Decompression (10 page)

Antje was standing in the hall. She looked as though she’d been waiting for me for hours. When I kissed her forehead, I held her by the shoulders so she couldn’t cling to me.

“How was it?” she asked.

“Nice,” I said. “Really very nice.”

“How about a nightcap?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Come on, stay up another thirty minutes. We’ve got something to talk about.”

“I’ve had a hard day.”

“It’s only ten o’clock!”

She knew I hated to go to bed after ten o’clock. I needed to feel I could lie awake for two hours and still get six hours’ sleep. And if I stayed up past midnight, the fear of not being able to fall asleep would keep me awake all night long.

“Please,” Antje said. “Fifteen minutes, no more. Please!”

I’d known Antje since before she was even born. The Berger family lived two streets away from mine. Antje’s future father came on the weekends to mow the lawn; her mother cleaned our bathroom on Thursdays. I was almost ten when Frau Berger’s belly began to swell. From then on I used to watch her through
the keyhole every Thursday while she was at work in the bathroom. Until one day she stopped coming. A few weeks later a baby carriage was standing in the shade of the linden tree while Antje’s father mowed the lawn. My interest in the former contents of Frau Berger’s belly died.

At thirteen I started asking my parents for a dog. Asking turned into begging. I was unlucky in love, not particularly athletic, and much in need of a friend. My parents were strenuously opposed to the idea. They claimed I’d lose interest in the dog before very long and then saddle them with the work. I swore they were being unjust to me.

For my fourteenth birthday I got Todd, a brown cocker spaniel with soft eyes and long ears. We were inseparable. I took him on walks three times a day. No one but me was allowed to feed him. Once I brought him to school, where all the girls swooned over him and I became—for a day—the most popular boy in the class.

Two years later, I was going out with Mareike, and I’d forgotten why I’d needed a dog. Todd was sweet, loyal, devoted, and tiresome. Because I begrudged my parents the triumph of having been right, I clenched my teeth, did my duty, and kept on walking him. Every day our walks got shorter. I’d haul Todd like an object once around the block, and in the end I threw him out of my room, where he’d slept happily at my feet for the first two years of his life. He’d look at me sadly, but without reproach. My bad conscience made me hate him.

His salvation arrived in the shape of little Antje, who came to our door one day and asked if she could take Todd for a walk. From that moment on, Todd was the happiest dog in the world. He loved Antje, and Antje loved him. They’d spend whole afternoons
in the town woods. When Antje got a little older, they’d take a bus together and go hiking in the forests of the Neandertal. My mother would give her some pocket money, but the tip had less to do with Antje’s expectations than with my family’s habit of paying members of the Berger family for their services.

After I moved to Cologne to attend the university, on rainy days Antje would lie with Todd on the floor of my room, listen to my music, read my books, and wait to get older. When I came home for semester break, I’d sit at my desk and try to solve the riddles of some legal homework while Todd and Antje shared a bag of jelly babies on the Flokati rug. If I wanted to go to the bathroom, I’d climb over the two of them. Antje didn’t bother me. Her presence had a tranquilizing effect. She was almost sixteen when I inadvertently slept with her one wet afternoon. Since this one-on-one leisure-time activity harmed neither of us, we occasionally repeated it.

Later Antje would say it was me and not Todd she’d been in love with as a child. But a seven-year-old can’t approach a seventeen-year-old. Likewise, a twelve-year-old girl has no chance with a twenty-two-year-old student. A girl has to be sixteen before she’s capable of making an impression on a man of twenty-six. And so her plan had basically been to wait. During the long hikes in the Neandertal, she said, she had imaginary conversations with me. Even the books in my room smelled like me. She’d crept into my clothes closet for her first exercises in masturbation, she said. I would have thought it impolite not to believe her. I’d learned at court how people shaped the past according to self-created patterns. They’d talk the crudest nonsense with sacred conviction. That was maybe the most important insight I gained from my
legal education: he who doesn’t tell the truth is still a long way from lying. In my eyes, Antje was such a case.

On the day when I stopped by my parents’ house to pick up a few things I’d need on the island, Antje was lying on my bed, doing a crossword puzzle. My mother stood in the doorway and screamed at me. My father backed her up, having left work at the clinic where he was the chief physician for just this purpose. Since he’d paid for my university studies, I owed him my life. That was his position. We agreed that I couldn’t expect the smallest financial support when I came back from my reckless adventure, a failure and a disgrace, in a few weeks. I slung my army duffel bag over my shoulder and fled the house.

Antje followed me to the train station, to the train itself, and into my Cologne apartment. She simply refused to leave my side. I was exhausted, and I decided I couldn’t forbid her to turn up at the airport at the same time as me on December 31, 1997. It so happened that the pocket money she’d received for taking care of Todd, year in year out, nicely covered the price of a plane ticket.

I’d completed my military obligation with the Army Engineer Divers and trained as a diving instructor with the DLRG, the German Lifesaving Association, during semester breaks from my law studies. When Antje and I arrived on the island, I had more than five hundred dives in my logbook, and from the very first hour I was able to earn money as an instructor. Antje had studied Spanish in school, and in addition she had a real talent for organization. Founding a diving school required a great deal of work out of the water. Antje took on all the logistics, from visits to the authorities and bookkeeping to equipment maintenance, so that
I was able to concentrate on diving right from the beginning. It soon became undeniable that we made a good team.

Todd died a few months after our disappearance from Germany. By then he was almost thirteen years old, but Antje wouldn’t accept his age as the reason for his demise. She was convinced she’d killed her best friend in order to be with me. When the diving school started doing so well we could afford to buy the houses in Lahora, she moved heaven and earth to have Todd’s breeder send her an identical dog from the same part of the Rhineland. The new Todd actually looked indistinguishable from the old one. He loved Antje, and Antje loved him. I found it weird that she could silence her guilt feelings with such a simple trick.

“I’ve got a bottle open. One of Nenad’s.” Nenad was from Slovenia, and for the past twenty years he’d cultivated a vineyard in the La Goria region. “Shall we have a glass and loosen up a little?”

“Good night.” I turned to go.

“Jola was here,” said Antje.

I stopped. If a client was the subject, that was something else again. Todd lay in front of the couch and slapped the floor with his tail when we sat down. Antje poured a second glass of wine, handed it to me, and held hers up to be clinked. It was her unchanging opinion that I needed to “loosen up.” She generally seemed to believe that people were capable of interacting with one another only after an appropriate amount of loosening.

“So what did Theo talk about?” she asked.

“You were going to tell me why Jola was here.”

Antje looked at the window, through which there was nothing to see but black night. She leaned forward to pat Todd’s head and flicked some fluff off the arm of the couch. For a second I thought she’d invented Jola’s visit to stop me from going to bed. Then, however, she began to talk.

Somehow, she said, Jola had grown bored with studying and then had somehow decided to drop over. And since Antje had just finished preparing the tuna salad anyway, somehow or other Jola had stayed to dinner. They’d opened a bottle of Nenad’s wine and somehow managed to have a very good conversation.

I asked her not to constantly use the word
somehow
.

First, Antje said, Jola had talked about how much she liked diving and how much playing the role of the Girl on the Ocean Floor meant to her. Overall, Antje said, Jola seemed to be afflicted by an intense Lotte Hass fixation, which probably stemmed from a panic about missing the boat professionally. It was something along the lines of “If I don’t get this part, my career’s over forever.” Antje had found it interesting that a woman like Jola, who appeared so successful and self-confident, would in reality suffer such torments. Despite her 384,000 Google hits, Jola obviously had enormous anxiety issues.

Having registered the information that I wasn’t the only one who’d googled Jola’s name, I asked, “Well, so what?”

Somehow, Antje went on, Jola seemed to be having doubts about all her hopes and aspirations. She’d begun talking about people’s decisions and actions, how they were like pieces of furniture people installed in their lives. That was why someone who
did evil could never live happily again, no matter how rich and famous and successful he might be. By the same token, good deeds never arose from love of one’s neighbor but always and only from self-love. How to lead your life was therefore not a moral question but an aesthetic one. Of course, there were people who felt more at home with ugliness than with beauty. Because unless you were totally nuts, it wasn’t likely you’d do something bad by mistake. In this vein, Antje said, Jola had gone on for a good while, and she’d said a whole lot of remarkable things.

In the first place, I found Jola’s line of thought not particularly remarkable, and in the second, I had no idea why I was sitting there listening to the summary of an innocuous conversation. I made these very same observations to Antje.

After a brief hesitation, she explained that there was something about Jola that wasn’t right. She’d kept looking around as though some invisible menace was lurking in the room, and more than once she’d seemed on the verge of tears.

Now came the part where Antje invoked feminine intuition so as not to be at the mercy of concrete facts. My lack of interest escalated into anger. When I started to get up, she grabbed my arm.

“Don’t you understand?” she asked. “Jola’s afraid.”

“Of what?”

Antje put on her psychiatrist’s demeanor and explained that Jola’s real subject had been Theo the whole time. That when she’d talked about people who furnished their lives with evil deeds, Jola had meant no one but Theo.

I wanted to know if Jola had said Theo’s name.

No, but somehow it had been clear that the conversation was about Theo.

“Nonsense,” I said.

Antje remained stubborn. She said Jola had signaled that she needed help.

I asked whether the word
help
had been spoken.

Likewise no, but at some point Jola had suddenly seized Antje’s hand and said, word for word, “You should thank heaven for your Sven.”

I hadn’t ever been able to put up with the female propensity for psychologizing. With the assistance of a bottle of wine, Antje could construct an entire world out of mere interpretations, a world as dramatic and shimmering as a musical, and then confuse this production with reality. Only women had the ability to be angry with their mates because of bad dreams about them the previous night.

It seemed to me impossible that Jola had dropped over to ask for help, for protection from Theo. When it came to a taste for dangerous practical jokes, she was as bad as he was. I stood up.

“Okay,” I said. “Sleep well.”

Antje jumped up from the couch too. “Then she said, ‘Sven would never do anything to you.’ ”

I kissed her on the forehead. “It’s good that you two get along so well.”

“But,” said Antje.

One of the pleasant things in life is the fact that everyone is entitled to his own worldview. I took my perceptions to bed with me. I knew tomorrow would be a thoroughly normal day, a day on which I’d go diving with a couple of clients. Beyond that knowledge there was nothing that needed to be taken into account.