‘Open your eyes.’
She does not want to but she has learned to obey. He is holding a mirror in front of her face. His elbow pins her to the bed, like a stake.
‘Keep them open. I want to show you what you look like when you come.’
He swiftly pulls the knife up her leg; it stings as her misbehaving body is opened to the air. She watches the girl in the mirror, tries to stare at her straight-ahead eyes as they spasm. He is probably right: she probably looks like this — she would not know.
She waits for the release of air, but it does not come. It is as though he is dismantling her body, laying out her parts on an oil-splattered tarpaulin with plans to one day put her back together, a smoothly running machine. He throws the knife to the floor when he stands, the sea-grass matting dulling its expected clatter.
‘If you ever cut yourself again, Clare, I will cut you, too. Every time you do it, I will do one to match. You cannot keep changing yourself like this.’
As he leaves the room, he slams the door behind him. The light globe quivers on the end of its cord. If it fell down, would it burn her? She shuts her eyes and concentrates on her stinging leg, the warm blood trickling to the mattress. She stands from the bed, the blood drying like knotted string against her legs, and follows him into the living room.
‘You shouldn’t do that to me.’
‘You should not do it to yourself.’
But it isn’t the same. How can he not see that? She hates him for taking this away from her, for proving that she is nothing but blood inside.
‘It’s not yours. It’s not your body. I can do what I want.’
‘Is that what you want? To destroy yourself?’ He tries on an incredulous expression but it is ill-fitting. He gestures towards her legs, dismissiveness leaking from his fingers. ‘Is this what you want?’
She looks at those fingers, wishing that she, too, could be so sure, so direct. She shakes her head.
‘You’re just seeking attention,’ he says. ‘But you already have it. Do you think there is any room in my mind for anything but you? You’re all I think about. It’s making me crazy!’
She feels sorry for him; he finds all of this so difficult to understand. ‘I’m going for a walk.’ She waits for him to contradict her, but he does not say anything, so she returns to the bedroom and closes the door.
If she had a projector she could beam entire forests onto the walls. She would dress up in layers, wrap a scarf around her neck and pace against projections of birch trees in a Baltic winter. Strip down to a singlet, cover herself in sunscreen and project gumtrees for an Australian summer. Instead she throws herself on the bed. Lying on her back she leans her legs against the wall. She will never smell either of those trees again.
She cannot feel anything different beneath her hand. She always wondered why pregnant women stroked their bellies, even before the bump had formed. And now she knows. It’s the waiting to feel something growing. She refuses to be surprised; she will be ready for this. The tiredness, the nausea. Did she think it would never happen?
Her breasts grow with each day. She can feel the weight of them: they wish to distance themselves from her; they pull towards the bed as though there is somewhere else that she should be. She will be able to lie on her back until the baby’s weight becomes too much. And then she will lie on her side.
When she stands, her head spins, and she waits for the blackness to pass. She finds the rod in her arm, pinches it between her fingertips. They do not last forever, a few years at most, and now she has proof of the work it was doing all that time, while she thought she was alone. Something she never will be again.
Despite the persistent company of the child growing inside her, she feels an increasing loneliness. Her days in the apartment have become even more listless. The projects she had established to keep her mind busy have fallen away. The newspapers are piling up with their headlines intact; the jigsaw remains a jumble. She finds herself becalmed, as though tides are coming neither in nor out, and there is nowhere for her to catch hold and moor herself.
She wants to blame him for getting her pregnant, though she knows it was only a matter of chance. Or a matter of time, which she has long since stopped believing in. She does not want to tell him, but how can she not? Has he noticed the untouched tampons in the bathroom cabinet, her changing body?
The plant has begun to accuse her of infidelity. It was just me and you, it seems to say to her. You weren’t supposed to bring anyone else in to our days. There’s not room for more.
She has tried to ignore the plant, but it keeps hassling her. Its leaves rustle with disapproval every time she drops her hand to her stomach. She has taken to putting the plant in the bathroom each day, returning it to the living room before Andi comes home. When she goes to the toilet, she throws a towel over it, blocking its views, and she wishes the weight of the towel might reprimand the plant enough to give her peace. But when she lifts the towel, its leaves seem to unfurl even wider, feeding on their disappointment in her. As she hoists the plant in her arms, balances it on her hip and kicks open the bathroom door, she is aware she holds the plant as she will hold the baby. Close by, a secure grip. Not letting it get away.
He rolls over, throws the covers back and traces his hand across her shoulder. She continues to sleep. She may as well be far away, and it irritates him that he is not privy to her thoughts.
‘Dreams are only ever interesting to the people having them,’ she says when he asks. He pleads with her to tell him what goes on inside her night mind, but she refuses. He is afraid she is dreaming of places he has never been to and that he cannot know. Are they places that she would rather be?
‘Is it Australia you dream of?’
‘I’ve told you, it’s nothing. The beach, cliffs. I often dream of a jungle and swinging from vines, like they do in cartoons. There are no real people in my dreams, no meaning. They’re just thoughts, Andi, left over from the day.’
But one night she woke suddenly, sharply puffing as though in a race. ‘I dreamed my teeth were falling out. All of them. And even more than I had. They just kept coming, filling up my mouth, and I had to spit them out. They were spilling all over the table, cascading between my fingers.’
Holding her, he asked for details, eager to climb into this tiny piece of her thoughts. But she had little more to say, her fear subsiding as quickly as it had arrived. Eventually she drifted back to sleep, and the following day she said nothing of it.
Listening to her quiet breaths beside him, he is jealous; he rarely dreams. Instead he often lies in a state of restless wakefulness, his mind ticking over, his body begging to be left alone. He does this now, holding her body against his own as though to infuse himself with her peace. When it does not work, and she does not wake, he gets out of bed and goes down the hallway to the bathroom.
He has begun to think of life without Clare. At moments like this she is so far away from him that her physical presence is more torturous than comforting. He knows that he should release her, of course he does, but he is worried about what would happen next. She would tell the police, and he would go to prison. This is what would happen in such a situation — it is only right. And while he cannot quite abide the possibility, it is life without Clare that troubles him more than life in prison. It would not be enough, the sending of letters, the waiting for visiting hours. It would be so much worse than the long days spent at work, with his eagerness to return home. Would she visit him? But he dismisses this thought. She loves him; she would visit.
In the brightness of the bathroom light, he inspects his face in the mirror. There are dark moons beneath his eyes, and his skin seems loose, as though his skull is shrinking away. He looks more like his father every day, gawky and flustered, as though constantly being taken by surprise. He fears that, let free from their little world, she will forget to exercise the love s
he feels. And he will be left like his father, alone but for the memories of better times. He cannot let her go.
He has earned Clare’s love; he made it happen. Perhaps this is where his father went wrong. He expected love to simply be something that arose, fully formed, between two people. And when his wife left, it was as though that very thing had been stolen from him and there was nothing available to fill the void. If his father had paid more attention, Andi is sure that his mother would not have gone missing. Nothing should be taken for granted.
He turns off the bathroom light, goes back to the bedroom. He slips under the covers and takes her in his arms.
‘Clare?’
He knows she is pretending to be asleep.
‘Clare?’
He kisses her neck, rubs his hand over her hip.
‘Mmmm?’
‘Clare, I want to talk to you.’
‘I’m sleeping.’ She wriggles as though to accentuate her sleepy state.
‘What are you thinking?’
‘I’m not thinking, I’m sleeping.’
‘Clare …’ He pulls her towards him, rolls her body into his.
Her eyes open slowly, look at him, shut.
‘I want to talk to you.’
They don’t talk as much as they used to, and he worries about what comes after silence. For some time there seemed to be nights when they couldn’t stop fucking in order to talk. Or talking in order to fuck. And now they don’t do much of either, and he wonders again whether she is real; he fears that he has been taken in by some elaborate game. Has he tired of her?
‘Don’t you want to talk to me?’
Her eyes open again, regard him with disdain. ‘No, Andi, I don’t want to talk to you. I want to sleep.’
And there it is: he feels the anger twist inside him, a catapult ready to fire.
‘Well, it’s not always about what you want, is it?’ He holds her by the shoulders so she cannot roll away. The light from the hallway is still on, and it makes her hair a red halo around her face. He waits for her to emit a growl like a storybook lion. But she stays quiet, and her eyes stay open. He feels her body stiffen; she is making herself harder and more difficult to embrace.
‘Okay, I’m awake. What do you want to talk about, sweetie?’
Sweetie. He lets go of her shoulders, turns away from her and waits. Her hand creeps over his chest, nuzzles into his folded arms, searches for his own hand and holds it. It feels like a burrowing creature.
‘Andi, what’s wrong?’
Her other hand searches in between his neck and the pillow, her fingers stroke his cheek. He wants to turn and kiss them but he does not.
‘I was dreaming about the snow,’ she says. ‘I was dreaming about the snowman we made when I was very young and we went to the top of a hill that was near our town. The snow was in patches, you could still see the grass everywhere, and it probably had all melted away by the next day. But we gathered enough to make a snowman, and in my dream it was even bigger than me.’
He can picture the snowman, its belly leaning into the ground, its crooked smile. ‘What were the eyes made out of?’
She pauses a moment before answering. ‘Gum nuts. And his mouth was a gum leaf.’ She cuddles up close to him. ‘Maybe we can go to the snow one day?’
Her voice is loud in his ear. He wants to go to the snow. He wants for all of this to be over. He is tired of the care he must take, of the way time refuses to acknowledge their very existence. Nothing has changed or gotten better, it just stays the same; and he wishes he was not caught up in all of this, that he could be free to come and go as he pleases.
So then he tells her about his childhood, talking about snow as it is to her, an imaginary element, not the grey trampled slush he wades through on the way to work in winter. He tells her about tobogganing with his mother, her legs around him, forming a shell like a car body; her squealing voice above his head as they tore down the hill. ‘Faster, Andreas! Fast as the wind!’
And he had worried he couldn’t make it go any faster, but she did not seem to mind, and when they got to the bottom of the run she was laughing so much that she fell off the toboggan, her legs still wrapped around him, bringing him with her into the snow.
‘You must miss her, Andi?’
He is calmed by her voice and he does not want to disappoint her. ‘Of course.’ But the truth is, he does not miss her. There is no point missing something when you cannot have it back.
‘How old were you when she left?’
He thinks about not answering, about feigning sleep. He thinks of all those boxes stacked in his father’s spare room with no address to send them to. Belongings that his mother didn’t want and his father didn’t want to part with. He still has the scrap of paper his father gave him with her phone number, its plus sign indicating an international location; he has not called the number, he does not want to know what country she lives in. But it is almost summer. Soon she will be in Berlin, and he feels as though his world is folding in on itself. He has become an adult, but she has remained the same; she is still mother to his five-year-old self.
‘Five,’ he says at last.
‘What? That’s so young.’
‘I told you about it.’
‘When?’
‘I told you about how I waited at childcare that time,’ he replies.
‘What, when your mother caught the train to visit her grandmother?’
‘Yes.’ He wonders why he hasn’t explained it before. It all comes out so easily — it doesn’t seem like such a big thing now. ‘That was the last time I saw her.’
He hears her intake of breath. ‘She never came back?’
‘She went to visit her grandmother and she stayed.’ He rolls over so he is facing her. Her eyes don’t leave his face. ‘She always wanted to leave East Germany. My father says that was her only chance.’
‘But why didn’t she take you with her? Why didn’t you all go?’
‘We couldn’t all go. They only gave her a visa to visit the West because she left us behind. A husband and child, it was like insurance. They thought she would return.’ His mother used the Wall as an excuse, a reason to never return; and his father used it as a reason not to follow.
‘Did your father know? Did they plan it together?’
It was a question Andi had never needed to ask his father: the answer was as obvious as the boxes piled in the spare room, waiting as if one day she might return to unpack them.
‘My father is pathetic. He just let her go.’
‘But did he know?’
‘She left him a note saying her grandmother was sick, she had gone to Hanover, that she would be back in a few days and to pick me up from childcare. He didn’t know she wasn’t coming back. He even thought she might after the Wall came down. He didn’t hear from her again. And still he waited. Until now.’
‘Until now?’
‘She’s coming to Berlin.’
‘When?’
‘Soon.’ Andi turns away from Clare and stares at the ceiling, tries to make out the light fitting in the dark. He blinks rapidly, counting, not letting the tears leave his eyes. ‘I’m not going to see her.’
Clare doesn’t say anything, and he wishes that she would.
‘I don’t even know her. She’s like a stranger.’ He rolls over to face her, kisses her on the nose. ‘Unlike you. I know everything about you.’
Each day she thinks of new things to show Andi when he comes home, an attempt to take his focus away from her, from her changing body, which is courting disaster. It begins with the books: she lines them up according to the colour of their spines, with height as the second defining category.
She perfects her handstands up against the wall. It reminds her of lunchtimes at school when they would tuck their dresse
s into their knickers and cartwheel about the yard. There was so much freedom in being upside down, and it was something the boys were never able to do. She dips her hands to the floor and kicks her legs up, but the first few times her legs flail and come down, one after the other. At first she was too tentative: she was not used to flinging her adult body about. But now she just throws her hands down, flicks her legs up behind and lets them hit the wall. She stays there, feels the blood rushing to her face and her arms begin to quiver. Her head against the wall, she arches her back and, finally, when she can hold no more, she lets her feet drop to the floor with a thud.
She handstands in the middle of the room, maintaining her balance as she counts to five, then eight, then ten. She walks about on her hands: quickly at first, the momentum jolting her along, but as she gets better at balancing, her hand steps become slower and more certain.
She practises the handstands every day until her heels have marked her upside-down height on the wall. Her heel marks look abandoned, and she wonders about Andi’s mother, wonders about her own mother, a world away. Why has she not come to find her yet? She has so many questions to ask her mother. It would be awkward to discuss this situation with her, and she doubts that she ever will. But she runs through conversations in her head, answers herself as she expects her mother would. She asks her mother whether handstands would hurt the baby. Her mother laughs and wonders why Clare would be doing handstands anyway.
When her mother has dismissed each of her concerns, Clare removes all the teabags from their tin and puts them in a saucepan. She pours hot water on them and watches the tea steep to a dark brown. Using Andi’s toothbrush she paints with the tea mixture on the wall. It does not take very well: it trickles to the ground. She carries the bowl back to the kitchen and adds cornflour to the tea, stirring quickly. Back in the living room, she draws fighter jets on the wall with fire shooting from their engines, bombs falling onto the ground below. She draws spirals of smoke rising from the floorboards and pilots floating to the skirting boards beneath parachutes. It is the same kind of picture her sister used to draw when they were young. She, on the other hand, would draw landscapes, a river winding through the hills, a sun in the corner of the page beating down. Everything in perspective, leaning with commitment towards the vanishing point. She would pepper the landscape with a cottage, cloudy sheep, a train track, a reed-edged pond, all the requirements of country serenity. But those storybook pictures are too static for the apartment; she wants things that move, so she paints two-dimensional Roger Ramjet planes with bubble windows and wings bent with speed.
Berlin Syndrome Page 20