Indigo (34 page)
Authors: Clemens J. Setz
Then he went into the bedroom, which lay unsuspectingly in semidarkness. Drawn curtains, a room with its eyes closed. He ran the brush along the underside of the pillows on the double bedâthe nearly clear residual moisture was soaked up by the fabric of the pillowcase and, as far as he could tell, was absorbed without a trace.
Two hairs and some air, the master Bob Ross always called that.
Robert went back into the living room, to the books.
On Death and Dying.
The brush made its soothing sounds on the spine, then he moved on to the other books. Perhaps he would cure Willi's asthma in this way, who knows.
Suddenly there was a knock. The brush almost fell out of Robert's hand. He froze, listened.
But the knocking was only in the walls. Muffled, repeating. A neighbor was probably hanging a picture or putting up a shelf on the wall.
Robert replenished his supply one last time. The brush this time got a full, visible load. And he bored the chopstick deeper into the sole of his shoe, where under the hard-trodden layer somewhat softer, lighter-colored sludge was waiting. He dabbed the window handles and was about to paint the apartment door handle with it, when he realized just in time that he himself still had to touch it today. So he gave the final, once again somewhat paler stroke to the mouse of Willi's computer, which had a slightly brownish color anyway.
Satisfied, Robert headed home. Newspaper, chopsticks, and brush he had taken with him and thrown in a garbage can at some distance from Willi's apartment. While he walked, he checked the smell of his fingers. They smelled a bit sweaty, but otherwise everything was fine.
As if to cheer for him, a shop for children's toys showed him a smiling face as he passed.
Forever Young
was written under the face.
On the way home he thought of the empty apartment. He knew what he was supposed to be feeling. Cordula was gone. She had packed, had stuffed all her clothes in the travel bag that smelled like the dark years of the bad panic attacks, and had walked past him. Be happy, she had said to him. You finally did it.
When he tried to be horrified by it, as he had this morning in the kitchen, there was nothing there, only the memory of how her belly had felt when he hadâ
He held the moment. Pause button. But still nothing came.
Confused, he went into a pizzeria on Jakominiplatz and ordered a Margherita to go. Then he carried the box home like a portfolio, oil dripped next to him onto the street, and he let it drip. When he opened the box, the cheese had slid completely to one side. Stroke pizza.
Outside, at dusk, only a few cars played tag in the street. He ate, went to the bathroom, thought about what it would be like to let a kid in a wheelchair hurtle down a steep street, and took a shower. Warm water. The vertigo-suppressing face of Alicia came to his mind again. His erection looked stupid and unhappy. He pressed the head of his penis against the white tiles of the shower, played a bit with the tiny fish mouth the urethral opening could be formed into. The kid in the wheelchair, hurtling downward, went faster and faster and crashed through a large windowpane, which was being carried across the street by two silent film extras in slow motion. Glass shards everywhere. The kid's ostomy bag whirled away and landed on the mailbox of a house (one of those American ones, on a long post, with a little red flag that is put up when letters have come).
He forced himself to think her name: Cordula. He said it aloud, water from the shower head ran into his mouth. He swallowed it, as if in punishment.
Why do I exist? I stand in the shower. I paint one or two pictures a year.
He staggered as he stepped out of the shower and dried himself. Gentle rampage fantasies accompanied him in half sleep. A knife fight, as soft and springy as a pillow fight. The man without shoulders who had accosted him in the bank lobby approached him and handed him a new business card. To replace the old one, he whispered to Robert, who pushed him away with both hands in disgust and let himself fall from the taut tightrope into the gloomy circus ring of sleep, where other creatures awaited him.
[RED-CHECKERED FOLDER]
The Mojave Phone Booth (1962[?]â2000) was the loneliest telephone booth of all time. It stood in the middle of the Mojave Desert, many miles from the nearest settlement or highway. In 1997 it became an Internet phenomenon, many fans called the phone booth, visited and painted it and recorded the conversations that came about from time to time when someone actually happened to pick up the phone in the middle of the desert. Eventually the phone booth was completely covered with graffiti. The constant demand on the phone line was regarded by the manufacturer, Pacific Bell, as a wrongful use of the telephone service, on top of that environmental activists were upset by the incessant ringing in the middle of the desert, which supposedly disrupted the daily routine of certain animal species. On May 17, 2000, it was removed and destroyed by Pacific Bell.
5.
The Relocation of Magda T.
[GREEN FOLDER]
Rough, migraine-yellow headaches alternated with attacks of vertigo. And yet, I told myself repeatedly, no one was anywhere near me. The cool water mixed with slimy white shampoo had been unable to dispel the (not feverish, but more atmospheric) heat from my head. Nor did the symptoms improve when I, wearing only a bathrobe, walked through the nocturnal corridors of the hotel and stood in front of the snack machine to turn back and forth a little in the ice-cold light of the soda cans and chocolate bars. I returned to the hotel room, lay down in bed, and counted.
An hour and another hour . . .
On their return to the pasture, the sheep compare the numbers assigned them tonight by the sleepless man in his bed: What number did you get? â Nineteen, again. â Who is number one? Hey, number one! We have to know who the leader is. Disappointed, grief-stricken mother animals whose children got only a three-digit number, once again not among the first one hundred! There are even sheep silently weeping to themselves who have today remained numberless. Most of them hang their heads, dissatisfied with life. But they still go to him every evening, the sleepless man in his darkened chamber, who counts them to become tired. They need it as much as he does. Ultimately they love the moment the number hits them, in the middle of their woolly belly. It allows them to forget for an instant that their quantity, like the days and nights of the sleeper, is finite.
Finally I got up, a body moving with day speed in the slowed nighttime. I felt like a spaceship.
I took the documents that Oliver Baumherr had given me out of the green folder and studied them. The Relocation of Magda T. I sorted the newspaper clippings on the narrow hotel desk. In the oldest articles there were pictures of a child whose face was covered with a black anonymity bar, then, in the more recent ones, that had been dispensed with: A thirteen-year-old girl. Braces smile. Bright, cheerful-looking eyes.
She's doing well now, said the first sentence of an article. It dated from May 5, 2001. It mentioned that the father, Theodor T., had moved with his daughter at some point in 1999. However, it didn't speak of moving, but rather of relocation.
The first use of this word
, I thought in the voice of the
Oxford English Dictionary
. The small family then lived with one of the girl's uncles, who was a guard in a prison on the German-Austrian border. During the day she often played in a room that was completely empty. On a later inspection of the prison, officials noticed a room that was furnished like a children's room. But Magda had never been in there, the article said, the room had been furnished solely for visits from children. Children of prisoners.
I had to reread the article. Somewhere there was a jump in the story. Somewhere my focus had been lost. I closed my eyes, tried to collect myself, despite the late hour. So: She moved, relocation, okay, and lived with an uncle, he was a prison guard, got it, but then . . . an empty room in which she had played. Or actually hadn't played . . . Was the room in the prison or . . . The article didn't reveal it. Inwardly cursing the writer of this confusing, sloppily written article (I imagined drawing a little circle on his cheek with a marker in punishment and then abandoning him to the angry crowd), I turned my attention to the next article.
Only once I had read the first linesâ
The worst day of my life was the evening I was brought back. The best day was when I saw the man on the other side of the glass window bore his fingers into his own ears until blood came, then I knew that I was really something spe
âonly once those lines had run emptily through my mind did I realize that my revenge fantasy about the writer of the first article had been totally nonsensical . . . a ring on the cheek, in marker or pen . . .
I noticed that my hand was lying on the high-speed Internet plug. I took it away, and it felt strange. For some reason the plug was ice-cold. A stabbing headache flared up briefly, but then immediately dissipated when I touched my forehead with my cold hand.
With the help of my forefinger, I read on. At one point there was mention of a prison breakout, then of abuse, which was, however, hard to prove. There was no pan-European legislation regarding I-effects in relation to prisoners. The name Brussels came up. The keeping of a child in a separate room did not in itself constitute a demonstrable . . . A crime had therefore not necessarily . . . Before her ultimate liberation by . . . The sentences lay side by side, and each sentence peeked over its period at the next sentence, like a creature staring at a creature of a different kind and seeking to fathom its mystery.
Then I turned to the notes taken by Oliver Baumherr's colleagues.
On the basis of several disparate scraps, they had tried to reconstruct Magda T.'s long and agonizing journey. Not one of these Venn diagram bubbles gave the investigators the pleasure of overlapping with another. The only element common to all the fragments was Magda. She was there, saw, and experienced. And erased from memory what overburdened her consciousness.
Here a compilation of things and situations that Magda remembered (jotted down by hand on a single sheet of paper):
1) A plain somewhere in a very hot region and hours of walking in the sun. One foot in front of the other, meanwhile the constant jerk of the rope on her wrist. Someone was holding the rope, but who it was can no longer be said clearly. It's possible that he's wearing sunglasses. It's a sunny day. A warehouse with cars, many of them lying on their side, a white road that runs past the warehouse and from which a lot of dust whirls up when a truck drives on it. In general, a lot of trucks are on the road that day. So there's also a lot of dust. As soon as a dust cloud has settled, the next is already forming, everything is covered with it, hair, eyelashes, toes poking out of sandals. In a warehouse that she passes, several large, unfamiliar pieces of equipment are standing around. Workers in light orange coveralls walk back and forth among these pieces of equipment.
2) A whole day in a room with round frosted glass windows, there's nothing in it, not even a bucket. It takes a long time before she can bring herself to simply pee on the floor. When that's done, she feels sick from the smell, and she pounds with both fists on what she thinks is the door, but in the half-light it isn't easy to make out. There are a lot of peculiar joints in the walls, as if their parts were held together by rivets; corrugated metal debris perhaps, which had been gathered somewhere. That day she pounds until she runs out of strength.
3) An amusement park. Signs in a foreign language, on top of that there's the lack of glasses (the loss of which she can't remember, however; as of a certain point in time they are simply missing), an altogether blurry impression. A clattering roller coaster that seems to pass very closely by her head. Strange-smelling money in her hands and brief moments in which she's not sure whether she is being observed or accompanied by someone. Yet surprisingly clear memories of home, especially of the sled run behind the house and the empty rabbit hutch.
4) Many hours spent alone in a room in which there's a sink, and even a bucket standing in the corner. It is regularly taken out and replaced. Every morning it smells overpoweringly of lemon. In a small medicine cabinet hanging on the wall there's bandaging material but no scissors with which it could be cut from the roll. Here too the milky white portholes. Loud noises penetrate from outside. Mainly at night the screaming of a man, or perhaps of various men, can be heard. These screams are terrible, they can be heard for hours, they simply won't cease. Loud and crowing, like a rooster. She can still hear them to this day and, according to the record of the interrogation, even demonstrated them for the investigators. But aside from the note
Imitates screaming
, there is no information, no more detailed description.
Another piece of paper quoted Magda T. verbatim. Sources weren't provided. On the back of the paper was only a word written in pencil:
Arboretum
.
The land was so flat that you could see to the horizon in every direction. And the horizon was just about knee-high, sometimes it was also up to my hip.
And:
In my uncle's house there was a chest that I was incredibly fond of. It was made of dark wood and smelled wonderfully of old fabrics and shoes. It was empty, so I often lay down inside it in the evenings and let the lid fall shut over me. The lid was slightly warped and didn't close completely, a narrow crack of light always remained, leaving me enough air to breathe. Sometimes I fell asleep in the chest. Once, when I saw my uncle in the yard, I went to the window and shouted down to him. I wanted to know what used to be stored in the chest. He shouted up to me that he didn't remember. He himself had still been a small child, back then. What he meant by that sentence I've never understood. But I never asked him about it either.
Once she was visited at night by a white crocodile, which had been very polite. Another time a little fish with legs came to her and performed in the half-light of the cell several good-naturedly clumsy balancing tricks.
She had been able to laugh at that.
Asked what she wanted to be one day, Magda answered with a smile: An astronaut.
And sometimes a man with a pyramid head paced on the balcony at night and talked to himself.
(Compiled by O. Baumherr, C. Thiel, and P. Quandt.)
The last thing to be found in the green folder was a Polaroid of Magda T. from the year 2003. She is standing next to Oliver Baumherr and two other men, smiling at the camera. Her eyes are narrow slits, as if something were blinding her.
I awoke in the middle of the sheets of paper and articles spread out on the narrow desk. A small piece of paper was stuck to my saliva-wet lips. I removed it carefully and put it with the others. I looked at my watch: six-thirty. At eight I had the appointment with Oliver Baumherr and his colleagues.
While dressing, I tried, as before a test, to recite all the important facts about Magda T.'s relocation. But I got stuck on the man with the pyramid head. Had I really read that?
I searched in the papers for the passage, but couldn't find it.
In the hotel breakfast room, I drank a strong green tea and imagined it making me more and more alert and focused.
â Herr Setz, good morning. Did you sleep well?
â Yes, in a way. Helloâ
I shook hands with the other two men standing next to Oliver Baumherr, and they introduced themselves. Christian. Paul. They were immediately on a first-name basis with me.
â So, Clemens, you're interested in Magda? asked Paul.
â No, Herr Setz wrote those two articles, you knowâ
â Oh, of course, yes.
The man named Paul nodded.
â Back then we reconstructed her picture, it wasn't hard, because the child had been gone for only a few years. And then Ferenz took care of the rest.
The green tea was having an effect.
â Ferenz? I asked. Where does he live?
â Oh, him, said Oliver Baumherr. He's in Brussels at the moment. Or at an unknown location. As the case may be.
â Is he a descendant of . . . ? I asked. Yesterday we talked about . . .
Oliver Baumherr and Christian Thiel exchanged a glance.
â As I said, Ferenz is more like a title. Old Hollereith was a sort of patron for the whole thing. The idea has remained the same.
â Okay.
â Come, we've prepared something for you, Herr Setz. A little demonstration.
Software
The most important factor was time, said Christian. In the question of where missing persons might be, what they looked like now, or what exactly might have happened to them, time played the most important role. Then he told me about a case that had occurred a few years ago. A Russian programmer named Aleksandr Archin, Christian said, had caused quite a stir with new software for simulated aging. His program had worked more reliably than most of the others on the market at that time, his algorithm had been top secret, and the hype in the scene had been accordingly intense. Then some people suddenly claimed that, although the program was very fast and provided results that seemed convincing at first glance in terms of the hypothetical appearance of the aged missing person, the success and recognition rate was at the same time strikingly low. According to Christian it had taken a long time for this vaguely denunciatory criticism to give way to a more concrete and also considerably more astonishing assessment: the aged images
resembled each other
. The people who first noticed it hadn't believed their eyes, Christian said, he himself had felt as if he had been living for months underwater or on the far side of the moon. A downright painful awakening from hypnosis. The images had clearly developed from the source pictures of the missing persons, but in the cheekbones, in the slightly upward-tapering curve of the lips, and above all in the converging eyebrows, the same pattern always emerged, which often had nothing to do with the original pictures. Of course, the solution to this mystery was soon found: the photo of the Russian programmer himself. He had, as it were, programmed his own face into the morphing technology of his software, as a visual constant underlying everything, toward which every hypothetical aging process tended. When, say, a twelve-year-old girl, who had been missing for five years, was made older by the software, she received a second, foreign countenance: that of Aleksandr Archin.
â In itself a pretty virtuoso stunt, Paul interrupted Christian's story.
â Hm? said Christian.
â Well, to program that in, that's actually . . . well, in itself, actually . . .
â Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's absolutely criminal, isn't it?
â Does anyone know why he did it? I asked.
â I don't know, said Paul, maybe he wanted to sabotage the work of people like us. I mean, there are a lot of people who have something against it.