Yelena Moskovich - The Natashas

Karl snorted. “Why would we waste our time on that?”

Karl’s father interjected. “But you used to love your games. I mean, the ones with the cards and the ones online?”

“Not any more.”

Karl left more and more regularly in that old car with the boys. When Sabine’s mother demanded to know where it was he was going, Karl said, “None of your business.” When she demanded that he speak to her with respect, Karl said, “Earn it first.” When Karl’s father stepped in to reprimand the boy, Karl said, “Save it for your other illegit kid.” With that, he slammed the door and was off to one of his meetings .

At least Karl had grown out of his introverted internet games and found some intra-personal social activity, his father reasoned. This, like his games, was surely another adolescent phase. Both parents decided to leave it at that and wait for Karl to outgrow this phrase independently.

A month before graduation, Karl had managed to grow a thin, golden goatee on his chin. He had also shaved his head. Then, coming home in the middle of dinner, he announced that he was moving out. His father set his fork and knife down and stood up.

“Karl. You come and go without a word. You’ve no manners with your mother and sister—”

“You mean your new whore and her little bitch,” Karl said flatly.

The father squared up to his son. He was twice as bulky as the boy, but his son’s eyes were packed with more muscle. The men looked at each other in silence.

Sabine waited for the father to hit his son in the face. But this was not a man who could use his strength for violence. Anger surged through his body limply, like tears running down his veins. The father peered into Karl’s eyes, trying to find his son. Everything was familiar, except what lived within those two holes. Karl broke the eye contact and glanced at Sabine.

“Karl. Look at me,” demanded his father. “I raised you to be a man of respect and principle.”

“I am, Father .”

Karl took a seat and began to speak about integrity.

Sabine and her mother were asked to leave the room. Karl’s voice was heavy with concern and responsibility as he spoke to his father, about human suffering. He explained ugliness so precisely that one could imagine he was performing surgery on the bellies of ants. His father was ready to let the past go, to reach out to his son and take him into his arms and help him believe in his own beauty, when Karl suddenly said, “…Ugliness, like yours .”

His father sat still, taking apart this phrase in his head.

Karl picked up where he left off without changing expression. Now, however, the content of his speech jarred more and more with his calm, charitable tone. He spoke highly of an older woman, for whom his father almost assumed he had romantic feelings, until Karl quoted her speech to young German women, urging them to lead a lifestyle that minimises the risk of rape in order to avoid the mutilation of human life. He explained to his father the Sabbath of perverts, when men degrade themselves with other men. He asked if his father had ever put a cockroach in his mouth. At this, his father almost jumped from his seat. He continued, “How, then, could he kiss that woman on the lips day after day?” By that woman, of course, he meant Sabine’s mother.

It was clear now. Perhaps it had been clear from the moment Karl got in the car with the boys, from the moment he began tucking in his shirt, from the moment he shaved his head, but now it was undeniably clear, and yet his father was desperate to make it less clear.

“Why would you say such a thing?” Karl’s father pleaded.

“I say it because others remain cowering in their silence. In their silence, their tongues, like yours, father , are covered with the filth of it all. With the filth of the ugliness around us, father . The filth on the flailing tongue of this country, father . The filth in the crevices of this decaying world. The filth you, father , have brought into our own house. And the filth you have dug your manhood into, you reek FATHER you smell of IT!”

Karl moved out and despite his father’s continual efforts, cut ties with the family. By then, Sabine had entered high school. She did not have many friends, partly because of her relentless commentary on everything. She informed everyone around her, her teachers included, of all kinds of facts that they surely should know, unless of course they were downright stupid. She retreated into her studies, and did exceedingly well. But she remained a girl who was hard to like.

The more time that passed without Karl in the family, the more his father believed that it was not Karl who had abandoned the family, but rather he who had abandoned Karl. His father lay next to his new wife at night, with a disgusting texture growing in his mouth. If Sabine’s mother tried to reach over to him, he would flinch, then say he was sorry, then get up and go to the hallway to look at a childhood photo of his son. Karl, barely standing on the grass, with his biological mother behind, holding him up. Now both this woman and the son were gone. The thought terrorised him: it’s all my fault.

What the father did not know was that Karl made regular visits back in his absence, to rifle through the apartment and stock up on supplies. He would come home wearing the same loose black jeans with a black shirt tucked in, except this time with black gloves. He carefully went through the drawers in each room and slipped valuables into his pockets: cash, jewellery, the occasional credit card.

Sabine was the only one who knew, because she had caught him once.

“That’s my mother’s,” Sabine said from the hallway, referring to her mother’s wedding ring from her first marriage. Karl put a leather-gloved finger to his mouth as he slipped the ring out of its case and down his long jean pocket.

“You can’t take that. It’s not yours. That’s stealing. You’re a thief. You’re disrupting society. You belong in prison.” Sabine spoke in an endless trail as Karl tried to move past her. After several attempts, Karl saw this girl would not budge from the doorway. He leaned down and looked his stepsister straight in the eyes and said, “ Sabine .” As he reached out to take her shoulders, Sabine began to flail her small hands at Karl’s chest, screaming, “DON’T CALL ME THAT, DON’T CALL ME THAT!”

Sabine charged at him, but Karl flung his long arms out and pushed her back. She fell into the wall, but got up immediately and charged at him again. He caught her at her shoulders, then grabbed her throat to stop her screaming. He brought his face into her bulging eyes.

“Sa… bine,” he said. His hot breath went into her nose.

Sabine twisted and heaved.

“SA-BINE,” he repeated. “SABINE. SABINE. SABINE.”

Tears and mucus ran down her face. Karl let go and Sabine stumbled back coughing. She caught her breath and glared at Karl. Her eyes terrified him. When she charged at him again, he pushed her back with greater violence than before. She ricocheted straight into the hallway table, then dropped on to the floor. Her skirt flew up to her waist and her chin tucked into her collarbone. Karl looked at her immobile body, at her barely teenage legs and her thin, white underwear the texture of gauze. He gritted his teeth, made a ball of saliva in his mouth, and then spat it out on to her naked thigh.

When Sabine came to, it was already late afternoon. She got up, fixed her skirt, and wandered dazed down the stairs.

That evening, when her stepfather asked what had happened to her head, she said she did not remember. When her mother came into her room at bedtime and kneeled at her bedside and told her to be honest now, Sabine said, “I’m always being honest.”