Sorry (21 page)

“Where’s your dear father?”

Frauke gave a start when she heard Mrs. Sanders’s voice behind her. She didn’t turn around, she could clearly imagine Mrs. Sanders standing in the doorway of the apartment—on tiptoes, careful not to cross an invisible line.

“He’s not coming today,” said Frauke.

“Aha, but they’re going in and out of your dear mother’s apartment. Whoremongering, I dare say. Is she pregnant again? You can’t turn on a light, your head stays in the dark.”

Frauke ignored Mrs. Sanders and stopped outside her mother’s door. Number 17. She laid one ear against the wood. She was nervous, but then anyone would probably be nervous if they hadn’t spoken to their mother for eleven years.

Tanja Lewin started seeing the evil in her daughter after her husband had had her committed to the private clinic. One day—they had been in the garden at visiting time, and her father had nipped off to the bathroom—Tanja Lewin took her fifteen-year-old daughter aside and said, “I know who you are and who’s hiding behind your face. And I know what you’ve done. Look at me, or is that so hard to do? It’s because of you that I’m here. It’s because of you that it all happened.”

That was how it began.

The phone rang at night, and when her father picked up the receiver the line went dead, but when Frauke got the phone her mother hissed in her ear: “How’s my whore-child? You know I’m locked up in here while you share a bed with your father? How much must you hate me to do such a thing?”

Her mother’s doctor asked Frauke time and again how she felt and how she was dealing with her mother’s illness. She wanted to know if her mother had made any accusations against her, and repeatedly explained
that Tanja Lewin was non compos mentis and confused people and situations.
If that’s the case
, Frauke wanted to say,
why is she accusing just me and not my father too?
Frauke kept her mouth shut. To the doctor and also to her father. She didn’t want anyone to learn about her mother’s threats because she was afraid that the doctors would increase her mother’s medication or worse. Buried deep inside Frauke was the hope that if everyone thought her mother was normal she would soon be able to come home and resume her old life.

So during visiting times Frauke always stayed in the background and avoided looking at her mother. The worst thing about it was that there were also lucid moments in her mother’s life, when she was warm and affectionate and called Frauke over to her. This emotional roller coaster increasingly threatened to tear Frauke in two.

The big split came the year Frauke finished school and went to Italy for two months. Her mother was so disappointed by her absence that she stopped talking to Frauke when she came back. And that is how it has stayed until today.

Frauke took a deep breath, knocked and lowered the handle. The apartment was deserted, and her mother wasn’t in the adjoining bathroom either. Frauke looked at the back of the door where the weekly schedule was kept. It was macaroni and cheese today, with rocket salad. Under the word
Saturday
was a big letter S with a circle around it. Now Frauke knew where she could find her mother.

She had to push aside the curtain over the narrow window in the room to see her mother sitting on a bench. She was naked and alone. Frauke tapped against the glass, but her mother didn’t react. Frauke opened the door and stepped inside. The heat struck her in the face.

“Mama?”

Her mother looked up, startled. The doctors didn’t care for spontaneous visits. They said patients had to prepare themselves for visits.
Perhaps I don’t exist for her, because I didn’t register in advance
, Frauke thought and tried to smile.

“I didn’t think you were coming so soon,” said her mother. “Birgitt was going to massage me after the sauna and—”

“I’ve got to talk to you,” Frauke interrupted her and stopped in the door. It felt as if her lungs were refusing to inhale the sultry air. Her mother tapped on the bench next to her.

“Then sit down.”

“Couldn’t you—”

“Shut the door and talk to me here,” her mother snapped and slid aside to make room for her daughter.

Frauke shut the door and sat down. She was nervous, and wished she could light a cigarette, but she had no idea whether that was even possible in a sauna.

“I knew you’d come,” said her mother. “I felt it here.”

She lifted her left breast and let it fall again.

Nice gesture
, thought Frauke, and nodded as if she understood exactly what her mother meant. Her body was drenched in sweat, but she didn’t think of taking off her coat.
It’s my armor, it’s staying on
. Her mother’s hand settled on her knee, and Frauke flinched.

“Calm now,” said her mother.

“I am calm.”

Her mother patted the knee.

“He was here,” she said. “He talked to me. He likes you. I think that was why he sought me out. He wanted to know more about you. He asked me why you suffer so. You can imagine how surprised I was. I didn’t know you suffered. That’s why I had to speak to you. I wanted you to know that you’re blameless. Do you understand?”

Frauke tried to react.
Order, bring order into this chaos
. She cleared her throat and wiped the sweat from her eyes.

“Mama, who was here?”

“The devil, who else would I be talking about?”

“How do you know he was the devil?”

“Do you think I wouldn’t recognize the devil when he’s standing by my bed?”

Her mother laughed, at Frauke, and Frauke did something she would never have thought possible: she slapped her mother in the face.

“I’m twenty-nine,” she said and had to repeat it. “I’m twenty-nine, I’m not fifteen any more. I’ve got enough shit on my plate. You’ve got to stop telling me such crap, do you hear me? Enough now.”

Mother and daughter looked at one another. Was there any recognition in the mother’s eyes? Something about her expression confused Frauke. Then Tanja Lewin raised her hand and rested it on her daughter’s cheek, gently, as if Frauke had taken the blow rather than her mother.

“Don’t cry,” said her mother. “I know how hard it is for you.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“I do, I know, and if you knew all the things I know, you’d be locked up in here with me. We crazy people just know too much.”

She smiled as if she had made a joke. Frauke wanted to get away. She imagined herself running out of the sauna, she saw herself leaning against the wall, breathing heavily, and tasted the cigarette, and then she was in the street and then in the car, and then she was gone.

“What did you tell the devil,” she asked quietly, and her voice sounded almost brittle. Painfully, she understood what she was doing here. She was getting involved with her mother.
Again
.

Tanja Lewin has seen the devil so many times that she’s no longer deceived. The devil has sung for her and recited poetry for her; he has gripped her heart, thus proving to her that she belongs to him. Frauke’s mother knows what the devil smells like, his preferences and his dislikes. Once he came to her as a child. He crept into the clinic, stood by the side of her bed and said he’d gotten lost. Tanja Lewin laughed at him. Another time he visited her as her doppelgänger, and that time she screamed until not a sound issued from her mouth.

After an absence of several years, five days ago the devil came back to Tanja Lewin. He was wearing a thick jacket, boots, and a woollen cap. He was young, he was friendly.

“The devil doesn’t get cold,” she said by way of greeting.

“I didn’t want to stand out,” he said and pulled up a chair. The devil had no rings on his fingers, his eyes were brown, his face clean-shaven.

“So they know you’re here?”

“Of course, they let me in. Look what I’ve brought you.”

The devil held up a camera.

“You want my soul?”

“I want to remember you.”

The devil asked her to smile. Frauke’s mother smiled, the devil took a picture, then another.

“Tell me about your daughter,” he said.

“I’m not telling you anything,” said Tanja Lewin and laughed anxiously. Even if she spent day and night waiting for the devil, it didn’t mean he didn’t scare her. The devil shook his head and said that wasn’t
what he’d understood. He folded his hands. He plainly had time. They looked at each other. They looked at each other for a long time. It hurts when the devil is silent. It’s a bit as if the energy is being sucked out of the room. The air. The life.

“What do you want to hear?” asked Tanja Lewin after a while.

“Tell me what you did to her,” the devil said.

Tanja Lewin wanted to scream. She wanted to jump out of bed and drag her fingernails across his face. The devil didn’t let it come to that. He pushed Frauke’s mother onto the bed with one hand, and with the other he held her mouth shut.

“Everything,” he said and leaned over her. “Tell me everything.”

Tanja Lewin bit into the heel of his hand. She was so filled with fear that the fear gave her courage. The devil kept his hand resting on her mouth. His eyes closed for a moment. The blood from the wound flowed into her mouth, making her swallow and choke. The devil didn’t flinch. His eyes were a question.

Tell me everything, OK?

Tanja Lewin nodded, the hand detached itself from her mouth, Tanja Lewin spat blood on the floor, she choked and nearly vomited. The devil handed her tissues from the bedside table. Tanja Lewin heard the blood dripping from his hand onto the floor.

“I’m bleeding for you,” he said and smiled.

Tanja Lewin started to cry. As she later explained to Frauke, it wasn’t out of fear, it was pure relief that the devil wasn’t furious with her. He was acting sympathetic. He ran his uninjured hand over her forehead and told her to calm down. Now.

She calmed down.

He told her to look at him. Now.

She looked at him, and again the devil asked her to tell him everything.

Tanja Lewin shook her head.

“You didn’t tell him anything?” Frauke said with surprise.

“Nothing. Not a word.”

“And he was satisfied with that?”

“He was satisfied with that. The devil is a gentleman. That’s why I have to talk to you. I don’t trust him. The devil says he likes you, but beware. The devil lies, he always lies. And what he likes, he
hates; and what he hates, he calls love. That’s why I gave nothing away. He isn’t to know who you are. You’re my daughter. That’s all he’s going to get. There’s nothing more to say. Do you know what tired means?”

Tanja Lewin didn’t wait for the answer, but laid her head in Frauke’s lap. Like her father. As if her mother knew how he had behaved toward his daughter. Frauke got goosebumps in spite of the heat.

“Let me sleep just for a day,” said her mother. “Or for a week, OK?”

She closed her eyes, one hand still resting on Frauke’s knee and the other clenched in a fist in front of her mouth. Tanja Lewin went to sleep like that, and Frauke sat there and sweated her soul out of her body and didn’t dare wake her mother.

She protected me
.

The thought was like ice in the heat.

Frauke withstood it for twenty minutes, then she carefully lifted her mother’s head and rested it on a tissue. The air outside the sauna was the loveliest that Frauke had ever known. Relief came over her in sobs. She slumped onto a chair in the corridor and breathed greedily.

He was here, he wanted to know more about me
.

On the way out Frauke asked the nurses if her mother had had any visitors over the last few days. No one knew anything; they explained that her mother wasn’t in a high-security prison.

What does he want from me?

The snow came as a relief. All the white, the cold, the silence. Frauke went to her car and was just tapping a cigarette out of the pack with trembling hands when her phone rang.

The display showed Tamara’s number.

“Yes?”

In the silence that followed Frauke expected all kinds of things. Insults and questions. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Tamara had simply been mucking about.

Do you still know me?

“Could you come, please,” said Tamara. “Your father’s lying outside the door.”

Frauke gives a start. She doesn’t know how long she’s been staring straight in front of her.
How could I be so careless?
The noise of the passing
snowplow pulled her from her thoughts.
How did Meybach know I felt guilty? How did he know that?
Her right hand hurts, she loosens her grip and stares at the knife. It’s twenty past ten, and Frauke wonders if she’s really capable of killing. She used to believe that if she ran up a hill fast enough she would get to the top and go flying off. It was the run-up that mattered.

Killing might be like that, I need a proper run-up and I have to believe in it, then it’ll happen all by itself
.

Frauke tries to imagine her life afterward. Starting work again, ordering a plate of tabouleh at the Arab restaurant, browsing in the bookshop or talking to Kris, making a date with this man and that one and knowing exactly whether she would or whether she wouldn’t have sex with him; talking to Wolf, holding Tamara in her arms, everything being as it should be and she just being who she is and no one else after she’s killed a human being.

“Where are you?” she says in a whisper and listens to the departing snowplow and wishes she was back in the villa.

Normally it doesn’t take Frauke ten minutes to get to the villa from Potsdam, but yesterday the journey through the snowstorm took half an hour. Arriving in front of the villa, she didn’t dare drive up to the property and parked like a stranger on the pavement outside.
What if they don’t let me in?

Frauke checked her face in the rearview mirror. The black hair, the center part, perhaps a bit too much makeup around the eyes. She brushed her hair behind her ears and got out.

Her father was sitting on the veranda, wrapped in a blanket. He held a cup in his hands and reminded Frauke of a black-and-white photograph that she’d once seen at an exhibition. When her father saw her coming toward him, he quickly took the blanket off his shoulders.
He doesn’t want to look old and weak
.