Decompression (29 page)

Christmas passed without anything happening. On New Year’s Eve, I had clients and went to bed before midnight. The New Year was 2012. A number like any other. After breakfast on New Year’s morning, I sat around for a while. Exactly fourteen years had passed since the day I left Germany and began my new life on the island. Fourteen years. An unimaginable span of time. I thought about the day of the murder attempt, or more precisely, about a very specific moment in that day, and an instantaneous feeling of gratitude flooded through me. All at once, that second appeared to me as the most important moment of my life. I had hesitated, looked at Theo’s unconscious face, and thought about Jola. And then I had decided. I hadn’t let Theo sink to the bottom of the sea; instead, I’d saved his life. Gratitude for that decision drove tears into my eyes. I sat there with my empty coffee cup
in front of me and wept. Afterward I could breathe, freely and deeply. Something had changed. I needed only to think back on that hesitation to feel that I’d become someone else. I no longer understood why I’d found “Stay out of it” such an appealing motto fourteen years before. Now it repelled me. When I climbed into the van to go diving, I felt better. In a fundamental way.

January was, as always, a slow time. Who goes on vacation right after New Year’s? Only a few retirees, singles, and freelancers. On the first Saturday of the year, a single new client arrived. Her name was Katja, and she was a criminal defense lawyer, a specialist in such major felonies as murder, homicide, and rape. We hit it off from the start. On the first evening, I invited her to dinner. On the second evening, we made love. She was over forty and correspondingly avid. She sucked my cock for a long time. In the end, she straddled me and rode me like an experienced jockey to the finish line. On the third evening, we signed a contract that bound her to secrecy and stipulated her consultation fee as equivalent to the costs of completing an Advanced Open Water Diver course and obtaining nitrox certification.

I told her the whole story. As I spoke, I had to control myself to keep from blubbering. Only then did I realize how much the previous weeks had exhausted me. The silence. The waiting. The questions. I couldn’t take any more. I described to Katja how Jola’s plan kept turning through my mind in an endless loop, how I couldn’t stop questioning what had happened, how my obsession
was eating me up inside. She said she was a lawyer, not a psychiatrist, and I should pull myself together. I gave her the diary. She read it so fast that it looked as though she was just superficially flipping through the pages.

When she finished, she raised her eyes and asked, “So how much of this is true?”

“In the beginning a lot, in the middle not much, and in the end nothing at all.”

She smiled. “One of you is brilliant.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. “Don’t you believe me?”

“You haven’t hired me to believe you. You’ve hired me to tell you what you should do.”

Katja advised me to write this account. Because you never know what’s coming. Why has Theo kept his trap shut so far about what happened on the
Aberdeen
? Maybe he and Jola have reconciled. Maybe he’s blackmailing her. Or he’s afraid of a public scandal. But there’s no statute of limitations for attempted murder. Some factor or other completely beyond my control could induce Theo to bring charges after all. And then Jola will defend herself with the oldest of all human sentences:
It wasn’t me
. She’ll declare that Theo’s only purpose is to destroy her with accusations of murder, while the actual guilty party is Sven Fiedler, the perpetrator of the failed attack aboard the
Aberdeen
.

After that, Katja said, it would be testimony against testimony. Jola’s word against Theo’s. Jola would probably have the public’s sympathies, and perhaps the judge’s as well, on her side. There were no witnesses to the murder attempt, and it would be too late
to gather forensic evidence. At this point, the diary would come into play, just as Jola planned. The added weight, calculated to tip the final balance. Of course, I could destroy the notebook and claim it never existed. But if Jola had been cunning enough to make a copy, I could forget about trying to defend myself. Being caught in such a lie would mean a free ticket to the slammer.

Katja’s observations precisely summarized my fears. She recommended that I start composing my account as soon as possible. She said that I should proceed section by section, setting my version of events against Jola’s diary entries. Otherwise, she told me, my memory would soon start writing its own story. In her view, there was nothing more corrupt than human memory. First the details of incidents would become blurred, and then the incidents themselves.

“Maybe someday,” Katja said, “you’ll even come to believe that Jola’s telling the truth and not you.”

She gave me an ironic smile when she said that. As a defense attorney, she’s probably all too accustomed to being lied to by her clients. I slept with her twice more, out of gratitude. Then she flew back to Nuremberg, where she’s attached to the district court.

The very next day, I got on the telephone and canceled all the clients on my schedule. I took my home page down from the Internet and set up an automatic e-mail reply informing all inquiring parties that the diving school was closed. It took only a few days to sell my complete inventory of equipment. A colleague in Thailand knew someone who was planning on setting up his own business. I arranged for everything to be loaded into containers. Since then, I’ve been sitting around in half-empty rooms,
and I have time. Outside there’s a delicate green covering on the slopes of the volcanoes. It’s the island spring. The talk in the news revolves around the euro crisis, the presidential crisis, and the Syrian crisis. As though time’s been standing still. As though nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed.

I occasionally see Antje while we’re both out shopping. She’s looking good. She and Ricardo are considering buying a little house in Tinajo. Todd waits outside, tied up next to the shopping carts, and pretends not to know me. Not long ago, I ran into Bernie in the entrance of the Wunder Bar café. He congratulated me on Antje’s pregnancy and laughed when I looked bewildered. And then we broke records. He delivered the longest coherent speech of his life, and I understood more English words per minute than ever before.

He said I shouldn’t imagine I was getting away with anything, because everybody, but everybody, knew what had happened, and no one believed it was an accident. And therefore I could count on getting what was coming to me, one way or another, sooner or later, and it made no difference if I packed my things and pissed off like a cowardly dog. People had contacts, people were connected, and they’d make sure I couldn’t work anywhere in the world. At least, not as a diving instructor. I was a danger to the clients, he said, and a disgrace to the sport. In other words, he was looking forward to the day I’d leave the island, and he wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Just to let me know, he said.

The expulsion from paradise. There could be no response to such a rant. And so I left him standing there, a stocky fellow with
a five-day beard and a pleasant, weather-beaten Scottish face. I didn’t care about any of that. I didn’t care about
him
. I should have seen what an asshole he was a long time ago.

That evening I called Antje and congratulated her. She started to cry. She said she’d always wanted us to have a child together. Ricardo was a nice guy, but she’d loved only one man in her life, namely me. I took care to sound as cheerful as possible. I told her how well pregnancy became her. I said everything had turned out all right in the end. I suggested we could see each other in Germany when she went home to visit her family. Antje was still sobbing a little, and she kept repeating, “Ah, Sven.” But she sounded more wistful than desperate.

Now that I’ve finished writing, waiting is hard. I often spend a whole day not knowing what to do with myself. I’ve decided against flying. Instead I’m going to put my few belongings on a cargo ship and accompany them back to Germany. The voyage to Hamburg takes fourteen days, departure is early next week. I’m looking forward to the journey. I no longer understand how I could have taken this island for something special. It’s a place like any other. War isn’t a geographical phenomenon.

This morning I googled Jola’s name and wound up looking at a gossip magazine’s website. The headline read, “Jola Pahlen: Dream Wedding with Writer!” Below, a photograph of her and Theo. They looked reciprocally radiant. Jola had her dark hair done the same way as she had that evening on the
Dorset
, braided into a crown. A pair of spectacles I’d never seen before was perched on Theo’s nose. The brief article reports that “Bella Schweig” has announced her engagement to the writer Theodor Hast. Rumor
has it that the pair will go on an Arctic expedition in order to be married at the North Pole.

Right after reading that, I went to the web page of a real estate agency that specializes in vacation homes and listed the Casa Raya and the Residencia at a bargain price. I don’t know why, but I can’t bear the sound of the surf anymore.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Juli Zeh’s debut novel,
Eagles and Angels
, won numerous prizes, including the German Book Prize. She has worked at the United Nations in New York and Krakow, and currently lives in Brandenburg.
Decompression
is her fourth novel.