A woman opens the door, holding a cat. He apologizes for disturbing her so late, and leaves without giving her any further explanation for his visit. Two houses along a man opens the door to him. His instinct tells him this is the place, but he has to convince himself.
“Sorry to disturb you so late,” he says. “My car broke down. I’m just over there and I was hoping to call ADAC and have it towed.”
“Anyone who hates cell phones is a friend of mine,” Joachim Belzen replies and invites him in.
His mother raved about this talent of his when he was still a child. He always found the right words, he had the right smile.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” he says.
Joachim Belzen calls up to his wife, who comes downstairs. Her hand is small and strong. She doesn’t show the slightest trace of suspicion either. Whatever he does, people always see the good in him.
“You’re chilled to the bone,” says Helena Belzen.
He rubs his arms and shrugs. A minute later she has disappeared into the kitchen to make him some tea. In the meantime he phones the weather information service, reads a fake customer number off a parking ticket, and thanks them for their quick service.
“ADAC will be here in three quarters of an hour,” he says, and looks through the terrace window into the garden, discovering the villa’s illuminated window.
“I always thought it took longer,” he adds.
“ADAC never has much to do at night,” says Joachim Belzen, and asks his guest to sit down. Helena comes in with a cup of tea. She tells him to forget about sitting outside waiting in the cold. And the Belzens start talking. It only takes him four questions to cut to the chase. He talks about their wonderful property and asks as if in passing who could afford that ostentatious villa opposite.
They tell him everything. How nice the new owners are, what their names are and how successful they are in their work.
“So it’s an agency,” he says at last.
“We think they do something with insurance,” says Helena, “although they really don’t look that way.”
“At any rate they have more money than they can earn,” Joachim cuts in, and all three of them laugh at the ambiguity of his remark.
The Belzens talk about their house and the many years of work that they’ve put into it. They give him a guided tour, and his suspicion that they don’t often have visitors is confirmed. They’re the sort of couple where if one of them dies the other one quickly loses the will to live.
“I could make you another cup of tea if you like,” Helena offers.
He glances at his watch and shakes his head. It’s time to go, the tow truck is probably waiting already. He thanks them for their hospitality, and for letting him use their phone. The Belzens walk him to the door.
He shakes them by the hand. He’s always found it important to keep physical contact for a few seconds. As he’s about to turn away, the cell phone rings in his coat pocket.
Fifteen minutes later he washes his hands in the guest bathroom and sits down on the Belzens’ terrace. He should have turned off his cell phone. He doesn’t understand how it’s possible for him simply to forget the most important things.
“Karl?” he says. “Now we can—”
“I don’t know where she is,” a voice says before he can finish. “It’s been two days and—”
“Karl, try to be calm.”
Karl sounds flustered. That can’t be right, he’s never flustered.
“But she always calls me when she—”
“When I say calm, I mean calm, do you hear me?”
It’s an order, and Karl shuts up immediately. It’s the only way.
“I am calm,” Karl says quietly after a few seconds, and when the man hears that he gets a warm feeling in his heart. And after the warmth comes grief.
I know where Fanni is, Karl
. He wonders how to tell him. They were like brother and sister.
My children
.
“I know where she is, Karl,” he says carefully and starts telling the story. Soon all that can be heard is Karl’s weeping. He doesn’t want to tell him off, but he doesn’t want that wailing noise in his ear either.
“Karl, pull yourself together.”
And then he warns Karl, telling him that whoever murdered Fanni could be after him as well.
“You’re in danger, Karl. You’ve got to be careful.” With these words he leaves him alone. Full of fear and full of insecurities. Because anyone who’s scared and insecure is also sensitive to the dangers around him. And he demands all that from his children. It’s the least they can give him back for his love.
The place on the terrace is ideal. He has taken the plastic sheets off the chairs, and is sitting in the shade of a porch, with the darkness of the house behind him. The villa is in front of him, and he has a clear view of a shed and part of the drive. It couldn’t be better.
He knows all he can do now is wait.
The correct action is rooted in patience, patience consists of waiting. He who doesn’t wait shows no patience and misses the correct action
. He can’t remember where he got that quote. He probably read it
on the page of a calendar; he hasn’t been interested in books for ages. Life is already complicated enough without other people’s thoughts.
It’s cold, he fetches a blanket from the house. He wouldn’t have been so cold before. Everything’s different now. He voluntarily spent the last few years in exile. A house in the west of Berlin, an anonymity that makes him smaller and more insignificant. But it had been his decision. No more contact. His heart was too weak. After the operations and the weeks and months in the hospital he changed his life and disappeared. He became a character in a fairy tale who voluntarily fell asleep for years. Until her phone call woke him.
“You won’t believe who’s sitting in my bathroom right now,” were her words.
He replied with a silence. Her call was unexpected. They had had contact by mail, but the contact was one-sided. He didn’t want to live for his children any more. They had outgrown him. Although they couldn’t know it, their very existence showed him what life was denying him now. So he said nothing and heard their breath in his ear and felt a shudder running through his body. It was as if he was trying to hold back an orgasm. Without success, his body was trembling. Grateful. Happy. Relieved.
Fanni
. She was family. Even though he would never show it, he really missed his family.
“He’s got so big,” said Fanni.
“Who?” he said at last.
“Little Lars. Our little Lars is back. He’s—”
He put the phone down. He was so nervous that he let out a little trickle of urine, which slid down his leg. All the years of silence, and then this message. One of his sons had come back.
Lars
. Why couldn’t it have happened when he was still healthy? Why now? Now he was history.
He reacted spontaneoulsy and drove to Fanni’s. He had her new address, he knew where all his children lived. On the way he was surprised that the hunger could be so intense, that he threw all his principles overboard. He laughed. He felt young and reckless again.
Our little Lar is back
. As if the pieces of the jigsaw all suddenly fit. And he was part of it.
Yes
.
But he was too late. By a mere matter of minutes. Today for the first time he was aware that time was out of joint. It had never been too late before, he would have punished himself severely for such inattention.
In the hallway he met a man who was coming down the stairs carrying a black trash bag, and who stepped aside respectfully to let him pass. They nodded to each other. He couldn’t see the connection, he was too excited and hungry. Too many feelings, too many memories raged in him. Comprehension came only when he was standing at the door to Fanni’s apartment, ringing for the fourth time. His instincts kicked in, and he dashed down the steps and into the street. Of course the man was long gone. He stood there with his fists clenched. He concentrated.
Where to?
And with every passing second he started becoming the man he had once been.
He replayed Fanni’s call again and again in his head. He sat down in a café and thought. The pieces didn’t fit.
What does Lars want from Fanni?
He drank his first coffee in four years. His body spoiled his enjoyment, his stomach started rumbling, he started to fart and rushed to the bathroom. When he was back sitting at his table, he ordered a large cappuccino. He didn’t plan to be ruled by his body. The coffee also helped him think. And he had a lot of thinking to do. In the end he drove back to Fanni’s apartment. It took him less than a minute to crack the lock. His suspicions were correct, Fanni was gone.
The sofa cover had bright stains in two places, and the sofa itself had been shifted. He could see where the feet had been, and knew that Fanni would never have left it like that. Fanni was brought up well, and he had been the one who had brought her up. He bent over the discolored patches on the sofa and sniffed. The smell was familiar to him. Bitter and sharp, CS gas. And now that he looked more closely, there were clues everywhere. Under the coffee table he discovered a hole burned into the carpet and bits of ash beside it. The woollen fibers could have caught fire, but someone had stamped out the cigarette butt and then put it in the ashtray. A few fibers still stuck to the filter. Fanni would have emptied the ashtray immediately and wiped it out.
He imagined himself as little Lars, who was now a man. He saw him in front of him. He opened himself up to memory, as if pulling the boards away from an abandoned well. The silence, the chill that rose from down
below. He laughed. It was so easy when he relied on his instincts. There was only one place Lars would take his Fanni.
He drove to Kreuzberg. He found a parking space on the opposite side of the street, got out, and waited for a gap in the traffic before crossing. And as he was waiting, he saw them coming out of the house. Two men and a woman. Something in their faces made him stop on the pavement. He took his cell phone out of his coat and pretended to read a message. They crossed the street and walked past him. The woman brushed his shoulder slightly. He turned round and saw them getting into a car. They pulled out and drove off, and he understood what he had seen in their faces.
They had met death
. Without hesitating, he crossed the street, got honked at, pushed the front door open, walked through the courtyard and up the stairs.
But once again he was too late.
Hours later, when he is sitting on the Belzens’ terrace watching the opposite shore, watching the same men whom he met on the street, who are also the ones who dug the grave in the forest, he knows their names and he knows they are brothers. Kris and Wolf, the Belzens didn’t know their surnames. The brothers are sitting in the winter garden, getting drunk. They suspect nothing, they sense nothing. He doesn’t take his eyes off them for a second. The longer he watches them, the bigger the mystery becomes.
What do these people have to do with Fanni? What’s the connection?
The mystery is like a house with walled-up windows and only one locked door. There’s only one way into the house, and he knows that Lars Meybach is the key.
At about four o’clock in the morning he sees the brothers digging another grave. There’s no argument this time. They lay Fanni’s corpse in the hole. It starts raining. An ice-cold rain that pelts down, accompanied by a storm. The brothers take the soil to the water in a wheelbarrow and tip it into the Kleine Wannsee. He can’t sit still any longer. He ignores the rain and goes and stands by the shore. He’s fifty meters away, and hears the brothers’ wheezing breath over the rain. They look up once, they can’t see him, because he doesn’t want to be seen. He hasn’t forgotten everything he learned. He disappears into the shadow. He could call out to them, and they wouldn’t see him.
Here, I’m over here
.
The brothers go back into the villa, the lights go out. He stands there motionless, listening to the silence. He isn’t cold in spite of the wind, an inner fire keeps him warm, his soul is in flames. The rain is the only sound. Rain, wind, and in the midst of it, him. His heart has found the rhythm, he senses it, he breathes it.
The Belzens have told him about the boat that they use to row to the Pfaueninsel. The boat is on the other side of the house. He pulls the tarpaulin down, the oars are fastened at the sides. He goes back to the house and fetches an oilskin jacket that he pulls on over his wet clothes. He also finds a baseball cap and puts it on so that the rain doesn’t get in his eyes as he works. He’s about to go outside when he’s struck by the flowers in the corridor. They’re just beautiful, pure, white. They are life itself. He picks up the bunch of lilies and takes it with him.
As he slides the boat into the water, he imagines his doctor’s worried face. For a few minutes an uneasy flickering sensation runs through his chest, but with each stroke of the oars it gets weaker and weaker. The current is hardly noticeable. He covers the fifty meters to the opposite bank without any trouble, ties the rope to the jetty, and goes ashore. He knows where the brothers have put the wheelbarrow and the spades. He takes one of the spades and finishes his work.
At dawn he goes back to the Belzens’ house. He left the sleeping bag in the hole, the grave has been filled again. After making Fanni comfortable on the sofa, he beaches the boat and puts it back in its regular place. He is tired, but the euphoria is stronger. He hangs the oilskin jacket in the wardrobe and puts the baseball cap on the shelf next to it. Everything is as it was before.
He looks down at himself. His clothes are smeared with dirt, his trouser legs covered with a crust of mud. He stuffs his clothes in the washing machine and switches it to the quick-wash cycle. He goes to the cellar wearing only his underpants. The fire inside him has calmed down, he doesn’t plan to freeze. The cellar is a big workshop with a long work surface. Model airplanes hang on wires, there’s a worn-out sofa, a rattling fridge, and in one corner an old pinball machine. After he’s set the heat to twenty-five degrees, he discovers a pair of binoculars in a leather case hanging from one of the struts.
In the shower he presses Fanni to him and yields to grief. It’s like a reunion. He washes her, kisses the wound on her forehead. He looks at
what’s become of her. His own Fanni. She’s aged. He touches her lips, he lifts her breasts and lets them fall again. He rubs the blood from the wounds in her hands until only the clean, open flesh can be seen. He washes her hair and feels aroused. His penis lies full and heavy against his thigh. He rinses the foam from her hair, dries her, and carries her upstairs. He lays her on a sofa in the next room because he doesn’t want her to share a room with the Belzens. Fanni was special. He pulls the blankets over her, and leaves her alone.