In Free Fall(52)
This is a film! This is not reality!
Her manicured fingers have upset the pile of magazines on the side table; she had wanted to fling them onto the floor, but hasn’t after all.
Ralph dead? My son kidnapped? And I am cycling happily in Airolo, not knowing any of this?
Happiness and not knowing are the same thing, dear Mrs. Physicist, Schilf thinks.
The sofa shakes with the impact of a man’s fist.
Look! At! Me! I couldn’t ring you, for God’s sake!
A pause, a deep breath.
Keep your voice down!
The man’s laughter makes the curtains tremble.
Don’t worry. He’s dead to the world. The motion sickness pills.
The laughter trails off. The print of a woman’s hand on the glass of the side table fades away.
Something is … wrong … I can’t …
And what about me?
The man’s voice rises, driving the walls apart, transforming the room into a cathedral in which every word hangs in the air.
Do you want to know what I’ve been through? This is what it feels like, like this!
The armchair judders to one side as a small body falls into it, shaken roughly by the shoulders.
Let me go, Sebastian!
The final cry is like a bolt of lightning and the slamming door thunder. The quiet after the storm is what remains. Naked scorn. The neighbor’s dog barks with three voices: soft, medium, and loud.
“Do you know what it’s like to have lost everything?” Sebastian asks.
“More than you can imagine.”
“What’s your name, anyway?”
“Schilf.” Sebastian slowly takes his gaze from the ceiling and repeats the name, which feels good in his mouth. Schilf.
Their eyes meet. Somewhere in the apartment an object falls to the ground but neither of them turns his head. The detective wonders why it is suddenly so dark. The headlights of a passing car lift the room and turn it on its own axis; Sebastian sits on the sofa, Schilf in the armchair, then Schilf on the sofa, Sebastian in the armchair. Then the car is gone. They nod to each other. The combine harvesters are working in the fields outside the town; somewhere Julia is sighing in her sleep. The detective wheezes air out of his lungs once (ovum) and twice (avis). A sharp beak is pecking the shell of the bird’s egg. It is bright again, midday in summer, with dusty shafts of light by the window. Sebastian looks at Schilf with a mixture of suspicion and interest. He leans forward, almost as though he wants to take the detective by the hand.
“I want no further investigations,” he says.
“You don’t want to know who kidnapped your son?”
“I want to forget.”
“Bad idea. You’ll only realize when it’s too late.”
“I’m not interested in too late. I’m interested in now. I don’t know what the word ‘future’ means anymore. There are situations where you have to draw the line. Do you see?”
“Even before you started going into detail,” the detective says.
When Sebastian raises his arms to brush his hair out of his face, they both see how badly his hands are trembling. The skin beneath his rolled-up sleeves is thickly covered with scratched insect bites, some moist and inflamed and others crusted with yellow. Sebastian buttons his cuffs.
“Can I get you something to drink?”
“Yogi tea.”
“Sorry, what?”
“Look in the kitchen. A woman like your wife will have something like that.”
“How do you know Maike?”
“She just ran past me.”
Sebastian pauses for a moment before he gets up and leaves the room. Schilf listens to the rustling in the kitchen cupboards, which stops when Sebastian finds the box of tea. The detective stands up quietly and crosses the room as carefully as if the floor were littered with dry twigs that might snap beneath his feet. He has no problem finding the study. Books fill the shelves and lie in piles on the floor. The computer keyboard on the desk is covered with a strangely shaped piece of red card. Schilf rifles through a pile of papers with practiced fingers.
“The Problem of Precision in the Constants of Nature,” “The Purpose of Absurdity,” “Materialism and the Metaphysical Landscape”—We cannot ascertain that the universe was created with regard to a living observer …
Or by an observer, the detective thinks.
He opens and closes drawers. A Yogi tea has to be brewed for about fifteen to twenty minutes on a low flame.
Pencils, used paperclips, letterhead paper from the university. Right at the back of a drawer, there is a photo of two young men in formal suits, slim as whippets, hands casually shoved into the pockets of their striped trousers. Although the faces are turned toward each other, their gazes are lost in the middle distance. Schilf puts back the photo. A normal detective would find a decisive clue among such documents. Schilf finds nothing.