In Free Fall(50)
When she had calmed down sufficiently to ask what on earth had happened, she heard Sebastian gulping hard on the other end of the line. He asked her to believe him—first he begged her, then he suddenly started screaming. He could call Oskar instead, Oskar would stand by him. Maike’s shock turned to rage. She demanded that he pull himself together. She got no reply. Finally she realized that Sebastian was about to fall asleep while on the phone. This shocked her more than anything he said. She promised to take the first train to Freiburg in the morning. He swore that nothing had happened to Liam, then the line was cut.
Maike leans back across her seat and stretches her legs. In the seat opposite, a nun has wound her rosary so tightly around her hand that it has left red marks on her knuckles. The nun tries to engage everyone walking past her in conversation, as if she wants to prove to the poor Lord Jesus that mankind has no desire to be left in peace. Love thy neighbor. Maike shudders. When the dapper conductor speaking pretty Swiss German checks her ticket, she thanks him profusely.
She did not sleep well the previous night and spent a great deal of time imagining all kinds of different scenarios. A failed kidnapping attempt, perhaps, or maybe Liam got lost in the forest and has been found. Or perhaps Sebastian had had a nightmare and called her still half asleep, and would be thunderstuck when she walked through the door.
As morning approached, her imagined scenarios lost their definition, her theories grew wilder, and her questions led nowhere. Her thoughts began to work in images and to revolve around a night ten years ago, as if it were still the cause of every dark, incomprehensible part of Maike’s life. It was the evening of the day that stood at number one in her list of favorite memories.
A function room misty with cigarette smoke. Happy crowds swaying to music. Friends, family, and an angular figure among them who wanders the room aimlessly, anxiously, conspicuously, like a shadow that has lost its master. Maike’s feeling of delighted terror (or is it terrible delight?) every time this shadow bumps into the newly minted groom in the crowd. Proud and cold, the two men look each other in the eye. At some point Maike—incredibly drunk by then—tugs the sleeves of their frock coats and tries to get them to dance à trois. The guests clap and hoot. Oskar tears himself away and leaves the party without a word. A close-up of Sebastian’s face as he kisses Maike with mouth wide open almost as soon as Oskar has left.
In the first year of their marriage, Maike was constantly prepared for something to break free and rise from the depths of the man who smiled at her every morning across the breakfast table. Something that could not be conquered by goodwill and understanding. But nothing of the sort happened. From an anomaly, Sebastian had turned into a good husband and a loving father. He was the youngest professor on faculty at Freiburg University. Maike opened her gallery and made sure that Oskar came to dinner regularly. The family got wrapped up in the everyday.
For a long time now, Maike has thought of herself as part of a happy family. Regardless of how well or how badly their life together is going, there is one thing she has never doubted since Liam’s birth: she and Sebastian inhabit the same world. And she is prepared to do anything to keep it that way.
Perhaps, thinks Maike, looking at an Asian woman who is pushing a metal trolley down the aisle, perhaps this is what is waiting at home for me. The disaster I have feared more or less consciously for so many years. Perhaps it even has a woman’s name, like a hurricane. Perhaps my own name.
Her thoughts are about to tip over into the abstruse again. She buys a coffee from the Asian woman. The cup is so hot that she can barely hold it in her hand. Two border guards appear in the carriage and the German one holds Maike’s coffee for her so that she can dig out her ID card.
She feels her worry like a thousand pinpricks in her side. But whatever is waiting for her in Freiburg, she can be sure of one thing: if Sebastian swears that all is well with Liam, then it’s true. Everything else can be borne. One of the reasons Maike loves cycling is because she enjoys estimating her own strength correctly. She drinks, burns her lips, and takes another sip anyway. The Swiss idyll has been left behind on the other side of the border; outside, a pale sun is conducting the overture to another relentless summer day. Let’s see what happens, Maike thinks. Later, she will say the same to the detective: Let’s see what happens. Long before that, she will see the face of her friend Ralph Dabbelink on the newspaper racks in Freiburg Station. It will be the beginning of a new list: the most terrible days of her life. And the detective will take second place on the list of people she is most suspicious of, just ahead of Oskar, who has topped this list for years, and just behind Sebastian, the new contender who has jumped straight to number one.