Sorry (34 page)

But Wolf wouldn’t just disappear like that. Not Wolf
.

“I wish we’d argued,” says Kris, rattling the gate to the property, which is still locked.

Tamara looks up.

“Do you think he climbed over it?”

“Perhaps. Or over the wall. A ten-year-old could do that without having to try too hard.”

“But why should he?”

“Good question.”

Tamara shakes her head.

“Wolf would never forget his keys.”

They go back to the villa and look through every nook and cranny. But whatever they do, Wolf has still disappeared.

They wait till midday. They phone Lutger and they phone the people stored in Wolf’s address book. They sit over his calendar. His next appointment would have been in Duisburg in two days. They phone Duisburg. They go on waiting. At four o’clock Kris locks himself in the
bathroom and tries to contact Meybach on his cell phone. Tamara isn’t supposed to know. No one answers, no mailbox, nothing. Meybach’s words echo in his head:
I’m going to disappear now. We no longer exist for one another
. Kris has to keep himself from driving to Charlottenburg and camping in front of Meybach’s door. He’s in a panic, he doesn’t know what to do.

“Where are you going?”

“To get some air, I might bump into Wolf.”

Kris knows how lame that sounds.
No more solo gigs
, he thinks, and asks Tamara if she wants to come with him.

They walk to the suburban rail stop and stand around on the platform for a while as if Wolf might get out of one of the cars at any moment. A fine drizzle starts falling and floats irresolutely in the air. They don’t know what to say. On the way back to the villa Kris wants to voice his suspicion.
Why should someone who nails people to a wall stick to the rules?
In the end he leaves it be, because Tamara doesn’t even know that they tracked down Meybach.

He thinks of the gun. It’s in his wardrobe, right at the back with his socks. At least that’s where he put it yesterday evening.

“What’s up?” asks Tamara.

“Nothing, I …”

Kris wants to run, he wants to leave Tamara standing there and run to the villa to look for the gun. Because if the gun isn’t there, it’s clear what’s happened. Part of him wants the gun to be right where he left it, another part wishes that Wolf has found it and driven to Meybach’s place.

Please
.

The gun is still behind the socks.

Kris wanders restlessly through the villa looking for clues. He wishes he had a bloodhound. It feels as if Wolf is present, although he isn’t present.
Where on earth are you?
For a moment Kris even puts an ear to the wall and listens. He knows he has to pull himself together.

“If Wolf hasn’t rung by tomorrow morning, we’ll go and see Gerald,” he decides that evening. “We’ll go and see Gerald and tell him everything. And forget the consequences. This is about Wolf.”

Every unnecessary caller is ignored this evening. They go on waiting. Saturday becomes Sunday. They wait until one in the morning, they
wait until two, then they can’t keep going and collapse. The nervous tension overtakes them, and they fall exhausted on their beds. Total unease. Kris rolls from one side to the other and dreams about the patch of forest. They’re burying the man, and suddenly he isn’t dead any more. He lies in the sleeping bag and he starts talking and says he doesn’t want to be buried alive.

Damn it, let me out!

Kris wakes up breathing heavily and turns on the light. It’s ten to four. He stares at the ceiling, the ceiling stares back. His head is a hollow space. He gets up, fetches the television from his study and puts it by the bed. Again and again he dozes off, again and again he wakes and looks at the screen. When the morning light colors his room blue, he turns the television off and gets into the shower. Then the toothbrush, then his reflection. When he comes down, he isn’t surprised that Tamara has been awake for ages. She’s lying on the sofa. Book in hand, teapot and cup on a side table.

“How long?” he asks.

“Since four,” she says.

The blue morning light has disappeared, the sunbeams whirl through the windows as if they were still drunk from the night before. Dust glitters in the air. Tamara and Kris sit down in the kitchen and have their breakfast. They don’t want to go into the conservatory. There were three of them sitting in the conservatory the previous morning. Nothing is as it should be. They are so withdrawn that they don’t even notice the piece of paper between the posters.

An unpleasant silence spreads.
It’s sad when you can’t bear silence with the people close to you
, Kris thinks and stands up.

“I’ll put some music on.”

In the sitting room he crouches down by the stereo, rummages among the CDs, and puts on Iron and Wine. The guitar, the voice. When he straightens up again he glances outside. It’s unequivocally the wrong weather to miss his brother, just as three days ago it was the wrong weather to put a friend under the ground. Spring is exploding, Kris sees it everywhere. He wants to go back to Tamara and tell her they can phone Gerald, that the weather’s getting on his nerves, that he’s had enough of searching inside himself for explanations of Wolf’s disappearance, when he notices a shimmering on the ground. It’s like a déjà vu. Startled, he looks at his feet and expects them to be standing in a puddle. Then he looks to the right. Wolf isn’t by his side, Tamara is still sitting in
the kitchen, Kris is standing alone in the living room, and Iron and Wine are singing “We Gladly Run in Circles,” and winking and nodding in the garden once again are the white heads of a bunch of lilies.

T
HE MAN IS DRINKING
his second coffee when the villa slowly comes to life. Light on the first floor, light on the ground floor. Kris and Tamara. Now he knows everything he wanted to know about the girl and the brother. Yesterday it took them two hours to notice the boy’s disappearance. They scoured the whole area for him. The man watched it all. They stayed awake until late at night. Wolf. The boy insisted that he call him by his name. The man refused. He sips from the coffee and raises the binoculars again. He is a patient man. He knows they will discover the lilies in the garden at any moment.

Yesterday afternoon he saw the girl sitting smoking nervously under one of the chestnut trees and looking over at the Belzens’ house. He wasn’t concerned. He knew they couldn’t see him. He focused the binoculars. He was so close to the girl that he could make out her face in detail. The sight was soothing. Fear and worry.
I see something that you don’t see
.

The girl went back into the villa. The man waited for the brother and was disappointed. After another five minutes he turned away from the window and went down into the cellar. He tried to be quiet as he did so.

The first time the man visited him was at nine in the morning. He bound him and pulled a pillowcase over his head. The boy had completely lost his bearings. The man could see that the boy was in a bad state. His heartbeat was irregular, and he had difficulty breathing. The man knows that the anesthetic was responsible for that. His doctor told him about the side effects of Isoflurane, but there’s a big difference between theory and practice.

The man pushed the pillowcase up and held a bottle of water to the boy’s mouth. The boy spat and cursed, he wouldn’t drink. Then the man went back upstairs and went on watching the villa.

The second time the man stopped ten feet away from the boy before he spoke to him. He didn’t curse him this time, just listened.

He doesn’t know if I’m actually here
.

The man tried to remember the feeling of being young and hungry and helpless. It was hard. Now he’s hungry all the time, and his body is being consumed by that hunger. Before, hungry meant being strong. Today the hungry are helpless and weak. The justice of this world is a lie.

The boy sat naked on the chair. Muscles, sinews, the dark rivers of his veins. The nest between his legs was just a shadow, sweat covered his chest. It was hot in the cellar. The man stood motionless in front of the boy and admired his body. That morning he would have given a lot to wear the boy’s skin.

Just for a day, even an hour
.

The man sighed, giving himself away. The boy threw his head back and screamed for help. The man could hear that his breathing was improving. The gray color of his skin had vanished as well. His wrists and ankles were rubbed bloody, the nylon tape had sunk deep into his skin. The boy must be in pain.

The man endured the screams of help for a minute, then went back upstairs and washed his hands. He couldn’t help it, he had to touch the boy. His trembling thighs, the softness of his hair.

It was the only way
.

He turned the water off and listened. He wasn’t worried. The house swallowed the screams as dry soil swallows a sudden fall of rain. The man looked at his watch. He would give the boy a few hours to calm down, then he would come and visit him again.

W
OLF TRIES TO REMEMBER
. He sits in the dark and feels as if he’s just come out of an operation. Spaced, zonked, and not really alive. There is something around his head, blocking his vision. He tenses his arms. His hands are on his back, he can’t move his feet. Wolf tries to stand up, there’s a jerk, something chokes him. He falls back on the chair and gasps for air.
Where am I?
Wolf tries to reconstruct what it was that brought him here.

Tamara?

Tamara came to him in the night. First there was the click of the door, and a moment later she was lying beside him, and he felt her nakedness. She felt familiar and alien at the same time.

His voice:

“How long are we going to do this?” Her voice:

“Not long now. We’ll tell Kris tomorrow.”

Sex. They had made love, he still remembers that very clearly. Afterwards they lay there in the dark, and he felt as if he were glowing from inside. They were contented. Eventually Tamara sat up and wanted to go. His voice again.

“Stay.”

He hadn’t just meant that he wanted her to stay with him in bed. He had also meant:
Stay by my side for as long as you can
. He had meant:
Forever
.

She had kissed him, she hadn’t wanted Kris to find everything out by some stupid accident. She had wanted him to hear it from them, so Wolf let her go. One last kiss. The footsteps, the closing of the door.

His eyes. His eyes had fallen shut. Contented, exhaustion. He had lain there and preserved the feeling of her still at his side. The impression on the mattress, her warmth. He had gone to sleep like that and dreamed of Erin. At last she was back. He remembers the relief.

They were lying on a hill. There was no city to be seen, no street, just flowing treetops. He sensed Erin beside him. There was the wind blowing over them as if they were both part of the landscape; there was a bird calling to another bird, and in between, clearly and distinctly, Erin’s breathing.
Talk to me
, he thought, and Erin started talking and snuggled closely to his side, and her kisses covered his neck and wandered up to his cheek until he felt her lips on his, and then at last he saw her.
At last
. Her eyes, her hair. The way she watched him as if nothing else in the world existed, just her and him, and he closed his eyes happily and knew he couldn’t tell her about Tamara, he could never let Erin go like that, because there was that familiar whisper when she took off her blouse, there was that stillness and the sunlight on her skin made everything fall silent.
Wake up
, said Erin. And he smiled and kept his eyes closed.
Please, wake up
. And he stopped smiling, because there was something in her tone that he didn’t recognize.
Listen, wake up
. And he opened his eyes, and the hill and Erin had disappeared, the landscape was a room in a villa far from the reality of his dreams, and he saw an old man sitting on his chest, and the old man was nodding as if he was pleased that Wolf had woken up, and then the old man leaned forward and made Wolf disappear back into the darkness.

“N
OW THAT YOU’RE FEELING
better, let’s chat,” said the man, and pulled the pillowcase off the boy’s head. The man saw the boy closing his eyes tight, the ceiling light was blinding, the reaction was normal. Their eyes met, and the man curiously observed the sheer fury in the boy’s eyes, and was not surprised.
Be furious if you want
. The boy looked down at himself, and his fury turned into panic. He was sitting naked on the chair, and his feet were tied to the chair legs. What he couldn’t see were his hands behind his back. The man had bound them with nylon tape, he had pulled the nylon tape through a hook on the wall that led back to the boy and lay as a noose around his neck. The man didn’t want to take any risks. He told the boy that. He also told him that education was an elementary part of life. And that applied to everybody, whether boys or girls.

“I’m not a boy!” said the boy. “My name is Wolf Marrer. I’m twenty-seven years old and I would like to know what the fuck’s going on here.”

Questions. The boy had so many questions. His eyes sought a means of escape. He tried to understand the room. He had no idea where he was.

“Where is this place?”

“Why am I naked?”

“Who are you?”

So many questions. And now:

“Are you Meybach? Are you that fucking asshole? I thought it was over. You said you’d disappear. What have we done now?”

A flood of questions. The man waited until the boy had fallen silent, then he cleared his throat and said:

“It doesn’t matter where we are. It doesn’t matter who I am. The rules are very simple. I will ask you questions, and you will give me the answers. If I don’t like the answers, I will go away again and keep you waiting. I can do that all day long. I can keep it up for a whole week. If you like, I’ll never come back. But you’ll want me to come back. You will beg me to come back. That’s how it has always been. You’re all the same. You want to be free up there.”