Indigo (11 page)

– He probably didn't even smoke, know what I mean?

I looked up.

– I beg your pardon?

– Well, said Frau Stennitzer, the way of the world. You rehearse and rehearse and then—boom, it's showtime. I wouldn't be surprised, in all honesty. If he had always just puffed. I wouldn't put it past him. Every week a dress rehearsal.

– Have you ever heard of those tunnel systems in—

– Yes, said Frau Stennitzer, of course. Sure, the thing in Riegersdorf. Yeah, they thought they'd really solve the problem from the ground up . . . Sort of out of sight, out of mind, right?

She took a big sip of peach juice from my glass.

I didn't return to Pension Tachler until evening. When I entered, I saw the young woman at reception pick up the cage with the bird in it with a hasty movement and (as the man with glasses had done in the morning) put it on the floor, as if she wanted to protect it from me. Her face was friendly, but she kept an eye on me.

– Good evening, I said.

She returned my greeting and withdrew into the back area of reception, among some boxes and cartons standing around there. She acted as if she were searching for something, and I don't know why, but at that moment I couldn't help taking a few steps toward her.

– Excuse me, I said. My hands are really cold, and my fingertips are practically numb. Might you touch them for a moment?

She backed farther away.

– Sorry? she said.

– My hands somehow . . . I don't know, maybe something didn't agree with me, an allergic reaction, or . . .

– Should I call an ambulance? she asked, but didn't come any closer.

– No, thanks, I said, withdrawing my hands. It's already getting a bit better. Probably just a circulatory problem. Hm, strange . . .

The young woman's face was pale.

On the way to the stairs I had trouble suppressing a grin. Only in the room did I begin to feel guilty. I called home and talked on the phone for a little while, then flipped through a few channels, skimmed my notes, and added a few things while I fought against the slight claustrophobia welling up in me.

First I tried to distract myself by searching the hotel room for hidden cameras and microphones.

– Ferenz, hello? I murmured as I searched. Calling Ferenz? Ferenz calling!

Then I checked the exact position of my suitcase's wheels and inspected its contents. I hadn't touched it since my arrival, and someone might have searched it in my absence. But everything was in its place, and I sat, breathing heavily, by the window and gazed into the night, which was adorned with a magnificent yellowish moon medal. Late at night came my salvation: a documentary about couples with Tourette's syndrome. A man and a woman sat on a couch, he had his arm around her and hissed insults at her, dirty slut, cunt, bitch, and her left hand kept wandering to his face and his neck and scratching him with her fingernails, until she intercepted it with her other hand and held on to it. We can basically never fight, the man said in answer to the interviewer's question. Every curse word that exists has taken on a different meaning for us. So we don't even know how to do it, to fight, haha. Afterward a few more scenes were shown from the couple's everyday life. While shopping, the man shouted nasty vulgarities at her while she threw things off a shelf and immediately picked them up again. People stopped, looked at the camera, then at the strange pair, and finally moved on. I was so excited that I bounced while sitting on my bed and clapped my hands.

Soothed by the wonderful documentary, I fell asleep, without a blanket, in my street clothes, but soon awoke, because I had again dreamed of frame no. 242 of the Zapruder film. That happened to me perhaps two or three times a year, usually when I was traveling, and it was always a terrible experience. It's the moment shortly after the first bullet hit President Kennedy in the neck. He is clutching with both hands at the wound, like someone trying to open a stuck zipper. And he looks to the side at his wife, who looks at him uneasily, but also kindly and helpfully:
Yes, what is it?
And he appears as if he wanted to say:
Here, I can't get this open, can you please help me?
And in an instant she will move closer to him and touch him and cry for help, until finally the second bullet hurtles down from the cosmos and tears off half the President's skull. But that explosive last impact is still many, many microseconds away. The universe remains at a standstill, held by the gaze of the fatally wounded man, whose voice probably fails, because he can no longer breathe, and he is actually already a dead man, who is trying to speak to a living woman, and the two of them are sitting in the backseat of a car, although they are in reality millions of miles apart; he is attempting to communicate with her, to explain to her what has happened, and she looks back at him understandingly and also somewhat worriedly.

In other variations of this dream, frame no. 242 appeared to me on a cereal box, another time I sat across from the two frozen figures in a train compartment. And then, about six months earlier, I was the salesman who had sold President Kennedy the stuck zipper, and I felt so ashamed of myself that I had trouble waking up from the dream.

6.
Going to Get Cigarettes

They had been living together for three years. Since autumn Cordula had been well adjusted, that is, the medication had settled in her and set up a provisional but functional interim regime.

Robert had meanwhile put away in his wardrobe the portrait of the monkey that had so horrified Cordula. He took some pleasure in the idea that he had it at his disposal as a secret weapon, a last straw he could grasp at if all other means had been . . . He shook his head and drove away the strange thought. Straw?

When he passed the mirror that evening after brushing his teeth, he silently made monkey grimaces and scratched his armpits with his hands. Cordula had taken half a zolpidem, really just half a pill, which actually only made you very, very tired and not completely drugged, because that way she could convince herself that she was brave and could
in principle
get through the night without it. Besides, it had happened before that when she took, for example, two zolpidem tablets and fell into bed as if struck dead with a hammer, she couldn't get up the next day to go to work. Once, in the hospital, it had also come to pass that she had peed herself in the drugged night.

– How are you doing? he whispered (although, for some reason, he felt more like declaiming loudly in a Falstaffian manner).

– Hm, she said. Embarrassed. Always so fast, the trigger, the . . .

The half a zolpidem had worked. But you weren't even supposed to take the drug for panic attacks. In that case, Lexotanil or Xanor were more appropriate. Those strange medicine names, like magic spells from fantasy novels. As if they were invented by children.

– I wrapped the painting in a cloth and put it in my wardrobe. Just so you know where it is. You don't have to be afraid of it anymore.

When she didn't respond, he said (while playing in his head a scene from the Japanese movie
Tetsuo
, in which the insane man shoves a steel pipe into his thigh):

– The painting isn't that good anyway. Artistically, I mean. Not really successful.

Cordula nodded weakly. She seemed to be falling asleep.

– Do you know what I've been thinking about? he asked her loudly.

She looked up, was awake, but not really there. Then, perhaps out of politeness toward him, or perhaps out of a guilt that had from sheer exhaustion become loud and one-dimensional, she gathered up her consciousness, which had already been standing with its toes in the pleasant nonsense in which it got to dissolve each evening, and said:

– What?

Robert knew that it was his last chance to stop. Just say: Oh, nothing, we'll talk about it tomorrow, it can really wait until you're feeling better. Just say nothing more. Just say: You dealt really well with the anxiety attack this time, you know that? I'm proud of you. And you only needed half a zolpidem, really incredible.

He stood over an abyss and the thin rope on which he believed he had to balance cut into his toes.

He said:

– I think maybe I'll . . .

You can still turn back. Don't say it. Not at this moment.

– . . . go away for a while. To Gillingen or something, you know? See old acquaintances again. Check out the cable car. I haven't been there in a long time.

He sensed her drugged but not immobilized body stiffening, as if she were about to be pushed lengthwise, like a battering ram borne by several men, headfirst through a narrow opening. From a movement of the muscles on the back of her neck, the bright spot that could be seen well in the half-light of the room, he saw that she tried to swallow but was already too weak.

Should he wish that she hadn't heard his remark? But she had been awake, clearly awake, for God's sake, what was wrong with him! He stood up, made one or two monkey grimaces, then ran out of the room, sat down in front of the television, and had to hold his face in his hands so that the rats stayed in.

He felt as if he were about to explode—not spectacularly, however, with napalm majesty as in
Apocalypse Now
, but more like one of those firecrackers that made only hard, small explosions, which were more akin to the feeling of prepubescent erections, compact, anxious, enraged, confused.

I'd like to unfasten my arms and plant them in the earth.

Stop, stop, stop.

He turned on the television and put on headphones. Gillingen, he thought, that strange little town in southern Styria. On home shopping channels diamonds and bracelets were held up to the camera. The hand that turned the objects back and forth was extremely hairy. A report on container loading regulations at the port of Amsterdam. A game show with disabled people (blind person versus wheelchair user, Tourette's versus thalidomide). A documentary on a Norwegian Nazi named Hamsun to whom people made pilgrimages after the war and over whose garden fence they threw books. Robert tried to understand what it was actually about, but he couldn't concentrate, he continued flipping through channels, found horse racing and golf and Bilderbergers, a language course in business Chinese and a woman begging to be called. She was naked and her face might have been Pakistani, or maybe Indian, and he stared at her for a long time without thinking anything in particular.

Sunlight, as fresh as the air on a terrace full of tin watering cans, came through the window. The first day of theoretical freedom, thought Robert. He turned over and saw Cordula, she was lying bare-chested on her pillow, embracing him in her sleep. Her hair fell down her back, she breathed softly and regularly. Her spine, her shoulder blades. The gray half-light of the room on her flanks.

She did that on purpose, thought Robert. The past three nights she had slept with a pajama top on,
I freeze so easily, women's circulation is different from men's, a completely different system
, and it had been getting somewhat cool. The skin on her shoulders had that fine, dimply elasticity when it stretched over the round bones. Everything round is a mystery, precisely because it's round. You first grasped that when you tried to draw an apple. My God, the many hours wasted in still life drawing classes. Where the motionlessness of the students surpassed even the motionlessness of the fruit. The fruit at least rotted and began to smell, that was life, but the students . . . Not even when they had sat very close to Robert had they shown any reaction. He had never felt as naked as he had then, outside his zone for the first time.

He took a deep breath and for a brief moment smelled again the stuffy hot air inside his Lichtenberg hut at Helianau, and in there, in the still circle of light cast by the small reading lamp: the fruit bowl, the altar on which artists since Cézanne have sacrificed their talent and flagellated themselves. And all around him countless fruit flies, like a skin disease of the air.

With a heavy breath Cordula lifted her head. She looked around, saw Robert, and said:

– Oh.

He nodded at her.

Then he climbed on her, immediately her smell wafted toward him, her breath, which due to the sedative smelled stale and sour. Still, he felt the need to kiss her, but she lay there angularly and inhospitably, so he contented himself with sliding between her legs and pressing himself against her. She said nothing, but let him penetrate her, though only a few centimeters. She was not at all moist, so it would work only with great pain anyway. Robert stayed where he was. At the entrance, on the threshold. Another breath of stuffy hot air from the past.

I'm cruel
, he thought. And for a moment the shadow of an image fell on him, like a bird flitting over a snow-covered landscape: the image of a disheveled rooster he carried in a crate through the snow, it seemed so remote from him and his situation, the animal had meanwhile died, and nonetheless it was there, bright as the light at the end of a tunnel.

I'm cruel.

Usually Cordula had to go to the bathroom every morning shortly after waking up. Now she couldn't, and he was pressing against her, was perhaps pressing on her bladder. Cruel.

– Wait, she said softly and trustingly. You . . . can you . . .

She tried to shift him into a more pleasant position. On another day she would have pushed him away, called him an idiot and a mangy dog, and would have taken her time in the bathroom until his arousal had subsided. Then she would have marched naked through the room and might have asked what his plans were today. She had to go to work, of course, earn money, be normal, and so on, and he, what was he going to do, all day long? And that might lead to a little quarrel, a substitute for the aborted intimacy.

But today—nothing.

She moved back and forth as if her pelvis were nodding reassuringly,
Yes, yes, I understand, it's okay, everything's okay—
and he knew that he could now feel something like compassion. This time she was actually frightened that he could leave forever. And that was what he was going to do too, first thing tomorrow. Today preparations, phone calls, tickets; tomorrow departure. She didn't want him to leave, and that was why she stayed still. Robert had respect for that attitude, for that consistency.
I'm cruel
, he thought again, and felt himself shrink, soften, slip out of her. She stroked his cheek with her hand.