Retrograde Read online

  “I’ll get dinner started. Do you want anything to drink? I brought some red wine. You know, Dr. Hofstaedter said you should have a glass now that you’re off the painkillers. Good for the blood.” He’s aware that he’s rambling, giving away his nervousness, and comes to an abrupt halt on his way to the kitchen.

  “Sure,” she says. “I’ll have a glass.”

  When he brings it to her, he’s again startled by the expression on her face. It isn’t hostile, but rather what he expected her to look like when he came in—distant, barely present enough to take in his words. But she’s not reading now. Where are you? he wants to ask, but instead busies himself in the kitchenette, pretending she’s too far away for them to speak. He scrubs the potatoes and puts them in a pot of boiling water, spoons some curd cheese with herbs into a bowl and chops up vegetables for a salad. He has the eerie feeling of being watched the whole time, as if she were staring, unblinking, unmoving, at his back. But when he glances over, she’s reading her book. Or at least she has it open.

  She doesn’t say a word until they’re both seated at the table and he’s serving.

  “Thank you for cooking.”

  Even these innocent words sound strangely empty, her tone like that of a foreigner who knows a few polite phrases, but never gets the delivery quite right. Again he wants to ask what the matter is; again he stops himself.

  Finally, it’s Helena who breaks the silence. “Where are my books, darling?”

  The question startles him. It takes him a moment to recall the answer to questions like this. “But I told you,” he says a few seconds too late, “so many things were ruined by the flooding.”

  “So they’re all gone?”

  “Some of them might be in the cellar. We were reorganizing things right before your accident.”

  For her, it makes no difference whether they’re in the cellar or another part of town.

  “I’ll have a look tomorrow after work. I’m too tired to carry them up tonight.” He can stop by her apartment and pick up a box or two. She must be bored with the stupid bestsellers he bought. Maybe that’s all this is.

  “Thanks.” Another pause. “Joachim?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do I keep a diary?”

  He chews longer than necessary, biding his time. She did, at least at the time of their separation. He saw it once when she’d run down to sign for a package, leaving it on the nightstand. He couldn’t help picking it up. She’d just started a new page, and all she’d written was: that I hate him and only want—she must’ve been writing when the delivery man rang. She was gone a few minutes, but he had no interest in reading more. That was a few days before she moved out.

  “I’m not sure.” He takes a sip of wine. “If you do, you haven’t told me about it.”

  “I’ve kept a lot of diaries in my life. I thought it might help if I had a recent one to look at.”

  “I’ll have a look in the cellar tomorrow.” He never considered the possibility of a diary. If she reads her own record of their separation before he can explain, he’ll have no chance at all. What if she knows she kept a diary and is testing him to see if he’s lying? He’ll have to bring one over, but keep her from reading it. Distract her somehow. Or hide it during the day. Just a little more time. Things are going well between them now. He just needs a little more time like this, and she’ll be ready to hear the truth. Ready to hear and accept his side of the story, like she never was before.

  “Was it because I was leaving?”

  “What?”

  She takes a bite, chews, swallows and sets down her fork without taking her eyes off of him. “You said we were reorganizing things. Was it because I was moving out?”

  So it’s not about the diary. Or the books. One less trip to make, anyway. Again, he overchews his food, takes a long swallow of wine. What can he say? Is there an answer that will keep her from asking more questions? Which answer is less of a lie, when her books aren’t even in his cellar to begin with?

  “Yes,” he finally says, because that’s the less favorable answer, and therefore the one she’s more likely to believe. He’s ready for a barrage of questions now, for a minefield of half-truths he’ll have to navigate, for anything but the question she actually asks.

  “Did I ever… I mean, as far as you know, did I ever cheat on you?” She’s blushing and her voice is apologetic before he’s answered. Is that what’s been on her mind all evening? Where did she get an idea like that?

  “No, never.” As long as she doesn’t ask whether he ever cheated on her. They’ve still never agreed on the answer to that question. But she doesn’t ask.

  “And you never suspected me of anything like that? Never had your doubts, or didn’t think I was where I said I was? Anything like that?”

  “Never,” he says again, refilling their glasses. He carries their empty plates to the kitchen sink. Helena, cheating on him? Helena, the pillar of righteous anger who told him he’d poisoned their marriage? Impossible. “Not once did I ever have reason to suspect anything like that. Why?”

  She waits until he’s back at the table to respond. “I thought that might be the reason I was moving out.”

  “No, that wasn’t it.” Which of course begs the question of why she was moving out. Or rather why she did. He has to keep things straight or he’ll end up even more confused than she is. When she doesn’t ask the question he expected, he gives her an answer of his own accord. “It was more complicated than that. We were always fighting, and at a certain point we just wore ourselves out. We couldn’t live like that.”

  “What were we fighting about?”

  He can tell her heart isn’t in the question. Does she not care, or is she thinking of something she isn’t saying? Maybe they can agree to leave the past behind them, and live based on what comes next. Would he want that? If it weren’t for the past, Helena would just be a good-looking stranger. The past is the special bond between them.

  “Nothing, really,” he says. “Just little things, one after the other, but it added up.” Is that the truth? You could say they separated because of that letter from Ester, but that wouldn’t be true, either. That was the last straw, but the camel’s back had been at the breaking point for a long time. If it hadn’t been that, it would’ve been something else. Or maybe they would’ve kept bickering and sniping at each other forever. What is it that makes things so much easier now?

  “I remember us fighting,” she says vaguely, like someone listening to a more interesting conversation at the next table.

  Will things stay easy? Or will they inevitably fall back into their old patterns? He remembers that feeling of helplessness, as if he were being made to speak against his will, seeing himself moved along the path to a fight, unable to turn back. Or was he only unwilling?

  He takes the empty wine bottle to the recycling crate, and then returns for their glasses. Sometime before she left, she told him he wasn’t made for marriage, that he’d never really committed to her. “This is the exit you’ve been searching for all along,” she said. And he was silent, suffocating with hurt and rage and terror, until long after she and her things were out of his apartment.

  “We should get ready for bed,” he says.

  Helena is fixedly watching the point across from her where he used to be sitting, and he has to repeat himself.

  “Yes,” she says. “I think we’re both tired.”

  He falls asleep on his side of the bed with one hand resting on her stomach, raised and lowered by her breath. He’s afraid to move closer tonight, but he needs to feel that she’s still there.

  HELENA

  Helena wakes once, before Joachim, from a vivid dream she forgets immediately, but feels sure contained one of her lost memories. She wakes again when he gets up for work, and then a last time after he’s left. In his absence, she feels a strange, heavy guilt that it takes her a moment to place.

  Then she recalls Doro’s visit, and the fact that she’ll return today. What will she say
when Doro asks what Joachim said? That she didn’t ask him? In a way, she did. She found out that either she wasn’t cheating on him, or he didn’t know she was. It must be the latter, since Doro set up that date. She still can’t think what would’ve prompted her to do something so against her nature. She must’ve been absolutely miserable, or else Joachim must’ve done something so horrible she felt driven to it. Or was that simply the person she’d become over the years, a change in her character she can no longer remember?

  He said they’d separated over nothing. But how could that be? Of course, they fought a lot, and they’d been fighting for a long time. Some before they were married, and more after. But there must at least have been one last fight, one specific point in time when the decision was made. Why doesn’t he want to tell her about it? Is he protecting himself, or her?

  While she brushes her teeth, she tries to imagine what her right leg looks like under the cast. Not much longer until she can walk without crutches. It’s strange that such an obvious physical injury could heal faster than whatever’s going on in her brain. She’s gotten so used to thinking of it all as one big package that it’s hard to believe it won’t all be over at once.

  She rinses her mouth and washes her face. When it is over, whatever secrets Joachim is keeping from her, or whatever she kept from him, won’t matter anymore. At least, they won’t be secrets from her.

  It’s late and Doro could be here soon, so she sits down on the bed to dress, the clothes catching in awkward bunches on her casts. Afterward, she goes back into the bathroom to wrench a comb through her tangled hair—she must’ve moved a lot in her sleep—and tries to trick her foggy mind into remembering either her last dream this morning, or the person she was just before she stepped in front of a truck.

  So she had an affair. Or many. She had a double life. A second home Joachim knew nothing about. She can’t picture that now because she’s just thinking of the facts. What she needs is to remember how she felt at the time. Hurt, maybe. Or angry? She and Joachim were fighting. Maybe she felt like he didn’t love her anymore, that it was just a matter of time until he left her. She could’ve been looking for someone to comfort her. Or did she want to hurt him? But then she wouldn’t have kept the whole thing secret.

  The doorbell interrupts her thoughts, and she puts her half-combed hair into a sloppy bun before buzzing Doro in. Because of course it’s Doro. Who else could it be?

  “Are you all right?” Doro asks as soon as Helena opens the door. Her eyes move around the room, searching for other occupants.

  “Same as yesterday. Come in.”

  Doro pours two cups from the pot of coffee Joachim left, and they sit next to each other on the sofa again. Helena watches Doro and waits for a cue. She notices a dimple in the woman’s chin, a strange feature in the rather thin lower part of her face. Out of place somehow, until the theme is echoed by her round cheeks. Helena feels that she knows this dimple, but of course she might’ve noticed it yesterday. What’s a dimple in some woman’s chin, anyway? That’s not going to answer her questions.

  Doro puts milk and sugar into her own coffee, a bit of milk and no sugar into Helena’s. Helena watches carefully, waiting for her to make a mistake, but the coffee is the exact shade of brown she makes for herself every day. She finds herself wondering whether Joachim knows her that well. But he’s usually at work, not there to prepare the individual cup. It’s strange to think of Joachim with Doro here, just as it was strange to think of Doro last night. They exist in two different realities. She might as well start demanding an explanation from Joachim for something someone said to her in a dream. But this is really happening.

  “I was worried about you,” Doro says. “After I left, I wasn’t sure I’d done the right thing, leaving you here by yourself.”

  “But I was fine and I wasn’t by myself. Joachim came home a little while later.”

  Doro blows on her coffee, puts down her cup and slicks back an invisible wisp of hair from the top of her ponytail. “That’s actually what I was worried about. I didn’t know what might happen once you confronted him.”

  “Oh.” Helena lifts her cup with both hands to drink. She knows Doro’s words aren’t meant as an accusation, but still. She should’ve confronted him. Or been honest, whatever you want to call it. She should’ve said, Something funny’s going on here. Why do I have two apartments and why has my friend never heard of you? Why didn’t she? No one could blame her now, whatever she did before. No one could hold things against her that she can’t remember doing.

  Doro waits another moment, then asks, “Well, what did he say? When you confronted him?”

  “Not much really.” Helena knows what the next question will be before she hears it.

  “You did confront him, didn’t you? You did ask for an explanation?”

  “Not exactly. I asked whether he’d ever thought I was seeing other men. He said he never had. I didn’t mention this other apartment you were talking about.” The way Doro looks at her with her lips slightly parted makes her feel the need to justify herself. “What could I confront him about? I don’t even know what’s going on. Maybe I’m the villain, here. Did you think of that? This could be a case of me going behind his back and him not knowing a thing about it.”

  “I thought of that, but I don’t think that’s it. You had a full social life and you were always having guests over, sometimes until late at night. You have a bed in your apartment; I assume you slept in it. You’ve never mentioned this neighborhood to me. And this business about a flood is a little too convenient. Ask your neighbors upstairs whether a pipe burst.”

  Helena feels the blood draining out of her, leaving her cold and immobile. Everything Doro is saying makes sense. Hasn’t she had thoughts like these at the back of her mind? Not about the other apartment, of course, but the flood, the way it seems only to have affected her things… and now this story about her things being in the cellar. Are they both lies, or was the flood story meant to cover for moving her things because she was moving out? But why moving out? She already had another apartment. And if that’s not the revelation that led to their separation, then what is?

  “Are you all right?” Doro asks again.

  “Just a little dizzy. I haven’t eaten yet.”

  She lets Doro make her toast and bring it to the table, lets herself be treated like more of an invalid than she really is. When she’s finished eating, Doro says, “I have an idea.”

  Another shudder passes over Helena. She knows she isn’t going to like it. But she does her best to smile. Doro is helping her. You can tell a good medicine by its bad taste.

  “Let’s go to the registry office,” Doro continues. “Your address must be on file there. We can find out how long you’ve had that other apartment.”

  She’s calling a cab before Helena can refuse.

  • • •

  It’s easier than Helena expected to get down the stairs, now that Doro’s here to carry her crutches and take her by one arm.

  She doesn’t quite see the point of this outing. Knowing how long she’s had this apartment won’t tell her anything. She wants to know why she rented it, not when. And they won’t have that kind of information on file. Maybe Doro just wants to prove that she’s been telling the truth. Not that Helena doesn’t believe her. Not that she’s quite able to.

  The sight of the registry office, located in a sprawling complex of familiar brick buildings, reassures Helena. She’s been here a thousand times for some errand or other—replacing a lost driver’s license, doing the paperwork for her marriage, registering at Joachim’s address. It’s not the kind of place where strange revelations are made.

  Doro helps Helena up the steps and leaves her in one of the chairs along the corridor while she draws a number. They’re lucky; the wait isn’t very long. Most people are at work by now.

  “Tell me about yourself,” Helena says when Doro sits down next to her.

  “What?”

  “I don’t remember a
nything about you. Here you are, doing all these things for me, and I feel like you’re a stranger.”

  “But Hel, that’ll pass—”

  “Still.”

  Doro puts her chin on one hand and considers. “Well, I’m from Schwerin originally. I studied some in Berlin, then later in London, then I worked in Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Berlin. I started at CuttingEdge Medien about a year and a half before you. I do mostly motion graphics and some 2D design with you. I have a husband, Georg, whom you’ve met, and we have three children and two rabbits. You wouldn’t have met the rabbits, I guess, because they’re always in the kids’ rooms.” She pauses and looks at Helena to see whether she’s given the right answer, or at least said enough.

  “Okay,” Helena says. Is it enough? She still doesn’t remember any of it. Will that change when she sees the specialist, or will she never get back those years? She and Doro will have to become friends all over again. Maybe they won’t really be friends, but only feel obligated to pretend, because of the past. When, all the time, she won’t feel any closer to Doro than to any other random stranger. But that’s not fair. Doro’s being so nice to her. They’ll be real friends again, sooner or later. She tries to get a hold of the things Doro said, to picture her husband, children, and rabbits, to recall being seated at a crowded family dinner table. But she catches herself imagining it and trying to call that a memory.

  She remembers other friends, Susi and Thomas, Magdalena, Sara, Sepp… These and many others are clear in her memory. When did she last see them? Are they still friends? Why hasn’t she heard from them? You’d think they’d come by and see how she was doing. But maybe they don’t know about the accident. Maybe they’ve fallen out of touch. That can happen with old friends. Just because they were close a few years ago doesn’t mean they are now.

  And then Doro is pulling her to her feet and pointing at the screen where her number is flashing, helping her down the hall to desk number 23.

  The bureaucrat has a sour look on his face as the door opens, which softens when he sees Helena’s crutches. He starts to get up, then settles into his chair again, rubbing his thick gray mustache as Doro helps Helena into one of the two seats across from his desk. How different this is, Helena thinks, from sitting in these two seats with Joachim, giddily telling that woman we wanted to get married.