Indigo (25 page)

Robert had never been the Ference. Too sluggish, too slow, generally too-easy prey. Who would have thought that in the twelve years that had elapsed since graduation the world still hadn't ended?
But we're working on it
, he thought, as he passed the iBall in the hall. The iBall had closed its lid and didn't raise it as Robert crept past.

He found the newspaper on the bookshelf. It often lay there, unnoticed and nearly invisible. You could recognize it by a pale shadow it cast on the wall behind the books. He took the newspaper and started the article search. His search terms were:
setz clemens flayed man dogs.

The entries were more or less copies of the article about the acquittal. Only the photos of the now-thirty-nine-year-old math teacher were different. In some he actually looked the way Robert remembered him. A face that without the eyebrows would have been nothing. Tired eyes. Thin-rimmed glasses. A strangely protruding Adam's apple. Crooked incisors. Receding hairline. Puppy belly, round as a ball, under a patterned vest.

One article mentioned that the family of the victim had announced that they would challenge the verdict by all available legal means. At the time of his death two years ago, the victim himself had been forty-five years old. The man left behind two daughters. His farm, on which he had kept the dogs, had been sold. His surname was nowhere mentioned. It was always: Franz F., born in Cluj (Klausenburg), Romania. Daughters born in Austria, dog breeding at first only a hobby, later his main job—damn, get to the point already. But the article ended without even mentioning the horrible crime.

Robert released the newspaper and sat down at his desk. Interf . . . Ference game, in autumn . . . Strange, formless thoughts. Max. What happened to him? And the man who had spoken to him, he had said that . . . what word had he used? Role model, no, mentor, right . . . skin peeled off . . . Max Schaufler . . . mentor . . . Klausenberg . . . burg . . .

He tried to imagine stripping off the skin of a screaming, writhing man. Ideally the shoulderless, egg-shaped man in the bank lobby. How long did it take before the man lost consciousness? And how did that work with the blood loss? And where did you begin? At what points did the body have to be fastened, and by what means? Did it perhaps happen under general anesthesia?

And a guy like that taught me
.

Okay, okay, he was acquitted and everything, but still. Someone who was now walking around out there had definitely skinned the man. That Romanian-born guy, who kept his dogs in a basement dungeon, or what was it again . . . ? Robert looked around in the room for the newspaper, but it was probably hanging around on the balcony, for some reason it liked sunlight, good-for-nothing little feather-light thing with no memory.

Basement dungeon
, the term might have come from a different memory. At home in Raaba there had been that odd animal . . . That is, not at his parents' house, but in the neighbor's basement. A rooster. The cry of that rooster could be heard all year long, shifted forward by a tiny unit of time each day. The rooster was kept in a basement and possessed, as far as he had been able to tell, absolutely no concept of daylight. Of course, there was the inner clock with which nature had endowed him. It told him when the first rays of the sun, invisible to him, fell over the roofs outside, but for some reason this inner clock was not quite correctly set, perhaps the genes that were responsible for its operation came from a different millennium, when the days on earth lasted a few seconds longer, because the planet had not yet been exposed to the strong quakes influencing the tilt of the earth's axis. The rooster was, so to speak, fast. Which didn't change the fact that you could always hear him, he never missed a day; not even in the deepest winter, when day hardly ever really arrived outside, did anyone in the neighborhood have to do without his cry early in the morning. Even in the gloomy winter light that drove so many people in the suburbs into melancholy and awakened their abhorrence of their own family, that special mood when nothing more connects you to your own planet, even in the blue hours the cry of the rooster kept in the basement sounded as always, just as it did in summer. It gave the people on his street a certain sense of security. It got on some people's nerves, of course. They wished the rooster dead and released.

– Can I see him? Robert had repeatedly asked his mother.

Only two days at home, and the old bug had bitten him again: the need to see the ravaged creature. He would absolutely have to bring his sketchpad, but in a lightless basement he wouldn't achieve much anyway. If he didn't set eyes on him, he would probably have to torture a hedgehog or catch flies and slowly melt them in focused sunlight.

– What? How is that supposed to work?

Even in memory the voice of his mother was unpleasantly loud. He couldn't turn it down.

– Well, he's not invisible, is he? Robert said, and noticed that he was beginning to talk faster than was conducive to normal communication.

– No, he's not, but . . . he doesn't belong to me. How am I supposed to . . .

– I would really like to see him.

– Yes, but . . .

– Mommy.

– Don't look at me like that. I . . . Oh, my head, wait, I just need a minute to . . .

– Oh, come on, this isn't believable!

Robert stood in her way.

– Robert, please, his mother said wearily. I just have to recuperate for a minute.

– I want—

– Robert!

She pushed him aside, her hand on his shoulder. Then she was in the hallway. He thought of slamming the door, but that wouldn't have accomplished anything.

– Fine, next weekend, then! he shouted.

Arno Golch, whom Max's disappearance from the institute had made unusually aggressive, waved to Robert on the playing field. Then he approached, with huge strides; Robert ran away, but soon Golch had caught up with him.

– You motherfucker! he shouted at Robert, kicking him so that he fell to the ground.

Robert was immediately seized by a violent urge to gag, and an attack of vertigo so bad that he felt as if he were rotating on a vertical axis while standing on his head. Side of beef on a meat hook.

– You just had to open your damn mouth! said Golch.

– I . . . I don't know what you mean . . . oh, God . . .

Robert retched.

– Do you know what I wish? said Golch, kneeling down and putting his hand on Robert's neck. That he gets
you
, the Ference. That
he
gets his hands on you. What will you dress up as, hm?

Robert said nothing.

And then the air suddenly returned to his lungs, because Golch let go of him. The voice of an adult boomed across the playing field.

One day in winter the rooster had disappeared.

No one knew how he had escaped from the basement. Faint tracks in the snow suggested that he had gone about two hundred yards on his own feet and then must have been seized by a larger animal and dragged away. In any case, the prints of his claws disappeared at a certain point and didn't reappear. Perhaps the wind had blown away the animal's delicate tracks. People in the neighborhood cracked jokes about the overwhelmed rooster running through the daylight with its tongue hanging out,
ooohhh
, half stupid with astonishment over the brightness of the world, which his cells had always told him actually existed, and he hadn't been able to believe it . . . Robert's mother was eating lunch in her corner while Robert shoveled the thinly sliced potatoes into his mouth at the other end of the dining room, and she wasn't talking. He could tell that it was about that and not about some other subject that she wasn't saying a word. He grinned. His sketchpad was full. And before he had delivered the excited but not at all frightened-looking rooster to Konrad, who, despite the cold, had come from the next village with his moped and a wooden crate, happy about the gift for his father's farm (which his father might finally praise him for instead of just laughing at him all the time for the way his moped in certain lighting looked pink), and who promised to take good care of him, he had given him a name. He looked at his mother and said the name without moving his lips. He would never reveal it to her. He had not even revealed it to Konrad. No one in the world would ever learn it. No one deserved it, at least up to now.

11.
The Meaning and Secret of Second-Order Curves

I opened my eyes. A will-o'-the-wisp wandered at the edge of my visual field. When I clenched my jaw, it disappeared, but it returned when I relaxed it.

– Mmh, you're awake, said Julia. I didn't want to wake you.

– What time is it?

– Four-thirty, I think.

I checked the alarm clock. She was right.

– Oh, God, I groaned.

– The new alarm clock is too small, said Julia.

I looked at the alarm clock.

– Really?

– Yeah, I can't make out the display.

– Shit, I have to get up soon, I said. Four-thirty, what sort of time is that supposed to be? I want most to set fire to everything . . .

– Like what?

– I want . . . oh, I don't know . . . The students stopped taking me seriously when I burst into tears in front of them. That was my death sentence. They're beasts. Do you know what they look like?

– Describe it to me.

I got up and pulled the curtain aside, which made the room a bit brighter. Then I turned on the light. Julia hid her glare-sensitive eyes behind her hands and waited until they had grown accustomed to the lighting.

– Imagine: Carnival booths. Okay?

– Yeah.

– Okay, carnival booths. And in one of them hang balloons. Balloons you're supposed to throw darts at. In all different colors. That's exactly what they look like.

– The students?

– Yeah.

– At the animal shelter I have a few blue rats, said Julia. No idea why someone has abandoned them. And another, it has a completely indefinable coat color. At least everyone is in total disagreement. Some say it's brown, but I think it has more of a green tinge. Others think it looks red. Did I tell you where we found it?

– No, please don't, I can't hear that now. I . . .

– Really? You used to always want to know how the animals are doing.

– Of course, I . . . It's just completely dragging me down at the moment. Everything's so weird at the institute. Dr. Rudolph mentioned relocations. I don't even know what that's about. But yesterday I saw a student from another class, who was in a sort of . . . ah, what was it . . . well, some sort of harlequin costume, like a clown . . .

– I hate clowns.

– Yeah, anyway, he was walking around in some costume, and later the chauffeur drove him away, probably down to the train station. Another time it was a chimney sweep a student was . . . Oh, never mind. That disgusting mountain atmosphere up there, that country air, the grass . . . even the grass is hostile. It just grows. It doesn't care about the people, buildings. Not like city grass. City grass is respectful. Like city pigeons. They've come to terms with us. But the grass there . . .

I stumbled around in one pants leg.

Julia got up too.

– But you know what? I said to her. Your advice helped.

– Which advice?

– To write. To imagine what those di . . . ah, kids would be like someday and so on.

– I told you to do that?

– Yeah.

On the platform of the Payerbach-Reichenau station, newspapers flew around. Lame paper birds, defenseless against the wind. All they had wanted was to sleep on the asphalt, now they were being thrown all over the place. A newspaper even fluttered along behind me for several yards, like a child begging, and I briefly considered adopting it and taking it with me, but then I left it there.

At a transformer building I spotted a small graffiti artwork. The face of a baby spray-painted in black-and-white stencil technique. His disgusted and thus unusually adult-seeming expression and his mistrustfully tilted head seemed to pass judgment on anyone who passed. I automatically lowered my eyes.

On the last stretch before the institute the path through the woods spun once around me. That happened to me almost every time. I stopped briefly and thought of a white flight of steps, a quiet image that anchored my thoughts. Sometimes it also helped to imagine a comet, an object standing still in the sky, which you could hold on to with your eyes.

In the teachers' lounge I drank a cup of green tea I got from the machine. I still had some time, so I took my red-checkered folder (a gift from my father for my fifteenth birthday) out of my backpack. A piece of reassuring reality among the unreal materials for math class.

So, where were we . . . stardate 2021 . . .

When I heard the deep voice behind me, I immediately raised my head, but couldn't cover the sheets of paper with my hand and push them back into the folder in time. Dr. Ulrich had seen something.

– Dirty stuff, he said with a laugh.

– No, I said. Not really.

Dr. Ulrich was an intolerable creature. He was a hunter and liked to entertain the students, as he said, with stories from the exciting life with a rifle. On top of that, he was always leaving his materials lying around in the lecture hall. His biology tests probably consisted of questions about the correct disembowelment of a deer or the preferred manufacturer of camouflage-patterned binoculars.

Whenever I saw him, I developed the fantasy of tying him up somewhere and then shooting at him. First with arrows, then with handguns, finally with an old-fashioned harquebus, with which the dodos on the island of Mauritius were exterminated in the seventeenth century. Or perhaps skinning him, painstakingly, as he did to rabbits and foxes.

– You look pale, said Dr. Ulrich.

– Yeah, the air here.

– I understand. It was no different for me the first year. But it gets better.

– Probably.

– No, not probably. Definitely. It will definitely get better. You shouldn't lose sight of that. The students get used to you, and after that things aren't so bad anymore.