"I'm sorry," he said, "I don't have any with me. I don't smoke."
"What a coincidence," she croaked. "We've got something in common: I don't smoke either, I gave it up years ago. All I thought was, with a cigarette I'd at least get one hand free."
"Would you like that?"
"Not really. I'm quite comfortable like this. I'd like to scratch my nose occasionally, that's all."
She almost substituted arsehole for nose, but Magdalena's favourite vulgarity refused to pass her lips.
"If you're sensible, I'll get them to remove your restraints."
"Haven't I proved how sensible I am?" she demanded. "I tried to save the taxpayer a tidy sum. They ought to reintroduce the death penalty. An eye for an eye, the Bible says. A life for a life."
He didn't pursue this. "It's up to you," he said quietly. "If you eat and drink something and take your medication. . ."
It cost her an effort to speak, but having once started she wanted to go on. "Got something nice for me? Some Resedorm maybe?"
It was only a momentary image like a flashgun picture in her brain: a slender, well-manicured hand and a glass of orange juice. Then it vanished into the darkness, and in the darkness a woman's voice asked suspiciously: "What's that you're giving her?"
A man's voice answered, a familiar voice, not gentle but businesslike: "Resedorm. It works quickest."
"But she isn't fully conscious," the woman protested. "Can she swallow?"
"That's what I'm trying to find out," the man replied, sounding faintly annoyed. `And I'd prefer you to keep quiet. I'm not sure if she can understand us."
The darkness persisted. She felt a hand slide beneath her neck, heard his voice say: "Blink if you can understand me."
She blinked, although there was nothing but mist before her eyes. "Good," he said. "Try to raise your head. I'll help you." The cool rim of the glass touched her lips. "Drink up," he said. "Nice and slowly. Go on, try, one sip at a time. Yes, wonderful, that's it. You can go back to sleep in a minute. You still need plenty of sleep."
Another flashgun picture in her brain, an image suffused with green and red, blue and yellow light. It meant nothing - it was suddenly there, that's all, perhaps because the chief had mentioned an ashtray. But it was accompanied by the metallic taste of blood in her mouth and a cry, more a scream, of pain: "She bit me, the bitch!"
A hand reached for the table and reappeared in front of her face holding a heavy glass ashtray. It came flashing down, then nothing more. Nothing but a thought, almost a grin, in her brain: don't torment yourself wondering who stove your skull in. You know who it was: your last punter, paying you in his own coin.
The expert was still standing over her, watching her closely. "Have you had experience of Resedorm?" he asked.
"I've had a lot of experiences," she said. "Which ones would interest you most?" Her throat was so parched, her vocal cords seemed to be juggling with a pincushion. "My experiences with my pious mother? With my weak-kneed father? With drugs?"
"Resedorm isn't that kind of drug," he said. "It's a soporific."
"I know," she muttered.
It came back to her as she spoke: Margret had given her Resedorm - on the advice of her boyfriend Achim Miek. The doctor and the nurse ...
No! No, it hadn't been like that. Achim Miek had never held a glass to her lips, and Margret had never given her any orange juice. Two tablets and a glass of water - that was what Margret had given her, and that voice just now had not been hers.
It must have been the grumpy nurse and the doctor with the slender hands and the neatly trimmed beard. Strange, she had no recollection of him holding a glass, only of the injections. And of what he had said about her perverted clients!
She was tired now, just tired. "I know all that," she muttered. `And that's what you should let me do now, sleep."
He lingered beside her bed a while longer. She took no more notice of him.
When she closed her eyes she saw herself beside the lake. The little boy was squatting at her feet, waving the red fish. His thin white back, smooth round shoulders, delicate neck and whiteblond hair made him look like a girl. Like Magdalena at the time when she was just a bundle to be carried from room to room, a creature she was at liberty to hate with all the innocent fervour of a child.
Why hadn't she swum out? He wouldn't have followed her. To him, she had merely been the woman who fed him yoghurt and apples on weekends instead of chocolate and jelly babies. That he called her Mama was unimportant. Some day his subconscious might associate the word "Mama" with the taste of Golden Delicious and the sight of a little bloodstained knife. Someday his grandmother would tell him: "Let's be thankful she's gone. She was a slut. To think of all we found out about her after she left ..."
At some stage she heard footsteps making for the door. It didn't matter; the expert would return like a demon she herself had summoned from hell.
Now she would never be free from the ghosts she'd raised.
"The Sorcerer's Apprentice." She'd had to learn that poem for school. It was one of the ones the doctor had kept making her recite. She'd enjoyed doing so then, but not now It had raised too many ghosts.
And the man who was shutting the door behind him could not let her rest until he'd dragged the last grain of dirt to the surface: a couple of perverts who beat up a drug-addicted whore once they'd had their fun with her. That was his job, the one he was paid for.
She could always rebel against him and spin the whole thing out, but there was no escape, no right to remain silent. She had forfeited her rights when she stabbed that man with the knife, and the people outside wanted to know why. So did she. That tune had been no rational motive. That she'd once been afraid of it had almost ceased to be true.
At some point she fell asleep. She was unaware of the women who came into the room and might have stood around her bed, possibly stroking her face, possibly her hair, before getting into their own beds. Next morning she had the impression that someone had stroked her face and hair during the night. It must have been her father, who had put his arms around her and wanted to bring her a bowl of lukewarm bean soup because he knew she was as hungry as a wolf.
The beds were empty again by the time she awoke. Feeling only half-alive, she recalled a crazy dream she'd had, just before waking, in which she'd plugged her nostrils with pieces of paper and thrust a gag down her throat. Then came a blow on the forehead, but she hadn't lost consciousness. Panic, asphyxia. A key rattling in the lock. The shrill voice of the wardress: "For God's sake! I told you she'd flip!" Fingers down her throat. Red rings before her eyes. The end of the line: a psychiatric ward. And that was no dream.
Breakfast came. She ate some once her left arm had been released. Shortly after breakfast they removed the restraints from her right arm and both legs. She was told to get up, get washed and dressed. Her limbs were stiff from lying down; her mind was numb with fear. She had a date with the chief at nine, she was told.
Something inside her refused to call him that. The chief was Rudolf Grovian, an awful man who failed to grasp what he'd done to her. But at least she could lie to him. Any attempt to lie to a psychiatrist struck her as hopeless.
Professor Burthe, they told her. He looked like a professor, too: short and puny. He was a dwarf, and he had to be. Only dwarfs could probe other people's brains, crawl into every convolution, peer around every bend. His manner was as amiable as it had been last night, serene and self-assured. The kindly god whose eyes could see deep into others' hearts. And his eyes were open.
No more recalcitrance, no rebellion. She had shrunk in the night. Father, perched on the edge of her bed and trying desperately to show how much he loved her, had reduced her to a tiny, transparent little creature who was permitted to sit in a comfortable armchair and bare its innermost self.
The professor began by asking how she was feeling.
"Like hell," she said, drawing a deep breath. Father shouldn't have come; she'd told Margret to stop him coming. She star
ted to massage her left wrist with her right hand, staring at it and waiting for the next question.
She could hardly bear it, he was so gentle, because it was false and deceitful. He wanted to talk about the meaning of life and escaping punishment.
"I didn't try to escape punishment," she said. "I simply didn't want to listen to what the chief had heard from my father."
"What could he have heard?"
None of your damned business, you dwarf, she thought. That I ... Father came into our room one time and poked around in our bedside table. It was a plain bedside table with a drawer at the top and a cupboard below. Magdalena kept her music in the cupboard and her medication in the drawer. And the candle! One of the ones Mother had bought for the altar. Mother never came into our room, but Father did. And lie found the candle. He also saw I'd never used it for praying. The wick was still white and the end a bit smeary.
She saw Father standing in the doorway, torn between disgust and disappointment. He had the candle in his hand. "What's been going on here?" he demanded, holding it out. "What have you been up to?"
She heard herself reply: "Can't you guess? You aren't usually so slow on the uptake when it comes to human nature. Didn't you tell me it becomes too much for you when you're older? Well, I'm human too, but I prefer the dry variety. A candle doesn't come and it doesn't stink. Put it back where you found it and get out of here."
Father dropped the candle on the floor and slunk out with his shoulders sagging. He was weeping the way he'd wept the night he sat on her bed and tried to explain why he was so miserable. This time he merely muttered: "What's become of you? You're worse than a whore."
Everything changed as the years went by. It probably had to do with growing up, with perception and comprehension. There are things you don't want to understand but have to. That a father is a man. That he has his needs like any other man. That he becomes angry and unjust when denied gratification. I understood him in a way.
When I grew older I often wondered what it must be like to be loved. Loved with the body as well as the heart. Self-abandonment, passion, French kisses, orgasms - stuff like that. I became accustomed to my breasts and my periods. I no longer had any difficulty using tampons, and sometimes, when I was inserting one, I caught myself wondering. What if a man ... It can't be all that different, I thought, and if a man needs it!
But I also understood Mother, who wanted nothing more to do with it. She deserved to be pitied, really. After all, a woman can't help being off her head. Mother genuinely believed all that rubbish. I mean, that you mustn't do it unless you're trying to make a child.
Even three times a day had been fine as long as she didn't get pregnant. She could tell herself she was straining every muscle to do the Almighty a favour. Mother had never grasped that two thousand years are a hell of a long time. Enough time in which to produce more than enough children.
It could well be the way Margret had put it in her letter that time: that the Saviour had nothing whatever to do with all these prohibitions. That all this horrendous nonsense had been concocted by his earthly representatives, and people were compelled to believe it. What else were they to do when they couldn't read or write?
When I think what Buchholz used to be like! Just a handful of farms on the poorest soil imaginable. There were many years when stripping the thatch from the roofs was their only means of over-wintering the few cattle they possessed. Father once told me that a fat pig weighed a hundred pounds in those days. A measly hundred pounds, imagine! It sounds absurd today. And then came the Black Death and the Thirty Years War.
They were poor, they were stupid, and they seldom knew how to fill their children's bellies. When a preacher told them it was a damnable sin to yield to their sexual urges, they looked at their children and said to themselves: "Hey, he's right. If we stop it, there won't be any more mouths to feed."
The womenfolk were particularly impressed. The curse of Eve. Nobody gave them anything when they were in labour. It was part of the process. In sorrow shalt thou bring forth ...
When the responsibility became too much for her, and when she had no other recourse, Mother took refuge in this poverty and stupidity. And there she remained. She no longer had to cope with the birth of an unwanted baby. Although she doubtless realized that it was bad of her to abort it, there must have been a few people in her circle who thought it better for a respectable German girl not to bring an enemy soldier's brat into the world. And she believed them.
Mother always needed someone to tell her what was right and proper. As a girl she believed in Hitler. Later she believed in a victorious soldier. She never believed in herself. For a while she believed in me when I said what she wanted to hear. A few Biblical quotations, and you could twist her around your little finger.
Father never bothered. When he came home not only late but drunk, he would tell her his colleagues in the firm had been celebrating and he couldn't back out every time. Mother knew as well as I did that he'd been with another woman.
He often patronized whores after I caught him at it in the bathroom. Then, because he felt rotten, he would drink himself silly and take out the anger and self-contempt he felt on Mother. I felt so sorry for her when he shooed her away from the crucifix and made her warm up his supper, I couldn't help myself. "Leave that, Mother," I would tell her. "I'll do it."
I could have wept sometimes when I saw her slink back into the living room. I was only fourteen or fifteen, but I felt so old - almost as if I had two children. They were far bigger and older than me, but that didn't alter the fact that they were children for whom I bore a responsibility. I had to cherish and discipline them.
Mother didn't require much disciplining. She was a good girl - no dirty thoughts, just dirty underclothes - but Father was a bad boy deserving of the sternest reprimands. "How much did today's whore cost you?" I asked him, aged fifteen. `A hundred marks? Two hundred? I'll be needing three hundred this week. Everything's getting dearer, and you aren't the only one in this house with personal needs."
He would look at me when I put his meals in front of him. He never said anything, just took the notes from his wallet and shoved them across the table. He despised me for the language I used, I knew, and he knew the feeling was mutual.
We had become enemies just as a mother and her son become enemies in the course of time because the son does things of which the mother disapproves, and which the son knows that the mother herself did once - or, in my case, would do in years to come. But the mother is the stronger of the two. As long as they live under the same roof, she wields a great deal of power over her son. He loves her, after all. He wishes with all his heart that she loved and took pride in him too, however often he yells and curses and hurls his rage and disappointment in her face, motivated solely by despair, loneliness and fear of being abandoned by the last person on earth capable of giving him a little love.
I was the one who broke Father's backbone, not Mother. I was to blame that he eventually knuckled under to her; that in his declining years he shared not only her bed but the crucifix; that he forgot lie was a man - forgot it entirely, as if the physical evidence of it had rotted off at last.
I often wondered afterwards how I could have brought myself to sleep with men for money. I know why I did it: because I needed the money. Later on I needed still more money for drugs to deaden my disgust. But I've never found that a sufficient explanation. And the silly thing is, I don't remember that phase of my life.
I do recall smoking pot in Horsti's car one time. He rolled a spliff and let me take a drag. Then he said I'd done it wrong because I blew out the smoke at once. That's all I remember. The rest has gone, whether as a result of my addiction or the head injury, I don't know.
The doctor said it might be one or the other. He said it could well be a case of suppression because I'd done things I knew no normal person does. And I wanted to be normal. I didn't want to think about the men I'd sold myself to, that's why I stowed them all away behind the wall in my
head. I didn't want them to acquire faces and bodies and groping hands in my mind's eye. I didn't want to see or feel them when I cast my mind back. I simply didn't want to remember, period.
But I've often wondered whether they were old or young. To begin with, I think most of them must have been old. Men like Father, who got a raw deal at home and had to satisfy their needs in the bathroom or on the street at night. Whose only wish was a little affection and the feeling that they were still men. Sometimes I've even wondered why I never offered that to my father.
"You can come to me if you need it so badly. Be honest, it's crossed your mind. Don't worry, you won't be sacrificing a second lamb. I've never been a lamb. You've no idea of all the things I've stolen from shops the way I stole from Mother in her womb. I sucked all the strength out of her through the umbilical cord. I desiccated her brain and drove her mad. I'm a werewolf. I jump out of my box at night and devour innocent children. As for old, defenceless men, I strip the skin from their bodies and rip out their hearts. I'm evil personified, Satan's daughter. And, since you're my father, you must be Satan. Come into my arms, you poor thing! You said much the same to me when I was little; now I'm saying it to you."
I never did say it, but I suppose I tried to apologize to Father in my own way. Perhaps I saw him in every man with whom I at first had sex in a normal way. Perhaps I really did come to understand that men are slaves to their desires. Not everyone possesses the strength of a Saviour capable of self-denial-capable of understanding and pardoning even a whore like Mary Magdalene.
Her hour was up. The professor had asked her to recount her experiences with her pious mother and weak-kneed father, and she had. To get it over as quickly as possible, she had also unloaded the filth. It hadn't been easy, but she'd done it. She was feeling pleased with herself and satisfied that the professor would promptly pass on what she'd told him to the district attorney.
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