Decompression (5 page)

Four professors seated behind a long desk. In front of it, me and another examinee, whose bad preliminary marks were stinking up the whole room. The longer the professors put him through the wringer, the more restlessly I shifted in my chair. I sat on my hands so I wouldn’t forget myself and start waving one like a geek in German class. I tried to establish eye contact with the examiners and to indicate by movements of my eyebrows that I knew the answer to every single question. In short, I behaved like a complete jackass.

At last, Professor Brunsberg, an expert in constitutional law,
addressed himself to me. Notorious for his halitosis, Brunsberg had a reputation for speaking directly in students’ faces, knowing that his victims, fearful of bad grades, wouldn’t turn their heads.

“Herr Fiedler,” said Professor Brunsberg, “as you are obviously a very knowledgeable man, you’re surely familiar with the name Montesquieu.”

As if he’d pressed a button, I broke out in instantaneous perspiration. Political theory had played no part in my five years of legal studies. We were supposed to learn, for example, what constitutes an
Erlaubnistatbestandsirrtum
, a “permission facts mistake,” and not what dead philosophers had said about the functioning of the state. I had no choice but to nod slowly.

“Good, Herr Fiedler. Then spell it, please.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Am I not speaking clearly? Spell
Montesquieu
!”

A row of blurred letters appeared before my mind’s eye: a
Q
, a couple of
U
s, some
E
s. I got the “Montes” part right away, I knew it was followed by “qu,” but everything thereafter lay in God’s hands.

“M-o-n-t-e-s-q-u-e-u-e,” I said.

Brunsberg slapped the table in delight.
“Queue
like ‘cue stick,’ right, Herr Fiedler? Is that what you’ve been doing the past few years? Playing pool?”

It became clear he wasn’t going to let it rest. He was out to get me.

“You get a second attempt, Herr Fiedler. We’re not inhuman.”

Under my jacket, my shirt was stuck to my back. A spot on my behind itched so unbearably that my brain stopped working. I produced an alphabet salad that didn’t have very much to do with
Montesquieu
. Brunsberg’s mood abruptly darkened. His bored colleagues looked toward the window. Outside, a couple of sparrows were fighting for the best spot on the ledge.

“Good, Herr Fiedler, or rather, not good. The question about Montesquieu has a second part. You’d like to get at least fifty percent in this examination, wouldn’t you? Then tell me—quickly—the great father of constitutional doctrine’s first name.”

I took my time. I’d learned by heart examination presentations for fourteen different forms of legal action. I was thoroughly familiar with the Maastricht Judgment of the German Federal Constitutional Court. While the sparrows’ dispute got louder, I wondered why it was that neither Montesquieu nor Voltaire seemed to have had a first name. You included the first names quite naturally when you referred to Thomas Hobbes or John Locke.

I felt at peace when I said, loudly and clearly, “Friedrich.” That was Brunsberg’s first name. The rest of the examination disappeared into fog.

When, two hours later, we were called back into the room to be given our results, I had become a different person. I couldn’t understand myself anymore. Had I really paid four thousand marks for tutorial courses, spent eight hours daily in the library, and sat for a six-hour mock exam every week just so I could be inducted into the Asshole Club? The thought that I could spend the rest of my life in an occupation where people like Brunsberg called the shots nauseated me.

Maybe life would simply have gone on all the same if they had subtracted half a point from my total exam score because of that wretched oral. I would have gotten angry, done better in the next state examination, and landed a decent job in a law office. But
in fact my average was even slightly improved by the oral. Brunsberg himself gave me almost a perfect score. When he shook my hand, he bared his teeth with joy. “You’re a good lawyer, Herr Fiedler,” he said. “If you do a bit of delving into the philosophical underpinnings of the law, you’ll get even better.”

Seeing that he no doubt meant well, on top of everything else, made the interior light in my head switch on. Everything in me was radiant with realization. My friends gathered around to congratulate me. The other candidate had failed the exam; he stood alone at the window, weeping. I stopped hearing what was being said. In my mind, I’d already left the country.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu. From that time on, there was no problem that formula couldn’t solve. “Montesquieu” prevented me from passing judgments on other people, meddling in their lives, or even just handing out well-meant advice. I wanted nothing more to do with Germany, which I’ve thought of as “the war zone” ever since. When I began my new life on the island not long afterward, the fundamental expression of my worldview was “Stay out of it.”

“Maybe she’s a drug addict,” Antje said. “Lots of actresses have drug problems.” I slammed the dishwasher door and inadvertently stepped on Todd’s paw. “Don’t talk nonsense,” I said.

It sounded harsher than I meant it to. If I didn’t want to show that my tone of voice had been a mistake, the next thing I said had to be spoken just as sharply. “You’re not allowed to take drugs and dive. If she’s using, she’s obligated to tell me.”

Antje shared with Todd a bad habit of looking utterly innocent when you fussed at her. “You want to know what I think?” she asked. “I think Jola’s the kind of woman who needs to have a child. It would do her good. Think about Luisa. Or Valentina. Remember how nervous they always were? And they’re super calm now that they have children.”

Antje had a great many Spanish girlfriends who envied her blond hair and who were all raising children or expecting children or both. It irritated me exceedingly that she let pass no opportunity, however far-fetched, to present me with her own desire to have kids.

“Don’t you think a child would be a good idea for her?”

I said, “As you well know, I don’t want children. So stop with this shit.”

Antje’s head sank. I left her standing next to the dishwasher and went to bed, where a bad feeling kept me awake. When Antje quietly crept into the bed, I closed my eyes tight and turned to the wall.

4

The sea was quiet, the air still and for eight o’clock in the morning unusually warm. The dead calm made me uneasy. Whoever’s that quiet is up to something.

I could see the two of them from our roof terrace, where I was gathering up my sandals and a couple of towels. They were standing in front of Casa Raya, waiting for me. Theo reached out a hand to Jola and with two fingers grabbed the soft skin on the back of her upper arm. When she tried to pull away, he pinched her harder; I could see the pain on her face. He kept those two fingers clamped on her arm, stroked her cheek with his other hand, and talked at her. I could hear his voice, but I didn’t understand what he was saying.

Once I’d caught Antje with her arms raised in front of the bathroom mirror, scowling as she appraised her triceps: problem area.

Theo let Jola’s arm go and dug his fingers instead into the flesh above her hip bone, where all women who aren’t anorexic
have a little pad of fat. He squeezed her twice and released her to light a cigarette.

In the van, I asked them what no-decompression time was. Jola said it was the number of minutes a person could stay underwater. Theo added that it had something to do with nitrogen.

As always before the first diving session, Antje had briefed me at breakfast about our new clients’ level of experience. In the course of a trip to Vietnam some years earlier, Theo and Jola had taken a diving course and obtained entry-level certification—the “Open Water Diver”—and that was it. Their logbooks documented no more than ten dives. So in their case, a bit of theory couldn’t hurt. Basically, diving wasn’t a dangerous sport as long as you internalized a couple of rules. For their diving-license exam, most beginners learned a few sentences and set phrases by heart and forgot them immediately afterward. Maybe they could define
no-decompression time
, correctly, as the length of time a diver can remain at a given depth and still ascend rapidly to the surface without exposing himself to grave health risks. But only a few inexperienced divers had the ability to visualize the reality behind that definition. Most beginners were particularly unwilling to accept that their lives could depend on accurately calculating their no-decompression time. I was rather proud to think of myself as a conscientious teacher in this regard.

While we drove to Puerto del Carmen, I rolled out my standard explanation. The high pressure underwater, I said, causes nitrogen to build up in the body, in blood, tissue, and bones. You
can imagine it as similar to carbon dioxide in a fizzy drink. As long as the bottle remains closed and under pressure, there’s no problem. But what happens when you open the bottle too fast? Something similar happens in your body when you stay underwater past your decompression time and then ascend to the surface too quickly. It’s not pretty.

Suddenly Jola cried out, “Stop!”

I slammed on the brakes. Jola had risen halfway from the passenger seat. “Did you see what was on the road?” she asked.

I leaned far out of the window on my side and looked back. “Nobody’s there!” I yelled.

“ ‘Everything is will,’ ” Jola said. “In giant letters, sprayed across the asphalt.”

I exhaled, put my hands on the steering wheel, and concentrated on letting my shoulders drop. “Are you crazy, scaring me like that?”

A car overtook and passed us, its horn blaring.

“A message,” Jola said. “A message for me. Written in German, even!”

“Sounds like a very German idea,” said Theo. He was writing in a notebook balanced on his knee. “Good title.”

“I can do it. I can do Lotte,” said Jola. “It’s only a matter of will.”

“Only if you know what no-decompression time is,” I said. “You have until Puerto del Carmen to understand it.”

I put the van in gear and stepped on the gas.

For starters, we walked down the little road to Playa Chica without any equipment. I pointed to a buoy in the water about seventy meters offshore.

“Swim there and back, is that it?” Jola asked.

“At a comfortable pace,” I said.

“But we’re not beginners,” Theo protested. “We have diving experience.”

“I just want to get an idea of what kind of shape you’re in,” I said.

Jola, who’d already pulled her sleeveless shirt over her head, stepped out of her jeans and stood there in a bikini. Theo looked around as though searching for his valet. Or at least a changing room. I helped him out of his linen suit jacket.

While he hopped around on one leg, trying to get his pants off, I observed his girlfriend. In my line of work, I had a great deal to do with bodies. Most clients chose to change into their swim clothes while badly hidden behind the back of my VW van. They’d stand there in gray socks and shabby underwear, looking at the ground because they were ashamed of their hollows and folds and spots. Jola, on the other hand, was not hiding herself. She stood in the middle of the quay, narrowed her eyes, and gazed at the horizon. She was perfect, a living statue. Thoroughly fit, toned, and yet soft. I assured myself that this was not a judgment on my part. It was simply a fact. I knew what a body like that required. Not only time, money, and discipline, but also a sense for the correct measure of things. The knowledge that beauty is to be found not in the extreme, but in balance. Jola had shaped her body like an artist. I frankly admired the result. I would have liked
to offer her a word of praise, from one expert to another, but the danger of a misunderstanding was too great.