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    “What’s up?” Frauke asks, turning to Tamara, who is still standing beside the phone booth. “What are you waiting for?”
    “Are you sure he wants to see us?”
    “What sort of a question is that? Of course he wants to see us.”
    The last time Tamara talked to Kris was New Year’s Eve. Kris described her as irresponsible and incompetent. Tamara is in fact irresponsible and sometimes incompetent as well, but there was no reason to rub her nose in it. She has no great desire to listen to this tirade all over again.
    “Today’s his last day at the paper,” says Frauke. “Wolf mailed me. Kris
has
to see someone, or he’ll go off the edge.”
    “Wolf said that?”
    “I said that.”
    Tamara shakes her head.
    “If Kris wants to see anyone, it’s certainly not me.”
    “You know he doesn’t mean it like that.”
    “So how does he mean it?”
    “He … he gets worried. About you. And about the little one, too, of course.”
    Frauke deliberately doesn’t say her name.
The little one
. Kris, on the other hand, always says the name, although she’s asked him not to. And that hurts. They don’t talk about Jenni. Jenni is the wound that does not stop bleeding.
    Tamara tries to see Jenni twice a week. She isn’t allowed to talk to her. She isn’t allowed to show herself to her. On especially lonely nights Tamara walks through the south of Berlin and stops in front of Jenni’s house. Always well hidden, as if waiting for someone, she looks to see if there’s a light in Jenni’s room. That’s what she and David have agreed upon.
    Jenni’s father worked his way up over the last two years and now owns a bookshop in Dahlem. Tamara met him at accounting school in Leipzig and became involved for the first time with a man who was grounded and had goals in life. After the relationship had been going for a year Tamara got pregnant. In spite of the pill. Frauke said it was all due to her hormones.
    “If your hormones are going crazy, you may as well chuck your pills down the toilet.”
    Tamara wasn’t ready for a child. Although her hormones claimed the opposite, she didn’t feel like a mother and wanted an abortion. David fell to pieces when he heard that. He talked about their great love, their future, and how wonderful it was all going to be. Tamara should trust him.
    “Please, trust us.”
    Interminable discussions followed, and in the end Tamara gave in, even though she didn’t love David. Being in love with someone and loving someone are two completely different things as far as she’s concerned. She can fall in love with a new person every week, but she onlywants to love once. David just wasn’t the man who totally set her heart alight. He was good to her, he laid the world at her feet, but for true love that wasn’t enough. Tamara stayed with him because he had goals and had determined their course
    Jenni came into the world, and it was a fiasco. Tamara learned too late that you should never try things out on a child. It’s not like choosing a kind of wallpaper, getting out at the wrong station, or entering a relationship. You can take wallpaper down again, there’s always a next train, and relationships can be ended—you can’t do that with a child. It’s there, and it wants to stay.
    To make things worse David was the ideal father; he never lost his temper and always took plenty of time, while Tamara was climbing the walls.
    She managed seven months before giving up.
    She knows it was wicked and mean to go, but she couldn’t help it. She didn’t feel enough for little Jenni, and was afraid of becoming one of those women who bring up a child who’ll spend her whole life in therapy talking about the lack of affection she received from her mother. So Tamara took flight. And it wasn’t that Tamara didn’t feel anything at all. It was a slowly progressing detachment from herself. She had the feeling of becoming less and less every day, while Jenni was taking up more and more room. As