Retrograde

  “Of course.” Sister Anne steps out again.

  Every second alone is a victory and a torture. Dr. Meier will be here at any moment, and then what? With all these hours and days and even these last minutes to prepare, she still hasn’t decided what she wants to tell him. The truth? She can’t do that to Joachim. Wouldn’t he be in some kind of trouble? There must be a law against deceiving a sick person this way. Certainly they wouldn’t leave her in his care. She could tell the doctor part of the truth. She could say that she’d started to remember things, things from much earlier, but not yet everything. He may be a specialist, but he can’t see into her head. If they start to talk about what she remembers, she can come up with some harmless memories, ones that won’t change anything, and tell the doctor about those. And when they call Joachim in? Then it won’t just be about what she says. He’ll have to explain things, too. That’s what they want him for, isn’t it? To tell her about the things she can’t remember. As if he could tell her about all those years he wasn’t there. It’s a relief to know that the responsibility is Joachim’s, that it’s his decision how much to say. But it’s also terrifying to have so little control. Can she cover her ears as he speaks, shout at the top of her voice that she isn’t ready to know?

  The door opens and a handsome Middle Eastern man in a lab coat comes in. Helena’s surprised at how young he is. As if only an old man could know anything about memory.

  “Dr. Meier.” He comes over to give Helena his hand so she won’t have to stand up.

  “Ms. Bachlein.”

  He sits down behind the desk and takes out the images from the manila folder. Helena makes her way through the names of all the schools she attended and a list of her relatives, what she majored in and her first job. Sister Anne returns with a notepad and pen, then sits down one seat away from Helena.

  “You can finish that later and fax it in,” Sister Anne says, indicating the form.

  Helena nods, and then the silence seems long to her, so she explains about the accident again. Sister Anne already knows and the doctor must, too; it must all be there in her folder. But once she’s started she can’t just stop in the middle of things, so she speaks as fast as she can, stumbling over her words, until she’s reached new ground.

  “When my husband came into my hospital room I knew exactly who he was, who I was, all kinds of things. I felt confused about what had happened and why I was in the hospital—I couldn’t remember any of that. But in terms of our lives, I wasn’t aware of anything missing. It all felt… normal.” It’s strange to talk about that first meeting, strange even to remember it. She feels as if all the memories she’s regained were much more recent, and her accident had been years before. It’s even stranger to think of Joachim seeing her before she regained consciousness, seeing her lying there, and having to decide what to say when she woke up. Maybe he’d already decided. Did he plan it from the moment he got the phone call, or was it a spontaneous whim? But he couldn’t have planned it that far in advance. Even the doctors didn’t know she had amnesia.

  “When did you first become aware that you couldn’t remember certain things?” the doctor asks.

  She thinks back. It’s hard to identify with that vague woman in the hospital gown and all the bandages. Was that really her, or did she only see it in a movie? But if it wasn’t her, she’d remember what the face with the bandages looked like, instead of the view through them. “I was confused about the date,” she recalls. “I wasn’t sure what the date was, not even the year, and when I saw it, it seemed strange to me.” She pauses to give Sister Anne time to finish taking notes.

  “And what else?” the doctor asks. His elbows are resting on the desk and he leans forward, looking genuinely eager to find out about her case. It makes her feel like someone with an interesting story to tell rather than a patient. He must love his work. His enthusiasm makes her want to speak freely, and it’s hard to remember what she’s supposed to say and what she isn’t.

  She hesitates for a moment. But this is a thing she’s allowed to say; even Joachim said it. “My husband told me we’d decided to separate. I couldn’t remember that and I think that’s when we both noticed how much I’d forgotten.”

  “So you had decided to separate from your husband, but he still came to check on you when he heard about the accident.”

  “Of course,” she says, although there really is nothing natural about it, even less than the doctor thinks.

  “Are you separated now?”

  She feels herself blushing, although it’s the next logical question and answering it shouldn’t be difficult.

  “No,” she says after a few seconds. She doesn’t use the time to think about her answer, but rather to force herself not to think. If she really started asking herself that question, they’d be here all day.

  “In other words, in light of the accident…?”

  “We sort of put that on hold.”

  “Whose decision was it to separate?”

  “I suppose it must’ve been both of ours.”

  “You suppose?”

  “Doctor, I am being treated for amnesia.” As soon as she’s spoken, she regrets what she said, and regrets her tone even more than her words. If only she’d managed to say it lightly, make a joke of it. But the reminder came out defensive. Not that he’s accused her of anything, not yet.

  He gives her a tight smile. “That’s why I ask, of course. It’s important to define the boundaries of your ability to remember so we can work on these trouble areas. I take it you don’t remember why you separated, either?”

  “Not exactly. That is, not the specific moment I decided to, but we’d been having problems for a long time. So I can imagine…” Did the doctor notice her slip-up? The fact that she just called it her decision? If he did, he isn’t giving anything away.

  “Well, that’s one reason we like to have a family member or close friend at the appointment to clarify these things. What else have you had trouble remembering?”

  “Pretty much everything about the past few years. I’d changed jobs but I didn’t remember the new company I was working for, or friends I’d made there.”

  “Have you been on sick leave since the accident?”

  “No. I’ve been working from home. It’s the same type of work I’ve always done, so it wasn’t that hard to pick it up again.” Like her marriage. The same way it had always been, so it was easy to pick it up again. But it isn’t the same, is it? It feels different this time. When you come down to it, though, not much has changed. They may be fighting less, but they’re no more able to speak to each other than they’ve ever been. The realization knocks the wind out of her and she has to struggle to get air into her lungs again, keep answering the doctor’s questions about where she’s from and when she moved to Berlin fast enough to sound natural, slow enough to give Sister Anne time to write it all down, mark the boundaries of her memory like the map of some theoretical country neither she nor the doctor will ever know.

  By the time Sister Anne goes to get Joachim, Helena’s exhausted from the strain of remembering, replying, always measuring her words to say just enough. She tells the doctor in the past tense what she couldn’t remember, but never says that she remembers it now. Always, I noticed that I couldn’t remember… and never but now I can. When Sister Anne returns with Joachim, she almost expects to be sent out of the room so they can interrogate him in private, not give him and his so-called wife the opportunity to compare notes. But Sister Anne simply shows him to the seat next to Helena and asks whether anyone would like a cup of water.

  JOACHIM

  When Sister Anne returns with two paper cups of tepid water, Joachim takes both from her, gives one to Helena, and then slowly drains his without looking up. He isn’t thirsty but it’s a way of slowing things down, one millisecond at a time. Maybe he can keep draining little cups of water until their time here is up, until it’s the next patient’s turn and the doctor has to ask them to leave. Once he’s emptied his cup, he
doesn’t know what to do with it. Helena’s only taken a couple sips from hers, and has it balanced on one knee. She’s facing toward the doctor, but he can feel her watching him out of the corner of one eye as Sister Anne takes her seat again and turns to a fresh page in her notebook. He crushes the empty cup in the palm of one hand and holds it there, hoping no one will notice. He glances over at the nurse, and then fixes his eyes on the doctor like Helena is.

  This guy looks like he just finished medical school. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe he hasn’t seen enough to get what’s really going on here. What is really going on here? Even Joachim’s having trouble keeping track. Is he here to help the doctor treat Helena’s amnesia or to prevent her from remembering?

  “Let’s start with the basics,” Dr. Meier is saying. “Why don’t you tell me about your relationship with Ms. Bachlein?”

  Joachim can feel sweat gathering between his palm and the crumpled paper cup. What if Dr. Hofstaedter warned Dr. Meier to check up on him? He shouldn’t have asked her for advice. She was suspicious of him the whole time. But it’s a perfectly normal question so there must be a perfectly normal answer.

  “We’ve been married for six years now,” he begins, and wonders where to go from there. What level of detail is the doctor asking for? Does he want to know what their relationship was like, or just have some kind of time line? “We’d been dating for a couple years before that,” he continues. “We met at the advertising agency where Helena used to work. I was freelancing at the time and sometimes had projects there.”

  The doctor asks Helena whether she remembers all that and everyone turns to watch her nod once, twice, three times; yes, that’s all true. Joachim turns to see Sister Anne noting it down.

  “Did you live in the same apartment that whole time?” the doctor asks once the nurse’s pen comes to a rest.

  Joachim hesitates. It almost seems like a trap. Whether he and Helena were still married all this time is open to a very loose interpretation, but an address is an address. He didn’t move, though. “Yes,” he says. “The same one we live in now.” He looks over at Helena for a reaction, some conspiratorial wink or twitch of her face, but her expression is impassive as she nods a couple more times. So nobody’s in on this with him; he’s all on his own.

  “And you remember that apartment?” the doctor asks Helena.

  She clears her throat. “I do, but not everything looks the way I remember it. When I came home from the hospital, I noticed some changes.”

  For just an instant, the doctor’s thick, elegant eyebrows dart up, then settle again. “What did you notice, exactly?”

  “A painting I remembered was missing and not all of my things were there.”

  “What kind of things were missing?”

  Helena is searching the doctor’s face for some kind of cue, and Joachim wishes she’d look at him instead, so he could tell her to say… well, something. But she doesn’t take her eyes off the doctor’s face, and Joachim wouldn’t have known what the right answer was, anyway.

  “My clothing,” she says. “My books, shoes, that kind of thing. I had things in the apartment, but not all the things I remembered.”

  The doctor looks in Joachim’s direction and he wishes he had just one sip left in his crumpled paper cup, anything to dribble onto the sudden, excruciating dryness of his palate. “Mr. Schmidt, where are your wife’s things?”

  “Pardon?” Joachim croaks, although he understood the question perfectly. He clears his throat.

  “The things your wife remembers that aren’t in the apartment—where are they?”

  “Oh, you know.” Even Joachim resents his own superior tone. “It’s not like she remembers everything like it was right before her accident. Some of the things she’s been asking about I haven’t seen her put on in years. She probably gave them to charity ages ago and then forgot about it.”

  He finds himself unable to keep looking into the young doctor’s dark, unflinching eyes, and bends to put his cup on the floor. Sister Anne grabs it and tucks it into a pocket of her white uniform.

  “And the other things?” the doctor asks.

  “Some things are in the cellar.” With relief, Joachim recalls that Helena already heard this lie, so it doesn’t count as a new one. “We’d packed them up because we planned to separate for a while.”

  “A while?” the doctor repeats.

  Joachim nods as the muscles in his throat go through the motions of swallowing without any saliva to smooth the way. “Yes, we hadn’t really come up with a specific amount of time.” Except forever. Helena’s disappearance still stings like a recent wound if he presses on it, but he’s kept it out of his head this long, and he can keep it out for another half hour. So what if she never wanted to see him again? That was another Helena in another marriage in another life.

  “Your wife doesn’t remember why you decided to separate,” the doctor tells Joachim. “That definitely falls within the time frame affected by her amnesia, which seems to go back around three to four years, including the point at which she started her current job.”

  Helena leans behind Joachim’s back to whisper something to Sister Anne and the nurse stands up.

  “I’m just going to help Ms. Bachlein to the bathroom,” she says. “We’ll only be a minute.”

  Joachim watches them go like a train he just missed. But when the door closes behind them, a new ease settles over him. Does it really matter what he says now? The doctor can’t tell whether he’s lying, and if telling Helena the truth will help her remember, then it doesn’t matter whether he does it during this session or in the privacy of their apartment. Why does there have to be a witness to his confession? He won’t let himself be fooled by that stern medical gaze or the fine lines that appear and disappear from the doctor’s young forehead. Dr. Meier doesn’t know anything more than Helena’s recent medical record and whatever Joachim tells him.

  “There was no one reason we decided to separate,” Joachim says, and realizes for the first time how true this is. It always went without saying that Ester was the reason they split up, but now he sees that that was just an occasion for them to finally do it. After all, if he and Helena hadn’t “taken a break,” he’d never have met Ester. It could’ve been Ester or any other fight. She was just the sign they’d been waiting for.

  “But there must have been some reason,” the doctor persists. “Your wife wasn’t sure what it was but she implied that it was her decision to leave. It seems to me that she wasn’t sure that the separation was just a temporary arrangement.”

  “It’s true that it was mostly her decision. Helena was—” He clears his throat again and wonders why the past tense seems so much more fitting. “Helena can be a very moody person. If she gets upset about something, she may sulk about it for days, or she may do something impulsive.” That’s it: Helena’s a bit unstable, an unpredictable type who could walk out on him over nothing. That’s enough of an explanation for now.

  “And what did she get upset about in this case?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Mr. Schmidt,” the doctor interrupts. “I understand that this is a difficult topic for you to discuss with a stranger, or even with your wife. But you do understand that her mental health is at stake? Please do your best to think back to what this particular fight was about.”

  Their time must be almost up by now. Maybe he should just come clean, or start to. Once he opens his mouth to speak, all of this may disappear, like a bad dream you wake from in the last crucial instant, before you have time to die. “Helena thought I’d cheated on her,” he says. “We’d been fighting a lot and already talked about a trial separation, but things got especially hostile over that issue and that’s when we actually decided to go through with it.”

  “Had you?”

  “What?”

  “Had you cheated on her?”

  “No.” The single harsh syllable tastes like a lie, but it’s what he thought at the time, and what he’d say if he and H
elena were having the same argument now. He didn’t cheat. Or if some greater authority should step in and tell him that it had been wrong to sleep with Ester, that he had cheated, then it would still be true that he hadn’t meant to. And isn’t that what it comes down to? Not the physical act of sex with another woman, but whether he betrayed Helena in his heart.

  He has to ask the doctor to repeat his question.

  “Why did she think that?”

  Joachim answers in a single breath, not allowing himself time to think, because he’s already told the truth now, and he might as well. “We’d taken some time off before, just for a short amount of time, and I was involved with another woman during that period. I stopped seeing her the second Helena told me she wanted us to get back together, but…” He looks to the doctor for help, but his expression is as blank as ever. He could just as easily be watching a dull soccer game as hearing about the most difficult period of Joachim’s life. No nod for him to go ahead, no sympathetic smile of I’m a man, too brotherhood. And what was it all about, ultimately? That he hadn’t told Helena about Ester or that he’d been involved with her at all? He can’t remember now, and maybe he never really knew.

  “Your wife didn’t believe you?”

  “I didn’t tell her about the other woman right away,” he says, but the confession brings him no relief. If only Helena were here now, they’d be over the hurdle and in the home stretch. If only he’d already spoken Ester’s name aloud in front of her. But he’s done enough. She slipped out just when he needed her, but as soon as she comes back, the doctor will catch her up on everything she’s missed.

  “She found out, though?” the doctor asks.

  Sister Anne opens the door with a clatter as if to dispel any suspicions that she was eavesdropping. It doesn’t matter whether she was, or Helena was. If they were, Joachim won’t have to say everything twice. Sister Anne helps Helena back to her seat and resumes her position with the notebook on her lap.