Schilf would never forget the accusing look of the murderer as he was arrested. The young man had trusted him at first glance. He had told Schilf that he came from the future, and that he had landed in this time in order to conduct a few groundbreaking experiments. He was working on nothing less than a solution to the grandfather paradox. He wanted to prove that changes in the past had no effect on later events at all; so a time traveler could kill his forebears without endangering his own existence in the future. Schilf continued listening with interest for another half hour before two plainclothes officers walked in and arrested the young man so courteously that none of the other people in the café noticed.
During the trial, the murderer had presented a file detailing the lives of his victims up to the year 2015. Desperately, he had assured the court over and over again that the victims were alive in the future, some of them were married and had successful careers. Moreover, they had agreed to the experiment. He himself was not like everyone else, he shouted. He did not live here, he was only a guest, on a work trip to a world without consequences, and therefore was not responsible for any actions, however strange. In the jungle of time, the time-machine murderer screamed as Schilf was leaving the room, every moment was itself the next one.
Schilf leaned against the wall in the corridor outside the courtroom. He knew that the jury would convict someone who would not learn, someone lonely, someone innocent in the tragic sense.
[6]
THE DETECTIVE RUBS BOTH HANDS OVER HIS FACE. When the InterCity train takes the next curve, he becomes aware of whirling flecks, as seagulls seem to follow the train like an ocean liner. Although the speed of the train clearly rules out the possibility of seagulls, which must be an optical illusion, he can even see their orange beaks and the black feathers on top of their heads when he squints.
Gently he strokes the smooth surface of the rolled-up magazine. It is not actually the contents of the article that fascinate him so much, but the feeling that he recognizes the voice of the person who wrote it. While reading, he could hear it in his head, as if the professor of physics were speaking to him in person. As to a friend. The detective is sure that this article has been written by someone who does not believe in what he is saying. Someone who doubts reality, despairs of it, as one who is lost in a labyrinth. The detective superintendent learned something else from the butterflies with their compound eyes: those who believe in nothing also know nothing. Without a reliable cure for doubt, there can be no cognitive orientation. Schilf would give anything to speak with this Sebastian about it. Perhaps he does not need a doctor, but a physics professor for the yawning abyss that has started opening up in front of him at the most inconvenient moments. His doctor had not done much more than ask him a load of questions. He had asked about Schilf’s successes in his work and the ever-increasing price he paid for them—memory loss, headaches, a loosening grip on reality. The following week the detective was shoved into a scanner like a loaf of bread into the oven, so that magnetic fields could throw the atomic nuclei in his head out of balance. Sometime after that, he sat once again in the wood-paneled study and the assistant brought him a coffee so that he would have something to stir. Schilf dropped one lump of sugar after another into the cup and kept on stirring. While he was doing this, the doctor told him about the secret subtenant in his head. Name: Glioblastoma multiforme. Age: definitely a few months, perhaps even several years. Size: 3.5 centimeters. Place of birth: the frontal lobe, a little left of center. Function: causing memory loss, chronic headaches, and a loosening grip on reality.
The sugar in the detective’s cup melted into the cooling liquid, forming a saturated solution. He had to stop stirring so that the doctor could pat him on the hand. On the table in front of him were the results of the MRI scan, photographs in tones of gray that Schilf found so attractive that he considered getting them framed. Glioblastoma multiforme sounded like a rare tree or a deformed insect, so he gave his subtenant a new name: ovum avis—bird’s egg. As the doctor was writing down the name of a specialist for the detective, Schilf rose and said farewell. He did not intend to return. And he would not go to the famous specialist. Anyone who regularly attends postmortem examinations does not expect much from having his own skull sawed open.
“ARE YOU STILL THERE? Can you hear me? Damn.”
Smiling, the detective shakes his head and stretches his spine until he hears a crack. Two rows behind him, someone is furiously pressing the keys of a mobile phone. The advent of the mobile has finally given human beings a means of expressing their metaphysical isolation and their deep-seated doubt about the existence of other life-forms. Can you hear me? Are you there? Who could claim with any certainty that the other person was really there and could hear you speaking? All sentient beings are necessarily solipsists and therefore occupied with ignoring that very fact throughout their lives, the detective thinks. He himself would have every reason to take his mobile phone out of his bag, dial the number to his own apartment, and wait to see if his new girlfriend picks up the phone—he still does not quite believe that she exists if she is not in front of him. Are you still there? He could ring himself or the bird’s egg in his head and ask the same question. If the doctor is right, Schilf has only a few weeks, at most a couple of months left of the rendezvous with the self that people generally call their existence. He would need this time for an investigation in which he himself would be the chief suspect. The connection between his new girlfriend and the bird’s egg had to be cleared up. Perhaps the time-machine murderer is an accomplice and the physics professor a valuable witness. The detective would also have to bridge larger gaps—to find out how the fragments of his life could make a whole. With some patience he would find a solution, one that at least he alone understood. After all, it is not every day that one is declared dead and then called the love of someone’s life within a few hours. Before he finally signs off, the only thing to be done, surely, is to make himself whole.
Somewhere in the growing distance, Julia rolls onto her other side and sighs in her sleep because the narrow room is slowly growing too warm for her. When Schilf thinks about her, about the soft-skinned being heavy with sleep in his bed, who quite naturally spends the day tidying his apartment and reading his books and glows with cheerfulness all the time like a puppy, his stomach contracts with a mixture of fear and happiness. He does not believe in the redeeming power of love, and therefore does not plan to connect his desire to live with the tingle in his stomach. Nevertheless, he does not want to die—so far he has gotten no further than this with his musings. The only thing certain is that Schilf and the detective must hurry at all costs if they still want anything in particular from each other.
[7]
AFTER CHANGING TRAINS IN KARLSRUHE, the detective decides to put his musings aside. From his bag he takes a leather pouch, and from this a matte-silver object no bigger than a pack of cards. His new girlfriend has given it to him. She thinks the game of kings suits him and that if someone were to write a book about him one day, he could be the chess-playing detective, just like Sherlock Holmes was the violin-playing detective. Schilf refrained from pointing out that Holmes was not really a detective and that the violin was not a game of strategy, and accepted the gift with thanks. When he presses the “on” button, the display lights up in shades of blue like a new day dawning. Schilf learned the rules of chess thirty years ago from a friend at school, without mustering any enthusiasm for the game. But he has hardly been able to put down the electronic game since he received it. This pleases Julia. She perches on the side of his armchair looking over his shoulder while he taps away at the blue screen, and her hair tickles him until he has lost and goes out for a meal with her.
The game that was interrupted the previous evening appears at the touch of a button. It is the detective’s turn, as always. The computer never needs more than a couple of seconds to make its move, but he takes half an hour over every one of his. It waits patiently for him. He is unable to work out the simplest
algorithm in his head, so he ties himself into knots with his calculations until he finally makes an incredibly clumsy move after rallying himself to “just give it a go.” The gadget lets him make his own fateful mistakes, so at the end he is plagued by the feeling that he has not been beaten but has checkmated himself.
At Offenburg, Schilf’s bishop embarks on a daring attack on the queenside, which he feels he has prepared for by advancing a phalanx of pawns. His little soldiers have marched determinedly against the enemy and are now looking the opposing queen full in the face. Just for fun, Schilf imagines that she has Rita Skura’s face. In the background, a couple of agitated officers are occupied with a plan that is too cunning for their own good. It has not fooled any grandmasters. It has also never worked.
Schilf’s army is literally fighting for its life when the train arrives in Freiburg. On the platform, waiting passengers drop their bags and press their hands to their ears. An infernal screeching of brakes suspends time for three whole seconds. The detective gathers himself and his things quickly.
As he shuffles along next to his greenish reflection on the long row of train windows, he asks himself for the umpteenth time why he plays chess against a stronger opponent as if his life depended on it, without ever once pressing the button to reverse a mistake. In real life he would reverse any number of mistakes without hesitation. He would have given the most personal match of his life—which ended with the fracture, a disastrous checkmate—a new twist. Perhaps the “touch-move” rule applies less to chess than to character, thought the detective, thinks the detective.
AT THE END OF THE PLATFORM, a woman in a flowery dress and a cardigan is waiting for a cup of coffee from the drinks machine. She does not bother to turn around.
“Schilf. Congratulations on your promotion.”
Rita Skura watches the final drops of coffee drip into her cup, giving Schilf enough time to recover from his shock. She takes the cup from the drip tray and sips from it before extending her right paw to the detective, a gesture that in defiance of several thousand years of cultural history has something threatening about it. She grabs the straps of his bag and tries to take it from him, but he resists indignantly. They tug back and forth a few times until Rita Skura suffers the first defeat of the day, as is evident from the look in her eyes. They walk side by side without another word. Secretly the detective steals a glance at his former student: the deep furrow above the bridge of her nose and the pursed lips, with which she sips from the cup as she walks. He is glad to see her again. At the police college he liked her ambition, her chin quivering constantly with tension, a testament to how seriously she took the world around her—it was rather touching. He almost envied her sincerity then. When he looks at her furrowed brow, he is nearly sorry that he had destroyed her childish trust in appearances with a single piece of advice. He had not remembered how short she was. Her bouffant hair barely reaches his shoulder.
Rita Skura takes long strides, and the skirt of her flowery dress swings around her legs like a sail whipping in a storm. She overtakes him on the steps up to the pedestrian bridge and waits at the top, visibly pleased at the opportunity to look down on him.
“Miss your train?” she asks. “Didn’t get out of bed on time?”
“Delay tactics,” the first detective chief superintendent pants as he walks up the steps. “To prolong the anticipation.”
Rita snorts derisively. She has waited on the platform for an hour and God knows she has no time to waste. When Schilf reaches the top step, she looks at him properly for the first time. Her gaze flits over him with an expression of suppressed rage. The detective wonders why she is not pretty, why all the female qualities in her do not make a pretty woman, but simply Rita Skura. The veins on the backs of her hands are prominent and look like satellite images of deltas in the Amazon River, but that cannot be the reason. She tosses the coffee cup into a trash can decisively, pinching her nose with the other hand at the same time to clear her ears. As if she is crashing in an airplane, Schilf thinks, feeling a ripping sensation in the cortex of his brain, going from his left temple down to his ear. The two of us have arrived in this world like seasick fish, he thinks, but he does not know what this means. He reaches for the knob on the handrail and closes his eyes as the pain rises and swells. He hears the people behind him cursing as they have to maneuver past, and he sees Rita slipping her foot out of her flat shoe and wiggling her toes to rearrange the holes in her stocking. But he cannot actually see anything with his eyes closed, and Rita Skura is not wearing stockings.
Schilf tears his eyes open again and stares Rita Skura in the face, shocked because what she is saying comes through to him only after some delay. Her lips are moving like those of an actress in a badly dubbed film.
“You don’t have to act the invalid with me,” she says. “I know you better than that.”
“That’s what I’m counting on,” he gasps in reply.
The headache disappears as quickly as it arrived. Schilf wipes the sweat from his brow with his shirtsleeve. Rita stares at him with knitted brows, turns abruptly, and walks on, shoveling air aside with both arms. Schilf has to make an effort to keep up with her. At the station exit he insists on having a sandwich, not knowing whether he is really hungry or simply wants to annoy his colleague. He will find out that these feelings are astonishingly similar.
Standing with their elbows on the sticky surface of a table, they listen to the soft squeaking of mozzarella between Schilf’s jaws.
“I’m burning in hell,” Rita says with a mixture of derision and wonder, “and you’re eating cheese.”
Broad shafts of sunlight suddenly fall through the glass front of the station, turning the people in the concourse into slivers of themselves. In the midst of this biblical light show, an unimpressed Rita Skura counts off the hell she is talking about on her fingers.
“Scandal at the hospital. Beheaded cyclist. And to top it off, a lunatic who is claiming that his son was kidnapped, though the son knows nothing of it.”
Schilf lowers his sandwich. “Oh?”
Rita picks up a piece of tomato that has dropped onto the table and puts it in her mouth. “Some family nonsense. The man reports a kidnapping and as soon as the phones are bugged, the boy calls from holiday camp, safe and sound.”
“And the father?”
“Apologizes profusely, withdraws his report, and assures us that no further investigations will be necessary.”
“That’s not for him to decide.”
“I know. But the case will peter out anyway. We have more important things to do.”
“Oh, the cyclist,” Schilf says. “You shouldn’t worry so much about him.”
Her index finger is pointing like a weapon at his head—directly at the bird’s egg, he thinks, feeling a faint pulsing.
“Don’t play Superman with me,” Rita says.
“I meant well.”
“In case you failed to notice when you read the file, this cyclist was the right-hand man of Medical Director Schlüter. Strange coincidence, isn’t it?”
Schilf suppresses a yawn, passes her the rest of his sandwich, and wipes his hands on a paper napkin.
“The press is roasting us on a spit,” Rita says with her mouth full. “People don’t like it when the gods in white are under suspicion.”
“And you come to the station yourself and wait an hour to welcome me in person?”
Rita shoves the last piece of bread into her mouth and chews for far too long. She does not object when Schilf takes a pack of cigarillos out of his pocket.
“I wanted to talk to you without being disturbed,” she says in an unusually quiet voice.
“This is a no-smoking station!” the sandwich man calls from behind the counter.
“And this is a smoking madman with good friends in the health and safety inspectorate!” Rita shouts back.
Schilf blows smoke through his nostrils and observes the play of light on the wisps as they rise through the air. The sandwich
man starts wiping his counter.
“Experimenting on patients,” Rita says. “Horrible stuff, don’t you think?”
“The kidnapping guy,” Schilf says. “What does he do?”
“He’s a professor of physics,” says Rita. “But that’s not what this is all about. Just try proving that a doctor has done something wrong. They’re all stonewalling. That’s where you come in. Detective Schilf?”
Schilf is no longer listening. He has wedged the cigarillo between his teeth, picked up his bag, and has already walked a few steps toward the exit.
“Come on,” he calls over his shoulder.
Behind the glass doors is a solid wall of heat. It shimmers in the air above the lipstick-red Corsa in the no-parking zone. In a sudden fit of respectfulness, Rita opens the rear door for Schilf. Moved by this, the detective climbs into the backseat. He had hoped for air-conditioning, but there is none. While a cursing Rita attempts to ease the car into traffic, Schilf finds time for a move with his knight that has occurred to him as a final opportunity for salvation. His defense is in tatters, his queen barricaded in by her own officers. Fleeing forward is his only option, moving another piece into the disputed area of the enemy kingdom. A gap opens up for Rita. The car moves forward in fits and starts. Her eyes seek out the detective’s gaze in the rearview mirror.
“Let’s get to the point, Schilf,” she says. “I wanted to suggest that you call the police chief.”
He has made a mistake that is stupid even for a beginner. The move was so irresponsibly rash that Schilf can hardly believe it when his knight disappears with a brief flicker of the screen. In the heat of battle, he has omitted to protect a particular square. He sinks back into the synthetic upholstery, exhausted. Rita’s Corsa is one of those cars that will always smell like new. The detective considers abandoning the game, tipping his own king over and surrendering. He looks out of the window in a rage. He sees light patches on the grassy banks of the Dreisam. Snowdrifts or seagulls that are lying on their fronts with their wings spread wide, or sleeping sheep, if sheep ever sleep—he is not entirely sure on this point. Rita clears her throat.