When Time Runs Out
Page 18
‘She’s dead,’ the man repeated. ‘The people next door said that.’
He turned around and left. They heard sobbing from the living room.
Judith instructed Kai to bring the mattress to the car. While he was gone, she began to disinfect the room. The use of further poisons wasn’t necessary – the decay hadn’t spread that far yet. Every time she fought her way through the narrow hallway into the bathroom she saw the man sitting on the couch, bent wide over as if he was searching for something on the threadbare carpet. On the fourth or fifth time she stopped and watched him. He wasn’t looking for anything. He was just moving with the erratic motions of an addict.
‘We’re almost done here,’ she said.
The man looked up.
‘I have no one else left.’
Judith shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t want to be sucked into a conversation.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ the man said. ‘I should have taken better care of her. And you’re right. Yes. You’re right.’
He started to rock back and forth. She went back into the bathroom and filled a bucket with water. Of course she was right. But it wasn’t her business to judge what had gone wrong in the life of Gerlinde Wachsmuth and her son. His photograph had stood next to her bed. He had been in her life but she wasn’t in his. It was that simple and brutal. The old rage boiled up in her, but she had learned to keep it under control. You had to differentiate between what was right, what was necessary, and what was pointless. It was absolutely pointless to tell men like him the truth. It would roll off him like drops of rain on a dirty pane of glass.
She turned off the tap and then went back to the bedroom without wasting another glance on the hypocrite in the living room. A little later Kai joined her and they worked until the early afternoon without looking up once.
Judith slipped out of the overalls and stuffed them in the blue bin bag. Her work was done. She was satisfied. She instructed Kai to carry the sacks of rubbish down and followed him into the hallway.
‘Mr Wachsmuth?’
The door to the living room was closed. She opened it and uttered a quiet sound of surprise. Kai, already almost outside, turned around and came back to her.
‘It can’t be true,’ was all he said.
The doors of the living room cupboard had been ripped open. The drawers had been pulled out, their contents spread out across the floor. Several picture frames were scattered carelessly on the tiled coffee table. Their backs revealed that someone had searched for something with great haste and little care. Light-coloured spots on the wallpaper glowed where they had hung. Judith lifted one of them. It was a poor facsimile of Spitzweg’s The Poor Poet.
‘The pig is gone.’ Kai, having inspected the entire apartment once again, returned. ‘What now?’
Judith held the print in front of a spot that would have been the right size.
‘We have to clean up.’
She put the picture to one side, kneeled down, and started to refill the drawers. Shot glasses, shoehorns, half-burnt candles, lace doilies, a box of photos. All had been tossed to the ground, spread across the floor all the way to the couch. Kai sighed, picked a cushion off the ground and fluffed it repeatedly.
‘If I ever see that guy again . . . First he leaves the old woman to rot and then he steals from her.’
‘Gerlinde,’ Judith said. ‘The old woman’s name is Gerlinde Wachsmuth.’
She was holding a photo of a man, a woman and a child. Taken sometime in the sixties, when people still assumed a pose in front of the camera, but were no longer spruced in their Sunday best. The man was broad-shouldered and rather stout. Although he gazed sternly into the camera, he had draped his arm around the woman’s shoulder. There was an almost girlish smile on her round face. The boy’s lower lip protruded. He looked up to his father and grinned at him.
Judith flicked through the remaining photos in the box. The man appeared several more times. The child developed into an ugly teenager with sideburns and long hair and began to assume a similarity to the wreck that she had encountered in this apartment a couple of hours before. Then the man disappeared. The woman appeared a few more times, posing in front of the Eiffel Tower or on a beach boardwalk. The rest were portraits cut out from passport photo machine prints.
A pictorial history of the pursuit of a little happiness. Father, mother, child. A family. Not perfect. Rather pathetic even, when the son goes as far as to steal from his dead mother. But Judith had a weakness for families. She pocketed the photo. The box would land on the rubbish heap anyway, just like everything else from the old woman’s belongings that couldn’t be turned into cash.
‘Are you swiping something?’ Kai had rehung The Poor Poet and was straightening it.
‘Not really. I collect family photographs.’
‘Don’t you have any of your own?’
‘No.’
Kai must slowly be getting the message that her sense of humour was limited. But he had learned enough today to know when it was better to keep his trap shut.
The heat tasted like burnt rubber. When Judith opened the driver’s door, it felt like she was climbing into an oven. Despite taking the autobahn, she needed almost an hour to get to Neukölln. The rush hour traffic was stop-start in both directions. The further south she went the more frequently she was passed on the shoulder by low-riders with tinted windows and boots full of subwoofers. She wiped sweat from her forehead and rolled up her long sleeves.
Kai had fallen asleep on the passenger side. His head lolled against the side window, the exhaustion so extreme that not even the potholes roused him from his coma. She risked a second glance. Did everyone get so tired at that age? She tried to remember how she had felt when she was that young. But she only ran into a blazing flame of self-hatred, vague yearning and depressing despondency. She saw the scars on the crook of her arm and rolled her sleeves back down.
Kai only jolted upright when she reached Dombrowski’s headquarters and turned off the motor. She motioned to a pockmarked steel container rusting away next to the entrance.
‘That’s where the rubbish goes. Your job.’
She removed the key and tossed it to him. He was still too groggy to react and let it fall to the ground.
‘Should I come on Monday?’
‘Do you want to?’
‘I have to think about it.’
He searched for the key. She had already got out by the time he had found it and resurfaced.
‘Hey!’ he called after her.
Judith didn’t turn around. She raised her hand in a fleeting parting gesture and walked across the dusty asphalt to the old tyre storage that her boss had converted into an approximation of a real company headquarters. There were lockers, showers, changing rooms and a break room in a building with a flat roof. To the left, a narrow hall led to the offices. Judith went to the bulletin board next to the entrance and with a single glance registered that no one was still on assignment except for Matthias, Josef and Frank, along with a small cleaning crew. It looked like a quiet weekend. She would take a shower, drink about four litres of water and then make her way to her apartment, where she only had to collect her telescope and sleeping bag. She went over to her locker and removed her duffel bag, which contained the essentials for becoming a human again after a day like this.
After the shower she dried herself off and paused briefly in front of the mirror in the bathroom. She lowered the towel she had just used to rub down her hair. What did someone like Kai see in her? A woman who had, at some point, missed the exit marked ‘pretty’ and come to a rest with a stuttering motor next to ‘mousey.’ Only with great effort did she make progress on this bumpy road called life. She had already choked the motor completely a couple of times; the last time it looked like she had totalled it. She had to watch out. Every day, again and again. Not become complacent. Always keep in mind that the next exit could be marked ‘terminus.’ The fact that real work wasn’t about an eight-hour shift, but
how you coped with sixteen hours. She had already survived two years and was stuck in one lane at work. She forced herself not to avert her gaze as long as she could. Then she turned away and slipped into her jeans and an old but clean T-shirt. She returned to her locker with the bag in hand.
‘Dearest Judith.’
She needed a moment to register what those two words meant. Dombrowski had crept up in his plimsolls. His plump face beamed with fake joy over seeing her again, the grey locks spinning their way over his high forehead like wet spider webs. He looked a freshly bathed Buddha, even if he wasn’t just emerging from the showers, like her, but from an office with no air conditioning.
No, she thought. Simply no. He raised his arms as if he wanted to apologise.
‘We have a cold starter.’
First published in Finland in 2015 by Werner Söderström Ltd (WSOY)
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Manilla Publishing
This ebook edition published in 2017 by
80-81 Wimpole St, London, W1G 9RE
www.manillabooks.com
Copyright © Elina Hirvonen, 2015
English translation copyright © Hildi Hawkins, 2017
Cover design by Lewis Csizmazia
Cover photographs © Michael Mann/Getty Images
Extract from The Cleaner copyright © Elisabeth Herrmann, 2011
English translation copyright © Bradley Schmidt, 2016
The moral right of Elina Hirvonen to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-78658-017-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78658-027-6
This ebook was produced by IDSUK (Data Connection) Ltd
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