Her eyes found first their focus, and then the clock. It was just before seven. The bells would ring soon. I will lie here until the bells ring. Anna’s head thumped. She would wait for the bells, then rise. What day is it? It was Friday. She would allow herself the indulgence of waiting on the bells.
When they came, Anna rose. She moved at an invalid’s pace; each step made her wince. It took a full minute to shuffle into the bathroom. The absoluteness of the morning had been her imagination. Dietlikon was as busy as Dietlikon ever was. A man walking three sheepdogs passed by the house on his way up the hill. The postman was awake and at work. He zipped down Dorfstrasse on his yellow motorbike. He was a light-complexioned man in his upper twenties with a shaved head and a wide, silly mouth. For the first few months he’d worked this route, he’d been under the impression that Bruno and Anna were siblings, not spouses. In lumbering English he would flirt with her, ask where would she be that weekend, what she would be doing. Then, he would detail his own plans and end their interaction by mentioning how nice it would be if they happened to run into each other some evening out. Bruno eventually corrected him. Why didn’t you tell him I was your husband? Bruno asked. Why did you let him flirt with you? Anna told him she hadn’t realized he’d been flirting. Since then he’d kept a proper Swiss distance: ruthlessly polite but tediously reserved. He’d been their postman for five years. Anna learned his name once but she’d subsequently forgotten it and was too embarrassed to ask for it again.
Anna forced herself to look at her face. The area between her cheek and her nose had begun to purple; the socket of her eye—the entire eye, from beneath the lower lashes to above the brow—was a pale yellow green, awful as bile. Her finger was raw where Bruno had wrenched off the ring. Her arms and legs were sore but otherwise unharmed. Her face, though. She’d wear these bruises for a month.
This is my face, she thought. It was undeniable. That was she. She was that. It was the truest reflection she’d ever seen. Her perfect twin. Her doppelg?nger.
Hello, Anna. Nice to meet you.
Bruno called her name from his office. When she didn’t answer he came into the bathroom. He made a generous amount of noise as he approached in an effort not to spook her as he had the night before (but really, what more could be dropped, cracked, broken?). When he saw Anna’s face in the mirror his own face fell. Anna had no reaction to this. Bruno patted her shoulder. “Get dressed. Come into the living room.” His mouth was dry and his words scratched his lips as he spoke them.
“Okay,” Anna said. Bruno returned to his office as Anna hobbled the several steps from bathroom to bedroom.
The day was gray. Pants would have been most practical, but Anna felt prettiest in skirts and rare was the occasion that dressing well didn’t make her feel at least a little better. Such frippery. The question was not irrelevant. Is it wise to dose oneself with the medicine of foolish vanities? Yes, she thought. Then, No, when she rethought it. A dress, a man, whatever. They cover you, you hide in them. Then Anna shook all philosophies from her head and began to rifle through the Kleiderschrank. I will take what comfort I can get.
The blurry details of the night before began to sharpen at their edges and a picture came into focus. Bruno beat me, she thought plainly as if this were a fact she’d only just then realized. He beat me badly. Anna looked at herself in the bedroom mirror to see if anything in the last minute had changed. Oh, Anna. You had this coming, she thought. Anna knew there was something broken in her line of reasoning. No one ever has it coming, of course. But … she wasn’t the textbook example of a battered wife. She hadn’t been victimized into believing she deserved what she got. She decided it all on her own. In a violent, complicated world, Anna thought, it was a quick, lucid solution to a problem of have and lack. I had this coming and I got what I deserved. He’d never hit her before and he would never hit her again. Bruno wasn’t a violent man. There was no pattern of abuse. I brought this to myself. Myself, I provoked this. Her face throbbed. She held on to these thoughts until she chose her clothes, setting the former to the side and picking up the latter. There’s only so much I can carry. She dressed in a dark skirt, navy turtleneck, and gray tights. As she slipped on a pair of stylish flats she looked to the mirror yet again. Excepting the bruises, Anna looked pretty.