In Free Fall (19 page)

After the receptionist had put the call through to her room, it had taken Maike an entire minute to realize that the stammering caller was
her husband. He said to stay calm so many times that Maike finally started panicking. It was only when she sternly told him to stop it that he told her his confused story. Liam had been kidnapped but was perfectly fine in scout camp after all. Sebastian would pick him up early tomorrow morning. Maike had better break off her holiday, too. It wasn’t actually necessary, but you never know. Perhaps the police might want to ask her a few questions.

Sebastian’s outpouring ended midsentence, like a broken tape. There was a white noise over the line while she remained silent. Oskar had once said that the whole of space was filled with white noise. Maike had heard from someone else that such noise was caused by bugging devices. For a crazy moment, she wondered if they both meant the same thing.

When she had calmed down sufficiently to ask what on earth had happened, she heard Sebastian gulping hard on the other end of the line. He asked her to believe him—first he begged her, then he suddenly started screaming. He could call Oskar instead, Oskar would stand by him. Maike’s shock turned to rage. She demanded that he pull himself together. She got no reply. Finally she realized that Sebastian was about to fall asleep while on the phone. This shocked her more than anything he said. She promised to take the first train to Freiburg in the morning. He swore that nothing had happened to Liam, then the line was cut.

Maike leans back across her seat and stretches her legs. In the seat opposite, a nun has wound her rosary so tightly around her hand that it has left red marks on her knuckles. The nun tries to engage everyone walking past her in conversation, as if she wants to prove to the poor Lord Jesus that mankind has no desire to be left in peace. Love thy neighbor. Maike shudders. When the dapper conductor speaking pretty Swiss German checks her ticket, she thanks him profusely.

She did not sleep well the previous night and spent a great deal of time imagining all kinds of different scenarios. A failed kidnapping attempt, perhaps, or maybe Liam got lost in the forest and has been
found. Or perhaps Sebastian had had a nightmare and called her still half asleep, and would be thunderstuck when she walked through the door.

As morning approached, her imagined scenarios lost their definition, her theories grew wilder, and her questions led nowhere. Her thoughts began to work in images and to revolve around a night ten years ago, as if it were still the cause of every dark, incomprehensible part of Maike’s life. It was the evening of the day that stood at number one in her list of favorite memories.

A function room misty with cigarette smoke. Happy crowds swaying to music. Friends, family, and an angular figure among them who wanders the room aimlessly, anxiously, conspicuously, like a shadow that has lost its master. Maike’s feeling of delighted terror (or is it terrible delight?) every time this shadow bumps into the newly minted groom in the crowd. Proud and cold, the two men look each other in the eye. At some point Maike—incredibly drunk by then—tugs the sleeves of their frock coats and tries to get them to dance
à trois
. The guests clap and hoot. Oskar tears himself away and leaves the party without a word. A close-up of Sebastian’s face as he kisses Maike with mouth wide open almost as soon as Oskar has left.

In the first year of their marriage, Maike was constantly prepared for something to break free and rise from the depths of the man who smiled at her every morning across the breakfast table. Something that could not be conquered by goodwill and understanding. But nothing of the sort happened. From an anomaly, Sebastian had turned into a good husband and a loving father. He was the youngest professor on faculty at Freiburg University. Maike opened her gallery and made sure that Oskar came to dinner regularly. The family got wrapped up in the everyday.

For a long time now, Maike has thought of herself as part of a happy family. Regardless of how well or how badly their life together is going, there is one thing she has never doubted since Liam’s birth: she
and Sebastian inhabit the same world. And she is prepared to do anything to keep it that way.

Perhaps, thinks Maike, looking at an Asian woman who is pushing a metal trolley down the aisle, perhaps this is what is waiting at home for me. The disaster I have feared more or less consciously for so many years. Perhaps it even has a woman’s name, like a hurricane. Perhaps my own name.

Her thoughts are about to tip over into the abstruse again. She buys a coffee from the Asian woman. The cup is so hot that she can barely hold it in her hand. Two border guards appear in the carriage and the German one holds Maike’s coffee for her so that she can dig out her ID card.

She feels her worry like a thousand pinpricks in her side. But whatever is waiting for her in Freiburg, she can be sure of one thing: if Sebastian swears that all is well with Liam, then it’s true. Everything else can be borne. One of the reasons Maike loves cycling is because she enjoys estimating her own strength correctly. She drinks, burns her lips, and takes another sip anyway. The Swiss idyll has been left behind on the other side of the border; outside, a pale sun is conducting the overture to another relentless summer day. Let’s see what happens, Maike thinks. Later, she will say the same to the detective: Let’s see what happens. Long before that, she will see the face of her friend Ralph Dabbelink on the newspaper racks in Freiburg Station. It will be the beginning of a new list: the most terrible days of her life. And the detective will take second place on the list of people she is most suspicious of, just ahead of Oskar, who has topped this list for years, and just behind Sebastian, the new contender who has jumped straight to number one.

[3]

THE SUN GLINTS ON THE SNOW-WHITE STUCCO
. Front doors and balcony doors are open, and a state-of-the-art racing bike is leaning against a streetlamp covered in ivy. The building is lovely to look at and perfumed with the scent of wisteria, but it resembles empty packaging. All this beauty cries out for happiness, and the people who live here are no longer happy. To the detective, everything looks wrong and empty, as if the entire street has been turned into a postcard, a memory of itself. When he steps onto the footbridge, Bonnie and Clyde swim up to him on the anthracite-colored canal. From his bag, Schilf takes out a currant bun he bought on his leisurely walk through the town center. The ducks paddle against the current so that the pieces of bread drop down directly onto their beaks.

“Back, back, back,” they chorus.

“Look out,” the detective calls to them. “Look out.”

But Bonnie and Clyde clearly don’t know what to make of the parrot Agfa’s words. They turn like two synchronized swimmers and paddle swiftly down the canal. Schilf brushes crumbs from his hands and walks into the entrance hall, studying the names by the doorbells. Just as he finds what he is looking for, a thunderous bang causes the building to rumble. Up above, someone has slammed a door. Quick steps clatter down the stairs and a woman rushes out of the front door, straight
past the detective. He touches his fingers to his forehead so as to raise an imaginary hat. He does not recognize the woman. Her blond hair waves around her head and falls over her eyes as she bends over to unlock her bicycle. The detective watches, transfixed. She is wearing a sleeveless shirt and cotton shorts; the morning light turns her tanned arms and legs into polished wood. In contrast, her blond hair seems far too bright, as if she had borrowed it from another pale person. The woman is livid—she hurls her bike around, swings a leg into the air, and, already moving at speed, shoves her feet into the straps on the pedals. A few seconds later, she has disappeared around the corner at an impressive angle. It occurs to the detective that he has never seen a more beautiful person.

He avoids pressing the buzzer, and climbs the stairs to an apartment on the second floor. It is apparent that someone is listening behind the door. He approaches and presses his ear against the wood in imitation. The tension is electric. Two men, separated only by a piece of wood, are straining with all their senses toward each other, as if they want to blend into a single creature. The door is wrenched open.

Sebastian is standing there with the remains of an interrupted fight on his lips—his lungs are pumped up, his mouth tensed for a scream. Helplessly his gaze moves across the detective’s face.

“Do you have a trash can?” Schilf asks.

He stretches out a scrunched-up paper bag toward his host-to-be, and bread crumbs fall out of it. Sebastian slaps the ball of paper out of his hand.

“Get lost!”

The detective has, of course, already put his foot in the door. They look each other in the eye through the narrow opening. Instead of cursing and tussling over entry to the apartment, they are suddenly standing very close together, as if enveloped in a bubble of stillness in which something beyond language is happening. An encounter. A pause, at the intersection of two different kinds of chaos.

The definitive entanglement of our lives, the detective thought
, the detective thinks.

The dripping of a tap behind Sebastian’s back marks the passage of time. A jackhammer in a distant street marks the passage of time. There will probably be many questions. Why each of them feels the other has come to help him. Whether it is possible to stop a life from falling apart. How to patch it up in retrospect. If there is such a thing as mutual recognition at first sight between two strangers.

But they cannot stand like this forever.

“Professor,” Schilf says softly, apologetically, “I’m from the police.”

Sebastian immediately opens the door fully and walks down the hall with stiff legs. Without turning to look at his visitor, he drops onto the sofa in the living room, puts his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.

“I’m sorry,” the detective says as Sebastian finally looks up and rubs his reddened eyes, “but I’m still here.”

Stillness seeps into the room again, but this time it does not feel intimate. It is like the silence between two travelers waiting on a platform for different trains. While Sebastian stares at the ceiling as if there were something to see up there, the detective looks around the room. The furnishings have lost their tasteful unity. They stand around indifferently like extras between takes.

Within seconds, Schilf thinks, everything here has become the past.

He listens for the echo of a scene that the room must have heard, for objects don’t have ears they can block. The shadow of a man still passes over the walls, pacing up and down, trying to find a way out, his arms raised to protect himself from something heavy that is threatening to fall on him. A woman’s screams still echo in the leather of the armchair.

This is a film! This is
not
reality!

Her manicured fingers have upset the pile of magazines on the side table; she had wanted to fling them onto the floor, but hasn’t after all.

Ralph
dead
? My son
kidnapped
? And I am cycling happily in Airolo, not knowing any of this?

Happiness and not knowing are the same thing, dear Mrs. Physicist, Schilf thinks.

The sofa shakes with the impact of a man’s fist.

Look! At! Me! I couldn’t ring you, for God’s sake!

A pause, a deep breath.

Keep your voice down!

The man’s laughter makes the curtains tremble.

Don’t worry. He’s dead to the world. The motion sickness pills.

The laughter trails off. The print of a woman’s hand on the glass of the side table fades away.

Something is … wrong … I can’t …

And what about
me
?

The man’s voice rises, driving the walls apart, transforming the room into a cathedral in which every word hangs in the air.

Do you want to know what
I’ve
been through? This is what it feels like, like this!

The armchair judders to one side as a small body falls into it, shaken roughly by the shoulders.

Let me go, Sebastian!

The final cry is like a bolt of lightning and the slamming door thunder. The quiet after the storm is what remains. Naked scorn. The neighbor’s dog barks with three voices: soft, medium, and loud.

“Do you know what it’s like to have lost everything?” Sebastian asks.

“More than you can imagine.”

“What’s your name, anyway?”

“Schilf.” Sebastian slowly takes his gaze from the ceiling and repeats the name, which feels good in his mouth. Schilf.

Their eyes meet. Somewhere in the apartment an object falls to the ground but neither of them turns his head. The detective wonders why it is suddenly so dark. The headlights of a passing car lift the room
and turn it on its own axis; Sebastian sits on the sofa, Schilf in the armchair, then Schilf on the sofa, Sebastian in the armchair. Then the car is gone. They nod to each other. The combine harvesters are working in the fields outside the town; somewhere Julia is sighing in her sleep. The detective wheezes air out of his lungs once (
ovum
) and twice (
avis
). A sharp beak is pecking the shell of the bird’s egg. It is bright again, midday in summer, with dusty shafts of light by the window. Sebastian looks at Schilf with a mixture of suspicion and interest. He leans forward, almost as though he wants to take the detective by the hand.

“I want no further investigations,” he says.

“You don’t want to know who kidnapped your son?”

“I want to forget.”

“Bad idea. You’ll only realize when it’s too late.”

“I’m not interested in too late. I’m interested in now. I don’t know what the word ‘future’ means anymore. There are situations where you have to draw the line. Do you see?”

“Even before you started going into detail,” the detective says.

When Sebastian raises his arms to brush his hair out of his face, they both see how badly his hands are trembling. The skin beneath his rolled-up sleeves is thickly covered with scratched insect bites, some moist and inflamed and others crusted with yellow. Sebastian buttons his cuffs.