Indigo (12 page)

Everything with her was actually fine. It wasn't her fault. She was kind, attentive. Her apartment was bright. She smelled wonderful, even her scalp and the always slightly sweaty patch of skin between her shoulder blades. And her dark blond hair was healthy and strong. She even sometimes let him try things out that he had seen in movies. She was patient. And even when she had headaches or migraines, she didn't blame him. She was well bred.

– I'm just going out for a few minutes, Robert said, standing up.

– Okay, said Cordula.

He left the room and stood there.

How do they do it, the men who say, I'm just going out for a few minutes to get cigarettes, and then never resurface? They must be out there, somewhere in the world they're all roaming around, those hordes of cigarette refugees, they sit in cold hotel rooms, without a passport, without a credit card, without much cash, and wait. For what? Perhaps it's an ancient secret of the cigarette machines themselves, a secret code you enter by pressing the buttons for various brands, and then the box opens with a hissing hydraulic sound, revealing a passage into the underworld. From all the cities on earth, through the openings on street corners and in the walls of public restrooms, the men descend into the galleries, greet one another with a brief nod, because they're not in the mood to speak, for far too long they have been asked by their wives and children at home how they're doing and where they're going and when they're coming back, and they follow the glowing signs to the Great Underground Transit Station, the secret hub for all those who want to escape their lives. Under the large neon signs on which the logos of the cigarette companies glow, they wait on vast platforms, each of them alone, each withdrawn into himself, for further connections. Bearded figures in trench coats, with caps and sunglasses. There are also young men among them, having only just grown up and already impregnated a woman, they couldn't endure that and are now here, frightened and shy, trembling in the subway wind in the face of their uncertain future, their exile. Then black underworld trains appear, lit only inside, which burrow through the earth and bring the escapees to faraway cities, to Singapore, Saint Petersburg, Cape Town, Los Angeles. In the cars it's as quiet as at truck stops in the middle of the desert, the passengers don't talk much, some perhaps murmur to themselves a little, while the others take apart their cell phones or smash them with a hammer. Tracking chips of all sorts disappear in sealable lead containers, which hang in each compartment. And there are also those who never take one of the trains and resurface in faraway cities of the globe with a false name and a new hairstyle, no, some get used to the coolness and the peculiar freshness of the air down there in the transit galleries, to the flickering neon light of the cigarette advertisements, to the McDonald's counters, which are run by blind people, and they sit down and think:
Tomorrow, tomorrow I'll take a train, and for this one night I'll just stay sitting here.
And then they fall asleep and, without realizing it, get through the famous
first night.
And after that they are free, they remain in the tunnel systems and improve them, expand them. It's important that they are there, for without them the tunnel systems and the artificial lighting and the trains wouldn't exist. All this didn't just grow in the earth, of course. All man-made, over centuries, like an underground ant city, starting with the first, unknown escapee, who scratched the wall next to the cigarette machine with his fingernails and wished the earth would swallow him up—he was followed by millions of lonely men, who wanted no more contact with their past and family and who dug their way into the earth with their bare hands or primitive tools they happened to pocket on their way out of their home, forever far from the domestic hearth—

– What are you thinking about?

From behind, Cordula put a finger on his head and ran it along the cranial suture, in improvised zigzags. Like the cartridge of a phonograph.

– Why do women always ask that? he replied.

Robert put on a T-shirt that said “Dingo Bait.” The shirt had actually been a Christmas present for Cordula, but when she had unwrapped it, she had been horrified. He explained to her that it had been meant as a joke, that he had no problem with the term as long as it wasn't used pejoratively, and so on; for what must have been longer than an hour he had gone on and on to her, but she had remained unable to laugh about it. Then she had tried it on, had taken a few steps in it, and had torn it off again so quickly that her glasses flew off her face.

– Oh, Cordula . . .

– I don't want to wear it. What do you think my colleagues at the office will say if I walk around in that?

– You don't have to wear it to work, if there's nothing but humorless jerks there, but at least—

– Robert, I'm sorry.

And then, of course, came the trembling upper lip and the guilty look down at the floor, because it was Christmas, the holy time in which things always had to be wonderfully harmonious, and now she had rejected a present from him and so destroyed the Christmas peace, yes, those very thoughts were with certainty going through her stupid little head, thought Robert. He still remembered taking the T-shirt gently from her hand and putting it on himself.

In the meantime, he had several of them. Most of them were silly and had to do with Australia, such as, “I'm a father but I love my dingos.” Or, “A dingo ate my government!” Or, very simple, “I need a dingo's breakfast.” On the Internet you could also find some T-shirts that directly (and totally self-confidently!) referred to the Indigo topic, but they were all unbearably stupid.

At noon Willi and Elke were going to stop by. Robert had met Willi in Berlin. At every opportunity Willi mentioned that he had lived there for three years. Three years in Berlin. Really? Three years? Not just two? No, three. That number, connected with the vibrant metropolis in which every side street was steeped in history, formed the innermost core of his being. He had lived there with a woman who also came from Austria, and was deaf. She could read lips and speak indistinctly, but soon they communicated only in signs, a sort of doubly secret language, because their Salzburg sign dialect often met with incomprehension among deaf Germans, and people on the street with normal hearing understood nothing anyway. Willi's girlfriend had often been amused by the uselessly hanging arms and hands of hearing people, the way they carried them around listlessly as if they were broken windmill vanes, two burdensome appendages with which no one knew what to do apart from now and then pushing down door handles or hailing a taxi. Sometimes they had fun incorporating a curse or an obscene sign into everyday gestures, say, a harmless wave. But nothing of the deaf woman had remained in him, he didn't even like to mention her name, Ilona, the only thing that meant something to him was the number three in connection with Berlin. The more often you asked him about it, the brighter and more pleasant his day became.

A visit from Willi was always good, in his presence Robert was usually calm and relaxed . . . but nothing had grounded him recently as much as the monkey at the university medical lab. He could still feel it, the peace was like an arrival, like a—ah, he had to get up, go, move.

He went into the hall and dismantled an umbrella into its component parts.

He imagined a drill sergeant shouting at him to assemble the umbrella as fast as possible. Damn it, Private Tätzel! Why aren't you done with the umbrella yet! If this were the real thing, you'd be long dead, you miserable dingo!

Robert laughed.

Cordula found him on all fours, still occupied with dismantling the old umbrella. She greeted him, didn't ask what he was doing, but simply stepped carefully over him and the parts arranged in slightly staggered rows, roughly quincunx-like, and slipped into the kitchen, where she prepared snacks and drinks.

– Where did you put the white wine? she asked after a few minutes.

– In the sink, Robert said calmly.

– Ah, of course, didn't see it, she said.

– You know, Robin, Robert said in Adam West's German Batman voice, often we can't see the forest for the trees and sometimes we can't even see the tree for the branches. And even then birds are still perching on the tree and chirping.

To say anything more tender than that wasn't possible for him at the moment. Cordula understood and laughed at the joke.

A bit later Cordula, who had finished everything, came to Robert in the hall, who sat, more or less relaxed, in the middle of the parts.

– Everything okay with you two? she asked.

Even though the cheerful tone irritated Robert—he didn't like it when she was afraid of him—he answered softly:

– Yeah, everything's pretty much okay. I . . . I was just trying to repair it. It wouldn't open anymore, and . . .

– And? Did it work?

He shook his head.

– How are you doing, with . . . ?

– No aftershocks, said Cordula, sitting down next to him on the floor.

[RED-CHECKERED FOLDER]

(
FROM:
R
OBERT
B
URTON
,
The Anatomy of Melancholy, Bodily Causes Among People in Proximity
, p. 382–383)

7.
In the Zone: Part 2

B
Y
C
LEMENS
J. S
ETZ
*

The Head

The next morning I discovered in my hotel room a door that led to a balcony. Pleasantly surprised, as if this access had grown from the room overnight through my own dream efforts, I stepped out. It smelled of the warm wood that had turned tar-black from years of exposure to sunlight, and I stood before an unusually large and unusually beautiful watering can. Its tin head was stretched forward as if it were on the lookout for something, and when I touched it, it let out a high-pitched clang as if it had long been waiting for that release from immobility. In contrast to watering cans made of plastic, ones made of tin have an unmistakable character, a particular posture that resembles a ballet dancer frozen mid-twirl in a photo. Their body is cylindrical and stern, their surface usually rough and pleasantly recalcitrant toward the skin of your palm. Fingernails break easily on it. Inside the watering can I discovered, when I held it up to the light, a system of white, feathery spider webs, and I immediately went back into the room to look for my cell phone and call Julia and tell her about my find. While the phone rang, I stood next to the watering can and looked at it, the phone rang three times, four times, then I quickly hung up, because I realized how nonsensical what I was doing was. It was nothing, just a watering can with a few spider webs in it, on a hotel room balcony at Pension Tachler, in this town already buzzing sunnily away early in the morning. The church steeple and the watering can were almost exactly the same color, I now noticed. I tried to take a photo with my cell phone of this remarkable correspondence, but it didn't work, the backlight plunged everything in the picture into midnight black.

The clatter of horse hooves could be heard at some distance when I stepped out of the pension, a wonderful, relaxing sound, as if the landscape were clearing its throat. Frau Stennitzer had announced that Christoph would speak with me briefly today. He was the reason for my visit, after all, and not, haha, she herself, she had said, yes, she knew, of course, how priorities were allocated in the world, in general . . .