It was a fine September day outside, but inside it could have been any time of year at all. Or any year. The air was half smoke, half dust. Men sat alone, their faces propped against their hands. High up, where the walls turned yellow, a deer’s head was mounted on a wooden shield. It had both its antlers, but only one of its glass eyes. Above the bar there was a faded poster of a girl in red shorts and a bikini top. She was advertising tyres. The door to the toilets was ajar and I could smell the disinfectant.
I took the stool next to Karl’s. He didn’t notice me — or, if he did, he gave no sign of it. His glass was almost empty, its tall sides laced with froth. He must have drunk it fast. I bought him another and put it in front of him. I bought myself one, too. When he looked round, there was a slow, knowing smile on his face. I didn’t think he was pleased to see me particularly. I was simply somebody he recognised.
‘Nice place you found,’ I said.
He grunted.
I raised my glass. ‘Your health.’
His shoulders shook once or twice, but if he was laughing, he kept the sound of it inside.
That was the way it began, the two of us just sitting there. The silence was my father’s silence: you didn’t open your mouth until you had something to say — and even then, sometimes, you didn’t. But when an hour had gone and I still hadn’t left, when I ordered more drinks instead of leaving (using the money set aside for Karin’s shoes), he began to talk. It was mostly to himself, though I must’ve been the trigger for it. He was at his wits’ end. There was a business to run, the family as well, and all Eva did was sit in that fucking rock-pool and read from the Apocalypse. Recently she’d started claiming that their guests were agents of the devil, sent to lead her into temptation. Sometimes she told them the hotel was full. Or else she hid bowls of sulphur water underneath their beds, and the smell was so terrible, they always left the next morning. She already smelled bad enough herself. Like hell, in fact. He’d stood it for years, but he didn’t know how much longer he could last. He couldn’t even bring himself to touch her any more. It was hard to believe he’d had two children by her.
‘Are you going to leave her?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. It’s Tom and Anna …’
I nodded.
‘Sometimes I try and wait it out,’ he said. ‘Mostly that’s what I do. It’ll get better, that’s what I’m thinking. But it doesn’t. And if anyone tries to talk to me about it —’ He broke off, shook his head. ‘Like that time I hit your husband.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘That time he came to see me. I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have hit him.’
‘Ah, fuck it,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ I drank some beer. When Karl looked at me, I shrugged and said, ‘He’s a coward.’
I wasn’t only thinking about the way he drove Mazey to the institution when I wasn’t looking. It was everything that had happened since. At first he tried to separate Mazey from the family by legal means. He wouldn’t allow Mazey to use his name. Mazey was a Hekmann, he said, not a Kroner, and he had a piece of paper from the lawyer’s office to prove it.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘In that case, I’m a Hekmann, too.’
From that time on I used my maiden name, even though we were still married and living in the same house. Even though I didn’t have a piece of paper from the lawyer’s office. But for Kroner that was just the beginning. He wanted Mazey gone, and practised untold cruelties behind my back, hoping to drive him away. He was sly, as always. He hurt Mazey in ways that made it look as if the boy had done it himself. The bruises, the lacerations, the burns — they could have been accidents. Once, Mazey came home smelling of urine and I thought he must have wet himself — he did that sometimes — but I could smell it on his face and hair, and I became suspicious. I couldn’t prove anything, though. Later I heard rumours that Kroner and a couple of his men from the quarry had chained Mazey to a fence and then they all undid their trousers and pissed on him. That kind of treatment didn’t work with Mazey. He knew no other life — why would it make him leave? Added to which, he didn’t understand things that other people took for granted. If you put him in front of a television it was quite possible that he’d use it as a mirror. Kroner never understood that. Someone told me that Kroner had taken Mazey to the bridge one time and pointed out along the road and said, ‘Get out of here. Go on, get.’ Mazey just stared at Kroner’s finger, the way a cat might, and then followed him home.
I nodded to myself. ‘A coward’s all he is. And what you were saying about Eva, well, the same goes for Kroner.’
Karl looked at me across the rim of his glass, but I didn’t want to talk about my husband any more. There were nights when I could feel he was ready and he tried to put it into me, but it had been a long time since I wanted him — in fact, maybe I never had. His white belly lowered over me, his flesh so soft I lost my fingers in it. The way his skin flushed in a wide red collar round his neck. I only had to think of Axel lying by the stream before the sun came up, the colour of his skin in the morning light, the clean wood smell of it …
And anyway, I knew what his game was, as surely as if he’d been wearing a stocking over his head and carrying a sawn-off shot-gun. He’d stolen from my body once, and I wasn’t about to let that happen again. I still dreamed about the roses sometimes, all twenty-six of them, and I always woke up feeling sick.
‘No one in our family knows how to marry,’ Karl said.
‘Maybe Felix got it right,’ I said. ‘He didn’t even try.’
Suddenly I looked at Karl, my brother, and I smiled. I’d just realised. This was the first time we had ever talked.
But there was a moment, later, when everything spread out sideways like melted glass, and Karl turned to me and said, ‘You know, I never did like you very much.’
At first I laughed, treating it as a joke, but his face didn’t change. And suddenly I wasn’t drunk any more. Something like that, it sobers you from one moment to the next. In a way, though, I’d known it was coming. By sitting on the empty stool, I’d asked for it. The truth behind those years of silence.
‘I just never did.’ He was still looking at me with his three-day growth of beard and his sudden, drunken clarity. ‘Know why?’
‘You’re going to tell me, aren’t you.’
‘Oh yeah. I’m going to tell you.’ He turned on his stool so eagerly, so clumsily, I had to smile.
‘You smile,’ he said. ‘But underneath, you’re not smiling.’
‘Oh?’ I said. ‘And what am I doing,’ I said, ‘underneath?’
‘You never let anything out, do you. You fucking never,’ and his hand closed in a tight fist as he fought to explain himself, ‘you never give anything away.’
I was beginning to think I’d made a mistake by walking into the bar. I wished I’d driven right past it. The shoe shop seemed a far better place to be.
‘Maybe that’s why you look the way you do,’ he said.
I asked him what he meant.
‘Our mother, she was beautiful. That’s why she left —’
‘You remember that?’
‘Karin’s got something of her, in a way. But you —’ He looked down at the bar and shook his head. ‘Me, all right, I get drunk,’ he said, ‘I make a fool of myself, I knock people down, sometimes I spend a couple of nights in prison cooling off — but I’m not dangerous.’ He leaned closer to me, one finger lifted, pointing. ‘It’s you. You’re the one who’s dangerous.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘People are terrified.’
But what he was saying tied a string around my heart and pulled it tight. I’d always wondered if anyone knew. If anyone had guessed.