He took a step out into the street. “Now he’s stopping,” he told her, almost dislocating his neck. He was presumably talking about a car that had stopped a little way from the tenement.
She was relieved to see him occupied with watching the car instead of subjecting her to his usual volley of obscene remarks. Her letter box was empty; naturally it was too early for a response from Behringer’s. She hurried back up to her flat before Heller’s interest in the car waned and turned to her.
A little later there was a knock at the door. It wasn’t Heller, as she feared, but a young man who claimed to be doing a survey on unemployment. Heller was on the landing, gawping at them. She asked the young man in simply in order to get away from Heller’s glassy stare.
Without being asked, the young man sat down on the couch and asked for a glass of water. Friday was as hot as Thursday had been, so there was nothing odd about his request. After she had brought him a glass, he noted her answers on a questionnaire and took down - “Just for the statistical evaluation, you understand, it’s completely anonymous,” - some personal details: date of birth, place of birth, marital status, children, school, professional qualifications, dates of birth and, if applicable, death of her parents and any siblings etc., etc.
Naturally she didn’t tell him the truth. For the last two years she hadn’t even been telling that to her mother. Agnes Runge thought she had a well-paid position with a small firm. To the alleged pollster she claimed she worked as a secretary with a well-known estate agent’s. It wasn’t, she told herself, really a lie, just a little premature, given what nice Herr Reincke had hinted at the previous day. When the young man responded with a sceptical look round the room, she told him she was obliged to pay maintenance to her divorced husband, besides which she was also making a small contribution towards her mother’s upkeep, so that there wasn’t much left for herself.
As if to punish her for her lies, the letter box wasn’t empty on Saturday morning. One of her own large envelopes was in it. Her fingers were already trembling as she took it out of the box and recognized the company stamp. As she went up the stairs her knees were trembling as well. There was something raging inside her for which disappointment was too mild an expression.
After two days her documents had been returned with kind regards from Behringer and Partners. They were pleased to have met her but unfortunately had to inform her that they had given preference to another candidate and wished her all the best for the future. She couldn’t understand it. Hadn’t Herr Reincke indicated her appointment was as good as settled? She spent the rest of the day staring at the TV. She had intended to go for a walk, but she felt she would burst into tears sooner or later and she didn’t want to do that out in the street.
On Sunday she went to see her mother. The old folks’ home was twenty-five miles away and Johannes Herzog drove her there. His grandmother had a room next to her mother’s and at some point or other Johannes had offered to drive her home. Since then he had been coming to pick her up punctually at two o’clock every second Sunday, as long as he didn’t have a problem with the car.
Johannes was in his mid-twenties. He was studying - sporadically - some technical/scientific subject, but most of the time he was working as a stuntman for a TV series consisting mainly of wild car chases and crashes. It showed in the way he drove his car, an old BMW. She often felt carsick. But going with Johannes cost nothing.
She was still smarting from the disappointment with Behringer’s. Despite that, the usual fictions flowed from her lips while she was with her mother: the stress at work, going to see a play with her friend Jasmin Toppler. And that nice Herr Heller from the second floor had invited her out to dinner next Saturday. Specially for her mother she had endowed the obnoxious Heller with a lucrative profession, perfect manners and a pleasant appearance. But she wasn’t sure whether she’d go out with him, she said. She still hadn’t come to terms emotionally with her failed marriage.
That corresponded to the facts. There were moments when she felt a burning hatred of Lasko. He had made a name for himself as a freelance journalist and at the same time had been successful as a writer of books on current events. While she, three years after their divorce, was at her wits’ end as to how to survive, he was working on a book about the background to the conflict in Palestine. His previous book, about the operations of the UN forces in Bosnia, had been in the best-seller lists for ten weeks and must have earned him a tidy sum.
There was no contact between them. Despite that, she knew exactly how her ex was doing. Sometimes she saw him on television, sometimes she read an interview or report by him in the weekend edition of the paper, which she bought regularly for the vacancies section. Perhaps he would have helped her get back on her feet. When they got divorced he’d said, “If you ever need help…” But she had her pride.
She preferred to continue her monthly visits to the bank, and on the Monday she nervously filled out the slip to transfer four hundred euros from her mother’s account to her own. A hundred of that she took out straight away. On Tuesday she went for a long walk and concentrated all her hope on the next vacancies section. Then on Wednesday she found the slim white envelope in her letter box.
Her name and address had been handwritten in capital letters. There was no indication of the sender’s address. The stamp had a local postmark. She couldn’t wait till she was back in her flat but tore the envelope open on the stairs. As she went up, she unfolded a printed letter and read:Dear Susanne Lasko,
You said no. I attribute that to your surprise and the fact that you were understandably in a hurry. But I refuse to accept it. If Nature can play a trick like that, then surely we must give ourselves the chance to laugh at it together, at least just once. On Friday at three I’ll be on the balcony of the Opera Café and I’d be delighted if you could find the time to come for a coffee. Even if you don’t want to know who I am, I’d like to know who you are and what kind of life you lead. Not the best, was my impression. Perhaps I can do something to change that.
With best wishes,
Nadia Trenkler
It was obvious where Nadia Trenkler had got her name and address. There was only one possibility: Behringer and Partners. From her appearance she could even have a business of her own in the building, so knew Herr Reincke, Frau Luici, possibly even Behringer himself, had made enquiries and discovered that her double had not got the job. Perhaps she was desperately searching for a reliable secretary herself.
Friday started with vain attempts to moderate her wild hopes. She spent half an hour reviewing the meagre contents of her wardrobe, eventually deciding on a cotton skirt and a T-shirt. They gave her a fresh, summery look, she felt, not too poverty-stricken.
She set off at two, her head full to bursting with crazy hopes for some kind of miracle. She reached the Opera Café punctually at three and scanned the balcony. No sign of Nadia Trenkler. Most of the tables were occupied by middle-aged ladies. She sat down at one that was free. The waitress scurried over, but she told her she was meeting someone and would order when she arrived.
Nadia Trenkler was half an hour late. Despite the blazing sun, she was in a grey trouser suit with a bulging document case under her arm, as if she were coming from a meeting that had gone on longer than expected. She seemed slightly out of breath and excused her lateness with the traffic in the city centre and the time it took to find a parking place. She sat down and smiled. “I’m glad you waited.”
The waitress came. Nadia ordered two pots of coffee and two slices of fruit flan. “Sorry I didn’t ask, but what else can one eat when it’s so hot?”
Susanne nodded. They sat there in silence.
“Well now,” said Nadia after a while, stretching out the words, “where shall we start? I told you my name, wrote it in the letter too, and I’ve found out what you’re called. You don’t want to know anything more about me, but we can still be on first-name terms, can’t we?”
Susanne nodded again. The coffee and cake arrived.
The flan was covered with a thick layer of fruit - juicy peach halves, cherries, slices of banana and green grapes. She cut off a piece with her fork, trying not to bolt it down, and waited to hear what Nadia could do for her. But for the moment the woman with her face showed no sign of coming up with an offer. She didn’t like to ask straight out, and no harmless topic of conversation occurred to her.
As Nadia was putting the second piece of cake into her mouth, Susanne noticed her wedding ring. It was slim and almost invisible below a second ring with a showy blue stone that sparkled in the sun. “You’re married, er… Nadia?” she asked hesitantly.
Nadia was chewing and just nodded.
“I’m divorced,” Susanne explained. “Have been for three years now. He married again right away and had a daughter.”
She hadn’t meant to tell her that, just to mention the divorce to make her situation clear, but not that festering wound. His daughter! Dieter had announced the birth of his child with a half-page spread - and a bombastic message: “In a time when hope has all but vanished, we are delighted to have brought a little ray of sunshine into the world: a child’s smile.” It had sounded as if she were being blamed for failing to bear him the expected messiah - when she would have loved to have a child while she was still married.
“How long were you married, Susanne?” Nadia asked. The name came quite naturally.
“Seven years.”
“That’s too long just to smile and say thank you for a kick up the backside,” Nadia declared. “But some men are desperate to become fathers and if you don’t go along with it, or can’t, they give you the heave-ho.”
Susanne said nothing to disabuse Nadia of her belief that her cupboard was bare. Perhaps it was. Since the divorce her periods had been very irregular. Often there was nothing for months. But without a husband there was no point in worrying about it, and without health insurance nothing she could do about it anyway.
Nadia explained briefly that she had been more fortunate in her husband. He wasn’t interested in having a family. With that she passed on to the next topic and asked Susanne about her parents. It was, she said, making a joke of it, to rule out the possibility that they were related after all, even if at twenty-seven removes. Their excavations got them as far as their great-grandparents. All Susanne knew of hers was that they were honest, respectable people. She had no uncles and aunts at all.
The conversation was taking a course that was unlikely to fulfil her expectations. Bearing in mind Susanne’s declaration that she didn’t want to know who she was, Nadia told her neither with whom or how long she’d been married, nor where she lived or what her work was.
It must have been lucrative. Everything about Nadia screamed money. The ostentatious ring, the gold lighter and the cigarette case she held out to her when they’d finished their cake. She declined.
“So you don’t smoke then,” Nadia observed, almost with a note of envy. “How do you do it? Lord knows how often I’ve tried to give it up.”
“By never starting,” she said.
Nadia smoked three cigarettes with her second cup of coffee. Then she waved the waitress over, paid and left a generous tip. For a few seconds the sight of her bulging wallet left Susanne floundering in a welter of contradictory emotions, a revolting mixture of greed, envy and shame.
“You’ve still got some time, I hope?” Nadia asked. “I thought we’d go for a little drive in the country. We can talk without being overheard there.” She sketched a nod in the direction of two old ladies who appeared to be holding a whispered conversation about them. Time was the one thing Susanne had plenty of. A drive in the country sounded nice. And to talk without being overheard sounded promising.
The car for which Nadia had spent so long finding a parking place turned out to be an extremely manoeuvrable vehicle that could squeeze into small spaces: a white Porsche. Susanne settled as comfortably as she could into the passenger seat and scrutinized Nadia’s face with surreptitious sidelong glances. It was a strange feeling, as if she were sitting beside herself. She hadn’t felt it so strongly in the café. In the confines of the car it became overpowering and oppressive.
Stuck to the dashboard was a tiny frame with the photo of a man’s face. He was laughing. A nice guy, in his mid-twenties, Susanne guessed. Blond hair blowing in the wind, a straight nose, thin lips. The photo was too small to make out any more details.
“Your husband?” she asked, assuming it was an old photo.
And Nadia said, “Who else? It was taken two months ago, since then he’s had his hair cut. He only goes round with a mop like that during the holidays. Do you like sailing?”
Susanne shrugged her shoulders and swallowed. Two months ago, on a sailing boat! A sailing boat?! A boat wasn’t Nadia Trenkler’s style. A white yacht, that was it, with Nadia lying on the deck and the man oiling her back.
After a good hour’s drive they stopped at a little car park where a path led off into the woods. Nadia picked up her handbag and document case from the back seat and took both on the walk with her.
Then they strolled through green-filtered shade. Bit by bit Susanne spread out her whole life along the dry pathway, adopting Nadia’s tone of voice, though without noticing it herself. Her initial monosyllabic answers soon gave way to fluent candour. At the back of her mind she was still hoping for a job offer, but apart from that it did her good, after all the lies of the previous months, to talk to someone about the way things really were.
She’d had a good start in life: loving parents, good marks at school, good reports during training as a bank clerk and during her first years at work. Her father was proud of her and already saw her as a branch manager. Now and then she dreamed of getting married and having children.
She’d not been short of admirers. At twenty-four she met Dieter Lasko. He was working for the local paper and hardly earning enough to pay for more than the bare necessities. When they went out together she’d picked up the tab. Three years later they got married, moving in with his mother. And that was the beginning of the end.
Naturally it wasn’t all Dieter’s fault. A year after they were married she gave up her job after a bank robbery, which, it turned out, had been carried out with a toy gun. It would have been the right time to have a child. But it was not to be. Her mother-in-law became bedridden following a stroke and, shortly afterwards, Dieter started going to international trouble spots as a freelance journalist. It was probably preferable to the running battles at home.
For six years she’d looked after the house and garden, and taken her mother-in-law on fictional journeys to the castles of princes who regularly fell in love with their chambermaids. Dieter, meanwhile, had seen a war-torn world from the front line, and on his rare trips home he found she was becoming more and more of a cabbage.
By the time his mother died, they had nothing to say to each other. Dieter had found another woman in one of the trouble spots: Ramie, a translator, twenty-four and already pregnant with his child when he brought her home. Susanne was thirty-four, without children and convinced that after six years she’d fully got over the trauma of the bank robbery.
At this point Nadia gave a snort of contempt and said, “Parasites, that’s what they are. Let their wife finance them while they launch themselves on a high-flying career, then take her for every penny.”
“No, it wasn’t like that,” Susanne protested.
“But you said he was a freelance journalist,” Nadia insisted. “You had to support him financially when he wasn’t working.”
“No,” she said. She’d told the man doing the opinion poll something like that but had forgotten it by now. “For a start I had no income of my own. He even voluntarily paid a lump sum so I could get a flat in the city and furnish it.”
“He did, did he?” said Nadia. “And you haven’t seen him since your divorce?”
She shook her head.
“No other contact? Not even an occasional telephone call?”
“I haven’t got a t
elephone. And we wouldn’t have any more to say to each other than we did three years ago.”
Nadia nodded thoughtfully but said nothing more. After a few seconds Susanne went on with her story. After the divorce she’d applied for a job with her former employer - with her heart in her mouth and a shot of schnapps in her belly. Her father had sworn by schnapps in stressful situations. It worked for her as well. She was taken on - for three months.
The first month was taken up with familiarizing herself with the changes that had taken place over the years. Everything in the bank was done by computer now, but she could cope with that - more or less. In the second month she was already working at the counter. At times she was nervous, watching the door rather than what she was doing. Twice some money was missing at the end of the day. The second time it was a significant sum.
The manager agreed with her that the five thousand marks she’d recorded as paid in must in fact have been a withdrawal. She’d presumably pressed the wrong key. They relied on the honesty of the customer, unfortunately in vain. She’d had to make good the loss. The money was to be deducted in three instalments from her salary. But it never came to that.
She was transferred from the counter to the customer-service desk. One Thursday she went down to the basement with a middle-aged man called Schrag. He came regularly on Thursdays in the late afternoon to deposit something or take something out.
Herr Schrag ran a small electrical business from which he barely made a living. His accounts made grim reading. Whether things looked any better in his deposit box, no one knew. On that particular Thursday he came back from his deposit box with a brown envelope, which he put in his inside jacket pocket. Then he followed her up into the main hall.
Pale-faced, the cashier was emptying the tills. The manager and two of her colleagues were standing by their desks, hands raised, and beside the manager stood a figure like the one who’d put the fear of death into her all those years ago with a plastic toy. She wasn’t going to put up with that again.
The Lie Page 2