When Julia returned from Hamburg, she opened the gallery one morning to find a hand-delivered envelope in the mail. It had no addressee. Inside, she found the printed page of a book and a newspaper cutting. An interview with Madina Schneider alongside a photo of her taken on a bridge in Berlin. The loose book page had been defaced with a swastika. The familiar Nazi symbol was scrawled with a red marker that came through like a blurred mirror image on the reverse side.
The missing page. Cut from my ribcage when Armin made his payment in the barber shop.
Weird, Julia said on the phone to Lena. You better come down.
I’ll be there right away, Lena said. She was not far away, working in her new studio.
You should let Armin know, Julia said.
What?
It’s got to do with his sister, I think.
The interview with Madina describes her as a new talent with limited previous media exposure in Germany. So far, she’s better known in Holland, where she is in discussion with a company about recording her first album. The journalist reveals that the singer travels with a collection of artificial legs, each of them different – like you wear different clothes for certain occasions, Madina is quoted as saying. Some of them have flashing lights, others are decorated with various absurd things like medical tubes and bandages, depending on her mood. She is proud of her prosthetic leg, the journalist writes, and she jokes about getting a parrot, if that isn’t a bit cruel to take a live bird on tour, maybe a false one would be more appropriate. She talks about the parrot once found by Humboldt, the great German explorer, speaking the language of a lost Amazonian tribe.
The journalist goes into her Chechen background, though the biographical details are thin. The singer lost her family during the Second Chechen War, it says, after which she and her surviving brother were brought to Germany by an aunt. They grew up in Frankfurt with a family that she cannot possibly say enough good things about.
Madina has no intention of going to Chechnya while the leader of that country posts photographs of himself lying around with a tiger.
The interview goes on to say that her music allows her to express the longing for what is missing. The absence of a backstory is what got me singing, she says, something she picked up from her adoptive mother, who is from the former East Germany. She used to sing at the top of her voice around the house to make up for the gaps in her biography. Your life is a bit of a fabrication anyway, Madina says of herself. Like a song. With an accordion solo in the middle. It’s never going to be any more than – based on a true story. What was it her father used to say – biography, the story you call your life?
My story is prosthetic.
Her quote is pulled out of the interview for the headline. The caption underneath the photo says the Chechen-born singer is in training to run the Berlin Marathon.
It’s raining heavily by the time Lena arrives. I can feel the dampness in my pages. The character in my story feels it in the stump of his amputated leg. Lena gives a shudder as she comes in the door. The water is heard dripping on a steel window ledge outside and I have that sensation of being confined indoors, like a deferred sneeze. She leaves her umbrella open by the entrance, forming a series of pools on the floor.
Shouldn’t you bring this to the police, Lena?
Wait. Let me talk to Armin.
Looks like a death threat, Julia says. We shouldn’t have touched it, there might be fingerprints.
Let me figure this out with Armin.
While they wait for Armin to arrive, I become reunited with the missing page. It’s a great moment for me. That feeling of being intact. Lena goes about fitting the severed page back into place with tiny strips of adhesive paper on each side. It might be somewhat predictable to say this, but it feels like having your leg reattached by an expert surgeon, hinging perfectly back and forth at the knee joint. Julia begins to unpack some of the artworks that have arrived for her next exhibition. A collection of nudes painted by a female artist celebrating the flesh of women with all their pudginess and blue veins showing.
My story is complete again. All my fingers and toes, page numbering correct.
The reattached page begins to tell me where it’s been all this time. It sat folded up in the inner pocket of a leather jacket belonging to the man who defaced it with the red marker. Ulrich Bogdanov. He never takes that leather jacket off. I was forced to witness everything first-hand, the rediscovered page says. The way he eats, the way he slouches in his chair with the phone, the way he talks to his wife. I even had to accompany him into the bathroom.
The lost and found page goes on to describe that time in captivity as an eye-opener. Bogdanov, it says, seems at first not to be such a bad person at all. He works in a retirement home for the elderly. You would have to be decent enough to even want to take up a job like that.
I’ve seen him with some of the patients, the mutilated page says. He can be extremely kind. Their infirmity doesn’t bother him. Their smells. Their morbidity doesn’t put him off life. In fact, it seems to enhance his lust, knowing that he is young and they are old. I have seen him, for example, the page recalls from its days in captivity, wiping the bum of an old man and then going home to have sex with his wife no more than an hour later. She wanted him to have a shower first. She said he smelled of old people. But he looked on it as part of the same sequence of life, the arc of time going backwards, cleaning the shit from an incontinent old man’s legs in an operation that lasted twenty-five minutes, followed by urgent sexual activity with his wife, lasting no more than three to four minutes.
Without taking his leather jacket off.
He is terribly generous to his children. He loves them. No doubt about that. He buys them massive Disney dolls, the house is covered with stuffed toys and plastic products – that’s where the earth’s resources are all heading, the previously missing page says. And his wife. Anna. She has more jewellery than she has days to wear the stuff. He’s just got her a TV the size of a farm gate and he keeps saying it’s too small – I’ll bring it back and get you a proper one.
He is moved by a deep range of feelings. His favourite songs are those describing male humility, such as the big hit about angels. Angels spreading their wings to shield him from harm. He cannot help singing along to the words – protection – love and affection. When he’s drunk he sings that song at family gatherings, raising his voice to an emotional pitch on the word waterfall. It brings him to tears and his wife Anna consoles him like a baby, stroking his head.
Once or twice, the newly freed page says, you can see the other side of him coming from nowhere. An irrational piece of cruelty breaks out with no warning. Some crime carried out long before his time, something his Russian grandfather did during the war, coming back in some delayed form of trauma. The violence committed in war is brought home by the perpetrators and continues loitering in the kitchens, in the bedrooms, in the uneasy dreams of children, only to resurface a generation or two later like a dormant virus.
Without explanation, he just flips, punishing somebody at random for an atrocity that was never atoned.
He is in a position of power over the people in his care. He can be generous and he can also withdraw favours, like divine justice. I’ve seen him taking it out on an old woman who is unable to retaliate, the eyewitness page says. She wants her wheelchair to be placed next to her husband in the sunshine when they are brought out into the garden every afternoon. They’re all lined up, wrapped in blankets. And just because she asked to be placed beside her husband, he says – no. Bitch. He places her in the shadow of the buildings, as far away as possible from her husband. They only have a few days or weeks or months at most left in this world, but he refuses to grant her that request. He has them sitting apart and she’s getting cold, unable to say a word, looking over at her husband at the far end of the universe. She waves but he can’t see her with his back turned.
My defiled page describes him as a talented hater. He understands exactly what will hurt this old woman most. He leaves her out there until the rest of them have all been brought back inside again for supper, she’s the last, and one of the nurses then says her hands are frozen, they’ve gone blue, her skin is like thin wax paper. The nurse blows on her hands and rubs them back to life, saying it might be better that she doesn’t go outside in the afternoons any more until next summer. Where, in fact, the old woman doesn’t care about the cold, there is nothing she wants more than being out there beside her husband, they don’t have to speak, just sitting side by side is all she wants.
The following day, Bogdanov makes an about-turn. He is so kind to her she can hardly believe it. He treats her like the most favoured person and she cannot trust him. He tucks the chequered blanket in around her back and even asks which side of her husband she would like to sit on.
Then he goes home to spend hours at night on his laptop looking up right-wing sites. While his wife and children are asleep, he’s in touch with his friends, discussing ways to create chaos and destabilize democracy. They want to fight the system from inside, infiltrating peace movements and climate activist sites, spreading their message of unrest in the most unlikely places. He followed every word in the epic trial of Beate Zschäpe, the woman whose two lovers went around Germany murdering kebab vendors and greengrocers mostly of Turkish origin. He has online friends in Poland, in the USA and New Zealand. He unfurls a swastika and hangs it up behind him on the wall, then takes it down again before going to sleep, folding it up neatly and putting it away on top of the wardrobe, inside plastic packaging that came with a set of pillows.
Armin arrives at the gallery with his jacket soaked and his hair down on his forehead. One eye is still discoloured by the blow he received from Bogdanov.
The windows have steamed up.
They sit together over coffee and wonder how to react to this piece of hate mail. Is it a sign of something worse to come, or is it simply the action of a jilted lover?
It’s not fair that you two have been dragged into this, Armin says.
Armin, you can’t do this alone, Lena says.
We can’t let this happen, Julia says.
It has been decided, after Armin helped Lena and Julia to map out each possible scenario like a series of alternative plots, that it might be best to contact the police.
This is serious, Julia says. Let’s keep it all above board. I don’t want those fuckers coming in here and I certainly don’t want them getting either of you on the street some night. I know this city. They shot a Chechen separatist in the head, right here in the Small Tiergarten. His assassin fled on a bike. Then they put out a whole lot of misinformation about the victim being a brutal terrorist. All you do nowadays is reverse the accusation, say the man they killed was a killer, then his killing becomes a good deed.
It has been decided, by Armin himself, that he will give up his job measuring car park spaces and go on tour with his sister instead. He has been offered the job of roadie – that will get him out of Berlin for a while.
And finally, it has been decided, by Lena, that Armin should leave his current place of residence and come to stay in her studio instead. It has a bed and a small kitchen, she says, and lots of light. It’s at the top of the building, overlooking the river. He’ll never find you there.