“Oh—”
“The phone keeps ringing all the time as it is. Frau Beck,” she says, imitating a honeyed voice, “do you still have any hope that your daughter will be found? How are your grandchildren, Frau Beck? Just a short interview, Frau Beck, we won’t disturb you for long.” Shaking her head, she starts clearing the table. “I don’t want to have to go through all that again, Matthias.”
“I know, Karin. But I don’t believe that will happen. Why would they hang around here? Why would they waste their time? They won’t get an interview, not with us and certainly not with Hannah. And they’ve already got a photo of her. Why should anyone take the trouble to lie in wait here with a camera? They’re calling her the zombie girl, Karin! You’ve seen for yourself!” I shake my head in disbelief. “Zombie girl. But she looked so pretty in the photo.”
Karin freezes.
“Matthias, no.”
I lower my eyes. Karin can read me. She’s known me for almost forty years. She knows. Her “no” has got nothing to do with my desire to bring Hannah here. I can sense that Karin understands something bigger.
“You took that photo of Hannah and gave it to the press,” she says eventually. “You’ve done it again.”
JASMIN
So far as the pain of my broken ribs will allow, I sit huddled in my reading chair. My fingers clenched around the letter. Trembling.
Are you freezing, Mama?
Be quiet, Jonathan!
I love you, Mama.
Be quiet, both of you! You’ve got to leave me in peace, do you hear me? I don’t feel so well today.
I close my eyes and count my breaths, just as my therapist advised in the case of a panic attack. “The voices aren’t real, Frau Grass. They’re just inside your head. Let them pass over like clouds you watch in the sky. Don’t try to banish them, nor the images in your memory. Let them come and pass over; everything is all right, breathe. Breathe, deeply and calmly, breathe in, breathe out…”
I breathe.
The voices, they’re here. The memory floats upward, breaches the surface. But it doesn’t pass over, it grabs me by the scruff of the neck and drags me down, right into the depths where it’s dark, dusky at forty watts. I’m back in the cabin and it’s cold, so terribly cold. My breath makes little clouds in the air as I sit at the dining table with Hannah and Jonathan. English is on our timetable today.
“You have to concentrate, Mama. Learning is important. It’s important not to be stupid.”
I can’t concentrate. The cold. The clouds of breath which remind me how time is passing and I still haven’t found a way to escape from this hole. I don’t even know if I’ve been here for days, weeks or months. It could be just a cold summer’s day, or winter already.
“Are you freezing, Mama?” Jonathan asks with the naïve sincerity of a child who knows nothing apart from all this here. Your husband has been leaving us on our own more often during the day recently. Supposedly he goes to work, an absurd thought. A monster with a job, possibly a very normal, structured job; a monster with a payslip and insurance cover.
“Mama, I asked if you were freezing?”
Don’t call me Mama.
I’m not your mama.
“Yes, Jonathan, I’m really freezing. It’s cold today.”
He leaps up from his chair, darts to the sofa, where a woolen blanket is folded over the armrest, and brings it to me.
“Thank you, that’s very kind of you,” I say, wrapping the blanket around my body. For the past couple of days all I’ve been wearing is a thin, ankle-length satin nightie, as a punishment. While I was doing the washing under Papa’s supervision I spent a fraction too long with the detergent bottle, scouring the information on its contents. Poison, a possibility.
No possibility.
“You could drink that stuff for breakfast, Lena. It’s organic.” A short, horrible laugh. “You don’t appreciate just how much freedom I let you have.”
“Oh, I do appreciate it very much.”
No, I didn’t, God decided, and he punished me. No clothes, no stockings, no shoes, just my thin nightie. By now my feet feel like two lumps, foreign bodies that no longer belong to my body, and my fingers are numb. The cold has eaten its way inward from the goose pimples on my skin, right through my bones. I’m stiff all over. I even find sitting down difficult.
“Next word!” Jonathan calls out, beaming.
“Summit,” I read out robotically. This isn’t a textbook in front of me, but a general dictionary. “Basic English Vocabulary.” We’re merely working our way through the alphabet, from beginning to end. Robotically, we do everything robotically.
Jonathan’s index finger shoots in the air straightaway; Hannah’s doesn’t, which is unusual. Instead she’s thrown her head back and is letting her gaze wander across the ceiling.
“What’s up with you, Hannah?” I ask cautiously.
It seems to take an eternity before she looks at Jonathan, then at me, and says, “The recirculation unit is broken.”
“Don’t worry. I’m sure Papa will be back home from work soon and he’ll fix it in no time,” I say.
But I’m wrong. Nobody comes.
A quarter past six—a quarter to seven—half past seven—almost eight o’clock.
We’re going to get tired—sleep—suffocate. Jonathan’s already yawning.
“Don’t worry,” I keep saying.
The air seems to be getting thinner; I can’t differentiate anymore between fact and imagination. The ticking of the kitchen clock begins to sound like the beating of a heart, a heart with a loud, muffled, sluggish beat—loud, muffled, sluggish—louder, more muffled, more sluggish. The children, both yawning now, behind their hands at first, then with wide-open mouths. Jonathan, his eyes already closed. Hannah, with Fräulein Tinky on her lap, me reassuring her time and again that she doesn’t have to be afraid.
I brace my cold hands on the table and push myself up from the chair. I stagger through the sitting room, stagger to the front door, shake the knob pathetically until I’ve no more strength and I slump to the floor.
“I’m very tired, Mama,” I hear Hannah say softly.
“I know,” I reply.
Reaching out for the doorknob, I pull myself up on to my weak, cold, stiff legs, and go back to the children, the table. I glance at the kitchen clock, its heartbeats echoing inside my head, almost eight o’clock. I put my hand on Jonathan’s shoulder, wake up, stay awake, and hear myself say in a surprisingly calm voice, “Children, it’s time for your bath.”
We wander down the hallway, Hannah in front with Fräulein Tinky, then Jonathan and I, hand in hand. We take turns to go to the bathroom and clean our teeth, maybe for the last time. I suggest to the children that they sleep with me tonight, in the big bed.
“Can Fräulein Tinky come too?” Hannah asks.
I smile. “Yes, of course.”
We lie down close together; they mustn’t be alone now, that’s all I can do for them, be there for them right now; it’s not enough. I cry silently. When Jonathan breathes, there’s a rattling in his chest.
“We’ll definitely wake up again tomorrow morning,” Hannah whispers. “You don’t die that quickly, do you, Mama?”
“That’s right, darling,” I say with a smile and kiss her cold forehead. I avoid asking her how long the extractor hasn’t been working for, how long ago she stopped hearing the humming. In any case I’m far too tired to utter so many words.
“I love you, Mama,” Hannah says, but I can barely hear her now. “Forever and ever and ever.”
“I love you both too. Goodnight.”
I wrench open my eyes and gasp for air. I’m back in my sitting room, huddled in my reading chair. In my hand the letter is quivering. The piece of white paper with the accusatory letters on it. FOR LENA.
It’s not possible.
Is it?
JASMIN
I forced myself to call Kirsten, who is outside my apartment less than half an hour later, k
nocking just as I instructed her to do over the phone: three short knocks and two long ones. Knockknockknock—knock—knock.
“I’ve been meaning to get in touch,” she says, closing the door behind her. I just nod. I’m mesmerized by the sight of her. She looks so good, tanned. I wonder if she went away on holiday in summer. If she went away while I was locked up in the cabin.
“What a fucking mess, Jassy.” She strokes my hair, which was brown last time we saw each other; it was always brown, but now it’s blonde. Light blonde, with brown roots. When I was in the cabin I sometimes imagined us seeing each other again. Only in my imagination she said, “It’s great you’re back.”
“In the beginning, when you’d gone, I thought—” she begins, once we’ve sat on the sofa in the sitting room.
“I can imagine,” I interrupt her as soon as I can. I don’t want to hear that my disappearance could have easily been a melodramatic ploy to get her attention.
Just a few days away, mobile switched off. Go on, start worrying about me, look for me, find me, take me back home.
“Is it all true? I mean, what I’ve read?”
She takes a packet of cigarettes from her handbag and offers me one.
“No thanks, I’ve given up.”
“How stupid of me. I don’t imagine you had any in the cabin.”
“No, I didn’t.” I start biting my thumbnail, another annoying habit I ought to have given up a long time ago.
“Well, what about the rest? I mean, what it says in the papers?”
Her lighter clicks. She bends down to the ashtray, which is on the shelf of the coffee table, and puts it on the top.
“Do you mean that we were tied up and had to eat out of dog bowls?” I shake my head. “We had cutlery and crockery.”
It takes Kirsten a few seconds to decide she can chuckle at this. Much has been written in the papers these past few days; some of it accurate, but a lot of it far-fetched. Sometimes I wish I could bring myself to agree to an interview, to put them right. But I’m scared of the questioning, of some pedantic, overambitious, suspicious reporter trying to dig ever deeper. My brackets are fixed, even if this means that the poor woman from the cabin was fed from a dog bowl.
I show Kirsten the letter.
“This came in the post today.”
Kirsten inspects the piece of paper, far longer than necessary to take in the two words written on it. When she finally looks at me again, I detect a hint of doubt in her eyes.
“It must just be some nutcase who’s followed the reports in the media and wants to scare the living daylights out of you. You hear about this all the time.” She puts her head to one side and gives me a searching look. “Or who else do you suppose wrote it?”
I keep biting my thumbnail.
“Your abductor? Jassy, he’s dead. You killed him.”
“I know. But…”
Kirsten shakes her head ignorantly.
“What, then? Go on, tell me.”
I take a deep breath.
“The children.”
“What?”
“The children have every reason to be angry with me.”
Kirsten’s eyes get bigger, practically bursting from their sockets. This is what people look like when they come face to face with madness.
“The children? Jassy, what on earth are you talking about?”
I ought to laugh to cover up my silly little outburst, but instead I grab the armrest and try to get up. I can’t: the pain.
“There’s something else,” I pant. “In the bedroom. In the chest of drawers, second drawer, in a rolled-up pair of socks.”
Kirsten nods.
“It’s okay, Jassy. I’ll go take a look, you stay here.”
She gets up, bends down to my legs and lifts them carefully on to the sofa.
“Have a rest,” she says. I close my eyes gratefully.
Soon afterward I hear the wonderfully familiar sound of her heels on the laminate in the hallway and then a jarring squeak: the handle of the bedroom door. We oiled it hundreds of times, but just couldn’t get rid of the squeaking. I don’t know how often it woke me at night when Kirsten tried to slip into the bedroom after her shift at the club. At some point we got used to just leaving the door open … I tear my eyes open in horror, but I can already hear Kirsten’s voice, shrill with shock. “Jassy! What the…?”
MATTHIAS
Student, 23, missing in Munich
Munich (LR)—The Munich police are searching for clues relating to the whereabouts of Lena Beck, 23, from Munich-Haidhausen. According to eyewitnesses, the student was at a party on Tuesday night in the Maxvorstadt district until around 5 a.m. On the way home she telephoned a friend. Her mobile phone has been switched off ever since. A police search of Munich on Friday produced no leads. Lena Beck is 5 feet tall, petite, and has blonde, shoulder-length hair. She was last seen wearing a silver top, black jeans, black boots and a dark blue coat.
* * *
That was it, the first article of many—as I so naïvely thought—that would keep appearing until we’d found Lena.
It was the first article of precisely four: four articles over all the years she remained missing. Four serious articles, to be precise. The second one mentioned the police divers sent to check whether Lena might have fallen into the Isar and drowned. Witnesses who were at the party with her said she’d consumed “large quantities of alcohol and other unspecified intoxicants.” The third article then went off on a completely wild tangent. The Bayerisches Tagblatt had interviewed a girl, supposedly a friend of Lena’s, who had spoken to her on the phone just before she disappeared. The supposed friend, Jana W (“the name has been changed”) was quoted as saying, “Lena is a girl with a lot of problems.” Apparently she’d been on the verge of abandoning her studies. She’d taken drugs, not just at this party in Maxvorstadt, but at many parties, everywhere. She’d been “one of those,” “one of those” who’d go off with someone at the drop of a hat. An easy girl: you just had to buy her a beer, it was claimed. By the time the fifth article appeared, the “Munich student (23)” had become the “Munich party girl (23).” At the time I agreed to every bloody request for an interview, even though I already suspected that the press’s interest was no longer in finding Lena, or at least helpful witnesses.
I’ll never forget the day I met a journalist in my office.
“Lena is a model student,” I said, showing him her semester reports as proof. “Even as a young girl she wanted to become a teacher. And so her studies are her top priority—besides her family, of course. Our relationship is very close.”
A photographer the journalist had brought along took pictures of her reports and of me sitting upright in my chair, upright in every respect. Matthias Beck, then forty-eight, independent tax adviser with a successful practice, starched shirt and pinstripe suit, neat parting, rational, strong-minded.
“We don’t know what’s happened to my daughter, but she’s already a victim in some way. So I’m not going to allow her to become the victim of a media smear campaign too.” I’d specifically jotted down some notes beforehand, prepared in advance the sentences I was determined to say so I wouldn’t forget anything. “The way she’s presented in the media doesn’t reflect her character at all, and this type of reporting is also, in my opinion, hampering the police investigation.”
“How are you coping with all of this?” asked the journalist Lars Rogner, a smooth type with dark, gelled hair and a turned-up collar. This was a question I hadn’t prepared an answer to.
“It breaks my heart,” I said quietly, a lump in my throat.
Rogner nodded sadly.
“I can well understand that, Herr Beck. Terrible.” Then he cleared his throat and asked, “How old was Lena when she started taking drugs?”
A question like a fist, a hard right hand that hit me square on and made me slump into my chair.
The following day, of course, Rogner’s paper didn’t publish the picture of Lena’s reports or a determ
ined father sitting upright. It showed the heap of misery slumped in his desk chair. Father of missing party girl (23) from Munich: I knew nothing of her double life, ran the headline.
Karin belted me when she read that. It took her almost a week, and half a packet of opipramol, before she finally believed me that I’d never said those words. After that I would get up earlier every day and get the paper from our mailbox before Karin did. I read it secretly in the garage, sitting on my fishing chair in case my legs gave way as I browsed all the rubbish about my daughter. When I was finished I waited a while for my circulation to return to normal. Then I would fold up the fishing chair, leave the garage and put the paper in our neighbor’s bin. I would force a smile on my face, go back into the house and make breakfast. Karin and I came to an understanding that I’d learned something.
“At least she’s still in the papers,” we persuaded ourselves. However painful it was, we shouldn’t care whether the police and people out there were looking for a model student or a wild party girl. The key thing was that they were still looking for her. The key thing was that she didn’t fall into oblivion. Nonetheless Karin made me promise that I’d keep my distance from journalists in the future.
But now she’d found out that I’d intervened again. That it was me who’d passed Hannah’s photo to the press. It was a snapshot she’d let me take last week on one of my visits to the trauma center after I’d shown her my camera.
“Why the hell did you do it?”
Karin is standing beside our dining table, her arms spread wide. I pick up the dishes she has already stacked and take them silently into the kitchen. Karin scurries after me.
“Have you forgotten what happened the last time you got mixed up with those vultures? How first they tore Lena to pieces, then us?”
“All I want is for them to keep away from Hannah,” I say, making a pitiful attempt at an excuse as I run water into the sink to wash up. Karin’s incomprehension moans over the rushing of the water. Me of all people, who ought to have known better.
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