Sorry

She shakes him by the shoulder. He stirs, opens his eyes, grins.

“Hi, sweetie.”

“You shouldn’t do that,” says Frauke.

“What? And what am I supposed to do in your opinion, if you don’t call back?”

He sits up and she helps him; even though she doesn’t really want to, she helps him. He gets to his feet, groans and sighs, then tries to hug her. Frauke shrinks back.

“Let’s go in,” she says.

Frauke’s flat isn’t big, and with him inside it shrinks by half. Space and time. It all comes back to her father.

“Have you been running again?”

“What does it look like?”

He takes his shoes off and marches into the living room as if he does this every day. Frauke hears him sigh again, then he falls silent. Even though she knows he expects coffee, she puts on water for tea. Green tea that tastes like hay, which she drinks when she wants to punish herself with health.

“What’s that supposed to be?” he asks when she comes into the living room with the tray. He holds up one of the printouts. Black text on a white background. Frauke sets the tray down and takes the printout from his hand.

“Since when have you been doing obituaries?”

Frauke is glad she used a dummy text, otherwise she would have had to give her father answers that she doesn’t want to give him. She sets the printout back on the desk. Her life is none of his business.

“New job?” he asks.

“New girlfriend?” she asks back.

“First some coffee,” her father says to change the subject and walks over to the tray. For a few seconds he stares at the teapot and the two cups as if he can’t work out what their function might be. Frauke can tell from his back that he is repelled. His shoulders are slightly hunched, he looks ridiculous. He looks like all the fathers over the age of fifty that she meets in the street. Preposterous and old.

“What’s this?” he asked, sniffing at the tea. “Cow piss?”

Frauke pushes him away, takes one of the cups and sits down on the sofa. She can’t help grinning, even though she doesn’t want to. Her father sniffs at the tea again and leaves his cup where it is.

“Sweetie,” he says, and walks over to her. His head settles in her lap and his eyes close contentedly. He always uses the same tactic. As if his life ran only on a single track. The gestures, the words.

“I miss you both,” he murmurs.

Frauke feels like crying. It’s been her ritual since she moved out ten years ago. And she always gives her father the same answer, because whether she likes it or not, she’s part of the ritual.

“Your own fault,” she says, although she knows it isn’t his fault.

Frauke drinks her tea, as her father’s head lies heavy in her lap and time seems to stretch out comfortably again.

Gerd Lewin owns a construction company and various plots of land in the north of Berlin, occupied by apartment blocks. He owns shares in two big hotels, and twice a year he changes his girlfriend, who is supposed to replace Frauke’s mother and can’t.

Every two weeks it’s visiting time.

Frauke takes the train down to Potsdam and waits outside the clinic while her father smokes one last cigarette. Always frantically, with one eye on the street, as if he can only accept the presence of the clinic at the very last minute. It’s only when he drops the cigarette on the pavement and crushes it with his shoe that the brick building, with its park and its grandiose entrance, becomes real for him. By now Frauke wants a cigarette as well, but she quells her craving because she doesn’t want to be like her father.

Tanja Lewin has been living in a private clinic for fourteen years. Her life there is barely any different from the life she led at home. From outside everything looks normal, if it weren’t for the times when Frauke’s mother would climb the walls, throw up her dinner, and hide in the wardrobe. Times when she saw the devil everywhere.

If you ask Frauke’s father, he claims he should have seen it coming. He often says he should have seen something coming. The crisis in the building trades, the chlamydia one of his girlfriends gave him, the bad weather, and of course the misunderstandings between him and his daughter.

Frauke’s mother first ran away on her forty-third birthday. The police caught up with her just before Nuremberg. Tanja Lewin had locked herself in a gas station bathroom, and was endlessly calling out her own name. Questioned later, Frauke’s mother didn’t know exactly what had happened. She remembered feeling a sudden urge to get out of Berlin. Then she had a blackout and woke up in the gas station bathroom—her throat was sore from shouting, and two men lifted her into an ambulance.

Frauke’s mother entered psychiatric treatment for two months. The next blackout came a few days after her release. This time Frauke’s mother stayed in Berlin, and was arrested in the bedding department of a furniture store. All she remembered was waiting for the bus on Nollendorfplatz. A man told her the bus was going to be late. A moment later the bus stop had disappeared, and Tanja was naked in the bedding department, clutching a pillow, asking what all the people were doing in her bedroom.

It was in the furniture store that the devil first appeared to Tanja Lewin. He came in the form of a policeman and told everyone to move on. He gathered up Frauke’s mother’s clothes from the floor, and handed them to her under the covers. He was nice. He only spoke when she was dressed. He said, I’ll always be with you now. I will come to you with different faces, but you will always recognize me.

Tanja Lewin would never forget those words.

The doctors studied the Lewin case at length. They questioned Frauke’s mother and gave her medication; they spoke to Frauke’s father and advised him to have his wife put in a clinic. The medication worked to some extent, but round-the-clock care was recommended.

A week later Gerd Lewin signed the papers and put his wife in an exclusive private clinic in Potsdam. The same day Frauke’s father stopped sleeping. He lay in bed at night staring at the ceiling as if waiting for the everyday to return to his life. Incredibly, he went on working, brought money into the house, and did what he had to do to protect the lives of his wife and daughter. Only his eyes gave him away—dark, burned-out hollows that scared Frauke. For over six months Gerd Lewin survived this state, and then one evening he stood by Frauke’s bed.

“Tanja,” he said, “my Tanja.”

Frauke didn’t know whether he thought she was her mother or was only asking after her. She brought him back to his bedroom, covered him with a blanket, and was about to go when he reached for her hand.

“Stay.”

“I’m not Mama,” said Frauke.

“I know,” said her father. “I do know.”

He pulled Frauke onto the bed so that she was lying on her mother’s side.

“Sleep,” he said, and fell asleep immediately.

It was his first sleep in seven months and sixteen days. The next morning he woke up next to Frauke, looked around in surprise, and started crying. He howled until the snot poured unhindered from his nose and mouth.

That was how the rituals between father and daughter began. Gerd Lewin couldn’t get to sleep alone, so for the next few years they shared a bed.

Since Frauke has had her own flat, her father’s insomnia has returned. That’s why he comes to her place from time to time. Because of the calm she gives him, because of the pathetic illusion that his wife is with him again and he can sleep. Love can be cruel. It won’t let you go, it wants to be noticed day and night. Gerd Lewin could write a book about it.

Frauke pushes a pillow under her father’s head and gets up. She is so exhausted that she can no longer think clearly. Nonetheless she sits down for a moment at her Mac, converts the advertisement into a PDF file, and e-mails it to Kris. Now everything’s right. Her work is done. Sleep.

When Frauke wakes up ten hours later, her father has vanished from the sofa, and Kris has left a message on the answering machine:

That’s brilliant! See you later! We’ve got to celebrate!

Frauke plays the message through four times, leaning against the wall, one foot over the other and a hand pressed to her mouth so that the laughter doesn’t explode from her. She is happy. She is really happy.

A week later the advertisement appears in Die Zeit and Der Tagesspiegel. It is set in the style of a high-class obituary, the death of a head of state or something. Eye-catching. The text is literally as Tamara wrote it during the night. It embodies Kris’s idea perfectly.

SORRY