That night it was hard to sleep. I had spent the greater part of the day hanging around the hospital, confined in my father’s room, with no further distance to roam than the vending machine in Reception. If my body was restless, my mind was worse. It ran with sickly persistence on my father’s illness, on my sister’s arrival and departure and on Achim’s death. I reminded myself that he had figuratively and almost literally pushed me into a corner. He had forced me to hex him. If the curse had worked, and his death was not some perverse coincidence, he had only himself to blame. And yet whenever I tried to close my eyes to sleep I saw him, the great grey-white adipose bulk of him, propped up in the corner of the cold store, his skin almost the colour of the metal walls, a rime of ice crystals around his bluish lips, as though his last breath had frozen there, which I supposed it had.
The police thought it was suicide – perhaps accidental suicide – although they had carefully bagged and taken away the two bottles with their bright labels and their innocent-looking residue, as clear as water but as dangerous as poison – with that much alcohol in your blood the cold would kill you so much more rapidly than if you were sober, not to mention the fact that you would be too stupefied to think about what was happening.
Perhaps it was suicide, I told myself, but the idea was unconvincing. The police – certainly the Kriminalpolizei, who came down from Bonn – hadn’t known Achim as it was my misfortune to have done. All the aggression and rapacity which had been crammed into that vast bulk, as the stuffing is crammed into a sausage skin, had been directed outwards, at others. Achim would cheerfully have tormented me until I was suicidal, but I didn’t believe he would ever have taken his own life. And then there were the sounds I had heard on the night he died and the night before. I did not believe that it was Achim I had heard laughing.
Eventually I could not lie there sleeplessly any longer. I got out of bed and padded through into the kitchen to make myself a cup of fruit tea. When it was ready, I couldn’t sit down at the kitchen table with it either; I was much too restless. I cradled the warm mug in my hands and went through to the living room.
The shutters and the curtains were open. If my mother had been here, she would have let down the shutters before she went to bed. It was late enough now that it was fully dark outside, and the moon was a mere sliver like a thumbnail clipping, so that the only light came from the street lamps. Bad Münstereifel is a dead town, a ghost town, at that time of night. I could see a good way up and down the street from my vantage point and nothing was moving at all, except the end of a thin white curtain at an open upstairs window in one of the houses opposite, which sucked gently in and out with the night breeze, as though the house itself were breathing deeply in its sleep.
I sipped my tea. I had forgotten to put sugar in it and it tasted bitter. I went back to the kitchen and heaped a great teaspoonful in, then I returned to the living-room window to resume my silent vigil.
I glanced up the street towards the old brewery and all was as before. Nothing moved; the street was still, with the yellow light of the street lamps picking out individual cobblestones like scales. I glanced the other way, in the direction of the Werther Tor, expecting the same unchanging tableau, and almost jumped. There was someone coming up the street.
There was no reason to think that it was anyone other than some honest citizen making their way home, even if the hour was unusually late. All the same, I had no desire to be spotted standing there in my nightclothes. I slipped behind the curtain, where I could see whoever it was approaching but could not be seen myself, or so I hoped.
He was walking quickly, whoever he was, and as he stalked along on his long legs the hem of his dark coat swirled around them. I saw one of the metal buttons on the coat wink in the light of a street lamp and even before he had come close enough for me to see the shock of red hair I knew it was Julius Rensinghof.
Some instinct made me draw even further back into the shadows. At that moment Julius glanced towards the bakery and I wondered whether he had glimpsed my sly movement. He glanced away almost immediately, however, and there was no sign that he had seen anything. Another few heartbeats and he had passed in front of the bakery itself, and I could no longer see him from where I stood. I risked moving back into the room, then slipping behind the curtain on the other side to watch him walking away up the street.
Nothing. The street was empty, the pools of yellow light under the street lamps undisturbed by his passing shadow. Unnerved, I stood there for a second wondering what to do, and then cautiously I approached the window. If I stood a metre or two away from the glass, all I could see were the opposite side of the street, the wall which bounded the river and the houses on the other side. If I wanted to look at the spot just below, I would have to go right up to the window and risk being seen.
I moved as quietly as I could, though I knew I was wasting my time. Julius wasn’t likely to hear me moving about, although if he looked up he would see me. I went to the window and peered out.
He’s not there, was my first thought. The street outside the bakery was completely empty. For a second I entertained the chilling idea that Julius had somehow vanished altogether, but a moment later I saw him step back into view and I felt another chill of an entirely different nature. Clearly he had been on the actual doorstep of the bakery, hidden from my sight by the little porch over the door.
What the hell was he doing? But I didn’t need to ask that question; I knew the answer already. He had been standing on the doorstep, his nose almost touching the glass panel set into the door, staring into the bakery’s dark interior. Now he was lingering in front of the step. In a moment or two he would probably glance upwards and unless I moved very quickly he would spot me staring down at him. Already I could see his head turning as he looked around him. Any second now he would look up.
Now was the time to slip back into the shadows, to duck behind the curtain. Instead, I made my hand into a fist and knocked as hard as I could on the glass with my knuckles.