Indigo (22 page)

In his head Robert marched to the worm and picked it up. It took a while before its body noticed that it no longer had solid ground under it. It stopped moving onward and again coiled senselessly around itself, its head swung back and forth. The whole scene was of such heartrending senselessness that Robert had to laugh. Max made an astonished sound with his mouth. And then Robert noticed that the teacher had come in and had taken a seat. He quickly pushed the magazine with the worm story away from him, as if it had been holding on to him, and it slid almost a yard across the long, long table of the biology room, at which they, arranged in an equilateral triangle, sat.

Professor Ulrich didn't look angry or upset. On the contrary, he reached for his magazine, turned it around, seemed to skim the article, and then said:

– Right, huh?

In the days that followed Max seemed despondent and dejected, probably because there had been no punishment for his behavior, so no confirmation either that anything had ever happened. It occurred only rarely that their eyes met anywhere.

Soon thereafter Max was relocated. A car with international plates came and took him away. Robert had seen him as he (making noise with his clicker, which the teaching staff often jokingly called a leper clapper,
proximity awareness
) had passed his room, and a bit later as he stood bare-chested in the corner at his sink, his face looking in the mirror—and his hand spreading a sort of soot or black makeup on it. Next to him on a chair was a black tailcoat, as for a funeral or a piano concert. On the back of the chair balanced a dented top hat. Later Max had waved to them, with his soot-smeared paw, from the rear window of the car, where there were little stuffed animals stuck to the glass with suction cups. And that same morning the math teacher had burst into tears while reading an article about bees that had by chance been left in the lecture hall from the biology class. Freak. Robert still saw the scene so clearly before his eyes that the memory clenched his fist.

He looked for the business card of the man who had accosted him in the bank lobby:
[email protected].
Then he tore it up and went into the next room to find something that he could break and repair before Cordula came home.

7.
Romeo and Juliet at the Institute

There were, of course, some, well, how to phrase it, uh, Romeo and Juliet tendencies among the students, said Dr. Rudolph, that was also completely normal and to be expected, when the hormones reached a certain level in the individuals. And especially now, with summer approaching, he went on, the air was also saturated in that extraordinary way with substances that sort of rub your nose all day long in the existence of your own body. Pollen, flowers, and grass, the heat itself, which brought with it sweat and contamination of the pores and a
pervasive spread
of your own smell. It was absolutely normal that at this particular time especially intense feelings often developed in the young people. As an educator you always had to be cognizant of these circumstances, face them, as it were, with a steady eye, for nature had made provisions, in the truest sense. Yes, even the allergies afflicting so many of the institute children in these months were a constant reminder that you possessed a body, which, involuntarily and without concern for the desires and the will of its owner, reacted to its environment, interacted with it, took in molecules and then interpreted them falsely, yes, allergies of that sort were actually a very memorable symbol for all the other unpleasant effects a summer had on life in that age bracket and stage of development. And on top of that came, of course, the proximity problem and individually varying zone behavior, which quite frequently led to enormous nervous strain on the children, said Dr. Rudolph. He remembered in particular the case of Felix and Max, last year. Felix was now no longer at the institute, but at least was active in the spread of proximity awareness among the general public.

Dr. Rudolph repeated the sentence in a peculiar way, almost as if it were a mantra or a linguistic convention like hastening to add after the name of a deceased person
God rest his soul.

And then, of course, there was Max, said Dr. Rudolph, that was a really unusual case, because no one could feel anything, at least not at first, he probably suffered from an extremely rare variety of proximity distortion.

– Sometimes scientific research grows out of its infancy too fast.

– Was that the same Max we just . . . ?

– Yeeeah, said Dr. Rudolph, nodding proudly.

– Aha.

– Felix has since been relocated, but with Max the problem is less a hormonal—

– I'm sorry, what do you mean by
relocated
? That he's been transferred to another school?

– Well, yes, said Dr. Rudolph. You could put it that way. You know, Herr Seitz, the world works a little differently for children with limited social options than it does for us. As I always say: There are no happy ends in such matters. But it isn't too much to ask for fair ends. Fair ends, you know?

I nodded.

– Fairends, repeated Dr. Rudolph, laughing. Fairends! You can always rely on that. That they come.

There seemed to be something agreeable for him in these words. Almost like a sweet memory he associated with them.

We again went down the narrow corridor toward the yard. When we stepped outside through the door, I saw at some distance from the building two teenagers talking with each other. Like two land surveyors they stood facing each other and gesticulated. Their voices couldn't be heard. The longer I observed them, the more uncertain I became what it was about the signs with which they supplemented oral communication that had such an unsettling effect. Then I realized that it must have been their gentleness. One gesture in particular, which each of them made at regular intervals, reminded me of the way adults would throw a bocce ball or another toy to me as a child: they would move their hand upward with scarcely any power—as if they wished the object wouldn't follow a parabolic trajectory at all—and release the ball into the planet's gravitational field, which would then take care of the rest, the path and the acceleration into my open hands.

The Zone Game

The most popular sports among the students of the institute were dodgeball, soccer, tennis. And once a month they walked to a nearby golf course and there whacked little chalk-white balls around a forty-acre area, but this service wasn't supported by all the parents, said Dr. Rudolph, at the moment only three children were active golfers. In the huge schoolyard there was also a ping-pong table, but someone had put a few stacked buckets on it. The somewhat smaller buckets in the somewhat larger ones, making a sort of tin ziggurat, the purpose of which I could not discern. A few coffee cups stood next to the tower on the table, which showed barely any signs of wear.

To witness the behavior of the children in the yard was really quite impressive, Dr. Rudolph said, but these days it didn't happen all too often. It wasn't the right time for it. In autumn, however, they all actually stood around constantly in the yard, God knows why. Their zone behavior underwent striking changes in autumn, their personal boundaries suddenly existed only to be gauged. Like wire models of molecules the students moved through the yard, always maintaining the distances between them, as if they were attached to steel connecting pipes. A human mobile. Sometimes just watching made you dizzy, said Dr. Rudolph. From his window he could contemplate the mystery practically all October, and it even reminded him of the starling flocks in Jutland in autumn, which he had seen once as a child, gigantic clouds of bird bodies moving over the land according to unknown principles, now swelling, now contracting, never touching one another in their morphogenetic field flight. Of course, the children could ultimately look back on a life spent with years of training for this special form of everyday movement art, and when you took that factor into account, the spectacle did seem quite a bit less mysterious. But still, said Dr. Rudolph, he always felt really strange when they moved back and forth in that way and talked with one another as if all this were completely normal. As if they had eyes in the back and front of their heads. Or feelers. Or a sort of spider web around them, and one of them needed merely to tug at one point for the others to know exactly where he had tugged. And never, with the trivial exception of bullying or a physical confrontation between two boys, did one of them get sick, no, that had never happened, not even an attack of vertigo, never did one of them run into a wall and so get pressed into another's zone, when that point was reached a new pattern simply formed. Truly remarkable and mind-boggling what situations human beings could come to terms with. And then that geometry also came out of it, which took your breath away. We could even live deep inside the earth, said Dr. Rudolph, in completely lightless circumstances, in areas with contaminated air and poisonous water, at polar stations in eternal ice, or in monasteries thousands of feet above sea level, where the oxygen content of the air was so low that everyone turned to God.

– Yes, eventually people will adapt against anything, said Dr. Rudolph.

And then these boys here, with their school uniforms, their fine shoes that always looked immaculate, and their expressive gestures. The preservation of the right distances. That moved him sometimes, he couldn't help it.

– The cluster has meanwhile also been used in the military and at management seminars, he said in a somewhat altered tone.

– What?

– The cluster, oh, right, I didn't mention that. That's our name for it.

– For the way the children stand around in the yard?

– Stand around, said Dr. Rudolph. You try to
stand around
in that way. You won't have a chance, your Venn diagram will constantly overlap with that of your neighbor. But for fields of activity in which teamwork is everything, or actually team
spirit
, the cluster is a very good exercise. We're the only authorized trainers in Austria.

I nodded respectfully.

– Yes, said Dr. Rudolph, this sensitivity to one another, this awareness of the tiniest nuances—though always from a distance—this can be extremely beneficial. Most extremely.

The Lichtenberg Huts

The yard behind the institute was not what I had feared. My childhood phantom memory of the uncanny snow-white flight of steps remained untouched. I had the feeling I had made a terrible fool of myself, and I would have liked nothing more than to go down to the chauffeur, chloroform him, and bury him somewhere so that he couldn't tell anyone about it, but then I was jolted out of my thoughts by something unusual: Farther away, where the tree-covered yard turned into a meadow, stood several little huts, which were all made of strikingly dark wood, jet-black in places. The distance between the individual huts had to be at least ten yards, Dr. Rudolph explained to me. So that there wouldn't be any overlaps. And everything was provided for, he said, beckoning me to follow him. As we approached the huts, I hesitated, and he noticed. He turned around to face me, laughed, and made a gallant gesture:

– At this time the Lichtenberg huts are empty.

– Lichtenberg huts?

He nodded.

– Why are they called that?

He dropped his chin to his chest, lowered his eyelids, and gave a hint of a head shake.

– I don't know, he said. That's always been what they've been called. The manufacturer?

Then he laughed again, clearly trying to cheer me up, and I obliged by smiling.

The door to the first hut was open, and I could take a look inside. My first impulse was to call Julia at work and tell her about the unusual sight.
It looks like a portable toilet
, I thought,
one of those old-fashioned ones that are outdoors behind farmhouses and in which you are seized by fear of rats shooting upward and in winter freeze to your own excrement—

– Come on, let's go inside, said Dr. Rudolph. Here everything is still pretty much all right, presentable. Back there are Rudi Tschirner's and Mareike's stall . . . uh, Lichtenberg huts, we'd better not look at those. Difficult cases, you understand. Julius and Maurice are nothing in comparison.

I had always thought only people in novels smirked. An error.

– Does someone live here? I asked.

– Of course, he said. During the summer months it's really pleasant, and the distances can also be maintained only here, on grounds like these, you see, they go all the way out to where those poplars are, that's where they end.

I looked into the distance, but couldn't spot anything poplarlike. Only a few low trees. A brown hunting stand jutted like braces from the crown of a tree.

– Should I close the door or leave it open?

– It's okay, go ahead and close it, I said. I'm not claustrophobic.

– The light switch is here, said Dr. Rudolph, pressing it.

The first thing that struck me after Dr. Rudolph had closed the door was the extraordinary heat. It must have been over eighty-five degrees. All day the hut had loaded up with warmth, had stored solar energy, and now passed it on to me. The air was stuffy. There was dust everywhere. Only certain objects, which must have been used more often, were free of it.

On the inside a class schedule was stuck to the door. For each day three to four little boxes, in various colors. Next to it a key hung from a narrow board; the key fob was a small silver UFO. There were no windows. On the lightbulb, which dangled from the low ceiling of the hut, a black ring had been painted, probably with lacquer, dividing the light into two halves.

The cramped but curiously not-unpleasant room reminded me of an article I had read years ago in the weekend supplement to the
Krone
newspaper. It was about a young woman from Bavaria who was allergic to nearly everything. She lived, as the sloppily and unsympathetically written article never tired of emphasizing, in an empty room, all around everything was made of completely untreated wood (to which she was, of course, nonetheless slightly allergic), no plastics were permitted anywhere near her, not even bricks and concrete, because they immediately gave her horrible rashes and difficulty breathing. Three times a day she was brought a tray of food and medications, which she forced down in agony. The toilet was hidden behind a massive door, because the presence of the water in the tank was enough to endanger her life. I still remembered well the frustration I felt while reading this article several times. Another stone was always added to the heap, one terrible detail after another was disclosed, and eventually it just became funny, and I flung the weekend supplement into a corner. The description of the progressive development of her illness had driven me particularly crazy, a drama reminiscent of the stations of a cross: from the trailer at the edge of the woods through the wooden hut in the woods to the house made of clay in a colony specializing in this weird disease somewhere in Holland or Belgium—and still the young woman had once gone into a coma and nearly choked to death on her own vomit. So what do you do all day? asked the journalist. Nothing, answered the young woman. No clothes made of synthetic materials, no shampoo, no shower gel, etc. . . . I remembered these details, and although I had also tried that before, for a few weeks at least . . . (at the time I was a long-haired keyboardist in a heavy metal band) . . . I read, squealing loudly with enthusiasm, the article to my bandmates several times, and we eventually ended up in an absurd intoxication, and we improvised loudly, wildly, and dissonantly on this whole awful nonsense, on the flagrant senselessness of such a life and so on, on the filth, the shit, and the sensationalism in the final years of the twentieth century, and alas, no one thought of recording the whole thing on MiniDisc, which was an eternal shame, a terrible shame, just like the fact that I had never managed to this day to find out what had ultimately become of the young woman.