In Free Fall(69)

“I’m taking your car,” he calls. “Mine’s been impounded. See you later.”

He has never felt the weakness of mankind so clearly as during these few steps out of the apartment. The affectation of walking upright, the power of speech and free will, is suddenly exposed as a laughable hoax. Here are the car keys, the stair landing, the cast-iron streetlamps, the trees and the buildings, and here is Maike’s little car on a side street. The world is a signage system he just has to follow.

A liberating sense of clarity divides Sebastian’s thoughts into squares on a grid. The voice in his head tells him that he has just made an unforgivable and probably irrevocable mistake. In the continuous chain of horrible events that his life has become, walking out of the kitchen is the crowning glory. It wouldn’t be difficult to turn on his heel, climb back up the stairs, and steer the story a different way. But the observer in Sebastian recognizes that unforgivable mistakes are not the result of inattention, error, or not knowing better.

What distinguishes them is that they permit no alternative, even in full knowledge of the circumstances.

The central locking clicks. Sebastian feels the vibration of the engine in his arms and legs. He is a perfectly normal person driving a small car through the neighborhood in which he lives, shops, and works. He crosses the main road leading out of town, which is busy throughout the day regardless of what is happening in the world at large, and enters the enormous network of junctions, intersections, and connections that span the planet like the synapses of a giant brain. It’s amazing how little it takes to make a ruinous decision, Sebastian thinks. Soon after, he is on the autobahn.





[3]


IT CANNOT BE SAID THAT RITA SKURA and Detective Schilf have absolutely nothing in common. Like Rita, Schilf hated birds as a child. He had his reasons. They gobbled up the butterflies with whom he conducted epistemological debates beneath the walnut tree. They had immobile faces that showed neither pain nor joy. They stared at him fixedly, concealing a knowledge, which, in his opinion, they did not deserve. He thought it was unfair that they alone surveyed the world from above. If he had known then that it is always the observer who creates reality, he would have despised the birds even more for being the creators of a failed world.

Birds were also the source of nerve-racking noise. They didn’t give a damn about other living things who wanted to think, play, or sleep. Often the little Schilf went to his parents in bed in the middle of the night. I can’t sleep, he would cry. The birds are screaming in the garden, and trampling on the roof!

His parents laughed about that for years after he had left home, but Schilf didn’t find it funny. All those nights he had been unable to sleep, they had assured him that not a single bird could be heard for miles around. From then on, he had believed them to be on the side of the enemy.

Schilf has not thought about this for a long time; it must have turned up in his dreams. He awakens with the feeling that the sharp edge of a beak is boring into the soft inner sanctum of his skull. If only he could be left in peace to think, he would be able to ask himself what the little detective would have said about the bird’s egg in the big detective’s head.

Confused, he lies in a gloomy room, and it takes some time for him to realize where he is. The shadows around him are the furniture in the police apartment, and the shrill sounds that are tearing at his nerves are not coming from the throats of birds but from a ringing telephone. Schilf presses on the buttons of his mobile to no avail until he hits on the idea of getting up from the sofa to answer the landline.

“Is that you, Rita?”

A sunny laugh comes down the line.

“Sorry, there’s no Rita here. It’s me.”

There are not many me’s in the detective’s life. Most of the people he gets to know well disappear behind the bars of a penal institution sooner or later. So he doesn’t have to think for long.

“How did you get the number of the police apartment?”

“You gave it to me.”

Julia is right—for every “me” there is a “you.” Schilf’s new girlfriend has not been wrong about a single thing since he met her, and she seems to find that perfectly natural. The detective can see her now, sitting in the armchair next to the coffee table, hooking her finger into a hole in her sock.

“Did I wake you up?” she asks.

Schilf has not had the chance to switch on the light yet. Impenetrable darkness lurks behind the open doors of the kitchen and the bathroom, as if night were being produced for the entire country there.

“No,” he says. “What do you want?”