by Maike Wetzel
Then I get ill. The doctors operate on me. Suddenly there are only two possibilities, no questions, no compromises any more. Just life or death, zero or one. I savour this clear and simple feeling. My parents also rouse themselves from their stupor. They fuss over me, stuff cushions behind my back, stroke my hair. A girl in the hospital reminds me of my sister. We play with each other. It’s wonderful. A feverish warm flowing feeling. When I’m with her there are no questions, no future, also no past. Just a humming present. Almut is small and trusting. We are like sisters. We stick together. We shut the others out. But then she is discharged. She flies off on holiday. When we meet up to play afterwards, Almut acts weirdly. She is wary of me. She looks at me out of the corner of her eye. Every sentence I say, she repeats back as a question: Come on, we’ll go out. Shall we go out? I stop calling her. This brief friendship is nothing compared to the eternity in which Elly has disappeared, in which I’m alone with my parents, in which every thought, every action, everything we are revolves solely around my sister.
The neighbour’s cat slips through the high grass in our garden right in front of the window. The vegetable patches are full of weeds. The nettles come up to my hips. The fruit falls from the trees. It rots on the ground. Wasps settle on it. The bramble hedge is overgrown. It entwines around the fence, it creeps over the ground, full of thorns. The lawn in the middle is a dusty grey wasteland. The wind whips up the dry sand. It coats my skin. I turn the tap on to attach the hose, but not a drop comes out. The house is crumbling around us. First the bathroom cabinet gets jammed. Then it is hanging off its hinges. Instead of repairing it, my father takes the door off. My mother grumbles at him for that. She is tense, nervous. Her voice trembles, sometimes it topples and breaks off. We have pasta with butter for lunch more and more often, followed by tinned peaches. The fruit swims in the sugary water, orange and slimy. I spear the halves with my fork.
My mother and father get the feeling that my mother’s parents blame them for my sister’s disappearance. My parents and my grandparents shout at each other. My parents reject my grandparents’ apology. The door slams and doesn’t open again. My grandparents are banished. My mother makes herself invisible. Her hair hangs over her face. She wears the same dark jumper every day. My father drinks too much. The bags under his eyes swell up. His gaze is dim, then it’s furtive, like a lurking crocodile. I stand in front of the mirror and run my finger over my face. I ask myself whether I look good or bad. Even though I know it doesn’t make any difference. I reach for the scissors, as if something is compelling me. I cut my hair off. The ends are squint. My parents don’t notice. They are too occupied with the search for Elly. I’m not allowed to leave the house on my own at night any more. I’m not allowed to be late, I’m not allowed to get drunk or hang around or get up to no good.
Secretly, I’m angry at my sister. She has taken everything away from me. I have no right to be happy when my sister is suffering, when she might be dead, when she is locked in a cellar, raped, languishing without sunlight or proper food. Elly is gone. That’s the only thing that matters. I wish I could run away. But I know that would kill my parents. I want to move away, start again in another place, somewhere where no one knows about my sister. But my parents don’t want to go anywhere. They wait in our house, just in case Elly turns up at the door one day. They don’t say it out loud, but that’s what they are doing. My marks at school, my friends, my birthday — none of it is important. My parents cross off each day in their minds. Sometimes I wake up gasping. My inhaler is lying on my bedside table.
When I’m lying awake at night, I see Elly in her white judo suit. She is running through a red desert. Jagged cliffs tower above her on all sides. She weaves her way through a crack in the rock faces. The dust gives her suit a red tinge. The sun is burning. Elly stares into the light until the sun leaves a black image on her retina. A dark hole in the sky which disintegrates, dazzlingly. My sister is still only eleven. I can’t picture her differently. Her hair clings damply to her forehead. She drags herself up a slope. She is looking for people, water, shelter. But on the top of the mountain there is nothing but the wind which roars in her ears and forces her right up to the edge. My sister’s judo jacket is gaping wide open. The white t-shirt underneath is tight against her flat chest. Suddenly a dark blue ink-stain spreads across the left-hand side. As if she has been shot. My sister doesn’t take any notice of the stain. She screams wordlessly. Her arms are opened wide. Her hair, the flesh on her cheeks, everything is torn back by the wind. She leans into the storm, which scatters her syllables.
Sometimes I ask myself if this is actually Elly punishing us. What did we do wrong? Judith and I, me and Judith. Judith and the girls. Me next to them. When Elly was still a clump of cells, absolutely tiny, in Judith’s belly, I pictured her like Ines. The baby before her. No one is a completely blank page, not even a newborn. But Elly had her own head, her own impish laugh, adorned with dimples. I still believe I didn’t know her though. I wish we’d had more time. But there’s never time, when all your contracts are about to collapse or spiral out of control. You’re the one who pays the price. I put her to bed every evening though. Which book shall I read you? The same one again? Let me tell you a story. The unbridled joy when children discover something new, even if it’s only a loose cable swinging, or perforated light falling through a sieve. The happiness when they nestle into you, beg for a story, their eyes hanging on your every word, and you know: everything you say will come true. That’s a gift that only children possess. They make everything real. Judith and I are no longer children. We are full of fears and worries. There is no salvation any more, not even the little death. We hold back. It’s not everyday life that eats us up, but a tiny moment of distraction. A brief instant in which we weren’t paying attention, and our youngest daughter disappeared. I blame myself because we didn’t give her a lift to training. But it was the same route that she went to school. She cycled it daily on her bike by herself. What tortures me even more is the question of whether Elly might actually have begun to disappear much earlier? What if we just didn’t notice?
The police officer asks whether Elly has run away before. Judith and I shake our heads. No drugs, no signs of mental illness. No one in our house is violent. Can a child who grows up in affluent circumstances still go off the rails? There are countless books with explanations. Parenting guides, psychoanalytical models. I don’t want to read these books. But I can’t stop myself. The police officer says there are two possibilities if children aren’t found within twenty-four hours: either they may be victim of a violent crime, or they don’t want to be found.
Our stools squeak as we push them together to form a circle. Hamid is skiving off. The other parents have mostly turned up in couples. Blurry images hang on the walls, a box of tissues is lying on a side table. We go round in a circle, telling stories of the loss of our children. I am the only one without a grave. I place all my hopes on the woman with a large tattoo on her forearm. I scoot to the edge of my stool to be near her. The course leader has asked her to speak. The tattooed woman is meant to take on her partner’s role. She responds dutifully. Her voice squeaks. Disappointed, I lean back again. I wish my friend the dancer were here. She once told me how she sniffed cocaine before a PTA meeting so she could cope with the discussions about organic peas and carrots, or buying gift vouchers for the teaching assistants. I told her to give that stuff a rest. In fact I was always envious of her audacity. Of the unrelenting way she continued to flog her body in search of adventure. Later, she moved to the country. Now when we meet up, we try not to touch on the old times at all, the long nights, the parties and the men we shared. I got Hamid and the girls. My friend shears sheep now, she rides horses and makes jelly. That’s so much more satisfying, she says, and I contemplate the deep smile lines between her nose and mouth. I, on the other hand, think I’ve hardly changed in the last twenty years. My dress from my school leavers’ do still fits me. The mourners in the circle o
f stools are looking at me expectantly. I’m supposed to share something. Quickly I say: I would trade my life for my daughter’s. I feel heroic. The tattooed woman nods approvingly. But I know how hollow my words are. The psychologist who runs the circle of stools winks at me. Or maybe it’s just a nervous tick. The shutters come down. I don’t finish my sentences. But the course leader nods encouragingly at me. She asks what my name is again. I scream in her face with my silence. I want everything and so much more. Anything but pity. I leave.
Outside, raindrops dampen my face. A fighter jet breaks the sound barrier; afterwards, hush falls over the sparrows in the trees. It is deathly still. As if something has sucked up every sound. A storm is about to break. There is rumbling behind the clouds. A gust of wind sends a plastic bag swirling. It spirals up into the sky.
The point is, I’ve got a grip on myself. And that helps me now as well as before. There are people who can’t even take nasal spray. They get addicted immediately. People like that have no limits. It doesn’t make the slightest difference whether it’s pills, coffee, drugs, or chocolate. They just can’t stop. I’m not like that. Everything in moderation. Everything according to plan. A routine set in stone. That’s the secret. That’s how I do it. Two children and a husband, and on top of that a job with a high degree of responsibility and the prospect of good earnings if you are clever about it. Always take it slowly, don’t overdo it, and only cut loose at the weekend.
By the age of twenty I had started training as a radiographer. Although I had the grades for university, I didn’t feel confident enough to go yet. My parents ran a manual business. University was something alien to me. So after school I spent three years fastening lead aprons round other people. My colleague at the hospital suggested I try something from the drugs cabinet. At first I declined. A few weeks later we went on a night out together and he was raving again about how exceptional the high was. I read the package insert from his pills. There was nothing dramatic in it — at most heart arrhythmia. At the time I thought: I live such a healthy and boring life, I floss and wear a helmet when I cycle, I can take this risk for once. Then at least I’ll know what it feels like. The pills were antiepileptics, I think. The colleague who gave them to me was a paramedic. I knew that in an emergency he’d revive me. But he didn’t need to. I was completely absent, yet completely present at the same time. I was floating in the corner of the room and I could see myself. As if I was my own participant observer. My thoughts flashed, sharp like razors. I kept thinking I should write them down, they were so brilliant. But they flew away as quickly as they came. My whole body pulsated with sensations. They streamed from my fingertips, colouring my surroundings like on an infrared camera. Normally strangers stress me out, and we were in a bar. But thanks to the pills everyone was my friend. The practical thing about pills is they aren’t drugs, they are still medicine. So the high feels like a cure. Take this now and you’ll feel better. You persuade yourself that they are only marginally more dangerous than vitamins. Yet part of the rush lies in the fact that you know how much higher the risk is. The pills cured me of shyness. Right from that very first time all my inhibitions were gone. I wasn’t a nymphomaniac. I was completely in control, crystal clear, and my skin was so sensitive it was untrue. Even the covers on the sofa turned me on. We were sitting on velvet with wide ribbing. My companion grinned, and we went back to his place. It was the best sex of my life. Unfortunately the bloke was an idiot. But he was attractive, and thanks to the pills, he more than hit the spot. Even the sofa would probably have done it for me that night. I was glowing, sparkling, from the inside out. A wick was burning inside of me, consuming my wax. The next day I was completely empty. But I didn’t have a hangover.
By the age of thirty, I was married with two children. That suited me. One step at a time. What I did at the weekend, when my husband was watching the children, was nobody’s business. During the week I didn’t get a minute to myself. There was always something. Children are great, but they are utter dictators. There’s no time out, no breaks, they are always on the ball. My husband doesn’t take anything. I know that. Alcohol at most. He is so laidback it’s untrue. He can drink three pots of coffee and sleep like a baby afterwards. It took me ten years before I stopped getting palpitations and pixelated vision from caffeine. My husband travels a lot for work; he’s an architect. The escalators he designs are often in far-flung towns. He’s usually a lone soldier in the army of builders working on the train stations, department stores, and shopping malls of this world. I think he loves escalators because they transport people like goods, going up or down, to heaven or hell. Escalators are like gods. People are at their mercy. At any rate, Hamid is always on the move, staying in workers’ hostels or other dives. I never asked him what he did during the week. But I got Saturday evenings off in return. Then I would hit the town with the girls, and sometimes with a bloke from the internet. I started to hook up with them when I was annoyed with my husband. It was more exciting than it was enjoyable: I didn’t know the men very well. I would take something to stay awake and something to relax, with a vodka chaser. That doesn’t give you a headache. Really good spirits don’t burn either. They are very soft, sort of oily on your tongue. I would never offer the blokes pills or anything else. That was their lookout. When there were strangers around, I would be careful. I never took new substances then. Nothing bad ever happened to me mind you, but — touch wood — that’s how I wanted it to stay. One step at a time.
These days I earn my money writing sustainability reports for a range of companies. After the children arrived, I went freelance. It’s just better if you can be flexible. With two children, there’s always one that is ill, falls off the climbing frame or has an appointment with the speech therapist. Sustainability is the market of the future. Ethical economies. Profit in proportion. Thinking socially and ecologically, and taking on corporate social responsibility as a company and actively working towards this goal. This is the only way that businesses today can set themselves up as future oriented. This is what it’s about after all: conserving resources for the next generation, discovering how we can all get along with each other and live in prosperity. More and more people have an eye for this when shopping: how does this or that brand treat its workers and how do they remunerate the producers, say in third world countries. Are the products ecologically sustainable and fair trade? Does the transport or production consume unnecessary amounts of energy? The same goes for services, more or less. These are all the aspects I have to take into account in my reports. But I’m only repackaging it. I don’t create the content. The firms themselves supply it. I just turn it into comprehensible texts. It’s pretty banal, what I do, in the end. I don’t know what the point was of studying for this. But since Elly disappeared, my studies don’t help any more. Every sentence just consists of disconnected words. The words disintegrate into syllables. Sometimes I stare at a letter or the blinking cursor for minutes at a time. Only my little pink friends can help me then. I swallow them. They pick me up.
Elly
My sister has been gone a long time. It was four years ago this Thursday. I am older now. It won’t be long before I’m an adult. I long for that every day. But I’m still not allowed to go out without telling my parents. Sometimes I climb up the hunter’s lookout in the woods with the elder of the two boys from next door. We lie in wait, and when a deer appears in the clearing we press our faces up to the slit in between the boards. We make use of those few seconds to lean our shoulders softly against each other or to let a finger sidle up to the other’s hand. I can feel the boy’s warmth. He smells of hay. When I’ve finished school, I want to go to Australia to be an au pair. I practise sometimes with the boy next door’s younger brother. He can’t remember my sister. He was too young at the time. I love him for that. I bury my nose in his fine, almost white hair. His hands are plump. I put chocolate coins in them. Then the phone rings. It rings inside me. The sound is shrill. It vibrates in my skull. I tur
n hot, then cold. The ground opens up.
The phone rings. My trainers are outside on the terrace getting drenched by the rain. I’m staring out of the window while I peel potatoes. I still need to practise for a vocab test, so I’m peeling them in a hurry. The telephone doesn’t stop ringing. The sound seems to be getting louder and louder. It echoes. The knife slips. Blood pours from my thumb. My mother beckons me to answer the phone. She doesn’t want to speak to anyone. I lie and say she isn’t in. I’m sucking the blood from my cut when the female police officer on the other end of the line says: We have found a person who fits the description of your sister. Other officials have said something similar a few times before. It was always a false alarm. But this time it’s different. My parents are speechless when I tell them.
The voice on the telephone says the person concerned is a girl aged approximately fifteen years old. Not very tall, thin, with shaggy dark, almost black, hair. She was found lying in between beach huts at a Danish seaside resort. The beach was deserted at the time, back in October; the huts there were locked up. Gulls circled above the foamy sea. A few cars were parked in the street by the beach. The owners didn’t get out, they just reclined their seats, and closed their eyes or stared at the sea through the windscreen. One of these parked-up drivers discovered the girl. She was wearing a black binbag over her clothes, probably to keep out the damp. She had built a camp behind the huts on a set of tyres. She didn’t say anything when the man spoke to her. She immediately tried to hit him with an iron bar. He managed to restrain her. Soon police officers and youth workers were on the spot. The young girl didn’t speak. She babbled. She attacked everyone.
