In the Evil Day

26

…HAMBURG…

He found her on the university website.

Dr Alexandra Koenig, Dr. med., Dr. phil., Dipl.-Psych. Clinical psychologist.Research: Empirical validation of psychoanalytical concepts; psychophysiology; post-traumatic stress disorder.

A homepage carried a photograph, properly severe. He went to her curriculum vitae. It listed at least two dozen articles. She had been a visiting fellow at the Harvard Medical School. She was on the editorial board of The Journal for Trauma Studies.

There was an email address. Anselm stared at the screen for a while, then he opened the mailer, typed in her address. Under Subject, he put: Rudeness, contrition.

In the message box, he typed: We could meet, for a walk perhaps. John Anselm.

He felt relieved after sending the message and went back to the logbooks. The phone rang.

‘It’s done,’ said Tilders. ‘Some luck too. Two for the price of one.’

‘Not a concept known to this firm,’ said Anselm. He didn’t know what Tilders was talking about. They must have got the bug on Serrano earlier than expected.

His email warning was blinking. He clicked. Alex Koenig.

The message was: A walk would be nice. Does today suit you? I am free from 3 p.m.

Anselm felt flushed. He couldn’t think of anywhere to meet her, and then he thought of his childhood walks with Fraulein Einspenner in Stadtpark. He hadn’t been there in thirty years.

She was waiting in front of the planetarium, formally dressed again, wearing her rimless glasses. There weren’t many people around, a few mothers with prams or pushers, lovers, older people walking briskly.

She saw him from a distance, didn’t look away, watched him approach.

‘Herr Anselm,’ she said, long and serious face. She held out her right hand. ‘Perhaps we start again?’

‘John,’ said Anselm.

‘Alex.’

They shook hands.

‘Shall we walk?’ she said.

They walked on the grass, away from the building. There wasn’t much left in the day. A wind had come up, serrated edge of winter, hunting brown and grey and russet leaves across a lawn worn shabby by the summer crowds.

‘Well,’ she said, not at ease. ‘You know what I do for my living. You are not still a journalist.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m in the information business.’

‘Yes?’

‘We gather it and sell it.’ That was true, that was what they did. He didn’t want to tell this woman the sordid truth but he didn’t want to lie to her, he’d told a lot of lies, most of them to women.

They were at the road. She stopped and turned. He turned too and they looked back at the planetarium: it was big, solid, domed, towering over the parkland, a faintly sinister presence, alien in its setting.

‘That’s an Albert Speer kind of building,’ Alex said. ‘Hitler must have liked it. It says, look at me, I’m huge.’

‘Well, I don’t want to stand up for Adolf ’s taste in architecture but if you have to have water towers, it’s not too bad.’

‘Water tower? I thought it was a planetarium.’

‘Now it is. It think it was built as a water tower. We could have coffee, something.’

He needed a drink, he hadn’t had anything to drink all day, nothing at lunch time, he usually drank beer from the machine in the basement.

‘Yes, good. Do you know where?’

‘I think so. It’s been thirty years, almost that.’

They set off again, crossed the road. She took big strides, he’d always had to shorten his stride with women, the women he remembered walking with. That was not many. He remembered one. He remembered walking in Maine with Helen Duval, she complained constantly about being bitten by midges, then she tripped over a root and claimed to have sprained her ankle. They were within sight of the cabin he’d hired. That was as far as they ventured.

‘You’re a medical doctor,’ he said. ‘As well.’

‘In theory,’ she said. ‘In practice, I can’t even diagnose myself. I get flu and I think I’m dying. You came to the park when you were young?’

‘I was brought to see the birds. They used to have wonderful exotic birds and all kinds of fowls, these huge fluffy things, golden pheasants, I remember. May still be here somewhere. Do you enjoy what you do?’

She had taken off her glasses. He hadn’t noticed her do that.

‘I suppose so.’ She looked at him, looked away. ‘Yes. Well, I do what I do and I don’t give much thought to whether I enjoy it. It’s not that…it’s not a question that arises. It’s my work.’

She was not used to being asked questions. She asked the questions. They walked in silence for a time, gravel hissing underfoot, the wind tugging at them, lifting their hair. Then they saw a sign and went down a path and found the cafe. There were more people in it than in the park, people rewarding themselves for taking exercise.

‘Hot chocolate with rum,’ said Anselm. ‘That’s what we should have.’

‘Right.’

‘The woman who brought me here always had one. She used to give me a teaspoonful. That’s where it all began. My decline.’

A waitress in black with a white apron came and he ordered two, stopped himself ordering a drink as well, asking her whether she wanted a drink.

‘What brought you to hostages?’ said Anselm.

He wasn’t looking at her, he was looking at the people. He had been doing that since they entered, doing an inventory of the people in the big room. Then he realised she would notice that and he looked at her. She’s pretending she hasn’t noticed, he thought, she’s wary. She thinks I’m capable of repeating last time’s performance.

I am.

‘Well, most of the post-trauma research in this area has been on large groups,’ said Alex. ‘I’m interested in the dynamics of survival in small groups.’

‘What about personality and life history?’

She smiled. ‘You didn’t take well to that. May I say that?’

Anselm nodded. ‘Certainly. To my shame. Did it come under the heading of an extreme reaction?’

‘Mild, I’d class it as mild.’

‘On the extreme scale.’

Alex laughed. Some of the wariness was leaving her, he felt that.

The drinks arrived. She sipped.

‘Wonderful. I haven’t had one of these in years. Not since Vienna.’

‘Does research like this have a use?’ said Anselm.

‘That’s a journalist’s question,’ she said. ‘Academics hate questions like that. It might have a use one day. Everything has a use one day, doesn’t it?’

‘That’s not a very academic answer,’ said Anselm. ‘I thought the idea was to present your research as vital to the survival of the universe?’

She held up her hands, the long fingers, no rings. ‘I know, I should say that. Vital to the survival of my career would be more like it. Let’s say my project is part of the giant mosaic of research, we can’t quite see the pattern in it yet. But…’ ‘You’re not very German,’ he said. ‘You don’t take yourself seriously enough.’

‘If I’m not very German it’s because I’m Austrian-Italian. A quarter Italian. My mother is half Italian. Her family is Italian-Jewish. Jewish-Italian. Atheists until they think they’re dying. How do you describe yourself?’

‘Once I thought I was American. American-German. But I don’t know now. My mother was American but her father was British.’

There was silence. She looked away.

‘Not being sure about what you are, that wouldn’t be a trauma symptom, would it?’

Alex looked at him impassively, she had a judge’s face, and then she smiled. ‘Everything’s a symptom of something,’ she said.

She finished her drink, a pale collar of froth left around the glass. Anselm drained his.

‘I could drink many of these,’ she said. ‘But I have to see a doctoral student, a frighteningly earnest young man. How did you travel here?’

He told her he was parked off Ohlsdorferstrasse.

‘I’m near there. We can walk together.’

He paid and they walked back, light failing fast, shadow pools around the trees, streams of shadow under the hedges, the planetarium brooding, like a monument to something. He sometimes thought that everything old in Germany was a monument. The past had suckers, it attached itself to everything. There was no need to visit the sites or the denkmaler. Places spoke, whispered, smoked of what had been. The old railway lines held in their steel the weight of death trains, the city streets knew black boots, the songs, the slogans, the jeering and the tears. And lost hamlets and dripping cowpatted country lanes held voices, not always the voices of murderers and haters but of simple men and boys dead for the Fuhrer in frozen landscapes far away, the tanks bogged in mud set like concrete, the soldiers’ last thin intakes of air not reaching their lungs, going back into the huge grey world, then the rattle and then nothing. Just snow and ice and useless metal and human innards cooling, cooling, freezing. And over it all the sky of lead.

‘It’s a little menacing,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

They talked, it was easier now, leaves playing about their feet, they talked about the city, the traffic, the weather, the coming of winter, of Winterangst, of the need for sunlight, for Vitamin D, about where she lived. She lived in Eppendorf. She volunteered that she had been married. Her ex-husband was in America.

At their parting, she ran a hand over her hair and he thought he heard the sound it made.

‘So,’ she said. ‘Will you talk to me?’

He put his hands in his pockets. He was reluctant to part from her. ‘If you think it’ll help you get better. Come to terms with your life.’

She bit her bottom lip, looked down, smiling, shook her head.

‘It might,’ she said. ‘There is the possibility also that it could save the universe.’

‘Just added value, a bonus.’

Anselm drove back to Schone Aussicht, met Baader on the stairs.

‘I saw you smile,’ said Baader, pointing at the lobby below. ‘Down there. At the door. Feeling okay?’

‘Facial tic,’ said Anselm. ‘That’s what you saw.’