Daughters

I’d taken the first flight out, the night so short as to be practically non-existent, and now, at around half past nine on a Monday morning, I was dragging my suitcase across Warschauer Bridge, where the party had just broken up, the revellers either in bed, passed out in a pool of vomit or still dancing in some club. I trudged past empty bottles of cheap sparkling wine, shattered beer bottles and an abandoned amp. Shards crunched beneath the wheels of my case. Around the next corner, right beside a massive building site, was my flat. The stairwell smelled like an exploded beer cellar, and a numb silence had taken hold. The building had adapted to its bacchanalian surroundings. To survive the noise here, you needed a country retreat or a job abroad. To afford the rent, you had to sublet your rooms to people from duller countries, people who came here to behave in ways they would never dream of at home. We lived in a muddle, sleeping on sofas with the downstairs and upstairs neighbours, while in our own flats, party tourists pissed on the parquet floors.

I financed myself by fleeing the city. Whenever I was strapped for cash, I would head to parts of the world that were cheaper than this one, of which there were many. ‘Kill the investor in you,’ I’d read on the side of a building in Kreuzberg recently and cheerfully disregarded. I felt that I’d been living in this neighbourhood long enough now to deserve a piece of the pie, that in fact I myself was the pie. So, like nearly everyone else, I flogged my own home for 80 euros a night.

And then on Thursdays we’d clutch our cardboard coffee cups at demos to save the Turkish greengrocer’s, if not the entire neighbourhood, from being driven out, standing alongside artists from Charlottenburg and Prenzlauer Berg who’d shown up to express their solidarity and day-trippers carrying canvas bags emblazoned with protest slogans. A few speeches, a few songs about the rising rents and the selling-out, and demand on Airbnb would shoot up another twenty per cent. The tourists bought the bags and later toted them around New York, Barcelona and Lower Bavaria. No one ever bought vegetables.

The face in my mirror looked exactly as old as it was: just over forty. The lines stayed white in the sun now, as if I’d shattered on the inside. I could only call myself beautiful in the past tense. Age had arrived by night, and it kept on coming. I used to grow while I dreamt, but soon I would start shrinking in my sleep, waking up smaller each morning until I vanished entirely. Sometimes I wondered how I was going to get through all the time until then. And to top it all off, there was more hair sprouting on my face each day.

The Spanish kid had thrown up next to my toilet, the stereo had been set to the highest volume. A jar of peanut butter, a chunk of Emmental and a bottle of beer in the fridge, three cigarette butts stamped out on the floor. José, 24, lives in Madrid. The picture in my bedroom was now hanging upside down. Apparently José was a practical joker. I was glad I’d never met him.

It took me two hours to clean the flat, to purge it, to scrape Spanish youth out of the cracks. When I was done, I opened José’s beer, sat down by the window and looked out at the Spree. It was mid-April and the river was still a river rather than a party strip. In less than six weeks, the techno cruisers would be blaring past, their lasers groping the walls of my study. I’d be looking out at frenzied stag and hen parties, at semi-clad men and even less-clad women, all of whom would be thinking they were having the time of their lives and would probably be right, a state of affairs I found increasingly pitiful.

There was no sign of Martha when I arrived at the bar. There was no sign of anyone, apart from a barman I’d never seen before, who was polishing glasses. Martha had suggested the location, a former haunt of hers, though whether this was for sentimental reasons or for lack of a better idea, I didn’t know. It felt like a lifetime since we’d spent our nights here with Henning, a boyfriend she would regularly resolve to leave, only to eventually marry him last year. And with Jon, Henning’s oldest friend, whom we hadn’t been able to save, who’d made this bar his favourite and only companion, leaving his money and his will to live at the counter until both were gone. I didn’t think about Jon very much any more. We rarely talked about him, but then all three of us had got quieter in general since he died. Whether this reticence was down to our age or our pain, whether there was any difference between the two, I wasn’t sure. We just kept going, and it wasn’t as hard to keep going as we’d expected.

I glanced over at the door just as Martha slipped in, like a shadow. She gave my shoulder a listless stroke and sat down with a groan. She barely looked at me, just at the bottles on the shelves.

Martha only went out these days when it was absolutely necessary, and this necessity always came from within, never from the outside world. It had been a long time since she’d shown any interest in the outside world. She’d been pregnant again and again over the past year: four weeks, six, eight, and afterwards, after the miscarriages, we’d go drinking before it all started up again. I was a little unnerved by the way she emerged from these hormonal torture sessions virtually unchanged. Martha was the toughest old bird I knew. During her unfertilised weeks, she’d always order the most expensive booze, usually neat.

In for a penny, in for a pound, she’d say, and be pissed by her third glass. This was one change that did bother me. At first, I’d felt betrayed. At this age, this stage of life, a stage I couldn’t relate to, I had fewer and fewer friends who could stay upright on a barstool beside me. My nights were as long as other people’s days. Our lives were out of sync. Hardly anyone ever crossed my path, and the few who did scared me: they were lost souls who latched on to me, sinking their teeth into the backs of my legs.

Martha ordered an eighteen-year-old double whisky before turning to me, exhausted. We hadn’t seen each other in over a month, hadn’t spoken. This wasn’t unusual. I was always out, she was always at home, and we no longer needed reassurance that we were thinking of each other. We were there for each other and we’d stay there. We sat together in silence, like old men in a pub by the factory gate. I ordered myself a beer, a large one. It looked like it was going to be a long, quiet night.

‘Why Rome?’ she asked eventually.

‘No reason really,’ I lied. ‘Just, every couple of years I think it might help if I found religion. So I spend a day going from church to church, imagining how much better it would all be if I believed in God. I sit there, surrounded by the quiet, the darkness, the damp coldness, the crosses and frescoes on the walls, all that devout suffering, and it feels like maybe everything does have meaning after all. I sit and sit, for hours sometimes, because I know that as soon as I leave, everything will fall apart again.’

‘So you went to Rome to sit in a church?’

‘Well, where else do you get so many churches, each one better than the one before, a Caravaggio in every corner? If you chuck a euro in the machines, the light goes on and you can actually see the Caravaggio. Plus, I finally understand nuns now. Jesus looks completely different in Italy. Not the emaciated, anguished bloke we have here. No, the man on the cross over there has a six-pack. It’s plain lascivious. Anyone would join a convent for a man like that.’

I kept blathering on to give her time. Anyway, I didn’t want to talk about the real reason for my trip. Something about it embarrassed me, especially tonight. Tonight wasn’t supposed to be about me.

She ordered another whisky, still saying nothing.

‘What’s up, Martha?’

‘First tell me what you were really up to in Rome, apart from drooling over Jesus.’

‘I wasn’t up to anything in Rome. I’d planned to go to Bellegra, an hour south of the city,’ I admitted.

She looked at me in puzzlement.

‘I wanted to visit my father’s grave.’

‘Your father died?’

‘Not him. The other one.’

‘You’ve got so many fathers I never know which one you’re talking about.’

Martha was exaggerating. There were basically only three. The good one, also known as ‘The Trombonist’; the bad one, AKA ‘The Prick’; and the biological one, ‘Jochen’. My mother and I had vanished from the last one’s life so early that he was more like a nice-enough uncle I was always on my best behaviour with. Every now and then, I’d meet up with him for dinner. I’d never been able to feel anything other than pity for him. Not even after my mother wedded The Prick, who in the space of two years wreaked enough havoc on my prepubescent psyche to lumber me with an impressive range of lifelong psychological and sexual defects. The only beacon of hope in this male netherworld was The Trombonist. A gambling-addicted Italian, a devastatingly handsome macho, he’d put me on his shoulders and carried me through the good half of my childhood. I’d loved him to distraction.

‘The Trombonist,’ I said.

‘And he’s buried in Bellegra?’

‘That’s where he was from.’

‘Did he ever take you there?’

‘No, he never wanted to go back.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Yeah, it’s a shame.’

‘No, I’m sorry for keeping you from going there now, I mean.’

‘I kept myself from visiting for ten years, plus another three days in Rome. That’s one good thing about a grave: it waits.’

‘Yeah,’ Martha said, staring into her glass. ‘Yeah. That’s why I phoned. Kind of. My father.’ She took a large slug. ‘My father is a fucking bastard.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘You’ve mentioned that.’

For the first thirty years of Martha’s life, her father’s defining characteristic had been that he was never around, even when she needed him. Especially when she needed him. The stories she’d told me about her childhood were appalling. This father was a kick in the teeth. Her mother had left him early in their marriage, after which he’d taken to the bottle for a few years before getting remarried and then, over the course of this second marriage, almost entirely forgetting about Martha. Our childhood stories were similar in that respect, though our methods of dealing with them were completely different. Now, after several failed attempts to outrun her past, Martha was determined, come hell or high water, to start her own family. She wanted to make it all better, to make something, anything, to be happy, to get on with it. But my childhood, and to an even greater extent my teenage years, had stamped out any desire for a family so thoroughly that the slightest prospect of one made me break out in a cold sweat.

A few years ago, now old and widowed, Martha’s father started phoning her once a week. Twice a week after his cancer diagnosis. She’d probably spent a thousand hours on the phone to him since then, she said, and five of them had actually been worth it. There’d been discussions, truths and apologies, even declarations of love. On his part, needless to say.

He wasn’t such a bad guy really, Martha had once told me. After all, he hadn’t had it easy either. Once you knew where someone came from, which battles they’d won and, more importantly, which they’d lost, the channel opened and love flowed through.

The problem was, where did you go from there? Once everything had been said? You sat around with things nicely cleared up, drinking beer and nattering about politics. With a bit of luck, you could enjoy the odd comfortable silence.

‘All he cares about is himself, right to the end,’ Martha said. ‘But what’s really galling is that he wants me to help. Yesterday morning he phones and says, “It’s all sorted,” something like that. “I’ve sealed the deal,” he says, “they gave me the green light.” Then it’s, “Princess,” and “one last favour.” And, “I know you won’t let your sick old father down.” I mean, sure, who can refuse a last favour? At least you know that’ll be the end of it.’

I didn’t understand what she was trying to tell me.

‘He wants to die, Betty. And he wants me to drive him.’

‘What do you mean, drive him?’

‘To Switzerland. The appointment is next week.’

‘An appointment? Just like that?’

‘It’s not just like that. He obviously sent them his documents months ago: MRI scans, diagnoses, everything. Joined this organisation, shelled out a small fortune. That’s why he’s constantly scrounging money off me. All this time I’ve been wondering why he keeps running out. I just thought he was drinking too much, now I find out he was using my money to fund his death. I mean, how fucked up is that? It’s not enough to get his own daughter to pay for him to die, but he expects me to drive him there too.’

While nearly all our friends were inheriting houses, or at least halves of houses, while they droned on over dinner about wills and inheritance tax, Martha, who’d spent years helping her father out of various ‘tight spots’, as he called them, would just sit there with a bland smile. You never escape your parents’ poverty, the smell sticks to you. Even the way you walk betrays everything, so straight, stiff and proud, defying all oppression, lacking all ease.

‘And he never let on? What’s he been telling you all this time?’ I asked.

‘He didn’t want to be a burden. That’s what he says after dropping his bombshell. “I didn’t want to be a burden, princess.”’

Martha took a cigarette out of my pack, something she only did these days when she was plastered or at her wits’ end, usually both, and smoked it in her own special way: staring into nothingness, inhaling deeply, pondering. Martha set herself deadlines for everything, including thinking. By the time she stubbed out this cigarette, she would have made a decision. For particularly difficult decisions, she would buy a cigar. I placed my pack beside her glass.

‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘One’s enough.’

Her eyebrows drew together. I knew what this meant for me. Buried in the furrow on her forehead was a request, something she found hard to say, something she didn’t know how to put into words. Eventually I took the smoked filter from her hand.

‘I can’t do it,’ she said. ‘I can’t even drive any more. I can’t face it: my father in the passenger seat, our last few hours together.’

Martha hadn’t been behind the wheel of a car since the accident. An accident all four of us survived, or so we thought at first, but which changed everything. Which carved up Jon’s face and in fact did cost him his life in the end. Martha wouldn’t let anyone talk her out of the blame, even though it wasn’t her blame to take, and eventually she’d asked Henning and me to stop trying.

‘Can’t Henning drive?’ I asked.

‘Henning can’t stand my father, you know that. He’d have to bite the steering wheel to keep from screaming at him for the entire journey.’

‘I see,’ I said.

‘Anyway, I couldn’t do that to my father.’

‘Do what?’

‘Henning.’

‘But you’re married – happily, even. You want to have a baby together. And anyway, Henning’s the best.’

At least that’s what I’d come to believe. For the simplest of reasons: because he loved Martha. In a way, he had decided on her, a woman without equal, and in the end, that’s all love is: a decision.

‘My father thinks he’s a loser.’

‘Come on, Martha, that’s not true. Maybe it would be good for the three of you to go together.’

‘No!’ Martha’s voice had got louder. ‘You have to come.’

I’d only met Martha’s father once, more than ten years ago, and all I remembered about him was a sweaty handshake.

‘We’ll drive him there, he’ll take his dose, and then we’ll drive back home,’ Martha said.

‘Without him?’

‘They take care of everything, he said, repatriation and all that.’

Even if everything was exactly the way Martha had described it, I couldn’t picture it. How did you drive someone to the place where they would die? What were you supposed to talk about on the way? What were you supposed to eat? Was he even able to eat? Was it okay to listen to music? To enjoy the scenery? What the hell was it okay to do during someone’s final days and hours?

Martha started to cry. Just out of her left eye; her right eye remained dry. She could only cry out of one eye. As long as I’d known her, she’d been a left-eyed bawler.

When I put my arm around her, I could feel how rigid she was. It was as though she hadn’t exhaled in hours, as though she’d decided to hold her breath until it was all over.

‘He wants to go before the pain gets too bad. We’d probably do the same,’ I said. I myself was the queen of the disappearing act, someone who would travel halfway round the world to forestall any kind of pain, though in my case the pain was never physical. My body was in enviably good health.

‘But he ought to stick around,’ she said. ‘Phone me every day until he keels over. He ought to at least meet his grandchild, it can’t be much longer now. Doesn’t he want to see what happens to us all? He can’t just say, “I’ve seen enough now, thanks very much.”’

‘Yes, he can,’ I said.

She nodded.

‘Sometimes I wish he was still the shitty father he was for most of my life. Go to hell where you belong, I could say, and send a wreath to his funeral. Deciding to be nice shortly before the end, that’s just cruel.’

‘Have you told him this?’

‘Of course not.’

‘I mean that you’d like him to stick around.’

‘“Don’t try to stop me,” he said, but of course I did try. I started crying, he started crying, and then he hung up. Ten minutes later I got a text message with the appointment, nothing else. He’s no good at texting.’ Martha slumped on her stool.

‘But say I did manage to stop him, then I’d be responsible for everything that happens afterwards. And not much good would happen, that’s for sure. He’d be in pain, and it’d be my fault.’

She stared into her glass.

‘When’s the appointment?’ I asked.

‘Thursday,’ she said. ‘At two. We’ll have to pick him up in Hanover and then drive him down in his car. It’s an ancient Golf, but he insists on driving his own car. I mean being driven in it. He can’t drive any more. The car’s been parked one street over for more than a year now.’

‘Can’t we take your car?’

‘He’s dead set on going in his car. You know how it is: memories, nostalgia, all the places he’s been in the car, all the people who’ve sat in it. That car is his buddy. He used to pay it a visit every few weeks, get in and have a beer with it. So if we’re going, we’re going in his car.’

‘Petrol or diesel?’ I asked.

‘What difference does that make?’ Martha looked at me in bafflement.

‘I like to focus on the practicalities.’

‘Petrol. I think.’

‘Four-door?’

‘Christ, Martha, yes, and it has a boot too. Like I said, it’s a Golf.’

The thought of making one’s final journey in a Golf depressed me. I ordered a second pint and a shot.

‘Where exactly in Switzerland is it?’

‘In Chur,’ Martha said. ‘Around 800 kilometres from Hanover. I don’t think we’ll manage it in one day. Not at his age.’

She let out a snort of despair, her left eye still moist.

‘Then we’ll stop somewhere for the night,’ I said, and Martha asked where the hell we were supposed to stop, we couldn’t exactly spend the night at a motorway service station or in Nuremberg or Würzburg. She’d checked out the route, she said, and when you check out a route like that looking for somewhere to spend someone’s last night, you quickly realise there’s not a single place in the entire country that’s suitable for a last night. Germany is too drab for last nights.

Martha slammed the palm of her hand on the bar, upon which the barman looked up and suggested Lake Constance.

‘Lindau,’ he said. That’s where he was from, he said, and he wouldn’t hear a bad word about Lake Constance. ‘Go to Lindau.’

When you’re stumped for ideas yourself, you might as well do what others tell you to. Sometimes it’s best to just drift.

‘Okay,’ we said. ‘Lindau.’ Then we stared into our glasses and thought about our own last nights.

‘I just want to die in bed,’ Martha said. ‘The main thing is not to be alone. A view would be nice. I mean, I’d rather not be in a hotel room in New York with a window looking out on an air shaft. A bed with a view of the sea in a place with no memories. I don’t want to die somewhere I was once young. No coming full circle, like you’ve been reduced to a repetition of yourself. A Greek island, maybe. Yeah, I could imagine that.’

‘I’d like to veer off a coastal road,’ I said. ‘A Greek island would work for me too. I just don’t want to have enough time to think back over everything. I don’t want to have to think and die at the same time.’

Right, Let’s Go