During the course of the day he insulates the cellar. He buys some nylon tape and insulating material. Passing a florist’s shop he spontaneously gets some white lilies. He hangs dark curtain material over the windows, and is glad to be doing something practical. It’s very satisfying work. In the evening he turns the music back up and shuts the cellar door behind him. Nothing. Not a sound to be heard. Outside he leans forward and holds his ear close to the window.
Nothing.
That same night he sees them leaving the villa. He waits for two hours, watching the darkness behind the windows. After he has changed his clothes, he liberates the boat from the tarpaulin. He pulls it across the lawn to the jetty and is about to lower the boat into the water when a
car turns into the entry opposite, and the trees light up for a few seconds in the headlights.
He curses. He hesitated for too long.
The man drags the boat back to its place and spreads the tarpaulin over it before going back to the Belzens’ house to sit by the window.
That night the lights go out at 4:14. He shuts his eyes for a few moments. He knows he should lie down on the sofa. He knows his body needs peace. Perhaps it’s stubbornness that makes him sit by the window. Later that’s what he will think. Later he will curse himself for his stubbornness.
He goes to sleep …
… and is woken by the sun warming his legs. He is still sitting in the chair, it’s a wonder that he hasn’t slumped sideways. His body feels stiff. But it wasn’t the sun, and it wasn’t the stiffness of his limbs that woke him. He opens his eyes and sees the woman standing on the opposite shore. He’s surprised how close she is to him, although they’re separated by the water of the Kleine Wannsee. As if the distance had shrunk in the hours of morning.
In the night he felt safe in the darkness. Now he is clearly visible.
I should have closed the curtains. How could I just go to sleep like that?
He gets up and steps outside. It’s the only way. He walks to the jetty and talks to the woman. It’s only when he gets back to the Belzens’ house that he allows himself to yield to the tension. His body trembles. He leans back against a wall and gasps for air.
T
HEY GET THERE
fifteen minutes late, and are stopped at the entrance by a woman holding out a welcome gift to them.
“What sort of nonsense is this?” asks Kris.
“It’s sombrero night,” says the woman.
“I don’t care what it is,” says Kris, “I’m not wearing a thing like that.”
Wolf takes one of the sombreros and turns it around in his hands.
“They’re made of paper.”
“We’re only allowed to give out paper sombreros,” the woman explains. “Last time almost all the real ones got stolen. Sombrero night’s very popular.”
Wolf puts on his sombrero and poses. Kris shakes his head, he isn’t about to dress up like an idiot. He tries to push his way past the woman.
“Sorry, but it’s sombrero night,” she repeats, and Wolf can hear that it isn’t the first time she’s had an argument with a guest.
“How old do I look?” Kris asks. “Do I look as if I’m six?”
“I’m sorry,” the woman repeats, “I can’t let you in without a sombrero.”
Kris points at Wolf.
“You see my brother?”
The woman nods.
“You see how ridiculous he looks in that thing? Give me one reason why I’d want to look ridiculous.”
“Because otherwise you won’t get in,” the woman replies quietly, making the sentence sound like a question.
Wolf bursts out laughing. Kris looks at him in surprise.
“What are you laughing at?”
“It’s sombrero night!” says Wolf and taps his sombrero as if saluting a general.
“Forget it,” says Kris, and starts to leave the restaurant. Wolf holds him back.
“Look,” he says, “Tamara’s here already.”
Kris stands on tiptoe, now he can see her too.
“Give us a minute,” Wolf says to the woman and pulls Kris to one side. “Come on, do it for Tamara. It’s an important evening for her. Do it for her and Frauke.”
“What has Frauke to do with it?”
“We’re celebrating her this evening.”
“Frauke is dead.”
“Damn it, Kris, I know Frauke’s dead, but we can still celebrate her. I’d celebrate you if you were dead.”
Kris pulls a face.
“I hate Mexican food.”
“I know.”
“Why can’t she find an Italian or an Indian restaurant? We’ve got over four hundred Indian restaurants in Berlin, and she has to want Mexican?”
“Our fajitas are great,” the woman joins in, holding the sombrero
out to Kris. “Please take it and I promise you won’t have to join in the karaoke.”
There’s a cocktail in front of Tamara, the glass is full to the brim with crushed ice, slices of lime poking out of it here and there. In the middle of the table there’s a second cocktail. There is a red paper sombrero on Tamara’s head. It’s plain that Tamara feels ill at ease. When she sees Kris and Wolf coming toward her, she jumps up from the table.
“Do you know how ridiculous the three of us look?” Kris says by way of greeting.
“I know,” Tamara replies and points to the menu. “Who would guess that Metaxa is a Mexican restaurant? Can one of you explain that one to me? Metaxa’s a Greek brandy, not a dive in Mexico.”
“Maybe this place used to be Greek,” says Kris, “and the new owner couldn’t be bothered to change the neon sign.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Tamara agrees. “But I wanted to go to a Greek restaurant, not a Mexican one.”
“Is that for me?”
Wolf points at the cocktail in the middle of the table.
“Hands off, that belongs to Frauke.”
Kris and Wolf look at her.
“I know what Frauke would drink. We’re here to celebrate her. So let’s celebrate her properly.”
“Not a problem,” says Wolf and sits down. Kris hesitates for a moment before he too sits down. His sombrero is yellow, Wolf’s is blue.
“Why are you so late?” Tamara asks. “It’s half past six, we agreed to meet at six.”
On the way there the brothers talked for a long time about what to tell Tamara. In the end they decided to say nothing.
“Something came up,” says Wolf, and looks quickly at the menu.
“Brilliant excuse,” says Tamara.
Kris points at Wolf.
“It’s his fault, you don’t have to look at me like that.”
A waitress stops by their table. They give their orders. When the waitress is gone, Kris remarks that she wasn’t wearing a sombrero.
“So?” says Tamara.
Kris takes off his sombrero and scrunches it up. He drops it on the floor, leans forward and does the same with his friends’ sombreros.
“Hey, I wanted to keep mine,” Wolf complains.
“You can get another one on the way out,” says Kris. “At any rate I can’t take you seriously if you’re wearing these things.”
As they wait for their food, they talk about Frauke. And at this point we’ll look away and block our ears. Because it’s private. We’ll just wait till Wolf raises his glass and all three of them raise a toast to Frauke. And we’ll also wait till the food comes and a portion of enchilada is set down for Frauke in the middle of the table. It’s a good farewell. We don’t need to learn any more than that.
Three hours later they’re sitting in the villa, discovering that twenty-six new and seventeen old jobs are waiting to be dealt with. They sit together until after midnight, compare schedules and divide up the customers. At some point Kris goes upstairs and sends the file to Meybach.
Wolf is surprised at how quickly they fall back into their routine.
It’s what Frauke would have wanted
. He senses her presence. In every room. During the funeral Wolf had decided that he would do everything to ensure that Frauke didn’t simply vanish from their lives. Not like Erin. Two weeks partying, two weeks of happiness and that confidence, her incredible confidence.
How could she be so confident?
After Erin’s death Wolf discovered almost nothing usable about her. Her parents weren’t interested in talking to him. Two of her friends had coffee with him, but said they hadn’t heard from her for a year. They passed a few snapshots across the table to him. Erin didn’t look like Erin. Wolf left the photographs where they were. Even if Erin started haunting him in the form of other women, she remained a stranger to him, one who had fizzled out like a firework after a two-week guest appearance in his life. He doesn’t want that to happen to him again.
“Wolf, is that OK with you?”
“What?”
“The boxes.”
Wolf blinks and looks at Tamara. He doesn’t know where Kris has got to. A moment ago the three of them were sitting around the living room table, and suddenly he’s alone with Tamara.
I should tell her
, he thinks, and is a bit scared of her reaction. Tamara knows that Erin has met him time and again since her death, like a restless spirit. In the form
of other women, in cafés, in the street. But Tamara doesn’t know that Erin disappeared without a trace the day Tamara and Wolf made love on the shore of the Lietzensee.
Wolf looked for Erin. He kept an eye out for her because it was a little as if someone had stolen the memory of his great love from him. Wolf knows that he’s lying to himself, but for a while it’s been a good lie. However hard he looked, Erin was lost without a trace, and Wolf wondered how to tell Tamara.
You exorcised her ghost. Is that true love?
“Where were you?” asks Tamara.
“What?”
“In your thoughts, where were you?”
“Here and there,” Wolf replies and rubs his face.
Tamara walks around the table and puts her arms around his chest. Her body to his back. Warm and safe.
“When are we going to tell Kris?” she whispers in his ear.
“I thought you’d never ask,” Wolf whispers back and hears her breath as close as if she were sitting in the middle of his head.
“Tomorrow morning?”
“Tomorrow morning is good.”
“You or me?”
“Me. Why are we whispering?”
“Because it’s sexy, because I know that you can hardly sit still when I whisper in your ear.”
Wolf shuts his eyes and touches her cheek over his shoulder. They sit like that for a moment as if the moment was made only for them—a man and a woman, touching one another.
H
E ISN’T INTERESTED
in the girl, girls are alien to him. It’s always been like that. Fanni was an exception. Boys are much closer to him. They are sons.
He shuts the door behind him and stands in the dark. He remembers the first time he saw Karl. How the boy’s head felt under his hand. So firm and yet fragile. So easy to manipulate. There was this one gesture, when Karl laid his head on one side and looked at him. Affection. With the onset of age memories and yearnings are his life’s only spice. He
knows he thinks about family too much. He never wanted to end up an old man devoured by the past. And yet days accumulate when he is filled with yearning for those times and has to press the balls of his hands to his eyes to silence the thoughts.
After he has gotten used to the dark, he takes off his shoes and leaves them next to the door. He looks into the kitchen and curiously sniffs the air. He opens the fridge, looks in, shuts it again. For a few seconds he lets his hand rest on the tabletop and listens. On the wall next to the fridge there’s a bulletin board. Bits of paper, stickers, mottos and notes. He takes one of the pieces of paper and turns it over. On its blank side he writes a message. He pins it to the board. No, no one will notice it there. He takes the piece of paper and looks for a spot above the sink between two concert posters. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions on the left and Madrugada on the right. He takes a step back. He likes what he sees. In the gloomy moonlight his paper sits perfectly between the posters.
He goes back to the hall and is about to climb the stairs when he meets his reflection. He holds his index finger to his lips for a second and walks on. The stairs don’t creak, the hinges of the doors are oiled.
As if they were expecting me
.
The girl is sleeping on her side. One hand beside her head, the other resting around a knee. He looks at her face, he sees her lips moving as she breathes.
Easy
. He turns away and feels a flush of confidence. He is who he is. A negative quantity.
Behind the next two doors he finds offices and finally an abandoned room with an unmade bed. The shelves are empty, by one wall there are suitcases, bags, boxes. It looks as if one of the four is about to move out.
On the next floor up he stops for a while by the older boy and admires the fragility of his sleep. The last room is at the end of the corridor. He shuts the door behind him and squats down beside the bed. He’s surprised at how easy it all is. As if he’d been here many times before. His heart beats rhythmically, his muscles are supple, everything is in equilibrium. He wishes his doctor could see him now. Tonight he thinks he’s capable of anything.
The pupils beneath the boy’s eyelids are darting around. The man rests his hand on his forehead. There’s so much sadness there. He senses it. The pupils come to a standstill.
A person can hide nothing in his sleep
, he thinks and whispers reassuringly:
“I’m here.”
T
HE NEXT MORNING
Wolf has disappeared.
“What do you mean,
he’s disappeared
?”
Tamara points up the stairs.
“Have a look for yourself.”
Kris goes upstairs. The bedroom door is ajar, the sheets folded back, the bed made. Wolf never makes his bed. The previous day’s clothes are draped over a chair, his cell phone and his watch on the bedside table next to it. Kris goes back downstairs. Wolf’s shoes are in the corridor, his jacket is on the hook, and when Kris puts his hand in the pockets, he finds Wolf’s keys.
He opens the front door. Wolf’s car is still exactly where he parked it yesterday.
“Do you see what I mean now?” Tamara says behind him.
Kris doesn’t turn around. He sees what she means.
Wolf has disappeared.
Anything is possible. Wolf has taken different shoes, Wolf doesn’t need a jacket, it’s mild outside, Wolf has forgotten everything, Wolf has had enough and is traveling around the world. Anything is possible.