You (45 page)

You’ve been in Braunschweig since early afternoon visiting an old friend. You go to the movies with him, then you have dinner at a restaurant before you head back to Hannover. Shortly before you drive onto the Autobahn, a curious rattling sound starts coming from the engine compartment. The car slows and slows and finally comes to a standstill.

You don’t think about killing for as much as a second, you think about your apartment.

The breakdown service ADAC promises to be with you in an hour, and comes in thirty minutes. In the meantime you’ve tried to locate the problem yourself. You’re not a clueless idiot who just drives your car and fills it up. You tell the ADAC guy what the problem might be. He looks under the hood, takes the voltage of the battery, and says you’re right. The alternator’s probably had it. The tow truck arrives fifteen minutes later. You give the ADAC man the address of your garage, tip him ten euros, and get into a taxi.

It starts raining, it’s been gloomy all day, you’d give anything for a hot bath right now. The railroad station looks deserted, it’s just before eleven, if you’re lucky you’ll get to Hannover before one. You’re looking forward to your apartment, a cup of tea, and perhaps even the late news, if you don’t fall asleep immediately after your bath.

The Intercity train pulls out right in front of your nose.

You stand on the platform and watch the lights disappear. The next train for Hannover will be there in fifty-five minutes. You’re tired and try to imagine spending the wait with a magazine on a bench. You don’t like that prospect. You stand and look at the timetable. In seven minutes there’s an Intercity for Berlin. Without really thinking about it you switch platforms. You’re aware that you’ve got to take part in a conference in the morning. That prospect doesn’t appeal much either.

The Intercity stops with a long sigh. People get out, people get in, and you’re one of them. You’re still not thinking about killing, but you’ve forgotten about your apartment. As if there had never been an apartment.

You’re on the move.

The Intercity has seven second-class coaches, an onboard restaurant, and a first-class carriage bringing up the rear. You get in at the front. There are only five passengers in the coach with you. It’s a weekday. The people are tired, it’s the last train to Berlin.

Ten minutes after departure the conductor passes and you buy a ticket. After the conductor has left the coach, you shut your eyes and concentrate as if to store your thoughts for the lean times when thoughts are in short supply. A woman walks past you twice to go to the toilet. You hear the rustle of her leggings. Minutes later the smell of her perfume still lingers in the air. A man coughs, then there’s a crackle and an announcement. The train can’t stop in Spandau today because of work on the line. Someone curses, then everything’s quiet again. You take a deep breath, open your eyes, and get up.

A train, eight carriages, fifty-six passengers, a conductor, a driver, and a railwayman. Sitting in your coach are the woman with the weak bladder and three men. They keep their distance from one another; no one willingly seeks the company of a stranger late in the evening. The woman doesn’t even wake up. One of the men glances up and shuts his eyes again as you walk past him. You pick up his jacket and suffocate him. You break the other two men’s necks. You stand behind their seats and grip their heads. One jerk and it’s over. Time and again you’re surprised at how easy it can be. Easy and quiet.

The second coach takes more effort. You leave a couple sleeping. A man is reading and looks up briefly, you nod to him, he goes back to his book. You walk past him and strangle him with your belt. You spend the most time on an old woman who’s stretched out over two seats. When your hand closes around her neck she looks at you with horror. She looks straight at you for two whole minutes while her eyes bulge and her feet scrape on the seat. Then you return to the couple. You don’t even think of leaving anyone behind. Something is different. Something isn’t right.

In the third coach there are nine passengers. It takes you a quarter of an hour. At the end of it your shirt is soaked, and your jacket is sticking to your back. In the fourth coach there’s a problem. A man’s on the phone as you sit next to him. He looks up with surprise and asks what’s going on. You take his phone out of his hand as if you were taking a toy away from a naughty child, then you strike.

“What are you doing there?”

You overlooked the woman. You walked past her seat and overlooked her. She must have been asleep. Small, curly hair, thin lips. You thought she was just a jacket lying there. When you stand up she notices the blood on your face.

“We need a doctor,” you say, “otherwise he’ll bleed to death.”

“My goodness.”

The woman comes along the corridor. She’s in her leggings, with her shoes in one hand, the other hand pressed to her mouth. She reminds you of your mother and her startled face when she learned that Robbie was dead. This woman’s eyes are different, they’re probing lights. She leans forward and looks at the dead man. You grab her by the back of the neck and pull her to you so that she falls over him. Her shoes clatter on the floor. Before she can cry out, you press her face into the seat padding.

Coach five has six passengers. You leave no survivors.

Coach six has four passengers. You leave no survivors.

In the last second-class coach a man sits at a table. He has a book in front of him and he’s reading with his fingertips. You sit down opposite him and relax.

“Who’s there?”

You don’t reply, you look at him and look at him. You’re reflected in the lenses of his sunglasses and wonder what color his dead eyes are.

“There’s no one here,” you say.

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“Not really.”

The blind man snaps the book shut and leans forward. He
reaches out an arm as if to grab you. His fingers move like leaves in the wind. You interlace your fingers with his. Intimate. He tries to pull his arm back, but you hold him tightly.

“Please,” says the blind man.

You let go of his hand and take off his sunglasses. You see his dead eyes. Blue. They have no depth, they have no darkness. They are dull and blue with nothing behind them.
So that’s what it’s like
, you think and get up and go into the restaurant.

When the Intercity pulls into the Berlin Zoologischer Garten shortly after midnight and comes to a standstill with one last jolt, only a single door in the rear first-class coach opens and a man gets out. He carries no luggage, and no one is waiting for him. The man walks down the steps and leaves the station. He washed his hands and face on the train. One pink stain on his shirt is still damp, the knuckles of his right fist are swollen. The man doesn’t notice what else is happening on the platform—that no one else gets out of the Intercity and the people on the platform are getting impatient, that they try to look through the windows into the train and get in after a brief hesitation, that they find the corpses and in one of the coaches a blind man with his hands on the table, asking over and over again if there’s anybody there.

One of the surveillance cameras on the platform captured you. You’re a blurry patch walking purposefully toward the stairs. The police tried to enlarge the footage and failed. They showed the picture on television anyway. You didn’t look up once, and your movements are quick. A shadow moving through the light. Over forty callers told the police they knew exactly who the pictures showed. The suspects were questioned over the weeks that followed, they all had alibis.

The second shot wasn’t shown on television. A camera by the station exit captured and filmed you from behind as you threw something into one of the rubbish bins in passing. They found the sunglasses
that belonged to the blind man, and on the lenses were your fingerprints. Now the police knew for certain that the Traveler was on the road again, and that he was in Berlin. They didn’t know how disappointed you were with yourself. For eleven years you had climbed out of the depth again and again and opened countless doors for the darkness, but nothing happened. Perhaps your grandmother was mistaken, and there is no demon. Perhaps there’s only you on an endless quest, lonely and alone. You can’t find something if there’s nothing to find. No matter where your journey takes you. It’s a terrifying thought.

On that day in Berlin you grew tired of yourself for the first time. Opposite the station you turned and looked back, like someone checking that the door has shut behind him. A ghost train with fifty-seven corpses remained behind, and you didn’t once think about killing.

If it weren’t for the wind, you could be anywhere. At home on the balcony with your feet on the railing or on the shore of the Lietzensee with your hands in the thick grass and the smell of the city in your nose.

Anywhere, just not here
.

The wind exposes everything. Salt-harsh and tangy. You open your eyes and you’re miles from Berlin. Your hands grip the railing, the North Sea foams below you, above you the seagulls float like escaped thoughts. You wish you could grab them and put them in your head. Maybe then everything would be back as it should be, and there would still be five of you.

You breathe the wind in deeply, feel it all the way to the tips of your toes and especially in your back. As a child you always slept on your stomach, because you thought your shoulder blades were the beginnings of wings, and needed a lot of room in case they spread in the middle of the night. If you had wings right now, and if time were a landscape, you would fly back and save Ruth. She would be by your side again, and everything would be as it always was.

Footsteps approach and for a moment it’s almost true, Ruth joins you at the railing, her arm rests around your hip. You smile, and if your smile had a taste it would be salt-harsh and tangy like the wind. You don’t need to look, you know who’s standing beside you.

“I could be a madman who’s going to throw you overboard.”

“No madman smells so good,” you say.

Stink leans against you, you look out over the water and feel lost
and empty. The murmur of voices around you, music, shouting children, laughing women, the bellow of drunks, and again and again the sigh of the seagulls that never come closer and never disappear.

“What on earth are we doing here?” you ask.

“I have no idea, but we’ll manage. If we stick together, we’ll manage just fine. Don’t worry about it.”

She doesn’t know how much you’d love to worry, but there’s nothing in your head, it’s just a vacuum. Every thought fizzles out, nothing makes sense anymore.

“It’s just that I don’t know what’s what anymore, and I’m scared, really scared.”

And as you say that, you can no longer tell whether you’re scared for yourself or for your girls. Your fears all run together. The day won’t end, and that scares you. You don’t know what will happen at your destination, and that scares you too. It’s the sober realization that nothing is as it was, that there’s no going back.

“We can’t go back, right?”

Stink presses herself closer to you, that’s an answer too. And so you stand there and look across the water as if it were still Tuesday and you were back at the cinema and something was about to happen, the movie was about to take you on a journey. But the movie is just the monotonous surge of the waves against the ferry and nothing else happens. You girls can’t even cry anymore. And the day still refuses to come to an end, it claws onto every second, like an exhausted mountain climber who knows very well that if he loosens his grip even once, he will fall to his death. And that’s how you all feel too—you’re tense and concentrating on not losing each other. So you cling to one another and stand by the railing and breathe grief.