Fame (15 page)

“You poor thing. Those bores! I don’t know how you stand it.”

I detected no irony in her voice. And that was the other thing that surprised me: everyone makes fun of officials, bureaucrats, pen pushers, and paper tigers. But that’s us! Every one of us who’s an employee feels we’re an artist, an anarchist, a free spirit, a secret lunatic who recognizes neither norms nor constraints. Every one of us was once promised the kingdom of heaven and none of us wants to acknowledge that we’re part of these people we never wanted anything to do with, have been for years, that nothing about us is exceptional, and that it’s precisely the sense that we’re different that makes us so banal.

“And the children?” Now my voice sounded uncertain. Her saying “you poor thing” to me, just as Luzia said yesterday, hit me with unexpected force.

“Paul insulted his teacher. He’s been difficult recently. You need to talk to him on Saturday.”

“I can’t come home this Saturday. Unfortunately.”

“Oh.”

“Sunday.”

“Fine then, Sunday.”

I said something about appointments, things happening unexpectedly, and the appalling chaos in the office. I said something about a new colleague and incompetent workers. Then I had the feeling I was pushing it too far and I stopped talking.

My crew were waiting for me with the usual anxiety. I knew they hated each other and could understand it, that they hated me was in the nature of things, for I too felt a violent aversion for my boss, one Elmar Schmieding from Wattenwil, but why in the world were they afraid of me? I had never made trouble for anybody, and I didn’t care what they got up to. I know the system and I know that even medium-serious errors don’t cause fundamental upheavals, don’t change anything, simply aren’t important, they irritate this or that client, but we never hear anything about it and they don’t bother us.

So I greeted Schlick and Hauberlan, clapped Smetana on the shoulder, and called a loud “hello” a little emphatically into the room where Lobenmeier and Mollwitz sat opposite each other. Then I sat down at my desk and tried not to think about Luzia. Not about her skin, not about her nose, not about her toes, and absolutely not about her voice. There was a knock, and Mollwitz came in, sweating as usual, struggling under his grotesquely fat body, short, entirely lacking a neck, pathetic.

“Not now!” I said sharply. In a flash he disappeared again. I called Luzia. “Are you free on Saturday?”

“I thought you weren’t in the city on weekends.”

“How’s that?” I got a fright. How did she know that, what had I said to her? “I’m here!”

“Good,” she said. “So Saturday.”

Another knock, Lobenmeier came in to complain he could no longer put up with Mollwitz.

“Not now!”

He could, said Lobenmeier, put up with a great deal. But at a certain point, enough was enough. That he did absolutely nothing, well okay. That he spent his time posting like a maniac on Internet forums, well okay too. One could even get used to him cursing to himself all the time. But his lack of personal hygiene was more, or perhaps less, than could be tolerated in anyone.

“Lobenmeier,” I said gently. “Easy. I’ll talk to him and take care of it.”

I should have reprimanded him for speaking like that about his colleague, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, the more so since Mollwitz, particularly at the end of the day, really did smell appalling.

On Sunday at around midday I entered my row house in the town by the deep blue lake. Hannah was pale, she had the flu. Paul had shut himself in his room because of some fight, the little one was whining and upset, and I suddenly felt so dizzy it was as if I were drunk. I could still feel Luzia’s hands touching me all over my body.

“Till tomorrow?” she’d asked.

“Of course,” I’d replied without thinking.

I already knew I’d have to invent something to deceive her, but at the same time the lie seemed insignificant; the only things that did signify were this room and this bed and the woman lying next to me, and my other life, Hannah, the children, this house, were like some implausible fiction—just as now, when I sat down at the table after the long drive, pushed a rubber duck to one side, and looked at Hannah’s reddened eyes, Luzia became a distant ghost. I leaned back. The little one stuck her spoon into her mashed potatoes, then smeared the yellow mess all over her face. The phone in my pocket vibrated. A message. Luzia wanted to see me, right away.

“Now what?” asked Hannah. “Not on a Sunday, please.”

“They’re so incompetent,” I said, thumb-clicking:
office emergency, colleague, death.
I pressed Send and had no sense, to my own amazement, that I’d lied—it was as if I really had left another me back there, who was now setting off to the home of the victim: Hauberlan or Mollwitz? Maybe Mollwitz would be better. I nodded in a preoccupied way and left the room to have a serious talk with Paul. After that I’d send Luzia a message describing how I’d arrived in the dead man’s apartment and forced myself to be calm and make the first arrangements. Not too many specifics, just the main outlines, plus two or three well-observed details: a door half off its hinges, a cat searching vainly for its little bowl of milk, the label on a bottle of pills. How strange that technology has brought us into a world where there are no fixed places anymore.
You speak out of nowhere, you can be anywhere, and because nothing can be checked, anything you choose to imagine is, at bottom, true. If no one can prove to me where I am, if I myself am not absolutely certain, where is the court that can adjudicate these things? Real places anchored in space existed before we had little walkie-talkies and wrote letters that arrived in the same second they were dispatched.

Deep in thought, I switched off the phone in case it suddenly rang. No reception, I’d say, it was always plausible; and God knows network outages were always happening, I knew this, it was my job, my expertise. Then I made a fist, banged on Paul’s door, and yelled, “Open Up, Young Man!”

How long can it keep going? I would have said three weeks, maybe a month of danger, freedom, and playing a double game. But the month passed, more weeks went by, and I still wasn’t unmasked.

How did it happen in the old days? How did you lie and deceive, how did you have affairs, how did you get away and manipulate and organize your secret activities without the help of ultra-sophisticated technology? I had lived in those times. Yet I could no longer imagine it.

I sent Hannah messages supposedly emanating from Paris and Madrid, Berlin, Chicago, and even, one memorable day, Caracas: I described air yellow with pollution and streets crawling with cars in a hectically charged paragraph which I
composed on my laptop in Luzia’s kitchen while she stood barefoot and in panties in front of the stove and the autumn rain drummed its fingers against the glass. She dropped a cup of coffee, shards exploded all over the floor, the black liquid formed a Rorschach image.

“What are you writing?”

“An audit report for Longrolf.”

And when I told her about poor Longrolf (three children, four wives, alcohol problems, I was now a habitual liar and invented things for no reason at all), I saw myself four days later in my dining room with the little one crawling around on the carpet while Hannah organized holiday photos on the PC which I never used for safety reasons, pictures of the four of us on some overcast beach—having to write Luzia a report on my meeting with the aforesaid Longrolf: the dreariness of the corporate floor, the interoffice intrigues, Longrolf’s look of perpetual malice, and Smetana’s porcine face, the sheer misery of the whole thing and oh my darling I wish I were back with you. After which I’d slip out to the front of the house (“I’m taking out the garbage!”) to prop myself against the wall in the lee of the wind and use my cell phone to call her and tell her how I’d managed to sneak out into the stairwell for a moment just to hear her voice.

A lie? Of course, but hadn’t I truly been thinking about her all the time, wasn’t I eating my heart out with longing to be near her, while I played with the children or had the same old conversation with Hannah about taxes and the water bill and kindergarten and the mortgage, wasn’t I obsessing about her body, her face, and her slightly hoarse voice? What difference
did it make whether it was Longrolf who was keeping me away from her or a more or less alienated companion with two noisy children who regarded me as a stranger, and whose existence for as long as I was with them struck me as the product of some confused dream? And conversely, when I locked myself in Luzia’s bathroom to run the taps while I talked to Hannah and then the boy (“That noise? It’s a bad connection!”), my distant family seemed closer and more dear to me than ever, and Luzia out there in bed a sudden weighty encumbrance like the Congress I’d just claimed to be attending on the phone. I loved them both! And most of all I always loved the one I wasn’t with at that moment, the one I couldn’t be with, from whom the other one was keeping me separate.

I began to wonder if I was crazy. I woke up in the middle of the night, listened to the breathing of the woman next to me, and wondered for several anxious seconds not so much which one she was, but who I was at this moment and what labyrinth I’d strayed into. Only one step at a time, none of them a large step, none of them difficult, but without realizing it I’d gone so far into it that I could no longer see the way out. I closed my eyes and lay still and surrendered to the cold rush of panic. But when day dawned and I got up and donned each of my roles as if I had no other, everything seemed easy and almost back to normal again.

.   .   .

Two days before the Congress of European Telecommunications Providers, I sat in my office on the phone with the babysitter we’d arranged for. Hannah and I wanted to go together, finally we were making time for each other. My presentation was to be short and didn’t require any preparation, and the hotel promised luxury and a spa. As I hung up, I saw that an e-mail had just arrived from Luzia. Just one line:
your congress. I’m coming too.

I rubbed my eyes and thought, as I had every hour of every day, that sooner or later everything was going to explode and a flaming catastrophe was bearing down on me.

“
Better not,
” I wrote, “
a lot of work, dreadful people.
”

That’s when I realized.

If Luzia knew about the Congress, for I had said nothing about it, that meant she knew someone who was also going to be there. Then I couldn’t go with Hannah; far too big a risk that Luzia would hear about it.

And conversely. What if I took Luzia? Hannah didn’t know many of my colleagues. She almost never came to this city, and my job had never interested her. But the risk was too great. For a moment I hated both of them.

I called Hannah.

“Oh, what a pity!” She sounded as if her mind were elsewhere, something was preoccupying her completely. I saw her in front of me: buried in a book, eyes bright but dreaming, and the situation—that I wasn’t there with her, that I had another woman, that nothing was the way it was supposed to be—brought tears to my eyes.

“It’s not going to work,” I said. “Have to stay. Too much going on in the office.”

“Whatever you think.”

“Another time, yes? Soon.”

She cleared her throat distractedly. In the background I heard the burble of music on the radio. “Yes, yes, fine.”

Luzia’s reply popped up on my screen:
ridiculous, it’s going to be fun. I need to get out from time to time as well. If you’re going, I’m going too. End of discussion!

“Don’t be sad,” I said.

“I understand,” said Hannah. “I understand.”

I hung up. With Luzia it was going to be more difficult, because she was always wanting to know things about my work. Why, when I didn’t want to know them myself! But the department had to be represented there: if I went alone, Luzia would come, if I went with Luzia, Hannah would hear about it, if I went with Hannah, Luzia would hear about it; there was only one answer. I summoned Lobenmeier.

Impossible, he said. Trip to Paris. Long planned. Wife’s idea. Wedding anniversary.

I called for Schlick.

Impossible! Parents, birthday, big party, only son, had to be there. Besides which, family farm. Outbreak of foot-and-mouth just diagnosed.

I didn’t get the connection, but I sighed and let it go, and called Hauberlan, who couldn’t because he’d booked a nonrefundable cruise to the Hebrides. Smetana was off sick, and my secretary, whom I’d have drafted in desperation, had a
long-standing commitment to the National Paintball Championships in a village in Lower Saxony. In no circumstances could she stand in for me. So there was no avoiding it. There was only one last possibility.

Can’t do it
, I wrote.
Have to send Mollwitz. He has friends in Corporate, he’s become too influential.
I had trouble typing, my hands were shaking—with agitation, naturally, but also out of fury with Mollwitz and his intrigues.
So sorry.

Mollwitz
, she replied at once.
Thought he was dead.

Oh God. Breathe calmly, I thought, calmly. When in doubt, flee forward.
That was another guy with the same name. Strange coincidence.
I looked up. Mollwitz was standing in the door. “You’ve made it!” I told him authoritatively. “You’re leaving tomorrow.”

He was sweating more than ever. His little eyes twitched uneasily. He seemed to have put on even more weight recently.

“Don’t pretend to be surprised. You’re going to represent the department at the Congress. Well played, neatly done, I congratulate you.”

Mollwitz panted. Tomorrow, he said quietly, wasn’t so good. He had a lot to do. He didn’t like traveling. He really did smack his lips when he talked!

“Let’s not exaggerate. You know you want to go, I know you want to go, and on the floor above”—I raised my forefinger—“they know too. You’ll go far, my friend.”

He gave me a pleading look, then decamped. I imagined him next door, back sitting at his desk like a big toad, cursing quietly, and posting online somewhere.