Indigo (37 page)

Herr Ferenz's apartment was on the third floor. The air there was astonishingly fresh, as if the windows had never been closed in the last twenty years. Everywhere stood small statues in the style of North American indigenous people. Masks hung on the walls or were stacked on the floor. Ronald Reagan was among them, Michael Jackson and Saddam Hussein and a number of other classic bank robber masks. A few colorful party hats stood, one inside the other like plastic cups in the supermarket, in the form of a slightly bent ziggurat on a workbench.

On a desk leaned a calendar with pictures of Elis dolls. Each week a new picture. In today's space someone had written in large block letters:

ARRIVÉ!!!

C.S.—9:00.

C.S.—that had to be me, Clemens Setz. Strange, I thought, at nine o'clock I was just on the way to Frankfurt. I hadn't arrived in Brussels until around noon. And the three exclamation points . . .

On the wall next to the desk hung a few very impressive black-and-white photographs, which had presumably been taken with extremely long exposure times. The view of a city, a soccer stadium, a classroom. One of the pictures was signed with a wide
V
.

– Beautiful, aren't they?

– The pictures? Interesting, yes.

– That's a special technique, which . . . yeah, it would probably be too complicated to explain it now.

There was a pause.

– Oliver Baumherr showed me documents about Magda T.

Ferenz laughed. He had the Jenga block in his hand, though I couldn't remember having given him mine back. I checked my pockets. They were empty.

– Magda, yes, dear Magda, said Ferenz. I was the one who . . .

He ended the sentence with a rolling gesture of his right hand.

– You know . . . Herr Setz, right?

– Yes.

– Not Seitz?

– No.

– Okay. Herr Setz. When you called, I thought,
Olivier is sending me a gift
. But that's not the case. You really don't have the slightest . . . ? No, tell me: Why are you here?

– Well, I worked at the Helianau Institute.

– Mm-hmm, Ferenz said with a nod.

– And I noticed that students disappeared. They were taken away, and the name . . . your name kept coming up.

– That's what happens when you buy your name in a DIY superstore, said Ferenz.

– After that, I did some research and wrote an article about a single mother in Gillingen, I even brought the article along for you, and I visited the family of one of my former students, and at their home everything was really weird, I had an attack there.

It took a while for Ferenz to respond. Then he said:

– Seriously?

– What?

– Oh, never mind. Now you're here, right? And a friend of Olivier's is a friend of mine. Unfortunately, the reverse isn't true.

He leaned against the workbench, gave me, it seemed to me, a pitying look, and began to speak.

– If you give people the chance to do something they're too ashamed to do on their own, you always trigger an avalanche. In 1739 Thomas Coram established the Foundling Hospital in London. At the time it was the first care facility for abandoned children. Before that there was nothing. If a mother wanted to get rid of her baby, she took it and . . . (Herr Ferenz pantomimed it.) But the Foundling Hospital had only four hundred beds, and the rush of mothers who wanted to give up their babies was tremendous, well, you have to imagine: really tremendous, incredible, barely manageable. So all the mothers had to participate in a lottery. A container with balls. The mother reaches into it blindly. If she draws a white ball, the child is accepted, a red ball means waiting list, a black ball rejection. In many attics in England these black balls could still be found well into the twentieth century, mostly wrapped in some cloth so that they weren't recognizable at first glance. The old disgrace.

Pause. I said nothing.

– There are so many parents, said Herr Ferenz, who want to get rid of them, most often, for some reason, in Scandinavia. Last year there were eleven.

– Eleven children?

– Many parents take a close look at the new owners first, it's, well, it's terrible.

He left the workbench and walked through the room. Then he picked up one of the big-nosed masks and, with a weary sigh, put it next to his bed. The mask was probably supposed to portray a hippopotamus. It was stone-gray and plastered with a great number of shiny strips. In some places a few headlines of the newspaper that had been used to make the papier-mâché shone through from under the gray paint.

– Yes, that's terrible, I said.

– And there's nothing at all that can be done about it, said Herr Ferenz, picking up the mask and putting it on.

He tapped it with his knuckles as if he wanted to check it for weak spots. Then he took it off again, shook his head, and sat down.

– It all proceeds by way of friends and relatives, by way of families, he murmured. That's the great niche that no one ever gets close to. And if a family would like to immigrate to Brazil or Argentina . . . together, you understand? Hand in hand? Then you can't prevent them from doing that either. Ah,
putain
. . .

He had turned the mask around and discovered something in it. With his little finger he took it out. It was a residue of reddish paint, as if from lipstick. Herr Ferenz moistened his thumb and wiped the remaining mark from the inside of the mask with it.

The oh-God-what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here? feeling set in.

But that was nothing, said Herr Ferenz, he had once worked on the case of a mother, an Albanian woman, who had sold her children to a pimp. The pimp, who was distantly related to her, took the two kids one night. One of the two kids, due to lack of oxygen during birth, was mentally disabled, couldn't speak, and had difficulties with spatial coordination, and on account of those impairments the mother had been promised a particularly high price for the child. So she had the two of them (four and seven years old) picked up, and waited for the money. But it didn't come, for weeks the mother waited in vain for the agreed-upon high sum. So she went to the police and reported the pimp. But not for child abduction or human trafficking, no, she sued him because he didn't pay his debts with her. And that was how the whole thing first got out. And then, in court, the woman wept and said: I made a mistake. Yes, he, Ferenz, had with his own . . . but what, what— Herr Ferenz waited until I removed my hands from my ears.

– What's the matter? he asked.

– Nothing, I said, that's just automatic . . . when something makes me angry.

– Did you hear what I said?

– Yes, every word.

– Well, and then recently I heard about this incident, an unusual occurrence in one of those long lines for a baby hatch in Brooklyn, a woman was standing there—

– Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, one second!

I had actually waved my hands. Herr Ferenz looked at me with an amused expression in his eyes. He put the mask on the workbench.

– What?

– In line for the baby hatch? I asked.

– Yes.

– Isn't that a bit . . .

– In-your-face? Yes, of course, totally. Anyway, it was a few years ago, and there was this line, and you know how it is, like at the airport, you wait and wait, one woman behind another, and some have these little blue frozen bundles in their hands and wonder why it's not moving, others have come with a stroller because they at least tried it for a while, you understand, purchase of a stroller, ekseterah—

The French intonation of the et cetera brought me back to reality. For a moment I had accepted the invitation of the horror story and had imagined the situation.

– But that didn't really happen!

– Not here, said Herr Ferenz, shaking his head. In Brooklyn. But . . . well, anyway, these women are standing there in line, and some time has passed, and the night is also cold, always in winter, most babies end up in the hatch . . . um, most babies end up in the hatch in winter, ah, German word order, the faster I speak, I make more . . . the more mistakes—I—make, haha, but this is nothing, you should hear my Flemish, it's absolute crap, even though I hear it every day—

– You're joking, right?

– No, I can't speak Flemish, it's enough to drive you crazy. Where was I with the story? It . . . ah, yes, the night is quite cold, one of those nasty nights when really everything freezes, even makeup or superglue or the hands of a clock, and why isn't it moving, up front, the women begin to ask, first one, then the others, in Brooklyn a few years ago, a night like other nights, icy cold, and then suddenly someone answers, Yeah, because she's taking so long there in front, she still wants to say goodbye, and the others reply: Yeah, she should have thought about that sooner, this is already my third time here, and I've never said goodbye, that doesn't even occur to me, to let a bastard like that make me feel guilty, and so on, just the way it is in Brooklyn in wintertime. And then suddenly a woman in the line attracts attention, she doesn't have a baby at all. She's just standing there, in her winter clothes, and is, so to speak, childless. She's waiting, all by herself, and it of course quickly becomes clear to the others that she's not with anyone, she's not a companion or something. So they speak to her, What are you doing in our line, why are you standing here, if you don't even want to give up a baby? The woman doesn't answer, pretends she's deaf. When the others move forward a few feet, she moves forward a few feet too, but she does no more than that, she doesn't respond at all to the other women in line for the hatch. In the hatch line without a hatchling, you might say, hahaha.

He actually laughed.

During that brief breather it occurred to me to pay attention to my facial muscles. I seized the marionette strings, which had slipped out of my grasp, pulled them tight, and my mouth closed.

– And the woman ignores everyone who speaks to her, she turns her head away and doesn't answer, doesn't respond, the others look at her to see whether she might be pregnant, for some women also come to the baby hatch in Brooklyn to give birth astride it, as it were, it happens from time to time that idiots like that get in the line.

– Naaaa, stop, stop, stop! I cried. This is—

– It's almost over, the story. Anyway, the woman inches forward in the line, the others follow her, and she is standing in front of the baby hatch, and now everyone is really very, very curious about what she is going to put into it. Will it be a bucket with a face on it, like those crazy women from the suburbs always carry around with them, God knows why, or will it be a gift, for that happens now and then too, or money in an envelope or baby clothes in those depressing colors that baby clothes for some reason always have to be, you know, those depressing autumn colors, that dark red and that blue. Or what will it be? That's what the women in line are wondering. And then the woman without a baby is finally next, and she steps in front of the hatch, the automatic opening is activated, the motion sensor detected her, so she isn't a figment of their imagination or the appearance of an angel that has come among the poor lost souls, but a woman of flesh and blood. And what do you think she puts in the baby hatch?

– What?

Herr Ferenz took a step back and shook his head. As he did so, he laughed, as if at some childishness.

– We could go to a new club, to Getuige X-1. Just opened a few months ago. There's actually not much going on there yet, but . . .

– No, thanks, I said. I'd rather go back to the . . . But what was in the baby hatch?

Herr Ferenz laughed:

– I like you better this way, Herr Setz. You should see your face now. Open for anything.