Warum Mütter töten

“I killed,” I say. “And not just once.”

The young woman across from me is still smiling. At first she takes the sentence for a failed joke. Then the smile goes out.

“Excuse me?”

“You understood me just fine.”

She gives a short laugh, uncertain, as if she hoped she had only missed the punch line. I don’t laugh along.

“But you were never in prison, Anastasia,” she says slowly. “No charges. Nothing. If you had really killed someone—why are you sitting here, in this house, and not behind bars?”

“Because you don’t get punished for something that never happened,” I say. “No body. No file. Not even the days it happened on.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“No,” I say. “Not yet.”

Her name is Lena; she is young and well prepared. She has read my first book: the foreign language, the night shifts, the first keys of my own, and a life that I built up slowly and that did not fall apart again. That book reached a lot of women and brought me here out of nothing. She knows nothing about the second manuscript in my study.

Every morning I wake up in the same minute. No alarm clock. I lie still until the minute is over. The room stays where it is. Some mornings I am not glad about that.

She has come to tell the success story: a cleaning woman who became a writer. A good ending, clean enough for a magazine. For years I have answered such questions with a smile and a few sentences about courage. The first book tells what came after the escape, not what happened before it. Today the smile doesn’t hold anymore.

Her hand hovers over the recorder. On her wrist there is a half-washed-off blue star, apparently drawn by a child’s hand. She notices my look and pulls her sleeve over it. Then she looks at me again. She thinks I have just given myself away.

“These days you’re talking about,” she says. “Were you sick? Did you have gaps in your memory?”

I shake my head. “There is nothing wrong with my memory. That’s the bad part. I remember every day. Every single time.”

“Every time? Remember what?”

I say nothing. Some things sound like lies as long as they only happen to other people.

“You won’t believe me,” I say. “I wouldn’t have believed myself. That’s why I’m not explaining anything. I’ll tell it the way it was. You decide for yourself.”

A recording couldn’t touch me. What I did happened far away from here, a long time ago, and on days that no longer exist.

This is not testimony. It is a confession. I don’t expect absolution. I just don’t want to be the only one anymore who knows what happened back then.

“Turn off the recorder, Lena,” I say. “And take a pen.”

Her hand stays on the device. “It protects you too,” she says. “Word for word, so nothing gets twisted.” I only look at her. Finally she presses stop and reaches for her notebook.

“What I am telling you is in no published book,” I say. “This morning I wrote the last sentence of a second manuscript. No one has read it. You are the first outsider to hear the story in full.”

Whether the world will ever learn it, I haven’t decided yet. Maybe I first need one person who hears the truth and stays in the chair anyway.

She opens to a blank page.

“Good,” I say. “Then listen. From the beginning.”

It begins on a fall morning. In an apartment, in another country.