Indigo (27 page)

– Of course, she went on, even depressed people can get through daily life and communicate with other people, but . . . but it's a tightrope act, and it can end at any time. Eventually you wake up and realize that there's no point in moving anymore, that there's no point in eating or drinking anymore, and that there's no point in taking care of your own kids anymore. It constricts your throat, and you can speak only with a very soft voice. I always tried to make clear to other people at the time what an immense exertion of strength it was for me to sit with them at a table and talk somewhat coherently. Most of them didn't understand that. It's as if you had to walk around with massively heavy clothing or in a diving suit. You've already visited every corner of your own head once, know all experiences you're capable of inside out.

She laughed and again looked at her husband, who was still occupied with the back of his hand.

– Right? she said.

He looked up. First he looked at me, then his wife.

– Mm-hmm, he said. It was on the whole a very difficult time back then. But in the end you did learn how to drive a car. You should see her, how she drives now.

– Sometimes depressed people begin to hurt themselves. With a needle or a bent-open paper clip. But that too, they soon realize, is pointless. Whether you bleed or not makes no difference worth mentioning, but—

Now Herr Tätzel took her hand, and immediately she stopped speaking and seemed enormously relieved.

I had attentively taken notes and leafed again through the last few pages in the notebook. It struck me that my handwriting had become virtually illegible. It had always had that tendency, but this here was really bad. On the three or four pages I had covered with writing in the last half an hour was nothing but little senseless clouds of lines, as if someone had tried in the dark, hanging upside down from a branch, to draw Kanji characters with a pen between his teeth. It was all unusable, I could throw it away . . .

– Sorry, I said. I think I made a mistake, I . . .

I felt dizzy. On top of that I was having trouble breathing, which was probably due to my folded-up sitting position. I stood up from the armchair. My left foot was numb.

– Is everything all right with you?

Supposedly I answered that question: I put my shoes on the wrong feet. But I don't remember that.

– I think I'll get going, I said. I'm somewhat . . .

When I said that, Frau Tätzel, her husband, and her father left the room. I remained behind by myself, swaying. After a brief time, Herr Tätzel returned and gestured to me to follow him. He wanted to show me something before I left, something really beautiful.

We went outside, to the front of the well-kept yard. The fresh air did me good, and the dizziness vanished. From here you could look over several neighboring yards directly into the parking lot of a large insurance company housed in a silver twin building built in the form of binoculars, which was surrounded by flagpoles from which lengths of fabric hung with a Sunday slackness.

Herr Tätzel pointed to the family vehicle, the pickup, which he hadn't driven for three years.

– Isn't it beautiful? he asked.

– Um, yeah, I said, stepping closer.

– The bed, he said.

He pulled a remote control out of his pocket. His arthritic fingers had difficulty activating it.

– She, he said with a sideways nod toward the house, she doesn't know that I still have this here.

He pressed the button, and the top of the pickup lifted. Slowly the roof folded into a pleasantly soft accordion form that had a soothing effect on the state of your own elbow and knee joints. Finally it retracted all the way, down into the bed of the pickup. I had never seen anything like that before.

– Wonderful, isn't it? said Herr Tätzel. Would you like to look inside?

– Sure, I said with a shrug.

He opened the driver's side door for me and had me take a seat behind the steering wheel. Then he opened the rear door, sat down on the backseat, and pressed another button on the remote control, which made the gate from the yard to the street open. Slowly and solemnly the two metal sides of the gate moved apart, an inviting gesture.

– The key is in the ignition, said Herr Tätzel. Isn't it wonderful?

– Yes, I said, nodding into the rearview mirror.

His eyes had taken on a strange expression. He looked several times back at the house.

– You have a driver's license, right? he said.

– Well, yes, I said, but it's a funny thing. I passed the driving test back then, but that was six years ago, and since then—

– Please, he said.

– What?

– Please, you just have to drive out and then take a right. I'll tell you then what to do next, okay?

– I don't understand.

– I'm begging you, really. It . . . well, you've seen what the climate is like in there, right? I mean, I saw how you were taking notes. You must have noticed that too. I'm sure you didn't just take down our trivial chatter. You know what's going on, don't you?

– Herr Tätzel, I don't know what you want from me.

I was about to get out, but a bent claw shot forward and pushed down the lock. I moved the hand aside and unlocked it again.

– What's this about?

– It's nothing, please, said Herr Tätzel. It's, ah, wait, I began completely wrong, the problem is just that I, that we, in a way, are under time pressure, you know? I'd be happy to explain everything to you during the drive, but for that you have to start driving first, okay?

– Is this supposed to be an abduction, or what?

– Why, no, please, no, you have it all wrong, I'm not intending to in some way . . . but please, listen for a second, okay? I'm begging you, I'm really begging you to start the engine and to drive out, please.

– Okay, but why?

I placed my finger on the ignition key.

– Why? My God, we don't have to discuss everything to death right now! Please, I . . . I'm sorry, Herr Setz, I didn't mean to shout, but we're under some time pressure, at any moment—

– Is this about Robert?

– I have to get out of here, Herr Setz, please help me.

– But if you want to get away, why don't you take a taxi or go to the train station, or—

– Please, said Herr Tätzel, please, I'm not prepared to put up with this treatment for one more . . . I have to get out of here, before the interfe . . . You don't understand at all what's going on, do you? You really haven't grasped anything, have you? You were actually only taking down our small talk? How can you not notice that!

– What? Tell me.

I stepped on the clutch in the hope that I remembered correctly how to start a car, and was about to turn the key.

– What are you guys doing there? said a cheerful voice coming from the patio door.

Frau Tätzel approached us. She had one hand hidden behind her back. Herr Tätzel stepped, as quickly as his physical impairment permitted, out of the truck, backed away from her, put the remote control on the edge of an empty rain barrel standing next to the truck, and took a few steps toward the house with his head hanging. In profile he looked exactly like Robert when he had trudged with the party hat across the Helianau yard.

I got out of the pickup too.

– He's really in love with our truck, said Frau Tätzel.

Her hand came out from behind her back. She was holding a thick oven mitt.

When Herr Tätzel saw the oven mitt, he turned around to face me again and said:

– Oh, well, then we'd better go back to the living room, huh?

Again the unpleasant light in the living room. I was on the verge of offering to change the buzzing, flickering lightbulb for them. Now I also noticed the removed lampshade lying right next to the patio door on the floor. I had seen it before, but had mistaken it for a silly model UFO.

– I have to get going, I said.

– Too bad, said Frau Tätzel.

Something moved at the edge of my visual field. When I tried to look at it directly, it slipped away into some blind spot and didn't come back until I turned my eyes again to Frau Tätzel, to the tea set on the little table, to the cell phone in her one hand and the oven mitt in the other. The indefinable thing on my periphery was light-colored, it even flickered a little, but at the same time it was bodiless and resembled cellophane, like the shadow of a water jet on a white wall.

The room suddenly spun around me, and the floor flew toward me as if I had stepped into a trap snapping shut. Fluid ran from my mouth and nose, unbearably hot and sour, I closed my eyes and tried to gather my strength, then I was suddenly back on my feet, and someone was supporting me, no, was pinning my arms behind my back, the vomit dripped from my chin, I tried to lift my head and understand my situation, but it didn't work, my upper body was bent forward so that walking became harder and harder, soon I collapsed again, and something heavy that had been behind me fell on me and caused me tremendous pain. In panic I wanted to free myself from it, kicked my feet, but something hard struck my head, and there was a bright flash in the same place where the cellophane-like thing had been before.

For a moment it was calm, and I could open my eyes and even make something out, but I felt terribly dizzy, I tried to cling to the floor to keep myself from plunging into emptiness, I pressed both hands against my head so that it couldn't move a millimeter, but everything was still spinning, it was as if I were lying on one of those rotating disks to which you allow yourself to be strapped in order to have your own body's contours traced with trembling blades by a knife thrower. I must have cried for help, and eventually someone came into the room, a small creature wearing jeans, an Adidas T-shirt, and a large diving bell on its head. The creature stood over me and reached out toward me. Then it was pulled aside.

I awoke with a splitting headache in a passenger seat. I kept calm, because I knew neither where I was nor whether the people accompanying me were well disposed toward me. Only once I was in the emergency room at the hospital did my memory gradually return. When Herr and Frau Tätzel and a man with a thick white beard who looked vaguely familiar to me took leave of me and wished me all the best, I even remembered what was going on and why I was here. The name of the young doctor who attended to me was Uhlheim. That was also the first word I said to him.

– Yes, that's my name, he said.

His tone clearly revealed that he thought I was an idiot. Or someone who had hit his head.

A few minutes after my arrival in the emergency room I had to fight off an unbearably strong feeling of déjà vu. All the actions happening around me appeared to me as if choreographed and performed for the hundredth time.

When I was home again and lay on my back in my bed, I thought: Someone drank from my health, and the glass was clearly half empty . . .
Drink your Health.

Dodo, my feline attachment figure, to whom I always crawled when I had a problem, sat there so compactly with curled-up paws that she looked like a little rocking horse.

I had accidentally stepped on her tail when I had staggered into the room. The impossibility of apologizing to an animal. She hissed, puffed up her fur, ran away, and looked at me aghast from a distance. She didn't possess the categories
accident
,
apology
,
reconciliation
. But even worse and more disturbing was the eerie way she accepted my unmotivated outburst of violence—for that was how she must have perceived my blunder—as if it were the most natural thing in the world. A minute later she had forgotten everything, cleaned her fur, and let me pet her, but the uneasy feeling remained that always set in when the distorting mirror of your own clumsiness presented you with what you might actually have been capable of.

Now she sat next to me on the bed. I curled up into an egg under the blanket. For a while the room continued to spin around me. When I closed my eyes, I had the sensation of rotating while standing on my head, like an acrobat hanging from his rope in the circus. Only when I kept completely still and preempted every millimeter-movement my head involuntarily tried to make did the universe stop spinning. I remembered that Vincent van Gogh was said to have suffered from a condition known as Ménière's disease, which regularly caused such extreme attacks of vertigo. From that perspective, the cosmic swirls in his famous night paintings also struck me as completely natural, the swarming gardens and the houses with the brightly shimmering façades rising at a slant from the earth, the blurred faces of the harvesters and the confusing surge of a wheat field at midday, what else should he have painted? . . . I tentatively opened my eyes, and the room was somewhat slanted, but completely at rest. I blinked a bit and moved my eyeballs back and forth. Nothing.

I sat up. Dodo lay next to me, now curled up into a peaceful cat ball, her chin cushioned on her paws. When she noticed that I was looking at her she opened her eyes and lifted her head. I winked at her. She winked back politely. Then we lay down again. I dreamed that I was in Belgium. Somewhere in the countryside, among several low, white buildings. Behind me, in the distance, was a bus that had brought me here. And at my feet was a grave, no larger than a balcony vegetable patch, adorned with a fist-sized stone. It was the grave of that mouse with the human ear on its back.
Finally I have found it
, I thought in the dream, and awoke, my face sticky with tears.

On the wall next to my bed hung a painting by Max Ernst,
The Angel of Hearth and Home
, the sight of which usually made me happy, wherever I encountered the mysterious creature with the horselike head dancing across a plain in ecstatic laughter. Now I couldn't look at it, because I couldn't help imagining a child at the institute putting on this costume and then being taken away.

In the afternoon Julia came from work. She brought with her the smell of rats, hay, and feathers. She sat down next to me on the bed and asked me how the conversation had gone. Since I didn't answer, but only shook my head, she reached for the little violet plastic dinosaur on the nightstand and made it hop across my chest.