Elly

by Maike Wetzel

  Maybe at that moment my sister is already dead. Maybe she is crawling, injured or raped, through some bushes, the branches scratching her cheeks. Tears burn in her eyes, but she is too afraid to make a noise. The attacker’s semen drips from her. She is half naked. He is still there, somewhere behind her in the bushes. He is lying in wait. Panic constricts her throat. She knows she can’t get away. She is shaking. Her sobs stick in her throat. Something howls. She jumps when she realises it is her. She hurries on, crawling on hands and knees. Then a hand closes round her ankle. My sister kicks out. She defends herself. But the hand slowly pulls her back into the thicket. Maybe it’s a gang of youths who surround her in that moment. Maybe it’s not one man on his own. Maybe it’s several men, or a couple. A woman who lures my sister under a pretext and a man who then drags her onto the back seat of a car. There are so many images, so many stories. It’s always a young girl, the main perpetrators are always men. That seems to be the rule. Or maybe nothing actually happened to my sister at all. Maybe she just turned off on her way to the sports hall. Maybe she cycled back or along to the next motorway exit. Her bike is never found either. It disappears like her, without a trace. She hadn’t packed anything more than her sports kit. Nothing is missing from her bedroom. No trousers, no skirt, no toothbrush. There is no goodbye letter. We don’t get any contact later either. She doesn’t call. She doesn’t email. It’s like my sister is swallowed up by the ground. No one sees her, no one demands a ransom.

  My parents and I search for signs of a plan. We want Elly to have simply run away. We want her to be alive somewhere. We cling to that. We often talk about the days prior to her disappearance. The police officers keep asking us about them too. They compare our versions. They question the neighbours. In the majority of cases like this, perpetrators come from the victim’s close social circle. First the police suspect my father of having a mistress, then they accuse my mother of having a lover. The investigators speculate that my sister had discovered the new relationship. They insinuate that Elly was disposed of. She probably caught them at it. My parents can hardly speak for rage. They are furious. How could the police suspect them of committing a crime? My mother wants to pour her heart out to a journalist friend. My father urges my mother to keep a clear head. Instead they discuss engaging a private detective and withdraw a sum of money from Elly’s savings account, which our grandparents keep topping up. It was meant to be for her education. Even before Elly’s disappearance we very rarely received visitors to our house, though more than a dozen of our relatives live in the same small town. When we met them, they would greet us, but Elly and I didn’t even nod. We don’t know them. Our mother never introduced us. Sometimes my sister and I would go to our school friends’ houses for a visit. We never invited them into our playroom. I don’t know why. It wasn’t as if it was forbidden.

  Now my parents and I glide wordlessly past one another. We don’t touch, not even in the narrow hallway or in the doorways. My parents don’t cry in front of me. Only once do I hear my mother sobbing, behind her closed door. She won’t allow herself to cry, because my sister Elly is still alive. That’s our rallying cry. We hold fast to it. We know that the likelihood is violence and death. The police search the area with sniffer dogs after a worker at the sewage treatment plant claims to have seen my sister. Later the man is treated for psychosis.

  Secretly I picture my sister lifting her bike under the tarpaulins of a truck and getting in the front. This vehicle takes her to France without harm. Travelling like this, Elly reaches the sea. The waves rage, the wind drives the flecks of foam from the spray onto the wet beach. My sister’s hair blows in her face. In a shopping centre in the small seaside town on the Atlantic coast she comes across a group of vagrant youths. She follows them obstinately. One boy pelts her with empty cans. But she doesn’t give up. When the police come, she flees with the gang. After their getaway together, she belongs to them. During the day she begs with the others, at night she snuggles up to her girlfriend, a French girl, in their army sleeping bag. I hope this girlfriend has her wits about her, is smart enough to know how to break in without getting caught and how to get false papers. This girlfriend looks after Elly, I’m sure of it. My sister’s skin has a touch of caramel, summer and winter alike. I am envious of her. Along with her light eyes, the dark soft waves of her hair. When she laughs, her whole body heaves. Laughter bursts out of her. It rocks her. I keep calling to mind the details of her body. But whenever I try to describe Elly in my thoughts, she slips away from me. I can’t force her voice into my ear any more. Her face is changing more and more into the one in the photo albums, the unreal face of the prints inside, copied and filed away, slowly fading. Only at night, when I’m asleep, can I see my sister as she is and feel her vitality. In the morning when I wake there are a few precious moments when I don’t yet know she has disappeared. Then the memory hits me like a blow.

  I collect first moments. Straight after these flashes of light, that’s when my forgetting begins. The first time I looked into the eyes of my daughters, Ines and Elly. The first time I met their father. The first time we stepped inside our house. The first time I sat on a school bench. The first time I got a commission. The first time my mother took me to the gynaecologist. The first time. My first time was panting and poking in the dark. I don’t know how it happened. I just wanted to prove that I could do it. I acted as if I’d had a hundred men before, slutty and knowing. I rubbed my arse up against Casanova’s groin. I was relying on the fact he was still learning the ropes. He didn’t notice my blood. He honked his horn as he drove off. I closed the blinds.

  The first time I saw Hamid was at a party. A woman was putting a pistol made of porcelain into his hand. He grinned, helplessly, good-naturedly, swinging his other arm, and reached for a glass of red wine. I was convinced he must have three children at home. My red dress was radiant, but I sat quietly in the corner. He didn’t notice me. This man is spoken for, I repeated to myself like a catechism. But he didn’t look at me. The small woman with the tiger print trousers was eagerly explaining to him how long she had fired the porcelain in the oven and which gallery she was exhibiting in. Hamid smiled politely. He was the only man at the party wearing a suit. The hostess, my dance teacher, was celebrating her birthday. She had invited a random selection of people who were strangers to each other. Perfect for meeting someone in fact. But it didn’t work out with Hamid and me. I was too proud and at the same time too shy to talk to him. And what about him? He didn’t notice me. After the party I left for France for three months, where I slurped oysters and doubted whether there were any men you could trust these days. My dance teacher had been planning to marry her boyfriend and dance partner a few weeks after her birthday. The wedding was called off. He had threatened to throw himself off the roof. But Hamid and I met each other a second time. It wasn’t fate: it was something I cooked up. I thought up a script. I tracked Hamid down on the internet, invited him to view my profile. I revealed that I’d seen him once before and hadn’t been able to get him out of my head. I wouldn’t have deigned to give any other man so much as an encouraging smile. Hamid reached for the line I had cast. I was responsible. But to friends I would sigh and say it was destiny. We had a second first moment.

  First moments are treacherous. You have to stick it out from that moment forth. I seek out first moments, I contrive sensation for myself in my quiet suburban life which is devoid of all unpredictability. I try to picture how wild and determined I was as a young woman. When I catch the spark in Ines’s eyes that used to be in mine, I feel old and lifeless. But I can transform myself. For that I need nothing more than make-up and cottage cheese. Both of them make me glow, make my skin smooth. First moments are a matter of perspective. The beginning of the end. The first slug of coffee in the morning. The first time I refused his advances. The first time I tried to switch the phone off, not to pick up the papers any more, to avoid the news. The first time I was drawn back to the data stream, when I t
ried once again to find Elly on there. Because Elly is now my first and last moment. Elly. My little girl, my wild child, my sanctuary. She’s the one. After her, I forgot everything. All the first moments are suddenly just final glimpses, the beginning of the end, harbingers of doom. Elly has gone, disappeared. No one knows what happened to her. There was no demand for ransom, no shoe found, no hair. She cycled to training and she never arrived.

  Now I feel my way through the house in the dark. I run my hands over the furniture, the walls, the pictures hanging there. I don’t stumble on the stairs. It’s the uncertainty which is slowly eating me up. Hamid instructs detectives. He organises action groups and manhunts far and wide. He searches for her in the most remote places, in the most roundabout ways. In vain. Elly is gone. Everything we had goes out of focus, everything we experienced with her falls apart. We are rotting from the inside out. The poison bubbles up until it’s in our mouths. Hamid tries to give me hope again. He finds descriptions of persons who match her, he telephones authority after authority. In the end it’s always the same answer. Elly has gone. We still have Ines. I hope she stays.

  I ask myself whether Elly has run away, whether she couldn’t put up with us any longer. I ask myself whether I fought too much with Hamid, whether I was too impatient with Elly, who was contrary, rebellious from an early age. I remember her pinching my upper thigh as a young child. The way she kept pinching me over and over, laughing like an imp, even though I shrieked and scolded her. I remember I ended up digging my fingers into her leg. She barely reached my hips, she was so small. She was shocked to death; she couldn’t breathe, her face went red, and only then her features dissolved. A wet baboon mask. When I finally let go, an imprint remained. Elly shouted for her father, her grandparents. But no one was there. And she got no comfort from me.

  Now my hair is greasy, stiff with dirt. I slip into the same clothes every day. My fingernails have grown long. They curve. Everyone claims that time heals all wounds, but our time stands still. The pain that I feel doesn’t fade. It comes in waves, surges and breaks again, over and over. First it came as a blow. It left me numb for weeks on end. Then senseless anguish, sobbing, collapse. I despise myself, I loathe what is left of my family. I can’t change it. I wish I had never become a mother. The danger, the pain, the fear that is wrapped up in motherhood is something I can’t bear. There are no more first moments. When your child disappears, everything stops.

  I call up beautiful memories to pray myself back to life. I think about Hamid’s hands in my lap, his smiling lips; about Ines on the horse, her back straight, her plait dancing on top. I slowly feel my way towards the memories of Elly. As a baby she was neat and long. Soft padded fists, rings of fat on her thighs, a triple chin. But as soon as she docked onto my breasts, she had the force of a truck. She sucked so hard I saw stars. I took pills for the pain, to keep going. On the upside, she could tell night from day by four weeks and she slept through. Apparently that was a huge achievement for a newborn. It meant I could get enough sleep. But rather than relaxing, I kept watch anxiously, in case some calamity might befall her. Was she breathing regularly? Was her stomach swollen or did her nappy need changing? Or was that Ines? I don’t know any more. Their baby faces are superimposed on each other. I don’t know where one begins and the other ends. Sudden cot death and other macabre afflictions haunted my thoughts. But we were spared. Fear was my constant companion. It is gone now. I no longer look left and right when I cross the street. What else is going to happen to me? Everything seems to be at an end. I try to take care of Ines, to pay attention to her. But I don’t seem able to tame my thoughts.

  Elly disappeared almost four years ago. With no prior warning. Simply gone, as if she had been put out like a flame. Everyone suspects that we threw her out or killed her. The police investigations took that direction. Perhaps it was just an accident, the officer suggested. As if a confession would burst out of us when faced with her understanding. At home we cursed and raged about these suspicions. But the police clung to them. The distrust against us grew. It spread out, star-shaped. We saw it in people’s eyes in the pharmacy, in the bus driver’s slight hesitation when she opened the door for us. The suspicion took root. Even the weather is against us. It’s always too cold or too hot. I know I haven’t committed a crime. But what was Hamid doing that day? I’m not one hundred per cent sure where he was when. I don’t dare ask him. But I pay more attention now. Where he says he’s off to, when he comes back. Which female friends he mentions suspiciously infrequently. It wouldn’t really affect me if he did cheat on me, or so I imagine. Worse things happen after all. The pain of losing Elly is a fire that never goes out. And even Hamid is standing on the outside, far away, on the other side of the smoke.

  After Elly’s disappearance I was prescribed pills. I couldn’t sleep. But it was the wrong drug. It just made me mushy. It didn’t touch the sides. I had to concoct my own mixture to get through the day. Something to make me sleep, something to wake me up, and something for the time in between. I needed to get through it. Sometimes, I can sense that Elly is alive. Then my excitement feels like a wing fluttering inside me. Like individual feathers stroking my diaphragm. I know that it makes no sense to think about her surviving. Elly was so small, so young when she disappeared. But she was old enough to identify any perpetrator, and I don’t believe that she ran away. Why would she? It’s like I’m living on autopilot. Structure is the only thing holding me up. I keep the tablets in moderation too. Although I’ve thought more than once that I can’t go on. I just want everything to stop. But I still have one daughter. I need to live for her. I need to look after her. I don’t go out any more. How could I enjoy myself when my youngest daughter is suffering? How could I dance while she decomposes?

  I can’t switch off. Without the tablets I would never have managed to carry on. I am infinitely grateful to Big Pharma. Maybe there are a few cases where medication like this did more harm than good. But in actual fact psychopharmaceuticals are a blessing. They have saved my life. Without the pills I would have given up. Maybe I would have jumped, or poisoned myself with exhaust fumes. Or thrown myself under a train. On the internet there are detailed instructions for suicide. You can even buy stud guns. I imagine pressing one of those to my temples. But the risk of it slipping is too great. Then I would probably be permanently paralysed and wouldn’t even be able to kill myself. Enough. I will wait for Elly. I can sense she’s alive.

  My sister is dead. I hardly dare to think it, because I know my belief is enough to kill her. We’re all Elly has left. Our belief keeps her alive. Everyone else has given up on her. The police aren’t looking for her any more. There are new cases with more promising leads. Elly is being shelved, my father says, raging. He never usually gets angry, but he has hatred in his voice when he talks about the police. I love my father. He looks like an Arab version of Barack Obama. Admittedly he’s almost two heads shorter than the former American president, his voice is higher, his smile more shy than winning. But he is a generous, endlessly patient man. My father’s father comes from Tunisia. Hamid himself doesn’t even speak Arabic. His parents dropped the second language out of consideration for his sister, who has learning difficulties. Sometimes, particularly after Islamist terrorist attacks, my father likes to insist to strangers that he is Greek or Spanish. But his name gives him away immediately. When my sister and I wanted to tease my father, we would try to pronounce his name in the Arabic way. First we would pretend to clear our throat for the guttural H-sound, then we’d spit the rest of his name out behind it. Just like we had heard our relatives do when we went on holiday to Tunisia: Chrrr-amid. It always sounded wrong. We stuck to the German pronunciation. My mother is the true Arab in our house. She cooks tagine, chakchoua, couscous, hangs carpets from the bazaar and camel saddles on the walls. She cultivates the Arabic heritage that my father is embarrassed by. Thanks to her, we have the director’s cut of Lawrence of Arabia at home. We watch it every year at Christmas. My
mother loves Peter O’Toole in this role. His blue eyes flashing above the Bedouin scarf. She would have braved every sandstorm with him. My father protests that my mother’s adoration constitutes false advertising. After all, Lawrence was actually a Brit. But my mother argues that he was a true nomad. He loved the Arabs.

  That was all a long time ago. Now Elly skips through the images on the television, she haunts the lines of every novel I read. I think I see my sister on every corner. I’ve stalked a dozen girls in vain already. In the meantime, my parents try to make up for the failures of the police. They issue calls for search parties for my sister on the television, via the internet, through every available channel. They give interviews. They allow themselves to be coiffed, powdered, their hair sprayed rigid for the cameras. They look at the blinking red light. They talk into the dark lens. They plead and beg. Even the bishop gives us an audience. But at some point my sister stops being news. She has fizzled out. My parents call the editors, but only their secretaries will speak to them. No one returns their calls. We are alone again. Fear eats away the hours. The clients and agencies that normally employ my mother and father are understanding at first. But when my parents still don’t reliably deliver their work six months later, these calls also become infrequent. My parents send me to do the shopping. I’m supposed to pay by card. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Then I have to leave the groceries in the supermarket. The checkout operator is annoyed. At home I make apple sauce with rice pudding or pancakes. A sweet, warm comfort food which is meant to fill the void. It doesn’t comfort me.