Love in Case of Emergency, page 17
By the time he came back it was dark.
Malika was sitting in silence on her chair.
I’m sorry, he said, but I can’t go on like this.
* * *
Bertram is talking insistently to her father. His face, which to begin with Malika thought was featureless, now looks gritty and determined.
Since Helmut came back from the bathroom, Bertram hasn’t shown any discernible interest in her.
She looks up at Viktoria, who’s leaning against the doorframe beside Ruth. Malika catches a few words: names of classical singers and musicians. They’re probably talking about the last Handel festival; Viktoria had gone to almost every concert.
Let’s ask my daughter, Helmut says suddenly, slamming his hand on the table. Do men and women each have a natural purpose? In a reordering of society this question needs to be addressed.
Malika smiles. Not even Bertram can avoid Helmut’s pet topic.
What reordering of society? she says, to win time.
The one that is imminent, Bertram says, coming to Helmut’s defense. The dictatorship of the moralists won’t last forever. The world is becoming more conservative once more, and men and women will have to assume distinct roles.
If everything had turned out the way she wanted . . .
But that’s not what happened.
Turning to Helmut, she says a touch too harshly, Rubbish! What natural purpose are you talking about?
When your Swabian handyman was still on the scene you talked differently, Helmut retorts.
And? she says. What do you want to do with childless women like me? Shove us into a nunnery? Forced marriage?
Her father laughs. Why not? he says, taking a large gulp of wine. Bertram shakes his head vigorously. No, he says, that’s not what we mean. It’s about the differences we ought to acknowledge and the limits of our own autonomy.
Malika also rejects the idea that an individual can shape themselves and the world at will, but as she’s searching for the right words a phone goes off. Bertram feels in the inner pocket of his jacket. He declines the call and places the mobile on the table. The lock screen shows a Doberman with a shining coat.
At that moment Jorinde enters the kitchen.
Malika can feel the tension drain from her body.
Helmut gets up. He opens his arms wide and waits for Jorinde to embrace him. My kitten, he says in his sweet voice, peering past her into the hallway. But neither Torben nor the children are there. Jorinde has come on her own.
For a moment Malika closes her eyes and sticks to her therapist’s advice. Instead of comparing herself to Jorinde, she gauges herself against her former self. She sees how much she’s developed, what she’s achieved, that she’s become a popular violin teacher.
Only then does she get to her feet and walk tall over to her sister.
* * *
Jorinde is sitting on the balcony. On her own. Malika could have followed her sister, but the conversation with Bertram had turned interesting. As the invitees start to crowd around the canapés in the kitchen she goes to the bathroom. She locks the door and sits on the rim of the bathtub. Bertram definitely smiled at her when she pushed her way past the hungry guests. They seem to be closer mentally than she’d expected. Tongue-in-cheek, she’d summed up the points on which they agreed. Not everything new is good. Not every foreigner comes in peace. Not every border is restrictive. He nodded in relief, then she got up from the table.
Still, he can’t hold a candle to Götz.
When she was discharged from the psychiatric clinic one cold, sunny November day, she was able to see the future clearly ahead of her.
Vicky and Helmut were waiting beside a covered grand piano and an oasis of tropical houseplants. Patients sat limply in the yellow fake-leather armchairs dotted all over the place, gawping at their smartphones. Malika went down the stairs, one by one, thinking that from this point onward her life was going to be a hopeless search. She wouldn’t be able to love in the same way again. And she didn’t want to love any less.
After the move, she was helped by a steady rhythm of work, therapy, and organized activities in her free time. In the two summers that followed she even went occasionally to the lake, to the sloping meadow with its apple trees. She swam to the other side and back. She didn’t see Götz once. At a time when the memories no longer weighed down every grain of present happiness like lead, she saw the display stand outside her local bookshop. The woman on the picture was Brida Lichtblau. The title of her book was Life Patterns.
On the evening of the book launch Malika felt sure she’d see him. In the front row, watching proudly as his wife sat at the table and read. She scanned the seats. To the right she recognized Dr. Gabriel and next to her the bookseller with the red hair. Götz was missing.
She looked around again. He wasn’t there.
Malika barely caught anything about the contents of the book. Her thoughts wouldn’t keep still. His absence could mean anything, and that anything included the possibility they could try again. But Brida’s words at the end of the reading shattered her hopes. She thanked her husband, Götz, who sadly couldn’t be there that evening because their young daughter was ill.
The following morning Malika cycled to the shop and squinted through the display window. The bed had gone. She continued on to the bookshop and bought herself a copy of Life Patterns.
Since then she’s read everything Brida Lichtblau has written. Every male character has some of Götz’s features. She doesn’t get any closer to him.
According to the bookseller, Malika is Brida’s biggest fan.
She stands in front of the mirror, puts her hair up into a high, loose bun, and applies some lipstick. It has to have an end. She knows this.
Through the frosted glass of the door Malika can see someone standing outside the bathroom. One last check in the mirror then she steps into the hall.
Let’s go into the bedroom, she tells Jorinde. Nobody will bother us there.
She stops beside the Jorinde shrine. It’s stuffed with small cardigans and onesies from her first year, her first pair of shoes, her favorite doll, Lilli, various cuddly toys, a small cloth bag of marbles, and a shoebox with exercise books, pictures, and essays from her later years at school.
Viktoria has comprehensively erased the mementos of Malika’s childhood. There are no baby clothes or toys, merely a few drawings and letters from her primary school days and two certificates acknowledging her participation in minor violin competitions.
Have you thought a bit more about it? Jorinde says, looking at her anxiously.
How small her sister is. Her presence onstage and the screen has nothing to do with her physical attributes. It’s much more an outward projection of her inner self-confidence.
And yes. She has thought about it.
Malika has spent entire nights playing out concrete scenarios. Wondering what she would do if Jorinde demanded her child back. Imagining what the child would do if later it found out that its aunt was in fact its mother. Even picturing the reactions of her parents, colleagues, and friends. And every image, every response was a compelling argument against Jorinde’s plan.
Nonetheless Malika has felt the painful urge to raise this child as her own.
Jorinde sits on the edge of their parents’ bed, buries her face in her hands, and cries. The sobbing comes from deep inside, her body is shuddering.
Malika looks down at her silently. She’s not going to be taken in by these stage tears. How often has she witnessed her sister’s theatrical performances? Jorinde rubs her puffy eyes and wipes the snot on the sleeve of her dress.
At least sit down next to me, she says.
A few seconds later they’re sitting side by side in silence.
My marriage is over, Jorinde says flatly, and you’re still furious with me. She looks at Malika. You ought to be angry with our parents, not me. I was just a child. Your little sister.
Then she puts her head in Malika’s lap and reaches for her hand.
Tears are running down Malika’s face. She glances at the door. They don’t have much time. Viktoria will soon come looking for them.
What’s happening here is a beginning, but she doesn’t know what of. Give me a few days, she says. I’ll come to Berlin and then we’ll talk.
Part Five
Jorinde
Jorinde puts her finger on the bell.
She turns up the corners of her mouth and widens her eyes. She knows how to produce an inner radiance. Now she just has to maintain it until she gets to the third floor.
The buzzer sounds; she runs up the steps, taking two at a time. The door to the apartment upstairs is ajar. When her mother comes toward her in the hallway, Jorinde opens her arms, rushes forward, and says in her deepest and most assured voice, Happy Birthday, Vicky!
It was less than three hours ago that Torben put his face right up to hers and yelled that she was completely mad. Ill, crazy, nuts. Only someone from a troubled family could come up with an idea like that. When he was finished with his rant, he gasped wearily that she could go to see her batty mother and Nazi father on her own. He and the children were staying in Berlin.
Jorinde went.
She was utterly absent as she sat in the tram to the railway station and was on autopilot as she made her way through the station and down the escalator to the deep-level platforms 1 and 2. All the way to Leipzig she stared out of the window instead of learning the script for her forthcoming TV appearance. Just a minor role in an episode of a crime series, but still.
As the familiar landscape drifted past she decided on illness as the excuse for her family not being there. Then her thoughts turned to what she had to discuss with Malika.
Where are my sweeties?
Viktoria takes a step backward. Her expression is a combination of doubt and reproach. Without hesitating, Jorinde tells her about a rampant virus at the school, embellishing her story with gruesome details that, as expected, stifle Viktoria’s interest.
Malika is sitting at the kitchen table with their father and another man. Although Jorinde doesn’t know him, one look is enough. Boring. Helmut gets up. My kitten, he says when she gives him a hug. And for a second time the virus story stands in for the unpleasant truth that her marriage is over and she’s pregnant for a third time.
When, soon afterward, the soft arms of her sister close around her, Jorinde just wants to cry.
For as long as she can remember she has fought for Malika’s love.
How often did she stand outside her sister’s locked bedroom door, kicking it angrily when yet again Malika hissed, Go away, I’ve got to practice! Then she would run to her mother to be comforted, and to say bad things about Malika.
The look on her sister’s face tells her that she hasn’t changed her mind. Still, it’s worth one last try.
Only a society that values community above the individual is resilient, the colorless man beside Malika says.
The GDR was a great example of that, Malika remarks ironically.
There were other reasons for the failure of the GDR, he objects. The peaceful revolution—.
It wasn’t a peaceful revolution, Helmut interrupts. It was a capitalist restoration. The people sold their soul to consumerism and nobody protected them from it.
The big topics, as ever. Helmut can’t help himself. Jorinde gazes out at the neighboring park where they used to go and feed the squirrels. Some were so trusting they would eat out of her hand. On one such occasion Malika clapped her hands, sending the animal scurrying away. Jorinde wept bitterly and Malika wasn’t allowed to go to the pool for a week, even though swimming was her favorite hobby at the time.
Around the table they’re talking about immigration. Thank goodness Torben is far away. He would say things she’d be ashamed of, and Helmut would smile indulgently. Torben lacks all political sense and Helmut’s lenience toward him only makes it worse.
The differences in opinion between her and her family have narrowed. She’s no longer an antifascist activist, on account of which Torben called her opportunistic, mousy, and cowardly.
Vicky darts around, filling people’s glasses without asking. She won’t be satisfied until most of the guests are as plastered as she is. In spite of the makeup, her nose is shimmering red. Her mother has been drinking too much for many years. She’s suffering from the visible effects of this and she keeps drinking to forget the fact.
You’re standing all on your own, she says, and scolds Helmut, urging him to include his daughter. But Jorinde doesn’t want to join them; she has no desire to get involved in a political discussion.
To begin with she, too, was disconcerted by the change in Helmut’s views, which Vicky largely endorses. The tolerance of her friends and colleagues ends in the center of the political spectrum. They’re left-leaning liberals and cosmopolitan, which inevitably produces an abhorrence of nationalism and isolation. The mantralike repetition of their high moral stance suppresses the doubts that nonetheless stir.
At first she didn’t take her parents’ newfound conservatism seriously. A generational conflict, no more and no less. But now, when she considers it more closely, Helmut’s and Vicky’s volte-face doesn’t appear quite so contradictory. They never shared the optimistic narrative of progress that took hold in the 1990s after the GDR joined with the West unconditionally. Maybe back then Jorinde had been closer to her parents than she’d assumed. These days she can’t position herself anywhere anymore. While Torben feels at home with the far left, she’s searching in vain for her own home.
Jorinde wouldn’t marry Torben a second time. She met him when she was working at one of the indie theaters in Berlin. There was an immediate spark. The inner turmoil that drove him haunted her, too. The fear of missing out on something important ensured that they were always among the first to get drunk, and the last to leave a party. And yet their hunger for life was never sated.
They drank, had sex, smoked packet after packet of cigarettes, and often turned up to rehearsals late. Contact with her parents was restricted to Vicky’s occasional phone calls. Jorinde would then speak—at a pace that allowed no room for questions—about how fabulous her life in the theater was, how close she was to making a breakthrough, and how extraordinarily talented her boyfriend was. It was what Vicky wanted to hear, and what she could broadcast to others afterward. Malika had already taken on the role of the problem child.
Helmut was patronizing toward Torben from day one, but Jorinde stuck resolutely with him. The most significant reason for this was the tiny thing in her tummy, which was less than an inch long on the day Torben first met her parents and nobody yet knew about it.
Ada was the emergency brake. Jorinde quit smoking from one day to the next. She stopped drinking and calmed the waves that in the past had tossed her hither and thither. When she met Vera on the panting course, which is what Torben disparagingly called the prenatal classes, her hedonistic days were numbered too. Vera’s casting agency became Jorinde’s springboard into film.
Torben kept on going as before. Only Ada’s appearance as a tangible, audible entity kept him on the straight and narrow for a while, and in the confidence of that phase they got married.
Later, however, when his age and the children required him to adapt his desires to reality, he refused to bend. He rarely compromised, and certainly not at a professional level. His tactlessness disguised as honesty cost him countless friendships and career opportunities.
She still defends Torben against her parents. Nobody readily admits to a mistake like that. What a windbag! Helmut said after the first meeting, and his assessment of Torben was reconfirmed time after time.
Her husband is a child, almost six feet three inches tall, who despite all his faults wants to be loved unconditionally. But she’s not his mother.
Until now she’s kept the whole truth about the state of her marriage from her sister, too.
Out of the corner of her eye she watches Malika and the man with the cold eyes. The fine curve of his lips is in strange contrast to the upper part of his face. The longer she looks at him, the more striking he appears. If Jorinde felt like it, she could make him shift his attention toward her, but she doesn’t even fancy doing that.
She needs to talk to Malika. Time is pressing and their last telephone conversation ended on a sour note. Why doesn’t Torben care about his offspring?
Because it’s not his.
Malika’s tone became harsh. How could that happen? Haven’t you heard of contraception?
And Jorinde asked rudely whether she’d never been in a situation where lust had gotten the better of her. Malika hung up without saying another word.
The smokers come in from the balcony, led by Roofing-Felt-Rudi.
She would never forget what Malika told her about Vicky and Rüdiger. At the time she thought her sister had fabricated the story, but now she’s not so sure.
Jorinde steps out onto the balcony. The plantings are extravagant. Her mother detests geraniums and other long-flowering plants. Instead she has white agapanthus flowerheads next to purple blazing stars and sunflowers. She sits in a wicker chair and looks through the railings at the pavement below, where a woman is standing with four children.
In three weeks’ time it will be too late. That’s when the legal abortion limit expires. The child’s father doesn’t know. His wife and young daughter will keep smiling their smiles beside him in the tabloids. He’s a real cliché. His name makes intelligent women abandon all dignity. His acting talent forgives everything. On a personal level he’s a total loser. But what physical presence! And that’s why she made a beeline for him and said Yes! in his hotel room when he asked if she was on the pill. She didn’t want any interruptions.
An abortion would be the easier solution. But who wouldn’t want a child by this man?
Things wouldn’t be so bad if filming for her first major feature film weren’t due to start a few weeks after the scheduled birth. She couldn’t bring the tiny creature with her; it would affect the quality of her work. She needs to be free. Even though there won’t be any nude scenes, her body has to be hers alone.
