Indigo (46 page)

When he stepped out of the narrow side street and wiped his sooty fingers on his pants, he couldn't help thinking of Willi's apartment and of what he had done to it. He imagined Cordula showering four times a day to wash the horrible smell off her body. Eventually they would have children, Willi and Cordula, and they would look exactly like all other couples. No difference.

And for a while everything will go on like this. First distance, then overcoming of distance, then union, and again distance.

On the opposite side of the street walked a woman who looked with the typical expression of young mothers into the stroller in front of her. She followed it with careful steps, as if, like a lawn mower, it had its own will. Most likely she had a headache and would soon vomit on her baby, like so many mothers every day in this country.

After a while Robert recognized the area. Yes, the university hospital, and here the tram stop. Should he ride it, as he had back then? A question you usually asked yourself only at an amusement park, in front of a decrepit roller coaster.

He got on, nodded to the iBall, and sat down on one of the rearmost seats. That way he would have a second longer to see the sign for the pastry shop approaching him.

The tram began to move. Houses rolled past. Parked cars. Soon they would reach the pastry shop . . . He had put the backpack with the empty folders on his knees.

A rattling went through the tram, possibly coins lay in the ruts of the tracks. At least Robert had seen that once on television, many years ago.

Merangasse stop. But there was no sign to catch his eye. Where the pastry shop used to be, there was now a hair salon. Black mannequin heads turned, eyeless, wearing wigs, on rotating posts in the display window.

Noon passed with ringing bells through the district. But that didn't make Robert hungry. He was completely calm. Had he been a cat, he would probably even have forgotten to purr. Between the individual seconds of the day, a pleasant glow became apparent, as in the cracks of escalators. Even when he wasn't paying attention to it, he could sense it. With his eyes closed.

That completely destroyed person, he thought. The math teacher. A miracle that he hadn't long since joined a parade. He was like a heap of ashes with which the wind had already begun to play. Where were they now, all the conic sections and pyramids and tetrahedrons and vector spaces and matrices with which he had spent his life? Would they eventually come to his aid? Would they gather around their old confidant, like a swarm of rational insects? Or would they abandon him, as you—according to Armstrong, Aldrin, and a handful of other participants in later moon missions—were suddenly and inexplicably abandoned by most of your childhood memories after you had returned from the moon? The maiden name of Buzz Aldrin's mother was Moon.

Robert imagined the teacher unscrewing the top of his own skull and reaching with his hand into his head, which was filled with a black, grainy, dry substance. He pulled out a whole fistful and put it in his mouth. Chewed. Swallowed. Shook his head and murmured: Not any better.

Usually Robert would have laughed at a thought like that. And might have felt the desire to draw it.

But now he was completely at peace. He desired nothing. Like ashes in a windless place, say, on the moon. The American flag there after more than fifty years looks like its own photo, it never flutters, stands there like a board.

A few days ago Robert had seen the moon during the day. That regrettable error in the solar system. That confused expression it had. The people on the bridge who paid no attention to it. It was terrible to see it like that. Listing heavily, half capsized in the blue. Bright white and as delicate as the tiny bones in the middle ear. And no responsible authority, no emergency service you could have reported it to, as you report a beached whale or a young cat stuck in a treetop. As if the sky were a glue trap, set thousands of years ago, in which it had gotten caught this morning and from where it now stared down at the daylight versions of people and animals, otherwise unknown to it, with a mixture of bewilderment and fascination, incapable of turning for even a second its face with the half-open crater mouth away from us.

 

About the Author

Clemens J. Setz was born in 1982 and lives in Graz, Austria. He has received numerous prizes for his work, including the Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2011, the Literature Prize of the City of Bremen 2010, and the Ernst-Willner-Preis at the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition in 2008. Setz was shortlisted for the German Book Prize for his novels
Die Frequenzen (The Frequencies)
and
Indigo
.

About the Translator

Ross Benjamin is a writer and translator living in Nyack, New York. His translations include Friedrich Hölderlin's
Hyperion
, Kevin Vennemann's
Close to Jedenew
, Joseph Roth's
Job
, and Thomas Pletzinger's
Funeral for a Dog
. He has received the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship.

Also by Clemens J. Setz

SONS AND PLANETS

THE FREQUENCIES

LOVE IN THE TIME OF THE MAHLSTADT CHILD

THE OSTRICH TRUMPET

Originally published in German as INDIGO: Roman
Copyright © 2012 by Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin
Illustrations on pp 44 and 134 copyright © Wikimedia, Photo: Michel Mazeau. Illustration on p 279 copyright © James Soc Nyun. All other illustrations from the author's collection or Suhrkamp Verlag's archive.
Translation copyright © 2014 by Ross Benjamin
First American Edition 2014

All rights reserved

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Setz, Clemens J., 1982– author.
[Indigo : roman. English]
Indigo : a novel / Clemens J. Setz ; translated by Ross Benjamin. — First American edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-87140-268-4
I. Benjamin, Ross, translator. II. Title.
PT2721.E78153513 2014
833´.92—dc23

2014028510

ISBN 978-0-87140-282-0 (e-book)

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