When Sebastian brings in the tea, Schilf has been sitting in the armchair for some time. The scent of ginger and cardamom fills the room.
“This doesn’t taste too bad.” Carefully Sebastian puts down his cup; his hands have steadied.
“Do you collect art?” Schilf asks, pointing at two knobbly paintings whose thickly applied explosions of color in red and black portray a throbbing headache. Clearly the artist takes a different view; he has marked the titles of the paintings in crude letters across the canvas: Blackmail I and II.
“My wife runs a gallery.”
“And likes cycling?”
“Is this the start of the interrogation?”
“Not an interrogation.” Schilf waves his teaspoon dismissively. “Just asking some questions.”
“What’s the difference?”
“You. You are not a suspect, but someone who has reported a crime, and also a witness.”
Sebastian laughs, and does not reply.
“If you’re ready,” Schilf says, “I would like to ask you a few questions.”
“About the kidnapping?”
Now the detective laughs.
“No. About the nature of time.”
[4]
“YOU’RE A STRANGE KIND OF DETECTIVE. It’s not that I don’t want to talk about the nature of time. That’s my job, after all. But do you really want me to speak to you as I would to my first-year students? That would be like a journey into the past. As if all this was over. Would you like to do me a kindness? Shall we talk as if nothing has happened? You’re looking at me like a doll without a brain.”
Sebastian takes a sip of tea, a second sip, then a third before he continues.
“When I was at school I once wanted to write a story in which a man finds out that he is surrounded only by dolls. I’ve no idea what happened to that story. I never wrote it down. So I’m going to talk to you as if I am talking to a doll, Detective. As if I’m talking to … a friend.
“Do you know what materialism is? The love of money? No. Or perhaps it’s that, too. The materialism I am talking about is a worldview that links everything back to one principle: that of matter. Seen this way, even thoughts and ideas are merely manifestations of the material. Dreams, for example—they’re a biochemical product.
“This view of the world is very popular. It has pushed religious belief aside, and replaced it, in fact. The Commandments of materialism are simple and threefold. Thou shalt not doubt the material nature of the universe. Thou shalt trust blindly in the chronological causality of all events. Thou shalt honor the objectivity and uniqueness of tangible reality.
“These statements of belief anchor materialists in the world better than God ever could. There is of course the odd phenomenon that contradicts the principles of materialism—or seems to—and therefore remains inexplicable, at least for the moment. But there is an unfailing remedy for such doubts. You simply paste labels over the holes in this view of the world. An example?
“Not even the most brilliant scientist has any idea why an apple falls from above to below. He simply calls this lack of knowledge ‘gravity.’ Coincidence is another of these labels. Possibly déjà vu and intuition, too. The unknowable pinned down by the act of naming. Do I hear you say that ninety-nine percent of all concepts are such labels? You may be right. If I were able to unite all the sciences, something that has existed for a long time would emerge from the process: language.
“I’ve never liked labels. When I was in school, I found it hard to believe in teachers who wrote numbers on the blackboard but could not explain what gravity was. Instead of continuing to listen to them, I waited until I was old enough to read Kant. I had always suspected my mind of doing secret things—I had an inkling that it added something to my cognition, that it brought everything I perceived into a ready-made order, creating a world that it could understand. Kant was able to prove that—he showed me time and space as forms of human perception. It was not a matter of whether or not I believed him. I felt that he was right.
“All paths lead to enlightenment and none lead back! For a long time, I was tormented by the fact that my research was clearly not related to the tiniest particles and the laws which govern them, but to the physicist who studied them. At some point I came to terms with the question of whether the scientist is striving for truth in a world of objective reality, or in a world of apparitions. Instead of torturing myself further on this question, I annoyed my colleagues by claiming that we’re engaged in psychology rather than in physics. It’s just a matter of definition, isn’t it? There’s no cause for despair as long as there’s logic, that long-standing barrier between us and the bottomless abyss. Perhaps the people who called me esoteric were not wrong after all.