A few years ago Julia had heard muffled shouting while standing at a supermarket checkout in Schweizer Viertel. At first she thought a mother was calling for her child in the carpark, but then the shouting became more hysterical. All of a sudden two customers and a member of staff started running to the exit. As Julia exchanged a worried look with the cashier, she saw in the woman’s eyes the same morbid schizophrenia she was feeling herself: torn between the desire to satisfy her own curiosity and the fear of bearing witness to something so terrible that she wished she’d never been there. The contradiction that had troubled her back then now visited her again. Only with a thousand times greater intensity.

She had to open the envelope. She absolutely wanted to find out what was in it, even though she was almost certain that a letter a daughter secretly leaves for her mother at night couldn’t be good news. Just like the wailing screams of a mother in a busy car park, where suddenly no cars were moving.

She was trembling as she tore it open, cutting herself on the sharp writing paper as she pulled it out. She opened up the page folded in the middle and read Lisa’s message, which she ought not to have received for many hours, not until nine o’clock, when her alarm would ring for them to have breakfast together. The letter consisted of a single sentence, itself only three words long.

I’m sorry, Mama.

This was all Julia needed to feel sheer terror for her daughter, to which nothing else in the world could compare.

36

‘Don’t you want to talk about it?’

Sticking his bottom lip out defiantly and drawing his chin more tightly to his chest, Timmy shook his head.

‘Aren’t you having fun at school any more?’

His son shrugged.

Timmy was sitting at his little desk and scratching his knee beneath it.

‘Look, I don’t care about the five you got in Maths,’ Martin told his son.

This was just a symptom. One of many that had manifested themselves recently, such as Timmy’s unbelievable need for sleep. These days Nadja was barely able to get him out of bed in the morning, and he’d already had three lates in the register. Then he’d stopped playing tennis. Just like that. Martin and Nadja were not the sort of parents to force their child to do something, but the decision to give up from one day to the next had taken them by surprise. They thought he’d been happy and was desperate for the next season to start when he had a good chance of being selected to play for Berlin. If Timmy hadn’t been ten years old, Martin would have assumed that his odd behaviour was down to girl trouble. But there had to be another reason.

‘Have you got problems at school?’