten, who seemed from a different world, who could have lived on Ibiza or another hippy island with her long, brown hair that looked as if it had been tangled by salt water and the wind and not brushed properly for years, in a flowery dress, countless necklaces and brown moccasin boots that were laced up to her knees. Kirsten, who was so cheerful, so full of life and only ever laughed. I was late moving out of home, but that was down to circumstances and probably a misplaced sense of responsibility toward my mother too. After my father’s death we only had each other, even if our relationship was more a matter of principle than anything to do with love or affection. Here, in this apartment, I was happy, strong, boisterous. Until Kirsten and Ignaz, a fat black tomcat, moved out about two months before I was kidnapped. I wanted to stay here just as fervently as I’d wanted to move in. I wanted to look after the apartment and the memories associated with it like a legacy, like a witness of an era, a brave remnant defying change; like a plant which grows through gray tarmac that you can pull out as often and forcefully as you like, but you’ll never get to its roots. Like the weeds in my parents’ drive that my mother never stopped complaining about.
I creep into the kitchen and take a knife from the block. The sharp one that cuts everything, including meat. I search every room, every one of the eight hundred square feet of this former home. I pay attention to the blind spots behind the doors and the floor-length curtains. I even check behind the shower curtain. There’s nobody here, the apartment is empty apart from me and my ghosts. For a moment I had been absolutely convinced that Maja had slipped in the door and was waiting in a quiet corner just to pounce on me.
Dear Child Page 12