Indigo (36 page)

[RED-CHECKERED FOLDER]

In 1934 a photographer named Ferenz Balkin discovered near Meiringen in the Swiss Alps an interesting, strangely shaped tree stump. After he had pressed his camera's shutter release, the strange tree stump stood up and ran away. The animal was probably the Tatzelwurm, the last of its kind in that region. The Tatzelwurm remained native to Austria for several decades, at the start of exploratory drilling for the Semmering base tunnel several smaller specimens were flushed out and chased away. After all the Tatzelwurms were gone, many workers complained of intense, persistent headaches and attacks of vertigo, which considerably slowed the progress of the excavation.

7.
Rue de la Loi

[GREEN FOLDER]

A few days before my departure for Brussels I received a spam e-mail with the subject line:
Going Belge?
The sender was a certain Merwin Thompson. When I opened the message, it contained only the well-known pitch for erection medication:
Wanna penis stay hard up all the time? Satisfy your wifes inner pleasure infinity! This really works have shown studies all around the world! Absolutely Powerful Unique Incredibly Penis-strength!
And so on. I read the e-mail through several times, in search of hidden messages. I printed it out and then deleted it from my inbox.

When Julia entered the room, I hid the sheet of paper from her. I put it in the green folder with the other documents about Magda T. Now and then I nibbled at them, when I felt unobserved.

The simultaneous fluttering of all the rolling letters on the display board at the Frankfurt airport updating itself automatically every few minutes: like a sudden gust of wind in the leaves of a tree.

On the airplane from Frankfurt to Brussels I read my favorite book,
Miss Lonelyhearts
by Nathanael West, which successfully distracted me from the compulsion to constantly figure out how horizontal or slanted the airplane was now as it hung in the air. At some point the plane plunged into a dense cloud layer, a uniform gray, into which the wings jutted. At the end of the wing, slightly blurred by the dense cloud mist, a light blinked, as if in proof that somewhere another pulse was beating. Inside a cloud it was possible to imagine that you were driving along on the ground. I put the book down and stared out a little,
Directly under us is grass
, I thought,
earth and grass, that's why the movement is so bumpy. A bumpy alpine meadow
. I couldn't help thinking of the article about Magda T. and tried to picture her face, but then the kind God-face of Leo Tolstoy intruded. I was particularly bothered by the passage in which Magda says she would like to be an astronaut because she thought that was a profession she could pursue without difficulty. Yet the long-term psychological damage from missions in outer space was still largely uninvestigated. The only thing that was certain was that the number of astronauts who in old age had to contend with severe hallucinations and unusually rapid progressive dementia was alarmingly high. (A short stretch of wild turbulence shook us.) An American woman astronaut had driven cross-country nonstop in adult diapers to kidnap a rival. Another astronaut had become incapable overnight of setting foot in his own house, so he slept for over a year in a garbage can and ate cockroaches and mice that he, as he said, squeezed like mustard packets to consume them. Another astronaut fell shortly after his return from his first space walk into a mania and, in an attempt to climb the façade of a hundred-story high-rise, broke several vertebrae. And the head of a training program for chimpanzees that had been sent on various missions succumbed in the seventies to a religious delusion and had his disciples wall him alive into a bridge pier somewhere in Oregon. The profession probably held a particular attraction for the sort of people who had always had a tendency to subject themselves to extreme situations, but it was also possible that the effects of the physical distance from earth had actually been previously underestimated. On a Mars mission the earth is no longer perceptible to the naked eye, and who knows what new forms of panic are born at that moment. The landing in Brussels was rough, the cabin lights went out twice, and an old woman took out her rosary and began, soundlessly, thank God, to finger the beads.

I had developed a habit of thinking after every successful landing: In reality I've crashed, pain and chaos, death and descent into hell. But then I'm granted a second chance, permitted to return from the gray asphodel swamp, like a broken lamp I am carefully laid on the boat that brings me to the other shore, back into this world, there I'm given some time to recover my breath. Slowly and arduously I relearn all the skills that I forgot at one fell swoop, distinguishing left from right, doing mental arithmetic, speaking, recognizing people and faces, and reenter life exactly where I was torn out of it: The plane has landed, a miracle, and I'm really standing on the earth, the old, familiar ground, which I had actually lost forever. Even as colorless a being as the secretary at Oeversee High School, to whom I had complained about how bad my stomach flu was, which meant I would probably have to stay home this week, seemed to me at that moment a true miracle, a gift from heaven.

I had such thoughts as I took a taxi to my hotel, and then I thought: Despite that uplifting, wonderful fantasy, which can sweeten your whole day, it would be incredibly funny if on the return flight I crashed in actuality and not only in an imaginary parallel world, if I had through my fantasy made that disaster palatable for fate, had raised the irony ante on the game table, as it were . . . And already I was panicking.

I was not even capable of retracing the fatal train of thought in order to retroactively correct it. I told the taxi driver to stop, paid, and looked for a little café, that almost always worked, the darker the café, the stronger the effect, shortly after entering you feel pleasantly bodiless . . . Soon I was doing somewhat better, and to round it all off, I ordered a number of childish things like a large soda and a couple scoops of ice cream with whipped cream (which I hoped would come with a fan-shaped cone and a little glitter umbrella, the wooden handle of which I would lick off first).

I pulled the green folder out of my backpack and read indiscriminately from the documents compiled by Oliver Baumherr and his colleagues.

I found especially funny an article mentioning that the two abductors who eventually took Magda away from her father and her uncle to bring her home apparently must have been heavily under the influence of drugs, so that they didn't blame the symptoms on the presence of the Indigo child in the backseat, but rather on the effects of the narcotic. Smart. They let Magda T. out somewhere near a psychiatric clinic, drove away in the car, and left no further traces.

She had climbed a white flight of steps into the large building and had there told the first person she encountered who she was and where she lived. That hadn't worked right away, however, because the man had been quite slow on the uptake. He had just stared at her and shaken his head.

Then another man had come and had led her away from the first man. This second man had been considerably more receptive and understanding. He had asked her name, her address, the names of her parents, her birthday, her favorite ice-cream flavor, the name of her pillow, the exact age of her fingernails. They grew back completely every few weeks, he said, even if you pulled them off entirely—that was very painful, but you could be sure that they would eventually come back, as nice and long as before. She had not been able to answer all the man's questions, so she had asked him to take her to a telephone. The man had laughed and said it was
obviously prohibited
for them to use the phone, that only gave you radiation in your skull and a satellite loaded you up with electricity from outer space so that you would lie incapacitated in bed for several days, your head as big as the room and your hands as small as the red sulfuric heads of matches.

At some point she had been pulled away from this man too, finally people had listened to her and suddenly everything had happened very fast, a telephone had even been available, and they had called various agencies for her. After half an hour with the kind and understanding people she had been left alone again and after a while the understanding bearded man had returned, who had worn a white gown, and had said he felt somewhat nauseous and dizzy, he probably had an upset stomach from the
wretched muck they serve you here
.

Although I didn't entirely understand what exactly had happened and what I had just read, I had to laugh heartily.

To quell the excitement before the meeting with Herr Ferenz, I listened to a few songs by the British band Faithless on my iPod: “Mass Destruction,” “Insomnia,” and “Bombs.”

Besides, I was in the city in which Europe was made. Here you could distract yourself for at least a few hours. I looked at the little peeing man, the city's greatest attraction. A dense crowd of tourists surrounded the tiny sculpture. An Italian woman had burst into tears out of sheer amazement and was photographing it fervently from all sides.

When I returned to the hotel, the man at reception said that someone had dropped something off for me.

– Voilà, he said softly, as he handed it to me.

A Jenga block. Somewhat scuffed, but still clearly recognizable.

– Merci, I said.

With the voice on the telephone I had arranged a meeting place near my hotel. In a small green and brown park full of ravens I waited for someone to approach me. I held the Jenga block out in front of me, clearly visible to anyone passing by.

The large birds with their completely black, eyeless-seeming heads stalked morosely across the meadow and rooted around with their beaks between the blades of grass for food. At some distance stood a steel structure that obviously claimed to be art, and thus seemed so completely disengaged and dissociated from all present and future problems of the Brussels population that it was almost offensive.

– Jenga.

Herr Ferenz was a peculiar figure. Long sideburns adorned his face, although the hair on his head had already thinned considerably. He was strikingly thin, and had little more shoulders than an egg. When he laughed, his expression had something quietly content and open like that of a sloth.

On the way out of the park we crossed a meadow on which a large oak chest stood, next to it two men wearing silvery colorful stage clothing as if for a magic show leaned against a tree and smoked cigarettes. Three stone steps led us from the green space down to the sidewalk of the Avenue des Azalées. We followed it southward and eventually entered a small restaurant, in which Herr Ferenz was greeted with a bow.

– Thank you for making time, I said.

Herr Ferenz only nodded.

– You have to excuse my German, he said. It's rusty.

He spoke with a very slight accent, which sounded Eastern European.

– How did you get the name Ferenz?

– Oh, he said. On the black market.

He laughed.

– There's a black market for everything. Even names. Even appearances. A gigantic one. A monstrous one. But the problem is never the production in itself. That is, no one knows the formula. How it works. You understand? A proper, a functioning name.

I let the cream of pumpkin soup drip from my spoon back into the bowl, put the spoon down, and looked at him. His facial expression changed, became softer, more compassionate. He shook his head and said:

– Terrible, isn't it?

I nodded.

– But that's just how people are, he said, stuck a fork coiled with spaghetti in his mouth, chewed. Mmm . . . mm . . . They simply see their fellow human beings as tools . . . mm . . . Some tools stand around ready to harvest, you only have to stuff them into a van at the right time and drive away with them. Others you first have to plant, such as . . . let's say you need a little . . . a name for an experiment, then it hardly makes sense to locate this name somewhere, to memorize the times of day when it's attainable, that is, when a controlled extraction can take place and so on. No. It would be much easier if you simply paid a woman from Eastern Europe who is unintentionally pregnant with a name, so that you can have her name. The name isn't registered anywhere, so it won't be missed, if it—

I raised a finger.

– A question, I said. What exactly are you telling me here?

He laughed. Then he said:

– The world is a sick place. It does no good to stick your fingers in your ears and say
mimimimi
.

– Okay, I said.

He propped both elbows on the table, rested his chin on his fists, and looked at me. For three, perhaps four seconds.

– You're not naïve, he said in a tone as if he wanted to declare,
Check!
You know exactly what I mean. For most people the world is a . . .
un hypermarché du bricolage
. A DIY superstore. Shelves, shelves, shelves everywhere, and every single one full of tools that you can use until they break. Just think of animals. As soon as we discover a new animal, the first thing we're interested in is the question of whether we can eat it. And with us it's exactly the same. When a baby is born, people start thinking:
What might it be good for? In what way might it serve me?

After the meal, during which I mainly had to tell Herr Ferenz about Oliver Baumherr, how he was doing, how he treated his colleagues, we went to his apartment. He led me up the Kunstberg to a building with a small shop on the ground floor that had abstract bird sculptures and hats in its display window. Little sculptures and hats, only these two things were sold there, at extremely high prices. The bird sculptures seemed archaic and could have stood next to many-armed god statuettes and erotic carvings on Dr. Freud's desk on Berggasse in Vienna, while the hats floated ownerless through his dreams and meant all sorts of things, anxieties about the future or geometrically impressive family constellations, or whatever, there was no salvation from interpretation, no more than there was an emergency exit from history.