Out of the Line of Fire (28 page)

The door opened and a young girl poked her head around from behind it. She had strikingly intense blue eyes which looked enquiringly up at me. I felt momentarily caught off-balance as I stared down at her. She would have been five or six years old. Her hair had grown darker and I watched as she brushed a lock of it back from her forehead.

Anya? I asked.

Yes, she said.

Is your mother home?

Without answering she turned back into the house and I heard her yell: Mummy, there’s a man here to see you.

So, I had been right, I thought to myself.

I heard another set of footsteps approaching the door. This was really it.

The door opened fully to reveal a young woman in her twenties. Standing there she was even more remarkably attractive than the photographs of her had led me to believe. Her dark eyes looked at me almost expressionlessly at first, then she began to frown slightly. Her hand reached up in the same gesture Anya had made to brush a loose strand of hair away from her face and then returned to rest on the door frame.

Yes? There was a slight edge to her voice, something anxious in her tone.

Are you Elena, Elena Schönborn?

Yes, she said again.

I’m a friend of Wolfi’s. We were students together at Heidelberg. Look, I know this is probably difficult for you but could I come in for a minute? I won’t keep you long.

She hesitated a moment and then opened the door and led me into a small sitting room.

Won’t you sit down, she said. Would you like something to drink, tea or coffee or something else?

No, no thank you.

Anya came back into the room and stood by her mother’s chair. Elena wrapped her arm around her waist. Apart from their eyes, the similarity was remarkable.

You see, the thing is, I said, I came looking for Wolfi. I had no idea that he was…Well, I had no idea what had happened. It was only by accident that I found out yesterday. It came as quite a shock to me…Quite a shock.

How do you mean, it was only by accident that you found out yesterday?

I told her what had happened, the phone calls, walking into town, the cemetery, seeing Wolfi’s grave.

Yes, she said when I had finished, it was a terrible time, absolutely terrible. And now with my father’s illness…

She got up, took a cigarette out of a packet on the mantelpiece, lit it and sat down again.

Do you know what happened? I said.

No. No one really knows. It was horrible really, not knowing. Anya darling, why don’t you go out and play for a little while.

But I want to stay here with you.

Come on, sweetheart, it’s just for five minutes. I won’t be long, promise.

She pulled Anya to her and kissed her on the forehead.

Okay?

Okay.

She watched as Anya left the room.

Where was I…Ah, yes. The thing is, we didn’t know where Wolfi was. Oh I mean, we knew he was in Berlin; my father used to send money to an account there for him every month. Then in, it must have been May or early June, my mother suddenly became ill. A week later she was diagnosed as having cancer. They gave her a year, perhaps two.

She paused to take a puff of her cigarette. She waved the smoke away.

She died three months later, she said almost to herself. You know, my mother had never been sick a day in her life. Never. When she was young she had been quite extraordinarily beautiful…

She got up from the couch and went to the window. She pulled the curtain aside a little and looked out.

Yes, I said. Wolfi once showed me some photographs of her taken around the time she married your father.

Wolfi absolutely idolized her. She could have been a great pianist if it hadn’t been for…She hesitated. Well, if things had been different.

If your parents had got on better?

She looked at me.

Wolfi told me your parents didn’t get on.

Yes, she said. Although at first, they did. In an odd sort of way I’m sure my father also adored my mother. But in the end she came to represent everything he was not. She was alive, vibrant, passionate, while he saw himself as dead, sterile, passionless. He just closed off inside. Wolfi and he used to have the most awful fights. My father thought himself the great realist, the great rationalist. To him, Wolfi was just a dreamer, an escapee from reality. He saw my mother and Wolfi in an alliance against him. Eventually things became so bad Wolfi couldn’t take it any longer. That’s why he went to Heidelberg—to get away, and to complete his studies. But mainly to get away. Then the next thing we heard, he was in Berlin.

How did you manage to get in contact with him?

We didn’t. About two weeks before my mother died there was a telephone call from the police in Berlin. Wolfi had been arrested for beating somebody up. My father was supposed to go and sort things out but that night my mother collapsed and she had to be taken to hospital. During the next couple of days she seemed to pick up and my father decided he would go to Berlin after all. She died the following Saturday. Wolfi was allowed to come back for the funeral on the condition he return to Berlin the next day.

At the funeral, things were terribly strained. Wolfi told me that on the night before they left Berlin he and my father had had a terrible argument, about my mother. When my father returned to Berlin Wolfi had disappeared. Two days later they found his body. He’d shot himself.

She paused for a moment.

The awful irony was that by this time all charges against him had been dropped.

Dropped?

Yes. I never was too sure about the exact details, but apparently the old guy whom he was supposed to have beaten up was involved with under-aged boys, sexually involved I mean. He’s quite a prominent businessman in Berlin. So the charges against Wolfi were dropped. He knew that all of this would come out in court. Then he’d face criminal prosecution himself. The whole thing was just hushed up.

I see. At least that explains why the police in Berlin had no record of any charges against Wolfi.

She looked at me.

I went there you see…to Berlin.

Yes, but how did you know Wolfi was in trouble with the police?

He wrote to me. It’s a long story really. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through over the past ten days. Then again, perhaps you would. I paused for a moment. Is it possible that Wolfi didn’t commit suicide?

What do you mean?

Well, that he was murdered.

Who’d want to murder Wolfi?

Well, from what I understand he was trying to get money for a friend to pay off a drug dealer. Or maybe the old guy had him killed to stop him talking. I don’t know. But apparently at the coroner’s inquest there was some doubt about whether he could have fired the shot or not, because of the angle the bullet entered the head.

Who told you that?

The old caretaker at the cemetery.

Himmelfarb?

I don’t know. Probably.

I doubt it. They found the gun beside his body. It was one of my father’s guns.

Your father’s?

Yes, when my father was a young man he had been a military cadet. He was an excellent ma…

Her voice trailed off.

…an excellent marksman.

She looked across at me. I could see a moment of panic register on her face.

Wolfi had apparently taken one of the guns when he was here for the funeral, she said, half to herself. No. I don’t believe it. He couldn’t have. When my father arrived at the hotel Wolfi had already gone. He hadn’t been there for days. My father had immediately phoned the police. That’s when he found out the charges had been dropped.

How do you know all this?

My father told me…Look, you have no right to do this. It’s taken me years to get over what’s happened to my family. All I have left is Anya. You’re saying that my father killed his own son. Why would he? He had no reason to. No, I won’t believe it. It just isn’t true.

She got up.

I think it might be better if you left, she said.

Look, I’m sorry. I’m not saying he did. In fact, until this very moment it never even crossed my mind that he had killed Wolfi. But…it’s a possibility isn’t it?

No, it’s not! Why would he?

He didn’t mention anything about having also argued about you and Anya that night in Berlin?

No, nothing. Why?

She looked at me suspiciously. Her hands were shaking.

Look, I don’t know how to put this…but your father found out about you and Wolfi.

What do you mean he found out about Wolfi and me?

Her voice was trembling. She lifted her cigarette clumsily to her mouth.

Wolfi told him. He told him that
he
was Anya’s father. That was what the real argument was about.

Oh God, oh God, she said.

She stood up and walked unsteadily to the mantelpiece. At that moment Anya came back into the room and ran to her. Elena bent down to embrace the child, tears streaming from her eyes.

It’s okay, sweetheart, sweetheart.

She kept repeating the word as she bent to gather Anya into her arms.

Mummy, are you okay? Mummy?

I’m okay, sweetheart.

She stood up again. She looked at me, her face distraught.

I’m sorry, she said. I think you’ve said enough.

I went to say something else. She raised her hands.

Please, she said. No more, no more. Just go.
Please
.

She went to the door and stood by it without looking at me.

I stood by her for a moment on the threshold trying to think of something to say but nothing came. I wished I could take back what I had said. I walked slowly down the steps and the door closed behind me.

What, I asked myself, did it really matter if Wolfi’s father
had
killed him or if he had killed himself. He was dead, that was all that mattered. His father was now intractably insane. Elena and Anya were still together. All I had come to Germany for in the first place was to find out what had happened to him. In any other context I would have been determined to resolve the question one way or another. But to do this now would merely have been to cheapen the life of my friend, to turn it into a conundrum, a murder mystery in need of solution.

In recounting the story of my friend Wolfi, I have been guilty of the same sort of bad faith that I accused Camus of earlier. Or have I?

Of course I knew of Wolfi’s death before I began writing his tale, indeed long before I had decided to put my recollections of him down on paper or to edit and assemble the material he sent me. It seemed to me that in the essentially three episodes of his life that he himself related he had created a self which was both separate from and an augmentation of the person I had known in Heidelberg. I could of course have done a number of things to expand and refine the picture I had of him. I could have gone back to his school to interview old friends or acquaintances. I could have tried to locate Andrea, if indeed she existed, or spoken with his grandmother. But, ultimately, what purpose would this have served? Wolfi had, in a sense, become displaced by a collection of memories, papers and photographs. I had become caught up in the ‘fiction’ of what he had written. Yet I could not help feeling that this was what was so cruel about his death—the sense of being left with a feeling of absolute loss, of irrevocable absence without appeal.

To return to Camus and narrative bad faith for a moment. In concluding Wolfi’s story at this point I realize that in terms of its ‘fictional’ conception this is hardly satisfactory. As a ‘story’ it seems to have been wound up too quickly. The narrative momentum seemed to promise more. Too many questions remain unanswered. Unlike Camus, Wolfi’s death does not seem to have been adequately prepared for. So be it. In some ways this mirrors the abruptness of my own discovery of the death of my friend. Suddenly everything just seemed to stop. Someone who had seemed so alive one minute, just ceased to exist the next. Instead of existence seeming meaningless and irrational, non-existence now appeared to me to be equally meaningless, equally irrational. Death is an arbitrary, not a necessary, condition of life. I must admit, however, that I do not fully understand this.

I might as well ask myself why Ingeborg Bachmann burnt herself to death one afternoon in her Rome apartment.

In her recollections she wrote how, often, she found it strange walking into a bookstore seeing her own books on the shelves. Strange how what she had spent hours and hours toiling over in her tiny room, what had become literally the transubstantiation of her self, had ended up being dispersed around the world in the form of complex patterns of ink printed onto sheets of bound paper.

What was she doing the day before her death? What were her thoughts as she lay in her petrol-soaked bed? What was going through her mind as she struck the match and sat propped up watching the small flame dancing around its bent black spine before, at last, she dropped it onto the bedclothes? As she lay back into the flaming pillows, had she caught one last glimpse of the outline of the fire before she finally lost control?

She was from Klagenfurt. Wolfi’s father and she were contemporaries. They would have known each other. Perhaps Wolfi had even met her himself or had unknowingly seen her shopping in the local supermarket. Perhaps.

The more I reread Wolfi’s material the more I am convinced that he took his own life. I do not know why I think this. I cannot see why he would have gone to the trouble of sending me what he sent me if he hadn’t meant it to be read as some sort of long valedictory note. Then again, maybe he suspected his father would try to kill him. Maybe his account of their meeting that night is incomplete. Who knows? Who will ever know?

But the real impact for me of Wolfi’s story ending here is the sense of a life wasted. I have no idea of how, had he lived, his life would have evolved, what ultimate destiny awaited him, or even what we would have said to each other had I eventually caught up with him.

I wrote Elena a short note expressing my regret at having come blundering into her life, re-opening old wounds. I left her my address in Australia to contact me in the event that she wanted me to send her any of Wolfi’s material. I rang the airline in Frankfurt to see if I could get an earlier flight back home but was unable to. The remaining four days of my trip I would have to spend in Klagenfurt unless I wanted to move on to somewhere else. But by this stage I was overcome by such a strong sense of lethargy that I let my body have its way. Besides, I said to myself, if my mood improved I could still wander about the town that had produced Musil and Handke and Bachmann…and Wolfi.