Forever Yours

by Daniel Glattauer

  In fact, Bianca and Basti in his fireman’s uniform picked up Judith around one o’clock in thick snow, so they could pay a visit together to Nisslgasse 14. “Look, Frau Wangermann,” Bianca said from the passenger seat of the car as they were parking. “Two squares are lit up four floors up – number six brightly, number five weakly. Just like we said.”

  Bianca stayed in the car and watched the entrance so she could alert them by mobile if Hannes arrived. Within seconds Basti had opened the communal door. He took the lift to the fourth floor and rang at the door of flat number 21. Judith was standing a few steps lower down in the stairwell, listening to what was happening. The bell sounded three times and a moment later he whispered: “No one there.” But then someone apparently did open the door. Basti muttered something about: “Fire safety, escape routes, routine, won’t take long.” After what seemed like an eternity the door closed. Judith waited a few more seconds, just to be sure that Basti was in the flat. Then she scuttled down the stairs and hurried out to Bianca in the car. “Want some?” she said, offering Judith a lip balm that smelled of wild strawberries. “It’s epic if you’re feeling nervous.” Basti came down five minutes later. His mouth was open wider than usual.

  7

  “One thing’s for sure, Frau Wangermann: Herr Bergtaler lied to you,” Basti said. They were having their debrief in Gasthaus Raab, a popular haunt with the fire brigade. Customers served themselves beer from the pumps, above which hung a sign that read: “Advanced fire extinguishing training”. The problem with the debrief was that it was entirely dependent on what Basti had to say, and the words had to be teased from his lips one by one.

  The door had been opened by a sixty- or seventy-year-old woman with no mobility problems or children – at least no children were present. “What did she look like?” Basti: “Pretty normal. But she didn’t want to let me in at first.” “Why not?” Basti: “Because she said her son-in-law wasn’t home.” “Son-in-law?” Basti: “Exactly.” “Did you ask what his name was?” Basti: “No, but it’s definitely our Hannes.” “How do you know?” “Because she said my son-in-law Hannes isn’t home.”

  “Unbelievable! What else did she say?” Basti: “Not much.” “Basti, please try! What else?” Basti: “Then she let me in after all. And I had a good look around.” “And?” Basti: “From a fireman’s point of view it was all O.K., just the access to the roof…” “What else?” Basti: “Er… pretty nice flat, really. All tidy. Clean. Well looked after. You know, normal.” Judith and Bianca both shrugged.

  Basti: “Hannes has been living there for twelve years. And the next-door flat, his proper flat, which is always dark, it belongs to him too, and he used to live there.” “How do you know that?” Basti: “Because she told me.” “So what else did she say? What about her daughter?” Basti: “She didn’t say anything about her. But she’s called Bella.” “How do you know that?” Basti: “Because I saw it on a letter stuck to the pinboard in the hall – for Bella, my angel on earth, or something like that. And underneath, with everlasting love, Hannes, I think, with everlasting love or fidelity, one of the two.” “O.M.G.!” Bianca said. Judith: “Mum’s going to love this when she finds out!”

  Basti: “And there are some photos next to it. And above it. The whole pinboard’s full of photos of Bella.” “What does she look like?” Basti: “Very young, quite pretty, really. But thin and blonde and, how should I put it? Like women used to look.” “Not sexy then,” Bianca translated. Basti: “And on some of the photos there’s not just Bella but Hannes, too. Our Hannes, only ten or twenty years younger.” “Unbelievable,” Judith said. “So what’s become of Bella?” Basti: “She didn’t say.” Bianca: “Why didn’t you ask?” Basti: “Because it’s none of a fireman’s business.”

  Bianca: “Maybe she’s dead.” Basti: “I don’t think so.” “Why?” Basti: “Because I think she was there, in the room with the door closed. The old woman wouldn’t let me in there even though I said that it had to be checked for fire safety too. She refused.” “O.M.G.!” Bianca said again. Basti: “And besides, that room’s square number six from the street. The one that’s always lit up, even at night.”

  PHASE FIFTEEN

  1

  When he came to her bedside that night, she pretended to be asleep, but her arms and legs were trembling. She’d forgotten to post her pills into the piggy bank, and of course he spotted at once that they were still on the bedside table. He slid his hand beneath her sweaty neck and raised her head. Like one of those dolls that sleeps when it’s lying down and suddenly wakes when sitting up, she opened her eyes and stared right past him at the chest of drawers with the bowl of bananas. “Darling, we have to take our medicine three times a day, otherwise we’re never going to get better,” he whispered, bringing to her lips the glass of water in which the pills were already swimming.

  Within a split second she had to decide whether to bring her act to an end and fling the glass in his face. No, it would be smarter to close her eyes, open her mouth, swallow like a good girl, resign herself to the freefall and plunge into grey cotton wool. She swore that this would be the last time.

  When he’d gone she pressed her palms against her temples and tried to banish the initial onset of numbness. As long as her thoughts could cling to “Bella”, she remained above the fog. From time to time Jessica Reimann flashed across her mind. She would have been very proud of Judith at this moment. And then, out of the blue, the dominoes fell, one brick knocking down the next and the next. One solved puzzle revealed the next: Bella was short for Isabella. Isabella, Isabella, Isabella… Permason! The woman who’d bought the chandelier. And she’d been right: she did know the name. It had been at the top of the list. Isabella Permason. Reimann’s slanted handwriting with the loop of her “s”. The first time they’d met in the psychiatry unit, Reimann had been sitting at her computer, analysing some results. Judith had picked up the sheet of paper and scanned the personal details, pausing when she came across an unusual name. “Who are the others?” she’d asked. “Patients with similar medical histories, from our archive,” the doctor had replied. Right at the top – she wasn’t mistaken, she definitely wasn’t – had stood “Isabella Permason”. She and this woman on the same list. Hannes and Jessica Reimann the link between them. The same voice, the same crystal chandelier, the same jangling. The same light, getting weaker and weaker. Just faint sounds. The fog descended. The wall enclosed her tightly and robbed her of her sight. Go to sleep just once more. One more deep sleep, then…

  2

  December 22 was a Sunday. Basti’s text message arrived at around ten o’clock in the morning from his car in Nisslgasse. Hannes and the woman purporting to be his mother-in-law had left the building at similar times. Five minutes later, Bianca, who had been on call, collected Judith for the “winter stroll” they’d planned. Another fifteen minutes passed before Basti had located the right cylinder and opened the door with his locksmith tool. Now he and Bianca took over lookout duty and Judith was able to enter flat number 21.

  “Hello?” she said at the door to give herself courage. She headed past the photo gallery, and past neatly decorated rooms furnished with flower-pattern rugs and Biedermeier furniture, in which the air of autumn still hung, and made straight for a white door which was ajar. She rapped gently on it twice before it opened by itself.

  Judith was barely able to suppress a scream. She’d been prepared for anything and everything which might scare the living daylights out of her, but she had not expected this: an unperturbed figure made of marble or porcelain, yet alive and sitting upright in a French art nouveau bed by the light of a massive globe dangling from the ceiling. The figure locked on to Judith’s wide eyes with her own sad expression.

  “Hello,” Judith said softly, partly just to hear her own voice and also to recover from the initial shock. “I’m sorry to…” Her counterpart with the translucent skin and grey-blonde, neatly combed, shoulder-length hair, closed her eyes as if she were in a vegetative st
ate, but then opened them again to signal she was conscious.

  “My name is… er… Judith, and you must be Isabella… May I call you Bella? – O.K. I’ll just say Bella.” Judith spoke almost in a whisper, to avoid startling the woman. “I really don’t want to… bother you, but the two of us, well, we have a common…” She may have been mistaken, but the doll-like woman appeared to raise the corners of her mouth. “We have a common… I know him well. Hannes, yes? Hannes Bergtaler.” She began to insert pauses between every few words, trying to adjust to the snail’s pace at which time passed in this silent room.

  “He and I, Hannes and I, some time ago, well, I crossed his path, in fact I bumped into him. In a supermarket at Eastertime. And then… I really had no idea that he… He never said a word. Not a single word about you. Bella? Can you hear me? Do you understand what I’m saying?” The pale woman stared at her. The second hand of a brown wall clock imitated the noise of a slowed-down heartbeat. “I… er… Bella, I hope my question isn’t too blunt, but for me it’s very important. You have to understand that I’m not giving up, I’m fighting against it, and this is why I want to know: are you really… really his… I mean his… wife?” Now something about the woman’s mouth moved, as if she were putting herself through pain to show that she was able to smile.

  “Do you mind if I sit on the bed?” She did it anyway – why not? – and took the patient’s limp hand. For a while the two of them gazed at each other in silence and let the clock go on ticking, until Judith’s eyes filled with tears.

  “I expect you’re under very strong medication, you poor thing. I know what it’s like, it’s as if you’re paralysed, walled in, somehow not on this planet anymore, isn’t it?” Now the pale woman blinked again. She must have been beautiful when she was still living with her own reason, rather than in conflict with it.

  “It’s important for me to tell you one thing. I don’t know if you can understand me or… even want to, but I have to say it. I never loved Hannes, never, honestly I didn’t. But I noticed that too late. That was my big mistake. That was my… fault…” The woman was moving her head, trying to swing it to the left and the right, tensing her slack facial muscles. She found it difficult even to register an objection.

  “I don’t know if I’ve got the right to… God knows what you’ve been through, how it happened that you… Were there voices? Voices from next door? I know Hannes. He’ll use any means available. He has only one goal. He’s incapable of anything else. His idea of love is… well, it hasn’t got anything to do with love. Please excuse me if I…” Judith stammered. Bella pressed her eyelids together, then her right hand stirred, freed itself from Judith’s, crawled over to the shelf by her bed and stuck out its thumb to point to something. Beside a pile of coffee-table books was a radio alarm clock, a glass of water, a small heap of banana skins, boxes of pills, a thermometer, and a few blue plastic flowers in a little Oriental vase. But the marble-skinned woman was gesturing to the light-brown wooden casket hidden at the back.

  From it Judith took a necklace with large, shining spheres of amber. “Very beautiful, I suppose,” she said. “I hope you like amber more than I do.” The woman attempted another smile. As Judith was about to return the necklace to the casket, she caught sight of a drawing on yellowed paper – a fat pencil heart. On the back were a few handwritten lines. Judith read the short text, read it again, took the woman’s hand, squeezed it hard and said: “Bella, I’ve got a big favour to ask. May I borrow this letter? Just for a day. I’ll bring it back. I’ll come again, I’m not going to leave you here on your own. I’ll talk to your mother. I’ll do it straightaway, I’ll tell her the whole story. Everything’s going to be… everything’s going to be… better again. I’ll look after you, I promise.”

  3

  A pre-Christmas celebration was planned for that evening, with family and closest friends. Judith wasn’t supposed to know a thing about it and, when it actually happened, probably wouldn’t have much of a clue about what was going on either. Or so they thought. But they didn’t want to ruin the surprise for Hannes.

  By late that afternoon, Judith, Bianca and Basti had made all the necessary preparations to ensure that this very special celebration went with a bang. Judith had crept into her bed for one last time, and now she listened as the first visitors showed up, toasted each other with their glasses of sparkling wine and took their vocal chords through the usual limbering-up clichés which mark the start of most evenings of this kind.

  There were also the occasional embarrassed whispers, of course, owing to the incapacity of the woman of the house. She learned that her mental state was “stagnating”, but that it had “already passed the critical point”, that there “hadn’t been any serious episodes for a while”, that she was “a good eater”, and how amazing modern medicine was, with its ingeniously multi-faceted drugs. These allowed psychiatric patients to enjoy a “completely dignified existence” at home. Not only this, but Hannes argued that Judith was “a truly happy, even-tempered woman” and “could quite happily live in this way to a hundred”.

  At the end of the discussions about Judith’s health, Mum presented Hannes, in recognition of the sacrifices he had made in caring for her daughter, and to the dignified applause of the guests, with a thick layer of lipstick on both his cheeks, like an official cherry-red badge. Judith could hear the smacking of Mum’s lips from where she lay in the adjacent room.

  The evening was now heading towards its first climax. Judith allowed herself be woken, taken from her bed, and prepared to be received by the guests, although she insisted on dressing from her winter-psycho collection: violet pyjamas under a black towelling dressing gown. All her nearest and dearest were allowed to give her a big hug and welcome her to the real world. Only from Lukas did she keep a slight distance, as she found it mildly embarrassing to be acting up to him. And she attempted to give her brother Ali some heartening winks, as he seemed to have had a particularly miserable day.

  Then the host addressed the gathering. “Dear Judith, dear family, dear friends, as you know I’m no fan of long speeches,” began his long speech. He spoke of the past few months, which “by God, had not been easy” for any of them, of challenges which had to be met, personal changes that could come about practically overnight, and against which one was powerless and defenceless. At this point Judith decided to indulge in some interim applause, which led to a few highly rewarding moments of awkward Christmas silence.

  After this Hannes kept it brief, and arrived before long at the declaration that “Today is a special day for Judith and myself” – he wasn’t wrong. “How should I put it?” he went on. “Well, our living arrangements,” he said, meaningfully prolonging the “a” sound – “arraaaaaaangements”. Oh, indeed. Their living arrangements would certainly be changing today. “Our living arraaaaaaangments are going to change, expand,” he explained, chuckling. At this point Judith couldn’t help herself; she clapped her hands again, loudly.

  Hannes held up a key, jiggled it triumphantly and put on the voice of a medieval gatekeeper: “May I request that you kindly follow me.” Judith clung to Ali and pretended as though she were going to let him lead her. In truth she was the only one who knew where this short excursion would end up. She had recently encountered a similar living arrangement.

  A few moments later they were all standing in the next-door flat – the one which had belonged to the now deceased pensioner Helmut Schneider – marvelling at the extent of the renovations. Hannes had done a first-rate job, and had managed to keep it an absolute secret, apart from a few night-time noise offensives which had almost deprived Judith of her sanity. Almost.

  Of course, in these first euphoric moments, there weren’t going to be any disagreements, not even about decor, although from every square centimetre of the carefully modernised flat it was clear to the naked eye that the architect responsible normally fitted out pharmacies.

  “I took on this flat so we wouldn’t have to keep treading on each oth
er’s toes,” Hannes said with ceremonious modesty. With “we” he obviously meant Mum, too, for whom all this seemed to herald a third spring. Judith had moved away from the group and discovered a table with filled rolls, whereupon she declared the buffet open.

  “May I request your attention just once more?” He might. For he had one last surprise up his sleeve. It was waiting behind the white door, its phenomenal brightness already evident through a narrow opening.

  Now they were all standing in Judith’s new living room, bedroom, quiet room, unquiet room, dayroom, nightroom, all-purpose room, in the five-star dungeon assigned to her, where she would have everything Hannes considered necessary for an “absolutely dignified existence”, including a new, even bigger fruit bowl, albeit containing a disappointingly paltry three bananas. He would have to work on that.

  Judith made straight for the wall separating her supposed new home from her old bedroom and, unobserved by the others, felt it. She was dying to ask Hannes how he’d made the metal sheet noise, whether his voice was live each time or a recording, whether he’d actually inserted speakers into the walls. But that wasn’t her job anymore.

  Of course their entranced gazes were fixed on the ceiling in the centre of the room. There it was, hanging majestically above her bed, the elegant crystal chandelier from Barcelona with its unmistakable glittering play of colour. “This chandelier, dear family, dear friends, this chandelier has a very particular significance for the two of us,” he said. “In its light, Judith and I almost…” The short pause was required to allow those present to form the smiles this touching situation apparently called for. “Almost came to love each other,” he said.

  Judith – obstinate and incorrigible – walked up to the chandelier from the back of the group, knocked the crystal pieces together with both hands, producing that strange and yet so familiar melody, and burst out laughing. “Just look how pleased she is!” Hannes said. The others gradually began to see this.