The Cusanus Game

  “Bite his dick off!” I shouted. No, I didn’t shout it. I knuckled under like everyone else—accepted it, that disgusting provocation, that travesty of fellatio, that outrageous humiliation of a woman. “Tu prostata nella polvere.” I accepted it out of fear of the genetically modified Rottweilers, growling and tugging impatiently at their chains, because they could smell the excitement of the spectators. But they were held back by the grinning bodyguards, who kept a watchful eye on the audience and closely monitored whether resistance stirred anywhere. “Death, death,” the animals panted hoarsely, and their life-seams on their heads shone fresh.

  “Come on, Bernd,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  He didn’t hear me.

  “Come on,” I implored.

  Yes, it was loud, but he was staring with fascination as the Condottiere climaxed and raised both arms triumphantly. And as he stuffed his member back into the black leather uniform, the girl vomited onto the stage. Gray-yellow slime ran down her chin. The triumphal march seemed never-ending.

  Those pigs! But it was typical for them: They fired up their audience with special laser effects and with deafening sound, went to the limit—and then a step beyond it, to test the spectators, to see whether resistance stirred. If that happened, they struck—hard and mercilessly—unleashing their cruel dogs and igniting naked terror.

  I felt tears running down my cheeks, turned around and hurried away. Bernd didn’t even notice.

  That evening the ICom on my lapel chirped.

  “Yes, Luigi?”

  “A call for you, Domenica.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Keller, Bernd.”

  “No!”

  A minute later it chirped again.

  “Yes?”

  “A call for you, Domenica.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Keller, Bernd. Shall I accept?”

  “No!”

  Again it chirped.

  “We’re incommunicado, Luigi!” I commanded.

  “If you say so, Domenica.”

  The chirping stopped.

  “I never want to see him again!” I shouted at my reflection. “Gets turned on when a vile fascist pig humiliates a woman on the open stage by using her like … like a urinal!”

  That evening I sensed what a stranger he had become to me. Or had he always been a stranger to me, and I had merely never noticed?

  * * *

  AT THAT TIME, the Praetorians were already the true rulers of the city. Where they appeared there was never a uniform in sight, neither police nor military nor EuroForce. They ruled the road, roared with their heavy motorcycles down Via Appia Nova or Corso d’Italia and wantonly swept the rest of the traffic aside. No one intervened; no one dared to oppose them. Even EuroForce shied away from taking them on. According to rumors, the officers made deals with them: fuel, weapons, lasers, high-tech electronics in exchange for dirty operations against supposed Moros in the Mezzogiorno, on the Gaeta-Termoli line, which had no more chance of being held than the earlier Salerno-Brindisi line had. Or on the coast, when a few dozen Africans, Greeks, Albanians, Croatians, or Montenegrins had once again tried to enter the country illegally at night with Mafia speedboats. And many an officer had nothing against mounting one of the chained-up, long-legged beauties from Senegal or the Christian-Ethiopian mandated territory of the former Sudan, whom you could shoot in the head if—in an officers’ club mood—you felt like it, without anyone asking questions.

  What sort of obscenity had they come up with this time to give people a thrill? Would they disembowel a person? Stick some illegal immigrant from the Balkans or Africa whom their dogs had only caught but not killed into a suit of armor and fry him with microwaves, then peel him out of the shell like a boiled lobster? I shuddered.

  The laughter of the Valkyries had ceased; the fire in the sky had gone out.

  I spat over the railing into the dried-out riverbed and turned around. The dog was gone.

  I pushed my Lectric across the bridge. Then I started the engine and drove home, taking Anguillara and Sanzio. One-way streets. I was going the wrong way. But who still bothered about things like that?

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT I dreamed about a dog. It lay in the dried-out riverbed. Its sand-colored fur was filthy. A raven had dug its talons into its head and was pulling at its dark jowls.

  “Help me,” said the raven.

  The dog looked at me out of empty eye sockets and smiled.

  II

  CarlAntonio

  If we begin to consider how many thousands of individual events were necessary to bring about our situation here and now, and how many thousands of individual events that did not occur could have prevented it, then the most certain thing we know, namely our situation here and now, takes on an extraordinary degree of improbability.

  ALEXANDER DEMANDT

  The students of my generation prided themselves on being particularly sexually permissive and not getting into committed relationships—at most for a brief time. We followed our inclinations, moved in for a spell with this guy, for a spell with that girl, until another interesting relationship came along—but I had really fallen a bit in love with Bernd. He was a handsome fellow with his long, dark blond hair, which hung down to his shoulders; a lean, sinewy body, which was entrancing to touch; his light skin, which looked like bronze after a few days of sun and which I never got tired of stroking and caressing with my fingertips.

  He looked like his sister Birgit, who was four years older than he was, just as tall and lean and athletic.

  Yes, Birgit …

  “You’re sleeping with her,” I accused him in a voice embittered by jealousy. “You’re always going ‘home’ to her! You’re always murmuring with her via Com! Are you enslaved to her, or what?! Your own sister?”

  He stared at me in confusion—anxious like a cornered animal.

  “At least admit it already! I don’t care! Do you hear? I don’t give a damn!”

  I cared. I definitely cared.

  “Are you crazy?” he shouted at me angrily. “You don’t understand anything!”

  No, I didn’t understand anything. What did I know at the time about fixations? About the hardships of a small boy who had lost his father and mother? Who clung to his older sister, because she was his only refuge in an incomprehensible, hostile world? I knew only that Birgit was an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Every man desired her, but none could boast of having “won” her. The news would have spread like wildfire. And then there was the almost painful resemblance to Bernd …

  No, I didn’t understand anything.

  They came from Wiesbaden and were on vacation with their parents on the Adriatic when the disaster happened. Vacationers from the worst-hit areas had been “advised” against returning until “things were under control.” But cities like Wiesbaden, Worms, or Mainz would never be “under control” again, at least not in this century. How were 180 kilograms of plutonium-238 to be brought “under control,” which, vaporized, had spread over thousands of square miles and had a half-life of 87 years? It could have been even worse, some scientists had the nerve to declare, for plutonium-239 takes 24,000 years before only half of it has decayed into uranium. But even in fractions of one millionth of a gram, both are highly radiotoxic and carcinogenic when inhaled. To say nothing of the radioactive strontium and caesium isotopes, which had also been released in the explosion and had been borne eastward by the wind, deep into Bohemian and Polish regions.

  The people who were on vacation in Italy when it occurred had been housed in camps near Rimini and Livorno and left in the dark about the true magnitude of the catastrophe. Thus many of them had tried to return home on their own, intending to see for themselves what was going on and save at least a few valuables and important family property—papers, photos, bankbooks and other documents. Thus Bernd and Birgit’s father too had set off one day. When he didn’t return and no news arrived, their mother left the two children behind with friends and headed n
orth in search of him. She was never heard from again. The military made short work of and no distinction between looters and former residents who illegally infiltrated restricted areas. Most of them were soon so contaminated by radiation that they were not even allowed to return to the “free” areas anymore. They were interned, received meager medical care, and wasted away. The death books of Osnabrück, Magdeburg, Bayreuth, and Würzburg listed far from everyone who lay in the mass graves of the “border towns” of Kassel, Heidelberg, Bad Neustadt, Schweinfurt, and Jena. For many, identification was impossible, and they had to be buried quickly.

  At the time, Bernd was two years old and Birgit six. A rich German chose a dozen children whose parents were missing. Bernd and Birgit, who were very beautiful children, were among them; they grew up in a country house near Siena and received an education with the most up-to-date curricula.

  Then something must have happened to Birgit to make her so aloof toward men, but neither of them ever said a word about it. Birgit ran away with her brother from the house of their “benefactor”—she must have been eleven or twelve at the time. They struggled along, lived for a few years in a commune of the “Acqua è Vita” movement, which destroyed lawn sprinklers on golf courses and cricket fields and cut through hoses at night. With the increasing water shortage, a few splinter groups of the AèV then grew more and more violent, and when the first millionaire families were found drowned in the swimming pools of their secure grounds, the antiterror units cracked down hard. They stormed the communes of the movement and liquidated them. Bernd and Birgit got lucky. They were not shot dead like many of the members, but landed in prison—for only a few weeks, as the state already had enough mouths to feed.

  Finally they came to Rome, took their entrance exam at the university, and were accepted into the Facoltà di Scienza. Both chose biology with a focus on botanical ecotechnology.

  That’s where we met.

  * * *

  “DO YOU HAVE an older sister?” she asked me.

  “Not that I know of,” I replied. “I don’t have any siblings.”

  “Strange,” said Birgit, clasping my chin and moving it back and forth. “She wore her hair somewhat shorter, but the same face shape”—she ran her thumb over my cheek and chin—“exactly the same.”

  “Hey! What’s the deal?” Indignantly, I shook off her hand. I didn’t like to be touched so intimately—and especially not by her.

  “Leave her alone, Birgit,” said Bernd. “You heard her say she doesn’t have a sister.”

  She whipped around to him. Her tightly woven braid lashed her shoulder, and her beautifully curved mouth sneered, but she said nothing. With a broad, expressive mouth like that, with its nimble lips and corners, some people can say everything without uttering a word. And the mouth said: “I won’t do anything to her, your little pet,” while her big blue-gray eyes looked him over with amusement.

  Arrogant bitch!

  Her long earrings made of red glass balls strung on thin silver chains, arranged according to size and hanging almost down to her shoulders, swung as she turned to me again. She raised her eyebrows at a steeper angle. “It was just a question. It’s strange, isn’t it? Ask the backpack. He was there.”

  She gestured with a nod to CarlAntonio, turned away, and left with those graceful, lithe movements characteristic of runners or high jumpers to devote her attention to other guests at her party.

  Birgit was probably six feet tall, everything about her was large, but that didn’t detract from her femininity in the slightest. Her figure was perfectly proportioned. Bernd and she could have been twins, but she was not only older than he was, she was also more mature. She had had her experiences early, had had no choice.

  Men, as attracted as they were to her, feared her; they were afraid she might make disparaging remarks, for her sarcasm was scathing.

  When she wore her hair loose, it framed her face in soft, dark blond waves. Then she seemed to be a different woman: more accessible, more sensual, more vulnerable. Perhaps she braided it tightly back from her face so that it accentuated her broad cheekbones, lent her a severe, unapproachable appearance. It was as if she had erected ramparts from which she looked down at us. Then the color of her eyes seemed changed too; a cool green mingled with the blue-gray of her gaze. Eyes like the sea northwest of St. Kilda, as Marcello claimed—Viking eyes.

  “How do you actually know what the sea looks like near St. Kilda?” Renata had asked Marcello, who was passionately in love with Birgit at the time and had let himself be carried away to the point of making this rapturous comparison. He wrinkled his forehead with annoyance and looked at Renata appraisingly. But she had asked in all seriousness, with innocently raised eyebrows.

  “None of you have ever read a Viking novel, or what?” He flashed his eyes at us angrily. Everyone was looking at him mockingly, which riled him even more. “No clue about Red Orm or Eric Brighteyes. About anything!”

  “Ah, that’s where you got it from,” said Renata, nodding with understanding.

  “You’re all terrible philistines!” he shouted, throwing his hands up and shaking his black curls uncomprehendingly.

  I too admired Birgit, even though she didn’t like me. Perhaps I even loved her a little, but the sight of her hurt me in a strange way. And I was jealous, because I sensed from the beginning that Bernd would never be able to part from her.

  For a long time, I didn’t want to believe it.

  * * *

  “YOU REALLY DON’T have a sister?” Carl asked, reaching back and tapping Antonio on the shoulder so that he stayed put. “What a shame.”

  “Now you’re starting with that too!”

  He scrutinized me with his lively dark brown eyes, clasped his narrow, triangular chin—which rested on his sternum—with thumb and forefinger, as if he could thereby wrench it out of its bony entrenchment, and pursed his lips thoughtfully. Antonio, patient as a mule, munched a sandwich. Mayonnaise and bits of egg were stuck to his chin.

  “Really a shame,” said Carl. “We would have liked to meet her. She really had an incredible resemblance to you. Perhaps not quite as pretty as you”—he eyed me appraisingly—“but just as stylishly dressed.”

  “Stop it, you old charmer.”

  He grinned. “Well, a bit older, in her early thirties or so, I’d guess. Let me tell you what happened. We were sitting in Emanuele on Santa Maria Maggiore. You know the place, of course. Birgit, Marcello, and us. Having coffee. We thought it was you when we saw ‘you’ from afar, and—strangely—we all had the feeling that she knew us, was almost about to greet us but then changed her mind at the last moment. Oho, we thought, so our Domenica is picking up rich uncles.” He laughed.

  “There was an older man there, you see, in his late fifties or so. No longer quite so fresh, but a stylish fellow: dove-gray pants, dark blue jacket, straw hat, sunglasses. Made an impression, you couldn’t deny it. Now she’s embarrassed, we thought at first, she doesn’t want to introduce him to us. Got dressed up and put on makeup to look older. But then we saw that it couldn’t be you after all. The woman really was older than you. And her hair was shorter than yours, cut about medium length.”

  He shook his head. “It must have been her older sister, we told ourselves. She has been keeping her from us.”

  Antonio, who had silently consumed his sandwich, wanted to move on, but Carl reached back and poked him hard so that he stayed put.

  “I just wanted to tell you, Domenica.”

  “I don’t know anything about a sister, although … who knows? My father supposedly got around. He didn’t miss any chances—so my mother claims anyway.”

  Carl grinned and shook his head appreciatively. “Is your mother actually still alive?” he asked.

  “I hope so. Haven’t heard anything from her for months. And I can’t reach her, because she doesn’t carry an ICom.”

  “Is that possible? It’s compulsory.”

  I shrugged. “In Genoa they’re apparently not too p
articular about it. You know, she’s one of those people who are still living in the last millennium. Really. She keeps an eye out for mailmen. She wants nothing to do with e-mail. She doesn’t understand anything about it, she says. You know, my mother writes me letters and probably sticks them in a mailbox that no one has emptied for years.”

  “It’s not unheard-of,” said Carl. “But there are still mailmen. Like us, for example. Antonio!” He snapped his fingers. Antonio, who had in the meantime gotten hold of some nuts or potato chips, stopped chewing and turned his head so I could see his coarse, bulbous-nosed profile. “Wipe your mouth and give Domenica her envelope.”

  With a strained frown, Antonio rummaged in his shabby brown shoulder bag, which he wore strapped over the misshapen poncho that served both of them as a shared article of clothing, and passed half a dozen identical envelopes over his shoulder. Carl took them impatiently from his hand and handed me one of them with a sigh. It bore the Vatican insignia.

  Personal was written on it.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “They arrived today at the institute. A whole bundle. Direct from the Holy Father in Salzburg.”

  He nodded.

  “Well, at least from the Holy See. For everyone who applied last year to that Rinascita Project.”

  The contents of the envelope felt like a VidChip.

  “Good luck,” said Carl, drained his glass with a forceful jerk of his torso, ran the back of his hand over his lips, and handed the glass over his shoulder for Antonio to put down.

  I knew that Carl drank vast quantities of red wine. He literally had to drink for two, while Antonio seemed to be more responsible for the nourishment of their shared body.

  “We have to move on. Still have a few letters to deliver,” he said with a smile, slapping Antonio on his bald head. Antonio pushed off, and Carl strained to peer forward over his shoulder past the thick, protruding ears in order to direct him.

  Antonio and his “backpack” Carl. After the disaster, there had been countless cases of mutations, but the pair of twins was definitely the most gruesome of all the monsters—while also the most likable. Many deformed children—people spoke vaguely of “tens of thousands”—who were born after the catastrophe of 2028 had quietly been registered as “stillbirths.” Premature birth had been induced and the fetuses removed to save the lives of the mothers. CarlAntonio’s deformation, however, was unique, so grotesque and so scientifically interesting that it was preferable to sacrifice the life of the mother to save the object of medical interest for study. In any case, the doctors at the Brothers of Mercy Hospital of the University of Regensburg regarded this as the right decision, and because it was a good Catholic university, the monster was even baptized: The Siamese twins received the names Karl and Anton. Their mother came from Offenbach, which, like Frankfurt, was directly at the edge of the death corridor; she had lived in one of the large refugee camps of the southern Upper Palatinate.