Decompression

  I said I was going to instruct them strictly by the book. Caution and security would be primary concerns in every situation. It wasn’t about having an adventure, it was about knowledge of the subject and mastery of technique.

  Jola stuck out her lower lip and played the little girl. Couldn’t she make friends with a whale shark?

  I said we’d see angel sharks. Six feet long at most, and generally lying flat on the seafloor. At this the little girl turned into a strategist with narrow eyes and a dangerous smile. “Just as long as I can tell Casting I’ve had experience with sharks.”

  I thought it wasn’t at all necessary for her to act that way. A cute little space between her upper incisors compelled me to keep looking at her mouth. Suddenly her hand was lying on my arm. The way she batted her eyelashes revealed practice. Didn’t I think she’d make a good Lotte?

  Theo looked up from his plate. “Get ahold of yourself,” he said.

  It sounded like a slap. Antje flinched as though it had been meant for her. The wind moved the curtains on the open windows; the air had become slightly cool. The clock on the wall gave the time as shortly before seven. The night was already creeping out of the corners of the rooms. I stood up to turn on the lights and close the windows.

  “Don’t you like the potatoes?” Antje asked.

  “Oh yes,” said Jola, quickly snatching the smallest one off her plate with her hand and stuffing the little morsel in her mouth. “But I’m not really hungry.”

  “Eating disorder,” Theo explained. He emptied his second glass of wine and poured himself some more. “She’s already too old for the part. If she gets fat to boot, she won’t have a chance.”

  He laughed as though he’d told a very good joke. Antje disappeared into the kitchen to fetch the rabbit dish. Jola stared at her unsoiled plate. Clients were like family members; you didn’t get to pick them. While we were waiting for the main course, I broke the silence to clarify once again what we could expect from one another. They would get exclusive rights to my services for two weeks, twenty-four hours a day, with an unlimited number of dives, completion of the Advanced Open Water Diver course, and nitrox certification, in addition to lodgings in the Casa Raya, the loan of all equipment, and chauffeur service to all the diving spots and places of interest on the island. I would get fourteen thousand euros. Ordinarily I had several clients, whom I would divide into groups. Jola and Theo were paying for the fact that I hadn’t accepted any other requests for the coming fourteen days. It wasn’t cheap, but in return I belonged to them alone. We shook hands. Jola’s telephone chirped. She read the display, smiled, and tapped in a reply. Antje came back, carrying a steaming stewpot between two kitchen towels.

  “Conejo en salmorejo,” she said.

  Bones were sticking out of the ragout. Theo’s telephone chirped. He smiled and put his hand on Jola’s thigh. They were actually sending each other text messages while in the same room. Antje served out rabbit pieces. Her cocker spaniel, Todd, came out of the kitchen, where he’d been worshipping the stove, assessed the situation, and took up a position next to Jola. He apparently considered her the weakest link in the chain. I tasted the food, praised it, and reminded my clients of my single condition: on the Wednesday after next, November 23, I would have a day off. Theo wanted to know why they would be obliged to do without my services on that particular Wednesday. He liked the rabbit. He also liked the wine, which he was drinking practically alone. With a quick look, I stopped Antje from getting a second bottle. Jola saw us exchange glances and laughed; for the first time that evening, her laughter was completely unaffected.

  “What?” asked Theo.

  “Nothing,” said Jola.

  You’re not right for each other, I thought, and once again I forbade myself to think like that. The private lives of my clients had nothing to do with me. I explained what was up on November 23. Late that past summer, I’d been out deep-sea fishing and started to get an unusually strong sonar signal. There was an object about one hundred meters down, an object more than eighty meters long. Maybe it was only a heap of stones with an unusual shape. Or maybe it was a sensational find. For years there had been hardly any new discoveries of sunken ships anywhere in the world, and certainly none in divable waters. I marked the coordinates on my GPS device; finding the right place again wouldn’t present much of a problem. But diving into a wreck for the first time at a depth of one hundred meters wasn’t exactly child’s play—especially if you did it alone. I’d spent weeks preparing for the dive, calculating gas mixtures, racking my brains to figure out how I could lengthen my stay on the bottom by twenty minutes and yet avoid needing more than three hours’ worth of decompression stops before I could surface. In addition, I’d ordered some specially made dry gloves, and I was working on a heating system to install in my diving suit. Bernie had promised that he and his equally Scottish pal Dave would man the Aberdeen to provide my floating base. These were all professional requirements for a professional undertaking.

  Jola listened as though the word of God were coming out of my mouth. Her big eyes began to reflect my own enthusiasm. I found it hard to come to the end.

  On November 23 I’d be forty years old, and I wanted to celebrate my birthday one hundred meters below the surface of the ocean. Alone. Or better yet: in the company of a World War II freighter that went missing seventy years ago.

  “I want to go too,” Jola said. “I can help the boat crew.”

  “This is an expedition, not an excursion,” I said. “Every move the crew makes has to be exactly right.”

  She looked at me insistently. “I grew up on ships.”

  “Her father owns a Benetti Classic,” Theo said.

  I had to pause and digest this information. A used Benetti cost about as much as a luxury penthouse. And in Manhattan, at that.

  “Nevertheless,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Or you could train me for that depth and then I could dive with you. Lotte would have liked that.”

  Against my will, I laughed.

  “Please!” Jola cried out. “We have two whole weeks!”

  “You’d need at least two years,” I said. “If I tried to take you down there with me, I’d wind up in prison.”

  “For how long?” asked Theo, without taking his eyes off Jola’s pleading face.

  “For life,” I said. “Convicted of murder.”

  “That’s enough,” said Antje, who didn’t like the conversation. “Only professional divers can survive those kinds of expeditions. Would anyone like some cactus pear sorbet?”

  “I’d be more than happy to spend a couple of years in prison,” Theo said in the tone of a man who wants to change the subject. “Then I’d finally have enough peace to write.”

  Antje drew back the hand that was reaching for his plate. She said, “But in exchange for that, you’d have to harm another person.”

  “That’s the advantage, isn’t it?” Theo turned the wine bottle upside down and shook the last drops into his glass. “If someone already wants to go to jail, he gets a free shot. Then all he has to do is pick his target.”

  Jola was scraping rabbit pieces off her plate with the back of her knife. Todd caught them on the fly. “Don’t listen to Theo,” Jola said. “Shocking his audience is part of his job. Unfortunately, for the past few years he’s preferred to be shocking at the dinner table rather than the computer keyboard.”

  “Which is still better,” Theo said, “than making a fool of yourself by standing in front of a camera and spouting idiotic lines.”

  Jola stood up abruptly and walked over to the window. “My idiotic lines,” she said with her back turned to us, “pay our rent.”

  Humming and sizzling inside the wall lamp, a moth was burning itself to death. The rabbit fibers between my teeth gave me an uncomfortable feeling that spread through my whole body. Antje raised her head and gave Theo a sympathetic look. “So why don’t you write anymore?” she asked.

  Sometimes I could kill her.


  JOLA’S DIARY, FIRST DAY

  Saturday, November 12. Night.

  They’re so cute, both of them. Blond, friendly, down-to-earth. Serving potatoes and bunny stew in their little white house. Normal and … yes, that’s it: healthy somehow. So what does that make us? Abnormal and sick? We didn’t even thank them properly for dinner. All of a sudden the old man was in this big hurry to leave. At first he didn’t even want to wait for dessert. Cactus pear sorbet. Difficulty level: complicated. Time required: two hours. According to my iPhone. Poor Antje. Now I’m waiting for the old man to fall asleep. He doesn’t like me to be lying next to him while he’s trying to doze off. I sleep well, he doesn’t. Sleep turns you into a corpse, he tells me. How am I supposed to relax with a dead person next to me?

  I text him: “Sleep well, Theo. I love you.”

  His phone chirps in the bedroom. I can hear the sound through the thin wall. No answer. It’s pitch-dark outside. Every now and then a dog howls. Our first night here and already I’m alone on the living-room sofa. This is how it begins, our very last serious attempt to get things straightened out.

  3

  “They’re sort of funny.”

  This was the prelude to what I called the “postgame analysis.” Scarcely had a person left the room when he or she became the subject of instantaneous, diagnostic discussion. Assessments were compared, details of judgments mutually corrected, and speculations transformed into a consistent psychological profile. Antje and her girlfriends practiced this discipline at the expert level. As for me, when it came to postgame analysis, I was the worst partner imaginable. If Antje gave it a try all the same, she must have felt some real sense of urgency.

  I stood at the sink, scraping food remnants from the plates and trying to ignore Todd while he stared a hole in me. Right from the start, it had seemed creepy to me that he not only had the same name as my parents’ now-deceased dog but also looked exactly like him. Antje firmly believed that we’d killed the first Todd by leaving him behind in Germany. I was afraid she believed just as firmly that the second Todd was a reincarnation of the first, whom she’d called back into life by recycling his name.

  “Don’t you think?”

  I turned my back to her and the dog. I hated it when people judged one another. It was an obsession, a curse. I had left Germany because I couldn’t stand living any longer in an all-encompassing net of reciprocal judgments. Judgers and judged found themselves in a permanent state of war, and everybody, depending on the situation, played one of the two parts. Everything my clients from back home told me was a report from the judgment front. What they thought about their boss. What their colleagues thought about them. What they thought about the chancellor. What they thought about the other divers. Then, after the first three beers some evening, what they thought about how their wives performed. And at the end of their dive holiday, they’d log on to a diving website and post what they thought about how I’d performed. It was as though people were afraid they’d fall silent forever if they stopped passing judgments.

  “Sometimes Jola just stares into space,” Antje said. “Like she’s miles away. And she eats nothing. Did that strike you too?”

  There was a reason for my aversion to judgments. Before I left Germany on New Year’s Eve in 1997, I had studied law for five years. I belonged to a generation of students who didn’t want school to come to an end. For us, high school graduation was by no means a happy event. It scared us. Most of us had no idea what to start doing with our lives. In school everything had been simple. You knew how to do things right and how much rebellion you could permit yourself. If something went wrong and there was any doubt, it was the teacher’s fault. I did my compulsory military service, extended it for a year with the Army Engineer Divers, and then decided to go for a law degree, because it was said that such a degree left all possibilities open. It wasn’t long before I really began to love my studies. Once again I’d found a field in which I could do everything right. As long as I took notes during lectures and spent three evenings a week in the library, I could enjoy the pleasant feeling that I was on the safe side. As a rule, I passed my exams with grades of 90 or higher. My fellow students’ envy relieved me of the necessity of having any doubts at all.

  After five years of study, my scores on the final written examinations were so good they made the impending oral exam seem like a mere formality. I bought a new pair of shoes, shopped around for the most appropriate aftershave lotion, and visited the barber. On the day of the exam I felt slightly nervous, but a sense of impending triumph buoyed me up on the way to the Justice Ministry.

  Four professors seated behind a long desk. In front of it, me and another examinee, whose bad preliminary marks were stinking up the whole room. The longer the professors put him through the wringer, the more restlessly I shifted in my chair. I sat on my hands so I wouldn’t forget myself and start waving one like a geek in German class. I tried to establish eye contact with the examiners and to indicate by movements of my eyebrows that I knew the answer to every single question. In short, I behaved like a complete jackass.

  At last, Professor Brunsberg, an expert in constitutional law, addressed himself to me. Notorious for his halitosis, Brunsberg had a reputation for speaking directly in students’ faces, knowing that his victims, fearful of bad grades, wouldn’t turn their heads.

  “Herr Fiedler,” said Professor Brunsberg, “as you are obviously a very knowledgeable man, you’re surely familiar with the name Montesquieu.”

  As if he’d pressed a button, I broke out in instantaneous perspiration. Political theory had played no part in my five years of legal studies. We were supposed to learn, for example, what constitutes an Erlaubnistatbestandsirrtum, a “permission facts mistake,” and not what dead philosophers had said about the functioning of the state. I had no choice but to nod slowly.

  “Good, Herr Fiedler. Then spell it, please.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Am I not speaking clearly? Spell Montesquieu!”

  A row of blurred letters appeared before my mind’s eye: a Q, a couple of Us, some Es. I got the “Montes” part right away, I knew it was followed by “qu,” but everything thereafter lay in God’s hands.

  “M-o-n-t-e-s-q-u-e-u-e,” I said.

  Brunsberg slapped the table in delight. “Queue like ‘cue stick,’ right, Herr Fiedler? Is that what you’ve been doing the past few years? Playing pool?”

  It became clear he wasn’t going to let it rest. He was out to get me.

  “You get a second attempt, Herr Fiedler. We’re not inhuman.”

  Under my jacket, my shirt was stuck to my back. A spot on my behind itched so unbearably that my brain stopped working. I produced an alphabet salad that didn’t have very much to do with Montesquieu. Brunsberg’s mood abruptly darkened. His bored colleagues looked toward the window. Outside, a couple of sparrows were fighting for the best spot on the ledge.

  “Good, Herr Fiedler, or rather, not good. The question about Montesquieu has a second part. You’d like to get at least fifty percent in this examination, wouldn’t you? Then tell me—quickly—the great father of constitutional doctrine’s first name.”

  I took my time. I’d learned by heart examination presentations for fourteen different forms of legal action. I was thoroughly familiar with the Maastricht Judgment of the German Federal Constitutional Court. While the sparrows’ dispute got louder, I wondered why it was that neither Montesquieu nor Voltaire seemed to have had a first name. You included the first names quite naturally when you referred to Thomas Hobbes or John Locke.

  I felt at peace when I said, loudly and clearly, “Friedrich.” That was Brunsberg’s first name. The rest of the examination disappeared into fog.

  When, two hours later, we were called back into the room to be given our results, I had become a different person. I couldn’t understand myself anymore. Had I really paid four thousand marks for tutorial courses, spent eight hours daily in the library, and sat for a six-hour moc
k exam every week just so I could be inducted into the Asshole Club? The thought that I could spend the rest of my life in an occupation where people like Brunsberg called the shots nauseated me.

  Maybe life would simply have gone on all the same if they had subtracted half a point from my total exam score because of that wretched oral. I would have gotten angry, done better in the next state examination, and landed a decent job in a law office. But in fact my average was even slightly improved by the oral. Brunsberg himself gave me almost a perfect score. When he shook my hand, he bared his teeth with joy. “You’re a good lawyer, Herr Fiedler,” he said. “If you do a bit of delving into the philosophical underpinnings of the law, you’ll get even better.”

  Seeing that he no doubt meant well, on top of everything else, made the interior light in my head switch on. Everything in me was radiant with realization. My friends gathered around to congratulate me. The other candidate had failed the exam; he stood alone at the window, weeping. I stopped hearing what was being said. In my mind, I’d already left the country.

  Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu. From that time on, there was no problem that formula couldn’t solve. “Montesquieu” prevented me from passing judgments on other people, meddling in their lives, or even just handing out well-meant advice. I wanted nothing more to do with Germany, which I’ve thought of as “the war zone” ever since. When I began my new life on the island not long afterward, the fundamental expression of my worldview was “Stay out of it.”

  “Maybe she’s a drug addict,” Antje said. “Lots of actresses have drug problems.” I slammed the dishwasher door and inadvertently stepped on Todd’s paw. “Don’t talk nonsense,” I said.