With my embroidered handkerchief I wiped the backseat before getting back into the car. The rain hadn’t cooled the air, it was still soft, and Alex didn’t close the window when he got behind the wheel.
I could have told on Rutger, but I never did, not that afternoon and not later. My goal to live at his side demanded that I keep my mouth shut, and it was important that Alex keep quiet too. After a short while, that silence gave me the feeling that I was the one who had committed a crime. I had not been raped; I had done it to another.
Sometimes, when the black car appeared at our front door, I felt weak and humiliated, but after a few weeks it seemed to me that Alex and I were allies. My disgust subsided, and from then on Alex and his car seemed to give me strength. His presence was preparing me for my new life, his touch was only a prelude to Rutger’s greed. In Alex’s car I was his accomplice. It couldn’t be otherwise.
That afternoon Alex looked once more in the rearview mirror, made sure everything was in order, and started the engine. The gravel crunched under our tires as we drove away from the old barn. Over the music he said, “Next time you can show a little more feeling.”
Christian
On a small chest of drawers in our living room stood the photographs of my family. Nicole and Ingrid as toddlers in our garden, both of them wearing white dresses. Nicole at her confirmation in front of the church. My parents’ wedding picture, taken in Frick’s Inn. My grandmother had kept her eyes closed, and the ring bearer’s face was blurry because he hadn’t sat still. Not a single photo had me in it. My mother had banned me from the family even while I was still living in her house.
One photo of my dad was of special interest to me in those days. It showed him as a young man wearing a leather jacket over his white uniform. Next to him stood the baker, whose right hand rested on my father’s shoulder, and who also laughed at the camera. Both men wore hats with stiff black bills, almost like the police, and they stood in front of their delivery vans, which were parked next to each other. In the background several men unloaded milk and large crates full of bread. They wore uniforms and wore their hair as short as soldiers.
My mother hadn’t removed a single picture of my late father, but it was this one I looked at almost daily. I was in love with Sylvia Meier, the baker’s daughter, and this picture seemed to connect our families. It was a source of pleasure and a certain discomfort to see the two men smiling at me together. It seemed as though my father had meddled with my life and love even before I was born. At times when I looked at Sylvia’s face and ran my fingers over her nose and cheeks, it was as though my dad were leading my hand and Sylvia were looking not at me but him.
When my mother caught me one morning with that photo in my hands, she hit my face repeatedly. My nose started to bleed, and one of her rings cut my forehead. The teacher often admonished me not to brawl—I looked all raw, he said. My white, almost translucent skin was a map of my mother’s wrath.
At night I left the house to meet Sylvia at our usual spot on the banks of the Droste. Sylvia had kissed many boys, and she had already done it with several of them. She was experienced. I was barely her height, but she said I was special and had not once missed an appointed meeting. She felt the small hills of my scars, kissed my burns, my bruises, and licked them. In the dark she ran her tongue over every bump of my skin, and since spring was near, we were half-naked and panting. Sylvia unbuttoned my pants and pulled down my underwear. She showed me how to unclasp her bra, asked if I weren’t curious to see how she looked without her pantyhose.
Often our encounters lasted several hours, but that night Sylvia soon told me to put my clothes back on, and then walked away from the river.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
She laughed, her legs naked and stockings stuffed into one of her coat pockets. We strode past the last houses of Hemmersmoor, across barren fields. The night was damp, thousands of fine drops clung to our bodies. But we were warm.
“Are we meeting someone?” I asked.
Sylvia kissed me, pulling my hand down to touch her. “Be quiet, Christian,” she whispered.
I trusted her, and yet I grew concerned as we made our way farther and farther out onto the moor. After a while the rows of drying peat bricks grew scarce, and only hard grasses covered the soil. Clouds as large as continents blew over our heads. Hemmersmoor had long since disappeared behind us.
After half an hour she finally slowed. In front of us scraggly trees rose and waved their branches, and after a few more steps, we came to a gate, rusty barbed wire curling at our feet.
“You’re not scared, are you?” Sylvia scaled the iron gate, her legs shining even in the dark.
I followed her. “What is this?” I asked. “Do they have dogs?”
Sylvia shushed me. “Don’t be afraid. No one’s here.”
We were walking along a narrow paved road, and soon we reached a low barrack. Its door was locked, but Sylvia opened a window on the far side of the building, and we climbed inside. She flicked a switch, and we stood among thirty bunk beds, their mattresses bare, some stained. The room smelled of dust, yet the overall effect was one of cleanliness.
Sylvia’s blond hair was glittering with moisture under the single bare bulb that dangled from the ceiling. Her cheeks were red.
“Who lives here?”
“No one,” she said, and kicked off her shoes.
Three weeks later she said she’d fallen in love with someone else, a twenty-year-old soccer player, and that we couldn’t see each other anymore.
I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t tell anyone. My mother was not allowed to know; my sister Nicole had no time for “that monster.” She had a little baby to take care of and couldn’t be bothered. Whatever I confessed to her would go straight to my mother.
Images of Sylvia doing what we had done with a new boy, an older boy, kept me sobbing at night. But even worse was when, after two days of mourning, I plunged into such hopelessness that I didn’t even have the strength to conjure up any haunting images. My world turned black.
After a week I decided to go to the place Sylvia had shown me. Just the thought of returning to that barrack revived my pain, and I felt grateful for it. I would spy on her, I decided. I would watch Sylvia with her new lover. I’d be so close to her, so close.
My task turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined. A walk after school one May afternoon proved futile. The daylight barricaded my way; after an hour of crisscrossing the moor, I stood in ankle-deep mud, with nothing in sight. My memory was useless.
During supper, I tried to steer my family’s conversation toward the subject of a gated area, an empty barrack somewhere north of our village. Maybe my mother or sister knew of that place.
“A barrack?” Nicole asked. Her son had fed and was sleeping in her lap; she never let me come close to him.
“Thomas said, in school, that he’d seen one outside the village. He said there was a gate.” I stared at my salami sandwich, unable to meet her eyes.
“Maybe he’s seen one of the vacation homes around here,” Mother said. My dad’s chair at the table was not to be touched or moved, and every evening she put out a plate for him.
“Probably just a barn,” my sister replied. “Thomas isn’t all that bright. Neither are his parents.”
I tried again to reach that gate after nightfall. How strange that once it had grown dark, my feet knew just where to go and my eyes followed my memories. Sylvia, of course, was not with me, but I hoped to see her at the barrack.