Decompression (8 page)

Seven years later we’re sitting in a restaurant, eating lobster and drinking a Meursault Premier Cru and crying over the wicked world and dreaming of emigrating. Because living in a penthouse apartment with a roof terrace in Berlin is a total nightmare. Because we’d be much happier with floppy hats on our heads and garden soil under our fingernails. The old man would sit on a simple wooden bench, his back against the sun-warmed wall of the house, and spend the livelong day musing. I’d make pottery, earthenware vessels he’d drink his wine out of. Once a minute, we’d look up and smile at each other. We’d be nice to each other from morn till night. He’d never again, just for fun, try to push me over a cliff
.

I thought he wanted to apologize. To blame it all on the wine. To say he didn’t know what had gotten into him, he could have killed us both. Very softly, he came up to the sofa. I lay there with my eyes closed, enjoying the way he was stroking my cheek with one warm finger. He does that so damned seldom. The wind rattled the shutters, which Antje had closed while we were out. When I opened my eyes, it wasn’t a finger, it was his dick
.

What would Lotte have done? When I tried to get up, he put his hands around my throat. I told him to let me go. He tried to shove himself into my mouth. I clenched my teeth. He pressed on my windpipe. My lips opened and I gasped for air. It felt like he was choking off my hearing as well as my breathing. The sound of the wind vanished. Absolute silence. It was dark in the room. I could see his face, far away, and his moving mouth. He was looking at me the whole time. I thought I’d better not vomit, it would suffocate me. I wondered how long this could go on. Sometimes he needs a good while. I thought everything would go black soon. Then everything went black
.

The thing Lotte and I have in common is that she could take a lot and so can I. I keep thinking about her time on the
El Chadra,
the hundred-year-old Arab pearl-fishing boat Hans Hass used as an improvised expedition ship. There was Lotte Hass, afloat on the Red Sea off the Sudanese coast, huddled together with ten men on the boat’s vermin-infested planks. I think about how she wrote her diary at night when the heat prevented her from sleeping. “August 12. People who see this in a movie theater will sit back in their plush chairs, offer one another candies, and think, Oh, how nice! I’d love to sail on a ship like that. How romantic!’ In the future, I believe I’ll look at expedition documentaries with different eyes, and when I see our film, I’ll ask myself, ‘Is that really me?’ ”

I lay in his arms. He was holding me the way he should always hold me, good and tight. He stroked my back, my hair, my face. I could hear again. He was crying. He told me what a brave, good girl I was. Said how much he loves me, loves me more than anything in the world, loves me to distraction. Said what a bad person he is. Nevertheless, he said, I can’t leave him. Because he needs me, because I’m his angel. He started crying louder. I sucked in his nearness like a drug. My jaw hurt. I began to comfort him. I told him everything would be all right. Said we just had to try a little harder. He was clinging to me like a child. He thanked me as though I’d saved his life. I smiled. I’m absolutely sure we can do it, I said. I put him to bed
.

Not long afterward, he started snoring. The bedroom door was ajar. I took my notebook and came to sit out here in front of the house. Now I imagine I’m on the deck of a ship, and the heat is the reason I can’t sleep
.

6

She’s asleep. Her lips are slightly parted, revealing the adorable space between her front teeth. I feel a mighty urge to stroke her head, and I consider whether I dare do such a thing. When my fingers touch her forehead, she opens her eyes. I say her name: Jola. We look at each other for a few seconds, and then her jaws spring open. Like a moray eel, she has a second pair of jaws in her throat and launches them into her mouth. With the teeth of a predatory fish, she snaps at my fingers.

I flinched away from her and sat up in the bed. It was pitch-dark; the digital alarm clock read 4:00
A.M
. Very gradually, I came to the realization that the woman beside me was not Jola but Antje. She was sleeping on her back with outstretched arms, her head tilted down to one side, in an attitude of crucifixion.

My revved-up heart slowly calmed down. Now I understood the unnatural darkness: Antje had closed the shutters. The wind was still blowing around the corners of the house, though not
howling as hungrily as a few hours earlier. I hated dreams that seemed like the inventions of a psychologist. There was no question of my going back to sleep. I figured I might as well get up and go out to my workshop.

I stood briefly in front of the house, looking over at the Casa Raya, the only bright spot in the midst of black darkness. For a moment I thought something long-haired and human-shaped was crouching on the garden wall, but it turned out to be nothing but a cactus pear whose paddles were moving in the wind.

The package had come the previous day, and Antje had put it on my workbench. For the first time, I’d decided to equip a dry suit with a heating system. At a depth of one hundred meters, seawater’s cold. The helium in the gas mixture promotes the loss of body heat, and the long decompression times are an additional factor. The package I’d received contained twenty meters of monopolar wire—the kind also used in heating car seats—a heating unit, electric cable, a couple of E/O cords, and a twelve-volt battery. I spread my undersuit on the table, threaded a needle, and got to work. In an instant, I forgot everything else. When Antje came to get me, it was already broad daylight outside and almost time to set out.

The weather had turned cooler. Theo had exchanged his linen suit for jeans and an anorak, which made him more simpatico. Although the wind had died away, experience told me the sea wouldn’t calm down until late in the afternoon. My suggestion that we spend the day sightseeing on land was rejected. My
references to the waves we’d encounter when entering the water and the bad visibility below the surface also fell on deaf ears. I spoke sentences in which the phrases
difficult conditions
and
at your own risk
occurred. Jola smiled at me and climbed into the van. I was glad to see that her teeth were in fine shape. We started to drive across the island—I thought it would be best to try our luck on the leeward side.

There was something strange about my two clients that morning. We were in Teguise before I realized what was different about them: they were behaving like perfectly normal people. Theo asked, “Sweetheart, can you reach in the backpack and get the water bottle?” Jola answered, “Sure,” and handed him the mineral water. They were both sitting up front with me, swaying a little with the movements of the van and holding their hands on their knees. When a phone rang, it was mine, with a text message from Jola: “Looking forward to the dive. J.”

The dive site near Mala was a lonely spot, not easy to reach. Level places for entering the water were nonexistent. You had to clamber down barefoot over slippery rocks with the heavy scuba tank on your back and the fins and mask under your arm until you were close enough to the bay to jump. I left the van on the edge of the gravel road; we stood in black sand and changed into our diving gear. Slowly, step by step, reaching for each other’s hand to get over the hard parts, Jola and Theo climbed down. The sea was rougher than I’d hoped it would be. I decided to hurry up so they wouldn’t have too much time to stare down into the waves. I
quickly demonstrated how they should jump into the water, with one hand on their weight belt and the other in front of their face. Theo stroked Jola’s shoulder before launching himself. He surfaced near me and made the “okay” sign.

Jola was still standing on the rocks; her body language was the picture of a struggle. Apparently she was giving her legs orders they had no wish to carry out. At last she leaped forward, a little too forcefully, and dropped right on top of me. I softened her impact, held on to her, fully inflated her buoyancy compensator, made sure her head remained above water. She’d temporarily lost her diving regulator, and she was coughing. I wanted to get under as quickly as possible, because it was dangerous to stay so close to the rocks. Under the water, calmness would reign. I gave the sign to submerge, and down we went.

Immediately, a great quiet surrounded us. The special silence of the sea. Movements slowed down and communication became a dance, a choreography of signs and gestures. Underwater, relationships were simple, requirements unequivocal, and responses radical. If you dove down ten meters, you simultaneously traveled back ten million years in the history of evolution—or back to the beginning of your own biography. You were in the water where life began, floating and mute. Without speech, no concepts. Without concepts, no justifications. Without justifications, no war. Without war, no fear. Not even the fish were afraid of us. Some curious ones came close and accompanied us for a while. If we kept still, they’d cast intense glances into our diving goggles. In exotic worlds, the tourist doubled as an attraction. I was fascinated by the peace that prevailed underwater, where hunter and prey lived together, courteously avoiding one another—a peace interrupted
only by the brief cravings of hunger, which was no treachery but rather a generally accepted process of selection.

Despite the swells, subaqueous visibility was amazingly good. One of the most beautiful dive sites on Lanzarote stretched out before our eyes. The island’s bizarre volcanic landscape continued underwater, forming a stone city with towers, columns, archways, and battlements. When the sun broke through the clouds above, we found ourselves floating inside a dome of rising air bubbles and light. I felt happiness like a fist in my stomach. Theo lay in the water next to me and looked up too.

Something wasn’t right with Jola. In order to get around a lava stream that reached well out into the sea, I’d led my two clients close to the rim of the ledge, where the seafloor dropped straight down. Two groupers, as long as grown men, lay on the rim as though enjoying the view. Jola had swum out over the ledge, emitting air bubbles far too frequently. Like a bird unsure of whether it could really fly, she was staring into the deep. Fear of heights presented a serious problem underwater. With a couple of fin strokes, I moved beside her and grasped her arm. She flinched away. For a second I thought she was going to strike at me.

Over the years, I’d developed an automatic reaction: the more frantic a diver was, the calmer I became. I slowed my movements down to the point where I hardly knew whether I was actually doing something or merely present. Behind her diving goggles, Jola stared at me with wide-open eyes. Her chest rose and fell much too fast; she was already hyperventilating. I squeezed her forearm several times, trying to get her to focus her attention. When her eyelids stopped fluttering and she began to concentrate on me, I nodded approval and signaled,
Good
. I moved one hand
slowly away from my mouth and closed my eyes:
Exhale. Wait
. I opened my eyes:
Now you
. She exhaled but immediately filled her lungs again, shot panicked glances left and right, and even looked upward, considering whether she should simply go back up to the surface. I tightened my grip on her arm and shook my head emphatically:
No. Look at me. Exhale. Wait. Inhale slowly
. Now she was following my instructions, but her eyes were still too wide. We found a common rhythm.
Exhale. Wait. Inhale slowly
. She calmed down. I let go of her arm, took her hand, and shook it:
Congratulations, well done
. She sheepishly returned my “okay” sign. When I tried to withdraw my hand, she clung to me hard:
Don’t leave me!
Peering through her mask, I could see she was crying. The sensation of suffocating is among the worst a person can experience. At that moment, Jola needed only one thing in the world: me.

The reading on her pressure gauge was under 100 bar; she’d breathed her tank half empty in two minutes. I was determined to proceed with the dive, and it was essential to do so in an orderly fashion. One of the most important principles beginners must grasp is that diving problems have to be solved underwater. Emergency surfacing isn’t an option. I signaled to her that we were going to share my air supply. We’d practiced this—two divers breathing from one tank—in shallow water. Now I showed her my octopus, my spare demand valve, and made sure she understood me.
Inhale. Take your own regulator out of your mouth and switch to the octopus. Breathe again
. She did everything right.