How I Lose You

by Kate McNaughton

  ‘HELLO?’

  ‘Hey, Carm – it’s me.’

  ‘Eva! Hi.’

  ‘Is this a good time? You sound like you’re somewhere where things are going on.’

  ‘No, it’s just I’m on Green Lanes – hang on, let me duck into a side street so I can hear you better … So – how’s things?’

  ‘Um. Yeah. Good, I guess.’

  ‘What have you been up to this week?’

  ‘Well … What’s that noise?’

  ‘Ugh. Somebody’s just started drilling a hole in the road … Hey, why don’t I go home and call you back, that OK? It’ll only take about fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Sure – take your time, I’m not going anywhere.’

  Eva thought about what she’d been up to. Wandering the city in this strange state of unexpected respite: her failure to find Lena Bachmann had given her licence to ignore her doubts about Adam for a while, but slowly they had begun creeping up on her again, and she knew she couldn’t postpone her search indefinitely. She looked around her room: the chalk-white walls, the sparse furnishings. It all seemed so foreign: this history-weary city, this shadowy woman she was looking for, the Adam who had known this woman. The future felt so foreign: if she found her, what new territory would Lena Bachmann reveal, what new Adam? Eva just needed to hear a familiar voice, someone who rooted her in her home and her past.

  But in the meantime, she might as well do what she should have done the minute the address had turned out to lead nowhere. She switched her computer on, and it sang a major chord at the world. Lena Bachmann was in there. We were all in there, ones and zeroes multiplying exponentially, expanding into the vastness of cyberspace. We all left traces – an IP address, an old email account, our names at the bottom of a forum thread. You could find anyone on the internet if you looked hard enough.

  She typed ‘Lena Bachmann’ into Google. There was a solicitor of that name in Munich, whose brilliant career in the field of corporate tax law filled most of the search results on the first page. Eva clicked on her bio page on the Allen & Overy website: born in 1986. A little young, surely? She would still have been in school when Adam started his trips to Berlin, and it said here that she had gone to school in Düsseldorf. It seemed strange that someone of so few years could be so well versed in the art of fiscal evasion – surely it should be the province of middle-aged fat cats, men with bald pates and weasel eyes. Lena Bachmann stared back at her, stern, beautiful, fully conversant with the niceties of the Handelsgesetzbuch. This was not Lena Bachmann.

  She typed in ‘Lena Bachmann Berlin’. Eva had a feeling she was still here; she belonged here, in Adam’s memories of this place, of that time. There were several hits: one who was in a band; one who ran a beauty salon; one who worked for some historical research institute; one who was a social worker and had taken part in a Franco-German youth project the previous year; one who posted a lot on various political forums, and who could have been any of the others. None of them had a helpful bio like Lena Bachmann from Munich did; in fact, not one of them had a photo of herself online – Germans being, on the whole, as Ulrich had explained to her, more protective of their privacy than people of many other nationalities due to their decades of experience of police states. But they did all have contact details of some kind, apart from the social worker, who could presumably be tracked down via the Franco-German youth project. Eva wondered if she should just pick up the phone, start ringing them. But she didn’t like the idea of doing it blind like that, of ringing Lena Bachmanns who weren’t the real Lena Bachmann. She had imagined herself walking up to her front door and announcing herself, and Lena knowing immediately who she was, why she had come there. She had imagined the look they would exchange, full of knowledge, of unspoken understanding. She didn’t want to bring these strangers into the story, these homonymous impostors.

  She logged on to Facebook; even people who weren’t on Facebook were on it, in the background of a friend’s photo or mentioned on someone’s wall. Of these Lena Bachmanns, only the manicurist and the musician had their own profile – as did Lena Bachmann in Munich, looking a picture of health in all her photos. Eva knew that the Lena Bachmann she needed probably wasn’t on Facebook at all, as Adam wasn’t friends with her; but his profile was the key to tracking her down.

  She hasn’t looked at it in so long – hasn’t wanted to, it’s too weird, this continued virtual existence of his. The traces we leave, the ones and zeroes that still belong to him; when the flesh is dead, when the spirit is gone, what happens to our electronic souls? She can’t delete it, and she can’t look at it. But it is the way to Lena Bachmann.

  Eva opened Adam’s Facebook profile. Seeing a photo of him was still a shock: to be reminded that he had actually existed, that he had actually ceased to exist. In a ribbon at the top of the page were the photos she knew off by heart: she had been around when most of them were taken, had taken quite a few of them herself, and had looked through them to exhaustion as she was preparing the funeral. In the stultifying, long weeks just after Adam was buried, it had been one of her few activities. Now, these photos felt like a way back into the past, but a past that had become unreal, like childhood or adolescence. Had she ever, really, been that person smiling next to her handsome husband? Had Adam ever been anything other than a gaping absence? She clicked on the thumbnail of one of the photos from their last holiday in Henry’s house, one of the ones she knew best: Adam and Henry beamed at the camera – at her – holding a huge carp which Henry had managed to wrestle out of the river at the bottom of the village. The carp’s eye also seemed to be looking into the lens, as though it too were posing for the photo and had leapt back into life once the shutter had clicked. Although she had looked at the picture hundreds of times, there was something different now about Adam and Henry’s expressions. She had always thought of this as one of the happiest shots, a perfect reminder of sun and holidays and friendship – but in their previously radiant faces she now detected a hint of doubt, an anxiety around their eyes. As though there could never be such a thing as simply being happy. You took a photo of someone and you thought that you were immortalizing them, fixing them in that state for good; but the faces that looked back at you changed. You couldn’t just pin people down like a collection of butterflies.

  She clicked on Adam’s friends list. It was a jumble of different eras and areas of his life: people from college – including some pretty obscure ones – medical professionals from all over the world, guys from his running club, school friends, friends of hers, of Henry’s, of Carmen’s, in that way that social networks real and virtual have of branching out into each other. And random people, connections picked up along life’s haphazard way, some of them names she didn’t even recognize. She scrolled through them all, stopping off methodically at each German-sounding name. Anko Barnheim, Anna Blau, Stefan Deutsch were all members of the ICHS, which organized the big conference Adam went to every year – medics. Irrelevant. Plus they all seemed to live in Oldenburg.

  Facebook pinged a notification at her: Ulrich had invited her to some sort of event, a demonstration to save the Berlin Wall. Why did the Berlin Wall need saving? She didn’t have time to worry about that right now. She clicked on ‘Maybe’ and went back to the friends list.

  There was a Barbara Friedrich who lived in Berlin and who, judging from her photos, might be a primary school teacher. She was a possibility. A Fritz Heinecker who lived in London – maybe? And then she had it: Magda Herzfeld, Wissenschaftlerin an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften. The same institute as Historical Research Lena Bachmann. That had to be the one. For the sake of doing things conscientiously, Eva looked through the rest of the Germanic names, but she knew she had her – and sure enough, none of the remaining ones seemed in any way relevant. She googled the Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften at Humboldt University and noted down the telephone number for Frau Professor Bachmann. She would call and make an appointment as soon as she�
��d finished talking to Carmen.

  And she wondered if she should tell her friend about Lena Bachmann after all.

  She had burdened herself with conjectures and imaginings and invented dialogues and accusations and Adam and Lena and Adam and Lena, and maybe it would be good to get all this out of her head and into her friend’s ear, get some outside perspective?

  But it would involve so many explanations. The hints of something amiss unnoticed, that had only fallen into place after Adam’s death. The address that had led nowhere, Eva gratefully hanging on to this as an excuse not to find out just yet, perhaps even hoping she might never find out, was never meant to know after all. And now, so easily found, a correct address from which there was no escape.

  And anyway. This was a thing between her and Adam, an issue they had to sort out between themselves. She couldn’t bring Carmen into this. There was no room, even for as close a friend as her, inside this intimate sphere of hunches and low, soft, jealous undertones. The only person who did have a place here, maybe, was Lena Bachmann herself.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey – that better?’

  ‘Yes, much better.’

  ‘So.’

  ‘So.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Oh – not much, really. I just wanted to hear your voice. I’ve been feeling a bit homesick this week, I guess.’

  ‘Well – home is but an Easyjet flight away …’

  ‘Oh no, it’s not that bad. Hearing your dulcet tones will do the trick.’

  ‘So you’re still enjoying yourself out there?’

  ‘I don’t know if “enjoying” is quite the right word, but I feel – yeah, I don’t know, I feel it was a good thing to come here.’

  ‘Good how?’

  ‘Well, you know – to see the places Adam went, there’s something – something comforting about it, I guess. And it’s funny, lately I’ve been feeling – I don’t know, it’s like there’s this part of me that’s kind of waking up. I mean, you know, with the whole fact my family is from here, it’s like I’ll see parts of East Berlin, what they’re like, or meet people who come from there, and it’ll make sense of some small thing about the way I was brought up, or how my mum behaves or something.’

  ‘Like – what sort of stuff, exactly?’

  ‘Like – I don’t know, this is a really obvious one, but people here have a reputation for having a Berliner Schnauze – a “Berlin muzzle”. Meaning they have this sort of really abrupt way of communicating with you, like when you first get here and get on a bus or try to buy a stamp or something, it feels like people are being really aggressive, but actually they’re not, it’s not rude, it’s just the way they communicate. You’re not expected to get tangled up in politeness like you are in England – I feel like my mum has a bit of that Schnauze sometimes.’

  ‘Hm. Interesting.’

  ‘Yeah. Anyway, you really should come over, you’ll see what I mean, I think.’

  ‘Yes, Henry and I have been trying to work out dates.’

  Eva hears the click of Ulrich coming through the front door like an electric current through her body, and hears his deep, enthralling voice:

  ‘Hallo!’

  ‘Hang on, Carm – Hi there!’

  ‘Hey, Eva?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did you see I have sent you an invitation to a demonstration they are planning for the Berlin Wall in— Oh, sorry. I knock again later.’

  Ulrich had pushed his head through the door and, seeing Eva on the phone, pulled it out again clumsily, drawing a giggle out of her.

  ‘No, no, it’s fine! Sorry, Carm.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Oh, nothing, just – Ulrich – you know, the guy I’m staying with – just saw I was on the phone and it made him stumble in an amusing manner.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  Eva will not tell Carmen, either, about the way her heart lifts whenever Ulrich appears, about how she can’t stop looking at him, about how much time they are spending together, how much they talk. She won’t admit it to Carmen, because she is barely admitting it to herself.

  ‘Anyway, yes. How are you doing, Carm?’

  ‘Hm. Not great, to be honest.’

  ‘Oh. Shit. What’s going on?’

  ‘Well, nothing’s happened, particularly, I just – kind of had a depressing session with my psychiatrist this week. I’ve not been reacting that well to the latest cocktail of drugs he’s been giving me, and he didn’t seem very optimistic about the chances of us finding something else that would work …’

  ‘What does “not reacting that well” mean?’

  ‘I’ve been OK mentally – I mean, I still feel like this stuff is semi-lobotomizing me, but, you know, they haven’t been worse than any of the other drugs on that front – they’ve just been making me feel really physically ill, like nauseous, and then I don’t sleep well because I’m feeling so shit …’

  ‘Have you stopped taking them, then?’

  ‘He’s put me on a new cocktail. I guess we’ll just have to see how that goes.’

  ‘Well – it often takes a while to find the right mix of drugs, right?’

  ‘Yes, but – I sort of feel, like, the way he was talking, he was trying to prepare me for the eventuality of it not working.’

  Carmen’s voice is so small at the end of the line, tinny and frail, and it makes Eva feel like there is an unbearable distance between them, not the actual distance that separates them, which is there too, of course, miles and miles of it, but rather a more profound, essential distance between their beings, paradoxically made more acute by the fact that she has Carmen’s voice almost inside her ear, her thin, small voice.

  ‘I – I thought you were – better.’

  ‘…’

  ‘I mean – after Adam died. You coped so well.’

  ‘That was different. Don’t take this the wrong way, but it was somehow – I don’t know, something normal. I mean, it was awful. But it was also – one of those things that happen, you know? An awful thing, and it hurts, and you have this unbearable grief, but so did you, so did Henry. We were all sharing that grief. I had the same feelings as you, the same thoughts as you – or, not the same, of course, you were his wife, but, you know … The grief, it was a normal emotion to be feeling. And maybe it helped me that I wanted to be strong for you, too. I wanted to be able to help you.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Whereas, with this – I don’t know if I can win against my own demons, Eva.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m gone. Like I’m not going to come back. Like there was me, but that person’s gone, and I don’t even know who this person here is. I’m thinking these thoughts, but I don’t know whose thoughts they even are.’

  ‘You’re still you. You’re Carmen. We all go through rough patches sometimes.’

  ‘I feel like my soul has been plucked out of me.’

  ‘We’re here to help you, Carm. Whenever you need it, you just have to call me, or call Henry. You know.’

  ‘…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I just think sometimes you’re on your own, you know?’

  ‘You’re not on your own.’

  ‘You can’t get inside my head, Eva. Thankfully for you.’

  ‘…’

  ‘I can’t even seem to get inside my head. It’s like I’m looking at this person and I don’t even know who this person is, and this person is me. And if the drugs can’t fix it, that’ll be what I’m stuck with.’

  ‘I really think you need to try and not worry about that until you’ve actually tried all the options.’

  ‘I know, it’s just – for some reason it suddenly struck me this week that it’s possible there might not be a solution. That this might be it. And that got me thinking, I mean, you know, that would mean I can’t have a job any more, or at least certainly not a job as a lawyer, nobody’s going to employ someone who has a psychotic episode every two years �
��’

  ‘Well look, I mean, seriously – I really would try not to focus on that bridge until you get to it. If and when.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I just – for some reason I hadn’t actually thought about the fact that this could be a possible outcome, and it’s scared the shit out of me. It’s like I can see all of these roads stretching out ahead of me, and each one has a sign on it with the combination of drugs I have to take to lead a normal life, except for one shitty dirt track that is just like “No drugs and a future of constantly recurring psychosis”, and all these barriers are coming down at the start of the roads with the drugs and soon the only one that’ll still be open to me is the dirt track …’

  ‘Look, I can understand, it must be terrifying for that to be a prospect you might have to deal with. But you’re not there yet. If you’d told me two years ago what my life would look like now, I would have thought I’d never be able to survive what was coming. But, I don’t know – somehow I’m still alive, somehow I have survived it. People do. We survive the worst stuff life throws at us. But I would never have believed that if you’d told me back then, and I’m certainly glad I didn’t know in advance what I was going to have to deal with.’

  ‘…’

  ‘If your body wants to live, it’ll get you through more shades of hell than you ever dreamt you could get through.’

  ‘But it’s my mind that’s diseased, Eva.’

  ‘What, you think I didn’t go crazy after Adam died?’

  ‘I’m sure you went crazy. But you didn’t go psycho-crazy. You didn’t catapult yourself into a reality that doesn’t exist.’