In the River Darkness (2 page)

I swallowed the bitter lump that suddenly stuck in my throat.
They have no idea . . . they don’t know anything!

The idiotic tears burned in my eyes. Again. I bit my lower lip until I tasted blood. I would rather suffocate than cry now in front of my parents!

Dad gave me a sympathetic look in the rearview mirror. I quickly stuffed the earplugs of my iPod back in my ears and turned up the volume. Vivaldi’s
Springtime
from the Four Seasons resounded so loud it almost hurt. But it drowned out the sounds of the tires, my mother’s voice, everything, until nothing was left but the music.

That must be it, I thought, twenty minutes later as our car rolled into a gravel driveway—my new home. It stood outside the town, as if it couldn’t quite decide if it should join the other houses or not. In front of the house across the street, the only other one around, an old woman was working in the garden. She looked us over suspiciously as we got out of the car.

My mother was right. It really was a pretty house: two stories high with shuttered windows and a well-tended garden all around it. The first crocuses were even poking their colorful heads up through the earth. A few hundred feet behind the house I could even see the river shimmering like dull metal in the afternoon light.

“Well?” my mother asked in an expectant voice. Her eyes were beaming.

I didn’t answer. All I could muster was a weak nod.

“Please don’t look so gloomy,” she pleaded, pressing her lips together.

“You can’t expect me to find everything wonderful here right away, okay?” I hissed back. My voice cut through the spring air like a knife, and the old woman in the garden across the street looked up at us in surprise.

“No, and no one is asking you to,” my father reassured in a calm tone. “But it would be nice if you would at least try. That makes it easier, you know.” Then he put one arm across my mother’s shoulder and the other across mine and drew us in the direction of the house. “Let’s take a quick look inside first. . . . I’m famished. And then we’ll see if we can’t find just the right room for you. What do you think of that, Mia?”

I picked the nicest room. It was upstairs, large, with a big window overlooking the garden. This was what it looked like, then, the efforts of my parental units to reconcile me to my forced relocation. A bribe, so to speak. Not so bad.

The furniture and the rest of our belongings wouldn’t be delivered until morning, but we had brought the essentials with us. The first thing I got out of the trunk was my cello.

“You wouldn’t let anyone else touch it, would you?” my father called after me, as I pressed the instrument to my chest like a shield . . . or a lover.

In my new room, I unpacked the cello and leaned it again a wall, then sat on the wooden floor in front of it. Its red body looked so beautiful in the empty room. The walls were entirely white. There was something comforting and pure about them. Everything was yet to be determined—no photos of a previous life, no memories.

Maybe it actually was possible to start over again . . .

The branches of a tree cast filigree shadows on the walls. I observed how the shadows slowly moved and changed the walls and decided not to hang anything on them.

I had no idea what I should do next. Finally, I stood up and opened the window. A large tree stood directly in front of the house and stretched its budding branches toward me, as if it wanted to welcome me with a handshake. “Hello,” I said to the tree. When I leaned out the window as far as I could, I could just touch the tips of the tree.

As I did that, I noticed that I had a perfect view of the house next door from here. I studied it critically. It stood closer to the river than ours and was built of wood. It looked a little run down, somehow. I searched my pockets for a cigarette while I continued to look the house over. Not that I saw anything interesting over there, but the house had some kind of fascination for me, for whatever inexplicable reason.

The old woman with her housecoat was still standing in her front yard. Her back was as straight as the handle of the rake she held in her hand. She just stood there and stared over at the bank of the little river. Even when it suddenly began to rain, hard, she stayed rooted to the spot and didn’t move.

“Now that’s strange,” I thought. She was probably a little senile. I wanted to turn away from the window, bored, but there was something about her stance. Something like . . . watchfulness.

The woman peered into the bushes and vines at the edge of the river as if there were a dangerous animal crouched there that might pounce at any moment. I craned my neck—but there wasn’t anything there, was there? Nothing and no one, except that slim figure in the streaming rain.

I asked myself what on earth she saw. What was she thinking about?

Rain rolled down my neck. I was so busy looking, I almost fell out the window! Out of fear, I made some noise, because the old woman suddenly turned her face in my direction. In spite of the distance between us, I couldn’t help but notice her light blue eyes, like forget-me-nots. Could she see me through the branches? Hesitantly, I raised my hand to wave to her.

In that moment, someone wearing a hooded shirt and carrying an umbrella came around the corner of the house. Must be her grandson, one of the “nice boys.” Shaking his head, he talked with the old woman. Then he took her by the arm to guide her, while his other hand held the colorful umbrella above her. The two of them disappeared into the house.

I put out my cigarette and closed the window.

The first night in our new house, I lay awake for a long time, listening to my breathing, which got lost in the darkness. It seemed so foreign to me. I stretched out a hand and touched my cello, still standing against the wall next to me. Carefully, I plucked a string. The A tone vibrated for a long time in the otherwise empty room.

Only when the note faded away with a sigh did I finally fall into a dreamless sleep.

One well-aimed kick and the Coke can skittered over the edge of the riverbank with a satisfying clatter and splashed into the water.

I hated that river, babbling as it wended its way through town. I hated the fields with their first smatterings of green. This whole backwater idyll made me sick! It was so damn quiet here. Apart from a few squealing children playing soccer somewhere in the distance, the only thing you could hear were the birds, singing their hearts out.

Where were the cars? Where were the people? Even if there was nothing more than a bakery, a tiny outpost of a grocery store, and—wow, the high point of entertainment and culture—a small outdoor swimming pool (where nothing was swimming at the moment but last year’s leaves), there still had to be at least a few people around here! But the houses stood silent in the sun as if the whole village had died out. Or had everyone left? It wouldn’t have surprised me.

But anything was better than schlepping moving cartons as heavy as pianos and having to listen to my parents’ upbeat commentary. My arms felt like they were as long as a gorilla’s by now, and I was in dire need of a cigarette break anyway. That was reason enough to steal away and explore this hick town.

On the other hand, I hadn’t seen much yet that would have been worth exploring. Even the dogs here seemed to be bored—a particularly ugly specimen trotted along behind me for a few minutes. I threw it a few of my chocolate-covered raisins, which it ate with a teeth-smacking grin. The motley stray seemed to be the only life-form to take any interest in me. I shook my head so that my favorite earrings jingled, the ones with the tiny shells that Dad had brought me from Greece.

If you closed your eyes and held your face up to the spring sun, you could almost believe you were somewhere else, in the south. . . . I could actually feel the first summer freckles of the year starting to sprout.

When I opened my eyes again, I noticed an old wooden footbridge that stretched across to the opposite side of the river in an arch. The bleached wooden boards bounced under my feet. Afraid they might suddenly give way, I looked down as I walked. That’s why I only noticed the five guys when I was already halfway across the bridge. They were sitting on the railing, drinking beer and spitting into the flowing river. What I really wanted to do was turn around, but to run off at that point would have been cowardly. So I leaned on the railing with my back to them and lit a cigarette. I suppressed a sudden urge to cough as I exhaled smoke through my nose. Stay cool, Mia . . .

But I could sense that the guys were staring at me like they’d never seen a female before. There probably weren’t a lot of girls around here in pale makeup with dark lines around their eyes and wearing black velvet clothes. This getup somehow made me feel confident, as if I were wearing a vampire costume that made me invincible. Who would dare approach such a monster bride? A dumb dog, at most, since most people look at the packaging first and not at what’s inside. That’s one of the basic principles of advertising psychology, a subject my father often teaches.

That day, my clothes didn’t protect me. The boys’ eyes were stuck to my body like spiderwebs. I wanted to shove the whole crew off the bridge and watch them flounder in the water like oversized insects. . . . But of course, I didn’t do anything of the sort. Instead, I tried to ignore their stares. The sun reflected off the water, and I was a little bit dizzy.