He’d imagined things differently. It was nothing like the movies, where the kidnapping victim comes home, embraces his family and all is well. It wasn’t that straightforward.
What he needed more than anything was an answer.
And maybe also revenge.
For seven years he had been tormented by the question of whether his kidnapping had been ordered by someone he’d loved and trusted.
There were three people on his list, and in the pale, wasted days and wakeful, desperate nights in the camp, he’d spent a great deal of time hating those three people. If there was anything he’d had plenty of during his captivity, it was time. He’d sworn that if ever he made it out of that hole at the end of the world and into the light of day, those people would pay for what they’d done. He used to wish they’d drop down dead—sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes all three, depending on which of them he thought guilty just then.
There was his fatherly friend, Johann Kerber, who had urged him to make this trip, supposedly because it would do Philip good to get away from Sarah for a bit. ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder,’ Johann had told him. As if he’d ever given a damn about Philip’s marital troubles.
Then there was Bernd Schröder. Bernd should have been with Philip in the car that morning—the car from which he’d been kidnapped. But Bernd had been taken ill at the last minute and couldn’t leave his hotel room. That’s what he’d said, at least. Ambition-crazed Bernd Schröder pass up a crucial meeting because of a slight cold? Hard to believe.
Last of all there was Sarah. Had his mother been right? Had Sarah only been after his money? He regretted never having asked her if there was any truth in his mother’s constant hints—that she had been prepared to accept money to leave him. He had once trusted Sarah blindly. Once.
Because of course he’d had good times with her too—it was just that his memories of them had largely faded, like photographs in an old newspaper that have been too long in the sun. All he’d been able to think about during his captivity was the fighting, the bitterness—admittedly his as well as hers. Towards the end, before that fateful trip, he’d sometimes thought there was no love left between them—only blood and tears. Could he really blame that one terrible night by the side of the road in the woods? Or had it merely laid bare what had long been there beneath the surface—that they were too different to love and understand one another? He remembered begging her to talk to him, saying all those stupid, desperate things that people said in films—that women said in films.
‘Please talk to me…’
‘What are you thinking?’
‘I can’t bear your silence anymore.’
‘If you’ve ever loved me…’
Was it only that terrible night? Or would their marriage have collapsed anyway? Had it ever stood a chance? He tormented himself with these questions, turning them over and over in his mind, until he’d convinced himself that Sarah had never loved him.
His guard had told him often enough. ‘You become vegetable here, rich man,’ he’d say in his broken English. ‘No one want pay for you.’
Now the plane was about to land.
Barbara Petry had told him that his wife was coming to the airport to welcome him. Of course she was.
The ministry officials hadn’t yet been able to give him any details about the investigation into his kidnapping. Harald Grimm had asked him to be patient. He and his team and their colleagues in South America wanted to get to the bottom of things, but it would take time. Grimm was confident he could find out whether or not Philip’s wife had ordered his kidnap, but he’d need a few days to make his inquiries.
Philip couldn’t believe he’d have to go home with her, not knowing if she’d done it.
Could it really have been Sarah who had tried to get rid of him? Was she capable of such a thing? Psychologically? Logistically?
Yes, a lot had happened. Yes, Sarah had spent a few weeks in a psychiatric clinic as a teenager after her mother’s suicide when she’d lost touch with reality. But that was a long time ago. Yes, she might have been unstable in the past. Yes, she might at times have had a tendency to extreme behaviour. But treachery? Was Sarah really capable of treachery?
Philip realised that his thoughts were going round in circles again, like goldfish in too small a bowl. Only one thing had changed.
He was free—free to act, free to see them. Johann. Bernd. And her—Sarah.
Only a few minutes to go. Then he’d look her in the eyes. He’d stare into her face and he would know.
Suddenly he thinks of their wedding.
Las Vegas, a sparkling mirage in the middle of the desert.
Sarah had almost got cold feet, only minutes before the wedding.
They were roasting in the sun, waiting their turn outside the little white chapel with the enormous sign saying ‘Wedding Chapel: America’s Favorite Since 1940’. They’d just seen a couple of newlyweds come out and zoom off in a huge pink Cadillac.
He was excited and full of happy anticipation—the mood of this strange, loud, bright, hyperactive city had infected him. Sarah, however, seemed pensive, quieter than usual.
‘Are you okay, Princess?’ he asked. Sarah loved it when he called her that, but she didn’t react now. ‘Is something worrying you?’ he said.
Sarah ran her hand through her hair, which fell loose over her white dress.
‘What if we turn out like all the other married couples?’ she asked. ‘If we end up arguing all the time?’
He realised that she was thinking of the fight they’d had a few days before—he’d already forgotten what it had been about.
‘Then I guess we argue,’ he replied. He smiled at Sarah, stroked her cheek, ran his fingers through her hair.
She looked at him doubtfully.
‘We just have to go back to loving each other again afterwards as quickly as possible,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
But she didn’t seem satisfied.
‘We love each other,’ he said. ‘That’s enough.’
‘All couples love each other when they get married,’ she said. ‘But that doesn’t mean they all manage to stay together.’ She hesitated. ‘The problem is that when we argue like we did the other day, I completely forget that I love you and that you love me. It’s not as if we even had anything to argue about. If we fight over little things like that, what will happen later? When we have children or…’ She let the sentence trail off. ‘When I’m as angry as I was the day before yesterday, I don’t care about anything, I’m capable of anything at all,’ she concluded.
He looked at her in silence, not knowing what she wanted to hear from him.
‘It scares me,’ she said.
‘What scares you?’
‘When we’re like that,’ she said. ‘When we lose control like that.’
‘I’ll never let you forget that I love you. I promise.’
Sarah’s look darkened. ‘Don’t make promises you can’t keep.’
From inside the chapel they heard music. They were next.
The chapel door opened and they were ushered in by the Elvis impersonator they’d booked to walk Sarah down the aisle and sing ‘Love Me Tender’ during the ceremony.
How we changed, he thought, in the time between our wedding and our botched goodbyes. He saw it all like a film montage: the night they met, their first date—on the Elbe Beach—their first kiss, their first fight. His proposal—that, too, on the Elbe Beach, their place—and then the wedding, the baby, the drifting apart.
Their goodbyes had haunted him for seven years. Did she no longer love him? Had she inflicted all this on him? Or was he being unfair to her? Did she still love him? Would she wait for him?
Seven years had not been enough to solve the mystery.
My fourteen thousand four hundred and fortieth day on earth, he thought. The day I return home—if such a place exists.
Then everything went very fast—the landing, the crowds of people. Philip felt like a mole
being dragged out into the light.
Keep going, he told himself.
He had, in any case, eyes for one person only. He would look Sarah in the eyes—and he would know.
Sarah
Philip is sitting opposite me at the kitchen table in silence. He’s not an arm’s length from me, but still he seems impossibly far away.
We are as alien to each other as two people can be. He has an entire universe in his head—I will never begin to understand him.
On the windowsill is an old photo of us. We look so ridiculously young and happy. Now he looks the way I feel—ready to die of exhaustion. I let my gaze wander about the kitchen. The brightly coloured flowers on the table are hanging their heads, the spherical lamp hovering over them like a languid moon.
We’ve been sitting here for ages. It’s going to take me some time to get my head round things. First I have to conflate the stranger with Philip.
I feel porous, and fragile as an empty snail shell. I look at Philip. I don’t know what to say.
I think back to the time before Philip went missing. To our fight the day he left, and the one the day before and the day before that. I’ve forgotten the flimsy reasons, the tenuous arguments. It wasn’t over anything particular—we argued for the sake of arguing, for the sake of proving ourselves right, of winning, of hurting one another.
There was a time when I cried every day, which drove Philip mad. What he didn’t know was that I wasn’t crying because I was sad or helpless or desperate or trying to make him feel bad, but because I was angry. I cried because he made me so furious that I sometimes didn’t recognise myself—so furious that I felt like taking something heavy and bringing it down over his head.
It wasn’t until he suddenly disappeared that I realised it wasn’t because I no longer loved him that I got so angry, but because I loved him still.
In the space of a single day, my life was reduced to hopes and fears—and questions: Where are you, Philip? Why have you left us? What’s happened to you? Are you still alive? Are you well? Do you still think of us—of your wife and son? What happened? Were you murdered? Kidnapped? Did you have an accident? A stroke? A brain haemorrhage? A heart attack? Did you die somewhere and nobody found you? Have you lost your memory, as I’d like to imagine? Or have you run away? Are you in hiding? Have you started a new life? Are you somewhere out there? Are you happy? Would I sense it if you were still alive? Would I have sensed it if you’d died? Where are you, Philip? Where are you? Will you ever come back?
How can you have disappeared without trace? How does anyone disappear without trace? Did you do it on purpose? Have you gone underground? Did you have secrets from me? Were you the man I thought you were? Or are there things I don’t know—undreamed secrets in that rich old family of yours, in that family business? Did you have enemies? Were you an enemy to anyone? Did you have a lover? Was there someone you loved more than Leo and me? Because believe me, that would be fine, absolutely fine. I just want to know. I have to know what’s happened to you.
What has happened to you?
And now?
For a long time I believed there was nothing I wanted more than to get Philip back. And now I think of something my grandmother used to say to me: be careful what you wish—it might come true.
We sit in silence. The fridge hums. Outside, a night bird calls. The floorboards creak, as if the wise old house were trying to lighten the silence between us. I turn away from Philip’s face and focus on the grain of the kitchen table. I run my hand over it, unsure what to think or do or say. Rationally, I know that the man at the airport and in the car and in my house—the man who followed me and whom I followed—the man I hit and screamed at—the man who threatened me and whom I threatened—I know that man was Philip. I know it, but I can’t get my head round it.
It’s all so surreal. I feel like a character in a play—as if any minute now I might go crashing through the papier-mâché and discover that the table I’m leaning on, the kitchen, the house, my whole world are nothing but a stage set.
I look up; our eyes meet. A small smile plays briefly on Philip’s lips, and he almost looks the way he used to. Then a shadow flits across his face, sweeping the smile away, and once again he is the stranger who got off the plane the day before yesterday—or was it the day before that?
The wrinkles in his good-looking face have grown deeper in the past few days.
My voice sounds rough when I manage to speak at last.
‘I just couldn’t,’ I say. ‘I couldn’t recognise my husband in you.’
‘Couldn’t?’ Philip asks, ‘or wouldn’t?’
I don’t reply. I don’t know.
But I remember. I remember the seven years without him, the eclipse of the sun, those few secret nights with Mirko, my goodbyes. And then this strange man with the hard eyes, who stepped out of that plane and burst into my painstakingly rearranged life. It was like when I was seventeen and found my mother hanging in the kitchen. The altered colours, the chill in my bones, the feeling of being swathed in cotton wool.
‘Something in me shut down,’ I whisper. I struggle to find the right words. ‘It was too much,’ I say. ‘It was just too much.’
Something in me shut down.
I can’t put it any better than that.
That is the truth.
Philip has a lovely face. I’ve always thought so. He is dark-haired and pale and has big brown eyes, which sometimes, when he’s happy about something, have an almost childlike expression. But when he raises his eyebrows, they form little triangles, like Mephistopheles’ eyebrows in a traditional performance of Goethe’s Faust. Philip’s lips are thin, but his upper lip has an attractive curve to it, which I fell very much in love with many years ago.
If you look closely, you can still see all that. If you know what you’re looking for.
How amazing that we all look different, I think. Over seven billion people on the planet and no two faces are the same. And we are capable of perceiving each one as unique.
Most of the time.
Philip raises his eyes and sees me scrutinising him. I look away.
There are so many questions in my head that I can’t get a grasp on even one.
For a long time Philip says nothing. Eventually I can stand the silence no longer.
‘You must have thought I was doing it on purpose,’ I say. ‘That I was only pretending not to recognise you.’
Philip nods.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I thought you were doing it on purpose. I thought you had a plan, that you were trying to get rid of me for good.’
‘Why would I have done that?’
He shrugs.
‘No idea, Sarah,’ he says. ‘Seven years are a long time. How was I to know what kind of a life you’d led in that time, what you thought, what you wanted, what you were prepared to do to get it?’
‘When did you realise?’ I ask.
‘That you genuinely hadn’t recognised me?’
I nod.
‘I’m not sure. Probably when you followed me into town,’ he says. ‘That struck me as strange. That’s when I began to suspect something.’
He considers.
‘And then when you brought my mother round.’
The memory is like being winded.
‘My mother, of all people. That’s when I knew.’
His hand moves to his chest, where the knife grazed him, and I think of the meeting with Barbara Petry.
‘When I asked you to show me your birthmark,’ I say, ‘why didn’t you just do it?’
Philip drops his hand, but he doesn’t answer. Finally I understand. The scars. Dear God.
For a while we sit in silence.
‘I thought you had a guilty conscience,’ he says. ‘I thought that was the reason you refused to recognise me. I thought it was you.’
I go cold.
‘That what was me?’ I ask, but I already have some idea.
Philip looks me in the eyes. The hatred, the anger, the
malice, the nastiness—suddenly it all makes sense. But I’m bewildered all the same. How could he think such a thing?
‘You thought I was involved in your kidnapping?’ I ask tonelessly.
He doesn’t reply.
I think of the time before he went missing, the daily bickering, the ugly remarks. I think of that terrible night, after which nothing was ever the same again—the night we were driven apart once and for all—the night I had done such a good job of suppressing.
‘You thought that?’ I whisper. ‘For seven years?’
Philip shakes his head. ‘I didn’t know what to think.’
‘And what do you think now?’
He swallows audibly. ‘That I simply had bad luck. That I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
‘Do you know that for sure?’ I ask.
Philip nods. ‘It was confirmed earlier today.’
Silence.
A long silence.
‘I still don’t understand why you did what you did,’ I say. ‘None of it makes any sense.’
‘I only wanted one thing,’ says Philip. ‘The truth. And I…’
He shrugs.
‘You…took advantage of my confusion,’ I say, finishing his sentence for him, ‘to put me to the test. And to punish me—to scare me.’
He nods hesitantly. ‘I thought it was you,’ he repeats. ‘When I got off the plane and came towards you, I saw right off that you weren’t pleased to see me. Far from it—you were appalled.’
I say nothing.
‘And Leo—Leo was frightened of me. I wondered what you’d told him, why he’d be scared. I thought you’d tried to turn my own son against me. He was terrified. Then, when I began to provoke you…when I asked you what the worst thing was you’d ever done…when I told you to tell the truth…you had guilt written all over your face.’
It’s only now that it dawns on me. ‘You meant the kidnapping,’ I say.
Philip nods.
‘And I thought you were talking about that night. About the accident. The hit-and-run. The man I killed—the man we killed.’
Tears well up in my eyes.
The fridge hums a tune.
‘What did you do in town?’ I suddenly ask, wiping the tears away.
The Stranger Upstairs Page 23
