Chapter 2
It was silent during dinner. Not that there wasn’t any sound, but you didn't dare make it. My cutlery ticked against my plate. Daddy breathed heavily. My chewing smacked. Cars droned across the square, they didn't sound as restrained as these days. Boys laughed, busses accelerated, women scolded, the neighbours bickered in the garden underneath our balcony, and all of those sounds entered our house because it was summer and the windows were open, and I heard it because we were silent.
In my thoughts I visited all the places where she could still be, the locksmith, the dry cleaner's, the tobacconist, but after having finished my refilled plate, I didn't know anymore.
'Where is mama?'
Daddy's eyes were so shadowy that sometimes I didn't see what he thought, but now he was gruff. 'Don't be so difficult.'
But I was difficult, I was proud of it. I decided for myself what I did, and if my parents said I shouldn't be a pain, I was an even stronger pain. 'But where is she?'
He chewed, his sauerkraut moustache heaved and sagged, his forehead was pale.
'Daddy?'
He looked at his food.
'Where is she?'
'That's enough.' His flat hand rattled the plates and the glasses on the table and the air in my belly.
My father was a caring, sometimes moody man, who loved me and sometimes cursed me. It was he who taught me how to cycle, on an abandoned parking lot behind our house. The white rubber tires of my little olive green bicycle zig-zagged on the red-bricked street, he ran after me and corrected my course with his words. We laughed when I fell. 'Try again,' and then I zig-zagged some more and fell again, he lifted me off the ground, repeated his words, until it was dark and I could cycle. In such hours our hearts and minds intertwined and I don't think someone has ever loved her father more than I did.
He worked as a carpenter. The parents of my classmates were head of a bank, or general practitioner, of judge, impressive professions behind which insecure children could hide. But my father could turn the unpredictable shapes of a tree into something practical and beautiful, at which you could sit and draw, or that protected you against rain, and that craft had something magical, it connected him and me to life before machines and expertise, when building your own house and growing your own vegetables was still a guarantee for a good and tranquil life. I was proud of his profession and so convinced that my pride was justified, that it made me radiate self-confidence, which protected me, half my childhood, against the unpredictability which my classmates had in store for who seemed shaky, until I too received a heavy blow, and was insecure half my childhood. Never did I realise what role my father played in the greatest tragedy of my life: where is mama, a question he never answered.
I thought that as time passed she would return, that she had gotten lost and cried and roamed streets she didn't recognise and would finally find our street late at night, when I was already in bed, and that she would come and lay with me, so that I could comfort her. Or that she visited a friend in a different city, but that a train had run over a human and so her train was in a traffic jam, that for the night she curled up on a train bench, afraid of the dark, without a blanket, without a cup of warm milk, and that she would only enter our kitchen during breakfast, still a little scared. Or that she did go visiting her parents, that she hadn't heard the train manager, like I sometimes didn't hear her, when I was reading a Tintin before dinner. The trip to Spain was a long one, I remembered that from when we made it together, so I gave her time.
But at a certain moment she had to have returned from all destinations I could think of. I still remember the moment I realised that.
My best friend Thomas and I walked in the fields behind our houses, where long-haired cows grazed and you could sit between the reeds without anyone seeing you, and do what is really forbidden, like touching brown frogs with a crooked branch, or pulling a reed stem from the ditch and pretending it is a cigar you smoke with gusto and then carelessly throwing it into the ditch, or trying to catch the fat flies that flew above the ditch with your fingers, which never succeeded, and precisely because of that was such an alluring game, because perhaps this time you would succeed. That's what we did, and it was a fresh morning, I wore my jumper of shorn wool and felt the moistness in my face. It smelt of sweet cow droppings.
And Thomas, who I'd kept posted about the playing of hide and seek, asked had I found her yet.
'No.'
'Where could she be?'
'Nowhere.'
My mother left my life on the afternoon of July 23, 1999. She flowed away like tap water into the hole of the sink: untraceably and irrevocably gone.
Thomas sat next to me, expressionless and motionless, like a cow chews and chews when you look at him. I was too young to carry such grief, Thomas was too young to help me, but one human existed who could help me.
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