In Free Fall

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Six-legged specimens.” The little man stretches out his hand. “Franz Drayer. Pensioner and amateur lepidopterist, on the path to immortality. And what are you looking for?”

  “A two-legged specimen.”

  “Tall, blond, friendly face?”

  “You saw him?”

  “He was sitting in these ferns a couple of days ago. Almost at the same spot as you.”

  “Thank you,” the detective says. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “You can read about me in the relevant journal!”

  Schilf nods farewell and leaves a witness who does not matter to infinity.

  Puffing and cursing, he reaches the road. He is combing his hair with his fingers, removing small twigs, when a ringing sound disturbs the peace of the forest.

  “All right, you bastard. I’m listening.”

  “Rita Skura in top form! Delighted. Sadly, my price has risen in the meantime.”

  “What do you want, you miserable blackmailer?”

  Schilf allows himself an artificial pause and plucks a final burr from his trousers. The police car is parked a few meters away, looking like an uninvited guest amid nature’s anarchic profusion. Schnurpfeil is sitting behind the windshield, pale and stiff as a waxwork, loath to even glance at him. Schilf turns away and looks at his feet. He needs all his concentration and persuasive powers for the next sentences, and not a resentful police officer.

  “Listen, Rita. I need a little more time to clarify the matter. I’ll give you the name, to take the wind out of your bosses’ sails—otherwise, come Monday they’ll be setting the special forces on us. Are you still there? Still listening?”

  “Stop blustering, Schilf. Tell me what you want.”

  “I want my man to remain free. Don’t take him in until I close the file. And no press.”

  This statement does not pass unnoticed. It’s half an eternity before Rita is able to reply. When she does, she sounds utterly uncertain.

  “We’re talking about a murderer. I think you’re losing your marbles.”

  “And you don’t have them all yet, Rita, my child. And I mean all the people who count as suspects in your case. Where are you right now?”

  “In my office.”

  “Are you waiting for the next call from the police chief?”

  “You bastard. You know full well I can’t guarantee what you’re asking of me.”

  “Oh yes you can. Call me again when you’ve made up your mind.”

  Schilf hangs up. He takes loping strides toward the police car, slides into the backseat, and taps the frozen Schnurpfeil on the shoulder.

  “You can drop me off at the police apartment. Then go to HQ and pick up my travel bag from Rita Skura’s office. You’ll probably be the only person to come out of there alive today.”

  The senior policeman starts the engine with a roar and puts his foot down. As they snake toward the valley through narrow bends, Schilf hums a sentence that is stuck in his head: You have to complete something before it’s all over.

  [2]

  WHILE SCHILF SLEEPS IN HIS CLOTHES and shoes on the sofa of the police apartment, looking like a corpse in one of his murder cases, Sebastian is standing in his kitchen where every drawer handle is an expression of Maike’s aesthetic sensibility. He is preparing an elaborate dinner. The day on which he embraced his son in scout camp, on which his distressed wife ran through the door only to storm out again after a terrible row, and on which a detective wanted to discuss physics—this horror of a day still stubbornly refuses to come to an end. Sebastian has spent the afternoon looking out from the balcony, concentrating on not calling the gallery because he wanted to give Maike time to get used to the situation. When he was unable to bear the silence in the apartment and Liam’s polite reserve any longer, he went out to buy groceries for dinner.

  Now he is cooking a Thai meal, following a recipe in a cookbook that he found at the back of a cupboard. It was still wrapped in plastic—an unwanted gift. Sebastian stands at the work surface, hunched as if he is trying to express humility before the highly specialized kitchen equipment in front of him. Even the simplest can opener fulfills its function better than Sebastian has fulfilled his.

  To be a good physicist. To live a happy life. Not to upset the people he loves.

  It is quiet like the eye of a tornado. Sebastian enjoys following the instructions in the cookbook. No pros and cons to weigh up, no decisions to make. He pounds coriander seeds, peppercorns, and cumin seeds into a rough paste with a heavy pestle and mortar, tosses slices of chili and ginger into the food processor, and almost forgets to thaw the prawns in water. Every now and then he bends down and takes another ingredient out of the two shopping bags that lie at his feet like obedient pets, losing some of their girth each time. Liam came into the kitchen ten minutes ago, and has been fighting his usual impatience before dinner by carrying glasses and plates from the cupboard to the kitchen table one by one, refilling the salt shaker, and constantly asking for other tasks.

  “Why are we eating in here?”

  “It’s cozier.”

  In truth, Sebastian would not dare to attempt sitting down together in the familiar environment of the dining room.

  “You can set the table,” he says for the third time.

  The washed vegetables glow in appetizing traffic-light colors, reaching their visual high point just before they sink into a reddish mass along with the prawns. When Liam comes up to the stove to peek into the pans, Sebastian strokes his head and swallows hard as he realizes how perfectly the curve of the child’s skull fits into the cup of his hand. He snatches a sidelong look at his son, who does not notice. He looks at the boy’s smooth forehead, the delicate nose with its arched nostrils, the pale eyes, which hint at depths as appealing as they are dangerous. As he looks at Liam, he gets a heavy, sinking feeling in his stomach. He is shocked by the strength of this love, which is capable of sending a grown man—with all his complex memories, convictions, hopes, and ideas—to a place outside of space and time, a place in which nothing except the laws of love apply. As Liam twiddles a wooden spoon with a wagging motion of his finger, Sebastian experiences, with painful clarity, the potential “no longer being” that is inherent in all creatures and things. From now on, Liam can also be seen as the absence of Liam, and that is hard to bear. Sebastian is irretrievably tied to an anti-Liam, whose visible body is a door, the entrance to hell, a door that is not closing properly. Ever since Sebastian has gotten his son back, it has cost him enormous effort not to send him out of the room.

  “Damn!”

  It was stupid of him to rub his eyes with his hands. The chili and onion take effect, sending Sebastian to the sink, where he washes his face with cold water.

  Maike smells the food as soon as she unlocks the door and steps into the hall. It smells of appeasement. Sebastian is standing at the stove with puffy eyes and a red nose, and Liam is doubled over with laughter, pointing at him. The spit between Liam’s teeth is green from secretly nibbled peppers. Maike stands in the door frame and wants to laugh with Liam and cry with Sebastian. She asks herself why she washed the floors of all the rooms in the gallery on her hands and knees in order to put off coming home.

  “What’s going on here, then?” she asks, dropping to her knees to catch Liam as he rushes into her arms.

  “Dad’s got Thai in his eyes!”

  Liam puts up with a kiss and runs back to the stove. He stands on tiptoe and devotes himself to stirring the rice, as though the viscous mass on the wooden spoon could bind him to normality.

  “How was your day?” Sebastian asks. For a second, it really seems as if everything were as usual.

  As Usual is the worst thing that can happen to Maike right now. She drops onto a chair and smiles helplessly into the growing silence. She feels as though she has been gone not for a few days but for years, and is now returning to a life in which she can participate only as a spectator. Sebastian, who is
screwing up his eyes as he tastes his curry, seems as alien to her as an actor who has stepped out of character without warning. She wants to take hold of him and shake him and scream at him, or perhaps hug him and stroke him and smell him, too—whatever it takes to get her husband back.

  Since this morning, however, it has been impossible for her to make any movement in his direction, so she can only sit and look and think. It is not only Dabbelink’s death that has driven her half out of her senses. Nor Liam’s mysterious kidnapping. It is the coincidence of these two things as well as the fact that, in some final way, she understands nothing. Emptiness is not an opponent, and it is impossible to defend a family without an opponent. If Maike had experienced a little less happiness and a little more unhappiness in her life thus far, she would know what to call this empty feeling: fear.

  “A strange day,” Maike says after clearing her throat, a very necessary action. “A funny guy came to see me in the gallery.”

  “As tall as Dad?” Liam asks. “Only old? Bulging tummy, and a face like an elephant?”

  “How do you know?”

  “That’s our detective.”

  “You’re joking.”

  Maike has grown paler than before, if that were possible. Her patched-up calm is crumbling at the edges.

  “Almost done!” Sebastian calls to her in an artificially cheery voice, like a TV chef. Maike ignores him.

  “Are you saying,” she says to Liam, “that this guy works for the police? And that he was here with you both?”

  “Just after you left,” Sebastian says in a low voice.

  “I can’t bear this any longer,” Maike whispers.

  “He promised to make everything OK.” Liam’s voice breaks with desperate enthusiasm. “He’s clever.”

  “Everything is OK, my darling,” Maike says to Liam. And to Sebastian, “What did you talk about?”

  Sebastian brings a pan to the table and ladles curry onto the plates.

  “About the nature of time.”

  He asks Liam to serve the rice, and wipes the hot ceramic stove top with a cloth. A burnt smell rises. Sebastian opens the balcony door slightly.

  “The nature of time,” Maike repeats, scornfully.

  She mixes rice with the curry and adds salt and pepper without tasting her food.

  “Is he coming again?”

  “Hopefully,” Liam says.

  His wife and child are sitting in front of their plates with their cutlery raised, so Sebastian looks at them encouragingly, fishing prawns from his plate and stacking two of them on his fork, by way of demonstration. Maike glances around the kitchen as if she is looking for something: a spoon, a napkin, an answer.

  “With a serious crime, you can’t just withdraw the charges,” Sebastian says. “They’re investigating the kidnapping. It’s a matter of routine.”

  “Have the police been to Gwiggen?” she asks. “Have they questioned the staff? Found out who took Liam there?” Her voice sounds as if someone were dictating to her. “Have they been to the service station? Did they look for clues? Find witnesses? Question the petrol pump attendant?”

  “Maike,” Sebastian says. Nothing more, but he repeats it. “Maike.”

  Not far from the balcony, a group of blackbirds is conferring in the chestnut tree. It is clear from their bickering that they are discussing something urgent. Do blackbirds even perch at the tops of trees? Do they spy on apartments in old buildings, or are they earthbound birds who leave their accustomed surroundings only in exceptional circumstances? And what constitutes an exception?

  When a magpie lands in the branches the blackbirds fall silent.

  “A pity it’s Saturday already,” Liam complains. “Otherwise Oskar would be here.”

  Sebastian bends down to him and presses his arm.

  “There, there,” he says, “it’s all right.”

  Liam loads his fork with curry and shoves it into his mouth. He chews once, twice, and then sits still looking at his plate as his eyes fill with water.

  “Still too hot?” Sebastian asks.

  Liam shakes his head and swallows with a gulp. “Spicy,” he says quietly.

  “I’m sorry.” Sebastian lowers his hands as Maike pushes her plate away from her. “You don’t like it either?”

  “I do,” she says, “but I’m not hungry.”

  “I can eat the rice,” Liam says. “The rice is good.”

  After a few more mouthfuls Sebastian puts down his fork and knife too, because the kitchen seems to be filled with the sound of his chewing. Maike is drinking water and Liam is trying to spear grains of rice on the tines of his fork. A drop of water falls from the tap and hits the stainless steel sink.

  “The morning after the kidnapping,” Maike says, “you rang the camp in Gwiggen and told them Liam was sick, didn’t you?”

  “Do we have to do this now?” Sebastian asks.

  “And no one at the camp wondered about this illness, even though Liam had actually arrived there sometime before?”

  “I’ve told you everything I know.”

  “Do you wonder, perhaps,” Maike says, her voice rising in a spiral of hysteria, “why your super-detective hasn’t cleared up this point yet?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll tell you why.”

  Sebastian resists the impulse to press his hands over his ears. He has never heard his wife speak in these shrill tones before. He has thought of Maike as a strong person ever since he met her, and he has never wondered what the conditions for this strength are. Just as Maike wants to grab hold of him and shake him, he, too, feels the urge to torment the figure on the other side of the table, the figure on the verge of a nervous breakdown, until it releases his wife. Until the usual, cool, collected Maike, stylish and composed to the last, appears again. Sebastian does not want to hear the next words. They have been in the room for some time, and are just waiting to be spoken by one of them.

  “The police are not investigating,” Maike says, “because they don’t believe you.”

  “I’m going to my room now,” Liam says.

  No one stops him. Sebastian sits hunched on his chair, his arms hanging heavily by his side. He looks at Liam as if he were watching a departing train. The food on the table is no longer steaming, and there is a wrinkled skin forming over the curry. This is what a farewell dinner looks like, Sebastian thinks, or, more precisely, something within him thinks—a new, unknown voice, as if spoken by an observer in his head.

  “The problem,” he says, amazed at his own calm, “is that you don’t believe me.”

  Maike finishes her glass of water, but does not know what to do with her hands after that.

  “Sebastian,” she says quietly, “have I ever given you cause to be jealous? Over Ralph?”

  Sebastian’s knee crashes against the table as he stands up abruptly, and curry slops off the plates onto the tablecloth. He stands with his back to the room, facing the glass door to the balcony, searching for the faint reflection of his face. He looks himself in the eye in order to know what to do next. Silently, he practices the sentence that he must say, a sentence that includes the words “truth,” “trust,” “I,” and “Dabbelink.” It is probably the only chance to save himself and Maike. A new feeling keeps him from speaking. It is the conviction that it is too late, and he finds it strangely uplifting.

  “Please, Sebastian! I’m asking you, please!”

  When he turns around, Maike’s eyes implore him. Sebastian feels like sliding down against the wall and dropping his head between his knees. That would probably have been a good idea, certainly better than the uncertain journey on which he has embarked. At the kitchen doorway, he looks at Maike again properly, the way she is sitting there, her frame slighter than usual, thin and hunched. He smells the fear that makes her hard and strange. He sees her eyelids fluttering and her agitated hands clawing the tablecloth. Sebastian does not know how anyone with such small hands can survive in a world like this, or bring up a child, or love a man
like him. He shares Maike’s conviction that she and Liam are simply victims. He bears his guilt alone and out into the hall.

  “I’m taking your car,” he calls. “Mine’s been impounded. See you later.”

  He has never felt the weakness of mankind so clearly as during these few steps out of the apartment. The affectation of walking upright, the power of speech and free will, is suddenly exposed as a laughable hoax. Here are the car keys, the stair landing, the cast-iron streetlamps, the trees and the buildings, and here is Maike’s little car on a side street. The world is a signage system he just has to follow.

  A liberating sense of clarity divides Sebastian’s thoughts into squares on a grid. The voice in his head tells him that he has just made an unforgivable and probably irrevocable mistake. In the continuous chain of horrible events that his life has become, walking out of the kitchen is the crowning glory. It wouldn’t be difficult to turn on his heel, climb back up the stairs, and steer the story a different way. But the observer in Sebastian recognizes that unforgivable mistakes are not the result of inattention, error, or not knowing better.

  What distinguishes them is that they permit no alternative, even in full knowledge of the circumstances.

  The central locking clicks. Sebastian feels the vibration of the engine in his arms and legs. He is a perfectly normal person driving a small car through the neighborhood in which he lives, shops, and works. He crosses the main road leading out of town, which is busy throughout the day regardless of what is happening in the world at large, and enters the enormous network of junctions, intersections, and connections that span the planet like the synapses of a giant brain. It’s amazing how little it takes to make a ruinous decision, Sebastian thinks. Soon after, he is on the autobahn.

  [3]

  IT CANNOT BE SAID THAT RITA SKURA and Detective Schilf have absolutely nothing in common. Like Rita, Schilf hated birds as a child. He had his reasons. They gobbled up the butterflies with whom he conducted epistemological debates beneath the walnut tree. They had immobile faces that showed neither pain nor joy. They stared at him fixedly, concealing a knowledge, which, in his opinion, they did not deserve. He thought it was unfair that they alone surveyed the world from above. If he had known then that it is always the observer who creates reality, he would have despised the birds even more for being the creators of a failed world.