Now, although Sebastian takes hold very gently, Dabbelink cannot help grimacing between his hands. Schilf casts a quick glance at his girlfriend, whose gaze is fixed on the head of the dead man, this three-dimensional caricature that was once a living face. Julia does not look as though she intends to become hysterical.
“So that’s what’s left,” she says.
Schilf nods at her. He is relieved to realize once again exactly why he liked his girlfriend from the moment he met her.
Dabbelink does not fit in the freezer at first go, so they scrape the lumps of ice off the sides of the compartment with a knife. Having succeeded, they feel quite comfortable with each other. Julia makes spaghetti and Sebastian lays the small table. Over dinner, they avoid talking about anything to do with Dabbelink, Oskar, Maike, Liam, or what could happen later that night. The only shared topic of conversation is the hospital scandal. Medical Director Schlüter has been suspended, not on grounds of bodily harm with fatal consequences, but because of inadequate supervision of his staff. The familiar public debate over poorly financed hospitals had started again immediately. Schlüter will pursue his career elsewhere. The rest is politics.
They don’t talk much. Schilf is the only one who has a second helping. Never has a meal tasted so good to him.
JULIA INSISTED ON GOING TO BED AFTER DINNER. Why sit around endlessly at the table, weighed down by troublesome thoughts, when they might as well sleep for a couple of hours and wake up at a set time? Schilf envies her deep calm. Her head barely touched the pillow before she fell asleep, as if at the flick of a switch. Her ability to give her body clear commands means that she is as good at falling asleep as she is at sitting still for hours in a life-drawing class. She once said to Schilf that she could not understand the phenomenon of insomnia at all: you have only to turn on your side to embrace a temporary death.
Propped up on one elbow, Schilf watches his girlfriend sleep. She has kicked off the blanket but is holding on to a corner of it, which covers her shoulders, neck, and part of her face. She bears no resemblance to an unplugged machine that by day pulls the wool over Schilf’s eyes. She breathes evenly, snuggled up in her own body warmth like a little planet with its own atmosphere. The longer Schilf looks at her, the more he thinks he has a miracle right in front of him. How can this be: a perfect system which, other than food, contains everything it needs for life!
The astonishment he feels rouses such a clamor within him that he is afraid the sound of his thoughts will wake Julia. He gets up quietly and closes the bedroom door behind him.
He stands in front of an open window. His head is clear, with no pneumatic drill trying to demolish the load-bearing walls. Behind him on the sofa is a large, dark shape: Sebastian, who is perfectly still, as if relieved he no longer has to come up with any answers. The zebra stripes across the room have grown sharper and the moon is tussling with the streetlamps over the color of the light. The street beneath is still covered with a carpet of wood shavings. Schilf remembers the feathery feel of it beneath his feet, and the smell of it, like a circus ring. He lights a cigarillo. The smoke casts shadows on the windowsill that curl around each other, fade, and then start swirling again when he blows the next puff out of his lungs. This is how he imagines the mysterious mesh of reality, the primordial soup at the heart of it all: shadows of a god smoking by a window.
In the kitchenette, the door of the built-in refrigerator glows like a white screen. Schilf crooks his fingers and casts the shadow of a panting dog onto its surface. Apart from the anticipation stirring in his stomach, he feels content. There is so little that a man can achieve in his life. Recognize the smell of a woman. Stroke a child’s head. Beat an adversary in a duel. Think on the nature of things without forgetting that a man takes all his ideas with him one day, when he leaves the world through the well-used back door.
Schilf has gotten through his stock of happiness in the first few decades of his life, and has been operating on his current account since. Many years ago he stopped thinking that death was the worst thing that could happen to anyone. And Sebastian’s explanations about long exposure time have eliminated once and for all any dizziness Schilf felt about standing at the edge of the final abyss. For this reason alone, he shall always be indebted to Sebastian.
Without fear, Schilf can think about his consciousness sinking painlessly back into the froth of information and transformation from which it once rose, and in which it thirsted all its life. He is not even afraid of having to leave an unpalatable block of matter behind, one that is just as hard and ugly as the deep-frozen Dabbelink. The recycling machine called nature will make sure that everything is used again. Whether he is hurriedly buried somewhere, cremated, or scattered over the sea, there are enough plants and animals around to find nourishment in the organic material that is currently still standing in human form at this window, emitting billows of smoke and thinking profound thoughts. They will turn him into something beautiful: green tendrils, blossoms, or colorful plumage. What had only yesterday seemed to him a depressing whirl of unsolved questions has transformed itself into a well-tempered score that has been preserved for millennia. The detective will take care of one last thing, and then go.