“We’ll talk about this later!” I got to my feet.
He was sorry, said Lobenmeier, but the situation was too serious. It could—
Would, said Schlick.
Lobenmeier nodded. Would cost several people their jobs.
I pressed several buttons, but there were no messages. Could I have dreamed it? Had I erased it by mistake? I had to be sure, it was critical that I not make a mistake.
“Be right back,” I cried, and ran out down the corridor to the elevator, which took me noisily downstairs, then through the main hall and into the street. That’s it, I thought, that’s what’s happening to me. You don’t founder because of circumstances, you don’t founder because of bad luck, you founder because of your nerves. You founder because you can’t take the pressure. That’s how, sooner or later, the truth comes out. I turned around slowly. I noticed that passersby were looking in my direction, that a child on the other side of the street was pointing at me, only to be dragged along by its mother. Pull yourself together, I thought, just pull yourself together, if you don’t give up it can work, but you have to pull yourself together. I forced myself to stand there calmly. I glanced at my watch and tried to look like someone mentally checking the day’s appointments. Turn around, I told myself, and go back inside. Get in the elevator. They’re waiting for you. Sit down behind your desk. Save what can be saved. Do something—defend yourself, don’t run away. You’re not going to fall apart. Not yet.
“A problem, dear sir?”
Standing next to me was a startlingly thin man with greasy hair, horn-rim glasses, and a bright red cap.
“Excuse me?”
“Life is hard?” he said with an ingratiating smile. It sounded more like a question than a statement. “Every decision is hard, even organizing the everyday things is so complicated that it can drive even the strongest of us mad. You agree, dear sir?”
“What?”
“So many things are not subject to our will, but some things can be made a little easier. I have a taxi at my disposal.” He pointed to a black Mercedes standing next to us with the door open. “And here’s my suggestion: if there’s someone you would like to see in the next hour, call them. Life is over so quickly. That’s what these little phones are for, that’s why we have all that electrical gadgetry in our pockets. Don’t you agree, dear sir?”
I didn’t understand what he wanted from me. His appearance was repulsive, but his words had a calming effect on me. “That’s a taxi?”
“Dear sir, get in, give me the address, and, you’ll see, it’ll become one.”
I hesitated, but then nodded and let myself sink into the soft leather of the backseat. He got behind the wheel, took some time adjusting the driver’s seat, as if this were not the car he’d come in, repositioned the rearview mirror, and slowly fingered the ignition. “Your address,” he said softly. “Please. I know many things but not everything.”
I gave it to him.
“We’ll be there in a flash.” He turned on the engine and steered out into the traffic. “Are you sure you want to go home? Not somewhere else? No one you’d like to visit?”
I shook my head, pulled out my phone, and dialed Luzia’s number. “Come to me!”
“Now?”
“Now.”
“What are you doing here anyway? I thought you had to be in Zurich for the whole week! Did something happen?”
I rubbed my forehead. Right, I had said that, so that I could get away the next day and spend the weekend with Hannah. “It didn’t come off.”
“Mollwitz again?”
“Mollwitz again.”
“I’m on my way.”
I disconnected and stared at the phone’s tiny screen. And if Hannah really was on her way here? Then I’d done the exact wrong thing, and Luzia couldn’t come anywhere near my apartment. I’d have to call right away—but which one of them? Why were things slipping away from me already? The thin man stared at me in the rearview mirror. I felt faint, and closed my eyes.
“You’re asking yourself why so many things aren’t doable, dear sir? Because a man wishes to be many things. In the literal sense of the word. He wishes to be multiple. Diverse. He’d like to have several lives. But only superficially, not deep down. The ultimate aspiration, dear friend, is to become one. One with oneself, one with the universe.”
I opened my eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“I didn’t say a word. And if I had, it wouldn’t be anything you don’t already know.”
“Is this even your car?”
“Should that really be your most pressing concern?”
I fell silent until he halted outside my apartment building. For some reason I’d assumed he wouldn’t take any money, but he named a wildly high fare. I paid and got out; when I looked back, the car was already gone.
Luzia was waiting in the corridor outside the door of my apartment. She must have set off immediately. You could really rely on her. “What is it?” she asked. “What?” She was looking at me attentively.
I opened my mouth and shut it again.
She put her hands on my shoulders. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
I didn’t move. We were still standing in the corridor. I took a deep breath and didn’t say a thing.
We went inside. Through the hallway, through my untidy living room, and then, as always, into the bedroom.
Seconds later we were lying there and I felt the firmness of her limbs, saw close up the darkness of her eyes. Her hands fumbled with my belt, my hands slid under her blouse, all of their own accord, without hesitation or reflection, it seemed to happen without our intervention. Then the covers and the nakedness and the panting and her strong hands, her clutching me and me clutching her and then we were already apart again, lying exhausted beside each other, out of breath. There was a thin coating of sweat on her skin. The sight made me melt, to such a degree that I was on the point of saying things that I would have needed to take back a few minutes later. Was she really carrying my child? But I already had two, and they were difficult and disconcerting enough, they looked at me suspiciously and asked questions to which I had no answers, and I wasn’t a good father to them.
“It can’t go on like this,” she said.
My stomach went into spasm. “What?”
“This Mollwitz. You’re too nice. You have to do something.”
I slid my hand under her neck. How soft her hair was. The golden fuzz on her arms. The soft curve of her breast. I would have done anything for her and abandoned anything.
Anything?
Anything except the other one who would call me in a few minutes or perhaps next week or next month or sometime this year at the most inconvenient moment, to tell me that she was coming for a surprise visit and was already in town, on my street or already in the building, on the stairs, right in front of my door. If this were a story, I thought, there would be no point in delaying things, and it would happen right now.
The doorbell rang. I sat up with a jerk.
“What is it?” asked Luzia.
“The bell.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
I stroked her head in silence. I can still confess everything, I thought, I haven’t yet been convicted of anything. Would you forgive me? But I knew she wouldn’t.
Without pulling on my clothes, I went out into the hallway. If I opened the door now and Hannah was standing outside, what should I do? Maybe there was a way to fake my way out of it. In films and stage farces there’s always one, just as everything looks hopeless. The leading actors find the most brilliant subterfuges, open and slam doors, push one woman into one room and the other into another, they maneuver whole groups of people around the smallest spaces without anyone bumping into anyone else. An entire genre specialized in nothing else. Anyone with sufficient determination could surely do the same thing. Almost anything could be accomplished with the necessary strength of mind. Even a double life. But who has it, I asked myself as I stood there n
aked in the hallway; who has that kind of strength?
I reached for the handle. Even the certainty that there’s absolutely nothing now between you and catastrophe gives a certain assurance. For one last moment I hesitated. Why not have an even bigger scene, an even more powerful effect? If Hannah was standing outside, why not the children too, why not my parents as well, come of their own accord from their dismal retirement home, and while we were at it, why not Lobenmeier, Hauberlan, and Longrolf from Accounting, why not Mollwitz too; all come to see me without my clothes on, without secrets, pretences, illusions, and deceptions, just as I really was.
“Come in.” I opened the door. “Come in, everyone!”
In Danger
I thought we were going to crash. My God, have you ever been through anything like that?”
Elisabeth shook her head. This time she too had thought this was it: the tiny plane had emitted cracks and groans as it was carried by huge gusts of wind and the packages of medicines had been hurled around in every direction in the cargo bay that stank of metal and gasoline. One of the doctors had been struck in the head, and they’d had to put a pressure bandage on it to stanch the flow of blood. But Leo had sat there calmly the whole time, pale but upright, a narrow, crooked smile on his face.
“I wonder,” he tilted his head back, stretched his arms, and turned around, “why we find this beautiful. Some grass, a few trees, a lot of sky. Why is it like coming home?”
“Not so loud!” She felt dizzy, she had to sit down on the ground for a moment: no asphalt, just reddish earth, flattened hard by the wheels of planes. At the edges of the runway two jeeps were waiting with a number of men in uniform. Two of them were carrying machine guns slung across their bodies.
“A dream from the distant past,” said Leo. “Millions of years on the savannah. Everything subsequent a mere episode. Tell me, are you feeling sick?”
“It’s okay,” she murmured: there was a dull coughing sound and the plane started the propellers: rotating at first, then a gray blur. The machine began to taxi. Müller and Rebenthal, the two doctors, loaded the cartons of medicines onto the jeeps. From time to time one of them cast skeptical glances at Leo. Nobody had been pleased that Elisabeth had come with a companion this time. It wasn’t customary, it wasn’t done; and if anyone were to find out that the nervous guest was in fact a writer whose job it was to spill everything he saw, she would never be forgiven. But Leo had insisted; he wanted, he kept on saying, to learn her world too, and real life couldn’t go on escaping him. So, perhaps because she wanted finally to show him this real life, perhaps because she was curious how he would handle himself under real pressure, but perhaps also because she just couldn’t refuse his wishes, she had finally taken him along.
“Is that a real weapon?” he asked the two doctors. “The one the man over there’s carrying, there, you see, the one in the jeep, is it real?”
“What do you think?” asked Müller. He was a tall, taciturn Swiss who’d worked for years in the Congo and had gone through things there he never talked about. When he’d been hit in the head by the crate during the flight, he hadn’t even groaned.
“Let me help!” Leo snatched the carton out of his hands and set it in the back of the jeep. There was a clink of glass. “Have you read Hemingway? I think about him all the time here. Can you work here without thinking of him?”
“Yes,” said Müller. “Easily.”
“But all this,” Leo pointed to the armed men, then the plane, which was just turning at the end of the runway, “could be straight out of one of his books!”
“Don’t point, please!” said Rebenthal.
“What?”
“Don’t point with your finger.”
“It could make them angry,” said Müller. “That’s certainly not what you want.”
“But these are your people!”
“Leo,” said Elisabeth. “Please.”
“But—”
“Be quiet and go sit in the jeep!”
How could she explain to him? How to make clear to an outsider what compromises had to be made when working in a war zone, how to say to him that you settled for the less murderous faction or the one you thought was less murderous, or you just paid one of them, no matter which, for shelter and protection. She had lived in murderers’ camps more than once, had eaten their bread and their soup, and then treated those people in destroyed villages whom her hosts had left alive. Nothing was clean, no decision was clear, you could only try to help the wounded and ask no questions.
“Look!” cried Leo.
She followed his glance. At the end of the runway the plane left the ground, climbed, grew small, and disappeared into the blazing corona of the sun.
“To crash here,” he said. “That would be something. Would sound good in someone’s biography. Lost in Africa.”
Elisabeth shrugged.
“Since Maria Rubinstein went missing a year ago her books have never been more popular. Now they want to give her the Romner Prize even in absentia. My God, can you imagine, I could have taken that trip. Then maybe it would be me and not her—I still keep asking myself if I should feel guilty.”
Elisabeth bobbed her head. She had no idea what he was talking about.
Then they were sitting squashed together in the jeep, driving through the tall grass. The wind blew through their hair, it smelled of earth, the sun above them was enormous; it was so bright they had to squeeze their eyes shut and everything dissolved in the light. Leo called something, she couldn’t understand a word. In the distance she heard the dark rumble of thunder.
“What did you say?” she cried.
“Real for the first time,” yelled Leo.
“What?”
“I can’t remember when something was as real as this.”
She didn’t want to know what he meant, there were other things she had to think about. Tomorrow she would start dealing with the first wounded, and she knew that once this started she would be cut off from all feeling. Everything would become soft and cottony, and while she was doing what needed to be done, there would only be a dull numbness inside her. How often already had she decided to stay in Europe and not do this work anymore? Next to her, Leo was pulling out his notebook and beginning to scribble. What was he thinking, did he take himself for André Malraux? She peered over his shoulder but could only make out a few words: Living room … switch off the TV … playground … neighbor.
He turned and saw her look. “Just an idea!” he cried. “That’s all.”
The dappled head of a hyena rose for a moment in the grass. The soldier behind them aimed his weapon but didn’t shoot and in a moment they had passed it. Leo kept making notes and she couldn’t help staring at the notebook. Her old fear that he would put her in a story and create a distorted copy of her, rearranged according to his own needs: the thought was unbearable. But whenever she said this, he evaded her or changed the subject.
Back there in the capital, he had been strangely calm. During her conversations with two ministers he had stood by her side without drawing any attention to himself, but not missing a word. After two days during which there was no water, he had made no protests but like all of them had washed first using mineral water and then had not washed at all, and on their last day he’d secretly paid their driver to take him through the slum where the worst atrocities had taken place. She only heard about it afterward. Apparently Leo had even gotten out of the car and asked people questions. Where did his sudden courage come from? It wasn’t like him. The thunder echoed in the distance again. Instinctively she looked up at the sky, but there was nothing but a few scattered high clouds.
“I’ve never heard shots,” said Leo. “Artillery?”
“Tanks,” said Müller.
Of course! She closed her eyes for a moment. Was it possible he’d recognized the sound and she hadn’t?
The village was a mere grouping of little corrugated iron huts. Two rusty jeeps were standing at an angle in the grass, a dozen me
n, weapons at the ready, sat yawning around the remains of a fire. A goat was sniffing thoughtfully at a mound of earth. Three Europeans ducked out of one of the houses: a little woman in her mid-fifties with glasses and a knitted vest, a man in uniform with the UN insignia on the front, and behind them a woman with brown hair, tall, slim, and extremely beautiful.
“Riedergott,” said the little woman. Elisabeth took a moment to realize she’d just introduced herself. “Klara Riedergott, Red Cross. Good that you’re here.”
“Rotmann,” said the man. “UNPROFOR. The situation is completely unstable. I don’t know how long we can maintain a presence here.”
A phone rang, they all looked around, puzzled. Finally Leo pulled out his gadget with an apologetic smile. How amazing that there was reception here! He turned away and began to murmur.
“Haven’t we already met?” asked Elisabeth.
“I can’t think where,” said Mrs. Riedergott.
“Yes,” said Elisabeth. “Not so long …”
“I already told you,” Mrs. Riedergott had turned rigid. “I can’t think where!”
Elisabeth noticed that the brown-haired woman was looking at her. She had an aura of intelligence and something secret. For some reason she seemed to be the most important person here. It was almost impossible not to look at her.
“The Elmitz Karner Prize,” cried Leo.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m getting the Elmitz Karner Prize. They wanted to know if I’d accept. I said I can’t possibly think about such nonsense right now.”
“And?”
“What do I know? Probably they’ll give it to someone else. Can’t pay attention to that sort of thing right now. They must be confusing me with someone who does give a damn.”
Elisabeth’s eyes moved back to the woman. What in the world was going on here? Her suspicions were still vague, she couldn’t put them into words. At that moment the horizon glittered, despite the brightness of the daylight, and she thought the ground trembled. Only seconds later did they hear the explosion. I shouldn’t have brought him here, she thought, it’s too much for him. But Leo looked calm and alert, only his lips twitched a little.
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