“Damn!”
It was stupid of him to rub his eyes with his hands. The chili and onion take effect, sending Sebastian to the sink, where he washes his face with cold water.
Maike smells the food as soon as she unlocks the door and steps into the hall. It smells of appeasement. Sebastian is standing at the stove with puffy eyes and a red nose, and Liam is doubled over with laughter, pointing at him. The spit between Liam’s teeth is green from secretly nibbled peppers. Maike stands in the door frame and wants to laugh with Liam and cry with Sebastian. She asks herself why she washed the floors of all the rooms in the gallery on her hands and knees in order to put off coming home.
“What’s going on here, then?” she asks, dropping to her knees to catch Liam as he rushes into her arms.
“Dad’s got Thai in his eyes!”
Liam puts up with a kiss and runs back to the stove. He stands on tiptoe and devotes himself to stirring the rice, as though the viscous mass on the wooden spoon could bind him to normality.
“How was your day?” Sebastian asks. For a second, it really seems as if everything were as usual.
As Usual is the worst thing that can happen to Maike right now. She drops onto a chair and smiles helplessly into the growing silence. She feels as though she has been gone not for a few days but for years, and is now returning to a life in which she can participate only as a spectator. Sebastian, who is screwing up his eyes as he tastes his curry, seems as alien to her as an actor who has stepped out of character without warning. She wants to take hold of him and shake him and scream at him, or perhaps hug him and stroke him and smell him, too—whatever it takes to get her husband back.
Since this morning, however, it has been impossible for her to make any movement in his direction, so she can only sit and look and think. It is not only Dabbelink’s death that has driven her half out of her senses. Nor Liam’s mysterious kidnapping. It is the coincidence of these two things as well as the fact that, in some final way, she understands nothing. Emptiness is not an opponent, and it is impossible to defend a family without an opponent. If Maike had experienced a little less happiness and a little more unhappiness in her life thus far, she would know what to call this empty feeling: fear.
“A strange day,” Maike says after clearing her throat, a very necessary action. “A funny guy came to see me in the gallery.”
“As tall as Dad?” Liam asks. “Only old? Bulging tummy, and a face like an elephant?”
“How do you know?”
“That’s our detective.”
“You’re joking.”
Maike has grown paler than before, if that were possible. Her patched-up calm is crumbling at the edges.
“Almost done!” Sebastian calls to her in an artificially cheery voice, like a TV chef. Maike ignores him.
“Are you saying,” she says to Liam, “that this guy works for the police? And that he was here with you both?”
“Just after you left,” Sebastian says in a low voice.
“I can’t bear this any longer,” Maike whispers.
“He promised to make everything OK.” Liam’s voice breaks with desperate enthusiasm. “He’s clever.”
“Everything is OK, my darling,” Maike says to Liam. And to Sebastian, “What did you talk about?”
Sebastian brings a pan to the table and ladles curry onto the plates.
“About the nature of time.”
He asks Liam to serve the rice, and wipes the hot ceramic stove top with a cloth. A burnt smell rises. Sebastian opens the balcony door slightly.
“The nature of time,” Maike repeats, scornfully.
She mixes rice with the curry and adds salt and pepper without tasting her food.
“Is he coming again?”
“Hopefully,” Liam says.
His wife and child are sitting in front of their plates with their cutlery raised, so Sebastian looks at them encouragingly, fishing prawns from his plate and stacking two of them on his fork, by way of demonstration. Maike glances around the kitchen as if she is looking for something: a spoon, a napkin, an answer.
“With a serious crime, you can’t just withdraw the charges,” Sebastian says. “They’re investigating the kidnapping. It’s a matter of routine.”
“Have the police been to Gwiggen?” she asks. “Have they questioned the staff? Found out who took Liam there?” Her voice sounds as if someone were dictating to her. “Have they been to the service station? Did they look for clues? Find witnesses? Question the petrol pump attendant?”
“Maike,” Sebastian says. Nothing more, but he repeats it. “Maike.”
Not far from the balcony, a group of blackbirds is conferring in the chestnut tree. It is clear from their bickering that they are discussing something urgent. Do blackbirds even perch at the tops of trees? Do they spy on apartments in old buildings, or are they earthbound birds who leave their accustomed surroundings only in exceptional circumstances? And what constitutes an exception?