by Maike Wetzel
In the hospital we live in the eternal present. Ines and I know that. We use it to our advantage. During the day we doze on our beds. Questions from our parents or from the doctors and orderlies vanish into smoke. They don’t touch us. We shrug our shoulders. We don’t exchange a word in front of the adults. We don’t even look at each other. We both just happen to be lying in the same room, we both just happened to have a twisted intestine. The rest is none of the grown-ups’ business. Elly only emerges after the sun goes down. I’m looking forward to it already. Our experiment seems to be working. The adults are at a loss. I’m feverish, my blood is poisoned. I’m allowed to stay with Ines. She tells me stories about death. I try to understand her. Our room smells of spray alcohol. I wrinkle my nose. Ines says: You’re making progress. She’s right. I walk more consciously. I breathe more deeply. Even my forehead seems to be higher and smoother. Just make a little bit more effort, says Ines. Then you’ll be there. At my school, everyone is happy. There are no pressures, no differences. They just have to accept you. She says she will intercede on my behalf. I clasp her hand gratefully. But she withdraws it. I’m only allowed to touch her as Elly. All of a sudden that bothers me. Who is this Elly? Does Ines like her or me? I’m not allowed to ask her any questions, I know that, otherwise she’ll drop me without a second thought. But the doubt eats away at me. I can hardly concentrate on my role. I scuff my feet. But the way Elly walks is more like a skip. Are my feet sticking to the floor deliberately? My performance is sloppy. I use the wrong phrases, I forget bits of my costume. Ines reprimands me. I quickly slip back into my role. As Elly, I put her in a gracious mood. Ines forgives my mistakes. She says she just wants the best for me, to look out for me. That’s why I have to learn to always do as she says. I swear obedience and silence until death. In the dawning light, Ines kisses me right next to my mouth. She strokes my wig hair again and murmurs: Sleep, my little one, sleep yourself better. I close my eyes.
In front of the hospital is a bus stop. I can see it from the window. A man is perched there with a plastic bag by his side. His face is ashen grey. He has been sitting there for days. No bus comes. I pull the curtain across the window. I’m uneasy, can’t eat any more. I have questions; I’m looking for the answers. I wait for an opportunity. Eventually Ines disappears into the bathroom. I rummage through her cupboard. The only thing I find is clean underwear. But just as I close the door, I spot the corner of a photograph. It is sticking out from under the cupboard. Ines is a few years younger in the photo, but I recognise her immediately. The man and woman behind her are her parents. They come to visit now and then. Ines’s mother has long, chestnut-brown hair and a nose ring. Her gaze is clear and sharp. Her father is shorter than his wife and smiles benignly, like a pensive troll. The sea splashes behind them. The honeyed light of the setting sun glistens on the waves. It’s a holiday snap. I know the scene, the smiles, the show of unity. Our family photos don’t look much different. It’s not the beach that transfixes me, it’s the person next to Ines. This person makes me catch my breath. She is smaller than Ines. Her black hair curls softly. They stick out in all directions, as if they are electrically charged. Even this girl’s clothes are familiar. I wear them every night. The sound of the toilet flushing in the bathroom. I quickly shove the photo back under the cupboard.
At night, Ines and I play as if nothing has happened. I am Elly, she is my queen. We make our way down to the hospital’s basement. Long, empty corridors link the individual buildings. There are no windows, just bare concrete and pipes. Down there is where the spare beds are parked too. They have empty mattresses and clean sheets. They are waiting for the next patient. The people who lay on these beds last were discharged or died. Ines reckons the nurses store the dead bodies down here too. The freezers must be somewhere, she says. I nod. I wonder whether Ines has ever seen a dead person before. I don’t ask. I just need to look at her to know the answer. For the first time, I notice the gleam in her eyes. Her pupils flicker. I want to turn round. I look for the stairs. I want to go back to our room. But Ines throws me onto one of the beds. She pushes me through the corridors. Faster and faster. The walls blur. I don’t know where we are any more. I shout: Enough, stop. But Ines doesn’t want to. She swings herself up onto the bed, next to me. It still doesn’t come to a stop. The bed whizzes through the basement, past a thousand shadows. Ines laughs. The echo bounces off the bare walls. I cling on to the mattress. I try to grab Ines’s flying hair and lose my grip. I fall onto the hard concrete. The bed carries on rolling. Ines throws herself on top of me. Her body is much heavier than I expect. I feel myself crumple. My heart stops beating for a moment. Then my pulse races. Ines kneels on my chest, victorious. She says: Now it’s your turn. But I don’t want to play any more. I pull the wig off my head. Ines’s expression turns angry and cold. She disappears into the labyrinth of the basement without me. I clamber to my feet. All alone, I keep wandering down the same corridors over and over. The light goes out. The dark makes me afraid. It’s the crack of light under the door which finally shows me the way. I drag myself up the stairs.
I’m staring at a book. After an appropriate length of time, I turn the page. I’m not reading. I can’t think any more, either. My thoughts splinter like thin ice with every step I take. Ines is perched on her bed, next to mine, filing her nails. The noise scours the back of my eyes. As long as the sun is shining, everything is like it used to be. Then evening comes. No sooner has the nurse switched on the emergency lighting in the corridor than Ines orders me into the bathroom. That’s where Elly’s clothes are hidden, in the cistern. I fish the knotted plastic bag out of the water. But this time when I start to get changed, I hesitate. I don’t have much time to put my thoughts in order. Ines is waiting outside for me. I venture out without my costume. Ines stares at me. Her voice slices through my eardrum. She orders me back in. I refuse to go. I tell her she is messing me around. I want to know when I can finally take the entrance exam for her school, why is she torturing me? Ines gets angry. She hisses that I don’t understand anything, that I’m not worthy. I don’t budge. I take some scissors and cut up Elly’s jumper. Ines moans. She snatches the bundle of clothes out of my hand. I manage to grab it back. We fight, wrestle, lock jaws. Ines’s breath burns my face. I accuse her. I say she isn’t interested in me. Why can’t I just be myself? Each of us is clinging on to a leg of Elly’s trousers. The material cracks and rips. Ines says: You’re ruining everything. That’s the last thing she says to me. It’s over. From this moment on, I’m dead to Ines. She even leaves me the destroyed clothes. I gather up the scraps. I sew them together again in secret. I find a little box with needle and thread in the nurses’ room. I lay the mended clothes on the table. But Ines still looks right through me. She doesn’t even look up when I throw chocolate on her bed. I’m sad, but I don’t cave in. I don’t want to be someone else any more.
My mother’s hair has white streaks all of a sudden. She worries about me. I tell her she needs to stop that. She wails: Don’t you want to get better again? What’s holding you back? She suspects that my roommate is behind my transformation. Ines is lying next to us. She plays deaf, but secretly listens in while my mother whispers. I didn’t speak to my mother much before, but since I met Ines, she means nothing to me. Less than nothing. I don’t need her. To her face, I claim that I don’t care about Ines either. I don’t talk to her; I don’t even look at her. My mother ignores my charade. She wants to split us up. The doctor helps her. While I’m sleeping, the sister releases the brake on my bed. She wheels me to another floor. When I wake up I see a white head of hair next to me. The hair rattles as it breathes. The room smells of old woman. I don’t know where I am. Ines is gone. I can’t find her. The ward door is locked. Patients aren’t allowed out. The doctor says: It’s for your own safety. You need to get better. Your mind isn’t willing. He is using it against me. I have a lot of time to think.
I’m not listening to the doctor’s questions or his advice any more. Even t
he groans coming from the old woman in the bed next to me get quieter when I think about Ines. I miss her. At night I stand by the window and watch the lawn in front of the hospital. Now, light from a torch is flashing at the spot where Ines and I lay in the grass together. It takes a while before I understand Ines’s Morse code. When I work out her message, my heart feels warm and soft. But I can’t get out. The ward door is locked. I want to go to Ines. I know she is longing for me too. At this moment I don’t care that it’s only Elly that Ines wants. I’m so alone that it hurts underneath my breastbone. The old woman next to me babbles; she reaches into thin air, points to me. Obediently, I take my pills. I don’t count the pills any more. I swallow them down. I eat and drink and don’t pick my scar open any more. The doctor is satisfied. My mother raises her hopes. She dyes her hair. But at night I read Ines’s flashes in the dark. They are the only thing that keeps me going.
The crocuses are poking their heads out of the earth in front of the hospital. I can see the brightly coloured dots in among the brown from my window on the third floor. The doctor adds his squiggle to the bottom of my discharge papers. Satisfied, he puts his hands into his white coat. He says something about a miracle, he congratulates me and my mother, gives her the suitcase and me his hand. I secretly cross my fingers behind my back. My mother thanks the doctor; he praises her patience, recommends a holiday. My mother says the flight is already booked. We’re off tomorrow. Surprise! She smiles at me. My gaze is rigid. We’re catching a plane to an island, she says. We’ll do whatever you want. My gaze drifts towards the window. My mother assures me I’ll like it. The hotel has four stars. We walk through the hospital corridors. My soles slap against the PVC. The other patients shuffle along the corridor in their dressing gowns and tracksuit trousers. Some are pulling their drip or an oxygen cylinder behind them. They don’t look up. I ask for a piece of cake from the shop, but my mother steers me out of the door. She doesn’t want to stay in the hospital any longer than necessary. We need to pack. Panic starts to rise in me.
For the first time in months, I’m lying in my own bed. I walk my feet up the wall. Higher and higher until I can flip over backwards. There’s no one there for my well-earned applause. Next door, I can hear my mother’s clothes hangers squeaking. She is looking for her linen trousers for the holiday. Once it’s dark, I creep out of the house. The door falls into the lock with a click. The street is damp. The tarmac is steaming. Petrol shimmers in rainbow colours on a puddle.
Ines is already waiting for me. She is sitting cross-legged on her bed. She looks even paler in the moonlight. The new girl in the bed next to her is asleep. I can only see her hair. I have a brief pang of jealousy. But Ines’s face lights up when she sees me. I am Elly. I’m wearing her clothes, the wig itches on my head. Silently, I extend a hand to Ines. Like sleepwalkers we wander out of the hospital. The porter is watching television. He doesn’t see us. No one stops us. Barefoot, we walk along the street. We walk as far as the river and stare at the dark water. A flat barge goes by. Ines remains silent. She doesn’t need to say anything. I know it too. She has definitely stood here before, or maybe on another bank. She was holding a girl’s hand then too. But she must have returned alone. We don’t speak. Ines squeezes my hand. As I make a move towards the bank, she holds me back. I drag her on. I’m stronger than Ines and healthy. She has to follow. The quay wall is high; the black water slaps against it. Over the waves, I hear Ines breathing heavily. She is sniffling. Tears run down her face. I stop just before the edge. My queen dies on this quay. But Ines and I, we stand there. We wait for the sun to come up. It’s just her and me. No one else is there.
Below
Zero
My sister disappears on a slightly overcast afternoon in June. I imagine how it happens. I see Elly wheeling her bike out of the garage. Her outline is clear and sharp, the background out of focus. She fixes her sports bag to the luggage rack. In it is her judo suit with the green belt. My sister is younger than me. I am thirteen at the time, she is just eleven. We live in a small town. Elly’s club meets in a sports hall in the nearest big town. She cycles there on her own across the fields. The wind sweeps through the wheat. From above, it looks like waves on water. Elly stands on the motorway bridge and looks down at the field. The wind ruffles her dark, almost black hair.
I wasn’t there. But that’s what it must have been like. We always used to stop for a minute up on the top there. We would wave to the long-distance lorry drivers on the motorway, look over at the fields, to the blue peaks of the Taunus mountain range on the horizon. Sometimes we would see a kestrel or a buzzard circling above the fields. Often the cars would come to a standstill under the bridge, a long queue with countless glowing red eyes. A lorry driver would beep his horn: a deep rutting sound. Elly and I used to laugh. We would quickly start pedalling, standing up as we sped off with our bums high in the air, down the cycle path on the other side of the bridge.
The sports hall is in a suburb of Rüsselsheim known as the Grove. I like the name. It sounds so adventurous. The Grove is the area where the workers from the car factory live. In the past, a number of people threw themselves off the top of the high-rise blocks. These days, anyone who wants to kill themselves here drinks themselves to death, or takes an overdose. No one makes a show of suffering any more. These days, the buildings are freshly painted, caretakers tend to the green spaces, keep the hallways clean, remove graffiti. The Grove is flourishing, while the rest of the town declines. Time is running out for cars. Soon, people will be catapulted from town to town by a kind of solar-powered pneumatic tube system. Their souls are left behind though. I read about it in the newspaper.
Our mother went to school in the Grove too, just like us. But it was a different school back then. Her teachers warned her that if she didn’t study hard enough she would end up working on the car assembly line. That was the highest form of punishment when she was young. These days my parents wish they earned as much as the workers on the assembly line. Hamid and Judith both went to university. They never mention it explicitly, but when they talk to each other it’s a competition to see who knows better or at least can sound cleverer. My father is an architect, specialising in escalators; my mother writes sustainability reports for large companies. Before my sister and I were born, she worked in an agency. My parents both pore over their computers for hours, their backs hunched. If anyone asks me, I say my parents are freelance. Generally people don’t have anything more to say then. Freelance professionals, free from all restrictions and pressures. I think it sounds intimidating. I say it as if it is. I don’t like questions. I think of Elly.
Before she disappears on that June afternoon, my sister crosses at the traffic lights on the edge of the Grove. On the opposite side of the junction is the police station. Elly doesn’t pay any attention to it. The only sighting of her is at the next set of lights, just before the sports hall. A female witness later recalls seeing my sister, the small, dishevelled girl, with almost black hair, on her red bike. The sports bag falls off Elly’s luggage rack right in the middle of the road. Elly flings her bike down at the side of the road and runs back to her bag. My sister is still well and alive when the witness drives on. She quickly loses sight of the girl in her rear-view mirror. She is focused on singing along to a well-known old pop song, very loudly and out of tune. She remembers the song: ‘The Eye of the Tiger’. That’s the last I hear of my sister. Her trail goes cold here.
The caretaker at the sports hall says he didn’t see my sister. The other girls stroll past him. He runs an eye over them. These giggling, long-haired child-women. Hair like whips, silver chains on their teeth, shiny pink nail varnish, denim shorts which barely cover their bums and ripped black tights underneath with holes as big as your head. The caretaker tries not to notice them. The girls whisper among themselves, laugh out loud. They run into the changing room. They leave the door open. They clamber into their judo trousers, tighten the drawstring. My sister would normally be amo
ng them. But she is missing. The other girls slip into their stiff jackets with the lapels their opponent has to grab during the fight. They tie their different coloured belts. One by one, the girls enter the dojo with the grey mats on the floor and the mirror on the wall. They form a long line and turn their faces to the instructor. On his command, they all bend first their left knee, then their right. They extend their feet, placing their insteps and big toes one on top of the other. Their knees gape, one fist-width apart, their hands rest on their upper thighs. Their arms hang loosely by the sides of their bodies.
The instructor scans the long line. On the left at the end kneels the girl who has the brown belt already. The other girls have lined up to her right according to the colour of their belts. There are lots of girls with white, yellow, or orange belts. My sister would sit roughly in the middle. But she isn’t there. My sister is one of the best in her age group in the club. Her favourite throw is the shoulder throw, seoi-nage. My parents believe the sport will help if anyone attacks her. They chose judo rather than karate because they believe judo to be the more gentle, intelligent sport. Judoka use their opponents’ strength against them. They don’t attack, they defend themselves. That’s what my parents believe. The instructor is in his mid-twenties. He has an angular Viking face. All the girls have a crush on him. They try to fight against him as often as possible. They want him to sweep them to the floor. My sister thinks that’s pathetic. She would never submit willingly. The instructor wears a black belt. He studies the girls. Deep in his throat he forms the words. Mukuso, he calls. They all close their eyes. They collect themselves, chase away their thoughts, just for a few seconds. The instructor calls: Rei. He and the girls bow to each other. They pause briefly with their foreheads on the ground. They breathe in the plastic smell of the mats.
