Sorry (32 page)

You laugh.

“Very funny, Marrer, really funny. What sort of problems have we got?”

“There’s this rumor going around that you took an overdose of sleeping pills and drowned in your bathtub.”

The fun’s over.

How could he …

You have no idea how that could have happened.

How dare he …

For a long, stubborn moment there’s a red curtain in front of your eyes. The room disappears, the building dissolves, and the boundaries of reality blur as if it were all just an illusion. Your life, this world. You blink, the curtain dissolves again, and you ask quietly, “Do I sound dead to you?”

“No,” Kris Marrer answers, “but—”

“
DO I SOUND LIKE A DAMNED CORPSE
?” you suddenly roar at him.

Silence, then out of the silence, cautiously:

“I said no.”

“Thanks,” you reply with self-control, trying to slow your breathing. You’re alive.

Yes
.

It’s all OK.

I know
.

Repeat it.

I’m alive. It’s all OK
.

Better?

Better
.

“Why does your mother think you’re dead?” asks Kris Marrer.

You sink back. It’s getting worse and worse. You feel the sweat on the palms of your hands. As if someone had opened all the pores. Wet. Your voice is a hiss.

“You went to my mother’s place?”

“The advertising agency gave us—”

“
YOU WENT TO MY MOTHER’S PLACE? ARE YOU COMPLETELY INSANE
?”

You can no longer sit still. You’re aware of the irony of the fact that Frauke accused you of the same thing. How could you be so stupid?
The brothers should never have gone to the advertising agency. You felt so secure. What an idiot you are! For a moment you’re glad, the next moment you’re crapping yourself.

Pull yourself together.

You get up and shut the door to your office.

You don’t know what to do next.

You don’t know.

“How could you go to my mother’s place?” you ask again quietly.

Kris Marrer doesn’t reply, there’s a rustling sound, then the younger brother is back on the line.

“Listen, you sick fuck. Who do you think you’re dealing with here?” he asks. “Be glad that we didn’t find
you
, because if we do—”

“Wolf,” Kris says, “give me the phone.”

“I want to know what he did to Frauke.”

“Wolf, give me the fucking phone!”

Rustling, cursing, then Kris Marrer is back on the line.

“Meybach? Are you still there? I’m sorry, we’ve all been a bit shattered since Frauke’s death.”

“It’s over,” you say. “Haven’t you worked that out?”

“Yeah, but we—”

“You don’t believe me. You think I’m just a sicko, wandering around the place killing people. That’s your problem, not mine. You think what you like. I’m going to disappear now, and you’re going to disappear. You won’t think about Lars Meybach again. We no longer exist for one another.”

Silence.

“Simple as that?”

“Simple as that. You’ve worked for me, I’ve paid you for it. There are no more jobs. That’s why we’re now parting in peace. If you so much as think about going on looking for me, if I see one of you anywhere near my parents, your families will pay for it. I mean it. What I’ve done so far had nothing to do with you. You don’t want it to have anything to do with you. Say it.”

“We don’t want it to have anything to do with us.”

“Now give me your brother.”

Rustling, a deep intake of breath.

“What is it?”

“I want to tell you what I told your brother yesterday. I had nothing to do with your friend’s death. It was an accident.”

“And why should I believe a madman?”

“If I were a madman, none of you would be alive now. I’m one of the good guys. Bear that in mind. And tell your brother I’m still waiting for the file.”

You hang up and are very pleased with your last words.
I’m one of the good guys
. You still can’t get your head around what these two brothers have done.
How on earth could that have happened?

There’s a knock at your door. One of your colleagues sticks his head in.

“Everything OK?” he asks.

“Everything’s OK,” you say and raise your thumb although there’s sweat on your forehead and you’re breathing far too fast.

The file comes by e-mail the same evening. You delete it without listening to it. It’s over for good. You also delete the mail account before closing the notebook and looking around. The apartment has changed, as if it’s leading a life of its own. The mirrors are unveiled, the darkness has made way for light. You walk through the rooms like a free man. Tomorrow you will close down the flat and sever all connections. You’ve paid your tribute; even if the brothers almost destroyed everything, you have stayed true to yourself and now it’s over. You can’t ask for more than that.

H
E TALKS ABOUT LOVE
. He talks about the one, true love. And he talks about suffering. He says whatever he says has nothing to do with his past. He says he first encountered love as a child. He says a man took him on and chastised him. He says it with a smile. He has forgotten that the now has nothing to do with the past.

Lake Constance is like a bottomless mirror. I sit with my back against the rear tire and hear him talking. I hope he will simply die. That he will be consumed with hunger. But he’s stubborn. He doesn’t think of dying. He has plans for the future when this is all over.

He talks about pain and closeness and hunger and pleasure. He says that if you haven’t discovered all of those things in your life you’re not really living. And he waits for me to react. I sit where I am and say nothing. I’d really like to put my hand in his mouth and reach deep into his gullet until I get to his damned heart.

I didn’t find the shack. There’s a campsite in the place where we turned in to the forest more than six years ago. I didn’t stop. Tears came into my eyes, I was so shocked that nothing remained of the past.

No shack, no memory, everything faded.

He says he sees no reason for apologies. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to apologize for. Everything is based on instinct. Evil is the shadow of good, but no one thinks that good might be the shadow of evil. He coughs and wants some water. A gentle drizzle begins, I lift my face up and see a seagull. It lands on one of the rocks. Is it thinking? What is it thinking? I wish I were the seagull. I wouldn’t think anything. I’d just be glad to be a seagull.

T
HE ROOM AROUND HIM
shimmers white and black as if the shadows can’t agree where they belong. Only after a few minutes does the shimmering subside, the sounds pierce through to him, and he recognizes his surroundings.

How stupid, how stupid, how—

He had a premonition and ignored it. There was a persistent pressure in his chest as he dug up Fanni and carried her to the row boat. He dismissed it as euphoria. He thought he had rested enough. Ignorance, sheer ignorance about his own body. Luckily the blackout didn’t come until the Belzens’ house, after he watched the police digging up the empty grave. When he saw Lars Meybach standing by the villa, the excitement was too much for him, and he had his second heart attack in four years. Except that this time his heart stopped. For more than two minutes he sat there lifelessly in the chair, his eyes wide open, his mouth an unbreathing slit.

Two minutes and forty-three seconds.

He had returned to his life with a sigh. The colors, the light, the air, time and again the air. He stayed in the chair for a whole hour and greedily absorbed the oxygen. Then he dragged himself laboriously to his car. He knew he should call a doctor right away and not move from the spot, but it was very important for him to put some distance between himself and the Belzens’ house.

His car was two streets away. With every step he took he had the feeling that nothing inside him was working properly any more, and that a single false move could mean the end. His skin was as thin as clingwrap, his right eyelid was twitching uncontrollably, and he had to concentrate to ensure that his bladder didn’t empty all by itself. When he was finally sitting in the car, he called his doctor from his cell phone and then mercifully lost consciousness. Now he’s lying in a hospital bed pressing his
hands to his chest as if they could hold everything together. His doctor stands at the foot of the bed and asks how he is. He also says: “We’re going to run a few tests and keep you under observation. We don’t know how long you spent without oxygen, so we don’t want to take any risks. Give yourself two or three days’ rest, then we’ll be able to tell you more.”

The two days turn into six. But he stays still. He undergoes the tests and stares at the ceiling as if there were a door behind it that he could escape through. His thoughts go on living in the Belzens’ house. He wonders how many traces of himself he left behind. He feels used up and alone. Even though he’s become familiar with this state in recent years, he doesn’t want to take it for granted. Resignation doesn’t suit him.

No one knows that he’s back in the hospital, no one must find out.
There’s such a thing as dignity
, he thinks, and can understand the old rites of the Eskimos, when they put their old people on an ice floe and pushed it out to sea.

Karl phones him on the sixth day.

“Where are you?”

“In the restaurant,” says Karl, “in the bathroom. He’s … he’s here. He’s sitting at my table, waiting. He’s exactly like you said. He found me.”

“Calm down, Karl.”

“I’m going to kill that bastard, you understand? I’m going to do to him exactly what he did to Fanni—”

“I told you to calm down,” the man cuts him off.

Karl breathes in deeply, Karl breathes out loudly.

“I am calm.”

“Be calm and careful. And whatever you do to him, I want to see him. I want to hear what he has to say.”

“When …”

Karl falls silent again. He controls himself, or tries to. His voice sounds different when he starts speaking again.

“When will we meet?”

Small, his voice is small, as if Karl were still ten years old and completely innocent.
When?
The man hesitates, no one should see him like this.

“You take care of Meybach,” he says. “Then call me, and we’ll see how it goes.”

Karl sighs. The man grimaces. The sigh hurts his ear. Homesickness. He puts the phone down before the pain can get to his heart. He listens. He waits for an echo. A warning. Nothing comes back. The excitement
is like a pulsing surge of electricity that flows down to his feet and ebbs away. Faint, but alive.

He waits.

He waits until the evening.

He waits until the evening for Karl’s phone call, then he gets dressed and leaves the hospital.

The man has read that all human beings are interconnected. Whether mentally or genetically, he can’t remember; he just knows that unfounded aversions and sympathies can be traced back to the fact. From birth, every human being has a past that goes with him all the way through his life. Regardless of where, regardless of who he is. And just as all human beings are connected to one another, so too are events. Nothing happens without a meaning.

He is aware that it’s utter nonsense, and that the only things that happen are the things we cause to happen. That’s why it’s been so long since anything happened to him. He was absent for too long. As if he’d been living in a sealed tank. Absent. And although he dismisses it as nonsense, the questions roil around inside him.
What connects Lars Meybach and those people in the villa? Why did they bury Fanni on their land? What do they know?

When he gets to the Belzens’ house, the stench of putrefaction is so overwhelming that he staggers back. He shuts the front door behind him and stops in the hall. He retches and tries to breathe shallowly. He makes it to the bathroom on the ground floor, where he throws up.

He hasn’t been in the house for a week, and he forgot to turn the heat down. A constant setting of twenty-five degrees has ensured that the putrefaction has advanced more quickly than he thought.

Once his stomach is empty, he lifts the ground floor windows and opens the door to the terrace to make a draft. In the upstairs bathroom he discovers a glass container of tiger balm. He rubs a thin film of it under his nose, steps into the garden, and takes a deep breath of the night air. On the other side he sees a single light burning in the villa. He checks his hands. They’re calm. He looks at his cell phone again. He doesn’t want to admit to himself what Karl’s silence means. Karl would never keep him waiting.

Not Karl
.

• • •

The Belzens are upstairs, where he left them. He seals the door with tape. He knows this won’t contain the smell for long, but he doesn’t plan to spend more than three days in the house. Three days should do it.

He stays by Fanni’s side. Her smell doesn’t bother him, it’s a different smell. Sweeter, heavier. He sits by her bed and grieves for his family. Karl won’t call again. Whatever has happened, Karl won’t call again.

He admits the truth and goes on grieving.

After he has sealed up this room too, he goes downstairs to take his place at the window. He senses the caution in each of his movements. His hand wanders repeatedly back to his chest and feels for his heart.
Too cautious
, he thinks, but he can’t do anything about that instinct.
You want to live
, he says to himself,
so behave accordingly
. He puts the binoculars to his eyes and looks across at the villa. He knows it’s time to make amends for the mistakes of his children.

The cellar is the ideal place. In the Belzens’ living room he finds a portable CD player and brings it downstairs. He puts on a CD of classical music, seeks and finds a passage when the whole orchestra is playing, and turns the volume up full. Upstairs in the corridor he can hear the music. He leaves the house. The cellar has two windows, one leading to the street side and the other to the neighboring plot. He leans forward and can hear the music.