Sorry (37 page)

The old man twitches, then lifts his head. Sixty, maybe seventy years old. A face that has seen everything. Marked by the sun. His look is weary and surprised.

“What?”

“You fell asleep. You should go home, it’s late.”

The man looks around. He isn’t surprised now, he’s startled.

“What … what time is it?” he asks and licks his lips.

You’d like to look after him, fetch him a glass of water, put his feet up. You push back the sleeves of your hoodie jacket and look at your watch.

“Just before ten.”

“Oh my goodness,” says the man, but doesn’t move. He suddenly smiles at you. His smile is infectious.

“Do we know each other?” you ask and smile back.

“No, I don’t think so.”

The man shakes his head as if he’s still deliberating, then he tries to stand up, trembling and unsteady. He looks at you apologetically and holds his hand out. You step forward. His fingers close around your wrist. For a moment it’s embarrassing having him touch your sweat-drenched skin, but that moment loses its meaning when the darkness around you suddenly explodes in a dazzling light. Your bladder empties as you open your eyes wide and clearly and distinctly see the man’s face. There’s something almost religious about it. A revelation. As if you were seeing God.

“That’s good,” says the man, but you don’t hear him now. You’re just a quivering bundle on the forest path. Your nerves are jangling, your synapses are firing uselessly, and in a corner of your mind a voice calls loud, shrill warnings to you, but you don’t understand a single syllable.

T
AMARA WAITS
. She spends the hours in the living room in the armchair. Now she understands why people keep vigil by the dead. It’s the separation that’s so hard. There’s no going back.
Maybe being dead means being abandoned by everyone. And the longer you stay with the dead, the longer they stay alive
.

She tries to read. She tries to think. For a while she also tries to sleep, but the thoughts come creeping in. Something is gnawing at her, hazy and vague like the fragment of a dream. She turns on the television and hops from channel to channel, she wants to be distracted.

When night falls and she still hasn’t heard from Kris, Tamara roams through the villa and is tempted several times to sit in the car.
And then?
She doesn’t know where to drive to. For a few minutes she stares out of the window at the drive. Every approaching car fills her with hope; every car that drives past makes her even more insecure than she is already.

Did I misunderstand him? He said he needed a moment to himself. He didn’t say it would turn into a whole night
.

Tamara looks over at the television. In a field a woman is hanging up a hundred yards of washing. It looks silly, the woman is working like a hamster. Tamara turns off the television and is about to go upstairs to take a cold shower. A storm of images goes rushing through her head.

Kris leaning forward and pushing dirt away from Wolf’s corpse
.

Kris pressing Wolf’s hand to his cheek
.

Tamara using her teeth to …

She rushes to the remote and turns the television back on.

The detergent ad is over, the next commercial shows a cat that looks like a person. But Tamara has found the connection. She sees the memory clearly before her eyes. She sees Helena in her garden. She sees the taut clothesline, the basket of washing, the calm with which Helena hung out each individual piece. Kris joking that there was probably no one in the world who hung her washing out as slowly as the lady opposite. And Wolf added that as soon as Helena had hung out the last piece the first row was bound to be dry.

Tamara shuts her eyes tight and sees still more.

The Belzens’ garden appears before her very clearly.

The clothesline and the wind moving the wet pieces of washing.

Pale green
.

She opens her eyes, gets the flashlight from the chest of drawers in the hall and runs into the garden. She kneels in the dirt and doesn’t have to look for too long. A corner of the pillowcase peeps out from the churned-up soil.
Pale green. Embroidered with lilies
. Tamara pulls out the pillowcase. She hears Helena calling out to her that there’s nothing better than laundry drying in the sun. Helena raving about the smell as if every day had its own smell, while behind her the sheets and covers flicker pale green in the light. Tamara lowers the pillowcase and looks across at the Belzens’ dark house.

She calls the Belzens’. She stands in the kitchen and watches the house. Kris still hasn’t answered his cell phone. It turns nine, then ten. Tamara knows she can’t sit idly around. There’s something wrong over there. She sees the old man’s face in front of her eyes, standing on the opposite shore and talking to her. She tries to remember the words, but it was only small talk, nothing significant.

He’s an old man, what could he have to do with it?

And the pillowcase? What kind of coincidence is that?

Lilies again. Time and again, those damned lilies
.

Tamara had only visited the Belzens once, they sat on the terrace and drank coffee. They hadn’t talked about lilies, and no lilies grew in the Belzens’ house.

They’ve been away for over a week and didn’t tell us before they left
.

Tamara goes upstairs and finds the gun in one of the boxes. Frauke was given the gas pistol by a friend years ago, and never used it. The gas pistol is an imitation revolver. No one would think of a gas pistol when they saw that gun. Tamara has no idea how the thing works. What matters is the first impression.

I could wait until Kris comes
.

I could pull a blanket over my head and hide under it
.

I could …

That’s enough
.

Tamara snaps open the barrel. It contains a yellow cartridge. She looks through the box, rummages through Frauke’s things. There are no more cartridges to be found.

“Better than nothing,” she murmurs and takes the gas pistol downstairs.

She drives across the Wannsee Bridge, turns into Conradstrasse and stops by the Kleine Wannsee, right in front of the Belzens’ house. Her car is the only one in a ten-yard radius. No one opens the door when she rings the bell. Tamara walks through the garden and around the house. It’s a strange feeling, seeing the villa on the opposite shore. That time with Astrid in the rowboat everything was new and exciting, now the villa seems familiar to her, and she’s startled to see how desolate and deserted her home looks in the distance.

The motion detector reacts, the lights come on. Two beams illuminate Tamara and she tries not to look startled.

You know the Belzens, you’re not a stranger, so don’t act like one
.

She looks up at the house. Three windows are ajar, and the terrace door is open a crack as well. Tamara reaches into the crack and pushes the door fully open. The stench makes her shrink back. She stays on the terrace and greedily breathes in the fresh air. When she steps to the door for the second time, she holds the sleeves of her blouse over her mouth. The stench reminds her of a summer on Norderney. Her parents had a holiday home that they visited twice a year. She found a dead cat under a bed. It had a wound in its head and its left ear was missing. It must have
come into the house via the roof, to die in peace. In the Belzens’ house it stinks as if a hundred cats had died.

Tamara turns on the flashlight. Everything looks normal. The sofa is in its place, no chairs have been overturned.

If it wasn’t for that stench …

There’s a glass in the kitchen sink. In the fridge there’s cheese, milk, a loaf of bread.
Definitely away
, thinks Tamara, and follows the smell upstairs. Someone has taped the two doors closed with duct tape, as if to make sure that no one leaves the rooms. Tamara stops by one of the doors, reaches for the handle and presses it down. The door isn’t locked, the handle pulls without resistance. The only resistance is coming from the tape, which stretches with a sigh as Tamara pulls on the door.

The stench gets worse. Tamara sets the flashlight down on the floor, turns her face away and pulls on the handle with both hands. A rasp, a crack, then the tape comes away and Tamara loses her balance for a moment.

The room is in darkness. The shutters are down, and no light comes in from outside. Tamara points the beam in front of her. Something comes flying at her, she jerks back. Flies, loads of flies. They beat against the glass of the flashlight. Tamara tries to keep the beam steady. She can see that she’s in a bedroom. On the bed there are two figures covered with blankets; under the blanket something is twitching and trembling.

Get out of here
, says a voice in Tamara’s head.
You don’t need to see what’s hidden there. You know what it is, why do you have to look at it? What’s wrong with you?

Tamara throws the blanket aside.

Flies. Maggots. And what was once the Belzens.

After Tamara has thrown up, she hangs over the sink and splashes water in her face, rinses her mouth out and breathes frantically in and out. On no account does she want to see what lies behind the second sealed door. She’s sure it’s the old man who was looking after the house.

Meybach, you sick bastard, how could you?

So many things are being explained. How Meybach knew what they were doing. How he was so well informed.
He must have been watching us. He talked about us to the Belzens, and when he didn’t need them any more, he killed them. He was watching us the whole time. Even when the police were there. All that time. He never had any intention of leaving us in peace
.

In the medicine cupboard Tamara finds a tube of tiger balm. She rubs a strip of it under her nose and inhales the sharp smell.

I’ve got to talk to Kris. I’ve got to call Gerald, and if Gerald isn’t there, I’ll talk to one of his colleagues. I’ll tell him what I’ve seen. I’ll—

One of the doors on the ground floor strikes the wall with a dull crash. The sound of footsteps. The door clicks shut again. Silence.

Tamara stands motionlessly in the bathroom. She looks at the ceiling, from which the light shines brightly and clearly down on her.

Whoever has come into the Belzens’ house will see that there’s a light on in the bathroom
.

Tamara turns out the light and creeps to the door to close it. She holds her breath and is as quiet and still as the door behind her.

No one comes up the stairs.

Tamara exhales carefully, wishes she could close her eyes, her eyes are wide open. For one ridiculous moment she thinks the Belzens have had enough of lying on their bed and have gone downstairs to make a sandwich. Tamara holds back an explosion of hysterical laughter.

Pull yourself together!

She doesn’t know how much time passes. The sweat on her face has dried. No more doors bang. Just silence. Tamara counts the seconds. Reaching three hundred she shuts the door and leaves the bathroom.

The smell hasn’t changed, the tiger balm barely helps. Tamara thinks she can taste the stench of putrefaction in her mouth, and suppresses a fresh urge to retch. Her eyes have gotten used to the dark, but she keeps one hand on the wall and starts creeping down the stairs.

Maybe I only imagined it
.

Maybe the terrace door just blew shut
.

She reaches the bottom stair, the door to the hall is shut, the terrace door is open. She sees the lights of the villa opposite.

If I set off running now, in ten seconds I’ll be at the water, and once I’m in the water I can swim to the opposite shore in a few minutes and—

There is the sound of footsteps from the hall, the handle lowers, and the living room door opens.

N
O ONE WOULD
really want to know how you feel, but anyone could imagine. First 600,000 volts were shot through your body, then you were put on the back seat of a car, transported across Berlin, pulled from the back seat again, and dragged down some cellar steps. Before
the last step you were dropped, and the ground received you roughly. For a while you just lay there, and the rough carpet imprinted its pattern on your face. Your consciousness was blank, so you weren’t aware of being pressed to the wall. You felt nothing, smelled nothing, heard nothing. And as you were waking from your blackout, a nail was driven through your joined palms with two blows.

What you sow, you reap.

You scream from the depths of your unconscious. You’re like a diver who has only seconds to escape the depths. Your screaming is the rope on which you pull yourself out of the darkness. Your screaming is your life, summed up in a breath.

You open your eyes and breathe frantically, your arms are stretched up, your fingertips touch the ceiling, you feel your weight pulling on the nail that’s been driven through your hand. It feels as if you’re burning from top to bottom. You try to calm your breathing, and look up. Above you are your hands, nailed together, below you your tracksuit, your legs, your running shoes. They just touch the floor.

I went jogging
, you think,
I went jogging and then …

You don’t remember any more than that. The pain in your palms destroys all thought. You try to hang motionless from the wall and banish the pain. You succeed for thirty seconds, you succeed for a minute, and then the will to survive kicks in and you move, and the flames travel down your hands, and it’s like dying and dying again and then again.

As if you knew what dying is.

As if.

Calm.

Calm down.

Now.

You relax, you hang there quietly again.

“Hello!”

You don’t want to call for help, you don’t want to plead, you just want to be noticed.

“Hello, is anyone there?”

You listen for footsteps, you wait and blink the sweat out of your eyes. It’s unpleasantly warm down here. You try to concentrate. There’s the sound of footsteps, a door opens, and then a man comes into the cellar. There’s something familiar about him, but you can’t grasp it.