The antique-looking street lights, modelled on gas lanterns, were still burning. At this hour on a weekend very few people were around. In the distance a man was walking his dog, and opposite a man was just pulling up the shutters of his newspaper kiosk. But most people weren’t even awake yet, let alone out and about. This year the Christmas holidays had fallen so that just a few days of holiday had been enough to bridge the time until the New Year’s celebrations. The streets looked abandoned, whichever direction Leon looked. No cars, no taxis, no Natalie.
His teeth began to chatter, and he wrapped his arms around his upper body. By the time he stepped back into the shelter of the lobby, Tareski had disappeared into the lift.
Shivering with cold, confused, and unwilling to wait, Leon took the stairs instead.
This time no cat ran across his path. Ivana Helsing’s door was closed, even though Leon felt sure the old woman was watching him through the peephole. Just like the Falconis on the first floor, the childless, melancholic couple who he was sure to have woken with his stumbling and clamouring.
It was very likely they would make another complaint about him to the building management, just like they had when he celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday rather too loudly back in the spring.
Confused, exhausted and trembling all over, Leon reached the third floor, thankful the door was still ajar and he hadn’t locked himself out. Natalie’s perfume, a subtle summery scent, still hung in the air. For a moment he lost himself in the hope that he had just dreamed it all, that the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with would still be sleeping peacefully, wrapped up in the thick quilt. But then he saw Natalie’s untouched side of the bed, and knew his wish would not be granted.
He stared at the ransacked wardrobe, the lower drawer of which was still open. It was empty, as was the small bureau next to the window which, until yesterday, housed her make-up brushes. Now it held only the laptop they watched DVDs on now and again. A compromise, because Natalie hadn’t wanted a TV in the bedroom.
The clock on Leon’s nightstand jumped to 7 a.m., and the fluorescent lamps above the tall aquarium flickered on. Leon saw his reflection in the shimmering, green-tinged glass of the tank. There was no longer even a single fish swimming in the four hundred litres of fresh water.
Three weeks before, all the angel fish had perished due to a persistent fungus, even though Natalie had tended to her precious possessions meticulously, checking the water quality on a daily basis. She was so despondent afterwards that Leon had doubted she would ever keep fish again.
The autotimer was still set only because, over the years, they had got used to being woken by the light of the aquarium. Leon angrily pulled the electricity cable out of the plug socket. The light extinguished, and he felt lost.
He sat down on the edge of the bed, buried his head in his hands and tried to find an innocent explanation for what had just happened. But as hard as he tried, he was unable to suppress the certainty that, despite all the doctors’ protestations that he had been cured, the past had caught up with him again.
His illness had come back.
2
‘. . . you have to speak into it.’
‘Into what?’
‘For heaven’s sake – into the telephone, of course!’
The older man on the tape sounded impatient; it clearly wasn’t the first time he had tried to explain to his wife how to record an answerphone message. The line crackled, then it seemed that Leon’s mother had brought the receiver into the correct position.
‘You have reached the home of Klaus and Maria Nader,’ she said, sounding like someone who was doing a bad imitation of a satnav.
Please turn around at the next available opportunity.
‘Unfortunately we’re not here right now.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ interjected his father drily from the background.
Even though Leon wasn’t in the mood, having felt sick and numb all morning, he couldn’t help but chuckle. His adoptive parents didn’t miss a single opportunity to act like the old couple on the balcony in The Muppet Show. With or without an audience, at home or out in public, barely a sentence from one of them failed to draw commentary from the other. Unwitting onlookers often thought they were witnessing the final scenes of a marriage in its death throes. But that couldn’t have been further from the truth.
‘And we won’t be able to return your call for a while, either, because we’re on a cruise,’ explained Maria on the tape.
‘Why don’t you just say where any potential thieves can find the house keys while you’re at it?’
‘And what would they take? Your Caracho railway?’
Leon smiled.
His mother knew, of course, that the brand was Carrera; she said it wrong on purpose to annoy Klaus. The racing circuit in the loft was his pride and joy. Klaus Nader had always played with it at Christmas, while Leon had only been allowed to watch. At most now and again he had been permitted to put back one of the race cars that had fallen off, while his old man operated the speed control with his eyes glistening. It was a father-and-son classic.
Klaus had more time for his hobby now that the arthritis in his knuckle had rendered him unable to stay in his job as a waiter, much to Maria’s chagrin, who now had to ‘put up with the old dog’ at home all day.
God, I miss them, thought Leon wistfully. He would have given anything to be able to talk to them in person right now. Once again it was far too long since they had last seen each other.
He closed his eyes and longed to be back at the head of the narrow wooden table in the kitchen, the best seat in the Naders’ end-of-terrace house for watching their affectionate bickering. Leon could picture his father clearly: his shirt-sleeves rolled up, his broad elbows on the table as he rubbed his chin thoughtfully, waiting for the scrambled eggs that his wife was preparing for him.
If it takes any longer I’m going to need another shave already.
Good idea, and why don’t you do your back while you’re at it?
Are you trying to imply I have a hairy back?
Of course not. Just like you don’t have a double chin.
What are you talking about? I just have a few wrinkles on my neck, not a double chin.
That’s what I said.
‘Our son bought us the cruise as a present,’ Maria announced proudly on the answerphone.
‘He’s such a good boy,’ murmured Klaus, quoting one of Maria’s favourite commentaries, which she always had at the ready whenever someone mentioned her son.
‘He sure is. And there’s no need to roll your eyes like that, you old fool—’
A beeping tone then accomplished something that Klaus Nader only rarely managed. It silenced Maria, reminding Leon of the reason for his call.
‘Er, Mama, Papa?’ he said, feeling flustered. ‘Nice message. I’m just calling because I . . .’
. . . wanted to ask if Natalie has been in touch with you?
It had been the same for his parents as it had for him. They’d fallen in love with Natalie the very second they met her.
‘Call me shallow,’ his father had said, taking him to the side briefly after Natalie had left the garden that summer afternoon to help Maria with the salad in the kitchen, ‘but if the contents are even half as beautiful as the packaging with this woman, then you’ll be even more of a loon than the idiot who messed up the fifty-euro question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? yesterday if you ever let her go.’
The affection was mutual, for Natalie had doted on the cranky couple. Especially Maria, which was astonishing when you thought about it, because the two women could hardly be more different.
Natalie wanted to pursue her career as a photographer and travel the world as a celebrated artist, while Maria was a housewife who saw the legacy she would bequeath to the world in Leon, not in a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. She wore her apron as proudly as Natalie did her stilettos. And while Natalie Lene had grown up in a twenty-room villa, Maria Nade
r had spent her childhood literally on the street, in a motorhome with a retractable awning and a chemical toilet.
The thing that united these two very different women was not their past or their plans for the future, but the fact that both were judged incorrectly by those around them. Natalie wasn’t a superficial bimbo any more than Maria was a simple-minded housewife. They were just two people on the same wavelength; it was up to other people if they wanted to waste their valuable time on earth wondering how such an affinity was possible.
They trusted one another, and so it was very possible that Natalie had turned to Maria in her moment of need. But despite this, Leon had made the phone call without holding out any great hopes, and only now, a day after her hurried departure.
Yesterday he had spent hours waiting for a call that would put his mind at rest, and the countless times he had dialled Natalie’s mobile number he had only reached the voicemail.
Today, still not having received a sign of life from her, he was tentatively beginning to contact people he could trust. People Natalie might confide in.
But he had stumbled into a dead end. His parents were away. On the high seas. Unreachable.
Like Natalie.
Leon realised that he had said nothing for too long, that for the last few seconds the answerphone would have picked up only his breathing, if that. Feeling dazed, he hung up without saying goodbye.
If his parents listened to the abrupt message after their return, they would be sure to call him back right away.
But Leon doubted they could ever feel as distressed as he did right now.
He didn’t know what had happened to Natalie, or why she had left him so hurriedly. Leon knew only one thing: whatever his parents might think, he had never given them a cruise as a present.
3
‘Did I wake you?’
‘Does size matter?’ grumbled the voice at the other end. ‘Of course you woke me, you idiot.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Leon apologised to Anouka.
She was Natalie’s best friend and, for that reason, the second person on the list of trusted confidants to contact. It was just before nine in the morning, but Anouka was known for being a night owl, and never made an appearance in the gallery before noon. He was sure to have torn her from a deep sleep. Or from the arms of one of the numerous lovers she regularly picked up in the clubs of the city.
Leon couldn’t totally understand her success with men, but then again beauty was known to lie in the eye of the beholder. The men drawn to Natalie’s svelte girlish body, her long dark hair and melancholic gaze had very little in common with the muscle-bound, hairy-chested and – at first glance – somewhat jaded men who tended to ogle Anouka’s artificially enhanced breasts in karaoke bars.
‘You sound strange,’ Anouka commented. He heard the rustle of bed-sheets, then the sound of bare feet padding across parquet flooring.
‘Have you taken something?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Has something happened?’
Leon hesitated. ‘I . . . I was hoping you might be able to tell me.’
‘Eh?’
‘Is Natalie with you?’
‘Why would you think that?’
Leon felt sure he could hear water gurgling, and if he knew Natalie’s best friend as well as he thought he did, she was squatting on the toilet right now and urinating unashamedly while he was on the line.
‘It’s complicated. I’m kind of out of sorts, but I don’t want to talk about it now, OK?’
‘You don’t want to talk about it but you called me in the middle of the night?’ Anouka managed to inject both amusement and annoyance into her tone at the same time. The sound of a toilet flushing thundered down the line.
‘Natalie left the apartment yesterday, and I haven’t been able to reach her since,’ explained Leon, turning towards the living-room door. He had been pacing up and down between the sofa and the window while talking, but his throat was beginning to tickle, so he decided to get a glass of water from the kitchen.
‘Did you have an argument?’ asked Anouka.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know whether or not you had an argument?’
I don’t even know if it might have been something much worse than a harmless argument, but you would never understand that.
‘This must sound really strange, I know, but could you please do me a favour and tell her to call me if you see her in the gallery today?’
Natalie and Anouka had shared first a room and then an apartment during art college. Long before Natalie met Leon, the two women had pledged to realise their dream of opening their own photography gallery in the old town. A space where they would exhibit their own pictures, along with those of other young artists. About a year ago they had put the dream into action and, following the first few press reviews, the gallery had got off to a great start.
‘I can’t,’ said Anouka.
‘You can’t what?’
‘Ask her to call you.’
‘Sorry?’
He knew Anouka had hated him ever since Natalie moved out of their apartment together to live with him. She saw him as a bourgeois stiff, because his work as an architect was commercial rather than artistic. On the rare occasions when they met up, they exchanged the bare minimum of small talk, and the aversion had been mutual ever since Leon found out that Anouka had begged her girlfriend not to get into a relationship with him. But despite all the antipathy, until today she had never acted in a hostile way towards him, at least not openly.
‘You don’t want to give her my message?’
‘No, I can’t, because it’s likely I won’t see her.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means your darling Natalie hasn’t come to work for the last two weeks. I’m running the gallery all by myself.’
Stunned, as though Anouka had just dealt him a blow to the head, he came to an abrupt halt in the hallway and stared at the magnetic board fastened to the closed kitchen door at head height. Natalie and he used to leave each other affectionate, playful messages on it, depending on who left the house first in the morning. But the last one (Sweetheart did we have sex last night? Sorry if I snored. Nat) had been months ago, and now there was just a notice from the building administration under the magnet, announcing to residents that the renovation of the stairway would begin in a few days’ time. (Be prepared for long waits for the lift!)
‘But Natalie told me you two were working on a big exhibition?’
Star Children.
An exhibition of images as moving as they were disturbing, on the subject of miscarriages and stillbirths.
That, after all, was why Natalie had been leaving early in the morning and coming back late at night.
Just like the day before yesterday!
He had waited for her in the dining room with a bottle of conciliatory wine, eventually opening it as the evening turned to night. Once it was empty, he had fallen into bed drunk, not even noticing how or when Natalie arrived home.
‘She told me you guys were working flat out to get everything ready in time.’
‘Flat out is right. But I’m doing it all by myself, Leon. I’ve got no idea what’s going on with her. I know she can be a bit unreliable at times, but not calling me back one single time even though I’ve left dozens of messages on her phone, that’s a bit much even for her. I mean, the exhibition was her idea, but perhaps it was too soon.’
No, I don’t believe that.
After the miscarriage last summer, Natalie had been devastated, but she got over it with astonishing speed. Perhaps because it happened in the tenth week, together with her period, meaning that a scrape wasn’t necessary.
A star child.
He had been so happy when her period didn’t come. She hadn’t told him about the first signs – the soreness in her breasts, the sensitivity to smell first thing in the morning – from fear it could turn out to be a false alarm. But then she bought a t
est, and those few days after the positive result were the most wonderful of his life.
Then came the morning when she discovered the blood in her pants, and their plans evaporated into thin air, along with the joyful anticipation. It was awful, but somehow, after a short, intensive period of grief, the incident ended up bringing them even closer together. If he hadn’t had this feeling, he wouldn’t have proposed to her two months ago.
And she had said yes!
The wedding was rather unorthodox; without any witnesses, a photographer or flower girls. They had simply picked the first available appointment at the registry office. Many of their friends reacted with surprise, and some were even indignant, but why shouldn’t they get married in exactly the same way as they fell in love: head over heels?
‘She was over the worst of it,’ said Leon, more to himself than Anouka.
Remembering that he wanted a glass of water, he opened the kitchen door, then began to cough.
Something in the air was making it almost impossible to enter the room. It felt like thick smoke, but the substance irritating his throat and forcing tears to his eyes in a matter of seconds was completely invisible.
‘What did you say?’ asked Anouka.
‘Nothing,’ he spluttered, rushing over to the kitchen window with his hand pressed against his mouth. He flung it open and sucked the cold, clear air into his lungs with relief.
‘Anyway, Leon. Whatever’s going on at home with you two doesn’t really have anything to do with me. I was actually hoping that you might call to explain why Natalie’s been so rattled recently.’
Leon rubbed his eyes, turning round and searching for the source of the irritant. His gaze fell on the microwave, the neon display of which was blinking.
‘I mean, she decides to give up now, of all the moments she could choose. We’re still in the beginning stages, we made a profit for the very first time last month, and now Natalie throws in the towel. I just don’t get it.’