Decompression (3 page)

I threw the used diving suits into the washing shed in the yard and went into the house. I was suddenly thirsty for an aperitif. Campari over ice. Ordinarily I drank only when I had to: in airplanes, at weddings, or on New Year’s Eve. The Campari I wanted at the moment was somehow related to Jola and Theo. I could smell and taste it before I knew whether Antje had any on hand. I found a bottle in the refrigerator, poured myself a large glass, and listened with pleasure to the crackling ice cubes. Glass in hand, I stepped out onto the lower terrace. If you put your chair right up against the railing, you could look across the sandlot and into the Casa’s living room. Just then the curtains were opened. Antje’s colorful dress was visible through the window. I could see Jola and Theo in the background, contemplating the cooking alcove. They were probably used to much better kitchen arrangements. Or maybe they were wondering how they could get anything to cook anyway, seeing that there wasn’t so much as a chewing-gum
machine in Lahora. On this, their first evening, Antje would invite them to dinner, and tomorrow after the morning dive, she’d take them shopping for supplies. That was what we always did with the guests who came to the Casa.

Across the way, Antje was explaining stove, microwave, and washing machine. Theo appeared to be listening, while Jola let herself drop onto the sofa. Her head bounced up and down in the window; she was probably testing the sofa for springiness. I was tempted to imagine Theo throwing her onto the dining table and pushing up her dress—but I deleted the image at once. Female clients were taboo. In my profession, your work clothes were a pair of swimming trunks.

JOLA’S DIARY, FIRST DAY

Saturday, November 12. Afternoon
.

Incredible place. White facades and barred shutters. Blazing sun and black sand. Zorro might come around the corner at any minute, rushing to prevent a duel. The air tastes salty. I find it fabulous here, but since Theo likes it too, I naturally have to take the opposite side. The sublime aesthetics of the austere! All right, old man. Why not just give it a rest? The world doesn’t become any more beautiful because you dump your poetry on it. Not bigger either, or more important or better. All you do is crash into the world and bounce off. Like the sea hitting the rocks, your words burst into spray and flow back into you. If you had ten thousand years, maybe you’d be able to round off a little corner, but you won’t live that long. You least of all
.

As for me, I’m keeping my mouth shut. I’m not talking about literature, I’m not talking about dying. We’re both making an effort. This is going to be a lovely vacation. I won’t provoke him, and he won’t let himself be provoked. Armistice
.

Well, maybe
vacation
isn’t the word. The real reason why I’m here is the part. The part I want. The part I need. Lotte’s my last chance. I tore her picture out of the book and pinned it to the wall over the bed. I could look at her and look at her. Charlotte Hass, Lotte Hass. The Girl on the Ocean Floor. She’s wearing a red swimsuit and old-fashioned diving equipment and holding on to part of a sunken vessel. Her eyes are heavily made-up behind her diving goggles, and her long hair is spread out like a water plant around her head. She’s so beautiful. And strong. A female warrior. Home and children weren’t enough for her. She went looking for danger. Her diary’s as thrilling as a crime novel. In the 1950s diving wasn’t a sport, it was pioneer work. A test of courage for men, not for women. Lotte was the first girl who insisted on swimming with the fish. When Theo noticed the photograph over the bed, he bit his tongue
.

Sven’s a beamish boy. Only two years younger than Theo, but built differently. With webbed feet and gills behind his ears. He doesn’t look at me. Doesn’t even see me. Probably because I’m not a fish. Which is what he’s supposed to turn me into. That’s what he’s being paid for, and he doesn’t come cheap
.

Sven comes with Antje, who’s his—what? Assistant? Wife? Sister? Secretary? She introduced herself as “Sven’s Antje,” as though giving both her job title and her family status in one go. Sven, meanwhile, was staring into space. Antje apparently embarrasses him. She’s a little thing but quite a looker, she talks a lot, and she smells like Nivea. Blond as a Swede. She stays out of the water. She made us aware of that right from the start. The water, she said, is Sven’s “state of matter.” I think she probably meant “element” or maybe “business.” Something like that goes through the old man like a burning knife. If you can’t talk right keep your trap shut, that’s his motto. He can’t stand to be around people he thinks sound like children. On the other hand, he seems quite happy to gaze upon Sven’s Antje
.

Lahora. The Spanish textbook in school had some strange sample sentences: My dogs are under the bed. I hear myself scream
. Te llegó la hora—Your hour has come.
Not another soul for miles. No automobile except for Antje’s, the car with the dog on the hood. Without a car, there’s no getting out of here. In short, except for us, the place is deserted. The old man liked that right away: “Somebody ought to set a story here,” he said. Go right ahead. Set a story. Write something instead of always just talking about writing something. I didn’t say anything
.

The old man let his eyes rest on Antje’s Swedish bosom and listened to her attentively. Used toilet paper should be thrown not in the toilet but in the bucket next to the toilet, because otherwise the pipes get blocked. Electrical appliances are to be turned off whenever we leave the house. If we want warm showers, don’t take one right after another. Don’t drink from the taps. Don’t put any garden furniture on any of the watering hoses. When we want to log on to the Internet, tell Sven so he can adjust the satellite dish. No swimming, and no going for walks—but we knew that already
.

Then I stood in the garden for a long time and watched the sea playing with itself. All at once the old man was behind me with a glass of red wine in his hand. He put an arm around my shoulders, pulled me to him, and kissed the crown of my head. “Little Jola,” he said, nothing more
.

My eyes got damp. I held him tight. When he’s in the mood, it can be a great thing to touch him. It’s always this way: you travel thousands of miles to sleep less comfortably and understand yourself better
.

2

A typical evening. All the windows were open. Warm air flowed through the house and eliminated the difference between inside and outside. Antje was banging around in the kitchen. A sound as pleasant as rain on a tent roof. I was glad to sit at the computer in our tiny office while she busied herself around the stove.

Three hundred and eighty-four thousand hits on Google. That was a shock. Even though I didn’t know exactly why it frightened me. In the background, a software program was uploading data from my dive computer. If Antje appeared in the doorway, I could click onto the other screen in a flash. I didn’t feel like explaining what I was doing and why. Googling clients wasn’t really my style.

It looked like half the Internet consisted of Jola. Wikipedia entry, fan pages, Facebook profile, Twitter, press reports, YouTube. Hundreds of photographs. How many faces could one person
have? The longer I looked, the faster they seemed to multiply. From page to page, from link to link. It was fascinating. And somehow offensive.

Jolante Augusta Sophie von der Pahlen (stage name: Jola Pahlen), born 5 October 1981 in Hanover, is a German actress. Von der Pahlen comes from a Baltic German noble family. At the age of eleven, she recorded a CD of children’s songs and performed a singing role in a production of
Woyzeck
at the Staatstheater in Hanover. She gained her first television experience (1995–1997) in the children’s program
Toggo
, which was broadcast on the Super RTL network. Since December 4, 2003, von der Pahlen has played the role of Bella Schweig in SAT.1’s daytime drama
Up and Down
. Jolante von der Pahlen lives with the writer Theodor Hast.

• See “Jola Pahlen” in the Internet Movie Database (German and English versions)

A chirping sound came from the ceiling. The gecko had left his sleeping quarters behind the curtain rod and was preparing himself for his nightly insect hunt. Years ago, when I saw him for the first time, he was approximately three centimeters long, practically transparent, and clueless about life. Now he was longer than my index finger, and he knew he had nothing to fear from me. I’d baptized him Emile, even though Antje declared he was a female. She claimed that this particular gecko species includes no males whatsoever; the females reproduce by self-cloning, she said. Then she grinned at me, as though she was talking about some masterstroke on Nature’s part. None of that bothered me. I liked Emile.
He had the most beautiful feet, and he used nanotechnology to run upside down across the ceiling.

“Frau Pahlen, you come from a noble family. In what ways has your family background shaped your character?”

“Everybody’s shaped by their origins. I’ve learned from my family to protect and preserve beautiful things. It causes me physical pain to see someone put a water glass without a coaster on the bare wood of a Biedermeier table. Carelessness is beauty’s worst enemy.”

“Your father is a successful film producer. Your family is rich. Do you sometimes feel a desire to do something independently?”

“Everything I do I do independently. My father doesn’t stand in front of the
Up and Down
cameras, and neither does anyone else in my family. That’s me.”

“But people say, don’t they, that your father got you the part in
Up and Down
?”

“Success always requires a combination of luck, hard work, and talent.”

“Frau Pahlen, you turned thirty last week. Isn’t it time to leave
Up and Down
?”

“Why? Do you think thirty’s too old for soap operas?”

“Not for soap operas, but maybe for a first real film role.”

“I’m looking at a serious project right now.”

“Then we wish you good luck, Frau Pahlen.”

The delicate scampering of soft feet. Emile appeared on the computer monitor, whose illuminated surface attracted little flies. He walked across the screen and sat in the middle of Jola’s face. Then he looked at me with his black button eyes and stuck out his tongue. In the movies, if a reptile sits on a character’s picture, that character will go crazy before the end.

Theodor Hast racked up 12,400 links on Google. Most of them referred to his relationship with Jola Pahlen. His Wikipedia entry consisted of two lines, with no accompanying photograph: “German writer, born 1969 in Reutlingen. His first novel,
Flying Buildings
, was published in 2001. He lives in Berlin, Stuttgart, and New York.”

The triple residence awakened unpleasant memories. In law school we were taught to cite all the publishing offices when quoting from the technical literature: “Volker Schlön,
Securities Law, with Special Emphasis on the Securities Trading Act
. Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, 6th edition.” A book like that cost 129 deutschmarks, and the copy in the university library was notoriously unavailable whenever a paper relating to securities law actually had to be written. In Theo’s case it wasn’t his book but he himself who apparently lived in three places at the same time.

“An irritating gem.”

“A clear harbinger of future masterpieces.”

“ ‘There are many people who like me, but only one has to live with me. And that one’s myself.’ (Theodor Hass,
Flying Buildings
, p. 23.)”

According to the jacket copy posted on the publishing house’s home page, the novel was about a character named Martin and the search for identity. It sounded complicated. I scrolled down and came to an excerpt from the text:

He asked himself how it could be that God created the world in six days and gave himself the seventh day off. Were there already days before the earth took its first twenty-four-hour spin around the sun? And how was it that God opted for the seven-day week? That must mean God had held down a job somewhere. Martin would have very much liked to know where. He set his glass down and looked up. The tattered sky was hurrying eastward, as if it had something urgent to do there.
Emigrate
, he thought. But that would make sense only if the country we escape to weren’t always and only ourselves.

Antje read a lot. Whenever I tried to read a novel, it would put me to sleep.

A pan started sizzling. I smelled rabbit. I got up but left the computer on. The monitor was a fabulous hunting reserve for Emile.

Antje had set the table for four. Two glasses per person, one for water and one for wine. I noticed that the glasses were standing on the bare wood of the teak dining table. I started searching the sideboard for coasters.