JF03 - Eternal (48 page)

As Fabel sat in the bus and watched picture-postcard Hamburg drift by, he considered his mission. He did not know why it had become so important to him to find Karl Heymann’s sister and to inform her that her brother’s body had been found. He always imagined that she had suffered from the lack of a funeral for her brother and that she could maybe take some solace or comfort from having a place to visit and mourn her sixty-year-old loss. Frank Grueber had got one thing right: truth is the debt we owe to the dead.

Frau Amberg met Fabel on his arrival and led him into a bright day-room that had picture windows that looked out over a large garden with a fountain at its centre. The garden and the fountain were only hinted outlines under the thick, crisp snow.

Frau Pohle sat in a high-backed chair near the window. It saddened Fabel to see how youthful she was for her eighty-eight years: it seemed to him that she had been cheated by the deterioration within, of her mind. She was very smartly dressed and again it pained Fabel to think that she might have deliberately worn her best outfit because she seldom had
visitors. As Fabel approached, she smiled at him eagerly. Expectantly.

‘Good day, Frau Pohle. My name is Jan Fabel. I’ve come to talk to you about your brother, Karl.’ Fabel extended his hand to shake Frau Pohle’s. She grasped it with both of hers.

‘Oh, thank you for coming, Herr …’ Fabel’s name had already escaped her. ‘I am so glad you came. You must be tired, coming all that way. I have been waiting so long for news of Karl. How is he?’ She laughed. ‘I’ll bet he has an awful American accent by now. You tell him when you see him that I am so angry. I can’t remember the last time I heard from him. Please – you sit down and tell me all about Karl’s life over there.’

A care assistant arrived with some tea and biscuits and Frau Pohle went on to explain how Karl had always talked about getting away from Germany and going to America before the Nazis could conscript him into the army. She had always known that he had used the confusion of the bombing raid to disappear, to escape. Was Fabel from America and was Karl well?

Despite the profound sadness that filled him, Fabel smiled as he listened to an old woman’s fantasy about her brother’s survival and his prospering in a far-off land. A fantasy that had sustained Frau Pohle for sixty years; and now, in her fading mind, that fantasy had become a concrete truth.

For fifteen minutes Fabel sat and lied to an old woman. He invented a life and a family that should have been but never was. As he got up to go, Fabel saw the tears in Frau Pohle’s eyes and knew that they came from a bitter joy.

‘
Goodbye, Mrs Pohle
,’ he said in English as he left her sitting by the window that looked out over the snow-covered garden.

Sometimes truth is not the debt we owe the dead.

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