Retrograde Page 12

  “We’d like a copy of her registry record,” Doro says.

  “ID?”

  Helena fumbles in her wallet and hands the man her ID. It occurs to her that she still doesn’t have the keys to the apartment, that she won’t be able to get back in later. What will she tell Joachim? But what nonsense. He probably already knows more than she does.

  “Bachlein, Bachlein…” The man searches for the file on his clunky computer.

  Helena looks over at Doro, who gives her a reassuring smile. What is there to worry about here? Since there’s no outcome that will answer her questions, there’s neither anything to worry about, nor to hope for.

  “Here we are,” the man says as the oversized printer next to his desk clatters into motion. He hands Helena a piece of paper and wishes them a good day. Then, remembering something, he asks to see her ID again.

  Helena hands it to him without looking up from the piece of paper. There it is, her registered address for the past two-and-a-half years. She can’t believe it. But she has to. It’s printed in clear black ink, leaving nothing open to interpretation. What could’ve possessed her to register there? And how could she have kept it from Joachim?

  “Excuse me,” she says, just as the man starts to say something to her. They both stop and then start talking at once again. Finally, he waits for her to continue. “Is this the only address I’m registered at?”

  “It is. If you want I can also give you a list of your former addresses, but then, you already know those, don’t you?” Helena stares at him without responding. “While you’re here, I’m just going to put a new address sticker on your ID. It’s still got your old address for some reason.”

  Helena watches, unable to move or speak, as he pastes a sticker with an unfamiliar address over her ID. When she doesn’t reach to take it from him, he sets it on the desk, and Doro tucks it into Helena’s wallet.

  “Thank you,” she says for Helena, and takes her friend by one arm, not because Helena can’t walk on her own, but because she doesn’t seem to know it’s time to leave.

  • • •

  Outside the registry office, Helena leans against the railing of the staircase and tries to regain her balance. She looks down at the paper, up at the green and gray branches cutting across the hazy blue sky, and down at the paper again.

  She knew that she had this apartment, that she’d had it for a while. So what’s the big deal? She already believed Doro or she wouldn’t have come here in the first place. Still, it’s somehow more than she expected. How could she have had the life this paper says she did for over two years, and have no idea about it? The strangest thing is that she’s only registered at this address. What would make her cancel her registration at her and Joachim’s apartment? Does he know? He hasn’t said a word about this apartment. And it’s not like the registry office would call him up and say: By the way, your wife just told us she doesn’t live with you anymore. But Doro said it would’ve been impossible for him not to know.

  “Are you okay, Hel?”

  What a question. “Sure,” she says. “I’m just a little bit confused.”

  “Me, too.” Doro steps out of the way of a group of foreign students paging through photocopied documents, then offers Helena her arm to help her down the stairs.

  “And now?” Helena asks when they’ve reached the bottom.

  “I think we should take a look at your apartment.”

  JOACHIM

  Joachim takes a long lunch break. At first, he thought of going by Helena’s to get some books so he could go straight home after work. But he decides against it. He’d have to bring the books to the office with him, and people would ask questions. He wants them to keep seeing him as the faithful husband looking after his injured wife, handling a difficult episode in their otherwise peaceful, normal married life. If everyone around him thinks that, maybe he can, too.

  Instead, he walks along the canal, enjoying the mellow warmth of the sun through the thin film of clouds. He feels the same strange blend of anticipation and regret he felt as his last year of school came to an end, and later his last year of college. But what is there to regret? If he’s careful, if he doesn’t make any mistakes, he has everything to look forward to. Helena’s already feeling better, and her condition will only improve. He’ll tell her the truth any day now, and then that will be behind them. She’ll remember everything sooner or later, the good times as well as the bad. But what she’ll remember best is what’s most recent, the way he looked after her when she was hurt, the way they managed to put all their fights behind them and be together like they always should’ve been.

  His heart races and he walks faster to keep up with it. The clouds are melting away from the sun, and when breaks in the vegetation reveal the water, the light on it dazzles him. A future with Helena. That’s what he has, or will have when everything’s sorted out. Somehow, he hasn’t thought much further than getting her settled in his apartment and making it look like she never left. But that’s just what’s going on now, something that will soon come to an end. It’s their future he should be thinking about. Going away for long weekends, giving each other a massage after a stressful day at work, having good friends over for dinner and wine. It all seems so ordinary, and yet so impossible. They should move to another apartment. Maybe that’s the problem. His place is already so full of memories it’s hard to fit the future in. They’ll at least have to redecorate. Something like that, something new to signal that they’re really starting over.

  His mind is so full of plans that he steps onto the bridge without waiting for a break in traffic. A car honks and slams on its brakes as Joachim jumps back off the road.

  “Asshole!” the motorcyclist behind the car yells, either at the driver, Joachim, or the whole world.

  Joachim waits for them to pass and then continues across the road. You’d think he’d be more careful after what happened to Helena. What if he’d been run over and it had ended just like that? Helena would never know quite what had happened. She’d figure out the past few years sooner or later, but no one could tell her, not even her own memory, all that he’d done and had planned for them. She’d only know that he lied to her, without ever understanding why.

  His chest clenches with a sudden, powerful sadness that stings all the way up to the corners of his watering eyes. He has to remind himself that it didn’t happen, that he’s fine and they still have everything ahead of them. Maybe it’s only the change in light on this stretch of the canal—the trees taller, the shadows deeper, and the path closer to the water. It’s just the car that startled him. He veers to the right to dodge a jogger shouting into his Bluetooth headset, then continues slowly, watching the dusty path at his feet. He’ll ask Helena where she wants to move to, what part of town she wants to try out. They could adopt a dog. Maybe even a kid, once things are more stable. They aren’t that old yet. They could take turns working from home.

  That would help patch things up, too. Not just with Helena, but with all their friends and relatives. Tom and Susi had him over once or twice after the breakup, trying to play the neutral parties, but for most of Helena’s friends, he might as well have been dead.

  Even when things were good, Helena’s parents had taken a while to warm up to him, but he won them over in the end and he can do it again. He hasn’t told his own parents about what’s going on between him and Helena, but they always liked her. They’d be thrilled. He’s still never heard the end of how he messed up the best chance he ever got. But his parents never were as supportive as hers. Anyway, once their old friends see that Helena’s forgiven him, they’ll forgive and forget, too. After all, what was he really guilty of? And if he was at fault, that’s in the past and he’s doing enough to make up for it now. Or they’ll make new friends, he and Helena. Other sophisticated couples they’ll go to readings and galleries with. For all the women he’s been involved with since Helena, he realizes, he hasn’t made very many new friends. Friendly acquaintances, sure. New and old colleag
ues he can grab a beer with, watch a soccer game. No one closer than that.

  But sometimes you take a wrong turn. Then you always want to keep going and try to make the path you’ve chosen be the right way, try to follow it as far as you can. When what you really should’ve done all along is double back to the point where you went wrong, and fix your mistake.

  That’s what he’s doing. He’s done his time without Helena, tried out how that is, and he knows now that he’s better off with her. He even likes himself better just knowing she’s in his life. He’ll tell her that. He’ll tell her all the good things about her, all the things he loves. He won’t keep it to himself, won’t try to be the winner in the relationship and the fights and petty little resentments by keeping his feelings to himself. He’ll expose himself, make himself weak and vulnerable, give himself up to her. If she sticks around.

  He stops abruptly as if something had struck him, then stumbles to the nearest bench. That, that thought is the one he’s been hiding from all this time. Thinking so hard about the distant future to keep from thinking about that one little question of the immediate future: whether she’ll want to stay. He leans back against the decrepit wood of the bench and allows himself to think the worst: that she could hear all he has to say, all he has planned for them and is ready to sacrifice for her, and still say, Sorry, you had your chance. That she could simply walk out of his life again, the way she did three years ago. What hope would be left after that?

  Sure, he survived it once and he could survive it again. But he doesn’t want to just survive. He wants the bright future he’s been cobbling together in his thoughts for the two of them; he wants to look forward to all those things, and a thousand others he hasn’t had time to think of yet. He’s not really religious, but surely there was some reason she came into his life again, some reason she stepped so blithely in front of a speeding truck. And some reason she never—officially, at least—severed the tie between them after she left.

  He looks at his watch and gets up to hurry back to his office. He’ll already get home late if he stops by her apartment again, or he can skip lunch tomorrow to make up the time. He tries to think of practical things, to plan how he’ll start the conversation about their past, but the dull drone of dread within him rises to a point where he can hardly hear his thoughts. As he watches his leather shoes kicking up dust, he feels a painful certainty that all his hopes and plans were nothing more than the fairytales he repeated to himself as a child when he couldn’t sleep. What will things look like when he and Helena finally wake up?

  HELENA

  “Well, here it is.”

  Helena nearly loses her balance when Doro stops in front of an old apartment building with crumbling molding on the façade and DEATH TO CAPIT— spray-painted on the front door, as if the left-leaning vandal had been interrupted in the middle of his work. She doesn’t remember the graffiti, but that could be new; there are a thousand other half-visible sayings, threats, odes, and tags scrawled on the door beneath it. It could be any door, anywhere. She tries to make an association with the building, the crumbling stone and the windows curtained in a dozen brilliant colors. Which one is hers? She doesn’t know. Instead, she feels like someone going to an apartment viewing, trying to picture the life she could have in an unknown house, once the lease is signed.

  “Do you know if any of your neighbors has a spare key?” Doro asks, then cartoonishly strikes her forehead. “Oh, sorry.”

  For a moment, they can’t hold back their laughter, but when the moment passes, the door to Helena’s building is still locked.

  “Let’s have a look at the names,” Doro suggests. “I might recognize one.”

  “Or I might,” Helena says. This time neither of them laughs. She watches Doro staring at the list of names, one finger hovering over the buzzers, waiting to press the right one. Her face has the same strained concentration Helena’s felt so often lately, trying to will herself to remember something it feels like she’s never known.

  “It’s no use,” Doro says finally. “We’ll have to buzz until someone lets us in, and then I’ll go door-to-door and ask.”

  Helena nods. What else can they do? She doesn’t mind about the difficulty. In a way, it makes things simpler. There’s no need to ask herself any questions now, only the task at hand: How will they get in? And Doro’s going to handle that, so there’s really nothing to worry about.

  No one answers the first three buzzers. It’s early enough for them all to be at work, but with any luck, there’ll be an old lady or stay-at-home parent around, some students in a shared apartment.

  When Doro presses the fourth buzzer, an irritable man’s voice asks what they want.

  Doro nudges Helena, who begins, “This is your neighbor, Ms. Bachlein, and I’ve forgotten my keys. I wanted to ask whether—”

  “Ms. who?”

  “Bachlein.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  The sound of him slamming down the receiver shakes both women so that it takes them a moment to continue.

  So my neighbor’s never heard of me, Helena thinks. Did I really live here? Maybe it’s all just a misunderstanding. Then she remembers the man who lives across the hall from her and Joachim. He seemed like he’d never seen her before, either. Maybe she never really lived anywhere.

  Doro continues to make her way through the buzzers. Toward the bottom of the list, a sleepy young voice answers. Helena has to explain twice, but then Müller / Göbek buzzes them in, after adding helpfully, “I don’t know how you’ll get into your apartment, though. Shit, right?”

  The narrow foyer is cluttered with rusty bikes and third-hand strollers. The damp, earthy smell seems familiar to Helena, and this time, she doesn’t second-guess herself, but sits down at the foot of the stairs to close her eyes and breathe it in.

  “I’ll go see if anyone’s got your spare key,” Doro says.

  Helena nods. She feels she’s on the brink of something. There’s an idea, a sense of something in her like a word on the tip of her tongue, but one false move could scare it away forever. It’s best not to pursue it.

  She opens her eyes and rummages in her purse for a pen. She doesn’t have any paper, but she limps over to the mailboxes and takes some moving company’s flyer out of the junk mail bin.

  She makes it with one crutch, and at first, the more obvious thrill of managing on her own overshadows a second surprise: how natural it was to walk over here. Like she knew exactly where she was going, like she’d done it a thousand times. Because she has. She looks up and sees her overflowing mailbox, the label with her name written on it. And that is her handwriting.

  The building still doesn’t look familiar; there’s still only the slightest sense that she’s been here before. But that’s enough.

  She presses the flyer against the wall and writes:

  Dear Neighbors, A couple of you have my spare keys and I really need them because I’ve been in the hospital and lost mine. If you still have them, please call me at—

  She has to look through her little prepaid phone to find her own number. She adds it and props the note above the mailboxes where everyone will see it.

  Will it do any good? I always keep to myself, Helena thinks. Am I really the kind of person who lives in a city and knows my neighbors? She feels that, whatever else has changed in the past few years, that won’t have.

  But she lived in this apartment for two or three years. It’s easy to forget how long that is, how much can happen in that amount of time. After all, the neighbors could’ve befriended her.

  She can hear distant footsteps in the stairwell, but she can’t tell whether they’re going up or coming down. Poor Doro. There are a lot of neighbors to ask.

  If she and Doro are so close, why doesn’t Doro have her spare keys? Again she feels a flicker of doubt. Then again, Doro never claimed to be her best friend. There could be any number of other, closer ones, all of them wondering right now where Helena is and why she doesn’t get in touch. Do
ro’s just the only number she had. And in Doro’s place, she’d probably also feel obligated to get to the bottom of this. Someone has to, and she certainly wasn’t going to on her own.

  She looks again at her mailbox, the pile of ads spilling out of the open slot. There might be something worthwhile in there, too. A clue, so to speak. How long has she been away? There could be all kinds of important things she’s been missing.

  It’s not just the keys to her apartment she needs, though. The key to her mailbox is gone along with the rest of them. She takes a step back toward the stairs, then stops and approaches the mailboxes again. This isn’t a top-secret room at the Federal Intelligence Service. First she reaches her left hand into the slit and pulls out everything she can get without opening the mailbox. She drops the pile on the floor behind her. She can feel that there’s more in there, but she can’t get at it.

  She runs her finger over the lock. It really doesn’t look very complicated. She sticks her pen into the slot and jiggles it. No luck, but if she had something a little flatter…

  Suddenly nervous, she looks over her shoulder. What if someone sees her? Let them. She’s got an ID and a certificate of registration to prove this is her mailbox. Besides, who would break in with two casts and a pair of crutches?

  She tries a hairclip, a folded-up piece of paper, the corner of her bank card and the zipper on her wallet. If only she had a screwdriver with a small bit! She’s sweating and tearing through her belongings with tears of frustration in her eyes, unable to stop. Once she’s tried everything she can find, she starts trying the same things over again, frantic, clumsy, scraping her fingertips and tearing her cuticles.