The Lie (2 page)

She went up to Behringer's on the fifth floor, still feeling shabbily dressed, wretched, old and worn-out. A deep-pile carpet, even in the lobby - on it an acrylic-glass desk and behind that a young woman looking like a catalogue illustration for correct business dress. She didn't look particularly dynamic, in fact she was clearly struggling with the problem of how to explain to someone of Susanne's appearance that Behringer's didn't do properties in the lower price range. The receptionist's tentative smile froze when Susanne told her she had not come for help in finding an apartment.

She was still feeling churned-up inside from the brief encounter with her spitting image and the light in which it had made her see herself. She was almost grateful that she was made to wait. It was a good quarter of an hour before she was shown in to see the office manager. He was called Reincke, a pleasant young man with a thin moustache who had familiarized himself with the details of her situation.

After they had talked about her lack of foreign languages and computer skills, he leaned forwards and lowered his voice. “I don't want to anticipate any decision the management might come to, Frau Lasko, but what I can say is that we have already discussed your application. There are four others, all from ladies who are younger and—” He broke off, suddenly embarrassed. “We're looking for someone who will not leave after a short time for family reasons, if you understand what I'm getting at. That does not seem to be a danger in your case. If, then, you were prepared to give up your time during the initial period to acquire the necessary skills… There are, for example, courses in foreign languages in which right from the beginning not a word of German is spoken; you learn very quickly. Naturally we would bear the costs.”

If was practically a job offer, she thought, hastening to assure him that she would be delighted to devote all her spare time to acquiring the necessary skills. With a pleased smile, Herr Reincke accompanied her to the door of his office. “You'll be hearing from us very soon,” he promised.

She was walking on air as she crossed the lobby. The smile she gave the young woman behind the desk was one for a colleague and friend.
She looked round, feeling almost as if she belonged there already. The telephone on the acrylic-glass desk rang and one of the office doors opened. Automatically she halted and looked back. The receptionist picked up the receiver and said, “Behringer and Partners. Luici speaking.” A man appeared in the doorway.

She smiled at him, hoping to catch his eye and thus influence the senior management in her favour. His imposing appearance alone suggested he was important. He was six foot tall, with receding hair. His bulky physique hid most of the luxurious interior of his office and the two visitors sitting at a coffee table. She merited nothing more than an uninterested glance as he turned to the receptionist.

Frau Luici was saying, “Herr Behringer is in a meeting at the moment, could you try again later?” The tall man asked who it was. Putting her hand over the receiver, Frau Luici whispered, “Hardenberg.”

“I'll take it,” said the man, clearly Behringer himself. He positively grabbed the receiver from Frau Luici and asked in effusive tones, “Hi, Philip, what is it?”, in the same breath telling the receptionist to get drinks for his visitors. Frau Luici leaped up and hurried into an adjacent room, presumably a small kitchen.

Susanne kept her eyes fixed on the giant at the telephone and saw him give a gasp of surprise. Frowning, he gave her a quick look, as if he were surprised she hadn't moved. “By what devious route did that come to your ears?” he asked, adding, “May I know why you're so interested in this property?”

Then he listened, gave a short laugh and said, “That could be done, assuming an appropriate quid pro quo. There are other offers on the table and there's been water damage recently.” As he listened, he finally gave her a smile. She nodded to him and went to the door, breathing a sigh of relief.

Out in the street she felt a slight regret that she'd rejected her double's offer. In her euphoria she felt there'd have been nothing to lose in having a coffee with Nadia Trenkler, perhaps an iced coffee. This heat! Her mouth was still dry, only now did she notice it again. She'd presumably not have had to worry about the fact that she only had a few coppers in her purse. Nadia Trenkler would surely have insisted on paying and might even have driven her home. She wouldn't have had to inflict another four miles' wear and tear on her old court shoes.

It was early evening by the time she reached her dilapidated flat in Kettlerstrasse. One and a half rooms - she'd managed to squeeze a narrow bed and a similar wardrobe into the “half room” - plus a mini-kitchen with a mini-balcony, a mini-bathroom with shower and the one square yard behind the door that the lease dignified with the name of “vestibule”. A local train rattled past outside. Once the noise had died away, she flung open the window, went into the kitchen and drank two glasses of water.

At seven she cooked her daily ration of noodles and carefully brushed her teeth as soon as she'd finished: without health insurance, cleaning her teeth was an absolute must. At eight she switched on the TV, stretched out on the couch and dreamed of her future. Once she had a regular income again, had plugged the hole in her mother's nest egg and put away a little for a rainy day, the first thing she'd do would be to buy a new fridge, then look for a larger, above all quieter flat, perhaps even go away on holiday.

 

On Friday she bumped into Heller by the apartment letter boxes. She only knew his surname and he was the only person she was at all acquainted with in the tenement apart from her immediate neighbour, Jasmin Toppler. She got on well with Jasmin, they said hello and exchanged a few words whenever they happened to meet on the stairs. Jasmin Toppler was in her late twenties, an energetic but friendly woman. Heller, on the other hand, was an obnoxious type, whom she tried to avoid. He grasped any opportunity to shower her with abuse. He was about the same age as her and had the front second-floor flat. It was rumoured that he had several convictions for car theft, grievous bodily harm, attempted rape and other offences.

When she came down the stairs to check her mail, he was standing by the open door, a can of beer in his hand. He heard her footsteps and turned round. He gestured towards the street with his free hand. “One fucking hot motor,” he said. She had no idea what he was talking about and since he regularly applied expressions like “hot” and all variants of “fucking” to her, she ignored him. “An MG,” he declared. “Saw it from the window. The third time it's driven past. And slowly, as if he was looking for something.”

He took a step out into the street. “Now he's stopping,” he told her, almost dislocating his neck. He was presumably talking about a car that had stopped a little way from the tenement.

She was relieved to see him occupied with watching the car instead of subjecting her to his usual volley of obscene remarks. Her letter box was empty; naturally it was too early for a response from Behringer's. She hurried back up to her flat before Heller's interest in the car waned and turned to her.

A little later there was a knock at the door. It wasn't Heller, as she feared, but a young man who claimed to be doing a survey on unemployment. Heller was on the landing, gawping at them. She asked the young man in simply in order to get away from Heller's glassy stare.

Without being asked, the young man sat down on the couch and asked for a glass of water. Friday was as hot as Thursday had been, so there was nothing odd about his request. After she had brought him a glass, he noted her answers on a questionnaire and took down - “Just for the statistical evaluation, you understand, it's completely anonymous,” - some personal details: date of birth, place of birth, marital status, children, school, professional qualifications, dates of birth and, if applicable, death of her parents and any siblings etc., etc.

Naturally she didn't tell him the truth. For the last two years she hadn't even been telling that to her mother. Agnes Runge thought she had a well-paid position with a small firm. To the alleged pollster she claimed she worked as a secretary with a well-known estate agent's. It wasn't, she told herself, really a lie, just a little premature, given what nice Herr Reincke had hinted at the previous day. When the young man responded with a sceptical look round the room, she told him she was obliged to pay maintenance to her divorced husband, besides which she was also making a small contribution towards her mother's upkeep, so that there wasn't much left for herself.

As if to punish her for her lies, the letter box wasn't empty on Saturday morning. One of her own large envelopes was in it. Her fingers were already trembling as she took it out of the box and recognized the company stamp. As she went up the stairs her knees were trembling as well. There was something raging inside her for which disappointment was too mild an expression.

After two days her documents had been returned with kind regards from Behringer and Partners. They were pleased to have met her
but unfortunately had to inform her that they had given preference to another candidate and wished her all the best for the future. She couldn't understand it. Hadn't Herr Reincke indicated her appointment was as good as settled? She spent the rest of the day staring at the TV. She had intended to go for a walk, but she felt she would burst into tears sooner or later and she didn't want to do that out in the street.

On Sunday she went to see her mother. The old folks' home was twenty-five miles away and Johannes Herzog drove her there. His grandmother had a room next to her mother's and at some point or other Johannes had offered to drive her home. Since then he had been coming to pick her up punctually at two o'clock every second Sunday, as long as he didn't have a problem with the car.

Johannes was in his mid-twenties. He was studying - sporadically - some technical/scientific subject, but most of the time he was working as a stuntman for a TV series consisting mainly of wild car chases and crashes. It showed in the way he drove his car, an old BMW. She often felt carsick. But going with Johannes cost nothing.

She was still smarting from the disappointment with Behringer's. Despite that, the usual fictions flowed from her lips while she was with her mother: the stress at work, going to see a play with her friend Jasmin Toppler. And that nice Herr Heller from the second floor had invited her out to dinner next Saturday. Specially for her mother she had endowed the obnoxious Heller with a lucrative profession, perfect manners and a pleasant appearance. But she wasn't sure whether she'd go out with him, she said. She still hadn't come to terms emotionally with her failed marriage.

That corresponded to the facts. There were moments when she felt a burning hatred of Lasko. He had made a name for himself as a freelance journalist and at the same time had been successful as a writer of books on current events. While she, three years after their divorce, was at her wits' end as to how to survive, he was working on a book about the background to the conflict in Palestine. His previous book, about the operations of the UN forces in Bosnia, had been in the best-seller lists for ten weeks and must have earned him a tidy sum.

There was no contact between them. Despite that, she knew exactly how her ex was doing. Sometimes she saw him on television, sometimes she read an interview or report by him in the weekend edition of the
paper, which she bought regularly for the vacancies section. Perhaps he would have helped her get back on her feet. When they got divorced he'd said, “If you ever need help…” But she had her pride.

She preferred to continue her monthly visits to the bank, and on the Monday she nervously filled out the slip to transfer four hundred euros from her mother's account to her own. A hundred of that she took out straight away. On Tuesday she went for a long walk and concentrated all her hope on the next vacancies section. Then on Wednesday she found the slim white envelope in her letter box.

Her name and address had been handwritten in capital letters. There was no indication of the sender's address. The stamp had a local postmark. She couldn't wait till she was back in her flat but tore the envelope open on the stairs. As she went up, she unfolded a printed letter and read:

It was obvious where Nadia Trenkler had got her name and address. There was only one possibility: Behringer and Partners. From her appearance she could even have a business of her own in the building, so knew Herr Reincke, Frau Luici, possibly even Behringer himself, had made enquiries and discovered that her double had not got the job. Perhaps she was desperately searching for a reliable secretary herself.

Friday started with vain attempts to moderate her wild hopes. She spent half an hour reviewing the meagre contents of her wardrobe, eventually deciding on a cotton skirt and a T-shirt. They gave her a fresh, summery look, she felt, not too poverty-stricken.

She set off at two, her head full to bursting with crazy hopes for some kind of miracle. She reached the Opera Café punctually at three and scanned the balcony. No sign of Nadia Trenkler. Most of the tables were occupied by middle-aged ladies. She sat down at one that was free. The waitress scurried over, but she told her she was meeting someone and would order when she arrived.