Part 4 — Jakob Made Me Bathe Twice a Day, but When His Mother Locked the Door, the Smile Disappeared from His Face

When the call ended, no one could move for several seconds.

The rain was still falling.

The drops of water on the roof of the police car sounded as if someone were constantly knocking on a door.

“Who was it?” Sophio asked me.

“I do not know. The woman said that no one had yet seen the most dangerous list.”

Marina heard this and her face changed immediately. For the first time she did not begin shouting at me. For the first time she no longer looked invincible.

“Do not listen to her,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because you do not know what they want from you.”

“Unlike you, now that is exactly what I want to find out.”

Jakob shouted from the back seat of the car:

“Nino, do not continue! You do not know whom you are fighting!”

Sophio signaled to the police officer to close the door.

“From now on, do not speak with him alone,” she told me.

That same night I gave my statement at the station. Doctor Levan brought the test results, while Emily told the details of her four-month captivity. The investigators worked at Marina’s house all night.

They found the second part of the list in a small safe hidden in the wall.

There were twenty-nine women’s names written there.

Among them were women who still lived in their own homes and thought they had simply enrolled in a health program with Jakob’s family. Some had taken on debts, while others were told that if they left the family, their personal letters and medical data would be sent to everyone.

Marina’s family did not deceive only women.

They sold women’s fear.

In the morning, the lawyer who had defended Jakob for years asked to come to the station. He stood in the hallway, holding a leather bag and nervously playing with his glasses.

“My client says that he had a personal relationship with you and that all of this is a misunderstanding,” he told me.

“A personal relationship gives no one the right to lock someone in a room.”

He lowered his head.

“There is one more thing you should know. Jakob asked me to prepare a statement in your name saying that you made up this story yourself.”

“And will you prepare it?”

The lawyer looked at me for a long time.

“No. Today I found out for the first time that monthly transfers from Marina were entering my firm’s account. I am no longer participating in this case.”

At that moment I realized that their power was collapsing from within.

Then Sophio took me into a small room. There were only a table, two chairs, and a recorder hanging on the wall.

“Jakob wants to speak with you,” she told me. “You can refuse.”

I went in anyway.

He was sitting on the other side of the table. His hands were placed in front of him. The mark of the watch he wore every day was still visible on his right wrist.

“My heart hurts,” he told me.

“You are not mourning your heart, but your own control.”

“I helped you.”

“Then why did you force me to hide the truth from the doctor?”

“Because Mother would become angry.”

“Why were you afraid of her?”

Jakob lowered his eyes.

“Since childhood she taught me that people stay with you only if you control them completely.”

“And you repeated that teaching on me.”

“I thought that if I obeyed you, I would be safe.”

“You demanded obedience from me so that you yourself would feel safe.”

He remained silent.

The recorder was working in the room. I listened to his voice and for the first time heard what Jakob sounded like through someone else’s ears: not caring, not tired, not frightened. Simply a man who was trying in every sentence to shift responsibility onto someone else.

“I was only obeying my mother,” he said.

His own words returned to the room.

The recorder repeated Jakob’s previous conversation from the tape. He heard his own voice. His face changed.

“Turn this off,” he whispered.

“Why?” I asked. “It is your voice, after all.”

For the first time he could not answer me.

Several weeks later, the police sealed every room of the house. The women were taken to different shelters. Emily stayed with me until she found a new place to live.

One day I went to the mountain house to collect my things.

The guest room was empty.

There was only one white towel on the bed, folded in half. A yellowish soap stain remained on its edge. They found my old bag in the bathroom. Inside it were the doctor’s card, ointment for burned skin, and a small wooden comb whose handle had marks carved into it in the shape of raindrops.

I picked up the bag.

There was no one left in the room from whom I had to hide.

This turned out to be the strangest feeling.

Freedom was not lightness at first. Freedom was a large, empty room where the sound of my own thoughts could be heard too clearly.

I went to the doctor three more times. My skin slowly healed. Every day I bathed only once, slowly, without hot water. The first time I did not use soap, I thought all evening that someone would knock on the door.

No one came.

Emily began working in a small library. I helped women at the city community center who were trying to escape control and blackmail.

Often they said the same thing:

“Perhaps I am exaggerating.”

I gave them my answer:

“If someone frightens you so that you are afraid of losing them, that is not love.”

Three months later the first snow came. The roofs of the city were covered in white. Emily and I were sitting in a small kitchen when she put a drawing on the table.

In the drawing, two women stood in a forest. Behind them was a tall house, with red lines drawn across its windows. A small road ran ahead.

“Is this us?” I asked.

“Yes,” Emily answered. “But now the road is ours.”

That evening I received a letter from Jakob. He had sent it through a lawyer. It was two pages long, but in almost every sentence the same word was repeated: “Forgive me.”

At the end it said: “If you come even once, I will explain everything.”

I put the letter in the kitchen drawer, then called Sophio and asked whether it was needed for his case.

“If you want, keep it,” she told me. “If you do not want it, throw it away.”

“I do not want to answer.”

“Then that is also an answer.”

The next day Jakob called again.

This time I answered the phone, but I told him only one sentence:

“I will no longer hide your consequences.”

Then I ended the call.

I stood by the window for a long time. Snow was still falling. My old bag lay on the table, the one I had brought from the mountain house. I placed the wooden comb beside it.

In the past, its small marks reminded me of rain.

Now they looked like a road.

I put the comb into the bag, locked the door, and went outside.

That night, for the first time, I did not check how I smelled.

I simply breathed.