Blood Relative (13 page)

– Addresses are registered at office called the Einwohnermeldeamt.

– Can follow people through those offices because have to give previous and next address.

– In East Germany same thing was called ZMK = Zentrale Meldekartei.

– Oh … great … NOW they tell me … There is a central Berlin office for birth certificates.

– QUESTION: who could fake documents in E. Germany?? Was there organized crime (cf. Russian Mafia) and/or resistance movement? Otherwise has to be people in charge of system = Stasi.

– QUESTION: or was name changed in West? When did she go to West? Ask Pete … how? What reason for question?

UPDATE: see chart for certificate trawl …

I followed the trail to a separate document and once again was given an insight into the thoroughness with which my brother went about his business.

He’d started out trying to find any record of a Mariana Slavik, born on 14 June 1980. There was no such certificate.

So then he’d asked whether any girl called Mariana Slavik had been born at any time, five years either side of that date. Again, he’d not found any record of any such birth. A note next to that information read: ‘NO Mariana Slaviks anywhere. Less than 150 Slaviks in whole German phonebook. Plus, Mariana is weird spelling. Usual way is Mariane, with an “e”. Where is this bloody woman???’

In order to find her, Andy had widened his search. He looked at all the girls born on 14 June 1980. There were twenty-eight of them in all, whom he’d arranged alphabetically from Renate Alback through to Heike Zuckerman, with all the data about parents, place of birth and so on that the certificates provided.

None of the girls was called Mariana, or Slavik. Three of them, however, had asterisks by their names: Marinella Knopf, Mariamne Schwartz and MariaAngelika Wahrmann.

Andy had obviously highlighted them as being the closest to Mariana, but he clearly wasn’t convinced that meant very much, because just below the list he’d written:

– Follow these up … all of them … will have to make 2nd trip back Berlin … BOLLOCKS!!!

– QUESTION: what if birth-date is fake, too? Kid would still want to keep same birthday, surely – parties, prezzies, etc. – but easy change one or two years either way … check them too, next trip?

– BIG QUESTION: HOW DO I TELL PETE ABOUT ALL THIS??

– Talk to Mariana first? Maybe she has reasonable explanation …

– NO … MUCH BIGGER QUESTION: WTF hasn’t P noticed any of this himself? She must be the greatest shag of all time to pull the wool over his eyes so well.

I put my pencil down and closed the laptop. The bubble of excitement I’d felt just a few minutes earlier had suddenly deflated, replaced by something much closer to humiliation. In my head I could hear Chief Inspector Yeats asking me, ‘How well do you know your wife, Mr Crookham?’

I looked again at Andy’s question to himself – ‘Talk to Mariana first?’ – and as I did so, my dreams of proving Yeats wrong seemed like nothing more than pathetic schoolboy fantasies. There, in writing, were words that seemed to support the precise scenario that he had suggested as Andy arrived at our house, bursting with ideas, and discovered I wasn’t there. It was easy to imagine him unable to stop himself asking Mariana endless questions about something, driving her to the point where she suddenly lashed out, and …

No! That couldn’t be it!

Of course, Andy was right, up to a point. I had accepted everything Mariana had said to me without question. And yes, shagging had something to do with it – I felt like I’d won the lottery every time I saw her naked. But that really wasn’t the most important thing. It was more that I believed we had something magical, a charmed life, and I hadn’t wanted to do anything that would break the spell. So I didn’t question her about her family or her past. Instead, I always described my family to her in a way that suggested there wasn’t really so much difference from the distance between Mum, Andy and me and the total chasm between Mariana and her background. That way our dysfunctional families bound us together and increased that fantastic sense of being a little team: us against the world with no distractions anywhere.

I loved the woman, all right? Sometimes that means wanting to know every single scrap of information about the person you adore. But in our case it had meant keeping the curtain between us and the outside world tightly shut, for fear that any light should be let in upon the magic. But as any honest magician will tell you, his tricks are not real. They’re all just a matter of distraction and illusion. So now I had to ask myself: had our marriage been an illusion, too? And once I saw through the trick, what the hell was I going to find?

20

If I’d understood Dr Wray correctly, Mariana did not consciously know what had traumatized her. But maybe her subconscious had let slip some clues: something in her words or behaviour that had indicated something was wrong, but that I would have missed, or ignored at the time.

That night, over dinner in the hotel restaurant, I found myself going back into the past, taking out all those echoes of happier times and looking at them afresh. I thought about what it must have been like for Mariana to be the product of not one dictatorship but two. She had grown up in a land that had gone straight from Nazism to Stalinism, and though she had only been ten when the Berlin Wall came down, it was always obvious that she had some sort of race memory of oppression and a visceral hatred of anything that resembled it.

She called herself a ‘neo-liberal’, meaning that she loathed communism, socialism, in fact any form of politics that even hinted at state control or the loss of personal freedom. Stories about the spread of CCTV cameras or the use of spy chips in rubbish bins provoked an anger in her that went far beyond obligatory suburban outrage. She never, ever, talked about the specifics of her East German girlhood, but the Stasi were always bogeymen in her eyes. ‘They are still out there, all of them,’ she would say. ‘The people who led this system are free today … they are police officers, lawyers and politicans and they are laughing in our faces. Someone should find them and shoot them in the head.’

Moments like that were very rare, sudden flashes of lightning across a sky that was otherwise calm and sunny. Now, though, the violence of her speech took on a new significance. Just like the email that Andy had been sent it was a reminder of the deeper, darker culture of violence from which it came. And as one thought unfurled into another through a mind relaxed by a bottle of rich red wine, another memory came to me, bearing another clue to her personality.

It was an evening after work, two or three years ago. Mariana and I were having a pint with Nick. He amazed me by saying that he’d decided to go to a therapist. ‘I need help,’ he said, with a vulnerability that I’d never heard in him before. ‘I mean, chasing skirt, never settling down, notches on the bedpost and all that … it’s fair enough when you’re twenty, even thirty. But I’m turning forty this year and I’m in serious danger of becoming a sad old lech … So I think I need some help.’

‘Good for you,’ I said. ‘I’m impressed.’

Nick snorted derisively, thinking I was taking the mick.

‘No, I mean it,’ I assured him. ‘Takes a lot of balls to admit there’s something wrong and even more to do something about it.’ I raised my glass: ‘Here’s to you … you sad old lech!’

Nick laughed and knocked his glass against mine. Then he looked at Mariana, who’d not said a word, and asked, ‘How about you, M? You ever had your head examined?’

His tone was perfectly friendly, but he couldn’t have provoked a more venomous response if he’d trodden on a rattlesnake. ‘Never!’ snapped Mariana. ‘Psychiatrists are all liars … all of them! They pretend they can read people’s minds when it is all just bullshit. How can they see inside my head?’

‘Whoa!’ said Nick, rolling his eyes at me. A minute or two later we were very deliberately talking about sport and letting Mariana calm down in her own time. The subject of psychiatry was never mentioned again. But as I sipped my wine, one idea about heads became associated with another glossed-over memory from our earliest days together.

I said we were married a year after we’d first flirted, that day in the car outside the Blacks’ house. That’s true. But it’s not the whole story. It wasn’t exactly a smooth, linear process. Nor was this the first time I’d been unable to communicate with Mariana.

After her first few weeks as an intern at our practice, she went away on holiday, then back to college to study for her postgraduate degree. There was just one catch. She didn’t give me her address. She changed her phone, too. The only way we could communicate was via email and instant messaging.

It was an incredibly manipulative way of playing hard to get, since she completely controlled the terms of our communication. At first, though, I was too giddy with excitement to care. Our hours of online chat revealed a woman who was clever, funny, well-read, filled with curiosity and original ideas and, above all, totally unabashed about sex. She was blatantly, graphically, hilariously frank about what turned her on and she provoked me into my own outbursts of personal pornography: a filthy honesty that I’d never dared to express to a woman before. As her messages popped up on my screen like darts from a dirty-minded Cupid, I was a junkie, a crack-whore for Mariana’s strange, artificial substitute for love.

One night as we were chatting she added a new, visual element to our communications. She’d just told me how she’d gone with some university friends to see a Sheffield United match at Bramall Lane. To prove the point she emailed me one of those pictures of a group of people, laughing hysterically, that make one feel hopelessly cut off from their private joke. Mariana was playing peekaboo from behind a guy’s shoulder, just her red-and-white-striped bobble hat and a huge pair of Jackie O sunglasses visible, like the cutest Where’s Wally in the world.

The next picture came later that week as a response to me complaining about a lousy day at work. She wrote back:

–
AH, POOR BABY. WAIT A MOMENT I CHEER YOU UP
!!

A couple of minutes later a message arrived in my email inbox with a jpeg file attached. I opened it to find a picture of Mariana. She was at the beach, at one of those playgrounds for bodybuilders and fitness freaks, hanging from a pair of gymnast’s rings. The picture was taken from the side and showed her spectacular body in profile like a magnificent pendant sculpture. Her left leg was vertical, the toes arched down like a ballerina
en pointe
, while her right was pulled up, the knee bent to form a perfect triangle. Her back and stomach were sleek and lean, the dazzling seaside light glinting off her tanned, sun-creamed skin. Her breasts, in a polka-dot bikini top, swelled beneath the tensed muscles of her arms, behind which I could just catch a glimpse of her forehead beneath a tumble of golden hair. My reply was hardly inspired:

–
WOW
!

And so it went on. Mariana used to complain, only half joking, about what she called her ‘gigantic butt’. In reality, it was as perfect a combination of curves as any man ever beheld. One night, she messaged me having just come in from a party, a little drunk I suspected, judging by the way she wrote, complaining that yet another man had been grabbing her:

–
HERE, I SHOW YOU WHERE HE PINCHED ME
!!

Next thing I knew, she’d sent a low-resolution shot, presumably taken from her computer camera, showing the ass in question only partially covered by a pair of white hotpants Kylie Minogue might have thought twice before attempting. I got the strong impression she had nothing on underneath.

The following night, she gave me a frontal view. She was standing with her hips cocked in front of a full-length mirror in what I presumed was her bedroom, and I hoped to God it wasn’t anyone else’s, wearing black high heels, hold-up stockings, minuscule knickers and bra. Her left hand – I knew it was hers by the watch on her wrist, which she used to wear to work – was perched saucily on her hip. Her right was holding the camera to her eye. But her face had disappeared behind a blaze of flash, reflected back from the mirror to the lens. She was, effectively, headless.

It suddenly struck me that her face had not been visible in any of the pictures she had sent me. So I wrote back…

–
SO HOT!! BUT WHERE IS YOUR LOVELY FACE
?

–
NOT TONITE. LOOK REALLY BAD
.

–
YOU COULD NEVER LOOK BAD
!!

–
HAIR DIRTY, SPOTS. I’M VERY VAIN, I KNOW
!

–
FACE! FACE! FACE
! _ _

–
NO! I LOOK SCHRECKLICH!!! TOMORROW MORNING, MAYBE

I looked up
schrecklich
on Babelfish. It meant ‘terrible’. I told myself that this was just typical female insecurity, that strange combination of vanity and self-loathing that makes even beautiful women see flaws where none exist. Next morning, to my surprise, she really did send me a picture as promised. She was sitting on the floor in her jeans, one leg crossed over the other, her face looking straight at the camera. There was just one catch. She had shot it in such darkness that she was barely visible. Even when I put it through an enhancer program, with the exposure banged way up, all I got was a pixellated image of a flash of blonde hair, the outlines of two huge eyes and a blurred, unreadable expression.

Now, when I thought about the compulsiveness with which Mariana had hidden her face in those photographs, it seemed to connect to her incredible suspicion of any therapist who might want to analyse her. Why does someone hide their face? Because they do not want to be recognized. Why would someone fear analysis? Because a shrink might get them wrong … or, even worse, the shrink might discover what they were really like. What was it that Mariana didn’t want anyone to see? Was there something terrible in there, in her head – something
schrecklich
– that she desperately wanted to be kept hidden? Was that what Andy had somehow stumbled upon – the secret shame that Mariana was willing to do anything to protect … including kill?