Untitled Part 4

Lehmann rubs a greasy finger against his nose, making no attempt to hide his irritation. His accent sounds harsh and grating and cuts through the muffling blanket of my weariness so that I have no choice, I am forced to listen and to respond.
“So you hated your father. Did you hate Stefanie? Were you angry with her? Did she do something to anger you? Were you afraid she would tell the police about you?”
I’m sick of the sound of his voice and I say “I loved her.”

It comes out before I can stop it. Despite himself the interpreter beside me stops fidgeting, the sergeant’s attention is suddenly fixed fully upon me. Surely now, surely he can see I would have given my life for her?
I suppose, in a way, I have.

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When I look back it doesn’t seem right to me. I will never understand how I managed to keep everything hidden for so long. At the time I just failed to see, refused to see, how bad it was getting. There was one deeply ingrained belief left in me- the belief that because he was the father figure, he would come to his senses and start looking after me, fit back into his expected role again, just like I wanted him to. Until then, I translated every fault of his into a shortcoming of my own. He hurts me. That’s because you can’t defend yourself. He frightens me. That’s because you’re a coward. He hates the sight of me. Because he blames you for her…

I felt disgusted with myself, my weakness, my… my never being quite right, never being enough. So I began to experiment with pain, I began to mete out my own punishments. It became addictive. I can’t explain it. I don’t like to dwell on it. There were times when I longed for the bell to ring and school to end just so I could scare myself, see how far the blade would get before I chickened out. It turned from an experiment into a sick, yet fascinating game.

Time passed. I began high school. To my relief it wasn’t as frightening as I had feared it would be. Pretty quickly I settled into the routine of finding my classrooms, avoiding making the Chemistry teacher angry and doing stuff to my fringe with gel. I also found a group of friends, the extent of whose problems reached hangovers and not knowing how to approach girls.

There were new subjects too. When I spoke new languages I felt like I was another person with a life wholly unconnected to this one. It was another escape route I clung to, especially during the darkest times.

And eventually, inevitably, I lost my grip on my pretence; my guard slipped. First lesson that day was German. I was twelve and at my lowest ebb. Dad was becoming something out of a horror film. It felt like my survival rested on a knife edge. I couldn’t even close my eyes at night without seeing his face twisted with hate, his hands reaching out ready to close around my throat, rend me limb from limb, make me bleed.

Really, I was a complete mess. So I stepped outside of my head for a bit and became a German author whose livelihood had been taken away from him because he was an ‘enemy of the State’, and who didn’t know when he would see his family again, and was unable to express himself without risk of imprisonment, and…

It took me a while to realise my partner was staring at me. Frau Schiller was standing behind me and I shut up and went red when I realised she was there.

“Fantastisch,” she said with enthusiasm, though her eyes were concerned. Quickly I followed her gaze. The baggy sleeves of my school jumper had come up and… Crap.

As she passed the desk again she asked me to stay behind a couple of minutes after class. The rest of the hour was tinged with worry.
But to my surprise, she did not plague me with questions. She just smiled at me and patted the desk beside her. I sat. Rummaging in her leather bag, she handed me a book in worn blue binding.
“I don’t know what you’re going through,” she said in German, so I could pretend not to have understood her if I liked. “But you must confide in someone. If not your family, or your friends, or me, or any of the teachers, then you must still confide in something. Do you keep a diary?”
I shook my head. Reaching over, she opened the book. Looking, I saw rows and rows of her bold black script, umlauts suggested with brisk lines above vowels. Then I stared at her, blank.
“Don’t you see?” she said, a smile in her voice. “These are dreams, Nathan, dreams, hopes and inspiration. Things which make me happy, and things which make me stop and think how lucky I am to be alive. Pieces of life I’ve collected over the years. Now I’ve found someone to carry on the collecting.”

I found myself reading Frau Schiller’s book more and more often. I lay on my stomach on the floor behind my bolted door, flicking through pages and daydreaming. One page held a photograph of an impossibly blue sky, with the tiniest shred of white cloud haunting the left-hand corner. Another was filled with an ostinato of glitter-glue stars, almost childlike in the way they wandered unsteadily across the page. Yet another held only the word “Ich”, followed by three dots. It felt mysterious somehow, yet also liberating. I turned back to it a few times, tracing the bold letters with a fingertip.

Dad was unpredictable. Sometimes he would almost be his old self again. He would stretch out on the sofa and prop his feet up on the coffee table, with a conspiratorial wink at me. Some days he asked how things were going at my new school, like he really cared. Other times, though, it was different. It was much worse. He would be in a foul temper, ominously silent yet ready to leap up like a coiled spring and send me flying- and almost immediately after he’d stare at his hands in horror as if they didn’t belong to him, and say, “What have I done?” Sometimes he would cry and shake his head and tell me he was sorry, that he was a terrible father and it was no wonder Mum had left him, and that everybody must hate him.
Despite everything, I didn’t. I couldn’t. I still saw the father who had raised me and it saddened me more than anything to see him like this. I couldn’t bring myself to hate him. I pitied him.
Once or twice I spoke to him about seeking help. Solemn and red-eyed, he would swear to do it- and never actually did.