The Cusanus Game

  “So there were no intimacies,” I said, to make sure.

  “No. She left the room. Apparently, she was suddenly in quite a hurry. I don’t know why. At first I was a bit annoyed, because I realized that I had missed the train to Rome and had to try to get a new seat reservation.”

  “You must have forgiven a charming woman for that and accepted the minor inconvenience.”

  “I was deeply grateful to her, signorina! For I had missed the train that was the target of the terror attack. She had, so to speak, saved my life.”

  “I don’t entirely understand. The terror attack was thwarted. Why do you think that woman saved your life?”

  Pensively, he wrinkled his forehead and stroked the lapel of his dark blue blazer with his thumbnail. The liver-spotted hand poking out of the worn sleeve shook.

  “Well,” he said with a helpless gesture, “how can I be absolutely certain that the attack would still have been thwarted even if I had been in the train?”

  I nodded. His shoes caught my eye through the glass tabletop. They were meticulously polished, but cracked, and the heels desperately needed repair.

  “So my doppelgänger played the role of your guardian angel and contributed to the fact that you were able to return home in one piece to your wife and daughter,” I said.

  “How did you know…?”

  “That was really just a guess.”

  “May I ask you your name?”

  “Oh! Domenica.”

  “What a coincidence! That’s my daughter’s name. She’s now—let me see—twenty-three. Unfortunately, I haven’t had contact with her for years. Since the divorce from my wife…” He broke off and then, after a while, went on, “I work in the fashion industry and am very often traveling around the world. You know, Paris, New York, Budapest—where fashion is made.”

  He didn’t look the part. I didn’t believe a word he said.

  “You don’t know what became of her? Your daughter, I mean,” I asked him.

  “Back then she moved with her mother to Genoa. My wife was Genoese. It wouldn’t surprise me if Domenica—my daughter, I mean—were now in Rome. She wanted to study botany here, if I remember correctly. Unfortunately, I don’t know whether anything came of that. We completely lost touch. My wife forbade her to meet with me, and so … I don’t even know what she looks like now.”

  He stood up. “May I treat you to a drink, Signorina Domenica?”

  “To be completely clear, Signore Ligrina, I will not go with you to your room…”

  “Please, what are you thinking!” he said, raising both hands defensively.

  “I just wanted to have said it. If you absolutely want to buy me a drink, then I’d rather get a soda or coffee at a sidewalk café somewhere.”

  He smiled, grabbed his hat, took his sunglasses out of the breast pocket of his jacket and put them on. He stood up and bowed gallantly.

  We walked down Via Cavour and were turning the corner onto Santa Maria Maggiore when the guests sitting at a table in Emanuele on the opposite side of the street caught my eye. Marcello and Birgit—and with them CarlAntonio. They looked over and whispered to each other. For a second I had involuntarily stopped, but Father had noticed nothing of my moment of shock.

  “Shall we go to Emanuele?” he suggested.

  “I’d rather not,” I said. “Let’s look for a different café.”

  “As you wish,” he replied.

  Later, when we had parted, I wondered uneasily what I should make of the daydreams that sometimes overcame me. I had already had them as a child, and they were sometimes of such clarity and coherence that in my memory I couldn’t distinguish them from reality. Sometimes it seemed to me in retrospect as if I had truly experienced them. But how could he, Father, have known about that?

  I remembered the woman who had come plunging out of the elevator and rushed past me, sobbing, when I, returning from the train station, had entered the lobby of the Grand Hotel Terminus. And then I gradually began to suspect that I would have to learn to live with such overlapping, only partially aligned realities.

  * * *

  A FEW DAYS later I walked across to Trastevere to visit Stavros. The front door was locked, but in the passage to the courtyard a short round man in a gray work coat was sweeping the pavement.

  “Are you the super here?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said tersely.

  “Does a Signore Vulgaris live here? Signore Stavros Vulgaris?”

  “No foreigners live here,” he replied in an unfriendly tone.

  “Are there vacant apartments in the house?”

  I had seen that nameplates were missing on a few bells. The Bartocellis apparently didn’t live here anymore either. “My” apartment seemed to be available.

  “That you should ask the house management,” he replied. “I can’t give you any information.”

  Shouldn’t Stavros already have been super here at this time? The Aegean conflict was already three years in the past. Had Stavros been killed in the battle of Icaria by the laser beam that in my memory had only seared his chest? Had he died in Turkish captivity when they had knocked out his eye and cut out his tongue?

  Suddenly the thought occurred to me: Hadn’t I already lived in this house myself at this point? I could no longer recall the exact date I had moved in, but nor did I remember ever having met here this surly dwarf in the gray work coat.

  Confused, I looked up to the windows from which I had seen the victims of the massacre on the Gianicolo that morning. I turned away and walked across to the convent of the Sisters of Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori. The gate to the small front courtyard was open. A car was parked by the wall and covered with a dusty tarp.

  The door to the entrance hall flew open with a click when I pushed against it. The second door wasn’t locked either. I cast a glance at the ancient secretary made of dark wood between the entrance to the chapel and the glass case made of cherrywood in which the life-size Christ Child stood—a blond boy in a pale red robe and with a golden halo. Over the hand raised in blessing was a white sash, on which large golden letters spelled IO SONO L’AMORE. The figure had not yet been blown to pieces. Bright light fell in through the tall, narrow windows from the convent garden, in which a fountain burbled. Involuntarily my eyes wandered to the point on the wall where Stavros’s outline had been spray-painted on the floor. No blood, no shards.

  “Can anyone just mosey in here?” I asked the small pale sister sitting behind the desk in her black habit.

  “I saw you a long time ago,” she said, pointing to the monitor next to her. “You didn’t make a particularly dangerous impression, so I let you in,” she explained with a laugh.

  “You never know,” I remarked. “Times have become unsafe.”

  “The Mother of God will protect us,” she asserted. “Besides, we don’t have any artworks here; a robbery would hardly be worth it. We’re a poor order.”

  “I know.”

  “May I help you? Would you like to see the chapel?”

  “Very kind of you. But I’ve been here often. I live nearby.”

  “I can’t remember ever having seen you here. And yet I do reception duty almost every day,” she replied.

  I shrugged. “Thank you anyway, Sister.”

  * * *

  I ALSO TRIED to find CarlAntonio, but the Siamese twins seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth. No one I asked about them seemed to have heard of the bizarre pair—Antonio with his “backpack.” Had the two of them never come to Rome? Had the Brothers of Mercy in Regensburg “selected” the newborns? Or had they fallen victim to their ambitious surgical experiments?

  Bernd, on the other hand, I ran into unexpectedly. It was directly in front of Stazione Termini, on one of those hot summer days in those years. The sun was burning down mercilessly. I stood in the shade under the large overhang of the train station, considering whether to take a taxi to the hotel or to walk the short stretch. Then I caught sight of him coming over from the metro.
He saw me at the same moment and came hurrying toward me before I could turn away and disappear in the crowd of passersby.

  “Domenica?” he asked uncertainly.

  He looked at me in shock with his large blue eyes. He hadn’t shaved for days; blond fuzz covered his chin and cheeks. How young he was! His T-shirt had large sweat stains under the arms, and I smelled his youthful body. How I had desired him! Memories welled up.

  “Do we know each other?” I asked, and my throat constricted.

  He shook his head. “You can’t fool me,” he replied. “My God, what have they done to you? What happened to you?”

  I forced a smile. “I got a little bit lost,” I replied offhand, “between times, worlds.”

  He eyed me from top to bottom.

  “Yes, I’ve gotten old, Bernd. I’ve gone through a lot in the meantime.”

  He brushed his long blond hair from his forehead. How I had always loved touching that hair!

  “Domenica, I will…”

  “No, Bernd, you won’t do anything. You won’t even say anything. To anyone, you hear? Not even to me, to the Domenica who still doesn’t know anything. Promise me that!”

  “I can’t…” he replied, almost sobbing.

  “Yes, you can. I know you can. The Domenica you know and maybe love lives in another world. You would destroy her and your world.”

  He looked at me uncomprehendingly. “But…”

  “Farewell, Bernd!” I cried, and left him standing there. I strode away quickly and didn’t turn back.

  * * *

  THUS I’VE TAKEN leave little by little of all my roots. What living thing can exist without any roots? Single-celled organisms, perhaps.

  “What are we actually?” I ask Don Fernando. He utters an excited squeak, as he always does when confronted with a difficult question.

  “That’s not at all so easy to answer,” he says, scurrying a few paces, turning around, and scurrying back again. Finally he plumps down with a sigh on the black stone tabletop. “You’re a biologist, Domenica. You must understand it better than I do.”

  “What is it I’m supposed to understand?”

  “Well, every organism needs something like messenger substances that can travel freely and unhindered through the body and maintain the connection between its parts, which convey information, make resources available, detect and eliminate disturbances. We’re something like that.”

  I think about that.

  “You mean hormones that travel in the bloodstream? Serotonin, dopamine, L1?” I ask him.

  Again Don Fernando squeaks. “Not exactly,” he says. “We’re among those who can also move freely outside the system. Outside the tunnels.”

  “You mean … antibodies? Suppressors? Cytokines? Lymphocytes?”

  “Yes, something like that. I think that’s not a bad comparison. But I was thinking more of enzymes, RNA genes, microRNA, riboswitches, the smart little helpers of life. Along those lines,” he replies.

  “And who is this organism we’re helping?” I ask, even though I know the answer.

  “The multiverse.”

  “And this organism, like any other, is in a process of evolution. It tries incessantly to improve itself, is in search of ways to optimize itself. New cells grow, others die off.”

  “That captures it really well. It’s a being consisting of membranes of space-time continuums, of countless universes—real universes, which emerge, grow, and collapse, and virtual ones, which can unfold at any moment into the dimensions. They’re linked to one another and together form a whole. Perhaps it’s only a mechanism or even only a computer program, as some believe. That’s a philosophical question or a question of faith. We don’t know. We know only that we ourselves are part of it.”

  I look across to the smoking ash seams, the sediments of innumerable failed possibilities. There are cells that cannot find their balance and in their insatiability suffocate in their own excrement.

  “Why should we work on behalf of this … monster?” I ask.

  Don Fernando chuckles. “We live in it. Where else could we exist?”

  “Are we directed by it? Do we receive orders?”

  Again he scurries excitedly back and forth. His paws patter across the polished stone tabletop. Then he again plumps down.

  “Perhaps we’re programmed. How could we ever find that out?” he asks, licking his front paws and cleaning his face. “To speak of passing the time doesn’t befit us, does it? The reduction of indeterminacy sounds terribly stilted. How about curiosity, the joy of discovery, the pleasure in play? Qualities that distinguish intelligent creatures. We’re restless and curious. We come across problems and try to solve them. That’s all.”

  I think about that. For a long time, we’re silent. The sky above us is empty. There’s no eye in sight.

  “Where are we actually?” I ask him.

  Don Fernando gets up and looks around as if he has to make sure himself.

  “Highgate,” he says.

  “And what does that mean?”

  With an elegant movement he winds his tail around his backside.

  “The border,” he explains. “It’s the outermost world in which life is still found. Beyond it begin the universes that have borne no life. And it’s the turning point of time. Here it has reached its maximum expansion. The time arrow faces indecisively now in this direction, now in the other. Many things thereby lose their validity.”

  And as if to underscore his words, the sun, which rose just a short while ago from the sandy sea, descends again toward the horizon. The rocks, which yesterday evening still stood on the beach, have disappeared. Perhaps, taking advantage of a temporal anomaly, they have moved on to seek a new berth on the coastline. Or, following the seductions of a capricious gravity, they have sunk into deeper regions of the continental shelf to be closer to the last warmth at the heart of this dying world.

  “Here the solitons, which accompany and tend the temporal dimension like shepherd moons, turn around and begin their descent into the past. They roll like a swell over the pole: They change direction without changing course.”

  * * *

  I AM NOW often on Highgate. I love the cool, salty smell of the morning and the bitter taste of midday, when the wind comes from the desert. Sometimes the sky breaks open and Sir Whitefang and his companion Kertschul come for a brief visit. I see them already from afar, because they come tramping up the glacier tongue of time—for every one step the man takes, the wolf takes four.

  “Where do they live?” I ask the ancient young man, the widely traveled one some time-natives call the angel, when the sky has closed again and the icy breeze is gone.

  “They live on the other side of the biophilic zone. They guard the border to the universes of cold and darkness, which are also without life,” he replies. “The borders overlap here at the end of time.”

  “Why do people actually call you the angel?” I ask the widely traveled man.

  “Perhaps because I can fly.”

  “Do you have no name?”

  “Oh, I’ve had many names. Some call me Hermes.”

  “Hermes? The messenger of the gods?”

  With a scarcely perceptible shrug, he answers, “The time-natives are very inventive in giving a name to the strange. They believe that they have a better grip on it that way—that they can grasp it.”

  “Are we who travel so freely through the times special?”

  “Freely? Are we free?”

  He looks at me mockingly with his odd honey-colored eyes.

  “We’re very mobile, yes. But are we therefore free?” he adds, leaning back in his rocking chair and folding his hands over his chest. “Special? A difficult question, Domenica. There are billions of lymphocytes in a body. They come into being and pass away. They have an important function. But is one of them therefore special? I don’t think so.”

  * * *

  OCCASIONALLY I RETURN to Amsterdam—to Venice, to Rome. I take a short walk with Grit, sit in th
e Waag while Leendert, preoccupied with intricate thoughts in his effort to track down contradictions in the sources, stares silently into his beer mug. I visit Grandfather at night after the last guests have gone, when he sits in his wheelchair on the terrace, and let him show me the stars.

  “You should come sometime in winter,” he says, “when the sky is full of stars.”

  I promise him. Sometimes I ride for a few hours by Renata’s side through the stony bed of the Isarco or sleep with Frans in his small apartment in Castello. But I notice that they all increasingly have trouble perceiving me. Have I become for them a hazy apparition, so that I encounter them only in their daydreams—in the languor of midday or at night when their senses are enveloped in sleep?

  At times I have trouble focusing on the present in which I happen to be at a given moment. I look around, marvel at the facts between which I find myself, for my consciousness is constantly straying, roaming my virtual future and my virtual past, which are in a state of constant flux. The multiverse must experience itself in a similar way.

  Then again, when I direct my attention to the reality surrounding me, I run the risk of getting tangled in the thickets of the factual. It is of a terrifying, overwhelming density. An unbearable flood of data assails me, which exceeds my receptive power. Time seems to stand still, and I feel as if I’m looking at a photograph in which I keep discovering new details, though I would like to close my eyes to them.

  Sometimes I penetrate deeper into the dark regions of this universe, areas full of horror, in which the smell of fear and torment is overpowering. There, at the fortresses of darkness, I encounter no more travelers I know, for they all rely on technology—on the arteries through time and the stations along the tunnels.

  Wherever I go, I gather information, for I think that even those events the historians call “constitutive facts”—those ugly encapsulations of violence and death, the pernicious knots of chance, negligence, and indifference—can be unraveled and disentangled by prudent probing, gentle smoothing, subtle changes in the period leading up to them. You only have to try. I hope we still have enough time. Our universe still exists. But for how long?