When Schilf’s babbling stops for a moment, Rita ventures to speak.
“This is madness.” She leans forward and taps her forehead. “You’re dangerous, Schilf. This is totally birdbrained.”
The detective breaks into a sudden fit of laughter that fills the vehicle. He sounds like he is suffocating by the end of it.
“Birdbrained!” he splutters, also tapping his forehead. “That’s a good one.”
“I’m getting out at the next junction,” Rita says.
“At the next junction,” Schilf says to Schnurpfeil, putting his hand on the driver’s forearm, “stop in front of the sports shop.”
The van brakes. Schnurpfeil gets out and slams his door. Schilf passes him the briefcase through the open window.
“Two tops, two pairs of trousers, and two pairs of shoes,” he says. “The jerseys in yellow. And take Sebastian with you for size.”
Sebastian puts the cooler down at his feet as gingerly as if it were a newborn baby in a cot, and gets out of the van. Her mind completely blank, Rita watches him as he walks into the shop with Schnurpfeil. When the two men have disappeared, Schilf puts an arm over the headrest and looks back at her. They are silent. It feels good to be silent, even though Rita knows that this long stare is only Schilf’s way of preventing her from getting out and walking away.
“All right, then,” she finally says. “Give it to me straight, in simple language.”
Schilf presses his thumb and index finger against his eyelids, as if he needs to concentrate intensely.
“Oskar created a parallel universe,” he says, “in which Liam had been kidnapped and not kidnapped at the same time. Sebastian was supposed to recognize what it means not to be able to trust in reality. What it is like to have no ‘either/or’ but only an ‘as well as.’”
“So much for the theory,” Rita says. “Let’s move on to the practice.”
“In a way, the kidnapping was an experiment. But something went wrong. Another memorial to the horror of what we call coincidence was built. And that tangled up the worlds.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t follow you.”
“Imagine two trains traveling next to each other for an instant, at exactly the same speed, totally parallel. At this point, it is possible to change trains. Oskar drew up the timetable, and coincidence created the disaster. And Sebastian slid from one universe into the other.”
Schilf takes his hand away from his face at last. His eyes are glittering.
“Rita, my child, we’re going to create a second parallelism, in order to enable Sebastian to return to his world.”
“You can be really frightening sometimes.”
Rita casts a glance at the cooler, tosses her hair back, and looks out of the window as if she is trying to convince herself that outside, at least, everything is as it was.
“This is what I understand,” she says. “It’s not about this nonsense of parallel universes, but about the fact that Oskar is the one who is really guilty. You’re saying that he has fucked up his friend’s life in order to teach him a lesson about responsibility. And he’s sitting in Geneva pretending that this has nothing to do with him.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying!”
Schilf’s face lights up and Rita cannot bear to contradict him. She allows him to stretch out his hand and pat her on the cheek. Sometimes she wishes that her work still required her to wear a uniform. That would keep the world at a slight distance.
“You want revenge,” Rita says, “justice, a moral victory. All things that have nothing to do with police work. That’s what you yourself taught us in our seminars.”
“I want to re-create a certain order of things,” Schilf says. “Apart from that, you’re right.”
“You’re overstepping the bounds of your responsibilities, and for your own personal pleasure, too. Give me one reason why I should play along, Schilf!”
“All right,” the detective says. “I’ll show you the reason.”
Rita recognizes the documents that he is pulling from his briefcase. They are copies from the file on Dabbelink’s murder. But Schilf is looking for something else. He flips back and forth, dips his hand into the briefcase again, and takes out a semitransparent photograph. The picture trembles between his fingers as he passes it to her. Rita lays the murky photograph against the window.
It shows a cloudy shape at least as wide as a hand—it is oval and so indistinct that it seems to be moving against the black background. Curved around the shadowy center is a tube, white as a maggot and filled with labyrinthine entrails. The whole thing is held together by two layers of skin on the outside: one thick and black in color and the other thinner and pale. Although Rita finds the sight repellent, she cannot tear her eyes from it. At the bottom of the picture is the detective’s name in capital letters.
“Since you constantly seem to doubt my intentions,” Schilf says, “why not simply look inside my brain?”
He rubs the top of his sparsely covered head, with its elephant face sitting loosely on the bone structure in front.
“Take a good look.”
His index finger strokes the back of the maggot and traces the curling outline tenderly. At the bend, Rita notices a patch that looks like a bird’s egg in both shape and size. Schilf taps it with his finger a few times.
“Good Lord,” Rita says.
“No,” Schilf says, “certainly not him.”
Rita Skura sits there staring at the patch, silent, as if the connection between her brain and her body has just been severed. She knows that she should hug him. She would even do it gladly. He smiles bravely, a child turned into a grizzled old man, and Rita wants to hold him tight for a while and press her face against his, not to comfort him, but because she suddenly feels alone, abandoned, as if she is surrounded by marionettes and Schilf is the only other creature on earth who belongs to that dying species: the live human being.
But she can do nothing. She cannot find the right gesture, cannot even smile along with Schilf, although he is looking at her with such warmth.
“How long?” she asks, finally.
“Who knows? A couple of weeks.”
Schilf takes the result of the MRI scan back and puts it in the briefcase at his feet. When he straightens, he and Rita are sitting one in front of the other like passengers on a bus. Rita sees his scalp showing through his thinning hair, and some flakes of dandruff.
“That’s some ammunition, eh, Rita my child? Do you believe that I’m serious now?”
Rita nods. Schilf must have heard that. His smile causes his ears to lift.
A dove has been run over on the road. Feathers dance around the squashed remains whenever cars whoosh past. The traffic light turns red and the cars roll up to it with studied slowness, stopping at a well-calculated distance. A passing woman looks curiously at the police van. On the other side of the road, a young man is whistling for his dog. A cyclist rushes to get off the pavement, and nearly crashes into a child, who drops his ice cream and starts crying.
“A civil war will break out if we stay here any longer,” Schilf says.
“What if he doesn’t come tonight?” Rita asks.
“A man of honor turns up to a duel.”
“How do you know that?”
Schilf turns sideways to look at her from the corner of his eye.
“Shall I take the photo out of the briefcase again?”
The minutes dawdle past, and the door to the sports shop finally opens. Schnurpfeil is laden with colorful plastic bags. Sebastian waves.
“Before I forget,” Schilf says. “The police chief rang me. I’m supposed to go back to Stuttgart immediately.”
Rita sits bolt upright, as if she’d had an electric shock.
“The hospital scandal has dissolved into thin air,” Schilf says, blowing into the palm of his hand. “Puff!”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that my time is limited, on all fronts.”
While Rita huffs, as
if she is an overheating computer about to crash, Schilf turns to her once more.
“It was a trainee nurse,” he says. “She gave heart patients blood-thinning drugs before their operations instead of the prescribed tranquilizers. Apparently these pills all look the same. A stupid mistake.”
Rita Skura sinks back into her seat, exhausted. What a ridiculous waste of a few weeks. Sleepless nights, visits to the hospital, neglecting the cat, being unfairly taken to task by her superiors—what had it all been for? Who on earth was interested in an exceptional performance to no end? There was only one way to see it: total failure. The thought has barely crossed her mind before she feels as if she has been declared cured, all without having an operation. She is floating in the air, she could sing out loud. She could kiss the detective or wring his neck.
She doesn’t have much time to brood. Schnurpfeil wrenches the driver’s door open and slips behind the wheel. While Sebastian gets into the back and puts the cooler back on his lap, the senior policeman sits motionless with both hands on the steering wheel, his head hanging like a schoolboy’s.
“Stage fright?” Schilf asks.
“I don’t think I want to go on,” Schnurpfeil says.
Rita sizes up everyone in the van with an appraising look. All at once, she thinks she knows how Sebastian feels. And how Schilf feels. Maybe even how Oskar feels. In the end, it’s simply about confronting total defeat with a brave face. She stretches a hand out quickly and places it on the senior policeman’s shoulder.
“Schnurpfeil,” she says, “I am leading this investigation.”
A smile flits over his face.
“What now?” he asks.
“Back home,” Schilf says, “to wait.”
[6]
JULIA RUSHES TO MEET HIM IN THE HALLWAY of the police apartment with such expectancy that Schilf is happy to have something to offer her. His girlfriend links arms with him as he introduces her to the murderer. Sebastian is lingering by the door that has just closed behind him, and seems quite helpless: too tall and angular for the narrow space. He grips the handle of the cooler. Schilf and his girlfriend are both smiling at him and he looks at them shyly, as if he is facing a court of law.
Schilf had not wanted to leave Sebastian alone again, so had asked him to spend the final few hours before the big event together. When Sebastian hesitated, Schilf turned the invitation into an order. Now Schilf realizes that a detective can no longer be an official when he is at home, in front of his girlfriend. Sebastian is suddenly presented with a stranger and his younger girlfriend, and is wondering what these two people think of him. In front of the police, a murderer is not ashamed of his crime, just as a patient seeing his doctor is not ashamed of his illness. But Sebastian does not have any practice in living with his crime in the personal realm. Like an accident victim, he must learn everything from scratch: speaking, hand gestures, looking people in the eye. The sooner you start, the better, the detective thinks.
Julia reaches out to shake Sebastian’s hand and says that she likes him in person even more than she did on television, and he relaxes visibly. As the detective walks ahead of them into the living room, he realizes that the result of an important experiment has almost passed him by. While climbing the stairs, he was nervous about this meeting between Julia and Sebastian. He had imagined his girlfriend extending her hand to Sebastian and a lightning bolt striking at the same time, reducing her to a puff of smoke. Or, worse still, he had imagined Sebastian entering the apartment and simply walking through Julia as if she were simply not there. Schilf feels a fleeting prick of conscience. He is not sure why this fear surfaced at the crucial moment—because it was so absurd or because he now no longer cared whether Julia disappeared in a puff of smoke.
Sebastian looks around the apartment, and says something pleasant but untrue about it. The detective positions his girlfriend in the open-plan kitchen with her back against the wall and indicates that Sebastian should bring the cooler. Schilf has brought not only the murderer with him, but something special that more or less belongs to the murderer. This needs to go into the freezer, urgently.
“A picnic?” Julia asks.
She chats away, joking about ice cream and cold beer while Schilf lifts the blue lid off the cooler. Dabbelink’s stare turns Julia’s voice into background noise, as if someone has turned the volume down. The skin on the face has dried up and drawn tight over the bones, so the eyes are open and staring, as if the cyclist were speeding toward a taut steel cable for all eternity. The nose is out of joint and the mouth is stretched in an evil grin. The cervical vertebrae stick out of the tangle of severed tubes, white and clean like a handle. Sebastian pushes in front of Schilf; he wants to lift the head of his victim out of the box himself.
“Careful,” Schilf says. “It’s only held in place by skin.”
When they had been standing over the large aluminum drawer in the forensic department, Sebastian bent down low as if to kiss his victim, then looked at the detective with shining eyes. Thank you, he said. Whatever you’re planning, you’ve just saved me from going mad.
Now, although Sebastian takes hold very gently, Dabbelink cannot help grimacing between his hands. Schilf casts a quick glance at his girlfriend, whose gaze is fixed on the head of the dead man, this three-dimensional caricature that was once a living face. Julia does not look as though she intends to become hysterical.
“So that’s what’s left,” she says.
Schilf nods at her. He is relieved to realize once again exactly why he liked his girlfriend from the moment he met her.
Dabbelink does not fit in the freezer at first go, so they scrape the lumps of ice off the sides of the compartment with a knife. Having succeeded, they feel quite comfortable with each other. Julia makes spaghetti and Sebastian lays the small table. Over dinner, they avoid talking about anything to do with Dabbelink, Oskar, Maike, Liam, or what could happen later that night. The only shared topic of conversation is the hospital scandal. Medical Director Schlüter has been suspended, not on grounds of bodily harm with fatal consequences, but because of inadequate supervision of his staff. The familiar public debate over poorly financed hospitals had started again immediately. Schlüter will pursue his career elsewhere. The rest is politics.
They don’t talk much. Schilf is the only one who has a second helping. Never has a meal tasted so good to him.
JULIA INSISTED ON GOING TO BED AFTER DINNER. Why sit around endlessly at the table, weighed down by troublesome thoughts, when they might as well sleep for a couple of hours and wake up at a set time? Schilf envies her deep calm. Her head barely touched the pillow before she fell asleep, as if at the flick of a switch. Her ability to give her body clear commands means that she is as good at falling asleep as she is at sitting still for hours in a life-drawing class. She once said to Schilf that she could not understand the phenomenon of insomnia at all: you have only to turn on your side to embrace a temporary death.
Propped up on one elbow, Schilf watches his girlfriend sleep. She has kicked off the blanket but is holding on to a corner of it, which covers her shoulders, neck, and part of her face. She bears no resemblance to an unplugged machine that by day pulls the wool over Schilf’s eyes. She breathes evenly, snuggled up in her own body warmth like a little planet with its own atmosphere. The longer Schilf looks at her, the more he thinks he has a miracle right in front of him. How can this be: a perfect system which, other than food, contains everything it needs for life!
The astonishment he feels rouses such a clamor within him that he is afraid the sound of his thoughts will wake Julia. He gets up quietly and closes the bedroom door behind him.
He stands in front of an open window. His head is clear, with no pneumatic drill trying to demolish the load-bearing walls. Behind him on the sofa is a large, dark shape: Sebastian, who is perfectly still, as if relieved he no longer has to come up with any answers. The zebra stripes across the room have grown sharper and the moon is tussling with the streetlamps over the colo
r of the light. The street beneath is still covered with a carpet of wood shavings. Schilf remembers the feathery feel of it beneath his feet, and the smell of it, like a circus ring. He lights a cigarillo. The smoke casts shadows on the windowsill that curl around each other, fade, and then start swirling again when he blows the next puff out of his lungs. This is how he imagines the mysterious mesh of reality, the primordial soup at the heart of it all: shadows of a god smoking by a window.
In the kitchenette, the door of the built-in refrigerator glows like a white screen. Schilf crooks his fingers and casts the shadow of a panting dog onto its surface. Apart from the anticipation stirring in his stomach, he feels content. There is so little that a man can achieve in his life. Recognize the smell of a woman. Stroke a child’s head. Beat an adversary in a duel. Think on the nature of things without forgetting that a man takes all his ideas with him one day, when he leaves the world through the well-used back door.
Schilf has gotten through his stock of happiness in the first few decades of his life, and has been operating on his current account since. Many years ago he stopped thinking that death was the worst thing that could happen to anyone. And Sebastian’s explanations about long exposure time have eliminated once and for all any dizziness Schilf felt about standing at the edge of the final abyss. For this reason alone, he shall always be indebted to Sebastian.
Without fear, Schilf can think about his consciousness sinking painlessly back into the froth of information and transformation from which it once rose, and in which it thirsted all its life. He is not even afraid of having to leave an unpalatable block of matter behind, one that is just as hard and ugly as the deep-frozen Dabbelink. The recycling machine called nature will make sure that everything is used again. Whether he is hurriedly buried somewhere, cremated, or scattered over the sea, there are enough plants and animals around to find nourishment in the organic material that is currently still standing in human form at this window, emitting billows of smoke and thinking profound thoughts. They will turn him into something beautiful: green tendrils, blossoms, or colorful plumage. What had only yesterday seemed to him a depressing whirl of unsolved questions has transformed itself into a well-tempered score that has been preserved for millennia. The detective will take care of one last thing, and then go.