The Girl Who Wasn't There Read online

  The fixer drove home too fast. Sebastian felt the seat-belt cutting into his throat. The fixer and Sebastian’s mother went to bed at once. Sebastian read from his book of poems for a little while longer, and then went out into the garden to smoke; his mother wouldn’t have smoking in the house.

  There was a light on in the bedroom. The fixer was standing beside the bed, naked, while Sebastian’s mother slept. The fixer was holding a video camera in one hand, with the red diode blinking to show that filming was in progress. He was masturbating with the other hand. Sebastian could see himself reflected in the outside of the large panoramic window.

  He went up to the room under the roof and sat at the Perspex desk in front of the window. He wanted to write a letter, but didn’t know who to. He stared at the point of his pencil, and then got an Opinel knife with a wooden handle out of his case. He usually took it hiking with him. He cut off the top of his left forefinger, and watched the blood come out, dripping on the desk. For a moment he felt alive. Then he went into the bathroom and bandaged the wound.

  Sebastian’s mother and the fixer got married just under a year later. They celebrated the wedding in a castle hotel, known to the fixer from a reps’ conference that was held there. The bridal couple went to the register office in a horse-drawn carriage, and Sebastian’s mother wore a white dress. A marquee was erected outside the hotel, an entertainer with a Hammond organ was booked to provide music. The guests could dance only out there; the hotel manager had said the parquet flooring in the castle was too easily harmed.

  The fixer had taken dancing lessons for the bridal waltz. All the same, he stumbled and fell hard on the wooden floor. The music stopped for a moment, and a woman held her hand in front of her mouth. When the fixer stood up his trousers were covered with dust. The guests applauded, a man who had had too much to drink shouted that it was a good omen for the marriage, and everyone laughed.

  Sebastian left the marquee. Then he heard his mother. She had linked arms with the fixer and brought him outside. They were quarrelling; the fixer shook his head and tore himself away.

  The fixer went up to the illuminated castle, limping. A cat was asleep on the stone steps outside the entrance, moving its paws in its sleep. The fixer looked round. Then he kicked the cat in the stomach with the toe of his patent leather shoe.

  10

  Two years later Sebastian took his school-leaving certificate. The Father stood at the altar in the monastery church. He wished the students who were leaving luck. It was a long sermon; he preached it every year. He said the students had finished their schooldays and must now make their own mistakes. Their lives would begin today. He hoped that they would leave the world better than it was. After the sermon, students played two movements from the Trout Quintet.

  Sebastian’s mother had been unable to come, ‘because of her nerves’, she had said.

  After Mass, Sebastian went to his room. In the last week before the leaving ceremonies, major industrial firms had set up their stands in the corridors of the boarding school. He had received offers from trainee programmes and courses leading to diplomas in applied sciences; a detergents manufacturer offered to finance his university studies. He sat at his desk. From here, he could see the Lukmanier Pass; he thought of his walks in the Rhine valley, and the wandering lights in the chestnut woods of the Val San Giacomo. He had been at the boarding school for almost nine years. He took the industrialists’ business cards and threw them in the waste-paper basket.

  He went by train to Freiburg, where he caught the bus and then carried his case home, almost a kilometre. He rang the doorbell. His mother’s new dog barked. The light came on; he could hear the fixer shouting at the dog. His mother opened the door. She wore a blouse with a frilled collar. They hadn’t been expecting him until tomorrow, she said, she must have entered it wrongly in her diary. Then she went back into her bedroom, saying she wasn’t well.

  Sebastian made himself a sandwich in the kitchen. The fixer sat at the table with him.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ asked the fixer. ‘You’ll have to do something. So what are your plans? How long do you intend to stay here?’

  ‘I’ll tell you both in the morning,’ said Sebastian.

  ‘No, I want to know now. You’ve already woken me.’ The fixer had swollen eyes.

  ‘It’s been a long day; it really is too late,’ said Sebastian. He kept calm. He knew what was coming now.

  The fixer jumped up, strode round the table and took up his stance beside Sebastian’s chair. The artery at his throat was pulsating. The last time the fixer hit him had been a year ago, when Sebastian had wanted to visit his girlfriend from the girls’ boarding school in Italy, but the fixer had refused to let him go. In a rage, he had dropped the fixer’s car keys down a drain. The fixer had hit him there in the street. Sebastian must learn discipline, he had said, he’d show him what was what, he had shouted. Passersby had turned to look at them, and Sebastian’s mother had stood there saying nothing.

  Sebastian put the sandwich down on the plate. He stood up slowly. He was a head and a half taller than the fixer. He had spent an hour boxing every day at school for the last three years, he had played ice hockey and gone hill-walking in the mountains. His body was smooth and hard. He even wears that watch at night, thought Sebastian.

  The fixer stared at Sebastian, apparently unsure what to do. Then he gave up. He dropped into a chair, he lost command of his features and his eyes turned dull.

  Sebastian saw that his hair was very thin now. He took the plate, went to the door, and switched off the light behind him.

  The next morning Sebastian got up early and went into the city. He bought some books, went to an exhibition and sat down in a café. He was waiting. When he returned to the house early in the afternoon, his mother was lying in a deckchair. The lawn had been mown short; she put nitrogen fertilizer on it every year. She was wearing sunglasses and the same blouse as yesterday, the edges of its frilled collar now brown with her foundation. She buttoned up her bathrobe and took off her sunglasses.

  He looked at her and she looked at him.

  Her feet were bare, their toes crippled by riding boots. The canvas of the deckchair was yellow and her legs were white and full of veins. He realized there was nothing more to say, because it was too long ago, and because there was no house by the lake any more, and no bright days. He would begin his life, and she would go on with hers. That was what they had decided, and now it was stupid to wonder whose fault it was.

  He nodded to her, that was all he did. Then he closed the door to the terrace again, taking care to make no noise. He went up to the room under the roof. It was stuffy, so he opened the window. The wind blowing over the fields smelled of hyacinths and irises. He undressed and lay down on his bed. His muscles ached. He heard his mother walking up and down in the yard.

  11

  The photographer greeted Sebastian von Eschburg in a friendly manner. They had met at an old boys’ reunion; the photographer had left Eschburg’s boarding school with his own certificate thirty years earlier. He had studied at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, and in the eighties he had published pictorial albums, large black and white photos of coalmines, water towers, haulage plants and gasometers. Most of these features were no longer in existence. Eschburg liked the industrial images, no human beings in them, harsh photographs with a backdrop of pale grey skies.

  The photographer was editor of a journal of architectural photography, a member of many committees, and chaired the jury panels for various competitions. He had written books about photography, he had a vast range of technical knowledge, and he regularly wrote reviews of photographic exhibitions in the major German newspapers. He made his living from photographs of residential and office buildings commissioned by architects and magazines. His photography was always immaculate, but he had never made an international name for himself. He claimed not to mind, but later Eschburg realized that it was a sore point.

  In addition, the phot
ographer ran four small studios in Berlin. They didn’t bear his name, and he didn’t do any photography for them himself. He called them his ‘bread-and-butter business’. Passport and portrait photos were taken by the studios, wedding photographs, photos of birthday parties, the celebrations of business firms and graduating high school classes.

  The photographer offered Eschburg a job working for him. Eschburg rented a small furnished room in Charlottenburg. At first the photographer paid him only a modest salary, but it was enough to live on. In those first months, Eschburg read the photographer’s books and all the other works on photography that he could find. Systematically, he learned about lenses, lighting, apertures, filters, about shutter speeds in analogue and digital cameras, about large, medium and small formats. He developed pictures in the studio laboratory, he made notes on alkaline and acid baths, experimented with acetic and citric acid, with sodium and ammonium aluminium sulphate solutions. The photographer was a good teacher. They discussed the history of photography, they went to exhibitions and galleries together, and although the photographer was moody and could be unjust, Eschburg enjoyed his company.

  To Eschburg, photography was far more than a trade. He worked only with black and white film, treating the prints later with thiocarbamide and sodium hydroxide. He experimented until his pictures had the soft, warm tone that took the harshness out of all the other colours in his head. The photographer told Eschburg that he must be revolutionary, art must be provocative and destructive, that this was the way to the truth. But Eschburg didn’t want to be an artist. He wanted to create another world for himself with his photographs, a fluent and warm world of the past. And after a few months the subjects of his pictures, the human beings and the landscapes, looked the way he could tolerate them.

  Eschburg often worked in the bread-and-butter studios, wanting to learn the daily business of their trade from the photographers employed there. Six months after he had begun working for the photographer, the owner of a perfumery came into one of these small studios. She wanted nude photographs of herself. She was in her mid-forties, and she and her husband had divorced a few months before; the pictures were to be for the new man in her life. She blushed when she said that.

  Eschburg helped with the photographs. They were the usual kind of thing: the stretch marks of pregnancy veiled over with tulle, muted light to fade wrinkles out, filters to blur her buttocks, thighs and stomach, invisible strips of sticky tape lifting her breasts.

  When the photographs were ready, Eschburg asked the woman if he could take a few pictures himself. She nodded. Eschburg used the second-hand Hasselblad that he had bought cheap. He liked the camera; the photographer doesn’t see his model directly, and instead his view is diverted by means of a mirror. The result is less brutal. Eschburg put a film into the camera, opened the curtains of the studio and switched off the artificial light. He asked the woman to take off her makeup. It had been raining all day, and the light that afternoon was soft, a clear grey.

  Eschburg talked to her, saying he had only just begun as a professional photographer, and was still unsure of himself. She relaxed. After an hour she was ready. Eschburg took twelve pictures very quickly, without using a tripod.

  In the pictures, the woman was sitting on the bed with her knees drawn up, the lengths of fabric used in the other pictures lay on the floor, and she was looking out through the window. A rectangle of light was shed on the sheet and her face. Her body was pallid, only her forehead brighter – a woman of forty-six with her dignity wounded.

  Two days later the woman came to collect the pictures for her boyfriend, slipping them quickly into her bag. Eschburg also showed her the photographs that he had taken, telling her he wasn’t charging for those. She stood there looking at the pictures one by one, then turned them over, tore them up and placed them on the counter. Still standing in front of Eschburg, she opened her mouth, but no words came out.

  The photographer changed as the years went on; he lost his ability to concentrate, ate too much and put on more and more weight. When he forgot delivery deadlines he shouted at his employees and slammed doors. Next day he would be sorry, and in that mood he used to say his life had run through his fingers. He had three daughters who wanted nothing to do with his work. He had stayed with his wife for the sake of comfort and fear of loneliness. Sometimes Eschburg thought the photographer saw him as the son that he had never had.

  Eschburg could almost always salvage the photographer’s deadlines, working through the night and delivering the pictures punctually. When he told the photographer, after four years, that he must move on now and try something else, the photographer was furious. He had made him great, said the photographer, he had taught Eschburg all he knew; but for him, the photographer, he would be nothing. The photographer’s face was red and his mouth very thin as he said it.

  That afternoon Eschburg went back early to the furnished room where he was still living. He sat at the window and watched the passersby in the street. He thought of the photographer’s large pictures and the truth that they showed. The pictures would long outlast the photographer who had taken them. He had not wasted his life; as a young man he had been very good, and in his old age he was still better than most others.

  Eschburg wrote the photographer a long letter. He sat at his desk for many hours, but in the end he tore the letter up and threw it away.

  12

  Eschburg rented a two-storey factory building in the yard of a house in Berlin-Mitte. The factory used to make umbrellas, but the building had been standing empty since German reunification. It had tall windows, the walls were reddish-yellow brick, and it was not expensive.

  He set up his studio on the lower floor, and moved into the living quarters on half of the upper floor with his private possessions. As he was carrying his cartons of books up, he met his neighbour for the first time; her apartment occupied the other half of that floor. They introduced themselves to each other in the corridor.

  Eschburg called all the editors and architects he knew, saying he had set up on his own. Gradually commissions came in, photographs for sales catalogues, small illustrated news stories about new buildings, sometimes photos for one of the city’s museums. He had spent very little money while he was working for the photographer, he didn’t need much, and he enjoyed his independence.

  There was an old armchair in his apartment; someone had put it out on the street to be taken away with the rubbish. Its black upholstery had worn thin, but it was still comfortable. Apart from that, he had nothing but two iron chairs, a rough-hewn wooden table, shelves for his books and a bed.

  The editor of a cinema magazine asked Eschburg to take a photograph of a well-known actress for an article. She arrived wearing no makeup, warm from riding her bicycle to his studio, and wearing a plain white shirt. He photographed her just as she was; it took him hardly a quarter of an hour.

  Eschburg was in luck. The actress was pleased with the photo and put it on her website. She recommended Eschburg to her colleagues and friends. Soon he was taking photographs of directors, actors, sports stars and singers. Then came the politicians, managers and entrepreneurs. Eschburg made a name for himself because the people he photographed were well known. Three years later he had published two volumes of photographs. He had taken hundreds of black and white portrait photos, there were exhibitions of his work in various cities, his pictures featured on music CDs, on posters and in magazines, and they hung in restaurants. He could charge high prices for his work. Eschburg was only twenty-five years old.

  His world changed. It took him an hour every day to answer his emails, and two hours to organize his engagements diary. An agency looked after the exploitation of rights to his pictures, another agency took care of his website. He had an advertising contract with a camera manufacturer. He travelled a great deal, and often woke up in hotels not knowing what city he was in. Sometimes that made him think it would be better to lie in bed and wait until all this was over.

  13

&
nbsp; Four years after Eschburg’s move to Linienstrasse, a woman called his studio and asked if he had time to see her. She was quite close, she said, and would like to look in. She gave the name of a French energy company to which she was adviser. Half an hour later she rang his doorbell. She was wearing a thin yellow dress and had pinned her hair up on top of her head.

  ‘Just call me Sofia, my surname’s far too complicated.’ Her hand was warm. Her business card told him that she was managing director of a public relations firm. She said that the energy company she was advising wanted to launch an advertising campaign with the face of a woman, and asked whether he would care to take the photographs for it.

  ‘How did you find me?’ asked Eschburg.

  She smiled. ‘Not by way of your famous portraits. Years ago I saw one of your photos in the office of your former employer. You weren’t there yourself that day. It was hanging in your office. A small black and white photo of a woman.’

  Eschburg had kept the pictures of the naked woman that he took in the photographer’s bread-and-butter studio. One of them hung over the desk where he worked.

  ‘Yes, that’s the one I mean,’ she said, pointing to the picture. She went over to the desk and looked at it. Eschburg stationed himself beside her. Sofia leaned forward; the nape of her neck was slim.

  ‘I like that picture; it’s honest. Just the kind of thing we could use in the campaign,’ said Sofia. She turned to him too quickly, so that their faces almost touched. They stood like that for a moment.

  ‘Show me some more of your photos, would you?’ she said.