Authors: Clemens Meyer
And then I stuff all the tablets on my palm, a proper tower, into my mouth; a couple of them fall out again, I swallow and retch, swallow and retch and put the vodka to my lips and feel like someone’s ramming their fist into my oesophagus. The toilet brush, the toilet brush, take the fucking toilet brush away. I scream, high and shrill, and there are tablets stuck to my lips and my chin, and I feel the vodka wetting my shirt. There’s a knock and a ring at the door. And I turn around in circles a couple of times, drop the bottle, a terrible crashing and smashing, I don’t stop turning in circles, the bottle must have fallen on the table and knocked over all the other bottles of healthy juice. And I turn around and around until I fall over, I’m lying on the floor, I want to crawl to my shotgun, want to crawl to my shoes, didn’t I crawl to my shoes a while ago? Then I want to crawl into the bedroom and lie down with her. But there’s a knocking and ringing at the door, no, I haven’t been to my shoes for hours, since yesterday, since forever, since my sweetheart got so mad and sad at me I haven’t been to my shoes, and I know that now for sure, because now it’s not just knocking and ringing at the door, it’s knocking and ringing inside me too. I beat both fists against my chest and scream, ‘Stop, stop, stop,’ and now I feel like I’m bathing in hot water, almost boiling hot, bathing in a huge saucepan that’s bubbling and simmering all around me now, and I know the only thing that can save me now is my shoes, but how am I supposed to get out of the boiler and out of the water to my shoes? There’s that story about the cooks in the canteen who used to bathe in the soup kettles, but I never believed it. My mother used to tell me it sometimes, she worked in a canteen as well, but now I believe her, believe every word of it, because that’s what I feel like, as if I was being boiled to death in a huge soup kettle. The lid’s fallen closed, and when the lid closes the kettle heats up automatically – the soup doesn’t want to get out and doesn’t scream and shout when it’s done. I’m screaming and shouting, there’s a crashing and splintering, and I don’t know why I’m bleeding, but then I’m suddenly perfectly still, I give it all up, I’m perfectly light and I can’t feel my scalded skin any more. I go out into the hallway, walk to the door; I’m so light I think I’m floating. But the door’s open already, and I’m floating around between the cops. The cops shove me and hold me, drag me across the hall back into the living room, see my shotgun, one of the cops takes my shotgun, and then I’m in the bedroom with them. ‘Leave her alone,’ I say. ‘She’s got nothing to do with it, just leave her alone, please.’ But they don’t leave her alone – they pull the cover off her. And I hit out all around me; I want to launch myself on the cops but they hold me tight.
She’s naked, and her skin’s so white I close my eyes for a moment. The cops say something but I take no notice, I just look at her lying there so still in front of me. Her hair’s fallen over her face so I can’t see her eyes. What I see is my hands round her neck. The marks of my hands.
They lead me out of the bedroom, my arms behind my back. It’s dark in the living room, broken glass crunches under my feet, and as they shove me into the hall I turn around one more time.
Outside the window, in the light of the street lamp, Mary Monroe smiles at me.
She was very shy. She always looked down at the floor when she came up to the blackboard. An eleven-year-old girl with brown hair down to her shoulders. Year five. Sometimes she wore her hair in a short ponytail. She was slightly pale. A long school year, year five. Later she turned twelve. That was after the summer holidays, at the start of year six. He still remembered her birthday very clearly. The way her friends had whispered and laughed as he stood at the garden gate and waved at her. He’d been sweating, and his face must have been bright red, like it always was when he sweated. She’d smiled and raised her hand briefly and then looked down at the ground. She was very shy. She raised her top lip slightly when she smiled and he saw her front teeth. The two in the middle were a tiny bit longer than the ones next to them, but just a tiny bit. And when she thought about things and got annoyed, all the numbers, that small crease ran from the top of her nose to her forehead.
He thought of all this often, imagining it, especially when he was alone and eating, and he ate a lot and was usually alone. Always, actually. He was eating a whole salami. Now he put it aside; the pain was back in his left arm, starting in his chest, aching, getting stronger, so strong that his breath came short and he felt dizzy. He laid the salami carefully on the plate, alongside a thick pork cutlet in aspic and three slices of bread and butter. He walked around the kitchen, massaging his left arm and then his chest, went to the door, saw the dark, long hallway ahead of him, the white doors, bedroom, living room, and went back to the table. He sat down, his belly brushing against the table, and the plate and the teapot and the glass gave a slight rattle. He’d hardly drunk any coffee since the stabbing and aching in his left arm and chest had started to come more and more often. He’d been meaning to go to the doctor for weeks, but he barely left the house now.
The last time he’d been out for a walk, a couple of days ago, he’d stopped at that garden gate. It was a small block of flats but it was a couple of years now since she’d lived there. She was nearly twenty-one now; it would be her birthday in twelve days. He’d leaned on the garden gate, and although it was quite cool – the entire summer had been cool and rainy – he’d broken out in a sweat. She had tied up her brown hair in two little bunches. A brightly coloured party dress. Balloons in the trees. Her parents had been sitting at a table, and he stood at the garden gate, stood there a good while and hoped they might invite him in for a cup of coffee and a piece of cake. But they hadn’t even said hello, even though they’d seen him. He waved at her again, and she smiled, then turned around and ran to her friends, who looked over at him and whispered and laughed. He turned away and left. The bag with the teddy in it knocked against his leg as he walked. The teddy was holding a calculator in both hands. The teddy had been quite expensive; the calculator was a new model. The calculator teddy was wearing a mortarboard and large spectacles. Its shirt was decorated with numbers; it didn’t have any trousers. It had small plastic rods on its hands where you could push the calculator in and out again. He’d given her the teddy later, after class. ‘Could you stay behind for a minute please,’ he’d said to her, ‘I want to have a word with you about the last test.’ She hadn’t done particularly well in the last test, even though she’d often stayed behind after class for extra tuition. There were four in the group: three boys and her. Sometimes they’d done more practice on their own after that, once the others had gone, twenty or thirty minutes, or longer. She was really good at German and most other subjects, among the best in the class, but maths … And he did everything he could for her, to help her understand numbers and learn to like them. He loved numbers.
‘Here, for you.’ He put the calculator teddy on the table in front of her. ‘Happy Birthday.’ She reached hesitantly for the teddy and pulled it slightly closer to her. ‘Belated best wishes,’ he said, ‘Happy Birthday, Juliana.’
‘For me?’ she said, smiling and raising her top lip slightly and looking down at the table. Then she lifted her head, looked at him and said, ‘Thank you, thanks.’
He sat down on the little chair next to her, his belly brushing against the table. ‘Imagine we’re in a florist’s,’ he said, ‘and you buy yourself seven lovely flowers, and they cost …’ he thought for a moment, ‘they cost seventeen marks fifty.’ ‘What kind of flowers, Mr Krein?’ she asked, still holding the teddy tight in one hand. He thought again. ‘Roses,’ he said. ‘No, lilies.’ The exercise was in the textbook and it said roses there, seven roses, but he wanted her to buy herself lilies, even though he knew nothing about flowers. ‘Why are lilies so expensive?’ she asked.
‘They’re,’ he said, ‘they’re especially beautiful lilies, special lilies,’ and she nodded. ‘So, one lily,’ he said, ‘how much does one lily cost?’
She took the calculator, removing it carefully from the teddy’s hands, and he said, ‘No, wait a moment. Write it down first and work it out, and then you can check it.’
She put the calculator aside, picked up her fountain pen and bent over her exercise book. ‘Seven lilies,’ she said softly. ‘Seventeen marks fifty,’ he said, leaning over to her. ‘And how much does one cost?’ He saw her writing the numbers in the little squares. He saw the small crease running from the top of her nose to her forehead.
Sweat ran down his face, and then the stabbing and aching was back again, from his chest to his left arm, and he held onto the garden gate for support. ‘Juliana,’ he said. Her friends called her ‘Juli’ – like the month. The school holidays were in July, the long summer holidays. He held onto the garden gate for support, with both hands. Then he closed his eyes and waited. He opened his eyes and saw the plate of food in front of him. ‘Happy Birthday, Juli,’ he said. But then he noticed that no time had passed, that he was still sitting at the table, with the same salami, the same cutlet in aspic shining in the light falling through the kitchen window. He ate salami and pork cutlet in aspic every evening; he hardly left the house now and he often thought of her birthday, the closer it came. Did she have a boyfriend, he wondered. Probably, she was almost twenty-one after all. But she’d always been so shy. Had always looked so shyly down at the floor when she came up to the blackboard. Perhaps she had a child already, a small child. He banged on the table, swept his open palm across the table. The plate fell on the floor and shattered, the salami bounced across the tiles, he had a nice tiled kitchen and the cutlet in aspic slapped onto the tiles with a dry splat and stayed put as if it were stuck to the floor.
He lowered his head carefully onto the tabletop. He was fifty-four and he was never going to have children. He stayed like that for a while, resting his arms on his belly and folding his hands together. ‘If I become a father at the age of fifty-five, and my daughter has a son at twenty-three, how old would I have to be for my five-year-old grandson …’ He fell silent. Even numbers brought him no pleasure any more. There was no one there any more to whom he could explain the magic of numbers. And there hadn’t been for a long time now. ‘Five to the power of four,’ he said. ‘That’s five times five times five times five. The small number controls the big one.’ He took her hand. ‘Count it on your fingers, go ahead. One times five, times five for the second time, times five for the third time, times five for the fourth time.’ She counted. ‘The small number controls the big one,’ she said, and he looked at the crease above her nose, ‘five to the power of two is twenty-five, that’s easy, five to the power of three is twenty-five times two.’
‘No,’ he said with a tap at her fingers, ‘the five for the third time, twenty-five times five. It’s like,’ he thought for a moment, ‘when you skim a stone, skim a flat stone across water, Juli, and it bounces off four times before it goes under. You can skim stones, can’t you, Juli?’
‘On the water,’ she said. He stood with her by the water, the lake outside town, the motorway beyond the embankment; they heard the hum of all the cars. She stood in front of him in her brightly coloured dress, the one she’d be wearing on her birthday, skimming flat stones across the water. ‘Seventy-five,’ she said, ‘seventy-five times five.’ He was wearing a loose Hawaiian shirt, watching her skim the stones across the water, and he was happy.
He walked slowly down the hallway, the white bathroom door ahead of him. He ran a hand over his face. He hadn’t shaved for a few days. Back then he’d shaved every morning and moisturised his face and gone to school with a smooth, shiny face. He’d usually started to sweat on the bus. Then he’d sat sweating in the staff room, his sandwiches and coffee on the table in front of him.
They talked about him behind his back; he knew that. Mrs Koch and Mrs Bräuninger put their heads together, Mrs Bräuninger with her silver whistle on a string round her neck all the time; he’d often stood by the window and looked out at the sports field, looking for Juli and hearing Mrs Bräuninger’s whistle. Juli was very good at sports, always a front-runner in races, and she won almost every sprint. She was wearing a pale blue tracksuit. She ran across the playing field to the other girls. She was laughing – he could see that from up here. He even thought he could see her teeth. He leaned against the windowsill and listened to the class behind him writing, the rustle of paper, the scratching of pens, now and then soft whispers. She didn’t have maths on Wednesdays, but when he taught 7b at noon he could look down at the playing field, if the weather was good. In the winter and when it rained she was in the gym with the others. Sometimes the girls and Mrs Bräuninger didn’t come out even though the weather was good; they played volleyball in the gym or did gymnastics and did all the things he’d never been able to do and had always hated as a child. He’d been bad at sports, fat and heavy-breathing, and when he thought about how they’d laughed at him when he clung onto the climbing bar and didn’t move an inch upwards, he wished he could clear the memories from his brain like old results on a calculator – ‘Fatty, fatty’ – he thought about numbers, about fractions, quadratic equations, matrix equations. He looked down at the playing field and looked for her in the group of girls, two or three pale blue tracksuits – there she was; he recognised her brown hair, which she tied up in a short ponytail. Eleven years, exactly a quarter of his life. Eleven years ago he’d been at a different school, in a different town. The German and Music teacher – a small, delicate woman. He thought about interior and exterior angles, about the first thirty-five digits of pi, about straight lines that would meet somewhere in infinity, but at night he dreamed of Miss Kerner, German and Music, and woke up sweating, and imagined inviting her to dinner, imagined himself calculating food and drinks, aperitifs and desserts and champagne in his head quick as a flash, then they’d sit on the sofa in his living room, close together, he’d explain the infinity of numbers and Miss Kerner would recite a poem.
Thirty-three, eleven, forty-four years. A series that almost fit together. He leaned against the windowsill and saw Juli among all the other girls, lining up in several queues, raising their arms and moving their torsos, Mrs Bräuninger in front of them, the silver whistle in her mouth. He had invited Miss Kerner to dinner back then, but she’d just smiled and said, ‘How nice, thank you,’ and told him she couldn’t come. Somehow, even the pupils had got wind of his rejected invitation, odd nasty remarks now and then, ‘K and K, Kerner and Krein,’ his colleagues smiled about him and in his mind he drew huge circles, with a giant set of compasses, huge intersecting circles, and he had to calculate the area of the cross section. And now they were whispering behind his back again after so many years, a different school, a different town, gossiping in the staff room, ‘Fatty and Juliana, something’s not right there,’ and he saw her down there on the playing field, and when she raised her hands above her head she seemed to be waving at him.
He stood in his living room, not knowing how long he’d been standing there, not quite knowing what day it was, not quite knowing what time it was, still seeing Juli, her light blue tracksuit getting paler and paler, and he shook his head. He looked over to the window; it was still light outside. It was summer and the days were still long. Then he remembered the cutlet in aspic that had splatted onto the kitchen floor, and suddenly he knew there were exactly eight days to go until her twenty-first birthday. And then he knew why he was standing in the living room in front of his cabinet. He took a couple of steps towards it, turned the key and opened the small glass door. The class photograph and the dog made out of conkers. Ever since he’d stopped taking the bus to school, he’d often stood in front of the cabinet in the morning – he still woke up at the same time – and looked at the dog and the photo through the glass, not opening the little door. She was in the last row at the back. She was smiling. He picked up the photo, for the first time in years; he had to squint and hold it right up to his face – he must need glasses. She was smiling. He was standing to one side. His bald head was shining and he was red in the face. ‘My dear Mr Krein,’ the headmaster said, ‘my dear Mr Krein, you’ve been teaching your syllabus very well for years, you’ve been popular for years with your colleagues and pupils,’ the headmaster hesitated, probably aware that wasn’t quite true. ‘My dear Mr Krein,’ he started in again, and Mr Krein interrupted him – even years later he was amazed at his courage, but actually it hadn’t been courage, it was sadness, the onset of sadness, for he knew what was coming. ‘Please stop all this “My dear Mr Krein” business,’ said Mr Krein. ‘Just get to the point and stop it, will you just stop it …’ Then he almost shouted, ‘Get to the point, will you, for God’s sake!’
The headmaster flinched, leaning forward so their heads were almost touching. ‘It’s about the thing with the girl, Juliana. Her parents came to see me. Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?’
‘I’m not getting myself into anything,’ said Mr Krein softly. ‘I’m not getting into anything at all.’