‘I let me in,’ said the little dust devil, ‘since you were so rude as not to invite me in the first place.’ And then the uninvited one stuck out the hand of a Lilliputian to Max and introduced himself. ‘Jansen Jäger at your service, Dr Portner. Your father Karl and I are old friends and when he told me about your plight I came as fast as I could, knowing how Officer Hummel here has a tendency to crash on regardless of the correct and legal procedures, isn’t that right, Officer?’
It was Hummel’s turn to be speechless whilst Max marvelled at the short, thin lawyer with the high-pitched voice who in every way was diminutive except in his manner: the most welcome of storms, which razed everything built on flimsy foundations to the ground.
‘What’s your line, Hummel?’ Hummel opened his mouth to answer but Jäger immediately turned to Max and asked the same question. ‘What’s he saying your motive is?’
‘Well,’ Max began quickly lest he lose the attention of his lawyer as quickly as the policeman did, ‘he reckons I killed our previous housekeeper—’
‘Karin Kranz, yes.’ Jäger nodded and Max was impressed that he already knew her name.
‘Yes, and he says I did it so as to make way for Jenny, our new housekeeper, who is a friend of mine from the war.’
‘Absurd.’ Jäger said the word so quickly it sounded like one syllable.
‘That’s what I said!’ Max said triumphantly.
‘Unless there’s more to your relationship with this Jenny.’
And suddenly Max deflated again as it felt as if Jäger was switching sides.
‘Ah,’ Hummel piped up. ‘Perhaps it would have been good to have you here earlier after—’
‘Shut up, Hummel, before I make you step outside, which of course I am well within my rights to do.’
Now Hummel looked as if he might vomit at any moment.
‘Well?’ Jäger snapped in Max’s face whilst remaining absolutely erect, which was quite a feat since he was still standing up and Max was sitting.
‘Well, Jenny and I are nothing more than friends, but she used to be a prostitute and I neglected to tell my family that.’
‘For obvious reasons,’ Jäger said with just a hint of a reduction in the winds that constituted his aura. ‘And where’s this evidence you took from my client’s belongings?’ He clicked his fingers at Hummel.
Hummel produced the picture of the Madonna again from his pocket, carefully pointing out the inscription on the reverse.
Jäger scanned the words in an instant then with the briefest leap of his eyebrows he turned over to view the image. ‘God fearing woman is she, this Jenny?’
‘I think so,’ Max said as Hummel simultaneously huffed with derision.
‘Clearly, if she is handing out pictures like this.’ He tossed the exhibit back at Hummel as if it were a piece of rubbish. ‘So why wouldn’t you sack her if you wanted her out of the way?’
‘I said that too,’ Max said, ‘And besides I didn’t want her out of the way. I had no idea that I would ever see Jenny again after I left the labour camp. No idea she even knew where I lived. The officer is claiming that I tried to sack her and she wouldn’t accept it, that we got into an argument and it got out of control.’
The air pressure in the room changed and Jäger lit up like a miniature summer storm cloud on hearing this. ‘Karin Kranz? Karl told me all about Karin Kranz on our way here. Karin Kranz – and I have no doubt we could get numerous testimonies to corroborate this from upstanding members of the local community – would not say boo to a goose. She was just about the most timid thing you could ever come across. She was the kind of girl, was she not, that if you told her she was sacked, would have a good cry and gather her things at once without so much as asking why, let alone arguing the toss with you about it.’
‘That’s exactly the kind of person she was,’ Max said, in awe of the lawyer.
‘Her body was found in the canal, was it not?’
‘Yes,’ Hummel said, ‘but she had been hit in the face first.’
‘So she was hit in the face. A blow to the face doesn’t usually kill someone, even someone as timid as Karin Kranz, does it, Hummel?’
Hummel knew where Jäger was heading.
‘So accusing my client of murder when she may well have been alive, albeit with a black eye, before she fell into the canal, is rather a rash action, don’t you think?’
Hummel was already on his feet. ‘Get out. Both of you.’
Jäger ushered a bewildered Max from the room ahead of the policeman, who called after them, ‘And you better get me a hundred testimonies to prove Kranz’s demeanour, because you can bet I’ll have a thousand to prove his.’
‘What happened?’ Karl said, trying to keep up with the whirlwind and his client.
‘The bloke is clutching at straws,’ Jäger said from the corner of his mouth as the three men sped along the cold dark street.
‘How do you know?’ Max asked with giggle of relief.
‘Because he let you go. I wouldn’t have let you go based on what you just told me.’
They woke to the first truly trenchant frosts of the season. The temperature plummeted and everything looked monochrome. Netta, Peter and Josef, when they looked outside, would be like all the children in Mengede that day: excited. Erika, like all the adults in her household, felt she was looking at her own insides spread out across the country.
She was so glad to have him back that she had let Max off the hook at first and hadn’t broached the subject of the Black Madonna, but today, with its biting stinging blankness, seemed the perfect time.
She sat up in bed. She knew he was awake though he was facing the other way. She knew Netta was not, as she was flat on her back, mouth wide open, not unlike a cadaver she’d once had to study, except for the reassuring rise and fall of her little chest.
‘She has to go,’ she said quietly.
Nothing, but perhaps the tightening of his shoulders.
‘Max. She cannot stay here after what’s happened.’
‘There’s nothing going on between us,’ he said into his pillow with a bored groan as if they’d had this conversation a thousand times already. And they had. But only in their own cacophonous minds. ‘The picture was a good luck gift. I lost it. She found it. Hence the inscription when she gave it back to me in Gegesha.’
‘But… the gossip that will go around. The gossip that is already going around.’
‘Frau Beltz can sort out her own damn varicose veins from now on.’
‘I can’t have her here.’
‘If we send her away the gossips will love that even more. That will look like an admission of guilt. And we have nothing to be guilty about.’
Erika felt herself shrink a little as her own indiscretion with Rodrick came bubbling up from the depths again. She needed to find something even more morally questionable to counter Max with. And she found it.
‘But what about this rumour that she’s a…’ She glanced over at her daughter again, now rolled onto her side facing the wall.
‘A prostitute?’ Max rolled onto his back, feeling at last he owed his wife the sight of his remorseful face, on this point at least. ‘She was.’ Erika twitched and he carried on quickly before he lost her. ‘I had to check all the… women’s health. It was my job. Jenny was nicer than most of them. You know that. She has a great character.’
Erika couldn’t argue with that. She found Jenny beguiling, attractive, and she hated herself for it.
‘And now she wants to change her ways, make a fresh start. It wouldn’t be Christian of me to turn her away.’
In her student days Erika would have seen this reference to his religion as an excuse, but, since her own conversion and since she knew how passionate and devout a Catholic Max was, this only made his reasoning for keeping Jenny stronger. Irritating, but stronger nonetheless.
‘We’re the only chance she’s got of getting on in life. She couldn’t have got into another house without references, without ex
perience. And you can’t deny she’s great at the job.’
Here Erika saw a chink in the argument and struck. ‘But you lied to me about her past. You lied to all of us about her. Surely it would have been the Christian thing to do to tell the truth and ask for us all to support her. You lied, and so why should I believe you when you say nothing happened between you and her?’
He thought for a moment he would tell her about the kiss. The kiss she gave him when he was at his lowest ebb, when he had been physically battered by that vicious sergeant and was lying in a bed in his own camp hospital, reeling and hallucinating. He could have told Erika that he wanted to return that kiss, that it stirred something in him, that he thought about a future with Jenny when he wasn’t sure there would be a future with Erika. He had no idea he would ever get away from Gegesha and when his best friend, his ‘brother’ Horst received a letter from his wife Eva telling him she was going to marry another man because she couldn’t go on alone, not knowing if he would ever return, was it any wonder Max began to question the future? If he had told her all these things right then, if he had been able to untangle each thought and lay them out on the bed smoothly and cleanly for her to examine, she, with her own misdemeanours in mind, could have done nothing but empathise and embrace him. But his tangle of thoughts clogged the channel between his mind and his mouth and all he could see was Erika translating the kiss into evidence of adultery, and all he could manage was, ‘I don’t know why you should believe me. Ask Jenny,’ he offered.
As if I would lower myself to discuss this with her, Erika sneered internally.
‘She has to stay,’ he asserted.
Because she’s a great housekeeper? Because it is our Christian duty? Erika needed him to just add something like that onto that terrible imperative. Anything to stop the unspoken words because life is so much easier for me with her here tapping at the Tiffany window as fingers of freezing yellow fog did then.
But nothing came.
In his effort to spare her feelings again, the unspoken words were deafening and gouged at her chilly ears.
And with her eyes scrunched shut in imitation of sleep, Netta begun to imagine ways of getting rid of this nasty housekeeper that was coming between her mama and papa, just as she had dreamt up fantastical stories about Karin’s demise.
It was the weekend and he went for a walk in the bleached polluted countryside to escape the unbreathable air of home. His feet crunched to a halt on the edge of the towpath and he found himself diverting up through the forest and out onto the open fields beyond. The frozen clods of earth were hard to negotiate but he relished the pain they induced in his ankles. Pain which he could tell himself was a kind of self-flagellation for the misery he knew he was causing his wife, when more likely the physical pain was triggering an opiate numbing within to block out the more excruciating mental pain there.
He walked faster to try and generate some heat. This time of year always did and always would remind him of his time in the camp inside the Arctic Circle. His body would never know temperatures as low again, but it shuddered in anticipation of them every winter. The vast expanse of farmland before him here reminded him of the endless Siberian steppes which had lain between him and home. Steppes which Horst had tried to flee across when he’d received that letter from Eva saying she was going to marry another man. If he could only get back to her, he had told Max, everything would be fine. This other man was merely a practical solution to a dire predicament, he’d said. But Max hadn’t thought for a minute his brother would actually try and escape the camp and make his own way back to Germany. Horst was a hulk of a man, even after a long time in the labour camp; strong but not fast, so he was hunted down by the guards quickly and shot, so Volkov claims, because he tried to attack the Russian sergeant. Max had never known a grief like it. He had never lost a parent, a spouse, a child even, but he had lost his real brother Sepp when they were both teenagers, and that blow had only been lessened by the presence of Horst in his life and Horst’s typically and wonderfully homely and unadorned offer: ‘I know it is not the same, but would you be my adopted brother, brother?’
Max blinked rapidly at the dirty white sky, trying to mop the welling tears back inside himself so he didn’t have to bring his hands from the warmth of his pockets to wipe at his face. The distant sound of a scream soon had him focusing on the few trees at the bottom of the field he stood in; trees which huddled around the pond, unsuccessfully shielding the goings-on there with their naked winter skeletons. The scream came again and a smudge of dark blue followed by two brown ones passed quickly across the frozen surface of the pond. Three children playing on the ice. And as he got closer he saw the three were Peter, Josef and Netta. Each daring the others to slide further and further out, all of them skating about with a joyful obliviousness to the cold. Max knew it was his duty to go and tell them off for playing in such a dangerous place, but his feet planted themselves in the cracked earth behind the thickest tree and he watched their abandon with an amused envy.
‘I bet you can’t beat me to the other side,’ Netta challenged both the boys and, as they all shot off across the ice, Max found himself admiring her fearlessness and felt he was watching Erika back at University in Freiburg, the only girl in their little circle of friends – Erika, Max, Edgar, Horst and Kurt – and one of only a handful of female medical students in the entire department. She’d always had to be the most determined amongst them, aggressive even, to be heard over the clamour of male mulishness. And now it seemed that characteristic was to be found in her daughter – through genetics, if you listened to Erika, through God’s will if you listened to Max, or perhaps through sheer coincidence in a world with so many more billions of ever-changing people than there are behavioural traits.
And then he saw her fall right onto her face. He watched her head rebound from the unforgiving ice as Peter and Josef’s eyes were fixed on the winning line. He saw her clutch at her nose and saw how bright the red blood looked against the white solid surface of the pond. And then he was there, scooping her howling body up and carrying her back to the trees as Peter and Josef looked on, petrified of the scolding they expected from the doctor when he was finished with his patient. He pinched her nose and held her head back and before long the wailing and bleeding both subsided.
‘I’m sorry, Papa,’ she pleaded, as he examined her face, ‘I’m sorry.’
He wasn’t just examining her nose, but her expression too and the fear he saw there. It saddened him, but didn’t surprise him after his behaviour in the garden when he’d discovered her sandwich dump, so a conscious softening of his own stony features and a rub on the arm of her dark blue coat was the best way he could think of right then to tell her not to be frightened of him. And then, when he came back to assessing her physical state, he realised one or two more reassuring rubs of the arm would be necessary, at least, as he delivered the news.
‘Netta, it looks like you’ve broken your nose,’ he said with a consoling smile.
‘Ow,’ was her shivery response.
‘So the best thing to do is for me to put it straight before it stays in that crooked shape forever. You don’t want it to stay all broken like that forever, do you?’
She shook her head as hard as her pounding face would allow her and tried to feel about her nose for the crookedness her papa had described. Her little gloved fingers were repelled by the alien shape they found there and so she quickly surrendered to her father’s grasp as Peter and Josef looked on with morbid fascination. He did it quickly. It felt as if she was being punched in the face by the ice yet again. She screamed, but it was a brief scream, clipped by the easing sensation that everything was back in its proper place.
‘Jump on,’ he said, offering his daughter his back. ‘We need to get home so I can fix you up a little more.’
Netta hesitated – at the idea of such close proximity to her papa or at the idea of more treatment to her bruised face, Max couldn’t tell.
‘It won’t
hurt,’ he said, hoping the statement would serve to remedy both possibilities.
And after a last glance at her two open-mouthed chums, she climbed gingerly onto her papa’s back and he set off across the fields for home.
Martha made a welcome fuss of Netta as Max sat her on the kitchen table.
‘What’s happened?’ Erika came into the room and begun scanning her daughter’s broken face with the double intensity of a mother and a doctor.
‘I was playing on the frozen pond and I fell on the ice.’
‘Oh, how many times have—’
‘It was broken. I’ve reset it.’ Netta appreciated her papa interrupting the reprimand, ‘Do you have any tampons?’
Erika looked momentarily stunned as her already suspicious mind (when it came to Max and other women’s private parts) started making all sorts of bizarre connections. But then the penny dropped and she hurried off to find some.
‘What’s a tampon, Papa?’ Netta asked.
‘Well, I—I—I don’t think…’ Martha began and Max just enjoyed watching his mother squirm until Erika returned and he simply said:
‘These are tampons, Netta. And they are really good,’ he said, inserting one up each of her nostrils, ‘for mending a broken nose.’
‘Oh,’ said Netta.
‘Oh,’ Martha blushed.
‘Oh,’ Erika breathed.
‘Have a look!’ Max said, picking up his daughter and holding her up to the mirror over the mantelpiece in the living room.
Netta giggled at the sight of her two new tusks and the smiley man in the mirror, whose strong grip on her waist felt so secure she tried to make it last by pulling faces and encouraging him to do the same.
‘Oh,’ her mama huffed again, with more intensity this time.
‘What is it, Erika?’ Netta heard her Oma say.
‘It’s coming,’ Mama groaned. ‘The baby’s coming!’
And suddenly her papa was letting go of Netta again all too soon, as he lowered her abruptly to the floor and hurried away with Mama in the red car to the hospital to bring his brand new child into the world in a way he had never done with Netta.
The Watcher Page 12
