28. Behind the Wall
Behind the Wall
Markus was jolted awake by a shrill sound.
It wasn’t a long scream, but a short, sharp cry cut off somewhere in the throat—as though someone had brutally clamped a hand over her mouth.
His eyes flew open.
The bedroom still lay in the dim gray light of early morning. His head felt heavy, his throat bone-dry, his muscles aching after a long night of gnawing guilt. For the first few seconds, he couldn’t tell whether the sound had actually been real or only the echo of a fading nightmare.
He lay completely still. The room remained silent. Slowly, he turned his head. Nadja’s side of the bed was empty.
The freshly made white sheet still held the indentation where her body had been, but the warmth was long gone. She must have gotten up quite a while ago.
Markus frowned slightly. He reached for his phone on the nightstand, didn’t find it, then remembered he had left it on the shelf in the bathroom the night before.
He looked toward the window. The light was still weak. It could hardly be later than seven. Where was his wife at this hour?
He listened. Nothing. Only the faint hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen, the distant sound of an engine from the street, the cracking of old rusty heating pipes somewhere deep inside the building.
Markus slowly exhaled.
Maybe it really had only been a dream. A sound from outside. Some stray tomcat down in the courtyard.
He closed his eyes and tried to sink back into sleep, trying to steal a few more merciful minutes away from reality.
He wasn’t ready for the lipstick on his collar from the night before.
Not ready for Nadja’s ice-cold stare drilling through him.
And he wanted even less to think about Leonie’s half-naked body and that absolute final boundary he had torn himself away from with clenched teeth.
Just as his consciousness began drifting again, a muffled sound came through the gypsum wall.
At first, it was only a faint, indistinct moan. Distorted by the thin wall, so soft and wet that it was impossible to tell whether it came from pain, exhaustion, or pure pleasure.
“Mmh…”
Markus’s eyes snapped open. His entire body tightened instantly.
A long silence. Then the sound came again.
Shorter. Deeper.
“Ah…”
Markus hurriedly told himself that this miserable, paper-thin building carried every sound. Probably something from the apartment downstairs. Some old widower’s television playing early in the morning. A fuzzy radio broadcast.
He started to turn onto his side, ready to simply put his back to it.
Then came the third moan. Longer. Far too clear.
“Ahh… mmh…”
It wasn’t coming from below. Not from above. It came from the wall directly beside his bed. The wall adjoining old Karl Seifert’s apartment.
A muffled, rough male voice followed. Markus couldn’t make out whole words, only the deep, heavy, breathless rhythm.
“… yeah…” “… just like that…”
A woman’s moan immediately joined it. “Mmh… ah…”
Markus swallowed against his dry throat and forced his mind to cling to the most ordinary, rational explanation.
Karl was a lonely, disgusting old bastard.
Maybe he was awake early, watching cheap porn with the volume too high.
What was so strange about hearing filthy noises coming from his rancid little cave?
But that voice didn’t sound like a man sitting passively in front of a television. It came in bursts. Strained. Like a hot growl breathed close against someone else’s ear.
Then a steady mechanical sound slipped between the voices.
Creak. Silence. Then another creak.
Markus froze on the mattress.
The impacts became clearer. Old wood groaning beneath shifting weight. Old bed springs compressing rhythmically. Mixed unmistakably with long, heavy breaths.
Creak. Creak.
The man’s voice broke through again, this time loud and clear enough to cut through the wall like a knife.
“… so fucking good…”
Markus swallowed. His throat burned like fire.
He quickly told himself Karl had brought home some cheap whore. A run-down old neighbor hiring a prostitute in the morning was disgusting, sure, but it had absolutely nothing to do with him.
He turned his head and stared at the empty place beside him. Nadja wasn’t there. And behind the wall came the unmistakable sounds of a man and woman having sex.
Markus desperately forced himself to believe those were two completely separate facts.
The woman’s voice rose again. Higher. Broken. Wet.
“Ah… ahh…”
Markus jerked upright.
He viciously shoved aside the dark, poisonous thought flashing through his mind and refused to put the pieces together. No. There was no way that was his wife.
But Karl’s voice continued coming through the wall, steady and filled with grotesque triumph.
“… your…” “… feels so tight…”
Markus threw back the blanket and planted his bare feet on the freezing hardwood floor.
As though in a trance, he walked toward the wall. He pressed his ear flat against the cold plaster.
At first, all he could hear was his own heart. It was beating far too hard. Too wildly. Drowning everything else out.
He held his breath, clenched his teeth until his jaw cracked, and forced himself to listen through that goddamn wall.
Directly behind the layer of paint, the woman moaned. Soft. Trembling.
“Mmh… deeper…”
Markus squeezed his eyes shut. Not her. Just some damn woman with a similar voice. His own guilt from the night before was poisoning his mind, making him hear everything through the filth of his almost-infidelity.
Nadja could be downstairs walking through the courtyard. She could be at the bakery buying fresh rolls for breakfast. She could not fucking be behind this wall getting fucked.
He pressed his ear even harder against the plaster.
Karl’s voice returned. This time, every word drove into Markus’s brain like a rusty nail.
“… your pussy feels so good…”
Markus’s blood ran cold.
Then came the soft, yielding moan in response. “Ahh…”
Karl’s breathing was heavy. Hoarse. Unbearably aroused.
“… how does my thick cock feel…”
The woman moaned louder and louder. Her voice was slightly warped by the thin wall, but that intimate, familiar color, that particular little tremor in her throat, shot down Markus’s spine before his mind was even ready to accept the truth.
“Mmh… ah…”
Then Karl said her name.
“Nadja…”
Markus’s blood ran cold. It suddenly felt as though all the oxygen had been sucked out of the bedroom.
A moment earlier, he had still been clinging to the insane possibility of some devilish misunderstanding. That name slammed shut every last escape route.
Then came the woman’s voice. Quiet. Nearly strangled by pure pleasure. But unmistakable.
“Karl…”
Markus threw one hand flat against the wall to keep his weak knees from giving out.
Behind the wall, the rhythm grew more brutal. Faster.
Creak. Creak. Creak.
Karl’s voice became a rough, deeply satisfied growl.
“… yeah, just like that…” “… your husband…”
Markus’s chest tightened so hard there was no room left for breath.
Nadja’s voice broke apart into shrill, lustful fragments.
“Ahh… deeper…”
A frantic, sobbing breath. Then she hissed every word through the wall so clearly it was as though she were lying right beside him.
“I’m dying…”
The final resistance inside Markus collapsed.
That broken voice trembling with pleasure behind the wall was exactly the voice that had said yes to him at the altar.
The voice that had comforted him tenderly through long, dark nights of debt and exhaustion.
That exact voice was moaning now like a bitch in heat and calling the name of a disgusting old man right behind his back.
Horror hit faster and harder than any coherent thought. Markus’s stomach turned. Ice crawled up his spine and drained the strength from his bones.
He pressed his other hand over his mouth and bit into one knuckle until he drew blood, trying to hold back the scream tearing at his throat.
He didn’t want the two of them over there to know he was standing here listening. He wanted to puncture his own eardrums so he would never have to hear those sounds again.
But his feet stayed nailed to the floor.
Through the dizziness, all the strange little things from the past few days came rushing back and assembled themselves into one monstrous image that nearly stripped away his sanity.
The freshly changed white sheet last night.
The way she had ended the video call so abruptly.
Karl Seifert’s greasy helpfulness in the hallway.
All the times he had come into their apartment because of the pipes.
The fact that he had driven his wife to the supermarket.
His constant invasive closeness—the same closeness Markus, like a naive idiot, had actually thanked him for.
And that morning Markus had come home early with the red roses and gift box in his hands. The sharp smell of another man’s sweat and cold smoke on Nadja’s bare skin.
Everything fit. Perfectly. It was a fucking death sentence.
This wasn’t just a single, isolated moment of weakness. In one merciless blow, he understood that he had been living pressed up against this rot for weeks. He had let it grow before his very eyes while he was cuckolded — blind, stupid, in the most degrading way there is.
Another image shot through his mind, sharp and relentless as a razor blade.
Last night. The hotel room. Leonie lying on the mattress in whisper-thin black lace lingerie, eyes half closed, wet lips breathing his name and begging for him. Her soft hand around his neck. The incriminating lipstick on his collar.
He had put his mouth on her skin. He had walked all the way to the absolute edge of the abyss.
But Nadja’s face, his goddamn wedding vows, and the hard years they had spent together crawling through debt and shame had pulled him back at the last possible moment. He had taken that decisive step away. Closed his zipper with trembling hands. Walked out of the room without looking back.
And ever since, he had carried the crushing guilt as though he had committed some hideous crime— all because of a kiss. A few pathetic minutes of weakness. All because of this woman.
Because of this voice now tearing itself apart in obscene moans behind the wall.
“Mmh… don’t stop…” Nadja cried out in pleasure.
Markus squeezed his eyes shut. The bitter, grotesque irony of it all clamped around his lungs like an iron vise.
A wafer-thin, utterly desperate scrap of hope still twitched in him. Maybe he had misheard single words. Maybe she was being forced, held down, abused, too panicked to fight back. Maybe…
Karl’s dull voice, broken by extreme arousal, cut that pathetic lie to pieces.
“… I’m gonna come…”
Behind the wall, the rhythm turned frantic. The old wooden bed frame groaned beneath the raw force of two bodies.
Nadja’s breathing came in gasping, choked bursts.
A wet sound reached Markus and shredded every last excuse in his mind.
“Ah… ahh…”
Markus pressed both hands over his mouth. His teeth sank deep into his skin. His own blood tasted metallic on his tongue.
He didn’t want to hear the next sentence. He knew exactly that it would cut the final nerve holding him together.
But his ears remained wide open.
Karl released a deep, obscenely satisfied roar, half swallowed by the violent pounding of the bed.
“… where…”
A short pause. Barely longer than one wild heartbeat. Only heavy, greedy breathing.
Then Nadja’s voice rose through the wall. Cruel. Clear. Without the slightest hesitation. It drove into Markus’s chest like a serrated knife.
“Come in my pussy, Karl…”
Markus turned to stone. It wasn’t over.
The voice of his once so cool, respectable wife broke higher, full of unrestrained arousal, and pushed itself recklessly across the final boundary.
“Fill me up with everything… get me pregnant.”
There were kinds of betrayal a man might still somehow endure — by making himself small, by clenching his teeth hard. This damned command was absolutely not one of them.
Something deep inside Markus broke.
Not with a loud crash. It simply collapsed in silence, as though someone had pulled the solid ground out from beneath his feet.
His hand slid weakly down the wall. His knees gave way. He sank onto the cold floor and leaned his sweat-damp back against the same wall still carrying the final brutal thrusts of someone else’s pleasure into him.
On the other side, Karl let out a deep, grotesquely satisfied roar like some old triumphant animal.
Nadja’s moans broke apart into short, wet sounds.
Then everything grew more distant and finally disappeared beneath the deafening roar of Markus’s own blood.
And inside that enormous pain, he could not scream. He could not pound his fists against the wall. Not even the release of tears came. The shock was too massive for them to find any way out.
Markus only sat there motionless, his back pressed hard against the wall, one hand still clamped over his mouth, eyes wide open and fixed on the large wedding photograph hanging on the bedroom wall.
On the white mattress, the indentation left by Nadja’s body was still clearly visible. The indentation was ice-cold.