“Dabbelink?” Oskar finally asks.
“How do you know?”
“His picture’s in all the papers. The steel cable got me worried. You remember: Liam and the Nazis in the jeep.”
“I’d forgotten that. I thought it was my own idea.”
“One’s own ideas are rarer than we would wish them to be.”
While Sebastian sinks his head down onto the table in Freiburg, Oskar moves from side to side on his shabby sofa, trying to find a comfortable position. Compared with the flawless appearance of its owner, the state of the sofa is a scandal, but one that Oskar can well afford. He looks up through the skylight. The moon is bright as a spotlight in the theater, bathing the room in white. Oskar lights a cigarette and exhales languid curls of smoke from his mouth and nose.
“Jealous?” he asks. “Over Maik?”
“Nonsense!” Sebastian retorts, a little too indignantly.
“Then what? An escape attempt?”
“Oskar…”
“Or an experiment to prove the irreversibility of time?”
“Oskar! A man is dead. Don’t you give a shit?”
Coming from the mouth of the murderer, this sounds like bad cabaret. Only the seriousness of the situation prevents Oskar from using this opportunity to tease his friend.
“Cher ami.” Oskar takes two more quick puffs, then stubs the cigarette out in the ashtray on the floor next to the sofa. “Life is merely an exception in nature. Did you like Dabbelink?”
“That’s got nothing to do with it!”
“Answer me.”
“No, I didn’t like him.”
“Does he have family?”
“Everyone has family.”
“A wife and child?”
“No.”
“Did he have style?”
“Now you’re going too far!”
There is a rustling sound over the phone as Sebastian tugs his shirt out of his trousers to dab his forehead with the tails.
“Mon Dieu,” Oskar says. “You’re behaving like any old hypocrite.”
Oskar has stood up and opened the skylight. He rests his elbows against the ledge and stretches his back, as though he is going to speak to a large audience. His fatalism is not entirely responsible for his calm demeanor, as Sebastian thinks. Ever since he read about Dabbelink’s death in the newspaper, he has had time to consider every sentence in this conversation. The difficult part lies before him. From now on, every word must count. From now on, every word is a fiber in the rope with which Oskar wants to pull his friend over to him.
He wants to remind him that the entire universe owes its existence to a break in symmetry. Also that the existence of human consciousness is merely a result of this terrible breach, the space between its poles (big and small, hot and cold, black and white) spanned by thought. Without opposites there can be no distinctions, no space and no time; without opposites everything and nothing would be identical. Since distinctions are the basic condition for the material world, how is man supposed to believe in the moral validity of the distinction between “good” and “evil”? Why should one feel appalled about the extinction of a Dabbelink—when it was not even known if the man had style? Oskar laid particular importance on the first few words of the introduction: Morality is the duty of the stupid. Intelligent people exercise freedom of choice.
He has just drawn a breath when Sebastian cuts in.
“That’s not all, Oskar. Liam has been kidnapped.”
Individual stars hang on tight in the glow of light over Geneva. The city, thinks Oskar, is an enormous sack full of fear, sorrow, revulsion, and a tiny bit of happiness, tied up at the top.
“Liam is in scout camp,” he says slowly.
“Listen to me,” Sebastian says. “Dabbelink’s death is Liam’s ransom. Do you understand?”
The sofa is directly under the skylight, so Oskar merely has to turn around to sit down again.
“And…” Oskar does not normally break off midsentence. “And is Liam back?”
Sebastian covers his face with his fingers. This simple question would be reason enough to end the conversation and go back to lying on the sofa in the living room. Instead, he starts talking.
After a few coherent sentences (Sunday evening, service station, motion sickness pills) he starts losing himself in details. He talks about laughing truck drivers, ants carrying dead caterpillars, butterfly collectors, and an extended typology of waiting. Talking works well—everything can be described, everything consists of harmless details that add up to an event. When Sebastian has finished, he feels as if he has spoken for half an hour, but Oskar has smoked only a single cigarette in that time.