Rama: The Omnibus
Page 186
Suddenly there was an explosion of light in the pattern. A moment later the double helix had vanished altogether. Johann recalled feeling a strange warmth on his hand during the instant of his jump. As he held his right fist tightly closed he thought he could feel something inside. Slowly, carefully, he opened his fist directly under the light. Scattered around his hand, apparently stuck to his skin by the force of the impact, were exactly eleven tiny white spheres no more than a millimeter in radius.
After studying the objects for about a minute, and noticing that they were pure white and featureless except for a single narrow band of red around each particle, Johann used his identity card to scrape each of the little white balls into a special pocket of his waist pouch. During his walk home, he resisted the temptation to look at the tiny particles again, telling himself that he would analyze the spheres in detail after he reached his apartment.
9
Johann burst into his apartment with uncharacteristic élan. “Eva, Eva,” he shouted immediately. “Where are you? The most extraordinary thing has happened!”
“I’m in the bedroom, darling,” was the reply.
Johann hurried through the living room and into the master bedroom of the apartment. Eva was lying naked on the bed. Candles burning on the two end tables were the only lights in the room. A violin concerto by Mozart was playing softly on the stereo system.
Hardly looking at Eva, Johann switched on the overhead light as soon as he entered the room. Then he unfastened the pouch around his waist and placed it on the bed. “Something amazing has happened to me,” he said excitedly. “I still have difficulty believing it…”
Slowly Johann began to realize that Eva had been planning an altogether different kind of encounter upon his return. He glanced back and forth between Eva and the candles. Her face registered both her displeasure and her disappointment.
“Uh,” he said awkwardly. “I’m sorry… I didn’t expect…”
“No, you didn’t,” Eva said in a resigned tone, pulling on her panties and then slipping a small shirt over her head. “So what else is new? Sometimes I think it’s hopeless for me to try to inject any romance into this relationship. You’re about as romantic as a toilet.”
“I’m sorry, Eva,” Johann repeated, sitting down beside her on the bed. “I really am. I do appreciate your efforts… But something remarkable has happened to me. While I was in the Tiergarten this morning…”
Eva watched Johann curiously as he told the story. She was surprised by his unusual excitement and animation. When Johann described how he leaped up and snared some of the bright particles, he literally bounded off the bed.
“There are eleven of them altogether,” he said. “And they are really minuscule, maybe not even a millimeter across. As far as I could tell in the park, they are perfect round beads, pure white except for one narrow band of red around each sphere.”
With a dramatic flourish, Johann unzipped the special pocket in his waist pouch and switched on the bedside light. “Look,” he said, stretching the pocket open as wide as he could and holding it so that Eva could see inside. “Aren’t they incredible?”
Eva leaned over and stared inside the small pocket. She saw nothing. “Is this some kind of elaborate joke?” she said, starting to smile. “Goodness, Johann, you were really great… You had me believing—”
“What are you talking about?” Johann said with alarm. Reading Eva’s facial expression, he moved the waist pouch to the other side of the light and bent over it himself. He turned the pocket into several different orientations so that the light penetrated every nook. There were no longer any beads inside.
“But that’s impossible,” he said. “I scraped them in there myself, one by one, and then zipped the pocket.”
“Maybe they’re magical beads,” Eva said lightly, “that can open zippers or move through walls. Maybe—”
“This isn’t funny,” Johann interrupted her. “I tell you that I myself placed those beads in that pocket and then zipped it. There’s no way they could have escaped.”
He looked in the pocket one more time and then sat down again on the bed. Johann shook his head. “What could possibly have happened to them?” he said.
Eva put her arm around him and began stroking his back. “It was a great story, Johann,” she said, “the best you have ever told. It reminded me of your imagination and enthusiasm during our early courtship…”
Johann turned toward her to say something. As he did, Eva kissed him on the lips, softly at first but then more insistently. Johann really wasn’t in the mood for sex. Nevertheless, recalling how upset Eva always became when he didn’t respond to her advances, he decided to go along.
They were in the middle of intercourse when the phone rang.
“Let it go,” Eva said. “The machine will answer it.”
But Johann was already distracted. Could it be Bakir? he wondered guiltily. Asking me to reconsider?
He heard his mother’s voice on the communications machine. Johann disengaged himself from Eva and activated the receiving port of the videophone. His mother’s wrinkled visage appeared on the large television screen on the bedroom wall.
“I’m here, Mother,” Johann said. “I was in the shower. That’s why I’m not using the video transmitter.”
“It’s your loss,” Eva said quietly, jumping down from the bed and heading for the bathroom.
“What was that?” Frau Eberhardt asked.
“That was Eva,” Johann replied. “She said to tell you hello.”
“Oh, hello, Eva,” Frau Eberhardt said. She seemed momentarily confused and did not say anything for several seconds.
“What is it, Mother?” Johann asked. “If this is just a social call, why don’t I call you back tonight? I’m running late for work.”
“No, I’d like to talk now,” his mother said. She lowered her voice and had a conspiratorial look on her face. “It’s your father, Johann,” she said. “He has been terribly depressed all week. He was talking this morning about how much more he is worth dead than alive. He pulled out all the insurance policies again.”
“What do you want me to do, Ma?” Johann asked.
“Could you come see us sometime this weekend?” his mother said. “Please, Johann, I have something urgent to discuss with you and you know how much your visits cheer up your father.”
“I don’t know, Ma… Eva’s grand opening is this weekend and we have several social functions to attend.” Johann took a deep breath as he watched his mother’s pained reaction to what he was saying. “Look, I’ll do what I can. I can’t say anything definite now, but I’ll call you from work later… Good-bye, Ma.”
“Good-bye, Johann… Your father would really appreciate it.”
He switched off the phone. “Shit,” Johann muttered as he headed for the bathroom.
It was not a pleasant breakfast. Eva did not have the slightest interest in what may or may not have happened to the little white spheres Johann swore he had placed in the pocket of his waist pouch. On the other hand, she was very interested in, and angered by, the fact that Johann was considering going to Potsdam for at least a part of the weekend.
“You are almost thirty years old,” Eva said, making no attempt to disguise her feelings. “When are you going to tell your mother that you have a right to a life of your own?”
He looked at Eva across the small kitchen table. Johann didn’t want to argue with her, at least not this morning when he was late for work and still unsettled by what had happened in the Tiergarten. He tried to stifle his emotions as he took another bite of his roll.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Eva asked querulously.
When Johann still didn’t respond, her eyes flashed. “So you are going to visit them… I suppose it doesn’t matter that this is the most important exhibit of your fiancée’s career… Or that we have been planning this weekend since before Christmas… Or that everyone who counts in Berlin will be attending the opening…”
Johann glanced up at her. “That’s unfair,” he said. “My parents are going through difficult times and I’m their only child. They need my support.”
“Bullshit,” Eva said. “The only reassurance your mother wants is that you’ll come running every time she pulls your chain. It never fails. Every time we plan something special, there’s a new crisis with your parents. Can’t you see it? Remember last month, when we were going skiing at Mittenwald? On Thursday afternoon she fell and injured her hip. Do you think that was just a coincidence? And wasn’t her recovery amazing? Why, by Saturday afternoon she was able—”
“Stop it, Eva. Stop it!” Johann said in a loud voice. He paused a few seconds before continuing in a more subdued tone. “I don’t want to do this right now. Too much has happened this morning… And you know how much it upsets me when you criticize my mother.”
There was an uneasy quiet as Eva cleared her dishes from the table. Johann tried to finish his roll and coffee.
“Perhaps you would be kind enough to inform me,” Eva said after about a minute had passed, “just what rights I do have as your fiancée. I understand that I am not supposed to criticize your mother,” she said, her voice rising, “but can I at least expect you to honor engagements that we have made together? And do I have the right to bring up occasionally the question of when we are going to be married? As far as I can tell, the only right that I have is to fuck you, and then only if you’re in the mood and it fits into your schedule.”
Johann jumped up from the table and grabbed Eva by the arm. He stood there, holding her, trembling from the powerful emotions he was feeling. She said nothing more until his rage subsided. “Well,” she said at length, forcing a smile and removing her arm from his grasp, “at least you finally showed you care about something other than those stupid beads. It’s nice to know that I’m living with a human being and not a robot.”
Without saying anything else, Johann left Eva in the kitchen and went into the bedroom. He was very upset. He hated emotional confrontations of any kind, especially with Eva. Johann already knew that he would be going to Potsdam that afternoon, after work, to see his parents. He also knew that he didn’t want to tell Eva now. Johann would tell her on the phone later. Yes, that would be the best way to handle it.
He walked into the bathroom and looked at his face in the mirror. What a morning, he thought with a sigh. Johann splashed water on his face and thought briefly about Bakir and his family. Now what could have happened to those damn beads? he wondered a moment later.
Johann stared out the window as the train raced beside the Grünewald. The snow had stopped by noon, but almost ten centimeters had fallen throughout the Berlin area. The Grünewald was a winter wonderland in the twilight. Many people were walking around on skis. Children were busy building snowmen and riding down small hills on sleds and toboggans.
Johann’s eyes were open, but he didn’t see any of the winter scenes unfolding outside the train. His mind was occupied by a thousand other thoughts. He drifted into memory, into what seemed like another lifetime. How did it happen, Johann asked himself with difficulty, that my relationship with my parents inverted so rapidly? When did I become the parent, and they the children?
He recalled the moment when he had moved his belongings into the spartan dormitory room in Berlin that he had shared for a year with that whale of a boy from Kiel. His parents had both carefully inspected the room before they left to return to Potsdam. His mother’s eyes had been full of tears when she had hugged him good-bye. Just before his father had left, Herr Eberhardt had handed Johann a thick bundle of marks, “for spending money” he had said with a laugh.
That was a different era, Johann thought, when everyone thought prosperity was a birthright. And that it would last forever.
He remembered being awakened by the videophone early in the morning, a few years later, when he had his own apartment close to the university, and seeing his mother’s worried face. “Have you heard the news this morning?” she had asked.
“No,” Johann had replied. “I was up late studying for my exams. What’s going on?”
“The stock market is crashing,” his mother had said. “Your father is in an absolute panic. He has been sitting at his terminal since one o’clock this morning, but he has not been able to sell a single share…”
The crash of the worldwide stock market in 2134 marked the beginning of a global economic crisis of unprecedented dimensions. Half of the Eberhardt family’s assets were wiped out during the six weeks that the market was in free fall. What remained was reduced to insignificance by the failure of the Potsdam banks in 2135 and 2136. Nobody had predicted that the depression that would be called the Great Chaos would be so long and so deep.
Johann had finished his degree in systems engineering without being aware how tenuous his parents’ financial position had become. Although he’d had to borrow money for his university expenses during his last two years, Johann was truly shocked during the winter of 2137 when he learned from his mother that the Potsdam accounting firm of Sprengel and Eberhardt was permanently closing its doors. The young man had rushed home from Mainz, where he was working at the time, to see if he could help in any way. But Maximilian Eberhardt, a rotund man in his late fifties, convinced his son that everything would be fine. He had plenty of contacts, he told Johann, who would send freelance bookkeeping and consulting work his way.
It was not to be. When Johann visited home just before he began his two-year assignment with the Berlin Water Department in the early summer of 2139, he learned that his parents were already behind in paying their bills. By selling some furniture, Johann’s mother’s jewelry, and the family silver and china, enough cash was generated to pay the bills and to enable the Eberhardts to survive for another year. By that time, however, Herr Eberhardt could no longer find any work at all. Johann started sending money each month to help pay for food and other essentials. Meanwhile his father, who had once been a hearty and gregarious man, withdrew from the world and became a disconsolate recluse.
Johann was certain that the “something urgent” his mother wanted to discuss with him was financial in nature. They just drift from crisis to crisis, Johann thought. Without any overall plan. In his mind’s eye he imagined his mother and father being tossed about in a small boat on a stormy ocean. But where will all this end?
He had suggested once, and had nearly been thrown out of the house, that they could sell the family home. Even with the severe deflation that had occurred in the real-estate market, their house, a magnificently renovated old home on Kiezstrasse which the Eberhardts owned outright, would sell for over two hundred thousand marks. “If you are frugal,” Johann had said to his mother, “the money will last for five years or so.”
“Johann Eberhardt,” his mother had replied with uncharacteristic vehemence, “don’t you ever, ever mention selling this house again. Your father would rather die first. This house has been in his family since 1990, when his great-great-grandfather returned to Potsdam from the Ruhr…”
The train had temporarily stopped only a few kilometers from Potsdam station. A recorded announcement told the passengers there would be a delay of several minutes. Another by-product of this depression, Johann said to himself. Probably some software or equipment that has been improperly maintained.
To pass the time, Johann switched on the television news in the arm of his seat. In process was a feature report on a group of tent cities that had been established in London to rehabilitate and house the homeless. Most of the feature, which included interviews with some of the members of the Order of St. Michael who operated the large Hyde Park community, as well as some of the residents, was focused on what the German reporter called the “surprising success” of t
he endeavor. At the conclusion of the story the studio commentator remarked that all the proposals by the Michaelites to create similar enclaves for the homeless in Germany had been turned down by the authorities.
The next item on the news showed a scene that afternoon at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, where, according to the commentator, several hundred Turks, including women and children, were being forcibly loaded on a train to Istanbul. The camera panned slowly around the sorrowful faces as the voice droned on, carefully explaining that the train would not be overcrowded, that all the passengers would be well fed, and that each of them would be given five hundred marks in Turkish currency upon disembarkation in Istanbul.
Despite himself, Johann searched the crowd for any sign of Bakir and his family. As he was watching the screen he felt a strong surge of guilt, far stronger than any he had experienced that morning. But what can I do? he asked himself at length. I have enough troubles of my own.
10
Johann stood under the tall, bare tree directly across from his boyhood home, holding the bottle of white wine in his right hand. It was already dark and cold, yet he wasn’t in a hurry to step up to the door. He was looking at the second-floor window, above and to the right of the baroque decoration that was over the door. Almost every morning of his youth he had opened it, first thing, and stuck his head outside to check the weather.
The house had grown smaller with the passing years. As a child, he had thought it was huge. There had even been two extra bedrooms, empty most of the time, in which Johann had been able to play whenever he chose. In one of those rooms a light was now on. Several months earlier his parents, at Johann’s suggestion, had taken in a boarder, a quiet little man from Würzburg, who paid them a modest rent.
Despite the cold, some children were playing soccer down at the end of the street. Johann gazed in their direction, Watched them running after the ball, and heard their eager Cries The scene was one he knew well. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the boy in the red hat, standing nearly a head taller than his companions, would have been Johann.