I was taken aback. ‘What is it?’ I asked, removing my hand from under her shirt.
A moment ago I’d had the feeling I could read her thoughts, we were so tightly fused together, but all at once, although I was still inside her, she was miles away.
‘I don’t feel a thing,’ she gasped.
I stared at her in bewilderment. She had cried out and sunk her teeth in my neck, seemingly overwhelmed by a tidal wave of desire.
‘No kidding?’ I said flippantly, trying to lessen the distance between us. I took hold of her hips and thrust my pelvis at her. She moaned and bit her knuckles.
‘You really can’t feel a thing?’
‘Idiot. I don’t mean that.’
In one swift movement she freed herself from my embrace and climbed off me.
‘What, then?’
Her discarded jeans were lying in front of the sofa table. She felt for them with her foot.
‘Absolutely nothing happens when I touch you. I only touched the Eye Collector’s shoulders for a moment, but I can make love with you and... nothing.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve had a lot of men. I know, of course, that physical contact isn’t enough on its own. What puzzles me is why it only happens with arseholes who hurt me, not with someone like you. With you it’s just nice.’
With you it’s just nice... There are times when you don’t need a lot of words to make a poem.
‘I can’t see into your past,’ she said.
‘That’s a mercy for both of us, take it from me.’
Alina didn’t laugh. She didn’t even smile faintly. She simply continued to sit beside me with one leg in her jeans and the other on the sofa, sighing.
‘Maybe I don’t have enough negative energy inside me,’ I hazarded. A few hours ago I would have advised her to seek psychiatric treatment for her delusions. Now that her visions had introduced us to the Eye Collector’s underworld, my sceptical outlook on life had been shaken.
‘No, it isn’t that.’ She finished buttoning her jeans and drew up both legs on to the sofa. ‘Until today I also thought it had to do with negative energy in the people I touched. But that poor woman in the cellar was full of it, and I felt no more than your own fingertips did. That was when it dawned on me. Sometimes I get these feelings and sometimes I don’t. I suddenly realized why.’
‘Why?’ I asked softly.
What did you discover about yourself in the cellar?
‘It isn’t just physical contact that enables me to see into some people’s past.’
‘So what is it?’
‘Pain!’
I tried to withdraw my hand, but she hung on to it.
‘I only remember when I’m hurt.’
And then the words came pouring out. ‘I had my first vision when I was seven, just after a car had knocked me down. I only have to think of it and I can still smell the driver’s breath. It stank of decaying food and cheap spirits when he hauled me to my feet. I tried to put my weight on my right leg and the vision transfixed me like a flash of lightning. I saw a reprise of the accident amidst the aura of pain.’
‘You saw him knock you down?’
She nodded.
‘From the driver’s perspective, with his eyes. I saw him screw the cap back on the bottle he’d just taken a swig from at the last traffic lights. Then I saw a child walking along the street. I heard him curse loudly. Then came a cut. Next thing I saw, he was bending over the little girl, who was howling with pain in the roadway. Over me.’
‘But earlier on, in the cellar?’
‘I was agitated, frightened, scared to death, but it wasn’t like that time when the man drove into me, or like just before I started to massage the Eye Collector, when I stubbed my toe.’
‘You mean…’
‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘I have to be hurt.’
I stood up so abruptly that TomTom, who had been dozing beside us, gave a jump.
‘I know it sounds incredible, Alex, but when that vase fell on my foot back at the flat it happened again. More details came back to me.’
‘You can’t be serious.’ I looked around for my own jeans.
‘I am.’ She presented her ear to me as she always did when paying full attention to someone. ‘Pain not only summons up new visions. If it’s intense enough it can summon up old ones as well.’
I found my jeans on the floor and felt in the pockets for my mobile.
‘What are you doing?’ Alina asked.
‘Calling the police. We’re going to turn ourselves in.’
‘What? No!’
‘Yes!’
Enough of this. It’s over.
‘I’m putting an end to this nonsense right now.’
The mobile vibrated as soon as I turned it on.
Seven phone calls. One text message.
There really is a parking ticket! I read, and quickly opened the rest of Frank’s message.
The police have found the Eye Collector’s car.
My head swam when I read the address.
This makes no sense. Why should he do that?
The Eye Collector had left his car outside my mother’s nursing home.
24
FRANK LAHMANN (TRAINEE JOURNALIST) ‘You did the right thing.’
Stoya put his hand on Frank’s shoulder and relieved him of the mobile he’d just used to send the text message. The young trainee started at his touch.
‘Really?’ he said. ‘So why do I feel like a two-faced bastard?’
23
(62 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)
ALEXANDER ZORBACH
Something’s wrong here.
I knew it the moment I entered the room.
Alina had remained behind with TomTom in the car, which was parked in a side street behind the sanatorium. It was hard enough for a sighted person to sneak into the ward unobserved. A couple complete with guide dog and white cane wouldn’t have got past the reception desk.
‘Hello, Mother,’ I whispered, taking her hand. My uneasy feeling that something was wrong intensified. ‘Here I am again.’
Something’s different.
I’d been prepared for the worst throughout the drive, expecting to be greeted by the sight of a nurse making up my mother’s empty bed. She would have turned round, casting her eyes up to heaven in annoyance because the hospital authorities had failed to inform me in good time and left the thankless job to her.
‘... sorry to say your mother died during the night... It wasn’t entirely unexpected, though... A mercy, actually, from one point of view...’
But it wasn’t like that. There was no empty bed, no nurse, and the gadgets that prevented my mother from dying had not been switched off.
Not yet.
They continued to hum and hiss their electronic hymn of praise to intensive care, a morbid symphony performed for an apathetic audience that had long ceased to register the sounds in its vicinity.
Everything’s the same.
Almost.
I felt tempted to remove the breathing tube that distorted her face, but I had only to look into those pale green, watery eyes, which were staring up at the dim ceiling lights, to see that it really was my mother lying there in a waking coma. She twitched occasionally, but that was normal too. They were unconscious reflexes. After-images of the person she was, like the fading speck of light on the screen of an old-fashioned television set after it’s been unplugged.
Everything’s the same. Her occasional moans and the smell of the body lotion with which they rubbed her every day.
For all that, something here is wrong.
Just then my mobile buzzed. It informed me, yet again, that a diverted call had been made to my number. I listened to the message.
‘It’s the nicotine patch!’ Dr Roth, the person whose voice I had least expected to hear, sounded as if he had won the lottery.
I switched the phone from one ear to the other in the vague hope of enhancing my comprehension of what he had to tell me.
‘The smoking cur
e you’re taking contains varenicline, a substance very similar to laburnum, an extremely poisonous plant. In the States, the Federal Aviation Administration has already banned airline pilots from using it because, like laburnum, it can induce hallucinatory daydreams.’
I felt for the patch on my upper arm.
‘So-called varenic dreams. We’ve found substantial traces of varenicline in your blood, Herr Zorbach. This may account for your nervous condition, and it wouldn’t surprise me if you perceive colours, smells and light more intensely than normal.’ Dr Roth chuckled. ‘You aren’t having any schizophrenic hallucinations. Simply remove the thing and you’ll be fine.’
Will I? I crumpled the patch between my fingers and pressed the red button on my mobile.
I was far from fine. I couldn’t get hold of Frank, the police wanted me for murder, and I’d been told to not worry about my perceptual disorders.
I looked at the window – it was still dark outside. My gaze travelled from the mottled grey lino on the floor to the battery of medical appliances around the bed. I didn’t know what they were called, but their instruction manuals had to be as thick as phone directories. Then bedside cabinet containing Mother’s old diary caught my eye. It was the one I always read aloud from when I visited her. She herself would never again be able to open it and wallow in nostalgic memories such as the day we discovered the track to my subsequent hideaway in the Nikolskoë Forest. I was just about to see if the little, gold-blocked, leather-bound volume was still in the drawer when I spotted what had been disturbing me all the time.
The photograph.
What the...?
It hadn’t been there the last time I visited her. The frame, yes. I had given it to her for Christmas many years ago, together with one of the few snaps of myself that even I liked. Taken by my father outside our front door, it showed a seven-year-old Alex doing up his shoelaces with an air of intense concentration. The photo had always put me in a melancholy frame of mind because it was a reminder of a time when being teased in the school playground on account of my cheap sneakers was my greatest cause for concern.
I picked it up.
The picture of me on the stone steps was still in the frame, but it wasn’t as I remembered it. It was a close-up no longer.
I don’t believe this!
I had shrunk to about half my original size. This meant that more of my surroundings were visible and I was...
...no longer alone?
My hands began to shake as I stared at the face of the other boy who had suddenly materialized on the steps beside me and was watching me do up my shoes.
Who are you? I whispered to myself. Who on earth are you?
The boy’s face seemed familiar, but he looked younger than me and wasn’t recognizable as one of my friends at the time in question.
What are you doing in my picture?
I turned the frame over, opened the clips that held the cardboard backing in place, and removed the photo.
And how did you get on to my mother’s bedside cabinet?
The boy had flaxen hair. His left eye was covered by a pink plaster of the kind young children are made to wear to cure a squint.
...his left eye...
My bewilderment grew when I discovered the note in pencil on the back:
Grünau, 21.7.(77)
I never got a chance to put the photo back. I was still pondering on the significance of the date – and the fact that I’d never been to Grünau as a child – when I was arrested.
THE EYE COLLECTOR’S SECOND LETTER
EMAILED VIA AN ANONYMOUS ACCOUNT
To: Thea Bergdorf
Subject:... and nothing but the truth!
Dear, purblind Frau Bergdorf,
I must, I’m afraid, continue to address you in this manner because you’re still blind to the hidden ‘pieces’ in my game.
Your eyes will be opened by this second email, which I’m sending you even before the game is over. I hope you’ll be grateful, although I’m assuming that you check your private account a great deal less regularly than your professional email address. If you did you’d long ago have discovered my first letter and passed it on to the authorities, or at least published it on your paper’s website.
Well, as I’m sure you can imagine, my own commitments make it hard for me to keep up with everything at this hectic stage in the game. That being so, I’ll come straight to the point: my motive, which I’m handing you on a plate simply so that you and the miserable lie machine you call a newspaper can inject a little moderation into your malicious campaign against me in the future. (Wow, I’m sure that was far too long a sentence for someone whose mindless rag normally confines itself to printing sentences in which no commas occur.)
All I do, I do in order to preserve the only true system of values in the world worth fighting for: the family.
Your paper, which (pardon me) is worth less than the shit on its pages after your readers have used it to line the bottom of their bird cages, condemns me – me! – for being a destroyer of families. The opposite is the case. Nothing is closer to my heart than the restoration of the orderly, protective relationships that my brother and I were not privileged to enjoy.
I think that my little brother suffered most from our father’s lack of love, perhaps because his grave illness rendered him more sensitive than I was. The loss of his left eye at the age of five affected more than his eyesight. It was almost as if the cancer had eaten into his soul after the eye’s surgical removal had failed to assuage its hunger.
Mentally more stable than my brother, I found it easier to accept our father’s continual absences, which I sensed even when he wasn’t – for once – away on a business trip or spending time with his friends.
There came the day when our mother, too, abandoned us – and I mean that in more than a metaphorical sense. Having stowed all her jewellery, cash and papers in the little sports bag she always took to the gym, she went off and never came back.
Father was furious. ‘What am I supposed to do with you two brats?’ he bellowed. He seemed less annoyed that Mother had skipped out than he was about the fact she’d neglected to take us with her.
My little brother couldn’t understand at first. He scoured the house in search of our mother for hours on end. He searched the cellar, the attic, the summer house. He even got into the wardrobe, buried himself sobbing among her clothes, sniffed her perfume, and discovered that she’d taken her favourite blouse with her.
The salmon-coloured silk blouse had suited her. We, her children, had ceased to do so.
That night, when my brother raised the subject of the ‘love test’, I went along with it for the first time. Until then it had never been more than a wild idea, an unrealistic fantasy entertained by two sad and lonely children. The thing was, my brother had thought up a test that would prove whether or not our parents loved us. It was simple, really: one of us would have to die.
Hitherto we’d always spoken of drawing lots. The winner would check to see if Mother and Father really wept at the loser’s funeral.
On the day our mother deserted us, however, I suggested another way of testing our father’s love for us.
We would hide!
Not in our tree house or the shack beside the lake, but somewhere we’d never been before.
‘If Daddy still loves us he’ll come looking for us, and the sooner he finds us the more he loves us.’
It was a puerile method such as only a seven-year-old boy and his heartbroken little brother could have devised. But, childishly naive though it was, it displayed a logical simplicity that still fascinates me today, many years later.
We found a suitable hiding place the following night. Whoever had dumped the old chest freezer in the woods had at least taken the trouble to wash it out with hot water. Nothing – no smells or labels or scraps of food – gave any indication of what it had contained before we lay down inside it.
We were glad the capacious thing was so clo
se to home. It had been left on the edge of a clearing, beside the path our father took when he went jogging every evening. No one could have failed to see it, so we weren’t unduly worried when we found we couldn’t open the freezer once we’d pulled the lid down over our heads.
At first we even made jokes about the broken screwdriver with the wooden handle which the previous owner must have left inside the chest, and which kept digging into my backside. Later, when the air became steadily thinner, it proved as little use to us as the coin in my trouser pocket.
The lid wouldn’t budge because the chest freezer was so old it didn’t yet have a magnetic seal, as modern safety regulations prescribe, but was equipped with a bolt that could only be opened from the outside.
Our love test had unintentionally become a test of life or death.
‘Daddy will come soon,’ I said.
I said it again and again. At first loudly and with conviction, but then, as I grew tired, ever more faintly. I said it just before I dozed off and immediately after waking up.
‘Daddy will come soon.’
My little brother heard me say it when he wet himself, when he started crying, and when thirst woke him up again. I also repeated it while he was sleeping his way to extinction.
‘Daddy will come soon. He loves us, so he’ll come looking and find us.’
But that was a lie. Daddy didn’t come.
Not for twenty-four hours. Not for thirty-six or forty hours.
We were eventually released by a forester.
After forty-five hours seven minutes.
By that time my brother had suffocated. I was told later that my father thought Mummy had changed her mind and come back to fetch us, so he blithely went drinking with friends instead of looking for us.
I still can’t rid myself of the notion that he might have downed a cold beer at the precise moment when my brother, mad with thirst, ripped the plaster off his empty eye socket and started chewing it. Never a night goes by but I dream of gazing at that hole in the head of my lifeless brother, who was doomed to die simply because his father had failed the love test.
Eye Collector, The Page 23