The blind side of the heart - By Julia Franck Page 0,47

out, unexpectedly strong, to seize Helene and hold her firmly by the wrist.

Helene was alarmed. She turned, but there was no sign of Martha coming back. Indistinct sounds from the floor below showed that she and Mariechen had managed to get into the room, that was all. Helene twisted out of her father’s grasp, and next moment he seemed to fall asleep. She took the carafe of water from the bedside table and poured some of it into the little bottle that Martha had been using for the last few days to get liquid into her father’s mouth.

As soon as she put the little bottle to his lips he said, still in the position of a sleeping man: Drunken women in my mouth.

He couldn’t drink, couldn’t take any more water. Helene moistened her father’s lips with her fingers. She resorted to the syringe for aid, taking out the needle and dripping water into his mouth from it.

Then she replaced the needle and filled the syringe with morphine to the lowest mark, held it up and expelled the air. Her father’s arm was covered with puncture marks, so she looked for somewhere on his neck. An abscess had formed there, but next to it she found a good place for the injection. She pressed down slowly.

Later, she must have fallen asleep at his bedside from exhaustion. Twilight was falling as she raised her head and heard her mother cursing as she approached. Obviously she was being forcibly brought upstairs. Martha’s voice was heard, loud and determined: You must see him, Mother.

The door was opened, their mother was resisting, she didn’t want to enter the room.

I won’t, Mother kept saying again and again, I won’t. She hit out. But Martha and Mariechen were having none of that; they propelled her to the door and then, now that she was clinging firmly to them both, hauled her over to Father’s bed with all their strength.

There was a moment’s silence. Mother stood up straight. She saw her husband, the man she hadn’t seen for six years. She closed her eyes.

Just what did he do to you? Martha asked her, breaking the silence and unable to hide her indignation. For the first time in her life, Helene heard Mariechen speaking her own Sorbian language, a soft sing-song. She was familiar with its rhythm from the women in the market place. Mariechen folded her hands, clearly in prayer.

Ignoring that, Mother groped her way towards the bed like a blind puppy, a creature that doesn’t yet know its way but is instinctively getting the hang of it. She took hold of Father’s sheet and bent over the sick man. When he opened his sound eye, she whispered, with a tenderness that frightened Helene: Just say you’re still alive.

Her head sank on Father’s chest and Helene was sure that now she would shed tears. But she stayed where she was, motionless and still.

My little pigeon, said Father, laboriously searching for words. I didn’t give you a room in my house just for you to shut yourself up in it.

Mother withdrew from him.

Yes, you did, she said quietly. All the things in my room, all the hills and valleys they make, that’s where I’m at home. Nowhere else. They are me. Who knows what care I put into laying out my paths? Clearings. Your daughters wanted to throw away the Bautzen News, tidying up they call it. They tore away the chiffon as if it wasn’t hiding anything, they took last December’s editions apart, I worked for days stacking them up again. By subject. According to subject, theme, material, putting them together, stacking them, putting them in order that way, not by the date. I’m a nocturnal creature. It’s dark in me, but never dark enough.

Helene glanced at Martha, looking across the bed and over her parents’ heads. They were so preoccupied with each other that Helene felt as if she were at the theatre. Perhaps Martha was thinking the same. Mother’s heart has gone blind, Martha had once said when Helene asked what was wrong with her. She can only see things, not people any more, that’s why she collects those old pots and pans, scarves with holes in them and common-or-garden fruit stones. You never knew when this or that might come in useful. Only the other day she’d been sewing a peach stone to her woollen cape. Mother could see a horse in a piece of bent tree root and would tie a tail of hair