The Sinner (36 page)

"Would you like that?"

"Not really. I'm quite comfortable like this. I'd like to scratch my
nose occasionally, that's all."

She almost substituted arsehole for nose, but Magdalena's favourite vulgarity refused to pass her lips.

"If you're sensible, I'll get them to remove your restraints."

"Haven't I proved how sensible I am?" she demanded. "I tried to
save the taxpayer a tidy sum. They ought to reintroduce the death
penalty. An eye for an eye, the Bible says. A life for a life."

He didn't pursue this. "It's up to you," he said quietly. "If you eat
and drink something and take your medication. . ."

It cost her an effort to speak, but having once started she wanted
to go on. "Got something nice for me? Some Resedorm maybe?"

It was only a momentary image like a flashgun picture in her
brain: a slender, well-manicured hand and a glass of orange juice.
Then it vanished into the darkness, and in the darkness a woman's
voice asked suspiciously: "What's that you're giving her?"

A man's voice answered, a familiar voice, not gentle but businesslike: "Resedorm. It works quickest."

"But she isn't fully conscious," the woman protested. "Can she
swallow?"

"That's what I'm trying to find out," the man replied, sounding
faintly annoyed. `And I'd prefer you to keep quiet. I'm not sure if
she can understand us."

The darkness persisted. She felt a hand slide beneath her neck,
heard his voice say: "Blink if you can understand me."

She blinked, although there was nothing but mist before her eyes.
"Good," he said. "Try to raise your head. I'll help you." The cool
rim of the glass touched her lips. "Drink up," he said. "Nice and
slowly. Go on, try, one sip at a time. Yes, wonderful, that's it. You
can go back to sleep in a minute. You still need plenty of sleep."

Another flashgun picture in her brain, an image suffused with
green and red, blue and yellow light. It meant nothing - it was
suddenly there, that's all, perhaps because the chief had mentioned
an ashtray. But it was accompanied by the metallic taste of blood
in her mouth and a cry, more a scream, of pain: "She bit me, the
bitch!"

A hand reached for the table and reappeared in front of her face
holding a heavy glass ashtray. It came flashing down, then nothing
more. Nothing but a thought, almost a grin, in her brain: don't
torment yourself wondering who stove your skull in. You know
who it was: your last punter, paying you in his own coin.

The expert was still standing over her, watching her closely.
"Have you had experience of Resedorm?" he asked.

"I've had a lot of experiences," she said. "Which ones would
interest you most?" Her throat was so parched, her vocal cords
seemed to be juggling with a pincushion. "My experiences with my
pious mother? With my weak-kneed father? With drugs?"

"Resedorm isn't that kind of drug," he said. "It's a soporific."

"I know," she muttered.

It came back to her as she spoke: Margret had given her Resedorm - on the advice of her boyfriend Achim Miek. The doctor
and the nurse ...

No! No, it hadn't been like that. Achim Miek had never held a
glass to her lips, and Margret had never given her any orange juice.
Two tablets and a glass of water - that was what Margret had
given her, and that voice just now had not been hers.

It must have been the grumpy nurse and the doctor with the
slender hands and the neatly trimmed beard. Strange, she had no
recollection of him holding a glass, only of the injections. And of
what he had said about her perverted clients!

She was tired now, just tired. "I know all that," she muttered.
`And that's what you should let me do now, sleep."

He lingered beside her bed a while longer. She took no more
notice of him.

When she closed her eyes she saw herself beside the lake. The
little boy was squatting at her feet, waving the red fish. His thin
white back, smooth round shoulders, delicate neck and whiteblond hair made him look like a girl. Like Magdalena at the time
when she was just a bundle to be carried from room to room, a
creature she was at liberty to hate with all the innocent fervour of
a child.

Why hadn't she swum out? He wouldn't have followed her. To
him, she had merely been the woman who fed him yoghurt and
apples on weekends instead of chocolate and jelly babies. That he
called her Mama was unimportant. Some day his subconscious
might associate the word "Mama" with the taste of Golden
Delicious and the sight of a little bloodstained knife. Someday his
grandmother would tell him: "Let's be thankful she's gone. She was
a slut. To think of all we found out about her after she left ..."

At some stage she heard footsteps making for the door. It didn't
matter; the expert would return like a demon she herself had summoned from hell.

Now she would never be free from the ghosts she'd raised.

"The Sorcerer's Apprentice." She'd had to learn that poem for
school. It was one of the ones the doctor had kept making her
recite. She'd enjoyed doing so then, but not now It had raised too
many ghosts.

And the man who was shutting the door behind him could not
let her rest until he'd dragged the last grain of dirt to the surface:
a couple of perverts who beat up a drug-addicted whore once
they'd had their fun with her. That was his job, the one he was
paid for.

She could always rebel against him and spin the whole thing
out, but there was no escape, no right to remain silent. She had
forfeited her rights when she stabbed that man with the knife, and
the people outside wanted to know why. So did she. That tune had
been no rational motive. That she'd once been afraid of it had
almost ceased to be true.

At some point she fell asleep. She was unaware of the women who
came into the room and might have stood around her bed, possibly
stroking her face, possibly her hair, before getting into their own beds.
Next morning she had the impression that someone had stroked her
face and hair during the night. It must have been her father, who
had put his arms around her and wanted to bring her a bowl of
lukewarm bean soup because he knew she was as hungry as a wolf.

The beds were empty again by the time she awoke. Feeling only
half-alive, she recalled a crazy dream she'd had, just before waking,
in which she'd plugged her nostrils with pieces of paper and thrust
a gag down her throat. Then came a blow on the forehead, but
she hadn't lost consciousness. Panic, asphyxia. A key rattling in the
lock. The shrill voice of the wardress: "For God's sake! I told you
she'd flip!" Fingers down her throat. Red rings before her eyes. The
end of the line: a psychiatric ward. And that was no dream.

Breakfast came. She ate some once her left arm had been
released. Shortly after breakfast they removed the restraints from
her right arm and both legs. She was told to get up, get washed and
dressed. Her limbs were stiff from lying down; her mind was numb
with fear. She had a date with the chief at nine, she was told.

Something inside her refused to call him that. The chief was
Rudolf Grovian, an awful man who failed to grasp what he'd done
to her. But at least she could lie to him. Any attempt to lie to a
psychiatrist struck her as hopeless.

Professor Burthe, they told her. He looked like a professor, too:
short and puny. He was a dwarf, and he had to be. Only dwarfs
could probe other people's brains, crawl into every convolution,
peer around every bend. His manner was as amiable as it had been
last night, serene and self-assured. The kindly god whose eyes could
see deep into others' hearts. And his eyes were open.

No more recalcitrance, no rebellion. She had shrunk in the night.
Father, perched on the edge of her bed and trying desperately to
show how much he loved her, had reduced her to a tiny, transparent
little creature who was permitted to sit in a comfortable armchair
and bare its innermost self.

The professor began by asking how she was feeling.

"Like hell," she said, drawing a deep breath. Father shouldn't
have come; she'd told Margret to stop him coming. She started to
massage her left wrist with her right hand, staring at it and waiting
for the next question.

She could hardly bear it, he was so gentle, because it was false
and deceitful. He wanted to talk about the meaning of life and
escaping punishment.

"I didn't try to escape punishment," she said. "I simply didn't
want to listen to what the chief had heard from my father."

"What could he have heard?"

None of your damned business, you dwarf, she thought. That
I ... Father came into our room one time and poked around in
our bedside table. It was a plain bedside table with a drawer at
the top and a cupboard below. Magdalena kept her music in the
cupboard and her medication in the drawer. And the candle! One
of the ones Mother had bought for the altar. Mother never came
into our room, but Father did. And lie found the candle. He also
saw I'd never used it for praying. The wick was still white and the
end a bit smeary.

She saw Father standing in the doorway, torn between disgust
and disappointment. He had the candle in his hand. "What's been
going on here?" he demanded, holding it out. "What have you
been up to?"

She heard herself reply: "Can't you guess? You aren't usually so
slow on the uptake when it comes to human nature. Didn't you
tell me it becomes too much for you when you're older? Well, I'm
human too, but I prefer the dry variety. A candle doesn't come and it
doesn't stink. Put it back where you found it and get out of here."

Father dropped the candle on the floor and slunk out with his
shoulders sagging. He was weeping the way he'd wept the night he sat on her bed and tried to explain why he was so miserable. This
time he merely muttered: "What's become of you? You're worse
than a whore."

Everything changed as the years went by. It probably had to do with
growing up, with perception and comprehension. There are things
you don't want to understand but have to. That a father is a man.
That he has his needs like any other man. That he becomes angry
and unjust when denied gratification. I understood him in a way.

When I grew older I often wondered what it must be like to be
loved. Loved with the body as well as the heart. Self-abandonment,
passion, French kisses, orgasms - stuff like that. I became
accustomed to my breasts and my periods. I no longer had any
difficulty using tampons, and sometimes, when I was inserting one,
I caught myself wondering. What if a man ... It can't be all that
different, I thought, and if a man needs it!

But I also understood Mother, who wanted nothing more to
do with it. She deserved to be pitied, really. After all, a woman
can't help being off her head. Mother genuinely believed all that
rubbish. I mean, that you mustn't do it unless you're trying to make
a child.

Even three times a day had been fine as long as she didn't get
pregnant. She could tell herself she was straining every muscle
to do the Almighty a favour. Mother had never grasped that two
thousand years are a hell of a long time. Enough time in which to
produce more than enough children.

It could well be the way Margret had put it in her letter that
time: that the Saviour had nothing whatever to do with all these
prohibitions. That all this horrendous nonsense had been concocted
by his earthly representatives, and people were compelled to believe
it. What else were they to do when they couldn't read or write?

When I think what Buchholz used to be like! Just a handful of
farms on the poorest soil imaginable. There were many years
when stripping the thatch from the roofs was their only means of over-wintering the few cattle they possessed. Father once told me
that a fat pig weighed a hundred pounds in those days. A measly
hundred pounds, imagine! It sounds absurd today. And then came
the Black Death and the Thirty Years War.

They were poor, they were stupid, and they seldom knew how
to fill their children's bellies. When a preacher told them it was a
damnable sin to yield to their sexual urges, they looked at their
children and said to themselves: "Hey, he's right. If we stop it, there
won't be any more mouths to feed."

The womenfolk were particularly impressed. The curse of Eve.
Nobody gave them anything when they were in labour. It was part
of the process. In sorrow shalt thou bring forth ...

When the responsibility became too much for her, and when
she had no other recourse, Mother took refuge in this poverty and
stupidity. And there she remained. She no longer had to cope with
the birth of an unwanted baby. Although she doubtless realized that
it was bad of her to abort it, there must have been a few people in her
circle who thought it better for a respectable German girl not to bring
an enemy soldier's brat into the world. And she believed them.

Mother always needed someone to tell her what was right and
proper. As a girl she believed in Hitler. Later she believed in a
victorious soldier. She never believed in herself. For a while she
believed in me when I said what she wanted to hear. A few Biblical
quotations, and you could twist her around your little finger.