Michael took her handbag, which she’d stuck down the seat beside her. Presumably he was looking for paper handkerchiefs, but what he came up with was a bundle of banknotes. In the bank she’d just stuck them in her bag. Naturally he was surprised to find Nadia setting off with a large supply of ready cash when she also had two credit cards. “What’s all this?”
Answering was impossible. She just swallowed convulsively and pressed her hand to her mouth. The stewardess was close enough to see what was happening. She passed over several paper handkerchiefs and indicated a brown paper bag in the net on the back of the seat in front. She was so wretched that she didn’t even feel embarrassed. Michael apologized with a baffled shrug of the shoulders. “My wife doesn’t normally have any problems flying.”
It didn’t get better. She needed another paper bag. She couldn’t understand that there were people who enjoyed flying. By this time drinks were being handed out. With the best of intentions, the stewardess offered them a cognac. Michael categorically refused and insisted on mineral water. She decided on a tomato juice with a lot of salt and pepper. That had perked her up on the morning after Lilo’s party. It did so now. But before her head and her stomach could get completely back to normal, the plane began its descent and everything started up again.
There was no looking out of the window for a first sight of Paris from the air. The lockers were better. The Boeing lurched as it landed, her stomach lurched too. Then, at last, it was all over. Michael unfastened her safety belt, commenting, not without a certain satisfaction, “It must all have been a bit too much for you in the last few days.”
He waited for the crush in the gangway to subside, then helped her up. The stewardess asked how she was and wished her a pleasant stay. Michael led her out of the confines of the plane and along endless corridors. At some point he took their suitcases off a conveyer belt and looked round for a trolley because he couldn’t carry two suitcases and support her at the same time.
“If you tell me where to check yours in I won’t have to lug it all the way to the taxi.” Once again he seemed think - correctly this time - that she intended to take off.
“You don’t have to lug me along,” she said, though she wasn’t all that steady on her feet. The ground seemed to sway at every step. The lights on the ceiling were flickering. The throng all around her left blurred impressions, as if in a photo taken by a camera with the wrong exposure.
“Sit down,” he told her. “I’ll go and see where Phil is.” He set her down on a chair somewhere, put the two cases beside her and went off. Ten minutes later he came back, surprised that Phil was nowhere to be seen. “Didn’t you tell him when we were arriving?”
“I forgot.”
Irritated, he pulled out his mobile to remedy her forgetfulness. Unfortunately he couldn’t get Phil and Pamela, so he said, “We’ll go round to their place. Perhaps they’re only out for a short while. If not, we’ll leave a message and go to the hotel. She decided not to tell him she’d forgotten to book a room as well.
She staggered along behind him to the taxi rank. He asked her to tell the driver Phil’s address, where it was, Montparnasse, and that it was best to go via rue de Vaugirard. Fortunately the driver had understood him, she wouldn’t have dared open her mouth. She crawled into the rear seat, feeling like death warmed up.
Paris, the beginning of December. It was a grey dream and bitterly cold. All she saw of the city was drizzle, the reflections of streetlights on wet tarmac and the taxi’s windscreen wipers. Her brain was still throbbing. The slightest movement of her head produced a horrible dizziness. The feeling of nausea stretched from her eyes all the way down to the backs of her knees. They were presumably driving past some of the sights, but she didn’t dare turn her head to the side to look out of the window.
The driver tried to chat with Michael, asking what the purpose of their trip to Paris was. She did get a few phrases. Michael obviously couldn’t understand what the man was going on about, at least he didn’t reply. The handwritten lines to Jacques, mon chéri came briefly back to mind. It clearly wasn’t a great risk to leave something like that lying around if her husband couldn’t read French. By now she could perhaps translate one or two sentences, but she hadn’t learned much from Dieter’s language course yet. Nor was she likely to as long as Michael was close by. And it was so important.
The very idea of having to use any kind of transport in the next few days made her stomach heave. She couldn’t even think of a hired car without retching. The taxi ride or, rather, the way the Frenchman weaved through the traffic, made her feel even worse.
Finally they were there - in a street that didn’t look much different from the one where she’d spent the last few years. Cars tightly parked either side and, beyond them, the dreary façades of tenement blocks. That the university wouldn’t provide luxury accommodation for a short stay by a visiting lecturer made sense. But she still had no idea why Phil and Pamela were here in Paris and just felt as if she was back in Kettlerstrasse.
The drizzle was getting heavier. Michael asked her to tell the driver to wait as they might have to go on. Then he got out and went to the entrance of one of the buildings. Only a few seconds later he came back, paid the driver - from her handbag - took the two cases out of the boot and told her to stay there until he came for her.
The driver turned round and asked something. Not wanting to start a conversation with him, she got out - with some difficulty. Michael was at the entrance. He hadn’t noticed that she was following him, squeezing her way through between two parked cars. He pushed the door open and peered into the dark hall. Squeals of delight came from one of the upper floors. Michael dropped the cases and threw his arms round the man who had come rushing down to meet him. As they thumped each other on the shoulders and back, she leaned against the wall, feeling her knees about to give way as the first black spots signalling the arrival of a faint appeared before her eyes. Then the nausea and the terrible dizziness were no more.
Her awakening was almost the same as at Lilo’s party: a gaudy picture on the wall and the face of an unknown woman. She was lying on a couch and the woman was holding a cup to her lips, giving her something to drink. It was just water. She took a few sips. “Are you feeling better?” Pamela - who else? - asked in English.
She sketched a nod and tried to sit up. Pamela pushed her back down onto the cushion. “No, stay in bed.” Then she turned to the door and shouted, “Mike!”
The room was even smaller than her “half-room” in Kettlerstrasse. A naked bulb was dangling from the ceiling, the window had no curtains. Apart from the couch there was just a small cupboard and when Michael came in the room was more than full. He was furious. “I told you to stay in the car. Did you hurt yourself?”
Just a scratch on her forehead. Her clothes were wet and dirty because she’d fallen in a puddle.
“We ought to call a doctor,” he said. He’d presumably never seen Nadia in such a state, apart from the time when she’d been on the bottle. But now, without a drop of alcohol in her blood, she was white as a sheet and her teeth were chattering so badly she could barely speak. “It’s just a dizzy spell.”
“Nonsense. You’ve never had that kind of problem before.”
Phil appeared behind him. He was shorter than Michael and had to stand on tiptoe. He gave her a wink over Michael’s shoulder and made signs - which Nadia might have understood. “Hi, there. What’s the matter?”
Michael explained something to him. She couldn’t understand a word. He was speaking too fast. Phil nodded and went out again. Pamela looked down at her, full of sympathy, and also said something. For the sake of simplicity, she just nodded. Pamela then set about taking her wet clothes off, fetched an old bathrobe, helped her put it on, took her into the little bathroom and stayed there with her.
A few tears mingled with the hot water of the shower. Paris! And the first steps of her new life had ended in a puddle. It was a bad omen. Pamela said something. In the shower she
could pretend she hadn’t heard, but she couldn’t stay in the shower for ever.
When, half an hour later, Pamela brought her out of the bathroom, Michael and Phil were sitting in a kitchen-cum-living room with another man. He stood up, then bent down to pick up his bag, clearly a doctor’s bag. Saying a few words in French to the two others, he went with her and Pamela to the tiny bedroom. Pamela stayed discreetly outside the door.
She got through the first few minutes with half a dozen “oui”s, on the assumption the doctor was asking her about her symptoms. He measured her blood pressure, felt her stomach. Her blood pressure was extremely low. He didn’t need to tell her that, she could see it on the gauge. He felt lower down, looked puzzled and asked something.
“Oui,” she said.
His fingers continued to squeeze her lower abdomen. Behind him the door opened. Michael came in, with Phil peering over his shoulder, despite the fact that she was lying half-naked on the couch. The doctor covered her up with the bathrobe and said, “Madame, vous êtes enceinte, vous comprenez?”
He had long since realized she couldn’t understand him.
“What did he say?” Michael asked.
Before she or the doctor could reply, Phil thumped him on the shoulder and let out a whoop of delight that filled the dreary little room. “Congratulations, Dad!”
She understood that, she could even make sense of Michael’s “Impossible.” Then he turned to her, to make it absolutely clear to the doctor that he must have made a mistake: “What’s the French for ‘sterilized’?”
But the doctor didn’t need a translation. He took out his stethoscope, put the two plugs in his ears and pressed the cool disc against her lower abdomen underneath the bathrobe. It didn’t take him long to find what he was listening for. He handed the earplugs to Michael. Michael listened intently.
Her heart was in her mouth. Now he must realize! Because an operation had made a distinction. He looked down at her, his face a battlefield of emotions. In her panic she could almost hear him saying: You aren’t Nadia. Instead he asked, “Do you want to hear its heart beating?”
She shook her head. He handed the stethoscope back to the doctor and went out of the room. The doctor packed his bag and followed him. In the kitchen he wrote out a prescription and received his fee - again out of her handbag. Then she heard him leave the flat.
Paris! Alone in an old bathrobe on a worn couch under a naked bulb, its light reflected in an uncurtained window. Inside her head she kept hearing Andrea ask, “Are you going to sue Wenning?” Now she knew what she’d meant. The door from her room into the hall was open and from the kitchen she heard the sound of voices and the clatter of plates. She spent about half an hour alone with her panic. Then Pamela appeared in the doorway and asked icily, “Would you like some chicken?”
She just nodded. “Dinner is ready,” Pamela said. It sounded as if she were being invited to a meal of deep-frozen chicken.
The mood in the kitchen was sombre. They all spoke a little more slowly with the result that she could understand some of what was said. There was no problem with names, anyway. They still thought she was Nadia. Michael told them about Hardenberg, Heller, Susanne Lasko, Wolfgang Blasting and Nassau. A house with its own beach, one size up from the villa her father had given her. She could only think on that scale. And it didn’t matter how much she had, she always wanted more. Money, money, money, nothing else counted. And she thought a balm of luxury could soothe the pain she caused. A Jaguar for the terrible time after her first disaster. A nice car, true, but he didn’t really need it.
Now and then he threw her a hostile glance. Phil and Pamela behaved as if she wasn’t there. Perhaps she should have been grateful for that. Michael mentioned the bundle of banknotes in her handbag, commenting sarcastically that it was presumably enough to pay for an abortion in a clinic. When Pamela served the coffee, it occurred to him that it was high time they contacted the hotel. He’d just give them a quick call, he said.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, “I didn’t think of booking a room.”
“That doesn’t surprise me at all,” he snarled. “Presumably you didn’t think you were going to need one.”
Paul asked what was the matter and offered them the guest room again. It was the room in which she’d come round. The couch could be pulled out, Phil explained, making a passable bed, not very wide but - very gemütlich. At the German word - and presumably the idea of them spending a cosy night together - he grinned.
“That’s OK for me,” Michael said, “but you don’t have to put up with it if you don’t feel like it. Ring your clinic, I’m sure they’ll take you now, even at this hour.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I booked in for Monday.” His assumption suited her quite well. If she got into a taxi on Monday and he thought she was going to a clinic, it would be longer before he realized she’d gone.
Shortly after midnight he followed her into the little room, closed the door, leaned back against it and asked which clinic she’d booked into for Monday.
“What’s it to do with you?” she asked. “You don’t need to hold my hand, I can manage perfectly well on my own.”
He nodded. “The police are sure to have a few questions about the Friday evening. I could tell them you’d gone to Kettlerstrasse and I had to wait until twelve for you. And that’s what I will tell them, if you keep behaving as if it didn’t concern anyone but you. I played a part as well, remember.”
She had no idea where this was leading. It sounded almost as if he wanted to be there when his child was scraped out of her womb. At that moment she was no one but Susanne Lasko. “As far as I care, you can tell them what you like. I know only too well that you don’t trust me an inch. And in this particular case you’re even right for once. I didn’t get pregnant deliberately, but now it’s in my belly and it’s staying there until I go into labour. Whether you like it or not.”
“You want to keep it?” He was stunned. And she’d believed Nadia when she’d said, “He’ll blow his top if he learns he’s fathered a brat.”
“Why did you book in for an abortion, then?”
“I didn’t,” she said. “It was you who said that, I just didn’t contradict you. What would be the point? You don’t believe anything I say. And I don’t need you to have my child. You want a divorce. Go ahead. I’ll manage on my own.”
With two steps he was there and she was in his arms. From that moment on everything was different, though it was hours later before she understood what she’d done for him. She! Not Nadia! And if one day he came to know who she really was, perhaps he would be able to love her for it. If, at some point or other, he became aware he was living with a copy, perhaps he would already have realized that her idea of love was closer to his than anything Nadia had ever done for him. She’d financed his studies in the USA and bought him a Jaguar, but she’d never been able to give him the kind of life he wanted. And two severed Fallopian tubes had denied his longing for a child.
Since a pregnancy had occurred despite that, they could sue Dr Wenning, who had performed the sterilization. On the other hand, they could simply rejoice at the bungled operation. Michael was overcome with joy, wanted to forget everything and start all over again with her. If only it was that simple.
On Saturday morning he wasted no time telling the others she wanted to keep the baby. There were a few language problems, which were interpreted as the natural agitation of a happy mother-to-be. And after breakfast they solved themselves. Pamela asked if she would speak German with her and correct her mistakes. In contrast to Phil, who assumed his language was universal and thought anything else was a waste of time, Pamela wanted to learn. So they all got on famously, Michael with Phil and she with Pamela.
Shortly before midday Michael finally got round to booking a hotel. Phil drove them there. They just deposited their cases. Saturday was a slight improvement, cold but dry. She still didn’t get to see the sights, however. Nadia had been to Paris so often it never occur
red to Michael to do a sightseeing tour with his wife. After booking in at the hotel, they went back to Phil and Pamela’s.
On Sunday they went for a stroll along the banks of the Seine and had lunch in a little bistro. On Monday Phil was busy at the Sorbonne. Michael had something to he wanted do by himself in the hotel, so took her to Pamela’s by taxi. He still didn’t seem to trust her entirely.
That would have been the chance to do what she had planned to do in Paris. Instead she went out with Pamela, who took her to some little shops, not the big stores where Nadia would presumably have gone on a serious shopping spree. She bought some baby things, two more maternity bras, some underwear and a pretty dress she would presumably fit into nicely in three or four months’ time. Pamela, like her, was used to comparing prices and had never met Nadia. After two miscarriages when she was younger, she’d had to have an operation. She felt her inability to have children deeply and envied her, but they laughed a lot too, and were laden with bags when they came back to the flat which reminded her so much of Kettlerstrasse.
Michael was astonished at the prices she’d paid. She could laugh and said, “I’m out of work, love, or had you forgotten? And we have to fend for three from now on.”
He laughed too, though he had been anything but economical himself. He’d bought her a ring, the third seal of their union. He laughed at the evening dresses and the dinner jacket that she took, completely crumpled, out of the suitcases on Monday evening. He laughed on Tuesday when she had to borrow a warm pullover from Pamela since she’d spilled coffee over hers - because she’d laughed too much.
There was one more worrying moment in bed on Tuesday night. He looked at her birthmark again. Until then she’d always been careful to cover it up with concealer stick. “Why’s that suddenly popped up again?” he wondered.
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