“Absolutely vast,” Theo said. His head was tilted back, and he was looking up. “You can’t see this in Germany. There’s the Milky Way, directly above our heads. The starry sky you’ve got here is a work of art.”
He looked at me admiringly, as though the firmament were a result of my efforts. “All right, then,” I said. “Good night, Theo.”
“I hope it wasn’t an heirloom,” he said. “The chair, I mean.”
Obviously Theo wanted to be asked what had happened. I bit my lip. And then I put the question anyway: “What happened?”
“Don’t have a clue, man.” Theo was looking up again. “Maybe I dropped down on it too hard. The thing just came apart. Mind-boggling, all these stars.”
“Were you … dancing?”
Theo removed his gaze from the universe and contemplated me pensively for a while. “Let’s say the evening got a little wild.”
“Is it possible that the chair … went flying?”
“I threw it across the room in anger. It hurt pretty bad at first. Maybe you noticed the bruise on my thigh.”
I could have said with some certainty that there was no bruise on Theo’s thigh.
“But not to worry, nothing else got broken.” Theo laughed. “Then we heard the dog barking and turned off the music. I hope our rumpus didn’t wake up you and Antje.”
“No,” I said.
“So don’t look like that.” Theo nudged my shoulder. I immediately raised a hand to fend him off. I didn’t want him touching me.
“I’m not allowed to have fun with her anymore? Look, she’s not your property, got it?”
“She’s my client, Theo. That’s all.”
“That’s the correct attitude.” He nodded gravely. “She’s paying you to see to her every need while she’s on vacation.”
“She’s paying me for diving lessons.”
“Okay.” He folded his arms. “Let’s clarify things, once and for all. We’re alone, nobody’s listening. We’ll talk man-to-man. Understood?”
I nodded. I felt an enormous need for a thorough clarification.
“I’ve allowed you to give her a little pleasure,” said Theo. “But my relationship with Jola is none of your business.”
Exactly my take on the matter. I relaxed a bit.
“So I’m asking this for the last time: stop denying the obvious. It’s bad form.”
“But I’ve …,” I began, but then I fell silent at once. It wasn’t worth the trouble. He wasn’t about to believe any assertion of mine.
“Good boy. Just keep your trap shut.” Theo lit a cigarette. “The whole thing may seem weird to you. Believe me, I don’t find it so great either. But Jola refuses to go back home, and I refuse to leave her here alone. So we’re going to stay through the remaining six days, and after that you’ll never see us again. Maybe you and she will exchange a couple of e-mails, but before long the correspondence will die out and the thing will be forgotten. You’ll get on with your life and I with mine.”
I felt sudden relief. Even though Theo was proceeding from false premises, he was speaking to me from his soul. It was almost as if I were listening to my own thoughts. Rational and clear. Free from the strenuous and, all things considered, totally superfluous confusion of the past few days.
“We can get along extremely well in the time we have left,” he continued. “Provided we behave like adults.”
He drew so deeply and appreciatively on his cigarette that I had a sudden urge to smoke one myself. Apparently reading my mind, he held out the pack to me and gave me a light. I inhaled and coughed, enjoying the slight dizziness.
“Games aren’t in your line anyway, not if I’m any judge.” He stretched out his hand and said in English, “Fair play?”
I was still trying to figure out what I was promising while we shook hands. The gist appeared to be that I was to stop contradicting him on the subject of my alleged affair with Jola. Which didn’t mean I was admitting anything at all. In legal matters, a fundamental principle states that silence does not constitute a declaration of intent. Remaining silent means neither yes nor no. It means nothing at all. It’s a legal nullity. He who remains silent doesn’t lie. I pressed Theo’s hand. He slapped me heartily on the shoulder.
“I knew it,” he said. “You’re all right, Sven.”
He seemed to think our conversation had been of the utmost importance. We threw our cigarette butts away. “The great thing is, now we can talk,” Theo said. He looked up at the stars again. “Like me, do you sometimes get the impression that Jola’s not completely right in the head?”
The question took me by surprise. “I don’t know,” I stammered. “Actually, no. Maybe I haven’t known her long enough.”
He laughed as though I’d made a joke.
I said, “It’s a principle of mine never to judge other people.”
“No judgments, huh?” Theo nodded thoughtfully. “What a luxury that must be. Then I suppose you can’t say whether you think she’s pretty?”
I had to consider that one. Without a doubt, Jola was beautiful. To say so didn’t seem like a judgment but rather the statement of a fact that any normal person would observe and acknowledge. Of course, the very observation of a fact might contain judgmental elements; that couldn’t be ruled out, but I had no desire to discuss it. I had even less desire to talk shop with Theo about his girlfriend’s qualities as if we’d chartered a yacht together.
“I want to go home and get something to eat,” I said.
“Never mind,” said Theo. “This is new to you. You’re not used to it. And I appreciate your discretion. Wait a minute, I’ve got something to give you before you go.”
He reached into his hip pocket and pulled out some sheets of paper, folded at least four times into a little packet. He must have carried those pages around all day long.
“You wanted to read something of mine,” he said. “Hope you enjoy it.”
The packet he placed in my hand immediately started to unfold. The pages were typed. I pressed them back together.
“Say hello to Antje for me. Tell her we’re nearly out of wine. Fabulous sky, fabulous stars you have here.”
He’d reached the steps of the Casa Raya when he turned around again. “I apologize for throwing you in the water yesterday. And don’t forget to tell me how much I owe you for the chair.”
The door closed with a crash behind him. Only when the lights went on inside the Casa did I realize that it had been totally dark inside. As if Jola weren’t home. Except that when you were at the ends of the earth, you needed a car to go anywhere, unless you went to the water, so where was she? In her bed asleep, perhaps. Or maybe sitting in darkness at the dining-room table and staring into space. I tried to think about paella, but I didn’t feel hungry anymore.
That night I dreamed about Jola. She was dancing in front of a desk where two men were sitting. One of them was Theo, and I didn’t recognize the other. There was no music to be heard, so Jola’s bare feet struck the floor all the more loudly as she danced. She was trying out for a new role. She wore diving goggles and the red bikini. While the men watched her, they were jerking off under the table. Jola ended her dance before the men had reached their goal. A wrenching pain in my lumbar region made me aware that the second man at the table must be none other than myself.
“Lovely, Frau von der Pahlen,” Theo said to Jola as she stood before us, breathing hard. “And now please spell Montesquieu.”
Jola stuttered, Theo laughed. I wanted to go into action. I wanted to jump up and shout that I was no judge, that I would deliver no verdict, that I had nothing to do with the whole affair. But my mouth was so dry I couldn’t utter a sound, nor could I move my legs.
“Not even a guess?” said Theo.
Jola started crying. Now she was dressed like Bella Schweig, and she was telling her ex-boyfriend about the accident out on the street.
“Better try somewhere else.” Theo scribbled something on a little card and handed it to Jola. ??
?Death is a business that’s always hiring.”
My hands flew forward and seized Theo by the throat. Before I could tighten my grip, Jola came closer. She wasn’t actually in the room, she was on a large video screen. She smiled and spoke to the camera. “Don’t turn us off. We’ll turn you off,” she said.
I screamed and sat bolt upright in the bed. Antje rolled over and looked at me in the semidarkness.
“Serves you right,” she said, turned on her other side, and went back to sleep.
The next morning I woke up in the living room. I needed a little while to get my bearings, but I slowly realized that I was on the couch. Antje was asleep in the bedroom, and the house was absolutely quiet. Apparently that “Serves you right” had been part of my dream. The pages of Theo’s story lay scattered on the floor next to me. Although I couldn’t remember reading them before falling asleep, I knew for sure they were somehow connected to my dream.
I swung my legs over the edge of the couch and sat up. For the first time in four nights, I’d had several hours of uninterrupted sleep. I felt sick. It occurred to me that I didn’t know why and for what I was alive. Then I got to my feet and went into the kitchen to make coffee.
14
At first I believed it was a coincidence and then that it was my imagination, but on my tenth day with Theo and Jola, it became a fact: people were crossing the street to avoid me. It happened three times in a row on the main tourist drag in Puerto del Carmen, where we’d gone for ice cream between dives. First there was a group of local Spanish women, possibly part of Antje’s circle of friends. Then a married couple who might have been the owners of one of the holiday houses that Antje managed. And then two older men I couldn’t connect either to Antje or to myself. They all came toward us, looked at me, and crossed over to the other side of the street. Jola and Theo didn’t seem to notice anything.
My paranoia was probably a result of Bernie’s telephone call. My telephone had rung that morning at breakfast. It was Monday; the great diving expedition on the Aberdeen was to take place in two days. A few questions still needed to be cleared up, but it turned out that Bernie was calling for another reason. He asked me how things were going in a tone usually reserved for addressing pregnant women and cancer patients. “How are things going?” Because I didn’t understand what he was getting at, I said nothing. Antje looked at me attentively, holding a slice of bread and honey in front of her mouth. I stood up and went out onto the terrace.
And then Bernie really started in on me. What did I think I was doing. What was going to happen now. Didn’t I care about my job. Didn’t I have any shame. What did Antje have to say about all this.
It took me a while to understand that his subject was me and Jola. Actually, I liked Bernie. He was a person with a strong foundation, a basic agreement with himself that prohibited him from being friendly without good cause. This made dealing with him uncomplicated. In my opinion, most problems arose not because people wanted to harm one another but because they didn’t know what to talk about. They’d cast about for a topic, and outside of the weather and malicious gossip, there was simply nothing that could keep a conversation between two people going. With Bernie, it was different. He was taciturn and gruff and therefore incorruptible.
But on this particular morning, he talked and talked and refused to give it a rest. He got on my nerves. Speaking in English, naturally, he called me a “prick” and a “dumbarse” and came at me with the divers’ “Do It Right” doctrine. And all of it at machine-gun speed, even though he knew I didn’t understand English very well on the telephone.
I said, “Fuck off, Bernie,” and hung up. However, I couldn’t get his call out of my mind. I didn’t know what Bernie or Dave or anybody else had heard. He hadn’t sounded worried, he’d sounded irate. I needed Bernie, Dave, and the Aberdeen on Wednesday. Planning for the expedition had been going on for months, and I’d invested a pile of money in new equipment. What I most felt like doing was going out and taking the first person I saw by the collar and yelling in his face and asking him who he thought he was, sticking his nose in other people’s affairs like that, and demanding that he and his island friends stop spreading lies about me. Wars started that way, through the appetite for rumor. Through readiness to believe, always, the worst about other people. I was more than pleased when we got back into our diving suits. The neoprene formed a thick skin that kept the world out. I looked forward happily to another half hour when I wouldn’t have to share the air I breathed with humankind.
A measure of my perplexity was that we dove again off Playa Chica, the beach at Puerto del Carmen. By that time, Jola and Theo knew all the island’s dive spots. Barracudas, groupers, and angel sharks were no longer a sensation. One of my personal goals was to surprise my clients again and again. But few of them stayed longer than ten days, and hardly anybody undertook more than two dives per day. There was a limit even to the number of sightseeing points in the Atlantic Ocean. I had slowly run out of ideas. Under the ledge east of Playa Chica, there was a cave spacious enough to be safe. It was the last thing I had to show them. After that, we’d have to fill the remaining days with boat diving.
I swam close to the seabed, turning around every few seconds to check on my two companions, making sure they didn’t get tangled up in an anchor cable or caught in somebody’s lost fishing line. Although Bernie and I launched cleanup campaigns from time to time, Playa Chica remained the dirtiest spot on the island. To our left, Laura and a group of beginners were churning up sludge. Above us, children were jumping off the quay, feet first, prepared to kick an ascending diver in the head. Snorkeling tourists hauled their bellies through the water and looked down on us, never dreaming how badly their backs would be sunburned that evening. The drumming of motorboat engines was constantly in our ears. We couldn’t leave the cove behind fast enough. We headed for the rim of the ledge, from where we would venture into deeper waters.
We didn’t get that far. We were barely twelve meters down when I spotted it where it lay, buried in sand. It was over a meter long, surely a male. Electric rays always reminded me of the snowmen my mother baked out of cookie dough for Christmas. Two circular discs, one large and one small, joined together in a single flat object. Also known as torpedo fish, electric rays could generate life-threatening electric shocks.
Laura liked to tell the story about the time she was letting the current carry her backward so that she could keep an eye on her dive group. As she drifted, she disturbed a torpedo with her fins. The creature shot up from the ocean floor, did a full somersault in front of Laura’s nose, and struck her on the elbow. Two hundred volts, underwater. Not necessarily enough to kill you as long as you remained conscious. Laura compared the feeling to being punched hard in the solar plexus. Supposedly, she could still remember what went through her head at the time. She thought she absolutely mustn’t pass out, because the beginning divers wouldn’t be capable of saving her. She thought if the panicked fish zapped one of her clients, she could toss her diving instructor’s license into the trash can. And she thought it was a good sign that she was still able to have such thoughts. She made it to the surface with her group. I took over Laura’s clients for two weeks, until she felt able to get back in the water.
I raised my hand and signaled to Jola and Theo that they should kneel on the bottom. Then I pointed to the torpedo fish and drew the fingers of my other hand in a slashing movement across my throat. Both Jola and Theo nodded. They’d understood what my gesture meant: deadly.
I had them come a little closer. One meter was the approved distance. Electric rays were basically nonaggressive. If they felt they were being attacked, they’d defend themselves within a predictable radius. There was a trick I’d tried a few times since Laura’s experience, and it had always worked. I took off one fin, held it with both hands, and beat the water a few strokes, right above the torpedo. The compression wave blew the sand off the fish’s back. Now you could see its snowman shape and its marbling. An extremely p
ale specimen. I wagged my fin a few more times, touching the ray’s tail, trying to provoke a reaction. I wanted it to perform a somersault. Jola and Theo were seeing an electric ray for the first time. It could provide their overdue sensation, something they could record in their logbooks. When we were back on dry land, I’d explain to them about the strength of the electric current the torpedo could produce and tell them Laura’s story; maybe I’d even claim it for myself.
But nothing happened. The ray’s body oscillated slackly with the movement of the water. The thing looked like a big cleaning rag. I made a few more efforts, waving my fin as though I were fanning a campfire. Either the fish was in a really deep sleep, or he simply wasn’t going to let himself be disturbed. Finally I gave up and set about putting the fin back on my foot.
What came next is best described in the simplest words: Jola shoved Theo. She picked the right moment. Theo had leaned forward to take a few snapshots of the apathetic torpedo with the underwater camera. He was holding both arms out in front of his body and had shifted his center of gravity well forward. There was scarcely half a meter’s distance between the camera and the skin on the ray’s back. In this position, Theo was knocked completely off balance by Jola’s push. Even though the water resistance slowed his movement, he tipped forward too fast to react properly. Instead of twisting himself to one side, he let go of the camera and stretched out his arms to break his fall on the seafloor. But that was where the torpedo was lying. Theo made some desperate rowing motions in an effort to maintain his distance and avoid touching the fish. I was too far away to reach him with my hands, and so I kicked out at his thigh, hoping to change the direction of his fall. It could have worked. But at that very moment, everything became too much for the torpedo. A tremor went through its still-flaccid body, which stiffened itself into concentrated strength.