Do you remember Eric’s call, I ask. He said his secretary had mixed up Martin and me, and she called the wrong person. Do you remember?
You really have to get out of here, Ivan.
If she hadn’t mixed us up, then I would have met him for lunch today and I wouldn’t have come here and none of this would have happened, isn’t that curious?
Very curious, but you’ve got to get out of here. Otherwise it’ll be too late.
Too late … so why didn’t I give him my watch? A TAG Heuer, four thousand euros, bought in Geneva two years ago. If I’d given it to him, I wouldn’t have had to reach into my inner pocket. I look at the watch hands. Ten past four. Ten past four. Ten past four. Eleven past four.
All well and good, says Heinrich, but I’m advising you to get out of here.
Where to?
Out.
But where to?
The main thing is out.
Out there?
Out anywhere.
It’s easy for him to say, but it’s true, it was a mistake to come back here. This building is empty except for one floor, the warehouse, but I’ve never seen a soul even there. I’ll have to crawl to the door, past Holiday Snap No. 9 and the sniggering children, across the rectangle of light the sun is casting on the floor, the door is several yards farther on, that’s where I’ll have to straighten up to reach the bolt and the handle, and then I’ll be out.
So I push myself out of the chair, sink to the floor, and start to crawl. I’ve still got the strength, I’m managing, I’ll be able to reach the door. First I have to get past the chest of drawers; the bottom drawer, which is partway open, holds my brushes, all my brushes, but I don’t know at this particular moment how I’m going to find the right one. It’s not easy, there are a lot of them, and besides I’m not looking for a brush!
But what am I looking for, then?
It’ll come to me. Past the chest of drawers. Cold floor against my cold hands, cracked floor against my cracked hands, rough floor against my rough hands, keep going. I must not look at the painting, so that I don’t attract the attention of the children, and I have to stay clear of the rectangle of light.
But what was that about? The thing with the rectangle of light, what was that?
I no longer know. Help me, open the door, I can’t manage the thing with the bolt. Someone will find me down on the street, someone will call a doctor. And what if the doctor asks what I was doing in a neighborhood like this? But why would he ask, what does he care about my studio and a handful of forged paintings that you can’t even call fakes, they’re genuine, you’re the fake, poor Heinrich, help me with the door! I have to get out before I faint.
If you know this, you also know that you’re alone here.
Yes, I know this. And?
Ivan.
Yes?
If you’re alone here.
Yes?
Then I can’t help you with the bolt.
No?
Ivan.
Yes, I understand. Yes. So I have to. Keep going. But when I’m downstairs and the three of them come back, what do I do? Is there some way they can get in, do they have a key? Maybe when they took my wallet, they took my keys too.
If they’d taken them, then they’d be here now, not you.
How so?
Because you’d have no key.
But what would they want here?
Good question. Maybe you should keep on crawling.
But—
It’s urgent.
But—
It’s really urgent, Ivan.
I’ve never noticed how big this studio is. Looking at the window from down here, there’s much more sky, much more blue than usual. I assume it’s still hot outside, but I don’t feel it, I’m cold. Now it hurts a lot again. If you don’t have to breathe in, things would be easier, you can limit it but you still do have to breathe a little bit, and it burns like fire. It’s the pain that’s keeping me conscious. I’m so tired and things keep going dark for a moment, but then I breathe in again and in that moment it hurts so much that I’m awake again, do you understand?
Ivan, I’m not here.
You never were. Since that afternoon we went to the hypnotist. Always somewhere else. But aren’t you impressed? Your son, the hero.
I’ll never hear about it, Ivan. No one will, if you don’t make it to the door and outside. Keep crawling, don’t get stuck in the grass.
Do you remember the two of us in the sandbox? You built towers and I knocked them over, and then you weren’t the one who cried, I was, until Papa came and said, “Eric, stop that!” and it wasn’t even you who’d done it.
The grass is so high. But what if they do come back? The thin man is standing there again, pulling at his hat and saying, “Jaegerstrasse 15b, fifth floor!” He raises his hands as if to command a hearing, and bobs up and down nervously. “That’s where you’ll find him, that’s where your brother is.”
No, I say, that’s where I am, and there is here.
But he’s not listening to me, he’s in such a hurry to impart the information all over again: “Jaegerstrasse 15b, fifth floor!” He hops and waves, all trace of calm has evaporated, he’s actually fading already and I know I won’t see him again.
It’s freezing cold, but I’m safe. The three of them won’t find me. The door is barred, and even if they have the key, the grass is too thick. Everything rises and falls, forward and backward, all of it in waves, to and fro. This building will not be here forever, and even the blue out there won’t always be blue. Only I will always be here, I have to be here, there has to be me, because without me all this wouldn’t exist because there’d be nobody to see it. The cold floor, hard beneath my temple. And a rocking, as if I were on a boat again.
Do you remember when we went to Tangiers, you and I and Mama and Papa, and the evening ferry took us across the straits? We were six years old and when we left Algeciras the air was redolent with the smell of flowers and sweetish gasoline, the stars shimmered around a coppery moon, and Papa is carrying both of us in his arms, and Mama is following along behind, and there’s a fat man, all unshaven, asleep on the deck, his mouth wide open, and I have an intuition that I’m going to remember him all my life, but then the ferry stabbed its way out to the open sea, and the coast became a flicker of light, and next to us were pale cliffs and the sounds of the waves. The four of us belong together, it will always be like this, and I know, as I lay my head on his shoulder, that I’m about to fall asleep although I don’t want to, it’s night everywhere, nothing but stars close above our heads, more of them than ever, Africa will soon appear, only the pain when I breathe in reminds me how hard the ground is, and it’s cold again, everything keeps going up and down, and think about how excited the two of us were the first day, naturally they sat us next to each other so that everyone would notice that we look exactly alike, and our parents stand behind us against the wall, and the teacher says is there one of you or are there two, and the question strikes me as so hard that I turn around to Papa and Mama, but they smile and say nothing, as if to make clear to us that from now on we have to be the ones to answer, and look, there’s a bird fluttering past the window, I don’t see it, just its shadow in the rectangle of light, I’ve never seen a bird fly so slowly, we’ll be in Africa soon, and then it’s morning again, I could go after it, I’d really love to know
Seasons
1
The flowering apple tree was close to the wall, and you could see into the house through the window. On the main floor were the salon, the living room, the former media room, now empty, and the library. If you climbed higher you could see through the fanlight into the entrance hall and from still further up, directly into the study with the desk and the pale patch of wall where the little matchstick man had hung until recently. Anyone who still had the strength for it could keep climbing all the way up onto the roof.
Marie wouldn’t have dared go up there on her own, but along with Georg and Lena it was possible, because
if there were three of you, none of you wanted to be a coward, and sometimes Jo came too. You had to set one foot in the fork of the branch and the other on the upper edge of the window frame, and then it was really important not to look down. Just don’t think about it, close yourself off inside, or you’d feel in your stomach how far down it was, you’d start to sweat, you’d seize up with fear and hang there like a sack. The right way was to grab the tin gutter, get a swing going, push one knee against the wall, and barrel forward until you could work your fingers in between the roof tiles and pull yourself up. Then you could sit there with your back pressed against the slope of the roof and your heels in the gutter, looking over the top of the tree and the house where Georg lived all the way to the street beyond the next one. Ragged clouds were being driven across the sky, pulled and crushed and torn by the wind. As soon as they dissolved, the sun stood there like a blazing fire—even when you squeezed your eyes tight shut, it burned its way through to your eyeballs.
Georg often talked about his father being a policeman, and how he was allowed to play with his pistol at home, but no matter how often he announced he was going to, he never actually produced it. He also told stories about robbers, murderers, con men, and crocodiles. A crocodile could lie there motionless for hours on end, looking like an old tree trunk, and then suddenly it lunged and snapped its jaws. He’d been in Africa and in China, in Barcelona and in Egypt.
They talked about what could have happened to Ivan. Maybe he’d gone to America. People often took secret trips to America, sometimes they went by ship, and sometimes even an airplane, people over there wore big hats and boots.
“Or maybe China,” said Lena.
“China’s too far away,” said Marie. “And besides, they speak Chinese there.” She felt the sun on her skin, she heard the rustling of the apple tree and the soft buzz of a bumblebee close by her ear.
“Can’t he learn Chinese?” asked Georg.
“Nobody learns Chinese,” said Marie, because it was too hard, and there was no point, how could anyone find words in all those brushstrokes? And what if even the Chinese were only pretending they could? It was possible—she did the same, pretending she understood what her father was talking about when he kept explaining to her that the big crisis had saved him.
“And if he’s dead?” asked Georg.
Marie shrugged. How warm the tiles were. You could doze off, but you mustn’t, you had to keep your heels stuck tight in the gutter so as not to slide off the slope of the roof. “If he’s dead, they’d have found him.”
“He could be in the forest,” said Georg.
“What sort of forest?”
“The forest. Where the wolves are.”
The bumblebee landed somewhere, paused for a moment or two, then flew off again. Marie blinked. A cloud was looking like a bicycle with a man on it who had a hat but no head.
“Does space up there just keep on going?” asked Lena. “Or does it end somewhere?”
“Maybe there’s a wall,” said Marie.
“But even if there is,” said Georg, “you can always keep flying. You could make a hole in the wall. It can’t come to an end. It can never come to an end.”
“But if the wall is solid,” said Lena. “Really, really solid?”
“You could still make a hole in it,” said Georg.
“The most massive wall in the whole world?”
“Then imagine you have the pointiest tool.”
For a while none of them said anything. The buzzing of the bumblebee rose, then fell, then rose again.
“Matthias is stupid,” Lena said eventually.
“Yes he is,” said Georg.
“Why?” asked Marie.
“Marie and Matthias,” sang Lena. “Matthias and Marie. Marie and Matthias. Matthias and Marie.”
“When’s the wedding?” asked Georg.
Without opening her eyes, Marie made a fist and punched him. She hit him smack in the middle of his upper arm, and Georg let out a scream. Marie didn’t like Matthias that much, and of course both of them knew this. It was just the usual talk up on the roof.
Once Mama had caught them as they were climbing down. She had worked herself up into a terrible state. Georg and Lena had been forbidden to visit for a while, as had Jo and Natalie, even though Natalie had never ever been up on the roof. Marie had given her solemn word never to do anything so dangerous again, but she had crossed her fingers in the pocket of her jeans so it didn’t count, and luckily Mama soon forgot about it again. Mama forgot things quickly. She hadn’t been home a lot recently, there were costumes to try on and people to meet, and lots of telephone calls, and she had to have regular meetings with the divorce lawyer, a courtly gentleman with a beard, big ears, and eyes like a seal.
Her father came twice a week and took her to the zoo or the cinema. She wasn’t that interested in animals, and the films were always the wrong ones—he simply didn’t get what you wanted to see if you were eleven. Sometimes she also went to visit him in the presbytery. It was a secret that he was living there, she wasn’t allowed to tell anyone, not her grandparents, not Ligurna, not anyone at school, and most of all not Mama.
The presbytery smelled of mothballs and cooking. Her father slept on a couch next to the TV under a picture of Jesus looking as if he had a toothache. Her father always wore jeans and a red-checked shirt, and sometimes he wore a baseball cap that said I Boston on it. When she asked him when he washed the shirt, he got cross and said that he had two others just like it. He no longer owned a computer, or a phone, or a car, and only one pair of sneakers. She had never known him to be in such a good mood.
“The crisis!” he cried as they were walking around the zoo. “Nobody saw it coming. It’s like the end of the world. And eight months ago nobody was even dreaming of it!”
They stopped. A gnu with empty eyes returned Marie’s glance.
“Real estate derivatives. If only we’d predicted it, we could have made billions! But nobody predicted it. The exchange rates are in free fall, not even the banks can borrow money.” He clapped his hands. “And everyone knows it, they all keep talking about it, nobody wonders about it, do you understand? Nobody has any questions! Do you understand?”
Marie nodded.
He squatted down. “Everyone’s losing money,” he said in her ear. “Everyone’s losing everything, do you understand?”
Marie nodded.
“Nobody’s asking about their own money now. They’re all expecting it to be gone, they’re reckoning on it because it’s happening to everyone. It’s a miracle. Not one client is asking what’s happened to his investments.”
Marie knew the way you were supposed to look so that it seemed you were understanding everything. She used this look in school, and it was often enough to get her good marks. And she always put it on when her father decided to tell her things that were important. He believed that the two of them were alike and that she understood him better than anyone else did.
“Marie,” he said. “You understand me better than anyone else does.”
Seeking help, she looked over at the gnu.
“If, for example—it’s just an example, Marie! If you’ve made losses, and you were expecting that—but then suddenly no one’s asking questions anymore!”
“Are we going to go see the tigers?”
He leapt up and clapped his hands again, so loudly that a woman who was passing, pushing a baby carriage, looked at him reproachfully. “And Kluessen’s in the hospital! It may be a long time, he could even die, who knows! I’ll soon be done with the son. Who could have seen it coming!”
He put his hand on her shoulder and pushed her forward. She wasn’t surprised that they were heading for the exit. She wasn’t going to see the tigers today either. Her father never went to see the tigers.
“Finally!” called Georg when he saw them coming back. He was sitting on the garden fence wearing his Robin Hood cap, he’d tied on a quiver, and he had a bow in his hand. He’d obviously been ext
remely bored.
“Are they sharp?” asked her father.
“Not sharp, pointed. No, they’re not pointed.”
“They look pointed.”
“But they’re not.”
Her father paused for a few seconds before saying, “You’re not allowed to shoot with pointed arrows. It’s too dangerous.”
“They’re not pointed,” Georg said again.
“Honestly!” said Marie.
“Is that true?”
Both of them nodded. Georg even laid his hand on his heart. But her father didn’t see this because he was looking absentmindedly at the other side of the street.
“I’ve never liked this house.”
“Me neither!” said Marie.
“Were you ever in the cellar?”
“There’s a cellar?”
“No. There isn’t, and you’re not going down there!”
“Is it true that you lost all that money?” asked Georg.
“The crisis. Completely unexpected. No one saw it coming. Do you watch the news?”
Georg shook his head.
“Do you know what derivatives are?”
Georg nodded.
“And what mortgage-backed CDOs are, do you know that too?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
Georg nodded.
“Be careful with the arrows.” He gave the house across the street another anxious look, then stroked Marie’s cheek and left.
“They really aren’t pointed!” Georg called after him.
“Promise!” called Marie.
As she was watching her father go, she thought of Ivan again. It was only recently that she’d grasped that maybe the riddle would never be solved. Never, which meant: not now and not later and not even much, much later, not in her whole life and not even after that. She often found herself thinking how he’d once explained to her in the museum why artists painted ugly stuff like old fish, rotten apples, or boiled turkeys: it wasn’t because it was about the things themselves, it was about painting the things, so—here he had looked at her solemnly and spoken very quietly, as if he were betraying a secret—so what they were painting was painting itself. Then he’d asked her if she understood, in the same voice her father always used when he asked her the same question, and she’d nodded the same way she always nodded. Her uncle had always seemed a little weird to her, because he looked so exactly like her father and had the same voice and yet was someone else. Things were sometimes strange. People painted fish in order to paint painting, bicycles fell over when you set them on their two wheels but were perfectly stable on these same wheels when you rode off on them, there were people who looked exactly like other people, and sometimes someone disappeared from the world just like that, on a summer day.