You (60 page)

You girls stare at Taja, you have no idea what cameras he’s talking about, but you can see that Taja knows. Her face goes so sad that you’re sure she’s about to burst into tears again. Her eyes open, but there are no tears in them, she looks at you and in this short moment something happens to your friend, as if a part of her was getting loose and disappearing forever. And then she says the two words you don’t want to hear. You want to hear:
Run, he’s nuts
. You want to hear what a miserable fucker Ragnar Desche is and that it’s all a bunch of stupid lies. Everything, but not these two words. But there they are. Live with it.

“I’m sorry.”

It isn’t a heroic moment for you. Look at your girlfriends, they still don’t understand exactly what has hit them, but they smell the corruption in the air, they feel it with every fiber of their bodies, as if the corruption had wings and was about to plunge down on them from thirty thousand feet up.

Did you really think it wouldn’t come out? By the time you were standing outside the derelict beach hotel, you must have understood how brittle your reality was.

Of course you were surprised.

You thought the hotel would still look as it did in the photographs. But why should time be good to a place that’s been empty for twelve years? Time isn’t good to anybody. Even if you turn time into God, it just laughs at you. Like now. You hear? Her laughter sounds like a storm, like the storm that came down on Berlin exactly a year ago, with a cooling summer rain. The thunder kept you awake for a while, as if the weather knew exactly what you intended to do. It spurred you on.

You summoned your courage and went downstairs to drink a glass of water. You thought you could have a look at what your father was doing. There were nights when he stayed in the attic till the early hours, working on his new jingles. And there were nights when he had visitors.

You knew he was alone that night.

You went upstairs and looked in his bedroom. He was lying on his side, his back was rising and falling as he breathed calmly. Sometimes
he twitched when a crack of thunder made the sky outside tremble. You heard the rain on the plank flooring and closed the door. Now you were in his room, you’d taken the first step. You hesitated for a few minutes and watched him, you listened to his breath before you lay down next to him. As you had always done when you were little. At the age of ten you knew it had to stop.
I’m not a child anymore
, you had said. Tonight you aren’t a child anymore either, but you want to be with your father. For a while. In safety. And perhaps it had something to do with the fact that your boyfriend had split up with you, perhaps you were lonely and wanted to hear that everything was okay. Perhaps even that is just a lie.

You lay down behind your father and it felt proper and warm. He was aware of your presence, he turned round and looked at you in surprise. Before he could say anything, you threw your arms around him and pressed him to you as if you were lost and he was your salvation. Your heart was thumping wild and confused, and your leg pushed its way between his legs. Only then did he slowly start to understand that you weren’t his little girl anymore. He tried to pull away from you, he actually recoiled, and that was too much for you, that wasn’t right, he couldn’t push you away, so you held him tight, your hands on his back, your breath on his neck. You felt his erection, and it was shockingly beautiful and right, because an erection meant something, it meant he was aroused, it meant you were arousing him.

He hurled you out of bed and gathered the blanket between his legs as you sat bewildered on the floor in your T-shirt and black knickers that you’d chosen specially for this evening. Planning is everything. Only those who are brave reach their goal.

“You … It’s you?”

Your father tried to laugh.

“Who did you think it was?” you asked him and rubbed your bottom and thought of his erection and wondered if it was still there. Until then you’d only slept with Kai and you always had to hurry, because his erections came and went, as if he had to think every few minutes about whether he actually wanted to have sex.

“Were you afraid of the storm?” your father asked in a falsely chatty tone, and you could tell by his eyes that he wanted to say
something else. Something like
Are you crazy? How the hell could you even think of this? I’m your father!

But he didn’t say it, and that encouraged you.

“Nightmare,” you replied and got up. You turned round and showed him your sweet ass and asked him if there was a bruise on it, and as you did so you looked at him over your shoulder. He didn’t risk a glance, he stared at the bedcovers and said there wasn’t a bruise and did you want some hot milk with honey.

That was how the night ended—the two of you in the kitchen, each holding a cup of hot milk, candles burned, a summer storm raged outside and you talked about music.

For two days there was peace.

For two days he studied you out of the corner of his eye.

On the third day you stood by his bed again in the middle of the night.

“Dad?”

“Yes.”

He wasn’t asleep. He must have heard you coming in. Perhaps he’d been waiting. You liked that idea. His back was turned to you.

“Can I get into bed with you?”

“Taja, no, it’s not right.”

“I’m so alone.”

“Sweetheart, that …”

You started crying. It was real, you weren’t acting. You couldn’t deal with rejection. You stood by the side of the bed and cried and held your hand out to him.
Help me
. He turned around. Your hand was trembling. He pulled you into bed and held you in his arms as he had held his little girl in his arms six years before. Your back was turned toward him, he held you tight. It was lovely, but it wasn’t what you wanted.
More
. You slowly started pressing your ass against his crotch. He shrank back, he tried to hide his erection, you held his arms tight, he couldn’t get away.
Stay
. You heard him groaning, his breath burned the back of your neck and smelled of pot and slightly of vodka.
Mine
, you thought, as your bottom rubbed against him and then you took his sweaty hand and stuck his thumb in your mouth. It was as simple as that.

It wasn’t love, it wasn’t passion, it was pure power. And of course we want to hear that it was despair that drove you to it. Loneliness, abuse, violence. Give us something so that we can understand and forgive you. But there’s nothing. There’s just a fifteen-year-old girl who wanted to test her power and whose only excuse was that her boyfriend dumped her.

You wanted it; it made you grow. Each time it happened your value increased, while your father’s attempts to resist got weaker and weaker. When you got into the shower with him, when you stuck your hand down his trousers in the kitchen in the morning. Discreet, always discreet. Never when you had visitors, never when he was composing. You could still be the daughter who loved her life and didn’t get in her father’s way; but you could also be the little slut who seduced him and felt triumphant.

When women stayed overnight, you asked him in the morning if it had been any good. He blushed, tried to defend himself, and you walked away mid-sentence. You enjoyed it. You were taking your mother’s place without even thinking about it. And perhaps at some point you’d have had enough, normality would have returned, and you could have dumped your father like a boy who didn’t interest you anymore. It didn’t come to that, because your father started losing himself.

He couldn’t do it anymore, he didn’t want to do it anymore.

Six months had passed. No one noticed anything, even your girls hadn’t a clue. There was just you and your father in the house, you lived in a cocoon of lust. Your father knew it was wrong. He said he didn’t want to be a square, but it couldn’t go on like this. You knew your weapons and you used them. You look so like your mother and you pulled out all the stops. Clothes and hairdos. At Christmas you had your hair cut because your mother had a pageboy cut at her wedding. You became a second Majgull, and your father would have been a liar if he’d claimed he didn’t like it.

It didn’t last long. He avoided you until the summer, then he broke down completely, he took more drugs, drank vodka for breakfast, and wanted you both to see a psychologist. Your father became paranoid with guilt. He didn’t want to be alone with you in
a room anymore, he was ashamed and said he’d go voluntarily to jail if it had to be.

And then came that Wednesday.

He hadn’t slept that night, he’d been fiddling about with various songs and taken tons of amphetamines because he was worried you might surprise him in his sleep. In the morning he stood in your room and just looked at you. You woke up with a start as he lay down next to you. You had swapped roles, he couldn’t live without you anymore, however much he resisted, he couldn’t. He said it. He said:
I’m giving up
. Now he was you, and he wanted you to hold him. You held him until he had fallen asleep, then you got up and showered. Something was wrong, your triumph had a stale aftertaste, something was definitely wrong.

When you came back out of the bathroom, he wasn’t in your bed anymore. You were relieved. It was like waking from a dream. Then you heard him downstairs on the telephone. His voice sounded as if he might burst out laughing at any moment. You crouched on the stairs and listened.

“Maybe a week, maybe longer. A holiday will do me good. Diana’s always wanted to go to the Côte d’Azur. No, without Taja. What did you think? She’ll manage, you know what kids are like.”

He hung up, and you went downstairs. He was standing in the kitchen drinking orange juice. You were so furious, so incredibly furious, and you wanted to know what he was up to. He laughed.

“Didn’t I tell you about it?”

He was messing with you and he didn’t even hide it. It was as if his helplessness had been wiped away, he was in control of you again. A cool, detached indifference was looking at you. Your father said, “We need a break.”

“I don’t need a break.”

“Too bad.”

And then he gave that laugh again.

He walked past you into the living room and slumped on the sofa. He put his feet up, picked up the remote control, and zapped through the channels. Whatever had given him back his sense of balance, it sent you back to the start. You couldn’t get past Go, no one gave you a get-out-of-jail card, it was wrong, even your voice sounded pitiful.

“You can’t leave me alone here.”

You were his daughter again, and you needed him. He sat up and rolled a joint, didn’t look at you, lit it and took a drag, sighed, still not looking at you, and then said, “You’re a big girl. Invite your girlfriends. Have a party.”

“Oskar, you can’t just run away from me.”

“Don’t call me Oskar.”

“That’s your name.”

At last he looked at you.

“You’re a slut. Just like your mother. Do you know that?”

You thought you’d misheard. He could disrespect you as much as he liked, but he couldn’t talk like that about your mother.

“Mom wasn’t a slut.”

“She was unfaithful, so she was a slut.”

“She was what?”

“Do you think I’m such a shitty driver that I’d just lose control like that and drive into the ditch? Your mother broke her fucking neck because she wanted to leave me. You get that? She wanted to leave me and you. God punished her for it. If there is a God, he did a good job.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She was a slut, Taja. Get that into your head. It’s all you need to know. It’s in your blood too.”

“You’re lying, you’re a fucking liar!”

“Believe what you will. I should have seen it coming from the start. Your mother always did what she wanted.”

“At least she didn’t let her father fuck her.”

He fell silent and stared at the television, his eyes wide. He’d stopped breathing and you were satisfied because you’d hit the bull’s-eye, he wanted to hide it from you, his voice sounded dull:

“You’re no better than your mother, just get out of here, I can’t look at you anymore.”

So you got out, you disappeared deep into yourself and walked round the table and stood in front of him so that he couldn’t see the television. He didn’t dare look up, his eyes were focused on your crotch, because your crotch was level with his eyes. No thoughts of sex now, nothing at all. You spread your legs and sat down on his thigh.