Birds were also the source of nerve-racking noise. They didn’t give a damn about other living things who wanted to think, play, or sleep. Often the little Schilf went to his parents in bed in the middle of the night. I can’t sleep, he would cry. The birds are screaming in the garden, and trampling on the roof!
His parents laughed about that for years after he had left home, but Schilf didn’t find it funny. All those nights he had been unable to sleep, they had assured him that not a single bird could be heard for miles around. From then on, he had believed them to be on the side of the enemy.
Schilf has not thought about this for a long time; it must have turned up in his dreams. He awakens with the feeling that the sharp edge of a beak is boring into the soft inner sanctum of his skull. If only he could be left in peace to think, he would be able to ask himself what the little detective would have said about the bird’s egg in the big detective’s head.
Confused, he lies in a gloomy room, and it takes some time for him to realize where he is. The shadows around him are the furniture in the police apartment, and the shrill sounds that are tearing at his nerves are not coming from the throats of birds but from a ringing telephone. Schilf presses on the buttons of his mobile to no avail until he hits on the idea of getting up from the sofa to answer the landline.
“Is that you, Rita?”
A sunny laugh comes down the line.
“Sorry, there’s no Rita here. It’s me.”
There are not many me’s in the detective’s life. Most of the people he gets to know well disappear behind the bars of a penal institution sooner or later. So he doesn’t have to think for long.
“How did you get the number of the police apartment?”
“You gave it to me.”
Julia is right—for every “me” there is a “you.” Schilf’s new girlfriend has not been wrong about a single thing since he met her, and she seems to find that perfectly natural. The detective can see her now, sitting in the armchair next to the coffee table, hooking her finger into a hole in her sock.
“Did I wake you up?” she asks.
Schilf has not had the chance to switch on the light yet. Impenetrable darkness lurks behind the open doors of the kitchen and the bathroom, as if night were being produced for the entire country there.
“No,” he says. “What do you want?”
The laugh comes down the line again.
“To ask how you are.”
This is not an unusual request, but it surprises Schilf. Julia is ten years older than Rita Skura, but to him she stands just as clearly on the other side of the divide between young and old as Rita does. She is part of a new informal generation, a generation that treats everyone like a good friend. With someone uncomplicated like her, Schilf, with his respect for the infinite complexity of things, can relax and feel like a relic from a bygone age. A person like Julia, who can barge her way into a stranger’s life with the words “Don’t have a job, don’t have any family, and I don’t like the benefit reforms,” is perfectly capable of ringing just to ask how he is.
“Good,” Schilf says, which is true and false at the same time, and therefore needs elaboration. “I’ve found the murderer. Now I’ve got to protect him from the police.”
“I thought you worked for the police.”
“That doesn’t make things any easier.”
“Have you fallen in love with the murderer?”
Now it is Schilf’s turn to laugh. He wishes he could see life through Julia’s eyes, just for once. It must be like a building with a very straightforward design. Not your everyday detached house—that would be too boring; but perhaps a circus tent with an entrance, an exit, benches to sit on, and a roof. The detective can practically smell the sweet scent of the sawdust.
“Not exactly,” Schilf says. “For me, the murderer is a great man, the kind of person we owe something to. I owe him a thorough investigation of this case. Anything else would destroy him.”
“But it’s your job to destroy the lives of murderers.”
“There are subtle differences.”
“The good policeman saves the poor criminal! Sounds romantic.”
The length of the telephone cable and the size of the apartment allow Schilf to reach the balcony door. The balcony is so small that there is barely room to stand. People only ever want to save themselves, the detective thinks. The difference lies in what they want to save themselves from.
“I would do everything I can to help this man,” Schilf says, “whether you believe it or not.”
“I believe you,” Julia says tenderly. She has interpreted his long silence correctly. “I believe everything you tell me. I have to, for structural reasons.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you understand?”
“No.”
“I love you.”
The detective shakes his head involuntarily. There it is again, the notion that his life is completely out of control. The distant throbbing of a headache announces itself. Schilf suddenly thinks about Maike and realizes at the same time that he has skipped lunch and slept through dinner. He lights a cigarillo and inhales. The nicotine sets free a couple of endorphins somewhere in his body—he feels a slight dizziness and a gentle release. That’s what dying must be like, smoking a cigarillo on an empty stomach.
“So you’ll be staying a few more days,” Julia says.
“Looks like it.”
“Great. I’ll come to visit.”
“I’m not free tomorrow,” the detective says quickly. “I have to do something.”
“The day after tomorrow, then.”
A group of young people are walking in the street below, and their voices carry up to Schilf. Young men, rendered soft and bloated by the love of their mothers, and young women who have made up their eyelashes like spiders’ legs. They slap each other’s backs, tug each other along, lean over parked cars, staring into the dark interior. They seem aimless, incidental, a mere episode in history. At the sight of them, Schilf finds it hard to believe what human beings can achieve on this earth when they join forces. The females are still wearing shoes that are impossible to walk in.
“What would you say,” he asks his girlfriend, “if I had to go on a journey sometime soon? On my own?”
“Schilf,” Julia says, with an earnestness that takes the detective by surprise, “you haven’t asked me about my past. I won’t ask about your future. That’s what they call a deal.”
“OK,” Schilf says, using a word he detests, but which suits her “deal.” Perhaps life would be a circus tent, thinks the detective, if people had the right concepts. Concepts like rubber gloves, so you could touch things without getting your hands dirty. Julia has a lot of such concepts.
“OK,” he says again. “See you the day after tomorrow, then.”
They send kisses through their telephones, but Schilf purses his lips clumsily and makes smacking noises that are far too loud. He puts the receiver down on the windowsill and finishes smoking his cigarillo. The monotonous beep of the busy signal blends with the darkness. His inner observer has not said a word during the entire conversation with Julia. A wave of exhaustion that the detective cannot explain sweeps over him, and he decides to go back to bed.
[4]
THE SUN HAS SET INTO THE HAZE OVER THE CITY, and has taken with it not only the light but the heat of the day. Night has come out of its hiding place at the bottom of the lake more quickly than usual, and crept into the lanes. It is cool and humid, as if summer is ending today. The air already smells of poorly lit pavements, hunched shoulders, and damp hats.
Maike’s car is parked near the lake. Sebastian is sitting behind the steering wheel, trying to imagine where he will be in the winter. What he will look like then, what he will be eating, whom he will be talking to, and about what. He can’t imagine it. He remembers the feeling of never being able to think beyond the next couple of hours because every day held the possibility of turning him into someone else altogether: t
hat was how he lived as a child. At the time, he felt so at home in the present that it seemed normal to him that it was not time passing but he himself. Although that was a happy state of being, Sebastian is not thrilled to have lost his future in his early forties. For a grown-up, the absence of time is clearly a kind of homelessness.
He looks out over the black expanse of the water, which reflects the lights on the promenade. He has not chosen to stop here; he is simply stranded, with no strength left for the next step. He could take out his mobile phone and look in the address book for a number that naturally he has long known by heart. Or turn on the engine and take the familiar route to a certain apartment. Or take the key out of the ignition, get out of the car, walk along the Quai des Eaux-Vives, and then drive back home.
Since leaving Freiburg and the horror of the last few days behind him, he has been in the grip of an exhaustion that feels like the flu. The symptoms are similar: burning eyes, a scratchy throat, and aching limbs. Sebastian barely knows how he has managed to get here, let alone why he has come in the first place. When he closes his eyes, the autobahn zooms through his head with unrelenting speed. The windshields of the cars in the oncoming lane are flecked with the pink of the evening sky to the north. Wilted sunflowers beside the autobahn turn their faces down toward the earth into which they will soon sink.
The car swerved a few times on the way here. Sebastian breathed more quickly and pinched his thigh. Because nothing helped, he thought of Dabbelink. He led himself through a series of scenes depicting blood, bones, and bicycle parts, all captioned: “This is what I did.” The effect was weaker than expected, a twitch in the stomach that was barely enough to keep his eyes on the road for five minutes. The more he tried, the less it worked. After fifty kilometers, the memory of Dabbelink left him completely cold.
Now he knows why murderers like to return to the scene of the crime, as the detective novels maintain. It is not the irresistible lure of evil, nor a desire for atonement or the secret hope of being arrested on the spot. It is their inability to believe that the murder has actually happened. A murderer returns to the scene of the crime so as not to continue thinking of the victim as a living person. If Sebastian could turn back the clock, he would not undo Dabbelink’s murder. He did it to save Liam, and he is sure that he would have done plenty of other things merely for the illusion of saving Liam. But he would not leave the scene of the crime without having looked for the remains of his victim.
Sebastian realizes that even a minor player like Dabbelink cannot be shoved off the stage without consequences. He knows that he is lost. But this knowledge is suspended in midair as long as he thinks of his crime in terms of television images. Everything that awaits him—arrest, a torturous murder trial, perhaps a prison sentence, the loss of his family—his future misery seems to have arisen from another world altogether, a world that has no rightful claim on him. Whoever does not believe what he has done is in no position to understand what is happening to him and around him. The best thing about being at Lake Geneva is that it prevents him from pounding on the doors of the forensic department of the Freiburg police, demanding to see the head of his victim.
As if something had been decided with this realization, Sebastian starts the engine and turns the car around.
ON THE RUE DE LA NAVIGATION, he signals his name with the doorbell—short, long, short-short—and knows within seconds that Oskar is out. He wraps his jacket tightly around him and takes up his position in the entryway. Exhaustion has given way to restlessness. Newspapers tumble through the streets, a cyclist flaps past, and a siren sounds somewhere. Sebastian normally loves the anticipation that accompanies his visits to Oskar in Geneva. Despite all the changes in their lives, he and Oskar have kept a piece of the past here that seems like it will live forever. Sebastian has come here over and over again like an addict because, up there in the attic apartment, he is a god, in control of all the fulfilled and unfulfilled potential of his life. That attic is the source of his strength and life force, and also of the restlessness that now has him shifting from one foot to the other.
When a rowdy bunch of nocturnal revelers approach, bound by some giant embrace into a single being, and shout at him in German, asking where to find the best nightclub, he pushes himself away from the wall and disappears into the darkness.
The blue circle of neon lights that serves as the sign for Le Cercle Est Rond is not complete. One of the lights broke years ago, so the circle is open on one side. The bins shoved into the middle of the pavement, and several stray cats, keep the tourists away; since the red-light district was recommended as an insider’s tip in several travel guides, Oskar has been talking about looking for a new apartment. He often says that those who go to the Cercle are the last people left on the planet who go out in order not to be recognized.
The room is lit by candles jammed into empty bottles, and the light sketches the souls of people and objects in flickering shadows on the walls. The tables seem to be more for beer-drinking card players than for the well-dressed men who sit at them in twos or threes, drinking red wine. The men speak in low voices and move cautiously, as if they are trying not to frighten each other.
Sebastian pushes aside the leather curtain at the entrance. The bartender, who is washing glasses under the only electric light in the room, does not even acknowledge him with a glance, though they have known each other for a long time. Oskar is leaning back against the bar, and a lanky young man wearing round-rimmed spectacles is standing in front of him, talking eagerly in the direction of his own feet. It is not possible to tell if Oskar is listening to him as he stands there with his legs crossed and his elbows bent, motionless. His hands are dangling beside him in an attitude of courtesy mingled with lordliness, as if he were allowing a beringed finger to be kissed. In this position, he looks like he could be leaning against a tree trunk in a forest clearing in the morning mist, his white shirt open at the collar, holding a pistol in his hands.
He allows himself little more than an arch of the eyebrows when he notices Sebastian. But Sebastian can see that his friend is shaken to the core. He almost expects Oskar to clutch his hands to his heart and sink to his knees. He has known this man for half a lifetime, and he has never seen him so shaken.
The bespectacled young man has not noticed that anything has changed. His eyes dart here and there behind his glasses as he is speaking, and when he finally raises his head because he has not received a reply to a question, his age nudges eighteen. Sebastian knows these young geniuses who come from afar to discuss the theory of the quantization of time with its renowned originator. In a pub in Geneva, they meet a man who adorns his intellect not with white hair and a face furrowed by thought, but with a classically handsome profile and a smile proclaiming the right to ownership. Oskar puts his mouth close to the young man’s ear and whispers something. The boy immediately raises his hand and walks off toward the restroom.
Within seconds, they are standing opposite each other. It is Oskar who stretches his hand out first. No one can keep himself afloat day after day all on his own. The mingling of their scents is an invisible home. It houses the pain they feel about the space they share, a space that knows only biting cold and blistering heat, but not the conditions for human survival.
Oskar takes the “Reserved” placard off the table in the corner and sits Sebastian down facing a kitsch reproduction of a still life. It portrays a pheasant in its dress of feathers, its neck hanging broken over the edge of a bowl. Sitting opposite Sebastian, Oskar has a view of the whole room. Unbidden, the barman brings over two glasses and a bottle of whiskey that is as old as the bespectacled youth who has left the Cercle after his visit to the restroom. They clink glasses and drink. Oskar is outwardly calm. He does not tap his feet, or pick fluff off his suit trousers. He looks at Sebastian intently.
Sebastian is tracing the grain of the table with a finger, concentrating on not counting the years, not asking how many times he has sat in the Cercle filled with a delicate mix
ture of happiness and fear. Seen from here, his normal life seems like the memory of a film in which he, Maike, and Liam play the touching lead roles. Every time he has left Freiburg on the weekend for a supposed conference, Oskar has been waiting for him with eyebrows raised—mocking and acerbic, but not angry.
Perhaps Oskar’s supreme quality is not his intelligence, thinks Sebastian, but his patience, which has the force of a natural law. “How time flies” is never a statement for Oskar, always a question.
And perhaps, Sebastian thinks, Maike and Liam’s supreme quality is their boundless trust, while his own is the ability to abuse this trust without scruple. “Can that really be true?” is never a question for Sebastian, but always a matter of physics.
His index finger traces the grain of the wood on the other side of the table and when Oskar reaches out to grasp it, he gives him his hand.
“It can only be days now,” Sebastian says.
“Hours,” Oskar says.
“A detective is onto me. Either he understands nothing—or everything.”
“Everything, probably. Or were you foolish enough to hope that they wouldn’t find you?”
“Hope is the last thing to die,” Sebastian says lamely.
“And honor never does.”
Oskar drinks from his glass, then puts it down on the table.
“Cher ami,” he says, “there is this thing called life and there are stories. The curse of the human being is that he finds it difficult to distinguish between the two.”
“Say it again.”
“What?”
“When I told you about Dabbelink on the phone, what did you say?”