Читать книгу Sorry - Shaun Whiteside - Страница 15

KRIS TALKS ABOUT HIS morning at the Urbanhafen and how he apologized to the woman. He said he knew exactly what was going on with her.

“And she believed me. She accepted my apology without hesitation. No doubt, nothing.”

“You couldn’t have done that with me,” says Frauke.

“With me you could,” says Tamara.

They talk for a while, and one idea chases the next. They anticipate each other’s sentences, they are moving on a single wavelength, so that Frauke can’t shake the feeling of floating above the ground.

It’s the dope, she thinks, we’re just a bit high, it’s nothing more than that.

But it isn’t the dope or the wine. It’s a particular string of circumstances that brings particular people together at particular times. And anyone who finds that puzzling has never been influenced by such a concatenation.

At three in the morning Wolf gets up and announces that he’s going to butter some rolls.

“I’m incredibly hungry, aren’t you?”

They watch him go, then Tamara explodes with laughter and says, “He’s not really going to do rolls, is he?”

“Of course I’m doing rolls!” come the words from the kitchen.

They laugh, tears run down their faces, they gasp for air. The last time they got so hysterical was at the end of school. All the senior grades went to the Teufelsberg to celebrate their goodbyes. Kris wore a suit, Frauke and Tamara came in dresses. Black and white. They all felt inviolable, and Frauke can still remember what she whispered in Tamara’s ear: I’m immortal, what about you? Tamara had grinned and said she was with them. Of course I’m with you, do you think I’d leave you in the lurch?

They thought the whole world was at their feet. First university, then the big job, then masses of cash. They particularly agreed on the last point. They planned to meet up again in a few years and celebrate their successes appropriately. Even today Frauke can’t get her head round how naïve they were back then. They talked about going abroad, as if abroad were right on their doorstep waiting for them. England, Spain, Australia, China. They wanted to go everywhere. We thought no one could touch us. We thought we could get everything that could be—

“Frauke, are you still there?”

Tamara snaps her fingers in front of her face.

“Where else would I be?” Frauke asks back.

She has no idea how long she was thinking about the party on the Teufelsberg. No one is laughing now. Kris rolls the next joint, Wolf goes on busying himself in the kitchen, and Tamara sits with a ballpoint in her hand, bent over a notepad.

“One minute,” she says.

Frauke is amazed at what it is that has brought her and Tamara together and held them together for so long. There was one falling-out during their school days. Tamara had met a new clique of girls, and Frauke didn’t fit in with them at all. It was a bad month, and then all of a sudden Tamara sat next to Frauke during break and said it had been a really bad idea. Frauke never told her that she could almost have cried with relief. She felt incomplete without her best friend. She knows exactly what her life would be without Tamara. Like an endless winter’s day. Like no sun ever again.

“I’ve got it.”

Tamara holds the notepad out to Frauke. Frauke reads, and the grin vanishes from her face.

“What’s up?”

Kris crouches down and joins them. He and Frauke freeze. Wolf comes out of the kitchen with the rolls.

“What’s wrong with you guys?”

Tamara blushes.

“Nothing in particular. It’s just what Kris said,” she explains, and is about to set the notepad aside when Kris grabs it.

“You’ve just written this?” he asks.

Tamara shrugs.

“I could try and do it a different way, if you …”

She gets no further, Kris has passed the pad on to Wolf, and put his hands on Tamara’s cheeks.

“You bloody genius,” he says and kisses her.

When Frauke comes back into the room at half past four, her answering machine is flashing. Three messages, three times the same voice.

How are you …

What are you doing …

When are we seeing each other …

Frauke deletes the messages without listening to them all the way through, and pins Tamara’s text to the corkboard beside the monitor. Kris said she should take her time, Wolf would really want to do it himself, and Tamara had no opinion, because she’d gone to sleep on the floor.

Frauke promised to set about designing the text right away the following morning. But she’s so uneasy that she doesn’t know if she can even get to sleep. To calm herself down she takes a shower. Her brain is intoxicated with the ideas that they all had last night. It feels a bit as if they had traveled into the past together to bring their youthful immortality into the present.

I’m immortal, what about you?

I’m not tired, Frauke thinks and gets out of the shower to switch her computer on.

Two and a half hours later Frauke pushes herself up from her desk. She has turned Tamara’s text into an advertisement, and is now so amped that she can’t sit still. Work as a pick-me-up. Her muscles are tense, her thoughts a bright flame. In a few minutes Frauke has put on her running things and is out the door.

The Tiergarten is deserted at this time of day, the morning light is like underwater photographs on a rainy day. Colorless and crisp. Frauke runs three times around the little lake, her body has found its rhythm, her breathing adapts to her footsteps. As if I could slow down time, as if the minutes were collapsing into one another and the clock hands slowing down. Frauke likes the idea. The faster she runs, the harder it gets for time to advance. Time becomes material. Frauke has the feeling that she can stretch, compress, or tear that material. Time has torn so often for her before that Frauke finds herself wondering how it is that time still exists at all.

When she gets back from her run, he’s waiting for her by the door to her apartment. She often wonders how he manages to get up the stairs. The tenants are very suspicious and even discuss on the intercom with the man from the parcel service because they think he’s delivering some sort of junk mail.

He’s sitting on the floor, his back resting against the door of the apartment, chin on his chest, hands clasped in his lap. Once a neighbor found him like that and called an ambulance. Frauke knows he isn’t asleep, he’s in more of a twilight state. Or as he once explained: Half the time I’m on standby.

She shakes him by the shoulder. He stirs, opens his eyes, grins.

“Hi, sweetie.”

“You shouldn’t do that,” says Frauke.

“What? And what am I supposed to do in your opinion, if you don’t call back?”

He sits up and she helps him; even though she doesn’t really want to, she helps him. He gets to his feet, groans and sighs, then tries to hug her. Frauke shrinks back.

“Let’s go in,” she says.

Frauke’s flat isn’t big, and with him inside it shrinks by half. Space and time. It all comes back to her father.

“Have you been running again?”

“What does it look like?”

He takes his shoes off and marches into the living room as if he does this every day. Frauke hears him sigh again, then he falls silent. Even though she knows he expects coffee, she puts on water for tea. Green tea that tastes like hay, which she drinks when she wants to punish herself with health.

“What’s that supposed to be?” he asks when she comes into the living room with the tray. He holds up one of the printouts. Black text on a white background. Frauke sets the tray down and takes the printout from his hand.

“Since when have you been doing obituaries?”

Frauke is glad she used a dummy text, otherwise she would have had to give her father answers that she doesn’t want to give him. She sets the printout back on the desk. Her life is none of his business.

“New job?” he asks.

“New girlfriend?” she asks back.

“First some coffee,” her father says to change the subject and walks over to the tray. For a few seconds he stares at the teapot and the two cups as if he can’t work out what their function might be. Frauke can tell from his back that he is repelled. His shoulders are slightly hunched, he looks ridiculous. He looks like all the fathers over the age of fifty that she meets in the street. Preposterous and old.

“What’s this?” he asked, sniffing at the tea. “Cow piss?”

Frauke pushes him away, takes one of the cups and sits down on the sofa. She can’t help grinning, even though she doesn’t want to. Her father sniffs at the tea again and leaves his cup where it is.

“Sweetie,” he says, and walks over to her. His head settles in her lap and his eyes close contentedly. He always uses the same tactic. As if his life ran only on a single track. The gestures, the words.

“I miss you both,” he murmurs.

Frauke feels like crying. It’s been her ritual since she moved out ten years ago. And she always gives her father the same answer, because whether she likes it or not, she’s part of the ritual.

“Your own fault,” she says, although she knows it isn’t his fault.

Frauke drinks her tea, as her father’s head lies heavy in her lap and time seems to stretch out comfortably again.

Gerd Lewin owns a construction company and various plots of land in the north of Berlin, occupied by apartment blocks. He owns shares in two big hotels, and twice a year he changes his girlfriend, who is supposed to replace Frauke’s mother and can’t.

Every two weeks it’s visiting time.

Frauke takes the train down to Potsdam and waits outside the clinic while her father smokes one last cigarette. Always frantically, with one eye on the street, as if he can only accept the presence of the clinic at the very last minute. It’s only when he drops the cigarette on the pavement and crushes it with his shoe that the brick building, with its park and its grandiose entrance, becomes real for him. By now Frauke wants a cigarette as well, but she quells her craving because she doesn’t want to be like her father.

Tanja Lewin has been living in a private clinic for fourteen years. Her life there is barely any different from the life she led at home. From outside everything looks normal, if it weren’t for the times when Frauke’s mother would climb the walls, throw up her dinner, and hide in the wardrobe. Times when she saw the devil everywhere.

If you ask Frauke’s father, he claims he should have seen it coming. He often says he should have seen something coming. The crisis in the building trades, the chlamydia one of his girlfriends gave him, the bad weather, and of course the misunderstandings between him and his daughter.

Frauke’s mother first ran away on her forty-third birthday. The police caught up with her just before Nuremberg. Tanja Lewin had locked herself in a gas station bathroom, and was endlessly calling out her own name. Questioned later, Frauke’s mother didn’t know exactly what had happened. She remembered feeling a sudden urge to get out of Berlin. Then she had a blackout and woke up in the gas station bathroom—her throat was sore from shouting, and two men lifted her into an ambulance.

Frauke’s mother entered psychiatric treatment for two months. The next blackout came a few days after her release. This time Frauke’s mother stayed in Berlin, and was arrested in the bedding department of a furniture store. All she remembered was waiting for the bus on Nollendorfplatz. A man told her the bus was going to be late. A moment later the bus stop had disappeared, and Tanja was naked in the bedding department, clutching a pillow, asking what all the people were doing in her bedroom.

It was in the furniture store that the devil first appeared to Tanja Lewin. He came in the form of a policeman and told everyone to move on. He gathered up Frauke’s mother’s clothes from the floor, and handed them to her under the covers. He was nice. He only spoke when she was dressed. He said, I’ll always be with you now. I will come to you with different faces, but you will always recognize me.

Tanja Lewin would never forget those words.

The doctors studied the Lewin case at length. They questioned Frauke’s mother and gave her medication; they spoke to Frauke’s father and advised him to have his wife put in a clinic. The medication worked to some extent, but round-the-clock care was recommended.

A week later Gerd Lewin signed the papers and put his wife in an exclusive private clinic in Potsdam. The same day Frauke’s father stopped sleeping. He lay in bed at night staring at the ceiling as if waiting for the everyday to return to his life. Incredibly, he went on working, brought money into the house, and did what he had to do to protect the lives of his wife and daughter. Only his eyes gave him away—dark, burned-out hollows that scared Frauke. For over six months Gerd Lewin survived this state, and then one evening he stood by Frauke’s bed.

“Tanja,” he said, “my Tanja.”

Frauke didn’t know whether he thought she was her mother or was only asking after her. She brought him back to his bedroom, covered him with a blanket, and was about to go when he reached for her hand.

“Stay.”

“I’m not Mama,” said Frauke.

“I know,” said her father. “I do know.”

He pulled Frauke onto the bed so that she was lying on her mother’s side.

“Sleep,” he said, and fell asleep immediately.

It was his first sleep in seven months and sixteen days. The next morning he woke up next to Frauke, looked around in surprise, and started crying. He howled until the snot poured unhindered from his nose and mouth.

That was how the rituals between father and daughter began. Gerd Lewin couldn’t get to sleep alone, so for the next few years they shared a bed.

Since Frauke has had her own flat, her father’s insomnia has returned. That’s why he comes to her place from time to time. Because of the calm she gives him, because of the pathetic illusion that his wife is with him again and he can sleep. Love can be cruel. It won’t let you go, it wants to be noticed day and night. Gerd Lewin could write a book about it.

Frauke pushes a pillow under her father’s head and gets up. She is so exhausted that she can no longer think clearly. Nonetheless she sits down for a moment at her Mac, converts the advertisement into a PDF file, and e-mails it to Kris. Now everything’s right. Her work is done. Sleep.

When Frauke wakes up ten hours later, her father has vanished from the sofa, and Kris has left a message on the answering machine:

That’s brilliant! See you later! We’ve got to celebrate!

Frauke plays the message through four times, leaning against the wall, one foot over the other and a hand pressed to her mouth so that the laughter doesn’t explode from her. She is happy. She is really happy.

A week later the advertisement appears in Die Zeit and Der Tagesspiegel. It is set in the style of a high-class obituary, the death of a head of state or something. Eye-catching. The text is literally as Tamara wrote it during the night. It embodies Kris’s idea perfectly.

SORRY

WE ENSURE THAT NOTHING

EMBARRASSES YOU ANY MORE.

SLIPS, MISUNDERSTANDINGS,

DISMISSALS, ARGUMENTS, AND ERRORS.

WE KNOW WHAT YOU SHOULD SAY.

WE SAY WHAT YOU WANT TO HEAR.

PROFESSIONAL AND DISCREET.

Under the advertisement there is no homepage or e-mail address. They unanimously decided against it. Frauke only put in Kris’s landline number. It’s a gag. She wanted to see who would call, whether anyone would call, and what he would have to say.

The first day nothing happens.

The second day nothing happens.

The third day they get four calls.

By the weekend it’s nineteen.

Without understanding how it’s possible, they’re in business.