The Scent of Lemon Leaves

by Clara Sanchez

  I was finally in the lift. In normal conditions, a person wouldn’t have been subjected to such an interrogation and, in normal conditions, it wouldn’t have entered their heads to go poking around in my affairs, but we all knew we were in the thick of a covert war. I wasn’t at all happy – I was most decidedly unhappy – that they’d seen Sandra. This was the second time she’d come to the hotel, and I’d have to tell her to be more careful, because I didn’t trust Tony. After all, we were in a small town, and in a small town everyone knows everyone else and spends the whole time making connections until, in the end, people put two and two together.

  I dropped the flowers into a vase waiting on a small table as if it was taken for granted that sooner or later bunches of flowers would be coming into the suite. I looked at the bathroom and looked at the card. What should I do first, read the card or put some water in the vase? Still wondering about this, I took off my shoes but, since I took them off sitting on the edge of the bed, I then lay down and reached over to get the small envelope.

  I read it carefully. I read Sandra’s words several times. They sounded like poetry, but it was an specific message. She spoke of stems, of eternal youth among the stems. I jumped off the bed and took out the flowers. I broke the ribbon with the corkscrew that, in suites, seems to be forever waiting for a bottle of wine. It was difficult for me to break it and there was no sign that anyone had been tampering with it. Thus, fortunately and protected by a huge amount of luck, the good luck that Tony wasn’t as smart as he thought he was, I would be the first person to see what was nestling among the stems.

  Inside a cellophane wrapping there was another package, and its contents nearly pricked me. Good God! Inside were the disposable syringes Karin used to inject the mysterious liquid – white gold, because if it wasn’t so mysterious you’d be able to buy it here in any chemist’s shop.

  In a laboratory they could extract a sample and analyse it. I’d go down to the hotel phone box and look in the yellow pages for clinical labs. I’d call a few to see if I could find any that were open.

  This indeed is what I did, but first I closed my eyes for twenty minutes, trying to relax and rest, because it was stupid trying to force the body and end up being no use for anything. Nothing was going to change because of twenty minutes more or less. Next to the toilets in the hotel vestibule there was a telephone box encased in mahogany panels either side. I looked in the phone book and started to call the three labs I found listed. They were open to the public until lunchtime and only one answered with a human voice. I explained that this wasn’t a blood or urine analysis, but another substance extraneous to my body. The voice informed me that they analysed all kinds of organic and non-organic fluids and gave me an appointment for nine in the morning.

  Now I had some time to go over my notes before leaving to meet Sandra. After Raquel, she was the most marvellous, the bravest woman I’d ever known. My daughter was another story. I never compared my daughter with anyone. I would never have been objective.

  Sandra

  When I finished putting away all the junk Karin had bought and while the soup Frida had left was warming, I went up to have a quick peek at Fred and Karin’s bathroom. Going into that bedroom was always impressive, thanks to the headboard of the bed, the satin bedspread and curtains, their portraits on the wall and the framed newspaper photo I’d given them on the mantelpiece over the fireplace, which suggested that they must have preferred to have it in here so the others wouldn’t see it. The wardrobe was spectacular inside with Karin’s long, low-cut dresses over which the hand of the Führer himself might have passed, and Fred’s massive trousers and jackets. There was a special atmosphere, full of the thoughts of these two monsters, full of their nightmares, although I’d never observed that they had any problems about sleeping. They only stayed awake to bonk or if they were doing something out of the ordinary the next day. I wouldn’t say they were people who suffered from any kind of remorse.

  Sometimes I was surprised to see them, surprised that they were real flesh-and-blood people I could actually look at, because the atrocities that Julián told me about couldn’t have been committed by any human being. So, after that, when I heard someone saying that someone was very human, I didn’t know whether that was good or bad.

  The bathroom was impressive too. It was made of marble from the Macael quarries, like the stairs, which always made me think about the quarry at Mauthausen, where Julián had been locked up like all those other poor people I’d sometimes seen in documentaries. This was very fine marble, cool and pink, and Karin’s bottles of perfume were luxuriously conspicuous on top of it. Inside the cupboards were pots of cream with gold tops and indecipherable names. But now I wasn’t concerned with any of that. I’d heard the street door opening with the typical noise of Fred’s keys. He liked to rattle them for a while in his hand, and from the jingling they made you could tell whether he was in a good or bad mood.

  I opened up the metal lid of the sanitary bin, or whatever you call it, and, to my surprise, saw that Frida hadn’t emptied it. It looked as if all the crumpled paper, the cardboard cylinders from used toilet paper rolls, an empty shampoo bottle and several other things were more or less as I’d left them. It seemed that the way the contents looked now fitted with the way they’d looked the last time I’d seen them that morning, but I couldn’t be sure that Frida wasn’t playing with me, because this oversight didn’t square with what I knew of her. Frida was the cleaning champion, she never skived, she never left anything undone, she was conscientious. She was a cleaning storm trooper. I felt a trembling inside me that quickly took away any desire I might have had for soup, because of the mere thought that Frida was on to me and that she was going to tell Fred and Karin the next day – that’s if she hadn’t already got hold of Fred and squealed. If so, what excuse could I come up with? It was her word against mine and they’d believe her.

  But then something happened. It shook me out of my mental block and made me think that before taking any drastic decisions like confessing or throwing myself out of a window I should wait, should wait in silence for something else to happen, because something always happens. You just need to have patience.

  What happened was that Fred was talking to Karin in Norwegian in a way that startled me. Fred never raised his voice at Karin. Fred was Karin’s dog and that’s why I was so shocked. I tiptoed out of the pink-and-golden room just in time to see the two of them making their way upstairs. Fred was practically pushing Karin and Karin was lurching from one hip to the other, grabbing hold of the banister as tightly as she could. At first I thought it was because of me. Karin must have been protecting me, and if they hadn’t caught me spying on them until now it was because they hadn’t wanted to, or because I had a special gift that made them blind, or because according to the laws of probability it was highly improbable that a girl they’d found throwing up on the beach should turn out to be a spy. Luckily, the fit of anger had nothing to do with me. Fred was so pissed off he hardly even saw me in the passage heading from his room to mine.

  Karin came towards me half-crying, and clung to me when she got to me. Fred looked at us with a softer expression. I could see that Karin was pretending to be half-crying. I moved away from her a little and stroked her hair, looking at Fred, asking him with my eyes what was going on.

  They told me. Karin with her half-crying act sobbed that Fred didn’t understand what a woman’s jewellery meant to her. Fred wanted to give hers to Alice.

  I nodded, as Karin wished, despite the fact that we both knew I was a woman without jewels and that they were the last thing I’d be thinking about.

  “For God’s sake, Karin,” Fred said. “Some things are more important than jewels.”

  Karin said nothing and Fred went on.

  “Life’s more important, isn’t it? Life in exchange for jewels.”

  “That bitch…” Karin said. “She’s taking everything I’ve got.”

  I understood that the injections Otto and Ka
rin were giving them had a price in jewels.

  “I want you to go to their house,” Fred said, opening the built-in safe inside the wardrobe, “and tell them that you forgot to give them this little present and that you’re sorry. I’ve never been so embarrassed in all my life as I was when Otto brought me to heel.”

  “Can’t you go?” Karin asked.

  “No,” he said, opening the safe and taking out the jewel box, which I’d seen before. At that point I walked out. It didn’t seem a good idea for me to hang around there looking at Karin’s jewels, especially since I didn’t want to see them.

  “Let Sandra go with you. Then you can both have a walk.”

  The soup smelt as if it was burning. I ran downstairs and then started coughing as I’d been doing the past few days. A cold sweat ran down the nape of my neck. I took the soup off the fire and lay on the sofa, practically in the hollow that Karin had left a moment before.

  They must have been choosing which jewels to take to Alice, which gave me time to pull myself together and serve out the soup in some wooden bowls that Karin had bought in the shopping centre.

  We had the soup in the presence of the plastic bag I’d brought from the chemist’s, into which Fred put the jewellery for Alice before dropping it with a clunky sound on the table. They talked for a while in Norwegian, telling each other off, maybe because Fred hadn’t managed to get control of this product that was costing them so dearly. Then he announced that he was going to phone Otto to tell him that Karin was coming to see Alice because she really wanted to give her a gift.

  He got up, made the call and said she was expecting us at five. Precisely the time I’d agreed to meet Julián at the lighthouse.

  “Don’t you think that you two should go? I don’t feel very comfortable being involved in such a private matter.”

  “That’s why I want you to go,” said Fred, “because I want them to understand for once and for bloody all,” and here he stunned me by thumping the table, “that you are family, that you deserve to join the Brotherhood, that you deserve it much more than many others who’ve earned their stripes as street louts.”

  Karin looked admiringly at her husband and then smiled at me.

  “He’s right,” she said.

  It scared me that they wanted to share so much stuff with me. It scared me that Fred could rebel against his tribe because of me. I hadn’t counted on this. They’d probably been keeping their secrets and plotting things between themselves for so long that they desperately needed a third player to come in and save them from boredom. The Brotherhood gave them security but no fun. The little parties of the past were all very well but they fell short of the mark. More than anything else, the idea that I wouldn’t be able to meet Julián was making me really nervous.

  “I have an appointment at five to enrol for a course of childbirth classes. Could we go a little earlier to Alice’s or, better still, tomorrow?”

  Fred and Karin shook their heads.

  “Earlier than that,” Fred said, “Alice is resting. It’s impossible to see her between two and five. I’m sure it won’t hurt if you put your childbirth classes preparations back a day.”

  “The thing is they might be fully booked. That’s the problem,” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” Karin said with her diabolical smile. “In my gym they do childbirth classes too. I only have to talk to the director. Then, when I’m doing my exercises, you can do yours. I’ll speak with him tomorrow morning.”

  It was impossible. It was impossible for them not to do what they wanted to do, whenever they wanted to do it. It infuriated them to have to fit in with anyone else’s needs.

  At five on the dot, I parked the four-by-four at Alice’s gate. We rang at the bell and they took five minutes to open it for us, which was humiliating for Karin. Without my wanting it (I didn’t care about Karin any more than about Alice), this put me on her side. Living in Karin’s house, I had closer contact with her. I knew her better. Even though the time had come when the two of them had started thinking about getting rid of me, it was impossible not to take sides.

  I didn’t say anything, as I wanted to avoid mortifying her any more. I didn’t even look her in the face.

  “This Alice is going to pay for this,” she said as the gate slowly opened.

  And while we were walking towards the Doric columns, I wondered which would be the worse of the two, which one would win. On the face of it, Alice was more youthful and stronger, and she was the one who controlled the liquid, so there wasn’t much Karin could do except hang in and swallow her pride.

  Frida, who apparently cleaned this mansion in the afternoons, came to greet us, and we had to wait a little longer in the living room. I was eager to see if I could read in Frida’s face whether she’d discovered my theft of the used syringes, but she barely looked at me. Now I was paying more attention to her, I could see that she saw me as an intruder in the Brotherhood and that my presence in the Christensens’ house would have been bugging her a lot.

  “What bad taste!” Karin muttered, her eyes passing over bronze clocks, silver candelabras, gold-framed mirrors, extremely old tapestry and museum-piece paintings.

  “Are they the real thing?” I asked.

  “Even if they are, they might as well not be,” said Karin, showing her contempt.

  I asked her if she’d brought the bag of jewels and she touched her handbag to confirm that she had. It’s not that Karin had exquisite taste herself, but at least it was more personal. She liked nice things even if they weren’t expensive or luxurious. Alice’s thing was pure luxury, a total glut of luxury, which meant that nothing special stood out from the rest. I felt as if I was in an antiques shop where you go around looking at the different things, picturing them in a different place. I’d never bought an antique, didn’t have the money to buy one, or a house to put it in but, of all the things I could see here, I liked a Chinese urn that must have been two thousand years old.

  Alice suddenly made her appearance at the top of the stairs. She started a leisurely descent, like an actress. She was wearing some exquisitely cut black velvet trousers that made her look really classy as she came down. Apparently she loved velvet, because the curtains were velvet too, turquoise in this case. She’d also put on a tight jacket of the same material as the trousers, and the only prop she needed to complete the transformation into the perfect old-fashioned vampiress was a long cigarette holder. Seeing me, she changed her pose. I didn’t know whether that was good or bad. She fluffed out her hair with her hands, so I supposed it was good. She was happy to see me and they knew it. Fred and Karin knew that seeing me would soften her up and then everything would go better. I’d just realized that her gesture was better for them than it was for me. Maybe when they were massacring Jews and people like Julián these people thought they were doing them a favour.

  Even so, I was on Karin’s side, not Alice’s. She offered us tea. They were always having tea. I passed. I said that tea gave me insomnia.

  “You’re so young,” Alice commented, “I don’t believe you. You don’t even know what that is. I’ll make you some camomile tea.”

  I regretted not having accepted her tea, because the camomile would mean further delay. It was five thirty already. To add insult to injury, she wouldn’t let Frida make it, which probably poisoned Frida against me even more. I was lost. She went to the kitchen herself, put the water on to boil, dropped the sachet of camomile in the cup, and brought it back on a small tray which she set down in front of me with something like adoration. She scared me. Then she sat down, elegantly crossing her long legs, and sipped her tea from a very beautiful porcelain cup. Heaven knows who’d drunk from it before.

  She stared at Karin over the top of her cup.

  “Ah!” said Karin, pulling out the plastic bag bearing the green cross of the chemist’s shop. “I hope you like them. This is the best I have and what would suit you most.”

  “Let’s have a look.” Alice tipped the contents onto the gl
ass top of the coffee table amidst cups, sugar and teaspoons. Karin shot me a look as if to say: she’s common and doesn’t even deserve to look at these jewels.

  “A ruby necklace,” Alice pronounced, holding it up in her hand, “matching earrings, a pearl bracelet, a sapphire ring, if I’m not mistaken, and an amethyst ring. Is it white gold?”

  She picked up the pearl bracelet. It had four strands.

  “What a shame about this bracelet. It needs the necklace to go with it.”

  “The necklace?” said Karin. “Ah, yes. It must have dropped out into my handbag.”

  Before Alice’s pitiless gaze Karin pretended to rummage in her bag and then fished out a two-strand pearl necklace that must have been worth a fortune.

  “Thank you,” said Alice as she took it. “I know you’re not so keen on pearls, but I love them.”

  She got up and put it on, looking into a gold-framed mirror.

  “It’s a bit heavy,” she remarked, “but very pretty.”

  Karin drained her cup, I made an effort to swallow the scalding camomile and we stood up. I glanced at my watch. It was five to six. Julián might still be waiting.

  “None of that,” Alice declared. “You’re not leaving yet. You’re going to have a slice of sponge cake that Frida made.”

  We said we weren’t hungry, that we’d had a very late lunch and that both of us were still too full to fit in a slice of sponge cake.

  “Just a little, only a taste. It’s spectacular,” she said, not getting up and still wearing the pearls. “Frida!” she screeched. “Bring some of that delicious sponge cake you made.”

  We had to sit down again. Alice too was used to getting her own way with every bloody thing that came into her head. She poured more tea for Karin and, to stop her from going to make more camomile, I said that now I’d have a sip of tea. Frida appeared with the same sponge cake she usually made in Karin’s house and served everyone with a gigantic slice, a chunk so big that it almost overlapped the plate.