In Free Fall (2 page)

The curve is easier to cut out in the middle, and it becomes more complicated again toward the end. Liam holds on to the card with both
hands, cheering when the scissors have negotiated the final jagged cliffs and the zigzag cutting falls to the ground. He picks up the masterpiece carefully by the edges, and runs off to see if the kitchen scales are free.

MAIKE IS STANDING AT THE KITCHEN COUNTER
chopping some unruly-looking salad leaves. She is wearing a white dress that makes her look as though she is about to be married for the second time. Her feet are bare, and she is absentmindedly scratching a mosquito bite on her left calf with her right foot. The window is open. Summer air is wafting in with the smell of hot asphalt, flowing water, and a wind that is juggling with the swallows high in the heavens. In the golden evening light, Maike looks more than ever like the kind of woman a man would like to ride up to on horseback and carry off into the sunset. She is unique, and not just at first glance. Her skin is even paler than Sebastian’s and her mouth is very slightly lopsided, which makes her look a little pensive when she laughs. The small contemporary art gallery in Freiburg where Maike works has her to thank for a great deal of its success, for she is not only the artists’ agent, but also their occasional model. Maike’s aesthetic feeling has almost the fervor of religion about it. Surroundings furnished without care depress her and she is the sort of person who checks every glass against the light before placing it on the table.

When Sebastian approaches her from behind, she stretches her damp hands out in front of her, showing her shaved underarms. His fingers climb the staircase of her vertebrae, from her bottom to her neck.

“Are you cold?” she asks. “Your hands are trembling.”

“Can’t you and Liam think about anything other than my clapped-out nervous system?” Sebastian asks.

“Yes,” Maike replies. “Red wine.”

Sebastian kisses the back of her head. They both know that Oskar will have read the article in
Der Spiegel
magazine. Maike has no
particular desire to understand the intricacies of the long-standing scientific disagreement between Oskar and Sebastian. But she knows what will happen. Oskar’s voice will be threateningly quiet when he launches his attack. And Sebastian will blink more rapidly than usual while he is defending himself, and his arms will dangle limply by his side.

“I bought a Brunello,” she said. “He’ll like it.”

As Sebastian reaches for the carafe of wine, a red point of light sweeps over Maike’s breasts, as if a drunken marksman were aiming through the window. Fruit, oak, earth. Sebastian resists the temptation to pour himself a glass and turns to Liam, who is waiting by the kitchen scales. Cheek to cheek, they read the digital display.

“Excellent work, little professor.” Sebastian presses his son against his side. “What conclusion can we draw?”

“Nature behaves in accordance with our calculations,” Liam says, glancing sideways at his mother. Her knife taps a solid rhythm on the wooden chopping board. She doesn’t like him to show off with sentences learned by heart.

Sebastian lingers at the kitchen door before bringing his graph back into the study. Maike will want to say that she will keep Liam off his back later. Off his back. She likes that expression. It reminds her of the battle of her everyday life, which she wins every evening. But Maike is not really the fighting kind. Before she met Sebastian, she was very much a dreamer. She used to walk through the streets at night, dreaming her way into every illuminated window. In her mind, she was watering strangers’ potted plants, laying their tables for dinner, and patting their children’s heads. Every man was a potential lover, and, depending on the color of his eyes and his build, she dreamed of living a wild or conventional or artistic or political life by his side. Maike’s vagabond imagination had inhabited people and places as she encountered them. Until she met Sebastian. The moment she walked into his arms on the Kaiser-Joseph-Strasse in Freiburg (“On the Münsterplatz!” Sebastian would say, for there were two versions of their first
meeting—one for him and one for her), her hazy reality became solid. It was love at first sight, precluding alternatives, reducing an endless variety of possibilities to a here and a now. Sebastian’s appearance in Maike’s life was—as he would express it—a wave function collapse. From that moment on, Maike had had someone whose back she could protect. She does so at every opportunity, and gladly, too.

“You two can talk in peace later,” she says, brushing a strand of hair off her brow with her forearm. “I’ll keep…”

“I know,” Sebastian says. “Thank you.”

She laughs, showing a glimpse of chewing gum between her molars. This does nothing to diminish her irresistible charm—all fair hair and childlike eyes.

“When is Oskar coming?” Liam pesters.

As his parents look at each other, he expresses his impatience by decorating the kitchen table with chunks of onion and cloves of garlic. Maike lets him get away with it because there is a seed of creativity in his cheekiness.

[2]

IT’S INCREDIBLE, OSKAR THINKS
, that all human beings are made up of the same components. That the glands which give him a light rush of adrenaline can also be found in the autonomic nervous system of the delicately built Oriental woman with the Yoko Ono face who is distributing coffee and rolls. Incredible that her nails, hair, and teeth are made of the same material as the nails, hair, and teeth of all the passengers. That the hands pouring the coffee are being moved by the same tendons as those reaching for change in their wallets. That even the palm into which he—carefully avoiding any contact—drops a couple of coins has the same pattern on it as his own.

As she passes him the cup of coffee, the Oriental woman holds his gaze a split second longer than necessary. The train judders as it travels over a set of points and the coffee almost spills onto his trousers. Oskar takes the cup from the woman and looks down at the floor to avoid the beaming smile of farewell that she is about to give him. If only it were just the similarity of their hands that connected him to her. If all they had in common were hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. But the shared elements go deeper than that, right down to the protons, neutrons, and electrons from which he and the Oriental woman are made, which also make up the table supporting his elbows and the coffee cup warming his hands. So Oskar is merely a random collection of matter from
which the world is formed, containing everything that exists, because it is impossible to be otherwise. He knows that the boundaries of his person blur into the enormous whirl of particles. He can literally feel his substance mixing with that of the people around him. This is almost always an unpleasant feeling for Oskar. There is one exception. He is on his way to him now.

IF SEBASTIAN WERE TO TRY
to describe his friend Oskar, he would say that Oskar looks like the kind of person who could answer every question put to him. Would string theory one day succeed in uniting the fundamental forces of physics? Can a dress shirt be worn with a dinner jacket? What time is it in Dubai? Regardless of whether he is listening or speaking himself, Oskar’s granite eyes stay fixed on you. Oskar is one of those people who have quicksilver in their veins. One of those people who always stand at a commanding vantage point. People like Oskar do not have silly nicknames. In his presence, women sit on their hands in order to stop themselves from reaching out to touch him involuntarily. When he was twenty, people put him at thirty. After his thirtieth birthday, he seemed ageless. He is tall and slim, with a smooth forehead and narrow eyebrows that seem to be raised in permanent questioning. Despite shaving carefully, a dark shadow colors his slightly sunken cheeks. He always looks as though he has dressed with care, even when he is wearing simply a pair of black trousers and a sweater, as he is now. On his body, clothes can do nothing but fall in the right lines. For the most part, he holds himself with a mixture of apparent ease and inner tension that makes others look him in the face with curiosity. Behind his back, they cast about for his name, taking him for an actor they ought to know. Oskar is indeed well known in certain circles, but not for acting. He is famous for his theories on the nature of time.

Outside, summer speeds by in a band of green and blue. A road runs alongside the tracks. The cars follow the train as though they are glued to it. The pavement is flecked with flat pools of light. Oskar has
just pulled out his sunglasses when a young man asks if the seat beside him is taken. Oskar turns away and hides his eyes behind the dark glasses. The young man walks on down the aisle. A brown puddle of coffee spreads on the foldaway table.

Oskar’s aesthetic sense is often what makes life intolerable for him. Many people cannot stand their fellow men, but few are able to explain precisely why. Oskar can forgive the fact that his fellow human beings consist merely of protons, neutrons, and electrons. But he cannot forgive their inability to maintain their composure in the face of this tragic state of affairs. When he thinks about his childhood, he sees himself at fourteen, surrounded by boys and girls who are laughing and pointing at his feet. He had, without his parents’ permission, sold his bicycle in order to buy his first pair of handmade shoes—three sizes too big, to be on the safe side. To this day he despises tactless laughter and avoids pompous people, show-offs, and the Schadenfreude of the stupid. To his mind, there is no violence greater than an offense against aesthetics. If he were ever to commit murder—certainly not something he has planned—it would probably be because his victim had made an importunate remark.

His schoolmates suddenly stopped teasing him when he reached a height of 1.9 meters at the age of sixteen. They began to vie for his attention instead. They spoke loudly whenever he was in earshot on the school grounds. When a girl raised her hand to answer a question in class, she would glance over at him to make sure he was listening. Even the math teacher, an unkempt person whose neck hair stuck out over his shirt collar, would turn to Oskar with a “That’s right, isn’t it?” when he placed the chalk-breaking period after a row of figures on the board. Yet Oskar was the only one in his class who had left school after the
Abitur
exam without a practical experience of love for his fellow man. He viewed this as a victory. He was convinced that there was not a single person on this earth whose presence he could endure for more than ten minutes.

When he met Sebastian at the university, the magnitude of this
error made him quite dizzy. The fact that they noticed each other on the first day of the new semester was due to their height. Their eyes met over the heads of the other students, and they seemed to be automatically drawn to sit next to each other in the lecture theater. They sat in silence through the embarrassing welcome speech by the dean, then started chatting easily as they left the hall. Sebastian did not say anything even faintly naive in the following ten minutes, and he did not laugh in an irritating manner, not once. Oskar could not only tolerate his company, but even felt a desire to continue their conversation. They went into the dining hall together and continued talking into the evening. From that moment on, Oskar sought the company of his new friend, and Sebastian acquiesced. Their friendship had no preliminary stages—nothing had to grow and develop. It simply turned on, like a lamp when the right switch is flicked.

Any attempt to describe the following months runs the risk of getting lost in exaggeration. Ever since Oskar started at the university in Freiburg, he had appeared in public dressed always in a morning suit—long jacket and striped trousers—and a silver cravat. It was not long before Sebastian started appearing at lectures in a similar dandy’s uniform. Every morning they walked across the lawn in front of the Institute of Physics as if drawn to each other by an invisible string—bypassing all the other students in various different years who seemed to exist only to get in their way—and greeted each other with a handshake. They bought only one copy of every textbook because they liked bending their heads over each page together. The seats next to them in the lecture theater remained empty. Everyone found their getup odd, yet no one laughed at them, not even when they walked arm in arm on the bank of the Dreisam in the afternoons, stopping every couple of steps, because matters of importance could only be discussed while standing still. In their old-fashioned garb, they looked like something from a yellowing postcard, carefully cut out and pasted—but not seamlessly—into the present. The ripple of the Dreisam punctuated their conversation and the trees above them waved in the wind. The
late-summer sun was never more beautiful than when one of them pointed at it and said something about the solar neutrino problem.

In the evenings, they met in the library. Oskar strolled along the shelves, returning from time to time to their shared table with a book. Ever since Oskar had got into the habit of putting his arm around his friend while bringing his attention to something interesting in a book, female students of German literature had started gathering on the benches behind the glass walls of the reading room. At parties, when Oskar and Sebastian glided through the crowds separately, Sebastian, with a heavy heart, sometimes kissed a girl. When he lifted his head, he could count on seeing Oskar smiling at him from across the room. At the end of the evening, the girl would be led to the door and handed over to anyone passing by, like a piece of clothing. Then Oskar and Sebastian would walk together through the night until they had to part ways. They came to a standstill, the light from a streetlamp falling around them like a tent that neither of them wanted to leave. It was hard to decide on a suitable moment to say good-bye—this one, or the next? As the headlights of passing cars caused their combined shadow to rotate on its axis, the friends made a silent vow that nothing would ever change between them. The future was an evenly woven carpet of togetherness unrolling before them. When the chirp of the first bird sounded, they turned away and each disappeared into his half of the coming morning.