Dora

by Zoë Beck

Bahnhof Zoo

Take a look at her. Even if it’s hard.

You won’t want to look at her because she stinks and is filthy from head to toe. You think you know what you’ll see but take a look anyway.

Don’t wait for the woman from the rescue mission to help her to her feet and prop her up so she doesn’t fall over again, then bring her to the homeless shelter where she’ll have to cut the clothes off her body, wash her, and give her something new to wear. The clothes aren’t new, of course, just castoffs from strangers, but they’re new to her. She’ll wear them for a day or two and then they’ll have to be cut away again, because she won’t be able to take them off: they’ll be so stiff with filth and grime and blood and sperm and vomit that the only way to remove them will be to cut them from her body and throw them away.

They know her here; they know how it is. They’re happy when she shows up. Sometimes a person from the rescue mission finds her and brings her in. Sometimes she screams and lashes out for hours and they have her taken to the clinic, at least for a few days until she discharges herself or simply disappears. Here they hope she’ll stay longer in the hospital until she’s fully recovered and healthy, if there is such a thing. Ever since someone from the mission saw her by chance after she’d been in the hospital for five days in a row, and told everyone that he didn’t recognize her at first because she looked so young and beautiful, that’s what they all want here.

So, take a good look at her. Somewhere under the dirt and the stench, it’s still her.

* * *

In her early twenties, she took her meds. Not always, but there were stable phases. Sometimes entire months went by without incident. A year and a half ago, I remember that we thought everything was going to be fine and that our lives and hers would return to normal. We thought: She’ll take her meds for a while longer, and then this whole topic will be a thing of the past. We longed for normality. As if anything had ever been normal. A year and a half ago, when we’d been lulled into a sense of security, the call came from one of her friends.

“Come here immediately,” he said. “Just come, now.” Then he hung up.

I heard voices in the background, loud and confused. Students, I figured, the cafeteria. I was in the library not far away, and I jumped on my bike. When I reached the Math Institute, one of the nightmare scenarios that I’d been trying to block from my mind was taking place in front of the building.

Dora was standing on the steps leading up to the entrance. In each hand she was holding a glass bottle, which she aimed like weapons at other students who were gathered at the bottom of the stairs. At the same time, she was yelling: “I’ll kill you! You fuckin’ Nazis!”

I felt sick—not because I was afraid she’d really do her classmates harm, but because I saw that she had wet herself and didn’t seem to have noticed. I saw a guy standing at the edge of the group who was taking pictures with his cell phone.

As a big brother, you have responsibilities and you have to make decisions. My decision was to take the guy’s cell phone first, then grab my sister. The guy didn’t want to hand over his phone just like that, so we scuffled a bit, but the others barely noticed. Then I put his cell in my pocket, latched onto my sister’s arm, and dragged her into the building. There I grabbed her bottles, put them by the door, led her to the toilet, and told her to clean herself up. If you spoke English to her, it worked just fine. Another student rested his hand on my arm and handed me her backpack. I thanked him and looked for her meds inside the bag, but only found a month-old prescription. Luckily, I also found her gym bag, which I handed to her in the bathroom so that she could change. She was still cussing Nazis, but sounded a little calmer and at least didn’t want to kill anyone anymore.

We went to the nearest pharmacy in the village of Dahlem. In the Luise beer garden, I gave her one of her pills, saying they would protect her against the Nazis. As always, she was suspicious at first, but eventually swallowed it. It would take a few more hours until the voices in her head went quiet, and a couple more days until she was stable.

* * *

When you look at her, remember how young she is. You’ll think she’s at least twenty years older than she actually is. That’s because of all the dirt on her haggard face. Her hollow cheeks. Her empty eyes. She hardly eats, and drinks instead to block out the voices, and when she gets hold of some money, she sometimes buys drugs—any old kind. She doesn’t care as long as they’re stronger than the voices.

Dora heard the voices for the first time in South America. At least that’s what we think. We weren’t with her, and she never said much about it, but the friend she was traveling with during the semester break thought so too. This is what we figured: somewhere, somehow, she took the wrong drug. She’d had almost no experience back then, and it must have triggered something in her brain. The doctors we spoke to said that she must have been going through the early stages of her illness for a long time and it would have eventually happened anyway.

After returning from South America, she seemed really stressed. She was always turning around, startled, spoke in a low voice, and refused to use the telephone. She took the radio and television out of her room and locked away her computer and cell phone. Blacked out her window. Talked to herself.

We brought her to see the best doctors and made appointments with the most renowned therapists. She regularly took her prescriptions until a therapist told her that she didn’t have to if she didn’t want to. Three weeks later, she started hunting for Nazis in the backyard. We brought her to a different therapist and sued the man who talked her out of taking the meds. There were bad phases, but also good ones. She was able to carry on studying and heard the voices less and less often. She even used a laptop and warmed to the Internet again.

In the past, it had been one of her obsessions. In the past: before South America, the period that the doctors kept digging up for some kind of explanation. In the past, Dora had taken pictures and posted her every move online. She didn’t do anything without telling the whole world where she was and why, what she’d eaten and drank, why she was laughing and with whom. Her Instagram account had several thousand followers. She was a minor celebrity. She used to be outspoken, cocky even, and our brother Bela called her an attention junkie. If she’d had a musical streak like him, she would have made a perfect diva. He, on the other hand, always hid behind his double bass.

In the bars on Ku’damm she was a real hell-raiser, but her favorite hangout was the Lang Bar in the Waldorf Astoria. She’d gather there with the admirers who could afford to join her. Or with those who’d do anything to post a selfie with her. She herself wasn’t afraid of approaching real celebrities at the Lang to take photos with them, with the Memorial Church or Zoo Palast cinema in the background. On summer nights, she would sit on the rooftop terrace and snap shots of herself and her followers with the floodlit construction sites around Zoo Station as a backdrop. She loved it there.

* * *

That’s why she often sleeps there, under the railway bridge next to the bakery. If you look around, you’ll see very few women. They try to stay off the streets at night. Or they look for nooks and crannies where they can’t easily be found. Most try to find a place to stay—in homeless shelters or women-only facilities. Some go home with any old guy and stay for as long as they can stand it; they let the guys do whatever they want with them, just to have a roof over their heads. Shame is often greater for women than men—shame, but also fear of sleeping on the streets. Because they are attacked more often. Because they are raped. I’ve done my research.

Dora feels no more shame. She has nothing left to protect or hide. She sometimes spends the night in shelters and the like, but whenever we look for her she’s mostly here; and when the rescue mission contacts us, we’re often told that they found her just around the corner. They know her and they know us. Once she disappeared for several weeks, and no one around here could tell us where she was or when she’d last been seen. We asked around in all the shops and dive bars, even showing her photo to passersby. We called hospitals and every single emergency shelter. We made inquiries with the police. Finally, we stood, exhausted, in front of the Zoo Palast and Bela burst into tears. I could tell he thought she was dead. No one would contact us, he said. No one would recognize her. Perhaps she had been buried in some anonymous grave. The glass pane reflected the brightly lit Waldorf Astoria. I left Bela and crossed the street, let angry motorists honk at me, made it to the other side unscathed, and stormed into the lobby of the luxury hotel. I asked about my sister. Showed photos. Looked into their helpless faces. She was a regular here, I said, up in the Lang Bar. They’d long since forgotten her.

Then the concierge, a woman, remembered that a homeless person had been thrown out a few weeks ago. A young woman, she said, but it had been hard to tell at first, because she had looked so old. I nodded encouragingly and asked her to tell me the whole story. She had been pacing about on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, then finally huddled on the floor near the main entrance. Of course, she was immediately shooed away, but that same night, a colleague had found her in the underground parking lot, where she’d settled in a corner to sleep.

No one knew what had happened to her after that; no one could even remember the exact date. I went back to my brother, who was still standing in front of the Zoo Palast, crying silently. I hugged him and starting crying too. I knew she would have never gone home with some guy just to have a roof over her head. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Now we both thought she was dead.

* * *

I happened to be at the Lang Bar when she gathered her followers together for the last time. I’d not planned to go out that evening. This was right before my law degree exams, and I had other things to do; but then the attorney from the firm where I’d done my internship invited me there, and with an eye toward my future career, I wasn’t going to turn him down. I was hoping not to meet my sister; but, of course, she was sitting there happily in the midst of her admirers with a nonalcoholic cocktail in front of her—she barely drank at that time because she didn’t like the taste—and waved to me excitedly. I said a quick hello, mentioned my business meeting, and sat down with the attorney. A good hour later, she got up to leave, but the lawyer asked her to join us at the table; I found it embarrassing, though it couldn’t be avoided, especially as Dora was so gregarious. We were drinking tea and talking about a case that I’d worked on as a legal clerk. He offered Dora a cup, which she accepted with a shrug. I remember this because she never used to drink tea or coffee. But I understood that she wanted to appear more grown-up, to somehow reduce the eight-year age gap between us. She was pretending that she didn’t think it was stuffy and conservative to drink tea. Smiling, she threw back her hair and answered the attorney’s questions about her majors and exam subjects, and what she was going to do later on.

Then, all of a sudden, I noticed that she had grown tight-lipped and distracted. She stared into her tea, looked around nervously, then stared back into her tea. If she’d been shy, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but this wasn’t typical of my sister. I asked her if she was okay, but she only muttered that something was wrong, then stood up and left the bar, even forgetting her purse.

“Young girls at that age,” was all that the lawyer said, and we resumed our conversation.

When I returned to our father’s roomy apartment in Uhlandstrasse, where I still lived for financial reasons, I found her sitting on the bed in her room, staring into space. There was something in the tea, she said. I asked her to elaborate, and she said that something had appeared on the surface and had risen with the steam. It had been impossible for her to drink. I asked why she hadn’t ordered something else, and she said, “Because I had to leave. It didn’t want me there.”

I thought I’d misheard, and to this day I’m not sure if that’s what she really said, or if I’m just imagining it in hindsight. But from then on, something changed. She became quiet and introspective, sometimes sitting for long stretches with a faraway expression on her face, as if deep in thought, and only reacting when we shook her or said her name very loudly. Her grades suffered and she complained of trouble concentrating and insomnia. Dad took her to a doctor, who prescribed her sedatives, saying it was due to the pressure of high school exams; apparently, he had many such cases.

On some days she was better; on others, worse. But none of us thought that she was seriously ill. Dad thought she might simply be growing up, and that perhaps she’d even take after him in the end. “Like you, Adrian,” he said to me. “Like you and your brother.”

I think that’s what he wanted to see, because she reminded him too much of our mother—our mother when she was young.

As far as I know, she never went to the Lang Bar again. From her Instagram pictures, I gathered that she frequented a café at the Bikinihaus; she obviously liked sitting in front of the large window, from which she could see straight into the monkey enclosure. She posted fewer selfies, and I read the concerned comments from her followers: Is everything all right? What’s happened to you? What about the Lang Bar? She replied that she was stressed by her exams, and I admit that it put my mind to rest.

A few weeks later, Bela called me from the hospital. He had burned his wrist, he said. When I picked him up and asked him how it had happened, he said: “It was Dora. I was making myself tea in the kitchen when she passed by, stopped, looked at my cup, then knocked it out of my hand.”

He’d been advised not to play the bass for a few days. He wasn’t badly hurt, and had he been studying a subject other than music, chances are that he wouldn’t even have bothered going to the emergency room. But Bela’s hands were his pride and joy, and he returned home in a foul temper, slamming his bedroom door.

I knocked at Dora’s door, wanting to know what had happened. She wasn’t crying. “I didn’t mean to hurt him,” she said. “But he mustn’t drink tea.” She looked at me and I saw the fear in her eyes. “Adrian, what’s wrong with me?” she asked.

“You’re stressed out,” I said. “That makes people do strange stuff.”

I didn’t know at the time that she thought she’d seen something in the rising steam, like at the Lang Bar. Something she was afraid of and saw as a threat. I didn’t know because she didn’t tell me or anyone else. Maybe I should have been more insistent. Maybe I was even afraid of what she would tell me.

The next day, she apologized to Bela. Then she left the house. She wanted to go to the zoo. “To listen to the animals,” she said. “It calms me down.”

* * *

Yes, she even sleeps out here in winter. Until they pick her up and bring her somewhere warm. But she never wants to stay. She’s afraid of the others—that they’ll give her a hot drink. Most of the mission staff know about it. But the volunteers frequently change. She’s already scalded some hands. And one woman’s face. The winters in Berlin are long and gray, and they can get very cold.

* * *

Dora managed to get accepted to the math program, and after the first semester Dad rewarded her with a trip to South America—the trip which caused her complete transformation. She thought that someone was giving her orders; she could hear them in her head. The commands came from American intelligence agencies. In her mind it was 1945, and she was a soldier whose mission it was to liberate the city. We don’t know how she managed to get through the return flight, because just as we arrived at the airport to pick her up, we saw her jump onto the back of an older woman and swear at her violently.

We thought the incident was the aftermath of some wild drug trip, because the friend she was traveling with said something like that. It wasn’t for a few weeks that we realized it was more.

Things got quieter when she started on the meds. We became hopeful. Everything seemed to be going well. A few blips whenever she did not take her pills—sometimes on purpose, sometimes out of forgetfulness. Then we’d have to pick her up from some place to stop her from chasing imaginary Nazis and make her take her medication again. Yet things didn’t go too wrong. The thing at the Math Institute was a bad relapse, but after that it was quiet again for a few weeks.

Until a therapist tried to convince her that she felt guilty about our mother’s death. Dora came home distraught and wanted to know everything. Dad had always spoken vaguely of a fatal accident; Bela and I knew better. Now Dad thought it right to tell her the truth, something he himself didn’t like to talk about. He told her about Mother’s suicide shortly after Dora’s birth. How or even whether the therapist knew wasn’t clear: she refused to talk to us about it. We made sure that Dora was transferred to a different doctor. But the truth about Mom’s death preoccupied her for a long time afterward, of course.

One evening she knocked on my door, sat down on the sofa, and said: “What other things don’t I know?” I told her as factually and calmly as possible about our brother Carl, who had died only a few days after his birth. He had had severe birth defects, but Mom hadn’t wanted to terminate the pregnancy under any circumstances, and immediately after his birth, she fell into a deep depression. It had been her wish alone to get pregnant again. Why she had killed herself shortly after the birth of a healthy girl was something none of us could understand. She’d always wanted a girl, as I knew from Dad.

“Why wasn’t I named Carla?” Dora asked, and I couldn’t answer that. I hadn’t even thought of it myself. I told her to talk to Dad.

She disappeared that very day and never returned to our apartment.

* * *

She often walks by but only sometimes recognizes us. She doesn’t say hello or address us by name; she just registers us and responds to our voices. She occasionally even agrees to come with us if we offer to take her to the hospital or try to get her into one of the shelters, just so she’s off the streets for a few hours at least. And when we come back to pick her up, she complies. But she never comes home.

Lately, the voices seem to have died down again. In any case, the thing about believing she’s an American soldier on a mission to kill Nazis hasn’t happened for at least two months. But we’ve heard that she often takes walks around the zoo. She walks along Hardenbergstrasse and Budapester Strasse, stopping and listening. She listens to what the animals tell her, as a woman who works at the zoo ticket office told us. “Sometimes I let her in,” she said. “I’m not really allowed to, but if she doesn’t look too bedraggled and is having a good day, I turn a blind eye. She wouldn’t hurt a flea.”

Bela gave the woman a hundred euros and thanked her.

Once we brought her to our front door. When we got to Zoo Station, she went berserk in Dad’s car because she wanted to get out. As soon as we stopped in Uhlandstrasse and opened her door with the child-safety lock, she jumped out of the car and ran back to Ku’damm. We knew where she was running and let her go.

If you saw her, you wouldn’t believe that men sexually assault her. You’d think: She’s dirty and stinks, who’d want her? You don’t understand what these men want. They want to punish her. For being what she is. For some, she’s just a piece of meat that happens to fall into their hands. She probably has every STD going. Syphilis is back in Europe, I’ve heard. When you see her, you won’t believe how often it happens. Sometimes they only beat her up, and when I see her afterward, when they cut away her clothes at the rescue mission, I wonder why she didn’t lose her will to live long ago. I’ve forgotten how many times they’ve broken her ribs. And her fingers. Her shins twice, I know that. Once she had a serious head injury. Not one of the usual gashes—this was worse. But she managed to survive that too. Her nose has already been broken three times, and once her left ear had to be sewn on again. She’s not an isolated case. It’s not her fault. The rescue mission says that anyone else out there would experience the same thing. That’s why most women try to find a place to stay at night. But not Dora.

* * *

When she killed Bela the day before yesterday, she’d been to the zoo that afternoon. Since Bela gave the ticket office woman a hundred euros, she started calling him every time Dora showed up. I don’t think it was because she cared, but Bela always felt reassured, and I knew he kept tabs on Dora’s zoo visits to give the woman money again as soon as he could. Money for her tickets, he said, all added together and rounded up. “That woman’s lining her own pockets,” I said. Bela didn’t care. Somehow it eased his conscience.

There was no reason to go looking for Dora that evening. I don’t think Bela intentionally walked past her. He’d been out with his orchestra colleagues, and they parted at Zoo, where most of them caught trains and buses home. But Bela walked. The day before yesterday the weather was mild, and Bela liked to go for a stroll after concerts.

So he passed Dora, and maybe that evening she recognized him. Everything might have gone fine, but Bela was carrying a plastic cup of tea, which he’d just bought at the station and had taken off the lid to drink, the steam rising to his face. They say that Dora ran over to him and yelled: “You’re going to die!” Then she sprang toward him and knocked the tea out of his hand, and he fell backward hard, hitting his head on the sidewalk. Dora kneeled over him, hitting him and shouting, “You’re going to die!”—over and over again. And that’s exactly what happened. The head injury from his fall might not have been fatal, but Dora’s shaking and beating certainly were. By the time they pulled her off, it was too late. The paramedic could only confirm his death. Our sister had long since vanished.

* * *

So, if you see her, and if you take a close look, you’ll know she didn’t mean to kill him. She was trying to save him. I still don’t know what she sees in the steam, or what’s reflected in the surface of hot liquid. I don’t think I have to either. When you see her—before the woman from the rescue mission picks her up, brings her in, washes and dresses her, then calls the police—remember: you mustn’t be brutal. So many men have already been brutal with her. Be gentle, do it quickly. Bela would have wanted her to have a decent grave with her name on it.