Helena leans a little more heavily on Sister Anne’s arm than she needs to. After all, she’s the injured party here. Even if she’s the only one in danger of forgetting it.
All the way down the corridor, Sister Anne makes pointedly pointless conversation. How are Helena’s injuries healing? What does Helena do? Is that her husband in the waiting room? So nice of him to come. Unpleasant to wait at the doctor’s office by yourself.
In the examination room, she closes the door and starts setting up the scanner. Helena sits down uninvited on the cot in front of it; after all, her leg is in a cast.
“Did your husband do this to you?” Sister Anne asks from her crouched position next to the crowded power strip into which she’s trying to wedge one last plug.
“No,” Helena answers quickly. “I was hit by a truck crossing the street.” For an instant, she has the feeling that she’s lying. Didn’t he do something to her? Didn’t he do all he could to keep her from getting her memory back? It’s strange that she isn’t angrier at him. Just thinking about what’s happened to her brain turns her stomach. And if it were up to him, the damage would be permanent. Maybe it will be anyway. She still can’t remember why she crossed against the light at a busy intersection, or anything about the man she spent the afternoon with just before. Still, those are trivial details compared to what Joachim was trying to hide from her. Just incidents, not fundamental circumstances of her life.
But what should he have done? Not come to get her in the first place. That would’ve been the normal thing to do. He could’ve called her parents and let them handle it. Or Magdalena or Susi. And then? And then nothing. He would’ve stayed out of her life like he had all along. Or rather, like she made him.
And if he’d come and told her the truth right away? She still might not have remembered for a while, but she would’ve been able to learn the facts like new information. She probably still would’ve let him take her home. It wasn’t Joachim who lied to her first; it was her feelings when she saw him.
What does that mean? Were her emotions, like her memories, set back to some earlier point in time? Or maybe something within her never stopped waiting for him to reappear, was relieved instead of surprised when it finally happened.
“I hope I haven’t offended you, Ms. Bachlein. You know we have to ask that kind of thing.”
Helena looks up, startled. “Oh, no, not at all. I was just thinking of something.”
“Well, don’t think too much when you’re in there.” Sister Anne indicates the scanner. “No, that’s a joke—you can just relax.” She gives Helena a set of earplugs to block out the noise and shows her a button she can press if she has a problem. “So there’s really nothing to worry about at all,” she says.
Helena lies back and tries to believe her, tries to separate the dull pings of the machine from the sound of her heart, close her eyes and keep from dreaming. But in the darkness of the machine, her heart beats back and forth between guilt and dread, sure that everything she’s been doing her best to hide is exposed now. And she’ll protest that she wasn’t always faking it, but no one will believe her. She knows this scenario is absurd, but she can’t stop picturing it to herself in a thousand different variations. Sometimes Joachim is watching, and sometimes she’s all alone. It’s as if Sister Anne had wheeled her into a private movie theater where she can watch all her worst anxieties in action.
With a great effort, she forces other faces into her mind. Doro, Magdalena, Susi, Thomas, her parents… All of them positive, supporting her, on her side. They know what she’s been through. But then another face starts to appear in the crowded darkness: a young, but sickly woman’s face, with matted hair and clumps of mascara around her eyes. The horror-movie moment where that woman reached out a clammy hand to grab Helena’s arm strikes her with such visceral vividness that a tremor runs through her body. That woman, that woman, who was she? Where were they? Helena strains to build up the scene around them, not sure how much she’s remembering and how much she’s inventing. A doorway. They were standing in a doorway, Helena on the outside, that woman on the inside. Helena had come to see her and the woman didn’t expect her. But why? It must’ve been that woman’s—what was her name?—it must’ve been her apartment. Helena can’t remember what she said or what the woman said when she opened the door, only the sickly horror of that cold, damp touch on her arm, and the terrible effort of trying to hold herself together, not disintegrate or run for her life.
Then the dull noises stop and she feels a warm touch on one of her arms. It must be over now. She still has her eyes closed when Sister Anne rolls her cot away from the scanner, but she can feel the light around her, protecting her, cleansing her of what she just saw. She opens them and tries, just for now, just until she’s alone again, not to remember. She watches Sister Anne saying something for a few moments before taking out her earplugs.
“Are you feeling all right, Ms. Bachlein? You’re quite pale and I noticed you shivering a bit during your scan.”
“Yes,” Helena answers without thinking. “I just remembered something.”
“Something you’d forgotten? How wonderful! You’ll be able to tell Dr. Meier all about it in a few minutes. I’ll just get your scan printed out and then take you into the consultation room.” She steps out, leaving Helena sitting on the cot. She knew there’d been something about another woman but it was too much to remember all at once. You have to take it in small doses. She knew it was something like that, but she thought: one step at a time. Until this moment, she didn’t realize she’d seen the woman, been touched by her cold hand. She can hear some kind of machinery groaning through the wall, and then Sister Anne comes back in with a manila folder under one arm. As the nurse helps her to her feet, she remembers in sickening detail the moment just after, that woman’s damp, cold hand drawing the warmth out of her pulsing wrist, when they both burst into tears: Helena’s silently streaming down the burning skin of her face, and the other woman’s sickly weeping, the strands of snot coming out of her nostrils that she didn’t wipe away, her heaving gasps for air. She shudders and feels the tremor pass through her body into the solid, healthy warmth of Sister Anne at her side.
“Shall I get you a blanket, Ms. Bachlein? You seem to be a little chilled.”
“That would be nice, thank you,” Helena manages to say. She doesn’t understand anything. She can’t believe she’d go to the home of some woman Joachim was seeing, confront her like that. It isn’t like her. And why was the woman already such a mess, even before Helena arrived? She lets Sister Anne deposit her in one of three vinyl-covered chairs opposite a sparse pressed-wood desk, where the nurse deposits the manila folder next to a metal penholder. She opens a drawer in the desk and takes out a form on a clipboard, which she hands to Helena.
“Please start filling this out,” she says.
Helena nods and begins answering the questions: when and where she was born, her parents’ names, whether she has siblings. The form is several pages long, and that reassures her, having so much paper to put between herself and whatever’s about to happen.
“Would you like me to get your husband right away, or would you prefer to speak to the doctor alone first? Many of our patients find it helpful to have someone there to help them put together the memories they’re missing and—”
Helena surprises both of them by cutting her off. “Why don’t I see the doctor first so we can discuss the medical aspects? I don’t want to worry my husband unnecessarily, and we can call him in after.”
“Of course.” Sister Anne steps out again.
Every second alone is a victory and a torture. Dr. Meier will be here at any moment, and then what? With all these hours and days and even these last minutes to prepare, she still hasn’t decided what she wants to tell him. The truth? She can’t do that to Joachim. Wouldn’t he be in some kind of trouble? There must be a law against deceiving a sick person this way. Certainly they wouldn’t leave her in his care. She could tell the doctor part of the truth. She could say that she’d started to remember things, things from much earlier, but not yet everything. He may be a specialist, but he can’t see into her head. If they start to talk about what she remembers, she can come up with some harmless memories, ones that won’t change anything, and tell the doctor about those. And when they call Joachim in? Then it won’t just be about what she says. He’ll have to explain things, too. That’s what they want him for, isn’t it? To tell her about the things she can’t remember. As if he could tell her about all those years he wasn’t there. It’s a relief to know that the responsibility is Joachim’s, that it’s his decision how much to say. But it’s also terrifying to have so little control. Can she cover her ears as he speaks, shout at the top of her voice that she isn’t ready to know?
The door opens and a handsome Middle Eastern man in a lab coat comes in. Helena’s surprised at how young he is. As if only an old man could know anything about memory.
“Dr. Meier.” He comes over to give Helena his hand so she won’t have to stand up.
“Ms. Bachlein.”
He sits down behind the desk and takes out the images from the manila folder. Helena makes her way through the names of all the schools she attended and a list of her relatives, what she majored in and her first job. Sister Anne returns with a notepad and pen, then sits down one seat away from Helena.
“You can finish that later and fax it in,” Sister Anne says, indicating the form.
Helena nods, and then the silence seems long to her, so she explains about the accident again. Sister Anne already knows and the doctor must, too; it must all be there in her folder. But once she’s started she can’t just stop in the middle of things, so she speaks as fast as she can, stumbling over her words, until she’s reached new ground.
“When my husband came into my hospital room I knew exactly who he was, who I was, all kinds of things. I felt confused about what had happened and why I was in the hospital—I couldn’t remember any of that. But in terms of our lives, I wasn’t aware of anything missing. It all felt… normal.” It’s strange to talk about that first meeting, strange even to remember it. She feels as if all the memories she’s regained were much more recent, and her accident had been years before. It’s even stranger to think of Joachim seeing her before she regained consciousness, seeing her lying there, and having to decide what to say when she woke up. Maybe he’d already decided. Did he plan it from the moment he got the phone call, or was it a spontaneous whim? But he couldn’t have planned it that far in advance. Even the doctors didn’t know she had amnesia.
“When did you first become aware that you couldn’t remember certain things?” the doctor asks.
She thinks back. It’s hard to identify with that vague woman in the hospital gown and all the bandages. Was that really her, or did she only see it in a movie? But if it wasn’t her, she’d remember what the face with the bandages looked like, instead of the view through them. “I was confused about the date,” she recalls. “I wasn’t sure what the date was, not even the year, and when I saw it, it seemed strange to me.” She pauses to give Sister Anne time to finish taking notes.
“And what else?” the doctor asks. His elbows are resting on the desk and he leans forward, looking genuinely eager to find out about her case. It makes her feel like someone with an interesting story to tell rather than a patient. He must love his work. His enthusiasm makes her want to speak freely, and it’s hard to remember what she’s supposed to say and what she isn’t.
She hesitates for a moment. But this is a thing she’s allowed to say; even Joachim said it. “My husband told me we’d decided to separate. I couldn’t remember that and I think that’s when we both noticed how much I’d forgotten.”
“So you had decided to separate from your husband, but he still came to check on you when he heard about the accident.”
“Of course,” she says, although there really is nothing natural about it, even less than the doctor thinks.
“Are you separated now?”
She feels herself blushing, although it’s the next logical question and answering it shouldn’t be difficult.
“No,” she says after a few seconds. She doesn’t use the time to think about her answer, but rather to force herself not to think. If she really started asking herself that question, they’d be here all day.
“In other words, in light of the accident…?”
“We sort of put that on hold.”
“Whose decision was it to separate?”
“I suppose it must’ve been both of ours.”
“You suppose?”
“Doctor, I am being treated for amnesia.” As soon as she’s spoken, she regrets what she said, and regrets her tone even more than her words. If only she’d managed to say it lightly, make a joke of it. But the reminder came out defensive. Not that he’s accused her of anything, not yet.
He gives her a tight smile. “That’s why I ask, of course. It’s important to define the boundaries of your ability to remember so we can work on these trouble areas. I take it you don’t remember why you separated, either?”
“Not exactly. That is, not the specific moment I decided to, but we’d been having problems for a long time. So I can imagine…” Did the doctor notice her slip-up? The fact that she just called it her decision? If he did, he isn’t giving anything away.
“Well, that’s one reason we like to have a family member or close friend at the appointment to clarify these things. What else have you had trouble remembering?”
“Pretty much everything about the past few years. I’d changed jobs but I didn’t remember the new company I was working for, or friends I’d made there.”
“Have you been on sick leave since the accident?”
“No. I’ve been working from home. It’s the same type of work I’ve always done, so it wasn’t that hard to pick it up again.” Like her marriage. The same way it had always been, so it was easy to pick it up again. But it isn’t the same, is it? It feels different this time. When you come down to it, though, not much has changed. They may be fighting less, but they’re no more able to speak to each other than they’ve ever been. The realization knocks the wind out of her and she has to struggle to get air into her lungs again, keep answering the doctor’s questions about where she’s from and when she moved to Berlin fast enough to sound natural, slow enough to give Sister Anne time to write it all down, mark the boundaries of her memory like the map of some theoretical country neither she nor the doctor will ever know.
By the time Sister Anne goes to get Joachim, Helena’s exhausted from the strain of remembering, replying, always measuring her words to say just enough. She tells the doctor in the past tense what she couldn’t remember, but never says that she remembers it now. Always, I noticed that I couldn’t remember… and never but now I can. When Sister Anne returns with Joachim, she almost expects to be sent out of the room so they can interrogate him in private, not give him and his so-called wife the opportunity to compare notes. But Sister Anne simply shows him to the seat next to Helena and asks whether anyone would like a cup of water.