The Child

by Sebastian Fitzek

  At this point Stern couldn’t stop himself any longer. He vomited on the parquet floor. A few moments later, when he turned back and stared at the screen with one trembling hand over his mouth, it was all over. His son was gazing at the camera with eyes blank and lips parted. The whole of the neonatal ward was once more in shot: four cots with four occupants, but one of them unbearably still.

  ‘I’m very sorry. I realize that these last pictures of Felix must be very distressing for you.’

  The grating voice was as sharp as a razor blade.

  ‘But it was unavoidable, Herr Stern. I’ve something important to tell you, and I want you to take me seriously. I assume I can now rely on having gained your full attention?’

  8

  Robert Stern felt he would never regain the ability to think clearly. It was a while before he grasped that the mist before his eyes came from the tears streaming down his cheeks. The merciless voice had evidently allowed for this.

  Did it really happen? Did I really just witness the last few seconds of my son’s short life?

  He felt like getting up, ripping the DVD from the player and hurling the television out of the window, but he was too traumatized to lift a finger. The only movement of which his body was still capable took place without his volition: his legs were trembling uncontrollably.

  Who is doing this to me? And why?

  The scene was changing. His fear intensified.

  The neonatal ward had been replaced by the industrial estate where Carina had kept him waiting yesterday. These shots had been taken on a sunny day in spring or summer.

  ‘Yesterday afternoon you discovered some human remains on the site of a former paint factory.’

  The voice inserted another pause. Stern blinked as he recognized the tool shed.

  ‘We waited a very long time for this to happen. Fifteen years, to be exact. After such a long interval we’d actually assumed the dead man would be accidentally discovered by some tramp or a dog. Instead of that, you turned up. For a purpose. With two companions. That’s why you’re now involved, Herr Stern. Whether you like it or not.’

  The camera panned round 360 degrees. Apart from derelict buildings, it briefly showed an unmarked delivery van. Then it focused on the charred remains of the building into which Stern had followed Simon Sachs only hours before.

  ‘I want you to tell me who murdered the man you found in that cellar yesterday.’

  Stern shook his head in bewilderment.

  What is all this? What does it have to do with Felix?

  ‘Who killed the man? To me, the answer to that question is a matter of extreme urgency.’

  Stern stared at the DVD player’s bluish digital display as if the cause of his mental anguish resided in that silver box.

  ‘I want you to take Simon’s case. If you knew who I am, you would understand why I can’t do so myself. That’s why you must represent him. Find out how the boy knew about the body.’

  The voice laughed softly.

  ‘However, because I know that lawyers never work for nothing, I’ll make you an offer. Whether or not you accept it, Herr Stern, will depend entirely on how you answer my original question: Do you believe in the possibility of reincarnation?’

  The screen began to fill with snow like an old black-and-white set with an ill-adjusted indoor aerial. Then the picture quality abruptly improved. The derelict factory had disappeared. The superimposed time and date indicated that these new, colourful images were only a few weeks old. Stern’s nausea returned. Discounting the year, the date was that of his dead son’s birthday.

  9

  ‘Well, do you recognize him?’

  The sun-tanned youngster with the shoulder-length, slightly curly hair was bare-chested and wearing a black coral necklace. Aware that he was being filmed, he sat there looking expectantly at the camera. All at once he got up rather awkwardly and walked off. Stern’s heart stood still when the boy turned away. There was a dark violet birthmark on his left shoulder. It resembled a miniature boot.

  It can’t be! It’s impossible!

  Stern’s cheeks burned as if someone had slapped him. The boy, whose face looked at once unfamiliar and agonizingly familiar, came back into shot with a knife in his hand. Someone off screen apparently called something to him. He gave a sheepish smile, drew a deep breath and pursed his lips. The camera panned down to reveal a birthday cake on a table. A Black Forest gateau. It took the boy two attempts to blow out the ten candles embedded in the whipped cream.

  ‘Look closely, Herr Stern. Think of the last pictures of Felix you saw just now. Remember the body in the little coffin you carried into the crematorium yourself. And then answer a very simple question: Do you believe in a life after death?’

  Stern raised his hand. For a brief moment he felt tempted to press his fingers against the screen. The blood pounded in his ears. He was overcome by a weird sensation: he was gazing into a mirror – a rejuvenating mirror.

  Is it …? It can’t be. Felix is dead. He was cold when I took him from Sophie’s arms. I buried his ashes myself, and …

  ‘Looking at these pictures, you could be forgiven for wondering, couldn’t you?’

  … and I saw him die. Just now!

  Stern gave a choking cough. He had been holding his breath in shocked suspense, but now, as the merciless succession of unbelievable images continued to unfold, his lungs cried out for oxygen.

  But that can only be … must be a coincidence!

  The ten-year-old boy was left-handed. So was he.

  Stern began to tremble all over. He felt he was watching a replica of himself. He had looked just like that as a boy. Absolutely everything fitted. The hair, the rather wide-set eyes, the prominent chin, the dimple that appeared in his right cheek only when he smiled. If he dug out those old photo albums in the packing cases in the cellar downstairs, he felt sure he would find a faded snapshot of himself looking at the camera just like this boy. At the age of ten.

  And he’s got the birthmark too.

  It was bigger now, of course, but its proportions exactly corresponded to those of the one Sophie had spotted the first time she held Felix naked in her arms.

  ‘Here’s the deal.’

  The voice was once more claiming Stern’s attention, and it sounded even more inhuman than before.

  ‘I’ll give you an answer for an answer. You tell me who split that man’s skull with an axe fifteen years ago, and I’ll tell you if there’s a life after death.’

  So saying, the voice faded out the birthday boy and transported Stern ten years back in time to the neonatal ward. He was presented with a terrible, rhythmical alternation of two freeze-framed images. Felix in his cot. First alive, then dead.

  Alive … Dead … Alive …

  He strove to stand up and vent his anguish in a despairing cry, but every ounce of strength had deserted him.

  Dead.

  ‘An answer for an answer. You take care of Simon Sachs, we’ll deal with the psychologist. You have five days, not an hour longer. Fail to meet that deadline and you’ll never hear from me again, never learn the truth. Oh yes, one more thing.’

  The voice sounded bored now, like a medicine commercial warning of possible risks and side effects.

  ‘Don’t go to the police. If you do, I’ll kill the twins.’

  The screen went black.

  10

  ‘Are you drunk?’

  Sophie was standing barefoot in the passage outside the bedroom, where she’d fled with the phone so as not to wake her husband. Patrick was due to leave on a business trip to Japan in a few hours’ time and he needed his sleep. Besides, it was just after half past twelve, and she would have found it hard to explain why her ex-husband was calling her in the middle of the night when he hadn’t even done so on her birthday in recent years.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you, I know it’s late. Are the children all right?’

  Even though he hadn’t answered her question, she could hear the answer in his voice.
He sounded terrible.

  ‘Yes, of course they’re all right. They’re asleep. Fast asleep, like any normal person at this hour. What on earth do you want?’

  ‘The thing is—’ Stern broke off and started again. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but there’s something I must ask you.’

  ‘Now? Can’t it wait till tomorrow?’

  ‘It’s already waited too long.’

  Sophie paused on the sisal runner that led to the living room.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ The hour, his tone of voice, his vague allusions – everything about this phone call alarmed her. No wonder she was shivering, especially as all she wore in bed was a T-shirt and briefs.

  ‘Back then, were you ever in any doubt …’

  Sophie shut her eyes as Stern went on talking. Few words summoned up more negative emotions in her than back then, especially coming from the man who had taken Felix from her arms.

  ‘I mean, there was absolutely no reason why—’

  ‘What are you driving at?’ She was getting really angry.

  ‘You didn’t smoke during your pregnancy, Felix wasn’t too warmly clad – he was wearing a sleepsuit that prevented him from lying on his tummy, and—’

  ‘I’d better hang up now.’

  It defeated Sophie why he should wake her up in order to list the potential causes of cot death, or sudden infant death syndrome. Although some forty per cent of all cases of infant mortality were embraced by this mysterious collective term, its causes were largely unidentified. Which wasn’t really surprising, given that every inexplicable death of an apparently healthy child was assigned to this dread category.

  ‘Wait, please! Just answer one question.’

  ‘Well, what is it?’ Sophie caught sight of herself in the hall mirror and winced at the expression on her face. She detected a mixture of sorrow, despair and fatigue.

  ‘I know you’ve hated me ever since it happened.’

  ‘Are you running a temperature?’ she asked. It wasn’t just his slurred speech. He sounded as if he had a bad cold.

  ‘No, I’m fine. All I need is an answer.’

  ‘Damn you, Robert! Look, I just don’t understand what you’re getting at.’ Having spat out the first words in a fury, she strove to moderate her voice for fear of waking Patrick and the twins.

  ‘He wasn’t breathing – in fact he’d stiffened a little by the time you finally opened the bathroom door.’

  The phone went silent for a moment or two.

  ‘The question is, why weren’t you sure even so? Why, in spite of everything, did you believe that Felix was still alive?’

  Sophie lowered the phone and let her arm hang limp at her side. Her tiredness had given way to the sort of torpor that normally overcame her only after taking sleeping pills. At the same time, she felt as if she’d just caught a burglar rifling through her underwear. And that’s just what’s happened, she thought as she made slowly for the children’s bedroom. Robert’s phone call had broken into her world and wrenched open a drawer in her psyche – one she had laboriously striven to nail shut with the help of her new husband, the wonderful twins and a qualified psychoanalyst.

  She opened the door with bated breath. Frieda had kicked her bedclothes to the foot of the bed and was sleeping peacefully with her arm around a cuddly penguin. Natalie’s little chest, too, was rising and falling at regular intervals. During the first critical year after the twins’ birth, Sophie had set the alarm clock to go off every two hours and looked in on them. Now she did that only when waking them at night for a pee. The paralysing fear she used to feel had been replaced by a loving routine.

  Or had been until just now. Until Robert called.

  ‘Why did you believe Felix was still alive?’

  The soft mattress yielded beneath her as she perched on the edge of Natalie’s bed and brushed the dream-damp hair off her brow.

  ‘There are times when I still believe it,’ she whispered. Then she kissed her daughter gently on the forehead and started to weep.

  The Quest

  Just as we have thousands of dreams in our present life, so our present life is only one among thousands which we have entered from another, more real life, and to which, after death, we shall return.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Every person brings something new into the world; something inexistent heretofore, something primal and unique.

  Martin Buber

  Birthmarks and birth defects are proof of people’s recurrent lives on earth.

  Ian Stevenson

  1

  Perhaps it was because he was overtired. Perhaps the collision occurred because, instead of looking where he was going, he was watching the DVD unfold once more in his mind’s eye.

  He wouldn’t have dared to watch it again last night. Not all of it, at least. He had no desire for another sight of Felix in his death throes. That was why he had skipped to the shots of the birthday boy. He’d stared at the nameless youngster again and again. In slow motion, freeze-frame and fast-forward. After the tenth time his eyes had smarted so much, he fancied he could detect reddish signs of wear on the DVD.

  This morning, after a sleepless night, he felt as helpless and emotionally drained as he had on the day of Felix’s funeral. He had lost his grip on reality. His rational lawyer’s brain was trained to always see problems from two sides. A client was either guilty or innocent. In this respect, the personal nightmare into which he’d stumbled yesterday was no different from the tragedies he had to deal with professionally. Here, too, only two possibilities existed: Felix was either dead or still alive. The former was the more likely. The boy with the birthmark might have been a chip off the same block as himself, but that was far from being proof.

  Proof of what? Stern asked himself as he emerged from the hospital lift. As ever, when he pondered a difficult problem, his mind’s eye envisioned a bare white wall on which he stuck Post-it notes recording his main hypotheses. Where important cases were concerned, his brain contained a kind of cell to which he withdrew whenever he wanted to sort out his thoughts. The biggest Post-it of all bore the words FELIX ALIVE? in bold capitals.

  Later on, long after the burial in the woodland cemetery, he’d naturally wondered whether the boy had been exchanged. But Felix had been the only male child in the ward. The other three mothers had given birth to girls, which completely precluded the risk of a mix-up. Besides, before the post mortem Stern had satisfied himself that he was really mourning the right child. He still recalled how he felt when he lifted the inert little body lying on the autopsy table in order to run his fingers over the birthmark in farewell.

  What, then? Rebirth? Reincarnation?

  He tore up that mental Post-it before giving it serious consideration. He was a lawyer. He couldn’t resolve problems by resorting to parapsychology, much as it pained him to accept the fact. FELIX = DEAD, he wrote on a third Post-it. He was just trying to entrench this in his mind when his thoughts performed another somersault.

  If he’s dead, why is someone casting doubt on his death? And what has it all to do with Simon Sachs? How in the world did the boy know about the body in the cellar?

  Stern wondered what it said about his state of mind this Saturday morning that he had set off for the Seehaus Clinic determined to get to the bottom of the last question. He was so engrossed in his sombre thoughts that he failed to hear the male nurse who was pushing an elderly patient to the physiotherapy department in a wheelchair. The two men were humming the Abba classic ‘Money, Money, Money’ in unison as Stern rounded the corner and blundered into them.

  He crashed into the chrome-plated chariot sideways on, lost his balance, and made a desperate grab for the nurse’s sleeve but missed. Having briefly supported himself by planting one hand on the patient’s head, he gripped his wrist as he tumbled and eventually fell flat on the mint-green linoleum, but not before pulling out the cannula that connected the old man to his drip.

  2

  ‘Jesus! Are you OK, Herr Losensky?�
� The bearded nurse knelt down beside the wheelchair, looking concerned, but his patient seemed half-amused and waved him away.

  ‘It’s nothing, nothing. I’ve got a guardian angel.’ The old man reached under his open-necked shirt and pulled out a chain with a cross dangling from it. ‘Better look after our friend there.’

  Stern massaged his palms, which he’d bruised on the unyielding floor when trying to break his fall. He ignored the throbbing pains in his knees rather than present an even more pathetic picture.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said apologetically when he had regained his feet. ‘Is everything OK?’

  ‘That depends,’ the nurse growled. He carefully slid the old man’s sleeve up his arm to the elbow. ‘That cannula will have to be replaced in due course,’ he muttered, looking at the back of the patient’s age-freckled hand, and told him to hold a ball of cotton wool over the puncture mark. Then he examined his bony arm for bruises or blood blisters. Although his hands would have graced a prizefighter, his movements were gentle – almost caressing.

  ‘Why in such a hurry? Cops after you, or something?’

  Stern was relieved that the nurse hadn’t discovered any cause for concern.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Herr …’ He couldn’t decipher the scratched plastic ID card on the nurse’s gown.

  ‘Franz Marc. Like the painter, but everyone calls me Picasso because I prefer his pictures.’

  ‘I see. I do apologize, I was a million miles away.’

  ‘We’d never have known, would we, Herr Losensky?’

  Immediately below Picasso’s earlobes, two luxuriant sideburns ran down his cheeks like strips of Velcro and culminated in a chestnut-brown beard. When he smiled, baring two rows of massive teeth, he looked like a carved wooden nutcracker.