That Which Remains In the Absence of a Confession
Hot. Sweltering. The dregs of August that settled low over the capital on Odin, trapping everything in their sticky haze. It wasn’t yet raining, but distant lightning spiderwebbed the horizon, and thunder groaned not long after. Reuenthal stood at the window in his home office and watched it, bathed in the eerie electric grey and purple light outside. Aside from the lightning, the clouds were half-lit by the sunset on the opposite side of the sky.
The floor creaking outside his office door was as loud as the thunder. Elfriede didn’t bother to knock. She never did. Reuenthal had honed instincts over many years, tracking the movement of people around him, and he turned towards the door as she opened it.
She was dressed, but only barely, in a gauzy white undergarment that made her appear ghostlike in the ill-lit hallway. Her blonde hair tumbled around her face. Reuenthal looked at her coldly.
“When did you get back?” she asked.
The answer should have been obvious: he hadn’t even taken off his uniform cape yet. But perhaps he had been standing at the window, watching the storm, longer than he thought he had.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
He turned back to the window, and she came into the room. He tracked her motions in their reflections in the glass. She couldn’t hurt him— but just in case.
Her fingers were ice cold as she slipped them across his neck, under the collar of his uniform, not with any pressure, just to make his skin crawl. She leaned against his back.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Liar.”
“Yes.”
When she said nothing, and the thunder rolled distantly, he turned back towards her, pulling her hands from his neck.
“ Mein Kaiser has decided to move his capitol to Phezzan,” Reuenthal said.
“And you’ll be going with him, I assume?”
“Yes.”
She stepped away from him, going towards the window herself. As she did, she trailed her hands across the wood of his desk. “That’s a shame.”
“Why? Are you not coming with me?”
“You presume a lot. I didn’t know you were planning to bring me with you on your flagship, since I’m an enemy of the state.”
“A passenger freighter, and whatever false name you used to get back to Odin in the first place.”
She laughed. “And why would I do that for you?”
“Don’t, then. Stay on Odin. I don’t care.”
“Maybe I will. Here in this house, by myself.” She sat on his desk and spread her fingers across its polished surface as she leaned back.
“You’ll go somewhere else. There’s nothing here for you.”
“No? It’s a nice house. It’s a shame for you to leave it.”
“There will be a nicer one on Phezzan.”
“One befitting His Majesty’s most loyal servant.” She licked her lips. “A reward for your obedience.”
He stepped towards her and grabbed her wrist, which was supporting half her weight. His fingers completely encircled her arm. “Yes,” he said.
She ignored the fact that he was doing this, the fact that she had made herself vulnerable. She was certainly aware of it, but she didn’t react. She just looked past him, out the window. When would the rain arrive?
“It won’t be a better house,” she said. “Bigger. Prettier. But not better.”
“Oh?”
“Isn’t this the house you grew up in?”
“It was my father’s house.”
“So, you’re giving up what you inherited, for him?”
Him. Reuenthal made a noise low down in his throat. “Why would I care at all about the fact that I inherited this place? It doesn’t make any difference.”
“Of course you don’t think so.”
“And you do?”
She turned to look at him, and he took her chin in his other hand to force their eyes to meet.
“You like that he’s tearing down every piece of history. Even your own,” she said.
It was Reuenthal’s turn to laugh. “He was right to do it to your family.”
“And yours?”
“He did it to his own. You know his name used to be Müsel.”
A flash of hatred crossed her face. “And if he gave you someone else’s name, when he puts you in someone else’s house, you would take it?”
It disgusted him how much the thought stirred some strange, long forgotten desire in his heart. But he didn’t let the want onto his face, and merely curled his lip. “ Mein Kaiser is not in the habit of delivering that kind of reward.”
Maybe he had not kept his expression clean enough. “Wouldn’t he, if you asked him to?”
“Why would I do that?”
“You’re so eager to get rid of the past.”
“I don’t care about the past,” he said. He let go of her, and turned away, taking a few steps, so that she couldn’t touch him without getting off the desk. She didn’t. “I’m a bastard, anyway. I only have the von Reuenthal name because my father—”
“The man who raised you?”
“Yes.” The rain started falling, single fat drops at first splashing against the glass, then more and more. If he opened the window, he would smell it, something warm and green, rising up from the dark earth. But he kept the window shut, and the thunder trembled again.
“You should take your mother’s name, then,” she said.
“She was married to my father. It is her name.”
“What was her maiden name?”
“Von Marbach.”
“She wasn’t any more of a von Reuenthal than you are.”
“Or any less.” He watched the rain. “That’s a very Phezzani attitude that you have, that she didn’t belong to my father once they were married.” He couldn’t see her expression. “I thought you detested that kind of modernity.”
“I do.”
“And will you ever give up the von Kohlrausch name?”
“I won’t take yours.”
He laughed, harsh. “Not even some new one that Mein Kaiser might give me? To secure some prestigious spot in this dynasty, since you lost what you had of the last one?”
“You’d be a hypocrite for starting some new noble line. You detest the thought.”
“I do.”
She got off the desk. “Then why do you want me to come with you to Phezzan?”
“I don’t care.” This wasn’t true. He was testing himself. It was very easy to play whatever game the two of them had been playing, here in this house. He wondered, if he brought it to Phezzan, would it remain a game? It would probably all fall apart.
She pressed herself against his back again, taking his exact stance, so that her arms were against his, the insoles of her feet clinging to the outside of his shoes, their knees crooking together. He stayed perfectly still.
“Why didn’t your father leave your mother?” she asked. “Once she gave birth to a bastard, it would have been his right.”
He realized that the answer to this question would determine if Elfriede followed him to Phezzan or not. He didn’t know what his father had been thinking.
“He wanted to make her suffer,” Reuenthal said.
“And did he?”
“People used to think that he killed her.”
“Did he?”
The lightning flashed. “No,” Reuenthal said. “Of course not.”
In his mind’s eye, Reuenthal circled that child of nine. The boy looked up at him coldly, uncowed. There were no threats that Reuenthal could make that could shake him, no matter how he menaced him, loomed over him, grabbed his chin in his broad, adult hand and forced their eyes to meet— black and blue.
That was memory, Reuenthal thought. It always seemed to be happening to someone else, someone outside himself. He no longer could access whatever he might have been thinking in those moments— only the images of events remained, needing to be re-interpreted again and again.
To remember is to interrogate the past.
But even if the boy had been someone that Reuenthal could touch and threaten across the space of years, he wouldn’t have divulged anything. That didn’t surprise Reuenthal.
You’ve always been good at staying silent, haven’t you?
In that memory, you sit on the plastic chair in the long hallway of your boys’ school. The other students in your class are outside, running drills— calisthenics and aerobics and marching. You can hear the instructor, a tall man with a dark beard, shouting, and then the trembling rush of your classmates’ feet pounding across the asphalt below the window, with some cruel laughter and jeers as the slowest boy trips over his own feet and skins his hands on the pavement. These sounds are muted by distance, despite the open window. The squeaking of your shoes on the wet brown linoleum as you kick your feet repeatedly on the floor is much louder.
Are you anxious? You have your head tilted to listen to the sounds out the window, but your hands squeeze the edges of the chair’s seat, knuckles white and the jaundice-yellow plastic digging into your skin. Surely, you aren’t nervous about getting yelled at?
You are inside because it is the fifth day in a row that you have forgotten your uniform for exercise class, and the instructor has decided that the breach of discipline inherent in letting you run in your starched class clothes for this long is too much.
Of course, you have not forgotten your uniform. You know exactly where it is. That morning, as you have done every day this week, you took it out of your gym bag and stuffed it under the lift-top of your desk when no one was looking. Later, in case there is a desk inspection, you will perform the swap again, and the clothes will be back in your bag.
Reuenthal, when he remembered this, could not contain his derision. Everything you do is hopelessly paranoid.
In fact, just that Monday, your classmate Gregor had been describing his father’s reaction to the theft of thirty marks from his wallet, which Gregor had used to purchase train fare, and admission to a soccer game, and lunch. The story was delivered with such enthusiasm that it seemed that the majority of listeners decided right then and there to pilfer their own fathers’ pockets just for a chance to enthrall their peers with the tale later. They would all exaggerate their punishments, to each seem braver than Gregor under the thrashing that he described receiving.
As you listened to this, you sat on the bench on the side of the room, still wearing your school clothes. As you painfully bent down to tie the laces of your tennis shoes, you looked up at the sea of bare, lily-white shoulders and legs before you. You only stole glimpses, and if anyone happened to be looking your way, you would stare back down at your own feet.
The feeling of shame, the physical heat that rose to your face, the sudden thickness in your throat, was easy to remember. This disjointed the memory, and Reuenthal couldn’t have put names or faces to any of the rest of the boys in the scene if he tried. But your eyes, black and blue, still fixated on that wall of smooth, unmarked skin when everyone else’s back was turned to you.
Those boys are out running now. You probably prefer to be out there with them. Even in your stiff and heavy class uniform, you would lead the pack. But you’re inside, waiting for someone to address the problem of Oskar von Reuenthal.
You look away from the window and sit up straight as you hear someone else’s footsteps echo down the hallway. It’s the headmaster, a man whose name Reuenthal has completely forgotten in the intervening years. He has a close cut grey beard and walks at all times like he’s marching, as if to make up for his watery blue eyes and the wan little smile that rises to his lips when he sees you. You don’t smile back, but you stand.
“Oskar,” he says. “Why aren’t you in class?”
You hold out the scrawled note from the athletics instructor and the headmaster takes it, reads it over, and then silently unlocks and holds open the door to his office.
“Come have a seat,” he says as he crosses behind his heavy desk. You sit on the edge of the wooden chair in front of it, and you look at the plaques on the wall, though you can’t read the small print from where you sit, and can’t discern what the diploma or any of the awards are for. The headmaster steeples his hands and looks at you. “So, you’ve lost your gym clothes?”
“No, sir,” you say. “I forgot them at home.”
“Every day for a week?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How is that possible, Oskar? After the first day, what you should have done is found them at home and put them directly in your bag.”
“I forgot, sir.”
He sighs. “Do you need a new set? We have spares.”
“No, sir. I know where the clothes are. I’ll bring them on Monday.”
“I would like you to do that,” the headmaster says. “It’s not healthy to run in your class clothes. They constrict the movement of blood and such.”
“Yes, sir.” You kick at the legs of the chair, sitting on your hands. Thump-thump-thump.
“Is everything alright with you, Oskar?” the headmaster asks.
“Yes, sir. Everything’s fine.”
“I only ask because it’s not like you to forget things like this. Your teachers tell me that your classwork is usually very good.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“So, why is it that you’ve been having this problem in fitness class? Is there an issue with the other students?”
“No, sir. I just keep forgetting my clothes.” No matter how many times you repeat it, it won’t become true. The completely unaffected tone in your voice isn’t helping your case. Other children, honest ones, might be in tears at the shame of actually being so forgetful. But you have a line, and you’re sticking to it.
The headmaster leans back in his seat. “I know it’s been difficult for you since your mother died.”
You stare at him, not giving any response.
“Do you have anyone to talk to about that?” the headmaster asks. “It’s good to—” He fumbles for the words and waves his hand ineffectually. “Process things, sometimes. Talk them through.”
What does he want out of you? Reuenthal wondered. The headmaster’s eyes are watery, but focused on you. It’s some sick curiosity, probably. It’s unlikely to be kindness. Before your mother died, the headmaster had never looked at you at all, and if he had, Reuenthal was sure that he would have had the same shiver of revulsion looking into your eyes as most other people did.
“No, sir,” you say.
“Would you like to talk about it?”
You shrug, and the headmaster leans towards you. It is curiosity, then. He waits expectantly for you to say something, but you don’t. There’s just the rhythmic sound of your shoes hitting the legs of the chair. You’re digging your fingernails into the underside of your thighs as you sit on your hands.
“Your grandfather, Count Marbach, wrote me a letter, you know,” the headmaster says.
You shug again.
“He wanted to know if you had said anything to any of the teachers here about your father.”
“No,” you say. Maybe a little too sharp, too quick.
He smiles, a thin smile. “Of course. And I’m afraid I legally can’t tell him anything, either. He’s not entitled to any of your— well.”
Reuenthal hated the way he is speaking to you— there’s a sickly tone in his voice, and he’s pretending like you don’t understand what he’s saying. You’re not stupid, even if you are only a child.
You kick the chair some more and don’t say a word.
“But it makes me wonder if there is anything you would like to say.”
“About my father?”
“Yes, or anything else.”
“No, sir.” A more sarcastic child might have asked what the headmaster wanted him to say, but you are a serious boy, alarmingly so. You don’t blink, but you continue kicking the chair.
The headmaster looks at you for a long time. Are you uncomfortable under the scrutiny? You don’t even twitch.
“Are you happy at home, Oskar?”
“Why do you ask, sir?”
“I know— it’s difficult to grow up without a mother, especially when yours died— ah. My own mother died when I was young. I just want to do all that I can to make sure you have the best chance to succeed here.”
“I’m fine, sir. I don’t need any help.”
That is the mistake, Reuenthal decided. You shouldn’t have said that. The headmaster leans forward again, focusing all his attention on your skinny little frame. You do look away now.
“If there is anything we can do for you, Oskar…”
“No, sir.”
The headmaster slides open one of his desk drawers and finds some hard candy: peppermints. He offers one to you. You take it and eat it, but you keep crinkling the wrapper once you’ve put the candy in your mouth. You press the sweet between your tongue and front teeth, forcefully enough that the sharp imperfections in the hard sugar bite into your tongue.
“You must miss your mother,” the headmaster says.
You look down at your feet, still kicking the legs of your chair.
“I know it must be terrible to not have her with you anymore. I’m sure—” He struggles to find something to say to you, something that might unlock the well of secrets he’s sure you’re hiding within. Of course, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that will get you to speak. You’ll be silent here forever, no matter how many times Reuenthal replayed this memory in his head. (Was he, too, hoping you would change your mind and speak? What could you even say?)
“I’m sure your mother loved you very much, and that it was the last thing in the world that she wanted, to leave you.”
“May I go, sir?” you ask.
The expression on the older man’s face is pathetic. “Yes, of course, I won’t keep you from your next class. Please do remember your gym uniform on Monday.”
You stand up. “Yes, sir, I will.”
“And Oskar—”
“Yes, sir?”
“On Monday, come see me. I’d like to speak with you again.”
Just once in this conversation, your facade cracks. Your face twitches with something inscrutable— anger, or annoyance, or fear. You cover it up quickly. “Yes, sir,” you say.
He doesn’t stop you again, and you leave the office and head for the bathroom. There’s no one in there, so you must feel safe enough spitting out the peppermint candy and untucking your uniform shirt from your pants. You lift it up and examine yourself in the mirror, puffing out your chest, your ribs all visible. You meet your own eyes in your reflection— black and blue.
With two fingers, you poke at your side and judge if the ugly, spreading bruise will be dimmed enough on Monday to be unnoticeable when you change clothes.
The day of your mother’s funeral is blisteringly cold, but inside the temple, you’re suffocatingly warm. The place is dim— flickering firelight from the pit in the front of the room, and the torches along the walls. Does it awe you, the lights and the shadows they cast?
The air is thick with smoke and incense, and you take shallow breaths. Huge statues lining the walls loom menacingly above you in the gloom. You stay as still as you can, like a statue yourself, though you’re small— pathetically so— in comparison.
You and your father stand together at the front of the room while the priest reads out some sonorous prayer. Your father’s hand is heavy on your shoulder, squeezing with a force that would leave marks on bare skin, only attenuated by the heavy black suit you’re wearing.
You’re right next to the coffin, though when you kneel it’s so far above you that only the tips of your mother’s fingers are visible as they rest folded on her breast. When you stand, you can see all of her. You look.
The firelight of the temple doesn’t make her look alive, nor does the heavy makeup that the mortician has applied to her face. It always stood out to Reuenthal as pathetic, the heaviness of the white paint making the viewer question what was hiding beneath it. For a long time, remembering this scene, he dismissed it as a mannish face incapable of being made more delicate, feeling an uncomfortable twisting of disgust each time he did.
Reuenthal had not thought about this scene in years for that reason, but as he looked through your eyes now, he was struck by how the mortician’s caked makeup obscures her youth. Strange, to realize that he now was older than she was when she died. Strange, to see a young woman for the first time.
(When Reuenthal finally settled still in bed, for just a moment, he arranged himself like the corpse: eyes closed, head flat back and facing the sky, fingers entwined over his bare chest. Elfriede raked her hand through his hair, and he continued to pretend, just for a moment, before he rolled over.)
The funeral is not well attended, which makes the priest’s voice reading the ceremonial words feel wrong as they bounce across the cavernous space. You don’t know the few people who have come, and their faces didn’t stay clear in Reuenthal’s memory. There’s only an indistinct sense that there are some people there, tall figures with blurry faces who will haunt your nightmares for a few years before fading away completely.
With experience at many other funerals, Reuenthal understood that your father should say something during the ceremony, but you certainly don’t know that. It must not seem odd to you how silent he is for the duration. He, too, stands as still as humanly possible. You’re both like the statues, though he isn’t much like Odin, and you’re even less like Thor. You don’t look up into your father’s face— too far above you— but Reuenthal’s imagination liberated him from your fixed perspective.
Yes, perhaps he’s more like Saturn, his skin yellowed in the firelight, cut out against the blackness of the temple itself. The way his hand digs into your shoulder— it seems impossibly large in comparison to your frame— like he could rip you apart, limb from limb, if he chose.
Why is it, Reuenthal wondered, that this memory of smallness still had power over him? This feeling was clearer than so many others. It isn’t what you’re even thinking about at this moment. You must be thinking about your mother as you look at the body before you.
To you, she was so recently a part of your life. Reuenthal no longer remembered her at all— the sound of her voice, the way she moved, it was all forgotten. Only her face, which was the same as his own, or at least it became the same as his own in memory, remained distinct.
Whatever the priest is saying passes over you in a drone, time slipping away as you stand— sweating and trying not to shiver, paradoxical sensations that nevertheless weave themselves together. It’s like you’re feverish, but you’re perfectly well. The temple is designed to create overwhelming, otherworldly sensations. It might have made a different child a believer, but Reuenthal didn’t remember that happening to you, even for a moment.
When the ceremony is over, you follow behind the coffin as it’s carried by faceless men out into the cemetery behind the temple. The moment you cross the threshold, into the outside world, you cover your eyes with your arm, instinctively— it’s too bright, the sun glinting off the snow. Your father grabs your arm and wrests it away from your face. Perhaps it’s just because you hesitate in your walking, blinded by the sudden light, and he wants to move you along. You march at his side, through a path carved in the knee-high snow. You’re freezing.
The Reuenthal family has its own section in the graveyard: the grandmother and great-grandparents you never knew, distant uncles and other more nebulous relationships— a family tree that somehow narrowed to a single point to land on your skinny shoulders, despite the fact that it shouldn’t have been yours at all. The last von Reuenthal stands in the snow beside the last of the von Reuenthal line.
The other people who attended the service have departed, not waiting to see the coffin be lowered into the frozen earth. You peer down into the darkness of the grave. It seems impossibly large, but that’s just the way it looks to you. Your hand, hanging at your side, stretches for something for just a moment, looking for something to hold onto— you’re dizzy, and feel like your feet are going to slide off the edge of the snowy ground, sending you tumbling down that endless pit. The ground would swallow you whole, like it’s about to swallow your mother. But there’s nothing to cling onto, except for your father, and there’s no support to be found there, so you clench your hand into a cold little fist and shove it into your pocket, and look out across the cemetery, pockmarked with gravestones covered with snow.
You probably haven’t eaten today, actually, though Reuenthal didn’t remember any of the specifics of the morning before the funeral. That would explain the way the memory swims around you, why you steady yourself by squinting into the sun.
Because you’re looking in that direction, you notice the intruder before anyone else does. He’s a black shadow across the white landscape, and he approaches silently and slowly, until he’s standing some twenty meters away. Your father, who is looking at his own name carved on the gravestone in front of you, does not notice him. The intruder takes off his hat as the coffin sinks into the ground, but when your father scoops up a handful of icy dirt from the pile next to the grave, he stalks the remainder of the way forward. Finally, your father notices him.
Now that he’s close enough for you to see his face, you recognize the old man. This is your grandfather: Count Marbach. You’ve seen his portrait a hundred times on your mother’s desk in the sitting room, but you would have recognized him even without that knowledge, though you’ve never spoken with him before. He looks just like your mother, which is to say, he looks just like Reuenthal, with forty more years of age.
Your father tosses the dirt into the hole before your grandfather arrives. The priest and the gravediggers vanish from the scene. Reuenthal didn’t remember them leaving, but he also didn’t remember them staying. Perhaps this is because you and your father actually spend a long time alone at the graveside before your grandfather arrives, and time has become compressed in the intervening years.
Your father’s hand is on your shoulder again, this time staining your suit with dirt. He tries to marshal you away from the grave, but your grandfather blocks your exit.
“Murderer,” he says, and though he must be looking at your father— it’s the only thing that makes sense— for some reason, his eyes seem to pierce right through you. That, more than anything else, remained in Reuenthal’s memory after all these years. He stares at you, accuses you. “Murderer,” he says again.
For the first and only time after your mother’s death, you begin to cry. Open mouth, silent, heaving breaths— a wail that won’t quite emerge. The air is so cold that you can’t take any of it into your lungs; you’re choking on the lump in your throat. The tears burn as they cross your cheeks, and you want to wipe them away, but you’re frozen under your grandfather’s glare.
“Murderer,” he accuses again, or maybe he doesn’t.
This moment is stuck on a loop that would last forever if Reuenthal didn’t push the memory forward, go elsewhere. Reuenthal stopped thinking about it before he could remember his father dragging you out of the cemetery through the snow.
The police station is brightly lit, but dingy. Above you, the ceiling tiles have rings of brown from old water that’s dripped out of hidden pipes. The linoleum of the floors is cracked in places, and the rows of desks that you pass, where the uniformed officers on duty are stationed, look rickety and scratched. This doesn’t really register for you, though the scene is vividly detailed in the memory. What matters to you is that you’re alone.
You and your father were brought to the police station together, but the officers separate you as soon as you enter. They shuffle you into a room, by yourself, and then they close the door. Perhaps they say things to you as they do this, but Reuenthal didn’t remember it. All he remembered is the way you wait. Hours pass— you don’t know how long.
You’re alone in a room with a long plastic table and just two chairs. No one has chained you to the chair you’re sitting on, but by the way you’re looking around, you must half-suspect that someone is going to. There aren’t any windows, but even if there had been windows, you wouldn’t have been able to see anything out of them— it’s late at night, and you were pulled out of bed to get here. They let you dress, but you forgot your coat as the officer ushered you out of the house. It was snowing when you left home, and the flakes melted into your black hair in the few steps between your front door and the back of the police car.
Some time into your wait in this room, out of curiosity, you try the door. It’s locked. There’s a button on the wall, with a speaker below it— you think that you could probably summon someone if you pressed it, but you have not pressed it, and you’re not going to, no matter how much you need to use the bathroom. You’re just going to wait.
Anxiety ensures that the time is accurately represented in this memory. You count it in the nervous tapping of your fingers on the table, the jittering of your leg. Every time you hear footsteps outside the door of the interrogation room— surely, that’s what this is— you whip your head towards it and stop all other movement until they pass.
Perhaps the memory isn’t accurate. Perhaps you do doze off. You’re here for hours. Reuenthal knew that it was likely that you are forgotten about, but you’re convinced that they’re keeping you here to punish you, or to get you to confess. Confinement is a familiar experience for you, which helps you endure it with more grace than should be expected from a child your age.
When someone finally does come, opening the door, you suspect it’s morning. The man who comes in is carrying a tray, like the ones they have in the cafeteria at your boys’ school, and it has a plate of dry looking scrambled eggs, and little burnt sausages, and toast, and a carton of orange juice. He sits it down on the table in front of you.
You look at the man rather than the food, and make no move to pick up the fork. He’s older— probably older than your father— with streaks of white in his light brown hair. He has thick glasses balanced on his nose, and when he sits down in the seat next to you, he pulls a recording device from his pocket, and a notebook emerges from where it was held beneath his arm. He clicks his pen open. What’s most interesting about him— though you suspect it’s some kind of trick to disarm you— is that he’s not wearing a police uniform.
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” he says in a soft voice. “I’m Doctor Keller.”
He holds out his hand for you to shake, and you stare at it for a second, then do. You look so stiff and formal.
“Your name is Oskar von Reuenthal, isn’t it?” he asks.
There’s a moment of silence as you decide how polite you’re going to be to this man, and how much you’re going to say to him. You decide very quickly: as little as possible, on both counts. But he already knows your name, so there’s no point in lying. “Yes,” you say.
“Very good. Please, have some breakfast. I know this must have been a very stressful night for you.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Dr. Keller purses his lips, but turns it into a smile. “At least have some juice.”
He picks up the juice carton and puts it in front of you. You look at it with barely hidden skepticism, but the carton is at least sealed, so you open it and take a tentative sip, just to appease him. It’s bitter and cheap tasting, but you don’t realize how hungry you actually are until you start to drink it, and you finish the carton. You haven’t eaten since— Reuenthal didn’t remember how long it had been since you had last eaten. Something was strange about tracking time backwards from this memory. All he remembered was the police station.
You still don’t touch the food, though.
“Good, good,” the doctor says as you put the empty carton down on the table in front of yourself. “Do you want more? We can get you more.”
“No.”
“Alright. That’s fine. If you change your mind, let me know.” He smiles as he looks at you. You look behind him, at the door. You wonder if it’s locked, if he’ll have to ask someone to let him out. There’s a moment of silence as the doctor studies you. This is real scrutiny: he’s taking everything in— the way you sit, the way you are holding your hands, the state of your clothes and hair. When you open your mouth, you can see him checking your teeth.
“Do you know why you’re here, Oskar?”
You make him tell you. You’re not stupid enough to admit anything. “No,” you say.
He lets out a rush of breath. Perfectly calculated, on his part. “I’m afraid I have some very bad news for you.”
You nod, but don’t speak.
“I’m afraid that your mother has died,” he says.
You know that already. It’s not a surprise, and you’re not a good enough actor to fake surprise. “Oh,” is all you say.
The doctor writes something down in his notebook. “Did you know that?”
You stare at him.
“Did someone else tell you?”
“No,” you say.
“I know this must be very overwhelming for you,” the doctor says. “Do you need a minute? It’s okay to cry, if you need to cry.” He has a handkerchief in his breast pocket, one he would certainly offer to you if you broke down in messy sobs. But you’re not going to do that.
“No,” you say. You stare at the wall behind him, bumpy white plaster. The light is so harsh and bright that every gritty speck in the wall has a dark shadow beneath it.
He nods. Perhaps there are many children just as stoic as you, children who have been training their entire lives to hear that their father has died in battle. It’s not stoicism that’s making you keep silent.
The fact that it’s your fault that your mother is dead— that is something that you cannot allow yourself to cry over.
“Oskar, I’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s alright?”
You know he won’t go away without at least asking, even if you avoid answering. “Okay.”
“Where were you, last night?”
“In my bedroom,” you say.
“Very good. What time do you usually go to bed?”
“Eight.”
“And did you go to bed at eight last night?”
“Yes.”
“Did you get out of bed at any time during the night?”
“When the police came and told me to.”
“Yes, that’s right.” He writes something in his notebook. “The officer told me that you were awake when he got you. This was about one in the morning. Did something else, or somebody else, wake you up?”
Lie. “I heard the cars in the driveway,” you say.
“Of course,” he said. “And did you hear anything else during the night?”
“No.”
“Nothing at all?”
“No.”
“Let me ask you about your father—” the doctor says. You shift in your chair, uncomfortable. The doctor notices this, and writes something else down in his notebook. You can’t read it from where you’re sitting— his handwriting is a scribble, and you’re not good at reading upside down.
“Oskar, what is your father like?”
Nothing. You’re not going to say anything. You look down at your hands.
“I understand that it’s probably very difficult for you to say anything to me right now. You haven’t slept, and you haven’t eaten, and you’ve been here for a while. But anything you could tell me would be very helpful.” He’s listing the interrogation techniques that they’re using on you. You wonder what will happen to you if you say nothing.
“Why?”
“Well, I would like to let you go back home,” he says. “But I need to know a few things before I can do that.”
“What?”
“Do you know where your father was, last night?”
“At home.”
“And what was he doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s alright, that’s alright. When does he usually go to bed?”
“I don’t know.”
“Alright. Your mother, do you know where she was?”
The questions go on and on and on. You refuse to answer most of them, at least in any real way. The doctor probably thinks your silence is stupidity— he speaks in simpler and simpler words, short sentences, a cajoling, baby voice. None of it will make you say anything.
Eventually, he tires of recording your non-answers in his notebook and on his voice recorder, and he leaves. A police officer escorts you to a cell, with a skinny bed and a toilet. This only confirms your suspicions that they know the truth, and reaffirms your desire to say nothing.
In the end, they hold you in the police station for three days. You’re given food, and crayons to draw with, and there’s always someone standing around, in case you reveal something. Occasionally, there’s someone who takes you away to the interrogation room, to ask you questions that you refuse to answer.
On the end of the third day, they haven’t found anything to charge you with, so they let you go, you and your father. He grips your shoulder tightly, and in the taxi that you take back home, he glances down at you.
“You didn’t say anything to them, did you?” he says. His voice is rough, and his eyes are bloodshot. He smells: not like alcohol, but like sweat. “Why not?”
You don’t say anything to him, either.
With the distance of years, Reuenthal knew that the police never would have charged him, a child, with anything. He wasn’t responsible for killing his mother in a literal sense. It had been a delusion, born of panic and fear, a warped way of trying to make sense of a world that refused to make sense: to take blame— and therefore control.
His father hadn’t killed her either. She had killed herself. He remembered it very well.
You are the one to find her body.
She’s laying on the bed, in the master bedroom. Her body is right where Reuenthal was, with Elfriede asleep already beside him. The past and the present superimposed themselves in Reuenthal’s mind, half asleep.
He watched as you come in the door, silhouetted in the hallway light. You’ve come to ask your mother something about dinner— a tedious, quotidian question. At first, you think she’s just asleep. But when you turn on the light, you see how pale she looks, and you see the empty bottle of pills at her right hand. She’s perfectly still, and you don’t see the rise and fall of her chest— though it’s always been difficult to see breathing beneath her tight corset.
Reuenthal, too, stopped breathing for a minute, just to pretend.
You kneel at the side of the bed and study your mother’s face, the way her hair is brushed, the way her mouth is slack and open. You reach out to touch her, but you hesitate and then withdraw your hand.
This memory is strange, too. Reuenthal knew that it should take place almost immediately before you go to the police station, but he couldn’t trace a line between the two events. It must just be the shock of seeing your mother dead— it freezes this moment forever, keeps it away from every other memory.
You look at your mother for a long, long time. You stay there until your father comes in.
When he sees her on the bed, he shoves you aside with one broad hand. You end up crawling on the floor, just to get out of his way. He takes your place, kneeling at the side of the bed, and lets out an almost inhuman sound. It’s a wordless cry of anger, rather than sadness. He shakes her shoulder, throws the empty bottle of pills across the room to bounce off the wall and roll under the bed.
He stands and picks your mother up. Her body dangles limp from his arms, and he towers above you.
The actual words that he says when he yells at you changed every time that Reuenthal remembered this scene. It doesn’t particularly matter. He blames you.
“You were born to make us suffer,” your father growls.
You try your best to get out of his way, and you run for your room.
When you flee the master bedroom, and your father takes your mother’s body somewhere else, Reuenthal finally was able to put the reminiscences away. The past faded into nothing as he stared at the dark ceiling above him.
Elfriede was right, in a way, that he hated this place and would be glad to be rid of it. He rolled over in bed. In the darkness, the master bedroom of his father’s house was the same as any other room, in any other home. It was his mind that conjured up the setting. There was nothing special about the fact that the memories lived here, because they didn’t. He was sure that he would remember you, and your father, probably until he died.
There was a kind of peace he could make with that. He wasn’t going to spend any effort trying to pretend to be something he wasn’t, trying to rid himself of a past that had shaped him by forgetting it.
Reuenthal closed his eyes and fell asleep.
You aren’t in the dream.
You should be. You should be the window through which Reuenthal saw the scene. But you aren’t there. Instead, there is only the scene, as if seen through a keyhole, or something smaller than that: the eye of a needle.
Your mother and father are in the study. There’s a bottle of wine on the table, and they stand across from each other, vicious expressions on both their faces, though your father’s is wilder, his eyes yellow and his hair in disarray. It’s unlike him. Your mother simply looks tired. Exhausted, even. The hollows underneath her eyes look like bruises.
The noises are garbled, as if heard from underwater, or rising up through the floorboards and seeping through the walls of the house. Your mother and father are yelling at each other. Your father throws a book at your mother’s head. It doesn’t hit— it sails past her ear and dislodges the painting on the wall behind her, knocking it crooked.
Your mother raises her hands in a conciliatory way, says something inaudible. Your father turns away from her and goes to stand over at the window. She sits down at the table, picks up the bottle of wine, and pours herself a glass.
“Do you want some?” she asks. Now that they’re speaking in a normal tone, the words are clearer for some reason.
“No,” your father says. “I’ll have whiskey.”
“Ah.”
He walks over to the drinks cabinet and fiddles with it for a moment while your mother picks up the wine glass. She holds it to the light where it sparkles blood-red, then downs half of it in one draught.
It takes a moment, but only a moment, before she realizes that something is horrifyingly wrong.
She stands, clutching her throat, choking and gasping.
Your father doesn’t turn around from where he stands at the drinks cabinet, even as your mother makes inhuman, warbling sounds— screams that are cut off by the blood that fills her throat and begins to crawl out of her open mouth, past her teeth, dripping down her chin.
She falls to the floor and writhes in pain, kicking her legs in her dress, clawing at her throat. When she goes slack and silent, with eyes opened wide but not seeing anything, your father walks over to her, picks her up, and puts her back in the chair, arranging her perfectly so that her head is slumped over the table and her wine glass is in her hand.
Very calmly, he picks up his phone from the table and dials the emergency number.
“I think my wife just swallowed poison,” he says. “Can you help me?”