Decompression (4 page)

Jola talked a great deal. Her hands flailed the air as though she was shooing away insects. Her long hair seemed to be in her way. She was constantly swiping it from one side to the other. Antje served salt-crusted Canary potatoes, mushrooms in olive oil, and three different
mojo
sauces. The conversation revolved around Jola’s movie project. She was reading a book about Lotte Hass, and she had romantic notions about the adventure of diving: you put on a chic bathing suit, jumped into the water, and quickly emptied your breathing tank, preferably while eye to eye with a whale shark. Theo ate potatoes. In a steady rhythm, one after the other, like a man doing a job.

I said I was going to instruct them strictly by the book. Caution and security would be primary concerns in every situation. It wasn’t about having an adventure, it was about knowledge of the subject and mastery of technique.

Jola stuck out her lower lip and played the little girl. Couldn’t she make friends with a whale shark?

I said we’d see angel sharks. Six feet long at most, and generally lying flat on the seafloor. At this the little girl turned into a strategist with narrow eyes and a dangerous smile. “Just as long as I can tell Casting I’ve had experience with sharks.”

I thought it wasn’t at all necessary for her to act that way. A cute little space between her upper incisors compelled me to keep looking at her mouth. Suddenly her hand was lying on my arm. The way she batted her eyelashes revealed practice. Didn’t I think she’d make a good Lotte?

Theo looked up from his plate. “Get ahold of yourself,” he said.

It sounded like a slap. Antje flinched as though it had been meant for her. The wind moved the curtains on the open windows; the air had become slightly cool. The clock on the wall gave the time as shortly before seven. The night was already creeping out of the corners of the rooms. I stood up to turn on the lights and close the windows.

“Don’t you like the potatoes?” Antje asked.

“Oh yes,” said Jola, quickly snatching the smallest one off her plate with her hand and stuffing the little morsel in her mouth. “But I’m not really hungry.”

“Eating disorder,” Theo explained. He emptied his second glass of wine and poured himself some more. “She’s already too old for the part. If she gets fat to boot, she won’t have a chance.”

He laughed as though he’d told a very good joke. Antje disappeared into the kitchen to fetch the rabbit dish. Jola stared at her unsoiled plate. Clients were like family members; you didn’t get to pick them. While we were waiting for the main course, I broke the silence to clarify once again what we could expect from one another. They would get exclusive rights to my services for two weeks, twenty-four hours a day, with an unlimited number of dives, completion of the Advanced Open Water Diver course, and nitrox certification, in addition to lodgings in the Casa Raya, the loan of all equipment, and chauffeur service to all the diving spots and places of interest on the island. I would get fourteen thousand euros. Ordinarily I had several clients, whom I would divide into groups. Jola and Theo were paying for the fact that I
hadn’t accepted any other requests for the coming fourteen days. It wasn’t cheap, but in return I belonged to them alone. We shook hands. Jola’s telephone chirped. She read the display, smiled, and tapped in a reply. Antje came back, carrying a steaming stewpot between two kitchen towels.

“Conejo en salmorejo,”
she said.

Bones were sticking out of the ragout. Theo’s telephone chirped. He smiled and put his hand on Jola’s thigh. They were actually sending each other text messages while in the same room. Antje served out rabbit pieces. Her cocker spaniel, Todd, came out of the kitchen, where he’d been worshipping the stove, assessed the situation, and took up a position next to Jola. He apparently considered her the weakest link in the chain. I tasted the food, praised it, and reminded my clients of my single condition: on the Wednesday after next, November 23, I would have a day off. Theo wanted to know why they would be obliged to do without my services on that particular Wednesday. He liked the rabbit. He also liked the wine, which he was drinking practically alone. With a quick look, I stopped Antje from getting a second bottle. Jola saw us exchange glances and laughed; for the first time that evening, her laughter was completely unaffected.

“What?” asked Theo.

“Nothing,” said Jola.

You’re not right for each other
, I thought, and once again I forbade myself to think like that. The private lives of my clients had nothing to do with me. I explained what was up on November 23. Late that past summer, I’d been out deep-sea fishing and started to get an unusually strong sonar signal. There was an object about one hundred meters down, an object more than eighty meters
long. Maybe it was only a heap of stones with an unusual shape. Or maybe it was a sensational find. For years there had been hardly any new discoveries of sunken ships anywhere in the world, and certainly none in divable waters. I marked the coordinates on my GPS device; finding the right place again wouldn’t present much of a problem. But diving into a wreck for the first time at a depth of one hundred meters wasn’t exactly child’s play—especially if you did it alone. I’d spent weeks preparing for the dive, calculating gas mixtures, racking my brains to figure out how I could lengthen my stay on the bottom by twenty minutes and yet avoid needing more than three hours’ worth of decompression stops before I could surface. In addition, I’d ordered some specially made dry gloves, and I was working on a heating system to install in my diving suit. Bernie had promised that he and his equally Scottish pal Dave would man the
Aberdeen
to provide my floating base. These were all professional requirements for a professional undertaking.

Jola listened as though the word of God were coming out of my mouth. Her big eyes began to reflect my own enthusiasm. I found it hard to come to the end.

On November 23 I’d be forty years old, and I wanted to celebrate my birthday one hundred meters below the surface of the ocean. Alone. Or better yet: in the company of a World War II freighter that went missing seventy years ago.

“I want to go too,” Jola said. “I can help the boat crew.”

“This is an expedition, not an excursion,” I said. “Every move the crew makes has to be exactly right.”

She looked at me insistently. “I grew up on ships.”

“Her father owns a Benetti Classic,” Theo said.

I had to pause and digest this information. A used Benetti cost about as much as a luxury penthouse. And in Manhattan, at that.

“Nevertheless,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Or you could train me for that depth and then I could dive with you. Lotte would have liked that.”

Against my will, I laughed.

“Please!” Jola cried out. “We have two whole weeks!”

“You’d need at least two years,” I said. “If I tried to take you down there with me, I’d wind up in prison.”

“For how long?” asked Theo, without taking his eyes off Jola’s pleading face.

“For life,” I said. “Convicted of murder.”

“That’s enough,” said Antje, who didn’t like the conversation. “Only professional divers can survive those kinds of expeditions. Would anyone like some cactus pear sorbet?”

“I’d be more than happy to spend a couple of years in prison,” Theo said in the tone of a man who wants to change the subject. “Then I’d finally have enough peace to write.”

Antje drew back the hand that was reaching for his plate. She said, “But in exchange for that, you’d have to harm another person.”

“That’s the advantage, isn’t it?” Theo turned the wine bottle upside down and shook the last drops into his glass. “If someone already wants to go to jail, he gets a free shot. Then all he has to do is pick his target.”

Jola was scraping rabbit pieces off her plate with the back of her knife. Todd caught them on the fly. “Don’t listen to Theo,” Jola said. “Shocking his audience is part of his job. Unfortunately,
for the past few years he’s preferred to be shocking at the dinner table rather than the computer keyboard.”

“Which is still better,” Theo said, “than making a fool of yourself by standing in front of a camera and spouting idiotic lines.”

Jola stood up abruptly and walked over to the window. “My idiotic lines,” she said with her back turned to us, “pay our rent.”

Humming and sizzling inside the wall lamp, a moth was burning itself to death. The rabbit fibers between my teeth gave me an uncomfortable feeling that spread through my whole body. Antje raised her head and gave Theo a sympathetic look. “So why don’t you write anymore?” she asked.

Sometimes I could kill her.

JOLA’S DIARY, FIRST DAY

Saturday, November 12. Night
.

They’re so cute, both of them. Blond, friendly, down-to-earth. Serving potatoes and bunny stew in their little white house. Normal and … yes, that’s it: healthy somehow. So what does that make
us?
Abnormal and sick? We didn’t even thank them properly for dinner. All of a sudden the old man was in this big hurry to leave. At first he didn’t even want to wait for dessert. Cactus pear sorbet. Difficulty level: complicated. Time required: two hours. According to my iPhone. Poor Antje. Now I’m waiting for the old man to fall asleep. He doesn’t like me to be lying next to him while he’s trying to doze off. I sleep well, he doesn’t. Sleep turns you into a corpse, he tells me. How am I supposed to relax with a dead person next to me?

I text him: “Sleep well, Theo. I love you.”

His phone chirps in the bedroom. I can hear the sound through the thin wall. No answer. It’s pitch-dark outside. Every now and then a dog howls. Our first night here and already I’m alone on the living-room sofa. This is how it begins, our very last serious attempt to get things straightened out
.

3

“They’re sort of funny.”

This was the prelude to what I called the “postgame analysis.” Scarcely had a person left the room when he or she became the subject of instantaneous, diagnostic discussion. Assessments were compared, details of judgments mutually corrected, and speculations transformed into a consistent psychological profile. Antje and her girlfriends practiced this discipline at the expert level. As for me, when it came to postgame analysis, I was the worst partner imaginable. If Antje gave it a try all the same, she must have felt some real sense of urgency.

I stood at the sink, scraping food remnants from the plates and trying to ignore Todd while he stared a hole in me. Right from the start, it had seemed creepy to me that he not only had the same name as my parents’ now-deceased dog but also looked exactly like him. Antje firmly believed that we’d killed the first Todd by leaving him behind in Germany. I was afraid she believed just as
firmly that the second Todd was a reincarnation of the first, whom she’d called back into life by recycling his name.

“Don’t you think?”

I turned my back to her and the dog. I hated it when people judged one another. It was an obsession, a curse. I had left Germany because I couldn’t stand living any longer in an all-encompassing net of reciprocal judgments. Judgers and judged found themselves in a permanent state of war, and everybody, depending on the situation, played one of the two parts. Everything my clients from back home told me was a report from the judgment front. What they thought about their boss. What their colleagues thought about them. What they thought about the chancellor. What they thought about the other divers. Then, after the first three beers some evening, what they thought about how their wives performed. And at the end of their dive holiday, they’d log on to a diving website and post what they thought about how I’d performed. It was as though people were afraid they’d fall silent forever if they stopped passing judgments.

“Sometimes Jola just stares into space,” Antje said. “Like she’s miles away. And she eats nothing. Did that strike you too?”

There was a reason for my aversion to judgments. Before I left Germany on New Year’s Eve in 1997, I had studied law for five years. I belonged to a generation of students who didn’t want school to come to an end. For us, high school graduation was by no means a happy event. It scared us. Most of us had no idea what to start doing with our lives. In school everything had been
simple. You knew how to do things right and how much rebellion you could permit yourself. If something went wrong and there was any doubt, it was the teacher’s fault. I did my compulsory military service, extended it for a year with the Army Engineer Divers, and then decided to go for a law degree, because it was said that such a degree left all possibilities open. It wasn’t long before I really began to love my studies. Once again I’d found a field in which I could do everything right. As long as I took notes during lectures and spent three evenings a week in the library, I could enjoy the pleasant feeling that I was on the safe side. As a rule, I passed my exams with grades of 90 or higher. My fellow students’ envy relieved me of the necessity of having any doubts at all.

After five years of study, my scores on the final written examinations were so good they made the impending oral exam seem like a mere formality. I bought a new pair of shoes, shopped around for the most appropriate aftershave lotion, and visited the barber. On the day of the exam I felt slightly nervous, but a sense of impending triumph buoyed me up on the way to the Justice Ministry.