Rain Girl

by Gabi Kreslehner

  “No,” Felix interrupted, patting his leg reassuringly. “Of course not.”

  Thank God, Arthur thought and tried to unwind a little. That’s the last thing I need!

  “Or if she does . . .” Felix said, “not in any detail, anyway.”

  He cleared his throat. “Do you want me to go a little faster? Am I driving too slow for you?”

  Arthur shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “It’s all right.”

  I’ll kill you, he thought, I’ll send you straight to the happy hunting ground, and then I’ll get mitigating circumstances.

  “Watch it now!” Felix said. “You’re not thinking any ugly thoughts, are you?”

  Yes, Arthur thought, that’s precisely what I’m doing. The happy hunting ground, Hades, all those things, and with a decent portion of hellfire on top—just like on the Danube a little while ago!

  “Oh, yes,” Felix said. “One more thing. In the future, please make sure you get sufficient sleep. You were just unbearable to watch.”

  OK, Arthur thought, that’s enough.

  He opened his mouth for a long-overdue retort. “And what about yourself? I’ve got a feeling you’ll envy me my nights in a few months’ time. I’ve heard yours are going to be pretty substandard. I’ll be happy to tell you about my nights with Karolina then—in all their scintillating colors. Sound good?”

  “Ouch!” Felix said appreciatively and sighed. “How malicious!”

  67

  “Franziska, my dear,” Franza’s mother used to say in honeyed tones when Franza visited her in the old folks’ home in the days just before her death. As always, Franza was annoyed about her full name, which, since childhood, she had considered antiquated and poorly suited to her.

  Sometimes she thought about not going, and then the one time when she actually didn’t go for her daily half hour—not because of carelessness or laziness, but because her job hadn’t permitted it—her mother died.

  Of course it hadn’t been her fault, the nurses and doctors at the home assured her with surprise. Where did she get that idea? Her mother was an old lady and her heart just couldn’t keep up anymore. These things happened all the time.

  Franza didn’t know what made her think of this now of all times, on the drive back to the village where Judith Gleichenbach lived. Her mother had died two years ago, and Franza was now the owner of the small house where she’d grown up twenty miles downriver. The same house where she’d had to go piggyback as a child when the brook burst its banks and they had to evacuate.

  Maybe it was being close to the Danube that caused her to think of all these things, or maybe it was just sheer exhaustion that made her so inappropriately sentimental.

  They entered the village, and Judith wanted to get out of the car. “Thank you,” she said. “I’d like to walk for a bit.”

  Franza nodded and pulled over to the side of the road. The village was deserted, and when she checked her watch she saw it was half past one.

  “There’s one more thing I’d like to know,” said Franza.

  “Yes?” Judith asked, gazing into the dark village. “What is it?”

  “The anonymous caller back then,” Franza said. “That was you, wasn’t it?”

  Judith nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Of course. That was me.”

  She’d already opened the door. There was a chilly breeze, and some raindrops were blowing in. They both shivered.

  “Are you sure you won’t let me take you home,” Franza said. “It’s raining.”

  “No,” Judith said, “the fresh air will do me good.” But she stayed there, as if waiting for the next question.

  OK, Franza thought, I’ll ask it then. She cleared her throat.

  “Why didn’t you go to the police? Why didn’t you report him? Were you scared of the consequences because you were in the car, too?”

  “Scared of the consequences?” Judith thought it over and shook her head. “There wouldn’t have been any consequences for me, no legal ones. He forced me back into the car and he beat me like a madman. Any doctor could have confirmed that.”

  “But,” Franza began, “then I don’t understand . . .”

  Judith closed the door again and thought silently for a moment. The rain was drumming onto the roof of the car, louder now, turning the car into a protective cave.

  Hopefully it won’t hail, Franza thought while she waited for the answer, looking through the window anxiously at the sky. If it starts hailing, my car will be ruined.

  “I was pregnant,” Judith said.

  68

  “It was very recent,” Judith continued. “I’d only known about it for a few days.”

  Franza closed her eyes and felt the world falling silent, silent like they were. The rain, she thought somewhere in her mind while contemplating the words she’d just heard, the words that were chiseled into the silence like a relief of sadness, a relief of darkness. The rain stopped. She was pregnant. It won’t hail. She was expecting a child.

  “Should I have reported him, then?” Judith continued with a desolation and a brokenness in her voice that was overwhelming. Franza knew there’d be no more consolation, nothing. “Should I have? He was the man I loved up until that moment, until everything fell to pieces.”

  Silence again. No hail.

  “Today, yes . . .” she said, “today . . . I know . . .”

  She shook her head. “But in hindsight,” she said, “in hindsight it’s always too late.”

  She put a hand on Franza’s arm. “The burial’s on Tuesday,” she said. “Will you come?”

  It was so quiet, so still, in the car and everywhere. It can’t be, Franza thought, not this. She turned her head slowly, opened her mouth to say something, but had to clear her throat because it had turned dry and sticky.

  “No,” Judith said. “No. Please don’t ask.”

  Then she got out and started walking down the road. The houses moved closer together, taking her into their circle. She carefully avoided the big puddles on the road.

  Franza got out, too, leaned against the car and breathed deeply, trying to suppress the shivering, the tears. There was a fresh smell—how she loved it—in the air and the rain. Tuesday, then. Another Tuesday. “I’ll come,” she whispered. “Of course I’ll come.”

  The moon was peering out from behind the clouds. A soft sound of singing was wafting through the air from somewhere far away. Clear and high, one single note.

  69

  Franza startled out of a dream around six o’clock in the morning. Reuter had been sitting opposite her in the interrogation room; the lamp had burnt holes into his eyes, and outside the window, trees were sliding past at high speed.

  “I didn’t want to kill her,” he said, smiling at her. “You have to believe me, Frau Detective.”

  She was fascinated again by the way the sun caught in his hair, creating sparkling and glimmering spots, which turned into flames. But Reuter didn’t burn; he was still smiling at her.

  Her eyes flashed coldly back at him. “You mean you didn’t want to do it yourself.”

  He thought about it for a long time. “Yes,” he said eventually. “I guess you could say that.”

  Trees slid past again, more slowly this time, and she recognized alder trees and willows with their weeping branches blowing in the wind.

  “Go to hell!” she said. “Damn you, go to hell!”

  He started to laugh. “OK!” he laughed. “If that would make you happy!”

  When Port turned up and Reuter started to flirt with him, she awoke and sat straight up in the wide bed. She looked around, confused.

  Slowly, her memory returned. She had driven back to town, willing herself not to think anymore, but it hadn’t worked. She’d left the autobahn and driven past the theater, past Port’s house. The temptation to stop and ring the doorbell, to fall into his bed and into his warmth, had been great, but she hadn’t yielded to it.

  Suddenly and very conveniently, the Babenberger, one of the few luxury hot
els in town, came into view. The prospect of a huge, soft bed and a sparkling clean bathroom had made her pull over immediately and check in.

  “You don’t have luggage?” the receptionist had asked, eyeing her skeptically.

  “No,” she answered, putting on her policewoman expression. “Is that a problem?”

  “Of course not,” he assured her hastily.

  “Good,” she replied. He needed to get a move on if he didn’t want to pick her up off the floor.

  The alarmed look on the receptionist’s face spoke volumes, and his manicured fingers raced over the keyboard to type all the required information into the computer. Before she knew it, she was checking into an almost indecently large room. She had collapsed on the bed and gone to sleep immediately.

  That had been barely four hours ago, and slowly the memories were coming back to her, everything that had happened over the last few days. She got up, wrapped herself in a blanket, and walked to the window. The morning was gray and bleak, as glum as a morning in November even though it was June.

  She rested her head against the cold glass and pulled the blanket tighter around her. She hadn’t had enough sleep.

  A shower, she thought, my kingdom for a shower!

  She stood in the doorway to the bathroom, looking at the white tiles shimmering in the warm glow of the ceiling lights and the fixtures sparkling like freshly polished pennies, and sighed contentedly.

  Good, she thought, all right, let’s face this morning and all that comes next. Ben, she thought, where are you, why aren’t you calling?

  She took her time in the shower, standing under the stream of warm water with her head tilted back and her hands against the tiles, the water warming her right through and steaming up the bathroom.

  I’ll order some breakfast, she thought, bacon and eggs and coffee and croissants and orange marmalade, yes, orange marmalade. Surely they’ll have that in a fancy place like this.

  And then, she thought, I’ll try Ben again, and I’ll call Max and Port.

  She got out of the shower, put on the bathrobe that was on the shelf next to the shower, fresh smelling and neatly folded, and waited until the steam dissipated and her face was visible in the mirror. Sometimes she could still see the face of the teenager she’d once been, ages ago. Other times it was the face of the twenty-year-old or that of the woman who’d woken up one morning and found that her life was running out unremittingly, toward an end or a beginning depending on how you looked at it. That final face was probably the most normal and at the same time the most bitter fact of her life.

  She smiled at herself in the mirror and had to admit she badly needed a haircut. When she realized she was slipping back into the normalcy of everyday life, and that even Marie’s death wouldn’t change that, tears came to her eyes and she thought of her son and how little she’d been there for him. She wished he were here, and she was filled with sadness for what awaited him.

  When her cell phone rang she thought it was him, but it was Port.

  “I’m standing by your car,” he said. “Where are you?”

  She was surprised. “By my car? At this hour? It’s the middle of the night for you!”

  “Yes,” he said, “it is. I’m on my way home. It got a little late. We had the premiere.”

  “Until now?”

  He was a little embarrassed. “No, not until now. So where are you?”

  She told him, and he wanted to come up.

  When he hugged her, she noticed he was wet and also that he stank of cigarettes, schnapps, and sweat—just what people smelled of after an all-nighter. She liked it.

  “You’ve solved the case,” he said. “Haven’t you? You seem so . . . serene.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But serene? No.”

  He saw the bed and staggered toward it.

  “Oh!” he said. “I bet it’s soft. I bet it’s for me.” And he dropped onto it and was asleep at once. She shook her head and looked at him. There he was in his T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops.

  You’re a crazy man, she thought, shaking her head. You really are nuts.

  She pulled the flip-flops off his feet and covered him with a blanket. What do you know about the world, she thought, unless it happens onstage?

  But she knew she wasn’t being fair. He knew a lot about the world. He knew how to please a woman. He even knew how to please a man with innuendoes. Wasn’t that a lot?

  She grinned and enjoyed indulging unchecked in her cynicism.

  Then she walked to the window and indulged in the time-honored gaze out into the world, into freedom, into boundlessness, into whatever.

  It was all doom and gloom outside: wind, rain, and it was not getting any lighter. When the Danube sent the fog, everything sank into a state of insignificance. People wandered around aimlessly as if nothing concerned them.

  She walked to the room telephone, ordered breakfast, sent Max a text message saying she’d come home in the afternoon, and went back to bed.

  Lauberts came to her mind.

  Shit, she thought, we’ve got to call off the search. We can’t forget that. His bad conscience had probably made him miss his wife, and he’d gone and joined her in some vacation spot in southern Italy. Right now he was lying in the sun and would never cheat on his wife again. Maybe she would be cheating next.

  She picked up her phone again, typed Cancel Lauberts, and sent the text message to Felix. Then she realized that he’d missed his second appointment with Max. Frau Brigitte will be pleased, she typed into her phone, adding five exclamation marks, pushed the “Send” button, and suspected Felix would curse her if he happened to have left his phone somewhere close to his bed. Considering the impossible time of night—or rather morning—they’d all gotten to bed, it was more than likely he’d forgotten to turn it off.

  She thought of Brückl and how happy she’d made him by solving the case so fast. There wouldn’t be a trial for him to play up to the media, but at least he’d get a few interviews with the local paper.

  Then she decided to ask his wife, Sonja, about the strange affinity she’d always seemed to have for square, insignificant men void of any mystery or melancholy. She really wanted to know why.

  Franza suspected it had something to do with security and constancy, things Karen Reuter never had.

  Kind of crazy, she thought. Here I am lying in bed in an obscenely expensive hotel, not even five hundred yards away from Port’s apartment, and I don’t even feel bad. Was it decadent or just plain stupid? She sighed and thought of the bill waiting for her a few floors below. She definitely could not expense it.

  Port stirred and crawled close to her, resting his head against her shoulder. She looked at him, his handsome face and his dark hair. She brushed her hand over his chin, which was prickly like a baby hedgehog. It was how she liked it. It reminded her of Max and of how it was in the beginning, long ago. She thought of the future and wondered what it held for her, and she thought that everyone else was probably right, that one day Port would leave for a bigger and better theater, in a bigger and better city. They wouldn’t see each other anymore, wouldn’t touch each other anymore, or be there for one another. A small, sad feeling spread inside her, pricking the other, all-encompassing one.

  Thank God Port began to snore at that moment, and the pressure that had begun to hold her in its tight grip was released. “Hey,” she said, nudging him. “You snore!”

  He started, looked at her out of sleepy eyes, and said indignantly, “Not true!” Then he fell back asleep and continued to snore.

  She shook him off and got up again. We’ll see, she thought, as always, we’ll see.

  That had been her mother’s mantra. She used to say it at any possible or impossible occasion. For some reason Franza had picked up the habit; maybe it was just a mother-daughter thing.

  She had to laugh and wanted to sigh at the same time. Her stomach rumbled loudly, and she hoped breakfast would be there soon. She thought of the orange marmalade and wondered if they had
to pick the oranges first. She imagined its bright, sun-like shimmer and the slightly bitter taste, which would melt on her tongue.

  She sank deep into the armchair she’d moved next to the bed and pressed her feet gently on Port’s behind, to which he replied with a soft grunt. Just you wait, she thought and kicked him, once, twice, and then he spun around so suddenly that she gave a surprised laugh. He grabbed her feet and stuck them under his arm, and she felt how tired her bones were, so tired she was sure she’d never get up again, especially not from this armchair, which must have been made for tired bones.

  She thought of the case again. Had they forgotten anything, overlooked anything?

  As she was drifting off, her cell phone rang. She started. It was probably Max, or maybe Felix wanting to tell her off for waking him.

  She looked at the screen and made a sound of surprise.

  Ben. It was Ben.

  She pushed the “Accept Call” button and noticed her fingers were trembling. “Ben!” she shouted into the phone. “Oh my God, Ben! Finally!”

  . . . was a peculiar girl

  a peculiar child

  now the wind’s blown her away

  as winds tend to do . . .

  marie in memoriam

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © Martin Hartl

  Award-winning writer Gabi Kreslehner lives and works in her hometown of Ottensheim, Austria, located on the shores of the Danube. There, she is a teacher and is involved in student theater. Rain Girl is her first novel for adults and also the first of her books to be translated and published in English.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Lee Chadeayne, translator, is a former classical musician and college professor. He was one of the charter members of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) and is editor in chief of the ALTA newsletter. Recent translations include Oliver Pötzsch’s The Poisoned Pilgrim: A Hangman’s Daughter Tale and The Wandering Harlot by Iny Lorentz.