Indigo (24 page)

Each lesson at the Proximity Awareness and Learning Center began with a review. After a week the students had become completely indifferent to the fact that they would have a new math teacher—or, as it was known here: math tutor—for the rest of the school year. They sat, evenly distributed, in the large lecture hall and looked down at me with blank faces.

Each day I wanted more than anything else to run away screaming when I saw those horrible faces in the morning.

I scrawled the contents of each lesson in my tiny block letters into the lens area of the projector. In the enormous enlargement on the white screen I realized for the first time how ridiculous this handwriting looked. The little letters looked like huts blown over by a storm, especially the
M
. The
I
usually leaned at a slant on its neighbor. I tried to write the mathematical symbols somewhat more clearly, but didn't always succeed.

– 'Scuse me? Can you write a bit bigger?

I had to look at my seating chart to figure out who had spoken to me. A pale female face in the highest row. She held little opera glasses up to her eyes, which made her feel incredibly elegant.

I was always glad to get out of the lecture hall again. In the heavy sunlight I would lean on the corner of a wall and recover from the unpleasant tension in my head.

On the doorframe of the teachers' exit someone had written in permanent marker:
A dingo ate my baby.

Years ago I had heard about a mother who regularly had to vomit over her baby's cradle, usually directly onto the child. At the time I couldn't help laughing.

Now I could understand her.

The headaches weren't particularly bad, and I ascribed them more to the change of air and the one-hour train ride I had to take every morning to get to work. The compartments in the trains of Austria's national railroad had a peculiar inner climate, which rarely had anything to do with the prevailing temperature and air pressure conditions in reality. On top of that, I barely got around to eating anything all day. When the students headed to the dining hall, I had to set off, in order to be on the platform on time. Otherwise I would lose two whole hours.

Only once did I stay longer and eat lunch with the students. That day math class had been postponed to the afternoon for a change.

On the plate that the lunch lady, a woman named Leni who was invisible all day, kindly brought to me at the table were peas, carrots, a decent portion of dark yellow purée, and a trout, which was indifferent to everything. Its eyes were open, and its posture spoke plainly. I barely got down a bite. The unappetizing eating and slurping noises of the students and the unpleasantly buzzing air in the dining hall spoiled my appetite. So I went outside and filled my body with clean, sun-warmed air.

Later I got a coffee from the machine in the entrance hall. Black, without anything. A cup full of eye pupils.

The air in lecture hall A was stale and musty. There were no windows that could have been opened. On top of that, the room was overheated. From a fire extinguisher white foam dripped on the floor. I had planned several times to inform the janitor, Herr Mauritz, but had repeatedly forgotten.

– Good afternoon! I said to the students.

They just sat there. Eyes stuck in faces. Some of them chewed gum. A girl in the highest row lay on her open notebook and seemed to be asleep.

I sighed and sat down behind the teacher's desk. What was I doing here? Second-order curves. I closed my eyes for a moment, ran my hand over my temples—although that might have been impolite toward the students—and tried to imagine an approach to the subject. Second-order curves. Second-order curves. It was as if the textbook knowledge had been blown away. In my head was only an image of a flat cone. I took a deep breath, told myself that I had just had a cup of coffee and would definitely feel its effects in a moment, and stood up.

A few sheets of paper lying around on the teacher's desk caught my eye.

For R.T.
, was written on one of them. I turned it over. It was a photocopied article from a science magazine.

A picture showed a bee whose backside was destroyed. I read the caption.
Bees don't always die after they have used their stinger in defense. This bee lived for seven hours without its stinger.

I felt dizzy, and I had to hold on to the blackboard behind me.

Another picture in the photocopied article showed the bee lying in a small white box, useless and according to its nature already long beyond death. Confused. Unmoored.

– Excuse me, I said, and ran out of the lecture hall.

I imagined the grass under me was a baby in a cradle. I retched a few times, but nothing came, only the taste of burnt coffee rose in my esophagus, mixed with stomach acid. All that fell in the grass were the drops that ran down my cheeks.

I turned around and was about to head back to the lecture hall. But then took a few steps backward. As if I were set wrong. Operated in reverse.

In the quiet, abandoned teachers' lounge I sat down in a corner and called Julia. It took a while for her to answer. In the background a high, chaotic squealing could be heard. Probably the crowing of the new rooster. Or the bats were fighting again. Intermittent rattling of cages.

– Ah, you're not home yet either? I asked.

– No, where are you?

– I have an afternoon session. For a change. But I felt sick.

– Assholes.

– Yeah. This is the strangest job imaginable.

– Mine is stranger, said Julia.

– The animal shelter? Well, I don't know . . .

– There they at least understand your language, she said. I have to learn a new one every time. That's difficult.

– How's the rooster doing?

– He's being nursed back to health. I think he likes me.

– Have you given him a name yet?

– Yes.

– So what is it?

– Mmmh, it's still too soon to reveal it. He still has to get used to it himself.

– Seriously, this internship is no fun at all.

– But there are no other jobs. You said so yourself.

– Yeah, why do we even exist? We're superfluous.

– Me too?

– No, I mean, we teachers. I should have become a rapper or graffiti artist.

– Or a bat.

– Yeah, exactly. How are they doing?

– Hm. Hard to say. They're somewhat introverted. They just close the curtains and don't let anyone near them. I'm something like the mediator.

I closed my eyes and waited for the tension headache to pass.

– You felt sick? asked Julia. Really sick?

– No, not really. It's all so absurd, these students, I mean, I don't even know what all this is about.

– No one knows.

– They sit here in this huge building, far away from one another, and hey, I didn't tell you yet, the birds here . . . or did I already mention it?

– No, what?

– The birds here are totally weird.

– In what way?

– Oh, I don't know . . . I'm losing my focus again. I feel it. As if someone were pulling a string out of my body.

– In what way are the birds weird?

– Who?

– Oh, never mind. You sound tired. Do you really have to stay?

– I switched with this guy, this Ulrich. Biology professor. Looks like Virginia Woolf. Exactly the same profile.

– Gross.

The teachers' lounge looked like the waiting area of a small provincial train station. Rounded benches made of old, experienced wood stood around in it. Brown was the predominant color. There was a cabinet with textbooks and educational materials, there was a globe, a multistory copying machine, and even some head-high potted plants.

– During the afternoon session, I said, in the lecture hall. I saw something awful.

– What was it?

– Something really awful.

– With animals?

– Yes.

– Real animals? Or in pictures?

– Pictures. Really horrible. In an article.

– Yeah, you sound pretty upset, she said. It's good that you called me right away, hold on, I'm just going to a different room . . . the cackling is pretty loud here.

– And those wretched statues, I said, they all noticed, of course, that I . . . Ah, I can't imagine how I'm supposed to stand this any longer. You should see them!

– Maybe you should write something.

– Why?

– No reason, to distract yourself. That has always worked well up to now.

– Yeah, but those gruesome pictures . . . I mean, there was a bee that . . .

I didn't go on.

– Don't think about that now, said Julia. You can go home now, can't you?

– Technically, yes. But the train doesn't depart for another . . .

I looked at my watch and made a disappointed noise intended to imply the unpleasant wait.

– Then sit down in the library or in the yard—

– I can't go in the yard, the lunatics roam around there, my God, I really have to make a video of
that
sometime and put it online . . . They even have a special name for it. For the way they move in the yard. A special name! Shit!

– Well, in the library, then, Julia said calmly. Sit down there and imagine . . . I don't know, what's going on inside them.

– Oh, God, seriously?

– Okay, then imagine, oh, I don't know, what could you . . .

– Exactly.

– Pick one of them. And imagine what he'll be like someday. What sort of life awaits him. And why he has to look at pictures like that.

– Who?

– Just pick one of them and imagine how he'll behave later on.

For R.T.

– And when? How far in the future?

– I don't know. In a few years. Ten, twelve.

– In twelve years humanity won't even exist anymore.

– So then ten.

– At that point there's civil war. Everywhere.

– In every country?

– Yep.

– Hey, said Julia, I have to go back to work. My bats . . . Can we continue this talk at home?

– Okay.

10.
The Rooster

In autumn the sunshine seems to have stubble.

The leaves fell in the courtyard of the old building on Glockenturmgasse 20/21, the wooden stairs indoors, compressed and worn to a shine like old ink pads from countless footsteps, creaked under the temperature and pressure changes, the calendar grew thinner, the names of the months longer and more melancholy, then, eventually, you needed a scarf when you were out on the street, and from that point on there was no going back to the warmth of the summer.

Except in this way.

Robert lay next to Cordula and nestled in her armpit. The world-famous cable car in Gillingen, he thought, a gentle rocking over the landscape. Even though she had never spoken about it and didn't let it show, he knew that she often got a slight tension headache when he stayed that way for a long time, so he slid down a bit and laid his cheek on her warm flank. Incredible, how warm a woman's belly always was. He had often compared it with his own belly. As different as day and night.

He closed his eyes and thought of autumn at Helianau. The heating in the student apartments was always turned on only in mid-September. Beforehand you could turn the radiator valve as much as you wanted. All that came was a tentative, muffled hiss in the pipe, perhaps air, perhaps a residue of weary water that had waited there through the whole warm season to finally be used. A water residue in which, as if to make up for the long wait, little creatures had developed, hybrid forms of algae and tadpoles, which now moved through the pipes and bred there in a new way, not entirely comprehensible even to them, consisting of symbiosis and division; in the pipelines hidden in the walls (Robert saw the walls of his room at Helianau as clearly before his eyes as if they were part of a picture he had painted himself) they lived and flicked each other with their tongues in greeting, their pale green, semitransparent bodies pressed close together in the autumn cold (the shiny film of skin care cream on Max's upper body, Robert's hand reaching out toward it . . .) and so again bore new creatures, and over the years they wandered from one house to another, test-tube babies of all inoperative radiators, and they formed a huge, listening horde in the walls, fungal colonies taking in everything that was said in people's lives, houses, and rooms.

Who might have heard the screams of the skinned man? And what had he made of them? Robert opened his eyes and searched for the newspaper. He wanted to check whether other, more informative articles about the case had come out in the meantime.

In autumn the restlessness had always been the worst. Robert put on his pants and went into the kitchen to do a few karate chops in the air. Bruce Lee, he thought. He could focus all his body's energy, his chi, in one point in his hand, and then he only had to touch you gently with it, and your heart stopped. He could have used that back then, at Helianau, when it got cold. On the one hand, so that he didn't freeze all the time, on the other hand, so that he could at least win the zone game now and then.

That ridiculous, but okay, yeah, yeah, also pretty fun standing orgy and the sensation of the zone feelers coming into contact with the others, just like the bodies of the heating pipe creatures in their tiny primeval pools in the walls, that was really something . . . While they were being watched, they always played it slowly and chess-piece-like, of course, but when they were left alone, things got wild. Arno Golch was always the first to breach the order, he always got bored very quickly. My God, Arno, head of conception at PETROPA, oil field development, pioneering work, John Franklin. Or Sven Hedin, screw it, smeared shiny black like the penguins and kingfishers in the South Atlantic. Back then already. Always the first to break through.

Robert remembered that the first one to burst into the ordered crowd, seize another student, and drag him away was called Ference. Max had always claimed with abundant gestures (imitating with both hands waves of an oscillograph) that the word came from interference. The Ference always came unexpectedly, that was the point, and . . . yes, right, when he grabbed his immediate neighbor and hauled him away with him, then that was a hundred points or what do I know, a lot of points, anyway. The institute yard in autumn formed a grid with finite elements, and then that disrupting signal penetrated it, like the waves that surged on the façade of the World Trade Center after the plane had flown into it, that rearing-up of the inanimate glass front, the bursting, sighing . . . he had seen it in a documentary as a computer-animated model.