To Clear the Air Read online

  ALSO BY MECHTILD BORRMANN

  Silence

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2006 KBV Verlags- und Mediengesellschaft mbH

  Translation copyright © 2017 Aubrey Botsford

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as Wenn das Herz im Kopf schlägt by KBV Verlags- und Mediengesellschaft mbH in Germany in 2006. Translated from German by Aubrey Botsford. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2017.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503941878

  ISBN-10: 1503941876

  Cover design by M.S. Corley

  Thanks are due to my fellow restaurant workers, without whose support this book would not have been possible.

  For my parents and siblings.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Chapter 1

  Thursday, April 13, 1967

  The screaming wakes her. That and the silence that follows.

  She stumbles down the steep wooden staircase, stubs her toe on the threshold to the pantry, throws her whole weight against the heavy door.

  The neon light pierces her eyes. Tea trickles over the edge of the cloth on the kitchen table, forming a puddle on the linoleum floor. The fat teapot lies motionless on its belly and spout. One of the chairs is broken.

  Her heart pounds in her head.

  She crosses the room and pulls open the metal door that leads into the covered yard. At the other end, standing by the outer gate, is Papa. He is wearing his good suit.

  Mama is lying on the concrete floor.

  When her heart is pounding in her head, she can’t think straight.

  The gate is wide open. She can see the fine drizzle in the glare of the lamp outside. She starts running—falls over. Mama’s slipper. Papa runs out into the farmyard. She gets up, picks up the slipper, and squeezes it against her body with both hands.

  The car door slams. The engine screams into motion.

  Mama isn’t crying. The other times, she always cried. Mama’s legs and feet are completely naked, completely still.

  Through the gate she sees two small lights quickly dwindling down the road.

  “Mama! Mama, get up!” Her cries echo around the empty space. She carefully pushes the slipper onto Mama’s left foot.

  “Mama, get up!” She presses her hands to her ears.

  The other slipper! Mama can’t get up without both slippers.

  She runs off. Into the living room, the kitchen, the hallway.

  She runs, whimpering. Bathroom, bedroom, pantry.

  She pummels her head with her fists. Farmyard, garden, stable.

  I’ll find it, Mama. I’m going to find it. Then you’ll be able to get up.

  A car drives into the yard. The headlights dazzle her.

  “Papa?”

  Chapter 2

  Tuesday, March 25, 2000

  The front door closes with a soft click. For a moment Anna is enveloped in a cocktail of odors: citrus cleaning fluid, garlic, smoked sausage, cabbage. She breathes through her mouth. A stroller and a tricycle stand in front of the mailboxes. She places the file folder on the seat of the tricycle, pushes the stroller aside, and opens one of the battered metal boxes, the fourth in the top row.

  The nameplate is barely legible. The slip of paper has sat in the little plastic window for twenty years. She had moved in here with another student. Sitting at the kitchen table, they had drawn up several versions of this little sign. Four years later, her roommate completed her studies and moved to Bonn. Anna had taken the piece of paper out and crossed out the lower of the two names. I won’t be here long myself, she had thought.

  She had stayed here during her short marriage to André, though, and throughout her daughter’s childhood; she has been living here alone again for the last six months or so; and she will probably die here.

  Publicity flyers, a postcard from Margret and Karl.

  She hurries up the worn stone staircase, two steps at a time as usual. The steps between the third and fourth floors she takes one at a time, fumbling in her jacket pocket for her keys. She always does it like this—the key ready between thumb and index finger, like a small weapon that she can use to shoot her way out if necessary, so she can slip straight into her apartment.

  She does not succeed.

  Her neighbor is standing in the doorway of her own apartment, fidgeting and repeatedly shoving her poodle back inside with her left foot. She is waving a letter in her right hand as if fanning the dying embers of a fire. “Frau Behrens, I’m so glad I caught you.”

  Her neighbor’s body reminds her of a female centaur. Today she is wearing a pink parachute-silk tracksuit. The top half is baggy on her narrow upper body; the bottom half is stretched tight over her ample hips and thighs.

  “A registered letter for you.” She holds the envelope out to Anna. “From a lawyer.” She leans farther out of her doorway and kicks the yapping poodle firmly back into the apartment. “If it’s about the mildew in the bathroom, don’t let them bully you. We’ve got it too, and I air the place out regularly.”

  Anna grabs the letter and unlocks the door.

  “I mean, if you need witnesses . . .”

  “Thanks.” The door closes behind Anna, and at last she can breathe. Outside, her neighbor is talking to her dog.

  Anna looks at the sender’s name: Dr. Martin Kley, Attorney-at-Law and Notary Public, Cleves.

  The words swim before her eyes for a moment. She s
ees fields and meadows, pollarded willows along a small river, and, on the horizon, a straight line of poplars. The soldiers at the end of the world.

  She goes down the hallway into the kitchen, tosses the postcard and flyers and her keys onto the kitchen table, and opens the window. Outside, the first shadows of evening are blending into the gray of the day. She takes her leather jacket off without putting down the letter. The paper twists and gets stuck as she slips the sleeves off.

  In the park below, a woman is scolding her children in Turkish. The sounds are earthy, alive. Anna studied French, English, and Russian. French and English because Karl advised her to. Russian because, back then, she felt it sounded dependable.

  She goes over to the kitchen drawer, takes out a small paring knife, and slits the envelope open with a single stroke.

  It takes her a long time to understand, as if she were translating a complex Russian text.

  Outside, the sun has dipped behind the apartment building on the other side of the park. The streetlamps spread their diffuse light over the paths. Voices from the neighborhood’s televisions seep into the park.

  Estate of Frau Johanna Behrens, deceased February 25, 2000

  Beneficiary: Frau Anna Behrens

  One cottage with contents, 50 acres of pastureland, one grove of oak trees.

  She stares out at the park.

  She sees the cottage in the shadow of the oak woods; the meadows and fields; and, atop a low hill, the farmhouse itself: the Behrens farm.

  The images bring with them a familiar numbness, a menacing silence that she knows well and finds difficult to bear. The images are dangerous. In the past, when she was unable to free herself of them, they brought on suicide attempts and stays in psychiatric hospitals.

  Her husband had been unable to handle it. Her daughter had had to.

  Without switching on the light, she goes into the bathroom and undresses. She turns on the shower, setting it so hot she can hardly bear it. The water is painful on her shoulders and back. It has to hurt for a long time before she can feel herself again. It has to hurt for a long time before she can escape the images.

  Chapter 3

  Friday, April 12, 2000

  Flat land, with meadows and fields stretching all the way to the horizon, appears on both sides of the Autobahn. Cleves, near the Dutch border, is only seventy-five miles from Cologne, but she has never been back. It is foreign to her. In her memory, Cleves was a castle and a Christmas display in a shoe store. There was a huge angel in the window, gently flapping its wings.

  She finds Kley’s office quickly.

  The little old man expresses his routine condolences. Tells her there is no will and she is therefore the sole heir. She must provide identification and sign “here, please, and here.”

  “You can pick up the keys from the Lüderses—at the Behrens farm.”

  Anna feels the muscles in her thighs going into spasm. She stares at him. “Lüders?”

  His professional neutrality falls away for a moment. “Yes, yes. Lüders purchased the farm at the time—if you can call what he did buying.” He sits up in the leather chair behind his desk. “He’s already called me three times. I told him I couldn’t tell him anything. That the matter wasn’t concluded yet.” He appears to enjoy saying this. He is evidently pleased with himself. “He is of the opinion that the cottage, the meadows, and the forest are now his too.” He adds emphasis to what he says by stabbing at the desk with his forefinger on the words cottage, meadows, and woods.

  “I didn’t know the farm . . . Lüders . . .” She swallows hard.

  He attacks the surface of the desk again, using the tapping sound to emphasize certain words. “Immediately after your father’s suicide. At the cemetery, that man wanted to make an appointment with me. I’ve never seen anything like it in all my days.” There are red spots in the pale little man’s face.

  Anna thanks him and shakes his hand. She feels nausea rising.

  Lüders!

  The heavy door closes behind her. No way back. Locked out.

  She has signed. No way back. Locked in. Locked into a small village in the Lower Rhine. Locked into the close confines of the images in her head.

  Lüders. The small farm next door.

  She goes to the car.

  Lüders! A big man with a loud voice.

  She threads her way back into the line of traffic heading out of town.

  Lüders. A wife with brightly colored housecoats. She turns left onto the Nijmegen road.

  Lüders. One of the men in her head?

  Once on the main road, all she needs to do is hold on to the steering wheel. She passes small settlements to the right and left, scattered about in a vast open space in which everything seems to be taking cover. Tall church steeples that look as if they are drilling their way directly up to the heavens. Horses grazing, innumerable cattle chewing their cud. Meadows, marked out with willows and divided by drainage ditches that dry out in the summer and rise steadily during the autumn until all the land is waiting beneath a shallow, trembling mirror of water. Meadows that freeze over in cold winters, over which children skate toward Holland.

  Lüders bought the Behrens farm. Lüders scrubbed the blood off the concrete floor and settled in. Anna feels her heart pounding in her head. She forces herself to breathe slowly and deeply. When her heart pounds in her head, she can’t think straight.

  Chapter 4

  He swings his walking stick. He lifts it with each step, brings it vertical, and holds it there for a fraction of a second. Then, as he relaxes his grip, the tip drops onto the asphalt with a metallic tap, and he starts again from the beginning. The wind races over the fields in gusts, driving the last wisps of morning mist across the land and doing its best to delay him. There will be rain showers today. The weather has cooperated this year. The seedlings are coming up well, the meadows are rich, and the yellow of dandelions has been appearing everywhere for a few days. White Queen Anne’s lace blossoms sway on tall stems.

  Today he has no eyes for any of this.

  They had disagreed. The old woman had gone on about a lease, but he had told her clearly that he would pay her during her life and that everything would belong to him thereafter.

  He leans his powerful body into the fresh gusts and points his stick into the wind.

  “The farmhouse,” she had insisted stubbornly. “The farmhouse and the arable land to the west, for that I’ll go to the notary. But no written contracts for the meadows, the woods, or the cottage.” She hadn’t even invited him into the house. She had treated him as if she were doing him a favor, in that big-landowner way of hers. “Haven’t got anyone else anyway; you’ll probably get everything. Just have to wait till I’m gone.” Then she had turned and stalked off into her miserable little cottage as if it were a nobleman’s castle.

  Now she’s been gone for six weeks and still he’s had no news. Kley, that puffed-up little street-corner fee-chaser. The matter of the inheritance isn’t concluded yet. What is there to conclude? Pompous ass.

  He stops abruptly. What if the old woman . . . ? What if she left it to the church?

  He leans more heavily on his stick, his breathing quick and shallow. She had to wait till he turned seventy. Seventy years old before she finally . . .

  Only now does he notice that he has taken the path toward the cottage. It’s still at least a hundred yards off. The little house sits low, guarding the path in front of the grove of oaks.

  His eyes narrow as he looks at the house, as if seeing an enemy. For a moment he thinks he catches a net curtain twitching. What did Klara say yesterday? The priest used to go by her house every other Saturday?

  He straightens up, transfers his weight from the stick to his feet. He hesitates another moment, not daring to turn his back on his enemy. Then he turns. He walks hurriedly back down the path. He lifts his stick only a few inches off the ground. Now the wind is pushing him, adding to his haste. He hears the rattling in his lungs and the staccato of his walking
stick.

  He must go to the village. He must know.

  Chapter 5

  The little church once in the center of Merklen is now off to one side. The settlement has expanded eastward, row upon row of houses. The development hangs like an unsightly growth on the old heart of the village. Gietmann had been lucky. His fields had already been zoned as building land before all this environmental nonsense started. Just like the old woman’s fields. But she had never understood that.

  Lüders halts in the flagstoned yard. Here and there, daffodils and tulips are coming into bloom in the neatly trimmed borders. To the right, next to the church, stands the redbrick building housing the parish office and priest’s house. He undoes the bottom button on his loden coat and pulls a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket. He leaves the ironed square folded, takes off his hat, and wipes his red face and bald pate.

  Rudenau has only been here for four years. He doesn’t know anything about the whole business, the agreements, how unpredictable the old woman was. She had thrown her own granddaughter out, and if she did leave the land to the church, she must have been trying to atone for that. She wanted to be sure of a place in heaven. And so she sinned for a second time, went against clear agreements. And this clueless priest gave her absolution for it, no doubt.

  He straightens his back momentarily, then walks decisively up the narrow path to the priest’s house and rings the bell.

  Rudenau opens the door himself. “Herr Lüders?” He pushes his thick dark hair, which is quite long, back over his shoulder. A habit he can’t control even during his sermons. A gesture that Lüders finds effeminate, and that has already led to considerable speculation at the Stammtisch, the regulars’ table at the Dorfkrug bar.

  “I wanted to talk to you about . . . about the Behrens woman.” He watches Rudenau, trying to read his expression. The priest steps back and lets him in.

  Once in the office, Lüders keeps his coat on and sits stiffly on the edge of a large chair. With the stick upright between his legs, he rests both hands on the handle.

  “It’s . . . because I haven’t heard anything yet. About the will, I mean.” He pulls out his handkerchief again and wipes his forehead. “I thought you might know something. Klara said you were often there.”