Indigo (9 page)

– No.

– Okay, then please fill this out.

She gave me the form, I entered the requested information, and signed it. While I was writing, I saw out of the corner of my eye the young woman grab her right breast and adjust it a little with a straightforward movement. I made a mistake on my own address and asked for a new form.

– It's all right, she said with an enchanting smile. Are you one of the ski lift people?

– Ski lift? No. I'm just here on a visit.

– I see, said the woman, apparently a bit disappointed. Well, anyway, there are so many people here because of the ski lift, yeah . . . It gets a bit weird after a while. But you're visiting someone, fine, fine . . .

She put the form in a drawer and looked for the room key. She found it under a small breakfast plate that someone had evidently left here in her workspace. With a sigh she placed the plate next to the cage, jolting the exotic bird out of its semiconscious state. It took a few steps sideways on its perch and eyed skeptically the strange world behind the bars.

– Room fourteen. That's on the second floor. The elevator is back there to your right.

– Thanks, I said. I have one more question.

– Go ahead.

– Do you know your way around here?

– Of course, she said with a nod. Where d'ya have to go?

– I wrote it down here . . . I have to go there tomorrow morning . . . One second . . .

I rummaged around in my coat pocket for the piece of paper, made the whole thing a bit more suspenseful by pretending not to find it right away, tried the one pocket, then the other. In reality I knew the address by heart and had even studied the satellite image on the Internet, but here, in this little town where everyone knew everyone, it would undoubtedly be revealing to find out how people felt about the Stennitzer family.

I pushed the piece of paper toward the young woman and focused on her face.

Stennitzer fam.

Glockenhofweg 1

8910 Gillingen

The woman's eyes went blank, then became alert, then she seemed to relax again. Information was being retrieved.
Maybe the name means nothing to her
, I thought.
Unlikely, but possible
. When she began to speak, I could tell that I had just turned into something scary in her eyes.

– So you're best off going out right here, outside the building, okay? Well, no, let me start over, you exit the building, okay? And then take a right, walk up the street until you get to the hill, and then take a left, so going up the whole time . . . uphill, that should actually . . .

She placed a hand on the key, pushed it toward me.

– Thank you, I said.

– They live pretty far out, she said.

It sounded a little like a warning, so I said:

– I'm sure I'll make it. What do you think?

– I'm sorry?

– I mean, walking there. That's doable, walking, right?

– Yeah, sure, it's all doable. At the very top of the hill. Just keep going uphill and . . .

I held her gaze and pretended I had to store the important information she had given me. When the bird in its cage made a rasping noise, the woman started violently.

– Thanks, I said, and went to the elevator.

While I waited, I looked over to the woman again. She extended a finger through the open cage door toward the bird, but it wasn't paying attention to her.

– Hey, you, I heard her saying softly. Got frightened, huh?

The key hung on a small piece of wood with the word
Jenga
on it. I imagined someone, frustrated after the collapse of his Jenga tower, throwing the blocks across the room and deciding to turn them all into key fobs.

The room was small and smelled minty.

The light switch in the bathroom activated, along with two flickering fluorescent tubes over the mirror, a vent, the sound of which was somewhat reminiscent of the buzz of leaf blowers in autumn. In the sink was a flower vase, half filled with water.

As always when I was alone in a hotel room in the evening, I turned on the television. Harmless voices, people, and events that had nothing to do with me made the room a bit warmer. Only then could I close the curtains without being seized by a slight panic in the face of my solitude.

I sat down in the broad armchair in front of the window and looked out into the area in the evening light. That feeling when you gaze from some distance at a landscape or a town in which you assume the presence of a particular person. The peculiar hue, like the quality, reminiscent of underwater photos, of television pictures from the seventies with their blending colors, their rounded corners, and the bright, unnaturally flickering orange into which ordinary sunlight is transformed. The certainty:
In one of these houses, on one of these streets.
Prominent architectural elements begin to beckon, dark spots send signals. Trees stand still as if for a group photo. Gillingen: a church spire, a few houses, a handful of shops. Wooded hills in the vicinity. So this was the hometown of Christoph Stennitzer, fourteen years old, profoundly affected by Indigo syndrome since the first year of his life. His mother owned a medium-sized paper mill, or rather, a few years earlier she had sold it in several steps, when Christoph's condition had been getting worse and worse.

Those were the words Gudrun Stennitzer had used in the e-mail she had sent me:
When C's condition was getting worse and worse.
Of course, Christoph was a healthy, outwardly inconspicuous kid. Once he had had the measles, another time a severe flu with mild pneumonia, as a result of which he had to be hospitalized for a week, but apart from that everything with him was fine. If you saw him in a video, you wouldn't notice the slightest difference from other children. The problem, the
condition
, lay elsewhere.

Christoph lived in his own roughly four-hundred-square-foot house, which had a bathroom and even—as I gathered from the photo attached to the e-mail—a satellite dish mounted on the roof. He had moved into it on his third birthday.
He was excited
, his mother had written me.
A little house of his own, just for him.

After I had closed the curtains, the unpleasant hotel room feeling came after all and constricted my throat, so I focused for a few minutes on the images on the television and waited until it passed. Then I turned on the reading lamp over the nightstand next to the bed and sat in front of it. With the peaceful murmur of the television program, which was about the lives of reptiles in a Cologne zoo, in the background, I reviewed all my notes and organized them a bit for the next day. I was planning to go straight to the Stennitzers' after getting up. We hadn't arranged an exact time.
We're always here, of course, where are we supposed to go.

I had already noticed in Frau Stennitzer's first e-mail (which, like all the others, I had printed out and filed with my notes) the dramatic tone she tended to adopt every few lines, the tone of someone who hadn't spoken with anyone about her problems for a long time and assumed that she wouldn't be understood anymore anyway, now, after she had suffered for so long in obscurity. But perhaps there was something else behind it, for the Stennitzers, it seemed, did not at all live in isolation. Gudrun Stennitzer mentioned at several points her neighbor who often visited, and also a Dutch doctor who a year ago came every few months for his research.

I lay down on the bed and masturbated a bit to a telephone woman who begged to be called. She was cross-eyed, which for some reason made me feel very tender and protective toward her and made it difficult to think erotic thoughts. The woman looked dramatically to the left and right, shielding her eyes with her hand, but still the telephone didn't ring, while every few seconds an alarm with a rotating blue light went off in the studio and announced that the amount of money to be won had just gone up by two hundred euros.

When my compassion for her became too intense, I gave up and wrapped myself in the blanket. After I had found a station whose nighttime programming seemed harmless enough for me to let it watch over my sleep, I turned the volume down to the softest level, only a line away from complete soundlessness, and closed my eyes.

I usually slept best to
Space Night
, which was often shown late at night on BR-alpha, wonderfully hovering footage from orbit, the slowed-down dance of astronauts attached to their umbilical cords while they repaired solar receptors or readjusted antennae and under them continents floated and swirling clouds drifted across the Atlantic. But that channel wasn't available in the hotel, so I had to content myself with an N24 documentary on the making and loading of shipping containers.

Glockenhofweg 1

The next morning a man with glasses sat at reception. So I asked the same question again. I had to go here, please, I explained, and read from the crumpled piece of paper: Glockenhofweg 1, Stennitzer family . . .

On the screen behind the man a silent video clip of the band AC/DC was playing. The sweating guitarist Angus Young hopped across the stage like a limping bird, and his mouth looked like it was taking big gulps of air.

– Yeah, that's out there, the man said. But I can't recall right now . . .

– Roughly in what direction?

– Yeah, we can look at a map, if you want.

He turned around, closed the window with the hopping rock star, and opened Google Maps.

– So you've never been up there before? I asked.

He shook his head.

– You probably don't live here in the town.

– Yes, I do, he said. But I don't go up there. No reason for me to.

While the printer forced out the sheet of paper, we stood silently facing each other. I put the printout in my pocket, thanked him, and went into the breakfast room. When I returned to the entrance area, I saw that the man with the glasses and the young woman from the previous evening were sitting at reception and talking softly to each other.

The man, when he saw me coming, picked up the cage with the bird in it and put it on the floor. Then he disappeared through a back door, the woman stayed behind. She smiled at me as I passed her. The bird made a soft rasping noise.

Fortified by my breakfast, which had consisted of a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, I walked up to the Stennitzer family's house. I was terribly nervous and, to bolster my courage a little, listened on my iPod first to “Sweet Home Alabama” by the Leningrad Cowboys, then to “Joyride” by Roxette, to the beginning of “Le Sacre du Printemps,” conducted by Valery Gergiev, and finally to “Stop the Rock” by Apollo 440.

The spring in the stranger's step must have looked odd to the people who encountered me that sunny morning. And even more so the singing:

–
Shake my paranoia . . . can't stop the rock . . . shake my paranoia . . .

This song always dispelled all melancholy or brooding thoughts and made me empty and receptive like a dry sponge—the ideal state for an interview. But that elation was soon clouded again by the impression the people in the town made on me. They all seemed to me strangely elongated and excessively upright, like figures on a ceiling fresco, which can never entirely fill the space of the dome in which they live. Two-legged lizards. Perhaps my perception had something to do with my own compressed posture that morning, or perhaps with the mountain scenery, which was unfamiliar for my spatial sense. They weren't high mountains, more like hills, surrounding the town, but they were always there, awaited you at the end of every road and intimate side street, like creatures turned away from you, whose shoulders you have to study for a clue to their mood.

Frau Stennitzer was a small, pleasantly proportioned woman in her mid-forties. She had long hair, a pale face with deep, distinctive eye sockets, and a thin mouth that shone unusually red, like a diamond on a playing card. She greeted me at the gate to the yard on her property. She often spent whole days here outside, in the company of her plants, she said. In the house it was cool, the heat wasn't on yet. Not until September has really begun, Frau Stennitzer said. So I left my coat on.

I should have brought my scarf, I thought. The living room was particularly cold. But Frau Stennitzer seemed to be accustomed to the low temperature in her house. In addition to the cold, it struck me that the whole time I spent in the house the rattling of a washing machine could be heard. Every few minutes it took a short break, then it started again.

We sat down. Frau Stennitzer put both hands to her temples and made a few circling movements.

– Do you have . . . ? I asked.

– What? A headache? she asked.

– No, that's not what I meant.

– No, it's all right, she said. Please, you don't have to be careful around me in that regard.

– Okay.

– It's fine, she said. It's not like it's anything new.

A nervous laugh.

The room smelled strongly of air freshener. The bottle was on the floor next to the table, Febreze. Next to it another one. I also noticed a bottle on a shelf, but with a different label.

– Yeah, well, thank you very much for agreeing to speak with me.

– Oh, my God, said Frau Stennitzer, putting a hand on her collarbone. Please, it's nothing. If it helps.

We were silent. I fished my notebook out of my pocket.

– Maybe you'd like to go right into the yard? The little house . . .

She said that like a weary museum guide who always has to show the visitors the
Mona Lisa
before anything else, even though hundreds of far more interesting paintings are hanging on the walls all around.

– Yeah, I'd like that. If your son won't—

– Oh, yeah, of course, it's fine. He's not in his room right now anyway.

– Then where is he?

Frau Stennitzer laughed, looked at her fingers folded in her lap, and then said:

– So you'd like to see his room, right?

– As I said, yes, if it doesn't bother him.