The Package

by Sebastian Fitzek

  No, I won’t manage it.

  Even though Dr Plank was the closest vet, only five minutes’ walk away, and his practice stayed open till six o’clock, whereas most others in Berlin were closed on Saturdays.

  I still can’t.

  It’s inconceivable.

  Emma stood motionless for a quarter of an hour beside the suffering animal at her feet, until she made the decision to try and cope without outside help for the time being.

  Then Samson had his first respiratory arrest.

  18

  Anxiety eats into the soul and hollows people out from the inside. It also feeds on human time: it took Emma half an hour to put on something warm, and she needed several attempts just to lace up her boots before her clammy fingers pulled up the zip of her puffer jacket and, dripping with sweat, she opened the door, which required another eternity, or so it seemed to her.

  At the moment the diazepam that she’d washed down with a gulp of tap water was having more side effects than direct ones. Emma was incredibly tired, but the iron ring around her chest would not loosen its grip.

  Luckily Samson had started breathing again, although he couldn’t stay on his feet for long. So to make matters worse Emma had to make a detour to the shed, a small, grey, metal shack that stood at the back of the garden. If she wasn’t mistaken, the sledge was still hanging on the wall in there. Philipp had bought it when they moved, on the erroneous assumption that they’d use it regularly, given that they were now living so close to the Teufelsberg.

  Well, maybe it was paying for itself today as transport for Samson.

  Emma was breathing heavily and focusing on her path across the snowy lawn. Shuffling tentatively, like a patient attempting her first step after a major operation, she teetered forwards.

  Each step was a test of courage.

  The walk was so arduous, as if she were having to make it with diving cylinders on her back and wearing flippers. Her feet sank to her ankles and more than once she had to stop to regain her breath.

  At least she wasn’t shivering, which may have been because her soul was already so frozen that there was no room left to feel the cold physically.

  Or I’m already suffering from ‘hypothermic madness’, the name given to a psychological phenomenon whereby some people on the point of freezing to death believe they’re terribly hot. Which was why sometimes you found frozen corpses naked outside. As they died, the poor souls ripped the clothes from their bodies.

  Well, if fear were a shirt, I’d be happy to take it off, Emma thought, surprised that she couldn’t smell anything out here in the garden. No snow, no earth, not even her own sweat. The wind was blowing in the wrong direction, bringing the rattling of the S-Bahn from nearby Heerstrasse station into the gardens. Although her hearing was a little better than usual, her sight was worse.

  The garden seemed to get narrower with every step. It took her a while to realise that the panic was constricting her field of vision.

  First of all the bushes disappeared, then the cherry and rhododendron, and in the end there was just a long, black tunnel leading straight to the shed.

  Visual disorders.

  Emma knew the symptoms of an oncoming panic attack: dry mouth, racing heart and a change in the perception of colour and form.

  Worried that she’d never get any further if she stopped again now, Emma staggered onwards until she finally reached the shed.

  She jerked open the door and grabbed blindly for the sledge which Philipp had hung neatly on the wall beside the door.

  A bright-red plastic object that was light, wide and shaped like a shovel. Thank goodness it wasn’t one of those old-fashioned, heavy wooden things with runners, which Samson could very easily have fallen off.

  On the way back Emma felt a little better. Her success in having found the sledge immediately imbued her with some confidence.

  Her field of vision had widened again too. The bushes were in their place, although they were moving about in a most unnatural fashion. Not sideways, as if being blown by the wind, but up and down like an accordion.

  Disconcerting, but nowhere near as terrifying as the footprints that Emma hadn’t noticed on the way there.

  She looked at the heavy boot prints in the snow in front of her. They couldn’t be her own as they were at least three sizes too big. They were only going in one direction.

  To the shed.

  Emma turned back to the grey shack. She’d left its door open.

  Was it moving?

  Was anyone in there?

  Had she maybe grabbed the sledge in the darkness and just missed a man crouching behind the lawnmower?

  Emma couldn’t see anything or anyone, but the feeling lingered that she was being watched.

  GET OUT!

  ‘Samson,’ she called, speeding up. ‘Samson, come here! My poor thing, please come!’

  The suffering creature did her bidding, struggling up from the doormat where he’d been waiting for her. It sounded as if he had whooping cough.

  ‘Thank you, my darling. Good dog.’

  She tapped on the seat of the plastic sledge and he dragged himself onto it, then slumped, sniffling.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Emma said comfortingly to the dog and herself. ‘I’ll help you.’

  She patted his head, gritted her teeth and pulled Samson with a rope towards the road. Unwisely, she turned back and thought she saw a shadow behind the small window in the door.

  Did the curtain just move?

  No, it was hanging serenely and there was no light behind it that could have cast a shadow.

  And yet. Emma felt as if she were being followed by invisible eyes.

  GET OUT

  BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.

  And these eyes opened wounds, out of which all her courage seeped.

  If my will to live were fluid, I’d leave a red trail behind me, she thought. Which would be practical; I’d only need to follow it to find my way back.

  She took hold of the sledge rope, which had briefly slipped from her hand, and forced herself onwards again. To the vet.

  Away from the dark house behind her, from which she believed she was being watched by dead eyes at the window. Waiting for her to come back.

  Assuming she ever did.

  19

  ‘How long has he been in this condition?’ Dr Plank asked as he listened to Samson’s chest.

  The poor creature was on a drip providing him with electrolytes and a substance that should induce him to vomit in a few minutes’ time. Ever since the vet had heaved the husky onto the treatment table with Emma’s help, Samson had barely been conscious. Now and again he shuddered as he exhaled, but that was the only sign of life.

  ‘How long? Well, I, I think…’ Emma’s voice was trembling as badly as her knees.

  She felt as if she’d run for her life, rather than merely having gone three hundred metres around the corner. In her mind, three hundred metres equated to a marathon.

  My first time outside alone, and with a dog as close to death as I am to insanity.

  Contemplating her feat in the harsh light of the halogen lamp that hovered above Samson, she could scarcely believe that she’d made it. Made it here, to the broad, end-of-terrace house with its cream façade and green shutters. The garage had been converted into a waiting room years ago. Fortunately Emma didn’t have to spend too much time there. With the exception of a small girl, who’d sat crying with a cat basket on her lap, she was the only patient. And because of the severity of Samson’s symptoms she’d been shown in immediately.

  ‘I’m not sure. He’s been droopy since this morning,’ Emma finally managed to complete her sentence. ‘I think it started around eleven.’

  The vet grunted and Emma couldn’t tell if it was a grunt of satisfaction or concern.

  He’d put on a bit of weight since she’d last seen him, but that was a while ago now, in the time before, at the neighbourhood party organised every year by the residents’ association. The freshly starched
apron was a little tight around the tummy of the 1.90-metre man. He’d developed a slight double chin and fuller cheeks, which made him appear more affable than before. Now Plank resembled a large teddy bear with light-brown, unkempt hair, a broad nose and melancholic button eyes.

  ‘Did he eat anything unusual?’

  Emma felt nervously for the headscarf covering her short hair. If Plank was wondering why she hadn’t taken it off he wasn’t letting it show.

  ‘Yes, I mean, no. You know Salim, don’t you?’

  ‘Our delivery man?’

  ‘He gave Samson a dog biscuit, he always gives him one.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  Plank was wearing latex medical gloves, similar to those that had stroked her head. Back in the darkness of the hotel room.

  ‘What’s going to happen now?’ she asked the vet, one hand on Samson’s chest, gazing at a white, glass-front cabinet, her eyes fixed on packets of gauze bandages and surgical collars as if they were as captivating as a work of art.

  ‘We’re going to have to wait to begin with,’ Plank replied, checking the drip with a critical eye. He pointed to the drain of the table. ‘We’re treating him on spec; there are lots of signs that he’s been poisoned. As soon as he’s been sick we’ll give him some charcoal to bind any toxins. My assistant is just calling the laboratory courier. Once that’s done we’ll hook Samson up to a urinary catheter to prevent the toxin from being reabsorbed by the bladder wall. Then, of course, there’s the usual cocktail of medicines.’

  Emma nodded. The same procedure as for humans.

  ‘Everything on spec until we have the haemogram.’

  ‘Could it be anything else apart from poisoning?’

  Plank managed to nod and shrug at the same time. ‘Unlikely. We’ll know in more detail when the lab results are back.’

  He patted the plaster covering the injection site on Samson’s hind leg, from where he’d taken the blood.

  ‘I’ve got good contacts at the veterinary clinic in Düppel, I’ll have the results tomorrow morning at the latest.’

  Emma noticed that her eyes were filling with tears. She couldn’t say whether this was due to exhaustion or fear that it might be too late and the poison had already worked its way irreparably through Samson’s body.

  ‘The best would be if you left him here under observation for the next twenty-four hours, Frau Stein.’

  Plank paused and accidentally brushed her hand briefly as the two of them stroked Samson’s head together. ‘He’s better off here than at home.’ He followed this up with a baffling question.

  ‘Talking of home. Is your basement dry again?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The water that got in last month. The same thing happened here once. It was ages before we could get rid of the fan heaters. Dearie, dearie me, I thought, poor old Frau Stein. I mean, first your illness and then something like that. Nobody needs that. Your husband told me all about the palaver with the burst pipes.’

  ‘Philipp?’

  The door to the treatment room opened and a plump elderly woman in a nurse’s coat entered. She gave Emma a cheery smile as she walked over to the medicine cabinet in her squeaky Birkenstock sandals, presumably to get everything ready for Samson’s treatment.

  Plank kept talking regardless.

  ‘I met him in town by chance. It must have been four weeks ago pretty much to the day. A freaky coincidence. I was on call and that evening I had to go to a hotel, the chihuahua, do you remember?’ he said to the nurse, who nodded wearily.

  Plank grinned, shaking his head. ‘An American woman’s plaything had stepped on a piece of glass. As I left I saw your husband sitting in the lobby.’ As Emma listened to the vet’s words a wave of heat surged against her ribcage from the inside.

  ‘My husband? In the lobby?’ she repeated as if in a trance.

  ‘Yes. Well, well, I thought, I wonder what Herr Stein’s doing here. Then I saw the two drinks on the table and when I said hello he told me that the two of you were having to spend the night here until the worst was over.’

  There was a ring at the door and Plank’s assistant returned to the reception.

  ‘Not that I was being nosy, mind, or thinking he was up to something, but afterwards I thought one could easily have drawn the wrong conclusions. I mean, who sleeps in a hotel in their own town, if…’

  ‘… they haven’t got the builders in?’ Emma completed his sentence flatly.

  Converting the nursery.

  Which will never be used.

  Or repairing water damage.

  Which never happened.

  ‘Well, I hope the pumps are out and your floor is dry again. Frau Stein?’

  Emma removed her clenched fist from Samson’s coat, realising that she must have been gaping at Plank for quite a while with an expressionless face. Without the sedative she would have probably screamed the place down, but the diazepam had deadened her emotions.

  ‘Is everything okay with you?’

  She forced a smile. ‘Yes, everything’s fine. I’m just a bit out of sorts because of Samson.’

  ‘I understand,’ Plank said, softly stroking her hand. ‘Don’t worry about him. He’s in the best hands. And take a card with my mobile number from reception. If you have any questions you can call me at any time.’

  Emma nodded. ‘I’ve got one question already,’ she said, on her way out.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘The hotel.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Where you bumped into my husband. Do you remember the name?’

  20

  Emma opened her mouth and waited to taste her childhood as soon as the snowflakes landed on her tongue.

  But this sensuous experience failed to occur.

  The fragrance of winter, the smell of the wind, the taste of the snow and all other sensations that could only be experienced rather than described, and which would bring back memories of her first sledge ride, difficult walks with wet socks and falling off her bike, but also a comforting hot bath in the evening, dunking lebkuchen into warm milk on the bench by the window while watching the tits pecking at the feed scattered from the birdhouse – Emma couldn’t recall any of this.

  She just felt cold. The way back was long and arduous, even without the sledge that she’d left behind at the practice. She felt her way forwards circumspectly, step by step on the pavement, which was icy in parts, listening to the crunching of her boots.

  In her first December here in Teufelssee-Allee, Emma thought the estate could have been made for Christmas. Small, cosy houses with fat candles in the windows, evergreen firs in the front gardens that needed merely a chain of lights to look Christmassy. Hardly any cars to spoil the atmosphere with their noise and which the foxes would have to watch out for as they scurried into the road from the Grunewald early in the afternoon.

  Even the local residents, most of them slightly older, fitted the picture perfectly. Old Mother Frost type women in their pinafores returning with their shopping trolleys from the weekly market in Preussenallee, white-haired men in billowy cords, puffing on pipes as they cleared the snow from the pavement, and who you wouldn’t be surprised to hear say ‘Ho, ho, ho’ as a greeting.

  At the moment, however, there wasn’t a soul about, except for a teenage boy who’d obviously been forced by his parents to grit the driveway.

  This is something at least.

  Emma couldn’t have coped with being stopped by a neighbour for some small talk.

  ‘Well, Frau Stein, what a nice surprise this is. We haven’t seen you in ages! You must have missed at least four community breakfasts.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry. A rapist stuck his penis in my far too dry vagina and then cut my hair off afterwards. I’ve been a bit all over the place since then, but if you don’t mind me suddenly getting up and screaming during the meal, smashing my head against the edge of the table or pulling out clumps of hair, just because for a second it occurs to me that the man opposite could be the instig
ator of my paranoid panic attacks, then I’ll happily turn up to the next breakfast and I’ll bring some croissants with me. How does that sound?’

  Emma smiled briefly at this absurd inner dialogue, before starting to cry. Tears ran down her face, already damp from the snow. She went around the corner, turned into her street, then, after a few short steps, had to cling onto a fence and regain her breath.

  She couldn’t, no, she didn’t want to comprehend just how far she’d fallen. Only a few months ago she’d been running an excellent practice. Today she couldn’t complete even the most basic of everyday tasks and was being defeated by a pavement of no more than a few hundred pathetic metres.

  And all because I didn’t go back home that night.

  Pitying oneself. Reproaching oneself. Killing oneself.

  Emma knew the tragic trinity, and she’d be lying if she claimed never to have considered the last option.

  ‘How absurd,’ said her reason.

  ‘How inevitable,’ said that part of the human system that essentially makes all the decisions and which cannot be monitored nor cured, but only ever damaged: the soul.

  The problem with psychological illnesses was that self-diagnosis was impossible. Trying to understand your brain using your brain held out about as much hope as a one-armed surgeon trying to sew back their own hand. It didn’t work.

  Emma knew that she was overreacting. That there must be a harmless explanation for why the vet had met Philipp in the hotel.

  ‘Le Zen. A palace of Oriental kitsch, don’t you think?’

  And in all likelihood the mystery of the package would have a ridiculously simple explanation too.

  It was pointless to spend hours poring over whether Salim really had given her a delivery for the neighbour, because her brain would never accept the alternative conclusion – that she’d lost her mind. Perhaps she hadn’t seen Salim at all today; perhaps it wasn’t the delivery man who rang at her door, but a stranger who’d given Samson poison rather than a biscuit?