Sisters of Berlin

by Juliet Conlin

  She stops talking. The clock keeps ticking, replacing her words. Nina looks up from the table and feels her facial muscles contracting into what must be a hideous grimace of sorrow. She opens her mouth. A wail is released.

  Frau Lehmholz leans forward in her chair and opens her arms. Nina releases her tears with a desperate moan, and flops forward onto her knees. She grabs Frau Lehmholz around the waist.

  ‘I . . . I . . .’ She holds onto her as if she were clinging to a rock in a torrent. ‘I can’t . . . I don’t . . .’

  ‘Hush, my dear, hush.’ The old woman’s spidery hand strokes the back of Nina’s head.

  ‘I can’t stop it! I can’t stop it!’ Nina says into the folds of the woman’s skirt. She gives herself over to another bout of crying. Frau Lehmholz doesn’t speak, just sits and strokes. When she feels the tears receding, Nina lifts her head slightly, but doesn’t quite look up. She speaks into the woman’s chest.

  ‘I can’t control it, I don’t know what to do. I have to hide it from everyone. The children. It’s so hard. They don’t know how hard it is! And Sebastian, Sebastian – he pushed me. How could he do that? How? I needed him, I was depending on him and he turned on me. How could he do that?’

  The words come out twisted, in a spray of snot and tears. She sounds crazed, pitiful, but there’s nothing she can do to stop it.

  Frau Lehmholz shifts her position beneath Nina’s head. Then she hands her a tissue.

  ‘I think you must be very lonely, dear,’ she says. ‘You should speak with your husband, tell him what you’re telling me. Men can be rather . . . clumsy, in such matters. Not because they don’t care, but because, well, you know, if they can’t master a situation, they’d rather pretend it isn’t there. And then it can be too late.’

  But Nina is not listening, not really. She wipes her nose with the tissue.

  ‘I’m not even sure if he’s Kai’s father.’ Her voice is calmer, her thoughts more structured now. ‘I had – I made a mistake, and I don’t know for sure. I’ve never told anyone, not even Marie. Telling would make it real. But it scares me. It really terrifies me.’

  Frau Lehmholz keeps stroking her hair. ‘That’s right, you talk, let it all out. You’ll feel better for it, believe me.’

  They remain in this position for a while, Nina’s head resting on the hard, bony lap of Frau Lehmholz, inhaling her smell, which, although tainted by the whiff of underlying cell decay, is warm and comforting. She’s lulled by the relief of her confession, despite the rawness it has left behind. Then, as Nina feels herself sliding away from utter distress and towards sleep, Frau Lehmholz speaks.

  ‘But, to be honest, dear, it doesn’t surprise me.’

  Nina sniffs and murmurs, ‘Mmm?’

  ‘You see, if you behave like a whore, you only have yourself to blame for the consequences.’

  Nina jerks her head up. Whore? She must have misheard.

  ‘Yes, quite. All those men, in and out of your flat, in and out of your bed. God knows where you picked them up from.’ She spits these words out in a hiss. ‘Those street walker clothes you insist on wearing. What did you expect?’

  Nina sits back on heels. ‘I’m sorry, I – I’m not sure –’

  ‘Indeed,’ Frau Lehmholz continues, more loudly. ‘I’m a respectable woman and I must say I am shocked, if not to say disgusted. In truth, it’s best that you leave, right now.’

  ‘Frau Lehmholz –’

  ‘I said, leave!’ Her voice has risen to a shriek. ‘And take your filthy ways with you!’

  Stunned, Nina gets to her feet, ignoring the giddiness that now always accompanies sudden movement. Frau Lehmholz is trying to get out of her chair, but her cane slips away as she puts her weight on it and she topples over. Nina lunges forward to assist her, but this leads to more yelling.

  ‘Don’t touch me, you dirty slut! Get out, before I call the police!’

  Nina grabs her handbag and coat, and runs out into the hall, yanks open the front door and slams it shut. From behind the door to Marie’s old flat, she can hear the motorised hum of a floor-sanding machine.

  30

  Nina waits outside the school gates, concerned that Kai might comment on her appearance and start worrying. She did her best in the car, pulling her hair into a fresh ponytail and taking deep breaths to try and calm her nerves, which are dancing and jangling throughout her body, right into her fingertips. But her eyes remain bloodshot, her nose red and swollen.

  She spots Kai as soon as he appears from behind the heavy oak doors, amid a cloud of laughing, shouting children. He sees her and comes bouncing down the concrete steps, so quickly she has to make an effort to suppress an image of him stumbling and crashing down.

  ‘Mama!’ he calls, and she opens her arms to receive him.

  ‘Hello sweetie.’ She gives him a tight hug and then straightens up and walks briskly, his hand in hers, towards the car. He doesn’t get a chance to look up at her face.

  ‘Hop in,’ she says.

  Kai clambers into the back and onto his booster seat. Nina gets in the driver’s seat and resists the temptation to turn around and help him fasten his seatbelt. Finally, he snaps it into place and they set off towards home.

  She doesn’t feel better for the confession, if that’s what it was. She feels hollowed out, raw, as though something has been scraped from her insides. She feels betrayed by an old woman’s madness. As if she doesn’t have her own madness to contend with! She’s completely exhausted, and finds it hard to believe that it is only early afternoon. If it weren’t for her son, she would go straight to bed once she got home. She looks up at Kai’s reflection in the rear-view mirror. He catches her eyes with his own.

  ‘Can we have schnitzel for supper?’ he asks.

  Nina wipes her nose with the back of her hand. ‘Of course. Anything you like.’

  ‘Cos Papa likes it too.’ Then, when she doesn’t reply, ‘Can I help you hammer the meat?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘If you promise to be careful.’

  ‘Because we don’t want finger-schnitzel for supper,’ he says earnestly.

  Nina almost start crying at hearing this long-running family joke, which began when Sebastian once flattened the tip of his index finger while tenderising the meat. But she manages to turn the feeling into a tight laugh. ‘No, we certainly don’t.’

  When they get home, Kai scurries past Nina and drops his school bag on the floor.

  She calls out, ‘Bekka?’ but there is no answer. Rebekka has a short school day on Mondays, but she’s probably hanging out with her friends.

  ‘Can we make the schnitzel now, Mama?’ Kai asks, sitting on the stairs and struggling with the buckle on his shoe. Much like Sebastian, Kai isn’t particularly dextrous with his hands. This thought grates against her raw insides, makes her catch her breath.

  ‘Um, maybe we should wait for Bekka to come home,’ she says. ‘Then she can help us.’

  Kai shrugs and flicks off his shoe in the direction of the open shoe cabinet, cheering ‘Yesss’ to himself as it hits the target.

  ‘We can watch some TV together, if you like,’ Nina suggests.

  Kai looks up at her, his face briefly betraying incredulity at her suggestion, as though she’d just offered to give him his Christmas presents early, followed by a widening of his eyes and an eager nod.

  He hurries into the living room, evidently fearful she might change her mind at the last moment, and switches on the TV. Nina joins him on the sofa and puts her arm around his shoulder.

  They settle in to watch a stream of flickering, boisterous cartoons that Nina finds exhausting. Outside, the sky is darkening; soon, there will be no light left in the room, save for the sharp brightness smashing out of the TV set and bouncing onto their faces. But the warmth of him leaning in against her, the smell of his hair and skin, keeps her there, immobile, not healing her, exactly – she’s too abraded for that – but grounding her, holding her down gently like the weight on a helium-filled ballo
on. If she has to be somewhere, this is where she wants to be, beside her little boy who isn’t really that little anymore, until finally, he stretches out his legs in front of him and announces, ‘Mama, I’m hungry.’

  Nina checks the time. It is half-past six.

  ‘Can we make schnitzel now? I don’t want to wait for Bekka,’ he says.

  Nina nods. She can’t summon the strength to feel angry that Rebekka hasn’t called, at least, to say when she’ll be home.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she says, and leads the way into the kitchen. They flatten four slices of veal between sheets of clingfilm, taking turns with the meat mallet, until the slices are almost as thin as human skin – Nina holds each slice up to the light to demonstrate its transparency to Kai. Then they dip two of them in cornflour, beaten egg and breadcrumbs, their hands getting slimy and sticky in the process.

  ‘Schnitzel goes soggy once it’s cooked,’ she tells Kai, as she heats butter in a cast iron pan. ‘So we’ll just cook for you and me. Papa and Bekka can have theirs when they get home.’

  She doesn’t know when Sebastian will be home. She hasn’t seen him since their brief encounter on the landing, and it’s entirely possible that he might not come home at all tonight.

  ‘You and me, Mama,’ Kai repeats. ‘Let’s cook!’

  Nina switches on the extractor fan above the stove and slides the first slice of breaded meat into the hot pan. The smell hits her like a physical force; she had forgotten – forgotten! – that she’s preparing a meal she won’t be able to eat. This lapse of control, the smell of fried breadcrumbs and browning butter – delicious and disgusting at once – panics her. A small moan escapes the back of her throat.

  *

  May, 1997

  It was a week after her twentieth birthday. A month before her first-year exams. Marie was sitting on Nina’s bed, jeans and T-shirt filthy from playing outdoors.

  ‘I’ve decided,’ Marie said, giving Nina her most serious look, eyebrows pulled down in a curly V, lips pouting slightly.

  Nina lowered the textbook she’d been trying to read. She’d been staring at the same paragraph for twenty minutes but it was refusing to make sense. ‘You’ve decided what?’

  ‘From now on, I’m going to eat whatever you eat.’

  Nina flushed and turned back to her book. ‘That’s silly, Marie.’

  Marie puffed a short snort of air through her nose. ‘I don’t think it’s silly. And I’ve decided.’

  Then she bounced off the bed, leaving a mud-brown smudge on the bedspread.

  ‘Mama?’ Kai’s voice is barely audible above the sizzling of the meat and the growl of the extractor fan. ‘Are you okay, Mama?’

  She breathes in through her mouth to try to block out the smell.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she says, struggling to stay here, in the kitchen, with Kai. ‘I had a sudden headache, that’s all.’

  ‘Like when you eat ice cream too fast?’

  ‘Exactly.’ She forces herself to slide the spatula underneath the schnitzel and turn it in the pan. ‘Would you get me a plate, please?’ she asks, desperate now to get away from the stove, the smell, the meat.

  Kai pulls a chair over to a cabinet and retrieves a plate, setting it down next to her. She lifts the schnitzel onto the plate and hands it to him.

  ‘You’ll need a knife and fork,’ she says. ‘And you can eat in the living room. We won’t tell Papa.’

  ‘What about you?’ he asks, glancing up at her, and then down at the plate in his hand.

  ‘I think I’ll wait for this headache to pass,’ she says. ‘Then I can eat with Bekka and Papa when they come home.’

  Kai gives her a look in which she can detect uneasiness, as though he has now started wondering whether all these special privileges might be leading up to something very bad. She leans down and kisses his forehead. ‘And we can watch TV while you’re eating,’ she whispers.

  Delight triumphs over uneasiness, and he grabs some cutlery from the drawer and rushes into the living room.

  *

  At seven forty-five, when Kai starts emitting a series of large, unselfconscious yawns, Nina becomes worried. It is a clawing feeling, unpleasantly familiar, a feeling she has recognised since the day Rebekka, aged three, slipped her hand in a supermarket and disappeared into the labyrinth of aisles. She finally found her, after a frenzied, hysterical search, behind the cheese counter, where she had befriended a plump, rosy-faced sales assistant and was chomping on a wedge of Gouda.

  Since that day, Nina has experienced this feeling innumerable times – glancing up from a newspaper on a playground bench and not being able to spot Kai instantly; scanning crowds of over-buoyant, vociferous children for the familiar face of third-year Rebekka, as they were released in potent, unstoppable waves from a long school day of forced immobility and overheated classrooms. A heart-stopping throb of panic, more often short-lived than not, but forceful enough to have made her wonder at times whether, over the years, the mere accumulation of such moments might add up to a shrivelling of her own life-resources.

  She reaches over to the phone and dials Rebekka’s mobile. It rings and rings. She hangs up when the voicemail comes on. The phone is probably wedged at the bottom of a school rucksack, or on vibrate or something. Nina tries to subdue the mixture of dread and anger that scrapes at her, and notices only then that Kai has fallen asleep on the sofa beside her. She picks him up, as gently as possible, holding him as she did when he was a baby.

  He opens his eyes, says, ‘I fell asleep,’ and Nina shushes him. He’s heavy; she negotiates the stairs with difficulty, but finally reaches his bedroom and sets him down on his bed. She slides his socks off but leaves him in the rest of his clothes and pulls his blanket up, kissing him on his smooth cheek, inhaling his soft, warm breath, before leaving the room.

  Downstairs, pacing the floor, she dials Rebekka’s number again. This time, there is no ringing tone; the phone is switched off. Or the battery is dead. Her finger hovers over Sebastian’s number, but she decides against calling him. She tells herself to calm down. She’s thirsty. She goes to the kitchen; the lingering smell of cold frying makes her queasy. She opens the kitchen window wide and breathes in the icy air. Then she pours a large glass of Diet Coke and drinks it as quickly as the fizz will allow. She burps and pours another glass.

  Twelve minutes past eight. It isn’t late, by any standards, not for a fourteen-year-old to be out and about, but it is after dark and Nina just wishes she knew where Rebekka was. Before she can stop it, she imagines Bekka stepping out onto a road, in the dark, a car hitting her before it has a chance to stop, metal against bone, a body flung through the air like a ragdoll . . . And then Nina forces herself to imagine Rebekka walking through the front door, apologising for being late and not calling, or perhaps in one of her moods and stomping upstairs – either way, Nina makes herself imagine the relief she will feel on seeing her daughter safe and sound.

  Fourteen minutes past. She retreats to the living room and picks up the phone again. She tries Bekka. Voicemail. That’s something, at least. She leaves a short message, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. She sends a text to the same effect. Then she calls Sebastian. Straight to voicemail. She hangs up before the beep. She’s suddenly angry, enraged that she’s here on her own, that Sebastian isn’t experiencing the sharp, clawing worry that something might have happened to their daughter. She makes herself sit down and watch TV. The children’s channel switches to light comedy after eight p.m. She flicks to a news channel and turns the volume to mute, looks instead at the headlines skimming from right to left across the bottom of the screen. A house fire in North Rhine-Westphalia; three dead, including two children. Severe flooding in Malawi; hundreds dead, tens of thousands displaced. An estimated 1.5 million famine victims in North Korea. Slow to negative economic growth forecast in Brazil following a downgrade by Moody’s. Sports: Bayern Munich heads up the league.

  Her vision blurs, and she closes her eyes to rest them.
A car slows in front of the house, but accelerates again and drives away. She dozes and wakes, dozes and wakes, and at just after ten, she begins to cry.

  Then the phone rings. She snatches up the receiver.

  ‘Bekka?’ Her voice is hoarse and thick.

  ‘No. It’s me.’

  ‘Mama? Have you spoken to Bekka? Have you any idea –’

  ‘She’s here, with me.’ Her mother’s voice is frosty, but to Nina’s ears, it is the sweetest thing she has ever said. ‘She turned up on our doorstep about twenty minutes ago, frozen through, poor thing.’

  ‘What? Where? I’ve been . . . can I speak to her?’ Nina is finding it difficult to put her words in order.

  ‘You should come right away. I should also tell you that I’ve called the police. They’re on their way here.’

  ‘The police? What –’

  ‘Bekka’s fine. I’ll explain everything when you get here. Don’t be long.’

  And with that instruction, her mother puts down the phone.

  31

  When her mother opens the front door, Nina can see immediately that she has been crying. Her nose is swollen and pinkish; her cheeks reveal faded streaks of mascara, remnants of little brooks of tears she hasn’t bothered rinsing away. But her expression is hard.

  ‘You took your time,’ she says, but Nina shaves past her and rushes into the living room. Kommissar Franzen is sitting in a chair close to the fireplace, perhaps to warm himself, although the fire appears to be almost burned out: two ashy, amber-glowing logs emit a sporadic flame or two. He looks up as Nina come in.