56
“I hear myself cry out,” I said in Gertrud’s kitchen. “In my dreams some nights, I hear myself cry his name.”
But no one hears me, least of all Tonio. I see him running. It all happens at breakneck speed. He runs and runs, out into the water, into the raging surf; he doesn’t stop. He is alone. He is happy. He wants to feel the water on his skin. Feel the wind that has long since whipped up into a storm. How awesome it is to feel the water like oil on your skin, the wind like velvet—how often he said that.
His face glows brightly through the darkness. I feel his warmth from hours ago when I’d held him in my arms for the last time.
He’ll die. I don’t know it yet. I’m lying in our bed, sleeping. That’s why he’ll die. Because I didn’t look out for him. Because I wasn’t there. Because I was asleep. I didn’t protect him from his own high spirits, from his own recklessness.
It’s strange, but in my dreams everything always happens in slow motion. In my dreams Gertrud isn’t there at all. I see Tonio die. I see the way the waves dash him down, the storm buffets him—all in slow motion, which makes it worse, because it lasts twice as long, because we feel the pain for twice as long—both he and I.
Everything is so much louder in the night. Every noise—the storm, the waves. The footsteps on the stones. His cry as he sinks into the water. Into death. Black air, black water. An ocean of distance.
He was a good swimmer, had been all his life—even in death. I see how he wrestles with the forces all around him, how he begins to feel surprise as he realizes that there is no use.
Eventually he is gone, the sea suddenly still, an oily black mass, the storm dwindled to a light wind. Everything empty, still.
As am I. When he disappears and stops fighting, I become as still as never before. When his heart ceases to beat; when his heart stops still. He disappears—his body, his warmth. And eventually . . . the memory of it, too.
The Danube. Here, now.
How beautiful it is. Smooth surface, the occasional shimmer as if the river is scraping along the sky. The sun is dazzling—the twin suns: the one in the sky and the one on the water. People walking in the distance move into the golden sunlight on the river, become black shadows, dissolve into dazzling shimmers. Gold light from behind the clouds, too. Two dogs, black and white, Pablo and Maja. The shrill cries of young girls float upward like white seagulls in the air.
I close my eyes and turn my thoughts back to Gertrud’s kitchen. We drank wine; perhaps we were a little tipsy, which gave us the courage to ask the right questions, give the right answers.
“I ran to him,” I said. “The next morning, after they retrieved him. They let me go to him. As soon as they saw me the circle silently opened up. I touched him and felt a momentary stillness inside, the stillness which came from his heart. I touched him again and again, stroked his body, felt the stillness, felt that his heart was no longer beating, felt that he was no longer warm, felt that he had already vanished, vanished into a faint shimmering, a dark beam of light.
“Wetness had pooled around him, the wetness of the sea, the wetness from the depths. I felt it on my hands and then the pain came, and it began to overwhelm me.
“I knew right then that it would hurt like nothing had ever hurt before. I knew it would take me to the edge, to a place where it’s easy to fall over the precipice.”
I halted, looked at Gertrud. She held her wine glass in her hands, looking into it so I couldn’t see her eyes. I felt the faint scar inside me, the old pain.
“Yes,” I said, without taking my eyes away from Gertrud until she turned her face to me, her eyes impenetrable.
“I knelt down, by Tonio’s body,” I continued, “and felt inside me that stillness which came from his heart, and which I didn’t want to let go of for a long, long time. It was a protection, a shield. I took it with me out into the world. It accompanied me, made it possible for me to go, to begin my journey.
“At last they pulled me away from him, they spoke to me. There was a woman who held me in her arms, murmuring soft words, probably words of comfort, but I didn’t hear them. I didn’t understand her. I heard nothing. Only that his heart was no longer beating.”
“Stop it, Hanna,” Gertrud said. “I know it all already.”
But I couldn’t stop. I talked and talked. A light wind had arisen, murmuring in the trees. We could hear it through the open window.
“It was the last time I saw him, and apart from that . . .” I shook my head, listening inside myself. “I remember nothing.”
Only that I set off then. I packed my backpack and disappeared. Away from the island. Away from Greece. Away from the black sand.
Gertrud nodded, and I looked at her cautiously. Her eyes were dark, her mouth a hard line. She looked like an animal about to take flight.
She looks old, I thought. Suddenly, she looks old. I granted us a break and put some fresh coffee on to brew. Milk, cups, sugar pot. With the coffee bubbling through the filter, I sat down again.
“Why didn’t you come to find me, Gertrud?” I asked finally. “Why didn’t you?”
Silence, only the bubbling of the coffee machine, a fly buzzing through the room.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. Her voice was a whisper, a breath, dying away. “I don’t know. Stop asking. It’s all so long ago. Leave the past alone. Let it go. Otherwise you can’t live.”
“Have you let it go, then?” I asked.
Silence again, then, “No.”
I leaned forward, took a strand of her hair and wound it around my finger. She turned away, and the lock of hair slipped from my finger, pulling at her scalp a little.
“Where were you?” she asked. “After Tonio’s death. All those long months?”
I shrugged. “Everywhere. Nowhere. No idea. Sugar?”
“Where did you live? How did you get money?”
I finally thought back.
To icy streets in cold lands, to smoke rising from chimneys, threads rising upward and cutting the sky in two, darkness falling rapidly. I thought of the rich green leaves of primeval forests, mangrove forests, sun, sea, oceans, foreign smells, foreign touches, and the ever-recurring cold, freezing until it was hardly possible to freeze anymore—all of it like a dream, but not mine.
At night, whenever I could, I slept with the door open, afraid of closed rooms.
“One day!” I would whisper then. “One day . . .”
I was always wishing for the future, and when the wishing grew too much, it drove me onward. Then I would stand on a station platform and choose from all the directions and destinations, blindly, without a plan, and send myself on my way, the main thing to be on the move.
The impermanence of velvet moments made life good. I liked to see the light reflected in a glass of red wine, to be enveloped by clouds of tobacco smoke making the light diffuse and gray.
Then I would smile myself and strangers into seventh heaven; I hung on to life or to whatever I considered to be life. I was not afraid of feeling a man’s hand on my knee; on the contrary, I would grasp it, smoke my cigarette to the end, catch hold of the stranger’s fingers, and guide them further.
It was as though I were standing next to myself and watching myself smile, laugh . . . and then cry. Because I suddenly recalled what warmth was. Because I suddenly recalled what . . .
I was moved by bodies that were good and wiry and tender. I smiled through tears when they immersed me in their language, of which I often didn’t understand a single word, a single syllable—even when they scattered the incomprehensible sounds of their language over my body and continued to slurp them out, slurp them in . . .
I was always afraid of neglecting myself, no longer finding myself in the arms of happiness. I wanted to hold on to it, the happiness, hold it deep in my heart, but when morning broke on the diffuse fog of my intoxication and the traces of the night, the night itself could no longer be concealed, and I fled from the suffocation of my own alcohol-soaked bre
ath.
Lipstick on the pillow and my face in the mirror of a wrecked bathroom, dirt-smeared and wrecked like the mirror itself, my hair straggly, my hands sweaty—my cold, thin, lost fingers.
In the bed sometimes there would be someone sprawled, a naked stranger, harsh as the morning, and I . . . I would take off again.
“He’s dead,” I would whisper into the mirror, and I finally knew it but kept forgetting it over and over again. “Dead and gone. No shirt will ever look good on him again—white, blue, or yellow.”
And I took off. Again and again. Back to the sea. Another sea. Never back to that one. Stiff breezes. Squalls. Sand on the feet. Foaming white, mountainous waves. The line between sky and ocean lost in the twilight.
In all the images was a great stillness, deep cracks, and always the cold wet of Tonio’s body on my hand. It had worked its way into all the pores of my skin—I would never be free of it.
I was on the edge, I thought, sitting in Gertrud’s kitchen in the face of Gertrud’s silence. I was at the precipice, and the images I still have are those that led me back onto firm ground, like fine pins stuck in a map that is spread invisibly through my body.
Another flash of light and more images, and the nearer I brought myself to home, the thicker and faster the memories came.
Finally, I lay on busy beaches in the Aegean summer. The days shimmered back into the sun as if they had never happened. At midday the seagulls were as if painted on glass, the sun shining through them, translucent around the edges, and the white feathery clouds seemed so close they were almost within reach.
It was there that I began to fall silent, that I crept into the stillness, wanting to unlearn all languages on the way to myself, to the wetness on my hand.
I dreamed of the days we’d had. They had been beautiful, beautiful. Splendid gems. If you could have tasted them, they would have melted on your tongue. Slowly. Solemnly.
I dreamed of the time that had dripped from the clock—invisible, intangible—time that had not been enough.
And then . . . I began . . . eventually . . . suddenly . . . to feel something foreign inside me, something that did not belong there—not inside me, not in my body. It made me afraid, a hazy terror. I wanted happiness once more, I thought, one more refill before I die.
I thought about Dorothee for the first time during all those months. Of Dorothee, who was my mother of sorts. I turned for home.
It was May, everything smelled of spring, of summer almost, but I was nauseated by all scents, unable to bear them. I descended from the train, shouldered my backpack, and walked along the platform into the concourse. All my desires seemed to be satisfied. For the sea, the wide expanses, the beaches. Again and again trains had spat me out, now here, now there, with cold monotony, cold regularity. Until nothing remained, only the amazement that I had not been drawn into their rattling, that the indeterminate remained indeterminate and the uncertain remained uncertain.
Tonio’s death had come between everyone and everything. It was forever, I finally knew, like a death always is. But it also came between us, the living.
57
Dr. Borger had brought the medical record into town with him when he went to eat. He’d planned to enjoy it after his meal—the high point, as it were. With the last wisps of smoke from his cigar drifting up into the blue September sky, the espresso and cognac drunk, Borger opened the file and began to read.
When he had finished, he leaned back, took a deep breath, loosened the knot of his tie, stared into space for a moment, and finally raised his hand to summon the waiter. This piece of news merited another cognac.
58
It was dark in the room. Only the narrow strip of light from a streetlight fell through the window and brought out the contours of their bodies.
At seven that morning Port would be leaving for Vienna. His car was parked outside.
He stroked her face.
“Tears,” he said. “You’re crying? My Franza.”
“It’s for seven weeks, after all,” she said. “And I’ve got so much to think about—Lilli, this case, you. Everything’s getting a bit muddled up, you know?”
He said nothing, just stroked her face. She sniffled, and he wiped the tears from her cheeks, her mouth. She sniffled and had to laugh a little.
“You’ll come, though, won’t you? To Vienna. You’ll visit me. Won’t you? I’d like you to come. I really would. Otherwise these seven weeks will really drag.”
“Yes, I know. I’ll come.”
They lay side by side, hand in hand. They laughed a little in the face of the imminent separation, in its salty, bitter warmth. Then he said, “I’m hungry.”
He started to get up to go to the kitchen, to the fridge, but she held him back.
“Leave it. Stay here. I’ll make you something.”
She stroked his face.
“Oh,” he said. “There’s luxury! What have I done to deserve that?”
She shrugged, smiled. “You don’t have to deserve everything you get. Sometimes you just get things.”
By the time she returned, he had fallen back asleep.
She sat on the edge of the bed, the plate of open sandwiches in her hand. In the end, she ate them herself.
He slept in the strip of light from the streetlight. She gazed and gazed at him, taking in all his features, until the strip of light grew wider and wider, eventually overtaking the whole room because morning was gradually dawning.
She stood and went to her laptop in the living room. She knew he would be there. He always was at that time. Woken by an internal clock, he would be there. Waiting for her. For alien one. He was alien two. How stupid those names were. She had never questioned it. It didn’t matter in the slightest. The words flitted across the page, like shooting stars—that was all that mattered.
At first she’d asked him what he was looking for there. After all, he was spoken for.
At the same moment she realized she could ask herself the same question, and as she did, she found she was unable to answer it.
He had tried to find someone.
He loved his wife. He felt committed to her for life. He would never leave her. . . . but . . . there are some things . . .
. . . some things . . . ?
. . . some things . . .
She left it at that, never asked more. Just as she never asked for a photo. Neither did he. But that wasn’t important. They knew nothing about one another, only the basic facts: age, location. He was a little older than she was, they lived in the same town, he had dark hair, she was blonde. That was it. And that was how it should stay. Wolves in the night, howling occasionally at the moon.
He was waiting.
. . . i missed you . . . you weren’t here yesterday . . .
. . . i was very tired . . . she wrote, . . . i have a lot of work at the moment . . .
. . . what . . . he began.
. . . don’t . . . she wrote quickly, . . . let’s stay as we are, two aliens who met in Internet heaven, who will one day lose each other there too . . .
. . . why do you believe that . . .
. . . because that’s how it is . . .
. . . what if I don’t want to lose you . . . he wrote.
She logged out suddenly. Shut down the computer. No, she thought. Not those questions. Don’t start.
But it had already started. He would be there again tomorrow: alien two. So would she: alien one.
Tired, she went over to the balcony door. Lilli had not responded to her text. Earlier that evening Franza had tried to call her. Still nothing.
Rain was forecast, but it didn’t look like it. Franza fetched a blanket from the couch, wrapped herself in it, and went out into the morning. The ravens would soon be arriving, swarms of black birds filling the sky, their cawing full of harsh faith in warmer days.
Franza sat down, turning her face to the cool morning sun. The rain had a gentle touch. It was raining now, after all.
59
There we
re photos on the wall above the dining room table. A little boy, a man, a girl. I looked at them, lingering over the face of the girl. My heart began to thump, wildly, racing; my throat tightened and a longing flowed through me, an incredible longing. So that was her.
“So that’s her,” I whispered. My voice was cracking, and I had to clear my throat. “Is that her?”
“Yes,” Gertrud said. “Yes, that’s her. Of course it’s her. Who else would it be?”
I looked at Gertrud. Her face was ashen. We were silent. For a long while. It had gotten dark; only the small kitchen light was on.
“Maybe you’ll simply return to Strasbourg,” she said. “Perhaps that would be for the best.”
I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “Perhaps.”
But I knew that wouldn’t work anymore. She knew it, too.
“What was it like,” I eventually began. I hesitated and had to begin again. “What was it like when she was growing up? How did you two get along?”
There was no hesitation this time.
“She was everything.” Gertrud’s words came flooding out.” She held me together when I wanted to break apart. She calmed me. She’s my home. It’s through her that I’ve always felt I’m alive. She never left me. I haven’t been alone ever again.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes.”
“Sometimes,” she said, “it’s difficult. Like everything is. But . . .”
I nodded.
Silence again. For a while. I wanted a schnapps. We drank a little.
Eventually she said, “Come with me.” And she took me by the hand.
I went with her. It was lovely—her hand in mine, her arms around me, her scent. The night that glided over us finally gave me peace so that I was able to sleep. I fell asleep in her arms, like back when we were children and sisters.
But it didn’t last long, the stillness. The sleep. It didn’t last long. Christian arrived.
60
Franza was more punctual than usual. That was due to Port’s early departure, after which she had showered, grabbed a bit to eat, and set off for the office, intending to arrive first on that Tuesday morning. But she found Borger sitting outside her door. He greeted her with a smile.
Raven Sisters (Franza Oberwieser Book 2) Page 21
