Indigo (21 page)

Graduating Class of 99
was inscribed on a silver plaque on the lower edge of the picture.

– Our hope is that soon the whole wall will be full of such photos, said the principal, smiling at me. All plastered with . . .

His face suddenly became serious again:

– You know, I still remember that day clearly, I was really incredibly proud, you know. I mean, all the work of the past years . . . and it is concentrated in this one moment. At the time we documented it for the ministry, with cameras and also an expert, who made a record of everything. It was important to us, we had been working for a long time toward that day.

Dr. Rudolph seemed to actually be very moved.

– A really nice picture, I said.

– We were able to choose from several, he said. Aerial views, close-ups. And so on. But this one here was really the best of all, it is . . . majestic.

He gently touched the picture's frame, as if it were hanging crooked by a fraction of a millimeter.

– Their distance from one another is impressive, I said. Always absolutely the same. As if measured with a ruler.

– That's the mathematician talking, the principal said with an appreciative smile. Yeeeah, that's the tragedy and also the triumph of the children, in a way. Their sense of their body is spherical, not . . . not like ours. Those are two entirely different topological spaces. And you have to be sensitive to that. They can accurately gauge distances down to a few centimeters. Some even dream about it, about distance measurements and so on. Me too, by the way, at least in the beginning, haha . . .

He shook his head as if he had just told an embarrassing anecdote.

– Are you still in contact with the students from back then?

His face brightened.

– Oh, yes, of course, yes, not in all cases, but I am, yes, yes, definitely . . .

– And are the boys and girls separated in class too, or . . .

– No, not in the classes. But here it was . . . more of an aesthetic decision to separate them. But I know what you mean, Herr Setz. We watch out for that too, of course, because there are, well, there are obviously always certain tendencies, especially at that age . . .

6.
Max

It had been shortly after the state ceremony. That's what they had jokingly called it at the time. A spring day with a pleasantly impatient atmosphere in the trees and a stiff, uncompromising wind in the morning, which at noon became somewhat more conciliatory, just in time for the federal president's visit.

To welcome you all here and in particular all the distinguished in the Proximity Awareness and Learning Center who always ask me what I think of our youth where the future of our country is actually happening already from the bottom of my heart to my esteemed colleague Dr. Otto Rudolph who in his tireless efforts and pave the way for the people of Austria to a better understanding of even the most remote ladies and gentlemen for your attention.

That was roughly how Robert remembered the speech. Apart from that, the moving images he could still retrieve from the event were not particularly varied. In a few years they would probably play in black-and-white. Altogether the visit hadn't lasted longer than an hour. In the middle of the yard the president stood at his lectern, accompanied by several people who, as you could tell from their body language, regarded themselves as invisible. And then there were also a few journalists, or maybe they were also from the institute, no idea. The students had been placed at some distance, at equal intervals, which was okay for Robert, but made people like Arno Golch or Hubert Stöhger sweat.

And then that strange image: the principal in front of the federal president. Despite the cool temperatures and the light wind he wore no coat, only his usual suit jacket. He looked so fat and happy in front of the president that the sight made Robert really nervous. How red could a person turn? At some point, the walls of the blood vessels would surely crack.

He would have liked nothing more than to run from his assigned place to the two men and ring them, the way you ring a bell. Certain people perhaps had no other purpose in the world than to be rung.

A pope, for example.

A pope's cassock looked just like a bell, and the aging little legs with the downy white old-man hair were the clapper. The Pummerin bell in Vienna, thought Robert. New Year's Eve TV broadcast. Live episode of
Musikantenstadl
, merriment gone crazy, like after a bloody battle, wandering blood-smeared people with helmets askew.

A battlefield full of bloody popes. Robert felt an exuberant electric shock in his chest when he recalled the potbellied, egg-plump figure of the head of the Catholic Church. A Humpty Dumpty nailed to the cross. The blessing hands and the vestments. Like a penguin from the nightmare of a gaudy fashion designer. A pope is called a pontiff, he thought, which according to television means bridge builder, so he deals with the building of bridges, and those bridges eventually reach him, and you can pick him up, plump fabric bell filled with an old man's body, and make him walk across the bridge like a windup soldier.

A pope always appears alone. There are never two of him.

A pope translates Rome and the whole globe back into Latin.

Robert had to cover his mouth with his hand.

A pope, in accordance with Catholic doctrine, swings with the other fist. A pope throws red balls of wool at the courtyard cats of Vatican City. A pope echoes for a long time after he has been rung in the deepest and stillest night of the year, Christmas, when the disabled Baby Jesus was born and immediately nailed to the cross, before his parents could request a wheelchair.

Don't start roaring!

The angel of self-control wears a bank robber sock over his face.

A pope is the front part of a queen bee, thought Robert, that is the size of a subway car. And this queen bee has two beady black eyes, which look out from the pope's palms. For what we call pope is only placed on the backside of the queen bee (where everything pumps and pulsates), just as the conical little Christmas angel is placed on the top of the Christmas tree. That's why the pope is always raising his hands in blessing, so that he can finally see something, with his beady stigmata eyes. A pope has much the same effect as Christmas tree ornaments on world affairs.

Robert looked around in search of help.

He had to share his stupid thoughts with someone. Or else he would blow his top. Implode and explode at the same time. Like those early Soviet reactors built in the Urals. Whole regions ravaged and the children into the five hundredth generation with hydrocephalus and deformed heart muscle. And mothers bring their children to the only man in the village who has a Geiger counter and ask him to measure them and are happy when he names a particularly high radiation value because they believe that the Geiger counter sucks the radiation from their children . . .

Not even the thought of this could temper his urge to laugh.

Radioactive children, radioactive children, radioactive children
, he said over and over to himself, thinking of flaking skin and ash rain, but what he saw before his inner eye was only a big fat pope pumped full of royal jelly, leaning forward and roaring at the candles on his desk with his mouth gaping like a vacuum cleaner until they went out. And the Saint Nicholas hat fell off his head.

A pope without his hat is—a few ounces too light.

A pope is a salesman and goes from house to house, from earth to earth, and from dust to dust. A pope is named after another person—and always has a number.

What would it be like to press a pope very tightly against you, to feel his potbellied plumpness against your own breast?

Robert's laughter was no longer amused. Only painful. He had tears in his eyes.

Max Schaufler looked over to him, and something strange happened. He caught Robert's gaze, sick with the need to communicate, as if he knew exactly what was to be done. They gesticulated to each other silently how boring the event was. Max said that he had a new kung fu movie they could watch together. The prospect of a magnificently virtuoso Jackie Chan ballet actually managed to soothe Robert a little.

He sat relatively relaxed for the remainder of the event, until, right at the moment they were all supposed to stand up and give the eminent guest from Vienna their weary and uncoordinated applause, he suddenly wondered with an unusual intensity what Max had meant by that:
watch together.
Had he stolen the key to the projector room? Maybe he just wanted to lend him the DVD. Robert had lent him the movie version of
Batman
a week ago
. Shark-repellent bat spray
, the height of human ingenuity in 1966.

And then there was a knock at his door. Max stood there, his face shining as after a tennis match, and in his hand he held a few DVDs.

He asked whether he could come in.

Robert let him in, because he knew that Max would without doubt be the first to be overcome by dizziness, nausea, and all the rest.

Max was very excited. He didn't stay in the opposite corner of the room (out of politeness, Robert had moved immediately to the window), but stood next to him.

– I'm doing it, he said, I'm enduring it.

Robert saw the goose bumps on his forearms.

– Oh, come on, he said.

Robert knew that Max's number was very high. And his own—he didn't even know it anymore, something around 150, 160 seconds. Sometimes things seemed to be all right for much longer, that is, for a really long time . . . galaxies-drifting-by long . . . The reason they were constantly going for him. Termite in an ant nest.

And the worst thing about it was that he always enjoyed the first seconds, the way a cigarette that you lit up always smelled delicious, only later did the smoke become disgusting, and their hands also became disgusting, touching him everywhere, breaking through his thin layer of ice with their rough fingernails, Arno was the worst, his fingers were hairy, and he always stuck his fingers in Robert's mouth down to the little hairs and was cheered on . . .

– I'm enduring it! said Max.

It no longer sounded like autosuggestion, but rather like a genuine discovery. Now Robert's hair stood up too. Goose bumps down to under his wristwatch. He pulled the sleeve of his shirt over them.

Robert was reminded in an unpleasant way of his mother, who always said the same thing when she stayed in his proximity for a long time, and was always right: She really did endure everything. Disgusted, he withdrew to the normal distance, three to four yards, Max didn't protest, the glaring absurdity of their life under the sun he accepted as always, Robert wanted more than anything else to slap him, but then Max took off his T-shirt.

When there was another knock at the door and a moment later it opened, Max was more scared than Robert. Robert still had his clothes on.

Dr. Rudolph covered his face with a hand and politely took a step back.

– Schaufler, I saw that you . . . , he began.

– I'll be out of here in a second, said Max.

He looked at Robert with an imploring expression, as if he could conjure him away.

Then he put on his jeans and his shirt and left the room.

The door was closed, and Robert was alone. He put a hand to his forehead. No warmth, and no pain.

The next day they were both summoned to the small biology room.

It was an unpleasant-smelling room with an artificial skeleton (consisting of colored bones) in the corner. Stuffed birds, owl, raven, and a few others, all birds of prey, whose names Robert didn't know.

The biology teacher, Dr. Ulrich, wasn't there yet.

On the table at which they had sat down was an open magazine. Next to it a second one.
National Geographic.
On its cover was a frog with transparent legs.

Robert craned his neck in order to make out the picture in the other, the open magazine.

Goose bumps.

It was as if he were looking through the crack of a door into a strangely clean dream room, frightening and incomprehensible in its geometric purity. The picture wasn't beautiful, it was gruesome, it should have provoked horror in its viewer. It showed an earthworm. This earthworm was speared on a sort of wire and photographed by the lab assistant of the head scientist at the moment it formed with its body a curved question mark, the only gesture with which it could respond to what was being done to it. Treble clef, thought Robert.

The biology teacher was still taking his time. Max repeatedly sought Robert's gaze, but Robert kept brushing him aside like a bothersome insect.

Finally he could no longer resist and pulled the magazine over to him. The letters, immensely relieved to finally be allowed to make sense, glided along below him, but he didn't take in much, he incessantly had to stare at the short series of photos (all it would take to make it a comic strip were speech balloons) with which the worm experiment was documented. After the spearing with the wire apparently came (fig. 2) a brief pause in the process, perhaps somewhat more time had passed. In any case, the worm simply lay there.

Robert was still far too excited to focus on the meaning-giving mesh of unmoving text.

In the next picture the animal was freed from its instrument of torture. Robert imagined it: It fell on the sandy ground of a small box (fig. 3), which had already been blurrily discernible in the background of the first picture, and there began to crawl, slowly and carefully putting one body contraction in front of the other. Because its sense of balance had in all likelihood been damaged by the wire, it described a semicircle (fig. 4). Robert contemplated the image, overwhelmed with amazement. No person would ever have been able to radiate such peace after being put through the wringer to that extent. A wire implement pulled through the head, through the brain . . . But here was a creature that despite the horrible torture possessed absolutely no conception of revenge or self-defense. The animal simply crawled through the sand toward the hole in the ground from which it had been yanked some time ago. It wanted to return to the other members of its species, coil up in their presence, and react to chemical messengers. Perhaps it thought it had now been tormented enough, and simply put one whole-body coil step in front of the other, eventually it would arrive at its hole in the ground, and then only a few centimeters of familiar substance would separate it from its friends.