Yiza Read online

  Yiza

  Published in 2017 by

  Haus Publishing Ltd

  70 Cadogan Place

  London SWIX 9AH

  www.hauspublishing.com

  First published in 2016 by Carl Hanser Verlag as Das Mädchen mit dem Fingerhut

  Copyright © Carl Hanser Verlag München, 2016

  English translation copyright © Ruth Martin, 2017

  The rights of the authors to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-910376-75-1

  eISBN: 978-1-910376-76-8

  Typeset in Garamond by MacGuru Ltd

  All rights reserved

  MICHAEL KÖHLMEIER is an Austrian writer and musician. He divides his time between Hohenems in Vorarlberg and Vienna. The recipient of many prizes and awards in his native Austria, his novel Two Gentlemen on the Beach (2016) has also been translated into English.

  For Monika

  This man was her uncle.

  She didn’t know what the word meant.

  She was six years old.

  He bent down to her and explained what was going to happen one last time. Again, she had difficulty understanding him. But she did understand him. She was supposed to repeat something after him. And she did. He gave her a push when the light turned green and she walked across the zebra crossing to the market. She did not look around. He had said she mustn’t do that; she had to walk quickly. She walked quickly and kept her eyes on the ground and her hands in her pockets.

  She slipped past the men in the passageway between the market stalls without slowing her pace. She kept her head down. The men were setting up their stalls, sweeping, arranging the fruit and vegetables, they moved out of her way or stood still to let her pass. And no one was surprised to see her. That was exactly how it would be, her uncle had said.

  It was early in the morning. The street lamps were still lit. The puddles were frozen.

  She had eaten nothing since lunchtime the previous day. Bogdan would give her something to eat. Bogdan was a good man. Even if he scolded her, her uncle said, he was a good man. He might scold her to start with, but he would soon stop. And he wouldn’t scold her too harshly. She shouldn’t say she was hungry. She shouldn’t say anything. He would give her something to eat, and it would be better than anything she had eaten in her life.

  In the shop, she planted herself in front of the counter and clasped her hands behind her back and said nothing. She looked at the man standing behind the counter.

  The man behind the counter is Bogdan, her uncle had told her.

  Bogdan asked her what she would like. She didn’t reply. Had someone sent her, who had sent her, was she looking for someone, was she waiting for someone. What was her name. How could he help her. She gave no reply.

  He let her be.

  He fetched sausages, ham, cheese and the dishes of olives, artichokes, courgettes and aubergines preserved in oil from the cold store, and spread the things out beneath the glass countertop.

  She did what her uncle had told her. Nothing. She just stood there.

  Bogdan cut some bread, laid slices of sausage and cheese on it, cut it into quarters. He lifted her up and sat her on the barstool at the counter. He slid the plate in front of her, poured some yellow juice into a glass.

  Her uncle had said she should eat greedily. She ate the way she always ate. She was more thirsty than hungry. Bogdan refilled her glass. He asked no more questions. When she had finished, he took a bar of chocolate out of a cupboard and gave it to her.

  He said: You have to go now.

  She looked at him and said nothing. She found it easy to look at him and say nothing. She wasn’t afraid of this man.

  You have to go now, he said again. You can come back tomorrow. But you have to go now. He lifted her off the stool. She took two steps back into the corner by the umbrella stand, clasped her hands behind her back and went on staring at him.

  Look, he said, it’s no good, you have to go.

  So go!

  She said nothing.

  You’re in the way there, he said. You need to be gone by the time the first customers come in. Do you understand what I’m saying? Do you speak my language? Don’t you have any gloves?

  She didn’t move.

  Bogdan stopped worrying about her. When he cut himself a piece of sausage, because that was how he took his breakfast, he passed her a piece as well. Or a pickled gherkin. He brewed some tea and placed two cups on the counter. And finally he lifted her back onto the barstool.

  The first customer was the owner of the fishmonger’s just up from Bogdan’s shop. His hands were red, frozen from scooping ice. He asked who the child was. Was she Bogdan’s. That wasn’t a serious question.

  She came to me, said Bogdan.

  He passed the man his milky coffee over the counter, and a plate of bread, sausage, cheese and hummus. Only when the man had finished his coffee and his meal did he ask: How do you mean? And he asked the child: Who are you? What’s your name?

  She doesn’t talk, said Bogdan. Someone will come and fetch her soon. I’m sure someone will fetch her soon.

  What do you mean, came to you? asked the man.

  I think someone’s parked her here, said Bogdan. Her father, maybe, or perhaps she has an older brother. Because it’s cold outside and she’s in the way, what do I know. He’s got business to take care of and doesn’t know what to do with her. It’s a good idea, if you ask me. I hope word doesn’t get around. I’m not cut out for running a kindergarten. But she’s sweet, don’t you think? Look at her!

  The man chewed and looked at her. He held the bread and hummus in front of her mouth. She was full.

  What will you do if no one comes to fetch her? he asked.

  I’ll think about that this evening, said Bogdan.

  Send her over to me. For lunch, said the other man. I’ll give her something, too.

  I’ll do that, said Bogdan.

  Then the man said some other things, and finally he said: You have to call the police.

  The child screamed.

  That was something her uncle had drummed into her. She had to pay close attention to the words. When someone said a word that sounded like police, she should scream. He made her repeat the word over and over. He said it to her. He dressed it up in different sentences. He said it casually. He said it very slowly. He mumbled it. Until she understood. She should scream until she had no breath left, and then do the same again, and then stop. She didn’t ask what would happen then.

  Nothing happened. But the man left Bogdan’s shop.

  Bogdan picked her up. He smiled at her. She didn’t smile back. She stared at him intently. Her hands were cold. He carried her to the back of the shop where the electric heater was. He sat her in an armchair, put his parka round her, wrapped her hands and feet in the padded lining, pulled the hood up over her hair.

  A woman came into the shop. She was wearing a fur hat and pulling a shopping trolley. She didn’t notice the child. She wanted a special kind of cheese, she couldn’t think of the name, she pointed to it. The next customer didn’t notice the child, either. Eventually she started singing. Bogdan’s shop was full of people – it was lunchtime. Some of them smiled at her, some didn’t even look, and others looked over, but absent-mindedly and without smiling. No one asked any questions. Bogdan felt reassured.

  But still he waited for the fishmonger to come and fetch the child for lunch.

  He came. A little later than promised. It was dark in Bogdan’s shop, and at the back, where the child was sitting by the heater, it was even darker, and the sun was now shining outside, so the fishmonger had to accustom hi
s eyes to the darkness.

  Has she gone? he asked.

  Then he spotted her. He pulled her hood down, cautiously. When she recognised him, she screamed. She screamed until Bogdan picked her up.

  The fishmonger said again: You have to call the police, Bogdan.

  She screamed.

  When she had calmed down, the fishmonger said: Shall I call the hmhm? Someone has to. Otherwise you’re going to get yourself in trouble, Bogdan, I’d be careful if I were you.

  Let’s wait a bit, said Bogdan. Come back this evening. If she’s still here, you can call the hmhm. Or I’ll call them. Come over, anyway. If the hmhm come, I’d like you to be there.

  The fishmonger reached out a hand to the child, who was still in Bogdan’s arms, pressing herself against him. This time she didn’t scream.

  That evening she was gone. She had slipped out of the back door and run away, just like her uncle had told her. Her uncle was waiting for her, where he’d said he would be. He had walked past the shop and whistled with his fingers in his mouth. No one noticed. People often whistled in the market. But she noticed. Her uncle took her by the hand, and they got into the minibus where the other men were waiting.

  The next morning she appeared in Bogdan’s shop again.

  So it went on for several days. In the morning she was there; in the evening she was gone. Bogdan got used to her. And he didn’t follow her, either. When his day was over, he would pretend he had something to do in the passageway in front of his shop. To give her a chance to escape through the back door. He didn’t want her to be afraid that he might catch her and keep her there.

  If anyone asked, he said the child was his niece.

  His sister was visiting, he said; she had found a shortterm job in the city, and he was temporarily looking after the child. If anyone asked what the child was called, he said Evgenia. The fishmonger warned him again and again that it was risky and there were bound to be consequences. There were sympathetic people in the hmhm, to whom he could confide all of this. Something very dodgy was going on here, he was sure, and Bogdan might be making himself an accomplice to it. But soon he stopped saying things like that. And soon the child stopped screaming when she saw him. Soon she even let him pick her up. Soon she started laughing at him the same way she laughed at Bogdan. She talked, too. But neither Bogdan nor the fishmonger understood her. They had no idea what language she was speaking.

  She came in the morning and left in the evening.

  Bogdan gave her some padded gloves and a padded hat with ear flaps and some little toys. Her favourite was a bus with children’s faces painted in the windows. The fishmonger brought her a coat he said his daughter had grown out of. A good, padded coat.

  Her uncle was looking out for her. She had listened as the men talked about her in the place where they slept. She understood when her uncle said: she has to get herself through the winter. She understood that her uncle was looking out for her and that he was doing it reluctantly. The others were reluctant, too. But they still did it. She was given the softest sheets, the thickest blankets, and bananas. The men didn’t talk to her. Only her uncle talked to her. The men nodded at her. She thought that meant she was doing everything right. She was glad of that. She didn’t have to do anything, and still she was doing everything right.

  And then one evening her uncle wasn’t where he had said he would be.

  She waited, like he had told her to. She put on her mittens, pulled the hat down over her ears and folded her arms. She drew in her chin, because a patch of bare throat was peeping out above her collar. She stood with her back to the wind. People walked past her, but no one said anything. She didn’t look like she was lost. She looked like she was waiting. And that was what she was doing. She could see the market stalls, and Bogdan’s shop. She saw the lights go off in Bogdan’s shop. Then the lights went off in all the market’s stalls and shops.

  She was cold. She wasn’t hungry.

  She folded her arms, raised them up to her chin. When everything she saw and heard began to feel unfamiliar, she rubbed her lips together. That was a habit. It had happened quite often before, that everything she saw and heard felt unfamiliar. She rubbed her lips together so hard it made them sore and they started to burn.

  She was standing at a crossing. She watched the lights, scanned the people waiting on the other side of the street. Was there anyone who looked like her uncle. She searched for a bobble hat. The cars had happy people in them. The street lamps shone into the cars when they stopped at the lights. It was warm in a car. She didn’t see anyone in a car wearing a hat or gloves.

  A woman stopped, bent down to her. Said something. She didn’t know if it was a question. The woman’s mouth was painted. The woman smelled of soap.

  She turned her head away. Then she turned round completely. Hunched over. Stayed like that. When she looked over her shoulder, the woman had walked on.

  Eventually she started to move. Walked in the direction she thought she had come from with her uncle that first day. But it had been morning then, and now it was evening. The streets all looked the same now, and different from the morning. They were bright with headlights and street lamps, and the sky overhead was dark, as if there were no sky at all.

  With her uncle, holding his hand, she had not come along the wide road that the cars were driving down. She remembered walking under a narrow archway before they reached the road. She couldn’t find the archway. She turned into a side street and soon found herself on another wide road with lots of cars. She walked a little way along the pavement, past the shop windows, and came to a pedestrian crossing. People were standing there, waiting for the light to turn green. She waited with them. The people crossed the road, and she followed them. She walked after the people, and as they dispersed, she walked after other people. Sometimes just one. If he walked too fast, she waited for the next one. She didn’t speak to anybody. She walked as fast as she could, and soon she wasn’t cold any more. After a while, there was no one else in sight. Then she stopped, and didn’t move until she began to get cold again.

  She turned round. But she couldn’t find her way back to the market.

  She walked past a church. She didn’t know what a church was, but she had seen churches before. She was very tired now. It hurt to straighten her knees. Her head was heavy, and there was a pain in her back. She climbed the steps. She wanted to find a gap, to get into the big house. The door made her afraid. The latch was so high up she couldn’t see it. When she looked up it was as if the black portal was looming out, threatening to cover her. She was hungry again now, too. She would have loved some of the white bread from Bogdan’s shop, preferably just the white bread on its own, with no sausage and no cheese. She decided to stuff some into her pockets the next day. Bogdan had heated up some milk for her – that had been good, too. She sat down on the steps, pulled her gloved hands back into her sleeves, laid the side of her face on her knees and nodded off.

  She woke up because she had toppled sideways, and perhaps also because the church clock was chiming. She had never heard anything like it – it made her want to hide. She bounded down the steps and ran towards the trees that grew along the side of the church. Their leafless crowns dissolved into the dark sky.

  Between the trees, against the church wall, was a dumpster. She knew what a dumpster was for, even though she didn’t know the word for it. Several times she had been out with the women at night and they had fished good things out of dumpsters. The women had pushed back the lid and lifted her up, and she had jumped in. Then the women had shone the torch inside and whispered and praised her, and she had fished out the good things, which were then warmed up and eaten at home. She had watched them push the lid back to open the dumpster. It had been quite easy. She could only imagine that good things were to be found in all the dumpsters in the world. The good things were hidden under the bad things, but she knew how to tell good from bad.

  She was very hungry, but she was even more tired. She had never known such
tiredness. She thought that at any minute her chest would sink down onto her knees, and her head would fall off. There was a gap between the dumpster and the church wall. She crawled into it. It was narrow. She liked that. It felt like she was being held. She fell asleep. When the bells rang again, she didn’t wake up. But after midnight she did wake up.

  She was freezing. She couldn’t feel her hands. At first she wasn’t hungry at all, but her hunger soon returned. She braced her legs against the wall and pulled herself up on the dumpster. She tried to push the lid back. She couldn’t do it as well as the women had. She gripped the lid handle and pushed against the wall with her feet. A little crack opened up between the lid and the container, and she crawled through it and fell. She fell onto rubbish. It was pitch black in there. She felt around for the good things. She found a banana skin and chewed it. She found a few more things that smelled good and could be bitten. There was a lot of soft stuff in there. Newspapers and other things. She lay down on them, curling up in her coat. It was warmer in there than it was outside.

  She fell asleep and didn’t wake up for a long time.

  Snowflakes were falling through the little crack onto her face. She opened her eyes and saw a section of sky. It was bright, it was white.

  She could hear the sounds of engines and voices. The engine noises got further away; the voices didn’t.

  She struggled out of the rubbish that she had burrowed into to escape the night’s cold in her sleep, and peered out of the crack. She saw a man and a woman standing not far from the dumpster. They were holding a large umbrella. The snow was falling thickly onto the umbrella. The two of them were talking. It sounded as if they liked each other. Finally the man let go of the umbrella, waved to the woman and walked off, taking small steps across the cobbles. She would have liked to know where the man was going, but for that she would have had to climb out of the dumpster. The woman looked over in her direction. She was wearing a very serious expression now; she took a few steps towards the dumpster and stopped, as if she was listening. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing – or perhaps she didn’t see anything but a dumpster with its lid open a crack, and didn’t see a face and didn’t see eyes, or didn’t believe that it was a face, that those were eyes. She turned around and left. She, too, took small steps down the cobbled slope, with her arms outstretched, as if balancing on a tightrope, the umbrella in one hand, no longer protecting her from the snow.