Bunker by Andrea Maria Schenkel Read Free Book Online Page B

frame. I reach up, take hold of the frame and pull it out. A photograph, colours yellowing a bit with age. I like the picture; it reminds me of my childhood. My mother was only a few years older than the girl in the picture when she fell pregnant. The same dark-blonde hair, the pale face. She was so slender and fragile. I take the picture with me, put it in my jacket pocket. She’ll never notice
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    Suddenly there’s a rustling sound behind me. Quite soft. Then a scraping. I stand perfectly still, listening. I don’t move from the spot. The sound gets louder. Where does it come from? The door? Damn it, she lives on her own. No one lives here except her. I open my jacket a little way and reach into the back right pocket of my trousers. I take my hunting knife out. It clicks softly as I open it. With the open knife in my hand, I steal out of the room on tiptoe and cross the corridor. The sound comes from the kitchen. Knife in my right hand, I push the door gently with my left hand. The door is ajar. It slowly opens. I take a step forward, look around. No one there
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    A loud clatter, followed by a clinking sound. I spin round,the knife still in my hand. Then I see the cat, standing on the table and hissing, its fur on end. It jumps down, races past me through the open door. Broken china on the floor. Bloody animal, how it scared me!
    I close the knife, put it back in my trouser pocket. Go down the corridor to the front door of the apartment. Look through the spy hole. No one outside. I leave the apartment
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I’m bored to death. I walk up and down, climb on the chair, look at the sky and the treetops, lie down on the bed. The sky is getting darker and darker, it’s beginning to rain. The rain patters down hard on the roof. I hear the water flowing away along the gutter on the side of the house. I imagine the single drops falling on the tiles, running down, collecting, forming a little rivulet, splashing into the gutter and into the downpipe. Hurrying down the side of the house into the water butt. I lie on the bed, and in my mind I follow every single drop on its way. Roof, gutter, downpipe. Again and again, roof, gutter, downpipe.
    And suddenly my mind goes back to that photo, to Joachim and the way he’s grinning at me in it. Who knewhim? No one alive now. Our stepmother died years ago. I took the photo when I had to clear her place out, along with some other sentimental stuff. Joachim didn’t have any friends. Or not real friends. He was always tagging along after me. Sticking to me like a burr. And he used to go around with Hans, the two of them spent a lot of time together. Hans the village idiot. You’re not supposed to say that kind of thing these days, but it was perfectly normal at the time. Every village had its idiot, a village idiot was supposed to bring luck. The way Hans walked, the way he talked, everything about him was slow. He was retarded. Apparently he didn’t even make it to special school. Hans was shapeless; a massive body, big clumsy hands, everything about him seemed to me huge at the time. Perhaps because his clothes were always too small for him. The bottoms of his trousers flapped around his shins, and of course his shirt-sleeves were too short as well. He always wore a grubby vest under his shirt. In fact the whole idea of washing was foreign to him. His body wasn’t misshapen, but his shabby old clothes always made him look funny. His parents were from the East. Belorussians or something like that, I’ve no idea exactly what, and it never interested me. Anyway, Hans didn’t speak German properly. However, he wanted to belong, and he did all he could to be one of us.
    We always had a lot of fun with him. We’d egg him on to do all sorts of silly things. Like the time when we made him steal a pig for us from the biggest farmer in the village. It was one of the tests of courage we set him. He’d never have thought up the idea by himself, he was far