Decompression

  No one knows how things look from an electric ray’s viewpoint. Instead of giving Theo a heavy jolt of electric current, the fish decided to flee. With a few powerful lashes of its tail, it propelled itself away from us. Ten meters on, it already felt safe enough from further disturbance to sink back down to the bottom and shovel sand onto its back with the perimeter of its disc-shaped body. On the spot where the torpedo had just been lying, Theo was crouched on all fours. His heavy breathing caused a column of air bubbles to climb up above him. I didn’t even try to hold him back when he arbitrarily broke off the dive and began his controlled ascent.

  I had no idea what I was going to do or say once we reached dry land. Instead of structured thoughts, images shot through my head. Of me sitting on a bench up on the quay with Jola and pulling a sea urchin’s spine out of her foot. Of her struggling with Theo in darkness, wind, and rain atop a steep cliff in Famara. All that seemed so astonishingly far back in time that I wondered how long it had actually been since they arrived. However, when I tried to comprehend the immediate here and now, in which the three of us were swimming landward on our backs, I was compelled to the realization that this image too seemed like a memory. As if the present were nothing more than an especially distinct flashback to the past. Even the best plan—a severe tongue-lashing or the irrevocable decision to tell Jola and Theo to go to hell, once and for all—would have done nothing to help me along. Because no one could have prepared himself for what came after we’d clambered up the slippery steps to the quay. No one could have foreseen it. Bent under our heavy tanks and wearing our dripping rubber suits, we’d slipped through the holiday makers on the promenade and finally reached the van. Jola’s entire body was shivering. Not with shame, not with excitement, not even with cold; she was trembling with anger. She set down her scuba tank, threw her fins on the ground, ripped off her diving mask, and immediately went on the attack.

  “Are you crazy, doing this”—she drew her hand across her throat—“when the fish was alive?”

  “That,” I said, also making the slashing gesture, “was a deadly fish!”

  She stared at me aghast. “So when you stirred up the sand around it, were you doing that so we could see it better, or what?”

  “I wanted to wake it up so it would do a somersault for you.”

  “That close to us?”

  “It wasn’t my first electric ray, Jola.”

  “All the same, it was as pallid and limp as a corpse. I thought it was dead!” She repeated my gesture yet again. “Theo could have been killed!”

  “Because you shoved him!” I shouted.

  “No!” She stood right in front of me, her arms folded, her breasts molded as though in plastic under the tight neoprene. It briefly occurred to me that maybe she wasn’t angry at all, that she simply enjoyed putting on such a performance.

  “Because you gave a signal that wasn’t agreed on in advance,” she said. “Haven’t you ever heard that you’re supposed to use only prearranged hand signals? For safety reasons? That’s one of the ‘Do It Right’ principles you value so much, isn’t it?”

  Her tone of voice was slowly getting on my nerves. I said, “It’s a gesture everybody understands.”

  “No it isn’t, as we see.”

  “But you shoved Theo!”

  “Don’t try to turn the tables on me. You’re the one who bears the responsibility. You communicated badly, so you alone are to blame. If something had happened to Theo, you’d have had to answer for it.”

  She turned around and went over to Theo, who was leaning against the van, smoking a cigarette. He looked like a detached observer, waiting with quiet curiosity to see how the scene would develop. The bit of sidewalk we were standing on felt like a stage to me too. Not a good feeling.

  “Sorry, Theo,” Jola said. She stroked his cheek as though he were a little boy who’d cut his knee. “It was supposed to be just a stupid joke. Theo and the dead fish. Ha-ha.”

  “Forget about it,” Theo said, drawing on his cigarette and not taking his eyes off Jola.

  “It was Sven’s mistake. Complain to him.”

  She threw a last, annihilating glance at me over her shoulder and then stalked around the van and out of my sight. There was no other possible way to exit the stage.

  That was probably the exact moment when I should have understood the game Jola was playing. She’d dropped enough hints. Along with Lotte Hass’s biography, Jola had been reading countless nonfiction books about diving and the underwater world. And she, of all people, was supposed not to have known what an electric ray looked like and what my warning sign had meant? And when I tried to goad the torpedo into reacting, she’d thought—what? That I was playing around with a dead fish? I should have made it my business to recognize what was consistent in Jola’s behavior. Lawyers are supposed to have a sixth sense for patterns. But I wasn’t a lawyer, after all; I was a diving instructor. Instead of wishing the two of them a nice vacation and taking to my heels, I came to the conclusion that Jola wasn’t completely wrong. If Theo had collided with the ray and suffered a fatal accident, I might have been accused of involuntary manslaughter. Maybe even of murder. The motive would have been clear if half the island had taken the witness stand and testified to my alleged affair with Jola.

  We separated for the rest of the day. Theo and Jola wanted to stay in town a little longer, go to dinner later, and take a taxi back to Lahora. I was grateful for the evening off. I steered my Volkswagen van through the volcanic landscape, alone and enjoying it.

  It’s easy to judge your past self. How stupid you were, how little you grasped. Patterns, though not necessarily explanations, show themselves only in hindsight. So with all our efforts to do everything right, we can still be sure to arrive notoriously too late.

  JOLA’S DIARY, TENTH DAY

  Monday, November 21. Afternoon.

  I don’t have much time. He could come back at any moment. I’m in the Wunder Bar café, surrounded by German tourists. There’s a piece of cheesecake and a cup of filter coffee on the table. It’s 3:32 in the afternoon. Scarcely an hour ago, Theo tried to kill me again. Sounds like the beginning of a crime novel. But it isn’t. Maybe I should compose an appeal for help while I’m sitting here: Dear Sir or Madam, if you find these notes, please inform the police at once! Inquire as to the whereabouts of a certain Jolante von der Pahlen. Has she disappeared? Has something happened to her? Please tell the police it was no accident! They should question the writer Theodor Hast, and they shouldn’t forget he’s a true master in the art of twisting the truth. That’s his profession.

  It was so brazen, the way he attacked poor Sven! He said he’d misinterpreted Sven’s hand signal and assumed the fish was dead. The dead fish and the actress—ha-ha. I wonder if he concocted that story before he decided to push me onto an electric ray? Or is he ingenious enough to come up with such explanations spontaneously? In any case, he actually threatened to file a complaint with the police, while the truth was that Sven would have been perfectly justified in showing us the door. But the race is to the cheeky. In the end, Sven really thought he was to blame for everything.

  Now the old man’s looking for an ATM. He wants to withdraw a hefty sum from my account so he can take me out to dinner this evening. Such a failed murder attempt calls for a celebration. He probably didn’t even want to kill me. One doesn’t break a pretty toy on purpose; one merely wants to find out how much it can take. One wants to see it perform a two-hundred-volt dance at the bottom of the sea. To watch it roll up its eyes, twitch epileptically, swallow water, lose consciousness. What fun.

  Did he think Sven wouldn’t see him push me? Or was he determined that he should? Maybe it’s not really about me. Maybe it’s some kind of suicide attempt. Maybe Theo beats me right in front of the living-room window and shoves me onto a lethal fish before Sven’s eyes as a way of provoking Sven. Until he has no other choice but to avenge me and hang the old man on a rock the next time we dive. Theo’s clever enough to know
that staging an accident would be easy for an experienced diver like Sven. No marks. No witnesses. If that’s so, I’m less than a toy. Less than an instrument. Only a kind of lure. The piece of cheesecake in the mousetrap.

  Maybe I’m going crazy. I don’t feel anything anymore. Then again, my brain’s working incessantly. I remember wanting to talk to Sven. He’d rescue me, I thought. But then he suddenly seemed surreal to me. A flat, cardboard figure. As though I’d invented him. How can you be rescued by your own invention? Please let me in on that secret when you’re finished giving your statement to the police, dear sir or madam. And don’t forget to speak with the coast guard. They must search the Atlantic Ocean for the remains of the actress or the writer. Maybe even for the remains of both. Down forty meters deep.

  15

  Before I reached the sandlot, I could already see that Antje wasn’t home. In all our years in Lahora, I’d never been able to teach her to shut the gate only when the VW van was parked on the property. Whenever I came home, I always had to climb out and open the gate. There were days when that inconvenience galled me to my soul; on this day, however, seeing the gate standing open caused me only frustration. It meant that Antje wasn’t there. I’d been looking forward to spending the evening with her, to eating and chatting, to discussing the day just past and the new day tomorrow. To putting our heads together under the light of the dining-room lamp. It almost seemed as though I was observing that scene through a lighted window, while I myself stood outside on a cold, wintry German street.

  Without Todd’s yapping, the house positively boomed with silence. There was nothing extraordinary about Antje’s driving to town in the afternoon to do some shopping, meet girlfriends, or tend to a holiday apartment. It was only that she usually called me up before she left and asked what I was doing at the moment and whether she should come to the dive site and bring fresh scuba tanks or hot soup. When there was nothing on schedule for the evening, we’d sometimes arrange to meet for coffee and cheesecake at the Wunder Bar café. Or to take Todd for a walk on the promenade. Suddenly it became clear to me how much had changed since Jola and Theo arrived on the island.

  I put the wasp-waisted espresso pot on the stove and filled a big glass with lemonade. “Making things nice for yourself” described a method women resorted to; nevertheless, male though I was, I was determined to give it a try. I picked up the scattered pages of Theo’s short story from the floor near the living-room couch and put them in the proper order. I carried the coffee, the lemonade, and a bucket of ice cubes out to the terrace and pushed a deck chair into the shade.

  Two hours later, I called Antje’s number. All I got was her voice mail. Just in case she was in a dead zone, I called her three more times at intervals of a few minutes.

  It had cost me an effort to read Theo’s story all the way through. In the end I’d felt downright loathing for the typed pages themselves. It was as though the content of the words had bled onto the paper. As though they might dirty my fingers.

  The sun had sunk behind the flat roofs of the neighboring houses. Antje knew a lot about literature. I wanted to ask her how much real life entered into storytelling. Would she think an author who described something abominable in great detail must necessarily have had practical experience in his subject? I didn’t understand why Theo had given me that story. The feeling it had produced in me was that I never wanted to see him again. Several times, while I was reading the thing, I’d been on the point of calling up Bernie and asking him whether he’d agree to take over my clients. One of my basic principles was to accept money from my clients only at the end of their course, which meant that I hadn’t yet seen a cent from Jola and Theo. If I terminated the contract now, I could most probably kiss all fourteen thousand euros good-bye. Antje and I needed that money badly. That was why I wanted to talk with her. I wanted to ask her whether it wouldn’t be better to cut all ties with a guy who was capable of writing such stuff. I figured she’d look at me as though I’d made a joke. She’d say something like You want to ditch the best contract you’ve ever had in your life because your client wrote a story about two people who aren’t nice to each other? Hasn’t anyone ever informed you that literature is never about nice things, not even on islands? You’re acting like a child who’s seen a scary movie and now he’s afraid of the dark! Maybe the wretched feeling I had would go away if I could hear her talk like that.

  Her voice mail again. Antje never turned off her cell phone. That little gadget was always freshly charged and ready to work. For her, the ability to be reached constituted a kind of proof of existence. Just as some physicists thought that if no one looked at the moon it wasn’t there, Antje believed that anyone who couldn’t be called up disappeared. Voice mail, one more time. I resolved not to try her number again. Fortunately, I wasn’t the sort of person who always jumped to the direst possible conclusions. You just had to bear the normal probability distribution in mind. Getting in an automobile accident was much less probable than losing a cell phone or not hearing it ring. Even in Antje’s case. It struck me that I couldn’t think of anyone I could ask about her. I didn’t even know the names of most of her girlfriends, much less their phone numbers. Quite apart from the fact that holding a telephone conversation in Spanish was a physical impossibility for me. Bernie didn’t really have anything to do with Antje, and if I called him and inquired about her, he’d answer by immediately asking me what the devil was going on with us. I had no contact with her parents in Germany. And in any case, it was only eight in the evening.

  A strange restlessness drove me to pace through the house. I might also have been a little queasy. And probably hungry as well, but I couldn’t make up my mind to eat anything. As though attached by barbs, Theo’s story hung on my thoughts. There was even something baleful about the sunset in the beginning of the story, when he had his two characters go out for an early evening walk: The sky was an arrangement of bloody pieces of cloud, as if some enormous being had exploded overhead. The gathering darkness was a cloak, the gulls’ cries a jeering sound track. Even a literary lowbrow like me could tell that the woman wasn’t identical with Jola. Her name was different too. On the other hand, she seemed to share many of Jola’s characteristics. First and foremost, a dark beauty. And a certain unpredictability. It slowly became clear to me why I didn’t care for literature. Like jurisprudence, it was about the art of judging. The author acted as the highest judge, decided the facts of the case, called in witnesses, and in the end handed down the verdict. Punishment or acquittal. Unlike in the legal process, there was not even a possibility of appeal.

  I roamed around the living room like a man looking for something. Everywhere in the house, there were objects I would have sworn I’d never seen before had they been pointed out to me in some neutral place. It was time for me to get a grip on myself.

  I went into the kitchen and whisked three eggs and some Maggi seasoning sauce, tore off a big chunk of bread for dipping, and carried everything into the office. By way of distracting myself, I wanted to watch one or two episodes of Jola’s series. If it succeeded in making me sleepy, I’d be able to take advantage of Antje’s absence by spending a night in the bed for a change.

  For the sake of completeness, I’d started watching the series in chronological order from Bella Schweig’s first appearance. I sat at the computer, opened the Up and Down archive, and clicked through to Episode 589. Just as I hit the START button, I saw him. He was lying on his back just a few centimeters away from the mousepad, his four delicate legs with their high-tech suction cups thrusting stiffly upward. It was as though he’d been positioned to send a message: Look here, this thing’s dead. I jumped up and probably cried out. Emile. The chill of his little body burned itself into my hand. I prodded him with my index finger again and again, tried to warm him, turned him right side up, and set him on my arm in the usual spot. He fell back onto the table, reduced to a piece of rubbery matter. I thought there was a vaguely chemical scent, perhaps insect spray, in the room
.

  In the middle of my reflections on which would be more absurd, throwing a friend down the toilet or burying a reptile, the doorbell rang. Without Todd’s hysterical barking, the rooms seemed so unfurnished that I myself thought I wasn’t home. Antje had her own key and would have made more noise upon arriving. The doorbell rang again. Three short, three long, three short. It was someone who knew the Morse alphabet. Even without that hint, I would have guessed who was outside.

  When I opened the door, she fell into my arms. I caught a fleeting glimpse of her mascara-smeared face. She hadn’t had makeup on that afternoon. Her shoulders were twitching. She clung to me hard. Sobs shook her body all over. I held her in my arms and buried my nose in her hair. We hadn’t even said hello. While I inhaled the smell of her, I felt myself becoming indifferent to everything else. To the torpedo fish, to Antje, to Theo’s story, to the gecko. I thought, I mustn’t think about anything anymore, I mustn’t want anything more. She told me through tears what had happened, but I barely understood what she said.

  She and Theo had taken a walk on the promenade at sunset. Suddenly Jola had spotted a swimmer struggling with the current far from the shore. Her first impulse was to jump into the water, but Theo had held her back. They ran around pointlessly for a long while before finding a lifeguard. Meanwhile a crowd had gathered on the promenade, a coast guard boat was on the way, and a helicopter was arriving from one of the other islands. They were all too late to recover the swimmer alive. I thought fleetingly about Bella Schweig, who turns up weeping at her ex-boyfriend’s place with a story about a cyclist run down in traffic.

  While I stroked Jola’s hair, I told her that tourists often died on the island. They drowned or fell from bicycles or paraglided into a cliff or got drunk and drove off the road. There was a whole rescue industry dedicated to helping people who fell victim to their leisure activities. There were helicopters, boats, hospitals …