Decompression (20 page)

Now the old man’s looking for an ATM. He wants to withdraw a hefty sum from my account so he can take me out to dinner this evening. Such a failed murder attempt calls for a celebration. He probably didn’t even want to kill me. One doesn’t break a pretty toy on purpose; one merely wants to find out how much it can take. One wants to see it perform a two-hundred-volt dance at the bottom of the sea. To watch it roll up its eyes, twitch epileptically, swallow water, lose consciousness. What fun
.

Did he think Sven wouldn’t see him push me? Or was he determined that he should? Maybe it’s not really about me. Maybe it’s some kind of suicide attempt. Maybe Theo beats me right in front of the living-room window and shoves me onto a lethal fish before Sven’s eyes as a way of provoking Sven. Until he has no other choice but to avenge me and hang the old man on a rock the next time we dive. Theo’s clever enough to know that staging an accident would be easy for an experienced diver like Sven. No marks. No witnesses. If that’s so, I’m less than a toy. Less than an instrument. Only a kind of lure. The piece of cheesecake in the mousetrap
.

Maybe I’m going crazy. I don’t feel anything anymore. Then again, my brain’s working incessantly. I remember wanting to talk to Sven. He’d rescue me, I thought. But then he suddenly seemed surreal to me. A flat, cardboard figure. As though I’d invented him. How can you be rescued by your own invention? Please let me in on that secret when you’re finished giving your statement to the police, dear sir or madam. And don’t forget to speak with the coast guard. They must search the Atlantic Ocean for the remains of the actress or the writer. Maybe even for the remains of both. Down forty meters deep
.

15

Before I reached the sandlot, I could already see that Antje wasn’t home. In all our years in Lahora, I’d never been able to teach her to shut the gate only when the VW van was parked on the property. Whenever I came home, I always had to climb out and open the gate. There were days when that inconvenience galled me to my soul; on this day, however, seeing the gate standing open caused me only frustration. It meant that Antje wasn’t there. I’d been looking forward to spending the evening with her, to eating and chatting, to discussing the day just past and the new day tomorrow. To putting our heads together under the light of the dining-room lamp. It almost seemed as though I was observing that scene through a lighted window, while I myself stood outside on a cold, wintry German street.

Without Todd’s yapping, the house positively boomed with silence. There was nothing extraordinary about Antje’s driving to town in the afternoon to do some shopping, meet girlfriends, or
tend to a holiday apartment. It was only that she usually called me up before she left and asked what I was doing at the moment and whether she should come to the dive site and bring fresh scuba tanks or hot soup. When there was nothing on schedule for the evening, we’d sometimes arrange to meet for coffee and cheesecake at the Wunder Bar café. Or to take Todd for a walk on the promenade. Suddenly it became clear to me how much had changed since Jola and Theo arrived on the island.

I put the wasp-waisted espresso pot on the stove and filled a big glass with lemonade. “Making things nice for yourself” described a method women resorted to; nevertheless, male though I was, I was determined to give it a try. I picked up the scattered pages of Theo’s short story from the floor near the living-room couch and put them in the proper order. I carried the coffee, the lemonade, and a bucket of ice cubes out to the terrace and pushed a deck chair into the shade.

Two hours later, I called Antje’s number. All I got was her voice mail. Just in case she was in a dead zone, I called her three more times at intervals of a few minutes.

It had cost me an effort to read Theo’s story all the way through. In the end I’d felt downright loathing for the typed pages themselves. It was as though the content of the words had bled onto the paper. As though they might dirty my fingers.

The sun had sunk behind the flat roofs of the neighboring houses. Antje knew a lot about literature. I wanted to ask her how much real life entered into storytelling. Would she think an author who described something abominable in great detail must necessarily have had practical experience in his subject? I didn’t understand why Theo had given me that story. The feeling it had
produced in me was that I never wanted to see him again. Several times, while I was reading the thing, I’d been on the point of calling up Bernie and asking him whether he’d agree to take over my clients. One of my basic principles was to accept money from my clients only at the end of their course, which meant that I hadn’t yet seen a cent from Jola and Theo. If I terminated the contract now, I could most probably kiss all fourteen thousand euros good-bye. Antje and I needed that money badly. That was why I wanted to talk with her. I wanted to ask her whether it wouldn’t be better to cut all ties with a guy who was capable of writing such stuff. I figured she’d look at me as though I’d made a joke. She’d say something like
You want to ditch the best contract you’ve ever had in your life because your client wrote a story about two people who aren’t nice to each other? Hasn’t anyone ever informed you that literature is never about nice things, not even on islands? You’re acting like a child who’s seen a scary movie and now he’s afraid of the dark!
Maybe the wretched feeling I had would go away if I could hear her talk like that.

Her voice mail again. Antje never turned off her cell phone. That little gadget was always freshly charged and ready to work. For her, the ability to be reached constituted a kind of proof of existence. Just as some physicists thought that if no one looked at the moon it wasn’t there, Antje believed that anyone who couldn’t be called up disappeared. Voice mail, one more time. I resolved not to try her number again. Fortunately, I wasn’t the sort of person who always jumped to the direst possible conclusions. You just had to bear the normal probability distribution in mind. Getting in an automobile accident was much less probable than losing a cell phone or not hearing it ring. Even in Antje’s case. It struck me
that I couldn’t think of anyone I could ask about her. I didn’t even know the names of most of her girlfriends, much less their phone numbers. Quite apart from the fact that holding a telephone conversation in Spanish was a physical impossibility for me. Bernie didn’t really have anything to do with Antje, and if I called him and inquired about her, he’d answer by immediately asking me what the devil was going on with us. I had no contact with her parents in Germany. And in any case, it was only eight in the evening.

A strange restlessness drove me to pace through the house. I might also have been a little queasy. And probably hungry as well, but I couldn’t make up my mind to eat anything. As though attached by barbs, Theo’s story hung on my thoughts. There was even something baleful about the sunset in the beginning of the story, when he had his two characters go out for an early evening walk: The sky was an arrangement of bloody pieces of cloud, as if some enormous being had exploded overhead. The gathering darkness was a cloak, the gulls’ cries a jeering sound track. Even a literary lowbrow like me could tell that the woman wasn’t identical with Jola. Her name was different too. On the other hand, she seemed to share many of Jola’s characteristics. First and foremost, a dark beauty. And a certain unpredictability. It slowly became clear to me why I didn’t care for literature. Like jurisprudence, it was about the art of judging. The author acted as the highest judge, decided the facts of the case, called in witnesses, and in the end handed down the verdict. Punishment or acquittal. Unlike in the legal process, there was not even a possibility of appeal.

I roamed around the living room like a man looking for something. Everywhere in the house, there were objects I would have
sworn I’d never seen before had they been pointed out to me in some neutral place. It was time for me to get a grip on myself.

I went into the kitchen and whisked three eggs and some Maggi seasoning sauce, tore off a big chunk of bread for dipping, and carried everything into the office. By way of distracting myself, I wanted to watch one or two episodes of Jola’s series. If it succeeded in making me sleepy, I’d be able to take advantage of Antje’s absence by spending a night in the bed for a change.

For the sake of completeness, I’d started watching the series in chronological order from Bella Schweig’s first appearance. I sat at the computer, opened the
Up and Down
archive, and clicked through to Episode 589. Just as I hit the
START
button, I saw him. He was lying on his back just a few centimeters away from the mousepad, his four delicate legs with their high-tech suction cups thrusting stiffly upward. It was as though he’d been positioned to send a message:
Look here, this thing’s dead
. I jumped up and probably cried out. Emile. The chill of his little body burned itself into my hand. I prodded him with my index finger again and again, tried to warm him, turned him right side up, and set him on my arm in the usual spot. He fell back onto the table, reduced to a piece of rubbery matter. I thought there was a vaguely chemical scent, perhaps insect spray, in the room.

In the middle of my reflections on which would be more absurd, throwing a friend down the toilet or burying a reptile, the doorbell rang. Without Todd’s hysterical barking, the rooms seemed so unfurnished that I myself thought I wasn’t home. Antje had her own key and would have made more noise upon arriving. The doorbell rang again. Three short, three long, three short. It
was someone who knew the Morse alphabet. Even without that hint, I would have guessed who was outside.

When I opened the door, she fell into my arms. I caught a fleeting glimpse of her mascara-smeared face. She hadn’t had makeup on that afternoon. Her shoulders were twitching. She clung to me hard. Sobs shook her body all over. I held her in my arms and buried my nose in her hair. We hadn’t even said hello. While I inhaled the smell of her, I felt myself becoming indifferent to everything else. To the torpedo fish, to Antje, to Theo’s story, to the gecko. I thought,
I mustn’t think about anything anymore, I mustn’t want anything more
. She told me through tears what had happened, but I barely understood what she said.

She and Theo had taken a walk on the promenade at sunset. Suddenly Jola had spotted a swimmer struggling with the current far from the shore. Her first impulse was to jump into the water, but Theo had held her back. They ran around pointlessly for a long while before finding a lifeguard. Meanwhile a crowd had gathered on the promenade, a coast guard boat was on the way, and a helicopter was arriving from one of the other islands. They were all too late to recover the swimmer alive. I thought fleetingly about Bella Schweig, who turns up weeping at her ex-boyfriend’s place with a story about a cyclist run down in traffic.

While I stroked Jola’s hair, I told her that tourists often died on the island. They drowned or fell from bicycles or paraglided into a cliff or got drunk and drove off the road. There was a whole rescue industry dedicated to helping people who fell victim to their leisure activities. There were helicopters, boats, hospitals …

I’d probably long since stopped talking, assuming that I’d said
anything at all. In any case, I found myself on the living-room couch again, with Jola on my lap. Her hair formed a black curtain, behind which we kissed. A great peace came over me. As if I’d finally arrived. The tension of the past several days fell away. There was no more conflict, no doubts, no confusion. My hands felt completely at home on Jola’s body. Nothing about her seemed unfamiliar to me. The room revolved around us, and so did the house, the island, the whole world. The universe had found its center, from which it expanded and into which it would one day collapse.

Until Antje was standing in the room. I’d heard neither her car nor her key in the door. Todd growled at Jola. I wasn’t able to react. I simply sat there blinking. As though Antje’s entrance had turned on a dazzling light, had subjected us to pitiless illumination. A diving instructor with his half-naked client on his lap, caught in flagrante by his domestic partner.

“Okay,” Antje said. “We can handle it this way too.”

In duty bound, Jola jumped from my knees, took a few steps away, and rearranged her clothes with downcast eyes. I’d lost all further interest in the scene before it got properly started. As soon as I stopped touching and smelling Jola, she looked like Bella Schweig again. The way she was staring at the floor, her hair hiding her face, her hands smoothing her T-shirt over and over. Maybe the actors’ curse was that they couldn’t stop playing themselves.

Antje stood three meters away, unquestionably identical with herself. She was quivering. I felt impatient.
Where were you so long, I have urgent matters to discuss with you, I wanted to ask you a few things. Can we please call a halt to this nonsense and have dinner. A glass of wine, the warm lamplight on the table
. In the actual situation, there was nothing to say. Once again, I’d let myself be caught off guard by a chimera. Jola was a mistress of her trade. I would have gladly gone back to the usual order of the day, even though I knew, of course, that such a thing couldn’t happen without further ado. Because it was becoming absolutely necessary for someone to speak, I asked the only question that interested me: “Why did you kill Emile?”

That worked as though I’d thrown a switch and activated a brand-new, hitherto-unknown Antje. She didn’t even raise her voice. In fact, she spoke rather softly, but with a sharp edge in her tone more penetrating than any volume. “Actually,” she said, “I was willing to let the whole thing rest. All this”—she made a sweeping movement with her arm that took in me, the house, and herself—“is more important to me than your childish affair. But I won’t allow myself to be humiliated. Bringing your lover here now is just outrageous.”

“Jola’s not my lover.”

The edge turned into hate. “Maybe,” Antje said, “I’ve made it too easy for you the past few years. I’ve let you withdraw further and further into your own world and lose all sense of reality. In the end, it’s probably all my fault.”