Sorry by Zoran Drvenkar Page A

would have had to give her father answers that she doesn’t want to give him. She sets the printout back on the desk. Her life is none of his business.
    “New job?” he asks.
    “New girlfriend?” she asks back.
    “First some coffee,” her father says to change the subject and walks over to the tray. For a few seconds he stares at the teapot and the two cups as if he can’t work out what their function might be. Frauke can tell from his back that he is repelled. His shoulders are slightly hunched, he looks ridiculous. He looks like all the fathers over the age of fifty that she meets in the street. Preposterous and old.
    “What’s this?” he asked, sniffing at the tea. “Cow piss?”
    Frauke pushes him away, takes one of the cups and sits down on the sofa. She can’t help grinning, even though she doesn’t want to. Her father sniffs at the tea again and leaves his cup where it is.
    “Sweetie,” he says, and walks over to her. His head settles in her lap and his eyes close contentedly. He always uses the same tactic. As if his life ran only on a single track. The gestures, the words.
    “I miss you both,” he murmurs.
    Frauke feels like crying. It’s been her ritual since she moved out ten years ago. And she always gives her father the same answer, because whether she likes it or not, she’s part of the ritual.
    “Your own fault,” she says, although she knows it isn’t his fault.
    Frauke drinks her tea, as her father’s head lies heavy in her lap and time seems to stretch out comfortably again.
    Gerd Lewin owns a construction company and various plots of land in the north of Berlin, occupied by apartment blocks. He owns shares in two big hotels, and twice a year he changes his girlfriend, who is supposed to replace Frauke’s mother and can’t. Every two weeks it’s visiting time.
    Frauke takes the train down to Potsdam and waits outside the clinic while her father smokes one last cigarette. Always frantically, with one eye on the street, as if he can only accept the presence of the clinic atthe very last minute. It’s only when he drops the cigarette on the pavement and crushes it with his shoe that the brick building, with its park and its grandiose entrance, becomes real for him. By now Frauke wants a cigarette as well, but she quells her craving because she doesn’t want to be like her father.
    Tanja Lewin has been living in a private clinic for fourteen years. Her life there is barely any different from the life she led at home. From outside everything looks normal, if it weren’t for the times when Frauke’s mother would climb the walls, throw up her dinner, and hide in the wardrobe. Times when she saw the devil everywhere.
    If you ask Frauke’s father, he claims he should have seen it coming. He often says he should have seen something coming. The crisis in the building trades, the chlamydia one of his girlfriends gave him, the bad weather, and of course the misunderstandings between him and his daughter.
    Frauke’s mother first ran away on her forty-third birthday. The police caught up with her just before Nuremberg. Tanja Lewin had locked herself in a gas station bathroom, and was endlessly calling out her own name. Questioned later, Frauke’s mother didn’t know exactly what had happened. She remembered feeling a sudden urge to get out of Berlin. Then she had a blackout and woke up in the gas station bathroom—her throat was sore from shouting, and two men lifted her into an ambulance.
    Frauke’s mother entered psychiatric treatment for two months. The next blackout came a few days after her release. This time Frauke’s mother stayed in Berlin, and was arrested in the bedding department of a furniture store. All she remembered was waiting for the bus on Nollendorfplatz. A man told her the bus was going to be late. A moment later the bus stop had disappeared, and Tanja was naked in the bedding department, clutching a pillow, asking what all the people were doing in her bedroom.
    It