Goodbye Lucille

by Segun Afolabi

  ‘I don’t know why she puts up with me,’ her mother said. ‘Why does she do it when she could be enjoying herself – going to parties, travelling, focusing on her studies, anything – instead of looking after an invalid?’

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe she would rather be doing that if things were different. But they’re not, so she does what she does. Maybe she has no choice. She loves you.’

  ‘She does? Yes …I suppose she does.’ She began to cry again.

  30

  SHE DRANK BECAUSE it was what she had learned to do. It was the unlearning that came at an infant’s crawl, moving forwards, backwards, backwards again. As Frau Schlegel succumbed to the alcohol once more, I noticed how much calmer she seemed. She didn’t jump at the slightest noise, and though her words were often slurred, she was more relaxed, gentler. Sometimes her eyes betrayed an inner panic. They scuttled back and forth, unable to settle. She was full of the guilt and tension of the hidden drinker now. We never saw her touch the alcohol, but she was always under its influence.

  When she returned from work she made straight for the bedroom. There were places where she hid the drinks, which were dumbfounding. Sylvie found bottles of whiskey in the hanging baskets on the balcony. After we discovered how devious the mind could be, there was no place we didn’t look: the back of the new television set hid bottles of warm wine; the deep cracks of the sofa could swallow more than dust and pfennigs; the tops of cupboards; beneath the mattresses in the spare rooms; the cisterns in all the bathrooms; little bottles of spirits stuffed into the shoes that lined her room. Frau Schlegel never asked about her disappearing bottles. She didn’t appear upset by their loss, but she grew more cunning in her efforts to hide them.

  I took Claudia out to dinner several nights a week, to the cinema and the Rio – now Club Carnival, Claus’s latest venture. She had lost her appetite – she hadn’t been eating properly for weeks – and I worried about her self-neglect. I wanted her to surface from the constant anxiety of her mother’s illness. Frau Schlegel was no longer permitted to attend the AA meetings, where sobriety was insisted on, but Gaspar visited regularly to try to convince her to return to the sanatorium.

  ‘And part of me wants to stop,’ she confided in me one evening. ‘Part of me prefers it this way.’ She looked down at Claudia who was lying on the Persian rug. I wasn’t sure if she was awake, if she was listening. ‘It’s a bit like sleep,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Well … it’s not really like … like being awake. You’re hardly conscious. Days pass – you don’t know what’s happening some of the time, but you can function. Nothing seems so very important, and I like that. When I was in the sanatorium and soon after I left, every moment felt so real, so harsh, for such a long time. It felt brutal. I don’t know how to explain it well. I hated feeling that way; as if my whole body was electrified and I couldn’t switch off the current.’

  Claudia sighed and turned, but did not wake.

  ‘Have you made a decision about the reassessment?’ I asked. The sanatorium had agreed to readmit her on the basis of another interview.

  ‘I have no choice. I have to try again, for Claudi. And for myself,’ she said. ‘No one says it will be easy. They may not agree to take me this time, but I suppose it’s better to try and fail, and then try again. Better than to give up, no?’

  She had been so near to beginning a period of recovery, but I never saw Frau Schlegel again. It was in the news and on the radio. Clariss announced to all her friends that Vanessa Schlegel’s apartment block had been razed to the ground, along with her warehouse of shoes in Spandau. Frau Bowker claimed an explosion had destroyed all but the ground floor of the Zehlendorf building. The truth was less horrible, but just as devastating.

  She died on a Saturday afternoon. Claudia was in town, shopping for a raincoat. Frau Schlegel retired to her room to lie down. She fell asleep with a cigarette between her fingers. She hadn’t reacted quickly enough to save herself from the flames that raged all around her. A bottle of malt whisky was found beneath her pillow. We hadn’t once thought of looking there.

  People I had known or had once had contact with were appearing regularly on the news – Heinrich Henkelmann, Frau Schlegel, Ezmîr Özdemi – in the space of a single summer, the span of several weeks. All in the effort of getting along in the world: the casual sex, the alcohol, a place to call home. The endeavour to make life more bearable. Sometimes the sheer exertion of living drove a person beyond their limits.

  A batch of people I had seen in the press or had heard of attended the funeral: the actor Otto Ostermeyer and his wife; the playwright Clara Kohlhaase; the actress Sonja Mieke, who had once been married to Otto; half a dozen fashion designers. The Chancellor’s office sent a representative, but in truth Vanessa Schlegel’s star had been waning for at least half a decade. Few could afford her shoes and the styles had changed anyway. She had been reluctant to adapt to the times.

  It was strange to see the Schlegel clan: Julius and his sickly wife, Frau Schlegel’s still-sturdy mother, the aunts and uncles and some of their children. It was odd to see Claudia among all those white faces. With her mother gone she seemed alone in their midst. But Sylvie and her friends were there, as were B and Angelika, Frieda and the yellow-haired man from the sanatorium. Ulrich. Marie came out of journalistic curiosity, even though she had not been invited.

  At first Claudia could only cry, but later she seemed better able to cope than either Julius or her grandmother. In a way she had been preparing herself against calamity for much of her life. She had expected the worst and the worst had happened and still the world did not end.

  Julius and his wife remained in Berlin until the end of the week before returning to Frankfurt with Claudia’s grandmother. Frau Schlegel’s apartment was salvageable but, once it was restored, Claudia wanted only to sell it.

  It began to rain and the cold closed in. I remembered the hot summer, how we sat on the beach and our blood boiled.

  ‘We could go somewhere,’ I said, ‘before B gets married. Get away from here.’

  ‘You have somewhere in mind?’ Claudia asked. She hadn’t slept in her own apartment since the funeral. She did not want to be alone.

  ‘I don’t know. Greece, Spain? Somewhere warm. I miss the sun already. I’m not ready for another winter.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Claudia whispered. ‘It’s possible.’ She stood, staring out of my sitting room window as tears spilled down her cheeks.

  ‘Listen – anything you want, just name it. We’ll do it together.’ I went and held her. ‘Don’t worry about money.’

  She frowned and said, ‘But you haven’t any money,’ and then she laughed and cried and then somehow managed to laugh again through her tears.

  ‘I’ve got enough,’ I said, closing my eyes, and as I held her I felt a searing pain. It seemed I had never truly loved before. If this was love, what a terrible, brutal thing it could be. Not an experience to run to, but to flee from. I wanted to embrace it, yet cast it aside at the same time.

  ‘She should be here!’ Claudia cried. ‘There’s no need for her not to be. Sometimes it hits me so hard, that she’s not coming back. Not ever.’

  ‘Let’s go outside, let’s walk,’ I said. ‘It’ll take your mind off it.’

  She didn’t move. She hadn’t heard me. She inhaled as if she had just walked up the stairs, and wiped her face with the back of her hand. ‘You didn’t tell me,’ she said, still staring out of the window, ‘what exactly happened to your parents. You didn’t say.’

  ‘You don’t want to know about that,’ I said.

  ‘No, I do. Really. Tell me. Tell me something, anything.’

  I walked away and sat on the edge of the table. There didn’t seem any point in keeping it from her then. I told the whole story: of a grandmother left behind, and the rain and the car as it bounced like tumbleweed along the road. The last words spoken. How Matty’s ribs were smashed, his left leg broken at the ti
bia. How the scar across his torso remained to this day. How my father seemed unscathed apart from the awful whistling in his throat. How my mother lay half outside the car, her body twisted impossibly. How I screamed and screamed and screamed and no one heard. How I was untouched.

  I had never told Lucille what had happened. I had never told anyone the details as I was telling Claudia now.

  At the end she only nodded. She looked out at the stone-grey sky, which had shone so blue only weeks ago. ‘We could go far away.’ She turned at last. ‘Maybe Barbados or Hawaii.’

  My heart fell. I didn’t speak.

  ‘Money’s no object, remember,’ she smiled. ‘Only if you want to, Vincent. We can use some of Mum’s money. We don’t have to go if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Why did you say Barbados?’

  ‘Barbados? I don’t know. It was the first place I thought of. Why?’

  I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter … Say we go somewhere. We come back. I return to work, you continue your studies. What then?’

  Claudia sighed. ‘I don’t know, Vincent. I don’t know anything right now. The future …I can’t even concentrate on today.’

  ‘So … what is this?’ I said. ‘This back and forth? It’s tiring. I want to stay with you.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Well … yes.’ I had strayed from the shore and now the ice was thin. ‘I thought, maybe we … we could try at something – life, you and me.’

  She bit her lip and nodded vigorously as if she hadn’t quite taken something in, but was agreeing nonetheless. She came away from the window and placed her palm against my temple. ‘I never know what’s going on in here,’ she said.

  I shrugged. ‘Nothing much. It’s not such a mystery.’

  ‘I thought you hated me, in the beginning,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know how you felt.’

  ‘I didn’t hate you. Maybe I hated myself, but I could never hate you.’ I could feel the strength in her body despite her frailty.

  ‘We should go for that walk,’ she said, ‘before it gets dark.’

  I glanced outside. ‘It’s dark already.’

  Frau Lieser and Frau Bowker were shuffling into the hall as we descended the stairs.

  ‘You’re walking, Frau Lieser,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, no – it’s only the physiotherapy. It won’t last. If I collapse before I reach my door, don’t be surprised. Now, I’ll need a young man’s shoulder to assist me.’

  I helped her into her apartment while Frau Bowker and Schnapps clattered behind. ‘The sun disappears as soon as it arrives,’ I heard Frau Bowker complaining to Claudia. ‘The summer never lasts … and a good thing too.’ Already the heatwave was forgotten.

  ‘Now, a cup of tea would be perfect,’ Frau Lieser exhaled as she sank into the overstuffed chair. ‘Don’t you agree, Elsa?’

  Frau Bowker scowled, then looked up at us desperately, but we were already backing out of the door.

  ‘I hope they don’t come to hate each other, stuck in the apartment like that,’ Claudia said.

  ‘It’ll be all right. Frau Lieser will be well enough soon. She’ll be making tea for the other one in no time. Things will return to the way they were. She’s just enjoying the attention.’

  I looked back at the building, to the window where Frau Lieser and Frau Bowker had stood watching passers-by all summer. I looked up to my window out of which Claudia had been staring only minutes ago. Everything seemed settled and quiet, yet I knew that behind the walls life pitched and twisted, and sometimes it was calm for a while, but often it was not.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Claudia asked.

  I turned from the building. ‘Nothing, just nothing. Which way should we go?’

  Claudia shrugged. We glanced both ways as we waited on the pavement and then stepped into the road.