In the Dark

by Andreas Pflüger

  Yes, you smart-arse. Tomorrow I’ll go down Nanga Parbat on skis, the day after tomorrow I’ll fix your watch, and after that I’ll build an atom bomb.

  Token-Eyes waves the jack in front of her. Her fingers run along the bottom of the transporter and find the notch. She cranks up the vehicle. The ground is frozen solid, the steel doesn’t sink into it so much as a centimetre. She needs to make Token-Eyes so furious that he turns on her. ‘Listen hard when your brother gives you a private lecture. Even if you probably can’t spell “differential”.’

  Token-Eyes’ fist catches her on the temple. It’s a hard blow, but she was prepared for it, her neck muscles were tense and her shoulders braced to cushion it.

  ‘And how are you spelling that?’ he roars at her.

  ‘With a “d” for dickbrain,’ she replies.

  He kicks her in the crotch. ‘Just you open your mouth one more time.’

  Aaron falls in the snow, breathes to meet the pain, and imagines that her muscles are expanding to let it flow out of her. She pulls herself up again. Token-Eyes’ breathing tells her that he’s standing right in front of her. ‘I’d like to meet you without your dad. Just the two of us, nice and romantic. You dream of raping me, but how are you going to arrange that? I’m sure you were always the bride in jail.’

  His rage flies straight into her face. His fists rain down on her like hammer blows. Aaron curls up in the snow to present as small a surface as possible. Token-Eyes tries to pull her up, but she makes herself heavy. A kick catches her in the belly and brings acid spurting into her throat. She hopes against hope that she isn’t mistaken, and that Holm sets boundaries for his brother.

  ‘That’s enough,’ she hears Holm saying calmly at last.

  Token-Eyes refuses to let up. He grabs her by the hair. She waits for his fist again, afraid that he’s going to beat her into a coma. But Holm pulls him off. ‘Enough.’

  ‘Let go of me!’ Token-Eyes wails.

  She hears him dragging Token-Eyes away and pushing him up against the vehicle.

  The adrenalin factory opens its valves. Aaron’s pulse soars into the snowy sky.

  She leaps to her feet and sprints off, holding the clicker. Quick clicks. Two trees, five metres in front of her. She dashes between low pine branches that scratch her face, her open mouth. Runs in a zigzag through the invisible labyrinth, clicking every second. Locates the next obstacle. Not compact: bushes. She takes a big jump, almost gets entangled in a patch of thorns, but breaks through without losing her balance. No shots, Holm wants her alive. Breaking twigs behind her. He’s coming after her. No. There are two of them, both brothers, one off to her right, the other on her left. Her saliva tastes resinous. A distorted echo flies back at her, she’s unsure whether it’s two trees close together or a single thick one. She runs straight into the confusion of frequencies. Her shoulder crashes against a tree trunk. She staggers and catches herself. Her tights are ragged. Her bare feet scrape over icy roots, branches, stones that rip her skin, even though she can’t feel it. Just as she no longer feels the cold, her gastric acid, the wind. The ship is noisy, almost level with her, she must be very close to the bank. Shouting would be pointless. On board, all other wounds will be drowned out by the roar of the powerful diesel engine. But perhaps they’ll see her. No, she’s sure it’s already dark.

  Where are the brothers?

  There. They’re so close that she can already hear them panting. She has only seconds left. When she feels a glass-smooth surface under her feet, relief drags her across the ice like a sail. She skids towards the waterway. Water splashes her ankles. Her pulse races back to her and stops abruptly.

  Aaron becomes perfectly calm.

  She jumps.

  *

  ‘Breathing isn’t necessary. Breathing isn’t vital. Breathing is everything.’ Her father used to say this in the quarry, when she was still a child. Her teachers later found similar words. You can neglect your cover if there’s no other option. You can disobey pointless orders. You can take a risk to survive. But you can never, ever forget your breathing.

  She dives into the water. She doesn’t feel the cold. She feels nothing at all. Her brain tells her she’s swimming to the opposite shore in a moderate current and at a depth of one metre. Her brain tells her that her arms and legs are bringing her closer to her goal with each stroke and each push, even if she doesn’t know where her arms and legs are.

  She can’t have been under water for more than fifteen seconds. But everything in her is already screaming out for oxygen. She forces herself to have a vision of inhaling air, she accompanies her breath through her throat into her bronchias, she sees it being attracted by her alveolae, impatiently awaits the gaseous exchange, follows the pure oxygen through the pulmonary veins into the cardiac chambers, where it is accelerated and catapulted through the aorta into the brain, which has already been ardently waiting for it.

  It’s no help. She doesn’t think she can bear being under the water for a second longer. Still she counts to ten. Only then does she order her body to surface, prays that it will hear her.

  Her head emerges. She opens her mouth wide, in the wake of the barge. Choking, she gasps for air. The next wave. A clump of ice seals her throat. Between breaths that sound like wailing she has her first clear thought.

  Holm is after me.

  He’s somewhere behind her. Because he will never give up on his revenge. She inhales as deeply as possible, but the oxygen doesn’t seem to shoot through her veins at high pressure; that was a hopeful dream. Her lung is a depleted bladder with a big hole in it, a laughable memory of the powerful engine that her body once was.

  She dives again. The cold reaches her body after a brief delay, but it’s so unbelievably intense that Aaron feels as if she’s swimming against a wall. Her muscles quiver. Soon ice crystals will form in her cells; then she won’t be able to move.

  I’m going to die in this filthy swill.

  No, you aren’t!

  She has a lead on him. He will have had to shed his jacket and boots, or he wouldn’t have the smallest chance of catching up with her.

  But what use will that lead be? She may get to the opposite bank before Holm does. But once there she would be at his mercy. There is only one way to survive: Aaron has to stop attempting to reach land as quickly as possible, and instead swim to the bows of the ship with all her might. If they both have to swim against the current and the swirl of the propeller, she can force Holm into a battle of attrition. She is fourteen years younger than him. He may have the advantage of having rested. But that makes them almost equal adversaries.

  Aaron surfaces. The ship is on her left. She crawls towards it, and allows herself a breath with every third stroke. Jagged shards of ice collide with her arms. She beats them away, smashing them to pieces. When her head is in the water, the tail rotor roars like an avalanche; above the waves she thinks she can hear the thump of the pistons. The current becomes so strong that she feels she can’t advance so much as a centimetre. Her muscles burn like fire, over-acidify, freeze.

  But all of a sudden she feels herself becoming as light as a feather and moving quickly forwards. Relief shoots through her head now that her emergency motor has kicked in. Then she realizes that something else is happening: she is already so close to the propeller that it’s sucking her in. She is dragged under water and flies towards the ruthlessly spinning blade that is on the brink of slicing her into a thousand pieces. She desperately tries to escape its pull.

  Hopeless.

  She can no longer defend herself.

  So this is how it ends.

  Her left leg is pulled back. Holm pulls her to him by her ankle, fights against the drag of the propeller without letting go of Aaron, fighting for two. She is too weak to help him. She knows that he wants to save her so that he can kill her in his own way. He battles stubbornly, endlessly. She feels his fear of losing her, his hatred, his will.

  Suddenly the propeller releases her. Aaron squeezes air int
o the whistling bellows of her lungs. Holm seeks the kyusho point on the inside of her thigh, trying to paralyze her. A scrap of physical tension returns. With full force she kicks at Holm’s head. Of course that doesn’t disable him in the water, but it’s enough to shake him. His grip loosens. Aaron rolls, finds his eyes and pushes her thumbs in as hard as she can. Holm cracks her elbows with his ankles. It’s like an electric shock, her thumbs slacken. His legs wrap around Aaron’s, both perform a ballet move, each trying to find the neuralgic vessels through which their energy flows.

  When she feels two of his fingers on her hyoid, Aaron knows that she is only a second away from the unconsciousness that the pressure on that fragile bone would cause. She hurls the open back of her hand against Holm’s lower lip, makes a fist just before impact and twists it. She is very familiar with the pain that penetrates every cell of his body.

  I have to drag him down so that he can’t see anything.

  How Aaron longs to be able to take a sustained and controlled breath. But the little that she can scrape together wouldn’t be enough blow out a candle. She manages to grip Holm’s trouser leg and pulls him down with her. He barely resists, the pain is driving him mad. The river is deep, her ears are blocked, she doesn’t have a free hand to balance the pressure. A powerful wave of nausea surges up within her. Her knee hits the muddy bottom. Holm is thrashing wildly around. Aaron knows that his lungs are collapsing. She lets go of him and puts both index fingers in his ears. His body slackens. Her eyes bulge. She wants to scream, she yearns so intensely for breath. She lacks the precision to hit one of the deadly spots that are barely a square millimetre in size. But she finds Holm’s sixth rib, and jabs a finger in the space between the sixth and seventh.

  She has just enough strength to push herself away.

  That is the last movement she is able to make. There is as much air in Aaron’s lungs as there is in the universe. She feels hot, incredibly hot; she wants to pull her dress from her body. Quivering somewhere in her brain is the idea that she has entered the final stage of exposure. She has been freezing because the vessels in her arms and legs contracted in order to transport as much blood as possible to her organs. But now they can see that it was hopeless. They are expanding, the blood is flowing back. That’s why Aaron is sweating at a depth of five metres in zero-degree water.

  Ben must have felt the same thing.

  I wanted to hold on to you, I’m so sorry.

  ‘That’s easy to say,’ she hears him saying.

  Forgive me.

  Ben remains mute.

  ‘There you are at last,’ she hears a second, tender voice. Her father. ‘Everything I’ve told you about breathing was nonsense. You don’t need breath. It just gets in the way.’

  Many others agree with him, all the dead people that Aaron left behind as she was so busy trying to breathe. A mighty choir swells, but she can hear only a single voice. Niko’s: ‘Are you just going to let me die?’ When she kneels beside him in the warehouse and tries to rest his head in her lap, she becomes aware that it’s André. He whispers: ‘The truth is in the sixth lane.’ She is already waking up in her Berlin flat because something has twitched her big toe. Marlowe bumps against her, purring, as if he had been lying against her for ever and hadn’t just jumped through the open window that night to stay for eleven wonderful years. She sniffs at him, he smells of stray females and morning dew. Suddenly Aaron is sitting on a stool in a bar in Clichy, drinking anisette, smoking an unfiltered Gitane, and the scar on her collarbone itches. She pulls open the door of the gentlemen’s toilet, where Pavlik is staring at her from enormous eyes. She breaks off a leg of her sunglasses, and rams it to the hilt in the nose of the Basque who is trying to garrotte Pavlik. She tries to pick up Pavlik but is thrown into the arms of her mother, who is sobbing so hard that she can’t get a word out. She has told her father she is leaving him, and Aaron knows that she is the reason, the daughter he took away from her the first time he went to the quarry for shooting practice. She wants to cry but can’t, and is forced to her knees in an empty bedroom. She buries her face in the favourite shirt of her father, who died today. The smell of his cigars and his aftershave and something she couldn’t name but which belonged only to him and told her that he would always protect her, allows her to find the strength, only deep in the night, to let go of his shirt.

  ‘Stop resisting,’ her father’s voice forces its way through to her out of eternity. ‘Look how lovely it is here.’

  Aaron opens her eyes. She sees Holm slipping motionlessly away from her. He rolls around in the current, she looks into his face. His mouth is slightly open, almost mockingly so. His black shirt and black trousers stick to his muscles. The three top buttons are torn off. Aaron recognizes part of his tattoo. It might be a Japanese character, but she isn’t sure. The index and middle fingers of Holm’s right hand are still as stiff as they were when he was trying to press them into her hyoid bone. Dumbfounded, Aaron watches a second body drifting down to join Holm’s. It is her own. She has a scar on her hairline that is normally covered by her curls, the souvenir from a training session on the Neroberg a few weeks ago. Aaron is amazed at how tiny the scar is, she would have guessed it was bigger.

  She taps at Holm, and he rolls around again. They look one another in the eyes. His are blue, with an iris of flames that look like swords. Aaron pushes him away, she sinks deeper and deeper, she isn’t in a river now, she’s in sea somewhere far away, it must be the Mariana Trench. A Barbeled dragon fish skedaddles, a giant squid gives her a goggle-eyed stare, a bignose shark wearily circles her, a batfish winks at her as it darts by, welcoming her. Strange creatures, and she is the strangest one of all. She would like to stay here for ever, because this is where she belongs.

  But something takes hold of Aaron and raises her gently upwards. She doesn’t want to go, she aches to be left in peace. Holm is below her again, drifting forlornly into the darkness.

  High above her she sees a radiant white light, the headlights of a diving robot. She clings to its gripper arm.

  ‘Take your time, I’ll wait,’ Ben whispers.

  *

  Aaron wakes up and pukes water. She doesn’t know how long she’s been unconscious. She remembers André and Marlowe, the bar in Clichy, her mother’s tears, her father’s shirt, her scar. But it’s a mystery to her how she managed to make it to the shore. Which shore? How far did she drift?

  A thought struggles in her head: it must be the opposite shore, or Token-Eyes would have been here already.

  The river rushes. A buzzard shrieks. Her heart is as quiet as the ticking of a clock buried in the snow. Something hammers quite close by. What is it? She listens and finally establishes that it’s her teeth chattering.

  I’m shivering. That’s good.

  A car.

  It gets louder, then moves away. There’s a road somewhere, but how far away? Aaron can’t quite tell whether she’s lying on her belly or her back. She tells her left little finger to move. Strangely, it obeys. Now the one on the right. It hesitates, then declines to twitch. She cautiously approaches her arms. Incredibly slowly, they form a semicircle, as if making a snow angel.

  I’m lying on my belly.

  Her fingertips explore the ground beneath her. It’s as if they were sliding over polished aluminium, there is no feeling in them.

  What’s that?

  Soil? Snow? Wood?

  She has to get to her feet, even though she yearns to lie there and sleep. Contorting grotesquely, she tries to stand up. Her muscles are a gelatinous mass that yields and deforms at the slightest effort.

  But she succeeds. She totters, clicks her tongue. No echo. Her feet take one step, a second, a third. Arms outstretched, Aaron shuffles across the icy ground like an old lady, falls, strikes her knee bloody against a stone and uses the pain to distract her from her despair. When a twig brushes her shoulder and then springs against her face she knows that she is moving again.

  Again she hears a car. It comes closer,
then moves away.

  It isn’t far.

  Her legs give. This time she can’t get back to her feet. In slow motion she battles onwards on all fours. At last, at last she is crawling on snowy tarmac. Or a field. Or a pane of glass. Or a mountain.

  The next car. She’s on the road. With inexpressible relief she spreads her arms out. The driver brakes at the last moment. The car skids towards her and comes to a standstill so close in front of her that snow sprays in her face.

  The door opens, footsteps come closer.

  I’m saved.

  The very thought exhausts her.

  ‘Hi there, you sack of shit.’

  Aaron faints before Token-Eyes’ fist strikes her.

  25

  The prison warder who accompanies Pavlik to Block Six in Tegel is young, but her weary eyes, her deep wrinkles, her thin, chapped lips reveal that she puts up with insults, threats and humiliations for two thousand Euros a month before tax. Pavlik had asked her her name.

  ‘Engelschall,’ she had murmured indistinctly. Since no one had noticed that Melanie Breuer hadn’t been signed out and her corpse was found in Boenisch’s cell the following day, the staff’s nerves have been on edge. The investigations of the Homicide Unit didn’t help.

  As soon as Pavlik turned up unannounced in the security entrance and showed his ID, everyone there stuck their hands in their pockets. When the Department arrives, you have to be careful, best to say nothing, it only causes trouble.

  An electric vehicle hums past, with two prisoners sitting on the box seat, with copper pipes on the load bed behind them. The driver has a thin self-rolled cigarette in the slack corner of his mouth, ash flying away with the snow.

  ‘What was Sascha Holm’s behaviour like?’ Pavlik asks the woman, whose quick, striding steps reveal that she wants to get all this out of the way.

  ‘So so,’ she mumbles.

  ‘No incidents?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’