Planet Literature

Nadja Dietrich:The Dead Man in the Reichstag and the Dreamy Cleaning Lady

While cleaning the German Bundestag, Lidia Afanasyevna makes a terrible discovery – a discovery that will change her whole life.

The Science Fiction Cocoon

Lidia Afanasyevna had a great passion for science fiction stories. Above all, she was fascinated by the idea of a star gate through which one could simply disappear into another part of the cosmos. On grey days like these, such fantasies were like a cocoon for her, in which she could withdraw from the rigours of everyday life.
So now, too, her eyes transformed the dark corridor of the Reichstag she had to clean into an escape tunnel from the world in which she was trapped. Her hands were not pushing a sweeper, but a detector to find the spaceship that was waiting for her behind one of the doors leading off to the left and right.
Lidia Afanasyevna was well aware that this was an absurd thought. But as a science fiction fan, she was naturally also an enthusiastic amateur astronomer. And so she knew that the universe was permeated by all kinds of things that were as invisible as they were incomprehensible: dark matter, black holes, gravitational waves and minute particles that were gliding through her right now, at this very moment, without her noticing.
It seemed that the structure of the universe was so alien to human beings that it slipped away from the mind as soon as they tried to grasp it with their categories. But under these circumstances, was the absurd not the only adequate form to approach the essence of the cosmos?
Wrapped in her science fiction cocoon, Lidia Afanasyevna patiently opened one door after another and performed her cleaning ritual behind them. She wiped the non-existent dirt off the tables with the duster, walked the vacuum cleaner on the dirt-repellent carpets, fished in the half-empty wastepaper baskets with gloved fingers. Extraordinary or even extraterrestrial phenomena were nowhere to be found. The same sterile smell emanated from all the rooms, to which she added a subtle antiseptic note with her cleaning products.
On the desks, monitors prepared for the glare of the day, while behind the windows the city woke up listlessly. The seating areas in the larger rooms offered a little crumb food for the vacuum cleaner, garnished here and there with expressive stains that pointed to the stimulants of the previous week. Even more productive in this respect were the meeting rooms, where the chairs faced each other reverently and the table circles waited for their ceremonial shell to be filled with life.

Dismay in the Men’s Room

However, Lidia Afanasyevna did not mind at all that she was looking in vain for the extraordinary. The mere expectation that it could occur behind the next door helped her through the morning. With precisely this expectation, she also opened the door behind which – judging by her science fiction dreams – she was usually most disappointed: the door to the places of male excretion.
Familiar with the finest olfactory nuances even of this world, Lidia Afanasyevna immediately noticed that something was different this morning. While she was usually surrounded by a cloud of smells that reminded her of her grandmother’s pigsty, this time she was greeted by a rather sweet scent, familiar to her from her grandfather’s distillery.
More attentively than usual, she sprayed the washbasins in the entrance area. However, they showed no peculiarities apart from the usual loss of shine due to the soap film and the scrubbed-off skin particles. As she wiped across the wide mirrored wall and happened to look into her face with its hair tied up under a bandana, into the absent-minded eyes that seemed to look right through her, she even admonished herself: „You’ll end up in the loony bin if you go on like this! A toilet bowl is a toilet bowl, nothing more, it points to nothing but to itself.“
Likewise, there was nothing unusual about the row of urinals she turned to next. Some of the strainers had a piece of chewing gum caught in them, one drain was blocked, and in two cases the urine had not been flushed, so that the urine scale could only be removed by special treatment. Everything as usual, no special incidents. And yet she was still enveloped – here even more strongly than in the entrance area – by this strange smell that seemed both foreign and familiar to her at the same time.
Only when she turned into the corridor between the toilet cubicles did she get closer to solving the odour puzzle. The floor next to the toilet bowls was covered with dried urine splashes, pubic hair stuck under the toilet seats, some of it discoloured by dark stains. So far, everything was normal. However, something was sticking out of the rearmost cubicle that, as Lidia Afanasyevna immediately realised, did not belong there. On closer inspection, she noticed that it was two shoes, each with a grey sock protruding from it.
Since the shoes were tilted to the side and lay, above all, in front of the cubicle, it could not be assumed that the owner of the shoes was sitting on the toilet. Rather, it looked as if the person was lying next to the toilet bowl. Maybe, Lidia Afanasyevna thought, someone had felt sick here. But why was this happening now, of all times, at this early hour, on a Monday morning – at a time when she had never met anyone here before?
Reluctantly, yet magically attracted by the unusual, Lidia Afanasyevna stepped closer to the cabin. Carefully, she pushed open the ajar door. Her gaze fell on a pair of creased suit trousers, the waistband rimmed by the empty sleeves of a slipped jacket. They lay limp on the floor, limp and motionless like the body that was stuck in the rumpled suit.
The head peeking out of the shirt with the loosened tie was tilted to the side and propped up against the toilet bowl as if the mouth wanted to entrust something to it. This impression was confirmed by the open lips, even though what could be glimpsed in them seemed strangely rigid and dried up to Lidia Afanasyevna. However, the pupils were not directed at the target indicated by the position of the head, but were focused on the ceiling. At the same time, they seemed to be searching for each other in a strenuous contortion, as if one wanted to find support in the other.

A Thunderstorm of Questions

Lidia Afanasyevna reflexively pressed her hand to her mouth. Her eyes were wide open in a gesture of instinctive compassion. Cautiously, as if what lay there on the floor might leap at her unexpectedly, she took a step back, then another, until the invisible bridge between her gaze and those void-drinking pupils had dissipated.
She closed her eyes and thought of Alyosha – or rather, implored him to appear and take her in his arms. But no matter how hard she tried to conjure him up, he just wouldn’t come. Typical man, thought Lidia Afanasyevna. Whenever you need them, they are not there.
Trembling, she fumbled for her mobile phone and called the police. „Hello? Is this the police? I found a dead man here …“
A storm of questions rained down on her: Where exactly was she located, did she know for sure that the person was dead, did she touch the body, what was her name and who was her employer. This was followed by the instruction: „Don’t touch anything and stay where you are! We will be with you in a moment.“
Lidia Afanasyevna listened patiently to the questions and saw herself still nodding obediently when the disembodied voice at her ear had long since ended the conversation. Mechanically, she stepped out of the restrooms. With the unconscious determination of a sleepwalker, she trotted towards the window at the end of the corridor.
She opened the window and took a deep breath of the fresh morning air. And here, where the wind blew in the breath of the nearby river, permeated by the secrets of distant worlds, she finally found Alyosha again. She threw herself into his arms, wrapping herself in his masculine darkness as if in a long, warming cloak that made her forget the wintry world.
Shortly afterwards, she winced violently. Someone had touched her on the shoulder from behind. She turned around and looked into the featureless face of a middle-aged man. „Excuse me,“ he addressed her in a hushed voice, „did you call us?“
„Whether I called you … Yes, I … I think I did …“ She was still dazed by Alyosha’s embrace, her eyelids twitching under the suddenly flaring light.
When she regained consciousness, she was surprised to see that the man who had approached her had arrived with only one other colleague. Moreover, neither of them wore uniforms. Instead, they were dressed in civilian clothes.
Probably the security service, the vanguard of the actual police, she thought, and followed the man, who led her into a side room. There she was exposed to another torrent of questions, the results of which her counterpart recorded in a notebook parallel to her answers: How she had found the dead man, whether she had called the police immediately, whether she had informed anyone else, whether she had really not touched anything …
„You will understand that a dead man in the Bundestag is a very delicate matter,“ the man finally spoke to her. „I must therefore ask you not to talk to anyone about it for the time being.“ He looked her firmly in the eye.
Lidia Afansyevna nodded absent-mindedly.
The man closed his notebook. „That’s it from our side for now. You can go home if you like. But please keep yourself at our disposal.“
„But … I’m not finished with my work yet,“ Lidia Afanasyevna objected shyly.
The man twisted the corners of his mouth, perhaps it was meant to be a smile. „For today, you are done. Don’t worry: we’ll sort it out with your boss!“
The men’s behaviour seemed somehow strange to Lidia Afanasyevna. In the detective stories on television, the crime scene investigations always seemed much more elaborate, much more meticulous …
But perhaps it was a mistake to extrapolate from television reality to actual reality. Or were the men aliens after all, trying to abduct the dead man into their spaceship for research purposes? But when she turned to Alyosha on her way out and saw him shaking his head, half amused, half disapproving, she decided not to pursue this thought any further.

 

Picture: AI generated