Berlin Noir Page 2
Then the concierge, a woman, remembered that a homeless person had been thrown out a few weeks ago. A young woman, she said, but it had been hard to tell at first, because she had looked so old. I nodded encouragingly and asked her to tell me the whole story. She had been pacing about on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, then finally huddled on the floor near the main entrance. Of course, she was immediately shooed away, but that same night, a colleague had found her in the underground parking lot, where she’d settled in a corner to sleep.
No one knew what had happened to her after that; no one could even remember the exact date. I went back to my brother, who was still standing in front of the Zoo Palast, crying silently. I hugged him and starting crying too. I knew she would have never gone home with some guy just to have a roof over her head. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Now we both thought she was dead.
* * *
I happened to be at the Lang Bar when she gathered her followers together for the last time. I’d not planned to go out that evening. This was right before my law degree exams, and I had other things to do; but then the attorney from the firm where I’d done my internship invited me there, and with an eye toward my future career, I wasn’t going to turn him down. I was hoping not to meet my sister; but, of course, she was sitting there happily in the midst of her admirers with a nonalcoholic cocktail in front of her—she barely drank at that time because she didn’t like the taste—and waved to me excitedly. I said a quick hello, mentioned my business meeting, and sat down with the attorney. A good hour later, she got up to leave, but the lawyer asked her to join us at the table; I found it embarrassing, though it couldn’t be avoided, especially as Dora was so gregarious. We were drinking tea and talking about a case that I’d worked on as a legal clerk. He offered Dora a cup, which she accepted with a shrug. I remember this because she never used to drink tea or coffee. But I understood that she wanted to appear more grown-up, to somehow reduce the eight-year age gap between us. She was pretending that she didn’t think it was stuffy and conservative to drink tea. Smiling, she threw back her hair and answered the attorney’s questions about her majors and exam subjects, and what she was going to do later on.
Then, all of a sudden, I noticed that she had grown tight-lipped and distracted. She stared into her tea, looked around nervously, then stared back into her tea. If she’d been shy, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but this wasn’t typical of my sister. I asked her if she was okay, but she only muttered that something was wrong, then stood up and left the bar, even forgetting her purse.
“Young girls at that age,” was all that the lawyer said, and we resumed our conversation.
When I returned to our father’s roomy apartment in Uhlandstrasse, where I still lived for financial reasons, I found her sitting on the bed in her room, staring into space. There was something in the tea, she said. I asked her to elaborate, and she said that something had appeared on the surface and had risen with the steam. It had been impossible for her to drink. I asked why she hadn’t ordered something else, and she said, “Because I had to leave. It didn’t want me there.”
I thought I’d misheard, and to this day I’m not sure if that’s what she really said, or if I’m just imagining it in hindsight. But from then on, something changed. She became quiet and introspective, sometimes sitting for long stretches with a faraway expression on her face, as if deep in thought, and only reacting when we shook her or said her name very loudly. Her grades suffered and she complained of trouble concentrating and insomnia. Dad took her to a doctor, who prescribed her sedatives, saying it was due to the pressure of high school exams; apparently, he had many such cases.
On some days she was better; on others, worse. But none of us thought that she was seriously ill. Dad thought she might simply be growing up, and that perhaps she’d even take after him in the end. “Like you, Adrian,” he said to me. “Like you and your brother.”
I think that’s what he wanted to see, because she reminded him too much of our mother—our mother when she was young.
As far as I know, she never went to the Lang Bar again. From her Instagram pictures, I gathered that she frequented a café at the Bikinihaus; she obviously liked sitting in front of the large window, from which she could see straight into the monkey enclosure. She posted fewer selfies, and I read the concerned comments from her followers: Is everything all right? What’s happened to you? What about the Lang Bar? She replied that she was stressed by her exams, and I admit that it put my mind to rest.
A few weeks later, Bela called me from the hospital. He had burned his wrist, he said. When I picked him up and asked him how it had happened, he said: “It was Dora. I was making myself tea in the kitchen when she passed by, stopped, looked at my cup, then knocked it out of my hand.”
He’d been advised not to play the bass for a few days. He wasn’t badly hurt, and had he been studying a subject other than music, chances are that he wouldn’t even have bothered going to the emergency room. But Bela’s hands were his pride and joy, and he returned home in a foul temper, slamming his bedroom door.
I knocked at Dora’s door, wanting to know what had happened. She wasn’t crying. “I didn’t mean to hurt him,” she said. “But he mustn’t drink tea.” She looked at me and I saw the fear in her eyes. “Adrian, what’s wrong with me?” she asked.
“You’re stressed out,” I said. “That makes people do strange stuff.”
I didn’t know at the time that she thought she’d seen something in the rising steam, like at the Lang Bar. Something she was afraid of and saw as a threat. I didn’t know because she didn’t tell me or anyone else. Maybe I should have been more insistent. Maybe I was even afraid of what she would tell me.
The next day, she apologized to Bela. Then she left the house. She wanted to go to the zoo. “To listen to the animals,” she said. “It calms me down.”
* * *
Yes, she even sleeps out here in winter. Until they pick her up and bring her somewhere warm. But she never wants to stay. She’s afraid of the others—that they’ll give her a hot drink. Most of the mission staff know about it. But the volunteers frequently change. She’s already scalded some hands. And one woman’s face. The winters in Berlin are long and gray, and they can get very cold.
* * *
Dora managed to get accepted to the math program, and after the first semester Dad rewarded her with a trip to South America—the trip which caused her complete transformation. She thought that someone was giving her orders; she could hear them in her head. The commands came from American intelligence agencies. In her mind it was 1945, and she was a soldier whose mission it was to liberate the city. We don’t know how she managed to get through the return flight, because just as we arrived at the airport to pick her up, we saw her jump onto the back of an older woman and swear at her violently.
We thought the incident was the aftermath of some wild drug trip, because the friend she was traveling with said something like that. It wasn’t for a few weeks that we realized it was more.
Things got quieter when she started on the meds. We became hopeful. Everything seemed to be going well. A few blips whenever she did not take her pills—sometimes on purpose, sometimes out of forgetfulness. Then we’d have to pick her up from some place to stop her from chasing imaginary Nazis and make her take her medication again. Yet things didn’t go too wrong. The thing at the Math Institute was a bad relapse, but after that it was quiet again for a few weeks.
Until a therapist tried to convince her that she felt guilty about our mother’s death. Dora came home distraught and wanted to know everything. Dad had always spoken vaguely of a fatal accident; Bela and I knew better. Now Dad thought it right to tell her the truth, something he himself didn’t like to talk about. He told her about Mother’s suicide shortly after Dora’s birth. How or even whether the therapist knew wasn’t clear: she refused to talk to us about it. We made sure that Dora was transferred to a different doctor. But the truth about Mom’s de
ath preoccupied her for a long time afterward, of course.
One evening she knocked on my door, sat down on the sofa, and said: “What other things don’t I know?” I told her as factually and calmly as possible about our brother Carl, who had died only a few days after his birth. He had had severe birth defects, but Mom hadn’t wanted to terminate the pregnancy under any circumstances, and immediately after his birth, she fell into a deep depression. It had been her wish alone to get pregnant again. Why she had killed herself shortly after the birth of a healthy girl was something none of us could understand. She’d always wanted a girl, as I knew from Dad.
“Why wasn’t I named Carla?” Dora asked, and I couldn’t answer that. I hadn’t even thought of it myself. I told her to talk to Dad.
She disappeared that very day and never returned to our apartment.
* * *
She often walks by but only sometimes recognizes us. She doesn’t say hello or address us by name; she just registers us and responds to our voices. She occasionally even agrees to come with us if we offer to take her to the hospital or try to get her into one of the shelters, just so she’s off the streets for a few hours at least. And when we come back to pick her up, she complies. But she never comes home.
Lately, the voices seem to have died down again. In any case, the thing about believing she’s an American soldier on a mission to kill Nazis hasn’t happened for at least two months. But we’ve heard that she often takes walks around the zoo. She walks along Hardenbergstrasse and Budapester Strasse, stopping and listening. She listens to what the animals tell her, as a woman who works at the zoo ticket office told us. “Sometimes I let her in,” she said. “I’m not really allowed to, but if she doesn’t look too bedraggled and is having a good day, I turn a blind eye. She wouldn’t hurt a flea.”
Bela gave the woman a hundred euros and thanked her.
Once we brought her to our front door. When we got to Zoo Station, she went berserk in Dad’s car because she wanted to get out. As soon as we stopped in Uhlandstrasse and opened her door with the child-safety lock, she jumped out of the car and ran back to Ku’damm. We knew where she was running and let her go.
If you saw her, you wouldn’t believe that men sexually assault her. You’d think: She’s dirty and stinks, who’d want her? You don’t understand what these men want. They want to punish her. For being what she is. For some, she’s just a piece of meat that happens to fall into their hands. She probably has every STD going. Syphilis is back in Europe, I’ve heard. When you see her, you won’t believe how often it happens. Sometimes they only beat her up, and when I see her afterward, when they cut away her clothes at the rescue mission, I wonder why she didn’t lose her will to live long ago. I’ve forgotten how many times they’ve broken her ribs. And her fingers. Her shins twice, I know that. Once she had a serious head injury. Not one of the usual gashes—this was worse. But she managed to survive that too. Her nose has already been broken three times, and once her left ear had to be sewn on again. She’s not an isolated case. It’s not her fault. The rescue mission says that anyone else out there would experience the same thing. That’s why most women try to find a place to stay at night. But not Dora.
* * *
When she killed Bela the day before yesterday, she’d been to the zoo that afternoon. Since Bela gave the ticket office woman a hundred euros, she started calling him every time Dora showed up. I don’t think it was because she cared, but Bela always felt reassured, and I knew he kept tabs on Dora’s zoo visits to give the woman money again as soon as he could. Money for her tickets, he said, all added together and rounded up. “That woman’s lining her own pockets,” I said. Bela didn’t care. Somehow it eased his conscience.
There was no reason to go looking for Dora that evening. I don’t think Bela intentionally walked past her. He’d been out with his orchestra colleagues, and they parted at Zoo, where most of them caught trains and buses home. But Bela walked. The day before yesterday the weather was mild, and Bela liked to go for a stroll after concerts.
So he passed Dora, and maybe that evening she recognized him. Everything might have gone fine, but Bela was carrying a plastic cup of tea, which he’d just bought at the station and had taken off the lid to drink, the steam rising to his face. They say that Dora ran over to him and yelled: “You’re going to die!” Then she sprang toward him and knocked the tea out of his hand, and he fell backward hard, hitting his head on the sidewalk. Dora kneeled over him, hitting him and shouting, “You’re going to die!”—over and over again. And that’s exactly what happened. The head injury from his fall might not have been fatal, but Dora’s shaking and beating certainly were. By the time they pulled her off, it was too late. The paramedic could only confirm his death. Our sister had long since vanished.
* * *
So, if you see her, and if you take a close look, you’ll know she didn’t mean to kill him. She was trying to save him. I still don’t know what she sees in the steam, or what’s reflected in the surface of hot liquid. I don’t think I have to either. When you see her—before the woman from the rescue mission picks her up, brings her in, washes and dresses her, then calls the police—remember: you mustn’t be brutal. So many men have already been brutal with her. Be gentle, do it quickly. Bela would have wanted her to have a decent grave with her name on it.
I SPY WITH MY LITTLE EYE
by Ulrich Woelk
Moabit
This much is certain: things would have turned out differently if Hauser hadn’t gotten sick with an acute gallbladder problem. That’s why the morning editorial meeting was held without him, a delicate omission, as soon became obvious, because crimes don’t care about journalists’ gallbladders—they happen anyway. And that morning an incident took place that a newspaper like ours (admittedly not the classiest) had to report.
I wasn’t very focused during the meeting, because I’d had yet another fight with Irene the night before over custody for our daughter Chloe. It had been nerve-wracking and messy as usual, but gradually I had to face facts. There was no longer any doubt about it: Irene wanted to take Chloe away from me. She had decided to move to her new boyfriend’s place in Frankfurt—and take Chloe with her, of course. And then all that I would have of my daughter would be short, irregular weekends and a few meager vacations.
As always, Irene had become hysterical and had hurled all the usual insults at me: I’d never had time for our daughter and, anyway, wasn’t capable of empathy when it came to the mental and emotional needs of children and teenagers. To top it all, she presumed to claim that Chloe would be only too glad to get away from me and was looking forward to starting a new life in Frankfurt with her and her new partner—a boring but apparently very hip homeopath, or hands-on therapist, or miracle healer for Frankfurt bankers (or rather their wives).
Maybe that’s why my ears pricked up when Menning, in his morning analysis of the news we had to cover that day, started talking about Janina, a pupil from Moabit who had been missing since the previous day. She had been on a bus on her way home, this much was known. But she had never arrived. She may have been sighted again near the bus stop, and perhaps she had even got into an unknown car, but these were just the usual unconfirmed rumors and conjectures that always happen in such cases.
Anyway, it was clear that the story had to be published in the local section of our paper, or even on the front page, which meant that someone had to take care of it—talk to the relatives and get in touch with the police press office. And since Hauser, whose specialty was crime reporting, was now in the hospital with gallbladder problems, someone else would have to take care of it, which wasn’t easy to organize, given that we journalists are notoriously overworked. But before Menning could push the story onto any reasonably qualified department, such as the local section, I said I was interested in the case.
Menning did not answer right away. Admittedly, my involvement was unusual since I normally write for the feature pages of our newspaper (calling it the culture
section would be an exaggeration), mostly about movies and movie stars. I guess Menning assumed that by volunteering, I was seizing the opportunity to write about a real atrocity rather than a screen crime for once—and, well, why not? Maybe after all the CinemaScope adventures and Dolby catastrophes I’d seen and reviewed in the past two decades, part of me was yearning for real life, real drama. As a tabloid news editor, Menning was up to every trick; maybe he was wondering if my leap into crime reporting might add an interesting movie-like touch that would make it stand out from the usual stories about runaway teens. He looked inquiringly around the table and no one objected.
* * *
On the way to Moabit, my quarrel with Irene ran through my mind again. Like every Tuesday I had gone to my former apartment, which I moved out of less than a year ago, to pick up Chloe for our movie night. But then Irene had nailed me down in the hallway, announcing her plans to move to Frankfurt, which was probably a subconscious (or conscious) attempt to sabotage my Tuesday ritual with Chloe, and which she ultimately succeeded in doing. In the end, Chloe and I only managed to have dinner together, because all the films that we were interested in had already started, but that wasn’t such a bad thing. I’ve always enjoyed sitting with Chloe at an Italian or a Greek restaurant, noticing how the nature of our conversations has gradually changed over the years. Whereas they used to revolve around Chloe’s imagination as a child, they have become increasingly serious talks about all kinds of things, the more Chloe’s horizons expand beyond things that directly affect her. The idea that she might suddenly disappear or be torn from my life is the ultimate nightmare, and probably what drove me to sign up for the Janina story. It was prompted by the same psychological drive that makes us read cruel fairy tales or watch horror movies: the desire to somehow escape our worst fears and fantasies by experiencing them in a virtual way.