Decompression (11 page)

JOLA’S DIARY, THIRD DAY

Monday, November 14. Evening
.

I’m choking. I can’t shake the feeling of being unable to breathe. It’s lodged in my throat. As if there’s something stuck in there. A cork. A convulsion. Instead of studying, I jump up every three minutes and dash over to the window. I yank it open and suck air into my lungs. I tell myself, That’s oxygen! Your body inhales it automatically! You aren’t going to die. My heart races so hard it hurts. I try to calm down, to subdue my panic. To breathe slowly, the way Sven taught me to do. If only he were here. If only he would take my hand. Give me
his
air to breathe. I need a diving instructor on land. Someone who can teach me how to keep from choking on this crappy life
.

So the old man came out of the shower with a wet towel over his shoulder and that special expression on his face, and already I felt the air go out of me, I got cold, and my inner voice was hollering, Tough it out! You can stand it! It won’t kill you! Think about something else and hold still, it’ll be over with faster that way!

But the old man just laid a hand on the back of my neck and asked me, friendly as you please, if I really didn’t want to go to dinner with them in the little restaurant in Tinajo. I made a frantic grab for the diving books. A thin defensive perimeter. Then Sven arrived and looked shocked when he found out I wanted to stay in. Now I’m staring at the clock on the wall. It’s set an hour ahead so that vacationing guests won’t miss their programs on German TV
.

Studying theory is pointless. Math formulas and page-long descriptions of different pieces of equipment. As if theory could safeguard you in practice. As if the world didn’t have ways and means to sneak up on us from behind. And then there’s the constant blather about your “buddy.” You have to be able to rely on your buddy. You and your buddy must practice underwater communication. Always make sure you’re not endangering yourself or your buddy. I’m sick of my “buddy.”

I know Theo loves me. Not only because he says so. I see it in his eyes. I feel it in the way he puts his arm around me. Comforts me. Tries to protect me from himself. I know it from the efforts he makes. From the way he honestly tries to be someone else. Often enough, I provoke him, I ask for it. Come on, do it then. Give it to me hard. Stick your dick in my ass. You can’t get it up unless you can play the rapist. And so on, until he grabs my neck and forces me to stop talking. To provoke is to maintain control. In some situations, the greatest mercy is the knowledge that at least you’ve brought them on yourself
.

Do people have opposites? If they do, then Sven’s the opposite of the old man. Sven watches out for me. How quickly he moved to my side when I swam out over the ledge! He noticed I was losing control well before it became clear to me. His eyes behind the diving goggles. His firm conviction that he could help me. His calm was contagious, and I caught it. He should never have let me go. We would have simply stayed underwater forever
.

He sent me a text message a little while ago: “You’re in our thoughts.” He’s always worrying. I’ve never known anyone who worried so much. I can literally see the wheels turning inside his head. Broody wheels, worry wheels. Sometimes I want to grab his arm and hold on until he stops thinking and tell him, You’re a good person
.

I try to imagine Sven killing the old man. He grabs him by the throat, pushes him underwater, and holds him down. I’m wearing diving goggles. I sit on the bottom and watch. I see the mortal fear on Theo’s face. The sudden understanding that he’s gone too far. Drowning’s an ugly death. Music by Carter Burwell, as in a Coen brothers film, accompanies the scene. I press
STOP
.

Everything could be so beautiful. We’re on an island, we have money, we’re healthy. But everything’s ugly. And the more I think and do ugly things, the uglier my life becomes. Like a splendid home furnished with the most tasteless objects. It hurts to have to see that every day. Being inside is unbearable. The open window’s not helping anymore. I have to get out of here
.

7

By the next morning, the bad weather had finally moved off. Blue sky, bright sun, a friendly little wind. Jola was sitting on the steps of the Casa Raya, wearing cutoff jeans and a top with a narrow halter holding her breasts. Something was missing from this picture, namely Theo. Jola was alone. I knew immediately that he hadn’t just gone back in to pick up some forgotten trifle, he hadn’t yet left the Casa. I could tell by looking at Jola that Theo wouldn’t be diving with us that morning. She looked back at me as if seeing me for the first time.

I stood in front of her and reflected on how we’d been greeting each other the past couple of days. Handshakes? Mutual shoulder pats? Brief waves and simple hellos? Or were we already such good friends that we had to embrace? I didn’t like this constant cheek-kissing between near strangers. When it became the fashion at the university to greet people by flinging your arms around their neck, I decided not to go to any more parties. One thing was
certain: I couldn’t possibly fling my arms around Jola. Not as long as she was wearing that halter top. I realized that on the previous days I’d driven up to the Casa and simply stayed in the driver’s seat while Jola and Theo threw their bags into the backseat and got in the front with me. I couldn’t understand why I’d climbed out of the van on that particular morning.

“Is something wrong?” Jola asked.

“Where’s Theo?”

Her face clouded. She said,
“I’m
paying your fee.”

“Is he not in the mood today?”

“The old man’s your biggest fan. But he’s in bed with a cold.”

“Antje will bring him something that’ll put him back on his feet by tomorrow.”

“But are you ready and willing to go diving with me without Theo?”

I saluted and said in English, “Yes, ma’am.”

In the van she sat close to the passenger window, leaving an empty place between us on the front seat. When I turned my head toward her, she smiled strangely, showing the spaces between her incisors. This had the same effect on me as if she’d spread her legs. We didn’t speak. I forced myself to keep my eyes on the road.

Everything is will.

Silence on land was something different from silence underwater. It wasn’t a normal condition; it was the mute sound track of failure. After fifteen minutes, I couldn’t take it anymore.

“So how are you coming along with theory?”

“Fuck theory.”

She pronounced the word as if
theo-ry
had something to do with
Theo
. Then we fell silent again.

Finally the van was bouncing along the potholed road that led to the dive site at Mala. I considered it important that Jola’s next dive should be in the same spot where she’d had her panic attack the day before. The same principle as getting right back on a horse after a fall. There had been no discussion of this. She hadn’t asked where we were going, and I kept having trouble coming up with the first sentence of every single thing I wanted to say.

We stopped and Jola got out. She stretched her back and looked at the ocean, which shone smooth as foil all the way to the horizon. I opened the back of the van and felt gratitude at the sight of all the equipment. Scuba tanks to unload, buoyancy compensators to prepare, weight belts to find. Jola helped me spread out the tarp we were going to change our clothes on. When she crossed her arms to pull her top over her head, I turned back to the van and rummaged under the passenger seat for a mask.

“Where can you pee around here?” Jola said. It wasn’t a question, it was a warning. Not a tree or a bush within five kilometers in any direction. Just the gravel road where the van was parked. Beyond that, nothing but rocks and black sand.

Jola went to the other side of the van and squatted down beside the left front wheel. I bent low over the passenger seat, pretending to concentrate on my search, out of fear that she’d be able to see me through the half-open driver’s door if I straightened up. A stream struck the hard ground. I could practically feel it splashing on her feet and ankles. The longer the situation went on, the more impossible it became. The splatter seemed to present an increasingly detailed and shameless account of Jola’s insides. It wouldn’t stop. I stared at the dust at my feet.

Slowly, the hissing became a trickle, and under the passenger
door a thin rivulet appeared. It showed no inclination to seep away into the earth. Instead, the little stream was ferrying along a certain amount of dust at its edges, so that it wallowed rather than flowed. It was getting close to my toes. I didn’t move my foot. All at once, Jola was standing next to me. Her eyes were not on me but on the ground. On the damp print of my left foot.

“Let’s do it,” I said. My upbeat tone was a rebellion against her contemptuous smile.

As we made our difficult way down the rocks, she started to stumble. I instinctively reached out my hand to catch her; she took hold of it and didn’t let go. I said to myself that when we were carrying heavy equipment and going over dangerous terrain, it was my duty to support her. Her grasp wasn’t coy, it was tight and warm, almost like a man’s. It felt completely natural to go the rest of the way hand in hand with her.

Before we entered the water, I showed her once again how to protect her mask and diving regulator. I inflated her buoyancy compensator and tested every buckle on her outfit. When her fingers wandered over my suit during the safety check, I closed my eyes. Then I turned around and jumped.

All quiet. Jola lay in the water much more calmly than she’d done on the previous days. It was as though Theo’s absence relaxed her. She sank slowly, one hand on her nose for pressure equalization, while her hair floated around her like a living thing. She spread out her arms and legs and hovered in place, gently lifted and lowered by her own breathing. She turned on her back and looked up at the air bubbles rising toward the sun from her mouth like glinting jellyfish. I knelt on the sea bottom and couldn’t stop looking at her. We were together down there in the water. Two
slow-motion creatures in a slow-motion world. In fourteen years and with hundreds of clients, such a feeling of solidarity, of connection, had never come over me before. Jola approached and landed on her knees directly opposite me. We remained like that for a while, as though we were worshipping each other. A little cuttlefish swam up and looked at us inquiringly. It exchanged its camouflage for a striped courtship display to determine whether we were male or female. Eventually Jola raised her thumb and forefinger to signal,
Okay?
I responded in kind:
Yes, okay
.

I don’t remember whose hands reached out first. I do remember taking her by the shoulders and pulling her into my arms, and I remember that she immediately returned my embrace. We couldn’t kiss each other, because we had to keep our breathing apparatus in our mouths. We couldn’t caress each other, because our skin was covered by a layer of neoprene, and pieces of equipment blocked the way everywhere. The only parts of Jola available to me were her hands and the back of her head. I thrust one hand into the armhole of her buoyancy compensator so that I could at least feel the flattened shape of her breast under the neoprene. Then I turned her around, bent her forward, and rubbed myself against her rubberized behind. I considered whether I dared to undress her. I thought I could grip her weight belt with one hand and carefully remove her buoyancy compensator with the other. Then I’d lay her tank on the seafloor, and she could hold the tank tight in both arms to keep from being carried away by the current. I probably could have managed to peel her diving suit half off. The mere idea of pulling down her zipper and lifting out her breasts while she lay facedown on the bottom of the sea, helpless
as a newborn babe, chained by a hose to her air supply—that image alone drove me out of my mind.

Naturally, I did nothing of the kind. We were twenty meters below the surface of the water, it was her fifteenth dive, I was her trainer, and the responsibility was mine. The cuttlefish got bored and swam off. Three butterfly rays hovered close to the ocean floor in the middle distance. Theo would have been ecstatic.

All my adult life I’d considered myself a person with little capacity for love. Occasionally I’d gaze at Antje’s face and think that she was really nice-looking. At such times, I felt happy that she was with me. Those brief moments were the peaks of my emotional life. Love, on the other hand, the kind of love that ruined entire families, incited wars, or drove the lovelorn to suicide—I knew a love like that only from the movies. The very idea seemed foreign to me. It was as though I was missing the organ whose function was to engender such a love. And so for a long time I’d believed there was something wrong with me. During my university days, I’d invested a lot of effort in trying to fall in love. That led to sex. But I was too honest to mistake horniness for true romance.