That was four weeks ago. Since then, of course, the detective has tried his best not to make any noise when he gets up early. His new girlfriend lies asleep in bed.
[5]
SCHILF CAREFULLY PUTS ONE FOOT IN FRONT of the other on the clanging metal grate. He sucks the excessively warm morning air through his teeth and gazes at the facades of the buildings around him. People are sleeping behind all these dark windows, in layers beside and above each other like pupating maggots. This image does not exactly make him feel any keener on today’s continuation of his existence. Just as he is halfway down the steps, the inner observer starts talking.
Once again, Detective Schilf left the apartment by the fire escape, the voice in his head says. He was not keen on his new case.
Schilf has known this voice for over twenty years, ever since the fracture that divided the story of his life into two halves. From time to time the urge to comment off-camera on all his actions overwhelms him like a chronic disease. Then there is no longer a present tense in his head, only a narrative preterit, and there is only the third person instead of “I.” His thoughts suddenly start sounding as if someone in the future were talking about him and this early morning, which is fastened to the wall of the building by a zipper of metal grating. Schilf has learned not to defend himself. It is possible to run away from many things, but not from what is going on in one’s own head. He has christened this voice the “inner observer,” in the way that human beings give names to things they do not understand. Sometimes the observer’s visits last only a couple of hours. At other times, he stays close for weeks and turns the world into a radio play without off-switch or volume control, with Schilf as writer, speaker, and listener all in one. The observer keeps silent about some things, but then goes into great detail on other occasions. He can always be relied on at the beginning of a difficult case. He loves nothing more than to repeat what the detective is thinking.
The last thing I need is a beheaded cyclist, the detective thought, the detective thinks.
Two days ago, the walrus-mustached police chief had honored him with a personal phone call and—a sign of the estimation in which he is held—canceled the holiday Schilf had planned. “The Freiburgers can’t cope,” the chief had shouted into the telephone. “The hospital scandal is driving the whole town crazy. First four heart patients die, then a senior registrar is murdered. Even the blockheads in the press can see the connection. Take your vacation later, Schilf. Clear up this Dabbelink business first.”
In other circumstances, Schilf would have obeyed the chief’s orders without resistance. He obeys now, but his resistance is enormous. When he considers the matter carefully, there is a problem asleep in his apartment, and another problem (perhaps even the same one) that has inhabited his head for quite some time. The detective does not want to go to Freiburg now. He feels repelled by the thought of the tiny police apartment not far from Heinrich-von-Stephan-Strasse. He is not interested in dead anesthetists or the megalomania of a medical director. He has worked nonstop for years and he needs a break. Right now, there are more important things than this Dabbelink, who is in the safe mitts of Rita Skura.
Schilf considers smoking a cigarillo on an empty stomach, and abandons the idea. For a while he peers into the stillness of the courtyard. Slowly a cat walks across the cleanly swept flagstones. When Schilf starts moving again, it flees into the nearest building with one leap.
Some days there is just no choice other than to leave through the back door, the detective thought, the detective thinks.
He walks down the groaning metal steps. Ignoring the creaking in his knees and shoulders, he climbs sideways over the gate at the end of the fire escape and jumps the final one and a half meters down to the ground.
BARELY TWO HOURS LATER, Schilf leans his head against the cool, vibrating glass of a window, feeling his terrible headache subside. The air-conditioning is blowing into his face through a vent. In a broad curve the train rounds a small town, which with its church tower, half-timbered houses, and tidy meadows looks like an exhibit in an open-air museum. As the rear of the InterCity train comes into view, Schilf thinks, as he does on every train journey, what a miracle of human endeavor he is sitting in. What powerful masses are accelerated by mankind, what pains it takes to wrest materials from the earth in order to forge them into something that serves a great idea. And how it strives toward a goal that, despite thousands of years of philosophical efforts by the cleverest of men, is still utterly unknown.
When the next stretch of forest wraps itself around the train, he turns his gaze away from the window and the world becomes a blur in the corner of his left eye.