The Girl Who Wasn't There

by Ferdinand von Schirach

  Sebastian wanted to tell his mother that his father had never cleaned guns in his study, and there was no one who went about that job more carefully. He wanted to tell her that he had seen the cartridges on the desk, and the blood on the wall, and that there was nothing left of his father’s head. He had seen all that, he wanted to say, he understood it, and her story wasn’t true. He wanted to tell her about their hunt in the morning, the meadows, the soil, the hills covered in bracken. But all that had happened, his thoughts, the colours and smells, just existed side by side, unfinished, in a state of semi-consciousness. He couldn’t yet connect them with each other.

  Then his mother stood up and left the room.

  6

  Relations whom Sebastian didn’t know came to the funeral. Some of them patted his head and asked whether he remembered them. An old lady with a mauve Alice band in her hair hugged him. Her dress smelled of mothballs.

  The whole village had come. While the priest spoke beside the open grave, Sebastian went to stand beside his friend, who had also been obliged to wear a dark suit. His friend whispered that the raft was ready now, it was afloat again, even bigger than last year and much better. His friend asked when he would be coming back; they were only waiting for him.

  That afternoon the family members sat in the garden of the house. The cook had baked sand cake, and the cream on top of it was running in the sun. At first the guests were awkward with each other, but soon they were all talking at once.

  Sebastian’s mother tapped a glass with a fork. The conversations died down, and everyone turned to her. She said how glad she was that so many of them had come to the funeral; it had done her good. She asked them for their understanding, she said, but she was going to sell the house. Her voice was steady. Then she sat down again.

  There was still silence when his father’s brother stood up. He swayed and propped his hands on the table, the tablecloth slipped, a cake-plate fell to the paving stones and broke. He had been drinking.

  ‘My brother and I were born in this house – I love it and hate it, the house, the lake, the grounds. I both love and hate it all,’ he said with a gesture of his hand. His voice was slurred. ‘She’s right. My brother and I thought we could begin the world all over again. But there’s nothing you can begin again, nothing at all, everything’s always there. He couldn’t become what he wanted to be, and nor could I. I must, you see, I must…’ His wife was plucking his sleeve. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘let me have my say.’ But all the same he dropped back into his wicker chair. He picked up his glass. ‘I drink to the end of it,’ he said, and added, quietly, ‘Thank God, my poor brother has it behind him now.’

  Sebastian sat on the outside sill of a window, listening to his uncle. He didn’t understand what he was talking about. His uncle could cut silhouettes out of paper and perform shadow-plays with them. He had married an Indian woman who was serious and strange. He had been living in Delhi for almost twenty years. Once they had all been on the island of Norderney together. His uncle had taken Sebastian out in a fishing boat very early in the morning. He had been drinking gin; Sebastian remembered him standing in the middle of the boat with the yellow gin bottle. His uncle had called Sebastian over to him, hugged him and shouted, ‘The sea is so damn stupid.’ Then he fell over. Later, the fishermen had carried him off the boat.

  The night after the funeral, Sebastian got out of bed. He went down to the lake in his pyjamas and sat on the wooden landing stage. Maybe he could stay here in secret, he thought. There was a little room at the very back of the right wing of the house. The only access to it was through a built-in wardrobe; it would be ideal. Even the cook didn’t know about it. He could hide there, his friend would bring him food, and when he was grown up he would get the house back again.

  His father had said that the house would always be there, his parents and grandparents and all his ancestors had lived here, and Sebastian and his children and his grandchildren would live here too. You were lost without your home, he had said, even if keeping up such an old house as this was often a strain.

  Sebastian thought of that, and he thought of his plan, and finally he went to sleep out there on the landing stage.

  7

  Two weeks after the funeral, Sebastian’s mother set to work. She must ‘wind up’ the household, she said.

  First an antiques dealer came from Munich, a man with sparse hair who wore a pair of purple-framed reading glasses hanging from a chain round his neck. He went round all the rooms with Sebastian’s mother, stopping now and then to point at something. In the end he bought the silver cutlery, four eighteenth-century miniatures, three oil paintings in rather battered frames, the guns and the elephant tusks. He would have all those things collected, he said, making out a cheque.

  A house clearance firm brought a skip and put it down outside the steps up to the front door. The firm’s men spent a week carrying almost everything out of the house; the skip was changed twice a day. By midday the men already smelled of sweat; they wore only undershirts. Once they had settled into their surroundings they didn’t always bring the things straight out to the skip. They put on the African masks, yelled gleefully and threw the spears at trees in the grounds.

  Sebastian didn’t understand what his mother was doing. She called it ‘making a clean sweep’. His father’s slides, his cine-films, even his notebooks went into the skip. She burned photographs and letters in a water butt in the garden. She had to ‘clear up’, she kept saying at this time, ‘draw a line under it, put an end to it all.’ He heard her going through the house, she called to him, but he didn’t answer.

  Sebastian sat on the steps up to the front door every day, in the shadow cast by the house, waiting for the cool of the evening. The walls beside the little flight of steps had sandstone reliefs showing badgers, otters and beavers. His father always said you had only to stroke the nose of one of the otters as you left the house, and then you were sure to come home.

  Just before the end of the holidays, a house agent came. The slogan on his car said ‘We Bring Together the Wishes of Demanding People Worldwide’. The agent placed himself in front of the house, formed his hands into a tube like a telescope and said, ‘Well, rather run-down, yes, but a lovely situation. We may be able to sell it.’ He took a great many photographs. Later, Sebastian’s mother and the agent sat outside at the table under the chestnut trees. Sebastian heard his mother saying, ‘As little as that?’ and for a moment he thought she would keep the house after all.

  On the day after the house agent’s visit, Sebastian cycled out to the church for the first time since the funeral. He got off his bike at the cemetery gate and pushed it along the gravel path. He saw the gravestones of his ancestors, and read his own name on every one of them. At his father’s grave he stopped. Someone had planted flowers; the metal watering can was still standing nearby. He knelt down and dug a hole with his hands. On top, the soil was warm from the sun, but as he dug deeper it became cold and damp. He had knocked the otter’s nose off the sandstone façade of the wall with a hammer, and he laid it in the earth. ‘You’d better come home now,’ he said. ‘I can’t manage this on my own.’

  At the end of the holidays his mother took him to Munich. She grumbled about the car, saying that it was too old, and that as soon as the house was sold she was going to buy a new one. She parked in the station forecourt. She was sorry, she said, but she couldn’t go as far as the platform with him or she’d never get to the horse show in time. Sebastian got out, kissed her through the open window, and lifted his case from the back seat. She can’t wave goodbye because of all the traffic, he thought as he watched her drive away.

  He found the train, sat in his reserved seat and looked out of the window. Feeling in his pocket, he took his father’s cigarette case out and ran his thumb over the jade stone in it. He thought of the wall behind the desk; it had already been repainted. As the train left the station, he placed the cigarette case on the folding table in front of him. The stone gleamed i
n the sun, its colour calm and regular. ‘Imperial jade,’ his father had once called it. The cigarette case dated from the twenties, and there were Japanese characters engraved inside it. Sebastian held the case up to his eyes. Sometimes the shadow of a tree or an electricity pylon fell on the jade stone, changing its colour.

  He saw the house before him, the dark green of his childhood, the bright days. The colours smelled of the dust covering everything, they smelled like freshly mown grass in the afternoon and like thyme after rain, and like the reeds between the planks of the landing stage. He thought of the silk dresses that his mother once used to wear, he thought of her skin in the sun and the picture of the Arctic Ocean in his father’s study. He didn’t know what was real any longer, and he didn’t know what was going to become of him.

  8

  Over the next few years at boarding school, Sebastian spent nearly all his time sitting in the library, reading. He went to India, the Sierra Nevada, into the jungle, he drove dog-sleighs and rode dragons, he caught whales, he was a seafarer, an adventurer, a traveller in time. He didn’t distinguish between stories and reality.

  The librarian noticed it first. He saw Sebastian talking excitedly to someone, although the boy was alone in the reading room. It struck the librarian as strange, and he reported it to the school management. The prefects and teachers discussed the incident, phone calls were made to Sebastian’s mother, and finally it was decided to have the matter investigated.

  The Holy Father in charge of his year’s intake at the school went to the capital city with Sebastian. He said they were going to see a famous doctor who was a professor at the university.

  The doctor was fat, he smelled of pea soup and he was already very old. But he didn’t look like a medical doctor, and his consulting room didn’t look like a medical doctor’s surgery. African masks hung on its walls, and a chain made of bones lay on the desk. Sebastian and the Father went into the city to see the fat doctor five times. They were delightful excursions. After each visit, the Father always took Sebastian to a café, and he could choose whatever cake he liked.

  On the last visit, the fat man said there was no need for Sebastian to come any more. He discussed something with the Father. Sebastian wanted to take note of it, but the men were using words that he didn’t know. Visual hallucinations, said the fat man, and many other difficult terms.

  Outside, Sebastian asked the Father what the fat doctor had said, because he was slightly afraid that he was ill. The Father reassured him: there was nothing much the matter, he said, it was just that he, Sebastian, imagined people and things that didn’t exist. Children sometimes did that, he added, when the border between reality and what was in their heads wasn’t perfectly clear yet. In time it would put itself right. The Father looked sad when he said that. Then they went into the café. Sebastian ordered a slice of marble cake, and the Father had a beer.

  Sebastian didn’t like to think that part of him had to be put right. The cook at home had a crooked finger, and said it had just grown that way. Sebastian did not want to have anything crooked and ugly in his head. He thought about it for a long time on the way back, and decided that it didn’t matter if he went on talking to Odysseus, Hercules and Tom Sawyer. But he mustn’t tell anyone; he must be more careful.

  9

  After Sebastian’s mother had sold the house by the lake, she bought a modern equestrian centre near Freiburg. She lived there in a detached house with thin walls and a double garage.

  There were twelve boxes in the stables; there was an indoor riding arena and a square paddock for dressage. A groom cleaned the way leading through the stables, the tack room and the inner courtyard every day; Sebastian’s mother made a fuss if she spotted any cobwebs.

  She rose at six every morning, and rode all her twelve horses until afternoon. From spring to autumn she went to horse shows at the weekends, and once reached the rank of national number two in dressage. She lived on the proceeds from the sale of the house by the lake and its woods.

  Because of the long intervals between school holidays, Sebastian noticed the changes in her: her chin and nose grew more pointed, her mouth was thinner, veins stood out on her forearms.

  When Sebastian visited her, he slept in a small room under the roof, where it was stuffy in summer and dark in winter. His mother used the room as her office when he wasn’t occupying it. His own things, packed into two crates, were kept up in the attic.

  In the holidays he went to horse shows with her. The show grounds were muddy, water collected in the ruts left by the motorized horseboxes, and the tents smelled of onions and burnt fat. In summer the horse droppings dried on the grass, heat turned people’s faces red, and the air was full of the acrid smell of the horses’ sweat. Men sat on folding chairs round the dressage paddock, watching their wives and daughters. They had a language of their own: a horse being ridden on the bit; they spoke of travers, flying changes, an extended trot. Sebastian realized that the women riders were addicted to their horses.

  His mother didn’t talk to him much; riding left her tired. She said she found her body a trial these days, the pain in her knees and her back and her hand. A doctor had warned her that the constant strain on the nerves of her throat meant they were wearing thin, and it would be dangerous to go on riding, too much of a risk. She tried giving it up for a week, and then got back on her horses. She had to ride, she said, there was no other option.

  When Sebastian was sixteen his mother introduced him to her new boyfriend. He was in his mid-forties, half a head shorter than she was, with short grey hair, thick eyebrows and manicured fingernails. They met Sebastian at the station when he came home from boarding school.

  They’d go and eat now, said the new boyfriend. He drove to a restaurant which he said was the best; his boss ate there, too. As the menu said, ‘a former butcher’s shop has been turned into the perfect replica of a French café of the turn of the century’, and was now ‘an authentic piece of France in the middle of Freiburg’. The tables were packed close together, there were too many customers in the room, the chairs were uncomfortable. It was very noisy. The new boyfriend shouted that the food here was excellent, and he addressed the waiter by his first name.

  The new boyfriend looked at his watch and ordered for everyone. He knew what was good here, he said. While they waited for the food to come, he told Sebastian that he was a sales rep for plasterboard panels, in which there was ‘a huge trade’. An article about him had once appeared in a local tabloid paper, when he had been doing all he could to get a Swedish car supplier to open an outlet in this city. The supplier had changed his mind before anything could come of it, but he himself was described as ‘the fixer’ in the newspaper story, and a name like that stuck, he said. He raised his eyebrows and spoke in a tone suggesting that it was a humorous idea, but Sebastian realized that he was proud of it. His mother said nothing, and seemed to have heard the story before.

  ‘Everything has its price,’ said the fixer. ‘But if you can move your arse it makes no difference where you come from.’

  The fixer put his hand on Sebastian’s mother’s thigh and looked down her neckline. The waiter brought a bottle of Clos de Beaujeu, although no one had ordered it. He could have a drink, the fixer told Sebastian, ‘in honour of the day’. Sebastian asked for water.

  Then the fixer shouted across the table at Sebastian, ‘What are you planning to be?’

  Sebastian shrugged. The fixer was playing with the salt shaker. He had fat fingers, although he wasn’t fat otherwise. He wore a gold watch on a gold bracelet, with a magnifying section over the date on the face of the watch. Saliva was drying in the corners of the fixer’s mouth. Sebastian imagined the fixer’s mouth on his mother’s.

  ‘Don’t you have any plans? Going to such an expensive school, and you don’t have any plans?’ asked the fixer.

  Sebastian did not reply.

  ‘What’s that you have there?’ asked the fixer. He reached into the pocket of Sebastian’s coat, which w
as lying over the chair, and took out the book that Sebastian had been reading in the train.

  ‘Down the rivers of the windfall light,’ read the fixer slowly. ‘What’s this supposed to mean?’ He laughed uproariously, holding the book aloft.

  ‘It’s a poem,’ said Sebastian. He snatched the book from the fixer’s hand, accidentally knocking a glass over. Wine soaked the tablecloth and ran on to the fixer’s trousers. Sebastian apologized, saying he must get some fresh air.

  He went outside. A homeless man was searching a rubbish bin at the bus stop. A very long, shiny car drove soundlessly past. The air weighed down on the street with a smell of asphalt and petrol. A woman walked by, shouting into a mobile phone, ‘You’ve been a single long enough, that’s what it is.’ Sebastian smoked two cigarettes, one after the other and too fast. A photograph of the green fisherman’s hut where Dylan Thomas had written the poems hung over his desk at the boarding school. He thought of it now.

  When he returned to the restaurant, the ‘Homemade Galloway Meatballs’ that the fixer had ordered for him were cold.