The Sinner

by Petra Hammesfahr

  I went back into the bedroom and threw myself down on the bed. I'd forgotten I needed to go. Father came in a few minutes later. He sat down beside me and stroked my hair. He'd washed his hands - I could smell the soap.

  He stared at me as if he meant to hit me. Instead, he started crying. "I'm sorry," he blurted out, sobbing like a three-yearold with a grazed knee. I found that almost more revolting than the other thing. Once he'd calmed down, he said: "I hope you'll understand when you're older. Human nature is too strong. What am I supposed to do? There are women who do it for money, but that's just a business. When I do it by myself I can at least imagine there's someone there who loves me. Everyone needs to feel loved, even an oldster like me."

  "I loved you once," I said, on the verge of crying too.

  Mother and Magdalena had been woken by the din, as I'd feared. Mother gave me some funny looks at breakfast the next morning, but she didn't ask what the matter was. Magdalena wanted to know when I came home from school at lunchtime. She kept badgering me every time Mother left the kitchen. "Come on, tell! What did he do? Did lie stick his finger up you after all, or did he go the whole hog?"

  I shook my head. I didn't want to tell her what had really happened, nor did I need to. Magdalena could guess what I'd seen. She'd known for a long time why he sneaked into the bathroom at night. Why? Because he'd often knocked on their door and warned Mother he was going to do like the man in the Bible who spilled his seed on the ground. Could she reconcile it with her conscience that he had to keep on sinning this way?

  Magdalena found it funny. "He's still pretty randy, our old man, but lots of them are at his age. The old ones tend to be the worst of all, take it from me, especially when they can't perform the way they'd like to. Did you really see exactly how he did it?"

  I couldn't talk about it. I was in a complete turmoil for days. As for the nights! Father came home very late for the next week or so. I was already in bed, as a rule, but I couldn't sleep. Sometimes I thought I ought to say something nice when he finally did appear. Like telling him I still loved him. I'd lied to him so often about other things, it wouldn't have mattered.

  But when I heard him coming up the stairs and turning the handle I felt my stomach go as cold and stiff as the stone that seemed to be constricting my chest, and I couldn't breathe, couldn't utter a word. I pretended to be asleep and listened to his movements, trying to gauge whether he was getting up again, coming over to me or going to the bathroom.

  I wished things could be the way they were in the old days, when I'd even slept in his bed - when he was simply my father, nothing more. He had suddenly ceased to be that. Now lie was just a dirty old man who jerked off. The boys in school said you had to think of naked women while doing so. I grasped what Father had been thinking of three weeks later.

  We were having lunch on Sunday when lie suddenly said to Mother: "I'm switching bedrooms. This present set-up won't do."

  Mother disagreed, of course. "Why get so worked up after all these years?" he yelled at her. "Surely you don't imagine I could still be tempted by your shrivelled flesh? Don't worry, I prefer juicier meat, and I'd like some within arm's reach of me every night. I don't want to be the one that sacrifices our second lamb, but if things go on like this, I can't guarantee I won't. And don't quote Magdalena at me. You'd be powerless to help her in a real emergency, however near to her you slept."

  He had to sleep in my room once more that night. Mother took Magdalena up to bed a little earlier than usual and locked the bedroom door from the inside. The next day Father confiscated the key and carried his bedclothes across.

  Magdalena moved in with me. This soured the atmosphere for weeks until Mother finally grasped that her chastity wasn't in danger and that Magdalena and I were getting on together. It's true I was anxious for the first few nights, not being used to Magdalena's funny breathing, but she laughed at me. "I always breathe like this," she said. "It's just that you don't notice it during the day."

  After a few weeks I thought it was great, having her in my room. She did too. I usually took her upstairs after supper. She preferred me to help her rather than Mother. I couldn't carry her - it was a long time since even Mother had been able to do that - but she could walk very slowly if well supported. She could even manage the stairs as long as she took a breather after every step.

  I used to hang onto her while she was brushing her teeth, a thing she preferred to do on her own. Then I had to wash her. She couldn't have a bath in the bathtub any longer. Mother used to sit her in it and lift her out. When she got too big, Father bought her a chair with a hole in the seat and a pail underneath. That worked all right. You only had to wipe the bath out afterwards.

  I was pretty clumsy at first. I washed her the way I washed myself, but her skin was very sensitive from lying down so much, unlike mine. The rough flannel hurt her.

  "Use your hands instead," she said. "Then take the sponge and rinse off the soap. And only dab me with the towel, don't rub. Mother never understood that. Maybe she thought if she scratched me when she washed me, I'd at least be making some contribution to the family's penance."

  After washing her I applied some ointment to prevent bedsores, then pulled her nightie over her head and put her to bed. After that, if there was nothing more to be done in the kitchen, I used to stay with her. We always had a lot to tell each other before going to sleep.

  I could talk in a different way once we were in bed with the door shut. Magdalena was the only person I could talk to really frankly about everything. Not about stealing, but about how disgusted I was with Father and myself and the fact that I never wanted a boyfriend.

  Although Magdalena was a year younger than me, she took a different view of such matters. "Just you wait," she told me. "Once you've lost a few pounds your self-loathing will disappear of its own accord. As for the other thing, there's no comparison. Old men disgust me too. Why do you think I won't let Father touch me? Being messed around by him is the last thing I need. I'm sure he'd sit me in the bathtub and lift me out if you asked him to, but no thanks. It's quite different with a young man. I've noticed that with the doctors. There's a big difference in the way they look and the touch of their hands. I like the students best of all. They often come crowding around me. To them I'm a sight to be seen, a medical miracle. I'm the half-heart with the inoperable aortic aneurysm, the survivor contrary to all expectations. Who knows, perhaps the thing in my stomach took over the heart's function long ago."

  She laughed softly. "The youngsters stand there without a clue about how to use their stethoscopes. The poor fellows aren't allowed to do much more than that, just listen to what a balloon full of holes sounds like."

  Magdalena wished she could have a boyfriend herself later on, when she was fifteen or sixteen. Or preferably right away, because she didn't believe she would live that long.

  She took nearly an hour to calm down after the chief had gone. She didn't understand how she could have let herself be drawn into spinning him such a yarn, not when she already had the tissues in her hand. Having sex with two men at once! She supposed she must have done that during the darkest chapter of her life. Something of the sort had flashed through her mind.

  And then she'd had a vision of her father with his trousers down and a look of diabolical fury on his face. She'd almost blurted that out too and only just stopped herself by making the doctor a scapegoat.

  It was unpardonable of her. That man had saved her life and asked for nothing in return. A kindly, friendly person, he had never touched her in the way she'd described to the chief He hadn't been a dirty old man, just a man in a white coat who had made the minor mistake of getting into his car while slightly over the limit.

  He'd been in his early fifties at most, with a thin face and a dark, neatly trimmed beard and moustache. He usually appeared at her bedside holding a syringe. His hands were slender and very well manicured, and his voice was warm and gentle. "How are you feeling? You'll be asleep in no time."

  He
r forearms were a mass of suppurating sores. There was a cannula inserted in the back of her hand. When lie emptied the hypo into it, darkness promptly descended and oblivion claimed her. The pains in her head were unbearable. They hammered and drilled and stabbed away as if the bandage around her head were a vice.

  Her skull had been fractured in several places, the doctor told her later, when she'd recovered sufficiently to question him. As for her other injuries, they could not have been caused by such a minor impact. He hadn't been driving fast, had braked at once and merely brushed her with the radiator grille when she staggered out in front of his car. Three weeks ago, when she appeared out of the darkness on the edge of a country road.

  Unconscious for three whole weeks?

  "Think yourself lucky," he said. "You've slept through the worst of it. Withdrawal symptoms are a terrible thing. Your whole body rebels, your nerves go haywire. But you were unaware of it."

  He asked her name. She hadn't been carrying any papers, he said. He also asked if she knew what had happened to her. She didn't. It had all gone, and not only the three weeks he was talking about. Over five months had been obliterated.

  The last thing she remembered was a Saturday in the second week of May. Magdalena's birthday! A bottle of champagne! Bought - not stolen - in honour of the occasion. Hidden for three days under the old sacks in the barn and brought out when Mother and Father had left the house to spend another evening in the company of those despairing souls who clung to heaven because they couldn't stand on earth unsupported.

  The fizz was warm when she brought it into the house. She put the bottle in the fridge and left it there until just before eight. That was when Magdalena wanted to toast her new year of life. "I'm sure a sip won't do me any harm," she said. "Maybe it'll help me to make it through the year."

  No one believed that except Magdalena and her. She firmly believed it too, of course, but not the doctors at Eppendorf - as usual. Magdalena had been to the hospital again in April. She'd had to spend considerably longer there than the scheduled two days, but she wouldn't say why.

  "I pay no attention to the crap they dish out. If they were right, I'd have died long ago. They don't have a clue. As far as I'm concerned, they can shove my heart and my abdominal aorta up their backsides. And my kidneys too. All I need is willpower. That's it, Cora! You have to want to go on living, then you will. I've proved that for the last eighteen years. What's more, I'll show them that an operation is possible. How much money do we have?"

  Magdalena knew she'd been born at eight on the dot.

  "Will you stay with me till then?"

  "I'll stay with you all evening. Surely you don't think I'd go out on your birthday?"

  "But I'd like you to. One of us must celebrate at least. Next year we'll both have a proper celebration. We'll throw a party that'll make the neighbours' teeth rattle. Tonight you'll have to go out on your own again. I'll be happy if you're back by eleven. We'll save some fizz for then, and you can tell me how you got on. Will you be seeing Horst?"

  "No, I told him last week I couldn't come. He said it didn't matter. His father had already asked him a couple of times to fix the car. He could do it then, he said."

  "What a shame. Still, he may be there all the same - it can't take all night to fix a car. And if he doesn't make it, have a good time with someone else. A bit of a change can't hurt. Promise me you'll have fun with some gorgeous young man, and then come home. And then ..."

  That had been on 16 May, and suddenly it was October! The doctor didn't know what had happened in the interim. He smiled at her while she experimentally moved her fingers and toes, arms and legs. "You're bound to remember in due course. Give your head a little time to recover. And even if you don't remember, I don't think you'll have missed much."

  "I must go home," she said.

  "It'll be a little while before we can think of that." He lifted her left foot and pricked the heel with a pin. "Excellent," he said when she winced. "Now get some sleep. You still need a lot of rest."

  He never said much during his visits. Her only other visitor was a nurse, a surly creature of her own age who never spoke or did anything unless it was absolutely necessary. She brought Cora's meals, plumped up her pillows, smoothed her sheets and washed her. The doctor made her do exercises to prevent her limbs from stiffening up after so long in bed. He also made her do sums and recite poems from school to discover whether her brain had been affected by her heroin intake and the physical punishment she'd sustained. He inserted needles into the cannula in the back of her hand, applied ointment to her inflamed forearms and changed the bottle under her bed, which was connected to a catheter.

  She thought of Magdalena, who needed her. She had to go home as soon as possible. Magdalena was eager to show the doctors at Eppendorf what could be done. She wanted to have an operation in the United States if there were enough money for the flight and the hospital. There was far from enough. A vast sum was still needed, and she would have to get it somehow That was her last thought before the injection took effect.

  There was no day or night in her little room. There were no windows, just a dim wall light. It was on whenever she opened her eyes, and whenever the doctor came she tried to find out more. But he knew very little.

  "I don't think it was an accident," he said on one occasion. "The circumstances rule that out: a naked young woman without any identification, pumped full of heroin." He spoke of serious lesions in the vaginal area and elsewhere. Typical of certain sexual practices, they allowed for only one conclusion.

  He had formed a definite picture of Cora: she was a drugaddicted prostitute. Easy meat for a pervert, a sadist who enjoyed inflicting pain and had dumped his unconscious victim beside the road, possibly in the belief that he had killed her.

  "I ought to have notified the police," he said, "but I was afraid of losing my licence. And then I thought that you yourself should decide as soon as you were able. The police would be bound to judge by outward appearances, and you might as well have worn a placard round your neck. Look, no matter what happened and what sort of life you were leading, you've escaped without any lasting damage. You're still young - not even twenty. You can make a fresh start. All you need is the willpower to keep off that poison. Your body doesn't need it any more; now you must convince your mind. Life is better without heroin, believe me. Above all, it's cheaper. Even a respectable job will earn you enough to live on."

  "Where am l?" she asked.

  "In good hands," he said with a smile. "Forgive me if I think of myself now"

  Of course she forgave him. Nobody as nice and kind and understanding could be blamed for thinking of himself for once and not wanting to risk being rewarded for his kindness with a driving ban. He'd been little short of a saint. If she was now on the road back to a normal existence, she owed it to him alone.

  And she had cast him in the role of a brute. Whv? Because she couldn't admit what she'd been: a lump of filth that had drifted further and further down the gutter until she'd let anyone do anything to her.

  But the chief wouldn't give up. He kept probing away at the old wounds until they broke open one by one. If he spoke to Father ... That was the last thing he'd said before leaving: that he must pay a visit to Buchholz next morning "I'm very sorry, Frau Bender. I can't leave your father in peace, but I assure you I won't upset him unnecessarily. I only want to ask him. . ."

  Father knew about her perverted boyfriends. He also knew about other perversions.

  The ultimate sin! It had ceased to matter whether the Saviour forgave her or sentenced her to burn in hell, as Mother had graphically described so often. "Hundreds of little demons will rip the flesh from your body with red-hot pincers." The little demons had begun their work long ago, and the chief was guiding them, showing them where best to apply their pincers.

  After supper she waited another few hours until she felt satisfied that the wardresses would be less alert. They didn't come to check on her so often at night. Shortly after twe
lve she took out the packet of tissues, tore off two pieces, rolled them into balls and plugged her nostrils with them.

  Breathing through her mouth, she crumpled the rest of the tissues into a big ball and took up her position facing the wall at the end of the bed. Then she emptied her lungs and rammed the tissues down her throat as far as they would go. Even before she had lowered her hand, she drew back her head and butted the wall.

  Rudolf Grovian set off at six on the Wednesday morning. Mechthild was still asleep when he left the house. He had estimated that the drive would take him five hours - a miscalculation that failed to allow for extensive roadworks on the Al. The first tailback cost him half an hour, the second almost a full hour. He didn't reach his destination until half-past twelve.

  Buchholz. Clean as anew pin, lots of greenery, scarcely a building in the centre of town more than ten or fifteen years old. These surroundings, where Cora Bender had spent her childhood, were grossly at odds with his mental picture of her battered features.

  He drove around for a while, getting his bearings with the aid of a street map, before pulling up outside her parental home. A nice little house, probably built in the early sixties, as neat and trim as the rest of the neighbourhood. Small but well-tended front garden, gleaming windows with snow-white net curtains behind them. Grovian suppressed an urge to shake his head.

  He had learned the address from Gereon Bender on Tuesday night. He'd intended to get it from Margret Rosch and ask her a few more questions at the same time, but Cora's aunt had unexpectedly disappeared, so he had to make do with the husband. He was informed that Gereon Bender had never set eyes on his parents-in-law