Indigo (10 page)

– Oh, well, he's not there, so . . .

– All right. But I meant: Only if he doesn't mind strangers entering his private space in his absence.

– I'm not a stranger. And you're with me, so it's okay, said Frau Stennitzer.

Whenever she finished a sentence, she pursed her lips a little and stuck out her chin, as if she had to give her lips and jaw muscles a rest from the arduous effort.

We stepped through the patio door into the yard. A few apple trees stood there, along with some hedges and charmingly overgrown bushes. Next to the fence that marked the property line was a small, conically piled mound of earth, the purpose of which I couldn't exactly determine from afar; maybe a work of garden art. The little house, as Frau Stennitzer had called it in her e-mail, was, it turned out, an actual small house.

We entered. Here too it smelled to an almost numbing degree of Febreze and something else, even bitterer, sharper.

An air mattress lay right behind the door to the first room, which was Christoph's bedroom.

Frau Stennitzer sighed and pushed the air mattress aside with the toe of her shoe.

What first caught my eye were the many books in the room:
Harry Potter
, other fantasy books, Terry Pratchett, but also, surprisingly, a thick biography of Frédéric Chopin. And a copy of Philip K. Dick's
Ubik.

– Hey, I said. My favorite novel.

I pointed to the book. Frau Stennitzer sighed:

– Oh, really, yeah?

A half-gaping accordion. Several tennis rackets. A poster of Keanu Reeves in his
Matrix
outfit. A few medications on a table next to the bed.
Sviluppal
, I read on a bottle.

Frau Stennitzer laid the air mattress on the bed.

– No idea why it always has to lie around here, she said. But he can't be without it, he reinflates it every week. Sometimes that makes him dizzy. But he's fond of the air mattress. He learned to read on it, you know. Herr Baumherr from the APUIP recommended a private tutor for us back then. He was a really great young man. Passionate photographer, very cultivated, patient with Christoph and his peculiarities. Since then the mattress has always lain around here. He was illiterate for such a long time, you know. He refused to learn. He was a committed illiterate until he was about eight years old.

That phrase rattled me a bit. For a mother to speak that way about her child seemed unusual to me. The term
illiterate
is tinged with a certain horror, probably the reason that children released from a basement dungeon after years are always tested for their ability to read before anything else. A similarly horrifying atmosphere emanates only from openly asexual people and would-be suicides. They withdraw from our world, sit around, done with everything, waiting only for the opportunity to opt out again, to return to the peace they have tasted. But
committed
? The word made no sense at all. How could an eight-year-old boy be
committed
to his illiteracy?

In Christoph's bedroom were many toys, and everything was really neatly and lovingly arranged, a friendly dragon wallpaper pattern and completely dust-free corners. Such an immaculate room immediately evoked in me memories of that horrible room in which a five-year-old girl in Vienna had recently died of hunger and thirst. She hadn't even gnawed at the houseplants, even though they had been well within reach. The door had been locked, her parents out celebrating for several days and nights, and the first thing the officials actually discovered: no teeth marks anywhere. Neither in the wood of the doorframe nor on the peeling plaster of the walls nor on her own wrists—
nowhere.
The word haunted the newspapers for weeks. My girlfriend and I debated the question of what would be worse and grislier, teeth marks in all possible and impossible places or absolutely no teeth marks—and as stupid as it sounds, I don't even remember which position I took and which she took during this creepy debate, but I think that the absence of teeth marks ultimately won, and we talked and rolled around nervously in bed until late at night and then both deservedly had horrible nightmares. I seem to recall that at some point I even, in a nocturnally twisted and overtired way, became angry with the poor girl because she had died with such a terrible lack of resistance, as if in a tacit arrangement with the media and with people's sad hunger for sensation.

At the time Julia had said that something was wrong with my thoughts. They had become strange, were always straying to awful things, assumed gigantic, overwhelming proportions. I blamed it on the headaches and difficulties concentrating that I'd started having as a result of my work at the Helianau Institute.

– Everything all right? asked Frau Stennitzer.

– Yes, I said, letting go of my temples.

– If you have to go out for a little while, she said. (From her tone I could tell that these words had passed her lips hundreds of times before.)

– No, it's okay, I said. Oh, look . . .

On the windowsill of the room I noticed something that affected me strangely; I almost wished I hadn't seen it: binoculars. There were three pairs, two of them exactly the same type and a somewhat larger one. They reminded me of the nights during my childhood when, because there was a concert at the Orpheum concert hall across from my bedroom, I had to go to bed in a different room of the apartment and therefore often didn't sleep a wink until morning. It was my apartment, but the walls looked wrong at night, plus I heard the street, and cars were driving constantly as fan-shaped light-ghosts through the dark room. At some point, I received binoculars as a gift and spent the nights with—or better, in—them. They were especially useful when a school friend stayed overnight. Almost all night long we would patiently search the wall of the opposite house for interesting, sensational things. And since we rarely managed to find anything of the sort, we slipped gradually into invention, but without being aware
that
we were inventing things, which might have been the happiest and most relaxed state in which I had ever found myself.

From nights spent in the circular visual world of binoculars it's only a stone's throw to the purchase of a telescope. In the room through which Frau Stennitzer led me as if it were the conserved living space of a long-deceased famous person, there was one. I myself had never purchased one.

– Here's where he does his homework, that is, when he has some . . . And that's the intercom, it buzzes over in our kitchen and bedroom.

– Nice telescope, I said. Was it expensive?

– Pffff, uh, yeah, no idea, she said. My brother bought it for him back then. So you can assume it wasn't cheap. My brother's a pilot. Do you want to look through it?

– No, thanks.

I can remember only one time I looked through a telescope. It was several years ago in the house of a musician friend. For the first time in my life I viewed live the moon's surface, the incredibly sharp shadows of the crater rims, the gray swirls and ridgelines of the sandy surface. All gray on gray. Strange that most people, like Johannes Kepler in his famous dream narrative about the moon dwellers, imagined buildings and living things on that desolate, hostile rock, from which the sole comfort has for centuries been the mysterious face we can, with a little fantasy and fear, discern in it: an old man who has opened his mouth as if he were taking a deep breath after a strenuous march.

– I like to look through it, said Frau Stennitzer. I often come down here to Christoph's little house and then just sit here and . . .

She broke off as if what she had been about to say had been too private.

Basically, the man in the moon looked like Angus Young, I thought. Those half-open lips, that entranced . . . I realized that my mind was beginning to wander, my concentration was unraveling and becoming scattered among secondary things. So I took a deep breath, put a finger to the tip of my nose, and said:

– So where is Christoph, if you don't mind my asking?

– Yeah, he's . . . you know, it's complicated, we . . . we have a sort of agreement when it comes to visitors.

– To protect his privacy and such, I said.

– Yes, in a way.

– He doesn't like people coming here and asking him questions, sure, I'd feel the same way. But then where is he now, while we're in his room?

For a fleeting moment, Frau Stennitzer gave me a mistrustful look, as if she were grazed by the suspicion that she had apparently been wrong about me, then her face relaxed a little and she said:

– He can go anywhere. There's nothing stopping him.

– Ah, yes, of course, I said.

She stood there as if she were waiting for my next unpleasant question, then she reached for a few pieces of paper on her son's desk and held them out to me:

– Since very recently, Christoph has had a pen pal. They write each other regularly, you know. Demetrius Logan from Chicago.

– Excuse me? I asked.

She laughed.

– No, really, he actually exists. I checked. Pen pals, isn't that nice? I mean, that there's still such a thing nowadays.

The tone with which she said that was hard to interpret. I took the letter and said:

– Yeah, I think that's really great. I never had a pen pal.

– I don't even know why the two of them write each other letters, of all things. Usually Christoph writes e-mails, of course, just like everyone else. But this Demetrius . . . here's a photo of him.

A black boy, smiling, with a small fashionable hat on his head.

– He really exists, said Frau Stennitzer.

– Yes, I see that.

– In Chicago, said Frau Stennitzer. And the two of them write each other completely old-fashioned letters. Each week a letter arrives. From America. I always bring it here to the little house right away, without opening it first.

– I think that's wonderful. More people should do that. I mean, write old-fashioned letters.

– Hm, well. Yeah.

She took the sheets of paper back from me and placed them on her son's bed. I felt the need to get out of this stuffy building and return to the main house, so I stood near the bedroom door. But Frau Stennitzer sat down on the bed.

– The problem is, well, Demetrius is also . . .

– An I-kid?

She nodded.

– And that's the . . . uh, the crux of the whole matter. He can't come here, and Christoph can't fly to him, so . . . yeah, maybe this communication via objects you can touch is a sort of compensation for that.

– He can't travel?

– Of course not. Christoph in an airplane? How's that supposed to work? The pilots, the . . . Oh, never mind. A problem of range, like everything in our lives.

She made a sad, circular gesture with both arms.

– It was an awful day when I had to explain that to him. He didn't understand at all why he couldn't fly across the Atlantic. He went totally stir-crazy, and he . . . well, he simply imploded, there's no other way to put it. He raged, my God . . . Wouldn't sleep at all anymore. It was terrible, I lost fifteen pounds at the time. Not exactly what you'd call a happy ending, right?

– Well, I said, happy ends are rare. But it would definitely be nice if now and then there were (and I used, because it was really appropriate to the situation, Dr. Rudolph's favorite term) at least
fair ends
, wouldn't it?

I said that with a smile.

Frau Stennitzer winced and looked at me as if I had without warning spread out a frill-necked lizard's neck frill and hissed at her with a reptilian voice. Then she found her hands again, arranged them, left, right, as if they had gotten mixed up. And turned, half smiling, half keeping a careful eye on the space behind her, away from me.

After we had returned to the main house, I heard the front door open and close. But Frau Stennitzer acted as if nothing had happened, so I decided not to say anything either.

– Would you like something to drink? I have peach juice. Or wine, if you'd prefer . . .

– Peach juice sounds good.

No sooner had she set the glass on the table in front of me than I took a sip and then immediately drained the rest. I hadn't even noticed how parched I was. The dense air freshener atmosphere even affected my vocal cords. Every few seconds I had to clear my throat.

– So now that you've seen how we live here, would you like to . . .

– I have just a few questions . . .

– Go ahead, said Frau Stennitzer, collapsing into her armchair.

Frau Stennitzer had never married. Christoph's father, Peter, had abandoned her shortly after their son's birth. He hadn't contacted her since, and Frau Stennitzer didn't search for him either. She had managed very well alone so far, she said, her parents were here most of the time, reinforcements, as she called them.

– How did you meet Christoph's father?

– Oh, in the usual way. As people do. Do you want another peach juice? If you like it—

– No, thanks.

– But you had only one glass.

– Yeah, at the moment I'm satisfied.

– Good, okay, well . . . Yes, he abandoned me. It's not exactly a story of triumph. He said he was just going out for a few minutes to get cigarettes. Yeah, honestly. I know, to get cigarettes, I mean . . . Yes, he smoked. And he often went out in the evening to buy some . . . God, I was very naïve back then, but what was I supposed to have done?

She poured me another glass of peach juice. She spilled a little and wiped the liquid off the table with her palm, which she then rubbed on her pants with a weary, weak gesture. She seemed lost in thought.

How, I thought, do they do that, the men who say: Be right back, I'm just going to get some cigarettes—and from that point on it was as if the earth had swallowed them up? Perhaps they all ran aimlessly through the underground galleries that had been constructed for the large tunnel city, the
Giraffe
school project in Riegersdorf.