Perhaps, thinks Maike, looking at an Asian woman who is pushing a metal trolley down the aisle, perhaps this is what is waiting at home for me. The disaster I have feared more or less consciously for so many years. Perhaps it even has a woman’s name, like a hurricane. Perhaps my own name.
Her thoughts are about to tip over into the abstruse again. She buys a coffee from the Asian woman. The cup is so hot that she can barely hold it in her hand. Two border guards appear in the carriage and the German one holds Maike’s coffee for her so that she can dig out her ID card.
She feels her worry like a thousand pinpricks in her side. But whatever is waiting for her in Freiburg, she can be sure of one thing: if Sebastian swears that all is well with Liam, then it’s true. Everything else can be borne. One of the reasons Maike loves cycling is because she enjoys estimating her own strength correctly. She drinks, burns her lips, and takes another sip anyway. The Swiss idyll has been left behind on the other side of the border; outside, a pale sun is conducting the overture to another relentless summer day. Let’s see what happens, Maike thinks. Later, she will say the same to the detective: Let’s see what happens. Long before that, she will see the face of her friend Ralph Dabbelink on the newspaper racks in Freiburg Station. It will be the beginning of a new list: the most terrible days of her life. And the detective will take second place on the list of people she is most suspicious of, just ahead of Oskar, who has topped this list for years, and just behind Sebastian, the new contender who has jumped straight to number one.
[3]
THE SUN GLINTS ON THE SNOW-WHITE STUCCO. Front doors and balcony doors are open, and a state-of-the-art racing bike is leaning against a streetlamp covered in ivy. The building is lovely to look at and perfumed with the scent of wisteria, but it resembles empty packaging. All this beauty cries out for happiness, and the people who live here are no longer happy. To the detective, everything looks wrong and empty, as if the entire street has been turned into a postcard, a memory of itself. When he steps onto the footbridge, Bonnie and Clyde swim up to him on the anthracite-colored canal. From his bag, Schilf takes out a currant bun he bought on his leisurely walk through the town center. The ducks paddle against the current so that the pieces of bread drop down directly onto their beaks.
“Back, back, back,” they chorus.
“Look out,” the detective calls to them. “Look out.”
But Bonnie and Clyde clearly don’t know what to make of the parrot Agfa’s words. They turn like two synchronized swimmers and paddle swiftly down the canal. Schilf brushes crumbs from his hands and walks into the entrance hall, studying the names by the doorbells. Just as he finds what he is looking for, a thunderous bang causes the building to rumble. Up above, someone has slammed a door. Quick steps clatter down the stairs and a woman rushes out of the front door, straight past the detective. He touches his fingers to his forehead so as to raise an imaginary hat. He does not recognize the woman. Her blond hair waves around her head and falls over her eyes as she bends over to unlock her bicycle. The detective watches, transfixed. She is wearing a sleeveless shirt and cotton shorts; the morning light turns her tanned arms and legs into polished wood. In contrast, her blond hair seems far too bright, as if she had borrowed it from another pale person. The woman is livid—she hurls her bike around, swings a leg into the air, and, already moving at speed, shoves her feet into the straps on the pedals. A few seconds later, she has disappeared around the corner at an impressive angle. It occurs to the detective that he has never seen a more beautiful person.
He avoids pressing the buzzer, and climbs the stairs to an apartment on the second floor. It is apparent that someone is listening behind the door. He approaches and presses his ear against the wood in imitation. The tension is electric. Two men, separated only by a piece of wood, are straining with all their senses toward each other, as if they want to blend into a single creature. The door is wrenched open.
Sebastian is standing there with the remains of an interrupted fight on his lips—his lungs are pumped up, his mouth tensed for a scream. Helplessly his gaze moves across the detective’s face.
“Do you have a trash can?” Schilf asks.
He stretches out a scrunched-up paper bag toward his host-to-be, and bread crumbs fall out of it. Sebastian slaps the ball of paper out of his hand.
“Get lost!”
The detective has, of course, already put his foot in the door. They look each other in the eye through the narrow opening. Instead of cursing and tussling over entry to the apartment, they are suddenly standing very close together, as if enveloped in a bubble of stillness in which something beyond language is happening. An encounter. A pause, at the intersection of two different kinds of chaos.
The definitive entanglement of our lives, the detective thought, the detective thinks.
The dripping of a tap behind Sebastian’s back marks the passage of time. A jackhammer in a distant street marks the passage of time. There will probably be many questions. Why each of them feels the other has come to help him. Whether it is possible to stop a life from falling apart. How to patch it up in retrospect. If there is such a thing as mutual recognition at first sight between two strangers.
But they cannot stand like this forever.
“Professor,” Schilf says softly, apologetically, “I’m from the police.”
Sebastian immediately opens the door fully and walks down the hall with stiff legs. Without turning to look at his visitor, he drops onto the sofa in the living room, puts his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.
“I’m sorry,” the detective says as Sebastian finally looks up and rubs his reddened eyes, “but I’m still here.”
Stillness seeps into the room again, but this time it does not feel intimate. It is like the silence between two travelers waiting on a platform for different trains. While Sebastian stares at the ceiling as if there were something to see up there, the detective looks around the room. The furnishings have lost their tasteful unity. They stand around indifferently like extras between takes.
Within seconds, Schilf thinks, everything here has become the past.
He listens for the echo of a scene that the room must have heard, for objects don’t have ears they can block. The shadow of a man still passes over the walls, pacing up and down, trying to find a way out, his arms raised to protect himself from something heavy that is threatening to fall on him. A woman’s screams still echo in the leather of the armchair.
This is a film! This is not reality!
Her manicured fingers have upset the pile of magazines on the side table; she had wanted to fling them onto the floor, but hasn’t after all.
Ralph dead? My son kidnapped? And I am cycling happily in Airolo, not knowing any of this?
Happiness and not knowing are the same thing, dear Mrs. Physicist, Schilf thinks.
The sofa shakes with the impact of a man’s fist.
Look! At! Me! I couldn’t ring you, for God’s sake!
A pause, a deep breath.
Keep your voice down!
The man’s laughter makes the curtains tremble.
Don’t worry. He’s dead to the world. The motion sickness pills.
The laughter trails off. The print of a woman’s hand on the glass of the side table fades away.
Something is … wrong … I can’t …
And what about me?
The man’s voice rises, driving the walls apart, transforming the room into a cathedral in which every word hangs in the air.
Do you want to know what I’ve been through? This is what it feels like, like this!
The armchair judders to one side as a small body falls into it, shaken roughly by the shoulders.
Let me go, Sebastian!
The final cry is like a bolt of lightning and the slamming door thunder. The quiet after the storm is what remains. Naked scorn. The neighbor’s dog barks with three voices: soft, medium, and loud.
“Do you know what it’s like to have lost everything??
?? Sebastian asks.
“More than you can imagine.”
“What’s your name, anyway?”
“Schilf.” Sebastian slowly takes his gaze from the ceiling and repeats the name, which feels good in his mouth. Schilf.
Their eyes meet. Somewhere in the apartment an object falls to the ground but neither of them turns his head. The detective wonders why it is suddenly so dark. The headlights of a passing car lift the room and turn it on its own axis; Sebastian sits on the sofa, Schilf in the armchair, then Schilf on the sofa, Sebastian in the armchair. Then the car is gone. They nod to each other. The combine harvesters are working in the fields outside the town; somewhere Julia is sighing in her sleep. The detective wheezes air out of his lungs once (ovum) and twice (avis). A sharp beak is pecking the shell of the bird’s egg. It is bright again, midday in summer, with dusty shafts of light by the window. Sebastian looks at Schilf with a mixture of suspicion and interest. He leans forward, almost as though he wants to take the detective by the hand.
“I want no further investigations,” he says.
“You don’t want to know who kidnapped your son?”
“I want to forget.”
“Bad idea. You’ll only realize when it’s too late.”
“I’m not interested in too late. I’m interested in now. I don’t know what the word ‘future’ means anymore. There are situations where you have to draw the line. Do you see?”
“Even before you started going into detail,” the detective says.
When Sebastian raises his arms to brush his hair out of his face, they both see how badly his hands are trembling. The skin beneath his rolled-up sleeves is thickly covered with scratched insect bites, some moist and inflamed and others crusted with yellow. Sebastian buttons his cuffs.
“Can I get you something to drink?”
“Yogi tea.”
“Sorry, what?”
“Look in the kitchen. A woman like your wife will have something like that.”
“How do you know Maike?”
“She just ran past me.”
Sebastian pauses for a moment before he gets up and leaves the room. Schilf listens to the rustling in the kitchen cupboards, which stops when Sebastian finds the box of tea. The detective stands up quietly and crosses the room as carefully as if the floor were littered with dry twigs that might snap beneath his feet. He has no problem finding the study. Books fill the shelves and lie in piles on the floor. The computer keyboard on the desk is covered with a strangely shaped piece of red card. Schilf rifles through a pile of papers with practiced fingers.
“The Problem of Precision in the Constants of Nature,” “The Purpose of Absurdity,” “Materialism and the Metaphysical Landscape”—We cannot ascertain that the universe was created with regard to a living observer …
Or by an observer, the detective thinks.
He opens and closes drawers. A Yogi tea has to be brewed for about fifteen to twenty minutes on a low flame.
Pencils, used paperclips, letterhead paper from the university. Right at the back of a drawer, there is a photo of two young men in formal suits, slim as whippets, hands casually shoved into the pockets of their striped trousers. Although the faces are turned toward each other, their gazes are lost in the middle distance. Schilf puts back the photo. A normal detective would find a decisive clue among such documents. Schilf finds nothing.
When Sebastian brings in the tea, Schilf has been sitting in the armchair for some time. The scent of ginger and cardamom fills the room.
“This doesn’t taste too bad.” Carefully Sebastian puts down his cup; his hands have steadied.
“Do you collect art?” Schilf asks, pointing at two knobbly paintings whose thickly applied explosions of color in red and black portray a throbbing headache. Clearly the artist takes a different view; he has marked the titles of the paintings in crude letters across the canvas: Blackmail I and II.
“My wife runs a gallery.”
“And likes cycling?”
“Is this the start of the interrogation?”
“Not an interrogation.” Schilf waves his teaspoon dismissively. “Just asking some questions.”
“What’s the difference?”
“You. You are not a suspect, but someone who has reported a crime, and also a witness.”
Sebastian laughs, and does not reply.
“If you’re ready,” Schilf says, “I would like to ask you a few questions.”
“About the kidnapping?”
Now the detective laughs.
“No. About the nature of time.”
[4]
“YOU’RE A STRANGE KIND OF DETECTIVE. It’s not that I don’t want to talk about the nature of time. That’s my job, after all. But do you really want me to speak to you as I would to my first-year students? That would be like a journey into the past. As if all this was over. Would you like to do me a kindness? Shall we talk as if nothing has happened? You’re looking at me like a doll without a brain.”
Sebastian takes a sip of tea, a second sip, then a third before he continues.
“When I was at school I once wanted to write a story in which a man finds out that he is surrounded only by dolls. I’ve no idea what happened to that story. I never wrote it down. So I’m going to talk to you as if I am talking to a doll, Detective. As if I’m talking to … a friend.
“Do you know what materialism is? The love of money? No. Or perhaps it’s that, too. The materialism I am talking about is a worldview that links everything back to one principle: that of matter. Seen this way, even thoughts and ideas are merely manifestations of the material. Dreams, for example—they’re a biochemical product.
“This view of the world is very popular. It has pushed religious belief aside, and replaced it, in fact. The Commandments of materialism are simple and threefold. Thou shalt not doubt the material nature of the universe. Thou shalt trust blindly in the chronological causality of all events. Thou shalt honor the objectivity and uniqueness of tangible reality.
“These statements of belief anchor materialists in the world better than God ever could. There is of course the odd phenomenon that contradicts the principles of materialism—or seems to—and therefore remains inexplicable, at least for the moment. But there is an unfailing remedy for such doubts. You simply paste labels over the holes in this view of the world. An example?
“Not even the most brilliant scientist has any idea why an apple falls from above to below. He simply calls this lack of knowledge ‘gravity.’ Coincidence is another of these labels. Possibly déjà vu and intuition, too. The unknowable pinned down by the act of naming. Do I hear you say that ninety-nine percent of all concepts are such labels? You may be right. If I were able to unite all the sciences, something that has existed for a long time would emerge from the process: language.
“I’ve never liked labels. When I was in school, I found it hard to believe in teachers who wrote numbers on the blackboard but could not explain what gravity was. Instead of continuing to listen to them, I waited until I was old enough to read Kant. I had always suspected my mind of doing secret things—I had an inkling that it added something to my cognition, that it brought everything I perceived into a ready-made order, creating a world that it could understand. Kant was able to prove that—he showed me time and space as forms of human perception. It was not a matter of whether or not I believed him. I felt that he was right.
“All paths lead to enlightenment and none lead back! For a long time, I was tormented by the fact that my research was clearly not related to the tiniest particles and the laws which govern them, but to the physicist who studied them. At some point I came to terms with the question of whether the scientist is striving for truth in a world of objective reality, or in a world of apparitions. Instead of torturing myself further on this question, I annoyed my colleagues by claiming that we’re engaged in psychology rather than in physics. It’s just a matter of definition, isn’t it? There’s no cause for despair as long as there’s logic,
that long-standing barrier between us and the bottomless abyss. Perhaps the people who called me esoteric were not wrong after all.
“Please do light up! That way you’re one of two people who are allowed to smoke in this apartment. Here’s the ashtray—you can believe in its material nature or not, but it will fulfill its function in any case.
“It’s very much the same with time. Time fulfills its function, and we don’t know much more about it than that. It’s generally accepted that time is a strictly regulated process with a necessary order of cause and consequence. The only things that humanity shares willingly are its mistakes!
“Take this building, for example. They started work on it in 1896. The hammering of carpenters echoed through the streets in 1897, and soon after that the building was finished. What do you think was the reason for its construction? A lack of living quarters in the Wilhelminian period? Or an aesthetic love of the neo-Gothic and neo-Baroque styles? Let me tell you this, Detective Schilf. The reason for its construction was its completion.
“You smile. But it goes some way toward proving my theory. What are the chances of an architect’s plan actually beaming a house? Have a guess. Eighty percent? Good. The probability of a finished building being preceded by an architectural plan is nearly a hundred percent. The construction enables the existence of the building, but the building determines its own construction. Therefore the likelihood of a building being the cause of its own construction is significantly higher than the opposite assumption.
“You’re still smiling. I ask you this: What is time when we can prove that an effect logically precedes its own cause? Now you’re laughing. I think that you have understood me from the very beginning. I see it in your blank look.
“Don’t say anything. Forget this little play of thoughts. It was only to shake the gates of your imagination. Please don’t use the saucer, Schilf. I’ve brought you an ashtray specially. Or can’t you see it?
“Let’s get to the Many-Worlds Interpretation. You must know that God is guilty of its creation—or rather: its nonexistence. Stupidly, human life all comes down to a miracle, by which I mean an impressive instance of coincidence. During the big bang, the universe could have developed in an infinite number of ways. The number of possibilities that allowed for biological life was infinitely small. Despite this, the path that led to our existence was chosen. All the constants of nature that we observe are exactly calibrated to enable an unimportant cluster of biomass called the human being to exist among them. Given the tiniest deviation from the laws of physics we would not exist.