Fame

  Next day he was alone at home, and called one of the numbers for the first time. “It’s me. Just checking everything’s okay.”

  “What’s this?” a man’s voice asked.

  “Ralf!”

  “Which Ralf?”

  Ebling hastily hit the disconnect button, then tried again with another of the numbers.

  “Ralf, my God! I tried you yesterday … I … I …”

  “Easy!” said Ebling, disappointed that again it wasn’t a woman. “What’s up?”

  “I can’t go on like this.”

  “Then stop.”

  “There’s no way out.”

  “There’s always a way out.” Ebling couldn’t stop yawning.

  “Ralf, are you telling me I … finally have to take the consequences? That I have to go all the way?”

  Ebling went channel-surfing. But he was out of luck, there seemed to be nothing around but folk music and carpenters doing things with planks, and repeats of old series from the eighties: the whole afternoon-TV gloom. How was he even seeing all this, why was he at home and not at work? He had no idea. Was it possible he’d simply forgotten to go in?

  “I’m going to swallow the whole container.”

  “Go right ahead.” Ebling reached for the book that was lying on the table. The Way of the Self to the Self, by Miguel Auristos Blanco. The sun’s disk on the jacket. It was Elke’s. He pushed it away with the tips of his fingers.

  “Everything comes to you just like that, Ralf. You get it all on a platter. You have no idea what it’s like always coming second. Being one in a crowd, always someone’s last choice. You have no idea!”

  “That’s true.”

  “I’m going to do it—I mean it!”

  Ebling switched off, just in case this pathetic person tried to call him back.

  That night he dreamed about hares. They were large, there was nothing cute about them, they emerged from dense thickets, they looked more like filthy beasts than the charming little creatures from animated films, and they stared at him with eyes that glowed red. Behind him there was a cracking sound in the bushes, he swung round, but his movement shook everything loose, reality melted away, and he heard Elke saying it was unendurable, how could anyone breathe that loudly, enough was enough and she wanted her own bedroom.

  Starting the next morning, the phone was silent. He waited and listened, but it didn’t ring. When it finally did so in the early afternoon, it was his boss wanting to know why he hadn’t come in the last two days, if he was feeling ill, and if his doctor’s certificate had somehow got mislaid. Ebling apologized and coughed for good measure, and when his boss said it wasn’t serious, these things happened, no reason to get excited, he was a good worker and everyone knew his worth, he felt tears of rage in his eyes.

  The next day he sabotaged three computers and installed a hard drive in such a way that all the data on it would erase themselves exactly one month later. His telephone was silent.

  He came close a few times to calling one of the numbers. His thumb was on the call-back button and he imagined that only a second separated him from hearing one of the voices. If he’d had more courage, he’d have pressed it. Or started a fire somewhere. Or gone in search of Carla.

  At least there was Wiener schnitzel for lunch. Twice in one week—a rare treat. Rogler sat opposite him, chewing religiously. “The new E14,” he said with his mouth full. “It’s enough to drive you crazy. There isn’t a damn thing inside it that works. Anyone who buys it has only himself to blame.”

  Ebling nodded.

  “But what are we supposed to do?” Rogler was getting loud. “It’s new. I want it too! There’s nothing else on the market.”

  “True,” said Ebling. “There’s nothing else.”

  “Hey,” said Rogler. “Stop staring at your phone.”

  Ebling twitched and put it in his pocket.

  “Not so long ago you didn’t want anything to do with one, and now you don’t budge an inch without it. Just relax—nothing can be that urgent.” Rogler hesitated for a moment. He swallowed, then stuck another piece of schnitzel in his mouth. “Please don’t take this the wrong way. But who would be calling you anyhow?”

  In Danger

  A novel without a protagonist! Do you get it? A structure, the connections, a narrative arc, but no main character, no hero advancing throughout.”

  “Interesting,” said Elisabeth wearily.

  He looked at his watch. “Why are we running late again? It was the same thing yesterday, what are they doing, why does it keep happening?”

  “Because stuff happens.”

  “Did you notice the man over there, he looks like a dog on its hind legs! But what causes those delays, why can’t they experiment just once, just like that, and try taking off on time?”

  She sighed. There were more than two hundred people in the departure lounge. Many of them were asleep, a few others were reading crudely printed newspapers. The portrait of some bearded politician grinned down off the wall under a gaudy flag. A kiosk offered magazines, detective novels, spiritual self-help books by Miguel Auristos Blanco, and cigarettes.

  “Do you think these airplanes are safe? I mean, they’re really ancient equipment sold on by the Europeans. With us, they’d never even be allowed to take off, it’s no secret, right?”

  “No.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s no secret.”

  Leo massaged his forehead, cleared his throat, opened and shut his mouth, and blew his nose at considerable length, then looked at her with watering eyes. “Was that a joke?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “They should have told me up front, they shouldn’t have invited me, I mean, where are the rules? They can’t invite me if it’s unsafe! Did you see the woman over there, she’s writing something down. Why? What’s she writing? Say, you were joking, weren’t you, about these planes—they’re not really dangerous?”

  “No, no,” she said, “don’t worry.”

  “You’re just saying that to make me feel better!”

  She closed her eyes.

  “I knew it. I can tell. See over there! If we were in a story, we’d be part of this group, and they’d forget us before we even took off. Who knows how that could develop!”

  “Why should anything develop? We’d catch the next plane.”

  “If there is one!”

  Elisabeth said nothing. She wished she could sleep, it was still early, but she knew he would never allow it until after they’d landed. She would have to spend the entire flight explaining to him that flying was perfectly safe and there was no need to worry about a crash. After that she’d have to take care of the luggage and in the hotel it would be her job to speak to the receptionist and arrange for room service to send something up that Leo would agree to eat, given his juvenile tastes in food. And in the late afternoon she’d have to make sure that Leo was ready when they came to collect him for his lecture.

  “I think things are starting to move!” he cried.

  At the other end of the departure lounge a young woman had taken up a position at one of the counters. People began to stand up, gather their belongings, and shuffle in that direction.

  “It’s still going to be some time,” said Elisabeth.

  “We’ll miss the flight!”

  “They’ve only just started. They’ll be another half hour at least.”

  “They’re going to leave without us!”

  “Please, why would they—”

  But he was already on his feet and in the line. She crossed her arms and watched his skinny figure inch its way forward. Finally it was his turn, he showed his boarding card, and disappeared into the walkway to the plane. She waited. Fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes passed, and people were still boarding. When there was nobody left, she got up and boarded within seconds. Pushing her way down the center aisle, she sat down next to Leo.

  “You have no right to do that! I thought you weren’t coming. I was already working out h
ow to stop them taking off, but I can’t make myself understood here, I can’t explain things to anyone.”

  She apologized.

  “No, really, it’s all exhausting enough as it is, I can’t cope with more … Did you see the two children up front, they’re weird. Particularly the little girl. Green eyes! They’re flying on their own, without their parents.”

  “Impressive,” she said.

  He took a long look at her. “I’m pathetic,” he said finally. “Aren’t I?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “I’m insufferable.”

  She bobbed her head.

  “I’d understand if you wanted to go home. Of course if you did, I’d fly home too. I couldn’t get through it without you. The whole thing was a mistake anyway, I should never have agreed, absolutely idiotic. Shall we just go home? Right now?”

  “Please. Give it fifteen minutes. Please, just settle down.”

  He fell silent. And he actually managed to get a grip on himself and keep quiet for the next ten minutes while the plane accelerated, took off, and soared into the sky.

  They had met six weeks earlier at a particularly boring party, and it was only after she’d been talking to him for some time that it dawned on Elisabeth that the strange but intelligent man who kept cracking his knuckles and staring at the ceiling was none other than Leo Richter, the author of intricate short stories full of complicated mirror effects and unpredictable shifts and swerves that were flourishes of empty virtuosity. She had recently read his collection about the doctor Lara Gaspard, and naturally she knew his most famous story, the one about the old woman on her way to an assisted-suicide clinic in Switzerland. They had met again the next day, already that evening she went with him to his sparsely furnished apartment, and to her surprise, Leo in bed demonstrated a decisiveness for which she was totally unprepared. She had dug her fingernails into his back, rolled her eyes up under their lids, and bitten his shoulder, and as she was on her way home in the dawn after several hours that left her totally spent, she knew that she wanted to see him again and that perhaps there was room for him in her life.

  She soon discovered all the aspects of his personality: his anxiety attacks and neuroses, the sudden waves of euphoria that came out of nowhere, and the periods of total concentration during which he seemed to vanish inside himself and if she so much as spoke to him, he looked at her as if he had no idea what she was doing there.

  For his part, he was fascinated by her job. By her activities with Doctors Without Borders—had she really done parachute jumps, with a real parachute? In a real war zone?

  At this point, she always changed the subject. She knew that curiosity was part and parcel of his makeup and his métier, but there were things she didn’t wish to talk about. Anyone who hadn’t lived through such things personally would be likely to take it all as mere phrasemaking and anecdotage; words failed to capture the reality. What it felt like to amputate a man’s legs under inadequate anesthetic, to drag him across fields in the shimmering heat, only to lose him a few feet from the waiting helicopter, so that the entire effort was pointless, and then on the flight back to realize that entire portions of the previous days had erased themselves from your memory, that there were blank spaces, as if you’d had experiences that were so extreme and alien that they had no firm foothold in reality and were unavailable to the mind. How should she have described these things? As an old doctor had said to her years ago, people who have experienced nothing love to tell stories while people who have experienced a great deal suddenly have no stories to tell at all. But she knew that Leo intuited certain things. She had the same profession as his heroine Lara Gaspard, they were the same age, and if she was right about his sparse descriptions of Lara’s appearance, the two of them also looked rather alike. This must be another reason why he found her interesting. She often noticed that he watched her with an almost scientific focus, his lips moving as if he were taking mental notes.

  A few weeks previously, he had given a lecture at the Academy of Mainz about the ongoing death of culture and the fact that this was not necessarily a bad thing, since humanity would be in better shape without the burden of knowledge and tradition. This was now the age of the image, of the sounds of rhythms and a mystical dissolution into the eternal present—a religious ideal become reality through the power of technology. Nobody could figure out whether he was being serious or ironic, whether he was a nihilist or a conservative, but this was precisely the reason why the text was reprinted, all sorts of responses were solicited, and German cultural institutes all around the world invited him on lecturing tours. On a whim, he had agreed to do a circuit through Central America, and when he’d asked Elisabeth if she’d like to come along, to her own surprise she hadn’t even thought twice.

  Shortly before they landed, Leo fell into a restless sleep. Elisabeth was dreading what would come next: at their last stop, the moment they were in the airport he had been literally paralyzed with disgust at the sight of the head of the cultural institute in her traditional woolen jacket. He had sat in the car with Elisabeth in silence, jaw clenched, and had even reached for her hand when they were stopped at a police checkpoint. Nothing happened, of course, and the agents had immediately waved them on, but when they reached the hotel, he was totally undone, covered in sweat and terrified. He spent the entire afternoon locked in their double room before giving his evening lecture to twenty-seven Germans in a badly lit hall, after which the lady director of the cultural institute had insisted on taking them to the only pizzeria in town, where she had plied Leo with questions about where he got his ideas from and did he write in the mornings or the afternoons. He then spent half the night in lamentation, pacing up and down the room and cursing his fate until finally, more out of desperation than passion, the two of them fell onto the bed in each other’s arms. At five in the morning her cell phone rang, and she was told that three of her closest coworkers had just been abducted in Africa.

  “Did you see?” Leo was awake again, tapping her shoulder and pointing to the outside beyond the portholes. “Like a great big stage set. A grid with hundreds of lightbulbs. Maybe we’re not flying at all, maybe we’re not even here. Maybe it’s all a trick. And besides, what do we do if there’s no one there to pick us up? I’ve got a feeling, and I’m not often wrong. You watch.”

  The lady from the cultural institute who was waiting was named Rappenzilch, wore a traditional woolen jacket, and had buckteeth. Her first question to Leo was where he got his ideas from. Elisabeth listened to her voicemail. She felt hollowed out by fear.

  They were sitting in the car. Outside the little cubes that were the houses in the capital streamed by in the pale morning light. Shop signs, under them old women walking with their baskets of fruit, in the sky the yellowish smoke from distant factories.

  In the hotel, she called headquarters in Geneva. Her colleague Moritz, still at his desk though it was long past midnight, told her the situation was confused, the UN couldn’t help, and they had to assume the regime was complicit. Two years ago, when she was in that country, hadn’t she had personal dealings with a secretary of state?

  “Yes.” Her voice echoed off the tiled walls in the bathroom. “One of the worst.”

  “Worst or not, the way things are right now, you’re the only connection we’ve got.”

  She went back into the bedroom where Leo was sitting on the bed looking at her reproachfully. This Mrs. Rappenzilch! And her teeth! And back on another damn podium tonight, he’d absolutely had it! He turned on the TV. Pictures of soldiers marching, then the faces of some politicians, then more soldiers. Leo shook his head and started ranting about the metaphysical horror this spectacle induced in him: the feeling of being a prisoner, this whole part of the world was its own unique hell, you just knew instinctively you’d never get out. You’d have to be nuts to put yourself willingly in a situation like this. “Look, they’re not even marching in step. They can’t even manage that! Did you see her teeth?!”

  “
Whose teeth?”

  “Mrs. Rappenzilch’s!”

  She went back into the bathroom to make more calls. Leo mustn’t notice, it all had to remain secret, who knew what he might blurt out. She called an underling of the African secretary of state whom she’d gotten to know some years before in unpleasant circumstances. She had to try six times before she got through, the ringtone sounded strange and the sound quality was dreadful. The man said he’d see what he could do. She thanked him effusively, hung up, and had to fight the urge to crumple up onto the floor. Her stomach hurt, and there was a pounding ache in her head.

  When she came back into the room, Leo was on the hotel phone bawling somebody out. “It’s unacceptable, I refuse to be treated like this! No!” He threw down the receiver, turned to her, and said triumphantly: “Roebrich.”

  She had no idea who Roebrich was, but the way he’d said the name suggested that this must be some important person in literary circles.

  “The prize. They more or less promised it to me and now suddenly they want to take it back, all because I don’t want Eldrich giving the presentation speech. Unacceptable! Maybe they can do that with Reuke or Moehrsam, but not with—just look at the sky! The sun playing on those clouds of gas, it makes them look beautiful, not like filthy pollution. Everything looks beautiful if you see it against the sun. Anyhow, I told him he can forget it. If he wants me on the jury next year, then we’re going to play by my rules!”

  She sank down onto the bed. She’d been with Carl, Henri, and Paul in Somalia the year before. On the last day, Carl had told her that he wouldn’t be doing this much longer, his nerves wouldn’t take it anymore, and it wasn’t good for the soul either. What were they doing to the three of them right now, in what unlit room, inaccessible to every rational force on the planet? She lay there motionless, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, she was engaged in a conversation with four policemen who’d morphed into one and the same person, she had no idea how, whom she had to answer correctly, no mistakes allowed, though the questions were all about her childhood and involved the most complex calculations, because every wrong answer meant that someone would die. A hand came down on her shoulder and she woke up with a scream.