Sorry

“I said that.”

Tamara shakes her head.

“If Kris wants to see anyone, it’s certainly not me.”

“You know he doesn’t mean it like that.”

“So how does he mean it?”

“He … he gets worried. About you. And about the little one, too, of course.”

Frauke deliberately doesn’t say her name. The little one. Kris, on the other hand, always says the name, although she’s asked him not to. And that hurts. They don’t talk about Jenni. Jenni is the wound that does not stop bleeding.

Tamara tries to see Jenni twice a week. She isn’t allowed to talk to her. She isn’t allowed to show herself to her. On especially lonely nights Tamara walks through the south of Berlin and stops in front of Jenni’s house. Always well hidden, as if waiting for someone, she looks to see if there’s a light in Jenni’s room. That’s what she and David have agreed upon.

Jenni’s father worked his way up over the last two years and now owns a bookshop in Dahlem. Tamara met him at accounting school in Leipzig and became involved for the first time with a man who was grounded and had goals in life. After the relationship had been going for a year Tamara got pregnant. In spite of the pill. Frauke said it was all due to her hormones.

“If your hormones are going crazy, you may as well chuck your pills down the toilet.”

Tamara wasn’t ready for a child. Although her hormones claimed the opposite, she didn’t feel like a mother and wanted an abortion. David fell to pieces when he heard that. He talked about their great love, their future, and how wonderful it was all going to be. Tamara should trust him.

“Please, trust us.”

Interminable discussions followed, and in the end Tamara gave in, even though she didn’t love David. Being in love with someone and loving someone are two completely different things as far as she’s concerned. She can fall in love with a new person every week, but she only wants to love once. David just wasn’t the man who totally set her heart alight. He was good to her, he laid the world at her feet, but for true love that wasn’t enough. Tamara stayed with him because he had goals and had determined their course

Jenni came into the world, and it was a fiasco. Tamara learned too late that you should never try things out on a child. It’s not like choosing a kind of wallpaper, getting out at the wrong station, or entering a relationship. You can take wallpaper down again, there’s always a next train, and relationships can be ended—you can’t do that with a child. It’s there, and it wants to stay.

To make things worse David was the ideal father; he never lost his temper and always took plenty of time, while Tamara was climbing the walls.

She managed seven months before giving up.

She knows it was wicked and mean to go, but she couldn’t help it. She didn’t feel enough for little Jenni, and was afraid of becoming one of those women who bring up a child who’ll spend her whole life in therapy talking about the lack of affection she received from her mother. So Tamara took flight. And it wasn’t that Tamara didn’t feel anything at all. It was a slowly progressing detachment from herself. She had the feeling of becoming less and less every day, while Jenni was taking up more and more room. As Tamara didn’t want to lose herself, she went, leaving father and daughter in the lurch.

David was disappointed, David was furious, but he said he understood and accepted Tamara’s decision. He assumed custody on the condition that Tamara gave him the chance of a new start. He didn’t want any half measures. He wanted Tamara completely and totally, or else she was to disappear completely from his life.

And that was how Tamara became a ghost.

That same year David married another woman, they started a family, and Jenni got a new mother. For a year Tamara was fine with that, a second year began, and then everything happened as she had been warned it would. By girlfriends, by her family. A painful longing for Jenni exploded inside her. She started to doubt her decision, she started to burn with yearning.

David didn’t want to know anything about Tamara’s change of heart. He said the door was closed now, and would stay closed.

It hurts Tamara when people talk about Jenni. And for this reason she stays out of Kris’s way, because Kris is of the opinion that Tamara should do something about her yearning. He thinks that Jenni belongs with her mother. Regardless of what David has to say on the matter.

“Whatever the two of you agreed on,” he said on New Year’s Eve, “is completely worthless. You are and remain her mother. It gets on my nerves the way you run around the place suffering. Pull yourself together, damn it. Everybody makes mistakes. You have to stand by your daughter. No ifs or buts.”

Everyone makes mistakes.

Tamara understood all that. She gets more advice from all sides than she can deal with. And yet she doesn’t want to meet her daughter. Because what if that feeling of estrangement came back one day? Who’s to say that Tamara wouldn’t take flight again after two days by her daughter’s side? There are no guarantees. Tamara would give anything for a few guarantees.

That’s almost it. You’ve met nearly all of them now. Kris and Frauke and Tamara. The fourth member of the confederation is missing. His name is Wolf. He will be the only one that you will meet personally, for just a moment, which is a shame because he’s like you. You’d have got along. You both walk through life feeling guilty. The big difference is that Wolf is wrong to feel his guilt, while you are completely aware of your responsibility, which is why you’re slowly going mad.

At the moment Wolf is less than thirty yards away from Frauke and Tamara. He is holding a stack of books in his arms, and even though he would never admit it, he’d be really glad for a bit of company.

Let’s not keep him waiting.

WOLF

FOR A WHILE WOLF drove a truck. Out in the early morning to the central market, then delivering to the fruit stalls and the little neighborhood grocery stores. After that came a phase in which he did the rounds for various record labels, distributing promo CDs to the shops. That wasn’t the right thing either. But he does enjoy selling books outside the university. There are nice female students, who like to haggle and go for coffee. Otherwise, Wolf is in the fresh air and can read as long as nothing is going on. He gets most of the books from Hugendubel or Wohlthat. Today it’s Woolworth’s turn.

Wolf is one of those writer types who only venture into writing very cautiously. He says he’s collecting experiences, but in fact he uses that to hide the fact that he isn’t sure what story he has to tell. His first great novel is waiting to be written. Short stories and poems are his bridge to that dream.

Since waking up Wolf has had a brilliant dialogue going on in his head, he just wants to buy this last stack of books before sitting down in a café and putting the words in order. He doesn’t know that his course has been predetermined.

On the way to the registers he sees Frauke.

Wolf is about to duck. He has nothing against Frauke, in fact he makes a lot of time for her, they mail one another, they phone, but there’s no getting past the fact that there’s a lot of history between the two of them, and sometimes Wolf doesn’t want to see Frauke. The past can be like a millstone hung around your neck at the most inappropriate moment.

At moments like these.

Men don’t like to let their defeats simply happen, they experience them like a bad film, over and over again from the start, and enjoy the bitterness of loss as if it were something precious. When Wolf thinks back to his time with Frauke, he isn’t really thinking about Frauke. He is thinking about the woman who extinguished the memory of Frauke. That’s exactly where sand gets into the works, and the machinery of his thoughts begins to falter.

Her name was Erin. For two weeks, every hour, every minute, she and Wolf stuck together. That’s what love must feel like, Wolf had thought then, because everything seemed in focus and super-sharp. His senses were overstimulated, his belly constantly hungry. When Wolf went to the bathroom, he left the door open to go on listening to Erin. And listening was required, because that woman could talk. It was incredible. Wolf found everything she said right and good. Of course a lot of nonsense came out of her mouth as well, but during that brief period it didn’t bother Wolf for a second. His head transformed even that nonsense into razor-sharp philosophy. Wolf belonged to her completely.

It was Erin who had sought out Wolf. It happened on the night bus. Wolf was on his way home from a concert. Erin came and stood next to him, said Hi, and then said her name. Erin. It sounded like a question. Wolf, said Wolf, and made it sound like an answer. She took him by the hand, the bus stopped, they got out, and in a deserted playground a few yards from the bus stop they had sex together for the first time. It was very quick. Wordless. Wolf came right away.

“At last,” Erin said afterwards.

“At last,” Wolf said too, knowing that she would disappear almost immediately and he would lose her forever. He saw himself spending the rest of his life walking around the place with a broken heart. From the beginning Wolf had had that premonition.

They didn’t part for a minute. Time existed for them alone. Wolf lost ten pounds because he more or less forgot about eating. His new life consisted of vodka, television, dope, Pizza Express, sex, cigarettes, Vaseline, music, sweets, baths, talking and talking some more, of sunrises, sunsets, laughing, the best deep sleep of his life and of course one hundred percent of Erin.

On the fourteenth day her cell phone rang. Up until that point Wolf didn’t even know she had one. It was three in the morning, and Wolf said:

“Don’t answer it.”

Erin took the call, listened briefly, and hung up. Wolf wanted to know who was calling at that time of night, but before he could ask, Erin turned onto her belly and stuck her bottom in the air.

“Come on, fuck me again.”

Wolf didn’t take the trouble to pull down her panties. He pushed them aside to reveal her cunt. He couldn’t understand how this woman could always, but really always, be moist and ready for him.

It would be the last time.

Afterwards Erin was in the shower, and Wolf was sitting cross-legged on the lid of the toilet, rolling a joint and listening to her.

“As far as I’m concerned this could go on forever,” he said during a pause.

“What do you mean?”