Now he stands and walks around the table to pour more wine.
“Maike doesn’t like talking about Dabbelink’s involvement in the scandal,” he says. His jokey tone falls flat, as if he has played a note on a badly tuned instrument. He almost crashes into his wife as she stands up, still chewing, to collect the salad plates. The muscles beneath her temples are tensing visibly.
“That’s not funny,” she says. “Ralph is Schlüter’s favorite anesthetist. They get along well in operations and at conferences. Now everyone thinks that Ralph knows something about suspicious contacts with pharmaceutical firms. And that if he talks, the entire hospital will collapse.”
“I see.” Oskar’s eyebrows are raised in sympathy. “Has the poor man been threatened?”
“Yes indeed, he has,” Maike says. “When you try, you can even be quite sensitive.”
She carries the pile of plates to the door, and all is silent until she tells them that they can have a cigarette before the next course. As soon as she leaves, Liam runs into the next room, where there is a plate of biscuits on top of the television. Sebastian watches him through the half-open door, while Oskar sits with his head thrown back, blowing smoke sculptures into the air. For a few minutes, the silence is tender and good.
“What I said before I meant seriously, cher ami,” Oskar says now. “Our colleagues are laughing about your forays into popular science. If public attention is so important to you…”
Sebastian makes an angry gesture with his hand and Liam, who has come back with crumbs on his lips, thinks it is meant for him. He forces himself onto Oskar’s lap with a cheeky grin.
“Aren’t you getting too old for this now?”
“Not me,” Liam says. “You may be.”
“Do you know,” Oskar says to Liam, “that every time you sneak a biscuit, another world opens up, in which you haven’t stolen one?”
“Parallel universes.” Liam nods. “When Mom asks if I’ve had a biscuit, I always say yes and no. But that doesn’t work with her.”
Oskar starts laughing, and has to wipe his eyes with the backs of his hands. “How right you are!” he says. “If you’ll let me, I’m going to quote you tomorrow evening.”
“Tomorrow evening?” Sebastian asks.
“What are you doing over the weekend?”
Sebastian gets up to fetch him an ashtray.
“He’s taking me to scout camp on Sunday,” Liam says.
“And after that,” Sebastian says, crashing the ashtray down on the table, “I’m barricading myself in my study and turning our understanding of the world upside down.”
“What’s the work of genius going to be called?”
“‘A Long Exposure: or, On the Nature of Time.’”
“That suits you.” Oskar suppresses another fit of laughter. “And what’s Maike doing?”
“Three weeks’ cycling in Airolo. So, what’s going on tomorrow night?”
Oskar waves his hand mysteriously.
“In Airolo?” he repeats. “Alone?”
“Did you think I was bringing my senior registrar along, too?”
Maike has come back unnoticed, and is placing a bowl of tortellini on the table. Sebastian raises a palm and she gives him a high five, glancing sideways at Oskar at the same time. Unhappy that he is no longer the center of attention, Liam kicks his legs impatiently and slides off Oskar’s lap. Oskar stands up and, ignoring the ashtray, walks over to the window and watches as his cigarette butt falls into the canal and is carried away by the current. Bonnie and Clyde are nowhere to be seen.
“While we’re on the subject of holidays, perhaps you need a break, too.” Maike helps Liam light the candles—the flames are almost invisible in the evening light. “You don’t look as well as you normally do.”
Oskar strolls back to the table, hands in his pockets. “Insomnia,” he says.
“I’ll pull out the bed in the study for you. It’s quiet there.”
“The doctor has given me something.” Oskar taps his chest on the left side, as if he were wearing a jacket with inside pockets.
“Me too!” Liam shouts, running out of the room before anyone can stop him. A door slams, and a drawer in the bathroom is pulled open. When Liam returns, he is carrying a little plastic case in his palm.
“Travel sickness,” Maike says. “He gets as sick as a dog on longer journeys.”
“One for the way there, and one for the way back,” Liam says proudly.
Oskar looks at the tablets earnestly. “They look exactly like mine. Conditions like ours are the price to pay for extraordinary genius.”
“Really?” Liam’s eyes grow round, and points of light shine in his pupils.
“Enough of that,” Sebastian interrupts.
Oskar has sat down. He spears a piece of tortellini and holds his fork up in the air like a pointer.
“Mes enfants,” he says. “There are areas of thought that we do not traverse unpunished. Headaches and a bad character are the least we must pay. I know what I’m talking about, Liam.” When he stretches his hand out, Liam places his own in it quickly. “Your parents are lovely. But a bit too normal to know what real genius means.”
“Don’t talk nonsense to him,” Maike says heatedly.
“Tell me,” Oskar says, chewing thoughtfully on his pasta. “Is there some rocket in this, too?”
[6]
IN THE TWILIGHT, the chattering of the titmice is growing louder. They have a lot to talk about. A cloud of midges dance around an as-yet-unlit streetlamp, clearly drawn to it by the memory of light. Two swifts jaggedly circling their prey share the same memory.
Inside, the late evening has painted the walls red. Spoons are clinking on dessert plates; the wine in the glasses looks almost black. Liam is no longer allowed to talk and his pouting lower lip is hindering the consumption of his pudding. Maike is resting her chin in her hand, turning a spoon as she licks chocolate cream from it.
Quiet moments are as much a part of the Friday gatherings as confrontation, diplomacy, and barely averted war. In the reflective moments, it is mostly Maike who speaks. She enjoys talking about cycling, about the relentless heat on steep inclines with no shade, and the cool embrace of the wind as she goes downhill. About the quick changes in temperature in the layers of air, and about what freedom means—to reach a speed at which one can escape oneself. She says every time that speed preserves youth, and not only because physicists think that time passes more slowly for bodies in motion.
While Maike is speaking, Sebastian gazes at her intently. It is only when she laughs that he darts a quick glance at Oskar, as if there is something to share. He absorbs little of what she is saying. He is thinking about how much he loves Maike, yet how happy he is that he will have some time alone beginning the day after tomorrow. The thought of the three weeks ahead, which he will spend at his desk in isolation, brings on a shudder of anticipation. On the first day, he will fill the Volvo to the roof with shopping and then not leave the house at all. He will pull out the telephone cord, turn the television to the wall, and leave Oskar’s folding bed down in the study. He will lock the doors to the other rooms and thereby erase them from the map of his daily habits. It will be quiet. He will be entirely undisturbed for a few weeks—the greatest luxury that Sebastian can imagine. While thinking about space and time, images will form in his mind, not unlike the abstract brush strokes of Maike’s painters, who in their naive way, Sebastian has often thought, do nothing other than get closer to the true physical nature of things with the help of shapes and colors. For three whole weeks, Sebastian will relish the growth of the chain of letters across the computer screen, filling page after page until finally coming to the sentence that he has long kept ready for this purpose, the sentence that will form the crowning conclusion: “Thus, there is no more to say.”
Sebastian’s head sinks a bit lower, and his supporting hand pushes the flesh of his cheek upward. Oskar glances at him from across the table, humming in agreement now and then t
o keep Maike talking. As he does, he smiles at Sebastian, who has finally lost the thread and is secretly occupied with a question of physics. Once, Oskar would have been able to guess what his friend was thinking about by reading the play of his eyebrows and the silent movements of his lips, but those days are gone. He sits beside Sebastian’s thoughts as if by a river that he knows is flowing constantly, but can neither see nor hear. Despite this, Oskar still enjoys the presence of his friend’s river of thought. This means a great deal to him. Ever since his teenage years, he has felt as though he stumbled into the wrong century and is living the wrong life, while elsewhere—and above all, at another time—people like Einstein and Bohr are missing him in their discussions. Before the great European wars, there had been not only the necessary intellectual capacity but also the will to think a few things through to the end. Oskar wonders with longing what it would have been like to have been born in 1880. He can reconcile himself to very little in the world today, a world in which stupidity, hysteria, and hypocrisy reign, turning life into a carousel, rumbling along to music and spinning everything important away from the center, rendering it secondary. Sebastian’s presence is a consolation; but when he thinks about his friend, he grows impatient again. Sebastian is a renegade, a traitor to the cause of achieving a new intellectual revolution a hundred years after Einstein and Bohr. Every new departure from the path of theoretical physics is a departure from the possibility of their being together. If there is something that Oskar will never give up, it is his desire to get Sebastian back.
When Oskar realizes that Maike’s stream of talk has petered out, and that Sebastian is doing nothing other than tracing lines on the tablecloth with the handle of a spoon, he breaks the sudden silence by telling a vague anecdote about a young research assistant. The man got it into his head that he could come up with a brilliant idea, just as Heisenberg had while walking across an island, and he spent his entire salary on journeys to Sylt. There he tramped endlessly over one damn dike after another until he finally found out that the uncertainty principle had come to Heisenberg not on the island of Sylt, but on Heligoland—and then Oskar no longer knows where he is going with this, especially as the story isn’t even true; it had merely worked well once in another situation.
IT IS ALMOST DARK NOW. The streetlamp in front of the house has failed to go on, and will now stay unlit through the night. The mountains have sent a tawny owl as their night time spy; it is sitting somewhere in the branches of the chestnut tree, calling sorrowfully as if through cupped hands. Cutlery lies crisscross on the plates. Liam’s head is nodding slowly to the beat of his drowsiness. With his legs crossed and his arms folded, Oskar looks as if he is posing for a black-and-white photograph. Before the scene can freeze into a tableau, he stretches his back and draws breath into his lungs. It’s clear that he is going to make an announcement. He runs his hand through his perfect hair and taps another filterless cigarette out of the packet.
“Before, we would probably have met at daybreak in some forest clearing,” he says to Sebastian.
Liam’s head jerks up, curiosity stealing over his sleepy face, while Sebastian finds his way out of his own thoughts with some difficulty. Finally he realizes that the darkness in the room is not due to his confusion, tips back in his chair, and switches on the overhead light. Maike suppresses a yawn and begins collecting cutlery halfheartedly on one of the plates.
“Nowadays,” Oskar says, looking at his unlit cigarette from all angles, “there are microphones and TV cameras in forest clearings.”
“You’re talking in riddles,” Maike says, a yawn forcing its way out as she finishes her sentence.
Oskar puts the cigarette down on the table still unlit, folds his napkin, and continues speaking to Sebastian.
“TV,” he says. “The media. You like that, n’est-ce pas?”
There is something frightening in his voice that finally wipes the dreaminess off Sebastian’s face. “What are you thinking of?”
“ZDF started a new science show some time ago—Circumpolar,” Oskar says, standing up. “I’ve agreed that both of us will go on it. We’re going to Mainz tomorrow evening.” He is by the door now, raising a finger. “At eleven p.m. exactly. It’s live.”
Liam’s excited whoop gives Oskar the opportunity to leave the room. The boy runs excitedly around the table and grabs Sebastian by the shirt. At the same time, Maike has run to the open window. She is shooing a fluttering something back into the darkness.
“That was a tawny owl!” she shouts. “Did you see that? Unbelievable!”
“Daddy,” shouts Liam, “are you going to be on TV?”
“It feels more like I’m going to war.”
The bathroom door slams shut. Sebastian tries to catch Maike’s eye but she is still hanging half out of the window, looking down at the impossible bird. The last thing Sebastian feels like doing is laughing, but then his stomach begins to twitch. A laugh rises up in him like bubbles of air and shakes Liam’s small body, which is leaning on his. When Sebastian hears the sound of his own laughter, he realizes that the die has been cast. Oskar has reckoned with Sebastian’s pride, and has engineered everything so that it is impossible to refuse the challenge.
“You scoundrel!” he shouts down the hall.
Why this ridiculous word has occurred to him, he cannot say.
[7]
THERE ARE THREE EMPTY WINE BOTTLES left on the table. The window is closed and moths are flinging themselves against the glass. The grown-ups have moved to the living room; two rooms away, Liam is practicing insomnia. Low music weaves through the smoke curling up to the ceiling. Sebastian is sitting on the sofa, cradling an amber splash of whiskey in a tumbler, relishing the burning sensation in his stomach, not knowing if it is due to the whiskey or to happiness. Oskar and Maike are dancing, limbs heavy from the wine and from fatigue. Her eyes are closed and her cheek is on his shoulder. Sebastian looks on, feeling himself sink into the upholstery. His free hand scrabbles in the sofa cushions, as if searching for a lever that will stop this moment from disappearing. It is the last evening of happiness in this apartment, and it is a mercy—for Sebastian more than for the others—that humankind is not able to see into the future.
CHAPTER 2, IN SEVEN PARTS
The first half of the crime is committed. Man is everywhere surrounded by animals.
[1]
IT IS EARLY EVENING ON SUNDAY, two days later. Under a sky like this, Sebastian thinks, the world looks like a snow globe lying forgotten on God’s shelf, not shaken for a long time. His eyes and his arms are tired, so he has opened the car window a little. The breeze tugs at his hair and his shirt. Outside, meadows drenched in rich light roll by and utility poles stand proudly next to their long shadows. The winding road resembles a painted landscape, and it manages to look like ski country even in the summer. On the horizon, the slopes have been cleared—only a few pine trees remain in forlorn clusters. Wire mesh holds back the scree where the mountain encroaches upon the road. In the ditch lies a black cat who had the bad luck to cross the street from the left.
When Sebastian is not looking at the landscape, he rests his eyes on the line in the middle of the road. Its white dashes fly toward him, then strangely slow before disappearing one by one under the car. The longer he looks at them, the more he thinks he hears a sound like quiet footsteps—the passing of time.
Last night he slept no more than two hours. Having finally fallen asleep at about four, despite a pounding heart and sheets drenched in sweat, he was woken at six by a tetchy Liam demanding his full attention for the results of a calculation: In twenty-six hours, thirteen minutes, and approximately ten seconds at the latest, he shouted, he would be with the scouts in the woods!
Sebastian woke with the feeling that he had survived a disaster that he could not remember. But he had to smile at Liam’s excitement, and at the “approximately.” He could imagine how his son had sat down with pen and paper to work out the exact number of seconds, which, at the moment h
e recorded them, trying to fix them in place, became no longer right. As Sebastian swung his feet out of the bed and placed them on the floor, the memory of the previous evening returned and settled on his shoulders like a cloak of lead. The radio in the bathroom spat out a cacophony of sounds when he pressed the button, as if the noise had been stored up overnight. Fearful that he would hear his own name coming out of the speaker, he switched it off immediately. In the shower, he turned the hot water up to full. As the steam hit the glass, he told himself over and over again, arguing rationally, that nothing terrible had happened. Circumpolar had a relatively small audience, and his colleagues at the institute did not watch popular science programs. In any case, no one would take what had happened as bleakly as he did. Now no one could remember anything for more than a couple of days anyway, especially if they had seen it on television.
A stone’s throw away from the road, a fleet of shiny boats with horned figureheads glides over a sun-dappled lake. After a moment of confusion, Sebastian suddenly sees some deer—“Look, Liam! On your left!”—walking through a golden field of rape. And they’re gone. Trees hug the edge of the road Sebastian has taken. The air smells of mushrooms, earth, and a rain that has not fallen for weeks. Sebastian is gripped by the desire to keep driving toward the south, as if the south is a place one can reach. He tries to whistle a tune—“I haven’t moved since the call came”—but the sounds from his lips bear absolutely no relation to the melody in his head.