Indigo (28 page)

When she saw my injuries, she was alarmed.

Later, when I could get up and walk around again, we took a short walk. The air in the whole district smelled slightly burnt, but not unpleasant. Possibly a barbecue was taking place somewhere.

I described for Julia some interesting graffiti far up on the wall of a high rise near Oeverseepark. There are few things in a city that are as aesthetically satisfying as graffiti in unreachable places. It takes the eye only a second, and it sees the winged creatures that produce this work; equipped with several arms, they swing themselves over the architectural elements, smoothly and at a dangerous angle, and the gaze of the viewer reconstructs their feats of climbing, reminiscent of Marvel superheroes, which are necessary to reach all those wonderful impossible spots: the cross bracing of the steel structure in the middle of a bridge; the projecting part of a building, far from all balconies; the inside of a tunnel that is in use twenty-four hours a day; or the outer wall of elevators—I remembered having read of a case like that once years ago. In the course of the alteration of a twenty-two-story building in Vienna, the elevator shaft was widened and the car replaced with a new, larger one. When the workers removed the old one, they saw that every centimeter on the outside of the metal box that usually floated up and down on its steel cable was covered with tags and spray-painted love scenes. Out of sheer helplessness, the workers reportedly had the old elevator car immediately disposed of.

Julia noticed that I was talking more slowly than usual.

– I can't see clearly anymore, I said. Everything has become difficult.

– In what way?

– My forehead feels funny, I said.

At home I sat down at my desk and organized the contents of the red-checkered folder a bit. I read in Norman Cohn's fascinating study
The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages
about various rituals involving the exclusion of children, photocopied the relevant pages from the book, and placed them in the folder. In the German and Austrian countryside it was apparently custom until well into the eighteenth century to marry a chosen child couple symbolically on New Year's Day, Cohn wrote, to dress them in white fur and declare them untouchable for a week. No one was permitted to respond or react to them when he encountered them on the street, they were completely on their own, if they stole things, they weren't punished, and they were ignored even when they begged desperately to abandon the game. They were
ritualistically invisible,
as
C
ohn puts it. For that week these children, known as
Riedln
or
Riedser
,
were also not to be let into anyone's house and had to acquire food and shelter themselves. (Most of the time, however, small packages of emergency provisions were left in a previously arranged place by their parents and close family members.) This custom was not regarded as punishment, for after the week spent in total social isolation the children were reaccepted into the village community in a solemn ceremony and rewarded with abundant gifts.

While I leafed through and sorted the excerpts and pieces of paper in the red-checkered folder, I listened to some of the 555 sonatas by Scarlatti on CD, which had been recorded in their entirety in the eighties by the American virtuoso Scott Ross, who could play the harpsichord more finely and majestically than anyone else. For him a trill was not merely a quick back-and-forth between two notes, but rather could express anything, the anxious trembling of a stuck joint, the threatening rattle of a rattlesnake, the grumble in the belly of a hungry person, the fluttering of a flag in the wind, the impatient pulsing of certain stars in the night sky.

1.
The Easter Island Head

[GREEN FOLDER]

How wonderful is the solemn emptiness that permeates the weeks after the last sign of life from an incessant anonymous phone caller: He now breathes once again for himself alone, without anyone else hearing. Possibly he has died, as silently and secretly as an insect on a house wall, has folded up his six little legs and has expired. They have become rare, these callers, who a decade or so ago still numbered in the thousands. Nowadays there might be no more than a handful in all Europe, the last, basically precious representatives of their kind, who still rise now and then from their bed and drag themselves on all fours to the old rotary phone in the corner . . .

In the first weeks of the year 2007, I had been called so often by the unknown person, who had never wanted to say anything, that I started taking phone calls only when I recognized the number. When I saw Frau Stennitzer's name light up on my muted cell one day, I answered.

– Hello?

– Herr Setz? How are you? This is Gudrun Stennitzer.

– Good evening, Frau Stennitzer. Nice to hear from you.

– Yes, she said. Nice. Nice, I don't know. It's kind of you, anyway, to say my phone call is nice.

– Has something happened?

– I had a very silly thought, she said. I thought:
You haven't abandoned us, Herr Setz, have you?
Haha. I mean, because you stopped answering your phone. It can't be that you have bad memories of us, right? I heard that you went to Brussels—

– Who told you that?

– I don't remember . . . You know, I just wanted you to know that you're welcome to visit us anytime. That's a fact. That is to say: Our hospitality still stands, you know?

There was a brief pause.

– Thank you very much, I said.

– Oh, don't mention it, really, you know . . . This isn't actually relevant, but Christoph mentioned that he . . . he said he wishes you all the best. He said that, really.

– Oh, thank you very much. I hope he liked my articles.

– Oh, you're much too modest. Has that never occurred to you? You're always so defensive and . . . well, I'd already noticed that during your visit.

– Is that right? Well, yes, I might be a bit defensive sometimes, that might be true . . .

– We wanted to assure you, anyway, that we would be happy if you . . . Ah, what else can I say . . . ?

I was silent and waited.

– Everything is pretty much good with us, yeah, said Frau Stennitzer. But now we have a new problem, haaaa . . .

– What is it?

– Oh, it's not your fault, of course, Herr Setz, but . . . haaaa.

I waited.

– Those teenagers were here again, said Frau Stennitzer. And they . . . aahh, what's the best way to put it? . . . they interfered. Again. Now I have to think really carefully about the next steps.

– What did they do?

– Hm. You know, I'm wondering right now how you can ask that. I mean, you mentioned them in your article, didn't you?

– Yes, I did.

Frau Stennitzer paused. It sounded as if she were taking a drag from a cigarette.
Just going out for a few minutes to get cigarettes. Underground vaults.

– When he came home afterward, Frau Stennitzer said with an embittered tone in her voice. With his wet hair and the chlorine smell everywhere, I just couldn't believe it! That was truly . . . it was unreal. On Kenny.

– On whom?

– Uncanny. Don't you know the word?

– Ah, yes, uncanny.

– Yes, that was really uncanny, said Frau Stennitzer. I immediately recognized him, of course, but he had changed so much on the whole, in his essence.

– So where had he been?

Again she paused, and seemed to be gathering all her energy for the unpleasant information she unfortunately had to impart:

– At a swimming pool.

– At a swimming pool? You mean, he was swimming.

– Uncanny, she said, and laughed sharply. You should have seen his face, Herr Setz! Christoph isn't usually like that.

Through the telephone I could hear her shaking her head. Perhaps she had even closed her eyes. And perhaps her head was resting on the back of a chair.

– Okay, Frau Stennitzer, I said, I'm afraid I have to go, but—

– They took him to a swimming pool!

– Yes, I got that.

– And you think nothing of it?

– They probably meant no harm.

She made a shocked noise and swallowed. As if a chance passerby had suddenly spat into her mouth.

– They didn't even know if he could swim, she said. That didn't matter to them at all. They care only about their . . . dares, their sweat cure, the ability to hold out, keep holding out, the zone . . . They learned it from their parents, no question, they learned it from their parents! For the façade deceives. They only look like neglected youth, with shaved heads or spiky hair, but in reality they're the kids of well-off people here. You can tell by their shoes. And I should know, because they've left their shoes often enough outside Christoph's little house!

– Okay, I said. That's probably true.

– Skipping school, listening to music, hanging around under the Zetschn Bridge, that's what they do all day, and when they come home, the gold Mastercard is waiting for them.

– Mm-hmm.

– I really don't know what they were thinking. To parade him in that way like a circus horse! And he, he puts up with everything! His air mattress . . . came back wet. It was lying outside his door in the grass and drying.

At that point she could have easily burst into tears. But she didn't. I heard only the cigarette-like sound again.

– But the air mattress is meant for water, I said.

– Excuse me?

– The air mattress is—

– He reads on it! It's his reading mattress! He couldn't read on it for a whole day, because it was wet.

– Frau Stennitzer?

– What?

– I think I have to hang up now, out there . . . people are waiting for me.

– Where?

– Here in my yard. Something is burning.

With that I hung up.

Julia entered the room.

– Do you know what your voice sounds like when you're lying? she asked.

She went to the window and opened it. Outside the sun shone.

– What?

– Like you swallowed a spoon.

– Swallowed a spoon.

– Yeah, imagine you're eating a yogurt, okay? And then you get too greedy and accidentally swallow the spoon along with it. But it gets stuck in your throat. Like in those X-ray images. You know? Where some weird Americans have swallowed impossible objects.

– That's what I sound like?

– Yeah. Haven't you ever noticed that?

– And what do you sound like when you're lying?

– What, you don't know?

– No.

– Men, said Julia, shaking her head.

The year 2007 had begun with other irritations as well. They almost always involved peculiar blots. On the house wall next to our balcony a huge fungal mark had formed that could be washed away neither by rain nor by the water we sprayed on it with the garden hose. It had a reddish color and gave off an unpleasant odor reminiscent of old potato cellars. That odor often penetrated to us in the apartment, especially in the kitchen, where I liked to work, so I left the house more often and spent time in various places where I wouldn't be disturbed or spoken to.

One day in March I sat in a small café near the large meat processing plant that dominates our district. It was already early evening, and I had nothing to do but wait patiently until a rather large tea stain on my pants had dried. If I stood up now, it would have looked as if I had had an embarrassing accident. After some time a man sat down at one of the other tables. A monocle hung from his vest, or maybe it was a pocket watch. He looked at me. At first I evaded his eyes, then I met them:
What is it?
The man nodded and pulled an edition of
National Geographic
out of his bag.

It was obviously the issue in which the second part of my article “In the Zone” had appeared. He turned page after page, now looked elsewhere, yawned pointedly and turned the page again, acted astonished, as if he had discovered something unusual. His posture changed, and his expression became serious and focused. Then he began to tear some pages out of the magazine. I stood up and was about to approach him. But before I could take the first step, he had already walked out of the café. I followed him, but he had disappeared.

For several minutes I stood, at a loss and intimidated, on the street under a lamp that remained dark despite the advanced hour.

Disconcerted, I returned home and immediately lay down in bed, but I couldn't fall asleep for a long time. At some point I drifted away in a sort of canoe that was partly a balcony. At night I was visited by a white animal with a large skull, sad and pensive-looking, which it dragged with difficulty but, as it seemed to me, without particular haste to the foot of my bed: one of those gigantic ornamental heads of stone with the narrowed eyes of someone weeping, a large geometrical nose, and a broad-lipped mouth, from which, as if in tacit admission of great helplessness or guilt, a single coarsely grooved incisor jutted. The animal stopped at the foot of my bed and began to grind its head on the creaking metal post. It made a strenuous effort, and soon it managed to separate the head from its torso. With a satisfied heavy breath the head fell on the floor. What remained of the animal was a white fur ball, without limbs or discernible entrances and exits, a white, thick-haired sack that moved back and forth in rhythmic contractions, as if it were still breathing. I touched it with the tip of my foot—and it suddenly let out bloodcurdling screams and wails, but after a few minutes it went silent again, and the two parts, which had now without doubt been entrusted to decay, lay lifeless at the foot of my bed: the stone head and the fur sack, both frozen in a sort of solemn meaninglessness. For fear that the spectacle might, if I paid attention to it any longer, repeat endlessly, I pulled the blanket over my head. When, about a minute later, dazed, with difficulty breathing, I tore it from my face, I was lying in total darkness. I groped around and grabbed hold of one of the plastic buttons that formed a row on one side of the blanket. The button was pleasantly cool, and as in the case of a stranger's earlobe, which, through a lucky chain of circumstances, you grab hold of for the duration of a blessed moment, it was very soothing to touch it. To reassure myself that everything, at least in rough outline, was still as I knew it, I moved my head back and forth on the pillow and noticed that it was soaked with sweat, so I sat up and turned it over. But when I picked up the pillow, I realized that, without knowing it, I had been lying all night on soft bog soil, only a thin sheet and the pillow separated me from mud and black, stagnant water.

I hadn't told Julia anything about that. The strange vision had not returned, and I didn't want to worry her. She was glad that I had begun to work at a normal school. I had only a half-time teaching commitment, and didn't have to get up as early as when I had been employed at the Helianau Institute.

The Factors That Must Be Taken into Account

Soon I received another call from Gudrun Stennitzer.

– Hey, she said.

– Oh, hello, Frau Stennitzer, I said. How are you doing?

– Well, yeah, where to begin, how am I doing, ah, yeah, how am I doing, anyway? Ah . . .

She seemed to be out of breath.

– How's Christoph? Has he recovered from . . . ?

A button on the telephone was pressed.
Tooot.

– I actually wanted to tell you about that last time we spoke, said Frau Stennitzer. Tell you about the changes that have . . . well . . . happened, one after another, and everything . . . ah, yes, what else . . .

You could hear paper being crumpled up relatively close to the phone.

– Changes?

– Ah, yes, you must know how it is.
Panta rhei
, everything changes. Is always in flux. Nothing remains the way you once fixed it in your mind. Christoph . . . well, he coped relatively well with the outing. The mattress has of course been dry for quite a while too, in the meantime. He's reading again now, thank God. And . . . yeah, so he still remembers you well, of course. Your visit.

– I'm glad to hear it.

– Well, under the circumstances, he's doing . . . well, actually, no, of course not, how should he be doing? You know, I really wanted to call you again, to make contact, as it were, because I would otherwise feel so left alone, you know?

– Left alone in what way?

A heavy, impatient exhalation from Frau Stennitzer.

Then she said:

– The awful thing is that you're always wise only in hindsight. I assume you know the feeling. That you're wiser afterward than beforehand. And those two articles back then and everything, that was really, well . . . I certainly got wiser, I definitely wanted to tell you that. By phone. If not face-to-face.

– Did you dislike the article? I asked. I sent you both parts back then. Okay, it was shortened quite a bit afterward, and the pictures were added . . .

– Yeah, yeahyeahyeah, all that, yeah, sure, I know that, of course . . . sure . . . I just wanted, so that no misunderstandings arise, I just wanted . . . all that didn't do Christoph good, you know? He, I mean . . . he was already introverted before, but the article and everything, that was, well . . . and then the swimming pool, that was more symptomatic, you know? I mean, it was only an indoor pool, but still.

Another heavy exhalation. I sat down on the bed.

– Hold on, I'm going to switch to the headset, then we can talk better.

– Headset, no, not necessary, exclaimed Frau Stennitzer. I wanted anyway—

I pretended I didn't hear her anymore, took my time with the plugging in and the finding of the correct angle between microphone and lips.