After opening the door, she marched to the back of the room, anxious to put some distance between us. She had her mother’s short blonde hair and mesmerizing eyes. Her earrings were tiny silver bells.
She smiled at me fleetingly, standing between the head of her bed and a leather armchair positioned for a view out the window, then turned to the side abruptly, as though having just remembered to withhold her feelings. The oblique light from the afternoon sun made crescents of deep shadow under her eyes. The way she held her hands knitted tightly together seemed a bad sign.
She wore modest, impeccably pressed clothes – a silvery-green woollen skirt and an embroidered Ukrainian blouse. I had the sensation that they weren’t what she liked – that she dressed this way to please someone else.
Her shelves were neatly packed with books and stuffed animals. A Picasso print of a sad-faced harlequin was framed behind her bed.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she told me in an unsure voice. She spoke in German.
‘Thank you for letting me in,’ I replied.
She grabbed one of the blue silk cushions from her bed, took off her furry slippers and sat down in the armchair, folding her bare feet girlishly underneath her bottom. Placing the cushion over her lap, she leaned towards the window and gazed at the lawn below as if concerned about what might be taking place down there in her absence. Whether on purpose or not, she gave me a good look at the bald spot at the crown of her head where she must have been pulling out her hair.
A patient’s initial gestures often indicate how forthcoming they intend to be, and Irene had chosen to show me a symptom of her misery before even saying a word.
I sat down on her bed. Though the girl didn’t speak or look at me, I was at ease; this silence between myself and a patient had been a kind of home to me for many years.
‘Now, Irene, I’m just going to ask you some questions. Is that all right?’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
I didn’t have much time, so I tried a shortcut that had worked for me in the past. ‘If you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be?’ I asked. I was hoping she’d accidentally reveal what was pursuing her by telling me her fantasy of escape.
‘You mean, where in Warsaw?’ she questioned.
She was afraid to dream too ambitiously, which likely meant she felt powerless to flee her predicament. ‘No, anywhere,’ I replied. ‘London, Rome, Cairo…’ Finding my professional voice again gave me confidence.
‘I’d go to France,’ she replied. ‘To Nantes.’
I heard Swiss vowels in her reply, though she was speaking High German.
‘Why Nantes?’ I asked.
‘Because my grandparents live there.’
‘Would you feel safer with them?’ I questioned.
Grimacing, she moved her cushion over her chest and clutched it tightly.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
Straining for breath, looking at me directly for the first time, she replied, ‘There’s a constriction in my chest that comes and goes. And when it’s bad, it’s like a big rough hand is pressing down on me. Sometimes I think I’m going to suffocate.’ She fixed me with a desolate look. ‘Dr Cohen, it’s this house… it terrifies me.’
When tears came, she faced the window again, afraid to see my reaction.
‘What about this house scares you?’ I asked.
For a long time, she made no reply. I took out my pipe and examined the bowl to keep from looking at her and making her more uncomfortable.
‘I often think someone is hiding underneath my bed at night,’ she finally told me. ‘Or in my wardrobe, or in the dining room – a person who wants to kill me. I check everywhere I can think of, but it’s too big a house to be sure I haven’t missed something – or that the killer isn’t one step ahead of me.’
A knock on the door startled me. ‘Your coffee, Dr Cohen,’ a woman called out.
I asked Irene to excuse me a moment. Opening the door a crack, I saw an elderly maidservant walking away. On the floor was a wooden tray on which she’d placed an elegant porcelain coffee pot – white, with a black handle – and a matching cup. I carried the tray inside and put it on the girl’s bed.
‘Irene, this is a mansion, and it must have lots of hidden corners and passageways,’ I told her as I poured a first cup. ‘Our deepest fears tend to hide where we have trouble finding them. But I’m going to help you find them.’
She nodded her thanks, but guilt entered deeply into me; who could say if I’d ever come here again? I stole a look at my watch. It was 2.20. I wondered where Rowy and Ziv were at that moment. I decided to stay with Irene until three.
I took a first sip of coffee, but its dark flavour was so redolent of better times that I wasn’t sure I ought to drink it.
‘How long have you lived here?’ I asked the girl.
‘Four months.’ She looked far into the distance out her window. ‘Sometimes I imagine that the killer is outside the house and… and trying to get in any way he can,’ she told me cautiously, and with the effort of recall, as though groping her way through memory. ‘I start worrying that my parents might have left the front door open, which would allow him to get inside, so I check that it’s locked before going to my room. And I end up coming downstairs several times in the night to make sure it’s still locked.’
‘Do you think your parents might leave the door open on purpose – or unlock it after you’ve locked it?’
Those were risky questions, since they touched on her relationship with her parents. Irene faced me and held my gaze, wanting to see the kind of man who would ask them – above all, whether I would give up on her if she spoke to me honestly and revealed something of which other people might disapprove. So I looked at her hard and long. It was an important moment – the hub around which our subsequent conversation would turn. She didn’t flinch or even blink. I began to believe she was a courageous girl.
‘Please tell me what you’re thinking,’ I prodded.
‘I never before imagined that the door…’ She raised a hand over her mouth, assaulted by fear. At length, she said, ‘I love my parents. I want you to know that.’
‘I believe you,’ I told her, ‘but it’s hard to trust even the people we love most when we find ourselves in a new environment. I learned that when I moved into the ghetto.’
She started; she hadn’t expected me to talk about my own life. Drawing her knees into her chest and hugging them, she asked, ‘Is it… is it very bad in there?’
‘Yes, it’s bad, but there’s nothing any of us can do about it at the moment.’
‘No, maybe there is,’ she declared.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We can each play our part in preventing worse things from happening.’
I was impressed by her solidarity, but at the time she seemed hopelessly naive.
‘Maybe so,’ I told her. ‘But we need to talk about you for the moment. Now, Irene, can you tell me what the murderer looks like in your imagination?’
‘I’m not sure. I don’t recognize him, if that’s what you mean. But I sometimes see he has an awful face, and he looks at me in a dreadful way.’
A sense of deja vu made me halt as I reached for my coffee cup. Where had I heard her last words?
‘What makes his look so dreadful?’ I asked.
‘Something in his eyes – something dark and purposeful,’ she replied, moaning, and she began twisting the hair on top of her head.
‘And do you have any idea why he would want to kill you?’
‘No, I don’t know!’ she replied in desperation. Taking a deep breath, she tugged out the tangle of hairs she’d twisted around her index finger.
I grimaced, but she said reassuringly, as if I were the one in pain, ‘It’s all right, Dr Cohen, it doesn’t really hurt. And even if it does, it’s a good kind of pain.’
‘Why is it good?’
‘I’m not sure. I only know it is.’
