CHAPTER EIGHT
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Her body folded sideways on the narrow bench (feet high so no one would see) Sophi relaxed into the smell of damp tiles, old urine and sweat. She let her head sink to her knees, waiting to make sure no one had noticed she’d stayed behind. The changing cubicle remained blissfully silent and warm, as if the narrow space was just for her. However, she was a child inside the body of a giant – and couldn’t stretch out without either breaking through the door or reaching high over the cubicle wall.
The cleaners were mopping the pool sides with Wolfasept: a mixture of bleach and soap. Soon they’d move on to the men’s changing room, leaving (as if by prior agreement) her private space until last.
As the overwhelming smell of bleach drifted in through the main door, Sophi raised her head, sniffing the familiar scent, the scent of the place that had become home. Soon she’d shower. As long as they were out there, she was alone with no surveillance, no one watching or listening – free and silent as the stars.
She flexed her broad shoulders round and back, pulling back bone, moving thick muscle, as much as the space allowed; placed her feet on the floor. Next to her sat a box of plasters. Innocently skin-coloured, they were her secret companions, accompanying her where no one else could. Sophi lifted the box. Shook it gently. Only three left; somehow she’d have to get more. Her fingers were thick and clumsy as she fumbled to take one out. A prickle of tension began at the base of her neck and she reminded herself: it’s all right – you’re made of saltwater and speed: a torpedo under the waves, inside the tide you can move through water. You’re a dark mermaid.
The plaster slipped, floating towards the bench, falling through the gap in the wood to the floor. In a flash, she seized it from the wet tiles just before the adhesive soaked up damp and became useless.
One of the cleaners had already moved to the men’s changing room. Not long, she didn’t have long. To her left, between the wall and the seat, was just enough space to keep and hide the blade. She wedged two fingers into the gap and the razor slid into her greedy fingers; ready to soothe, cut, let tension out.
There’d been another injection. The sting: needle- breaking flesh, heralding a wild roaring speed one hour later. Her trainer had smirked and preened, nodding to the others as she muscled through the water, making it clear she was a winner. The plans he had to ride on her success story were common knowledge. He’d been bragging about an even bigger car, a holiday abroad after the first International Swimming Federation Championship in Yugoslavia, and the whispered promise of a place in politics. Yes, he was happy letting her take more pills, working her even harder.
Sophi turned over her right arm, running fingers gently across the ridged scars that were healing; though not fast enough. She’d had sidelong glances from the other girls, and couldn’t risk more attention.
The still damp swimming costume stuck to her back. It had become overstretched and worn with use, so she’d ask for another. Pulling down the straps, Sophi looked at her breasts – pink perched jellies with a thick brown raisin stuck on top. The muscle on her torso and arms took up so much room she could be anything between boy and girl. Her stomach was flat and toned, but a line of thick hair wormed down from her belly button; spreading a forest between her legs. She didn’t look there. Maybe so much hair was normal – maybe. Other things happened there. Sometimes she swelled, grew hot, tingling so badly that she had to run, hide in the toilet and rub, tension rising, squeezing as she groaned. Heat bursting into her stomach and heart, making her cry out and moments later; weep.
She let others do that to her now: girls with clever fingers and tongues; wet and slippery, whispering or groaning. Boys and men that grunted and made crude promises as they prodded their thing hard up inside her.
Sophi was forgetting who she was.
Her periods had started three months ago and she couldn’t get used to the cramps that came with it, nor the strange object she was supposed to shove deep in there to hold her blood.
Thirteen years old and she thought she was going mad with wanting. She wanted to die, to live, run, dance, swim, never stop doing sex until she was loose and deliciously spent – and that never lasted.
Sophi traced a cut along her left breast, the thin slice releasing a trail of wet red bubbles that popped across her skin, opening up a stream that drifted towards her nipple. She sighed; this weave of metal on soft flesh was delicious, tension easing to a soft, gentle whisper.
Along with injections there were now even more pills. Pills that would stop her monthly bleed: their golden girl couldn’t miss training, not for anything. She’d asked her father about the vitamins once. Papa said not to worry, they weren’t going to make her ill. Part of her whispered it was treacherous and wrong. Now, whenever she went home, she looked in his medical books and knew the drug she was taking was called Oral-Turinabol. The book said the tablets, one pink, one blue, were chlordehydromethyl-testosterone. So far she’d looked testosterone up in the dictionary, and freaked when it said how men had it. They were injecting her to make her strong, more like a man. That was why she grew hair on her face, and swelled up, down there. Of course Papa was a good doctor, he didn’t know about the things that happened, the secret things in the white room, underground, far away from the normal training centre.
Sophi slid her hand across the red cut, licked her finger, gently rubbing spit across the wound, cleaning away the blood. She cut another line just below and leaned back, eyes closed, swimming in a purple rapture.
Clumsy. Fast. She pulled the costume down to her thighs, drawing a finger through thick hair until it was inside her. The relief was instant, a long trembling shudder that had her gasping and crying out, hips dipping up and down as if the boy were there with her. She cried, tears dripping on her burning face and bent down, about to pick up the wet costume.
The last cut was deeper than she realised. Sophi heard waves breaking on a stone beach, the grating pebbles heaving sand under foam. A hush as the white swill eddied and swung from left to right, milling, waiting for the next wave.
She woke slumped against the concrete wall, cold and pimpled, costume on the floor. There was someone tapping on the cubicle door, tentative but persistent. A woman’s voice called ‘Are you all right?’ In the distance came the echo of another call, but this time it came from a voice used to being obeyed.
‘Künstler, Sophia Künstler. Where the hell are you?’
She scrambled to her feet, shaking. ‘I’m right here, about to shower.’
Thank god. Her trainer slammed the outside door. He wouldn’t come in because the cleaning women were here. Sophi had a flash of his face above hers: red veins bulging. Lips tight. Eyes closed. Sweating. Panting.
She opened the door and stared into the eyes of the woman who stood, hand on her mop, about to knock again. Stare them down, she thought. Stare them down. The woman’s eyes slid to Sophi’s breasts and she swayed, put her hand over her mouth, eyes widening, backing away as the handle of the mop slapped against the floor.
Sophi closed the door and sat down again. It was all right. Everything was all right. She picked up the swimming costume and the nearly empty plaster box, placing the blade carefully back in its home and left the cubicle, walking calmly to the shower block. Eyes firmly on the ground as the woman mopped the floor. It suited them both to ignore what had happened. The code was simple: look after yourself, see nothing.
Calm, she dried and dressed. The plasters pulled as they held each cut together – healing. Now she was ready to face him with a plausible excuse.
The cleaning woman was crying. Sophi touched her shoulder, the crisp feel of dry cotton, comforting, unfamiliar, so far away from all she knew.Alone, she turned towards the dark music that evening was sure to bring.
***
Time to leave the changing room. No way was she letting the nurse check her blood pressure or whatever it was she wanted to check. Mia’s open mouth. The muttered, ‘Are you insane? You can’t drive the car, you just fainted,’ made absolutely no difference. No doctors or nurses, thank you. There had been quite enough of them before. Plus there were stronger medicines back in the hotel room, though amazingly any signs of a headache had fled.
The girl was blessedly silent all the way to the hospital. They visited the pharmacy and gift shop to buy stomach settlers, a bottle of water and a glossy knitting magazine for Dagmar. Mia tried to convince Sophia to come to the ward. No, better not, she’d calm herself, drink her water and try to ignore the fact that her mother was lying, desperately ill, on the other side of the swinging doors.
The corridor grew dark under a low hanging cloud as she worked up the courage to go and face Käthe’s parents. A nurse rushed round the corner with a pile of notes under her arm. The file on the bottom had tilted to show the words: ‘Methylated Androgen’: steroids.
A feral young girl was pelting through the woods with a group of athletes whose feet streamed across the ground. Running until their lungs were about to burst. The young girl was her. The young Sophia climbed a tree, laughing as one or two joined her. Others mated – that was the only word for it, mated – by the tree roots, their gasps and groans making the others roar with laughter. The climbers leaped from the branches to rip young sapling trees from the ground with their bare hands. Baumausrissen, they’d called it. Baumausrissen. A test of who was the strongest.
Clutching her half-empty bottle of water, Sophia ran for the safety of her car.A brown file lay across the dip in the passenger seat: Dagmar’s medical notes. Petrus must have tried to find her and put the papers in the car – but he didn’t have a key. Head down, she drove to the hotel, locked the door and wedged the back of a chair under the door handle; she wasn’t going anywhere until she’d calmed and felt herself again.
Dagmar’s medical notes would be routine, but best take look, keep an eye on everything father did. In July ’75, the doctor had prescribed low-level painkillers; in November antidepressants. She’d known her mother suffered from depression, but Dagmar had been better when they left in ’77, Petrus had said so. More appointments followed, closer together: February to May ’77. So, yet again, he’d lied, Dagmar hadn’t been better at all.
The doctor’s cautious notations described ‘acute episodes of agitation’ following an order for ‘necessary’ interrogation. What? Stasi interrogation? The interrogation order was signed by ‘Romeo’. No. Was it possible that Petrus orchestrated such an action the day he and Sophia left the GDR? A deliberate ruse to keep the Stasi focussed on Dagmar rather than himself? Had Dagmar been interrogated because they’d escaped? Somewhere, in the midst of reading, Sophia began to weep.
She’d left Breden thinking Dagmar didn’t care. Her mother had been ill, terrified of what would follow if her husband and daughter fled, but she’d stayed to face the Stasi and their never-ending questions. Why? Because her mother had loved her and wanted her to be safe? Or was it something else? Hang on, the timeline didn’t make sense. Diertha had died in May ’76. Petrus had told her how ‘Dagmar cared for the child soon after we left’. What? While she was being interrogated? It didn’t seem possible. Would the hospital have agreed to such a thing? More confusing were the dates. Diertha had drowned before the games, not after, so how long had Dagmar been caring for a child?
The Montreal Olympics had been in August ’76; Sophia had come home triumphant with gold. She remembered cheering crowds. Smiles and damp handshakes from important people she didn’t know.Then a hospital, and feeling very ill. Had she seen Dagmar during that time? Yes, there was a brief memory of a pale-faced mother bending down to kiss her, but how could she not have known about Diertha’s six-month-old child?
In the drawer by the bed the ruinous blade waited. Picking it up again, she gently ran a finger along the rusty pitted metal. Useless. The disintegrating alloy, just like the one at home, was singing the same strange song of pain and wild release, of deliciously silent places where no one ever found you. She rubbed her nail against the flat edge and sniffed. Unmistakable: miniscule particles of her thirteen-year-old blood had turned as dirty as brown rust.
Her past inside ‘Theme 14.25’ was slowly unravelling. As she tried to catch hold of it only portions emerged, bright and perfectly assembled: as a scene on the inside of a toy snowstorm shaker. No moment seemed to connect with the others so as to make sense – and she so liked making sense. It was vital no one knew about this ancient secret relic. Or the new blade that sat, year in year out, in the bedside drawer in Berlin, a silver reminder that she was never ever going back to being a part of the machine that had moulded her from child to programmed athlete.
She’d forgotten the beefy-faced man. His rapid, stale breath as he edged his tongue between her clenched teeth. He’d drive his penis into her, time and again so she bled. When she cried out he’d come: jerking, labouring. Grunts, wet gasps spilling from his open mouth, eyes closed, head back, his neck stretching up to the sky. Now she remembered the silver blade. The bite of that knife as it cut away hope, sliced away her childhood – leaving nothing but a machine that did her trainer’s bidding.
It was useless re-reading everything. The more she read the angrier she became. She whispered ‘sorry’ to Käthe. She simply couldn’t face visiting her parents, and worse, by now they’d undoubtedly already know. But she couldn’t stay here and think, she had to do something.