Raven Sisters (Franza Oberwieser Book 2)

by Gabi Kreslehner

  That was how it was. A slow suffocation. Burnout. The exhaustion, the vague fear burrowed into him, coming at him in constant waves, breaking over him and making him tired and lethargic. The waves robbed him of his breath and blocked his thoughts.

  He shuddered and noticed that the water had grown cold. Kristin stuck her head around the doorway.

  “Are you hungry?”

  He nodded, wondering at her placatory voice and her kindness despite the way he’d snubbed her earlier. When he came out of the bathroom, she had already begun cooking.

  “Did you pick up the letter?”

  He was curt. “You ask me that every day. What do you care?”

  She looked up, brushing a lock of hair from her brow with the back of her hand. “The card states that it’s a notary’s letter. That means it’s important. Who knows, maybe it’s an inheritance.”

  He barked out a brief laugh. “Me? An inheritance? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  She threw the knife on the table and turned on him, eyes blazing. “You know what? I don’t have to take that kind of thing from you. It’s my area of expertise, in case you’ve forgotten. I know that if it’s a lawyer’s letter it won’t be just a parking ticket.”

  “OK, OK,” he replied in a soothing tone. “It’ll be fine.”

  “Go and pick it up,” she said sharply. “You’ve got fifteen minutes until they close.”

  “OK, fine.” He sighed. “If it makes you happy. Will you lend me your car?”

  She asked no questions, merely got her keys from her purse and threw them over to him.

  When he returned, the letter in hand, she had set the table. He smelled fresh pasta, salad, and seasoning, and felt his stomach tighten with hunger.

  “Open it,” Kristin said.

  He opened it, and there it was in black and white: He’d had a grandfather in a town on the Danube, two hours’ drive to the south. He’d died and there was a will to be read. Tonio’s presence was required.

  Tonio and Kristin stared at one another.

  “You do have an inheritance,” she said. “I knew it!” She shook her head in amazement and laughed. “When? When’s the will going to be read?”

  He looked and got a shock. “In three days. Only three days!”

  She shook her head again.

  “Because you took so long to pick it up,” she said. “Idiot! Idiot!”

  They eventually calmed down a little, convincing themselves that he would be left a few books or some old records and that would be the end of it. They finally ate the pasta, which had gone cold, and over a glass of wine, she asked about this grandfather. Tonio knew nothing. His grandfather had never been there for him, and why would he when there was no father?

  Later, he slept with Kristin, or rather tried to. Somehow it just didn’t happen—too much wine, too many thoughts.

  “Shit,” he said and rolled off her. What a load of crap.

  “Hey,” Kristin said, stroking his back. “It happens.”

  He shook her off roughly, then stood and opened the door to the terrace. It was still raining.

  “What’s up now?” Kristin asked impatiently, and he suddenly knew she would leave him. If not today, then tomorrow or the next day. Soon, in any case.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Doesn’t matter. Leave me alone. Don’t keep asking me about things that don’t concern you.”

  “What?” This time she was seriously shocked. “How messed up are you? And how drunk?”

  She jumped up, pulled on a shirt, slipped into her jeans, and ran from the room.

  Tomorrow then, he thought and made a bet with himself, wagering a bottle of deadly absinthe. He imagined the persistent sharp taste the drink would leave on his tongue and thought the mark Kristin left behind on his life wouldn’t run anywhere near that deep.

  He went back to bed and waited for his mind to still, but it didn’t. There was not a trace of stillness.

  Kristin was banging around outside the room. What the hell is she doing? he wondered impatiently, longing for a drink to shoot through his body. The banging of the front door shot through him instead. Ah, he thought, today. So I’ve lost my bet. A pity about the absinthe.

  In the morning he found her key in the kitchen with a note asking him to pack up the rest of her things and leave them outside the door.

  Nothing else.

  He went into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe, his eyes gliding over the few clothes that hung on hooks and lay on the shelves in there. Then he took a large shopping bag, threw all her belongings into it, and put it outside the front door. There it could stay until Kristin came to fetch it. Then at last it would be final.

  A brief guest appearance, he thought, only six months. The intervals are getting shorter. He was surprised to feel a slight hint of regret. Alone again, he thought. No one waiting for me when I come home, no smell of morning coffee, no fresh bread.

  He shrugged, picked up the wine bottle that was still on the table from last night’s dinner, and poured the last drop down his throat, instead of coffee. It tasted lousy, and he pulled a face, but it suited the emptiness he was feeling and the fact that Kristin had left.

  Oh well, he thought, there’s always Degenhard. She would always take him back; her love was big and hopeless, and life didn’t always throw up a beautiful woman around every corner.

  The sky was scrubbed clean after the night’s lingering storms, and Tonio was dazzled, closing his eyes as he stepped out onto the street. He looked around for his car, and then he remembered.

  He closed his eyes again, balled his fists, and swore. It was the last straw! He’d be late again. The head nurse would bawl him out again, and Rasmus . . . The car had probably been towed to some godforsaken corner on the edge of this godforsaken town. Hassle, nothing but hassle.

  He began to run. He was sweating, and he felt the moisture in the air clinging to his skin in a sticky film. He stopped suddenly. In front of him was the hospital. The glazed entrance doors, the elevator on the left. Oncology on the seventh floor, where Rasmus waited with his eternal death-defying grin—even though death could not be defied—along with Frau Beurer, who would maybe miss Tonio although she did not have long left to live, and the little girl who had been brought in the day before, with her blue eyes and thin, spindly arms.

  Tonio took a last glance at the entrance, at the revolving door spinning and spewing out a small crowd of people who quickly dispersed in various directions.

  Here goes, he thought and tried to start walking again, but it didn’t work. It was as though his feet were stuck to the ground. I’m stuck, he thought and wondered at the fact that this didn’t surprise him. There’s no going on, not in this direction.

  He stood there for a short while longer, then turned on his heel and retraced his steps back to where he had come from, back to his apartment. He locked the door, threw some more clothes into a bag—this time his own—along with a toothbrush, a comb, tissues, and on top of them all, the letter. Then he left. He stepped onto the street. Heading for the rail station. Heading to a new life.

  Let them tow away his car. Let them curse him at the hospital because someone would have to cover his work. Let Kristin come to the apartment door sobbing and full of regret. None of it meant anything anymore. He left. To a new life. He was heading south to whatever awaited him—records, books, a fancy pen, whatever. Another life, come what may. It was the moment that always came, sooner or later. All it required was a little courage.

  As the train drew away, Tonio stood by a window that couldn’t be opened and stared out at the trees rushing past like flapping sheets.

  He settled into a cheap hotel by the station and explored the town for two whole days. He spent hours walking along the Danube.

  On the third day he went to the address stated in the letter. When he entered the office, there was no one else there but the lawyer and his secretary. He was stunned. Everything had been left to him; there was no one else. He was the sole heir. He was s
tunned. Tonio was given a key to an apartment and a savings book with money—not a great deal, but enough to live on for a while if he was careful.

  “All the best,” the lawyer said as he shook his hand. “Enjoy it!”

  “Yes,” said Tonio. “I will!”

  He left with an incredible feeling in his gut that would stay with him for the next few days. It felt like the hint of a smile, peace, the calm before the storm.

  He got directions to the apartment and entered the building. It was an old building in an old residential area imbued with the stuffy atmosphere of its residents, who resembled the patients Tonio had until recently cared for day after day. He unlocked the door to the apartment, still stunned by what was happening to him, and closed the door behind him. He leaned against it and looked around a tiny dark corridor that stank of stale sweat and cat piss. Once his eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, he carefully felt his way to the other rooms—kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom. It was crammed with furniture—cupboards and dressers all stuffed with things, essential and nonessential alike. The abundance took his breath away.

  He sat down on the sofa, closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and wondered at his situation. For the fifth time he took out the letter the lawyer had given him, the letter from a grandfather to his grandson. A grandfather he had never seen or even known about. He gave the few lines another reading, understanding as little as he had the four previous times.

  Eventually he began to search the apartment. He found things. Photos. Letters. Copies of police reports, translated from Greek into German, and his grandfather’s meticulous notes recording the events, each day as it happened, with a precision that bordered on obsession, from the report of the death to the transportation of the body and subsequent burial.

  A little later Tonio went back to the hotel, checked out, and moved into the apartment.

  The days passed, a week and then two. The summer ran its course but still held a clear intensity. As Tonio wandered through the neighborhood, people began to greet him. He returned their greetings.

  He began to clear out the apartment, slowly but surely, beginning with the clothes and the shoes. Getting rid, rid, rid. Underwear, dusty curtains, newspapers, books, moldy food, ancient toiletries. He smashed up furniture and household appliances and disposed of them in the bulk waste facility, then bought cleaning supplies and scrubbed floors, windows, walls, tiles.

  He hardly kept anything. Just a mattress on the floor, the kitchen cupboards, the table, a chair, the record player, and a few records. The emptier the apartment became, the more freely it seemed to breathe.

  He found little time to eat, fetching a pizza from the corner stand, snacking on bread, drinking water. The world shrank right down and became a tiny island that fit effortlessly into the apartment. Finding my way back to health by following the footsteps of a grandfather, he thought derisively.

  When everything was cleared out and Tonio had finally gained a sense of calm inside his head, he retreated to the mattress and stared into the eyes of the two men he’d known nothing about.

  He still hadn’t given them their names. They were nameless, fixed to the wall with rough tacks, clearly visible from his mattress, looking at him with their dark eyes. He gradually began to feel them.

  The younger one, his father, dead long before his grandfather, who’d spent half his life without his son—no, Tonio calculated, longer than half his life.

  He began to talk to the father, to tell him about the hospital, about Rasmus, about Kristin, about his mother, who lived way up north and whom he hardly ever saw, perhaps once a year if something cropped up.

  More days passed, and eventually he pinned up the women, placing them on either side of his father. He didn’t give them their names either. Later, he thought, perhaps later. The violins howled from his grandfather’s record player, wailing like ghosts, scratchy and much too slow. Upstairs, the neighbor banged on the floor with a broom because the music was too loud and it was three o’clock in the morning.

  Then there were the letters. Love letters. Florid, he thought at first, florid and dripping with platitudes. But the more he read them, the more beautiful he found them, losing himself in the words again and again. He never wondered how the letters had come to be in his grandfather’s possession, his and hers—they were as they were, as it should be.

  . . . dear hanna . . . dear tonio . . .

  That was the way their conversations always began, their dialogue intertwined like grasping fingers.

  . . . dear tonio . . . she wrote. The days were empty. She was waiting for him, her beloved, with every fiber of her being, wherever he was, whatever he was doing. She was longing for him, she missed him as soon as he left the room. His body was her pitcher, her jug, her soul had found its place in him as had her heart. Without him she was a small soft thing that fell apart, unraveled . . .

  He wrote back. . . . dear hanna . . .

  The days were empty. He was waiting for her, his beloved. With every fiber of his being. Wherever she was. Whatever she was doing. He was longing for her. He missed her. He had always missed her. All his life. Always. As soon as she left the room. Her body was his pitcher, his jug. His soul had found its place in her and his heart had finally awoken. He fell apart without her. He unraveled without her. It was as if he had never lived before. As if I’d never lived before . . .

  Crazy, the younger Tonio thought. You were both completely crazy. He wondered how it must have felt and realized that he had never experienced such depth of feeling. It must have been . . . incomparable. The violins on the record player penetrated to his marrow, like plaintive summer days. . . . dear hanna . . .

  Tonio ran his fingers over her face—her radiant, young face framed in red hair—then over the other face: Gertrud. He wondered what his father had been to her, what role she had played for him and how remarkable it was that all these events had come so late into his own life.

  A notion began to grow in Tonio, a desire to know more—to know everything. He had to know. The letters were the key, a key that he would send on once again.

  It was easy to find their addresses. Gertrud still lived in the same town, and Hanna had not changed her name. He sent one of the love letters to Hanna. Then he approached Gertrud as she walked home. He noted from her shocked reaction that the trail was still hot. She tried to shake him off, but he refused to give in and began to spy on her, to follow her. He sat in the café opposite her pottery shop. When she arrived at nine to open up, he was sitting there over his first coffee, looking over at her as she set up the stand on which she hung mugs and jewelry. The weather was still good, and she kept a table outside the door to work, creating little figurines and beads. It was a clever tactic, he thought, a good way of attracting customers.

  It worked. Tourists stopped to talk to her and look at her wares. She explained what she was doing—smiling, friendly, cheerful—and they often went away with pottery fresh from the kiln.

  Tonio didn’t like it when people stopped to shop. They cut off his view of her. He wanted to see her clearly. He paid his bill and looked for a better position, daring to get closer. He pretended to browse the newspapers and magazines at the newsstand, hung around on the corner smoking a cigarette, all the time acting as if it were all coincidence, as if they were all completely normal moments of his life. Acting as if it were not as though time had stood still, as though everything was starting anew.

  He wanted to watch Gertrud brush her brown hair from her face, watch her pin it up so it didn’t get in her way as she worked. He wanted to watch her push her hands into the cool clay, kneading it and shaping it. He liked the way her face revealed her concentration and the way the clay left traces on her arms, her T-shirt, and her jeans, sometimes even her face when she distractedly reached with a clay-covered hand to brush away the lock of hair that kept falling over her brow.

  He came again the next day.

  The waitress, a good-looking woman around fifty, was pleased to
see him. “You must really like us, you were here only yesterday!”

  “Yes,” he replied with a smile. “I’m visiting a friend.”

  He glanced across the street, and she followed his gaze.

  “Oh,” she said. “Gertrud.”

  “Yes, Gertrud.”

  She raised her eyebrows, let out an “Aha!,” and left him in peace.

  Once he had drunk his coffee and paid, he crossed the street and approached her. Gertrud looked up as his shadow fell on her, and she stiffened a little.

  “What do you want?” she asked brusquely. “There’s no sense in this.”

  “Talk to me,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”

  She sat still for a moment, her eyes closed. “It’s not your fault, but your father was an asshole. If that’s what you came to find out, you know now.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I can’t say any more. I don’t want to. It was so long ago. You’re churning everything up again.”

  He sensed she was softening. And he probed deeper. “Because he loved Hanna? And not you? I found letters. I’ve sent one to Hanna.”

  She raised her face slowly and looked at him with empty eyes.

  “Go,” she said. “Please stop bothering me.”

  She said it in such a way that he knew he had no choice. So he went. She stayed sitting there, doing nothing, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. She had hoped so much that . . . but it would have been far too much, tempting fate, too much . . . No one deserved that, least of all her.

  “She’ll come,” she whispered. “So you’re going to come, Hanna.”

  The café owner stood on the other side of the street, watching.

  There was a storm that night. Lightning flashed across the sky, splitting it open.

  Gertrud hunched on her bed, staring at the photos that kept appearing out of the darkness in the harsh light of the lightning flashes. They had been children, then teenagers, and then young women. Then life had separated them.