You (63 page)

After you’ve left the sleeping girls on their own, you look up the cliff, all you can see is rocks, occasional bushes, but no hotel. You follow the road, reach the summit, and don’t believe your eyes. Where the girls will see decay and chaos two hours later, you see something completely different.

What is that?

It reminds you of a beach hotel that you saw in Montenegro years ago. The house could be from colonial times, it doesn’t fit here at all. Now you can understand why the man with the greyhound laughed a little while ago. Who would take the trouble of climbing up this cliff to see a wreck like this?

The rooms are dilapidated, cracks in the ceiling, holes in the walls, the floors covered with rubbish. But you can see that they’re good floors. Floorboards that have defied the elements and not warped. The entrance hall is tiled and supported by four pillars; a wide staircase leads upward, the banisters are missing in several places, and it looks as if the steps would give way under the slightest weight. You’re careful and climb up to the first floor. Empty rooms, in the bathroom even the toilets and fittings have been torn out. You run your hand over the wallpaper as if looking for a pulse. On the second floor you throw back your head and look up into the sky. The roof has been torn away completely, the rafters revealed, the withered branches of a fir dangle in and remind you of the Christmas
trees that lie sadly by the edge of the road at the beginning of January.

On the way down you imagine how many guests have walked up and down the stairs here. What they felt, what they thought. Every house has its own soul. The hotel’s soul hasn’t fled. It is still breathing, and lives hidden in the walls. Even though you haven’t yet found the pulse, you know it’s there.

Back on the first floor, you find a closed door at the end of the corridor. It’s jammed, the wood must have warped. You slam your shoulder against it and the door swings open.

The kitchen is massive and almost undamaged. A table with chairs, broken glass and stones on the floor, a kitten calendar from 1997. In the sink there’s the skeleton of a dead pigeon that must have flown in through the window and been too stupid to find its way out again. An old station clock hangs on the wall, the minute hand missing.
Who would steal a minute hand?
you wonder and open the cupboards. Plates. Cups. Glasses. You find cans whose use-by date ran out ten years ago. The kitchen is a time capsule. You go to the door and close it again, the capsule is sealed, the present only comes in through the broken windows and breathes in your face. You sit down and lay your hands flat on the tabletop. Dust and dirt don’t bother you. You’re quite still and listen to the house and wait for the pulse.

It feels like minutes, but you’ve been sitting here for over two hours, and you’d probably hold out for even longer if you didn’t hear the voices.

They’ve found the house
, you think and don’t move.

It’s like a radio play. You hear the girls arguing. Then it falls silent. A man speaks. Sharply, furiously. You like the sound. You can make out every word, and slowly, very slowly, you work out the connections.

My son’s murderer is standing outside
.

You don’t move. The girl Taja confesses. And you hear and don’t move, both hands on the tabletop, eyes on the closed door. Patient.

You can imagine staying here forever. You would start on the first floor and breathe life into the hotel, one step at a time. Clear away the dirt, cover the roof, entice past glories from the ruin. When you were on the second floor, you stepped out onto the terrace. In front of you was the fjord, below you there were rocks.

Not even the end of civilization could be more beautiful.

A place to stay
.

The shots make you flinch. No shouts, nothing. Just three sharp shots and then silence. You go on waiting. Hands on the tabletop, silent. You look at the door and the door flies open and the girls are standing in the doorway. The door bangs against the wall, swings back, the delicate Asian girl holds it open with one hand. They look at you in alarm. You say, “Just come in.”

They don’t move. They expected anything, but not you. The red-haired girl frowns and says, “Deselected?”

You look at your chest, look back at the girls.

“My son lent me the T-shirt. He thought I’d never wear it, he was wrong. Sit down.”

The Asian girl shakes her head. It’s the last thing she wants to do. You’re going to have to be a bit more persuasive. Tell them the truth, give them the feeling they’ve arrived.

“You’ll be safe here.”

No reaction; they probably don’t think much of the safety promised them by a stranger who’s sitting in a dilapidated house, wearing a stupid T-shirt.

“Which one of you is Taja?”

At last they react and look at each other and turn around. The girl with the golden hair says, “Where’s Taja?”

You stand in the middle of the corridor, while your girls go on running. They don’t notice, they look into the rooms and leave you behind. It’s the end of the sweet bitches. Your biggest fear has come true. You’re no longer part of them. You’re no longer part of anything. Even if you’ve been pretending over the past few days that everything would be as it always was, you were living only on the memory of a Taja who was once part of it.

Once upon a time there were five girls and I was one of them
.

Shame floods over you, and you’d probably cry again if it wasn’t for this pain. The bullet hit you a couple of inches above the left of your pelvis. It got you just as you were running through the front door. At first there was just a dull stitch, you staggered and bumped your shoulder against one of the pillars, but then came the pain. You clutched your hip and blood stuck to your fingers. Your girls mustn’t find out anything about this, you don’t want their sympathy and concern.
It’s just a scratch
, you lie to yourself while the wound pulses like a strobe light, frantic and nervous.

And sometimes you’re there and sometimes you’re gone.

Your girls haven’t noticed anything, not even Nessi, who’s normally alert to everything. It must be the fear, the fear is too deep in their bones, Darian and your uncle could come charging in at any moment, and it doesn’t help that Stink has shut the double doors, because if your uncle comes, nothing in the world is going to help. So you went running through the hotel looking for a hiding place and you followed your girls for a while, as if a hiding place could
save you. When they ended up in a blind alley, they turned around and you followed them to the entrance hall and that’s where you put on the brakes. You didn’t want to do this anymore, you let your girls go on.

Since you stepped inside the hotel you’ve only had one single destination.

The stairs groan under every step. You avoid the holes in the floor and hold on to the wall with your right hand, you don’t dare take your other hand away from your injury. Your lips move, you’re murmuring your very own mantra.

A house among rocks. Water below me, sky above me
.

On the second floor you choose the first room you come to that looks out over the fjord. Here too the glass in the door onto the terrace has disappeared, only a single shard hangs in the frame like a comma. Your father told you the glass in the windows and the glass doors are from the days of art nouveau. You break the shard out of the frame and hold it against the light. It has a soft orange glow.

I was born here
, you think and step outside.

The terrace is six feet wide and leads all the way around the building. You’d like to walk its full length, but in one direction the floor has broken away, in the other the wall has fallen outward, dragging the terrace and its railing away with it. When you were teething, your mother always pushed you around the house because you would only calm down in the moving stroller. Night after night. Her record is supposed to have been sixteen circuits of the terrace. You won’t be doing a single circuit, you’re trapped.

A house among rocks
.

You shiver, even though there’s sweat on your forehead and the air is warm. The sunlight lies like a halo on the fjord. The mist has vanished, on the opposite shore you see the mountains and a road with two cars advancing slowly along it. You lean forward, the railing creaks and bends slightly outward. There’s the pebble beach with the boathouse. It’s all as your father described it to you. You look straight down. It’s high, really high. A drop of sweat falls from the tip of your nose. At this point Stink would say:
This is definitely high enough
. You wonder what it would be like to land down there. The glass slips from your hand and vanishes.
No
. You’re not planning on dying, but you’re not planning on living either. You want to
stay in this intermediate stage. With pain, guilt, and suffering. You deserve to feel as miserable as this.

If your mother were here, she would understand you and your loneliness. You believe in that, you cling to it. Your mother would have understood you wanting to bring her back to life for a few days. For a few days you were really on the way to her.

Behind you, leaning against the wall of the house, are six deck chairs which are as weathered as the façade and have assumed the same gray color. When you were in your delirious state and traveled here in your mind, the deck chairs were green and yielded slightly under your weight. You unfold one of them, it comes to pieces in your hands. You pick up the chair behind it. It creaks and trembles when you sit down and stretch your legs out. The linen fabric holds, you lean all the way back, it’s the most relaxing feeling you’ve had for ages. Better than any drug, better than any hand touching you. You look down at the fjord. It’s like coming home.

Water below me, sky above me
.

You look down the corridor, you call her name, Taja doesn’t reply. You look at the man as if he might know what’s going on here. And it slowly dawns on you how crazy all this is. Meeting someone in this dilapidated house. Someone who speaks German.

Someone who knows us
.

“How do you know about Taja?”

“Sit down, then we can talk.”

You don’t move.

“We’d rather stand,” you say, “because we have no time to chat, there are two lunatics out there who want to kill us.”

None of this affects the man, he is tranquillity personified, he repeats that you’re safe here. Nessi stands beside you and she is as nervous as if she needs to go to the bathroom, she whispers to you that the guy’s weird.
That’s not really news to me
, you want to tell her. All of a sudden Schnappi can’t keep it in any longer: “Excuse me, why are we safe here? And who are you anyway?”

The man puts a key on the table.

“You’ve been traveling in my car.”

So there is the key!
you think and know right away that it must be nonsense, because you stole the car from Marten and not from a man in his late forties, wearing an idiotic T-shirt.
That’s never his car
. Then it clicks, then all of a sudden you know who you’ve got sitting in front of you. Schnappi works it out at the same moment.