‘All right?’ he said.
I nodded. ‘How are you?’
He wore a soiled check jacket and trainers, and he had a deep cut on his forehead.
I waited almost half an hour. At last a metal door scraped open and Munck emerged. It could only have been Munck. Each step he took, his foot flicked at the air, then slapped down on the floor. The way he walked, it always sounded as if the floor was wet. But there was someone with him, someone I didn’t recognise.
Munck shook my hand. ‘I’m sorry to have kept you, Martin.’ He turned to include the other man. ‘This is Jan Salenko. Nina’s father.’
Salenko took my hand awkwardly and shook it for too long. ‘I just arrived in the city this morning,’ he said, ‘by bus.’
He was one of those people who say too much, either out of nervousness or a desire to please.
‘I thought we’d go round the corner for a drink,’ Munck said. ‘Mr Salenko?’
‘Yes. A quick one, maybe. Thank you.’
I asked Munck if Slatnick was coming.
‘No,’ Munck said. ‘He’s off sick.’
Psychological problems, I imagined. That stone-age buckle of bone above his eyes, that shot-gun nose. It couldn’t be easy.
Munck took us to a place called Smoltczyk. He liked it, he said, because it was entirely without character. There was nothing to look at. No pictures, no hunting-horns, no china donkeys. It was just a bar, with drinks in it. I nodded. Salenko nodded, too. We ordered three brandies.
‘That should keep the chill out,’ Munck said.
As soon the drinks came, Salenko leaned forwards, both hands round his glass. ‘I understand from the detective here that you were the last person to see …’ He hesitated. ‘To see my daughter.’ He couldn’t bring himself to say her name.
‘So they tell me.’ I stared at him, but I couldn’t establish any physical resemblance. Then I remembered what Karin had said. Of course. Why would Salenko resemble Nina?
‘That’s what I’m told,’ I said.
‘How was she? Did she seem,’ and his hands opened, showing me his glass, ‘upset?’
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Actually, it was me who was upset.’
My answer seemed to take Salenko by surprise. It took me by surprise as well. But I’d been asked the same question so many times. There was what I’d felt, and I was tired of walking round it.
‘I’d been going out with her for about six weeks,’ I went on. ‘That was the night she told me it was over.’
I wasn’t looking at Munck, but I knew his eyebrows were halfway to his hairline. This was the first he’d heard of my rejection.
‘I’m sorry,’ Salenko said.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I was sorry, too.’ I sipped at my brandy, felt the warmth spread through me. ‘Strictly speaking,’ I said, ‘you’re not her father, are you?’
‘Not strictly speaking, no.’
‘You know who is?’
‘No. I never asked.’
I watched Salenko carefully. The silence seemed to embarrass him.
‘I just treated her like my own,’ he went on, ‘and she grew up believing it. She was only a few months old when we were married, her mother and me. Not even talking yet.’ He paused, thinking back. ‘First word she ever learned was Dad.’ He smiled sadly, looked down into his drink.
Then he roused himself. ‘Karin, she never told me anything. She didn’t like to talk about the past. If it ever came up, she’d throw things. Or she’d drink. Or leave the house.’ He tilted his glass on the table and watched the brandy climb the side. ‘I didn’t want to lose her, I suppose.’
‘But you did,’ I said.
‘Did what?’
‘Lose her.’
‘In the end I did,’ he said, ‘but that was later.’
He took a deep breath. When he breathed out, I could hear his heartbeat in it.
‘Something you’ve got to understand,’ he said. ‘I didn’t deserve her. That’s what I felt when I first set eyes on her, and I never stopped feeling it the whole time we were married.’
There was a river outside the village where he lived and one day he was standing on the bridge. A truck was parked at the far end, facing away from him. He saw a girl climb into the back of it, over the tailboard. Her dress looked handed-down — too big for her, anyway; it swirled around her skinny legs, made climbing difficult. She was about eight years old. Then a man walked out of the field and up the grass bank, and the truck lurched with his weight as he got in. The girl was standing in the back, both hands on the metal rail that ran along behind the cab. The man shouted something from the window, probably, Hold on, then the engine caught and the truck set off down the road, heading west, and that was all there was to remember, think of, dream about: that girl clinging to the rail as distance claimed the truck, her brown hair loose and streaming against the shoulders of her ill-fitting, pale-blue dress. Afterwards he was still standing on the bridge, only the road was empty now, and the wires that linked one telegraph pole to the next, the sun was shining through them, and the way their shadows fell across the tar, it looked as though a car had braked hard, as though there’d been some kind of accident.
By the time she was fifteen — the age he’d been that morning on the bridge — she was the prettiest girl in the county. She didn’t seem to know it either; it was as if she’d never looked in a mirror, or even in a window, or a pond. He was nothing special, though. He won a memory contest once by reciting an entire page of the local telephone directory, not one name out of order either, but where would that get him with a girl who could turn his stomach over like a ploughed field just by looking at him? And besides, his memory was something people mocked him with. There was a rhyme that everybody in the village knew:
Jan Jan
The Memory Man
Remember remember
As much as you can
Remember you’re ugly
Remember you’re weak
Remember that rubbish
Comes out when you speak
With his memory, of course, it was impossible for him to forget the rhyme — and verses existed that were far less innocent.
Jan Salenko smiled ruefully into his drink. He didn’t think Karin had ever called him ‘Memory’, as the others did, nor had she ever chanted those rhymes at him. When she saw him in the village she’d say, ‘Hello, Jan Salenko,’ as if the sound of his name said all at once amused her. She was always friendly, but somehow that was worse than if she hadn’t noticed him at all.
Then something happened. Nobody knew for sure what it was, only that Karin wasn’t seen around any more. The autumn he was twenty-three and the whole of the winter that came after. She just disappeared. And when she appeared again, in the spring, she had a baby. But there was no mention of a husband. And nobody could say who the father was. There were jokes, of course — immaculate conception, virgin birth; there was even some sarcastic talk about the second coming (the trouble was, the baby was a girl). The year before, Karin had been courted by half the boys in the county. Now they stayed away, every single one of them.
He gathered his courage. One morning towards the end of April he walked out to old man Hekmann’s place. It was a fine day, clouds running in the sky, trees with their new leaves. He found Karin crouching in the shadows on the back porch. She had her baby with her. No one else was about.